Aye, this is all a bit odd to me. It'd be like a Ford car dealership...
Car analogies rarely make any sense in terms of antitrust law unless you preface them with, "Imagine one car company gained global dominance over the market and there was no real competition in the auto industry anymore".
The competition is complaining that Google isn't showing their competing products? (and which competing products DO go up against Google)?
The complaint isn't that Google isn't being fair to alternate search providers. The argument is that Google is using their dominance in search to undermine competition in other markets where Google also competes (such as using their search to undermine competition in the social network market by unfairly favoring Google+ over Facebook in search ratings). The point I'm trying to make is that antitrust law almost always deals with multiple markets, the one monopolized and the one being undermined. If you're trying to make sense of it and you're only considering one market, you should probably read a little further because you haven't gotten there yet.
Except that nobody's forcing anybody to use Google.
This is completely irrelevant. Whether you have monopoly influence because of a natural advantage (control the only source of something) or you've been granted it by a sovereign nation, or you simply outcompeted everyone else; what matters is what you do with the monopoly. With great power comes great responsibility. When you have this kind of power you can basically break capitalism, profiting from lack of innovation. This is bad for society, so we passed laws about what you can and can't do with that kind of power. If you still don't understand why, look at the history of antitrust law and the horrible abuses that gave rise to these laws.
In fact, the real monopolist still forces every computer you buy to come with Windows and default you to Bing for searching.
And the EU has taken several actions against MS for abuses of their desktop OS monopoly and hopefully will take more. How does that man they should not also take action against Google if it turns out Google is breaking those same laws?
Maybe "Content was the hook to sell hardware" was true at one time, but nowadays it goes both ways.
Both Apple's quarterly profit figures and their statements to the SEC have indicated content sale profits are a rounding error compared to hardware sales. Even really generous interpretations that maximize sales numbers and minimize Apples expenses place it under 3%. Has this changed drastically in the last year? Please provide links if you have them, because I can find nothing to back up your claim.
Gold-plated weapons are at least useful when humidity is 100% all year round.
I guess I don't see how gold plating on weapons is "useful" at all, but how does humidity make it more or less so given the very stable nature of gold?
You do of course know that all of Apple's own software has to cheat the rules right? None -- absolutely zero -- of their desktop apps are or can be sandboxed...
WTF are you talking about? Apple apps were the only one sandboxed in Leopard and they've been adding more and more in every release. Hell that's why OS X was immune to several of the service level exploits that hit Linux, Apple's version of the service was sandboxed.
and for stuff like Xcode and lion
You chose the primary IDE and a new release of the OS as your examples of Apple "Apps"? Seriously?
I can see where they're coming from, it does seem a bit ridiculous that Samsung for example can get bitched at for suing over FRAND patents when they're simultaneously getting sued over equally important but non-FRAND patents resulting in the litigating company not getting bitched at.
Why is that ridiculous? Samsung agreed to the terms in order to get it included as part of a standard. If Samsung doesn't want to abide by FRAND licensing for any patent they own that's their choice, they just have to not agree to do so in exchange for having it included as part of that standard. Samsung chose to include it because it benefitted them financially at the time. Besides which, Samsung's patents are used by everyone only because they were chosen for the standard. 3G could have used something else but didn't because Samsung was ready and willing to try to get their technology included.
Your arguments all make it sound like it was something done to Samsung instead of a contract Samsung pushed for and which has benefitted them.
2) No government entity can be on the board of the standards group.
So you think patents should be enforced as decided by the categorization of a group of individuals not elected by a democratic process, but chosen by corporations? I'll call Ben Franklin's zombie and he'll be over to slap you momentarily.
Google bought Motorola. If you haven't heard about their FRAND patent licensing and the investigation thereof, you might want to get more background before reading this story.
I'd like a HUD display too. Every car should have one.
Having been peripherally involved in the design of HUD systems for some american car companies, no you do not want a HUD system designed by a committee and managed by a US car company exec who still thinks more and bigger is better. Just look at some of the Windows based touchscreens in recent models and imagine a similar quality of design popping up in front of your face while you're trying to drive.
Maybe, maybe not. If the requirements really are constantly changing, Agile poses a very real risk of never producing a working product.
I'm not really sure that is any worse than not producing the product needed.
At some point, you simply must stop doing the agile stuff to just beat on the project for an arbitrarily long period of time until you have something that is functional for some fixed set of goals, and worry about dealing with the fallout later.
If the goals are never firmed up, all projects fail, even if you abandon Agile. In my experience, Agile is just a good way to make it very, very visible to all the stakeholders that this is what is going on so they can do something about it. When managers are constantly telling you to change things, they often don't understand the costs. With Agile, everyone sees the forecast for completion growing or shrinking as they change it each iteration.
Also, Agile tends to assume that everything can be broken down into subtasks that take only a single iteration to complete. In practice, this is not always the case, particularly with complex software.
It does? I agree breaking things up into too many subtasks can be a common failing of agile implementations, but I see things estimated at 2+ iterations all the time.
Finally, Agile has a tendency to fail in its goal of producing software that is actually usable by its intended consumer. Because the design work is done iteratively, it is very easy to go off on tangents and iterate on some part of the design, while failing to design the whole.
I've seen this and I've worked in situations where all the design has to go through the designers before the developers, so when a customer requests a change in scope or purpose, they have to write a card for the UI specialists to design that change and write cards for the developers to implement it. This works fairly well in most cases and prevents the problems you're talking about.
This problem can also plague the architecture underneath if you aren't careful.
Agreed, this requires a significant number of competent engineers in a team and developers that remember to include architectural refactors into estimates by default. It also requires a culture of building solid, maintainable code and not relying on your fellow coders to go back in and fix your lousy hacks. (I've seen that happen as well, but the team was also collectively in charge of hiring and firing, so offending coders did not last.)
The biggest thing working against them, I think, is that working for GM usually means living in Detroit.
Nobody lives in Detroit anymore. Well, very few people working white collar jobs, including auto industry workers. They all moved out into the surrounding areas like Royal Oak, Grosse Pointe, Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Troy, etc.
Detroit is left to the very poor and the hipster kids into urban farming and Bankse.
Is that sarcasm? I can't even understand what the previous poster is trying to say. It seems like some sort of conspiracy theory involving Apple and MS, but the sentence structure is as torturous as the "logic".
I mean, I'm typing this on a MacBook and I can't even check out a preview of one of their fancy e-motion-2.0-books...
Ah it's not their fault that Apple is the only one right now supporting the advanced features.
Ummm... You know Apple makes the MacBook he was referring to, right? It even has several browsers that run on the same base rendering engine as the iPad app is using.
InDesign is the premiere tool and it doesn't support this type of interaction.
InDesign is from Adobe (read slow as shit to adopt any new tech they did not invent) and it is focused on the print magazine industry. You might want to look at their Flash replacement tools instead, whatever they're calling PhoneGap now that they bought it.
Question: Why would you try to force your GF to use Linux when obviously the software she requires doesn't work and in fact you had to cook up a VM just BECAUSE it won't do what she needs natively?
Generally, many of us end up being obligated to support our immediate friends and family in an IT capacity. If you've ever been there, you want to support what you know and preferably something low maintenance and remotely accessible. Stipulating what you'll support makes reasonable sense.
I can't believe no one has mentioned that this is a move for security. Yup, if you want to go through Apple's cloud service to connect your mobile and desktop app, both apps have to be vetted by Apple and both have to be sandboxed. Apple's mechanism for vetting on iOS is the App store submission process. Apple's mechanism for vetting on OS X and the requirement for sandboxing is the Mac App store.
I'm not a big fan of Apple's model and I wish someone would build a store/repository that worked for both OSS and closed source software and had multiple, configurable inputs to the vetting process, configurable by a user, but even in that case it would be perfectly reasonable for any online service provider to require specific vetting before gaining access to the service.
Apple makes basically very little if anything selling apps in either store. It's about promoting their bread and butter hardware sales business and it's been working great. Occam's razor people... you don't need to invent a conspiracy to understand Apple's business strategy here or predict their next moves. I just wish some people creating competing solutions could look past the "Apple bad" mantra to see in what ways they are winning here and adapt open and inclusive services to offer the same level of security and user convenience.
Copyleft licenses like GPL have always been ideal for projects where you're trying to build something you use in conjunction with others that use it. It's a community contract for building a shared tool with many contributors where one competitor forking it is a danger. This is great for things like LibreOffice or Webkit. Developers are large users and so long as it is a shared resource no one party gets an advantage.
Open, permissive licenses like BSD have always been better for component level technology or proposed new standard protocols or other software that requires both interoperability and adoption to have value. Things like drivers, services that run communication protocols, and generic system services all fit into this category. In these cases barriers to adoption (like dropping it into a bunch of closed source code) are detrimental to the project as a whole. It's better if MS takes it and incorporates it into Windows, even if they don't contribute anything back.
So an increase in the proportion of the latter category is hardly surprising as technology trends change. The move to mobile devices, cheaper targeted hardware manufacturing, and smaller, more efficient computing components lead to an increased number of projects in this latter category. Building a service to print wirelessly from your tablet? Why wouldn't you want you code as widely adopted and thus as widely supported by printer makers as possible? Does a competitor closing the source on the audio driver you built really give them any sort of advantage over a GPL where they have to give bug fixes back (but probably won't do much since you already made a feature complete product)?
It used to be the only place we saw this sort of development was in the Linux and BSD server markets because hardware costs made it out of the reach of those who built small devices. Now WindRiver and the like are taking a back seat as the market is flooded with cheap, small components. Most everyone in the industry has seen this trend ramping up for a long time. It isn't an ideological shift. We are all still applying the licenses that make sense to our projects. There are just more projects in the latter category now because the environment has changed.
If it was so scientific, there wouldn't be a long drawn out court case with many reversals and appeals. Instead, we should all settle antitrust disputes using a simple computer program right?
The lengthy nature of MS's prosecution had something to do with money, money donated to politicians who replaced the judges on the case with those those beholden to them. Money has always undermined the US legal system to a significant extent and there is a huge body of scientific evidence for that as well if you actually care to be informed.
Every side has more than one way of looking at it after all.
The idea that there are two, equally valid sides to anything is one of most idiotic inventions of modern entertainment news.
True, not all views are valid. That doesn't mean that there CAN'T be two views to an issue.
No, there can be many valid perspectives and opinions on topics. I never said otherwise. There is not, however, always two equally valid opinions on a topic. Often one side of an argument is simply uninformed or irrational. Your implication that because there are multiple ways of looking at the antitrust issue in question, that disagreeing with a logical and factually supported analysis without providing and backing for it is fine... well that is a very popular sort of opinion these days and one I find repugnant and anti-intellectual. It's right up there with, "scientific studies reproduced across the globe show A, but irrational mystics also have an opinion based on their feelings. Lets spend an hour giving them a soapbox to promote their attack on reason and science."
Chrome is getting to a stage where its share of the market could be regarded as significant.
Not in terms of either the economics or legality of antitrust action. Chrome is hovering around 25%. It isn't even the front runner, let alone dominating the market to the extent that it could be used to undermine competition. 70% is a guideline often used by regulators for when to start investigating potential antitrust issues.
It's about not understanding antitrust laws. It's about me not accepting the definition of antitrust in this particular case. Every side has more than one way of looking at it after all.
The idea that there are two, equally valid sides to anything is one of most idiotic inventions of modern entertainment news. Antitrust has a meaning and a distinct purpose. The economics are clear and well demonstrated. The laws are clear in their restrictions and follow logically from the economics. The application of the law to Microsoft's actions is clear. Your acceptance is not needed.
Yea sounds like recent claims by some other smaller browser makers made against IE.
Here's where you seem confused. They made claims against Microsoft, not IE. Microsoft has dominance in the desktop OS market and used that to promote IE instead of letting it live or die based upon it's own merits in a competitive marketplace. Google may be guilty of similar leveraging of their dominance in online search and search related advertisement, but not in bundling things into their browser (which has relatively small market share). Google can bundle anything they want with Chrome. It's when they bundle things with Google search (you get them when you get search) that you run afoul antitrust law. When Google starts promoting their other services unfairly in search results (as they've done and been busted for) that's when Google is doing the same antitrust behavior as MS.
Canonical and Apple both now offer proper stores for selling, installing, and updating third party software. They both need work and many publishers don't use them, but at least we're making some, slow progress.
I'm not infected (checked), but perhaps about 50% of those that "haven't installed the updates" is because people refuse to upgrade?
That's an interesting possibility. Netmarketshare.com puts 10.6 and 10.7 users as 82% of all Macs. 10.5 is 14%, but Apple is now offering a free upgrade to those users to 10.6. so 96% of Mac users can get this security update for free without manually installing Java (lets assume most users aren't technical enough to understand how). That means there are maybe 30 million Macs out there connected to the net that can't get free updates (All of them at least 6 years old).
I refuse to pay for an upgrade that will no doubt slow my Macbook Pro down and cause random issues.
Macbook Pro were introduced in 2006, 6 months before Leopard, so I guess it is possible you have one of the machines released in the first 3 months of 2006 that did not get a free update to Leopard and thus can't get a free update to Snow Leopard to get these security updates. I'm not sure why you think an upgrade would make your system slow or cause random issues.
You might be shocked at the amount of "automatic" updates the mac doesn't install.
Automatic updating of third party software sucks on all major OS's. Even Linux is pretty bad for commercial software (although Ubuntu is making great strides in this area, credit where it is due).
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Aye, this is all a bit odd to me. It'd be like a Ford car dealership...
Car analogies rarely make any sense in terms of antitrust law unless you preface them with, "Imagine one car company gained global dominance over the market and there was no real competition in the auto industry anymore".
The competition is complaining that Google isn't showing their competing products? (and which competing products DO go up against Google)?
The complaint isn't that Google isn't being fair to alternate search providers. The argument is that Google is using their dominance in search to undermine competition in other markets where Google also competes (such as using their search to undermine competition in the social network market by unfairly favoring Google+ over Facebook in search ratings). The point I'm trying to make is that antitrust law almost always deals with multiple markets, the one monopolized and the one being undermined. If you're trying to make sense of it and you're only considering one market, you should probably read a little further because you haven't gotten there yet.
Except that nobody's forcing anybody to use Google.
This is completely irrelevant. Whether you have monopoly influence because of a natural advantage (control the only source of something) or you've been granted it by a sovereign nation, or you simply outcompeted everyone else; what matters is what you do with the monopoly. With great power comes great responsibility. When you have this kind of power you can basically break capitalism, profiting from lack of innovation. This is bad for society, so we passed laws about what you can and can't do with that kind of power. If you still don't understand why, look at the history of antitrust law and the horrible abuses that gave rise to these laws.
In fact, the real monopolist still forces every computer you buy to come with Windows and default you to Bing for searching.
And the EU has taken several actions against MS for abuses of their desktop OS monopoly and hopefully will take more. How does that man they should not also take action against Google if it turns out Google is breaking those same laws?
Maybe "Content was the hook to sell hardware" was true at one time, but nowadays it goes both ways.
Both Apple's quarterly profit figures and their statements to the SEC have indicated content sale profits are a rounding error compared to hardware sales. Even really generous interpretations that maximize sales numbers and minimize Apples expenses place it under 3%. Has this changed drastically in the last year? Please provide links if you have them, because I can find nothing to back up your claim.
Gold-plated weapons are at least useful when humidity is 100% all year round.
I guess I don't see how gold plating on weapons is "useful" at all, but how does humidity make it more or less so given the very stable nature of gold?
You do of course know that all of Apple's own software has to cheat the rules right? None -- absolutely zero -- of their desktop apps are or can be sandboxed...
WTF are you talking about? Apple apps were the only one sandboxed in Leopard and they've been adding more and more in every release. Hell that's why OS X was immune to several of the service level exploits that hit Linux, Apple's version of the service was sandboxed.
and for stuff like Xcode and lion
You chose the primary IDE and a new release of the OS as your examples of Apple "Apps"? Seriously?
I can see where they're coming from, it does seem a bit ridiculous that Samsung for example can get bitched at for suing over FRAND patents when they're simultaneously getting sued over equally important but non-FRAND patents resulting in the litigating company not getting bitched at.
Why is that ridiculous? Samsung agreed to the terms in order to get it included as part of a standard. If Samsung doesn't want to abide by FRAND licensing for any patent they own that's their choice, they just have to not agree to do so in exchange for having it included as part of that standard. Samsung chose to include it because it benefitted them financially at the time. Besides which, Samsung's patents are used by everyone only because they were chosen for the standard. 3G could have used something else but didn't because Samsung was ready and willing to try to get their technology included.
Your arguments all make it sound like it was something done to Samsung instead of a contract Samsung pushed for and which has benefitted them.
2) No government entity can be on the board of the standards group.
So you think patents should be enforced as decided by the categorization of a group of individuals not elected by a democratic process, but chosen by corporations? I'll call Ben Franklin's zombie and he'll be over to slap you momentarily.
Google bought Motorola. If you haven't heard about their FRAND patent licensing and the investigation thereof, you might want to get more background before reading this story.
I'd like a HUD display too. Every car should have one.
Having been peripherally involved in the design of HUD systems for some american car companies, no you do not want a HUD system designed by a committee and managed by a US car company exec who still thinks more and bigger is better. Just look at some of the Windows based touchscreens in recent models and imagine a similar quality of design popping up in front of your face while you're trying to drive.
Maybe, maybe not. If the requirements really are constantly changing, Agile poses a very real risk of never producing a working product.
I'm not really sure that is any worse than not producing the product needed.
At some point, you simply must stop doing the agile stuff to just beat on the project for an arbitrarily long period of time until you have something that is functional for some fixed set of goals, and worry about dealing with the fallout later.
If the goals are never firmed up, all projects fail, even if you abandon Agile. In my experience, Agile is just a good way to make it very, very visible to all the stakeholders that this is what is going on so they can do something about it. When managers are constantly telling you to change things, they often don't understand the costs. With Agile, everyone sees the forecast for completion growing or shrinking as they change it each iteration.
Also, Agile tends to assume that everything can be broken down into subtasks that take only a single iteration to complete. In practice, this is not always the case, particularly with complex software.
It does? I agree breaking things up into too many subtasks can be a common failing of agile implementations, but I see things estimated at 2+ iterations all the time.
Finally, Agile has a tendency to fail in its goal of producing software that is actually usable by its intended consumer. Because the design work is done iteratively, it is very easy to go off on tangents and iterate on some part of the design, while failing to design the whole.
I've seen this and I've worked in situations where all the design has to go through the designers before the developers, so when a customer requests a change in scope or purpose, they have to write a card for the UI specialists to design that change and write cards for the developers to implement it. This works fairly well in most cases and prevents the problems you're talking about.
This problem can also plague the architecture underneath if you aren't careful.
Agreed, this requires a significant number of competent engineers in a team and developers that remember to include architectural refactors into estimates by default. It also requires a culture of building solid, maintainable code and not relying on your fellow coders to go back in and fix your lousy hacks. (I've seen that happen as well, but the team was also collectively in charge of hiring and firing, so offending coders did not last.)
The biggest thing working against them, I think, is that working for GM usually means living in Detroit.
Nobody lives in Detroit anymore. Well, very few people working white collar jobs, including auto industry workers. They all moved out into the surrounding areas like Royal Oak, Grosse Pointe, Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Troy, etc.
Detroit is left to the very poor and the hipster kids into urban farming and Bankse.
Well said.
Is that sarcasm? I can't even understand what the previous poster is trying to say. It seems like some sort of conspiracy theory involving Apple and MS, but the sentence structure is as torturous as the "logic".
I mean, I'm typing this on a MacBook and I can't even check out a preview of one of their fancy e-motion-2.0-books...
Ah it's not their fault that Apple is the only one right now supporting the advanced features.
Ummm... You know Apple makes the MacBook he was referring to, right? It even has several browsers that run on the same base rendering engine as the iPad app is using.
InDesign is the premiere tool and it doesn't support this type of interaction.
InDesign is from Adobe (read slow as shit to adopt any new tech they did not invent) and it is focused on the print magazine industry. You might want to look at their Flash replacement tools instead, whatever they're calling PhoneGap now that they bought it.
Question: Why would you try to force your GF to use Linux when obviously the software she requires doesn't work and in fact you had to cook up a VM just BECAUSE it won't do what she needs natively?
Generally, many of us end up being obligated to support our immediate friends and family in an IT capacity. If you've ever been there, you want to support what you know and preferably something low maintenance and remotely accessible. Stipulating what you'll support makes reasonable sense.
You're thinking of DReaM. It is CDDL but the OSS community does not really have a lot of drive to build DRM.
I can't believe no one has mentioned that this is a move for security. Yup, if you want to go through Apple's cloud service to connect your mobile and desktop app, both apps have to be vetted by Apple and both have to be sandboxed. Apple's mechanism for vetting on iOS is the App store submission process. Apple's mechanism for vetting on OS X and the requirement for sandboxing is the Mac App store.
I'm not a big fan of Apple's model and I wish someone would build a store/repository that worked for both OSS and closed source software and had multiple, configurable inputs to the vetting process, configurable by a user, but even in that case it would be perfectly reasonable for any online service provider to require specific vetting before gaining access to the service.
Apple makes basically very little if anything selling apps in either store. It's about promoting their bread and butter hardware sales business and it's been working great. Occam's razor people... you don't need to invent a conspiracy to understand Apple's business strategy here or predict their next moves. I just wish some people creating competing solutions could look past the "Apple bad" mantra to see in what ways they are winning here and adapt open and inclusive services to offer the same level of security and user convenience.
Copyleft licenses like GPL have always been ideal for projects where you're trying to build something you use in conjunction with others that use it. It's a community contract for building a shared tool with many contributors where one competitor forking it is a danger. This is great for things like LibreOffice or Webkit. Developers are large users and so long as it is a shared resource no one party gets an advantage.
Open, permissive licenses like BSD have always been better for component level technology or proposed new standard protocols or other software that requires both interoperability and adoption to have value. Things like drivers, services that run communication protocols, and generic system services all fit into this category. In these cases barriers to adoption (like dropping it into a bunch of closed source code) are detrimental to the project as a whole. It's better if MS takes it and incorporates it into Windows, even if they don't contribute anything back.
So an increase in the proportion of the latter category is hardly surprising as technology trends change. The move to mobile devices, cheaper targeted hardware manufacturing, and smaller, more efficient computing components lead to an increased number of projects in this latter category. Building a service to print wirelessly from your tablet? Why wouldn't you want you code as widely adopted and thus as widely supported by printer makers as possible? Does a competitor closing the source on the audio driver you built really give them any sort of advantage over a GPL where they have to give bug fixes back (but probably won't do much since you already made a feature complete product)?
It used to be the only place we saw this sort of development was in the Linux and BSD server markets because hardware costs made it out of the reach of those who built small devices. Now WindRiver and the like are taking a back seat as the market is flooded with cheap, small components. Most everyone in the industry has seen this trend ramping up for a long time. It isn't an ideological shift. We are all still applying the licenses that make sense to our projects. There are just more projects in the latter category now because the environment has changed.
If it was so scientific, there wouldn't be a long drawn out court case with many reversals and appeals. Instead, we should all settle antitrust disputes using a simple computer program right?
The lengthy nature of MS's prosecution had something to do with money, money donated to politicians who replaced the judges on the case with those those beholden to them. Money has always undermined the US legal system to a significant extent and there is a huge body of scientific evidence for that as well if you actually care to be informed.
Every side has more than one way of looking at it after all.
The idea that there are two, equally valid sides to anything is one of most idiotic inventions of modern entertainment news.
True, not all views are valid. That doesn't mean that there CAN'T be two views to an issue.
No, there can be many valid perspectives and opinions on topics. I never said otherwise. There is not, however, always two equally valid opinions on a topic. Often one side of an argument is simply uninformed or irrational. Your implication that because there are multiple ways of looking at the antitrust issue in question, that disagreeing with a logical and factually supported analysis without providing and backing for it is fine... well that is a very popular sort of opinion these days and one I find repugnant and anti-intellectual. It's right up there with, "scientific studies reproduced across the globe show A, but irrational mystics also have an opinion based on their feelings. Lets spend an hour giving them a soapbox to promote their attack on reason and science."
Chrome is getting to a stage where its share of the market could be regarded as significant.
Not in terms of either the economics or legality of antitrust action. Chrome is hovering around 25%. It isn't even the front runner, let alone dominating the market to the extent that it could be used to undermine competition. 70% is a guideline often used by regulators for when to start investigating potential antitrust issues.
It's about not understanding antitrust laws. It's about me not accepting the definition of antitrust in this particular case. Every side has more than one way of looking at it after all.
The idea that there are two, equally valid sides to anything is one of most idiotic inventions of modern entertainment news. Antitrust has a meaning and a distinct purpose. The economics are clear and well demonstrated. The laws are clear in their restrictions and follow logically from the economics. The application of the law to Microsoft's actions is clear. Your acceptance is not needed.
Apple has still not provided any fix or upgrade that addresses this malware for Leopard. Only for Snow Leopard and Lion.
They have a fix for Leopard. It's the free upgrade to Snow Leopard.
Personally, I could never understand why Microsoft got into trouble with IE.
Read an economics textbook. Antitrust and bundling are pretty common terms. Anything written in the last century should cover it.
Yea sounds like recent claims by some other smaller browser makers made against IE.
Here's where you seem confused. They made claims against Microsoft, not IE. Microsoft has dominance in the desktop OS market and used that to promote IE instead of letting it live or die based upon it's own merits in a competitive marketplace. Google may be guilty of similar leveraging of their dominance in online search and search related advertisement, but not in bundling things into their browser (which has relatively small market share). Google can bundle anything they want with Chrome. It's when they bundle things with Google search (you get them when you get search) that you run afoul antitrust law. When Google starts promoting their other services unfairly in search results (as they've done and been busted for) that's when Google is doing the same antitrust behavior as MS.
Canonical and Apple both now offer proper stores for selling, installing, and updating third party software. They both need work and many publishers don't use them, but at least we're making some, slow progress.
I'm not infected (checked), but perhaps about 50% of those that "haven't installed the updates" is because people refuse to upgrade?
That's an interesting possibility. Netmarketshare.com puts 10.6 and 10.7 users as 82% of all Macs. 10.5 is 14%, but Apple is now offering a free upgrade to those users to 10.6. so 96% of Mac users can get this security update for free without manually installing Java (lets assume most users aren't technical enough to understand how). That means there are maybe 30 million Macs out there connected to the net that can't get free updates (All of them at least 6 years old).
I refuse to pay for an upgrade that will no doubt slow my Macbook Pro down and cause random issues.
Macbook Pro were introduced in 2006, 6 months before Leopard, so I guess it is possible you have one of the machines released in the first 3 months of 2006 that did not get a free update to Leopard and thus can't get a free update to Snow Leopard to get these security updates. I'm not sure why you think an upgrade would make your system slow or cause random issues.
You might be shocked at the amount of "automatic" updates the mac doesn't install.
Automatic updating of third party software sucks on all major OS's. Even Linux is pretty bad for commercial software (although Ubuntu is making great strides in this area, credit where it is due).