From the times I've installed Oracle the database, and various other Oracle products, I'd have to agree. Total PITA.
And other products, like IAS or Oracle reports when you need a $DISPLAY to run? Heck, I can even recall Oracle Reports needing a WINDOW MANAGER running on that $DISPLAY. On a server product?
"Personally, I don't see customers going with Oracle Linux for general purpose servers"
Personally, I have a hard time seeing anyone going with Oracle Linux for any purpose server. RedHat Oracle would be vastly more compelling, but as oracle isnt OSS, that's unlikely to happen.
I really dont see any threat to RedHat; Oracle isn't doing anything that hasn't been done already several times over. People are still buying Redhat over zero-cost CentOS, or various other distribution vendors which have at least the brand name of Oracle in the field. In fact, I have a hard time seeing Oracle remaining long-term successfully committed to being RedHat on the cheap; they have no experience in selling support for lockin-free products, they certainly have little experience in being cheap, and their record on quality for both products and services outside the actual database is somtimes spotty.
"most people consider "found" diamonds more valuable."
DeBeers considers 'found' diamonds more valuable.
Everyone else considers them more expensive.
If DeBeers were selling pieces of bovine feces, they'd certainly claim it was 'valuable'. Their claims do not make it so, altho, had they a monopoly on bovine feces they could make it just as expensive as their diamonds.
Wanna bet? Personally, I can recall a certain zero budget film that even had shots in space.
Or, wait, did they use CGI and bluescreen?
Technology has advanced to the point where most films could plausibly be made in a livingroom. You could get away with scenes with actors who'd never even been in the same room, or even in the same country. Maybe not fistfights or lovescenes yet, but within a few years you'll probably even be able to paste on the appearance of a specific actor onto a standin.
"overthrow the government (bloodlessly) on a regular basis."
In a two party system that concept tends to lose it's meaning. If both parties become corrupt or are taken over, the citizens are essentially powerless to remove them through voting.
A two party system is one party away from being a dictatorship.
Major upgrades often carry incompatible changes. This entails the risk of breaking end-user documents and software as well as other dependent software within the released distribution.
If the distribution maintainers did mid-cycle upgrades in such a fashion, it would mean that if you ever patched or updated your dist, you'd risk random things just not working anymore.
While it would be nice, it currently just isnt possible. Maybe in the future we'll be ultra-virtualized and every application will be bundled with its own virtual machine with its supporting environment, and they'll all communicate via IPv6 as separate entities, and the whole issue becomes a thing of the past, but we're not there yet.
The big deal is they're using government assisted price discrimination to exact more than the free market price for the product. That creates a wide gap in pricing between units for one market and units for another, despite them being identical and having identical production costs. Companies doing parallel imports hurt their ability to charge what the market will bear, rather than freely compete, which pisses the anticompetetive monopoly huggers in Sony off to no end.
"Just because MS' self-imposed measure of success is dominating every market with 90% share"
I suspect Apples resurgence is mostly due to MS appearing to drift away from the ambition to utterly wipe out any and all possible competition. A few years ago, MS would have found it more or less intolerable that anyone but them were making any profit in 'their' segments. At that point they'd do more or less anything to make it impossible to actually be profitable at all, marketshare or not.
"Also, please note that taxes are purely parasitical."
Not inherently. They can be, but if the products and services the tax revenue is spent on are competetively provided, their economic function can be more or less comparable to any other joint financial scheme like insurances or cooperative ventures.
Of course, they're often mixed up with state production of goods and services, which breeds the inefficiency of any protected market.
Compared to the atrocity called intellectual 'property', they're actually less inherently damaging, as they at least have the option of competetive provisioning.
"The money is always taken from somewhere."
Much like intellectual 'property'. Or insurances.
The fundamental question is; does the specific method of financing the particular activity represent the most efficient one, and are the resources spent on the most competetive production of the particular goods or services.
The tax misery index is really quite misleading tho; as far as I can tell it ignores things like for example the cost of private health insurances, pensions and education costs. These costs dont vanish just because they dont take a detour through the government accounting office.
Not really; it's an artefact of monopoly protection legislation, ultimately derived from intellectual 'property'. The monopoly pricing of protected products is, to maximize revenue, set as a function of disposable income, rather than competetive pricing. The better you can discriminate between various income groups, the more revenue you can generate.
Regional discrimination is a woefully inadequate instrument (compared to, for example, pricing as a function of income), but it does carry various other benefits, allowing separation in low-cost and high-cost economies, allowing companies to use cheaper labour from the low-cost economy while separating the consumers in the higher-cost economy from their capital, thus vastly accelerating the transfer of wealth to the middlemen. As it's vastly harder for the consumers and labourers to move or outsource their personal 'work' and/or consumption (as the article shows), the inequilibrium can be maintained far beyond what a functioning market would allow.
You're not going to see a change in monopolist policy on that; it's simply far too good a deal to resist.
"black-market channels and piracy rings"
Black market 'piracy' is a natural effect of non-functioning competition, created by the strong incentive inherent in the huge margins between cost-of-production and sales price. In a free market sector there is no such margin (or it will rapidly fall as competetitors enter the sector in pursuit of that profit margin), thus little incentive for piracy.
As the only option for killing piracy is essentially removing that margin and selling DVD's and CD's for production cost, you can guess how palatable that would be for them. They'd rather keep the current system and fight a permanent battle. It's up to the rest of society to affect a change in those practices, or we'll get to live with them for the foreseeable future.
Not necessarily. The domain of human law and knowledge is huge; far too large for anyone to hold in their mind at the same time. Even tho the tax law draftsperson may be well versed in formulating taxes, he might not hold the same pieces of information in his head necessary for finding the obvious solution to escaping that tax.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the problem spaces of gathering taxes versus evading them are simply very different.
Patents are also close to equivalent to a taxation right on a specific way to implement an idea.
Wether handing out taxation rights to private parties really has a place in modern society and in a free market is dubious, particularly when the system is far removed from any democratic control.
Then again, paying eMusic $0.25/track for high quality completely DRM free mp3's is even better. And as the majors dont release there, you're automatically saved the bother of making sure your money doesnt go to the fascists.
Not particularly. Ammonia is readily produced from hydrogen and nitrogen with the haber process (dump them both in a chamber, apply pressure and heat in essence), and the nitrogen itself is easily extracted from the air.
Ammonia also has the slight advantage of the already existent vast infrastructure aimed at farming...
While ZFS looks impressive on a featurelist, I really dont like the monolithic one-size-fits-all cram approach. The current linux capabilities with the device-mapper and stackable block devices are vastly more flexible in the long term.
As far as I can tell, it looks pretty much like the same patches that CCRMA uses (but I could be wrong), which should in theory help, in the event that your problem is related to latency issues.
However, in my experience, under any normal circumstances (ie, machine produced in the last decade, not doing massive multitrack music composition and playback), you're vastly more likely to run into driver problems causing skips. Any non-prehistoric machine (500MHz+) should easily be able to playback an MP3 and not skip while moving windows, even without realtime audio.
Indeed. Emusic has the price and drm-freeness and legitimacy, but the majors are unlikely to accept those terms. Fine for people like me who refuse to have anything to do with the majors anyway; we get our music fascist-filtered for free without having to research every label.
Then again, I wouldnt be surprised by iTunes getting 'defeated' by the labels eventually simply forcing Apple to use equivalent to WMA DRM. Live by the sword of monopoly control, die by the sword of monopoly control.
Modern civilized judicial systems are not based on retribution and 'punishment'. They're based on (or should be based on) the concepts of crime prevention and rehabilitation.
'Punishment' for its own sake is pointless. You and I may want the bastard to suffer for what he's done, but from the viewpoint of civilized society, the actual interest is in preventing further and repeat crimes. (and really, what would you rather, not get killed, or have your killer harshly punished?)
Most statistics I've seen agree; hard 'punishment' doesnt deter, the factor that acts as a deterrent is the chance of actually getting caught. Hence the efficiency of zero-tolerance policies, as they vastly increase that chance for the average minor infraction.
So, to answer your question, _catch_ them, catch the _right_ person, and lock them up until they are no longer a threat to other people.
"but it's only recently that it's started to affect normal people."
Intellectual 'property' was a passable way to finance a miniscule part of the economy, but as the sector size grows its similarity to actual taxation of the economy and the debilitating inefficiency of state-protected monopolies becomes more obvious.
And taxes, as we all know, makes the average man care. Especially when they're sucking up so much of his wages that he has no chance to compete with foreign labour that doesnt have to pay the protection money to the IP sharks.
A large part of what you call 'standards of living' is actually everything ranging from state military spending through pharmaceutical patent regimes and other 'intellectual property'.
How do you expect a US worker to be able to remain competetive, when you look at what he actually has to finance?
"And unless the American engineer can do the job of 4 or 5 people, he's out of luck."
Yes, well, the trouble is, that engineer probably is doing the job of 4 or 5 people, or rather he's paying for them, whose actual activities do not produce sellable competetive value, except as designated by the state.
Looking at the 'expensive' label on western labour is pointless. Take a good long, hard look at exactly why western labour is expensive, why the cost of living is high, and who exactly is paying for all those lawyers, marketers and spooks. Because once the productive sectors of the economy are gone, there will be no end to the fun and games the trade deficit will play with the tattered remains of the US economy.
"Is something that has gone one since the begining of time."
As has murder, rape, torture, genocide, etc. Ever consider that maybe it's time we grow up and actually stop repeating every evil atrocity our primitive ancestors engaged in?
"does the greater society good."
An excuse used by more or less every evil bastard throughout the history of mankind to justify their actions. And one which is rarely accompanied with any sort of empirical evidence.
"I would suggest they be prepared to do so."
Perhaps. But dont kid yourself, any way you try to rationalize it to yourself to make yourself feel better, it's most likely going to be exceedingly unproductive and serve no actual good in the end.
As the right to life is one of the most fundamental human rights, and one of those most often considered inalienable, there are compelling arguments that any state legalizing the death penalty is overstepping its authority.
You can make excuses for anything from genocide through torture to slavery, which is essentially what laws legalizing such atrocities are. This does not change the fact that any observer can easily condemn the crime for what it is.
Trying to incite hatred against anonymous people who fear retaliation for speaking up, eh? Those pesky environmentalists criticizing waste dumpers; damn good if we could find out who they were and really nail them to the wall. And abused women speaking up? We really need to know who they are. Oh, and pro-lifers, definitely them. Etc. Ad infinitum.
There are a whole lot of people who have a vastly different opinion on what is 'hurtful' than what you might have.
"there are a lot of people that have suffered systematically from speech acts"
And there are a lot of people that have suffered physically because they've spoken without anonymity. Even more likely to be weaker minorities. It's usually not the strong or agressive that have a need for the protection of anonymity.
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"Anybody who's installed Oracle..."
From the times I've installed Oracle the database, and various other Oracle products, I'd have to agree. Total PITA.
And other products, like IAS or Oracle reports when you need a $DISPLAY to run? Heck, I can even recall Oracle Reports needing a WINDOW MANAGER running on that $DISPLAY. On a server product?
"Personally, I don't see customers going with Oracle Linux for general purpose servers"
Personally, I have a hard time seeing anyone going with Oracle Linux for any purpose server. RedHat Oracle would be vastly more compelling, but as oracle isnt OSS, that's unlikely to happen.
I really dont see any threat to RedHat; Oracle isn't doing anything that hasn't been done already several times over. People are still buying Redhat over zero-cost CentOS, or various other distribution vendors which have at least the brand name of Oracle in the field. In fact, I have a hard time seeing Oracle remaining long-term successfully committed to being RedHat on the cheap; they have no experience in selling support for lockin-free products, they certainly have little experience in being cheap, and their record on quality for both products and services outside the actual database is somtimes spotty.
"most people consider "found" diamonds more valuable."
DeBeers considers 'found' diamonds more valuable.
Everyone else considers them more expensive.
If DeBeers were selling pieces of bovine feces, they'd certainly claim it was 'valuable'. Their claims do not make it so, altho, had they a monopoly on bovine feces they could make it just as expensive as their diamonds.
"and you cant do that all over the planet,"
Wanna bet? Personally, I can recall a certain zero budget film that even had shots in space.
Or, wait, did they use CGI and bluescreen?
Technology has advanced to the point where most films could plausibly be made in a livingroom. You could get away with scenes with actors who'd never even been in the same room, or even in the same country. Maybe not fistfights or lovescenes yet, but within a few years you'll probably even be able to paste on the appearance of a specific actor onto a standin.
"overthrow the government (bloodlessly) on a regular basis."
In a two party system that concept tends to lose it's meaning. If both parties become corrupt or are taken over, the citizens are essentially powerless to remove them through voting.
A two party system is one party away from being a dictatorship.
Major upgrades often carry incompatible changes. This entails the risk of breaking end-user documents and software as well as other dependent software within the released distribution.
If the distribution maintainers did mid-cycle upgrades in such a fashion, it would mean that if you ever patched or updated your dist, you'd risk random things just not working anymore.
While it would be nice, it currently just isnt possible. Maybe in the future we'll be ultra-virtualized and every application will be bundled with its own virtual machine with its supporting environment, and they'll all communicate via IPv6 as separate entities, and the whole issue becomes a thing of the past, but we're not there yet.
"so what's the big deal?"
The big deal is they're using government assisted price discrimination to exact more than the free market price for the product. That creates a wide gap in pricing between units for one market and units for another, despite them being identical and having identical production costs. Companies doing parallel imports hurt their ability to charge what the market will bear, rather than freely compete, which pisses the anticompetetive monopoly huggers in Sony off to no end.
"Just because MS' self-imposed measure of success is dominating every market with 90% share"
I suspect Apples resurgence is mostly due to MS appearing to drift away from the ambition to utterly wipe out any and all possible competition. A few years ago, MS would have found it more or less intolerable that anyone but them were making any profit in 'their' segments. At that point they'd do more or less anything to make it impossible to actually be profitable at all, marketshare or not.
"Also, please note that taxes are purely parasitical."
Not inherently. They can be, but if the products and services the tax revenue is spent on are competetively provided, their economic function can be more or less comparable to any other joint financial scheme like insurances or cooperative ventures.
Of course, they're often mixed up with state production of goods and services, which breeds the inefficiency of any protected market.
Compared to the atrocity called intellectual 'property', they're actually less inherently damaging, as they at least have the option of competetive provisioning.
"The money is always taken from somewhere."
Much like intellectual 'property'. Or insurances.
The fundamental question is; does the specific method of financing the particular activity represent the most efficient one, and are the resources spent on the most competetive production of the particular goods or services.
The tax misery index is really quite misleading tho; as far as I can tell it ignores things like for example the cost of private health insurances, pensions and education costs. These costs dont vanish just because they dont take a detour through the government accounting office.
"This is another side to globalization."
Not really; it's an artefact of monopoly protection legislation, ultimately derived from intellectual 'property'. The monopoly pricing of protected products is, to maximize revenue, set as a function of disposable income, rather than competetive pricing. The better you can discriminate between various income groups, the more revenue you can generate.
Regional discrimination is a woefully inadequate instrument (compared to, for example, pricing as a function of income), but it does carry various other benefits, allowing separation in low-cost and high-cost economies, allowing companies to use cheaper labour from the low-cost economy while separating the consumers in the higher-cost economy from their capital, thus vastly accelerating the transfer of wealth to the middlemen. As it's vastly harder for the consumers and labourers to move or outsource their personal 'work' and/or consumption (as the article shows), the inequilibrium can be maintained far beyond what a functioning market would allow.
You're not going to see a change in monopolist policy on that; it's simply far too good a deal to resist.
"black-market channels and piracy rings"
Black market 'piracy' is a natural effect of non-functioning competition, created by the strong incentive inherent in the huge margins between cost-of-production and sales price. In a free market sector there is no such margin (or it will rapidly fall as competetitors enter the sector in pursuit of that profit margin), thus little incentive for piracy.
As the only option for killing piracy is essentially removing that margin and selling DVD's and CD's for production cost, you can guess how palatable that would be for them. They'd rather keep the current system and fight a permanent battle. It's up to the rest of society to affect a change in those practices, or we'll get to live with them for the foreseeable future.
"there's nothing forcing your buy it."
Um, people were voting with their wallets, buying a product from Lik-Sang. Now the government says you have to buy the product from Sony.
That plainly falls within the realm of coercive interference in the market.
"Sony themselves have to meet the legal standards before they can import their products to the EU."
So do parallel importers; that argument is a strawman.
Not necessarily. The domain of human law and knowledge is huge; far too large for anyone to hold in their mind at the same time. Even tho the tax law draftsperson may be well versed in formulating taxes, he might not hold the same pieces of information in his head necessary for finding the obvious solution to escaping that tax.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the problem spaces of gathering taxes versus evading them are simply very different.
Patents are also close to equivalent to a taxation right on a specific way to implement an idea.
Wether handing out taxation rights to private parties really has a place in modern society and in a free market is dubious, particularly when the system is far removed from any democratic control.
Then again, paying eMusic $0.25/track for high quality completely DRM free mp3's is even better. And as the majors dont release there, you're automatically saved the bother of making sure your money doesnt go to the fascists.
"That's the complicated part."
Not particularly. Ammonia is readily produced from hydrogen and nitrogen with the haber process (dump them both in a chamber, apply pressure and heat in essence), and the nitrogen itself is easily extracted from the air.
Ammonia also has the slight advantage of the already existent vast infrastructure aimed at farming...
"ZFS as its default filesystem."
While ZFS looks impressive on a featurelist, I really dont like the monolithic one-size-fits-all cram approach. The current linux capabilities with the device-mapper and stackable block devices are vastly more flexible in the long term.
As far as I can tell, it looks pretty much like the same patches that CCRMA uses (but I could be wrong), which should in theory help, in the event that your problem is related to latency issues.
However, in my experience, under any normal circumstances (ie, machine produced in the last decade, not doing massive multitrack music composition and playback), you're vastly more likely to run into driver problems causing skips. Any non-prehistoric machine (500MHz+) should easily be able to playback an MP3 and not skip while moving windows, even without realtime audio.
Indeed. Emusic has the price and drm-freeness and legitimacy, but the majors are unlikely to accept those terms. Fine for people like me who refuse to have anything to do with the majors anyway; we get our music fascist-filtered for free without having to research every label.
Then again, I wouldnt be surprised by iTunes getting 'defeated' by the labels eventually simply forcing Apple to use equivalent to WMA DRM. Live by the sword of monopoly control, die by the sword of monopoly control.
Modern civilized judicial systems are not based on retribution and 'punishment'. They're based on (or should be based on) the concepts of crime prevention and rehabilitation.
'Punishment' for its own sake is pointless. You and I may want the bastard to suffer for what he's done, but from the viewpoint of civilized society, the actual interest is in preventing further and repeat crimes. (and really, what would you rather, not get killed, or have your killer harshly punished?)
Most statistics I've seen agree; hard 'punishment' doesnt deter, the factor that acts as a deterrent is the chance of actually getting caught. Hence the efficiency of zero-tolerance policies, as they vastly increase that chance for the average minor infraction.
So, to answer your question, _catch_ them, catch the _right_ person, and lock them up until they are no longer a threat to other people.
"but it's only recently that it's started to affect normal people."
Intellectual 'property' was a passable way to finance a miniscule part of the economy, but as the sector size grows its similarity to actual taxation of the economy and the debilitating inefficiency of state-protected monopolies becomes more obvious.
And taxes, as we all know, makes the average man care. Especially when they're sucking up so much of his wages that he has no chance to compete with foreign labour that doesnt have to pay the protection money to the IP sharks.
"it's about lowering your standards of living."
A large part of what you call 'standards of living' is actually everything ranging from state military spending through pharmaceutical patent regimes and other 'intellectual property'.
How do you expect a US worker to be able to remain competetive, when you look at what he actually has to finance?
"And unless the American engineer can do the job of 4 or 5 people, he's out of luck."
Yes, well, the trouble is, that engineer probably is doing the job of 4 or 5 people, or rather he's paying for them, whose actual activities do not produce sellable competetive value, except as designated by the state.
Looking at the 'expensive' label on western labour is pointless. Take a good long, hard look at exactly why western labour is expensive, why the cost of living is high, and who exactly is paying for all those lawyers, marketers and spooks. Because once the productive sectors of the economy are gone, there will be no end to the fun and games the trade deficit will play with the tattered remains of the US economy.
"Sounds like a lawful killing to me."
Sounds like a weak excuse to me.
"Is something that has gone one since the begining of time."
As has murder, rape, torture, genocide, etc. Ever consider that maybe it's time we grow up and actually stop repeating every evil atrocity our primitive ancestors engaged in?
"does the greater society good."
An excuse used by more or less every evil bastard throughout the history of mankind to justify their actions. And one which is rarely accompanied with any sort of empirical evidence.
"I would suggest they be prepared to do so."
Perhaps. But dont kid yourself, any way you try to rationalize it to yourself to make yourself feel better, it's most likely going to be exceedingly unproductive and serve no actual good in the end.
As the right to life is one of the most fundamental human rights, and one of those most often considered inalienable, there are compelling arguments that any state legalizing the death penalty is overstepping its authority.
You can make excuses for anything from genocide through torture to slavery, which is essentially what laws legalizing such atrocities are. This does not change the fact that any observer can easily condemn the crime for what it is.
Trying to incite hatred against anonymous people who fear retaliation for speaking up, eh? Those pesky environmentalists criticizing waste dumpers; damn good if we could find out who they were and really nail them to the wall. And abused women speaking up? We really need to know who they are. Oh, and pro-lifers, definitely them. Etc. Ad infinitum.
There are a whole lot of people who have a vastly different opinion on what is 'hurtful' than what you might have.
"there are a lot of people that have suffered systematically from speech acts"
And there are a lot of people that have suffered physically because they've spoken without anonymity. Even more likely to be weaker minorities. It's usually not the strong or agressive that have a need for the protection of anonymity.