So let me get this straight...you can get a processor that's equivilant to a G3 333 (which elsewhere in this comment list was equated to a 400-450 Mhz P2 or whatever), a 6 gig HD, 32 Ram, 24x CD-Rom, 6 MB Vram on a Rage Pro, USB card, and a monitor (last time I checked it was 15") for $600?
But what if you don't want all that stuff? I have an iMac, a 603 Performa, and a PowerBook 5300 at home (to go along with my 486 Linux laptop). And you know what? He's right. Macs are more expensive.
In fact, the Macintosh philosophy is completely the opposite of the Linux philosophy. While Linux creates a thin OS by good engineering and throwing out junk you don't want, the Mac makes things easier by good engineering and including junk you don't want. What if I don't want USB, or accelreated graphics, or built in 16 bit stereo.
The Mac has many strengths, and the floating point rocks, but it still has high costs.
It is interesting to speculate about which OS they would release, and how fully? Would they free NT/2000, or just Win98, which seems to be headed toward depracation?
It would be great to get all that source, but it seems that Visual C++/Basic would have to be thrown in for it to be effective. COM/DCOM is so complex to write that people only use the wizards to implement components. If they kept Visual Studio, they could continue to control their core technologies by controlling the development tools.
It does seem like a good move for Microsoft. Linux will continue to put pricing pressure on the OS market, and they still have a pretty lucrative office suite.
When will ``web designers'' (ie trained monkeys) learn that not everyone works on a fsckin' 600x400 monitor.
When you complain to them. This seems like exactly the sort of thing they are looking for. Flame the webmaster directly and maybe it'll get fixed. Even if you plan never to visit the site again, the web designer may end up going to Linux.org and remembering his toasting at your hands and avoid font sizes in HTML like the plague.
At best, you need some new rules to govern platform builders
I don't think you do need new rules related to the monopolistic qualities. Anti-competitive behavior is well defined and deals more with company behavior than product nature.
We need significantly changed rules on software in general, because patent and copyright law don't seem to capture the nature of the beast. But that is orthogonal to the monopoly argument.
I also don't mean to imply that the government should break up all monopolies. Microsoft has lately been showing signs of the arrogance and misteps that eventually bring down all monopolies. There is no need to help them. On the other hand, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck, call it a duck.
So does that mean that Informix and Sybase are both monopolists?
Your rules don't apply to software, where any installed software has a stickiness, especially if apps have been built around it.
They apply in spades, look at the utility companies. I cannot run phone or power or lines to my house because it would be too expensive. And once I have cable, I will not switch companies and pay the installation charge again, so there is an inherent stickiness.
Does this mean that utility and cable companies are not monopolies? I think the courts have ruled that because of the "stickiness" they MUST be treated as monopolies.
Microsoft is NOT A MONOPOLY. Look at any graph of OS use - Microsoft has competition in every segment. In the server OS segment it wasn't even the fastest growing product this year.
Are you looking at percentage growth? That is a misleading figure. If only one person uses my server, and another uses it next year, I have 100% growth. Whoopee. 12% growth for NT amounts to a HUGE number of new machines running NT.
A higher percentage growth can still take a long time to overcome overwhelming odds. If Linux and Windows keep the same growth rate, it will take about 20 years for Linux to surpass Windows. How many people actually believe that today's growth rates will be the same in two years?
Also, the economic definition of a monopoly is that it can raise prices at will. Ignoring the 90% market share, MS has demonstrated that they can charge whatever they want to hardware manufacturers and large corporations. At least end users are showing some sense with slow adoption.
What, pray tell, would be their competition for end-user desktop OS? BeOS maybe? Or perhaps you are still a GEM user?
I've always said, "Think of how stupid the average person is. Half the people are dumber than that."
I once said to my mother-in-law that half of all people in the world were of average or below average intelligence. She disagreed, which identified her place.
Of course, you have to be careful with this. You can really only say that half are at or below median intelligence. Using average assumes a well behaved distribution.
Whether or not you agree with this guy, Ken Thompson has a must read article that says similar things.
One of the compelling arguments is: because compilers bootstrap, it is possible to put a trojan horse in the binary that never goes away, even if the source is modified. Very interesting stuff.
The MacOS people are annoyed with the linux/open source people (being stereotyped as "slashdotters") because the open source people are fighting over whether or not APSL is open source or not. We aren't mutially exclusive camps. A lot of us Mac users are an idealistic community who believe that computers should be usable by everbody, even without technical training. This fits pretty well with the free software (not as in beer) mentality.
I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants.
The book Open Sources talks about bilogical research going from academia to big business. When 75% of the researchers are working for pharmaceutical companies, there is more research on drug treatments than therapy treatments. SO all business has to do to corrupt the movement is throw bodies at writing OSS.
What would happen if Microsoft went completely open source? I think we would see the group heading towards them just because of mass. J-- anyone?
How can you taste freedom and not want others to be free? Maybe if enough people become comfortable with free software, we will finally see a viable alternative to capitalism start to develop.
(Anybody running X on a 4015CDS? Gimme your XF86Config, please!)
You're on a new model? I'm running X on a 2150CDT. I guess it's time to try to boot off that SCSI drive theourgh the PCMCIA slot. I hope tech support can help.
The modems do seem trivial, but they also use Win 3.1 instead of Win95 sans browser. I bet even Win 95 is faster than the bloated Win 98, which would just ruin the demonstration.
It is also interesting that they didn't demonstrate connecting to the Internet on a machine on which the OEM had chosen to pre-install Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
But what if you don't want all that stuff? I have an iMac, a 603 Performa, and a PowerBook 5300 at home (to go along with my 486 Linux laptop). And you know what? He's right. Macs are more expensive.
In fact, the Macintosh philosophy is completely the opposite of the Linux philosophy. While Linux creates a thin OS by good engineering and throwing out junk you don't want, the Mac makes things easier by good engineering and including junk you don't want. What if I don't want USB, or accelreated graphics, or built in 16 bit stereo.
The Mac has many strengths, and the floating point rocks, but it still has high costs.
It would be great to get all that source, but it seems that Visual C++/Basic would have to be thrown in for it to be effective. COM/DCOM is so complex to write that people only use the wizards to implement components. If they kept Visual Studio, they could continue to control their core technologies by controlling the development tools.
It does seem like a good move for Microsoft. Linux will continue to put pricing pressure on the OS market, and they still have a pretty lucrative office suite.
When you complain to them. This seems like exactly the sort of thing they are looking for. Flame the webmaster directly and maybe it'll get fixed. Even if you plan never to visit the site again, the web designer may end up going to Linux.org and remembering his toasting at your hands and avoid font sizes in HTML like the plague.
Was it Gore or RMS who invented the Linux kernel?
We may be looking at a choice between Al "CDA" Gore and Dan Quayle. Is Corel hiring? Canada is looking damn good about now.
RMS may be able to add the no revocation clause, and we respect him for it, but it doesn't affect the use of the term Open Source.
You'll hurt them the most if you leave the site up so that everyone can see it.
It looks like our best chance for another democrat is to register republican and get Quayle the nomination.
I don't think you do need new rules related to the monopolistic qualities. Anti-competitive behavior is well defined and deals more with company behavior than product nature.
We need significantly changed rules on software in general, because patent and copyright law don't seem to capture the nature of the beast. But that is orthogonal to the monopoly argument.
I also don't mean to imply that the government should break up all monopolies. Microsoft has lately been showing signs of the arrogance and misteps that eventually bring down all monopolies. There is no need to help them. On the other hand, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck, call it a duck.
Your rules don't apply to software, where any installed software has a stickiness, especially if apps have been built around it.
They apply in spades, look at the utility companies. I cannot run phone or power or lines to my house because it would be too expensive. And once I have cable, I will not switch companies and pay the installation charge again, so there is an inherent stickiness.
Does this mean that utility and cable companies are not monopolies? I think the courts have ruled that because of the "stickiness" they MUST be treated as monopolies.
Are you looking at percentage growth? That is a misleading figure. If only one person uses my server, and another uses it next year, I have 100% growth. Whoopee. 12% growth for NT amounts to a HUGE number of new machines running NT.
A higher percentage growth can still take a long time to overcome overwhelming odds. If Linux and Windows keep the same growth rate, it will take about 20 years for Linux to surpass Windows. How many people actually believe that today's growth rates will be the same in two years?
Also, the economic definition of a monopoly is that it can raise prices at will. Ignoring the 90% market share, MS has demonstrated that they can charge whatever they want to hardware manufacturers and large corporations. At least end users are showing some sense with slow adoption.
What, pray tell, would be their competition for end-user desktop OS? BeOS maybe? Or perhaps you are still a GEM user?
I once said to my mother-in-law that half of all people in the world were of average or below average intelligence. She disagreed, which identified her place.
Of course, you have to be careful with this. You can really only say that half are at or below median intelligence. Using average assumes a well behaved distribution.
One of the compelling arguments is: because compilers bootstrap, it is possible to put a trojan horse in the binary that never goes away, even if the source is modified. Very interesting stuff.
The MacOS people are annoyed with the linux/open source people (being stereotyped as "slashdotters") because the open source people are fighting over whether or not APSL is open source or not. We aren't mutially exclusive camps. A lot of us Mac users are an idealistic community who believe that computers should be usable by everbody, even without technical training. This fits pretty well with the free software (not as in beer) mentality.
The book Open Sources talks about bilogical research going from academia to big business. When 75% of the researchers are working for pharmaceutical companies, there is more research on drug treatments than therapy treatments. SO all business has to do to corrupt the movement is throw bodies at writing OSS.
What would happen if Microsoft went completely open source? I think we would see the group heading towards them just because of mass. J-- anyone?
How can you taste freedom and not want others to be free? Maybe if enough people become comfortable with free software, we will finally see a viable alternative to capitalism start to develop.
You're on a new model? I'm running X on a 2150CDT. I guess it's time to try to boot off that SCSI drive theourgh the PCMCIA slot. I hope tech support can help.
The modems do seem trivial, but they also use Win 3.1 instead of Win95 sans browser. I bet even Win 95 is faster than the bloated Win 98, which would just ruin the demonstration.
It is also interesting that they didn't demonstrate connecting to the Internet on a machine on which the OEM had chosen to pre-install Netscape.