while the POSIX system is just there as an afterthought
That is being generous. It is my personal opinion that Microsoft only included the POSIX subsystem in order to be "checklist compliant" to bid on government and commercial contracts that require POSIX compliance. Furthering my suspicions, they basically made the POSIX subsystem more or less useless by crippling it, and making it virtually impossible to run POSIX applications and Windows applications at the same time in any sort of useful manner. So bad was the POSIX subsystem that Interix and Cygwin were created to replace it as well as numerous other porting tools (WindU, MainWin), etc. Microsoft has since borgified Interix in order to make sure it never becomes any sort of serious way to wean Windows users off to other OSes. They want it to only be a one-way street.
I don't know who Ken Cutler is, but the chief architect of NT was David N. Cutler. Which goes to show how ignorant is the typical Microsoft apologist. Please, if you are going to make statements like you did, at least know what you are talking about.
Bloat is fine, just get everybody to buy bigger machines. If it sells, it is good. Sounds like the american auto industry in the 60's before the japanese invasion.
It will be interesting to see what does eventually come along to knock Microsoft off their pedestal. Something will, eventually. Those who say it can't happen don't have a big picture view of history. Sure, it might not happen tomorrow, or next year, but it will happen. And it doesn't mean they will dry up and disappear. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn't, although they were forced to adapt and no longer look very monopolistic. Examples... If you told people in the late 70's and early 80's that IBM would be knocked off as king of the hill of hardware vendors, almost everyone would have told you that you were nuts. Couldn't happen. Sure, IBM is still around, but they are no longer the 800lb gorrilla they once were. If you told people in 1980 that CP/M would be knocked off as the leading business micro OS, most people would have told you that you were nuts. The list goes on and on. But nothing is forever. If nothing else, even if a competitor doesn't come along to knock a dominant leader down, the leader often becomes old, tired and lazy and falls down often drunk on their own power. One of the things I've seen quoted from Gates is that he has a fear of Microsoft becomming (the old) IBM. It is starting to look more and more like it is happening, despite Microsoft's efforts to avoid it.
Wordperfect 5x was written in C. They were caught off guard because the next thing was going to be OS2, then MS came out with win3.0, which took off.
I don't think that it was an accident that Microsoft told IBM and all of the other software development companies that OS/2 was the future while at the same time they were already planning to pull the rug out from under it and go full out with Windows and NT. Microsoft wanted the development tools markets and applications software markets. Getting everyone to go for one platform and then switching to another was a great way to get a huge head start on everyone else. A very dirty trick, but who would expect fair play from Microsoft.
Come on now, do you really think that a product as awful as Exchange would get very far if it didn't have Microsoft's money behind it?
Let alone that Exchange wasn't even their first attempt to break into the email server market... Those who remember the horror that was MS-Mail know the revulsion of hearing Microsoft apologists say things like "well, at least Exchange is better than MS-Mail"...
Microsoft has had a monopoly position for a long time. Most people don't remember when there wasn't a such thing as an IBM PC or MS-DOS. Microsoft got into a monopoly position with MS-DOS pretty quickly after its release in 1981. Within a couple of years it had killed off CP/M and the 8 bit 65xx OSes. So certainly since at least 1984 or so Microsoft has basically had a monopoly position in OSes.
But wait... that wasn't Microsoft's first monopoly position. Even before MS-DOS they basically had a lock-hold on BASIC interpreters, which were one of the most critical parts of the pre-IBM PC desktop. Apple's BASIC, Commodore's, and Radio Shack's were all licensed from Microsoft. Most CP/M machines also bundled Microsoft BASIC. In fact a strong case could be made that the MS-DOS monopoly which grew into the Windows monopoly was itself leveraged from the BASIC monopoly.
There is a difference between pointing to monopoly power as the primary reason for Microsoft's success than the only reason. Saying that Microsoft's monopoly power had nothing to do with the failures of other companies is as wrong as saying that those other companies made no mistakes.
As for Microsoft's marketing, I am not so sure I would call it 'shrewd' as pervasive and persistant. They've outspent just about everyone else for years, with the possible exception of IBM, but that is easy when you have monopoly profits to fall back on. It would be hard for a startup to outspend Microsoft on advertising, even in a niche.
I agree with you up to a point with IE. Microsoft certainly isn't making any money on it, and doesn't look like they have any idea how. But the difference is that a company with a monopoly to fall back on can afford to keep around loss leaders whereas a startup can't. In the case of IE, I believe that Microsoft can, and is, trying to use it to leverage into other markets by trying to build proprietary lock ins to their.NET server products and lock everyone else out of those markets.
I don't think that is a fair statement. I think it is more that their culture puts more emphasis on conformity than creative thinking and their educational system puts a lot of effort into more engineering type processes than artistic ones. But those are all pretty broad and vague generalities. It is better to judge each individual on their own merits.
Partly true... Other hardware vendors were very nervous to sell software from IBM. Can't blame them, especially back in those days IBM was nearly as nasty as Microsoft. However, once Windows started to become more important than MS-DOS, Microsoft did start to use their OS licensing provisions to keep OS/2 from ever being able to challenge Windows on preloads. By that time IBM was no longer such a threat in PC hardware sales, and other vendors may have been more willing to deal with them, but Microsoft's exclusive licensing and per-CPU licensing deals made it financially impossible for even IBM to offer preloads of OS/2 or anything other than Windows. Frankly, since most PC purchasers couldn't handle installing any OS, the inability to buy preloaded OS/2 boxes pretty much doomed it from the desktop.
Another reason is that Microsoft was busy telling all the other developers (you know, the ones that made the PC platform popular, like Lotus, WordPerfect and Borland) to write all their software for OS/2, while they were secretly planning to stab IBM in the back and spend their real efforts on Windows. So Lotus, WordPerfect and Borland missing the boat with their original Windows versions is at least partially Microsoft's fault too. Microsoft had intentions of taking over the development tools and application software markets, and the DOS->Windows transition worked in their favor to doing that. It also didn't help matters that Microsoft was cutting off the air supply of the other software vendors through forced bundling and product dumping, which cut off revenue from other vendors when they most needed it to develop new products.
Do you agree with me that a number of companies that "lost" to Microsoft lost because they made bad business decisions?
I believe that is too simplistic. Sure, a lot of companies that lost to Microsoft made bad decisions, business and technically. However, that doesn't mean that Microsoft also didn't use dirty tricks and just general deeper pockets and marketing muscle to help kill them too. One of the problems with companies with the kind of monopoly power that Microsoft wields is that it allows them to capitalize on any mistake a competitor makes while their own mistakes make little difference. And Microsoft has a history of cheating and using unethical if not outright illegal tactics even when they don't need to.
The interesting thing is that Microsoft made plenty of stupid mistakes too, but since they were powered by monopoly profits in OSes (and earlier on by licences for BASIC in ROMs), they could afford to wait out their mistakes and just keep throwing money at the problems until they straightened them out. As long as a company is successful in the long run, people forget most if not all of their stupid mistakes, but if the stupid mistakes take down the company then people remember it. The history books are written by the victorious (in the short term at least), so I would take a lot of this guy's story with a grain of salt, as it is certainly far from unbiased.
It is a pretty bad situation for a market to be in if any one company is so big that all they have to do is wait for their competitors to make a mistake in order to be able to crush them. When any one company wields so much power, it makes it nearly impossible to sustain any sort of competition. Not to mention that when a market is ruled by an 800lb gorilla, all of the smaller players are pretty much forced to take more risks and make other decisions differently than companies do in a market where there are at least two or three players splitting up significant chunks of market share. Sometimes those risks pay off brilliantly, sometimes they are stupid mistakes.
Re:Wrong, and here's why.
on
Lineo Frees CP/M
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Still wrong... and here's why.
That would be IBM's PL/1. You know, the people who brought you RS/600, OS/2 and AS/400. The slash thing is sort of a theme at IBM. It was also a convention at Digital, which is where Gary probably borrowed it from moreso than IBM. RSTS/11, RSX/11, etc. were all PDP-11 OSes. CP/M was greatly influenced by PDP OS design.
The only problem is that every government that has claimed to be Marxist or communist has really been either a military dictatorship or an oligarchy. That is why most people are confused that communism == authoritarianism... Because people like Lenin and Castro, and worse monsters like Stalin and Mao intentionally confused people.
Now to not confuse people... The fact that I say that communism or Marxism hasn't ever really even been attempted on a national scale should not be misconstrued that I think it would work if it was tried. On the contrary, I don't believe it would. In fact I think that even socialism in the european form of 'social democracy' is ultimately doomed to decay into authoritarianism.
You can also send signals that interfere with other lines on the same trunk
This hasn't been true on phone lines just about anywhere in the US for years. In the old days trunk lines used in band signalling, but the telcos finally got smart and switched to out of band signalling. Phone lines have a low pass filter at 300Hz and a high pass at 3300Hz, so you just aren't going to generate signals that can get outside your chunk of bandwidth. This also the reason that modern modems have to use so many modulation tricks to get the speeds they do, because there is a limited range of frequencies they can use.
As for putting 120VAC through the wire, it won't cause nearly as much problem as you might suspect. Ring voltage is somewhere between 48VAC and 57VAC, so 120VAC isn't that far out of spec. It depends on what is between your demarc and the central office switch. If you are on a digital multiplexer you might blow something there, but if you have a copper pair all the way to the CO there will probably be enough voltage drop that you won't likely damage too much on their end. The wire run to houses is pretty thin guage, so it probably won't carry too many amps before it gets hot enough to melt. You can bet the telcos have seen this sort of thing happen before (there are some really stupid electricians in the world!:-) ), so they probably have their equipment pretty well protected. Of course it wouldn't do any other devices such as answering machines or DSS receivers or whatever you might have plugged into your line, so don't try it at home folx.:-)
I can attest that Athlons and Durons work just fine with Linux as well. We hardly have any Intel boxes in our office at all, including servers, although most of the rackmount servers we have in our colo are Pentium III's. That is pretty much only because at the time we bought them 1U Atlon SMP boxes weren't as readily available as they are now.
Other than a certain tendency to prefer to support the underdog if possible (I want to make sure the market stays competitive), I am inclined to buy whatever offers the best price/performance and runs stable, and right now AMD seems to have Intel beat.
My experience hasn't shown this. Here at work we have dozens of Athlon and Duron based boxes which have been running quite solidly for months. The motherboards (various brands and chipsets) and CPUs have never been a problem, even when we had a batch of bad CPU fans (Orb). When we replaced the fans everything was happy again. We've had a couple of hard drives die and other minor stuff like that, but not one failure you could blame on AMD. I know dozens of people who have Athlon and/or Duron based machines and I don't recall ever hearing one of them complain about them. I've even got a few old K6 or AMD 5x86 or Am486 based machines that have been running reliably for years. So you should be modded down for either not knowing what the hell you are talking about, or at least for not providing any sort of supporting evidence for your assertation.
I would mostly agree with you on Ovations. My complaint about them isn't necessarily the plasticy feel, but that the shape isn't comfortable to hold -- the back is too rounded. I've got much the same problem with Flying V electrics. First electric I had was a V copy... Love the look of them, hate playing them sitting...
On the subject, I recently bought one of those 'coffee table' type books on guitars that was a close-out book at Borders, and it contained a quote to the effect that today was the best time ever when it comes to buying a good sounding guitar for a low price. I believe it, at least for electrics. I'm not so sure about acoustics, as the availability and price of the exotic woods used in really good acoustics is not like it used to be. But electrics sound is mostly from the electronics, and with computerized design and automated mass production, the stuff being built today is about as good as it has ever been and prices are incredibly low.
Give me a break... You can buy a 'decent' electric guitar for under $300. By decent I mean something with a solid wood body (not plywood or particle board). For that matter you can buy both a decent guitar and amp for well under $1000. You really only need one or two guitars for a whole career if you treat them right. Microsoft's $1000 tax applies to every application you write. Many programmers write several applications a year, so the cost is going to be much higher. And I don't trust Microsoft not to hike the prices way up once they get people locked into this.
Useless upgrades and software is what keeps the market from ever getting ahead and really realizing its potential. If people could buy something, and then have their money to buy something else, think how much better off they'd be. The only people who profit from this kind of unproductive behavior are companies that lack the ability to do better. It is easier to rip off your customers to get rich than really build a better product.
What if Ford put out a car that had major problems that they knew about and yet did nothing and as a result 10,000 car accidents.
Ummm... Yea... Pinto (all models built in the early to mid 70's) -- gas tank is the floor of the hatchback which is undivided from the passenger compartment, in rear end collisions sometimes the tank would rupture filling the passenger compartment with gasoline, and in the event of a fire, an explosion. Mustang (2nd gen models) -- similar problem of gas tank serving as floor of trunk, sometimes in cases of rear end collisions the gas tank would rupture filling the trunk with gasoline, and in the event of a fire, the rear seat, being backed with fiberboard would often burn through quickly allowing fire to enter the passenger compartment. Ford vans (1980s and some 1990s models) -- gas tank placed too close to catalytic converter, often causing heat from converter to heat gas tank, and occasionally cause fires. Full size Ford/Mercury cars (Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis) -- faulty shift linkages that would occasionally cause a car to spontaneously drop to reverse if left idling with transmission in "Park" on an incline such as most driveways.
Of course in these cases, the courts have often punished Ford for product liability... Ford has had to recall and fix this sort of defects. Of course Ford, unlike Microsoft, warrants their products against defects and that they are fit for the purpose they are sold for. And unlike Microsoft's products which you only license, you actually own Ford's product when you buy it. Why doesn't the government and the marketplace hold Microsoft to the same standards?
Slashdot Mirror
while the POSIX system is just there as an afterthought
That is being generous. It is my personal opinion that Microsoft only included the POSIX subsystem in order to be "checklist compliant" to bid on government and commercial contracts that require POSIX compliance. Furthering my suspicions, they basically made the POSIX subsystem more or less useless by crippling it, and making it virtually impossible to run POSIX applications and Windows applications at the same time in any sort of useful manner. So bad was the POSIX subsystem that Interix and Cygwin were created to replace it as well as numerous other porting tools (WindU, MainWin), etc. Microsoft has since borgified Interix in order to make sure it never becomes any sort of serious way to wean Windows users off to other OSes. They want it to only be a one-way street.
I don't know who Ken Cutler is, but the chief architect of NT was David N. Cutler. Which goes to show how ignorant is the typical Microsoft apologist. Please, if you are going to make statements like you did, at least know what you are talking about.
Bloat is fine, just get everybody to buy bigger machines. If it sells, it is good. Sounds like the american auto industry in the 60's before the japanese invasion.
It will be interesting to see what does eventually come along to knock Microsoft off their pedestal. Something will, eventually. Those who say it can't happen don't have a big picture view of history. Sure, it might not happen tomorrow, or next year, but it will happen. And it doesn't mean they will dry up and disappear. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn't, although they were forced to adapt and no longer look very monopolistic. Examples... If you told people in the late 70's and early 80's that IBM would be knocked off as king of the hill of hardware vendors, almost everyone would have told you that you were nuts. Couldn't happen. Sure, IBM is still around, but they are no longer the 800lb gorrilla they once were. If you told people in 1980 that CP/M would be knocked off as the leading business micro OS, most people would have told you that you were nuts. The list goes on and on. But nothing is forever. If nothing else, even if a competitor doesn't come along to knock a dominant leader down, the leader often becomes old, tired and lazy and falls down often drunk on their own power. One of the things I've seen quoted from Gates is that he has a fear of Microsoft becomming (the old) IBM. It is starting to look more and more like it is happening, despite Microsoft's efforts to avoid it.
Wordperfect 5x was written in C. They were caught off guard because the next thing was going to be OS2, then MS came out with win3.0, which took off.
I don't think that it was an accident that Microsoft told IBM and all of the other software development companies that OS/2 was the future while at the same time they were already planning to pull the rug out from under it and go full out with Windows and NT. Microsoft wanted the development tools markets and applications software markets. Getting everyone to go for one platform and then switching to another was a great way to get a huge head start on everyone else. A very dirty trick, but who would expect fair play from Microsoft.
Come on now, do you really think that a product as awful as Exchange would get very far if it didn't have Microsoft's money behind it?
Let alone that Exchange wasn't even their first attempt to break into the email server market... Those who remember the horror that was MS-Mail know the revulsion of hearing Microsoft apologists say things like "well, at least Exchange is better than MS-Mail"...
BTW, thanks for the compliments.
Microsoft has had a monopoly position for a long time. Most people don't remember when there wasn't a such thing as an IBM PC or MS-DOS. Microsoft got into a monopoly position with MS-DOS pretty quickly after its release in 1981. Within a couple of years it had killed off CP/M and the 8 bit 65xx OSes. So certainly since at least 1984 or so Microsoft has basically had a monopoly position in OSes.
But wait... that wasn't Microsoft's first monopoly position. Even before MS-DOS they basically had a lock-hold on BASIC interpreters, which were one of the most critical parts of the pre-IBM PC desktop. Apple's BASIC, Commodore's, and Radio Shack's were all licensed from Microsoft. Most CP/M machines also bundled Microsoft BASIC. In fact a strong case could be made that the MS-DOS monopoly which grew into the Windows monopoly was itself leveraged from the BASIC monopoly.
There is a difference between pointing to monopoly power as the primary reason for Microsoft's success than the only reason. Saying that Microsoft's monopoly power had nothing to do with the failures of other companies is as wrong as saying that those other companies made no mistakes.
As for Microsoft's marketing, I am not so sure I would call it 'shrewd' as pervasive and persistant. They've outspent just about everyone else for years, with the possible exception of IBM, but that is easy when you have monopoly profits to fall back on. It would be hard for a startup to outspend Microsoft on advertising, even in a niche.
I agree with you up to a point with IE. Microsoft certainly isn't making any money on it, and doesn't look like they have any idea how. But the difference is that a company with a monopoly to fall back on can afford to keep around loss leaders whereas a startup can't. In the case of IE, I believe that Microsoft can, and is, trying to use it to leverage into other markets by trying to build proprietary lock ins to their .NET server products and lock everyone else out of those markets.
Their minds don't work like that
I don't think that is a fair statement. I think it is more that their culture puts more emphasis on conformity than creative thinking and their educational system puts a lot of effort into more engineering type processes than artistic ones. But those are all pretty broad and vague generalities. It is better to judge each individual on their own merits.
Partly true... Other hardware vendors were very nervous to sell software from IBM. Can't blame them, especially back in those days IBM was nearly as nasty as Microsoft. However, once Windows started to become more important than MS-DOS, Microsoft did start to use their OS licensing provisions to keep OS/2 from ever being able to challenge Windows on preloads. By that time IBM was no longer such a threat in PC hardware sales, and other vendors may have been more willing to deal with them, but Microsoft's exclusive licensing and per-CPU licensing deals made it financially impossible for even IBM to offer preloads of OS/2 or anything other than Windows. Frankly, since most PC purchasers couldn't handle installing any OS, the inability to buy preloaded OS/2 boxes pretty much doomed it from the desktop.
Another reason is that Microsoft was busy telling all the other developers (you know, the ones that made the PC platform popular, like Lotus, WordPerfect and Borland) to write all their software for OS/2, while they were secretly planning to stab IBM in the back and spend their real efforts on Windows. So Lotus, WordPerfect and Borland missing the boat with their original Windows versions is at least partially Microsoft's fault too. Microsoft had intentions of taking over the development tools and application software markets, and the DOS->Windows transition worked in their favor to doing that. It also didn't help matters that Microsoft was cutting off the air supply of the other software vendors through forced bundling and product dumping, which cut off revenue from other vendors when they most needed it to develop new products.
Do you agree with me that a number of companies that "lost" to Microsoft lost because they made bad business decisions?
I believe that is too simplistic. Sure, a lot of companies that lost to Microsoft made bad decisions, business and technically. However, that doesn't mean that Microsoft also didn't use dirty tricks and just general deeper pockets and marketing muscle to help kill them too. One of the problems with companies with the kind of monopoly power that Microsoft wields is that it allows them to capitalize on any mistake a competitor makes while their own mistakes make little difference. And Microsoft has a history of cheating and using unethical if not outright illegal tactics even when they don't need to.
The interesting thing is that Microsoft made plenty of stupid mistakes too, but since they were powered by monopoly profits in OSes (and earlier on by licences for BASIC in ROMs), they could afford to wait out their mistakes and just keep throwing money at the problems until they straightened them out. As long as a company is successful in the long run, people forget most if not all of their stupid mistakes, but if the stupid mistakes take down the company then people remember it. The history books are written by the victorious (in the short term at least), so I would take a lot of this guy's story with a grain of salt, as it is certainly far from unbiased.
It is a pretty bad situation for a market to be in if any one company is so big that all they have to do is wait for their competitors to make a mistake in order to be able to crush them. When any one company wields so much power, it makes it nearly impossible to sustain any sort of competition. Not to mention that when a market is ruled by an 800lb gorilla, all of the smaller players are pretty much forced to take more risks and make other decisions differently than companies do in a market where there are at least two or three players splitting up significant chunks of market share. Sometimes those risks pay off brilliantly, sometimes they are stupid mistakes.
Dohh... that should be RS/6000...
Still wrong... and here's why.
That would be IBM's PL/1. You know, the people who brought you RS/600, OS/2 and AS/400. The slash thing is sort of a theme at IBM. It was also a convention at Digital, which is where Gary probably borrowed it from moreso than IBM. RSTS/11, RSX/11, etc. were all PDP-11 OSes. CP/M was greatly influenced by PDP OS design.
Sadly, I can't really disagree with you about that.
The only problem is that every government that has claimed to be Marxist or communist has really been either a military dictatorship or an oligarchy. That is why most people are confused that communism == authoritarianism... Because people like Lenin and Castro, and worse monsters like Stalin and Mao intentionally confused people.
Now to not confuse people... The fact that I say that communism or Marxism hasn't ever really even been attempted on a national scale should not be misconstrued that I think it would work if it was tried. On the contrary, I don't believe it would. In fact I think that even socialism in the european form of 'social democracy' is ultimately doomed to decay into authoritarianism.
You can also send signals that interfere with other lines on the same trunk
:-) ), so they probably have their equipment pretty well protected. Of course it wouldn't do any other devices such as answering machines or DSS receivers or whatever you might have plugged into your line, so don't try it at home folx. :-)
This hasn't been true on phone lines just about anywhere in the US for years. In the old days trunk lines used in band signalling, but the telcos finally got smart and switched to out of band signalling. Phone lines have a low pass filter at 300Hz and a high pass at 3300Hz, so you just aren't going to generate signals that can get outside your chunk of bandwidth. This also the reason that modern modems have to use so many modulation tricks to get the speeds they do, because there is a limited range of frequencies they can use.
As for putting 120VAC through the wire, it won't cause nearly as much problem as you might suspect. Ring voltage is somewhere between 48VAC and 57VAC, so 120VAC isn't that far out of spec. It depends on what is between your demarc and the central office switch. If you are on a digital multiplexer you might blow something there, but if you have a copper pair all the way to the CO there will probably be enough voltage drop that you won't likely damage too much on their end. The wire run to houses is pretty thin guage, so it probably won't carry too many amps before it gets hot enough to melt. You can bet the telcos have seen this sort of thing happen before (there are some really stupid electricians in the world!
I can attest that Athlons and Durons work just fine with Linux as well. We hardly have any Intel boxes in our office at all, including servers, although most of the rackmount servers we have in our colo are Pentium III's. That is pretty much only because at the time we bought them 1U Atlon SMP boxes weren't as readily available as they are now.
Other than a certain tendency to prefer to support the underdog if possible (I want to make sure the market stays competitive), I am inclined to buy whatever offers the best price/performance and runs stable, and right now AMD seems to have Intel beat.
My experience hasn't shown this. Here at work we have dozens of Athlon and Duron based boxes which have been running quite solidly for months. The motherboards (various brands and chipsets) and CPUs have never been a problem, even when we had a batch of bad CPU fans (Orb). When we replaced the fans everything was happy again. We've had a couple of hard drives die and other minor stuff like that, but not one failure you could blame on AMD. I know dozens of people who have Athlon and/or Duron based machines and I don't recall ever hearing one of them complain about them. I've even got a few old K6 or AMD 5x86 or Am486 based machines that have been running reliably for years. So you should be modded down for either not knowing what the hell you are talking about, or at least for not providing any sort of supporting evidence for your assertation.
Now that is an amusing idea... not that I would ever advocate writing or spreading viruses... but it did give me a little chuckle.
I would mostly agree with you on Ovations. My complaint about them isn't necessarily the plasticy feel, but that the shape isn't comfortable to hold -- the back is too rounded. I've got much the same problem with Flying V electrics. First electric I had was a V copy... Love the look of them, hate playing them sitting...
On the subject, I recently bought one of those 'coffee table' type books on guitars that was a close-out book at Borders, and it contained a quote to the effect that today was the best time ever when it comes to buying a good sounding guitar for a low price. I believe it, at least for electrics. I'm not so sure about acoustics, as the availability and price of the exotic woods used in really good acoustics is not like it used to be. But electrics sound is mostly from the electronics, and with computerized design and automated mass production, the stuff being built today is about as good as it has ever been and prices are incredibly low.
Give me a break... You can buy a 'decent' electric guitar for under $300. By decent I mean something with a solid wood body (not plywood or particle board). For that matter you can buy both a decent guitar and amp for well under $1000. You really only need one or two guitars for a whole career if you treat them right. Microsoft's $1000 tax applies to every application you write. Many programmers write several applications a year, so the cost is going to be much higher. And I don't trust Microsoft not to hike the prices way up once they get people locked into this.
Umm... because you're unlikely to die a horrible burning painful death using Microsoft stuff?
Assuming that nobody is using any Microsoft stuff for anything mission critical. One would hope not anyway.
If there was a court remedy, it would be for Microsoft to make fixes available for free. Oh wait. They do that anyway.
That is only part of it, likely they'd have to pay damages as well.
Useless upgrades and software is what keeps the market from ever getting ahead and really realizing its potential. If people could buy something, and then have their money to buy something else, think how much better off they'd be. The only people who profit from this kind of unproductive behavior are companies that lack the ability to do better. It is easier to rip off your customers to get rich than really build a better product.
What if Ford put out a car that had major problems that they knew about and yet did nothing and as a result 10,000 car accidents.
Ummm... Yea... Pinto (all models built in the early to mid 70's) -- gas tank is the floor of the hatchback which is undivided from the passenger compartment, in rear end collisions sometimes the tank would rupture filling the passenger compartment with gasoline, and in the event of a fire, an explosion. Mustang (2nd gen models) -- similar problem of gas tank serving as floor of trunk, sometimes in cases of rear end collisions the gas tank would rupture filling the trunk with gasoline, and in the event of a fire, the rear seat, being backed with fiberboard would often burn through quickly allowing fire to enter the passenger compartment. Ford vans (1980s and some 1990s models) -- gas tank placed too close to catalytic converter, often causing heat from converter to heat gas tank, and occasionally cause fires. Full size Ford/Mercury cars (Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis) -- faulty shift linkages that would occasionally cause a car to spontaneously drop to reverse if left idling with transmission in "Park" on an incline such as most driveways.
Of course in these cases, the courts have often punished Ford for product liability... Ford has had to recall and fix this sort of defects. Of course Ford, unlike Microsoft, warrants their products against defects and that they are fit for the purpose they are sold for. And unlike Microsoft's products which you only license, you actually own Ford's product when you buy it. Why doesn't the government and the marketplace hold Microsoft to the same standards?