Amazing journalism;
"No one is saying what that minimum will be -- some say it may be as high as 70 percent"
If no one is saying it, then who are the some ones?
You can't convict somebody of being a monopolist, there is legally nothing wrong with having a monopoly in any given market.
You can however convict a company of not acting responsibly with the monopoly that they hold.
I can only apologize for my tone, I have a number of good friends in the Police force, here in Seattle, in London and in South Africa, it's not an easy life for them.
Whenever the Police get new tools or new powers some nut always comes along and worries about what would happen if the tools fell into the wrong hands. Without much thought, the argument can be liberally applied to computer systems, guns, patrol cars, uniforms and whatever else the police might have access to.
They always dismiss a number of crucial facts. a) The Police are regulated and monitored, their tools and training are studied, monitored and controlled. b) The Police are not 16 year old kids who might accidentally leave their new gadget on the bus.
Let the Police get on with their job, 99.99999% of the time their doing great things, taking substantial risk on our behalf. The more we can do to make that job easier and reduce that risk the better.
America is also one of the few countries in the developed world that does a poor job of relinquishing dead or dying industries... car manufacture is an example, programmers to one side for a second, think about the problems we have in turning over the workforce in an area like Detroit.
The UK (under Thatcher) went through a lot of pain in the 80s to kill off dead industries. It was a painful time for most of the country and Thatcher is pretty much universally hated as a result. In the long run it has been good for the country though, and continues to be.
They need to ship the old, dead, non-growth skills out to lower cost economies that can sustain those types of job and then retrain the workforce to take on new challenges that help the country and it's economy on the road to growth.
Nobody in the developed world needs to be developing code anymore, we need to use the minds we have for aids and cancer research, building hover bots and interactive hologramatic entertainment stations.
As an individual it's a harsh world, industries are going to turn over faster and faster in the future, we have to be ready to retrain and move on.
There is a reason why most European countries have worked hard over the last two decades to reduce the number of blue collar workers building cars or mining coal. This is just a natural extension of the same macro economics...a weak government will bend their policies and stop the flow of offshore low end jobs, a forward looking one will encourage it.
Correct, it's unlikely that you're going to have a bunch of xbox games you want to play unless you already have an xbox sitting around somewhere.
One of Microsoft's big issues on the desktop is the constant need to interop with their legacy products. Let's not have that mentality trip over into my living room where I want the biggest, the best and the brightest toys I can get my hands on.
Every time I've read about this proposal so far it has been about making the sending relay do a little extra processing by solving a simple puzzle rather than asking somebody to fork over a few cents.
The idea is that if it takes you some extra time to bulk mail you will need more hardward and more processors to do it. The algorithm I read about was using memory content movement through the bus rather than straight processor cycles, i.e. buying a faster processor does immediately reduce the amount of time it takes to solve the "sending puzzle".
No doubt Google will help you find the original article, it was only about a week ago when it was on the BBC news site.
... if there is any truth at all to this then it makes them one of the first American companies to have worked out how to get the Chinese to actually PAY for something, rather than just ripping it off.
I've always wondered... what exactally would it I've always wondered, split itself up into what exactally? an office and an OS busines?
There is little if any future for either, the future is probably in their other 5 or 6 business units, many of which are currently unprofitable.
If you split it up, are you not in effect just closing the company down? While that might be in the interests of this community, I'm not sure it does a good thing for the current customer base, the employees or the shareholders?
When we had analog exchanges in the UK you used to be able to simply play with the dialing codes for free long distance. Each town had a long distance code you had to dial to get to it (i.e. 0254), they also had short dials that would allow you to dial adjecent towns to your own (i.e. 91 used to get me from Blackburn to Preston).
If you could work it all out you used to be able to hop from town to town to town using the short dials. Long numbers to call, but much, much cheaper.
I know, I know... offtopic, I'd all but forgotten about this.
very few organisations have the cash or the skills to be able to do that. The best you can hope for in the majority of situations is to put competing studies from different organisations side by side and draw your own conclusions.
Why do you WANT to study something like this? Because when you're in a sales situation one of the first thing any sensible customer asks is "show me the data".
As the poster above says, if MSFT don't fund the creation of the data then it will never exist.
Correct, for the vast majority of personal users it is quick and easy to switch providers... if a 'need' comes along that a current provider is not meeting them people will shift.
I would be surprised if this hit the popular press... look up the London Borough of Newham, follow them through their eval process and then see how much press their final decision got when they chose to stick with Microsoft.
But this isn't about the OS... according to Gartner the OS is only about 8% of the overall procurement cost of a Government app, the majority of the cost is in the application.
With the support of the major vendors there is potentially a lot of value for Government in being able to choose their infrastructure (maybe getting the most out of some of their existing investments) and then sharing the applications and business process between themselves.
The mentality behind OSS brings a lot to this scenario.
Oracle / Sun / whoever to support this sort of open source applications work in Government? after all they have no vested interest in the business apps themselves, they just want to see them exist... traditionally they would have come from ISVs and SIs.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing journalism; "No one is saying what that minimum will be -- some say it may be as high as 70 percent" If no one is saying it, then who are the some ones?
You can't convict somebody of being a monopolist, there is legally nothing wrong with having a monopoly in any given market. You can however convict a company of not acting responsibly with the monopoly that they hold.
So I guess they won't be using Linux or OpenOffice then.
I can only apologize for my tone, I have a number of good friends in the Police force, here in Seattle, in London and in South Africa, it's not an easy life for them.
Of course there are - hence my not using 100%. The same goes for any organization, commercial, government or otherwise.
Whenever the Police get new tools or new powers some nut always comes along and worries about what would happen if the tools fell into the wrong hands. Without much thought, the argument can be liberally applied to computer systems, guns, patrol cars, uniforms and whatever else the police might have access to. They always dismiss a number of crucial facts. a) The Police are regulated and monitored, their tools and training are studied, monitored and controlled. b) The Police are not 16 year old kids who might accidentally leave their new gadget on the bus. Let the Police get on with their job, 99.99999% of the time their doing great things, taking substantial risk on our behalf. The more we can do to make that job easier and reduce that risk the better.
America is also one of the few countries in the developed world that does a poor job of relinquishing dead or dying industries... car manufacture is an example, programmers to one side for a second, think about the problems we have in turning over the workforce in an area like Detroit. The UK (under Thatcher) went through a lot of pain in the 80s to kill off dead industries. It was a painful time for most of the country and Thatcher is pretty much universally hated as a result. In the long run it has been good for the country though, and continues to be.
They need to ship the old, dead, non-growth skills out to lower cost economies that can sustain those types of job and then retrain the workforce to take on new challenges that help the country and it's economy on the road to growth.
Nobody in the developed world needs to be developing code anymore, we need to use the minds we have for aids and cancer research, building hover bots and interactive hologramatic entertainment stations.
As an individual it's a harsh world, industries are going to turn over faster and faster in the future, we have to be ready to retrain and move on.
There is a reason why most European countries have worked hard over the last two decades to reduce the number of blue collar workers building cars or mining coal. This is just a natural extension of the same macro economics...a weak government will bend their policies and stop the flow of offshore low end jobs, a forward looking one will encourage it.
Sorry, I'm in a funny mood.
Correct, it's unlikely that you're going to have a bunch of xbox games you want to play unless you already have an xbox sitting around somewhere.
One of Microsoft's big issues on the desktop is the constant need to interop with their legacy products. Let's not have that mentality trip over into my living room where I want the biggest, the best and the brightest toys I can get my hands on.
This is the URL to the original BBC story - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3324883.stm
Not having a NYT account I don't know if this is directly related or not. Seems that it needs some airtime anyway.
Every time I've read about this proposal so far it has been about making the sending relay do a little extra processing by solving a simple puzzle rather than asking somebody to fork over a few cents.
The idea is that if it takes you some extra time to bulk mail you will need more hardward and more processors to do it. The algorithm I read about was using memory content movement through the bus rather than straight processor cycles, i.e. buying a faster processor does immediately reduce the amount of time it takes to solve the "sending puzzle".
No doubt Google will help you find the original article, it was only about a week ago when it was on the BBC news site.
I was actually surprised that it was ONLY a year ago, it's been a busy year.
... if there is any truth at all to this then it makes them one of the first American companies to have worked out how to get the Chinese to actually PAY for something, rather than just ripping it off.
I've always wondered, what exactally would you split Microsoft up into? Or something like that.
I've always wondered... what exactally would it I've always wondered, split itself up into what exactally? an office and an OS busines?
There is little if any future for either, the future is probably in their other 5 or 6 business units, many of which are currently unprofitable.
If you split it up, are you not in effect just closing the company down? While that might be in the interests of this community, I'm not sure it does a good thing for the current customer base, the employees or the shareholders?
When we had analog exchanges in the UK you used to be able to simply play with the dialing codes for free long distance. Each town had a long distance code you had to dial to get to it (i.e. 0254), they also had short dials that would allow you to dial adjecent towns to your own (i.e. 91 used to get me from Blackburn to Preston).
If you could work it all out you used to be able to hop from town to town to town using the short dials. Long numbers to call, but much, much cheaper.
I know, I know... offtopic, I'd all but forgotten about this.
very few organisations have the cash or the skills to be able to do that. The best you can hope for in the majority of situations is to put competing studies from different organisations side by side and draw your own conclusions.
Why do you WANT to study something like this? Because when you're in a sales situation one of the first thing any sensible customer asks is "show me the data".
As the poster above says, if MSFT don't fund the creation of the data then it will never exist.
If you rummage around a little you will find plenty of examples of brits turning down knighthoods as well.
Correct, for the vast majority of personal users it is quick and easy to switch providers... if a 'need' comes along that a current provider is not meeting them people will shift.
The market will work this out.
... don't use it. Vote with your feet, buy your phone service elsewhere.
I would be surprised if this hit the popular press... look up the London Borough of Newham, follow them through their eval process and then see how much press their final decision got when they chose to stick with Microsoft.
But this isn't about the OS... according to Gartner the OS is only about 8% of the overall procurement cost of a Government app, the majority of the cost is in the application. With the support of the major vendors there is potentially a lot of value for Government in being able to choose their infrastructure (maybe getting the most out of some of their existing investments) and then sharing the applications and business process between themselves. The mentality behind OSS brings a lot to this scenario.
Oracle / Sun / whoever to support this sort of open source applications work in Government? after all they have no vested interest in the business apps themselves, they just want to see them exist... traditionally they would have come from ISVs and SIs.
... by the Bush Administration then this idea has my full and wholehearted support.