The private sector in the UK has proved far more effective at screwing up former government-run organisations than the inefficient state sector ever could.
The shockingly poor public transport system, British Telecom actively working to slow ADSL adoption and competition to protect its ISDN investment, the 25% hikes in natural gas prices this year, the predicted water shortages in the south-east due in part to not enough investment in infrastructure improvements, ad nauseum. You could argue that they are all former government bureaucracies, but I could then point you to any of the big banks as perfect examples of bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency that would shame the European Union.
Incompetence is not just a feature of goverment, it's just more visible than in the private sector.
Just because he uses MS as an example of the type of pressure that might be applied against such a move doesn't damage his argument in the least. MS may not produce the majority of closed source software but it is the biggest software company in the world and as such is the ideal organisation to mention in such an argument. Or did you expect him to list all proprietary ISVs just to avoid an accusation of bias.
Since TRAI is part of the Indian government and since you said that they have intervened heavily in the Indian cell phone market, that looks like government intervention to me. I didn't mean my post as against India, I think it's great that your government and judiciary won't let mobile phone providers abuse their customers. However this will be seen as anti-competitive government interference in the free market and the WTO takes a dim view of governments obstructing the right of a corporation to make as much money as it possibly can by any means possible.
Not for corporate users that's true, but any home user who has 2 or more PCs and a broadband connection, it's a very real issue. Given the choice of laying several metres of CAT5 or installing a couple of drivers, what do you think people will choose?
Government intervention in the free market benefitting consumers - who would've thought it. No doubt the WTO will come down heavily on this subversive piece of common sense at some point.
Trouble is that the shady websites are sometimes the most interesting. Blaming the user by implication doesn't excuse Microsoft's appalling track record on security. It should be hard for malware to get onto your machine, no matter how dubious your browsing habits are.
I'm not suggesting there was any tying of OS/2 to IBM hardware, but would you want to bet your business on one of your major competitors being totally honest? In 1995 IBM was still the big, bad monopolist and Microsoft were still an upstart and not in direct competition, if I were Michael Dell I know who I would have chosen. Having said that you know more than me, that's just how I see it from a historical perspective; I wasn't really into PCs around that time. I just get tired of hearing how Microsoft are amazing and all the competitors completely suck, when in fact they broke the law on a number of occasions to get to where they are now.
The Brits and to a lesser extent the Aussies have the same hangups. I don't understand where it came from, our ethnic cousins over on mainland Europe have no problem with sex, and we all share a pretty similar history in terms of social development. There was an advert a few years for shower gel that had been shown all around Europe without any problems but provoked major complaints in Britain. The reason? It showed a naked woman in the shower and you saw her erect nipple for all of 2 seconds. Sad. Time we all grew up and started treating sex as part of life, not some dirty secret to be embarrassed about.
He's just using the standard economists' practice of trying to make people feel ashamed about being justifiably upset about their livelihoods being taken from them; a practice that is primarily designed to make rich people and organisations richer and has zero to do with altruism.
OS/2 failed primarily because IBM weren't trusted to give the same OS/2 to Dell, Compaq et al that they were giving to their own PC division. If you still think that it was IBM, Novell and Netscape or whoever that handed the PC desktop market to Microsoft, ask yourself why the only competitor that has got a foothold in that same market, Linux, is free in both senses of the word? Is it because no-one could come up with and sell something that was better than Windows (as if), or is it that the only way to avoid being crushed by them is to be as difficult a target as possible to undermine. Microsoft should have had Win32 and Office file formats taken from them by the DoJ; I doubt they'd be anything now without that stranglehold or if they were, it would be a far safer internet for the general public.
Not really. Firefox has gained quite a decent market share considering that it doesn't come with Windows. My old man and little sister both use it, my dad with no prompting from me whatsoever (and he's no more a geek than I am a quantum physicist) and my little sister from being given mild scare stories about trojans stealing her bank details (although she still uses IE for her MSN home page). Firefox gets regular positive mentions in the PC mags over here in the UK (and is included on the cover CDs/DVDs), and given the advantages to using it and the only superficial differences between the way it works and the way IE works a lot of people are switching. There won't be any dominance by any one browser any more as there has been over the last decade unless MS do something very evilly clever (which to be fair is always a possibility). FF has too much momentum now to be derailed unless IE 7 offers something that is incredibly useful and can not be easily emulated by the competition.
It's pretty well understood that there do not exist coorelations between poverty and violence, but very strong ones between poverty and lack of freedoms.
Given the amount of food riots by starving people throughout human history, I hope you can show me some very convincing evidence of the above statement.
Well, that's a self correcting problem in a society where an individuals right to bear arms is respected.
Really? So how does the average gun-toting citizen get his gun out fast enough to nail the mugger before they get shot by the gun that is 2 inches from their face? I'm not going to argue about gun control anyway, all I'll say on that matter is that banning guns outright or draconian gun control won't solve any problems, but being a bit careful about who you sell a lethal weapon to might be worth looking into.
Oh yes Chinese factory workers choose to work there, because there are so many other alternatives like begging, starvation, prostitution or crime. Please. If sweatshop factories are so wonderful why did workers in the developed world fight so hard to get rid of them. It's only a better life relatively speaking, and once China becomes too expensive for the multinationals those people are going to be just as fucked as they were before - it's not like they could buy a house or save some money on the wages they get. Developing economies should not be competing on the cost of labour, that is only a short-term win situation for corporate cost-cutters, they should be competing on quality. Although Germany and Japan have fucked up their world position in recent years they had 20 to 30 years of success even though their products weren't particularly cheap in comparison to those from other countries, they were just better. This race to the bottom is in the long-term going to benefit no-one: workers in the developed countries see their incomes and lifestyles reduced, workers in the developing countries have a choice between working long hours in dangerous conditions for a pittance or starvation, and most multinationals lose the income from a well-paid workforce buying their products. The likes of Walmart will win big from this situation, but I can't see many other corporations that depend on people having disposable income doing well.
The reality is that the other PC manufacturers didn't want to depend on a competitor for their OS and had per CPU Windows licenses anyway, making a PC with OS/2 more expensive than one with Windows. The political take on this is that Microsoft were convicted of monopoly abuse in a court of law under a Democratic administration and were set to take a huge hit, the administration changed to a Republican one, and the pursuit of Microsoft was quietly settled with what amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. So blaming the competition is all well and good, but it's not possible to say where Netscape, IBM and Novell would be if Microsoft hadn't broken the law in the first place.
No they aren't and factory workers in China or anywhere else in poor countries do not have a good standard of living. Stop believing economists' lies, sweatshops are not good for anyone except corporations; why do you think they're illegal in the developed world?
The government uses that money for a lot of different things - social security is a fairly small part of it. Killing Ayrabs in a country that was no threat to the US for example. Blaming indigenous welfare scroungers is so last century man, over here in the UK it's the alleged hordes from Eastern Europe that are to supposedly blame for all of society's ills even though the actual percentage of Eastern Europeans here legally or illegally is infinitesimal. Anyway do you think that if welfare was done away with tomorrow, all those lazy scroungers would go get a job? No, some of them would take your money at gunpoint instead.
If Linux can't run the same software and doesn't have the drivers for the hardware as Windows then it doesn't really matter how good it is. That doesn't mean slavishly copying everything MS does, but I fail to see why a dotNET or Win32 layer for Linux is bad; name a single alternative Office product that doesn't have MS Office compatibility that anyone is seriously considering. People and businesses have a huge investment in Windows-only software and hardware, the only realistic way to get them to consider Linux on the desktop would be to provide as easy a migration path as possible. Linux on the server is a different proposition since Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there, but would it be as popular without Samba? Probably not.
Or to take your logic a step further, I'd rather pay $20 for a cheat hack rather than learning to fight because, like, it's so much effort. It would be like cheating in a single player game, you might win but where's the satisfaction in a job well-done by beating the game by figuring it out. I love the social part of WoW personally, chatting to various Europeans as we struggle noobily to complete the quests is far more fun than standing in the middle of Stormwind showing off ebayed Epic gear and having not the slightest idea of how the game works. What's the point of playing an MMORPG if you take shortcuts to the top level and kit, you might as well hire an RPG a week and cheat to beat them instead and spend your money on having some real world fun. Not like anyone's impressed by ebayers anyway, in the MMORPGs I've played they're treated as sad figures of fun.
25 There is a risk that open source software contains functional defects, or breaches a third party's intellectual property rights (e.g. where it contains code misappropriated from proprietary software or functionality in breach of a patent). The absence of warranties and indemnities in most open source licences means the licensee bears this risk. This can be contrasted with the protection usually available under commercial software licences.
As opposed to who? Microsoft? Here in the UK Margaret Thatcher preached a similar mantra that government organisations are useless, inefficient and bureaucratic. So she privatised like a demon and now we have public services that are not only useless, inefficient and bureaucratic but now also largely unaccountable even though people still depend on them as much as ever. The profit motive doesn't automatically make an organisation better.
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Leverage is a noun you dumb American.
Not easily translating to not profitable. What is the difference between NT 5.0 and 5.1 anyway?
The private sector in the UK has proved far more effective at screwing up former government-run organisations than the inefficient state sector ever could.
The shockingly poor public transport system, British Telecom actively working to slow ADSL adoption and competition to protect its ISDN investment, the 25% hikes in natural gas prices this year, the predicted water shortages in the south-east due in part to not enough investment in infrastructure improvements, ad nauseum. You could argue that they are all former government bureaucracies, but I could then point you to any of the big banks as perfect examples of bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency that would shame the European Union.
Incompetence is not just a feature of goverment, it's just more visible than in the private sector.
Just because he uses MS as an example of the type of pressure that might be applied against such a move doesn't damage his argument in the least. MS may not produce the majority of closed source software but it is the biggest software company in the world and as such is the ideal organisation to mention in such an argument. Or did you expect him to list all proprietary ISVs just to avoid an accusation of bias.
Since TRAI is part of the Indian government and since you said that they have intervened heavily in the Indian cell phone market, that looks like government intervention to me.
I didn't mean my post as against India, I think it's great that your government and judiciary won't let mobile phone providers abuse their customers. However this will be seen as anti-competitive government interference in the free market and the WTO takes a dim view of governments obstructing the right of a corporation to make as much money as it possibly can by any means possible.
Not for corporate users that's true, but any home user who has 2 or more PCs and a broadband connection, it's a very real issue. Given the choice of laying several metres of CAT5 or installing a couple of drivers, what do you think people will choose?
Government intervention in the free market benefitting consumers - who would've thought it. No doubt the WTO will come down heavily on this subversive piece of common sense at some point.
Trouble is that the shady websites are sometimes the most interesting. Blaming the user by implication doesn't excuse Microsoft's appalling track record on security. It should be hard for malware to get onto your machine, no matter how dubious your browsing habits are.
I'm not suggesting there was any tying of OS/2 to IBM hardware, but would you want to bet your business on one of your major competitors being totally honest? In 1995 IBM was still the big, bad monopolist and Microsoft were still an upstart and not in direct competition, if I were Michael Dell I know who I would have chosen.
Having said that you know more than me, that's just how I see it from a historical perspective; I wasn't really into PCs around that time. I just get tired of hearing how Microsoft are amazing and all the competitors completely suck, when in fact they broke the law on a number of occasions to get to where they are now.
The Brits and to a lesser extent the Aussies have the same hangups. I don't understand where it came from, our ethnic cousins over on mainland Europe have no problem with sex, and we all share a pretty similar history in terms of social development.
There was an advert a few years for shower gel that had been shown all around Europe without any problems but provoked major complaints in Britain. The reason? It showed a naked woman in the shower and you saw her erect nipple for all of 2 seconds. Sad. Time we all grew up and started treating sex as part of life, not some dirty secret to be embarrassed about.
He's just using the standard economists' practice of trying to make people feel ashamed about being justifiably upset about their livelihoods being taken from them; a practice that is primarily designed to make rich people and organisations richer and has zero to do with altruism.
OS/2 failed primarily because IBM weren't trusted to give the same OS/2 to Dell, Compaq et al that they were giving to their own PC division. If you still think that it was IBM, Novell and Netscape or whoever that handed the PC desktop market to Microsoft, ask yourself why the only competitor that has got a foothold in that same market, Linux, is free in both senses of the word? Is it because no-one could come up with and sell something that was better than Windows (as if), or is it that the only way to avoid being crushed by them is to be as difficult a target as possible to undermine.
Microsoft should have had Win32 and Office file formats taken from them by the DoJ; I doubt they'd be anything now without that stranglehold or if they were, it would be a far safer internet for the general public.
Not really. Firefox has gained quite a decent market share considering that it doesn't come with Windows. My old man and little sister both use it, my dad with no prompting from me whatsoever (and he's no more a geek than I am a quantum physicist) and my little sister from being given mild scare stories about trojans stealing her bank details (although she still uses IE for her MSN home page).
Firefox gets regular positive mentions in the PC mags over here in the UK (and is included on the cover CDs/DVDs), and given the advantages to using it and the only superficial differences between the way it works and the way IE works a lot of people are switching.
There won't be any dominance by any one browser any more as there has been over the last decade unless MS do something very evilly clever (which to be fair is always a possibility).
FF has too much momentum now to be derailed unless IE 7 offers something that is incredibly useful and can not be easily emulated by the competition.
It's pretty well understood that there do not exist coorelations between poverty and violence, but very strong ones between poverty and lack of freedoms.
Given the amount of food riots by starving people throughout human history, I hope you can show me some very convincing evidence of the above statement.
Well, that's a self correcting problem in a society where an individuals right to bear arms is respected.
Really? So how does the average gun-toting citizen get his gun out fast enough to nail the mugger before they get shot by the gun that is 2 inches from their face?
I'm not going to argue about gun control anyway, all I'll say on that matter is that banning guns outright or draconian gun control won't solve any problems, but being a bit careful about who you sell a lethal weapon to might be worth looking into.
Oh yes Chinese factory workers choose to work there, because there are so many other alternatives like begging, starvation, prostitution or crime. Please. If sweatshop factories are so wonderful why did workers in the developed world fight so hard to get rid of them.
It's only a better life relatively speaking, and once China becomes too expensive for the multinationals those people are going to be just as fucked as they were before - it's not like they could buy a house or save some money on the wages they get.
Developing economies should not be competing on the cost of labour, that is only a short-term win situation for corporate cost-cutters, they should be competing on quality. Although Germany and Japan have fucked up their world position in recent years they had 20 to 30 years of success even though their products weren't particularly cheap in comparison to those from other countries, they were just better.
This race to the bottom is in the long-term going to benefit no-one: workers in the developed countries see their incomes and lifestyles reduced, workers in the developing countries have a choice between working long hours in dangerous conditions for a pittance or starvation, and most multinationals lose the income from a well-paid workforce buying their products. The likes of Walmart will win big from this situation, but I can't see many other corporations that depend on people having disposable income doing well.
The reality is that the other PC manufacturers didn't want to depend on a competitor for their OS and had per CPU Windows licenses anyway, making a PC with OS/2 more expensive than one with Windows.
The political take on this is that Microsoft were convicted of monopoly abuse in a court of law under a Democratic administration and were set to take a huge hit, the administration changed to a Republican one, and the pursuit of Microsoft was quietly settled with what amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. So blaming the competition is all well and good, but it's not possible to say where Netscape, IBM and Novell would be if Microsoft hadn't broken the law in the first place.
No they aren't and factory workers in China or anywhere else in poor countries do not have a good standard of living. Stop believing economists' lies, sweatshops are not good for anyone except corporations; why do you think they're illegal in the developed world?
The government uses that money for a lot of different things - social security is a fairly small part of it. Killing Ayrabs in a country that was no threat to the US for example.
Blaming indigenous welfare scroungers is so last century man, over here in the UK it's the alleged hordes from Eastern Europe that are to supposedly blame for all of society's ills even though the actual percentage of Eastern Europeans here legally or illegally is infinitesimal.
Anyway do you think that if welfare was done away with tomorrow, all those lazy scroungers would go get a job? No, some of them would take your money at gunpoint instead.
If Linux can't run the same software and doesn't have the drivers for the hardware as Windows then it doesn't really matter how good it is. That doesn't mean slavishly copying everything MS does, but I fail to see why a dotNET or Win32 layer for Linux is bad; name a single alternative Office product that doesn't have MS Office compatibility that anyone is seriously considering.
People and businesses have a huge investment in Windows-only software and hardware, the only realistic way to get them to consider Linux on the desktop would be to provide as easy a migration path as possible. Linux on the server is a different proposition since Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there, but would it be as popular without Samba? Probably not.
Yes it is if you pretend that the registry doesn't exist.
This is exactly how the ecosocialist green Agenda 200X crowd of nature loving manhaters
Manhaters? How do you work that one out?
Or to take your logic a step further, I'd rather pay $20 for a cheat hack rather than learning to fight because, like, it's so much effort. It would be like cheating in a single player game, you might win but where's the satisfaction in a job well-done by beating the game by figuring it out.
I love the social part of WoW personally, chatting to various Europeans as we struggle noobily to complete the quests is far more fun than standing in the middle of Stormwind showing off ebayed Epic gear and having not the slightest idea of how the game works. What's the point of playing an MMORPG if you take shortcuts to the top level and kit, you might as well hire an RPG a week and cheat to beat them instead and spend your money on having some real world fun.
Not like anyone's impressed by ebayers anyway, in the MMORPGs I've played they're treated as sad figures of fun.
25 There is a risk that open source software contains functional defects, or breaches a third party's intellectual property rights (e.g. where it contains code misappropriated from proprietary software or functionality in breach of a patent). The absence of warranties and indemnities in most open source licences means the licensee bears this risk. This can be contrasted with the protection usually available under commercial software licences.
That made me laugh.
As opposed to who? Microsoft? Here in the UK Margaret Thatcher preached a similar mantra that government organisations are useless, inefficient and bureaucratic. So she privatised like a demon and now we have public services that are not only useless, inefficient and bureaucratic but now also largely unaccountable even though people still depend on them as much as ever. The profit motive doesn't automatically make an organisation better.
If you couldn't understand yourself what chance did he had (sorry couldn't resist :P)