MS don't give the best service, they offer the best compatibility, largely by working very hard to keep competitors out of their playing field. Had Microsoft behaved the way they have in the past in a truly competitive market they would now be in very serious financial straits. Your friend is not 'locked' into one concrete repair company because presumably there are others. Your rather bizarre argument is that Microsoft are so amazing that no-one wants to use anything else, which is quite frankly bollocks. Win32 is an enormous barrier to migration, there are so many apps that only run on Windows. I'm not talking just about the stuff you can buy in PC shops, I'm talking custom-built corporate apps, I'm talking about niche apps, I'm talking about devices that only have Windows drivers. I don't feel remotely threatened by Microsoft, I appreciate some of the things they have done. I love the way I can write simple data tools for my non-IT job without having to bother the overworked IT department. I love the simplicity of a lot of things. What I don't love are the constant patches, intrusion attempts, silent download of malware etc. In a properly competitive market these things would have a harder time getting a foothold; in the monoculture that has been unfairly and illegally gained it's easy peasy. My dad doesn't prefer Windows, it gets on his nerves. He has asked me in the past about Linux, but as soon I had to tell him he couldn't do everything he wanted to his reply was 'I guess I'm stuck with Windows then'. Most users are, the migration path isn't there yet. You think Linux on the corporate desktop wouldn't be ubiquitous now if it ran Windows apps? It can be got for a damn sight less than Windows XP Pro and that would be . That's the barrier to entry that any competitor to Windows faces, the huge installed base and the lack of a compatibility layer. Why do you think every other Office suite in the game offers MS Office compatibility? Because no-one would be interested in them otherwise, no matter how good they might be.
Mainstream as in programming mainstream, not KDE themes or Firefox. Deliberately misunderstanding me in an attempt to win the argument is kind of silly don't you think.
Superbly sums up a lot of what I think about the current world order. For those that will undoubtedly cuss me and the guy above as clueless, I want to be proved clueless, I want to be proved wrong, I want to be proved as just a paranoid nutcase, I truly, truly want to the world to become a better place due to globalisation. The thing is I don't believe it will; making your customers poorer is a suicidal business strategy for all but the likes of Walmart.
Which would be true except for the fact that mankind has always had a violent history and the relatively law-abiding non-violent citizenry in developed countries is a very recent phenomenon. This is far and away a more complex issue than violent imagery causes people to be violent. I don't deny it happens, but there are a plethora of other issues that could be causing people to be violent: money problems, relationship problems, drug misuse, excessive drinking. A lot of the safety nets that used to exist such as unions, social security and reasonable job security at a living wage have been scaled back or done away with altogether and that has left a lot of people with a lot of frustration and a lot less to lose. Banning violent video games/films/TV shows will not change that one little bit.
Government agencies have made roads, sending mail and (in properly run countries) public transport widely available. Just because its government doesn't mean it automatically sucks. Public transport over here in the UK is run by private companies and its a joke compared to the well-run publicly owned systems in most of mainland Europe. Government isn't automatically the wrong idea; no human would ever have left the Earth if it was left up to the short-sighted corporate world.
My old man is a pretty typical Windows user I reckon; he listens to his music which he downloaded from iTunes (no Linux client), makes photo CDs out of pictures he takes of his beloved grandchildren (Linux can't read the files on the camera), loves flight simulators, in particular the various flavours of Microsoft Flight Simulator (Satan will skate to work before a Linux version of this appears) and does various accountancy-type things in Excel (no Linux client either although he might at least be able to use one of the workalikes, although his simple macros won't work in any of them). You can argue that WINE/Crossover/Cedega are the way to go but that doesn't solve the problem of his camera not working and none of those projects, brilliant though they are, are anywhere near 100%. You're also ignoring the corporate market where there are thousands if not millions of custom-built Windows-only apps, a barrier to anyone trying to enter the desktop market. There is an applications barrier to entry, just saying it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't. You're right about one thing: Microsoft is not a predatory monopoly anymore, but then that wasn't my argument.
I didn't say I totally agreed with the 70,000 figure, sounds like he just picked a random number to me, but you have yourself just given a perfect example of the applications barrier to entry by saying there's just two apps and you'd switch. Same with me, I want to move completely away but my favourite MMORPG only runs on Windows and won't run properly under Cedega or WINE. Most users of Windows are in the same position, there will be at least one device or app that they want to use which doesn't work on any other system. BTW the lower court did mandate a break-up, MS managed to get that overturned on appeal though and then the Bush administration decided that being a predatory monopoly isn't so bad and stopped pursuing the case properly.
I'm having trouble seeing how that states that most software won't run on competing operating systems therefore creating an applications barrier to entry. Not only does any would-be competitor have to come up with a better OS, they also need a large proportion of the apps and drivers as well. How is that not a barrier to entry?
Know any programming languages? You might have heard of C++ which I have been known to use. Python and Perl I dabble in and have had no problems. I've been using Linux since 1998 and it's been a long while since I've had to install a source tarball of anything mainstream, although that practice was pretty common for the first three or four years. So who's making assumptions now?
Of course doing stuff in Linux rarely requires root access, unlike Windows. Now you can blame the app designers if you like (and I do), but setting an app to run as root while the rest of your work is done as a limited user is very easy in Linux, however I've yet to find a way on XP Home. Run As just isn't good enough, anything that runs at start up can't be set to run as a different user, and you also can't set it to be default behaviour, you have to keep doing Run As each time. I bet the Wintrolls will now tell me to use XP Pro, but since I'm not a pirate, and nor do I have spare cash for it or the inclination to stump up for an OS I pretty much already have, you can save your bandwidth.
Someone still stuck in 1998 I see. That myth was debunked successfully a long time ago. Why don't you google for "applications barrier to entry" to see why no competitor has threatened MS.
Absolutely, it has no transistors, resistors, diodes or microchips on a fairly complex circuit board, not to mention the complexity of LCD manufacture in the first place. It's not simple else I could build one right now using only household items. As for dumbing down, well Mandriva 2006, the user-friendly distro I installed recently, comes with plenty of developer tools, turning off the automatic GUI is one option in a text file and it can be configured very easily to do all sorts of things. Seriously I think your paranoia about your beloved Linux being diluted by 'pandering' to 'noobs' has affected your perception.
In WW2 and the Korean War it was defending largely democratic countries against vicious dictatorships. In the Middle East it's been backing one tyrant against another or propping up the very badly managed and intransigent Israeli governments.
Like it or not when one corporation has the market pretty much sewn up the only way to challenge them is to be compatible. When Gene Amdahl decided to compete with IBM in the mainframe market he didn't build a different and incompatible machine, he built the same thing for a cheaper price because that's what customers at the time were stuck with, irrespective of the merits of the particular platform. Linux can do so much more than merely be a cheap knock off of Windows, but so many organisations have so much time and money invested in Windows on the desktop that any competitor will have to provide a compatibility layer in order to get a foothold.
An LCD TV is a fairly complex piece of technology but the end user doesn't see any of that. Why should an end user have to care about configuring the hardware and software to any great degree, they have work to do. In any case Linux is not being dumbed down like Windows has been, since there is nothing stopping savvy users from switching off all the automatic stuff or, for the really geeky, building their own distro from scratch without it. Windows is the one size fits all mentality, Linux can cater to just about everyone (legacy Win32 apps users excepted for now).
The rules are different when you're a convicted monopolist who has already got into trouble for using its desktop monopoly to move into other areas. If MS had only 20% of the market and played reasonably nicely with everyone else this wouldn't be a story now would it. When MS start behaving as if the law is something they have to obey like everyone else instead of treating it as an inconvenient business expense then perhaps they'll lose a lot of their enemies.
So what you're saying is that as well as working 40-50 hours a week I need to give up my free time just to get experience in something? What about work/life balance, what about my other hobbies, what about my family and friends? Should I forget about doing anything else but eating, sleeping and programming just because billion dollar organisations are too cheap to retrain me in a new platform, given that I already have 15 years of IT experience and have no problem picking new stuff up. What you suggest might be fine for a 23 year old with no responsibilities but I've got a family to look after and to be honest better things to do with my free time than give it up so that some of the richest corporations in the world can save money on training.
And more broadly, too often on/. if MSFT does it, it must be evil. It's simply not always the case. Just too often to be ignored. Microsoft aren't unpopular because they're successful, they're unpopular because they deserve to be.
I'd love to learn how you get the 2-3 years experience in a platform you don't work on in order to avoid losing out to India. Funnily enough there are no courses available in that.
Somehow if economists' own careers were under threat they wouldn't be any where near as arrogant and condescending to those of us who have lost out to outsourcing.
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MS don't give the best service, they offer the best compatibility, largely by working very hard to keep competitors out of their playing field. Had Microsoft behaved the way they have in the past in a truly competitive market they would now be in very serious financial straits. Your friend is not 'locked' into one concrete repair company because presumably there are others. Your rather bizarre argument is that Microsoft are so amazing that no-one wants to use anything else, which is quite frankly bollocks. Win32 is an enormous barrier to migration, there are so many apps that only run on Windows. I'm not talking just about the stuff you can buy in PC shops, I'm talking custom-built corporate apps, I'm talking about niche apps, I'm talking about devices that only have Windows drivers.
I don't feel remotely threatened by Microsoft, I appreciate some of the things they have done. I love the way I can write simple data tools for my non-IT job without having to bother the overworked IT department. I love the simplicity of a lot of things. What I don't love are the constant patches, intrusion attempts, silent download of malware etc. In a properly competitive market these things would have a harder time getting a foothold; in the monoculture that has been unfairly and illegally gained it's easy peasy.
My dad doesn't prefer Windows, it gets on his nerves. He has asked me in the past about Linux, but as soon I had to tell him he couldn't do everything he wanted to his reply was 'I guess I'm stuck with Windows then'. Most users are, the migration path isn't there yet. You think Linux on the corporate desktop wouldn't be ubiquitous now if it ran Windows apps? It can be got for a damn sight less than Windows XP Pro and that would be . That's the barrier to entry that any competitor to Windows faces, the huge installed base and the lack of a compatibility layer.
Why do you think every other Office suite in the game offers MS Office compatibility? Because no-one would be interested in them otherwise, no matter how good they might be.
Mainstream as in programming mainstream, not KDE themes or Firefox. Deliberately misunderstanding me in an attempt to win the argument is kind of silly don't you think.
Superbly sums up a lot of what I think about the current world order. For those that will undoubtedly cuss me and the guy above as clueless, I want to be proved clueless, I want to be proved wrong, I want to be proved as just a paranoid nutcase, I truly, truly want to the world to become a better place due to globalisation. The thing is I don't believe it will; making your customers poorer is a suicidal business strategy for all but the likes of Walmart.
Which would be true except for the fact that mankind has always had a violent history and the relatively law-abiding non-violent citizenry in developed countries is a very recent phenomenon. This is far and away a more complex issue than violent imagery causes people to be violent. I don't deny it happens, but there are a plethora of other issues that could be causing people to be violent: money problems, relationship problems, drug misuse, excessive drinking.
A lot of the safety nets that used to exist such as unions, social security and reasonable job security at a living wage have been scaled back or done away with altogether and that has left a lot of people with a lot of frustration and a lot less to lose. Banning violent video games/films/TV shows will not change that one little bit.
Government agencies have made roads, sending mail and (in properly run countries) public transport widely available. Just because its government doesn't mean it automatically sucks. Public transport over here in the UK is run by private companies and its a joke compared to the well-run publicly owned systems in most of mainland Europe. Government isn't automatically the wrong idea; no human would ever have left the Earth if it was left up to the short-sighted corporate world.
My old man is a pretty typical Windows user I reckon; he listens to his music which he downloaded from iTunes (no Linux client), makes photo CDs out of pictures he takes of his beloved grandchildren (Linux can't read the files on the camera), loves flight simulators, in particular the various flavours of Microsoft Flight Simulator (Satan will skate to work before a Linux version of this appears) and does various accountancy-type things in Excel (no Linux client either although he might at least be able to use one of the workalikes, although his simple macros won't work in any of them). You can argue that WINE/Crossover/Cedega are the way to go but that doesn't solve the problem of his camera not working and none of those projects, brilliant though they are, are anywhere near 100%.
You're also ignoring the corporate market where there are thousands if not millions of custom-built Windows-only apps, a barrier to anyone trying to enter the desktop market.
There is an applications barrier to entry, just saying it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't.
You're right about one thing: Microsoft is not a predatory monopoly anymore, but then that wasn't my argument.
Scientists should perhaps consider using another word, since creationists are always going to use that fallacy to bamboozle the ignorant.
I didn't say I totally agreed with the 70,000 figure, sounds like he just picked a random number to me, but you have yourself just given a perfect example of the applications barrier to entry by saying there's just two apps and you'd switch. Same with me, I want to move completely away but my favourite MMORPG only runs on Windows and won't run properly under Cedega or WINE. Most users of Windows are in the same position, there will be at least one device or app that they want to use which doesn't work on any other system.
BTW the lower court did mandate a break-up, MS managed to get that overturned on appeal though and then the Bush administration decided that being a predatory monopoly isn't so bad and stopped pursuing the case properly.
Because the internet is full of people whose belief in their own leet skillz outweighs their mundane social skills.
I'm having trouble seeing how that states that most software won't run on competing operating systems therefore creating an applications barrier to entry. Not only does any would-be competitor have to come up with a better OS, they also need a large proportion of the apps and drivers as well. How is that not a barrier to entry?
Know any programming languages? You might have heard of C++ which I have been known to use. Python and Perl I dabble in and have had no problems. I've been using Linux since 1998 and it's been a long while since I've had to install a source tarball of anything mainstream, although that practice was pretty common for the first three or four years. So who's making assumptions now?
Of course doing stuff in Linux rarely requires root access, unlike Windows. Now you can blame the app designers if you like (and I do), but setting an app to run as root while the rest of your work is done as a limited user is very easy in Linux, however I've yet to find a way on XP Home. Run As just isn't good enough, anything that runs at start up can't be set to run as a different user, and you also can't set it to be default behaviour, you have to keep doing Run As each time.
I bet the Wintrolls will now tell me to use XP Pro, but since I'm not a pirate, and nor do I have spare cash for it or the inclination to stump up for an OS I pretty much already have, you can save your bandwidth.
Someone still stuck in 1998 I see. That myth was debunked successfully a long time ago. Why don't you google for "applications barrier to entry" to see why no competitor has threatened MS.
An alternative reply would be "have you tried running them under Crossover"?
Absolutely, it has no transistors, resistors, diodes or microchips on a fairly complex circuit board, not to mention the complexity of LCD manufacture in the first place. It's not simple else I could build one right now using only household items. As for dumbing down, well Mandriva 2006, the user-friendly distro I installed recently, comes with plenty of developer tools, turning off the automatic GUI is one option in a text file and it can be configured very easily to do all sorts of things. Seriously I think your paranoia about your beloved Linux being diluted by 'pandering' to 'noobs' has affected your perception.
In WW2 and the Korean War it was defending largely democratic countries against vicious dictatorships. In the Middle East it's been backing one tyrant against another or propping up the very badly managed and intransigent Israeli governments.
Like it or not when one corporation has the market pretty much sewn up the only way to challenge them is to be compatible. When Gene Amdahl decided to compete with IBM in the mainframe market he didn't build a different and incompatible machine, he built the same thing for a cheaper price because that's what customers at the time were stuck with, irrespective of the merits of the particular platform. Linux can do so much more than merely be a cheap knock off of Windows, but so many organisations have so much time and money invested in Windows on the desktop that any competitor will have to provide a compatibility layer in order to get a foothold.
An LCD TV is a fairly complex piece of technology but the end user doesn't see any of that. Why should an end user have to care about configuring the hardware and software to any great degree, they have work to do. In any case Linux is not being dumbed down like Windows has been, since there is nothing stopping savvy users from switching off all the automatic stuff or, for the really geeky, building their own distro from scratch without it. Windows is the one size fits all mentality, Linux can cater to just about everyone (legacy Win32 apps users excepted for now).
The rules are different when you're a convicted monopolist who has already got into trouble for using its desktop monopoly to move into other areas. If MS had only 20% of the market and played reasonably nicely with everyone else this wouldn't be a story now would it. When MS start behaving as if the law is something they have to obey like everyone else instead of treating it as an inconvenient business expense then perhaps they'll lose a lot of their enemies.
So what you're saying is that as well as working 40-50 hours a week I need to give up my free time just to get experience in something? What about work/life balance, what about my other hobbies, what about my family and friends? Should I forget about doing anything else but eating, sleeping and programming just because billion dollar organisations are too cheap to retrain me in a new platform, given that I already have 15 years of IT experience and have no problem picking new stuff up.
What you suggest might be fine for a 23 year old with no responsibilities but I've got a family to look after and to be honest better things to do with my free time than give it up so that some of the richest corporations in the world can save money on training.
You could probably script it on Windows too, iTunes has an ActiveX interface although I've not actually looked at it yet.
And more broadly, too often on /. if MSFT does it, it must be evil. It's simply not always the case.
Just too often to be ignored. Microsoft aren't unpopular because they're successful, they're unpopular because they deserve to be.
The EU has a population far larger than the US. Can you say shareholder lawsuit?
I'd love to learn how you get the 2-3 years experience in a platform you don't work on in order to avoid losing out to India. Funnily enough there are no courses available in that.
Somehow if economists' own careers were under threat they wouldn't be any where near as arrogant and condescending to those of us who have lost out to outsourcing.