Well, a few years ago I was working for an online learning provider, and a number of our courses used a proprietary plugin that was only available for IE. This included our Linux courses, which always made me laugh.
Exactly. And if the server logs start showing a huge number of firefox hits, then it's time to redesign the site. If not, then it's not worth the hassle.
Your argument is starting to fall apart here...;) I'd guess that a better guesstimate of the total number of Windows market share (in terms of numbers of home users) would be more like 75% than 90%
Bollocks.
I have never, ever, seen any seriously researched set of figures giving windows (in it's various flavours) anything less than 90 percent of the desktop market. If you or anyone else would care to link to any research that backs up your 75 per cent claims, I'd love to see it. The top hit in google for "operating system market share" gave me this. They give windows around 94 percent.
I don't use any Windows machines at home - and none of my family/friends do either.
Well, since we're talking anecdotes now, I do not know a single person who does not have at least one windows machine. I know one other person besides myself who runs Linux at home. I don't personally know any Mac users, but my wife has a friend at work who uses a Mac. Oh, and before you tell me my friends are luddites, I had lunch with a bunch of them saturday, and the group included two games developers and three IT support people. All of them use windows exclusively.
massive communities of people running VERY OLD hardware out there and would never dream of switching (C64, Amiga etc etc etc)
You and I clearly have very different definitions of the word massive. I would be amazed if you could find a reputable set of statistics giving those platforms a combined online marketshare of above 0.5 per cent.
The maths is of the situation is really fairly simple:
a = cost of changing website to be standards comliant.
b = cost of business lost from other browser users boycotting your site.
If a > b, then changing the site is stupid. If b > a, not changing it is stupid.
I'm not pretending that every site can just happily ignore the standards, support IE only, and never worry for a second about lost business. But equally, some sites probably only lose a vanishingly small number of customers by not supporting standards. For sites with a tech/geek audience, it's a priority. For sites with older/less tech savvy audiences, it's really not.
"The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients."
And then you say "Nobody here is dumb..."???? Come ON!
About three comments further up, someone posts a story about trying to use an IE only site to open an account. The poster in that comment went through a long, fruitless call to the companies tech support, complained bitterly to them that they did'nt support firefox, and then caved in and used IE.
The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, (Probably over 99% of certain demographics) and every single windows user has a copy of IE. If a firefox user tries to access a site and gets an "IE only" message, he will just click the blue E and get on with it. Both my desktop and my laptop run ubuntu, but if I really needed to access an IE only site, I'd just boot into windows.
It's not a question of how many people use firefox. It's a question of how many people will boycott your site rather than use IE.
Dude, only one in ten people have plans to get Vista. You are talking to an unusual group of people.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if the other nine in ten people plan on buying an OEM PC at any point in the next 5 years, then they will be getting vista whether they want it or not. That's why Dell shipping Linux pre-installed on laptops is such a big deal. "90%" of people don't change the OS their computer runs. I would love to know the breakdown of XP sales between OEM and boxed consumer copy. I would be willing to put money on OEM pre-installs being in a vast majority.
I mean, they don't allow you to sit in the cockpit anymore. Another thing islam has ruined.
--
vi VS emacs arguments are pointless and a waste of time.
vi is the best.
Attacking a religion like that is just pure flamebait.
You probably shouldn't have brought up Islam either.
This is a perfect example of why monopolies are bad. This will resonate all the way down to Joe Sixpack in a form that he'll understand - "Damned 'new' movies don't play in my DVD player." He may not understand the ins and outs of DRM legislation, but he sure as hell knows what getting screwed by the establishment means.
And the establishment will respond thus:
Yeah, that copy protection sure is painful, huh? Goddamn those freedom hating movie pirates for making us put it on there. You know those guys fund terrorists? It's true. The 911 hijackers paid for their flight training with funds made hawking pirate copies of the Phantom Menace. You want to help fight terrorists, don't you Joe? So you don't mind this anti-piracy/anti-terror stuff, do you? Great. Here's a flag. Go back to sleep.
[/channeling inner hicks]
a) The majority is wrong. He is an expert.
b) The majority is right. He is an agent.
The first option is that he is an expert on the subject and
know that the majorities solution is wrong in some way.
The second options is that he works as an agent for
the competitions and is here to ensure that the project fail
How about option C, he thinks is an expert, he thinks the majority is wrong. That's far more common in my experience. Besides, some of the most vicious flame wars I have ever seen are over issues where there is no right or wrong, just differing preferences. You're sort of assuming that anyone flaming on a project mailing list is either a transcendent genius who can see things us mortal cannot, or is a paid agent of the competition. Let me assure you, lots of them are merely opinionated idiots.
The copyright issue pertains to downloads, not physical sales, because it has to do with the legal right to download a song file and save it on your machine. Apple cannot by itself declare that you have the right to do this. That is up to the rights-holders.
I think you missed my point. I'll try again. Apple claim that record companies, under advice from their lawyers, will only allow apple to sell download rights in a single EU state, e.g. istore France can only sell the rights to download a song in France. So, why are they not worried about someone in Germany buying download rights from istore France with a French issued credit card? Under the current system that would be technically possible yet, according to them, illegal. Why are Apple and the record companies not concerned.
Your assumption here is that the law is clear, but the laws are in conflict so it was not so clear.
People keep saying that, but I have yet to have anyone explain exactly how the laws are in conflict. Can you explain it? The only possible "conflict" I can see might be if the copyright laws between , say, France and Germany differed, but even so, it should be possible to grant a licence to download in any EU state, with the proviso that you obey of all the copyright laws of whichever state you happen to reside in. The only people who seem to think this is impossible are the record companies lawyers. Funny how they came to the conclusion that the only legal course of action was the one which would earn the record companies the most money.
In any event, you can already connect to any itunes store, and download music from it, in any EU state. All you need is a credit card issued in the country the store serves. Now I have a friend from Denmark. The next time he's over here, he could log onto iTunes Denmark, and download a track. But he'd be in Britain. So would Apple be in breach of contract when he did that? Should I video him doing it and pass the evidence onto the EU commission?
True enough, but the laws conflict, hence the need for the EU to harmonize copyright.
Rubbish. THe laws may conflict, although Apple have yet to specify how, exactly, but that does not prevent the record companies issuing a pan european license. Besides, I don't even buy that as the problem. Remember, if I'm in France with a German issued credit card, I can buy from the German store. Why aren't they worried about that? There is nothing stopping Apple from issuing pan europena licenses, except for the record companies. so, if you can't do business legally, don't do business.
Apple is not the rights-holder. How could it grant such a license unless the rights-holders give it the power to do so?
True enough, but not the EU's problem. "My contract with my suppliers prevents me from doing business in a legal way" is not a defence. Renegotiate your contract, or don't do business.
Your mistake is trying to equate a download with a CD, when those two things are treated completely differently by EU law. Under EU law, you cannot transfer a copyright (download license) in one country to another, while you can transfer a copy itself (CD).
I don't believe I did any such thing.
So here's the problem. The right to copy a song onto your personal computer in France is considered, under EU law, a different service than the right to download that same song onto your personal computer in Germany because the right to copy it (copyright) is enforced separately in each country.
Bang on. Apple have stated that this is the advice that they recieved from their lawyers. Obviously, someone at the EU commission has a different opinon. Probaly they're thinking something like this. When I buy a track on iTunes, Apple sell me license to download a given track in, say France, in accordence with French copyright law. Now, what, exactly, is stopping them from also granting a license to do the same thing in Germany? Why not just grant a pan-EU licence, outlining the restrictions in each country and stating that the purchaser must obey the restrictions of the country they are currently residing in?
For what it's worth the EU has, for a long time now, been trying to harmonise it's copyright laws amongst its member states. That was one of the original intents of the EU Copyright Directive.
Have you ever looked into the situation. It has been years since the EU ordered the different music licensing cartels across Europe to offer a single, pan-european license and those record company groups have ignored them. Now they're demanding Apple charge the same amount in different countries, when Apple pays a different amount in different countries
Yes, I have looked into the situation, but you obviously haven't, since you completely fail to understand what this case is all about. Apple can charge whatever the hell it wants in each individual country. Want to charge the two euros per track in france and four in germany? Fine.
What the commission is complaining about, and what may very well be determined illegal under EU law, is restricting the sale of French priced tracks only to people with credit cards issued in France. That's what the case is about. If iTunes France wants to charge half the German price, that's fine, but they are not allowed to stop people with German issued credit cards logging on and buying tracks. The EU garuntees free movement of goods, services and people between its member states. Shutting out consumers based on where their cards are issued may well be in violation of this.
Now, you may disagree, and think that imposing this restriction is not in violation of EU law. Fine. But you are grossly misrepresenting the situaton by claiming the EU commission wants Apple to charge the same amount in every country.
Incidently, I agree with the commission on this one. I think refusing to process a credit card tranaction because the card was issued in a different EU state is probably a violation of the single market regulations. In the end, of course, that will be for the courts to decide.
Really, the last time I can remember people rushing out in their masses to buy a windows upgrade was '95. Remember when XP came out? Sure, you get the usual early adopters rushing out to buy the thing on release day, but by and large they sell the things via pre-installs on OEM systems. The AT article points out that the growth in VIsta sales over XP sales track exactly to the growth in PC sales XP's release. That hardly means Vista is a failure, it just means that, like XP, the vast majority of users are waiting till they upgrade their PCs to buy Vista. Vista will almost certainly have a 50 percent or more share of the consumer desktop market in 2 or 3 years time, just like XP did. By the time we get the next windows iteration in 5 years (or whenever) it will have over 80 percent, just like XP does.
Joe user (whoever the hell he is), does not reinstall his OS. Christ, most users have no concept of what an OS is. They buy a PC, they use what comes on it. That's why Linux will never really take off on the home desktop until a large vendor has real success selling pre-installed Linux PCs. Hopefully, Dell are about to do just that.
But still, that's not a fair analogy here. What diebold seem to be claiming (although TFA is sketchy) is that the state have not appled the criteria they siad they were going to, because if they had they would have chosen diebold.
A better analogy would run like this:
A government contract to supply office software is up for grabs. The department in question states they will selecet the bidder with best use of open standards, lowest cost per license and support for the largest number of OSs. No other criteria will be evaluated. They invite bids, evaluate them all, and choose MS Office over OO.o.
Now, whether they have chosen the best office suit or not is a matter of opinion, but there is no way any objective observer could claim MS Office beats OO.o on those criteria . Clearly, choosing MS office would be going against their stated criteria. Therefor, be it due to malice or stupidity, the process has not trated everyone fairly. Maybe they actually tested startup time as well, but forgot to tell the OO'o people they were doing so. If they had, perhaps the OO team might have been able to optimise their start up times further. It might be an honest mistake, but it would still have unfairly handicapped one bidder. That's what Diebold are alleging. Not "no one could ever want to use any other voting machine", but rather "Your criteria are clearly better met by our machine than by the competitions".
Now, I happen to think that they are almost certainly wrong, and hope they lose the court case, but lets not panic about Billy G's lawyers taking up station outside the Apple store just yet.
If it's not an issue of impropriety, then what's the legal basis for the suit? Any lawyers out there who can shed some light on this?
I would imagine the rational goes something like this:
"The secretary of state's office set their requirments for a voting machine contract, and invited bids. We have looked at the bid they accepted, and looked at ours. We believe our bid meets the criteria far more closely than the bid that was accepted, and we think any objective observer would agree. We don't think anything improper went on, but we do believe that the state has not selected a vendor in line with the rules they laid out. There for, the process has not treated us fairly"
In a nutshell, they're saying the state did not fairly apply their own rules. If they had, Diebold believe they would have won.
Wouldn't that be because Micro$oft's software takes up so much screen real estate that below 7 inches there really isn't much space left for users to work with?
The flipstart runs windows. So they seem to disagree with you.
The Mac is all open standards, apart from iTunes Music Store DRM - a Mac is *far* from vendor lock-in; certainly much further from vendor lock in than Microsoft's products. I have had absolutely no problems using things I have created on my PowerBook
I think that by vendor lock in he means hardware lock in. Look at it this way. If you have a bunch of apps and data you use under windows, and decide you want to upgrade your machine, you can buy any PC from any vendor in the world (even Apple) and install XP, then move all your work to that machine. Now, consider the same situation with OSX. You can buy any PC made by Apple. Apple don't make any machines you like? Tough. True, as long as you use open standards you can move your data to a new OS, but if like OSX and want to keep using OSX, you buy Apples hardware or nothing. That is a lock in.
A lot of people who read Slashdot and post here have a lot of influence in what people buy related to IT
Yes, but even assuming this is true, Slasdot is still a terrible place to shill, for several resaons. There's a huge anti-MS bias, and the mod system re-enforces that bias. A pro-MS/RIAA comment is unlikely to get moderrated up, meaning lots of people won't even see it. You would be better shilling on a standard forum, where every reply has equal visibility.
But even more importantly, the slashdot crowd is out and out hostile to MS/RIAA. Now if you're looking to get your moneys woth out of your shill, why waste time shouting at people who think you're the anti-christ? No, you would be better off posting on a forum where a large section of the readers have no strong ingrained views. Those are the kind of people who might be actually be persuaded one way or the other. Say, a BBC discusion on file sharing. That's going to be read by a lot of "average joe" type people. A bit if FUD on there might influence some readers. The same thing posted on slashdot will be flamed and modded into oblivion.
I'm not saying it never happens, I'm sure people have "shilled" on slashdot. I just think it's probably fairly rare. In any case, I think calling someone a shill is pathetic, and I have stopped reading peoples posts beyond that point. Unless people have hard evidence someone is a shill, (and no, holding a given view is not proof) then all they are doing is throwing around baseless insults. If you think someone is a shill, refute their arguments, but don't accuse them of it unless you think you can prove it.
This is mildly amusing for me, 'cause last thread I commented in I was accused of being a RIAA Shill (presumably that poster believes anyone who criticises Apple is a RIAA shill).
[offtopic rant]
I sympathize . I have noticed a growing trend to amongst the more excitable element on slashdot to scream "shill" at anyone with whom they disagree. I was accused of being on the Microsoft payroll twice last week. Presumably I must have taken up a position with them after leaving Nintendo, because I was apparently posting on their behalf around the time of the Wii launch.
The whole thing's just stupid beyond words. If MS or the RIAA were going to hire people to astroturf on their behalf, why in gods name would they waste time posting on slashdot? I could see them paying people to shill on, say, a BBC news discussion forum, but Slashdot? Owing to how the moderation system works, it would take multiple people months to have any success in penetrating the group think, and even if they did manage to earn get their stuff modded up, so what? Preaching pro-RIAA or pro-MS stuff on Slashdot is unlikely to change anyones mind.
[/offtopic rant]
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a few years ago I was working for an online learning provider, and a number of our courses used a proprietary plugin that was only available for IE. This included our Linux courses, which always made me laugh.
Exactly. And if the server logs start showing a huge number of firefox hits, then it's time to redesign the site. If not, then it's not worth the hassle.
Your argument is starting to fall apart here... ;) I'd guess that a better guesstimate of the total number of Windows market share (in terms of numbers of home users) would be more like 75% than 90%
Bollocks.
I have never, ever, seen any seriously researched set of figures giving windows (in it's various flavours) anything less than 90 percent of the desktop market. If you or anyone else would care to link to any research that backs up your 75 per cent claims, I'd love to see it. The top hit in google for "operating system market share" gave me this. They give windows around 94 percent.
I don't use any Windows machines at home - and none of my family/friends do either.
Well, since we're talking anecdotes now, I do not know a single person who does not have at least one windows machine. I know one other person besides myself who runs Linux at home. I don't personally know any Mac users, but my wife has a friend at work who uses a Mac. Oh, and before you tell me my friends are luddites, I had lunch with a bunch of them saturday, and the group included two games developers and three IT support people. All of them use windows exclusively.
massive communities of people running VERY OLD hardware out there and would never dream of switching (C64, Amiga etc etc etc)
You and I clearly have very different definitions of the word massive. I would be amazed if you could find a reputable set of statistics giving those platforms a combined online marketshare of above 0.5 per cent.
The maths is of the situation is really fairly simple:
a = cost of changing website to be standards comliant.
b = cost of business lost from other browser users boycotting your site.
If a > b, then changing the site is stupid. If b > a, not changing it is stupid.
I'm not pretending that every site can just happily ignore the standards, support IE only, and never worry for a second about lost business. But equally, some sites probably only lose a vanishingly small number of customers by not supporting standards. For sites with a tech/geek audience, it's a priority. For sites with older/less tech savvy audiences, it's really not.
"The boss wants to cut costs and doesn't see the choice driving away clients."
..."???? Come ON!
And then you say "Nobody here is dumb
About three comments further up, someone posts a story about trying to use an IE only site to open an account. The poster in that comment went through a long, fruitless call to the companies tech support, complained bitterly to them that they did'nt support firefox, and then caved in and used IE.
The simple fact is that Windows has over 90% of the OS market, (Probably over 99% of certain demographics) and every single windows user has a copy of IE. If a firefox user tries to access a site and gets an "IE only" message, he will just click the blue E and get on with it. Both my desktop and my laptop run ubuntu, but if I really needed to access an IE only site, I'd just boot into windows.
It's not a question of how many people use firefox. It's a question of how many people will boycott your site rather than use IE.
When I bought my Archos gmini, it was the cheapest and smallest 20gb player on the market.
It seems that both is basically security through obscurity, and that has not worked very well in the future.
So tell me.. was Duke Nukem Forever worth the wait?
Dude, only one in ten people have plans to get Vista. You are talking to an unusual group of people.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if the other nine in ten people plan on buying an OEM PC at any point in the next 5 years, then they will be getting vista whether they want it or not. That's why Dell shipping Linux pre-installed on laptops is such a big deal. "90%" of people don't change the OS their computer runs. I would love to know the breakdown of XP sales between OEM and boxed consumer copy. I would be willing to put money on OEM pre-installs being in a vast majority.
I mean, they don't allow you to sit in the cockpit anymore. Another thing islam has ruined.
--
vi VS emacs arguments are pointless and a waste of time.
vi is the best.
Attacking a religion like that is just pure flamebait.
You probably shouldn't have brought up Islam either.
Oh, goodbye karma.
I wonder what form the other three horsemen will take?
This is a perfect example of why monopolies are bad. This will resonate all the way down to Joe Sixpack in a form that he'll understand - "Damned 'new' movies don't play in my DVD player." He may not understand the ins and outs of DRM legislation, but he sure as hell knows what getting screwed by the establishment means.
And the establishment will respond thus:
Yeah, that copy protection sure is painful, huh? Goddamn those freedom hating movie pirates for making us put it on there. You know those guys fund terrorists? It's true. The 911 hijackers paid for their flight training with funds made hawking pirate copies of the Phantom Menace. You want to help fight terrorists, don't you Joe? So you don't mind this anti-piracy/anti-terror stuff, do you? Great. Here's a flag. Go back to sleep. [/channeling inner hicks]
a) The majority is wrong. He is an expert. b) The majority is right. He is an agent. The first option is that he is an expert on the subject and know that the majorities solution is wrong in some way. The second options is that he works as an agent for the competitions and is here to ensure that the project fail
How about option C, he thinks is an expert, he thinks the majority is wrong. That's far more common in my experience. Besides, some of the most vicious flame wars I have ever seen are over issues where there is no right or wrong, just differing preferences. You're sort of assuming that anyone flaming on a project mailing list is either a transcendent genius who can see things us mortal cannot, or is a paid agent of the competition. Let me assure you, lots of them are merely opinionated idiots.
Wooden pencils? Kids today, don't know how easy they've got it. When I wer' a lad, we chiselled everything into stone tablets!
The copyright issue pertains to downloads, not physical sales, because it has to do with the legal right to download a song file and save it on your machine. Apple cannot by itself declare that you have the right to do this. That is up to the rights-holders.
I think you missed my point. I'll try again. Apple claim that record companies, under advice from their lawyers, will only allow apple to sell download rights in a single EU state, e.g. istore France can only sell the rights to download a song in France. So, why are they not worried about someone in Germany buying download rights from istore France with a French issued credit card? Under the current system that would be technically possible yet, according to them, illegal. Why are Apple and the record companies not concerned.
Your assumption here is that the law is clear, but the laws are in conflict so it was not so clear.
People keep saying that, but I have yet to have anyone explain exactly how the laws are in conflict. Can you explain it? The only possible "conflict" I can see might be if the copyright laws between , say, France and Germany differed, but even so, it should be possible to grant a licence to download in any EU state, with the proviso that you obey of all the copyright laws of whichever state you happen to reside in. The only people who seem to think this is impossible are the record companies lawyers. Funny how they came to the conclusion that the only legal course of action was the one which would earn the record companies the most money.
In any event, you can already connect to any itunes store, and download music from it, in any EU state. All you need is a credit card issued in the country the store serves. Now I have a friend from Denmark. The next time he's over here, he could log onto iTunes Denmark, and download a track. But he'd be in Britain. So would Apple be in breach of contract when he did that? Should I video him doing it and pass the evidence onto the EU commission?
True enough, but the laws conflict, hence the need for the EU to harmonize copyright.
Rubbish. THe laws may conflict, although Apple have yet to specify how, exactly, but that does not prevent the record companies issuing a pan european license. Besides, I don't even buy that as the problem. Remember, if I'm in France with a German issued credit card, I can buy from the German store. Why aren't they worried about that? There is nothing stopping Apple from issuing pan europena licenses, except for the record companies. so, if you can't do business legally, don't do business.
Apple is not the rights-holder. How could it grant such a license unless the rights-holders give it the power to do so?
True enough, but not the EU's problem. "My contract with my suppliers prevents me from doing business in a legal way" is not a defence. Renegotiate your contract, or don't do business.
Just curious, why are you running an office suit on your server?
Your mistake is trying to equate a download with a CD, when those two things are treated completely differently by EU law. Under EU law, you cannot transfer a copyright (download license) in one country to another, while you can transfer a copy itself (CD).
I don't believe I did any such thing.
So here's the problem. The right to copy a song onto your personal computer in France is considered, under EU law, a different service than the right to download that same song onto your personal computer in Germany because the right to copy it (copyright) is enforced separately in each country.
Bang on. Apple have stated that this is the advice that they recieved from their lawyers. Obviously, someone at the EU commission has a different opinon. Probaly they're thinking something like this. When I buy a track on iTunes, Apple sell me license to download a given track in, say France, in accordence with French copyright law. Now, what, exactly, is stopping them from also granting a license to do the same thing in Germany? Why not just grant a pan-EU licence, outlining the restrictions in each country and stating that the purchaser must obey the restrictions of the country they are currently residing in?
For what it's worth the EU has, for a long time now, been trying to harmonise it's copyright laws amongst its member states. That was one of the original intents of the EU Copyright Directive.
Have you ever looked into the situation. It has been years since the EU ordered the different music licensing cartels across Europe to offer a single, pan-european license and those record company groups have ignored them. Now they're demanding Apple charge the same amount in different countries, when Apple pays a different amount in different countries
Yes, I have looked into the situation, but you obviously haven't, since you completely fail to understand what this case is all about. Apple can charge whatever the hell it wants in each individual country. Want to charge the two euros per track in france and four in germany? Fine.
What the commission is complaining about, and what may very well be determined illegal under EU law, is restricting the sale of French priced tracks only to people with credit cards issued in France. That's what the case is about. If iTunes France wants to charge half the German price, that's fine, but they are not allowed to stop people with German issued credit cards logging on and buying tracks. The EU garuntees free movement of goods, services and people between its member states. Shutting out consumers based on where their cards are issued may well be in violation of this.
Now, you may disagree, and think that imposing this restriction is not in violation of EU law. Fine. But you are grossly misrepresenting the situaton by claiming the EU commission wants Apple to charge the same amount in every country.
Incidently, I agree with the commission on this one. I think refusing to process a credit card tranaction because the card was issued in a different EU state is probably a violation of the single market regulations. In the end, of course, that will be for the courts to decide.
Really, the last time I can remember people rushing out in their masses to buy a windows upgrade was '95. Remember when XP came out? Sure, you get the usual early adopters rushing out to buy the thing on release day, but by and large they sell the things via pre-installs on OEM systems. The AT article points out that the growth in VIsta sales over XP sales track exactly to the growth in PC sales XP's release. That hardly means Vista is a failure, it just means that, like XP, the vast majority of users are waiting till they upgrade their PCs to buy Vista. Vista will almost certainly have a 50 percent or more share of the consumer desktop market in 2 or 3 years time, just like XP did. By the time we get the next windows iteration in 5 years (or whenever) it will have over 80 percent, just like XP does.
Joe user (whoever the hell he is), does not reinstall his OS. Christ, most users have no concept of what an OS is. They buy a PC, they use what comes on it. That's why Linux will never really take off on the home desktop until a large vendor has real success selling pre-installed Linux PCs. Hopefully, Dell are about to do just that.
But still, that's not a fair analogy here. What diebold seem to be claiming (although TFA is sketchy) is that the state have not appled the criteria they siad they were going to, because if they had they would have chosen diebold.
A better analogy would run like this:
A government contract to supply office software is up for grabs. The department in question states they will selecet the bidder with best use of open standards, lowest cost per license and support for the largest number of OSs. No other criteria will be evaluated. They invite bids, evaluate them all, and choose MS Office over OO.o.
Now, whether they have chosen the best office suit or not is a matter of opinion, but there is no way any objective observer could claim MS Office beats OO.o on those criteria . Clearly, choosing MS office would be going against their stated criteria. Therefor, be it due to malice or stupidity, the process has not trated everyone fairly. Maybe they actually tested startup time as well, but forgot to tell the OO'o people they were doing so. If they had, perhaps the OO team might have been able to optimise their start up times further. It might be an honest mistake, but it would still have unfairly handicapped one bidder. That's what Diebold are alleging. Not "no one could ever want to use any other voting machine", but rather "Your criteria are clearly better met by our machine than by the competitions".
Now, I happen to think that they are almost certainly wrong, and hope they lose the court case, but lets not panic about Billy G's lawyers taking up station outside the Apple store just yet.
If it's not an issue of impropriety, then what's the legal basis for the suit? Any lawyers out there who can shed some light on this?
I would imagine the rational goes something like this:
"The secretary of state's office set their requirments for a voting machine contract, and invited bids. We have looked at the bid they accepted, and looked at ours. We believe our bid meets the criteria far more closely than the bid that was accepted, and we think any objective observer would agree. We don't think anything improper went on, but we do believe that the state has not selected a vendor in line with the rules they laid out. There for, the process has not treated us fairly"
In a nutshell, they're saying the state did not fairly apply their own rules. If they had, Diebold believe they would have won.
Wouldn't that be because Micro$oft's software takes up so much screen real estate that below 7 inches there really isn't much space left for users to work with?
The flipstart runs windows. So they seem to disagree with you.
The Mac is all open standards, apart from iTunes Music Store DRM - a Mac is *far* from vendor lock-in; certainly much further from vendor lock in than Microsoft's products. I have had absolutely no problems using things I have created on my PowerBook
I think that by vendor lock in he means hardware lock in. Look at it this way. If you have a bunch of apps and data you use under windows, and decide you want to upgrade your machine, you can buy any PC from any vendor in the world (even Apple) and install XP, then move all your work to that machine. Now, consider the same situation with OSX. You can buy any PC made by Apple. Apple don't make any machines you like? Tough. True, as long as you use open standards you can move your data to a new OS, but if like OSX and want to keep using OSX, you buy Apples hardware or nothing. That is a lock in.
A lot of people who read Slashdot and post here have a lot of influence in what people buy related to IT
Yes, but even assuming this is true, Slasdot is still a terrible place to shill, for several resaons. There's a huge anti-MS bias, and the mod system re-enforces that bias. A pro-MS/RIAA comment is unlikely to get moderrated up, meaning lots of people won't even see it. You would be better shilling on a standard forum, where every reply has equal visibility.
But even more importantly, the slashdot crowd is out and out hostile to MS/RIAA. Now if you're looking to get your moneys woth out of your shill, why waste time shouting at people who think you're the anti-christ? No, you would be better off posting on a forum where a large section of the readers have no strong ingrained views. Those are the kind of people who might be actually be persuaded one way or the other. Say, a BBC discusion on file sharing. That's going to be read by a lot of "average joe" type people. A bit if FUD on there might influence some readers. The same thing posted on slashdot will be flamed and modded into oblivion.
I'm not saying it never happens, I'm sure people have "shilled" on slashdot. I just think it's probably fairly rare. In any case, I think calling someone a shill is pathetic, and I have stopped reading peoples posts beyond that point. Unless people have hard evidence someone is a shill, (and no, holding a given view is not proof) then all they are doing is throwing around baseless insults. If you think someone is a shill, refute their arguments, but don't accuse them of it unless you think you can prove it.
This is mildly amusing for me, 'cause last thread I commented in I was accused of being a RIAA Shill (presumably that poster believes anyone who criticises Apple is a RIAA shill).
[offtopic rant] I sympathize . I have noticed a growing trend to amongst the more excitable element on slashdot to scream "shill" at anyone with whom they disagree. I was accused of being on the Microsoft payroll twice last week. Presumably I must have taken up a position with them after leaving Nintendo, because I was apparently posting on their behalf around the time of the Wii launch.
The whole thing's just stupid beyond words. If MS or the RIAA were going to hire people to astroturf on their behalf, why in gods name would they waste time posting on slashdot? I could see them paying people to shill on, say, a BBC news discussion forum, but Slashdot? Owing to how the moderation system works, it would take multiple people months to have any success in penetrating the group think, and even if they did manage to earn get their stuff modded up, so what? Preaching pro-RIAA or pro-MS stuff on Slashdot is unlikely to change anyones mind.
[/offtopic rant]
Sorry. Had to get that off my chest