Although you still see Honda versus Chevy arguments on the internet
The difference is that if all your friends and neighbors use a different kind of car than you, that doesn't prevent you from using your "weird" car to drive to their houses, use the same gas station that they do, or move cargo from their cars to yours and visa versa.
all they have to do is link it in some way to security
All they have to do is claim it is linked in some way to security. They don't have to actually DO any linking of it to security. Since it's allegedly a security issue, they don't have to tell anyone the specifics, and therefore don't have to back up their claim that it's a security issue at all.
"We can't tell you how to plug in your own filesystem driver into Windows. It's a security issue."
"What?! How is that a security issue?"
"You could replace the drivers for the existing filesystems and therefore ignore all security measures on the filesystems."
"But for that I'd have to be able to replace the operating system's drivers in the first place which means that security was already broken through anyway."
"There's other reasons too."
"Okay, what are they?"
"We can't tell you. It's a secret. Security and all, you know."
The "don't buy the product that stifles your freedom" approach works beautifully in an informed free market. It doesn't work worth a damn in an UNinformed free market. Everyone who buys a car at least knows some basics, like the fact that the engine is the big heavy metal thing under the hood, and that the thing goes by causing gasoline to explode in little chambers and the explosions make little thingies move back and forth and that's where all the power comes from, and if you don't have enough oil the moving bits start to scrape and damage themselves, and the electrical stuff works off of a battery that gets charged by the engine's motion, so if your battery died you can recharge it if you can get your engine running again with the help of someone else's battery, and the reason the car turns when you spin the big wheel in front of you is that it cranks the front wheels to one side or the other through some type of mechanical linkage - and there's something hydrolic in there somewhere helping you push the wheel. And it stops when you hit the brakes because some rubber bits press onto some metal part of the wheel making it stop, or something like that.
What I describe above is the kind of basic understanding that is lacking in the typical computer OS "customer". And it's this lack that has made Microsoft so strong, and forced the rest of us to have no choice but to deal with it because the ignorant majority use it.
Standards aren't about picking one product only and having to use it and nothing else in order to interoperate with others. Standards are about defining a behaviour that products should follow to work with each other, so that companies are ENABLED to compete. There are standards that help the auto industry, for example, about how wide lanes on roads are, what the chemical mixture of gasoline available at the pump will be like. There are standards to make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to safety conventions (for example, the convention that an automobile's turn signal must operate by blinking either an amber light, or the red taillight, on the side of the turn, one in front and one in back.) These sort of standards don't stifle companies. They allow them to compete fairly in a situation where there would otherwise simply be a de-facto standard of "whatever the hell Ford happens to be doing, right or wrong, will the the standard since they have the most cars on the road (at the time these sorts of standards were being concieved.)"
Admittedly it's been a few years since I last needed to look on MSDN, but the last time I did they had two tiers of access on the website - stuff everyone gets to see, and stuff only subscribers get to see. Has that changed at all?
I never understand these people who bitch and moan about unions being socialist. They're a company just like any other. What they sell is labor. Do the same thing in the white collar world instead and you aren't called a union, you're called a consultancy firm. Let's look at all the things that might make someone want to call a union socialist, and I'll debunk them:
- They often take over an entire shop refusing to allow non-union workers to be hired.
This is just an exclusive contract, no different than saying "If you want to resell McDonald's food in your restaurant, you have to be a franchise that sells ONLY McDonald's food or we won't deal with you." And it's just like saying, "The terms of our contract say you can't install a competitor's OS on the PC's you sell."
They take dues from workers, like a tax.
consultancy firms grab a percent off the top for themselves. No difference.
A worker is forced to join the union in order to work at a union shop.
Again, the owner of the factory CHOSE to enter into this exclusive contract. The potential worker could always go elsewhere.
The employer is strong-armed into using the union because they grab up all the available labor
I can't even begin to count the number of times I've bitched about how "you can always just not use their products" is an empty solution when dealing with a company so large that they are everywhere, with their hands in everything so there isn't much left that ISN'T using their products. (Like Microsoft). Again, I don't see the relevant difference here. Don't like Unions? Don't use them. Your employees decided to unionize? If you don't like it, fire them and hire "scabs". What? the union is too big to piss off because they have so much of the potential worker population in their camp? Tough - go train your own workers from scratch or something. To repeat the mantra of the libertarians back at them, "you can always take your business elsewhere."
Now, you might have gotten the idea that I like labor unions from the above rant. I DON'T. Let me make that perfectly clear. I'm just trying to point out how the reason they are bad is IDENTICAL to the reason a monopoly company is bad, for the hard of thinking who seem to believe it's impossible for a company to do any wrong in a free market.
Anyone who can't learn how to do very basic things on another OS
You are operating under the false premise that ability is the only thing that would make someone stuborn to switch. There's also preference. I *could* give up using linux and do all my programming in Windows. The last time I programmed on windows was back in Win 3.1 so I'd have to learn a lot again, but I'm fully confident in my *ability* to do so if I had to. But I don't *want* to have to, and I would consider it counterproductive.
While you are right that IT doesn't hand down the decisions from on high, you are wrong that it gets its directives from the users. The users don't have much of a say in what they have to use. IT gets told by MANAGEMENT what to use, just like the users do.
And there's also still leftover laws on the books in some cities making it illegal to drive more than 10 miles per hour through the middle of town, and they're enforced about as often as the adultery laws are - roughly never.
I kind of like the idea of ancient China, where bureaucratic positions were based somewhat on a meritocracy; higher test scores gave you a better position.
But I've heard the subject matter tested often had nothing to do with the job being applied for. If you want to be in charge of overseeing the financial records you have to prove you can write poetry, for example.
I find it funny that a page "helping" people de-install linux (the 'bashdot.org' link in your article) is shown in a format that gets garbled on browsers people are likely to be using under linux (I tried with mozilla, and it ended up writing lines of text on top of each other into a scribbly black mess. making much of it unreadable.) Now, I realize Mozilla has had html compliance before so I double-checked the site against w3.org's validator, and it generates about 100 errors - andI tried all the version of html the page had, XHTML, HTML4.01 both transitional and strict), HTML 3.2, HTML 2.0 - They all said it was messed up. (what confused mozilla is the plethora of cases where a closing tag exists for which there was no opening tag (it has a about four times, for example.) And it's not even that complicated a page. It's just one page with some numbered lists and some paragraphs and bullet points and header size changes. All generic simple stuff that it shouldn't be getting wrong.
And of course the judges ignored (or knew perfectly well but *wanted* a meaningless settlement) that it's irrelevant that you realease 99% of the API if you hold on to that last 1% that does security and is necessary to get just about anything at all done on the machine. Consider the DeCSS situation: The thing that's holding up DVD software for Linux is one freakin' little paragraph of code that already got reverse engineeried but still can't be used legally.
The main reason for the differences in the pricing between countries, when that pricing comes from the company itself (as in the case of DVD's and this Nintendo incident) and not from government tarrifs, is simply that the companies want to charge whatever they think the market will bear, but the markets in different countries aren't the same. People in rich countries and/or countries where the populace is willing to pay a lot for entertainment will be willing to buy the same DVD for a bigger price, but price the DVD at that price in a country where the people are a little less rich and it won't do very well. The problem comes in when they create technologies that attempt to enforce this pricing to the detriment of usability or freedom. I don't care about the Nintendo pricing too much, because it was still legal to buy one from another country if you wanted to do the effort. The DVD region encoding is much more insidious becasue the technology doesn't work if people are allowed to build their own DVD players however they like - and so accompanying the region technology is a bunch of rules that restrict the free flow of information about how to build a DVD player (or at least the crucial decrypting component) - essentially turning technical competence into a crime.
The reason you can't compete isn't because you suck at being a hardware store. It's because the "operate at a loss" model of business isn't sustainable unless you balance it with a "operate at a profit" elsewhere. The only way to start a new hardware store to compete with home depot is: 1 - It has to be a large chain in all the same locations Home depot is in, so Home depot cannot fund their "operate at a loss" model with profitable stores outside your company's area. 2 - The only way to build that up from the ground is to have it magically appear all at once across the nation with many outlet stores. You can't do it by growing a smaller local business up into a larger national one.
There exist market forces that allow a geographically large company to undercut the prices of a geographically small company so long as they do it in only a few geographical areas at a time.
It's worse than that. He didn't violate any US law. If a law says an activity is illegal in the US, and you perform that activity outside the US, you haven't actually broken that law. It's not JUST that he's not a US citizen that's a problme. It's not JUST that he performed the "crime" in the other country, but that in the location he performed it, it was perfectly legal (in fact, it actually HELPS uphold the law since there is a Russian law that says you mustn't be prevented from making safe backups of digital stuff you purchase, which Dimitri's software made possible.)
Do you think there would be anything wrong with a company saying, "We'll sell our product to white people at price X, black people at price Y, and Asians at price Z." I doubt you would say that's okay, but if you want to be CONSISTENT, you'd have to, since right now you're saying it's okay for a company to say, "If you're German your price is different than if you're Irish" and you're defending that.
But the title doesn't tell you which is which. Just because it's called "junkyard wars" doesn't mean it's filmed in the US. The title depends on where you watch it, NOT where it was filmed. Both the UK filmings and the US filmings had been shown in both countries. The original poster said that the Junkyard wars episodes were filmed in the US and the scrapheap challenge ones were filmed in the UK - seemingly ignorant of the fact that the very same footage ends up being turned into two different shows, with the title depending on where you watch it, not where it was filmed.
I doubt the testing and the bulding were really one day apart. They probably pooled together all the ones they wanted to test in California and went there in one trip to film all of them.
The scraphead challenge scrapheap, and the junkyard wars junkyard are actually the same place. The shows are the same exact footage. The only difference was the title logos that would appear. Why there was a need to rename it for the American TV I don't know. I remember on several occasions on "Junkyard Wars" hearing people uttering the phrase "scrapheap challenge" despite the fact that I was watching something called "Junkyard Wars". They just renamed it and used the same footage, possibly edited a bit for American TV commercial spacing.
Slashdot Mirror
"We can't tell you how to plug in your own filesystem driver into Windows. It's a security issue."
"What?! How is that a security issue?"
"You could replace the drivers for the existing filesystems and therefore ignore all security measures on the filesystems."
"But for that I'd have to be able to replace the operating system's drivers in the first place which means that security was already broken through anyway."
"There's other reasons too."
"Okay, what are they?"
"We can't tell you. It's a secret. Security and all, you know."
What I describe above is the kind of basic understanding that is lacking in the typical computer OS "customer". And it's this lack that has made Microsoft so strong, and forced the rest of us to have no choice but to deal with it because the ignorant majority use it.
Standards aren't about picking one product only and having to use it and nothing else in order to interoperate with others. Standards are about defining a behaviour that products should follow to work with each other, so that companies are ENABLED to compete. There are standards that help the auto industry, for example, about how wide lanes on roads are, what the chemical mixture of gasoline available at the pump will be like. There are standards to make sure everyone is on the same page with regards to safety conventions (for example, the convention that an automobile's turn signal must operate by blinking either an amber light, or the red taillight, on the side of the turn, one in front and one in back.) These sort of standards don't stifle companies. They allow them to compete fairly in a situation where there would otherwise simply be a de-facto standard of "whatever the hell Ford happens to be doing, right or wrong, will the the standard since they have the most cars on the road (at the time these sorts of standards were being concieved.)"
Admittedly it's been a few years since I last needed to look on MSDN, but the last time I did they had two tiers of access on the website - stuff everyone gets to see, and stuff only subscribers get to see. Has that changed at all?
Now, you might have gotten the idea that I like labor unions from the above rant. I DON'T. Let me make that perfectly clear. I'm just trying to point out how the reason they are bad is IDENTICAL to the reason a monopoly company is bad, for the hard of thinking who seem to believe it's impossible for a company to do any wrong in a free market.
You are operating under the false premise that ability is the only thing that would make someone stuborn to switch. There's also preference. I *could* give up using linux and do all my programming in Windows. The last time I programmed on windows was back in Win 3.1 so I'd have to learn a lot again, but I'm fully confident in my *ability* to do so if I had to. But I don't *want* to have to, and I would consider it counterproductive.
While you are right that IT doesn't hand down the decisions from on high, you are wrong that it gets its directives from the users. The users don't have much of a say in what they have to use. IT gets told by MANAGEMENT what to use, just like the users do.
No, but they migrate. Migration doesn't have to mean flying.
And there's also still leftover laws on the books in some cities making it illegal to drive more than 10 miles per hour through the middle of town, and they're enforced about as often as the adultery laws are - roughly never.
But I've heard the subject matter tested often had nothing to do with the job being applied for. If you want to be in charge of overseeing the financial records you have to prove you can write poetry, for example.
oops - typo: I that was supposed to read "has had BAD html compliance".
I find it funny that a page "helping" people de-install linux (the 'bashdot.org' link in your article) is shown in a format that gets garbled on browsers people are likely to be using under linux (I tried with mozilla, and it ended up writing lines of text on top of each other into a scribbly black mess. making much of it unreadable.) Now, I realize Mozilla has had html compliance before so I double-checked the site against w3.org's validator, and it generates about 100 errors - andI tried all the version of html the page had, XHTML, HTML4.01 both transitional and strict), HTML 3.2, HTML 2.0 - They all said it was messed up. (what confused mozilla is the plethora of cases where a closing tag exists for which there was no opening tag (it has a about four times, for example.)
And it's not even that complicated a page. It's just one page with some numbered lists and some paragraphs and bullet points and header size changes. All generic simple stuff that it shouldn't be getting wrong.
And of course the judges ignored (or knew perfectly well but *wanted* a meaningless settlement) that it's irrelevant that you realease 99% of the API if you hold on to that last 1% that does security and is necessary to get just about anything at all done on the machine. Consider the DeCSS situation: The thing that's holding up DVD software for Linux is
one freakin' little paragraph of code that already got reverse engineeried but still can't be used legally.
The main reason for the differences in the pricing between countries, when that pricing comes from the company itself (as in the case of DVD's and this Nintendo incident) and not from government tarrifs, is simply that the companies want to charge whatever they think the market will bear, but the markets in different countries aren't the same. People in rich countries and/or countries where the populace is willing to pay a lot for entertainment will be willing to buy the same DVD for a bigger price, but price the DVD at that price in a country where the people are a little less rich and it won't do very well. The problem comes in when they create technologies that attempt to enforce this pricing to the detriment of usability or freedom. I don't care about the Nintendo pricing too much, because it was still legal to buy one from another country if you wanted to do the effort. The DVD region encoding is much more insidious becasue the technology doesn't work if people are allowed to build their own DVD players however they like - and so accompanying the region technology is a bunch of rules that restrict the free flow of information about how to build a DVD player (or at least the crucial decrypting component) - essentially turning technical competence into a crime.
Note that the only multi-region players that are being sold are old models. Wonder why that is?
The reason you can't compete isn't because you suck at being a hardware store. It's because the "operate at a loss" model of business isn't sustainable unless you balance it with a "operate at a profit" elsewhere. The only way to start a new hardware store to compete with home depot is: 1 - It has to be a large chain in all the same locations Home depot is in, so Home depot cannot fund their "operate at a loss" model with profitable stores outside your company's area. 2 - The only way to build that up from the ground is to have it magically appear all at once across the nation with many outlet stores. You can't do it by growing a smaller local business up into a larger national one.
There exist market forces that allow a geographically large company to undercut the prices of a geographically small company so long as they do it in only a few geographical areas at a time.
It's worse than that. He didn't violate any US law. If a law says an activity is illegal in the US, and you perform that activity outside the US, you haven't actually broken that law. It's not JUST that he's not a US citizen that's a problme. It's not JUST that he performed the "crime" in the other country, but that in the location he performed it, it was perfectly legal (in fact, it actually HELPS uphold the law since there is a Russian law that says you mustn't be prevented from making safe backups of digital stuff you purchase, which Dimitri's software made possible.)
The article to which we are responding is evidence against that claim.
He only got something out of the deal IF he buys another product. If he doesn't, then NO he did not get a damn thing out of the deal.
Do you think there would be anything wrong with a company saying, "We'll sell our product to white people at price X, black people at price Y, and Asians at price Z." I doubt you would say that's okay, but if you want to be CONSISTENT, you'd have to, since right now you're saying it's okay for a company to say, "If you're German your price is different than if you're Irish" and you're defending that.
But the title doesn't tell you which is which. Just because it's called "junkyard wars" doesn't mean it's filmed in the US. The title depends on where you watch it, NOT where it was filmed. Both the UK filmings and the US filmings had been shown in both countries. The original poster said that the Junkyard wars episodes were filmed in the US and the scrapheap challenge ones were filmed in the UK - seemingly ignorant of the fact that the very same footage ends up being turned into two different shows, with the title depending on where you watch it, not where it was filmed.
I doubt the testing and the bulding were really one day apart. They probably pooled together all the ones they wanted to test in California and went there in one trip to film all of them.
The scraphead challenge scrapheap, and the junkyard wars junkyard are actually the same place. The shows are the same exact footage. The only difference was the title logos that would appear. Why there was a need to rename it for the American TV I don't know. I remember on several occasions on "Junkyard Wars" hearing people uttering the phrase "scrapheap challenge" despite the fact that I was watching something called "Junkyard Wars". They just renamed it and used the same footage, possibly edited a bit for American TV commercial spacing.