I really don't understand what the big advantage is in using package managers. It's dangerous because you never know what "updates" will come down the pike.
Normal people don't want to have to keep up on what the latest version of everything is as it comes out and what security holes are in it. That's one of the main reasons people use distributions instead of hacking together their own. People want knowledgeable experts to make the decisions and let the computer do the rest.
The simple fix is to change the client so that it never regresses (e.g., never installs software older than what it already has installed).
That's a start, but then they can just keep you at the current version and when a new buffer overflow is found and an exploit created, then they hack you. Better validation of mirrors and package managers that check multiple repositories and compare the results are probably a more complete fix.
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a "Windows only" service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn't investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting other platforms in future. That's a non-starter in my book.
There is no such thing as free healthcare or education!!!!!!
True.
Somebody has to pay for it. The Europeans pay higher taxes to cover it.
This is misleading in many ways. First, they pay a lot less for their healthcare because they bargain en masse and there is no gouging to take advantage of desperate people. So while they do pay, they pay less with arguably better results. Second, the average person in Europe who has socialized healthcare does not pay more in taxes to cover it because for the most part their taxes progressively tax the wealthy. The US is just as socialist as most of Europe, we just spend the money on the military instead of healthcare and take more of the money from the poor instead of the ultra rich.
But ban "cruisers" from the spaces. No bike that weighs as much as, costs more than, and gets worse gas mileage than a jeep wrangler ought to be treated like a bike.
Generally the large bikes you're describing are called 'touring" bikes, not cruisers. Cruisers are a style of bike. For example, the low end 250CC bikes such as the Honda Rebel, Yamaha Virago, and Suzuki GZ are among the smallest and most fuel efficient of motorcycles, but are described by the manufacturers as "cruisers".
Way back in the halcyon days before 9/11 and the mandatory cavity search, the only thing the hijackers thought that they could get on the plane was a few box cutters. Semtex? Right.
Actually, that's probably all they thought they'd need, so it lowered the risk to use them. Various test of airport security since have demonstrated again and again that it is very possible to get explosives and firearms aboard commercial flights, even with the new security measures. In one test I read, they carried on an M4 without being detected (basically a more modern M-16).
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
System services on OS X. With KParts, the developer can add functionality easily. With system services on OS X, the user can add functionality and other applications can add functionality (add a program with some function like translating japanese and you can call it from within all your other programs).
I can not understand why people say nuclear is safe. I would accept fusion plants not fission plants. One fission plant going critical with the right weather system overhead could render North America uninhabitable.
I have my doubts about the safety of nuclear plants, but mostly with regard to their effect upon the local area, ala the German leukemia studies. The risk of catastrophic failure with modern designs seems insignificant though, regardless of the weather.
Free lunch is cool, but will it make up for the fact that your manager isn't any good?
No, but these are unrelated. Free lunch and a good manager is better than no free lunch and a good manager. Separate issues.
Spending 20% of your week on your own project is cool, but what if you already worked 50hrs on something that's overdue where you didn't come up with the estimate?
If you spent 50hrs working on an overdue project then the planning has already failed miserably and things need to be revamped. The 20% on your own project is partly to make sure you don't get burned out by working excessively on one project. Working really long hours, especially all on the same thing is not a sustainable development method. It's fine for a few people at a start up (I've done it) but when you start to grow, it just doesn't scale. That's partly why Google tends not to release things on a fixed schedule, but instead whenever they are sufficiently complete and stable. Seriously, if you're looking at working 50hrs to try to get something done at the last minute, the people allocating the manpower and putting together the schedule failed spectacularly and a better solution is just to delay the release while engineers work sane hours, but do better quality work.
Why is that ironic? Apple has signed a deal with AOL for iChat to be officially supported. Jabber is just a protocol and one AOL has been moving to interoperability with. I wonder if GTalk is being censored as it is an actual alternative client that doesn't use the AIM protocol.
The only reason I use ICQ is because you can send inline images. If anybody can point me to any other protocol that also supports it would be most appreciated.
AIM supports inline images and it works with my client (just tested it). It doesn't seem to work with Jabber and my client though, but I can't say that is the protocol instead of the client.
Well, the answer there is that those people chose OSX, when they could have chosen a different OS -- one that doesn't have hardware restrictions, for example.
You misunderstand how markets are undermined. A monopolist does not have to make another choice impossible to undermine the free market. They just have to make other choices worse than they would be without the monopoly abuse. The power company has a local monopoly on power distribution. You can buy a few hundred car batteries and go to another jurisdiction to charge them, then drive them home yourself for use, instead of using the lines they control. It isn't economical though. People can choose to use alternative OS's, but they're still suffering the ill effects of MS's monopoly on desktop OS's because the market is broken. If you have to buy a computer to get a different OS, you're suffering. In a free market, tying result in the seller losing money. Because the market is monopolized, tying results in Apple making money (and losing money if they don't do it). This hurts consumers.
I think you're confusing vendor lock-in with monopoly. There is no monopoly abuse here, because there is no monopoly to be abused.
MS is abusing their monopoly on desktop operating systems.
One chooses to use OSX knowing they will be locked in; that is part of the purchase decision for OSX.
Agreed, but that choice has to be made because of MS's monopoly abuse. If MS did not have a monopoly on desktop OS's, Apple would make more money selling their hardware and software unbundled and we'd have a better choice.
To choose OSX, then complain about hardware restrictions, is like buying a Ferrari and crying "monopoly" because of the price that a certified Ferrari mechanic charges.
No, it isn't because the prices Ferrari charges are not the result of a monopoly from another company. You can choose in the free market between a Ferrari or Lamborghini or any number of other options. If Ferraris were not available for sale and could only be obtained by buying a multimillion dollar house bundled with it from a given realty company, because Ford had a monopoly on cars.
Because MS keeps breaking the law and then the courts very, very slowly go about making them stop or at least making them pay the companies they hurt with their illegal actions. Nothing the courts have done are stopping them from committing more crimes. When you have a repeat offender convicted a dozen times already, in numerous jurisdictions, and you're brining them to court again, maybe you need to look at why your punishments aren't deterring them and what to o about it. MS is still making more money breaking the law and paying fines and settlements than they do obeying the law. Either the punishments need to be harsher, or you need to remove their ability to break the law. It's like a serial rapist. Either put them in prison or chemically castrate them. Breaking them up is the equivalent.
And you obviously haven't read any of the new stories over the last few years about MS being sued/sanctioned/bitched at by the EU.
They have been sanctioned, after they were convicted and refused to comply with the punishment. MS broke the law, was convicted, then refused to pay the fines or stop their illegal action. They did this for a year. Why don't you go break the law then refuse to stop or pay the fines the courts impose. See how long before you're in prison.
MS was not sued by the EU. They were sued by various companies financially harmed by their crimes. MS paid the settlements because it is part of their business model. They break the law and count on the settlements being less the profit, since most of the small companies can't afford to take them to court.
MS was fined by the courts and ordered to stop breaking the law in particular cases. This is the same as the EU has done with many other companies, except they were not so lenient in how long they had before they had to stop with other companies because those companies were not getting US diplomats sent over to ask for leniency for their crimes.
And you obviously haven't read any of the new stories over the last few years about MS being sued/sanctioned/bitched at by the EU.
The EU knows as well as anyone that the only way to fix the market is to break up MS. The only reason they haven't done so is because MS is a US company and they don't want there to be diplomatic issues and don't want to stir up anti-american sentiment anymore than the Bush administration has already managed. Instead they've been very slowly addressing a few issues at a time and hoping politics in the US will make the US start prosecuting corporate crime and take care of it for them.
You're a fucking MS troll and I dare you to even browse this link
there's no real repercussions of young kids getting a hold of 'mature' games.
Which of those are you claiming is the monopoly and which is the market they're leveraging the monopoly against?
Windows 2003 Server comes with a full set of server software. Some nutjobs have tried to sue MS over their bundling of a Web server et al with the OS.
So what? Some nutjob sued a laundromat for thousands of dollars when they lost his pants. How does this have any bearing on whether or not said laundromat should be held accountable for unrelated crimes?
Windows XP should have had a Business Edition that amounted to XP Pro + Office (including full Outlook and Visio). Windows Defender should have come standard, and had an AV built in; but it's from a different era.
...there's no real repercussions of young kids getting a hold of 'mature' games.
Just because there are no legal repercussions, doesn't mean there are no repercussions. Likewise, if your kids watch an X rated movie, the police don't bust them, but you might ground them. It's the job of the parents to raise kids, not the police.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized
No, it is result of Apple creating a product that people want. having a product that is in demand is not monopilizing a market. there are plenty of other choices in teh PC market besides Apple.
Again, you completely misconstrued my comments. Apple doesn't monopolize the desktop OS market. They don't even compete in the desktop OS market because they refuse to sell it unbundled from their hardware. Microsoft has monopolized the desktop OS market, which is why Apple doesn't sell their OS unbundled.
MS may have gotten a slap on the wrist in the US, but it was a decent slap.
How do you figure. The US still hasn't even made them stop all the violations they were convicted of. The sentence was a fine, which is almost certainly much less than what they made through their criminal actions. They were ordered to open their API as monitored by government regulators... or the regulators would watch them for another 4 years. So MS never bothered. They're just now getting most of the APIs published because of the EU, but still don't have all of them. They still are bundling IE and Web developers still have to code to really old standards because MS won't support newer ones. So basically the US did nothing effective except finding of fact that were used overseas and in private lawsuits.
The EU continues to rake MS over the coals and has new, ridiculous demands every few months or so.
The EU still hasn't even charged MS with abuses they've been convicted of in other jurisdictions. They were moderately effective with regard to abuses in the server OS market, but their remedy for media players has done nothing. They haven't touched the browser market, office suite market, portable document market, etc. All in all the EU has been very, very lenient to date, trying to be diplomatic and hoping the US would do the right thing and break up MS (about the only remedy anyone can expect to work).
You wrote, "The RAM that comes in the Apple products is the SAME RAM that comes in the Dell products." That is your assertion, which I asked you to back up with evidence. If it's exactly the same then it went through the same QA.
Gee, I wonder how much of that is due to Apple customers refusing to give their beloved company a bad review.
Some of their studies do involve customer surveys which can suffer from self selection, but they also do anonymous purchasing and testing (which does not).
Apple is, and always has been, a hardware company. Check the numbers, a huge percentage of revenue comes from HW sales. The OS is designed to support those hardware sales.
Apple is a "computer system" company, at least with regard to their hardware sales. That is to say they compete against Dell and Sony who sell complete systems including hardware, OS, and software which they bundle together and resell. The only difference is that Apple develops their OS themselves instead of buying it. For Apple the hardware and OS are both equally important for their sales.
Sales of upgrades to existing hardware customers should not be misinterpreted to mean that Apple is selling its OS to the general public as a software company.
Agreed, such sales are not significant enough to count as a real entry in the "desktop OS' market.
OS X is like the iDrive menu technology BMW built for its cars (and sometimes just as controversial). You cannot buy that Audi car and demand that BMW's iDrive run on it. iDrive was designed for BMW cars. And OS X was designed for Macs.
It would be, if every other auto company also needed a similar car OS/interface as a integral part of the car and one company had a monopoly on providing that system to every other auto company and had been repeatedly convicted of abusing that monopoly by doing things like moving into the stereo market and requiring companies to buy their stereos from them as well as the OS and that radio was intentionally incompatible the stereos BMW used and CDs would only work in BMWs or all other cars, but not both.
BMW may offer upgrades and improvements to existing owners, but that does not mean everyone is entitled to buy iDrive and put it on arbitrary hardware.
No of course, not, but they do deserve a choice of stereos and to be protected from the illegal actions of a monopolist that trickle into other markets.
Yes, Microsoft is a $14 billion / quarter [microsoft.com] believer of your broken OS market theory.
Umm, it is broken by MS's monopoly which allows them to extract more money with less investment than in a free market. How is MS making huge profits in any way consistent with the market not being broken? Would you use record profits for Saudi oil companies as evidence that OPEC hasn't undermined the free market for oil?
Political contributions are not the same as "bribing judges".
First, political contributions from corporations are pretty much bribes. If you don't believe that, you're hopelessly naive. Second, if you're going to use quotes, actually include what I said in them. That's what they're for and doing otherwise is misleading. Since I never wrote "bribing judges" you're just making a strawman argument. I wrote "MS has bribed the US courts" which they have, albeit indirectly. They gave people money to get elected and those people, in turn, appointed new people to the justice department who strangely enough let MS off the hook with no punishment and a favorable settlement, after MS had already been convicted by their predecessors. If you can't connect the dots, well you probably are a very blissful person.
Perhaps you'd like to make the same assertions about Google [opensecrets.org] and IBM [opensecrets.org]. Or any other corporation for that matter.
Yes, I would. That is to say, IBM has certainly been guilty of trying to influence the courts with lobbying "donations." As for Google, they certainly have been trying to influence the legislature and the executive branch. Personally, I think all corporations should be banned from making any political contributions, since their is no valid reason for them to be doing so.
If you are indeed trying to convince someone that Microsoft is "bribing" judges or politicians based on what's in that link of yours, as opposed to playing the lobbying game the same way everybody else does, then I'd have to disagree with that.
The lobbying game is about bribing politicians. Just because it is legal doesn't make it any less of a bribe.
Wow, what reality do you live in? Apple's charging of hardware upgrades has absolutely NOTHING to do with their bundling the OS with their hardware.
I disagree.
I'm waiting for the demand of customers to be able to buy the engines separate from their car. I mean, do you realize how much BMW is charging for that engine. And they just bundle it right in.
You have completely misunderstood my point. When people buy a BMW, one of the things they consider is the price (including the price of the upgraded options). With the automotive market, a person might compare a BMW to an Audi and in the course of the comparison, consider the cost of a built in GPS. If the upgrade cost for that feature (and the other features) is so high on one that it makes a substantial price difference, a consumer may buy a car from the other vendor. As such, the market does pressure these companies to keep these upgrade costs low enough that they don't drive sales to the competition.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized.
This is pure capitalism.
No, it is regulated capitalism because of the legal restrictions. But the point is, it isn't pure free market capitalism, because one of the markets involved is monopolized, and any economist will tell you, that undermines the free market in both that market and any tied market.
...If you don't like the upgrade options, don't buy them
In general I don't. This market affect is a minor inconvenience to me, no more. For that matter I can get OS X running on non-Apple hardware if I'm so inclined. That does not, however, mean it is not detrimental to the average user and to the market in general.
It seems most people don't have any conception of how a monopoly affect markets, nor on how drastic and wide ranging those affects are. Nor do they seem to understand how detrimental those monopolies are to them. I can't say if MS abuse their monopoly (or have a monopoly to abuse) that innovation would be faster in a very specific way, but it is pretty clear what has happened in other markets when those monopolies were stopped. Prices go down in all related markets and innovation speeds up to the benefit of consumers. Before Bell's abuses were stopped and it was broken up, prices were outrageous and people were paying tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime to rent really crappy telephones. Answering machine and services (a related market) was horrible and expensive, compared to the dirt cheap answering machines built into phones today. Right now, we're in that same place for desktop OS's and the related markets (like desktop computer hardware upgrades) are pretty poor and inflexible. How much better would it be? I can't say, but it is clear that prices would come down as competition was enabled, if nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand what the big advantage is in using package managers. It's dangerous because you never know what "updates" will come down the pike.
Normal people don't want to have to keep up on what the latest version of everything is as it comes out and what security holes are in it. That's one of the main reasons people use distributions instead of hacking together their own. People want knowledgeable experts to make the decisions and let the computer do the rest.
The simple fix is to change the client so that it never regresses (e.g., never installs software older than what it already has installed).
That's a start, but then they can just keep you at the current version and when a new buffer overflow is found and an exploit created, then they hack you. Better validation of mirrors and package managers that check multiple repositories and compare the results are probably a more complete fix.
RTFA
I looked at this the other day and it seemed to claim to be a "Windows only" service. My Windows system was busy at the time, so I didn't investigate further and it was unclear if they planned on supporting other platforms in future. That's a non-starter in my book.
There is no such thing as free healthcare or education!!!!!!
True.
Somebody has to pay for it. The Europeans pay higher taxes to cover it.
This is misleading in many ways. First, they pay a lot less for their healthcare because they bargain en masse and there is no gouging to take advantage of desperate people. So while they do pay, they pay less with arguably better results. Second, the average person in Europe who has socialized healthcare does not pay more in taxes to cover it because for the most part their taxes progressively tax the wealthy. The US is just as socialist as most of Europe, we just spend the money on the military instead of healthcare and take more of the money from the poor instead of the ultra rich.
But ban "cruisers" from the spaces. No bike that weighs as much as, costs more than, and gets worse gas mileage than a jeep wrangler ought to be treated like a bike.
Generally the large bikes you're describing are called 'touring" bikes, not cruisers. Cruisers are a style of bike. For example, the low end 250CC bikes such as the Honda Rebel, Yamaha Virago, and Suzuki GZ are among the smallest and most fuel efficient of motorcycles, but are described by the manufacturers as "cruisers".
Way back in the halcyon days before 9/11 and the mandatory cavity search, the only thing the hijackers thought that they could get on the plane was a few box cutters. Semtex? Right.
Actually, that's probably all they thought they'd need, so it lowered the risk to use them. Various test of airport security since have demonstrated again and again that it is very possible to get explosives and firearms aboard commercial flights, even with the new security measures. In one test I read, they carried on an M4 without being detected (basically a more modern M-16).
Kparts means that you can include practically entire programs (spreadsheets, browsers, editors) inside other programs - how much more modular can it get?
System services on OS X. With KParts, the developer can add functionality easily. With system services on OS X, the user can add functionality and other applications can add functionality (add a program with some function like translating japanese and you can call it from within all your other programs).
I can not understand why people say nuclear is safe. I would accept fusion plants not fission plants. One fission plant going critical with the right weather system overhead could render North America uninhabitable.
I have my doubts about the safety of nuclear plants, but mostly with regard to their effect upon the local area, ala the German leukemia studies. The risk of catastrophic failure with modern designs seems insignificant though, regardless of the weather.
Free lunch is cool, but will it make up for the fact that your manager isn't any good?
No, but these are unrelated. Free lunch and a good manager is better than no free lunch and a good manager. Separate issues.
Spending 20% of your week on your own project is cool, but what if you already worked 50hrs on something that's overdue where you didn't come up with the estimate?
If you spent 50hrs working on an overdue project then the planning has already failed miserably and things need to be revamped. The 20% on your own project is partly to make sure you don't get burned out by working excessively on one project. Working really long hours, especially all on the same thing is not a sustainable development method. It's fine for a few people at a start up (I've done it) but when you start to grow, it just doesn't scale. That's partly why Google tends not to release things on a fixed schedule, but instead whenever they are sufficiently complete and stable. Seriously, if you're looking at working 50hrs to try to get something done at the last minute, the people allocating the manpower and putting together the schedule failed spectacularly and a better solution is just to delay the release while engineers work sane hours, but do better quality work.
Ironically, iChat and Jabber are not censored...
Why is that ironic? Apple has signed a deal with AOL for iChat to be officially supported. Jabber is just a protocol and one AOL has been moving to interoperability with. I wonder if GTalk is being censored as it is an actual alternative client that doesn't use the AIM protocol.
The only reason I use ICQ is because you can send inline images. If anybody can point me to any other protocol that also supports it would be most appreciated.
AIM supports inline images and it works with my client (just tested it). It doesn't seem to work with Jabber and my client though, but I can't say that is the protocol instead of the client.
A monopoly does not void a free market.
No it undermines the free market, as I said.
Well, the answer there is that those people chose OSX, when they could have chosen a different OS -- one that doesn't have hardware restrictions, for example.
You misunderstand how markets are undermined. A monopolist does not have to make another choice impossible to undermine the free market. They just have to make other choices worse than they would be without the monopoly abuse. The power company has a local monopoly on power distribution. You can buy a few hundred car batteries and go to another jurisdiction to charge them, then drive them home yourself for use, instead of using the lines they control. It isn't economical though. People can choose to use alternative OS's, but they're still suffering the ill effects of MS's monopoly on desktop OS's because the market is broken. If you have to buy a computer to get a different OS, you're suffering. In a free market, tying result in the seller losing money. Because the market is monopolized, tying results in Apple making money (and losing money if they don't do it). This hurts consumers.
I think you're confusing vendor lock-in with monopoly. There is no monopoly abuse here, because there is no monopoly to be abused.
MS is abusing their monopoly on desktop operating systems.
One chooses to use OSX knowing they will be locked in; that is part of the purchase decision for OSX.
Agreed, but that choice has to be made because of MS's monopoly abuse. If MS did not have a monopoly on desktop OS's, Apple would make more money selling their hardware and software unbundled and we'd have a better choice.
To choose OSX, then complain about hardware restrictions, is like buying a Ferrari and crying "monopoly" because of the price that a certified Ferrari mechanic charges.
No, it isn't because the prices Ferrari charges are not the result of a monopoly from another company. You can choose in the free market between a Ferrari or Lamborghini or any number of other options. If Ferraris were not available for sale and could only be obtained by buying a multimillion dollar house bundled with it from a given realty company, because Ford had a monopoly on cars.
Hrm, you lost me right there.
Finish reading my post, and all the questions you asked are answered.
How is "breaking up" MS the "right" thing?
Because MS keeps breaking the law and then the courts very, very slowly go about making them stop or at least making them pay the companies they hurt with their illegal actions. Nothing the courts have done are stopping them from committing more crimes. When you have a repeat offender convicted a dozen times already, in numerous jurisdictions, and you're brining them to court again, maybe you need to look at why your punishments aren't deterring them and what to o about it. MS is still making more money breaking the law and paying fines and settlements than they do obeying the law. Either the punishments need to be harsher, or you need to remove their ability to break the law. It's like a serial rapist. Either put them in prison or chemically castrate them. Breaking them up is the equivalent.
And you obviously haven't read any of the new stories over the last few years about MS being sued/sanctioned/bitched at by the EU.
They have been sanctioned, after they were convicted and refused to comply with the punishment. MS broke the law, was convicted, then refused to pay the fines or stop their illegal action. They did this for a year. Why don't you go break the law then refuse to stop or pay the fines the courts impose. See how long before you're in prison.
MS was not sued by the EU. They were sued by various companies financially harmed by their crimes. MS paid the settlements because it is part of their business model. They break the law and count on the settlements being less the profit, since most of the small companies can't afford to take them to court.
MS was fined by the courts and ordered to stop breaking the law in particular cases. This is the same as the EU has done with many other companies, except they were not so lenient in how long they had before they had to stop with other companies because those companies were not getting US diplomats sent over to ask for leniency for their crimes.
And you obviously haven't read any of the new stories over the last few years about MS being sued/sanctioned/bitched at by the EU.
The EU knows as well as anyone that the only way to fix the market is to break up MS. The only reason they haven't done so is because MS is a US company and they don't want there to be diplomatic issues and don't want to stir up anti-american sentiment anymore than the Bush administration has already managed. Instead they've been very slowly addressing a few issues at a time and hoping politics in the US will make the US start prosecuting corporate crime and take care of it for them.
You're a fucking MS troll and I dare you to even browse this link
Grow up.
there's no real repercussions of young kids getting a hold of 'mature' games.
Which of those are you claiming is the monopoly and which is the market they're leveraging the monopoly against?
Windows 2003 Server comes with a full set of server software. Some nutjobs have tried to sue MS over their bundling of a Web server et al with the OS.
So what? Some nutjob sued a laundromat for thousands of dollars when they lost his pants. How does this have any bearing on whether or not said laundromat should be held accountable for unrelated crimes?
Windows XP should have had a Business Edition that amounted to XP Pro + Office (including full Outlook and Visio). Windows Defender should have come standard, and had an AV built in; but it's from a different era.
I don't see your point at all.
...there's no real repercussions of young kids getting a hold of 'mature' games.
Just because there are no legal repercussions, doesn't mean there are no repercussions. Likewise, if your kids watch an X rated movie, the police don't bust them, but you might ground them. It's the job of the parents to raise kids, not the police.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized
No, it is result of Apple creating a product that people want. having a product that is in demand is not monopilizing a market. there are plenty of other choices in teh PC market besides Apple.
Again, you completely misconstrued my comments. Apple doesn't monopolize the desktop OS market. They don't even compete in the desktop OS market because they refuse to sell it unbundled from their hardware. Microsoft has monopolized the desktop OS market, which is why Apple doesn't sell their OS unbundled.
MS may have gotten a slap on the wrist in the US, but it was a decent slap.
How do you figure. The US still hasn't even made them stop all the violations they were convicted of. The sentence was a fine, which is almost certainly much less than what they made through their criminal actions. They were ordered to open their API as monitored by government regulators... or the regulators would watch them for another 4 years. So MS never bothered. They're just now getting most of the APIs published because of the EU, but still don't have all of them. They still are bundling IE and Web developers still have to code to really old standards because MS won't support newer ones. So basically the US did nothing effective except finding of fact that were used overseas and in private lawsuits.
The EU continues to rake MS over the coals and has new, ridiculous demands every few months or so.
The EU still hasn't even charged MS with abuses they've been convicted of in other jurisdictions. They were moderately effective with regard to abuses in the server OS market, but their remedy for media players has done nothing. They haven't touched the browser market, office suite market, portable document market, etc. All in all the EU has been very, very lenient to date, trying to be diplomatic and hoping the US would do the right thing and break up MS (about the only remedy anyone can expect to work).
You're the one making the claim in the positive
You wrote, "The RAM that comes in the Apple products is the SAME RAM that comes in the Dell products." That is your assertion, which I asked you to back up with evidence. If it's exactly the same then it went through the same QA.
Gee, I wonder how much of that is due to Apple customers refusing to give their beloved company a bad review.
Some of their studies do involve customer surveys which can suffer from self selection, but they also do anonymous purchasing and testing (which does not).
Apple is, and always has been, a hardware company. Check the numbers, a huge percentage of revenue comes from HW sales. The OS is designed to support those hardware sales.
Apple is a "computer system" company, at least with regard to their hardware sales. That is to say they compete against Dell and Sony who sell complete systems including hardware, OS, and software which they bundle together and resell. The only difference is that Apple develops their OS themselves instead of buying it. For Apple the hardware and OS are both equally important for their sales.
Sales of upgrades to existing hardware customers should not be misinterpreted to mean that Apple is selling its OS to the general public as a software company.
Agreed, such sales are not significant enough to count as a real entry in the "desktop OS' market.
OS X is like the iDrive menu technology BMW built for its cars (and sometimes just as controversial). You cannot buy that Audi car and demand that BMW's iDrive run on it. iDrive was designed for BMW cars. And OS X was designed for Macs.
It would be, if every other auto company also needed a similar car OS/interface as a integral part of the car and one company had a monopoly on providing that system to every other auto company and had been repeatedly convicted of abusing that monopoly by doing things like moving into the stereo market and requiring companies to buy their stereos from them as well as the OS and that radio was intentionally incompatible the stereos BMW used and CDs would only work in BMWs or all other cars, but not both.
BMW may offer upgrades and improvements to existing owners, but that does not mean everyone is entitled to buy iDrive and put it on arbitrary hardware.
No of course, not, but they do deserve a choice of stereos and to be protected from the illegal actions of a monopolist that trickle into other markets.
Yes, Microsoft is a $14 billion / quarter [microsoft.com] believer of your broken OS market theory.
Umm, it is broken by MS's monopoly which allows them to extract more money with less investment than in a free market. How is MS making huge profits in any way consistent with the market not being broken? Would you use record profits for Saudi oil companies as evidence that OPEC hasn't undermined the free market for oil?
Political contributions are not the same as "bribing judges".
First, political contributions from corporations are pretty much bribes. If you don't believe that, you're hopelessly naive. Second, if you're going to use quotes, actually include what I said in them. That's what they're for and doing otherwise is misleading. Since I never wrote "bribing judges" you're just making a strawman argument. I wrote "MS has bribed the US courts" which they have, albeit indirectly. They gave people money to get elected and those people, in turn, appointed new people to the justice department who strangely enough let MS off the hook with no punishment and a favorable settlement, after MS had already been convicted by their predecessors. If you can't connect the dots, well you probably are a very blissful person.
Perhaps you'd like to make the same assertions about Google [opensecrets.org] and IBM [opensecrets.org]. Or any other corporation for that matter.
Yes, I would. That is to say, IBM has certainly been guilty of trying to influence the courts with lobbying "donations." As for Google, they certainly have been trying to influence the legislature and the executive branch. Personally, I think all corporations should be banned from making any political contributions, since their is no valid reason for them to be doing so.
If you are indeed trying to convince someone that Microsoft is "bribing" judges or politicians based on what's in that link of yours, as opposed to playing the lobbying game the same way everybody else does, then I'd have to disagree with that.
The lobbying game is about bribing politicians. Just because it is legal doesn't make it any less of a bribe.
Wow, what reality do you live in? Apple's charging of hardware upgrades has absolutely NOTHING to do with their bundling the OS with their hardware.
I disagree.
I'm waiting for the demand of customers to be able to buy the engines separate from their car. I mean, do you realize how much BMW is charging for that engine. And they just bundle it right in.
You have completely misunderstood my point. When people buy a BMW, one of the things they consider is the price (including the price of the upgraded options). With the automotive market, a person might compare a BMW to an Audi and in the course of the comparison, consider the cost of a built in GPS. If the upgrade cost for that feature (and the other features) is so high on one that it makes a substantial price difference, a consumer may buy a car from the other vendor. As such, the market does pressure these companies to keep these upgrade costs low enough that they don't drive sales to the competition.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized.
This is pure capitalism.
No, it is regulated capitalism because of the legal restrictions. But the point is, it isn't pure free market capitalism, because one of the markets involved is monopolized, and any economist will tell you, that undermines the free market in both that market and any tied market.
...If you don't like the upgrade options, don't buy them
In general I don't. This market affect is a minor inconvenience to me, no more. For that matter I can get OS X running on non-Apple hardware if I'm so inclined. That does not, however, mean it is not detrimental to the average user and to the market in general.
It seems most people don't have any conception of how a monopoly affect markets, nor on how drastic and wide ranging those affects are. Nor do they seem to understand how detrimental those monopolies are to them. I can't say if MS abuse their monopoly (or have a monopoly to abuse) that innovation would be faster in a very specific way, but it is pretty clear what has happened in other markets when those monopolies were stopped. Prices go down in all related markets and innovation speeds up to the benefit of consumers. Before Bell's abuses were stopped and it was broken up, prices were outrageous and people were paying tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime to rent really crappy telephones. Answering machine and services (a related market) was horrible and expensive, compared to the dirt cheap answering machines built into phones today. Right now, we're in that same place for desktop OS's and the related markets (like desktop computer hardware upgrades) are pretty poor and inflexible. How much better would it be? I can't say, but it is clear that prices would come down as competition was enabled, if nothing else.