"Get a bunch of us to form a utility company and employ thousands across the US, we'll use our [own] resources and create a new free network."
It appears that you think that building a "free" nationwide network is as easy as developing a "free" operating system. I don't mean to belittle the huge efforts of many people over several years who have constructed the Linux operating system - however, the cost and effort required to build this "free network" would be several orders of magnitude bigger. Why?
1) Scale: do you have any idea how many thousands of kilometres of fibre are in the ground right now? Do you have any idea of the effort required to lay just one kilometre? Linux, at its core, started out as a one-man project. There's no way that this could.
2) Cost of physical plant: you'll be paying billions for fibre and networking hardware. Linux development has no such needs.
3) Cost of Rights-of-way: billions more.
4) Individual contributions: if you want to participate in this project, you'll have to quit your day job. Oh, and you won't get paid for a long time, if at all (remember, it's going to be a "free" network).
5) Individual motivation: I can see where several people would be interested in devoting some of their spare evenings to write a cool image manipulation app, or even a device driver for Linux. Do you think you can find many people willing to dig trenches on the weekend?
Still think its such a good idea? Maybe it is, but certainly not for free.
"I want to be able to have the power that if I provided the hardware and everything on my end that 'they' would let me hook into the internet directly."
'They' (that is, the big boys who own the network) already do let you hook into the internet directly - for a fee. In the article, Uunet is willing to lease what appears to be a 45 Mbit, 530 Km pipe for $120,000 a year, which is quite possibly reasonable by US standards (I know it's dirt-cheap by Canadian standards). I have no idea how many billions of dollars the big boys sunk into the infrastructure to enable such a connection, but I'm sure it's a lot.
It sounds like you want 'them' to hook you in for free. Does your telephone carrier let you hook in for free? Your sewer company? Y'see, regardless of the value of the content content (be it bits, or crap), it costs money to transmit stuff from A to B. This is true even if you own your own hardware (be it telephone, or toilet). If you want a premium connection, be prepared to pay a premium price.
I'm all for technological advancement, and I really, really hope that 20 years from now, my laptop will run all month on a single charge. Heck, I'd be happy if I just didn't have to carry a spare battery on a coast-to-coast flight.
However, the various technologies that go into laptop power management certainly haven't obeyed Moore's Law so far. Case in point: my laptop from 8 years ago gobbled up batteries as quickly as my current model. Reducing CPU power consumption is nice, especially for devices where the CPU is the big consumer (i.e. all those "network appliance" type of applications). For a typical notebook, the bigger gains will come when better technology is developed for power consumption of LCDs, HDDs, CD-ROMS, etc, and for the battery itself. This has been a slow process so far.
3 a : to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process; specifically : to bring an action against b : to proceed with and follow up (a legal action) to proper termination
From the article (the first sentence, actually):
"Napster Inc., makers of controversial MP3 file-sharing software, slapped pop-punk band the Offspring with a legal order Friday"
Unless you're arguing that "slapped... with a legal order" somehow doesn't meet the above definition, that's QED. You can sue without actually seeking monetary damages.
I'm not sure if the Yahoo insider page is updated in a timely matter, however... notice that they are all "planned sales", not actual sales. That's the point of insider trading regulations: Mr. Allen must tell everyone what he's going to do, before he actually does it. So, he may not have sold yet.
Regardless of the timing, he's not hurting. Today's closing price for MSFT (even though its down nearly 20% in the last couple days) is almost exactly the same as it was late last year on the day that the DOJ news hit.
The story doesn't say if "the courts" they refer to are criminal or civil. If it is the latter, then the statement is correct: you CAN'T bad-mouth a company, if you are specifically uttering untrue statements, since you are committing libel and/or slander. Some of the most extreme statements could be criminally prosecuted (i.e. I hate XYZ airlines so much I'm going to plant a bomb on one of their planes).
The press does indeed badmouth companies all the time, and most of the time the facts back them up, so there's nothing the company in question can do about it. However, on the occasions where the press fabricated their "facts" and were caught doing it, it has turned out to be very expensive - recall the expoding gas tank story that burned one newsmagazine (Dateline?) a few years ago.
Since this is court-authorized, Northwest must have been able to demonstrate just cause for doing it.
A comment in the article compared this to a wiretap. However, I think a more accurate comparison would be to compare it to a search warrant with the goal of tracking down more evidence after-the-fact (i.e. written correspondence).
First off, let me say that this is an excellent discussion - one of the best interviews I've seen here in a long time.
In the text above, Jim attempts to define censorship:
"In the narrow sense, it is censorship if the government prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me. In a broader sense, it is censorship if any third person (or software imposed by a third person) prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me."
I entirely agree with his "narrow" definition - I disagree somewhat with his "broad" definition, because if the third person ("person C") legally owns/controls the privately-held communication medium, it is NOT censorship if "person C" prevents communication from "person A" to "person B".
So, in answer to your question, if Warren owns the computer, and he owns the establishment, he is free to install whatever blocking software he wants. This is not "censoring the Internet", it is simply Warren exercising his rights to exert control over his own property.
You may have to buy THIS stock at THIS particular IPO in blocks of 100, but it ain't necessarily so for stock markets in general (although it is certainly a common convention). For example, BRKa traded 310 shares today. BRKb traded 16,660.
Looks like any funny ones have no references
on
Dumb Laws
·
· Score: 1
I've just read a few, but the only one I've read with a specific reference goes like this:
"The new Infant Crib Safety Act in California (AB 3760, Speier), Colorado (SB 98-023,Pascoe and Morrison) and Washington State (SSB 6229, Kohl and Pennington) states that "no commercial user shall manufacture, retrofit, sell, contract to sell or resell, lease, sublet or otherwise place in the stream of commerce, a full-size or non-full-size crib that is unsafe for any infant using the crib."
"Since the computer is a machine developed over many years by many different people, it seems to me that no one should really own the work they do."
Substitute "pen" for "computer" in the above sentence, and see how absurd it sounds.
And yet, both "pen" and "computer" are generic tools, patented by no one (at least in the broad, generic sence), and as such they are available for use by anyone to research and discover new ideas and new processes. Sure, the "computer" is much more powerful and advanced than the "pen" in many ways, but they are still fundamentally both tools (with the current state of computer/AI technology, you could hardly argue it is something greater than simply that).
If you try to use this clause to deny a patent, you will find that it is not nearly as straightforward as it seems. What if part of the process you are patenting involves writing a C++ program, which gets compiled (using a licensed, third party compiler) into machine language?
You're not going to get denied the patent, just because you've used a tool to translate your high level instructions into machine language that you didn't actually "invent". As long as the computer is perceived as a (very powerful and advanced) tool, and not as a separate sentient entity, I don't think this clause can be applied here.
A computer spell-checked this response, and maybe even updated some grammar automatically. Does that mean I didn't write it?
Your point b) is way off base. Why do you think that someone is evil, simple because they choose not to be "devoting their life towards the goal" of helping people that they have never met?
I think you fail to assign a proper priority to the things that should really be important to you. Instead of trying to help 6 billion people equally, I devote my life to helping the people that are important to me. On my priority list, I happen to be tied for #1 (with a very small number of equally important people), so I have no guilt at all about seeing a movie or having a night on the town. Neither should you.
The real evil would be a strict adherence to your doctrine, taking every spare penny over and above the world's average income level, devoting your time and resources to trying to feed the world, and... having the people who are really important to you suffer as a result.
If your daughter was sick, and you needed $100,000 to pay for the cure, and your were just an ordinary Joe without that kind of money to spare, would you a) do everything you could to make her better or b) send $100,000 to the World Health Organization, and possibly immunize thousands of children you don't know. According to your philosophy, the answer is b) - and that, to me, is wrong.
The error in your argument is that you are confusing a monopoly (which is not inherently wrong) with illegal and coercive acts to protect that monopoly (which is inherently wrong).
If Standard Oil ordered people killed to protect their position, that is wrong. If Microsoft broke contracts and committed fraud to protect their position, that is wrong. These are examples of coercive, illegal, and morally wrong actions, and should be prosecuted.
The fact that Standard Oil was a big company with a lot of economic clout, or that Microsoft is a big company now, is neither good nor bad - it is just a fact. It is also a fact that being big provides you with a lot of economic leverage: for example, Microsoft can negotiate an exclusive agreement with a hardware supplier, in the same way that a trade union can negotiate a "closed shop" agreement with an employer. Unfortunately, due to what I consider to be errors of law, one of these can be prosecuted under the Sherman Act, and the other cannot.
The business model is not at all like a feudal lord telling his serfs what to do, precisely because the serfs don't have to listen. The fundamental fact is still that people are free to use their ingenuity to design and implement competing products (which has been done), or to "vote with their wallets" and choose to use competing products (which also has been done, but apparently not been done enough for the DoJ).
I'm not trolling for flames, I'm just looking for real limitations that impact the work you can accomplish (as opposed to limitations that do exist, but don't affect what you do during a normal course of business).
Drive letters: I work with several large power and telecom utility clients in North America. The nature of the applications I work with (GIS) frequently require databases in the order of magnitude of tens of GBs. My clients are roughly equally split between NT and Unix servers. None of them on NT have ever encountered operational limitations due to running out of drive letters.
Back slash/forward slash: good example of something that was a limitation in DOS, but not on NT. The following program compiles and executes fine, whether I use forward slashes or escaped backslashes: #include main() { FILE *f; if ((f = fopen("c:/temp/stuff.txt","r")) == NULL) { printf("Cannot open c:/temp/stuff.txt\n"); exit(1); } printf("Woo hoo\n"); return 0; }
Disorganized directory structure: I can't make a problem go away just by saying it isn't a problem. However, you can't cause a problem just by saying there is one. What specifically is disorganized? I repeat, except for the system-level things that go on under the NT installation directory (which most users never have to muck with), you can (dis)organize your directories however you want.
System crashes: I disagree - system crashes are not an acceptable part of any mindset. Remember I have clients who use NT and clients who use Unix, and they both demand (and receive) the same high level of availability from each.
Single-user mentality: I see your point now (I did misunderstand it in your previous post), but as an application developer this is not a problem. From an OS standpoint, Terminal Server (which I haven't used much) is possibly not as good as Unix tools. However, if I want to develop an application designed to run as an application server (i.e. 3-tier client/server architecture), there are no limitations to doing it that I have encountered. Again, this is based on actual development of applications for power utilities that are designed to support hundreds of users. Mebbe I can't make it work for orders of magnitude more users (or mebbe I can...) - the point is, for realistic use, there is no limitation.
Remember, I'm looking for things that impact me more than once a month. Also, I pretty much implied that I'm looking for things that cause a negative impact - just being different doesn't count. So:
1) Drive letters: not a problem. UNC pathnames. 2) Backslash as a path separator: not a problem. Are you serious? How is this better or worse than a forward slash? Also, I do most source code editing in emacs 19.34, which allows me to use either interchangeably if I really want to. 3) Bad shell: OK, I'll give you that one. I miss find and grep (which are available using other tools in NT) and sed (which isn't, at least not that I've seen). 4) A single-user mentality: not a problem. I'm a single user (tee hee). Seriously, our company uses both NT and Solaris servers, and their performance is interchangeable. 5) Disorganized directory structre: not a problem. Again, this isn't worse or better, just different. I'm free to organize my user files any way I want, and as far as C:\WINNT goes, well, that falls into the "less than once a month" category. 6) System crashes: not a problem. Why is it that only Linux users constantly get Windows BSODs? The only NT server failure we've had in our company in the last 6 months was when I accidentally disconnected the UPS while moving it. My NT laptop has had 2 BSODs, but never during normal usage (both times were powering up from hibernation mode). 7) API: not even an issue - remember, I'm looking for legacy DOS problems.
So, I'll give you 1 out of 7. I'm still looking for more, if anyone else has some ideas...
... for answering one of the original questions in this thread: "how much has 'windows' really changed over the years"?
If Windows NT is re-written from scratch, without any significant and identifiable limitations of its DOS ancestry, it sounds like it has changed a lot.
"a monoply [sic] in a market is like dictatorship in the political realm"
The reason this is wrong is that the market is free. If I don't like Windows, I am free to write my own OS (if I'm extremely resourceful), or to at least help a thousand other friends write it. If my friend sends me a Word document, I can ask him to send me an EBCDIC version instead, if I want do; my friend is free to comply (or not).
In a political tyranny, you are not free. If I don't like the government, there is nothing I can do about it that doesn't involve risking my life. I have no autonomy: I have no control in all of the most important aspects of my life. This is an entirely different situation, and to compare it to having Windows preinstalled on your new PIII is an insulting trivialization.
A) Netscape, thanks to the AOL merger, is still alive and well. In fact, you could easily argue that their radical, open-source change in business model (innovation, anyone?) was a direct result of having to compete with Microsoft.
B) Yes, to use IE you require a Wintel machine. What innovation in the computer industry doesn't have some sort of dependency or prerequisite? Most people on this board would rank the development of Linux as one of the top ten innovations this decade, but you still need some type of hardware (i.e. intelligent toaster or better) to run it.
C) If you created a competing, superior browser, you could charge for it, by the very fact that it is superior. People will pay for superior products, unless you are arguing that individuals cannot think for themselves.
D) (you didn't actually have a "D", but the point is implicit): the car analogy doesn't work at all. The advent of Linux has produced a free OS, and everyone posting here is arguing that the quality of it is improved.
I run Windows NT. Specifically, what are the "restrictive aspects ubiquitous in DOS" that I may suffer from? I'm trying to think of something that would impact my day-to-day work (i.e. would affect me more than once a month or so), and I can't think of any DOS artifact in Windows NT that fits the bill.
Surely some of you OS experts out there can answer this for me. Thanks.
If I were Bill Gates... I've made my billions (most of it in Microsoft stock, but not all of it), and the key people that I work with have made their millions. So, I'd just close up shop. Sell the tangible assets (which doesn't amount to much, since all the value is in product recognition and brilliant minds), give the shareholders all the proceeds (a penny or two on the dollar, to be sure). Buy a nice little island somewhere. Convince a few friends to come along. Establish a government that isn't so preoccupied with interfering with my rights. Let everyone else get on with the business of "innovating", which supposedly has been suppressed by Microsoft's presence.
As a shareholder, this would cost me a few bucks. However - it would be well worth it - as they say, you can't buy happiness...
Slashdot Mirror
"Get a bunch of us to form a utility company and employ thousands across the US, we'll use our [own] resources and create a new free network."
It appears that you think that building a "free" nationwide network is as easy as developing a "free" operating system. I don't mean to belittle the huge efforts of many people over several years who have constructed the Linux operating system - however, the cost and effort required to build this "free network" would be several orders of magnitude bigger. Why?
1) Scale: do you have any idea how many thousands of kilometres of fibre are in the ground right now? Do you have any idea of the effort required to lay just one kilometre? Linux, at its core, started out as a one-man project. There's no way that this could.
2) Cost of physical plant: you'll be paying billions for fibre and networking hardware. Linux development has no such needs.
3) Cost of Rights-of-way: billions more.
4) Individual contributions: if you want to participate in this project, you'll have to quit your day job. Oh, and you won't get paid for a long time, if at all (remember, it's going to be a "free" network).
5) Individual motivation: I can see where several people would be interested in devoting some of their spare evenings to write a cool image manipulation app, or even a device driver for Linux. Do you think you can find many people willing to dig trenches on the weekend?
Still think its such a good idea? Maybe it is, but certainly not for free.
"I want to be able to have the power that if I provided the hardware and everything on my end that 'they' would let me hook into the internet directly."
'They' (that is, the big boys who own the network) already do let you hook into the internet directly - for a fee. In the article, Uunet is willing to lease what appears to be a 45 Mbit, 530 Km pipe for $120,000 a year, which is quite possibly reasonable by US standards (I know it's dirt-cheap by Canadian standards). I have no idea how many billions of dollars the big boys sunk into the infrastructure to enable such a connection, but I'm sure it's a lot.
It sounds like you want 'them' to hook you in for free. Does your telephone carrier let you hook in for free? Your sewer company? Y'see, regardless of the value of the content content (be it bits, or crap), it costs money to transmit stuff from A to B. This is true even if you own your own hardware (be it telephone, or toilet). If you want a premium connection, be prepared to pay a premium price.
I'm all for technological advancement, and I really, really hope that 20 years from now, my laptop will run all month on a single charge. Heck, I'd be happy if I just didn't have to carry a spare battery on a coast-to-coast flight.
However, the various technologies that go into laptop power management certainly haven't obeyed Moore's Law so far. Case in point: my laptop from 8 years ago gobbled up batteries as quickly as my current model. Reducing CPU power consumption is nice, especially for devices where the CPU is the big consumer (i.e. all those "network appliance" type of applications). For a typical notebook, the bigger gains will come when better technology is developed for power consumption of LCDs, HDDs, CD-ROMS, etc, and for the battery itself. This has been a slow process so far.
I'm not throwing away my second battery just yet.
From m-w.com:
... with a legal order" somehow doesn't meet the above definition, that's QED. You can sue without actually seeking monetary damages.
SUE
3 a : to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process; specifically : to bring an action against b : to proceed with and follow up (a legal action) to proper termination
From the article (the first sentence, actually):
"Napster Inc., makers of controversial MP3 file-sharing software, slapped pop-punk band the Offspring with a legal order Friday"
Unless you're arguing that "slapped
I'm not sure if the Yahoo insider page is updated in a timely matter, however... notice that they are all "planned sales", not actual sales. That's the point of insider trading regulations: Mr. Allen must tell everyone what he's going to do, before he actually does it. So, he may not have sold yet.
Regardless of the timing, he's not hurting. Today's closing price for MSFT (even though its down nearly 20% in the last couple days) is almost exactly the same as it was late last year on the day that the DOJ news hit.
"there was no mention ... that a warrant was acquired for the search"
Re-read the title of the article. The first three words are "Court authorizes search". Clearly, a warrant was indeed obtained.
The story doesn't say if "the courts" they refer to are criminal or civil. If it is the latter, then the statement is correct: you CAN'T bad-mouth a company, if you are specifically uttering untrue statements, since you are committing libel and/or slander. Some of the most extreme statements could be criminally prosecuted (i.e. I hate XYZ airlines so much I'm going to plant a bomb on one of their planes).
The press does indeed badmouth companies all the time, and most of the time the facts back them up, so there's nothing the company in question can do about it. However, on the occasions where the press fabricated their "facts" and were caught doing it, it has turned out to be very expensive - recall the expoding gas tank story that burned one newsmagazine (Dateline?) a few years ago.
Since this is court-authorized, Northwest must have been able to demonstrate just cause for doing it.
A comment in the article compared this to a wiretap. However, I think a more accurate comparison would be to compare it to a search warrant with the goal of tracking down more evidence after-the-fact (i.e. written correspondence).
Oh, and I think race had something to do with it too...
First off, let me say that this is an excellent discussion - one of the best interviews I've seen here in a long time.
In the text above, Jim attempts to define censorship:
"In the narrow sense, it is censorship if the government prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me. In a broader sense, it is censorship if any third person (or software imposed by a third person) prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me."
I entirely agree with his "narrow" definition - I disagree somewhat with his "broad" definition, because if the third person ("person C") legally owns/controls the privately-held communication medium, it is NOT censorship if "person C" prevents communication from "person A" to "person B".
So, in answer to your question, if Warren owns the computer, and he owns the establishment, he is free to install whatever blocking software he wants. This is not "censoring the Internet", it is simply Warren exercising his rights to exert control over his own property.
You may have to buy THIS stock at THIS particular IPO in blocks of 100, but it ain't necessarily so for stock markets in general (although it is certainly a common convention). For example, BRKa traded 310 shares today. BRKb traded 16,660.
I've just read a few, but the only one I've read with a specific reference goes like this:
"The new Infant Crib Safety Act in California (AB 3760, Speier), Colorado (SB 98-023,Pascoe and Morrison) and Washington State (SSB 6229, Kohl and Pennington) states that "no commercial user shall manufacture, retrofit, sell, contract to sell or resell, lease, sublet or otherwise place in the stream of commerce, a full-size or non-full-size crib that is unsafe for any infant using the crib."
Doesn't seem particularly dumb to me.
"Since the computer is a machine developed over many years by many different people, it seems to me that no one should really own the work they do."
Substitute "pen" for "computer" in the above sentence, and see how absurd it sounds.
And yet, both "pen" and "computer" are generic tools, patented by no one (at least in the broad, generic sence), and as such they are available for use by anyone to research and discover new ideas and new processes. Sure, the "computer" is much more powerful and advanced than the "pen" in many ways, but they are still fundamentally both tools (with the current state of computer/AI technology, you could hardly argue it is something greater than simply that).
If you try to use this clause to deny a patent, you will find that it is not nearly as straightforward as it seems. What if part of the process you are patenting involves writing a C++ program, which gets compiled (using a licensed, third party compiler) into machine language?
You're not going to get denied the patent, just because you've used a tool to translate your high level instructions into machine language that you didn't actually "invent". As long as the computer is perceived as a (very powerful and advanced) tool, and not as a separate sentient entity, I don't think this clause can be applied here.
A computer spell-checked this response, and maybe even updated some grammar automatically. Does that mean I didn't write it?
Your point b) is way off base. Why do you think that someone is evil, simple because they choose not to be "devoting their life towards the goal" of helping people that they have never met?
I think you fail to assign a proper priority to the things that should really be important to you. Instead of trying to help 6 billion people equally, I devote my life to helping the people that are important to me. On my priority list, I happen to be tied for #1 (with a very small number of equally important people), so I have no guilt at all about seeing a movie or having a night on the town. Neither should you.
The real evil would be a strict adherence to your doctrine, taking every spare penny over and above the world's average income level, devoting your time and resources to trying to feed the world, and... having the people who are really important to you suffer as a result.
If your daughter was sick, and you needed $100,000 to pay for the cure, and your were just an ordinary Joe without that kind of money to spare, would you a) do everything you could to make her better or b) send $100,000 to the World Health Organization, and possibly immunize thousands of children you don't know. According to your philosophy, the answer is b) - and that, to me, is wrong.
The error in your argument is that you are confusing a monopoly (which is not inherently wrong) with illegal and coercive acts to protect that monopoly (which is inherently wrong).
If Standard Oil ordered people killed to protect their position, that is wrong. If Microsoft broke contracts and committed fraud to protect their position, that is wrong. These are examples of coercive, illegal, and morally wrong actions, and should be prosecuted.
The fact that Standard Oil was a big company with a lot of economic clout, or that Microsoft is a big company now, is neither good nor bad - it is just a fact. It is also a fact that being big provides you with a lot of economic leverage: for example, Microsoft can negotiate an exclusive agreement with a hardware supplier, in the same way that a trade union can negotiate a "closed shop" agreement with an employer. Unfortunately, due to what I consider to be errors of law, one of these can be prosecuted under the Sherman Act, and the other cannot.
The business model is not at all like a feudal lord telling his serfs what to do, precisely because the serfs don't have to listen. The fundamental fact is still that people are free to use their ingenuity to design and implement competing products (which has been done), or to "vote with their wallets" and choose to use competing products (which also has been done, but apparently not been done enough for the DoJ).
I'm not trolling for flames, I'm just looking for real limitations that impact the work you can accomplish (as opposed to limitations that do exist, but don't affect what you do during a normal course of business).
Drive letters: I work with several large power and telecom utility clients in North America. The nature of the applications I work with (GIS) frequently require databases in the order of magnitude of tens of GBs. My clients are roughly equally split between NT and Unix servers. None of them on NT have ever encountered operational limitations due to running out of drive letters.
Back slash/forward slash: good example of something that was a limitation in DOS, but not on NT. The following program compiles and executes fine, whether I use forward slashes or escaped backslashes:
#include
main()
{
FILE *f;
if ((f = fopen("c:/temp/stuff.txt","r")) == NULL) {
printf("Cannot open c:/temp/stuff.txt\n");
exit(1);
}
printf("Woo hoo\n");
return 0;
}
Disorganized directory structure: I can't make a problem go away just by saying it isn't a problem. However, you can't cause a problem just by saying there is one. What specifically is disorganized? I repeat, except for the system-level things that go on under the NT installation directory (which most users never have to muck with), you can (dis)organize your directories however you want.
System crashes: I disagree - system crashes are not an acceptable part of any mindset. Remember I have clients who use NT and clients who use Unix, and they both demand (and receive) the same high level of availability from each.
Single-user mentality: I see your point now (I did misunderstand it in your previous post), but as an application developer this is not a problem. From an OS standpoint, Terminal Server (which I haven't used much) is possibly not as good as Unix tools. However, if I want to develop an application designed to run as an application server (i.e. 3-tier client/server architecture), there are no limitations to doing it that I have encountered. Again, this is based on actual development of applications for power utilities that are designed to support hundreds of users. Mebbe I can't make it work for orders of magnitude more users (or mebbe I can...) - the point is, for realistic use, there is no limitation.
Remember, I'm looking for things that impact me more than once a month. Also, I pretty much implied that I'm looking for things that cause a negative impact - just being different doesn't count. So:
1) Drive letters: not a problem. UNC pathnames.
2) Backslash as a path separator: not a problem. Are you serious? How is this better or worse than a forward slash? Also, I do most source code editing in emacs 19.34, which allows me to use either interchangeably if I really want to.
3) Bad shell: OK, I'll give you that one. I miss find and grep (which are available using other tools in NT) and sed (which isn't, at least not that I've seen).
4) A single-user mentality: not a problem. I'm a single user (tee hee). Seriously, our company uses both NT and Solaris servers, and their performance is interchangeable.
5) Disorganized directory structre: not a problem. Again, this isn't worse or better, just different. I'm free to organize my user files any way I want, and as far as C:\WINNT goes, well, that falls into the "less than once a month" category.
6) System crashes: not a problem. Why is it that only Linux users constantly get Windows BSODs? The only NT server failure we've had in our company in the last 6 months was when I accidentally disconnected the UPS while moving it. My NT laptop has had 2 BSODs, but never during normal usage (both times were powering up from hibernation mode).
7) API: not even an issue - remember, I'm looking for legacy DOS problems.
So, I'll give you 1 out of 7. I'm still looking for more, if anyone else has some ideas...
Try: 1-800-WWW-DELL (1-800-999-3355). Works in Canada. Can distribute with Linux. QED.
... for answering one of the original questions in this thread: "how much has 'windows' really changed over the years"?
If Windows NT is re-written from scratch, without any significant and identifiable limitations of its DOS ancestry, it sounds like it has changed a lot.
"a monoply [sic] in a market is like dictatorship in the political realm"
The reason this is wrong is that the market is free. If I don't like Windows, I am free to write my own OS (if I'm extremely resourceful), or to at least help a thousand other friends write it. If my friend sends me a Word document, I can ask him to send me an EBCDIC version instead, if I want do; my friend is free to comply (or not).
In a political tyranny, you are not free. If I don't like the government, there is nothing I can do about it that doesn't involve risking my life. I have no autonomy: I have no control in all of the most important aspects of my life. This is an entirely different situation, and to compare it to having Windows preinstalled on your new PIII is an insulting trivialization.
A) Netscape, thanks to the AOL merger, is still alive and well. In fact, you could easily argue that their radical, open-source change in business model (innovation, anyone?) was a direct result of having to compete with Microsoft.
B) Yes, to use IE you require a Wintel machine. What innovation in the computer industry doesn't have some sort of dependency or prerequisite? Most people on this board would rank the development of Linux as one of the top ten innovations this decade, but you still need some type of hardware (i.e. intelligent toaster or better) to run it.
C) If you created a competing, superior browser, you could charge for it, by the very fact that it is superior. People will pay for superior products, unless you are arguing that individuals cannot think for themselves.
D) (you didn't actually have a "D", but the point is implicit): the car analogy doesn't work at all. The advent of Linux has produced a free OS, and everyone posting here is arguing that the quality of it is improved.
I run Windows NT. Specifically, what are the "restrictive aspects ubiquitous in DOS" that I may suffer from? I'm trying to think of something that would impact my day-to-day work (i.e. would affect me more than once a month or so), and I can't think of any DOS artifact in Windows NT that fits the bill.
Surely some of you OS experts out there can answer this for me. Thanks.
I agree wholeheartedly.
If I were Bill Gates... I've made my billions (most of it in Microsoft stock, but not all of it), and the key people that I work with have made their millions. So, I'd just close up shop. Sell the tangible assets (which doesn't amount to much, since all the value is in product recognition and brilliant minds), give the shareholders all the proceeds (a penny or two on the dollar, to be sure). Buy a nice little island somewhere. Convince a few friends to come along. Establish a government that isn't so preoccupied with interfering with my rights. Let everyone else get on with the business of "innovating", which supposedly has been suppressed by Microsoft's presence.
As a shareholder, this would cost me a few bucks. However - it would be well worth it - as they say, you can't buy happiness...
Unless you can demonstrate that Best Buy has monopoly power in PC sales, your statement has no relevance. I can just buy my PC somewhere else.