Plus, what does AT&T do with all the 1700MHz phones floating out there? Do they offer to replace smartphones that might be only a month old?
If they cut off 3G/4G service then that is breach of contract (I PAID for 4G service!) - and now their leading-edge customers are free to change carriers. They at least need to make a decent show of offering that service until the contracts run out.
Probably because use taxes are unconstitutional (court rulings to the contrary don't make it any less true). It looks like a duck and walks like a duck...
Why don't governments try collecting taxes from the 1% of Americans who have something to tax rather than trying to collect 10% of every book or battery purchase?
Well, more importantly how is it that states can tax interstate commerce commerce despite being explicitly forbidden in the constituion, whether you call it a "use tax" or whatever. That's like saying that a censorship law isn't about blocking free speech but instead it is just about regulating the movement of jaws and tongues.
And if they have no presence in CA, how do they propose to collect on the tax? All they have to do is not pay it, and there is nothing for the CA government to seize...
You did write what I posted about DNS servers and such, right? Can your local ISP run a proxy on port 53 and redirect half the internet at will? Can they go ahead and redirect by IPs to while they're at it? Can the only telco in town block Google if they don't pay a monthly fee?
So, obviously the situation was exploited a bit politically. However, the fact was that he did break the law.
He was sued for sexual harassment. He offered testimony that he did not have a pattern of doing this. Clearly a pattern of sexual harassment is COMPLETELY relevant in a sexual harassment lawsuit. Then it became apparent that he had lied under oath.
The issue wasn't that he slept with somebody. The issue was that he denied sexually harassing somebody in court, and relied in his defense on not having slept with anybody else who worked for him.
If the president were accused of robbing a store, and were asked if he had robbed any other stores, and he said no, and then it turns out he did rob another store, wouldn't that be grounds for a perjury charge?
Yes, and ask the local city police department what they think of the university police department, and they'll basically say "mall cop." It wouldn't surprise me if some malls have their own police departments.
Interestingly enough, the category of people described in the poster are the same category of people who the police would kill without a second thought - people who are armed.
Try being awake and facing a police officer armed and at best you'll end up with a gun pointed at you. In fact, police can shoot you for doing the very thing that they do to their suspects all the time - aiming a gun at them.
So, there are two possibilities here - at some point in the future the professor in question either will kill somebody associated with the university, or he will not (that is a tautology).
Suppose he doesn't kill anybody - then nothing bad will happen to the administration whether they make the guy take down his poster or not. Suppose he does kill somebody - then if they don't make an example of the guy the administration will be blamed for not spotting his "violence problem" or whatever and doing something about it.
Now, there might be only a 0.000001% chance that he will kill somebody some day. But, for a bureaucrat with a job that is impossible to lose, then that is a 0.000001% chance of losing their job vs a 0% chance, and it is easy to compare the two.
Modern courts don't employ common sense - they're just looking for a reason to ruin you. The only people who stand up to lawyers are people like company founders, since they have guts to take risks with their own well-being since otherwise they wouldn't be founding companies.
Yup. I just took a look at diaspora and the instructions seem barely usable for setting up a server.
I got to about the second line of the install script and it died since it wasn't running as root. If they need some ruby libraries installed they should supply a list so that they can be installed using your package manager, not tell you to use some 3rd-party package manager that will stick who-knows-what in your root filesystem. Or, they should just have it install stuff into their own directory tree.
Granted, this is as much as an inidictment of Ruby/PERL/etc as of Diaspora - they just chose to use those mechanisms which are fairly distro unfriendly. I'm not about to try something new and end up with 4500 orphaned files on my system that I have to later try to clean up lest they cause me problems.
Get involved in your local government and stop looking to the federal government to micro-manage your local situation.
Uh, does it really make sense to govern the internet at the local municipality level?
Should I be able to petition the local government so that google.com resolves to Fred's Search Engine in Stillwater, PA - population 202? And, then what if the big national telco that runs the lines just tells the mayor of Stillwater that they'll simply cut off their connection? To a company like verizon ANY municipality is expendable if it furthers their interests. We can applaud that when it means keeping DNS consistent, but what happens when the mayor of Stillwater tells them to provide content-neutral access to the internet and they're told to take a hike? Does Stillwater (population 202) have to run their own fiber backbone to the internet now despite having paid for Verizon to run one years ago?
Perhaps there is a reasonable compromise somewhere between letting telco monopolies completely control all the content on the Internet, and standing in line for my weekly soap and milk ration?
No, one company can buy 33% of the available spectrum and set up a monopoly. Of course, your prices are likely to be higher until somebody else steps in. But, expensive service is probably better than no service, and they can't charge too much otherwise the big national cell networks wouldn't bother to buy their service at all or make it part of their flat-rate plans which will obviously be the most popular option for them.
Actually, I'm fine with some kind of local regulation to prevent stuff like that from getting out of hand, although the usual utility monopoly power will not be there and the first company to set up can't drive out competitors by setting prices artificially low since they will have to charge the same price everywhere.
There will always be room for a second company to come in, and only having 33% of the spectrum allocation won't interfere with service since presumably the reason nobody else has set up shop is that there isn't much demand.
Moreover, there's no reason a tower has to be tied to one carrier or technology.
Yup - that was also what I was thinking when splitting carriers from tower operators. If somebody has the right-of-way for a tower and they charge the same price to all carriers then it is in their interest to maximize the use of that tower, and that will mean supporting everything they can from every cell network out there to fire/police and you-name-it. The tower is a fixed cost, and the only reason to not support everything is to try to block access to your competition. However, the local tower operator's only competition is other local tower operators, and they have no way to block them - their only option is to provide better or cheaper service.
I suspect that "their" motive is to keep their options open, and they're not going to get job offers from phone vendors by making it harder to monetize the platform. Steve is now employed by a phone vendor so I doubt he'll ever shake things up that much.
There are now 3rd-party apps that will block these APIs, which makes me less annoyed with Android.
Android is FOSS, so you could always make a "PrivacyMod" distro that just tracks CyanogenMod but adds a few patches like these sorts of things. That would be relatively low-maintenance, and if it ever took off it would put considerable pressure on CM to adopt a more user-centric policy.
I really could care less what is good for app vendors/etc - the phone is mine, and if they can make money off MY phone that is nice, but it isn't at all important to me. I don't hold to the "just don't install the app" model - there is no technical reason why I can't have my cake, eat it too, and send a message to app vendors that they need to restrain themselves or they'll be cut off.
I believe one multinational carrier there actually got fined by the EU for sloppy minute-counting that enabled their customers to avoid paying some of the usual roaming charges when using the same carrier's network in another country.
Well, the tower operators wouldn't have any relationship with the phone users - they'd just pass the packets onto their carrier. There would be no national operators either (the cell networks would obviously be national but they have no monopoly power).
Making them locally-owned public utilities is even worse, because THEN they're politically motivated to offer dirt cheap basic service for local users (who vote for the elected officials who can hire and fire the utility's management), and subsidizing those cheap fees for local voters making local calls by charging the most outrageous fees for everyone else that they possibly can.
They would have no way of knowing who is a local customer, since they have no relationship with the customers - they'd only know that SIM #12345 wants to send packets to AT&T and they'd have to charge the same rate to everybody as I stated.
In any area there would be at least 3 companies, and that should help control prices.
There's already a solution for rural areas that the major carriers aren't interested in. Sprint has an entire division that deals with rural wireless cooperatives who are allowed to build their own tower infrastructure and use Sprint's spectrum for free in return for allowing unlimited free roaming by Sprint's own customers.
And how is this of any use to somebody who doesn't have a CDMA phone. I'm trying to get rid of the tower-tied-to-one-carrier-or-maybe-two model here.
you want to have at least one or two nationwide networks, but once you have them there's no good reason to go on a rampage and try to force the consolidation of the others.
With my model you'd probably have 25+ nationwide networks - how many long-distance carriers are there in the US for landline service? You can't count them, because regulation eliminated the last-mile barrier. It is probably cheaper to call from New York to San Francisco than from New York to some suburb 50 miles away for this reason.
The nationwide networks would be analogous to long-distance carriers - they just connect peering points to/from the landline network/internet/etc, and manage the customer relationships. They wouldn't run towers. In any area they'd pick the cheapest rates they could get and make all the local networks transparent to the customer. And, I'd aim for a region size that results in a couple of networks per state, not one for every little town.
I just don't think the current model works, because it creates these huge national companies that have huge amounts of power and which achieve regulatory capture. If a local company is ticking people off chances are their local government will be more responsive than they could be if trying to get Verizon to do something differently. If the national companies tick people off then they are easily replaced since the barrier to entry would be low.
Well, clearly this is a major security issue and should be fixed ASAP - not that I'm holding my breath.
It would be like a linux distro spawning a root bash listening on some random TCP port. There isn't anything wrong with the linux security model per se - it just doesn't prevent the people configuring the distro from shootting themselves (or more importantly their users) in the foot...
There is an app that runs as root (which means it effectively has all permissions), and it publishes all kinds of data on a TCP port. Anything that can connect to it can just ask for whatever data it wants.
The fix it to get rid of that app, or at least make it not expose that data on that port (which requires editing the app source, and which seems pointless since the only purpose of the app seems to be to bypass the normal permissions model).
Apps that run as root can do whatever they want to - don't like it, don't run the app. That's why generally speaking you shouldn't run random apps as root.
1. Forbid anybody selling cell phones or cell phone service from owning any spectrum anywhere. 2. Forbid anybody from owning cell phone spectrum in more than one state. 3. Forbid anybody from owning cell phone spectrum in areas totaling more than 10000 mi^2. 4. Forbid anybody from owning more than 33% of the spectrum supporting any particular protocol in any particular location. 5. Assign a particular protocol to any particular frequency at the time of assignment and make this assignment national in scope. 6. Anybody owning spectrum has to publish their price-per-packet (or channel*time for analog) and charge the same price to all their customers and provide service to anybody (common carrier). 7. Anybody providing spectrum has to give access at a government-designed colo facility - there will be a moderate number of these.
In this model cell phone services can't vertically integrate - they HAVE to buy it from local utilities. Any area will have at least 3 local utilities running, which means pricing competition. Cell phone companies don't need to solve the last mile problem, and anybody with some capital can start a new cell phone company at any time and gets the same pricing as AT&T for spectrum use.
And yet, since protocols are assigned to frequency bands nationwide (NOT TO COMPANIES) you get full interoperability of the network nation wide.
Areas that are in the middle of nowhere that have no service today might have their local governments kick in some funding or incentives to get the network built out - or the municipality could buy up to 33% of the spectrum to run its own access, so this also helps areas that would otherwise lack coverage.
Local rent-seeking behavior goes away since nobody can corner any market entirely, and there is no way they can charge discriminatory pricing. The local utilities just accept packets at a colo and send them out over the air or whatever model works best for the techology.
And, spectrum could be re-designated for new protocols over time as technology marches on.
I think they're trying to go for the less-is-more branding (think about it - for the longest time the typical iPod did less than most competing mp3 players and yet commanded a hefty premium).
For small businesses/etc the fact that it has almost zero overhead to support long-term would also be a plus that would add value.
But, yes, I scratch my head over the decision to price these ABOVE comparable systems that run general-purpose OSes (windows tax and all). If they cost $150 US or something like that they'd probably have taken off, and THEN you can think about raising prices.
I still love my CR-48, but I can't say I'd pay $500 US for something like that.
Maybe my workplace is just unusual, but the problems I've seen include:
1. A chargeback system that discourages anybody from helping anybody else with anything unless that help is formalized and expensive and planned in advance.
2. Since only the most routine functions of internal service organizations actually get formalized and planned in advance, the ability to do anything else gets whittled out of those organizations in the name of efficiency. The windows guys know how to create/edit groups, the oracle guys know how to create schemas, and the workstation guys know how to reimage. Heaven help you when a new Windows version comes along and you have to figure out how to re-engineer all that stuff again.
3. So, when a complex problem comes along, all anybody can do is scratch their head and talk about hiring a consultant, assuming it even gets noticed.
And the reason ActiveX died was that other platforms become more dominant. If you target ActiveX then you exclude all non-IE-on-Windows markets.
In the beginning that didn't see as crazy as it seems today. When 10% of the windows users are running Fire* suddenly it doesn't seem like a good idea, to say nothing of the Macs/etc (which were also starting to regain popularity at the time).
As apps become more web-based with relatively thin clients if not outright browser based, we'll see a lot more OS diversity on the desktop/etc. Right now there are still enough apps in the typical user's library to keep them on Windows. Ten years from now I'm not sure how that will end up. When you do everything on the web then you don't really care if every desktop in your house runs a different OS. You just need to know how to launch a browser.
Games will probably still be more OS-specific, unless somebody comes up with something that works for browsers on the higher end.
I think cheap apps will also be an issue. Companies want too much money to run their online versions compared to buying a CD for $50 once every five years and maybe sharing it with 3 friends. If they charged $10/yr people would be more likely to buy into the online model than with the current model where many of these companies want $10/month or whatever.
Nobody said that it didn't exist. However, if you are writing a new web-based application, who targets MS as the server platform? Sure, it probably makes sense if you have a Windows-based app that you've been upgrading since the 90s, but if you're making something new you'd be an idiot not to base it on linux. It isn't about which platform scores marginally better on the latest benchmarks - it is about license costs and freedom from supplier control.
Why would you pay all those license costs for Windows, and be stuck with a limited number of suppliers? If you go the linux route it is cheaper to run yourself, and there will always be 40 bazillion companies that can host you since none of them have to secure agreements with anybody to do it. Plus it is less start-up cost for a start-up.
Can you run servers on Windows - sure! Does anybody do it unless they're somehow getting a deal that has nothing to do with the servers?
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Plus, what does AT&T do with all the 1700MHz phones floating out there? Do they offer to replace smartphones that might be only a month old?
If they cut off 3G/4G service then that is breach of contract (I PAID for 4G service!) - and now their leading-edge customers are free to change carriers. They at least need to make a decent show of offering that service until the contracts run out.
Probably because use taxes are unconstitutional (court rulings to the contrary don't make it any less true). It looks like a duck and walks like a duck...
Why don't governments try collecting taxes from the 1% of Americans who have something to tax rather than trying to collect 10% of every book or battery purchase?
Well, more importantly how is it that states can tax interstate commerce commerce despite being explicitly forbidden in the constituion, whether you call it a "use tax" or whatever. That's like saying that a censorship law isn't about blocking free speech but instead it is just about regulating the movement of jaws and tongues.
And if they have no presence in CA, how do they propose to collect on the tax? All they have to do is not pay it, and there is nothing for the CA government to seize...
I think it is called the protection racket. Paying your weekly fee is cheaper than fixing your windows or hiring an army of security guards.
So, what's the difference?
You did write what I posted about DNS servers and such, right? Can your local ISP run a proxy on port 53 and redirect half the internet at will? Can they go ahead and redirect by IPs to while they're at it? Can the only telco in town block Google if they don't pay a monthly fee?
So, obviously the situation was exploited a bit politically. However, the fact was that he did break the law.
He was sued for sexual harassment. He offered testimony that he did not have a pattern of doing this. Clearly a pattern of sexual harassment is COMPLETELY relevant in a sexual harassment lawsuit. Then it became apparent that he had lied under oath.
The issue wasn't that he slept with somebody. The issue was that he denied sexually harassing somebody in court, and relied in his defense on not having slept with anybody else who worked for him.
If the president were accused of robbing a store, and were asked if he had robbed any other stores, and he said no, and then it turns out he did rob another store, wouldn't that be grounds for a perjury charge?
Yes, and ask the local city police department what they think of the university police department, and they'll basically say "mall cop." It wouldn't surprise me if some malls have their own police departments.
Interestingly enough, the category of people described in the poster are the same category of people who the police would kill without a second thought - people who are armed.
Try being awake and facing a police officer armed and at best you'll end up with a gun pointed at you. In fact, police can shoot you for doing the very thing that they do to their suspects all the time - aiming a gun at them.
Yup, welcome to litigation-friendly USA.
So, there are two possibilities here - at some point in the future the professor in question either will kill somebody associated with the university, or he will not (that is a tautology).
Suppose he doesn't kill anybody - then nothing bad will happen to the administration whether they make the guy take down his poster or not.
Suppose he does kill somebody - then if they don't make an example of the guy the administration will be blamed for not spotting his "violence problem" or whatever and doing something about it.
Now, there might be only a 0.000001% chance that he will kill somebody some day. But, for a bureaucrat with a job that is impossible to lose, then that is a 0.000001% chance of losing their job vs a 0% chance, and it is easy to compare the two.
Modern courts don't employ common sense - they're just looking for a reason to ruin you. The only people who stand up to lawyers are people like company founders, since they have guts to take risks with their own well-being since otherwise they wouldn't be founding companies.
Yup. I just took a look at diaspora and the instructions seem barely usable for setting up a server.
I got to about the second line of the install script and it died since it wasn't running as root. If they need some ruby libraries installed they should supply a list so that they can be installed using your package manager, not tell you to use some 3rd-party package manager that will stick who-knows-what in your root filesystem. Or, they should just have it install stuff into their own directory tree.
Granted, this is as much as an inidictment of Ruby/PERL/etc as of Diaspora - they just chose to use those mechanisms which are fairly distro unfriendly. I'm not about to try something new and end up with 4500 orphaned files on my system that I have to later try to clean up lest they cause me problems.
Get involved in your local government and stop looking to the federal government to micro-manage your local situation.
Uh, does it really make sense to govern the internet at the local municipality level?
Should I be able to petition the local government so that google.com resolves to Fred's Search Engine in Stillwater, PA - population 202? And, then what if the big national telco that runs the lines just tells the mayor of Stillwater that they'll simply cut off their connection? To a company like verizon ANY municipality is expendable if it furthers their interests. We can applaud that when it means keeping DNS consistent, but what happens when the mayor of Stillwater tells them to provide content-neutral access to the internet and they're told to take a hike? Does Stillwater (population 202) have to run their own fiber backbone to the internet now despite having paid for Verizon to run one years ago?
Perhaps there is a reasonable compromise somewhere between letting telco monopolies completely control all the content on the Internet, and standing in line for my weekly soap and milk ration?
No, one company can buy 33% of the available spectrum and set up a monopoly. Of course, your prices are likely to be higher until somebody else steps in. But, expensive service is probably better than no service, and they can't charge too much otherwise the big national cell networks wouldn't bother to buy their service at all or make it part of their flat-rate plans which will obviously be the most popular option for them.
Actually, I'm fine with some kind of local regulation to prevent stuff like that from getting out of hand, although the usual utility monopoly power will not be there and the first company to set up can't drive out competitors by setting prices artificially low since they will have to charge the same price everywhere.
There will always be room for a second company to come in, and only having 33% of the spectrum allocation won't interfere with service since presumably the reason nobody else has set up shop is that there isn't much demand.
Moreover, there's no reason a tower has to be tied to one carrier or technology.
Yup - that was also what I was thinking when splitting carriers from tower operators. If somebody has the right-of-way for a tower and they charge the same price to all carriers then it is in their interest to maximize the use of that tower, and that will mean supporting everything they can from every cell network out there to fire/police and you-name-it. The tower is a fixed cost, and the only reason to not support everything is to try to block access to your competition. However, the local tower operator's only competition is other local tower operators, and they have no way to block them - their only option is to provide better or cheaper service.
I suspect that "their" motive is to keep their options open, and they're not going to get job offers from phone vendors by making it harder to monetize the platform. Steve is now employed by a phone vendor so I doubt he'll ever shake things up that much.
There are now 3rd-party apps that will block these APIs, which makes me less annoyed with Android.
Android is FOSS, so you could always make a "PrivacyMod" distro that just tracks CyanogenMod but adds a few patches like these sorts of things. That would be relatively low-maintenance, and if it ever took off it would put considerable pressure on CM to adopt a more user-centric policy.
I really could care less what is good for app vendors/etc - the phone is mine, and if they can make money off MY phone that is nice, but it isn't at all important to me. I don't hold to the "just don't install the app" model - there is no technical reason why I can't have my cake, eat it too, and send a message to app vendors that they need to restrain themselves or they'll be cut off.
I believe one multinational carrier there actually got fined by the EU for sloppy minute-counting that enabled their customers to avoid paying some of the usual roaming charges when using the same carrier's network in another country.
Well, the tower operators wouldn't have any relationship with the phone users - they'd just pass the packets onto their carrier. There would be no national operators either (the cell networks would obviously be national but they have no monopoly power).
Making them locally-owned public utilities is even worse, because THEN they're politically motivated to offer dirt cheap basic service for local users (who vote for the elected officials who can hire and fire the utility's management), and subsidizing those cheap fees for local voters making local calls by charging the most outrageous fees for everyone else that they possibly can.
They would have no way of knowing who is a local customer, since they have no relationship with the customers - they'd only know that SIM #12345 wants to send packets to AT&T and they'd have to charge the same rate to everybody as I stated.
In any area there would be at least 3 companies, and that should help control prices.
There's already a solution for rural areas that the major carriers aren't interested in. Sprint has an entire division that deals with rural wireless cooperatives who are allowed to build their own tower infrastructure and use Sprint's spectrum for free in return for allowing unlimited free roaming by Sprint's own customers.
And how is this of any use to somebody who doesn't have a CDMA phone. I'm trying to get rid of the tower-tied-to-one-carrier-or-maybe-two model here.
you want to have at least one or two nationwide networks, but once you have them there's no good reason to go on a rampage and try to force the consolidation of the others.
With my model you'd probably have 25+ nationwide networks - how many long-distance carriers are there in the US for landline service? You can't count them, because regulation eliminated the last-mile barrier. It is probably cheaper to call from New York to San Francisco than from New York to some suburb 50 miles away for this reason.
The nationwide networks would be analogous to long-distance carriers - they just connect peering points to/from the landline network/internet/etc, and manage the customer relationships. They wouldn't run towers. In any area they'd pick the cheapest rates they could get and make all the local networks transparent to the customer. And, I'd aim for a region size that results in a couple of networks per state, not one for every little town.
I just don't think the current model works, because it creates these huge national companies that have huge amounts of power and which achieve regulatory capture. If a local company is ticking people off chances are their local government will be more responsive than they could be if trying to get Verizon to do something differently. If the national companies tick people off then they are easily replaced since the barrier to entry would be low.
Well, clearly this is a major security issue and should be fixed ASAP - not that I'm holding my breath.
It would be like a linux distro spawning a root bash listening on some random TCP port. There isn't anything wrong with the linux security model per se - it just doesn't prevent the people configuring the distro from shootting themselves (or more importantly their users) in the foot...
There is no problem with "the permissions."
There is an app that runs as root (which means it effectively has all permissions), and it publishes all kinds of data on a TCP port. Anything that can connect to it can just ask for whatever data it wants.
The fix it to get rid of that app, or at least make it not expose that data on that port (which requires editing the app source, and which seems pointless since the only purpose of the app seems to be to bypass the normal permissions model).
Apps that run as root can do whatever they want to - don't like it, don't run the app. That's why generally speaking you shouldn't run random apps as root.
Actually, I'd do things differently:
1. Forbid anybody selling cell phones or cell phone service from owning any spectrum anywhere.
2. Forbid anybody from owning cell phone spectrum in more than one state.
3. Forbid anybody from owning cell phone spectrum in areas totaling more than 10000 mi^2.
4. Forbid anybody from owning more than 33% of the spectrum supporting any particular protocol in any particular location.
5. Assign a particular protocol to any particular frequency at the time of assignment and make this assignment national in scope.
6. Anybody owning spectrum has to publish their price-per-packet (or channel*time for analog) and charge the same price to all their customers and provide service to anybody (common carrier).
7. Anybody providing spectrum has to give access at a government-designed colo facility - there will be a moderate number of these.
In this model cell phone services can't vertically integrate - they HAVE to buy it from local utilities. Any area will have at least 3 local utilities running, which means pricing competition. Cell phone companies don't need to solve the last mile problem, and anybody with some capital can start a new cell phone company at any time and gets the same pricing as AT&T for spectrum use.
And yet, since protocols are assigned to frequency bands nationwide (NOT TO COMPANIES) you get full interoperability of the network nation wide.
Areas that are in the middle of nowhere that have no service today might have their local governments kick in some funding or incentives to get the network built out - or the municipality could buy up to 33% of the spectrum to run its own access, so this also helps areas that would otherwise lack coverage.
Local rent-seeking behavior goes away since nobody can corner any market entirely, and there is no way they can charge discriminatory pricing. The local utilities just accept packets at a colo and send them out over the air or whatever model works best for the techology.
And, spectrum could be re-designated for new protocols over time as technology marches on.
I think they're trying to go for the less-is-more branding (think about it - for the longest time the typical iPod did less than most competing mp3 players and yet commanded a hefty premium).
For small businesses/etc the fact that it has almost zero overhead to support long-term would also be a plus that would add value.
But, yes, I scratch my head over the decision to price these ABOVE comparable systems that run general-purpose OSes (windows tax and all). If they cost $150 US or something like that they'd probably have taken off, and THEN you can think about raising prices.
I still love my CR-48, but I can't say I'd pay $500 US for something like that.
Maybe my workplace is just unusual, but the problems I've seen include:
1. A chargeback system that discourages anybody from helping anybody else with anything unless that help is formalized and expensive and planned in advance.
2. Since only the most routine functions of internal service organizations actually get formalized and planned in advance, the ability to do anything else gets whittled out of those organizations in the name of efficiency. The windows guys know how to create/edit groups, the oracle guys know how to create schemas, and the workstation guys know how to reimage. Heaven help you when a new Windows version comes along and you have to figure out how to re-engineer all that stuff again.
3. So, when a complex problem comes along, all anybody can do is scratch their head and talk about hiring a consultant, assuming it even gets noticed.
And the reason ActiveX died was that other platforms become more dominant. If you target ActiveX then you exclude all non-IE-on-Windows markets.
In the beginning that didn't see as crazy as it seems today. When 10% of the windows users are running Fire* suddenly it doesn't seem like a good idea, to say nothing of the Macs/etc (which were also starting to regain popularity at the time).
As apps become more web-based with relatively thin clients if not outright browser based, we'll see a lot more OS diversity on the desktop/etc. Right now there are still enough apps in the typical user's library to keep them on Windows. Ten years from now I'm not sure how that will end up. When you do everything on the web then you don't really care if every desktop in your house runs a different OS. You just need to know how to launch a browser.
Games will probably still be more OS-specific, unless somebody comes up with something that works for browsers on the higher end.
I think cheap apps will also be an issue. Companies want too much money to run their online versions compared to buying a CD for $50 once every five years and maybe sharing it with 3 friends. If they charged $10/yr people would be more likely to buy into the online model than with the current model where many of these companies want $10/month or whatever.
Nobody said that it didn't exist. However, if you are writing a new web-based application, who targets MS as the server platform? Sure, it probably makes sense if you have a Windows-based app that you've been upgrading since the 90s, but if you're making something new you'd be an idiot not to base it on linux. It isn't about which platform scores marginally better on the latest benchmarks - it is about license costs and freedom from supplier control.
Why would you pay all those license costs for Windows, and be stuck with a limited number of suppliers? If you go the linux route it is cheaper to run yourself, and there will always be 40 bazillion companies that can host you since none of them have to secure agreements with anybody to do it. Plus it is less start-up cost for a start-up.
Can you run servers on Windows - sure! Does anybody do it unless they're somehow getting a deal that has nothing to do with the servers?