Well, it means that their scientists occasionally get confused and therefore crash their space probes. But, hey, if the USA wants to remain compatible with the only two other non-metric companies in the world Burma and Liberia), why not?
Not quite sure what he means about the rest of the world having to follow though. Are the bolts on American Toyotas imperial or metric? And American scientists must at least read metric if they want to benefit from any research done anywhere else in the world.
technology is now not an issue. You can do almost anything you want to with technology. Can we now make it more useful? Can we make it more practical?
AMD will sell a certain number of chips because 64-bit is a sexy number, just like the obsession with clock speeds, just like people buy PCs with 32Mb of video ram to do WP.
But the quote above seems to me to encapsulate the challenge facing the IT industry in general. What qualititive difference does the latest processor - or the latest kernel for that matter - make to the end user? What real-world job will it let me do that I can't do now? In terms of servers, it is easy to answer the question. In terms of desktop machines, I'm not so sure.
I'm sure you're right, but I seem to have a wider range of adjectives at my disposal:-)
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
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Sure, all that is true, MS has abused its monopoly, and will continue to do so. But if their new system won't run on non-DRM hardware, and that hardware won't run non-DRM software, doesn't that essentially put MS into a niche market? They are hoping, and you fear, that this will be a 99% market share niche, but I just don't see if, for all the reasons we have been round in this thread.
And here's one more. Let's say the/. worst nightmare happens, the police confiscate every non-DRM machine in the USA and users of Linux are shot on sight. That gives MS maybe 10% of the world market. Most of the rest of the world is just not going to hand control of its industry over to an American corporation, or the American government. So we're back to my market forces argument. If, as a result of DRM and MS's new system, the American economy continues to grow, it will keep DRM, just as being the only country in the world apart from Burma and Liberia not to go metric hasn't done them too much harm. If, on the other hand, the collapse of software exports and the migration of the heart of the Internet from DC to Brussels or Bangkok hits the US economy, the decision will be reversed by force and MS will be broken up into bits small enough to feed down the garbage disposal unit.
So the bottom line is, if, say, the EC goes open source en bloc, will that make it more or less competitive? And it's the answer to that question that worries me: I can't see Europe's graphic artists doing page layout in TeX, for example...
do you read the EULAs for all of the security patches you download?
You are making a false assumption here. I install my first ever Windows system in a couple of weeks' time. I'm typing this on one of my 15 or so Linux machines (and cursing the fact that there is a bug in the Mozilla cut and paste). Never owned a machine with Windows in my life. I am Mr Not Windows himself. I just don't think that believing your own scare stories is always good for your health.
The subscription thing hasn't happened yet (next March was the last date I heard). If it does, and if people buy into it, they deserve everything they get. But they could just sit tight with W2K, which isn't going to expire, has had a lot of the bugs fixed, and which MS will have to keep fixing for several more years, and wait for MS to change their policy, which they will if large corporate users rebel. There are plenty of people still using NT 4 or 5 because they couldn't see the point of upgrading and/or they thought NT was a better system for their needs.
I think you massively underestimate the intelligence of many MS corporate users. They read the papers, they know that MS isn't their fairy godmother, but they continue to use MS because, at the moment, the benefits outweigh the inconveniences. If and when the balance shifts, they will change, and, as I said at the start, MS introducing a radically new product gives them the ideal opportunity to do so.
Re:You are not taking the long view
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Are you sure it's not because they use closed binary file types that refuse to interoperate properly with other programs
They only have as much power as the consumer gives to them. They can use their monopoly to make moving to another system difficult, but, long term, obstruction is no substitute for giving people what they want.
If and when OSS offers tangible benefits to end users, people will switch. The problem as I perceive it is that the people who make the decisions see desktops rather than tight kernels, and, on the desktop functionality front, Linux looks, at best, like a slightly quirky clone of a Windows interface. Yes, yes, X was there first, but that's not an argument for 2002.
As long as the converts to OSS are limited to the IT department, everyone else will be dragged away from their talking paperclips kicking and screaming, and MS will continue to win.
Anyway, that's not the kind of talk that made America great!
I'd be delighted to have my argument reduced to swiss cheese if it meant my customers could live with my choice of browser. I'm alraedy resigned to using W2K TS to offer clients a WP that doesn't randomly throw away half their CV, as has happened twice this week with Star Office.doc filters, but I really don't want to have to run IE as well:-(
As mentioned in several other postings, it wasn't the screen rendering but the printing that caused the problem, and setting the minimum font size to 10pt gets me 7pt or so text on paper, which is bizarre but quite acceptable.
When Linux has enough desktop users to make this statistically likely. At present, even if people were switching in either direction by tossing a coin, you would expect about 99 defections towards Linux for each defection towards Windows, simply because there are so few Linux users (in this niche) to defect.
Re:You are not taking the long view
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Windows is not modular
Sure. So if modularity is what matters most to me, I don't buy Windows. But you don't have to spend a cent, you just have to take responsibility for your decisions. If you want the alleged benefits of Windows, you get the alleged problems of Windows. You can have both or neither. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
You cannot fix a problem yourself.
At the risk of blowing any geeky aura that I might somehow have acquired, I don't fix my Linux problems either, I wait for the next upgrade, and, usually, buy a boxed version that costs me money. We have fixed some minor quirks with the perl management scripts and Apache on our RaQ, but I'm not about to start recompiling my kernel with my own bug fixes. Which relegates me to the bottom 99.99% of computer users, though I guess having the possibility to do so is a unique selling point for the other 0.01%
Everthing works with 2.2
So why did anyone upgrade, if the new one does the same thing as the old one? I'm sure I'm missing something basic here, but I thought adding useful features, improving performance etc was a good thing, even if the resulting code won't always run on an abacus. In a similar vein, it's nice that you can still get i386 rpms, but if I can get better performance out of my kit with i686 rpms, I'm going to do so.
OK, it's not quite the same thing, since the i386 ones will still do the same job. Although have you tried Star Office on a 486 with 20Mb of RAM? It runs, but the one time I tried it for a client, it took - literally - over an hour to open a blank document. I don't think this proves that Star Office is a bad program (although some other evidence points in that direction), it just shows that it is designed for more recent hardware.
If what you're saying is that the upgrade path with Linux involves more smaller steps, I'd probably agree (although if you count service packs, MS produces several upgrades a year).
The reference is here. I must admit I'm touched by all these offers of help: I only mentioned it to make a general point...
(Pause to look for little box)
Well, I set it to 10pt, and what I got is nearer 7pt, but it is a lot more readable than the last version, and it does fill up the page (the mini version was less than 4" across. Why?) Thanks for the various suggestions.
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
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Just like the anti-trust actions against Standard Oil stopped consumers from purchasing the oil they wanted, right?
That analogy is so inappropriate it could be one of mine! Oil is black, sticky and flammable wherever you buy it from (well, more or less). I don't think that mixing 50% of the code for W2K and 50% of the code for Redhat 8 in my PC would be quite as easy as mixing oil from two fields in my refinery. Indeed, in that respect, you could argue that Apple has a monopoly on the supply of OS X and Redhat has a monopoly on the supply of Redhat 8. (It's less true for flavours of Linux, but moving from, say, Suse to Redhat is still not trivial).
Open standards compliance
None of the browers get close to full compliance, at least with CSS (my current bugbear in my day job), and it is by no means clear that IE is the worst offender in this respect (it depends how you count the instances of non-compliance).
Non-DRM hardware will become illegal
Ah, you're American? I really can't see this happening in Europe, let alone in most other places.
Hope of freedom on China, oh no
Are you basing this on the new Bond movie? If the new version of Windows requires DRM, a rapidly growing market of 1 billion users with higher than average abilities in math are going to throw themselves wholeheartedly into Open Source. That sounds like good news to me, although possibly bad for the western ego.
Re:You are not taking the long view
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in the long run (by 2006-8), DRM *will* be a serious problem
Only if DRM delivers: even if all companies start at 100% take-up at kit renewal time, they are going to have several years to do a cost benefit analysis before changing their last machines, and, in the meantime, the new system had better work with the old one.
Locked into paying upgrades
No-one is locked anywhere. If you want to upgrade from W95 to Redhat 8 and Open Office 6, with all that entails, good and bad, MS is not going to kick your door down. People are locked in because, at the end of the day, MS and all its works is perceived as the least bad option.
Worrying until 2008
Sure it's coming, it's just that a lot can happen in between.
Non-Windows jobs don't pay enough
Sorry, my last posting was a bit crass in this respect, but, even assuming that what you say is true, is this really MS's fault? If successful companies run MS, could it be that at least some of them actually find that it delivers for them? From what I see, Linux sys admins, for example, earn a very good living, ie using Linux to do something that it does well pays good money. If you are tied to being near a campus that may not help though.
No fun at parties
Actually, you're right:-) But I'm all for moaning, it's the open source victim mentality that gets me. No-one asked me to make a personal stand against MS, so why should I expect sympathy?
I make less than you
OK, so maybe we are the two worst paid/.ers in history!
I don't know... isn't that dangerous nowadays? Oh, OK, since it's you: www.interieur.gouv.fr. The page as is comes out minute, the 'printable' version is no better, but the text only one (which still has images, err...) seems to work OK. I had another one the other day where Mozilla printed it as light grey on white, and konqueror printed it with the side bars on top of the text.
Webmaster, not slashdot
Sure, but when people keep saying that Mozilla is the world's greatest browser, I think that the fact it doesn't work with a lot of sites (even if it is the webmasters' fault) is relevant.
Re:It's called "remedy" for monopolization
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Capitalism naturally rewards Evil Empires. That's why unbridled captialism is bad
In theory I'm with you. In practice, the word 'bridled' is quite apt: the anti-trust ideas proposed for MS seem to boil down to stopping the customer from buying what he wants. Working towards a situation where MS has, say, 75% of the OS market, and could have 90% again within months if it weren't for artificial restrictions, sounds very odd to me.
Your article basically says that small is beautiful, which, again, sounds good to me. The trouble is that as soon as you become succesful, you get bigger, and very quickly it is hard for anyone to catch up. I don't think that the computing world wants 5,000 operating systems, each owned by a few people, trying to gain market share over the other 4,999 companies. Most people I talk to don't actually want more than one browser. They certainly don't want to have to choose which browser to use on the basis of the site they want to look at.
Anyway, my point a few postings ago was that if MS does go for a radically new product in 2004, this significantly weakens their advantage as a monopoly, so it should be good news for other operating systems, providing the other operating systems can compete.
Re:Anti-monopoly != Open source advocate
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It could be as simple as courts forcing Microsoft to open up the Windows source, and forcing ccommecial competing products (such as browsers, media players, and e-mail clients) to ship on Windows CDs.
I can feel my karma about to come in for some serious abuse here, but this sounds neither simple nor reasonable to me. Are MS supposed to ship all their competitors' products on one CD? If not, who decides which versions of which browser, for example, they have to ship? Are they supposed to take responsibility for all those products? And why should MS pay the distribution costs of other companies anyway?
Last time I looked, Apple had their own proprietary multimedia solution, and every distribution of Linux I have ever seen ships with various multimedia applications. Does that mean that Linux is about to become a monopoly? I thought it was just giving the customer what he wanted.
This whole line of argument would sound obscene if applied to any company other than MS. How about forcing Ford to ship cars without seats, to stop them muscling into the upholstery market? Or maybe Walmart should be forced to sell Sears products? Of course MS want to increase market share and broaden their markets. That in itself doesn't make them the Evil Empire, it just shows that they have got to page 4 in any basic text on running a business.
And, in any case, the courts have rejected your option, and that situation isn't going to change in the next several years, so wouldn't it be better to come up with a plan for making progress in the situation that exists, rather than the one that might have existed but doesn't and probably never will?
There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible.
Re:You are not taking the long view
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Stop fixing win95 problems
It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it? If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed, and rightly so. In the case we are discussing, people could stop at XP, and MS's longstanding policy is to support the previous OS, so I wouldn't even start to worry until 2006-2008
Not backwards compatible
Is all the open source stuff released this year compatible with the original Linux kernel? Or even with the pre-version 2.4 kernel? Should it be? Would this make any sense whatsoever? I think MS's main problem is that they spent far too long trying to be too backwards compatible. Most OSS projects don't have this problem because they don't have a non-geek user base...
Forced to use Windows in every job
Nonsense, you just picked the wrong jobs. It's either a life and death issue or it isn't. If it is a life and death issue, make not using Windows the first criterion for choosing an employer and live with the consequences. If it isn't, take the money and stop complaining. I've never used Windows in any job at any point, which might be why I probably earn less than you do. I'm about to install W2K on one server, but that was my choice, no-one made me, and the reasons for doing so have more to do with the lamentable state of much OSS applications software than with Microsoft's monopoly.
Re:In market forces I trust
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Microsoft discontinues W2k and XP: new PCs will come installed only with the new OS
In that case
faced with having to retrain their staff and upgrade their hardware anyway, and being less than happy at being forced to do so by Microsoft, companies will look at the other options, and a fair number will realise that the alternatives are better.
There will be a huge market for non-knobbled PCs and software to run on them in the developing world, China, Russia and anywhere where people don't currently pay for MS licences anyway. This will produce a glut of cheap and powerful 'Made in China' PCs which will provide serious competition to the expensive knobbled PCs
CDs only work with new OS
They are doing this sort of thing already, so nothing changes with the next version of Windows. If that business model works, they will gain market share, if it doesn't, they will rapidly find another model.
no competition
Microsoft's record on killing competition is actually rather patchy. They have cleaned up in the desktop OS and office productivity markets. They don't own the server market, they don't dominate embedded appliances, they are struggling to make the XBox work: all these ventures are losing money, which they can only afford to lose because of their market share in the first two areas.
If corporate customers start boycotting the new OS, Microsoft will back down very quickly, monopoly or no monopoly. The main reason we are still waiting for XP server is that there is resistance to the licencing model: this new system could provoke a much bigger backlash.
Re:If market forces worked, there'd be no anti-tru
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everyone running MS-Windows and MS-Office for backward compatibility
That's a great argument against what the article is suggesting catching on.
And the main backwards compatibility issue is not with file formats, it's with users. The big thing going for Microsoft is that the majority of the world's users equate the Microsoft Way with how a computer should work.
If Microsoft break their own mould, they are going to meet the same resistance that currently hinders the take-up of alternative operating systems. They could stop renewing licences for XP server, but then, if people have to change anyway, they are going to look at all the options, which has to be good for open source...
...Providing the open source community has a product that does what Aunt Mildred wants as easily as Windows does it. Which, I fear, is going to be the problem.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I really like Opera, especially when I look at my server memory usage. I just wish it didn't have such a freaky interface. Most of my customers won't touch it.
In market forces I trust
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I think some people posting on this topic have spent too much time watching the X files. It's only an operating system guys, and, if it is as radically different to previous versions of Windows as is claimed in the article, it is going to have to compete not only with Linux and friends, but also with W2k and XP.
So if it really does offer something fundamentally new and useful that outweighs the disadvantages of DRM, people might buy new hardware and switch. If not, they won't. And even if the new OS is a runaway success, it will have to talk to W2K, XP and Un*x servers or it just won't work on the current Internet.
In other words, if things pan out as stated in the article (which is by no means certain), Windows 04 is going to have to compete without most of the advantages enjoyed by previous versions, so it should be a much more even fight between MS and OSS. And could it be that this is what has really got everyone spooked?
proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser
The points about spin have already been covered, so can I ask how many banking sites you have tried to use recently?
Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).
Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows. The Mozilla-on-remote-X bug is so longstanding that there is now a lobbying campaign to get it fixed...
So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet, or if it worked over a network.
I can't say I've ever bothered to count, but I probably get 10 or so a day. I have a dozen or so domains that give my email address as the contact, my various email addresses are plastered over several longstanding websites, I've posted a few things on usenet and all my friends have had viruses that have emailed my address to every other computer on the planet, so I would expect to be a prime target for spam.
On the other hand, the addresses are hosted on our own (leased) machines, so I would be surprised (and liable to sue) if my ISP was selling my addresses to anyone.
I have noticed that customers using webmail, especially Hotmail, get huge quantities of spam, but this seems inevitable to me.
I'd say deleting spams takes me 30 seconds a day, top whack.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it means that their scientists occasionally get confused and therefore crash their space probes. But, hey, if the USA wants to remain compatible with the only two other non-metric companies in the world Burma and Liberia), why not?
Not quite sure what he means about the rest of the world having to follow though. Are the bolts on American Toyotas imperial or metric? And American scientists must at least read metric if they want to benefit from any research done anywhere else in the world.
technology is now not an issue. You can do almost anything you want to with technology. Can we now make it more useful? Can we make it more practical?
AMD will sell a certain number of chips because 64-bit is a sexy number, just like the obsession with clock speeds, just like people buy PCs with 32Mb of video ram to do WP.
But the quote above seems to me to encapsulate the challenge facing the IT industry in general. What qualititive difference does the latest processor - or the latest kernel for that matter - make to the end user? What real-world job will it let me do that I can't do now? In terms of servers, it is easy to answer the question. In terms of desktop machines, I'm not so sure.
I'm sure you're right, but I seem to have a wider range of adjectives at my disposal :-)
Sure, all that is true, MS has abused its monopoly, and will continue to do so. But if their new system won't run on non-DRM hardware, and that hardware won't run non-DRM software, doesn't that essentially put MS into a niche market? They are hoping, and you fear, that this will be a 99% market share niche, but I just don't see if, for all the reasons we have been round in this thread.
And here's one more. Let's say the /. worst nightmare happens, the police confiscate every non-DRM machine in the USA and users of Linux are shot on sight. That gives MS maybe 10% of the world market. Most of the rest of the world is just not going to hand control of its industry over to an American corporation, or the American government. So we're back to my market forces argument. If, as a result of DRM and MS's new system, the American economy continues to grow, it will keep DRM, just as being the only country in the world apart from Burma and Liberia not to go metric hasn't done them too much harm. If, on the other hand, the collapse of software exports and the migration of the heart of the Internet from DC to Brussels or Bangkok hits the US economy, the decision will be reversed by force and MS will be broken up into bits small enough to feed down the garbage disposal unit.
So the bottom line is, if, say, the EC goes open source en bloc, will that make it more or less competitive? And it's the answer to that question that worries me: I can't see Europe's graphic artists doing page layout in TeX, for example...
I was useful for a time, now I'm a disposable commidity.
Yes, except that
This perennial /. solution of 'take your business elsewhere' just isn't viable for a lot of people a lot of the time.
do you read the EULAs for all of the security patches you download?
You are making a false assumption here. I install my first ever Windows system in a couple of weeks' time. I'm typing this on one of my 15 or so Linux machines (and cursing the fact that there is a bug in the Mozilla cut and paste). Never owned a machine with Windows in my life. I am Mr Not Windows himself. I just don't think that believing your own scare stories is always good for your health.
The subscription thing hasn't happened yet (next March was the last date I heard). If it does, and if people buy into it, they deserve everything they get. But they could just sit tight with W2K, which isn't going to expire, has had a lot of the bugs fixed, and which MS will have to keep fixing for several more years, and wait for MS to change their policy, which they will if large corporate users rebel. There are plenty of people still using NT 4 or 5 because they couldn't see the point of upgrading and/or they thought NT was a better system for their needs.
I think you massively underestimate the intelligence of many MS corporate users. They read the papers, they know that MS isn't their fairy godmother, but they continue to use MS because, at the moment, the benefits outweigh the inconveniences. If and when the balance shifts, they will change, and, as I said at the start, MS introducing a radically new product gives them the ideal opportunity to do so.
Are you sure it's not because they use closed binary file types that refuse to interoperate properly with other programs
They only have as much power as the consumer gives to them. They can use their monopoly to make moving to another system difficult, but, long term, obstruction is no substitute for giving people what they want.
If and when OSS offers tangible benefits to end users, people will switch. The problem as I perceive it is that the people who make the decisions see desktops rather than tight kernels, and, on the desktop functionality front, Linux looks, at best, like a slightly quirky clone of a Windows interface. Yes, yes, X was there first, but that's not an argument for 2002.
As long as the converts to OSS are limited to the IT department, everyone else will be dragged away from their talking paperclips kicking and screaming, and MS will continue to win.
Anyway, that's not the kind of talk that made America great!
I'd be delighted to have my argument reduced to swiss cheese if it meant my customers could live with my choice of browser. I'm alraedy resigned to using W2K TS to offer clients a WP that doesn't randomly throw away half their CV, as has happened twice this week with Star Office .doc filters, but I really don't want to have to run IE as well :-(
As mentioned in several other postings, it wasn't the screen rendering but the printing that caused the problem, and setting the minimum font size to 10pt gets me 7pt or so text on paper, which is bizarre but quite acceptable.
The problem was with printed output. The screen rendering is OK.
When Linux has enough desktop users to make this statistically likely. At present, even if people were switching in either direction by tossing a coin, you would expect about 99 defections towards Linux for each defection towards Windows, simply because there are so few Linux users (in this niche) to defect.
Windows is not modular
Sure. So if modularity is what matters most to me, I don't buy Windows. But you don't have to spend a cent, you just have to take responsibility for your decisions. If you want the alleged benefits of Windows, you get the alleged problems of Windows. You can have both or neither. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
You cannot fix a problem yourself.
At the risk of blowing any geeky aura that I might somehow have acquired, I don't fix my Linux problems either, I wait for the next upgrade, and, usually, buy a boxed version that costs me money. We have fixed some minor quirks with the perl management scripts and Apache on our RaQ, but I'm not about to start recompiling my kernel with my own bug fixes. Which relegates me to the bottom 99.99% of computer users, though I guess having the possibility to do so is a unique selling point for the other 0.01%
Everthing works with 2.2
So why did anyone upgrade, if the new one does the same thing as the old one? I'm sure I'm missing something basic here, but I thought adding useful features, improving performance etc was a good thing, even if the resulting code won't always run on an abacus. In a similar vein, it's nice that you can still get i386 rpms, but if I can get better performance out of my kit with i686 rpms, I'm going to do so.
OK, it's not quite the same thing, since the i386 ones will still do the same job. Although have you tried Star Office on a 486 with 20Mb of RAM? It runs, but the one time I tried it for a client, it took - literally - over an hour to open a blank document. I don't think this proves that Star Office is a bad program (although some other evidence points in that direction), it just shows that it is designed for more recent hardware.
If what you're saying is that the upgrade path with Linux involves more smaller steps, I'd probably agree (although if you count service packs, MS produces several upgrades a year).
The reference is here. I must admit I'm touched by all these offers of help: I only mentioned it to make a general point...
(Pause to look for little box)
Well, I set it to 10pt, and what I got is nearer 7pt, but it is a lot more readable than the last version, and it does fill up the page (the mini version was less than 4" across. Why?) Thanks for the various suggestions.
Just like the anti-trust actions against Standard Oil stopped consumers from purchasing the oil they wanted, right?
That analogy is so inappropriate it could be one of mine! Oil is black, sticky and flammable wherever you buy it from (well, more or less). I don't think that mixing 50% of the code for W2K and 50% of the code for Redhat 8 in my PC would be quite as easy as mixing oil from two fields in my refinery. Indeed, in that respect, you could argue that Apple has a monopoly on the supply of OS X and Redhat has a monopoly on the supply of Redhat 8. (It's less true for flavours of Linux, but moving from, say, Suse to Redhat is still not trivial).
Open standards compliance
None of the browers get close to full compliance, at least with CSS (my current bugbear in my day job), and it is by no means clear that IE is the worst offender in this respect (it depends how you count the instances of non-compliance).
Non-DRM hardware will become illegal
Ah, you're American? I really can't see this happening in Europe, let alone in most other places.
Hope of freedom on China, oh no
Are you basing this on the new Bond movie? If the new version of Windows requires DRM, a rapidly growing market of 1 billion users with higher than average abilities in math are going to throw themselves wholeheartedly into Open Source. That sounds like good news to me, although possibly bad for the western ego.
in the long run (by 2006-8), DRM *will* be a serious problem
Only if DRM delivers: even if all companies start at 100% take-up at kit renewal time, they are going to have several years to do a cost benefit analysis before changing their last machines, and, in the meantime, the new system had better work with the old one.
Locked into paying upgrades
No-one is locked anywhere. If you want to upgrade from W95 to Redhat 8 and Open Office 6, with all that entails, good and bad, MS is not going to kick your door down. People are locked in because, at the end of the day, MS and all its works is perceived as the least bad option.
Worrying until 2008
Sure it's coming, it's just that a lot can happen in between.
Non-Windows jobs don't pay enough
Sorry, my last posting was a bit crass in this respect, but, even assuming that what you say is true, is this really MS's fault? If successful companies run MS, could it be that at least some of them actually find that it delivers for them? From what I see, Linux sys admins, for example, earn a very good living, ie using Linux to do something that it does well pays good money. If you are tied to being near a campus that may not help though.
No fun at parties
Actually, you're right :-) But I'm all for moaning, it's the open source victim mentality that gets me. No-one asked me to make a personal stand against MS, so why should I expect sympathy?
I make less than you
OK, so maybe we are the two worst paid /.ers in history!
Mind sharing a URL?
I don't know... isn't that dangerous nowadays? Oh, OK, since it's you: www.interieur.gouv.fr. The page as is comes out minute, the 'printable' version is no better, but the text only one (which still has images, err...) seems to work OK. I had another one the other day where Mozilla printed it as light grey on white, and konqueror printed it with the side bars on top of the text.
Webmaster, not slashdot
Sure, but when people keep saying that Mozilla is the world's greatest browser, I think that the fact it doesn't work with a lot of sites (even if it is the webmasters' fault) is relevant.
Capitalism naturally rewards Evil Empires. That's why unbridled captialism is bad
In theory I'm with you. In practice, the word 'bridled' is quite apt: the anti-trust ideas proposed for MS seem to boil down to stopping the customer from buying what he wants. Working towards a situation where MS has, say, 75% of the OS market, and could have 90% again within months if it weren't for artificial restrictions, sounds very odd to me.
Your article basically says that small is beautiful, which, again, sounds good to me. The trouble is that as soon as you become succesful, you get bigger, and very quickly it is hard for anyone to catch up. I don't think that the computing world wants 5,000 operating systems, each owned by a few people, trying to gain market share over the other 4,999 companies. Most people I talk to don't actually want more than one browser. They certainly don't want to have to choose which browser to use on the basis of the site they want to look at.
Anyway, my point a few postings ago was that if MS does go for a radically new product in 2004, this significantly weakens their advantage as a monopoly, so it should be good news for other operating systems, providing the other operating systems can compete.
It could be as simple as courts forcing Microsoft to open up the Windows source, and forcing ccommecial competing products (such as browsers, media players, and e-mail clients) to ship on Windows CDs.
I can feel my karma about to come in for some serious abuse here, but this sounds neither simple nor reasonable to me. Are MS supposed to ship all their competitors' products on one CD? If not, who decides which versions of which browser, for example, they have to ship? Are they supposed to take responsibility for all those products? And why should MS pay the distribution costs of other companies anyway?
Last time I looked, Apple had their own proprietary multimedia solution, and every distribution of Linux I have ever seen ships with various multimedia applications. Does that mean that Linux is about to become a monopoly? I thought it was just giving the customer what he wanted.
This whole line of argument would sound obscene if applied to any company other than MS. How about forcing Ford to ship cars without seats, to stop them muscling into the upholstery market? Or maybe Walmart should be forced to sell Sears products? Of course MS want to increase market share and broaden their markets. That in itself doesn't make them the Evil Empire, it just shows that they have got to page 4 in any basic text on running a business.
And, in any case, the courts have rejected your option, and that situation isn't going to change in the next several years, so wouldn't it be better to come up with a plan for making progress in the situation that exists, rather than the one that might have existed but doesn't and probably never will?
There is a particular issue with the flash plugin over X. I don't like flash, but since it is on so many sites now, often on the first page, the result of this bug is to make quite a lot of the Internet inaccessible.
Stop fixing win95 problems
It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it? If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed, and rightly so. In the case we are discussing, people could stop at XP, and MS's longstanding policy is to support the previous OS, so I wouldn't even start to worry until 2006-2008
Not backwards compatible
Is all the open source stuff released this year compatible with the original Linux kernel? Or even with the pre-version 2.4 kernel? Should it be? Would this make any sense whatsoever? I think MS's main problem is that they spent far too long trying to be too backwards compatible. Most OSS projects don't have this problem because they don't have a non-geek user base...
Forced to use Windows in every job
Nonsense, you just picked the wrong jobs. It's either a life and death issue or it isn't. If it is a life and death issue, make not using Windows the first criterion for choosing an employer and live with the consequences. If it isn't, take the money and stop complaining. I've never used Windows in any job at any point, which might be why I probably earn less than you do. I'm about to install W2K on one server, but that was my choice, no-one made me, and the reasons for doing so have more to do with the lamentable state of much OSS applications software than with Microsoft's monopoly.
Microsoft discontinues W2k and XP: new PCs will come installed only with the new OS
In that case
CDs only work with new OS
They are doing this sort of thing already, so nothing changes with the next version of Windows. If that business model works, they will gain market share, if it doesn't, they will rapidly find another model.
no competition
Microsoft's record on killing competition is actually rather patchy. They have cleaned up in the desktop OS and office productivity markets. They don't own the server market, they don't dominate embedded appliances, they are struggling to make the XBox work: all these ventures are losing money, which they can only afford to lose because of their market share in the first two areas.
If corporate customers start boycotting the new OS, Microsoft will back down very quickly, monopoly or no monopoly. The main reason we are still waiting for XP server is that there is resistance to the licencing model: this new system could provoke a much bigger backlash.
everyone running MS-Windows and MS-Office for backward compatibility
That's a great argument against what the article is suggesting catching on.
And the main backwards compatibility issue is not with file formats, it's with users. The big thing going for Microsoft is that the majority of the world's users equate the Microsoft Way with how a computer should work.
If Microsoft break their own mould, they are going to meet the same resistance that currently hinders the take-up of alternative operating systems. They could stop renewing licences for XP server, but then, if people have to change anyway, they are going to look at all the options, which has to be good for open source...
...Providing the open source community has a product that does what Aunt Mildred wants as easily as Windows does it. Which, I fear, is going to be the problem.
Oh wait! That's Opera.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I really like Opera, especially when I look at my server memory usage. I just wish it didn't have such a freaky interface. Most of my customers won't touch it.
I think some people posting on this topic have spent too much time watching the X files. It's only an operating system guys, and, if it is as radically different to previous versions of Windows as is claimed in the article, it is going to have to compete not only with Linux and friends, but also with W2k and XP.
So if it really does offer something fundamentally new and useful that outweighs the disadvantages of DRM, people might buy new hardware and switch. If not, they won't. And even if the new OS is a runaway success, it will have to talk to W2K, XP and Un*x servers or it just won't work on the current Internet.
In other words, if things pan out as stated in the article (which is by no means certain), Windows 04 is going to have to compete without most of the advantages enjoyed by previous versions, so it should be a much more even fight between MS and OSS. And could it be that this is what has really got everyone spooked?
proof that Mozilla is well on the way to becoming the world's best browser
The points about spin have already been covered, so can I ask how many banking sites you have tried to use recently?
Just spent half an hour trying (unsuccessfully) to persuade Mozilla not to reduce all the pages on a French government site to 4 point text (why would this be a feature for anyone unless your name is Stuart Little?).
Most of my regular customers have learned how to do ctrl-alt-esc just to kill zombie Mozilla windows. The Mozilla-on-remote-X bug is so longstanding that there is now a lobbying campaign to get it fixed...
So, yes, it's a great bit of software, but it would be more useful if it worked with more than half of the Internet, or if it worked over a network.
I can't say I've ever bothered to count, but I probably get 10 or so a day. I have a dozen or so domains that give my email address as the contact, my various email addresses are plastered over several longstanding websites, I've posted a few things on usenet and all my friends have had viruses that have emailed my address to every other computer on the planet, so I would expect to be a prime target for spam.
On the other hand, the addresses are hosted on our own (leased) machines, so I would be surprised (and liable to sue) if my ISP was selling my addresses to anyone.
I have noticed that customers using webmail, especially Hotmail, get huge quantities of spam, but this seems inevitable to me.
I'd say deleting spams takes me 30 seconds a day, top whack.