What in the world do you mean? Do you think it is fine that the government was secretly monitoring everyone's phone records?
Not at all. I merely mean that we do not have all the facts yet. On the surface it looks pretty damning of the government but I'd be shocked if we know the whole picture at this point.
At this point, a trial is a formality. He claims he broke the law, and now the government is agreeing with him.
Fair enough. His guilt has little to do with whether what he did was justified. Sometimes one has to break the law to do the right thing.
It also does not appear that the NSA broke any laws - everything seems to be on the up-and-up.
He may have broken the law but in my opinion so did the NSA and absent evidence to the contrary I consider the NSA's conduct worse. Specifically I think the NSA violated the 4th amendment right against unreasonable search at the very least. I *know* that the government has no probable cause to search my phone or email records. Furthermore there is no reasonable justification for such a sweeping program being secret. Prudent people doing malicious things should have assumed their communications weren't secret so the only reason for such secrecy is because the program is of questionable legality.
Our system is now set up such that the government can monitor the details of every phone call made by every American, secretly and legally.
Rather scary isn't it? Realistically I suspect this recent revelation is just the tip of the iceberg.
Privacy has *long* been established as a natural right and is codified in the highest legal document in the nation.
There is no express right to privacy in the US Constitution. The word privacy does not appear anywhere in the document. Several amendments including the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th, 10th and 14th as well as various case law rulings indirectly guarantee some rights we regard as privacy rights. You don't need to refer to a generalized right to privacy here. It appears that the primary issue here is that the NSA has violated the 4th amendment right against unreasonable search. Speaking for myself, the government has no probable cause to need such information about me or my activities. Presumably the same is true for most US citizens.
I don't doubt for a moment that the NSA finds the information useful. I also think they are violating the law by merely gathering the information. If any arm of the government genuinely needs this information they should have to get that right publicly approved by Congress. A competent enemy of the state would have assumed they were gathering such information anyway so keeping the existence of the program a secret serves no purpose other than to hide activity in violation of the law.
So in other words, he's right but our system will prosecute him anyway.
We don't actually know if he is right at this point but it is correct that he is likely to face prosecution.
Isn't that the definition of a corrupted system? We should change our system and demand a pardon
No, it's how the system is designed to work. The government thinks you broke a law and so you go to trial where the legality of the matter is adjudicated. If the law is in violation of the Constitution, we have a Supreme Court to deal with that. Congress can intervene as well in theory. What would make the system corrupt is if the person was jailed in spite of being obviously innocent of the law as written. In this case he may be "right" but he may also have broken the law which we'll need a trial to decide. Whether the NSA was breaking the law or not is a separate issue which will be separately adjudicated. Even if the government is misbehaving the laws relating to release of confidential information are rather clear when it comes to the consequences of releasing such information. In any case the wheels of justice are likely to turn slowly and I think he is in for a rough couple of years even in the most optimistic scenario.
Even if that's true, he did nothing wrong. He merely shed light upon some of the government's wrongdoing.
Regardless of the rightness of what he did, he is likely to be a price to pay for doing it. Acts of defiance, no matter how justified, are rarely without consequence to the person doing them. Nation states tend to not like to be embarrassed and they are very powerful even when what they are doing is wrong.
... a necessary expense you should spend as little as possible on. Unfortunately, that's what they teach MBAs and the like in college.
You are making a biased assumption not based in any actual fact. I assure you that is not taught in any MBA curriculum from first hand experience. I have an engineering degree but I also have a business degree. I'm an engineer but I also am a certified accountant. They do NOT teach that IT is the same thing as paper towels in business school. I know because I've been through the classes myself. In fact they actually spend a surprising amount of effort trying to teach how IT can be a productivity multiplier. You would be surprised how many people who go to study business management are from IT. Probably 10-15% of my class had some form of IT background. They were there to learn how to more effectively manage which involves more than just optimizing IT.
Now there are managers who don't really grok IT and do regard it as an extravagance. Sounds like you've run into some of these fools. My sympathies for that. On the other hand there are plenty of IT people who greatly overestimate the importance of what they do and think that money should be poured endlessly into IT without any concept of the effect on the rest of the business. That door swings both ways. The trick is to find that nice middle ground where IT can be a real asset without costing the company needlessly.
if i want to muck up my phone with crap thats on me. I dont want apple pretending to be my dad and im 4 years old "now hold my hand as we cross the road."
I don't know any logical reason why you would want to "muck up" your phone with crap. Apple's policies have nothing to do with you specifically. They're in place because the vast majority (well into the 90% range) of people who use an iPhone (or Android for that matter) are very ill equipped to keep their phones free of malware. Most people really just want their phone to work and don't want to deal with a repeat of the malware removal software (ala Norton Antivirus) on their phones as well as their PCs.
If you want a phone with less hand holding, there are some options out there. No one will be offended if you choose something other than an iPhone.
You'd be surprised the kind of things that happen in your average large business thanks to HR and bean counters running the show and considering IT a cost center instead of an asset...
Umm, IT actually IS a cost center in most companies. My company is a manufacturing firm and I run all our IT operations (among many other duties) and our customers do not pay us a dime for our IT. They pay us to deliver the products we make for them. IT falls in to the necessary/useful expense category. If you are not being paid for the IT then it is by definition a cost center. Lot's of necessary, useful and important things are cost centers - it's not a pejorative. The job of IT is to help the other parts of the business do their job more effectively.
That does not imply that IT is not worth every penny we spend on it. It absolutely is worth every penny and I'd spend more on it if we had the means to do so. It enables us to do things much more efficiently than we would otherwise. If it is well done IT can sometimes be a competitive advantage. Unfortunately a lot of companies don't do a very good job with it.
You ignored my argument: then you cannot even call $100 lying on the pavement "free" since it will cost you time (i.e. money) to bend down and pick it up.
I didn't ignore your argument. I told you your argument is flat out wrong. If you want to be specific about there being no charge to you for the license of certain distributions of linux then say that. Be specific. If you do not care to be specific then be prepared to have the flaws in your argument pointed out to you.
And yes your time to bend over and pick up that $100 bill does cost money at minimum as an opportunity cost. The cost might be small but it is not zero.
If we use your definition, then nothing ever is free, and free becomes an entirely pointless word since it can be applied to nothing.
Nothing is ever free. That would be correct. There is an opportunity cost to everything even if there is no other direct or indirect cost. The only question is who is paying and when. Haven't you ever heard the phrase there is no such thing as a free lunch?
And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."
I might be willing to believe that if they would explain what they are doing and why and do so like we are all adults. Instead we get nonsense like the TSA claiming that someone is somehow going to blow up a plane with 4oz of liquid but it would be too dangerous to actually explain and details of this improbable threat to our safety. Frankly I just don't find their explanations (when they bother to provide them) satisfactory and so I'm forced to conclude that they are not acting in manner consistent with appropriate respect for my civil rights.
If there is a genuine threat out there I expect our government to explain what they are doing and why in terms that a reasonable adult can understand. I'm willing to extend some amount of trust to our elected leaders but that trust has very sharp limits and is contingent on continued evidence that they are behaving in a rational and respectful manner. I've seen rather little of that in recent days.
Linux is free period. It's just a fact. Like the sun is bright. Only because you chose to pay for support, you now proclaim "but but but for support I still have to pay"
Choose to pay? It's not a choice if you actually want to use it in any non-trivial way. You will have to pay for internal staff or external service providers but you will pay something for support either way. The only relevant question is whether the overall cost is cheaper than the alternatives. Often it is but the cost is NEVER zero.
Furthermore support is not remotely the only cost. Administration, training, installation, application software, data migration, integration with existing systems, etc. All those costs normally are much more than the software license. Linux is free in much the same way that your subsidized smartphone is free. You're going to pay for it, the cost just isn't in the initial acquisition of the equipment.
You know that's just a stupid thing to say. Free means free which means you don't pay anything for it.
And you WILL pay something for it. You might not pay a license fee but you will incur plenty of other costs. Curious that you think a fact is a stupid thing to say...
It still doesn't mean that Linux isn't free. It is because it costs nothing to acquitre.
Ok, Mr. Pedantic. If you want to get picky then say what you actually mean. Yes you can get a software license for linux for free. You cannot however actually use linux for free so it is a distinction without a difference. Often linux is a more economic choice. Sometimes it isn't. Pointing out that the license fees are lower is interesting but of minor importance. No accountant is going to be swayed by your unwillingness to consider all the relevant costs in the equation.
(full disclosure: I am a certified accountant specializing in cost accounting)
Speaking as an certified accountant, you cannot possibly come up with a situation where you can install linux in a business for zero cost. You might not pay to acquire the operating system software but you will pay for support, training, installation, administration, hardware, application software, data migration, and more. It might cost less but it will never cost nothing. The moment you have a single employee do any work on it you immediately will incur cost.
If you want to make the argument that linux often is more cost effective please do. It is a credible argument which is easily supported by facts. Claiming that linux is free of any cost however is utter nonsense and easily shown to be false.
your server product make me laugh because Linux can do everything for free and better.
"For free"? Hah! Not hardly. The fact that some linux distros (but not all) are distributed free of charge hardly makes installing linux in a business free of charge. You seem to have neglected the cost of hardware, installation, training, support, application software, integration with existing systems, and data migration just to start. While there are plenty of cases where linux is the better option financially there are NO cases where it is genuinely free. (as in beer)
As for better, that depends entirely on your specific needs. Linux is the better choice in some cases but it isn't hard to come up with specific cases where Microsoft products are the more sensible choice. At our company linux would provide essentially no cost advantage over Windows for what we do. I'm an accountant and I assure you that there is very little in the way of linux based accounting software and what little there is is largely pretty poor. If you are running a website or some heavy database work then linux is frequently a great choice but it demonstrably cannot do "everything for free and better".
As a naive individual with little to no business knowledge or training, could somebody please explain how Steve Ballmer is still CEO of Microsoft?
I would surmise it is a combination of the following:
* Balmer is among the largest shareholders in the company and good buddies with his predecessor who is the largest shareholder and Chairman *Microsoft has a relatively unimpressive and compliant board largely hand picked by Bill Gates and Balmer *The fact that despite their problems the company remains hugely profitable which makes it harder for the board to complain even if they were inclined to do so. *The company's large market cap and strong cash position make them a very unattractive target for a buyout and difficult for activist investors *There are credible rumors that Balmer culls potential rivals within the company
I'm sure there are other reasons but those are probably among the bigger reasons.
I get that but for me the problem always goes back to the fact that something had to come from somewhere beforehand. The wheel dawns the horse and cart, the horse and cart, horse and cart dawns the car.
The fact that someone came up with a prerequisite for an invention does not eliminate the free rider problem on development cost. Classic example is drug research. Manufacturing processes for drugs is well understood. However research to develop the drug will cost many millions to develop. Once developed the product can be manufactured usually for a few cents per unit. There is basically no possible way to recoup the research investment required to develop the drug if it can be freely copied once the formula is known. Hence we have patents to protect the incentive to do the research. The fact that our patent system in its current form is flawed does not make the free rider problem any less serious. Much of the technology we utilize today would never have been developed without some form of protection from the free rider problem.
All the prerequisites for an iPhone existed before Apple but no one else managed to put them all together. If there was no difficulty in doing the research to create the iPhone then someone else would have done it sooner. Virtually every smartphone that came afterward has copied Apple's basic design. Love them or hate them, you cannot deny that Apple is the one who figured out the form factor that everyone else has copied. Why should Apple (or any other company) be forced to be the research arm of another company for free? No one is arguing that Apple should have complete control over everything that even remotely resembles an iPhone (except maybe Apple) but it is very reasonable to grant them some patents to reward their inventiveness and incentivize more of it.
While it is without question that many aspects of our patent system are broken, your logic that everything depends on something prior is faulty because the economic incentives break down on a forward looking basis. Investments that cannot be recouped (almost) never get made.
You must be kidding. Apple is a law firm that happens to sell consumer electronics.
Right, because a courtroom is a great place to sell millions of smartphones and computers. I know I buy all my gear based on which company has the best lawyers. I trust you will point out the line on Apple's income statement where they highlight their earnings from lawsuits? [/sarcasm]
Seriously, none of Apple's competitors are a bit more ethical than Apple when it comes to patent litigation and all of them engage in the same behavior. A pox on ALL their houses.
I find it totally mind boggling that after an American organisation shows an Asian company how to create a successful product and when the Asian company actually does so the American's get pissed off?
The problem is called the free rider problem and it shouldn't boggle your mind at all. Patents were created specifically to deal with that problem. Research and product design are expensive. It is MUCH cheaper to just copy some else's solution. Problem is that the company that actually did the heavy lifting in figuring out the problem in the first place now can no longer compete because they still need to recoup their costs. And yes, that pisses off the company that solved the problem in the first place. Most of the time it is a zero sum game. Would you appreciate someone copying your work and making money instead of you? If you say yes I'm going to call you a liar.
They are fundamentally computing devices. Where they differ is in power potential. A tablet CPU now is as fast as a PC CPU 7-10 years ago.
And it used to be that laptops were a generation or two behind desktop machines. That gap has mostly been erased. You're conflating current technology status with trajectory. Tablets are slower now mostly due to battery limitations and heat issues. Those are not immutable limitations.
Desktop-class PCs will always have the advantage of space, power, and cooling. They will always be faster.
And they have the disadvantages of not being portable. As for speed, I suspect in time that except for consumer and light office grade uses you'll find the performance gap will greatly diminish in a few years. I'm typing this on a PC built in 2005 which works just fine and isn't much faster than a lot of tablets on the market today. I do accounting, light graphics, work instructions, some pretty heavy spreadsheet work and more and there is no reason a tablet with a few peripherals attached could not do all the same stuff.
I know there have been several of the "tablet that attaches to a keyboard" Windows 8 machines.
Yeah, they're trying. The initial offerings aren't especially good but that's not unusual. The first laptops were pretty crappy. Same with digital cameras. Same with smartphones. Eventually someone will figure out a product that really works. Microsoft is obviously working on this. I'm pretty sure Apple is too and I'd be shocked if Google isn't as well. I've already seen sales reps come to our office using an ipad with a bluetooth keyboard as a laptop and it's working well for them. I've seen medical offices doing the same thing. Relatively clumsy still but the concept is solid in my opinion. Microsoft is (rightly) getting beaten up for their clumsy implementation of Windows 8 but the fundamental concept of what they are doing is actually a pretty good idea. I see Apple doing similar things integrating bits of IOS into OSX. I don't pretend to know what the best approach is but that is pretty obviously the direction we're headed.
The beauty of software is you can configure it to adjust to how you are using the machine. If I need something optimized for keyboard/mouse when sitting at a desk or optimized for touch when sitting on the couch, there is no reason that cannot be done. It's going to be interesting to watch.
I'd like to see that happen in a slightly different manner, where the phone acts as some kind of central storage system, and allows you to access you data either via the phone itself, or via the PC you connect it to
That could work too. The main drawback I can see is that if it is just a storage device you have less control over the applications installed on the system you connect to. Not a huge problem though. Maybe some sort of portable apps for critical applications you need that might not be readily available. The other wrinkle is that storage can be based in the so called cloud. With a fast enough network connection it is unclear how much local storage makes sense. Varies by user and location I suppose.
In any case my main point was that people are WAY too wrapped up in the current hardware limitations of tablets and aren't thinking hard enough about their potential. What I want is a device that adjusts the interface based on how I need to use it. Smartphones are just a tablet with a small screen that can make calls. Both tablets and smartphones are PCs with a touch optimized interface. Aside from the software there is no fundamental difference between a PC and a tablet and a smartphone and thus I'm rather confident that over time they will converge. It's a little unclear exactly what form that convergence will take but I don't really see any credible argument against it happening.
Other than that tablets are designed for touch interfaces and make crappy desktops and laptops as a result.
Exactly my point. You're obsessing over what they are now and ignoring what they can and probably will become. Just because the software currently doesn't do a decent job on office tasks doesn't mean it will stay that way. OSX and IOS are already moving towards each other. Windows 8 is a first (crude) effort to try to merge the two. It's going to happen, the only question is when.
Just because they make crappy laptops now has very little to do with how they eventually will be used. It used to be that laptops were severely underpowered compared with desktops. Now aside from a few niche uses that is no longer meaningfully true. The performance of tablets will improve and the software will evolve to allow office type applications to be used effectively. I can't predict the exact form it will take but it will happen.
There is a reason why typical tablets are 7 to 10 inches and typical desktops are 15 to 23 inches.
And there is no reason why you cannot attach a tablet to a bigger screen or keyboard or mouse should the need arise. (it doesn't work the other way around though)
People get much to focused on the current limitations of tablets to see where they eventually are headed. Tablets will subsume much of the PC market the same way that smartphones took over the point and shoot camera market. There is only one important reason why tablets haven't taken over more market share - namely that the software hasn't been developed yet to make them work well on a desktop. Yet. Both Apple and Microsoft are working on the problem. It won't happen overnight but I assure you that much of what we use laptops for will be taken over by tablets in due time.
What is stopping MS from creating an Android and/or Linux distro?
Margins. It would be quite impossible for MS to create a differentiated product from Android and/or linux. Basically they would be at Google's mercy at that point. If MS were to ever do what you suggest it would be as a MUCH smaller company, probably post bankruptcy or buyout. There would be little value in yet another Android/linux distro from MS.
MS has lot's of life in them yet
No question. I can't conceive of any scenario whereby MS isn't a huge player for at least the next 10 years. There are some serious threats to them out there but their installed base will carry them at least that far. Beyond that who can really say?
Microsoft owns both gaming and workplace PC's. Nothing is going to take that from them.
In the short run you are quite correct. In the long run though the picture is far less clear. Microsoft has viable competitors in gaming both in hardware and software which they have been unable to drive from the market. While not likely, it's hardly inconceivable they could lose their grip on the gaming market in time. The biggest source of Microsoft's dominance in the work place isn't Windows, it is Office. Specifically the Office file formats (.xls and.doc especially) are the main source of their dominance. That isn't going to change in the near future but history shows that office product dominance doesn't always last. Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc used to rule the office and eventually they were pushed out of the way. There are some very real threats to the Office monopoly (Openoffice, Google docs, etc) out there. Whether any of them will eventually push Office out of the way I honestly cannot predict but it isn't impossible in the long run.
Tablets aren't meant to replace PC's, they're just too different kind of devices,
You forgot the key word "yet". No, tablets don't compete directly with PCs now but in time they unquestionably will. Remember that PCs didn't compete directly with mainframes back in the day either but eventually they did. There is no fundamental reason a tablet couldn't be put in a dock and used as an office computer and in time the probably will be. A tablet is just a general purpose computer which focuses on a touch interface rather than a keyboard/mouse interface. I think it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to adapt them for office work.
I would love the ability to plug my phone into a dock at my office (possibly with some extra processing horsepower/storage and connection to the office phone system) and have it be my work PC as well. Think something along the lines of a Mac version of OSX when docked and IOS when undocked. Done well that would be hugely useful.
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What in the world do you mean? Do you think it is fine that the government was secretly monitoring everyone's phone records?
Not at all. I merely mean that we do not have all the facts yet. On the surface it looks pretty damning of the government but I'd be shocked if we know the whole picture at this point.
At this point, a trial is a formality. He claims he broke the law, and now the government is agreeing with him.
Fair enough. His guilt has little to do with whether what he did was justified. Sometimes one has to break the law to do the right thing.
It also does not appear that the NSA broke any laws - everything seems to be on the up-and-up.
He may have broken the law but in my opinion so did the NSA and absent evidence to the contrary I consider the NSA's conduct worse. Specifically I think the NSA violated the 4th amendment right against unreasonable search at the very least. I *know* that the government has no probable cause to search my phone or email records. Furthermore there is no reasonable justification for such a sweeping program being secret. Prudent people doing malicious things should have assumed their communications weren't secret so the only reason for such secrecy is because the program is of questionable legality.
Our system is now set up such that the government can monitor the details of every phone call made by every American, secretly and legally.
Rather scary isn't it? Realistically I suspect this recent revelation is just the tip of the iceberg.
Privacy has *long* been established as a natural right and is codified in the highest legal document in the nation.
There is no express right to privacy in the US Constitution. The word privacy does not appear anywhere in the document. Several amendments including the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th, 10th and 14th as well as various case law rulings indirectly guarantee some rights we regard as privacy rights. You don't need to refer to a generalized right to privacy here. It appears that the primary issue here is that the NSA has violated the 4th amendment right against unreasonable search. Speaking for myself, the government has no probable cause to need such information about me or my activities. Presumably the same is true for most US citizens.
I don't doubt for a moment that the NSA finds the information useful. I also think they are violating the law by merely gathering the information. If any arm of the government genuinely needs this information they should have to get that right publicly approved by Congress. A competent enemy of the state would have assumed they were gathering such information anyway so keeping the existence of the program a secret serves no purpose other than to hide activity in violation of the law.
So in other words, he's right but our system will prosecute him anyway.
We don't actually know if he is right at this point but it is correct that he is likely to face prosecution.
Isn't that the definition of a corrupted system? We should change our system and demand a pardon
No, it's how the system is designed to work. The government thinks you broke a law and so you go to trial where the legality of the matter is adjudicated. If the law is in violation of the Constitution, we have a Supreme Court to deal with that. Congress can intervene as well in theory. What would make the system corrupt is if the person was jailed in spite of being obviously innocent of the law as written. In this case he may be "right" but he may also have broken the law which we'll need a trial to decide. Whether the NSA was breaking the law or not is a separate issue which will be separately adjudicated. Even if the government is misbehaving the laws relating to release of confidential information are rather clear when it comes to the consequences of releasing such information. In any case the wheels of justice are likely to turn slowly and I think he is in for a rough couple of years even in the most optimistic scenario.
Even if that's true, he did nothing wrong. He merely shed light upon some of the government's wrongdoing.
Regardless of the rightness of what he did, he is likely to be a price to pay for doing it. Acts of defiance, no matter how justified, are rarely without consequence to the person doing them. Nation states tend to not like to be embarrassed and they are very powerful even when what they are doing is wrong.
... a necessary expense you should spend as little as possible on. Unfortunately, that's what they teach MBAs and the like in college.
You are making a biased assumption not based in any actual fact. I assure you that is not taught in any MBA curriculum from first hand experience. I have an engineering degree but I also have a business degree. I'm an engineer but I also am a certified accountant. They do NOT teach that IT is the same thing as paper towels in business school. I know because I've been through the classes myself. In fact they actually spend a surprising amount of effort trying to teach how IT can be a productivity multiplier. You would be surprised how many people who go to study business management are from IT. Probably 10-15% of my class had some form of IT background. They were there to learn how to more effectively manage which involves more than just optimizing IT.
Now there are managers who don't really grok IT and do regard it as an extravagance. Sounds like you've run into some of these fools. My sympathies for that. On the other hand there are plenty of IT people who greatly overestimate the importance of what they do and think that money should be poured endlessly into IT without any concept of the effect on the rest of the business. That door swings both ways. The trick is to find that nice middle ground where IT can be a real asset without costing the company needlessly.
if i want to muck up my phone with crap thats on me. I dont want apple pretending to be my dad and im 4 years old "now hold my hand as we cross the road."
I don't know any logical reason why you would want to "muck up" your phone with crap. Apple's policies have nothing to do with you specifically. They're in place because the vast majority (well into the 90% range) of people who use an iPhone (or Android for that matter) are very ill equipped to keep their phones free of malware. Most people really just want their phone to work and don't want to deal with a repeat of the malware removal software (ala Norton Antivirus) on their phones as well as their PCs.
If you want a phone with less hand holding, there are some options out there. No one will be offended if you choose something other than an iPhone.
You'd be surprised the kind of things that happen in your average large business thanks to HR and bean counters running the show and considering IT a cost center instead of an asset...
Umm, IT actually IS a cost center in most companies. My company is a manufacturing firm and I run all our IT operations (among many other duties) and our customers do not pay us a dime for our IT. They pay us to deliver the products we make for them. IT falls in to the necessary/useful expense category. If you are not being paid for the IT then it is by definition a cost center. Lot's of necessary, useful and important things are cost centers - it's not a pejorative. The job of IT is to help the other parts of the business do their job more effectively.
That does not imply that IT is not worth every penny we spend on it. It absolutely is worth every penny and I'd spend more on it if we had the means to do so. It enables us to do things much more efficiently than we would otherwise. If it is well done IT can sometimes be a competitive advantage. Unfortunately a lot of companies don't do a very good job with it.
You ignored my argument: then you cannot even call $100 lying on the pavement "free" since it will cost you time (i.e. money) to bend down and pick it up.
I didn't ignore your argument. I told you your argument is flat out wrong. If you want to be specific about there being no charge to you for the license of certain distributions of linux then say that. Be specific. If you do not care to be specific then be prepared to have the flaws in your argument pointed out to you.
And yes your time to bend over and pick up that $100 bill does cost money at minimum as an opportunity cost. The cost might be small but it is not zero.
If we use your definition, then nothing ever is free, and free becomes an entirely pointless word since it can be applied to nothing.
Nothing is ever free. That would be correct. There is an opportunity cost to everything even if there is no other direct or indirect cost. The only question is who is paying and when. Haven't you ever heard the phrase there is no such thing as a free lunch?
And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."
I might be willing to believe that if they would explain what they are doing and why and do so like we are all adults. Instead we get nonsense like the TSA claiming that someone is somehow going to blow up a plane with 4oz of liquid but it would be too dangerous to actually explain and details of this improbable threat to our safety. Frankly I just don't find their explanations (when they bother to provide them) satisfactory and so I'm forced to conclude that they are not acting in manner consistent with appropriate respect for my civil rights.
If there is a genuine threat out there I expect our government to explain what they are doing and why in terms that a reasonable adult can understand. I'm willing to extend some amount of trust to our elected leaders but that trust has very sharp limits and is contingent on continued evidence that they are behaving in a rational and respectful manner. I've seen rather little of that in recent days.
Linux is free period. It's just a fact. Like the sun is bright.
Only because you chose to pay for support, you now proclaim "but but but for support I still have to pay"
Choose to pay? It's not a choice if you actually want to use it in any non-trivial way. You will have to pay for internal staff or external service providers but you will pay something for support either way. The only relevant question is whether the overall cost is cheaper than the alternatives. Often it is but the cost is NEVER zero.
Furthermore support is not remotely the only cost. Administration, training, installation, application software, data migration, integration with existing systems, etc. All those costs normally are much more than the software license. Linux is free in much the same way that your subsidized smartphone is free. You're going to pay for it, the cost just isn't in the initial acquisition of the equipment.
You know that's just a stupid thing to say. Free means free which means you don't pay anything for it.
And you WILL pay something for it. You might not pay a license fee but you will incur plenty of other costs. Curious that you think a fact is a stupid thing to say...
It still doesn't mean that Linux isn't free. It is because it costs nothing to acquitre.
Ok, Mr. Pedantic. If you want to get picky then say what you actually mean. Yes you can get a software license for linux for free. You cannot however actually use linux for free so it is a distinction without a difference. Often linux is a more economic choice. Sometimes it isn't. Pointing out that the license fees are lower is interesting but of minor importance. No accountant is going to be swayed by your unwillingness to consider all the relevant costs in the equation.
(full disclosure: I am a certified accountant specializing in cost accounting)
Free means you don't pay anything for it.
Speaking as an certified accountant, you cannot possibly come up with a situation where you can install linux in a business for zero cost. You might not pay to acquire the operating system software but you will pay for support, training, installation, administration, hardware, application software, data migration, and more. It might cost less but it will never cost nothing. The moment you have a single employee do any work on it you immediately will incur cost.
If you want to make the argument that linux often is more cost effective please do. It is a credible argument which is easily supported by facts. Claiming that linux is free of any cost however is utter nonsense and easily shown to be false.
your server product make me laugh because Linux can do everything for free and better.
"For free"? Hah! Not hardly. The fact that some linux distros (but not all) are distributed free of charge hardly makes installing linux in a business free of charge. You seem to have neglected the cost of hardware, installation, training, support, application software, integration with existing systems, and data migration just to start. While there are plenty of cases where linux is the better option financially there are NO cases where it is genuinely free. (as in beer)
As for better, that depends entirely on your specific needs. Linux is the better choice in some cases but it isn't hard to come up with specific cases where Microsoft products are the more sensible choice. At our company linux would provide essentially no cost advantage over Windows for what we do. I'm an accountant and I assure you that there is very little in the way of linux based accounting software and what little there is is largely pretty poor. If you are running a website or some heavy database work then linux is frequently a great choice but it demonstrably cannot do "everything for free and better".
As a naive individual with little to no business knowledge or training, could somebody please explain how Steve Ballmer is still CEO of Microsoft?
I would surmise it is a combination of the following:
* Balmer is among the largest shareholders in the company and good buddies with his predecessor who is the largest shareholder and Chairman
*Microsoft has a relatively unimpressive and compliant board largely hand picked by Bill Gates and Balmer
*The fact that despite their problems the company remains hugely profitable which makes it harder for the board to complain even if they were inclined to do so.
*The company's large market cap and strong cash position make them a very unattractive target for a buyout and difficult for activist investors
*There are credible rumors that Balmer culls potential rivals within the company
I'm sure there are other reasons but those are probably among the bigger reasons.
I get that but for me the problem always goes back to the fact that something had to come from somewhere beforehand. The wheel dawns the horse and cart, the horse and cart, horse and cart dawns the car.
The fact that someone came up with a prerequisite for an invention does not eliminate the free rider problem on development cost. Classic example is drug research. Manufacturing processes for drugs is well understood. However research to develop the drug will cost many millions to develop. Once developed the product can be manufactured usually for a few cents per unit. There is basically no possible way to recoup the research investment required to develop the drug if it can be freely copied once the formula is known. Hence we have patents to protect the incentive to do the research. The fact that our patent system in its current form is flawed does not make the free rider problem any less serious. Much of the technology we utilize today would never have been developed without some form of protection from the free rider problem.
All the prerequisites for an iPhone existed before Apple but no one else managed to put them all together. If there was no difficulty in doing the research to create the iPhone then someone else would have done it sooner. Virtually every smartphone that came afterward has copied Apple's basic design. Love them or hate them, you cannot deny that Apple is the one who figured out the form factor that everyone else has copied. Why should Apple (or any other company) be forced to be the research arm of another company for free? No one is arguing that Apple should have complete control over everything that even remotely resembles an iPhone (except maybe Apple) but it is very reasonable to grant them some patents to reward their inventiveness and incentivize more of it.
While it is without question that many aspects of our patent system are broken, your logic that everything depends on something prior is faulty because the economic incentives break down on a forward looking basis. Investments that cannot be recouped (almost) never get made.
You must be kidding. Apple is a law firm that happens to sell consumer electronics.
Right, because a courtroom is a great place to sell millions of smartphones and computers. I know I buy all my gear based on which company has the best lawyers. I trust you will point out the line on Apple's income statement where they highlight their earnings from lawsuits? [/sarcasm]
Seriously, none of Apple's competitors are a bit more ethical than Apple when it comes to patent litigation and all of them engage in the same behavior. A pox on ALL their houses.
Apple's patents are on design, silly things like rounded corners and page bounce.
Demonstrably not true with even a casual investigation.
I find it totally mind boggling that after an American organisation shows an Asian company how to create a successful product and when the Asian company actually does so the American's get pissed off?
The problem is called the free rider problem and it shouldn't boggle your mind at all. Patents were created specifically to deal with that problem. Research and product design are expensive. It is MUCH cheaper to just copy some else's solution. Problem is that the company that actually did the heavy lifting in figuring out the problem in the first place now can no longer compete because they still need to recoup their costs. And yes, that pisses off the company that solved the problem in the first place. Most of the time it is a zero sum game. Would you appreciate someone copying your work and making money instead of you? If you say yes I'm going to call you a liar.
They are fundamentally computing devices. Where they differ is in power potential. A tablet CPU now is as fast as a PC CPU 7-10 years ago.
And it used to be that laptops were a generation or two behind desktop machines. That gap has mostly been erased. You're conflating current technology status with trajectory. Tablets are slower now mostly due to battery limitations and heat issues. Those are not immutable limitations.
Desktop-class PCs will always have the advantage of space, power, and cooling. They will always be faster.
And they have the disadvantages of not being portable. As for speed, I suspect in time that except for consumer and light office grade uses you'll find the performance gap will greatly diminish in a few years. I'm typing this on a PC built in 2005 which works just fine and isn't much faster than a lot of tablets on the market today. I do accounting, light graphics, work instructions, some pretty heavy spreadsheet work and more and there is no reason a tablet with a few peripherals attached could not do all the same stuff.
I know there have been several of the "tablet that attaches to a keyboard" Windows 8 machines.
Yeah, they're trying. The initial offerings aren't especially good but that's not unusual. The first laptops were pretty crappy. Same with digital cameras. Same with smartphones. Eventually someone will figure out a product that really works. Microsoft is obviously working on this. I'm pretty sure Apple is too and I'd be shocked if Google isn't as well. I've already seen sales reps come to our office using an ipad with a bluetooth keyboard as a laptop and it's working well for them. I've seen medical offices doing the same thing. Relatively clumsy still but the concept is solid in my opinion. Microsoft is (rightly) getting beaten up for their clumsy implementation of Windows 8 but the fundamental concept of what they are doing is actually a pretty good idea. I see Apple doing similar things integrating bits of IOS into OSX. I don't pretend to know what the best approach is but that is pretty obviously the direction we're headed.
The beauty of software is you can configure it to adjust to how you are using the machine. If I need something optimized for keyboard/mouse when sitting at a desk or optimized for touch when sitting on the couch, there is no reason that cannot be done. It's going to be interesting to watch.
I'd like to see that happen in a slightly different manner, where the phone acts as some kind of central storage system, and allows you to access you data either via the phone itself, or via the PC you connect it to
That could work too. The main drawback I can see is that if it is just a storage device you have less control over the applications installed on the system you connect to. Not a huge problem though. Maybe some sort of portable apps for critical applications you need that might not be readily available. The other wrinkle is that storage can be based in the so called cloud. With a fast enough network connection it is unclear how much local storage makes sense. Varies by user and location I suppose.
In any case my main point was that people are WAY too wrapped up in the current hardware limitations of tablets and aren't thinking hard enough about their potential. What I want is a device that adjusts the interface based on how I need to use it. Smartphones are just a tablet with a small screen that can make calls. Both tablets and smartphones are PCs with a touch optimized interface. Aside from the software there is no fundamental difference between a PC and a tablet and a smartphone and thus I'm rather confident that over time they will converge. It's a little unclear exactly what form that convergence will take but I don't really see any credible argument against it happening.
Other than that tablets are designed for touch interfaces and make crappy desktops and laptops as a result.
Exactly my point. You're obsessing over what they are now and ignoring what they can and probably will become. Just because the software currently doesn't do a decent job on office tasks doesn't mean it will stay that way. OSX and IOS are already moving towards each other. Windows 8 is a first (crude) effort to try to merge the two. It's going to happen, the only question is when.
Just because they make crappy laptops now has very little to do with how they eventually will be used. It used to be that laptops were severely underpowered compared with desktops. Now aside from a few niche uses that is no longer meaningfully true. The performance of tablets will improve and the software will evolve to allow office type applications to be used effectively. I can't predict the exact form it will take but it will happen.
There is a reason why typical tablets are 7 to 10 inches and typical desktops are 15 to 23 inches.
And there is no reason why you cannot attach a tablet to a bigger screen or keyboard or mouse should the need arise. (it doesn't work the other way around though)
People get much to focused on the current limitations of tablets to see where they eventually are headed. Tablets will subsume much of the PC market the same way that smartphones took over the point and shoot camera market. There is only one important reason why tablets haven't taken over more market share - namely that the software hasn't been developed yet to make them work well on a desktop. Yet. Both Apple and Microsoft are working on the problem. It won't happen overnight but I assure you that much of what we use laptops for will be taken over by tablets in due time.
What is stopping MS from creating an Android and/or Linux distro?
Margins. It would be quite impossible for MS to create a differentiated product from Android and/or linux. Basically they would be at Google's mercy at that point. If MS were to ever do what you suggest it would be as a MUCH smaller company, probably post bankruptcy or buyout. There would be little value in yet another Android/linux distro from MS.
MS has lot's of life in them yet
No question. I can't conceive of any scenario whereby MS isn't a huge player for at least the next 10 years. There are some serious threats to them out there but their installed base will carry them at least that far. Beyond that who can really say?
Microsoft owns both gaming and workplace PC's. Nothing is going to take that from them.
In the short run you are quite correct. In the long run though the picture is far less clear. Microsoft has viable competitors in gaming both in hardware and software which they have been unable to drive from the market. While not likely, it's hardly inconceivable they could lose their grip on the gaming market in time. The biggest source of Microsoft's dominance in the work place isn't Windows, it is Office. Specifically the Office file formats (.xls and .doc especially) are the main source of their dominance. That isn't going to change in the near future but history shows that office product dominance doesn't always last. Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, etc used to rule the office and eventually they were pushed out of the way. There are some very real threats to the Office monopoly (Openoffice, Google docs, etc) out there. Whether any of them will eventually push Office out of the way I honestly cannot predict but it isn't impossible in the long run.
Tablets aren't meant to replace PC's, they're just too different kind of devices,
You forgot the key word "yet". No, tablets don't compete directly with PCs now but in time they unquestionably will. Remember that PCs didn't compete directly with mainframes back in the day either but eventually they did. There is no fundamental reason a tablet couldn't be put in a dock and used as an office computer and in time the probably will be. A tablet is just a general purpose computer which focuses on a touch interface rather than a keyboard/mouse interface. I think it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to adapt them for office work.
I would love the ability to plug my phone into a dock at my office (possibly with some extra processing horsepower/storage and connection to the office phone system) and have it be my work PC as well. Think something along the lines of a Mac version of OSX when docked and IOS when undocked. Done well that would be hugely useful.