Funny how people bash Microsoft for both a) not releasing patches and b) releasing too many patches.
Yes, well, there's obviously a problem with both a) and b). Under a) the problems don't get fixed. Under b) not even MS can keep up with the dizzying array of patches.
There was a patch available months before CodeRed was even heard of, put people didn't install it, and now everyone points to CodeRed as the perfect example of MS vulnerability.
Yes! A perfect example. A perfect example of how difficult it is to keep up with the dizzying array of patches from Microsoft. Why, Microsoft can't even do it. Gartner advised customers to ditch IIS exactly because you can't patch fast enough.
Further, the Microsoft patches, available for a long time, cause other problems, and I quote:
Speaking of patches, I've read a couple of recent posts on the Bugtraq mailing list that indicate a problem might exist with the Microsoft patch listed in bulletin MS01-033. A few people have reported that after they installed the patch, their systems remain immune to Code Red infection. However, when an infected system attempts to connect to their system to infect it, several IIS services (e.g., FTP, the default Web site, the administrative Web site, and the proxy service) stop processing.
I was using more 1b. IMHO, user interfaces can be consistent(same style), yet not make any sense(incoherent).
I used coherent because I was implying both same style and logical consistency. Having a consistent and logical interface lowers support costs because inexperienced users are more likely to be able to use it without asking for support.
For one thing, you are assuming stability now, which is not a given.
I am not assuming stability now. Also, stability is not either present or missing, it's a sliding scale.
Whether it's true that the new unbundled Windows is more or less stable is really irrelevant. All that's important is that MS can FUD the OEMs into believing that their support costs will go up because MS won't (be able to) stand behind the unbundled Windows systems.
When 3.1 was out, didn't Packard Hell have a different desktop?
I don't remember that, but what was happening in 3.1 days seems pretty irrelevant today. Packard Bell probably had invested in their pre 3.1 desktop that they weren't abandoning right away. Were they even selling OEM Windows at the time? If not, then this is irrelevant because if customers installed 3.1 on the PB then they were completely out of the picture for support.
As for coherent (I believe you mean consistent),...
I meant coherent. Which, in this context is a synonym for consistent.
I don't really understand your points. Are you saying that it would be as stable and consistent (I'll use you're word since you seem so hung up over it) either way?
I'm not sure if it would or not. If the unbundled version is more unstable, it may well be MS's intentional design. Doesn't matter really. The threat that it would be a support problem would scare the OEMs, who have enough headaches in this department.
It's useless in a store. But to an OEM that can make contracts with Opera,Mozilla,Stardock and other places?
What OEM would want to be in the position of having to support a Windows that was even less stable or coherent?
Most OEMs would avoid this like the plague, as their support costs are already one of the most difficult things for them to control.
If MS doesn't get contained on this issue, the next thing you'll know is that MSN will be integrated in such a way as to remove it will be impossible. Installing AOL would add considerable bloat and would never work as well as the integrated solution.
I've administrated numerous systems running OpenVMS. For the record, OpenVMS is extremely stable, with reported uptimes commonly counted in years. There was a system somewhere with an uptime of like 17 years or somesuch.
Anyway... We've found that when there are multiple admins, one of the dangers is that someone will edit a system startup file to start up something new that they've started manually. Often, the change they'll make has a mistake. This will cause confusion and problems surrounding the next reboot (typically for OS upgrade, HW change, HW failure, moving machines around).
We've actually taken to reboots every 6 months or so when people who might change startup files are around so that we can catch these kinds of problems.
Of course, the high availability systems are all clustered such that the customers don't really see one machine with problems anyway...
I've often thought that a monitor that reports startup file changes would be a good idea. Never got around to writing it though.
Collect money for issue ads. Great idea! Free speech! Grassroots movement!
Meanwhile, the Congress has just passed Campaign Finance Reform that the president has promised to sign. It'll take effect right after the 2002 November elections, before the CBDTPA/SSSCA will come up again.
CFR will make it illegal to run issue ads 60 days before election day. Somehow, we're all worked up about the CBDTPA, but when Congress attempts to rewrite the Constitution and curtail free speech right, it gets ignored here. In the post CFR world, grassroots movements are going to have to organize differently than sending your 5$ in the the EFF or other organization that you'll hope will run issue ads to get the word out.
I applaud Leahy for opposing the CBDTPA, but he's a supporter of CFR in it's present form. I give him a failing grade for protecting our basic rights, but he's in good company with practically the whole Democratic Party, John "Keating 5, stop me before I sell out again" McCain and George W. Bush.
If it comes up next year, it will be after the midterm election. Congressmen are a bit more easily swayed by grass-roots campaigns before the election.
If you were using Oracle, you could take advantage of iFS to provide a file system integrated with your database.
It's a true (NFS, SMB) mountable filesystem, with all the flexibility that provides, but also the replication and other Enterprise features you want from a database.
for the majority of databases the data should be moved to the filesystem no the database.
Simple joins, and most of them are can be replicated with links if necessary. Almost all the databases I've seen would lose little from moving out of the DB and into the filesystem.
But then, you lose all the advantages of database journaling (not just integrity, the ability to rollback to a previous state, if necessary), consistency (you have to make sure the files can't be accessed by other operations before the commits are done) and replication.
If I were building an application today with Oracle, I would be very tempted to use iFS for these reasons.
I'm not sure of what exactly are the differences between the two. Sputnik seems to have more information on their pages about the architecture, but they could be very similar, from what I'm reading.
If they are similar, this is one industry that's already in need of a shakeout. I imagine the real value of something like this being in availability and different systems don't help that much.
National Defense is one of the very few valid roles of the central government.
Then, the central government is in the economy in a big way. This requires tax money and tax money has a notable effect on the economy.
National Defense these days means support for a lot of research institutions. The most effective way to do a lot of this is to support higher education through grants. The Interstate Highway system was built to support national defense. Are there strategic industries like energy and steel that have to be supported in some way to ensure a national defense?
National Defense doesn't stop at a bunch of guys with guns who are expected to interrupt their sleep anymore.
Or, is your idea of National Defense stop at our borders? Total isolationism? The Germans and Japanese might have won WWII had this been practiced. If not, the Soviets certainly would have taken Europe after WWII.
No. As I said before, I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. Government has its rightfull place, but that is not in the economy, or in business. National Defense is one of the very few valid roles of the central government. Courts are another valid role for government. I've heard some compelling arguments otherwise, but none that describe a society I would want to live in.
How about schools? Does the government have a responsibility to ensure that people are educated?
If this is accepted, then will we also need to ensure that all those going through an educational system have access to internet? What if the Internet is shown to lower costs and greatly improve the efficiency of education? (Not that this has been shown, mind you, just a hypothetical.)
I gave a bunch of examples where government involvement in big projects appears to be a big benefit. Do you believe that these examples don't counterbalence all the great harm that government involvement does? I actually might be able to accept that.
Especially with the low quality of pandering, scheming, self-serving people that government has attracted lately. Campaign finance reform is an amazing example of how low we've bent. The politicians are actually arguing that there need to be restrictions such that they won't be bribed. These restrictions are actually restrictions on our free speech. The solution would be just for there to be full disclosure of who and to what extent all of the campaigns and issue ads are being financed. But, that might actually benefit one party over the other if people actually knew who was supporting what, so they've instead taken to banning speech.
If the prohibition against government involvement in the economy is solely on principle and not based on benefit/cost then you have to deal with the tough issues of where the lines are drawn.
Definately not. I find it amusing that here you recognize that governments inability to be efficient would cause delays and problems, but yet you still support the idea of govt getting involved in broadband.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Where do I recognize that governments inability to be efficient would cause delays and problems?
I'm guessing you meant that last comment to be sarcasm, but it's misplaced. That is not free-market competition. Both industries are highly regulated. Most areas only allow one cable company, and most only have one phone company. As a result, they have no fear of true competition. Yes, cable/dsl compete with each other, but DSL has a limited availability based on distance from the CO. So they get most of those, and the cable gets everyone else. No competition necessary.
I live in an area where DSL and cable are available. I chose cable because of the nightmare stories about service and connection problems from my local DSL provider. The phone company here is notoriously bad about service.
I've worked in the government and I've worked in regulated monopolies. I don't see any difference in efficiencies, really. If the government is supplying broadband to my house and the heavily regulated monopolies aren't, well, I don't see the difference, really.
Do you think these mega-corps would be more likely to provide broadband service if there was less regulation? I think they would still only provide it where it was cheapest and most profitable to do so. If a municipality wanted to take matters into their own hands, let 'em, I say.
Now, why is it that you seem to recognize the need for natural monopolies and yet you also seem to advocate free market solutions in this case?
Yes, it is market distortion, and it is caused by too much government involvement, not too little. The more they prod the market, the worse it will get.
A pat answer based on assumption that government involvement in the "marketplace" always makes things worse. Did Electricity costs to people in rural Tennesee go up or down due to the TVA? Did electricity costs go up or down to Los Angeles and Las Vegas after the Hoover dam? How about the Erie and Panama Canals? Did those increase or lower shipping costs? Would we be better off if we didn't invest tens of millions of $/yr. on the Army Corp. of Engineers keeping waterways clear? True, the Interstate Highways did do a number on the railroads (market distortions), but transportation costs went down and enabled Americans to vacation conveniently in America. A net benefit, I think.
Let's do it. Nobody would wait for competing water, sewer or electric services to come hook up your neighborhood.
I would. I grew up using a well for years because the local government couldn't be bothered to run water lines to my home. And I owned a home for a few years in the late 90s that STILL didn't have public sewer availability and it was two minutes from the city limits. Gimme private industry and competition any day.
Something of a non sequitur. No commercial interest ran in to fill the need in either of those cases. Do you think that public sanitation would be better if there were not public water and sewers? Do you really want only private industry and competition in all aspects of society? How about national defense? How about courts? Where, exactly, do you draw the lines?
I think this is more emblamatic of the larger situation - people are ditching rather than integrating older solutions.
That might have been true in go-go 1999 (partly driven by Y2K), but people actually are holding on to and even upgrading legacy systems these days.
Witness the renaissance of the IBM Mainframe business.
Ever been involved with an XML integration? The one's I've seen haven't been about recasting everything in new file formats, but taking data out of legacy systems and translating to XML formats.
I'm just curious how you can say they benefit from government involvement.
I used to be libertarian myself. I just can't see it anymore.
I think that going to the Moon, building the Interstate Highway System, the Hoover Dam, rural electrification are all good things and I don't see a private model for doing any of them.
I think universal schooling is a good too. I'm in favor of vouchers, by the way, but the society as a whole has a responsibility to ensure that all are educated. We can't remain a free people if people don't have a basic appreciation for our Constitution and other institutions and that means schools.
Some things need to be guaranteed by Government, like national defense. Increasingly, I think the ability to communicate over the Internet is becoming one of those things that we must not reserve only for those who can afford it. Without this basic ability, we marginalize whole segments of our society. It's not just that it's unfair to them, it's destabilizing in the long run. Eventually, being able to access the Internet will be a requirement for education, at all levels. As I said, I think society as a whole is responsible for education. We might as well guarantee Internet access while we're at it. The increase in infrastructure would go a long way to improving every segment of our economy. Markets work best when information flows freely. It's no different than the improvement to our lifestyle and economy that resulted from the building of the Interstate Highway system.
I don't feel there's really much difference between a regulated "natural" monopoly and government doing things. I don't see any good model for Electricity, Natural Gas delivery, water and sewer that's not either directly Government or a regulated monopoly. Maybe a regulated monopoly is not the best for Internet access, but whatever we can do as a society to make the Internet and Broadband ubiquitous would be a good thing, I think.
That's just like MS selling Xenix once-upon-a-time. Surely, when the market matures and the Coke development people are up to speed, they'll have Water/NT (WNT) out, which will suplant both Dasani and their old Coke offering.
To those who like Coke and Dasani, don't worry! WNT will come in versions to meet any need, from WNT/Cup, designed for the home user, to WNT/Ocean for the Global Enterprise Water user. Integrated products with WNT, like Liquid Explorer (LE) will provide flavors to meet all the needs of the drinking public.
Interesting way of looking at things, seeing as how we ignore the large bulk of what the founding fathers believed in.
There was a time when the national postal service was both necessary and efficient. Certainly, the fledgling democracy would have been even more fractious and divided without it.
Here is why am I against our government providing Internet access: government, at all levels, is wasteful and inefficient.
And the regional phone monopolies and cable companies are models of efficiency. Of course, I didn't say that the government should provide internet access. I said the government should do whatever's necessary to encourage and ensure universal broadband. Seems like it would be tremendous societal benefit and the oligopolies sure aren't doing it.
Here are some government run programs to serve as a refresher: United States Postal Service (USPS), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Federal Communication Commission (FCC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Social Security Administration (SSA) and locally run school districts. All of which have been on the ball so well, we hardly ever complain about them.
For counterpoint, here are a number of things that have been extremely valuable that seem to benefit from government involvement:
Local water and sewer services, TVA, Hoover Dam, Interstate Highway System, National Parks. All of which there is about zero private interest in maintaining but enrich our lives tremendously.
Advertising people tend to know what has come before and what else is out there, since...you know...it's their job and stuff.
I'm not in the ad business, so I don't really know what they go through, but I would guess that it's actually really hard for them to stay on top of what's out there and what's gone before.
The big agencies have to maintain costly archives and constantly be scanning the horizon for the new stuff.
This will make it easier for them. Of course, it'll make it cheaper. It'll make it easier to bring new people up to speed on the history, too.
A really great thing about something like this is that it would make the entry cost to become a serious ad agency much lower. Now, one great cost of running a serious ad agency, the archives and the ongoing research, has been commoditized to some extent.
Nobody seriously believes that our entire road system should be turned over to toll roads, with the obvious congestion and complication this would cause with every burrough, county, city, state and the federal government collecting payments every few miles.
Why must we live with oligopolies that "compete" against each other to provide these services. Somehow, the cable companies always seem to show up within months of the DSL offerings in an area with roughly the same service offering at roughly the same price. Yeah, the free market will bring us the best result, sure.
The US Founding Fathers knew the value of a free people freely communicating. They established the post office to ensure that people could easily communicate over great distances, without regard to their economic status or resources.
These days, this means Internet, and tomorrow, it'll mean broadband. Every aspect of society benefits from cheap and available broadband. Schools, industry, small business, homes, everybody. I'm surprised that local and state governments aren't more involved in making sure that their area has the best broadband service.
Hey, I'm all in favor of the telecommunications industry and the cable industry profiting from providing good service, if they would just get off the dime and do it.
It's time that government, at all levels, makes sure that all of that unused fiber capacity that's supposedly lying around gets lighted up and serving the people. If we leave this to the oligopolies, that fiber won't get used until it's already obsolete.
I'm pretty conservative most of the time, but what's happening now must be some kind of market distortion that the government should work to correct. If there's all this unused capacity and lots of demand but not at the current price point, then the markets need a little prod to close the gap.
Let's do it. Nobody would wait for competing water, sewer or electric services to come hook up your neighborhood. Seeing as Internet can enhance everbody's life in important ways (eGovernment anybody?), we shouldn't have to wait for Broadband either.
Microsoft is far more concerned about Linux inroads into the desktop. They feel that whoever controls the desktop ultimately controls the server. Linus has been heard to say this this, too, and it's why Sun pushes Star(Open)Office and Java so hard. They need to break the MS fist that controls the desktop. Ultimately, if MS holds on to the desktop, they could just turn around and make all the desktop apps not work with any servers but theirs.
Remember that MS is currently playing as nice as they can to get past this anti-trust nuisance. With the clear evidence that's coming out that they are, in fact bullying the OEMs wrt to Linux, can you imagine what they would be doing without the anti-trust scrutiny they are getting now?
Seems like they are still in the "meeting demand, but not creating demand" mode on the Server side.
Without competitors like VA around, they don't have to push it anymore. The Linux community either buys preloaded from them or builds their own anyway.
Because VA had to compete against price-leader Dell and others selling systems with Linux loaded on them. It's possible that MS only tolerated Dell selling Linux as long as VA was still out there.
This article is interesting in this regard. And I quote:
Compaq was also mentioned in other memos, with Microsoft taking the line that OEMs should "meet demand but not help create demand" for Linux.
So, at one time, it was OK with Microsoft for the OEMs to meet demand, but not to push Linux. Then, later, they clearly pressured Gateway and Dell to drop it completely.
VA Linux no longer out there pushing Linux? Another highly visible Linux company down...
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Yes, well, there's obviously a problem with both a) and b). Under a) the problems don't get fixed. Under b) not even MS can keep up with the dizzying array of patches.
Yes! A perfect example. A perfect example of how difficult it is to keep up with the dizzying array of patches from Microsoft. Why, Microsoft can't even do it. Gartner advised customers to ditch IIS exactly because you can't patch fast enough.
Further, the Microsoft patches, available for a long time, cause other problems, and I quote:
I used coherent because I was implying both same style and logical consistency. Having a consistent and logical interface lowers support costs because inexperienced users are more likely to be able to use it without asking for support.
I am not assuming stability now. Also, stability is not either present or missing, it's a sliding scale.
Whether it's true that the new unbundled Windows is more or less stable is really irrelevant. All that's important is that MS can FUD the OEMs into believing that their support costs will go up because MS won't (be able to) stand behind the unbundled Windows systems.
I don't remember that, but what was happening in 3.1 days seems pretty irrelevant today. Packard Bell probably had invested in their pre 3.1 desktop that they weren't abandoning right away. Were they even selling OEM Windows at the time? If not, then this is irrelevant because if customers installed 3.1 on the PB then they were completely out of the picture for support.
I meant coherent. Which, in this context is a synonym for consistent.
I don't really understand your points. Are you saying that it would be as stable and consistent (I'll use you're word since you seem so hung up over it) either way?
I'm not sure if it would or not. If the unbundled version is more unstable, it may well be MS's intentional design. Doesn't matter really. The threat that it would be a support problem would scare the OEMs, who have enough headaches in this department.
What OEM would want to be in the position of having to support a Windows that was even less stable or coherent?
Most OEMs would avoid this like the plague, as their support costs are already one of the most difficult things for them to control.
If MS doesn't get contained on this issue, the next thing you'll know is that MSN will be integrated in such a way as to remove it will be impossible. Installing AOL would add considerable bloat and would never work as well as the integrated solution.
Anyway... We've found that when there are multiple admins, one of the dangers is that someone will edit a system startup file to start up something new that they've started manually. Often, the change they'll make has a mistake. This will cause confusion and problems surrounding the next reboot (typically for OS upgrade, HW change, HW failure, moving machines around).
We've actually taken to reboots every 6 months or so when people who might change startup files are around so that we can catch these kinds of problems.
Of course, the high availability systems are all clustered such that the customers don't really see one machine with problems anyway...
I've often thought that a monitor that reports startup file changes would be a good idea. Never got around to writing it though.
Meanwhile, the Congress has just passed Campaign Finance Reform that the president has promised to sign. It'll take effect right after the 2002 November elections, before the CBDTPA/SSSCA will come up again.
CFR will make it illegal to run issue ads 60 days before election day. Somehow, we're all worked up about the CBDTPA, but when Congress attempts to rewrite the Constitution and curtail free speech right, it gets ignored here. In the post CFR world, grassroots movements are going to have to organize differently than sending your 5$ in the the EFF or other organization that you'll hope will run issue ads to get the word out.
I applaud Leahy for opposing the CBDTPA, but he's a supporter of CFR in it's present form. I give him a failing grade for protecting our basic rights, but he's in good company with practically the whole Democratic Party, John "Keating 5, stop me before I sell out again" McCain and George W. Bush.
If it comes up next year, it will be after the midterm election. Congressmen are a bit more easily swayed by grass-roots campaigns before the election.
What this means is that we really need to spend the time getting organized and involved.
It's a true (NFS, SMB) mountable filesystem, with all the flexibility that provides, but also the replication and other Enterprise features you want from a database.
Simple joins, and most of them are can be replicated with links if necessary. Almost all the databases I've seen would lose little from moving out of the DB and into the filesystem.
But then, you lose all the advantages of database journaling (not just integrity, the ability to rollback to a previous state, if necessary), consistency (you have to make sure the files can't be accessed by other operations before the commits are done) and replication.
If I were building an application today with Oracle, I would be very tempted to use iFS for these reasons.
I'm not sure of what exactly are the differences between the two. Sputnik seems to have more information on their pages about the architecture, but they could be very similar, from what I'm reading.
If they are similar, this is one industry that's already in need of a shakeout. I imagine the real value of something like this being in availability and different systems don't help that much.
I wonder if they'll be going after Kate Bush next?
Then, the central government is in the economy in a big way. This requires tax money and tax money has a notable effect on the economy.
National Defense these days means support for a lot of research institutions. The most effective way to do a lot of this is to support higher education through grants. The Interstate Highway system was built to support national defense. Are there strategic industries like energy and steel that have to be supported in some way to ensure a national defense?
National Defense doesn't stop at a bunch of guys with guns who are expected to interrupt their sleep anymore.
Or, is your idea of National Defense stop at our borders? Total isolationism? The Germans and Japanese might have won WWII had this been practiced. If not, the Soviets certainly would have taken Europe after WWII.
How about schools? Does the government have a responsibility to ensure that people are educated?
If this is accepted, then will we also need to ensure that all those going through an educational system have access to internet? What if the Internet is shown to lower costs and greatly improve the efficiency of education? (Not that this has been shown, mind you, just a hypothetical.)
I gave a bunch of examples where government involvement in big projects appears to be a big benefit. Do you believe that these examples don't counterbalence all the great harm that government involvement does? I actually might be able to accept that.
Especially with the low quality of pandering, scheming, self-serving people that government has attracted lately. Campaign finance reform is an amazing example of how low we've bent. The politicians are actually arguing that there need to be restrictions such that they won't be bribed. These restrictions are actually restrictions on our free speech. The solution would be just for there to be full disclosure of who and to what extent all of the campaigns and issue ads are being financed. But, that might actually benefit one party over the other if people actually knew who was supporting what, so they've instead taken to banning speech.
If the prohibition against government involvement in the economy is solely on principle and not based on benefit/cost then you have to deal with the tough issues of where the lines are drawn.
I'm not sure I follow you here. Where do I recognize that governments inability to be efficient would cause delays and problems?
I live in an area where DSL and cable are available. I chose cable because of the nightmare stories about service and connection problems from my local DSL provider. The phone company here is notoriously bad about service.
I've worked in the government and I've worked in regulated monopolies. I don't see any difference in efficiencies, really. If the government is supplying broadband to my house and the heavily regulated monopolies aren't, well, I don't see the difference, really.
Do you think these mega-corps would be more likely to provide broadband service if there was less regulation? I think they would still only provide it where it was cheapest and most profitable to do so. If a municipality wanted to take matters into their own hands, let 'em, I say.
Now, why is it that you seem to recognize the need for natural monopolies and yet you also seem to advocate free market solutions in this case?
A pat answer based on assumption that government involvement in the "marketplace" always makes things worse. Did Electricity costs to people in rural Tennesee go up or down due to the TVA? Did electricity costs go up or down to Los Angeles and Las Vegas after the Hoover dam? How about the Erie and Panama Canals? Did those increase or lower shipping costs? Would we be better off if we didn't invest tens of millions of $/yr. on the Army Corp. of Engineers keeping waterways clear? True, the Interstate Highways did do a number on the railroads (market distortions), but transportation costs went down and enabled Americans to vacation conveniently in America. A net benefit, I think.
I would. I grew up using a well for years because the local government couldn't be bothered to run water lines to my home. And I owned a home for a few years in the late 90s that STILL didn't have public sewer availability and it was two minutes from the city limits. Gimme private industry and competition any day.
Something of a non sequitur. No commercial interest ran in to fill the need in either of those cases. Do you think that public sanitation would be better if there were not public water and sewers? Do you really want only private industry and competition in all aspects of society? How about national defense? How about courts? Where, exactly, do you draw the lines?
Losing the A root is about as dangerous as the Staypuft Marshmellow Man. Now that we know to cross the beams.
That might have been true in go-go 1999 (partly driven by Y2K), but people actually are holding on to and even upgrading legacy systems these days.
Witness the renaissance of the IBM Mainframe business.
Ever been involved with an XML integration? The one's I've seen haven't been about recasting everything in new file formats, but taking data out of legacy systems and translating to XML formats.
I used to be libertarian myself. I just can't see it anymore.
I think that going to the Moon, building the Interstate Highway System, the Hoover Dam, rural electrification are all good things and I don't see a private model for doing any of them.
I think universal schooling is a good too. I'm in favor of vouchers, by the way, but the society as a whole has a responsibility to ensure that all are educated. We can't remain a free people if people don't have a basic appreciation for our Constitution and other institutions and that means schools.
Some things need to be guaranteed by Government, like national defense. Increasingly, I think the ability to communicate over the Internet is becoming one of those things that we must not reserve only for those who can afford it. Without this basic ability, we marginalize whole segments of our society. It's not just that it's unfair to them, it's destabilizing in the long run. Eventually, being able to access the Internet will be a requirement for education, at all levels. As I said, I think society as a whole is responsible for education. We might as well guarantee Internet access while we're at it. The increase in infrastructure would go a long way to improving every segment of our economy. Markets work best when information flows freely. It's no different than the improvement to our lifestyle and economy that resulted from the building of the Interstate Highway system.
I don't feel there's really much difference between a regulated "natural" monopoly and government doing things. I don't see any good model for Electricity, Natural Gas delivery, water and sewer that's not either directly Government or a regulated monopoly. Maybe a regulated monopoly is not the best for Internet access, but whatever we can do as a society to make the Internet and Broadband ubiquitous would be a good thing, I think.
To those who like Coke and Dasani, don't worry! WNT will come in versions to meet any need, from WNT/Cup, designed for the home user, to WNT/Ocean for the Global Enterprise Water user. Integrated products with WNT, like Liquid Explorer (LE) will provide flavors to meet all the needs of the drinking public.
There was a time when the national postal service was both necessary and efficient. Certainly, the fledgling democracy would have been even more fractious and divided without it.
And the regional phone monopolies and cable companies are models of efficiency. Of course, I didn't say that the government should provide internet access. I said the government should do whatever's necessary to encourage and ensure universal broadband. Seems like it would be tremendous societal benefit and the oligopolies sure aren't doing it.
For counterpoint, here are a number of things that have been extremely valuable that seem to benefit from government involvement:
Local water and sewer services, TVA, Hoover Dam, Interstate Highway System, National Parks. All of which there is about zero private interest in maintaining but enrich our lives tremendously.
I'm not in the ad business, so I don't really know what they go through, but I would guess that it's actually really hard for them to stay on top of what's out there and what's gone before.
The big agencies have to maintain costly archives and constantly be scanning the horizon for the new stuff.
This will make it easier for them. Of course, it'll make it cheaper. It'll make it easier to bring new people up to speed on the history, too.
A really great thing about something like this is that it would make the entry cost to become a serious ad agency much lower. Now, one great cost of running a serious ad agency, the archives and the ongoing research, has been commoditized to some extent.
Nobody seriously believes that our entire road system should be turned over to toll roads, with the obvious congestion and complication this would cause with every burrough, county, city, state and the federal government collecting payments every few miles.
Why must we live with oligopolies that "compete" against each other to provide these services. Somehow, the cable companies always seem to show up within months of the DSL offerings in an area with roughly the same service offering at roughly the same price. Yeah, the free market will bring us the best result, sure.
The US Founding Fathers knew the value of a free people freely communicating. They established the post office to ensure that people could easily communicate over great distances, without regard to their economic status or resources.
These days, this means Internet, and tomorrow, it'll mean broadband. Every aspect of society benefits from cheap and available broadband. Schools, industry, small business, homes, everybody. I'm surprised that local and state governments aren't more involved in making sure that their area has the best broadband service.
Hey, I'm all in favor of the telecommunications industry and the cable industry profiting from providing good service, if they would just get off the dime and do it.
It's time that government, at all levels, makes sure that all of that unused fiber capacity that's supposedly lying around gets lighted up and serving the people. If we leave this to the oligopolies, that fiber won't get used until it's already obsolete.
I'm pretty conservative most of the time, but what's happening now must be some kind of market distortion that the government should work to correct. If there's all this unused capacity and lots of demand but not at the current price point, then the markets need a little prod to close the gap.
Let's do it. Nobody would wait for competing water, sewer or electric services to come hook up your neighborhood. Seeing as Internet can enhance everbody's life in important ways (eGovernment anybody?), we shouldn't have to wait for Broadband either.
to those with Tourette Syndrome.
Remember that MS is currently playing as nice as they can to get past this anti-trust nuisance. With the clear evidence that's coming out that they are, in fact bullying the OEMs wrt to Linux, can you imagine what they would be doing without the anti-trust scrutiny they are getting now?
They've retreated from their visible "Linux Everywhere" position they previously held, even disbanding their Linux business division.
Seems like they are still in the "meeting demand, but not creating demand" mode on the Server side.
Without competitors like VA around, they don't have to push it anymore. The Linux community either buys preloaded from them or builds their own anyway.
Because VA had to compete against price-leader Dell and others selling systems with Linux loaded on them. It's possible that MS only tolerated Dell selling Linux as long as VA was still out there.
This article is interesting in this regard. And I quote:
So, at one time, it was OK with Microsoft for the OEMs to meet demand, but not to push Linux. Then, later, they clearly pressured Gateway and Dell to drop it completely.
VA Linux no longer out there pushing Linux? Another highly visible Linux company down...