Actually, I think these legal actions are important in maintaining the quality of US industry and, therefore, combating trade deficits. The problem is that recent Republican administrations have not done a good job applying the law to keep free markets free. The Clinton Administration tried but they didn't have enough time. To address your examples, the IBM antitrust thing never really went anywhere (except to employ lots of lawyers) but I think I see the other two examples a bit differently than you do.
Many people complain that phone service didn't get any cheaper, and customer service didn't get any better after the breakup of AT&T but there were some good things that happened also. Audio quality of phone lines increased dramatically and the "Baby Bells" invested heavily in internet infrastructure. I would bet that the good points of the AT&T breakup outweighed the bad by a significant margin, although it's never possible to do a real analysis of that kind of situation. You would have to compare what actually happened to what would have happened in the alternate reality where AT&T remained a monopoly but everything else was exactly the same.
Microsoft is still in possession of their monopoly power for now and, as the article says, the US still dominates the software industry. The problem I see is that Microsoft's monopoly is a prime motivator for foreign interests to try and build a competitor and use political means to protect and promote it. Here in the US we forgive Microsoft for many of their flaws because they are American but people in other parts of the world don't see things that way. The fact that Microsoft has the market power to remain complacent in many areas and still keep their profits, makes the technical barriers lower for some future competitor to rise out of Germany, Japan, China, India or some other country. A breakup of Microsoft would be one of the best things that we could do to preserve the ability of the US software industry to compete in the long run. They need to compete at home to be able to compete abroad and you can't have free markets without antitrust actions.
There's also OSXPM which is free GPL software and Desinstaller which is also freeware. Both use Apple's own package management system which leaves all the relevant information for uninstalls in/Libray/Receipts/. It is interesting that Apple has done everything but create a standard front end for uninstalls. Perhaps they have plans for a drag-and-drop uninstaller like you suggest but haven't gotten quite all the bugs out of it yet.
In fact, the police here in New Haven, CT (where Yale University is located) use license plate readers to catch people with unpaid parking tickets. They will tow your car if you have outstanding tickets past a certain period of time. The main reason this bugs me is because anything similar to a repeat of an incident which happened to me a few years back, before they started using the automatic plate readers, would now be much more serious.
I got a parking ticket, which I paid, and then a week or so later, The city sent me a notice saying that I had an unpaid ticket from three years earlier. I don't remember ever getting this ticket and I think what must have happened was that they put the ticket on my car and it blew off in the wind or some prankster took it. Naturally, it took me a while to figure out what might have happened and decide to just pay the ticket rather than complain. I sent in the payment and then, a while later, received a notice that I had an unpaid balance with the firm to which New Haven had outsourced their parking ticket collections. After more investigation, I found out that the unpaid balance was not that they had failed to recognize my earlier payment but it was a late fee because the original notice only gave a 15 day deadline to pay (which was only explained in the fine print). If something like this happens again, I could find my car missing and have to spend hours tracking it down at an inopportune time.
Combine just the right mixture of incompetent bureaucracy and high technology and you're in real trouble.
It's interesting to note, however, that some of the examples you list as well as most of what Microsoft has made, are not really technically better than their predecessors. The main difference has to do with licensing terms. Microsoft bundles and sells knock offs of other people's software under their license. Various Open Source projects copy commercial software and offer them under free licenses. In many cases, the choice of one piece of software over another has more to do with issues of licensing terms, commercial support and money rather than technical features.
> Why are we even LOOKING at other planets when we haven't solved the problems on our own?
Space offers solutions to many of those problems. Some problems are related to lack of resources and others to social problems. Space offers unlimited resources compared to what we can get here on Earth. Projects like asteroid mining and space-based solar power are not all that far off from today's technology and they could solve some of our major problems. On the social side, exploration of space can be a unifying theme which will help people to put aside their differences.
Some other social problems, which come from human nature, will never go away and we can't let that hold us back.
The right of OEMs to install their own stuff was one of the concessions which Microsoft agreed to in their antitrust case. It seems that they are trying to wiggle out of it now. I agree that they have a point to some degree but this wouldn't be a problem if they were not a monopoly in the first place.
After reading through a number of comments, I'm seeing the term "reasonable doubt" a lot but, if I understand the situation correctly, this is a civil case and "reasonable doubt" doesn't apply. The phrase "preponderance of the evidence" is the relevant concept. Am I right?
Similarly, with a criminal case, you need probable cause to go seize evidence like the son's computer. Does "probable cause" apply here?
If the PDF document from Dr. Jacobson is all you have to worry about, you're in good shape. He specifically says that the hard drive he examined was not the one involved in the relevant file sharing. They don't have direct proof that the copyrighted works were ever really in the possession of the defendant. All they've got is traffic analysis from Verizon. To link that to the defendant's computer, they are relying on data from the hard drive (registry entries, etc). Some guest could have jacked a laptop into the defendant's internet connection for a while and done the sharing for all we know.
Presumably they do have the IP address which was involved in sharing linked to a MAC address but that doesn't prove anything, especially if Verizon validates connections by MAC address. Some ISPs do that but I'm not familiar with Verizon's practice. A number of consumer devices allow you to either "clone" or even enter any MAC address you want so you can fool your ISP into thinking that the device is actually the computer which you registered with that ISP. LinkSys broadband routers are one example of such a device. Dr. Jacobson's declaration makes it look like the computer which was using the hard drive he examined was not using such a device but so what? We know that that hard drive wasn't the one involved in sharing the file(s) anyway. The computer that was actually doing the sharing could have been behind any kind of NAT device, wireless router, etc.
I think that knowledge of MAC address spoofing is particularly relevant to this case, especially the easy way, using a device like a LinkSys router. You can also do it by hacking a Linux or BSD kernel but that's beyond the abilities of most people. You could also point out the possibility that someone could have stolen the defendant's IP address for a while using a technique such as ARP poisoning but that's a bit of a stretch.
As I understand it (but I'm not a lawyer), the 5th will cover you just fine in a criminal case but not so much so in a civil case. You may have heard of situations where a court has ordered someone to give up their key (or password) and hold them in contempt if they don't. What I've heard is that they usually do whatever they can to prevent either party in a civil suit from taking the 5th. That often means granting immunity from prosecution but that's still not good if the information you're trying to protect is about something more embarrassing than illegal.
The slowness with disconnection of network drives is something which has been discussed here on Slashdot before (unfortunately my own post on the topic was too far back to easily find it). It does slow down the whole system but what really bugs me is that it completely locks the Finder. You should still be able to browse other, non-network, disks in other windows in the Finder while you're waiting for a network timeout but you can't. The funny thing about it is that the Finder in Mac OS 9 actually had more multithreading and could do this, IIRC.
Let me add a little to your point about the keyboard being error prone for user input. Many people think of keyboard shortcuts as being for advanced users but I have found that older people with bifocals, who are new to computers, do much better with keyboard input. Not only do they often have little experience with the motor skills of using a mouse but the bifocals sometimes make it more difficult to see where the pointer actually is.
For what it's worth, there was one occasion when I was given a bit of VBA code and told to make it work for Macs. It would not run as-is in Office 2004. I looked through the code and couldn't figure out much. I have no experience with VBA but I know enough about various other languages that I can usually figure out what's going on in an unfamiliar language but not this time. I called up the developer and got a description of what the program was supposed to do and then wrote it from scratch in AppleScript. I was able to do everything that I needed to do and my AppleScript turned out to be much more trouble free than the VBA script on Windows. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the fault of VBA itself. I don't think the guy who wrote that particular VBA code is that good a programmer.
Not everyone has an AppleScript developer handy, which I suppose is the problem with loosing VBA support. My point is that it isn't trivial to run VBA in existing Mac versions of Office anyway. At minimum, you need a small AppleScript wrapper. AppleScript in Office 2004 has a "do VBA script" command which is supposed to let you run code from Windows but it didn't work in for the code I was given. One of the issues is that you have to escape certain characters for it to work and that, alone, would not have been trivial for the quantity of code I had to go through. Even a small sample of code put into a subroutine, with all the escapes correct, did not work for me. If there's another way to run VBA code in Office 2004, I don't know about it.
It's interesting that Microsoft seems to be mostly focused on reactive security measures rather than proactive ones. It's true that they are adding some proactive security to Vista, like making some services run with lower privileges than they had in the past but, still, most of the stuff they are talking about has to do with identifying a threat and then blocking it.
Ever since I was in Boy Scouts, about 20 years ago, there have been situations with local groups within the organization doing radical things. All the anti-gay and you-must-believe-in-god stuff was instigated by a few local hot shots. It was when the national organization refused to overturn local anti-gay policy that a lot of the more moderate members of the organization and donors left. I think that has created somewhat of a snowball effect. The BSA has become smaller and smaller and more and more conservative. At one point, the national organization did tell the local people to cool it (especially on the religious issues) but it was too little too late.
I notice that a lot of Slashdotters posting to this discussion have mentioned that they are Eagle Scouts and I should point out that I am as well. The BSA was a great organization at one time. I wonder if the solution is to create a new Boy Scout organization (separate from the BSA) that is a member of the International Boy Scouts. Many countries have more than one national organization which is a member of the international organization.
I was going to make that same sort of point.
At the same time, it's important to highlight that it doesn't mean you just blindly follow rules without protest. If you believe that the DMCA (for example) is unconstitutional, you should fight it. Of course, you fight within the system, in legal ways.
Those belt loops were called "Skill Awards." For those who weren't in Boy Scouts, skill awards are sort of lesser versions of merit badges and they are required for the lower ranks. Merit badges are much more involved. I suspect you're right, the article probably has it wrong and the anti-piracy thing isn't really a merit badge at all.
I am an IT person for a large university in New England and we don't filter or censor any content as such. We do have a list of applications which people are not supposed to use on computers connected to the university network and that list includes some P2P software like Gnutella and Limewire but we specifically decided that Freenet is OK. The reason was that we were being contacted by the RIAA on, roughly, a monthly basis telling us that we needed to shut someone down who was serving copyrighted content. This policy is not enforced uniformly across the many areas of the University.
The enterprise editions of all the major antivirus vendors are starting to add a feature where you can make your own list of Presumably Unwanted Applications (PUA). It remains to be seen whether we will use that feature to automatically remove P2P software or not but the idea is under serious consideration. This would enforce the policy to some extent since we require antivirus to be on any machine connected to the network.
>* Internet Explorer 6 (with all its bastardized VBScript and.NUT client-side proprietary extensions)
And, most of all, Active Hex. I plan to test some intranet sites with Crossover as soon as I can get a test account. Running Active X content in a Crossover bottle might actually be somewhat secure.
In the case of examples like the Walmart machine, I agree with you. These are just standard PCs where the manufacturer is bypassing the Microsoft tax.
My premise, however, was that Linux gives manufacturers a lot more leeway to depart from the specs necessary to run Windows. This is especially true if you want to cut the cost of a box by putting in a processor that's cheaper than a comparable x86. The example I gave, from YellowSheepRiver, uses a low-cost 64-bit version of the MIPS processor family. If YellowSheepRiver used a 64-bit x86 processor it would more than double the cost of the machine (never mind the Microsoft tax). You aren't going to wipe Linux and install Windows on that machine because it can't run Windows.
My point in mentioning the Microsoft tax at all was that it matters most for low end PCs. Once you get your hardware to the point where it can profitably be sold for under $200 (with Linux), it will be clearly impossible for anyone bundling Windows to compete based on price.
I think that one of the areas where Linux is going to gain relative to both OS X and Windows, in the future, is the bottom end of price. Neither Apple nor Microsoft is going to compete well in the market for computers which cost less than the Microsoft tax (this is the license fee which Microsoft charges to bundle Windows with a new PC, thought to be about $200, although Microsoft and PC makers don't disclose the amount.) Manufacturers are just beginning to press the advantages of Linux. One of these is the ability to transition to a new processor type without as much problem as the commercial vendors would have. One Chinese company is working on pressing this advantage by developing a low cost version of MIPS just to run Linux. That's the sort of thing which will drive adoption of Linux in the future.
From previous stuff I have read about the Xerox Alto, I thought that it had a rather rudimentary GUI. There were only pop up menus and windows, which could overlap, but no pull down menus and no drag and drop. Files and folders were still shown as text (not icons) in a window. I haven't actually seen an Alto but maybe there's someone here who can verify if I'm right about it.
The author calls the Macintosh a "close clone" of the Alto but I thought it was supposed to be a massive improvement over the Alto design. It did take some elements from the Alto but added others and orchestrated them into a clear desktop metaphor which the Alto did not have.
I have seen quite a few LED bulbs and have not seen any flicker. There is such a thing as a LED-fluorescent hybrid and I've got one right here. Although mine doesn't flicker, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them do. The idea with the LED-fluorescent hybrid is to take light from the very bright blue LEDs and use it to excite fluorescent elements to moderate the light towards white. Unfortunately, ones like mine are still too blue. Something that's interesting about these hybrid bulbs (and the way that you can tell them apart from other LEDs) is that they continue to glow for a while after they are turned off.
I had intended to make it clear that this trend was specifically at my location (a large University). In terms of statistics, there are various sources from nodes on the network to usage of the help desk. Over the last 12 years, there seems to have been a steady decline in the percentage of Macs here. I think that custom applications used within the university coupled with politics of a few Windows centric administrators has always been a major factor in that. However, it's the last three years which, in a way, bugs me the most. Since 2003 we have gone from about 30% to about 20% Mac, specifically by adopting expensive, insecure, unreliable, Windows-only technologies. At the same time, there hasn't been the same kind of public outcry about it as there had been about 8-10 years ago when these sorts of decisions were first being made. I guess that many people are seeing that Apple is doing well in general and not noticing the local situation.
The point I was making in my original post was that it seems like the switch to Intel processors may be the thing to finally reverse the trend here. I don't have any evidence yet. It's too soon to tell. But it does seem like there have been a lot of new Intel Macs ordered.
I'm not so keen on SPY right now either. One of the great things about ETFs is that you can use them to invest in foreign markets which is the best place to find diversity and diversity protects you from risk. Take various ETFs and mutual funds and use an online tool like the graphing utility of Yahoo Finance and overlay the performance of these funds against the S&P 500. You will find lots and lots of funds behave just like the S&P 500, going up when it goes up and down when it goes down. You only need one such fund. There's no point in buying a whole portfolio of funds that track the S&P 500. What I have found recently is that foreign market funds are the most likely to behave differently.
For now, my money is on ETFs like ILF (Latin America) and EWY (Asia excluding Japan).
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Actually, I think these legal actions are important in maintaining the quality of US industry and, therefore, combating trade deficits. The problem is that recent Republican administrations have not done a good job applying the law to keep free markets free. The Clinton Administration tried but they didn't have enough time. To address your examples, the IBM antitrust thing never really went anywhere (except to employ lots of lawyers) but I think I see the other two examples a bit differently than you do.
Many people complain that phone service didn't get any cheaper, and customer service didn't get any better after the breakup of AT&T but there were some good things that happened also. Audio quality of phone lines increased dramatically and the "Baby Bells" invested heavily in internet infrastructure. I would bet that the good points of the AT&T breakup outweighed the bad by a significant margin, although it's never possible to do a real analysis of that kind of situation. You would have to compare what actually happened to what would have happened in the alternate reality where AT&T remained a monopoly but everything else was exactly the same.
Microsoft is still in possession of their monopoly power for now and, as the article says, the US still dominates the software industry. The problem I see is that Microsoft's monopoly is a prime motivator for foreign interests to try and build a competitor and use political means to protect and promote it. Here in the US we forgive Microsoft for many of their flaws because they are American but people in other parts of the world don't see things that way. The fact that Microsoft has the market power to remain complacent in many areas and still keep their profits, makes the technical barriers lower for some future competitor to rise out of Germany, Japan, China, India or some other country. A breakup of Microsoft would be one of the best things that we could do to preserve the ability of the US software industry to compete in the long run. They need to compete at home to be able to compete abroad and you can't have free markets without antitrust actions.
There's also OSXPM which is free GPL software and Desinstaller which is also freeware. Both use Apple's own package management system which leaves all the relevant information for uninstalls in /Libray/Receipts/. It is interesting that Apple has done everything but create a standard front end for uninstalls. Perhaps they have plans for a drag-and-drop uninstaller like you suggest but haven't gotten quite all the bugs out of it yet.
In fact, the police here in New Haven, CT (where Yale University is located) use license plate readers to catch people with unpaid parking tickets. They will tow your car if you have outstanding tickets past a certain period of time. The main reason this bugs me is because anything similar to a repeat of an incident which happened to me a few years back, before they started using the automatic plate readers, would now be much more serious.
I got a parking ticket, which I paid, and then a week or so later, The city sent me a notice saying that I had an unpaid ticket from three years earlier. I don't remember ever getting this ticket and I think what must have happened was that they put the ticket on my car and it blew off in the wind or some prankster took it. Naturally, it took me a while to figure out what might have happened and decide to just pay the ticket rather than complain. I sent in the payment and then, a while later, received a notice that I had an unpaid balance with the firm to which New Haven had outsourced their parking ticket collections. After more investigation, I found out that the unpaid balance was not that they had failed to recognize my earlier payment but it was a late fee because the original notice only gave a 15 day deadline to pay (which was only explained in the fine print). If something like this happens again, I could find my car missing and have to spend hours tracking it down at an inopportune time.
Combine just the right mixture of incompetent bureaucracy and high technology and you're in real trouble.
It's interesting to note, however, that some of the examples you list as well as most of what Microsoft has made, are not really technically better than their predecessors. The main difference has to do with licensing terms. Microsoft bundles and sells knock offs of other people's software under their license. Various Open Source projects copy commercial software and offer them under free licenses. In many cases, the choice of one piece of software over another has more to do with issues of licensing terms, commercial support and money rather than technical features.
> Why are we even LOOKING at other planets when we haven't solved the problems on our own?
Space offers solutions to many of those problems. Some problems are related to lack of resources and others to social problems. Space offers unlimited resources compared to what we can get here on Earth. Projects like asteroid mining and space-based solar power are not all that far off from today's technology and they could solve some of our major problems. On the social side, exploration of space can be a unifying theme which will help people to put aside their differences.
Some other social problems, which come from human nature, will never go away and we can't let that hold us back.
The right of OEMs to install their own stuff was one of the concessions which Microsoft agreed to in their antitrust case. It seems that they are trying to wiggle out of it now. I agree that they have a point to some degree but this wouldn't be a problem if they were not a monopoly in the first place.
After reading through a number of comments, I'm seeing the term "reasonable doubt" a lot but, if I understand the situation correctly, this is a civil case and "reasonable doubt" doesn't apply. The phrase "preponderance of the evidence" is the relevant concept. Am I right?
Similarly, with a criminal case, you need probable cause to go seize evidence like the son's computer. Does "probable cause" apply here?
If the PDF document from Dr. Jacobson is all you have to worry about, you're in good shape. He specifically says that the hard drive he examined was not the one involved in the relevant file sharing. They don't have direct proof that the copyrighted works were ever really in the possession of the defendant. All they've got is traffic analysis from Verizon. To link that to the defendant's computer, they are relying on data from the hard drive (registry entries, etc). Some guest could have jacked a laptop into the defendant's internet connection for a while and done the sharing for all we know.
Presumably they do have the IP address which was involved in sharing linked to a MAC address but that doesn't prove anything, especially if Verizon validates connections by MAC address. Some ISPs do that but I'm not familiar with Verizon's practice. A number of consumer devices allow you to either "clone" or even enter any MAC address you want so you can fool your ISP into thinking that the device is actually the computer which you registered with that ISP. LinkSys broadband routers are one example of such a device. Dr. Jacobson's declaration makes it look like the computer which was using the hard drive he examined was not using such a device but so what? We know that that hard drive wasn't the one involved in sharing the file(s) anyway. The computer that was actually doing the sharing could have been behind any kind of NAT device, wireless router, etc.
I think that knowledge of MAC address spoofing is particularly relevant to this case, especially the easy way, using a device like a LinkSys router. You can also do it by hacking a Linux or BSD kernel but that's beyond the abilities of most people. You could also point out the possibility that someone could have stolen the defendant's IP address for a while using a technique such as ARP poisoning but that's a bit of a stretch.
As I understand it (but I'm not a lawyer), the 5th will cover you just fine in a criminal case but not so much so in a civil case. You may have heard of situations where a court has ordered someone to give up their key (or password) and hold them in contempt if they don't. What I've heard is that they usually do whatever they can to prevent either party in a civil suit from taking the 5th. That often means granting immunity from prosecution but that's still not good if the information you're trying to protect is about something more embarrassing than illegal.
The slowness with disconnection of network drives is something which has been discussed here on Slashdot before (unfortunately my own post on the topic was too far back to easily find it). It does slow down the whole system but what really bugs me is that it completely locks the Finder. You should still be able to browse other, non-network, disks in other windows in the Finder while you're waiting for a network timeout but you can't. The funny thing about it is that the Finder in Mac OS 9 actually had more multithreading and could do this, IIRC.
Let me add a little to your point about the keyboard being error prone for user input. Many people think of keyboard shortcuts as being for advanced users but I have found that older people with bifocals, who are new to computers, do much better with keyboard input. Not only do they often have little experience with the motor skills of using a mouse but the bifocals sometimes make it more difficult to see where the pointer actually is.
For what it's worth, there was one occasion when I was given a bit of VBA code and told to make it work for Macs. It would not run as-is in Office 2004. I looked through the code and couldn't figure out much. I have no experience with VBA but I know enough about various other languages that I can usually figure out what's going on in an unfamiliar language but not this time. I called up the developer and got a description of what the program was supposed to do and then wrote it from scratch in AppleScript. I was able to do everything that I needed to do and my AppleScript turned out to be much more trouble free than the VBA script on Windows. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the fault of VBA itself. I don't think the guy who wrote that particular VBA code is that good a programmer. Not everyone has an AppleScript developer handy, which I suppose is the problem with loosing VBA support. My point is that it isn't trivial to run VBA in existing Mac versions of Office anyway. At minimum, you need a small AppleScript wrapper. AppleScript in Office 2004 has a "do VBA script" command which is supposed to let you run code from Windows but it didn't work in for the code I was given. One of the issues is that you have to escape certain characters for it to work and that, alone, would not have been trivial for the quantity of code I had to go through. Even a small sample of code put into a subroutine, with all the escapes correct, did not work for me. If there's another way to run VBA code in Office 2004, I don't know about it.
It's interesting that Microsoft seems to be mostly focused on reactive security measures rather than proactive ones. It's true that they are adding some proactive security to Vista, like making some services run with lower privileges than they had in the past but, still, most of the stuff they are talking about has to do with identifying a threat and then blocking it.
Ever since I was in Boy Scouts, about 20 years ago, there have been situations with local groups within the organization doing radical things. All the anti-gay and you-must-believe-in-god stuff was instigated by a few local hot shots. It was when the national organization refused to overturn local anti-gay policy that a lot of the more moderate members of the organization and donors left. I think that has created somewhat of a snowball effect. The BSA has become smaller and smaller and more and more conservative. At one point, the national organization did tell the local people to cool it (especially on the religious issues) but it was too little too late.
I notice that a lot of Slashdotters posting to this discussion have mentioned that they are Eagle Scouts and I should point out that I am as well. The BSA was a great organization at one time. I wonder if the solution is to create a new Boy Scout organization (separate from the BSA) that is a member of the International Boy Scouts. Many countries have more than one national organization which is a member of the international organization.
I was going to make that same sort of point. At the same time, it's important to highlight that it doesn't mean you just blindly follow rules without protest. If you believe that the DMCA (for example) is unconstitutional, you should fight it. Of course, you fight within the system, in legal ways.
Those belt loops were called "Skill Awards." For those who weren't in Boy Scouts, skill awards are sort of lesser versions of merit badges and they are required for the lower ranks. Merit badges are much more involved. I suspect you're right, the article probably has it wrong and the anti-piracy thing isn't really a merit badge at all.
I am an IT person for a large university in New England and we don't filter or censor any content as such. We do have a list of applications which people are not supposed to use on computers connected to the university network and that list includes some P2P software like Gnutella and Limewire but we specifically decided that Freenet is OK. The reason was that we were being contacted by the RIAA on, roughly, a monthly basis telling us that we needed to shut someone down who was serving copyrighted content. This policy is not enforced uniformly across the many areas of the University.
The enterprise editions of all the major antivirus vendors are starting to add a feature where you can make your own list of Presumably Unwanted Applications (PUA). It remains to be seen whether we will use that feature to automatically remove P2P software or not but the idea is under serious consideration. This would enforce the policy to some extent since we require antivirus to be on any machine connected to the network.
my 1337 r1Gh71n6 Sk1Lz.
>* Internet Explorer 6 (with all its bastardized VBScript and .NUT client-side proprietary extensions)
And, most of all, Active Hex. I plan to test some intranet sites with Crossover as soon as I can get a test account. Running Active X content in a Crossover bottle might actually be somewhat secure.
In the case of examples like the Walmart machine, I agree with you. These are just standard PCs where the manufacturer is bypassing the Microsoft tax.
My premise, however, was that Linux gives manufacturers a lot more leeway to depart from the specs necessary to run Windows. This is especially true if you want to cut the cost of a box by putting in a processor that's cheaper than a comparable x86. The example I gave, from YellowSheepRiver, uses a low-cost 64-bit version of the MIPS processor family. If YellowSheepRiver used a 64-bit x86 processor it would more than double the cost of the machine (never mind the Microsoft tax). You aren't going to wipe Linux and install Windows on that machine because it can't run Windows.
My point in mentioning the Microsoft tax at all was that it matters most for low end PCs. Once you get your hardware to the point where it can profitably be sold for under $200 (with Linux), it will be clearly impossible for anyone bundling Windows to compete based on price.
I think that one of the areas where Linux is going to gain relative to both OS X and Windows, in the future, is the bottom end of price. Neither Apple nor Microsoft is going to compete well in the market for computers which cost less than the Microsoft tax (this is the license fee which Microsoft charges to bundle Windows with a new PC, thought to be about $200, although Microsoft and PC makers don't disclose the amount.) Manufacturers are just beginning to press the advantages of Linux. One of these is the ability to transition to a new processor type without as much problem as the commercial vendors would have. One Chinese company is working on pressing this advantage by developing a low cost version of MIPS just to run Linux. That's the sort of thing which will drive adoption of Linux in the future.
From previous stuff I have read about the Xerox Alto, I thought that it had a rather rudimentary GUI. There were only pop up menus and windows, which could overlap, but no pull down menus and no drag and drop. Files and folders were still shown as text (not icons) in a window. I haven't actually seen an Alto but maybe there's someone here who can verify if I'm right about it.
The author calls the Macintosh a "close clone" of the Alto but I thought it was supposed to be a massive improvement over the Alto design. It did take some elements from the Alto but added others and orchestrated them into a clear desktop metaphor which the Alto did not have.
I have seen quite a few LED bulbs and have not seen any flicker. There is such a thing as a LED-fluorescent hybrid and I've got one right here. Although mine doesn't flicker, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them do. The idea with the LED-fluorescent hybrid is to take light from the very bright blue LEDs and use it to excite fluorescent elements to moderate the light towards white. Unfortunately, ones like mine are still too blue. Something that's interesting about these hybrid bulbs (and the way that you can tell them apart from other LEDs) is that they continue to glow for a while after they are turned off.
I had intended to make it clear that this trend was specifically at my location (a large University). In terms of statistics, there are various sources from nodes on the network to usage of the help desk. Over the last 12 years, there seems to have been a steady decline in the percentage of Macs here. I think that custom applications used within the university coupled with politics of a few Windows centric administrators has always been a major factor in that. However, it's the last three years which, in a way, bugs me the most. Since 2003 we have gone from about 30% to about 20% Mac, specifically by adopting expensive, insecure, unreliable, Windows-only technologies. At the same time, there hasn't been the same kind of public outcry about it as there had been about 8-10 years ago when these sorts of decisions were first being made. I guess that many people are seeing that Apple is doing well in general and not noticing the local situation.
The point I was making in my original post was that it seems like the switch to Intel processors may be the thing to finally reverse the trend here. I don't have any evidence yet. It's too soon to tell. But it does seem like there have been a lot of new Intel Macs ordered.
I'm not so keen on SPY right now either. One of the great things about ETFs is that you can use them to invest in foreign markets which is the best place to find diversity and diversity protects you from risk. Take various ETFs and mutual funds and use an online tool like the graphing utility of Yahoo Finance and overlay the performance of these funds against the S&P 500. You will find lots and lots of funds behave just like the S&P 500, going up when it goes up and down when it goes down. You only need one such fund. There's no point in buying a whole portfolio of funds that track the S&P 500. What I have found recently is that foreign market funds are the most likely to behave differently.
For now, my money is on ETFs like ILF (Latin America) and EWY (Asia excluding Japan).