Actually, there is a difference between money capitalism and free market capitalism.
American's rarely make that distinction. Our politicians point to global giants like General Motors, IBM, and Microsoft while simultaneously quoting Adam Smith.
Most folks who quote Smith have never completely read Wealth of Nations. If they had, they wouldn't make such foolish mistakes as attending industry forums while lauding his work. Smith thought industry trade groups were scum.
Those bright lights you see illuminating the night sky over Las Vegas are powered by the spinning of Adam Smith's body in his grave at the mere suggestion that we protect a market from competition.
The anti-capitalists are those who have never read Smith's tirades against corporate interests who use the government to protect their markets.
I don't know what university you attended, but the professors I studied under spanned the polical spectrum. Most were libertarian in their approach to government, but were more pragmatic than the Libertarian Party in that they realize that governments do not operate without revenue.
Nice attempt at a troll, though. The particular political rhetoric you apply, however, is getting rather stale and threadbare.
Maybe that's what the recent increase in SCO astroturfing is in anticipation of. Perhaps they will attempt to drive up stock prices just ONE MORE TIME before they release the data showing they are hemmoraging money.
There wasn't a question posed. The poster mearly disagreed my characterization of OSs as commodities.
Your entire argument rests on this flawed premise.
Perhaps you could dissect my entire argument and show me where it is flawed.
Are you saying that Microsoft's use of the Thai government doesn't constitute corporate welfare, or are you in disagreement with my contention that Microsoft did not envision itself as a computer language company when they first incorporated in Albuquerque?
Not everything that I posted was predicated on operating systems being a commodity.
Re:MS Tried This Before Through Best Buy
on
You've Got PC
·
· Score: 1
It's actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it is still regarded as slangy...
Great thing about the American culture, eh? We keep our language alive through a continual process of integrating slang into modern converational style. The fact that you cite, respectively, a 60 and 40 year old usage reference indicates that you haven't spent a great deal of time in the States.
There are local variations of English in the US that you probably wouldn't recognize as derivatives of the "mother tongue". One fine way to discover how richly diverse American English has become is to travel from Maine to Florida through the original Colonial America. I doubt you would be able to make sense of the dialect spoken by people living in the back country of West Virginia after having spent a week hanging around New York City. Nor would you be able to find much in the way of similarity between English spoken in the French Quarter of New Orleans and Atlanta, Georgia.
I come from a region of the US where we speak "West Coast-ese". That particular dialect is the one you hear "talking heads" use on television.
In the US, English can be your first, second, or third language depending on where you are geographically.
Until all my binaries run the same way under Windows, Linux, and OS X, the operating system is not a true commodity.
There is sufficent interchangability to regard OSs as commodities. I run Windows and Apple applications on Linux.
There are several categories of cross-platform apps, not just individual applications.
The fact that you cannot execute some MS binaries on Linux is hardly relevant to the end user. Can they switch between one computer and another and not see too much difference in the applications? If the answer is yes, then the underlying OS is irrelevant.
MS Tried This Before Through Best Buy
on
You've Got PC
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
And other outlets. You bought a rock-bottom priced PC and you were obliged to use MSN for 3 years.
After calculating the high cost of MSN service versus using a local ISP, you could have spent the difference in the contract price and bought yourself a really nice PC.
I could care less if Microsoft produced a cut-rate version of their software. I could care less if they give it away. They are a competitor and they have to respond to the market. The market now says "OSs are commodity". Microsoft will continue to capture all the revenue they can from that stream as long as they can. Remember, Microsoft initially wanted to be a computer language company. DOS was going to be the cash cow they relied on to continue their development of assembler, fortran, C, etc.
What pisses me off is that the Thai government is going to HELP Microsoft in spreading the deployment of XP Lite. I know that many Microsoft supporters will chime in about Munich's recent decision to move forward with Linux. This is different than a government making a purchasing decision for themselves and coming up with XP or Linux as the OS choice. Instead, the Thai government is helping with the deployment in non-government settings.
Nothing annoys me more than corporate welfare. The Thai government is supporting one of the richest companies in the world.
I for one wish to live in a civil society and watch my children (and eventually my grandchildren) grow up in one as well.
You have a better chance of being killed in your car in an accident on your way to work than being a victim of terrorism. That is a fact.
It is childish to believe that the State's sole function is to protect everyone of its citizens from every possible fate. Do you support wrapping every person, from birth, in bubble wrap to protect them from injury?
We all have a responsibility to protect each other. Installing cameras in every public venue only provides the public with a false sense of security.
If you are such a fan of surveillance, then tell me why the surveillance system maintained by the CIA and the NSA failed to detect terrorist activities in the US and abroad?
The only truly successful intelligence program is one that relies primarily on personal contact, human intelligence. Just ask the US Justice Department. That is the program they used to break the back of the Italian Mafia on the East Coast.
What activities are you doing that are being repressed?
Political actitivity.
When the State has cameras at every vantage point in public spaces, their presence has a tendency to squelch legitimate political discourse (e.g., rallies).
Just how long do you think it will take for the first elected official to use the public surveillance system for political activities?
Are you that trusting that you believe that the surveillance world you crave will not be used for the purposes you didn't intend?
Why bother masquerading this as news? We all know it's just another chance to rant and make lame Darl McBride jokes. Why not just post the article as "SCO sucks and we hate them, read for comments"?
You are hearby ordered by this court to attend regular anger management classes at the location set out by the Department of Corrections until such time as we give a flying fuck what you think.
Microsoft would have never reached the level of penetration they have to date. Keep in mind that everything that was done in personal computing in the mid- to late-80s was easier on a Mac than on a WinTel platform - hands down, no argument.
No argument there. Microsoft beat out the Mac because it ran on the cheaper x86 hardware.
The cost of hardware these days is irrelevant. The cost of software, however, is becoming increasingly relevant.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Let me draw the lines in... Mac was easier to use than Windows but Windows was cheaper to run. Windows is supposedly easier to use than Linux but...
I'm already with you. I think one of the remarkable things about that line of reasoning is that the 'better' system hardly relies on what the user finds easier to use. It is cold, hard economics.
The Third World will hardly consider ease of use a compelling reason to chose an operating system in their march to the global economy. These are societies that still use shovels and picks to do work where bulldozers and backhoes clearly are much easier to use.
On that score, the Industrialized World is already at a disadvantage for being so Microsoft-centric. In order to adapt the financial systems of the developing countries (where labor is cheap) with the financial systems of the G8, a lingua franca of operating systems will eventually become necessary.
I can't see Microsoft's market dominance making any difference in that economic analysis at all. Forcing developing countries to spend more on software that ensures interoperability while simultaneously eraseing the economic advantage that they have in labor is a non-starter.
The developed world will eventually start using open source software to merge with the developing world, not the other way around.
The irony is, is that you say American's don't think science is sexy on an American site loaded with geeks (very many of which are American) who do.
You must suffer from the Alanis Morissette syndrome of not being able to identify irony.
The 'fact' is, the readers of Slashdot do not constitute even 1/10 of 1% of the US population. If you take a poll of people on the street, I doubt even one in ten has ever heard of Slashdot. And if you ask those same Americans about how they feel about the fundamental facts of science, you will find that most of them don't know squat.
Your attempt to support your position that Americans are "science friendly" by pointing to when the article first appeared is misdirected. I didn't say that Americans don't cover science news at all. I just made the observation that Americans are, in general, more interested in whether Britney Spears has had a boob-job than whether fundamental research gets funded this year.
As for being correct, I think that a close inspection of the facts as they stand will support my original post quite well.
And as an American, it is my sworn duty to take a jab at the country I love.
Microsoft would have never reached the level of penetration they have to date. Keep in mind that everything that was done in personal computing in the mid- to late-80s was easier on a Mac than on a WinTel platform - hands down, no argument.
The same arguments used against Microsoft's platform are now wielded as a weapon against their enemies. I remember the constant flame-fests between Mac and DOS users and how each of their respective platforms were "the best". Unfortunately for Microsoft, there are still things that are easier to do on a Mac than on WinTel PC - hands down. This is true despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by Microsoft.
So the usability argument has proven to be an historically inaccurate guide to whether a particular operating system will gain prevalence.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there is a difference between money capitalism and free market capitalism.
American's rarely make that distinction. Our politicians point to global giants like General Motors, IBM, and Microsoft while simultaneously quoting Adam Smith.
Most folks who quote Smith have never completely read Wealth of Nations. If they had, they wouldn't make such foolish mistakes as attending industry forums while lauding his work. Smith thought industry trade groups were scum.
More stuff Slashdot didn't publish.
I agree.
Those bright lights you see illuminating the night sky over Las Vegas are powered by the spinning of Adam Smith's body in his grave at the mere suggestion that we protect a market from competition.
The anti-capitalists are those who have never read Smith's tirades against corporate interests who use the government to protect their markets.
More stuff Slashdot didn't publish.
I don't know what university you attended, but the professors I studied under spanned the polical spectrum. Most were libertarian in their approach to government, but were more pragmatic than the Libertarian Party in that they realize that governments do not operate without revenue.
Nice attempt at a troll, though. The particular political rhetoric you apply, however, is getting rather stale and threadbare.
We don't need no stinken' FIRE from false prophets.
It is well ESTABLISHED that the WORLD will be CONSUMED by a CORONAL MASS EJECTION. This was PROPHESIZED to Charles Cagle by our LORD.
Just buy one of these handy SKYBOLT Singularity KatalYsiert Beam Output Low Temperature Fusion power devices.
Amen.
To be fair, if you installed a stock version of Slackware from 1996 on the net, without a firewall, you would be subject to known exploits...
Oh, CRAP!! (runs from room to find server and power switch)
The 2003 third quarter results were posted on September 15, 2003.
Here's the last quarterlies.
Maybe that's what the recent increase in SCO astroturfing is in anticipation of. Perhaps they will attempt to drive up stock prices just ONE MORE TIME before they release the data showing they are hemmoraging money.
The answer is no..
There wasn't a question posed. The poster mearly disagreed my characterization of OSs as commodities.
Your entire argument rests on this flawed premise.
Perhaps you could dissect my entire argument and show me where it is flawed.
Are you saying that Microsoft's use of the Thai government doesn't constitute corporate welfare, or are you in disagreement with my contention that Microsoft did not envision itself as a computer language company when they first incorporated in Albuquerque?
Not everything that I posted was predicated on operating systems being a commodity.
That MSN PC must have been a hard sale.
The promotion lasted about a year, maybe less.
It's actually a very interesting linguistic development. But it is still regarded as slangy...
Great thing about the American culture, eh? We keep our language alive through a continual process of integrating slang into modern converational style. The fact that you cite, respectively, a 60 and 40 year old usage reference indicates that you haven't spent a great deal of time in the States.
There are local variations of English in the US that you probably wouldn't recognize as derivatives of the "mother tongue". One fine way to discover how richly diverse American English has become is to travel from Maine to Florida through the original Colonial America. I doubt you would be able to make sense of the dialect spoken by people living in the back country of West Virginia after having spent a week hanging around New York City. Nor would you be able to find much in the way of similarity between English spoken in the French Quarter of New Orleans and Atlanta, Georgia.
I come from a region of the US where we speak "West Coast-ese". That particular dialect is the one you hear "talking heads" use on television.
In the US, English can be your first, second, or third language depending on where you are geographically.
Until all my binaries run the same way under Windows, Linux, and OS X, the operating system is not a true commodity.
There is sufficent interchangability to regard OSs as commodities. I run Windows and Apple applications on Linux.
There are several categories of cross-platform apps, not just individual applications.
The fact that you cannot execute some MS binaries on Linux is hardly relevant to the end user. Can they switch between one computer and another and not see too much difference in the applications? If the answer is yes, then the underlying OS is irrelevant.
And other outlets. You bought a rock-bottom priced PC and you were obliged to use MSN for 3 years.
After calculating the high cost of MSN service versus using a local ISP, you could have spent the difference in the contract price and bought yourself a really nice PC.
You really don't care who you might potentially harm in your undying quest to push your own adjenda do you?
Wouldn't care to elaborate on that, would you?
I'd rate this article "Small and petty minded".
Considering that fact that you are posting AC, that opinion is worth about as much as the stuff that loads my nephews diaper.
"I could care less..."
It is a colloquial expression equivalent to the phrase "It doesn't bother me...".
A course in conversational English is in your future.
I never said it had to make sense. ;)
Then perhaps you could enlighten us about where his analysis is wrong instead of claiming that it is wrong.
Too difficult?
This isnt about reducing the size of windows..
It is about reducing the size of Windows XP so that they can reduce the cost of Windows XP in Asian markets.
Several articles have already circulated describing the XP Lite version as "hobbled".
The sales technique is described as a loss leader.
I could care less if Microsoft produced a cut-rate version of their software. I could care less if they give it away. They are a competitor and they have to respond to the market. The market now says "OSs are commodity". Microsoft will continue to capture all the revenue they can from that stream as long as they can. Remember, Microsoft initially wanted to be a computer language company. DOS was going to be the cash cow they relied on to continue their development of assembler, fortran, C, etc.
What pisses me off is that the Thai government is going to HELP Microsoft in spreading the deployment of XP Lite. I know that many Microsoft supporters will chime in about Munich's recent decision to move forward with Linux. This is different than a government making a purchasing decision for themselves and coming up with XP or Linux as the OS choice. Instead, the Thai government is helping with the deployment in non-government settings.
Nothing annoys me more than corporate welfare. The Thai government is supporting one of the richest companies in the world.
Fuck you Microsoft.
I for one wish to live in a civil society and watch my children (and eventually my grandchildren) grow up in one as well.
You have a better chance of being killed in your car in an accident on your way to work than being a victim of terrorism. That is a fact.
It is childish to believe that the State's sole function is to protect everyone of its citizens from every possible fate. Do you support wrapping every person, from birth, in bubble wrap to protect them from injury?
We all have a responsibility to protect each other. Installing cameras in every public venue only provides the public with a false sense of security.
If you are such a fan of surveillance, then tell me why the surveillance system maintained by the CIA and the NSA failed to detect terrorist activities in the US and abroad?
The only truly successful intelligence program is one that relies primarily on personal contact, human intelligence. Just ask the US Justice Department. That is the program they used to break the back of the Italian Mafia on the East Coast.
What activities are you doing that are being repressed?
Political actitivity.
When the State has cameras at every vantage point in public spaces, their presence has a tendency to squelch legitimate political discourse (e.g., rallies).
Just how long do you think it will take for the first elected official to use the public surveillance system for political activities?
Are you that trusting that you believe that the surveillance world you crave will not be used for the purposes you didn't intend?
As far as I am concerned that is all the more reason to hunt every last one of the bastards down...
You have just exhibited the difficulty in determine just who the bad guys are:
Sept 1972? Palestinians.
April 1995? Angry White Guy.
July 1996? Angry White Guy.
Sept 2001? Saudis.
Which specific bastards are you going to hunt down?
Do we just completely flush our civil liberties to make certain that we catch the bad guys?
Great idea: become just like our like our enemies!
Why are we fighting them again?
Why bother masquerading this as news? We all know it's just another chance to rant and make lame Darl McBride jokes. Why not just post the article as "SCO sucks and we hate them, read for comments"?
You are hearby ordered by this court to attend regular anger management classes at the location set out by the Department of Corrections until such time as we give a flying fuck what you think.
(WHACK!)
It is so ordered. NEXT CASE!!
Microsoft would have never reached the level of penetration they have to date. Keep in mind that everything that was done in personal computing in the mid- to late-80s was easier on a Mac than on a WinTel platform - hands down, no argument.
No argument there. Microsoft beat out the Mac because it ran on the cheaper x86 hardware.
The cost of hardware these days is irrelevant. The cost of software, however, is becoming increasingly relevant.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Let me draw the lines in... Mac was easier to use than Windows but Windows was cheaper to run. Windows is supposedly easier to use than Linux but...
I'm already with you. I think one of the remarkable things about that line of reasoning is that the 'better' system hardly relies on what the user finds easier to use. It is cold, hard economics.
The Third World will hardly consider ease of use a compelling reason to chose an operating system in their march to the global economy. These are societies that still use shovels and picks to do work where bulldozers and backhoes clearly are much easier to use.
On that score, the Industrialized World is already at a disadvantage for being so Microsoft-centric. In order to adapt the financial systems of the developing countries (where labor is cheap) with the financial systems of the G8, a lingua franca of operating systems will eventually become necessary.
I can't see Microsoft's market dominance making any difference in that economic analysis at all. Forcing developing countries to spend more on software that ensures interoperability while simultaneously eraseing the economic advantage that they have in labor is a non-starter.
The developed world will eventually start using open source software to merge with the developing world, not the other way around.
The irony is, is that you say American's don't think science is sexy on an American site loaded with geeks (very many of which are American) who do.
You must suffer from the Alanis Morissette syndrome of not being able to identify irony.
The 'fact' is, the readers of Slashdot do not constitute even 1/10 of 1% of the US population. If you take a poll of people on the street, I doubt even one in ten has ever heard of Slashdot. And if you ask those same Americans about how they feel about the fundamental facts of science, you will find that most of them don't know squat.
Your attempt to support your position that Americans are "science friendly" by pointing to when the article first appeared is misdirected. I didn't say that Americans don't cover science news at all. I just made the observation that Americans are, in general, more interested in whether Britney Spears has had a boob-job than whether fundamental research gets funded this year.
As for being correct, I think that a close inspection of the facts as they stand will support my original post quite well.
And as an American, it is my sworn duty to take a jab at the country I love.
Microsoft would have never reached the level of penetration they have to date. Keep in mind that everything that was done in personal computing in the mid- to late-80s was easier on a Mac than on a WinTel platform - hands down, no argument.
The same arguments used against Microsoft's platform are now wielded as a weapon against their enemies. I remember the constant flame-fests between Mac and DOS users and how each of their respective platforms were "the best". Unfortunately for Microsoft, there are still things that are easier to do on a Mac than on WinTel PC - hands down. This is true despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by Microsoft.
So the usability argument has proven to be an historically inaccurate guide to whether a particular operating system will gain prevalence.
Microsoft proved it.