And the dual screen? It's a gimmick. Anything the Dual screen can do could also be done by a bigger or wider screen.
Ah, but a "bigger or wider screen" would be bad for several reasons. First, the unit itself would have to become larger to accomodate a larger screen. Atari's Lynx taught the industry lots of things, one of them being "don't make handheld units bulky". And second, as you make LCD screens larger they quickly become much more expensive. Small screens are cheaper because the yields are higher. I bet Nintendo gets those two screens for a lot less than one screen with the same number of pixels.
So. The design of the DS is a clever way of doubling the screen real-estate in a portable gaming platform, without making the unit too large to be successful or too expensive to manufacture. And now they've made it sound like a feature!
A modern AAA-title videogame needs a story. But it can't be just any story--it's hard to make an exciting game about a love story or a comedy. So it needs to be an action story.
What should the main character be accomplishing with their actions? Should they be making the world a better place or a worse place? Most people opt for "make it a better place".
Well, if it's "make it a better place", then the world needs to be in a bad way, right? So they invent a world where something terrible has happened. They reach for the same tired bogeymen that are a staple of poorly-written dystopian movies: evil corporations and environmental damage.
In point of fact, there are plenty of games where a positive future serves as a backdrop. For instance, the "Extreme G" racer series is set in a future where mankind has everything it needs, so for excitement they construct these dangerous anti-gravity races. I thought it was clever, then I read a review that described it as "yet another" racer set in such a utopian future.
And there are many many more games with a strong storyline where politics are irrelevant. Too many to name.
The article seemed to imply that political messages in video games was growing, and that's just false. A small fraction of games have some overt political subtext, just as they always have. It's just that there are more games now, so the resulting number of games is also larger.
When I was eight, my parents took the whole family to Walt Disney World. While we were in SomethingOrOtherLand, we stopped because my parents wanted to watch a steeldrum band. I wasn't interested, and then I saw something really neat--a talking parrot! It was sitting on top of the archway to a store, and it was saying... well, I figured out it was just telling you to come into the store and spend money, so I lost interest. And when I turned around my parents were gone! I looked around and couldn't find 'em, and I cried and cried because I had been left behind. I turned myself over to a US Marine (!) who at the time was helping an old lady (!!), and he took me to The Authorities. They sat me in a ticket booth (this was back when Disney parks still had "E" tickets), where I waited for an interminable time until my dad picked me up.
I also got lost on BART (the Bay Area light rail system), and once at the old Marine World Africa USA.
I betcha my parents would have bought those wristbands for me. I bet I'd buy 'em for my kids, iff'n I had any.
p.s. I bet they already know the appropriate places to put vending carts! Because they try different positions and see what works better. Golly, maybe not everything on the planet is a conspiracy!
Professor Kellaris certainly has the "stuffy old fart" patter down pat. "You kids today, with your hula hoops and your fax machines! And that shuffle play! Why, when I was a kid, the only time we got shuffle play was during an earthquake!"
Decrying shuffle play is like complaining about remakes, when the original movie is still out there. I can listen to an album in its original order, or I can switch it around. Or I can mix it in with other albums, even by other artists.
And saying it gives light to hidden gems is absolutely right. When I play an album straight through, I'm often lulled into learning it as one monolithic composition. Shuffle play breaks that up and allows individual tracks to shine. I've discovered some wonderful tracks that way, tracks that I never noticed until I broke up the album's original order.
My name's Larry, and I've been using shuffle play on CD players for fifteen years. (Hi, Larry!)
When people talk about offshoring, it's often a foregone conclusion for them that jobs are being moved overseas because wages are cheaper there. Well, wages were cheaper overseas in the 70s, and the 50s, and even in the 20s. Why are companies only taking advantage of it now?
My answer: because it isn't primarily about the wages and never was. It's to escape the massive weight of regulation and taxation for employees and workplaces. The US Federal Government has instituted so many rules that they've "broken the camel's back" so to speak. Companies are now willing to put up with the added complexity and inconvenience of offshoring because the benefits now outweigh the disadvantages.
> *right about here is some gruesome video of bill gates being ripped to shreds from M4 rounds*
Bleah. This is what passes for +5 Funny on Slashdot? Say what you like about Microsoft's business practices, I hope and trust no one here sincerely wishes Bill Gates bodily harm, or even thinks it's particularly funny.
By "play from laptop", what you're really talking about is "play without a modern 3D chipset". And it's true! I'm not sure if the beta demo of UT2k4 has it, but the final version of UT2k4 will ship with a software renderer.
However, it's not the original software renderer written for the Unreal engine, as shipped with the original "Unreal" game. It's Pixomatic, the latest project from Michael Abrash. Pixomatic is a pure software renderer that supports modern video card operations. Version 2.0 was recently released, and brings it up to "DX7-class" devices (1.0 was only "DX6-class"). The game won't look quite as good under Pixomatic, and it won't run anywhere near as fast as it would with a 3D chipset. But hey! it runs!
Who gets the software renderer? Well, Pixomatic is heavily optimized for x86 processors, so you're not likely to see a Mac port. However, it is officially supported under Windows and Linux (though presumably x86 only). So the Linux builds of UT2k4 could ship with Pixomatic; it remains to be seen whether or not they will.
larry
p.s. I've only played a little of the (beta) demo, but I did get spider mines, and I believe I've had the grenade launcher too.
Yeah, I've only been programming professionally since '89, and doing multithreaded app program for maybe ten years. (Let's try not jumping to conclusions, m'kay?)
Can you list for me some "big games" that don't use The Big Game Loop? I sincerely doubt it. For one, very little consumer hardware supports SMP, which means heavily-threaded code is going to add context switches as well as synchronization overhead. For another, the work load simply doesn't distribute easily to multiple threads. Your "big games" face the same problem that my "little game" does: first, read all user input, second, compute the new game state, and third, render the current state of the game. (Client/server games split up this work a little.)
There are a few places where multithreading can really help. It can make networking cleaner, though that's just as easily done single-threaded with a big select() call. (A well-written select()-based web server can easily be higher performance than multithreaded servers; see thttpd.) It's also nice to do sound mixing in a thread, but again that's not a must. But this is an architectural concern, not a performance concern. Your game will be plenty responsive with The Big Game Loop even if it's networked.
Anyway, this is missing the point of my original posting. Run any game today and watch it with a high-end process monitor (I'm on Windows XP, so I used Iarsn TaskInfo). It might have as many as a dozen threads, but you'll see that it spends 99%+ of its CPU time in a single thread. For example, I just checked Unreal Tournament 2003 and found that to be true. It had about nine threads, but only one was using a measurable amount of CPU. My game also has about nine threads; one is the main thread with The Big Game Loop, and something like two or four are from the sound library. The rest seem to be started by global system DLLs. (I'm not sure what they're doing, but I can't do anything about them, and they don't seem to be hurting anything. Ah well.)
So let me put my original question another way: how will games on XBox 2 benefit from having six-way SMP? Since they will very likely still use The Big Game Loop, how will they make any significant use of those other five pipelines?
The quoted specs list three hyperthreaded G5s. That means a theoretical maximum of six concurrent threads running in parallel.
So what?
I'm writing a game right now, and I've studied up on game architecture. Without exception, that realtime game you've been enjoying uses what's referred to as The Big Game Loop. The simplest form goes like this:
while (we want to keep playing)
{
if (it's time for a new frame){
readInputs();
performGameLogic();
renderScene();
}
}
This doesn't parallelize well. You want to read user input as close to rendering as possible; the longer the delay between the user pressing the jump button and seeing the Space Goblin start to jump, the sloppier input feels. The best you could do, in the general case, would have one thread reading input and computing game state, and passing it off to a second thread for rendering just as it finished rendering the previous scene.
In point of fact, John Carmack experimented with exactly this while developing Quake 3 Arena. You can read his results here. To summarize: he saw improvements of between 3% and 15%, and some levels were actually slower. Meanwhile it added complexity. So he scrapped it.
XBox 2's six-way SMP sounds lovely, but it strikes me as irrelevant for games. Maybe it'll be useful for other applications.
larry
p.s. Please pardon the formatting, but Slashdot doesn't support the pre tag. (Or, sadly, SGML character references.)
Well, sure, once Governor Schwarzenegger passes the Emergency Alien Martian Atmosphere Reactivation Device To Protect Our Children And Keep America Strong Act.
If that was a sound and workable business plan, why aren't they already doing it? In current American society, AT&T can buy tanks, and 911 still wouldn't accomplish much in the above scenario.
In a Libertarian society, it would be just as illegal to force people to sign contracts under threat of violence as it is in current American society. (Perhaps more so, as the abolishment of force as a means of persuasion is one of the underpinnings of the Libertarian philosophy.) The contract would still be unenforcable, AT&T would still be punishable by law.
Finally, how much "interpretation" can one make of the Second Amendment? "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It's hard to imagine how the Framers could have made their intention any clearer.
Well, yes, in a free market nobody regulates business. However, you're wrong about monopolies being able to regulate the market--they can't. Only governments can regulate; monopolies can only persuade. There is a world of difference.
For more on this topic, let's turn to the dictionary.
reg u late 1 a: to govern or direct according to rule b: to bring under the control of law or constituted authority
In other words, to set laws controlling how something is done. But creating laws is the sole domain of government.
Government can force you to do things in a certain way, and if you refuse to do them that way, they can send men with guns to your house and take you away to jail. That's force. That's government.
Monopolies cannot create laws. In a genuinely free market, the most they can do is persuade you to sign a contract. They cannot force other businesses to conduct themselves in a certain way, nor can they force prospective customers to buy their products. And most importantly, they cannot prevent competitors from selling competing products. So monopolies can only come into being, and perpetuate themselves, by persuading customers to buy their products and services. Usually, they do this by undercutting their competitors, which is good, not bad, for their customers.
The greatest monopoly the world has ever seen was Standard Oil. However, Standard Oil still could not force anyone to use their products, or prevent competitors from competing. Standard Oil's monopoly was created and entrenched by providing the best product at the lowest price to its customers. In the heyday of Standard Oil, nobody could compete with them because their prices were so astonishingly low. This was wonderful for consumers.
However, in a regulated market (such as we find ourselves in today), monopolies can persuade the government to create laws favorable to them--subsidising themselves or punishing their competitors. And that is why we consumers fear monopolies; because we fear that we will be forced, by government, to use their services, which would relieve the pressure to keep their prices low. In a genuinely free market, we would have no need to fear monopolies.
As for the American war of independence, it was fought primarily to escape the British crown, i.e. Government. It was not British monopolies taxing the American settlers and ignoring their requests for legislative relief. I wouldn't be surprised if the early American settlers were required to do business with British monopolies, but Britain was not a free market. So those would have been ordained monopolies, regulated into existance by the British crown and enforced by law.
I'm all for alternative views of history--these days, I think Lincoln was a jerk--but I've never heard this particular spin on the War Of Independence, and I just don't see the proof anywhere. The factual history we have from those days clearly shows it was government, and not British monopolies, that brought forth the ire of the colonists, which led to their revolt.
You're a little confused. In a 100% free market, the government does not regulate business. That's why it's a free market.
A free market doesn't have, or need, need "protecting" from monopolies. Historically, monopolies have been positive boons to consumer; for instance, Standard Oil brought down the price of oil dramatically. Who needs protection from that?
Similarly, the government doesn't "encourage competition" in a free market. A free market encourages competition all by itself, by allowing competitors to blossom on their own. In a free market, competitors compete solely based on the quality of their goods and services. They aren't able to compete via litigation, suing other companies out of business. And they aren't able to compete based on being subsidized by government.
All that said, we don't have a 100% free market here in America, nor am I aware of any large-scale free markets anywhwere else in the world.
No, I'd be more likely to blame government regulation for HMOs becoming oligopsonies. The HMO Act of 1973 gave HMOs a distinct, artificial advantage in the market.
And if you look further back, the reason comprehensive health insurance (as opposed to catastrophic health insurance) even exists is--once again!--because of government interference in the economy. During the second world war, the Federal Government enacted strict wage controls. This meant that companies could no longer compete for employees in the market based on price. So employers began competing based on other benefits, one being more comprehensive health insurance.
Certainly, there is truth to Baumol's conjecture. I would not expect the cost of labor-intensive services to drop at the same rate as manufactured goods. But it is foolish to dismiss the increased costs in health care to Baumol's Disease. You seem to claim Baumol's disease requires service-sector wages to rise "rapidly", regardless of other factors. My understanding of Baumol's disease suggests service-sector wages will track the rise (and therefore fall) of wages in other industries. If wages have stayed the same for the last thirty years, I suggest to you that Baumol's disease has little or no bearing.
Also, I'll point out that my mother has been a practicing neurologist for twenty-five years, and her income has not increased at anywhere near the rate with which health care costs have risen. Indeed, Medicare continues to drop the fees they are willing to pay doctors for performing the same services.
(Sorry for all the Harry Browne articles, but he explains things very clearly and I knew where to find them.)
We need to strive towards a system of universal health care similar to Vermont's. We can't allow millions of children to remain without basic insurance, unable to get the most basic treatments.
Fifty years ago, health care in the United States was relatively unregulated, and we had the best health care in the world bar-none. Medical insurance was cheap and easily available, and the destitute had access to free charity medical care. But thirty years of intensive government meddling has left our health care system in shambles. In this article by Harry Browne, he quotes Dr. Jane Orient as saying:
When medical care was mostly paid for by patients, the hospital bill for an appendectomy was the equivalent of 10 days' wages for a common laborer ($149 in 1960). Now it's at least a couple months of take-home pay for a middle-income person (about $3,000). They still do the procedure the same way, and the patient is generally home faster.
Do you really think you can improve health care with more regulation, more bureaucracy, more goverment-institutionalized force?
The Millar brothers jumped from Blizzard a while ago, and are now working on Goblin Commander for consoles. Here's a preview at IGN.
This article at Gamespy claims they were the "designers" of Warcraft and Diablo.
California's power crisis was not the result of an unregulated industry, or even of evil power companies... it was the failure of the state of California and its idiotic mishandling of CA's power needs. Please see the Cato Institute's coverage of this.
Also, I'd like to point out that the rolling blackouts were not enacted by Enron or other power providers; they were the work of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the still-highly-regulated utilities provider for most of California.
Power companies are not capricious monsters; they they're just another company, trying to sell a product for a profit. They have no interest in "shutting down your house/town/state"--quite the opposite, they want to sell to your house/town/state. They don't make any money if they can't sell their product.
I for one would welcome deregulating the entire power industry in California. That would introduce competition, which would inevitably result in my power being cheaper and more reliable.
I admit I didn't strongly follow the happenings at the time, but Claris wasn't always an Apple subsidiary. It started out that way, then it was spun off--and indeed sold "ClarisWorks" for Windows!--but I guess it's been totally reabsorbed into Apple now. www.claris.com doesn't exist anymore, and the claris.com domain is owned by FileMaker Inc., a subsidiary of Apple. Again, I don't know the history, but I'd guess that Apple reabsorbed Claris, took over ClarisWorks entirely and renamed it to AppleWorks, and renamed the subsidiary to FileMaker after its remaining important product.
Interestingly enough, even though Filemaker Inc is an Apple company, Filemaker isn't Apple exclusive. It runs on Windows, on Linux, even on Palm OS.
:)
Re:Why is MS so much slower than Apple?
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A couple points:
Microsoft has heard back from Corporate America saying "please don't make us update so often". There used to be a new version of Office every year, and Microsoft's big institutional customers asked them to slow down. Microsoft has since deliberately slowed down the pace.
Why should Microsoft bother? XP is still flying off the shelves, virtual and non-virtual. It took Nintendo 1.5 years to add a light to the obviously-deficient GameBoy Advance. When you own a market lock, stock, and barrel, there really isn't a strong incentive to innovate, and you definitely don't feel rushed.
You are inflating Apple's accomplishments. How many of those products you named did Apple buy and stick their name onto? I don't follow the Apple software pantheon, but I do know that AppleWorks and FileMaker Pro were third-party software, and I thought Shake and Logic were too.
Similarly, you are sidelining many of Microsoft's accomplishments, eliding Office XP, Internet Explorer 6, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player 9, DirectX 9, ThreeDegrees, and more. Microsoft really does churn out a lot of software--they can afford to, as Windows and Office are cash cow juggernauts. So they spin out lots of new software to see if any of it sticks. (Which mostly it doesn't.) "Better" is a matter of opinion, but I sincerely doubt Apple has a "bigger" software lineup.
In case you were trying for a complete list, here are the ones you forgot:
Windows/386 Windows 3.0
Windows NT 3.1 Windows NT 3.5 Windows NT 3.51
Windows 95 OSR2 Windows 98 SE
Also, what you list as "Windows 3.1 for Workgroups" was officially titled "Windows for Workgroups", but internally it was actually Windows 3.11. And Windows NT 4 didn't come out until 1996, after Windows 95. And "Windows 1" was just called "Windows" at the time.
Finally, ME is an acronym for "Millenium Edition", and XP is a contraction of Experience.
I bet you're thinking of "Program Manager", the Windows 3.x (and before) program launcher application... precursor to the Start Menu.
As for messing with Windows to make it like UNIX, that depends on what you mean. Trying to make the GUI behave more like X is a fruitless endeavor. But I use zsh and Python every day. Windows' glass-TTY sucks for cut and paste, but it works just fine for everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but a "bigger or wider screen" would be bad for several reasons. First, the unit itself would have to become larger to accomodate a larger screen. Atari's Lynx taught the industry lots of things, one of them being "don't make handheld units bulky". And second, as you make LCD screens larger they quickly become much more expensive. Small screens are cheaper because the yields are higher. I bet Nintendo gets those two screens for a lot less than one screen with the same number of pixels.
So. The design of the DS is a clever way of doubling the screen real-estate in a portable gaming platform, without making the unit too large to be successful or too expensive to manufacture. And now they've made it sound like a feature!
What should the main character be accomplishing with their actions? Should they be making the world a better place or a worse place? Most people opt for "make it a better place".
Well, if it's "make it a better place", then the world needs to be in a bad way, right? So they invent a world where something terrible has happened. They reach for the same tired bogeymen that are a staple of poorly-written dystopian movies: evil corporations and environmental damage.
In point of fact, there are plenty of games where a positive future serves as a backdrop. For instance, the "Extreme G" racer series is set in a future where mankind has everything it needs, so for excitement they construct these dangerous anti-gravity races. I thought it was clever, then I read a review that described it as "yet another" racer set in such a utopian future.
And there are many many more games with a strong storyline where politics are irrelevant. Too many to name.
The article seemed to imply that political messages in video games was growing, and that's just false. A small fraction of games have some overt political subtext, just as they always have. It's just that there are more games now, so the resulting number of games is also larger.
I also got lost on BART (the Bay Area light rail system), and once at the old Marine World Africa USA.
I betcha my parents would have bought those wristbands for me. I bet I'd buy 'em for my kids, iff'n I had any.
p.s. I bet they already know the appropriate places to put vending carts! Because they try different positions and see what works better. Golly, maybe not everything on the planet is a conspiracy!
Decrying shuffle play is like complaining about remakes, when the original movie is still out there. I can listen to an album in its original order, or I can switch it around. Or I can mix it in with other albums, even by other artists.
And saying it gives light to hidden gems is absolutely right. When I play an album straight through, I'm often lulled into learning it as one monolithic composition. Shuffle play breaks that up and allows individual tracks to shine. I've discovered some wonderful tracks that way, tracks that I never noticed until I broke up the album's original order.
My name's Larry, and I've been using shuffle play on CD players for fifteen years. (Hi, Larry!)
My answer: because it isn't primarily about the wages and never was. It's to escape the massive weight of regulation and taxation for employees and workplaces. The US Federal Government has instituted so many rules that they've "broken the camel's back" so to speak. Companies are now willing to put up with the added complexity and inconvenience of offshoring because the benefits now outweigh the disadvantages.
Bleah. This is what passes for +5 Funny on Slashdot? Say what you like about Microsoft's business practices, I hope and trust no one here sincerely wishes Bill Gates bodily harm, or even thinks it's particularly funny.
Well, I dunno about you, but I consider myself both. And I've got the paper to prove it!
I have a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, bestowed upon me by the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Not just that, but he's only nine years old! How, erm, precocious!
However, it's not the original software renderer written for the Unreal engine, as shipped with the original "Unreal" game. It's Pixomatic, the latest project from Michael Abrash. Pixomatic is a pure software renderer that supports modern video card operations. Version 2.0 was recently released, and brings it up to "DX7-class" devices (1.0 was only "DX6-class"). The game won't look quite as good under Pixomatic, and it won't run anywhere near as fast as it would with a 3D chipset. But hey! it runs!
Who gets the software renderer? Well, Pixomatic is heavily optimized for x86 processors, so you're not likely to see a Mac port. However, it is officially supported under Windows and Linux (though presumably x86 only). So the Linux builds of UT2k4 could ship with Pixomatic; it remains to be seen whether or not they will.
larry
p.s. I've only played a little of the (beta) demo, but I did get spider mines, and I believe I've had the grenade launcher too.
Can you list for me some "big games" that don't use The Big Game Loop? I sincerely doubt it. For one, very little consumer hardware supports SMP, which means heavily-threaded code is going to add context switches as well as synchronization overhead. For another, the work load simply doesn't distribute easily to multiple threads. Your "big games" face the same problem that my "little game" does: first, read all user input, second, compute the new game state, and third, render the current state of the game. (Client/server games split up this work a little.)
There are a few places where multithreading can really help. It can make networking cleaner, though that's just as easily done single-threaded with a big select() call. (A well-written select()-based web server can easily be higher performance than multithreaded servers; see thttpd.) It's also nice to do sound mixing in a thread, but again that's not a must. But this is an architectural concern, not a performance concern. Your game will be plenty responsive with The Big Game Loop even if it's networked.
Anyway, this is missing the point of my original posting. Run any game today and watch it with a high-end process monitor (I'm on Windows XP, so I used Iarsn TaskInfo). It might have as many as a dozen threads, but you'll see that it spends 99%+ of its CPU time in a single thread. For example, I just checked Unreal Tournament 2003 and found that to be true. It had about nine threads, but only one was using a measurable amount of CPU. My game also has about nine threads; one is the main thread with The Big Game Loop, and something like two or four are from the sound library. The rest seem to be started by global system DLLs. (I'm not sure what they're doing, but I can't do anything about them, and they don't seem to be hurting anything. Ah well.)
So let me put my original question another way: how will games on XBox 2 benefit from having six-way SMP? Since they will very likely still use The Big Game Loop, how will they make any significant use of those other five pipelines?
So what?
I'm writing a game right now, and I've studied up on game architecture. Without exception, that realtime game you've been enjoying uses what's referred to as The Big Game Loop. The simplest form goes like this:
This doesn't parallelize well. You want to read user input as close to rendering as possible; the longer the delay between the user pressing the jump button and seeing the Space Goblin start to jump, the sloppier input feels. The best you could do, in the general case, would have one thread reading input and computing game state, and passing it off to a second thread for rendering just as it finished rendering the previous scene.In point of fact, John Carmack experimented with exactly this while developing Quake 3 Arena. You can read his results here. To summarize: he saw improvements of between 3% and 15%, and some levels were actually slower. Meanwhile it added complexity. So he scrapped it.
XBox 2's six-way SMP sounds lovely, but it strikes me as irrelevant for games. Maybe it'll be useful for other applications.
larry
p.s. Please pardon the formatting, but Slashdot doesn't support the pre tag. (Or, sadly, SGML character references.)
As long as you're writing the "global minimum wage law", why not increase the minimum wage to $1,000,000 an hour? Then we'll all be rich!
Well, sure, once Governor Schwarzenegger passes the Emergency Alien Martian Atmosphere Reactivation Device To Protect Our Children And Keep America Strong Act.
In a Libertarian society, it would be just as illegal to force people to sign contracts under threat of violence as it is in current American society. (Perhaps more so, as the abolishment of force as a means of persuasion is one of the underpinnings of the Libertarian philosophy.) The contract would still be unenforcable, AT&T would still be punishable by law.
Finally, how much "interpretation" can one make of the Second Amendment? "The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It's hard to imagine how the Framers could have made their intention any clearer.
For more on this topic, let's turn to the dictionary.
In other words, to set laws controlling how something is done. But creating laws is the sole domain of government.
Government can force you to do things in a certain way, and if you refuse to do them that way, they can send men with guns to your house and take you away to jail. That's force. That's government.
Monopolies cannot create laws. In a genuinely free market, the most they can do is persuade you to sign a contract. They cannot force other businesses to conduct themselves in a certain way, nor can they force prospective customers to buy their products. And most importantly, they cannot prevent competitors from selling competing products. So monopolies can only come into being, and perpetuate themselves, by persuading customers to buy their products and services. Usually, they do this by undercutting their competitors, which is good, not bad, for their customers.
The greatest monopoly the world has ever seen was Standard Oil. However, Standard Oil still could not force anyone to use their products, or prevent competitors from competing. Standard Oil's monopoly was created and entrenched by providing the best product at the lowest price to its customers. In the heyday of Standard Oil, nobody could compete with them because their prices were so astonishingly low. This was wonderful for consumers.
However, in a regulated market (such as we find ourselves in today), monopolies can persuade the government to create laws favorable to them--subsidising themselves or punishing their competitors. And that is why we consumers fear monopolies; because we fear that we will be forced, by government, to use their services, which would relieve the pressure to keep their prices low. In a genuinely free market, we would have no need to fear monopolies.
As for the American war of independence, it was fought primarily to escape the British crown, i.e. Government. It was not British monopolies taxing the American settlers and ignoring their requests for legislative relief. I wouldn't be surprised if the early American settlers were required to do business with British monopolies, but Britain was not a free market. So those would have been ordained monopolies, regulated into existance by the British crown and enforced by law.
I'm all for alternative views of history--these days, I think Lincoln was a jerk--but I've never heard this particular spin on the War Of Independence, and I just don't see the proof anywhere. The factual history we have from those days clearly shows it was government, and not British monopolies, that brought forth the ire of the colonists, which led to their revolt.
You're a little confused. In a 100% free market, the government does not regulate business. That's why it's a free market.
A free market doesn't have, or need, need "protecting" from monopolies. Historically, monopolies have been positive boons to consumer; for instance, Standard Oil brought down the price of oil dramatically. Who needs protection from that?
Similarly, the government doesn't "encourage competition" in a free market. A free market encourages competition all by itself, by allowing competitors to blossom on their own. In a free market, competitors compete solely based on the quality of their goods and services. They aren't able to compete via litigation, suing other companies out of business. And they aren't able to compete based on being subsidized by government.
All that said, we don't have a 100% free market here in America, nor am I aware of any large-scale free markets anywhwere else in the world.
And if you look further back, the reason comprehensive health insurance (as opposed to catastrophic health insurance) even exists is--once again!--because of government interference in the economy. During the second world war, the Federal Government enacted strict wage controls. This meant that companies could no longer compete for employees in the market based on price. So employers began competing based on other benefits, one being more comprehensive health insurance.
Certainly, there is truth to Baumol's conjecture. I would not expect the cost of labor-intensive services to drop at the same rate as manufactured goods. But it is foolish to dismiss the increased costs in health care to Baumol's Disease. You seem to claim Baumol's disease requires service-sector wages to rise "rapidly", regardless of other factors. My understanding of Baumol's disease suggests service-sector wages will track the rise (and therefore fall) of wages in other industries. If wages have stayed the same for the last thirty years, I suggest to you that Baumol's disease has little or no bearing.
Also, I'll point out that my mother has been a practicing neurologist for twenty-five years, and her income has not increased at anywhere near the rate with which health care costs have risen. Indeed, Medicare continues to drop the fees they are willing to pay doctors for performing the same services.
(Sorry for all the Harry Browne articles, but he explains things very clearly and I knew where to find them.)
In your issues paper, you say you are for the legalization of marijuana. That's fine, so am I. However, marijuana is already legal in California for medical use, but can still be arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated under federal law. So, if you were elected governor of California, of what possible relevance is your stand on marijuana?
larry
Also, I'd like to point out that the rolling blackouts were not enacted by Enron or other power providers; they were the work of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the still-highly-regulated utilities provider for most of California.
Power companies are not capricious monsters; they they're just another company, trying to sell a product for a profit. They have no interest in "shutting down your house/town/state"--quite the opposite, they want to sell to your house/town/state. They don't make any money if they can't sell their product.
I for one would welcome deregulating the entire power industry in California. That would introduce competition, which would inevitably result in my power being cheaper and more reliable.
Interestingly enough, even though Filemaker Inc is an Apple company, Filemaker isn't Apple exclusive. It runs on Windows, on Linux, even on Palm OS.
In case you were trying for a complete list, here are the ones you forgot:
Windows/386
Windows 3.0
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.51
Windows 95 OSR2
Windows 98 SE
Also, what you list as "Windows 3.1 for Workgroups" was officially titled "Windows for Workgroups", but internally it was actually Windows 3.11. And Windows NT 4 didn't come out until 1996, after Windows 95. And "Windows 1" was just called "Windows" at the time.
Finally, ME is an acronym for "Millenium Edition", and XP is a contraction of Experience.
As for messing with Windows to make it like UNIX, that depends on what you mean. Trying to make the GUI behave more like X is a fruitless endeavor. But I use zsh and Python every day. Windows' glass-TTY sucks for cut and paste, but it works just fine for everything else.