I'm guessing you either failed at your own logic or at reading my post. GP said: "Making X illegal would not fix the problem, these people already have X illegally." In his post, X = guns. My post was pointing out the foolishness of such an argument by replacing X with murder. In other words, just because criminals already have guns, doesn't mean making guns illegal wouldn't be better for society.
Yes I know, you're trying to imply because the reverse case in an analogy is not necessarily true, that the original argument is not true. That's pretty badly broken logic. It's actually fairly sound logic to imply that making it illegal to say, own butcher knives, won't decrease the number of people killed in muggings, since there are plenty of alternative weapons and people carrying butcher knives for purposes of mugging are already breaking several laws, so causing them to break one more is unlikely to work as a deterrent. The same holds true for firearms.
Regarding the rest of your post, we've obviously read different studies (excepting the ones correlating drug decriminalization with a better society), but we can at least argue the points on the data and not on our own personal experience.
I'd love for you to provide a citation. Let me caution you, however, 90% of the studies I see people cite suffer from a logical misstatement of the problem characterized by the term "gun crime". I'm sure if you think about it and you have taken any courses on informal logic, this error will be fairly obvious.
Making guns illegal would not fix the problem, these people already have guns illegally..
Right, and since the criminals already murder people, we should make murder legal so that non-criminals can murder people too. Makes perfect sense.
Wow, way to fail at logic. Laws are not magic. Passing a law does not necessarily reduce a particular activity, crime, or associated activity. For example, laws banning texting while driving seem to actually lead to an increase in accidents related to texting. Likewise, when countries like the UK enacted very strict gun control laws, there is no indication from independent studies that violent crime or murder decreased as a result and the police decided to change the way they collect statistics at the same time for some weird reason. In fact, if you actually research sociological studies of strict gun control laws the consensus is that they correlate very slightly with increased levels of crime, even when normalized for other factors. That doesn't mean it is necessarily causative, but that is the most likely implication.
The question you have to ask is, what is the problem you're trying to solve and what is the most likely, effective way to solve it. If violent crime or murder is the problem, science has pretty well answered that strict gun control laws are not an effective solution. Socialized drug abuse treatment programs and decriminalization of addictive drugs, in fact, seems to be very effective, correlating strongly with decreases in violent crime.
We used this very topic as a litmus test for hiring attorneys. I was working at a medium sized startup, growing into a proper company. We developed appliances and services that relied heavily upon Linux and other OSS, packaged with hardware and some closed source software. We knew very little about corporate law and had one attorney on board part time, but we had some good legal advice about OSS and every single major competitor we had was doing the exact same thing.
So we need to hire some new legal people, we bring them in and ask them about themselves and their expertise and then we show them the OSS licenses we are using and ask their opinion on incorporating it into products. A few days later, all the ones that come back telling us it's dangerous or we need to have every use of BSD or GPL approved by the legal department on a case by case basis or have we heard of Microsoft who licenses a closed source OS... yeah we trashed those resumes as being too out of touch with the high tech computing industry.
So let's apply your analogy to any other copyright infringement. Say Toyota included a DVD player in the back seating area of their vans and bundled a collection of Disney DVDs with the vehicle. Now suppose, Toyota never licensed those DVDs and just burned or pressed them themselves without permission from Disney. Disney notices and notifies the dealerships of the violation.
So, what do the dealerships do? Do they continue to sell the vans including the DVDs, knowing they are breaking the law and let Toyota deal with it? Do they violate their contract with Toyota and sell the vans without the DVDs? Do they stop selling the vans altogether, contact Toyota headquarters and wait for word from above? What would you do if you owned a dealership?
Actually, I think this is a fairly clear situation, but because copyright law is so weird and because many people don't understand the GPL or how it acts within copyright law, they overly complicate things. If you are distributing copyrighted material without a license and you're notified of this by the copyright holder, it doesn't really matter how many intermediate copyright violations there are. You've been notified so you can't claim ignorance. Your responsibility is to stop and rectify the situation before there is reason for damages to be levied against you instead of the intermediate parties. Then, you can always go back and sue the intermediaries to reclaim whatever it cost you.
You come up with a hypothesis, then you test the hypothesis and resulting theories by experimentation designed to disprove said hypothesis or theory.
i.e. you come up with a story about how things work, figure out the implications assuming it is true and then act on them and see if those implications hold.
I think the sticking point is your phrases "act on them" and "assuming it is true". It isn't part of the scientific method to assume it is true, even for the sake of experimentation. Rather, you determine if it is likely to be true via experimentation. I might have a hypothesis that grape jelly will make an excellent fuel source for conventional combustion engines, but the scientific method is not to assume that is the case and fill my truck's gas tank with it. Rather, I design experiments that would falsify it. For example, that hypothesis could be falsified simply by testing it's vaporization or rate of combustion.
As scientists we rarely, if ever, set out to prove ourselves wrong but to prove ourselves right (and probably someone else wrong!).
This may well be true, but we show that our theories have merit by setting out to prove them wrong, not by designing intentionally weak and inefficient experiments and we don't assume our hypothesis and theories are correct until after we test them. I might have the idea about grape jelly, might even want it to be true, but I don't believe it or present it to others as science until I've tested it as strongly as I can within my means. So after I get it to burn and vaporize I'm still going to actually try running it through an engine and testing the output relative to other fuels BEFORE I form my own beliefs or present it as science.
Science is a formalized, logical methodology for determining what is correct. If you're assuming things are a certain way, then trying to design experiments that won't fail to support that assumption, then you're working under the assumption that the theory is actually wrong or you'd be testing it in a more convincing manner. Assumptions in either direction are not science, regardless of what you call it.
Ahh, yes, good old "anyone whose morals disagree with mine is a sociopath" fallacy, one of the most common forms of Ad Hominem in current use.
First, that's not an ad hominem attack. Please people, if you're going to try to use classical rhetorical references, read a book first.
Second, If you decide to experiment on prisoners and murder people who have never harmed you, you are fitting into the textbook definition of "sociopath". Most people feel empathy for fellow human beings, picture themselves in the place of others, recognize the emotions of pain and fear and have a built in aversion to them. If your only reason for not murdering people is religion, you have a mental illness and should seek help.
Always remember that your "inflict pain and suffering upon others" is another person's "overreacting over trivialities" and viceversa.
"Vice versa" is two words and your comment doesn't make any sense. Who thinks experimenting on prisoners is "overreacting over trivialities" and what makes you think that person is not mentally ill?
Are you really a fundamentalist, or just someone who says he is? Do you really interpret every word in the sacred texts as literal truth? If so, which holy book is it that you believe and follow unquestioningly?
I think you're confusing literalism with fundamentalism. While fundamentalism and literalism have a lot of overlap both in concept and adherents, fundamentalism is usually considered the protestant movement that literally interprets certain core beliefs from the bible, usually: creation, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Second Coming. That's not to say the previous poster isn't a strict literalist, just that you can't infer that from the term "fundamentalism".
I'd also note, I've never met anyone who upon 15 minutes of discussion did not foreswear strict literalism, usually about the time you ask them if they think the earth is literally supported upon four pillars or if there is room for a figurative or metaphorical interpretation in parts of the bible.
this is almost exactly like science: we come up with a theory which we have not yet proved and then act on it as if it were true to see what the implications are and then test those implications.
That's not the scientific method I was taught. You come up with a hypothesis, then you test the hypothesis and resulting theories by experimentation designed to disprove said hypothesis or theory. It's not just about listening when people prove it wrong. It's about intentionally trying to prove it wrong yourself as a way of providing evidence it is correct and then acting as though the theory that has withstood the most rigorous testing is correct.
I provided two examples in my previous comment, the comment to which you are replying. It was only three sentences long. You should stop huffing paint. It seems to be effecting your ability to read and comprehend.
Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
You seem to have failed at grasping what science is. Science "proves" nothing. Science is a formal, logical methodology for determining what is most likely true. Recognizing how successful science has been, many irrational people fear to challenge it and instead claim that they "agree with science" or something; right up until the scientific method results in a most supported theory they don't like. Then they rationalize.
It's people's morals - often based on or at least supported by what you blithely dismiss as "fiction" - that stop us from doing those sorts of things.
Those of us that aren't sociopaths don't need religion to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Those who are sociopaths use religion as an excuse as often as it prevents them from harming others.
Any effective security procedures from locking down services to tightening up code to remove vulnerabilities. Anything that would prevent a market from forming. Once it has formed, however, MS has to comply with antitrust laws.
Since they did not proactively address security, [...]
Please elaborate on how they could have done so.
They could have built AV software into the OS before other vendors started selling a product or before Windows gained monopoly influence or they could have implemented security procedures to make AV unnecessary.
Since they did not proactively address security, they are legally obligated to compete in the market they created on a level playing field with other companies already in that market.
Why? This is not inherently a true statement.
It is a true statement, but not an inherently true statement, removed from context.
If I start selling widgets and company Y starts selling add-ons, I can create an equivalent addon and bundle it with my widget and put Y out of business. Companies do this all the time and it is not illegal to do this.
Yes, it's called "bundling".
THE ONLY reason Microsoft may be restricted would be due to a court order stemming from monopolistic abuses.
This is incorrect. Regardless of court orders, it is illegal in the US and many other countries to bundle products from a preexisting market with products from a market where you have overwhelming or dominant market presence. Since the courts have already ruled that this is the case for MS with regard to Windows (market definition varying based upon country), it is clearly illegal for MS to bundle with Windows a product that competes with existing market players.
But there is no evidence I have ever seen that they are under some sort of complete blanket regulatory oversight that legally requires them to compete in every market they enter on a level playing field.
In the US the Clayon and Shermans act require all companies with monopolistic influence on some market to compete on level playing fields when entering an existing market. Unfortunately regulators have been slow and inconsistent in their application of these laws, allowing vast abuses by many companies, with MS being one of the worst offenders. Because of the way antirust law works in the US, it usually relies upon private lawsuits and complaints to begin an action. MS uses their money to get around the law, for example, by giving piles of cash in private settlements to anyone who brings a case that might result in MS Office being declared another monopoly. I won't even get into their purchase of influence with lobbying dollars.
The law is fairly clear. Go read the antitrust acts or the EU competition laws. Unfortunately, even if the AV vendors act, it will probably be years before the courts do anything effective, at which point another market will be destroyed, most of the world will be reliant upon whether or not MS finds it profitable to update AV definitions, and the increasing cost of Windows will shell out settlements to the remains of the AV companies they killed.
They don't charge for it. There is no market in which SE plays because it's free.
That has nothing to do with it. MS makes money selling Windows, which this is tied to. Other companies make money selling into the market. Thus a market exists. You can't use a monopoly to tilt the playing field in other markets, including destroying those markets.
Shouldn't security be the purpose of the OS itself? Trend micro and other Antivirus software doesn't have a right to exist. the OS itself should theoretically already protect itself.
Correct, but Microsoft waited until a market had built up around the insecurity of Windows before they introduced a product of their own. Since they did not proactively address security, they are legally obligated to compete in the market they created on a level playing field with other companies already in that market. That means if they use Windows or products bundled with Windows to provide an advantage for their security suite, they are legally obligated to provide the same to competitors. Where do the other AV vendors sign up to be included in Windows update?
i am not calling it agile. Just admit there are situations where agile does not work. That is all the point I am trying make.
Well of course there are, like when someone wants you to make software that does something impossible, for free, in a day. No one is claiming Agile is magic. It's just that saying because you used some other methodology and don't want to invest to bring things into line with Agile methods, that Agile does not work, well that's a little redundant. It's just another way of saying Agile doesn't work in cases where you don't use Agile. That's the point I'm making. It's useful and constructive to point out the drawbacks to Agile, such as more overhead or an unneeded level of testing. Your example I find less relevant.
There are already products that are shipping. They were developed sold and they have to be maintained. No point in saying it should never happen in true agile environment. Agile has to take existing code base and existing programmers and hit the ground running.
True, but the problem is the result of the previous development methodology and the refusal to hire the manpower needed to implement Agile correctly. Hiring one programmer that can work the code and one that cannot is NOT Agile programming. Calling it such is just marketing.
The result was then discussed in emails between W3C members, including Anne van Kesteren of Opera, Maciej Stachowiak of Apple, Jonathan Griffin of Mozilla, Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen of Google, and Kris Krueger of Microsoft.
Opera's van Kesteren wrote, "This test suite is vastly incomplete. Publishing unverified results of a vastly incomplete test suite without a big fat warning is extremely silly. Why was this done?"
Stachowiak responded, "It's also strange that the results include alpha/beta/preview versions of most browsers, but the stable version of Safari [rather than the latest nightly build]. Wouldn't be a big deal other than the fact that this rather buggy test results page was labeled as 'Official' and then picked up in the press as authoritative. We should probably be cautious about the chance of creating PR events based on incorrect information."
Google employee Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of the Acid2 and Acid3 tests and the HTML 5 specification itself, added, "I agree with Anne that it's rather pointless to be publishing results for this test suite. Realistically speaking the test suite isn't even 0.1% complete yet."
Basically, there is not a comprehensive HTML5 test suite yet. What there is, is a pile of tests that Microsoft has submitted to the test suite and which do test some of HTML5, but ignore the vast majority of it needed to do real world HTML5 apps and sites. It includes no tests at all for drag and drop, Web Workers, local storage, or CSS3 transforms and animations. It includes a few tests for SVG, but only for the very minor parts IE 9 can handle and while there is a comprehensive SVG test, which IE 9 fails miserably, scoring dead last with 58% compliance behind the next worst Firefox which scores 79%
In short, these results are basically MS submitting tests they pass to a hugely incomplete suite, noting they then pass more of the incomplete suite then others, then trying to spin this as their being more complete in implementing the spec than others. MS and IE 9 beta win on marketing, but still lose on compliance to the spec.
Agile doesn't solve the essential problem in IT which is a lack of understanding of the software development process, lack of preparation and lack of method - it just provides cover for those developers which do everything in an ad-hoc, reactive way and will then excuse themselves as being "Agile".
I do some work in an Agile shop and usability is a huge concern. It is very often that we tell the customer "we don't know what this should do, schedule our usability experts to go conduct some interviews with users and find out". In some cases they do just that. In others they decide it is too expensive so they just declare what they just take a guess at what users need and we build it. But you can be sure the customer knows they're making a tradeoff and reducing quality for the reduced cost.
It works when the project has a large number of people with identical or largely similar skill sets. If the project has large number of specialists (like "Frank here is the only one who can even touch the turbulence modeling code") development will be slow, agile or not.
One should note that for pair programming environments and most Agile methodologies, this should never happen because there should have been many different people that developed each part of the code. If only one guy knows how something works, you probably did not follow an Agile development method.
I think maybe what some people are misunderstanding is that there is cost, explained to the customer as part of the process, for such changes. You see sometimes you absolutely need to change the requirements late in the development process; otherwise you finish the project but it doesn't do what the customer needs it to. Seriously, if you have a project and right near the end the customer tells you they were purchased and by fiat need to switch the networking protocol on which the app relies to comply with the new company servers that have replaced the old ones entirely, what are your options?
You can:
change at the last minute and hopefully your development method has a process for doing this;
Or you can finish the project as specced and then it gets trashed because it is useless.
I fail to see how you can blame the development methodology for being flexible enough to not fall over. I mean have people ever been in an Agile planning session with a customer? When they change the requirements they see a fair estimate of how much time that is going to cost them and how long and how expensive the project is now going to be. Further, they have a history of these decisions going back. If they're plain stupid or wasteful they can ruin the project, but hey that's not dependent upon the development method as I'm sure about 99% of developers can attest.
The ballot screen provided a few extra downloads for the other browsers, but didn't change much, if at all. Early reports were encouraging for IE competitors, but it turned out that the balance didn't tip as much as some had anticipated.
I don't really think the results of the ballot screen will be noticeable for some time. Given average turnover rates only about 6% of people in the EU in an average sales quarter would even see the ballot. So we need to wait at least a year to get numbers outside the margin for error of the studies I've seen. It will be four years or more before we can accurately judge the level of impact the ballot is making. Note, I'm not saying it is effective, just that trying to draw conclusions at this point is just bad math.
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I'm guessing you either failed at your own logic or at reading my post. GP said: "Making X illegal would not fix the problem, these people already have X illegally." In his post, X = guns. My post was pointing out the foolishness of such an argument by replacing X with murder. In other words, just because criminals already have guns, doesn't mean making guns illegal wouldn't be better for society.
Yes I know, you're trying to imply because the reverse case in an analogy is not necessarily true, that the original argument is not true. That's pretty badly broken logic. It's actually fairly sound logic to imply that making it illegal to say, own butcher knives, won't decrease the number of people killed in muggings, since there are plenty of alternative weapons and people carrying butcher knives for purposes of mugging are already breaking several laws, so causing them to break one more is unlikely to work as a deterrent. The same holds true for firearms.
Regarding the rest of your post, we've obviously read different studies (excepting the ones correlating drug decriminalization with a better society), but we can at least argue the points on the data and not on our own personal experience.
I'd love for you to provide a citation. Let me caution you, however, 90% of the studies I see people cite suffer from a logical misstatement of the problem characterized by the term "gun crime". I'm sure if you think about it and you have taken any courses on informal logic, this error will be fairly obvious.
Making guns illegal would not fix the problem, these people already have guns illegally..
Right, and since the criminals already murder people, we should make murder legal so that non-criminals can murder people too. Makes perfect sense.
Wow, way to fail at logic. Laws are not magic. Passing a law does not necessarily reduce a particular activity, crime, or associated activity. For example, laws banning texting while driving seem to actually lead to an increase in accidents related to texting. Likewise, when countries like the UK enacted very strict gun control laws, there is no indication from independent studies that violent crime or murder decreased as a result and the police decided to change the way they collect statistics at the same time for some weird reason. In fact, if you actually research sociological studies of strict gun control laws the consensus is that they correlate very slightly with increased levels of crime, even when normalized for other factors. That doesn't mean it is necessarily causative, but that is the most likely implication.
The question you have to ask is, what is the problem you're trying to solve and what is the most likely, effective way to solve it. If violent crime or murder is the problem, science has pretty well answered that strict gun control laws are not an effective solution. Socialized drug abuse treatment programs and decriminalization of addictive drugs, in fact, seems to be very effective, correlating strongly with decreases in violent crime.
We used this very topic as a litmus test for hiring attorneys. I was working at a medium sized startup, growing into a proper company. We developed appliances and services that relied heavily upon Linux and other OSS, packaged with hardware and some closed source software. We knew very little about corporate law and had one attorney on board part time, but we had some good legal advice about OSS and every single major competitor we had was doing the exact same thing.
So we need to hire some new legal people, we bring them in and ask them about themselves and their expertise and then we show them the OSS licenses we are using and ask their opinion on incorporating it into products. A few days later, all the ones that come back telling us it's dangerous or we need to have every use of BSD or GPL approved by the legal department on a case by case basis or have we heard of Microsoft who licenses a closed source OS... yeah we trashed those resumes as being too out of touch with the high tech computing industry.
So let's apply your analogy to any other copyright infringement. Say Toyota included a DVD player in the back seating area of their vans and bundled a collection of Disney DVDs with the vehicle. Now suppose, Toyota never licensed those DVDs and just burned or pressed them themselves without permission from Disney. Disney notices and notifies the dealerships of the violation.
So, what do the dealerships do? Do they continue to sell the vans including the DVDs, knowing they are breaking the law and let Toyota deal with it? Do they violate their contract with Toyota and sell the vans without the DVDs? Do they stop selling the vans altogether, contact Toyota headquarters and wait for word from above? What would you do if you owned a dealership?
Actually, I think this is a fairly clear situation, but because copyright law is so weird and because many people don't understand the GPL or how it acts within copyright law, they overly complicate things. If you are distributing copyrighted material without a license and you're notified of this by the copyright holder, it doesn't really matter how many intermediate copyright violations there are. You've been notified so you can't claim ignorance. Your responsibility is to stop and rectify the situation before there is reason for damages to be levied against you instead of the intermediate parties. Then, you can always go back and sue the intermediaries to reclaim whatever it cost you.
You come up with a hypothesis, then you test the hypothesis and resulting theories by experimentation designed to disprove said hypothesis or theory.
i.e. you come up with a story about how things work, figure out the implications assuming it is true and then act on them and see if those implications hold.
I think the sticking point is your phrases "act on them" and "assuming it is true". It isn't part of the scientific method to assume it is true, even for the sake of experimentation. Rather, you determine if it is likely to be true via experimentation. I might have a hypothesis that grape jelly will make an excellent fuel source for conventional combustion engines, but the scientific method is not to assume that is the case and fill my truck's gas tank with it. Rather, I design experiments that would falsify it. For example, that hypothesis could be falsified simply by testing it's vaporization or rate of combustion.
As scientists we rarely, if ever, set out to prove ourselves wrong but to prove ourselves right (and probably someone else wrong!).
This may well be true, but we show that our theories have merit by setting out to prove them wrong, not by designing intentionally weak and inefficient experiments and we don't assume our hypothesis and theories are correct until after we test them. I might have the idea about grape jelly, might even want it to be true, but I don't believe it or present it to others as science until I've tested it as strongly as I can within my means. So after I get it to burn and vaporize I'm still going to actually try running it through an engine and testing the output relative to other fuels BEFORE I form my own beliefs or present it as science.
Science is a formalized, logical methodology for determining what is correct. If you're assuming things are a certain way, then trying to design experiments that won't fail to support that assumption, then you're working under the assumption that the theory is actually wrong or you'd be testing it in a more convincing manner. Assumptions in either direction are not science, regardless of what you call it.
Ahh, yes, good old "anyone whose morals disagree with mine is a sociopath" fallacy, one of the most common forms of Ad Hominem in current use.
First, that's not an ad hominem attack. Please people, if you're going to try to use classical rhetorical references, read a book first.
Second, If you decide to experiment on prisoners and murder people who have never harmed you, you are fitting into the textbook definition of "sociopath". Most people feel empathy for fellow human beings, picture themselves in the place of others, recognize the emotions of pain and fear and have a built in aversion to them. If your only reason for not murdering people is religion, you have a mental illness and should seek help.
Always remember that your "inflict pain and suffering upon others" is another person's "overreacting over trivialities" and viceversa.
"Vice versa" is two words and your comment doesn't make any sense. Who thinks experimenting on prisoners is "overreacting over trivialities" and what makes you think that person is not mentally ill?
I am a religious fundamentalist
Are you really a fundamentalist, or just someone who says he is? Do you really interpret every word in the sacred texts as literal truth? If so, which holy book is it that you believe and follow unquestioningly?
I think you're confusing literalism with fundamentalism. While fundamentalism and literalism have a lot of overlap both in concept and adherents, fundamentalism is usually considered the protestant movement that literally interprets certain core beliefs from the bible, usually: creation, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Second Coming. That's not to say the previous poster isn't a strict literalist, just that you can't infer that from the term "fundamentalism".
I'd also note, I've never met anyone who upon 15 minutes of discussion did not foreswear strict literalism, usually about the time you ask them if they think the earth is literally supported upon four pillars or if there is room for a figurative or metaphorical interpretation in parts of the bible.
this is almost exactly like science: we come up with a theory which we have not yet proved and then act on it as if it were true to see what the implications are and then test those implications.
That's not the scientific method I was taught. You come up with a hypothesis, then you test the hypothesis and resulting theories by experimentation designed to disprove said hypothesis or theory. It's not just about listening when people prove it wrong. It's about intentionally trying to prove it wrong yourself as a way of providing evidence it is correct and then acting as though the theory that has withstood the most rigorous testing is correct.
I provided two examples in my previous comment, the comment to which you are replying. It was only three sentences long. You should stop huffing paint. It seems to be effecting your ability to read and comprehend.
It was the character Lazarus Long speaking, I think in "Time Enough for Love".
Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
You seem to have failed at grasping what science is. Science "proves" nothing. Science is a formal, logical methodology for determining what is most likely true. Recognizing how successful science has been, many irrational people fear to challenge it and instead claim that they "agree with science" or something; right up until the scientific method results in a most supported theory they don't like. Then they rationalize.
It's people's morals - often based on or at least supported by what you blithely dismiss as "fiction" - that stop us from doing those sorts of things.
Those of us that aren't sociopaths don't need religion to keep us from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Those who are sociopaths use religion as an excuse as often as it prevents them from harming others.
What "security procedures" ?
Any effective security procedures from locking down services to tightening up code to remove vulnerabilities. Anything that would prevent a market from forming. Once it has formed, however, MS has to comply with antitrust laws.
Since they did not proactively address security, [...]
Please elaborate on how they could have done so.
They could have built AV software into the OS before other vendors started selling a product or before Windows gained monopoly influence or they could have implemented security procedures to make AV unnecessary.
Since they did not proactively address security, they are legally obligated to compete in the market they created on a level playing field with other companies already in that market.
Why? This is not inherently a true statement.
It is a true statement, but not an inherently true statement, removed from context.
If I start selling widgets and company Y starts selling add-ons, I can create an equivalent addon and bundle it with my widget and put Y out of business. Companies do this all the time and it is not illegal to do this.
Yes, it's called "bundling".
THE ONLY reason Microsoft may be restricted would be due to a court order stemming from monopolistic abuses.
This is incorrect. Regardless of court orders, it is illegal in the US and many other countries to bundle products from a preexisting market with products from a market where you have overwhelming or dominant market presence. Since the courts have already ruled that this is the case for MS with regard to Windows (market definition varying based upon country), it is clearly illegal for MS to bundle with Windows a product that competes with existing market players.
But there is no evidence I have ever seen that they are under some sort of complete blanket regulatory oversight that legally requires them to compete in every market they enter on a level playing field.
In the US the Clayon and Shermans act require all companies with monopolistic influence on some market to compete on level playing fields when entering an existing market. Unfortunately regulators have been slow and inconsistent in their application of these laws, allowing vast abuses by many companies, with MS being one of the worst offenders. Because of the way antirust law works in the US, it usually relies upon private lawsuits and complaints to begin an action. MS uses their money to get around the law, for example, by giving piles of cash in private settlements to anyone who brings a case that might result in MS Office being declared another monopoly. I won't even get into their purchase of influence with lobbying dollars.
The law is fairly clear. Go read the antitrust acts or the EU competition laws. Unfortunately, even if the AV vendors act, it will probably be years before the courts do anything effective, at which point another market will be destroyed, most of the world will be reliant upon whether or not MS finds it profitable to update AV definitions, and the increasing cost of Windows will shell out settlements to the remains of the AV companies they killed.
introduced a product of their own
They don't charge for it. There is no market in which SE plays because it's free.
That has nothing to do with it. MS makes money selling Windows, which this is tied to. Other companies make money selling into the market. Thus a market exists. You can't use a monopoly to tilt the playing field in other markets, including destroying those markets.
Shouldn't security be the purpose of the OS itself? Trend micro and other Antivirus software doesn't have a right to exist. the OS itself should theoretically already protect itself.
Correct, but Microsoft waited until a market had built up around the insecurity of Windows before they introduced a product of their own. Since they did not proactively address security, they are legally obligated to compete in the market they created on a level playing field with other companies already in that market. That means if they use Windows or products bundled with Windows to provide an advantage for their security suite, they are legally obligated to provide the same to competitors. Where do the other AV vendors sign up to be included in Windows update?
i am not calling it agile. Just admit there are situations where agile does not work. That is all the point I am trying make.
Well of course there are, like when someone wants you to make software that does something impossible, for free, in a day. No one is claiming Agile is magic. It's just that saying because you used some other methodology and don't want to invest to bring things into line with Agile methods, that Agile does not work, well that's a little redundant. It's just another way of saying Agile doesn't work in cases where you don't use Agile. That's the point I'm making. It's useful and constructive to point out the drawbacks to Agile, such as more overhead or an unneeded level of testing. Your example I find less relevant.
There are already products that are shipping. They were developed sold and they have to be maintained. No point in saying it should never happen in true agile environment. Agile has to take existing code base and existing programmers and hit the ground running.
True, but the problem is the result of the previous development methodology and the refusal to hire the manpower needed to implement Agile correctly. Hiring one programmer that can work the code and one that cannot is NOT Agile programming. Calling it such is just marketing.
Shamelessly copied from another discussion:
The result was then discussed in emails between W3C members, including Anne van Kesteren of Opera, Maciej Stachowiak of Apple, Jonathan Griffin of Mozilla, Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen of Google, and Kris Krueger of Microsoft. Opera's van Kesteren wrote, "This test suite is vastly incomplete. Publishing unverified results of a vastly incomplete test suite without a big fat warning is extremely silly. Why was this done?" Stachowiak responded, "It's also strange that the results include alpha/beta/preview versions of most browsers, but the stable version of Safari [rather than the latest nightly build]. Wouldn't be a big deal other than the fact that this rather buggy test results page was labeled as 'Official' and then picked up in the press as authoritative. We should probably be cautious about the chance of creating PR events based on incorrect information." Google employee Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of the Acid2 and Acid3 tests and the HTML 5 specification itself, added, "I agree with Anne that it's rather pointless to be publishing results for this test suite. Realistically speaking the test suite isn't even 0.1% complete yet."
Basically, there is not a comprehensive HTML5 test suite yet. What there is, is a pile of tests that Microsoft has submitted to the test suite and which do test some of HTML5, but ignore the vast majority of it needed to do real world HTML5 apps and sites. It includes no tests at all for drag and drop, Web Workers, local storage, or CSS3 transforms and animations. It includes a few tests for SVG, but only for the very minor parts IE 9 can handle and while there is a comprehensive SVG test, which IE 9 fails miserably, scoring dead last with 58% compliance behind the next worst Firefox which scores 79%
In short, these results are basically MS submitting tests they pass to a hugely incomplete suite, noting they then pass more of the incomplete suite then others, then trying to spin this as their being more complete in implementing the spec than others. MS and IE 9 beta win on marketing, but still lose on compliance to the spec.
Agile doesn't solve the essential problem in IT which is a lack of understanding of the software development process, lack of preparation and lack of method - it just provides cover for those developers which do everything in an ad-hoc, reactive way and will then excuse themselves as being "Agile".
I do some work in an Agile shop and usability is a huge concern. It is very often that we tell the customer "we don't know what this should do, schedule our usability experts to go conduct some interviews with users and find out". In some cases they do just that. In others they decide it is too expensive so they just declare what they just take a guess at what users need and we build it. But you can be sure the customer knows they're making a tradeoff and reducing quality for the reduced cost.
It works when the project has a large number of people with identical or largely similar skill sets. If the project has large number of specialists (like "Frank here is the only one who can even touch the turbulence modeling code") development will be slow, agile or not.
One should note that for pair programming environments and most Agile methodologies, this should never happen because there should have been many different people that developed each part of the code. If only one guy knows how something works, you probably did not follow an Agile development method.
I think maybe what some people are misunderstanding is that there is cost, explained to the customer as part of the process, for such changes. You see sometimes you absolutely need to change the requirements late in the development process; otherwise you finish the project but it doesn't do what the customer needs it to. Seriously, if you have a project and right near the end the customer tells you they were purchased and by fiat need to switch the networking protocol on which the app relies to comply with the new company servers that have replaced the old ones entirely, what are your options?
You can:
I fail to see how you can blame the development methodology for being flexible enough to not fall over. I mean have people ever been in an Agile planning session with a customer? When they change the requirements they see a fair estimate of how much time that is going to cost them and how long and how expensive the project is now going to be. Further, they have a history of these decisions going back. If they're plain stupid or wasteful they can ruin the project, but hey that's not dependent upon the development method as I'm sure about 99% of developers can attest.
This doesn't break the rules at all, anyone can fullfill the tender, even google.
How so? The request didn't say it had to be interoperable with MS's service, it said it had to use MS's service. How does Google do that?
The ballot screen provided a few extra downloads for the other browsers, but didn't change much, if at all. Early reports were encouraging for IE competitors, but it turned out that the balance didn't tip as much as some had anticipated.
I don't really think the results of the ballot screen will be noticeable for some time. Given average turnover rates only about 6% of people in the EU in an average sales quarter would even see the ballot. So we need to wait at least a year to get numbers outside the margin for error of the studies I've seen. It will be four years or more before we can accurately judge the level of impact the ballot is making. Note, I'm not saying it is effective, just that trying to draw conclusions at this point is just bad math.