What I find most disturbing about this story is that New York's Attorney General is dictating a rule that 1) was not debated or voted on by the New York state legislature and 2) applies to the relationships that Yahoo! has with customers in 49 other states (and presumably other countries).
There's no way you can reasonably use XP on a 400mhz system!
Sure you can. I know two people who, until this year, did just that. One owned a Pentium II 400 machine with 384 MB of RAM, and the other owned a K6-2 400 with 256 MB. Both ran Windows XP acceptably.
Land, shoes, cars, strawberries, and every person's time are scarce resources. That doesn't mean the best way to manage them is to set up a bureacracy in Washington, D.C. to dole them out and regulate their use.
Re:Who decides what should and shouldn't be includ
on
Microsoft and EU Talks End
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Remember when Microsoft first bundled a TCP/IP stack with Windows (I think it was Windows 95)? TCP/IP vendors complained bitterly, and suggested that Microsoft should be forced to sell Windows without TCP/IP. I wonder if that issue will be revisited. If Microsoft's right to control its own property is compromised, I don't see where the line can be drawn.
Come to think of it, there was a time when third parties sold memory managers for Windows . . .
I've been using a 30 GB 75GXP as the sole drive in my main home PC since 1999. Its firmware has never been updated, and it has never given me any problems.
I believe a fair paraphrase of the position of dlur, chrisd, and many others here is, "If Microsoft paid for it, it must be a lie. Therefore, I don't need to read the actual report." And how do we know that Microsoft paid for the report? Apparently, because the report will favor closed-source software (If anyone has provided other evidence, I missed it). I guess this is what Slashdotters consider a spirit of free inquiry.
Why is everyone so sure that California was conned? Shouldn't we consider the possibility that Larry Ellison and Gray Davis made a pact? Perhaps Davis agreed to give Oracle millions of taxpayer-supplied dollars, in return for large campaign contributions from Ellison in the future. It's worth looking into, especially since the article reports that the purchase was not made after competitive bidding.
. . . space exploration becomes subject to the vagaries of politics, and private alternatives are crowded out of the market. All of you who are so disappointed that the Pluto mission was canceled should be in favor of a tax cut, so you can have more of your own money to donate to or invest in a private mission (assuming it's still worth it to you when others aren't involuntarily footing the bill).
From the scant details in the article, I can't tell whether Microsoft is asking for more or less government intervention. Praise for a "strong public-private partnership" is typical Clintonspeak for political corruption and protectionism, but elsewhere Microsoft complains about insufficient deregulation of the communication industry.
Other quotes are ambiguous. When Microsoft says, "The R & D tax concession is not well focused on boosting the future competitiveness of the Australian economy," are they complaining that taxes are simply too high, or are they complaining that cuts weren't targetted to their own interests? When they say "The fact that business R & D . . . remains at persistently low levels in Australia may be interpreted as a failure to provide sufficient incentives," are they asking the government to provide welfare or to remove barriers?
So I don't know whether Microsoft wants the Australian government to back off or hop in bed. Having said that, Microsoft is hypocritical. While they were defending themselves against an antitrust suit from the DOJ, they asked the FCC to force AOL to open their network to competitors. It's difficult to have sympathy for them.
I think a lot of libertarians were early adopters of the Internet because so many of them were computer science/EE students. At least, that's how it was when I went to college. I wonder what the connection is.
The question is not whether NASA succeeds more often than it fails, but whether it is more or less likely to succeed than private space agencies. Or, put another way, whether it costs more or less for the former to succeed than the latter.
I don't know whether lots of cheap projects beats a few expensive ones (although I suspect it does), but one of the advantages of a free market in space exploration is that those agencies with the right answer win, and those agencies with the wrong answer either cease to exist or adjust their behavior.
I would like to add that I am not a conservative, and I don't even know what Rush Limbaugh's opinion on NASA is, let alone mindlessly agree with it. My opinion is pretty clearly a minority on SlashDot, but unlike you, I won't ask those who disagree with me to "shut up."
That is clearly not what I wrote. It must be easy for you to win debates when you get to make up bad arguments for the other side.
A private space agency profits when it succeeds, and loses money when it fails. Would-be investors have an incentive to figure out which is more likely to occur, and the agency has an incentive to make sure it succeeds.
NASA loses other people's money when it fails. To an individual taxpayer the cost is very small, and he has virtually no choice over how that money is spent, anyway. As a consequence, it is not worth his effort, time, or money to monitor the details of what the agency is doing.
These are reasons to prefer shrinking NASA to growing it.
Check out the poll on the same page as the article. The question is, "In light of the Mars failure, what's your view on space spending?" As of this writing, 65% of the respondants voted to increase NASA's budget. Such is the nature of government.
I wrote: >> I don't believe that the Independence Institute had anything to do with it.
heretic responded: > Yes, yes. I did not even imply such.
Then why did you bring up the Independence Institute in this thread?
heretic continued: > However, you may want to review your history. > While the article in question does predate the > DOJ investigation, it most certainly does not > predate the FTC inquiry into Microsoft's > business practices.
True. Thank you for reminding me.
I wrote: >> Regardless, the article's point has not been refuted: The paradigm >> example of market-failure due to network effects rests on shoddy evidence.
heretic replied: > Happily, that remains just your opinion. It > doesn't seem any amount of evidence would > convince you otherwise.
Why not? It's not as though you've offered any evidence in favor of the Dvorak research in any of your three posts to this thread. All we've gotten from you is ad hominem. Other than the conclusion, which parts of the Liebowitz/Margolis paper do you disagree with?
"The Fable of the Keys" was published in the _Journal of Law and Economics_ in 1990, years before Microsoft's trouble with the DOJ. I don't believe that the Independence Institute had anything to do with it.
Regardless, the article's point has not been refuted: The paradigm example of market-failure due to network effects rests on shoddy evidence.
We don't have to speculate about which motherboards Tom used. See http://www.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990223/c pu-news-03.html
The K6-III was tested on an Asus P5A, and the PIII was tested on an Asus P2B. Tom didn't mention the cache sizes, so I checked the Asus web site. The P5A has 512 KB, and the P2B has none.
The benchmarks suggest that the PIII and K6-III perform equally on business applications, but that the PIII is better for games and other programs that use a lot of floating point operations.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find most disturbing about this story is that New York's Attorney General is dictating a rule that 1) was not debated or voted on by the New York state legislature and 2) applies to the relationships that Yahoo! has with customers in 49 other states (and presumably other countries).
Land, shoes, cars, strawberries, and every person's time are scarce resources. That doesn't mean the best way to manage them is to set up a bureacracy in Washington, D.C. to dole them out and regulate their use.
Remember when Microsoft first bundled a TCP/IP stack with Windows (I think it was Windows 95)? TCP/IP vendors complained bitterly, and suggested that Microsoft should be forced to sell Windows without TCP/IP. I wonder if that issue will be revisited. If Microsoft's right to control its own property is compromised, I don't see where the line can be drawn.
Come to think of it, there was a time when third parties sold memory managers for Windows . . .
I've been using a 30 GB 75GXP as the sole drive in my main home PC since 1999. Its firmware has never been updated, and it has never given me any problems.
I believe a fair paraphrase of the position of dlur, chrisd, and many others here is, "If Microsoft paid for it, it must be a lie. Therefore, I don't need to read the actual report." And how do we know that Microsoft paid for the report? Apparently, because the report will favor closed-source software (If anyone has provided other evidence, I missed it). I guess this is what Slashdotters consider a spirit of free inquiry.
Why is everyone so sure that California was conned? Shouldn't we consider the possibility that Larry Ellison and Gray Davis made a pact? Perhaps Davis agreed to give Oracle millions of taxpayer-supplied dollars, in return for large campaign contributions from Ellison in the future. It's worth looking into, especially since the article reports that the purchase was not made after competitive bidding.
The release announcement is not linked from the FreeBSD home page (which still says the current release is 4.3), and it has tomorrow's date on it.
. . . space exploration becomes subject to the vagaries of politics, and private alternatives are crowded out of the market. All of you who are so disappointed that the Pluto mission was canceled should be in favor of a tax cut, so you can have more of your own money to donate to or invest in a private mission (assuming it's still worth it to you when others aren't involuntarily footing the bill).
From the scant details in the article, I can't tell whether Microsoft is asking for more or less government intervention. Praise for a "strong public-private partnership" is typical Clintonspeak for political corruption and protectionism, but elsewhere Microsoft complains about insufficient deregulation of the communication industry.
Other quotes are ambiguous. When Microsoft says, "The R & D tax concession is not well focused on boosting the future competitiveness of the Australian economy," are they complaining that taxes are simply too high, or are they complaining that cuts weren't targetted to their own interests? When they say "The fact that business R & D . . . remains at persistently low levels in Australia may be interpreted as a failure to provide sufficient incentives," are they asking the government to provide welfare or to remove barriers?
So I don't know whether Microsoft wants the Australian government to back off or hop in bed. Having said that, Microsoft is hypocritical. While they were defending themselves against an antitrust suit from the DOJ, they asked the FCC to force AOL to open their network to competitors. It's difficult to have sympathy for them.
I think a lot of libertarians were early adopters of the Internet because so many of them were computer science/EE students. At least, that's how it was when I went to college. I wonder what the connection is.
The question is not whether NASA succeeds more often than it fails, but whether it is more or less likely to succeed than private space agencies. Or, put another way, whether it costs more or less for the former to succeed than the latter.
I don't know whether lots of cheap projects beats a few expensive ones (although I suspect it does), but one of the advantages of a free market in space exploration is that those agencies with the right answer win, and those agencies with the wrong answer either cease to exist or adjust their behavior.
I would like to add that I am not a conservative, and I don't even know what Rush Limbaugh's opinion on NASA is, let alone mindlessly agree with it. My opinion is pretty clearly a minority on SlashDot, but unlike you, I won't ask those who disagree with me to "shut up."
That is clearly not what I wrote. It must be easy for you to win debates when you get to make up bad arguments for the other side.
A private space agency profits when it succeeds, and loses money when it fails. Would-be investors have an incentive to figure out which is more likely to occur, and the agency has an incentive to make sure it succeeds.
NASA loses other people's money when it fails. To an individual taxpayer the cost is very small, and he has virtually no choice over how that money is spent, anyway. As a consequence, it is not worth his effort, time, or money to monitor the details of what the agency is doing.
These are reasons to prefer shrinking NASA to growing it.
Check out the poll on the same page as the article. The question is, "In light of the Mars failure, what's your view on space spending?" As of this writing, 65% of the respondants voted to increase NASA's budget. Such is the nature of government.
I wrote:
>> I don't believe that the Independence Institute had anything to do with it.
heretic responded:
> Yes, yes. I did not even imply such.
Then why did you bring up the Independence Institute in this thread?
heretic continued:
> However, you may want to review your history.
> While the article in question does predate the
> DOJ investigation, it most certainly does not
> predate the FTC inquiry into Microsoft's
> business practices.
True. Thank you for reminding me.
I wrote:
>> Regardless, the article's point has not been refuted: The paradigm
>> example of market-failure due to network effects rests on shoddy evidence.
heretic replied:
> Happily, that remains just your opinion. It
> doesn't seem any amount of evidence would
> convince you otherwise.
Why not? It's not as though you've offered any evidence in favor of the Dvorak research in any of your three posts to this thread. All we've gotten from you is ad hominem. Other than the conclusion, which parts of the Liebowitz/Margolis paper do you disagree with?
"The Fable of the Keys" was published in the _Journal of Law and Economics_ in 1990, years before Microsoft's trouble with the DOJ. I don't believe that the Independence Institute had anything to do with it.
Regardless, the article's point has not been refuted: The paradigm example of market-failure due to network effects rests on shoddy evidence.
We don't have to speculate about which motherboards Tom used. See http://www.tomshardware.com/releases/99q1/990223/c pu-news-03.html
The K6-III was tested on an Asus P5A, and the PIII was tested on an Asus P2B. Tom didn't mention the cache sizes, so I checked the Asus web site. The P5A has 512 KB, and the P2B has none.
The benchmarks suggest that the PIII and K6-III perform equally on business applications, but that the PIII is better for games and other programs that use a lot of floating point operations.