This is why I find it amusing when people say that a socialized medical system is inherently more efficient than a US-style system.
People say that because pretty much every shred of available evidence demonstrates.
The US health care system is - possibly - the best place to be if you're rich and suffering from some rare uncurable ailment. For pretty much everyone else, it sucks.
Strange as it may seem, some people do not want to be locked in a perpetual childhood, nurtured and comforted by the parent figure government. They are prepared to take on the risks and hardships of adulthood and desire to make their own decisions. A great many, though not all, of the people who think this way live in the US.
You sound like the kind of person who would never understand until they've been bankrupted by a serious illness, or seen someone suffer through an illness because they couldn't afford payment.
Luckily for you, you're an Australian, so you don't actually have to worry about that happening.
Universal Healthcare isn't about the Government being your surrogate parent, it's about a whole bunch of people who have decided to share the cost of keeping each other healthy, because they understand that this means their whole culture is better off because of it. Just like they share the cost of all those other trappings of civilised society, like police, firemen, transport, education, and the like.
It means that if IBM wanted to "destroy" Microsoft, all they would have had to do is *not* go knocking at their door.
I'm also kind of curious about how you think IBM could have used anti-competitive measures against Microsoft, given they weren't competing with anything until it was already too late.
They're hamstrung and can't compete when they're forced to implement things the same way as competitors? Their competitors can't bundle things with Windows either.
Newsflash. Microsoft aren't the only OS vendors out there. No matter what you, or anyone else might think, people *do* make purchasing decisions based on the OS (though the largest part of this decision is - at least historically - usually due to the applications).
That's the point. Because no one can, including MS, there is a competitive market for all the add ons and consumers decide based upon the merits of the product, rather than going with the one they're forced to pay for when they buy Windows.
No-one is "forced to pay" for functionality that is standard. It's like arguing people are "forced to pay" for the seatbelts and headlights their car comes with.
There aren't any viable competitors! That's the point.
There are. End users choose between different OSes.
Apple doesn't license their OS into the market because there is no way to compete with a monopoly.
No, they don't license their OS because they don't want to. Apple has demonstrated amply that they can compete with Microsoft, have run numerous advertising campaigns based around it, and have expanded their marketshare considerably in the last few years by getting people to switch from Windows to OS X.
Linux accounts for what 1%? And you think MS needs help in the desktop OS market?
At no stage have I suggested that they "need help". I have merely argued that their customers should not be disadvantaged by crippling their ability to improve their product either on par with, or in excess of, the alternatives.
"Not harming" and "helping" are not synonyms.
Apple sells complete systems and compete against Dell and HP.
Dell and HP sell commodity appliances. It's Windows the end users want, they couldn't give two hoots about which vendor happens to be providing the hardware it runs on this week.
MS has won the desktop OS market and is in no danger of losing it. The markets that are in danger are any MS tries to take over using their desktop OS monopoly.
The "markets" that are in danger are the ones where the basic functionality become so ubiquitous that customers demand it become "standard", and the vendors there are unable to provide a compelling alternative by improving their product to make it better than the "standard".
That's why the law says they can't leverage that monopoly into new markets, like Web browsers, because other companies can't bundle their browsers with Windows and win regardless of the merits of said browser.
Browsers have never been a meaningful independent market and have nearly _always_ been used as part of a larger strategy involving other products. Added to which, IE displaced Navigator by being better.
Why are you so opposed to MS having to make a better product in order to win a market? Why is that so abhorrent to you?
It's not. At all. But your argument is a straw man not only because it misrepresents my position, but because in nearly every case (and certainly the high profile ones under discussion here - browsers, media players) Microsoft *have* won the market by providing the better product.
There aren't any fucking competitors in the desktop OS market. HP is going to license Windows for inclusion on their desktops whether it has search or not.
But customers may choose not to buy Windows - and by extension HP computers - dependent on whether it has Search, or a fancy back
But without those antitrust laws IBM could have killed MS right away and they would never have made any of the products you seem so enamored of. You do know IBM was under antitrust restrictions at the time, right?
I seem to recall it was IBM who came knocking at Microsoft's door.
No, it's saying they have to improve their product in a competitive fashion.
But they _can't_, because they are hamstrung by *not being allowed* to implement equivalent (or better) functionality as their competitors. Competitors integrate a browser into their platform ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors include media playback capability ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors integrate search into their UI ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors include backup software ? Sorry, "pre-existing market".
But lets cut the crap. You think you can do better? What's your proposal. Would you just get rid of all antitrust laws? Would you modify them in some way. What's your alternative proposal?
Clearly, the idea and definition of a "pre-existing market" needs to be examined. The idea that - even with their customers clamouring for some feature, and every other platform including and integrating it - Microsoft aren't allowed to implement it (therefore punishing their userbase for choosing their product) because somebody, somewhere, had already written a program to do something similar, is fundamentally broken and utterly anti-innovation and anti-customer.
It's the same thing as patent trolling - come up with some vague and obvious idea, wait for someone else sufficiently large to come up with the same thing, then sue them.
That's your unsupported assertion, not mine.
Then perhaps you could identify some of the features added to Windows since, say, 1996 that _wouldn't_ class as an antitrust violation.
No forcing MS out of being able to ignore customers brings about innovation and competition.
You are begging the question.
Right then. I asked for a counter proposal. How would you fix antitrust law so it conforms with your economic and legal beliefs?
It's quite clear that your opinion is that the law should be punishing anyone who uses Windows and therefore, by proxy, Microsoft. You want to make it so expensive and difficult to use Windows, that people are forced to move to alternatives. *My* argument is that your position is reprehensible, that it's economically a broken window fallacy, and that a legal system supporting it is broken.
Just for reference, if you're going to be using the whole device as a PV, there's no real need to create a partition on it - and in some cases it can be detrimental (eg: if it's a RAID device you will probably introduce partition alignment problems that will impact performance).
You might want to read up on ZFS. It's not just a simple filesystem; it also includes LVM and RAID features, all in one. I'm not a professional sysadm, but my understanding is that, unlike Linux where changing a RAID5 array to have more disks or more space requires messing with the logical volumes using LVM, then messing with the RAID arrays with mdadm, then redoing the filesystems with the e[34]fstools, whereas doing this in ZFS just involves a few quick commands without having to unmount the filesystem.
ZFS can't resize arrays at all, so comparing it to the process in Linux isn't really relevant.
ZFS's "volume management" is certainly easier than in any other OS, but it's real killer feature IMHO is the block checksumming.
In fact, a quick Google search shows that resizing an ext3 partition is a bit of a pain, involving converting it to ext2 (removing the journal), running resize2fs, and converting it back. Obviously that's not good if the power cuts out while you're doing this. With ZFS, you should be able to resize arrays, add disks, etc., without even interrupting service.
Whatever article you found is wrong. The process for growing a FS in Linux (with LVM and ext3) is (can be done online):
Increase size of LV (lvresize)
Increase size of FS (resize2fs)
To shrink (needs to be done offline):
Unmount FS, run e2fsck
Shrink filesystem (eesize2fs)
Shrink LV (lvresize)
The process is straightforward and not difficult, though it *is* easier with ZFS.
What is "too late"? Would at most a couple months be too late? If so, your product must not have had much value in the first place.
"Too late" would be when your potential customers have gone off and bought the software from the other vendor who isn't so concerned that his software needs 2Ghz and 1GB vs 1.5Ghz and 512MB to run. Because once they've already got a tool in place, you need a hell of a lot more persuasion than "20% faster" to get them to switch.
Tell that to companies who need a lot of computers. Having to buy many new(er) computers still accounts for a lot of money.
"Companies who need a lot of computers" work on a 3-4 year cycle, 5 at the most. Your "efficiency" argument is more relevant to computers in the 7-10 year old timeframe.
Microsoft Office? IntelliJ? Visual Studio 200x?
Office is most certainly doing more with each version. You might not be using or appreciating it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. I can't speak for the other two programs, but I would guess they are the same.
Yeah, now if only you understood why we have antitrust laws you might reconsider that opinion.
Any law which so blatantly harms consumers, is insane. It's basically saying that once a product vendor hits a certain "level of influence", they are legally prohibited from improving their product, should any of those improvements already be provided by third parties. If you can't see why that is fundamentally broken, then I'm afraid you're beyond help.
It absolutely can, they just need to structure themselves with compliance with the law in mind.
But they can't. Any feature they add (heck, added, since being ruled a monopoly - it's not like they could know until after the fact) that a third party already provided, is an antitrust violation.
But hey, if you think it's impossible, that's fine because an MS that has had their monopoly power removed by being split up is the best possible thing for innovation and competition.
Forcing people to go out and buy whole new software (and possibly hardware) stacks because their existing vendor is legally prohibited from giving them the improvements they want is "innovation and competition" ?
By all means, let's assume it is impossible MS will ever be able to comply and break them up so they can bundle anything they want.
You are arguing that any feature of Windows that was available from a third party beforehand is inherently an antitrust violation. It's your reasoning, not mine. My reasoning says that your reasoning is obviously and blatantly harmful to consumers, therefore wrong, and therefore won't be held up by any court with some semblance of sanity.
1st, Just called my Aunt, had her send me an e-mail from her iMac 300MHz (blue tray load CRT iMac). It has 128MB of RAM and is running OS 9.1 quite nicely with netscape as her browser and e-mail client.
Well that's not particularly impressive. Windows 95 could do that on a 100Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM dating from before that iMac was even a twinkle in Steve's eye. *And* it didn't grind to a halt whenever someone held the mouse button down.
I can also state that the iMac 17" (lamp) G4, running with a "max capable" 768MB of RAM (came with 256) shipped wityh OS 10.2 and ran great on OS 10.4. It booted in about 15 seconds 9including McAfee's boot scan), and played video files better and cleaner than an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and an x600 ATI GPU.
Like I said, your Windows machine must be mind-bogglingly broken.
I did not say the mac required less CPU or RAM than Windows, I said Windows runs like ASS on it;s defined minimum requirement, and OS X runs fine on it's own, seperate, minimum requirement.
And you're wrong. OS X (pretty much all versions, and certainly all recent ones) need a gig of RAM and a modern video card to even hit the "OK" level of performance.
Further, the mac DOES outperform Windows on the same intel CPU with 1GB of RAM in virtually all 3rd party tests of the same software (photoshop, MP3 ripping, DVD decoding, etc).
Perhaps you can offer a couple of links to show that, then ?
OS X was ahead of it's time, no doubt, and the 10.0 and 10.1 editions were overburdened and slow, but that same machine that came with 10.0 and ran slow ran 10.2 great, without the RAM upgrade.
Rubbish. A standard Mac in the 10.0 days came with 128MB of RAM, which would barely have been enough to run 10.2 _badly_, let alone "great". Upgrade it to 512MB, and you might start to get tolerable performance.
Vista sucked, and still sucks. XP initially ran fine on 128MB, but today I've got 2GB in a machine with 10 times the CPU horesepower and it takes several minutes to convert fairly simple Viseo diagrams into PDF... XP has gotten worse withage, OS X has imporved, that's all I'm saying.
With closed you have to have literally blind faith in one person who may not even be a real user of the software, with open you trust a subset of a community of users of the software.
With such a comically unrealistic view on what professional software development is actually like, I'm pretty sure I don't need to take you seriously.
That's not even slightly tenuous when you understand how the law defines markets. There does not have to be direct sales, just profit. Mozilla makes money today by creating a web browser.
Wow. The insanity of laws knows no bounds.
We've had this discussion before. Pre-existing separate markets are the criteria for abuse. Not every feature added to Windows, only those added once MS had monopoly power that duplicated the functionality of products from pre-existing separate markets. That does include a lot of items MS has not been taken to court for yet, but that doesn't mean they are not illegal.
I imagine you'd have trouble finding a single feature added to Windows since its invention, that didn't exist in some piece of independent software beforehand. That, in essence, you're arguing Windows cannot exist in both a useful and antitrust-compliant fashion, should hopefully highlight the foolishness of it.
Software that is efficient runs faster for everyone, making for a better product.
That it runs faster isn't much use if it hits the market too late to be useful.
It also increases the target group of customers as more people can run it.
Not in any meaningful sense. Again, hardware computer is far and away the cheapest aspect of any computing infrastructure. The idea that an economically meaningful number of customers won't buy your software because of its hardware requirements (outside of edge cases) is just unrealistic.
Seeing as how often people have complained about Firefox' RAM usage and speed, JavaScript's speed, and Flash's speed, I'd argue that performance does matter, and that upgrading continually is not the desired solution.
Everyone complains. It's what people do. Now ask those people if they're rather have it at the current performance, or not available for another year, and see what they say.
Do you really think it makes sense to have a program using more resources in the next version for doing the same things? It happens a lot.
the key (I misspoke my statement, sorry) is that each new version runs with improved performance on the same hardware.
Yes, but that's because it started off so horribly, horribly slow that not even Moore's Law could remedy the situation. No version of Windows has _ever_ performed as badly as early versions of OS X did on contemporary hardware. Not even with that whole "Vista Ready" thing.
I can attest that I have had OS 10.4 running on a machine with 128MB of installed RAM, and it did in fact run (and booted faster than an XP box with 1GB).
You're either lying, or your XP machine was comically broken (not that boot time is a particularly good metric at the best of times).
I've used basically every version of OS X, on nearly every piece of Mac hardware made, since 1999. For the first 2-3 years you quite literally *could not buy* a Mac that could run it even well, let alone "like a champ". The situation im proved in the few years after that, and has been mostly moot since the Intel Macs debuted. However, the idea that OS X has meaningfully lower hardware requirements than Windows is simply false. OS X in anything less than a gig of RAM is slow, and the very idea it could run comparably to even a 512MB Vista machine (let alone a 1GB one), in 256MB, is simply laughable.
10.3? That's way older than Vista - and yet you chose to ignore the whole "Vista incapable" disaster.
That's because it's irrelevant. Even the "disaster" as you put it, was only a result of using absolute bottom of the barrel hardware configurations.
Further, the "Vista Ready" situation was ultimately no different to Apple having standard configurations woefully underpowered for OS X - and it was downright honourable compared to Apple not having hardware *at all* that could run OS X well in its early years.
People mostly don't choose Windows any more than they choose what brand of radio or tires come with their car. They don't buy Windows, they buy a Dell.
No, they buy a computer that runs Windows, and happens to be sold by Dell.
That's because the *real* selling point is the applications - and the applications run on Windows, so customers want Windows.
The ultimate "problem" is that the applications people want - the only aspect of the computer most of them care about - run on Windows.
For example, if MS makes them pay for the cost of developing Internet Explorer and bundles that cost into the cost of Windows, when there was a preexisting market for web browsers, [...]
The primary tenuous assumption here being that there was ever a distinct market for web browsers. The second being that the price of Windows would have changed if it didn't have IE.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that every single aspect of Windows's functionality introduced with and since Windows 95, is an antitrust violation ?
This only affects the browser market where Microsoft is steadily losing ground anyway. The fact of the matter is that the operating system itself is still untouched and Microsoft still has no penalty for pulling more and more functionality into the OS itself.
What functionality has Microsoft "pulled into the OS" that was not in direct response to either a) customer demands or b) a competitor doing it first ?
MS should have been broken into an OS company and an apps company long ago. But it didn't happen, and we're all still the worse off for it.
We are far, far better off that the legal system didn't sit down and decide what was an application, and what was an operating system.
"can Dell license OS X for inclusion on their computer systems aimed at the home and corporate markets?
Of course not. The Steve would never allow OS X on computers that are so... common.
Can Dell install Solaris or Ubuntu replacing Windows on the systems they ship, without going out of business?
Of course not, the demand for them in the market is comparatively miniscule.
No they can't, except for a few niche markets, so MS has them over a barrel.
I think you'll find it's the customers who have Dell over a barrel. They would be the ones who dictate whether or not the computers Dell sells will be bought.
"We find that temperature, known to strongly impact DIMM error rates in lab conditions, has a suprisingly small effect on error behavior in the field, when taking all other factors into account."
What temperature range does "the field" encompass, as opposed to "lab conditions" ?
They found a similar result with hard disks, but their data pretty much finishes at around 40 degrees, roughly where the typical desktop PC's drive is starting.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I find it amusing when people say that a socialized medical system is inherently more efficient than a US-style system.
People say that because pretty much every shred of available evidence demonstrates.
The US health care system is - possibly - the best place to be if you're rich and suffering from some rare uncurable ailment. For pretty much everyone else, it sucks.
Strange as it may seem, some people do not want to be locked in a perpetual childhood, nurtured and comforted by the parent figure government. They are prepared to take on the risks and hardships of adulthood and desire to make their own decisions. A great many, though not all, of the people who think this way live in the US.
You sound like the kind of person who would never understand until they've been bankrupted by a serious illness, or seen someone suffer through an illness because they couldn't afford payment.
Luckily for you, you're an Australian, so you don't actually have to worry about that happening.
Universal Healthcare isn't about the Government being your surrogate parent, it's about a whole bunch of people who have decided to share the cost of keeping each other healthy, because they understand that this means their whole culture is better off because of it. Just like they share the cost of all those other trappings of civilised society, like police, firemen, transport, education, and the like.
Why MS can't conceive that people don't want a lot of that crap is beyond me.
They can, they just don't think that tiny minority of people are worth spending the support and development time it would cost on.
Because, well, you're not.
So, what does that have to do with it?
It means that if IBM wanted to "destroy" Microsoft, all they would have had to do is *not* go knocking at their door.
I'm also kind of curious about how you think IBM could have used anti-competitive measures against Microsoft, given they weren't competing with anything until it was already too late.
They're hamstrung and can't compete when they're forced to implement things the same way as competitors? Their competitors can't bundle things with Windows either.
Newsflash. Microsoft aren't the only OS vendors out there. No matter what you, or anyone else might think, people *do* make purchasing decisions based on the OS (though the largest part of this decision is - at least historically - usually due to the applications).
That's the point. Because no one can, including MS, there is a competitive market for all the add ons and consumers decide based upon the merits of the product, rather than going with the one they're forced to pay for when they buy Windows.
No-one is "forced to pay" for functionality that is standard. It's like arguing people are "forced to pay" for the seatbelts and headlights their car comes with.
There aren't any viable competitors! That's the point.
There are. End users choose between different OSes.
Apple doesn't license their OS into the market because there is no way to compete with a monopoly.
No, they don't license their OS because they don't want to. Apple has demonstrated amply that they can compete with Microsoft, have run numerous advertising campaigns based around it, and have expanded their marketshare considerably in the last few years by getting people to switch from Windows to OS X.
Linux accounts for what 1%? And you think MS needs help in the desktop OS market?
At no stage have I suggested that they "need help". I have merely argued that their customers should not be disadvantaged by crippling their ability to improve their product either on par with, or in excess of, the alternatives.
"Not harming" and "helping" are not synonyms.
Apple sells complete systems and compete against Dell and HP.
Dell and HP sell commodity appliances. It's Windows the end users want, they couldn't give two hoots about which vendor happens to be providing the hardware it runs on this week.
MS has won the desktop OS market and is in no danger of losing it. The markets that are in danger are any MS tries to take over using their desktop OS monopoly.
The "markets" that are in danger are the ones where the basic functionality become so ubiquitous that customers demand it become "standard", and the vendors there are unable to provide a compelling alternative by improving their product to make it better than the "standard".
That's why the law says they can't leverage that monopoly into new markets, like Web browsers, because other companies can't bundle their browsers with Windows and win regardless of the merits of said browser.
Browsers have never been a meaningful independent market and have nearly _always_ been used as part of a larger strategy involving other products. Added to which, IE displaced Navigator by being better.
Why are you so opposed to MS having to make a better product in order to win a market? Why is that so abhorrent to you?
It's not. At all. But your argument is a straw man not only because it misrepresents my position, but because in nearly every case (and certainly the high profile ones under discussion here - browsers, media players) Microsoft *have* won the market by providing the better product.
There aren't any fucking competitors in the desktop OS market. HP is going to license Windows for inclusion on their desktops whether it has search or not.
But customers may choose not to buy Windows - and by extension HP computers - dependent on whether it has Search, or a fancy back
I'm actually not familiar with this...what exactly IS a cover letter, and what would make it a good one?
A Cover Letter is what today's Resume _used_ to be called.
But without those antitrust laws IBM could have killed MS right away and they would never have made any of the products you seem so enamored of. You do know IBM was under antitrust restrictions at the time, right?
I seem to recall it was IBM who came knocking at Microsoft's door.
No, it's saying they have to improve their product in a competitive fashion.
But they _can't_, because they are hamstrung by *not being allowed* to implement equivalent (or better) functionality as their competitors. Competitors integrate a browser into their platform ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors include media playback capability ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors integrate search into their UI ? Sorry, "pre-existing market". Competitors include backup software ? Sorry, "pre-existing market".
But lets cut the crap. You think you can do better? What's your proposal. Would you just get rid of all antitrust laws? Would you modify them in some way. What's your alternative proposal?
Clearly, the idea and definition of a "pre-existing market" needs to be examined. The idea that - even with their customers clamouring for some feature, and every other platform including and integrating it - Microsoft aren't allowed to implement it (therefore punishing their userbase for choosing their product) because somebody, somewhere, had already written a program to do something similar, is fundamentally broken and utterly anti-innovation and anti-customer.
It's the same thing as patent trolling - come up with some vague and obvious idea, wait for someone else sufficiently large to come up with the same thing, then sue them.
That's your unsupported assertion, not mine.
Then perhaps you could identify some of the features added to Windows since, say, 1996 that _wouldn't_ class as an antitrust violation.
No forcing MS out of being able to ignore customers brings about innovation and competition.
You are begging the question.
Right then. I asked for a counter proposal. How would you fix antitrust law so it conforms with your economic and legal beliefs?
It's quite clear that your opinion is that the law should be punishing anyone who uses Windows and therefore, by proxy, Microsoft. You want to make it so expensive and difficult to use Windows, that people are forced to move to alternatives. *My* argument is that your position is reprehensible, that it's economically a broken window fallacy, and that a legal system supporting it is broken.
Just for reference, if you're going to be using the whole device as a PV, there's no real need to create a partition on it - and in some cases it can be detrimental (eg: if it's a RAID device you will probably introduce partition alignment problems that will impact performance).
You might want to read up on ZFS. It's not just a simple filesystem; it also includes LVM and RAID features, all in one. I'm not a professional sysadm, but my understanding is that, unlike Linux where changing a RAID5 array to have more disks or more space requires messing with the logical volumes using LVM, then messing with the RAID arrays with mdadm, then redoing the filesystems with the e[34]fstools, whereas doing this in ZFS just involves a few quick commands without having to unmount the filesystem.
ZFS can't resize arrays at all, so comparing it to the process in Linux isn't really relevant.
ZFS's "volume management" is certainly easier than in any other OS, but it's real killer feature IMHO is the block checksumming.
In fact, a quick Google search shows that resizing an ext3 partition is a bit of a pain, involving converting it to ext2 (removing the journal), running resize2fs, and converting it back. Obviously that's not good if the power cuts out while you're doing this. With ZFS, you should be able to resize arrays, add disks, etc., without even interrupting service.
Whatever article you found is wrong. The process for growing a FS in Linux (with LVM and ext3) is (can be done online):
Increase size of LV (lvresize)
Increase size of FS (resize2fs)
To shrink (needs to be done offline):
Unmount FS, run e2fsck
Shrink filesystem (eesize2fs)
Shrink LV (lvresize)
The process is straightforward and not difficult, though it *is* easier with ZFS.
Which Microsoft had recommended before. But I can see why you say that is irrelevant.
"This is the barest minimum you can expect to do something resembling work" is not the same thing as "recommended".
What is "too late"? Would at most a couple months be too late? If so, your product must not have had much value in the first place.
"Too late" would be when your potential customers have gone off and bought the software from the other vendor who isn't so concerned that his software needs 2Ghz and 1GB vs 1.5Ghz and 512MB to run. Because once they've already got a tool in place, you need a hell of a lot more persuasion than "20% faster" to get them to switch.
Tell that to companies who need a lot of computers. Having to buy many new(er) computers still accounts for a lot of money.
"Companies who need a lot of computers" work on a 3-4 year cycle, 5 at the most. Your "efficiency" argument is more relevant to computers in the 7-10 year old timeframe.
Microsoft Office? IntelliJ? Visual Studio 200x?
Office is most certainly doing more with each version. You might not be using or appreciating it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. I can't speak for the other two programs, but I would guess they are the same.
Yeah, now if only you understood why we have antitrust laws you might reconsider that opinion.
Any law which so blatantly harms consumers, is insane. It's basically saying that once a product vendor hits a certain "level of influence", they are legally prohibited from improving their product, should any of those improvements already be provided by third parties. If you can't see why that is fundamentally broken, then I'm afraid you're beyond help.
It absolutely can, they just need to structure themselves with compliance with the law in mind.
But they can't. Any feature they add (heck, added, since being ruled a monopoly - it's not like they could know until after the fact) that a third party already provided, is an antitrust violation.
But hey, if you think it's impossible, that's fine because an MS that has had their monopoly power removed by being split up is the best possible thing for innovation and competition.
Forcing people to go out and buy whole new software (and possibly hardware) stacks because their existing vendor is legally prohibited from giving them the improvements they want is "innovation and competition" ?
By all means, let's assume it is impossible MS will ever be able to comply and break them up so they can bundle anything they want.
You are arguing that any feature of Windows that was available from a third party beforehand is inherently an antitrust violation. It's your reasoning, not mine. My reasoning says that your reasoning is obviously and blatantly harmful to consumers, therefore wrong, and therefore won't be held up by any court with some semblance of sanity.
1st, Just called my Aunt, had her send me an e-mail from her iMac 300MHz (blue tray load CRT iMac). It has 128MB of RAM and is running OS 9.1 quite nicely with netscape as her browser and e-mail client.
Well that's not particularly impressive. Windows 95 could do that on a 100Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM dating from before that iMac was even a twinkle in Steve's eye. *And* it didn't grind to a halt whenever someone held the mouse button down.
I can also state that the iMac 17" (lamp) G4, running with a "max capable" 768MB of RAM (came with 256) shipped wityh OS 10.2 and ran great on OS 10.4. It booted in about 15 seconds 9including McAfee's boot scan), and played video files better and cleaner than an XP machine with 1GB of RAM and an x600 ATI GPU.
Like I said, your Windows machine must be mind-bogglingly broken.
I did not say the mac required less CPU or RAM than Windows, I said Windows runs like ASS on it;s defined minimum requirement, and OS X runs fine on it's own, seperate, minimum requirement.
And you're wrong. OS X (pretty much all versions, and certainly all recent ones) need a gig of RAM and a modern video card to even hit the "OK" level of performance.
Further, the mac DOES outperform Windows on the same intel CPU with 1GB of RAM in virtually all 3rd party tests of the same software (photoshop, MP3 ripping, DVD decoding, etc).
Perhaps you can offer a couple of links to show that, then ?
OS X was ahead of it's time, no doubt, and the 10.0 and 10.1 editions were overburdened and slow, but that same machine that came with 10.0 and ran slow ran 10.2 great, without the RAM upgrade.
Rubbish. A standard Mac in the 10.0 days came with 128MB of RAM, which would barely have been enough to run 10.2 _badly_, let alone "great". Upgrade it to 512MB, and you might start to get tolerable performance.
Vista sucked, and still sucks. XP initially ran fine on 128MB, but today I've got 2GB in a machine with 10 times the CPU horesepower and it takes several minutes to convert fairly simple Viseo diagrams into PDF... XP has gotten worse withage, OS X has imporved, that's all I'm saying.
Somehow I doubt that's the fault of the OS.
With closed you have to have literally blind faith in one person who may not even be a real user of the software, with open you trust a subset of a community of users of the software.
With such a comically unrealistic view on what professional software development is actually like, I'm pretty sure I don't need to take you seriously.
That's not even slightly tenuous when you understand how the law defines markets. There does not have to be direct sales, just profit. Mozilla makes money today by creating a web browser.
Wow. The insanity of laws knows no bounds.
We've had this discussion before. Pre-existing separate markets are the criteria for abuse. Not every feature added to Windows, only those added once MS had monopoly power that duplicated the functionality of products from pre-existing separate markets. That does include a lot of items MS has not been taken to court for yet, but that doesn't mean they are not illegal.
I imagine you'd have trouble finding a single feature added to Windows since its invention, that didn't exist in some piece of independent software beforehand. That, in essence, you're arguing Windows cannot exist in both a useful and antitrust-compliant fashion, should hopefully highlight the foolishness of it.
Are *all* of their (recent) tower and desktop cases BTX?
As far as I know, everything that isn't one of those little "Mini" cases, is BTX, and has been for 3-odd years.
Does anyone know why they picked BTX and stuck with it?
I believe Intel "suggested" it.
Software that is efficient runs faster for everyone, making for a better product.
That it runs faster isn't much use if it hits the market too late to be useful.
It also increases the target group of customers as more people can run it.
Not in any meaningful sense. Again, hardware computer is far and away the cheapest aspect of any computing infrastructure. The idea that an economically meaningful number of customers won't buy your software because of its hardware requirements (outside of edge cases) is just unrealistic.
Seeing as how often people have complained about Firefox' RAM usage and speed, JavaScript's speed, and Flash's speed, I'd argue that performance does matter, and that upgrading continually is not the desired solution.
Everyone complains. It's what people do. Now ask those people if they're rather have it at the current performance, or not available for another year, and see what they say.
Do you really think it makes sense to have a program using more resources in the next version for doing the same things? It happens a lot.
Examples ?
For most users the main benefit of "open" is that it can be checked not to contain malicious code, artificial locks, or dumb exploitable mistakes.
Rubbish. Most users wouldn't even know what source code was, let alone how to audit it.
You may not be able to check it yourself but someone in your same position will.
Ie: you have to trust someone else to do it for you. How is that any different to closed source ?
the key (I misspoke my statement, sorry) is that each new version runs with improved performance on the same hardware.
Yes, but that's because it started off so horribly, horribly slow that not even Moore's Law could remedy the situation. No version of Windows has _ever_ performed as badly as early versions of OS X did on contemporary hardware. Not even with that whole "Vista Ready" thing.
I can attest that I have had OS 10.4 running on a machine with 128MB of installed RAM, and it did in fact run (and booted faster than an XP box with 1GB).
You're either lying, or your XP machine was comically broken (not that boot time is a particularly good metric at the best of times).
I've used basically every version of OS X, on nearly every piece of Mac hardware made, since 1999. For the first 2-3 years you quite literally *could not buy* a Mac that could run it even well, let alone "like a champ". The situation im proved in the few years after that, and has been mostly moot since the Intel Macs debuted. However, the idea that OS X has meaningfully lower hardware requirements than Windows is simply false. OS X in anything less than a gig of RAM is slow, and the very idea it could run comparably to even a 512MB Vista machine (let alone a 1GB one), in 256MB, is simply laughable.
10.3? That's way older than Vista - and yet you chose to ignore the whole "Vista incapable" disaster.
That's because it's irrelevant. Even the "disaster" as you put it, was only a result of using absolute bottom of the barrel hardware configurations.
Further, the "Vista Ready" situation was ultimately no different to Apple having standard configurations woefully underpowered for OS X - and it was downright honourable compared to Apple not having hardware *at all* that could run OS X well in its early years.
People mostly don't choose Windows any more than they choose what brand of radio or tires come with their car. They don't buy Windows, they buy a Dell.
No, they buy a computer that runs Windows, and happens to be sold by Dell.
That's because the *real* selling point is the applications - and the applications run on Windows, so customers want Windows.
The ultimate "problem" is that the applications people want - the only aspect of the computer most of them care about - run on Windows.
For example, if MS makes them pay for the cost of developing Internet Explorer and bundles that cost into the cost of Windows, when there was a preexisting market for web browsers, [...]
The primary tenuous assumption here being that there was ever a distinct market for web browsers. The second being that the price of Windows would have changed if it didn't have IE.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that every single aspect of Windows's functionality introduced with and since Windows 95, is an antitrust violation ?
How does that in any way change "MS came to dominates OS's the same way Google came to dominate search - people chose it more than the competition" ?
This only affects the browser market where Microsoft is steadily losing ground anyway. The fact of the matter is that the operating system itself is still untouched and Microsoft still has no penalty for pulling more and more functionality into the OS itself.
What functionality has Microsoft "pulled into the OS" that was not in direct response to either a) customer demands or b) a competitor doing it first ?
MS should have been broken into an OS company and an apps company long ago. But it didn't happen, and we're all still the worse off for it.
We are far, far better off that the legal system didn't sit down and decide what was an application, and what was an operating system.
"can Dell license OS X for inclusion on their computer systems aimed at the home and corporate markets?
Of course not. The Steve would never allow OS X on computers that are so... common.
Can Dell install Solaris or Ubuntu replacing Windows on the systems they ship, without going out of business?
Of course not, the demand for them in the market is comparatively miniscule.
No they can't, except for a few niche markets, so MS has them over a barrel.
I think you'll find it's the customers who have Dell over a barrel. They would be the ones who dictate whether or not the computers Dell sells will be bought.
"We find that temperature, known to strongly impact DIMM error rates in lab conditions, has a suprisingly small effect on error behavior in the field, when taking all other factors into account."
What temperature range does "the field" encompass, as opposed to "lab conditions" ?
They found a similar result with hard disks, but their data pretty much finishes at around 40 degrees, roughly where the typical desktop PC's drive is starting.