Nice attempt to paint his comment as like unto Epimenides' Paradox, but it fails in that "honesty" and "truthfulness" are not the same thing. All lies are dishonest, but not all dishonesty is wholly untruthful. Further, Epimenides' Paradox is just a philosophical exercise. It very obviously doesn't apply in real life. Liars tell the truth all the time-- you just don't know when.
This person claimed that their decision making process was to assume all members of society were lying. It is certainly logical to point out why that point of view is not a reasonable method of making decisions. The truth is you have to evaluate all the data and make the best decision you can based upon it. In the context of his assertions, my rebuttal was wholly appropriate.
I would have to agree with this. A lot of 'scientific' reports are funded by political organizations that want to push an agenda. I find it hypocritical that SlashDot will rip apart and condemn a MS SQL benchmark article (for example) that has some MS funding but completely believe a scientific report on a political issue like global climate change - and yes, these days, it is a political issue.
I think there are fundamentally two kinds of thinking and everyone does both of them to some degree. You can develop an opinion and then look to find support, or you can analyze the data and use it to form an opinion. If you predominantly do the former you'll end up with opinions like you just expressed. People don't like MS and thus show reasons their numbers are wrong. People do like the idea of global warming, so they don't find reasons their numbers are wrong. I can sort of understand that perspective.
The other way to think is to look at the numbers from a MySQL study and see if they hold up, logically. Are all the number presented and the data to evaluate it including error or is it just PR? Use this analysis to form opinions on the study. Apply the same technique to the global warming studies. In this case, finding one study to be credible and another to not be is in no way hypocritical.
As for trying to judge the credibility of those presenting data to lie, well we look at motivations. Do people conducting a study for MS have motivation to skew the results in favor of the product MS is trying to generate marketing material for? Do the scientists who conducted this study have motivation to come up with false positives?
This particular study is culled from multiple, publicly available sources and includes that underlying data and the margin of error. Your approach of disbelieving everything is not a workable model as it is useless. Making decisions based upon emotion and then trying to support them is even worse for accuracy. The best we can do is look at the data and the people presenting it and make our judgment based upon that. I suggest you rethink your decision making processes.
No, I'm just so disillusioned by society that I don't think anything is done honestly anymore.
Assuming you're right, that means you're probably lying since you're part of society. Assuming you're wrong, means you're mistaken. Thus, your opinion kind of defines itself as irrelevant, huh?
It all depends on which agenda they're pushing, or who's funding them.
Are you and the previous poster both, by any chance, on the payroll of Phillip Morris? Either state facts as to how this study does or does not show statistical significance for their conclusions and error bars or stop spreading this "all science is just opinion" bull crap.
It has a lot to do with how much said company contributes each year to taxes.
Usually it has more to do with how much the company contributes to election campaigns, not taxes.
Those taxes fund government programs such as welfare, foodstamps, education, defense, etc.
So what? If a billionaire pays a million dollars in taxes each year should we ask the EU not to convict them for armed robbery when we convicted them of the same offense two years ago?
Sure, it may not be what you want but the govt is actually looking out for its bottom line, not the company it's lobbying for.
Nope. They are looking out for their slush funds and bribes. Both the companies who asked the EU look into this issue and who are the victims whose money is being unlawfully redirected are American companies whose taxes also fund the US government. How does MS paying taxes on their portable document and antivirus tools businesses benefit the US any more than Adobe and Symantec doing the same?
Other than the (dubious) 'reason' "because I hate Microsoft!" why should anyone complain that the United States government was lifting a finger to possibly help one of its interests?
Because it was the politician's interest, not the American people's. We convicted them of the same crime and after certain lobbying suddenly our corrupt politicians replaced the people overseeing the case and did not punish MS for their guilt. The US is supposed to look out for the people as a whole, but here they are spending our tax dollars to work against the interests of the US people by trying to get criminals, who coincidentally donated lots of money to them, off the hook.
I don't know about you, but I sort of dislike obvious corruption and abuse within our government.
In wonder, though, if when Apple starts suing EU companies for using the letters "pod" in their products' names people will expect (demand) the U.S. government to rattle some sabers on their behalf...
This is such a straw man I won't even go into it.
Am I the only one who remembers all the red coats and that "rather unpleasant matter concerning tea" up in Boston? Sure, we're shoulder-to-shoulder against the world, but when it comes right down to it it's us-against-them in the oldest rivalry our nation knows...
Do you really think like this? Is everything in your beliefs based not upon "right and wrong" or "just and unjust" or "beneficial versus detrimental" and instead based upon "us versus them?" Do you really pick sides on an issue based entirely upon who is on each side? A few of us actually look at each issue and make up our minds based upon the facts, rather than who is arguing. I agree with a lot of things the EU does and disagree with a lot of them. The same goes for the US. I'll not support corruption, bribery, or dishonesty whether it is being done by a Republican, Democrat, American, European, christian, voodoo priest, or illegal alien. It is not who is doing something that determines if it is right, it is what they are doing.
Apple didn't come up with this word, so what the hell are they playing at?
Sigh. Podcast is obviously derived from iPod. Apple is cool with that. Go ahead and call it Podcasting. The problem is when some company decided to trademark "Podcast ready" which includes the derivative term from iPod. I think any company would be more than a little worried about such a thing. In fact, it might lead to their losing their trademark on the term iPod and then Microsoft and Sony could release their own products called iPods, confusing and misleading customers. Apple basically said, "don't try to trademark common terms that refer to terms we've already trademarked."
Ahhh... that is exactly what I said up above (and for which I was called a fool), only I used slightly different words (I called it "negotiating with the community") - which amounts to essentially getting somebody to approve your bug fix in the public source tree.
Well, there is not usually any negotiation involved. You just submit a patch with an explanation.
So I wasn't far off base after all. In the end, either you have your own source tree (i.e. your own distribution, by which I mean not just config changes on top of a public distribution) and make bug fixes there, or you use the "public" source tree, periodically (at your choice of intervals) pulling a new tree, and then trying to convince the distribution managers to include your bug fix.
This is not a dichotomy. No one in their right mind deploys the latest cutting edge fixes to everything in their production environment. I don't know any structured environment that rolls out an unmodified Linux build either, since it is easier to preconfigure the software packages you want and the configurations for your environment and then roll that out. It also makes testing easier. As for "convincing maintainers" that is usually not an issue at all. There is usually no back an forth at all and if their is it is usually something like, "Cool thanks" or "does this touch X as well? with the occasional, "thanks, but we've already got a fix for this rolled in in branch Foo."
So as a sysadmin you build a snapshot to roll out you simply issue the commands to build from the version you're using and to pull in fixes, configs, and packages from your tree as well. Bringing some part of the system to a more up to date version is a single line command.
So there is some risk, when you re-sync, that your fix gets overwritten with a version that doesn't have your fix.
Only if you're really clueless. Remember this is how everyone operates so the whole system is built to make this as easy as possible.
Thanks for the clarification.
No problem. Open source is not ideal for everything, but it is a model that has significant advantages for the end user. Since the developers of open source projects usually are the end users, this follows logically. They can out compete most closed source solutions because a commercial closed source project needs to make money, while an open source project can break even and be just fine.
Apple is a trademark whore. They seem sue anybody using a term that might be related to thier products even if the term itself is not trademarked. But they don't concern themselves at the onset. They wait to see if something actually becomes popular to send in the wolves.
Bullshit. Apple likes the fact that the term podcast is popular and based on their existing brand. It is as though everyone started calling modding pickups for racing toyotafizzing. Toyota would be cool with that too. The problem is when another company or companies apply for trademarks that include your trademark and try to lock down terms to that only they can sell things in that market. If some company tried to trademark the term "Toyotafizzle" to use in their aftermarket mods of all trucks, not just Toyotas, you can bet your sweet ass Toyota would send them a nasty letter in short order too.
Is your argument that ignoring copyright on phonorecordings is morally justified?
I don't know about the previous poster, but I believe ignoring copyright on phono-recordings is laudable and a form of civil disobedience that will hopefully bring about meaningful improvements.
I suppose it also depends on how comfortable you are managing your own distribution.
But they aren't managing their own distribution, they're managing their own customizations, just like many companies do with Windows, but with more options. They're using an existing Linux distro which is already kept up to date for them, and then rolling out customizations to it.
I frankly am skeptical that it makes sense to keep your own source tree and "hire a guy to fix a nasty bug" as the grandparent suggested, but I have minimal understanding of the OSS model so I can't really say for sure.
Here's the way it works, here and most places I've worked that use Linux or other open platforms. You keep your platform up to date by periodically testing new versions with fixes from thousands of different places. If you run into a specific bug, you need fixed, you pay someone to fix it, either an internal employee, a company you've contracted for support, or an independent contractor. You can even take bids from all three to get the best deal. Then you add that software package patch to your repository and submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually. The same goes for applications you add. The benefit is that your bug fixes are soon the standard and you get all the bug fixes from everyone else for free. That means not only can you get bug fixes, you can get them when you want at an affordable price and most often for free.
Since all of this is standard operating procedure, it is also really, really easy to do.
> When the moral right to infringe on another's copyright is elevated to the same status as the fight against the Ku Klux Klan... I know I am hearing the voice of the eternal adolescent.
Actually, I think the right to infringe on copyright is very, very important to our society in ways you probably do not appreciate. Cultures are often judged by history based upon their art. Art is often what defines a culture and information and ideas are conveyed by it. One insightful, entertaining book, movie or song can bring about real change. The Klu Klux Clan was as devastated by the post WWII superman cartoons/radio shows depicting him taking on the Klan than they were by affirmative action laws. Superman was America and clansmen throughout the south felt ashamed to let their children know they were members for the very first generation. It broke a cycle of hate.
So might think, "just pay for the copyrighted works." The problem is, that is not an option for most works. You heard me. Most copyrighted works are not available to the general public at all. Thousands upon thousands of books, movies and songs were copyrighted when released, sold for a time, then taken off the market and stored in warehouse or not at all. Every day the last copy of some book is destroyed. Every day the last recording of some song vanishes, and it is illegal to save them. Many of these works are owned by unknown parties who have no idea they even own the rights to a work.
So now maybe you're thinking, "but if they were good, they'd still be on the market. After all, if they are good people will buy them." That too is wrong. Executives at media distribution houses are not the best judges of what is and is not good. Almost all of the longest running, most award winning TV shows, for example, were cancelled or almost cancelled in their first season and then saved by chance. That is because they were different and different is risky, something big business avoids. A good anecdotal example is "It's a Wonderful Life." It is a timeless classic Christmas story and, I dare-say, part of our culture. It was also a box office flop that was tossed in a warehouse after its first run and never saw the light of day again, until the copyright on it expired. Then PBS aired it and people saw it again and were hooked. Through some legal machinations it somehow became re-copyrighted and now is no longer free for everyone to enjoy. More importantly, due to the bribes from the industry, copyrights don't expire anymore. Theoretically they do, but in fact there is no reason to think anything will ever enter the public domain again. Thus, all those great works like "It's a Wonderful Life" are gone, forever or known only to one or two collectors, forbidden by law from sharing. Great works are rarely popular right away. I would go so far as to say the best works of American art are probably unrecognized and the law will stop them from ever being recognized. Thus our society loses out. Losing innovation in art is a hallmark of a dying empire. We remake old movies, but rarely introduce new ones. We stagnate.
In my opinion it is not only the right, but the duty of every American to disobey copyright laws in a display of public protest to such a degree that the lawmakers will realize they can use copyright reform to get votes and will save our broken copyright system and fix it. After all, copyright is not a natural right, but a government imposed monopoly that is supposed to provide advantages to our society, not gut our culture of its heritage.
Please rethink your views on copyright and its effects upon society. It is much more important in fundamental ways, than you give it credit for.
Ok[sic] all you did was bash that collaboration software. Setup a second workstation for it all? No? I can run everything mentioned on 2 Blades.
Are you telling me you don't even know the difference between a workstation and a server? A workstation is on your desk. A server is in the server room and might take blades. Since a lot of people need Linux development environments and those workstations aren't running Windows you need a second workstation for those employees just to run the Windows only client software you're recommending. Almost every other collaboration package has clients for Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc. so workers on those platforms don't need a second machine just to run them.
Oh and greatplanes is accounting software.
Do you Mean "Great Plains" software, which was bought out by Microsoft and their product renamed to "Dynamics" six years ago?
Now you still didnt[sic] tell me what Linux can do in it's[sic] place.
Well i could ask you what functionality you find necessary that you can't find on Linux, but I don't think it will make any difference. You obviously have no idea what runs on Linux and have never tried it. You're just talking out of your butt. I suspect you've never tried to run a business on any platform, since you don't know the difference between a server and a workstation and don't even know the name of the software you're recommending. Please stop wasting everyones time with your uneducated, clueless assertions.
The manufacturers should have the firmware require a password change after the initial set-up. If everyone did this, this wouldn't be a problem. Of course, I also blame my bank!
A lot of companies avoid this because machines are first used in a test lab, or set up by an installation company and then finally configured/stocked by the bank. This leads to incidents where the bank is calling and wants to know the password, but it has been changed from the default. So companies leave a default in, but tell customers to change it. It saves them some support costs with incompetent customers.
Umm, we sell servers on 8 different server platforms and have never had a problem with Linux supporting it. Nor have we had any problem with the Thinkpads, powerbooks, and towers we buy. Obviously you've never tried using Linux in a business environment.
I take it you mean you admit your sig is wrong, in that you can't find me a way MS does what I need 20 times better. Gee, what a surprise.
Also show me what Linux can do over Sharepoint, CRM, Portal server, GreatPlanes and other nice things Microsoft integrates with the business man.
Please, collaboration is easy enough without all the crappy MS junk that can't even talk to other platforms. As a company we have to interact with other professional companies that develop on Linux and the BSDs and that means engineering needs it. Buying a second workstation just to run collaboration software is horribly inefficient and it is dumb to lock yourself into a single supplier for all this software, rather than going with open standards so that you can get competing bids without throwing away your investment. For most people, the free software collaboration tools are more than sufficient and much cheaper.
I have no idea what GreatPlanes is, but since I've never needed it I can pretty much assume it is not useful to me or has a replacement. You don't seem to have a lot to back up your assertions. Have you ever run a business on Linux?
This is like Linux vs. Windows. Open Sorce[sic] vs closed sorce[sic].
Not really. This is a study of the state of the industry across a variety of open, closed and mixed open and closed source development processes. It is a bit disorganized, but it shows number of publicly known bugs and bugs speed of fixing bugs once they are public. We can speculate as to how much the popularity of a browser contributes to said, number of bugs, but the speed to fix is a lot more interesting, especially in this case.
People say Windows has many holes. Its[sic] not that they have many holes its[sic] just people choose to find thoes[sic] holes in the OS over Linux because the majority of users use windows.
It is hard to quantify the number of people searching for bugs on a given platform, but it is certainly not effected only by the number of users. For example, because Linux is open source, a lot of academics and hobbyists will view the code and incidentally find bugs. And then there is the level of concern. No one runs Windows as a secure platform. No really. Unless your tech people are morons they recognize that Windows is wholly unsuited to a task as a secure workstation. It was not designed for that role and because modifying the code is unsupportable, it cannot be modified to work well in that capacity. Thus, people really really concerned with security and with lots of headcount to devote to securing their systems (like the NSA) use Linux or UNIX variants. They consequently spend a lot of time auditing the code and finding bugs.
Linux could have more problems its[sic] just people dont[sic] care about Linux because most businesses[sic] use windows.
Linux and Windows both re-use a lot of code between their server and desktop versions. The majority of people concerned about security aside from secure workstations (who don't use Windows) are people running servers. Realistically, the risk of a server being compromised or DoSed is much higher and has much worse consequences than a desktop. The people operating them, in general, have lot more ability to find security holes. For server environments, Linux is still in the majority. Ergo, more bugs should be showing up in Linux than Windows.
Now whats[sic] happening is that more and more people are using firefox and now people are begining[sic] to search for problems with firefox because alot[sic] of people use it now. The truth now comes out that Open sorce[sic] software can have just as many if not more problems than closed sorce[sic].
Sigh, open or closed source software will have bugs and the development process is not the only thing that determines how many of those bugs will be found. Now that Firefox is more popular, it is attacked more often than IE is, but it is almost never compromised. This is because it had 1 day worth of time so far, when there was a vulnerability exposed without a patch. IE has had 9 days worth of time so far, and the type of vulnerability has been much more exploitable. Their are unpatched vulnerabilities for IE right now, being exploited in the wild. Will more malware authors target Firefox as it becomes more popular? Sure. Will it be compromised as much as IE if they both reach equal market share? Not likely. While open source development is not the only factor in making software secure, it is a contributing factor, as is design methodology aimed at making the users happy, rather than just the developers. I don't know where you're getting your ideas, but find some new sources of information. IE is a disaster and the fact that it is bundled with Windows is not the only reason that is the case.
P.S. Your sig reads, "Show me what Linux can do for a business, and I'll show you how Microsoft does it 20 times better." Are you a troll or a very ignorant Windows fan? For my business can you show me how I can get 100 workstation and 50 unlimited server licenses for free. Also, will you show me where I can get modifiable source code for Windows that I can strip down and use to easily make a super secure server that I can resell without paying any licensing fees? Because that is what I"m using Linux for at my business. Also, apparently Linux can spellcheck.
Comparing the "number of vulnerabilities" is irrelevant to me. How many of them have actually been exploited in the wild? How many of them have caused users to lose data or unintentionally host malware? How many have resulted in people's identities being stolen?
The study does not give exact numbers for any of these things, but it does nicely summarize the state of these things by saying all the widespread exploits were for IE and none for any other browser.
This study shows me nothing useful.
The study itself does have a few useful tidbits in it, but the write ups so far seem to have all focused on one misleading graphic. More revealing are the comparisons of each browser between last year and this year as a study in how many people are looking at each browser's security.
It turns out that Firefox leads the pack with 47 vulnerabilities, compared to 38 for Internet Explorer.
This is very misleading. These are the numbers of vulnerabilities reported to Symantec and which the vendor has acknowledged to Symantec. The total number of vulnerabilities reported to Symantec are 50 for Firefox and 57 for IE.
If you add to this the quote from Symantec, "at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred..." you start to see that this is mostly spin with little substance. Firefox is not really being attacked, and while they have bugs they fix them an order of magnitude faster and have an open process that responds to the community. This bug count includes all the bugs the Firefox team found, but who knows what percentage of bugs Microsoft and partners found that they deemed not worth fixing and which do not show up in this study? It is debatable that in theory, Firefox is more secure, but attempts like this to twist numbers to make is seem like maybe Firefox is not more secure in practice, are misleading and simply a way to get attention. I declare the summary here to be FUD.
Importantly, these are direct competitors (i.e. desktop operating systems that can be installed on PC hardware), and not mere substitutes (Mac OS X could arguably be considered a substitute, since it provides similar benefits, but requires Mac hardware).
Since you're an expert on economics, perhaps you know what a market is? It is the criteria for a monopoly since to have a monopoly you have to monopolize a market. The market MS monopolizes is desktop OS's and the consumers are mostly OEMs like Dell and Gateway. OS X is not in this market because they don't sell their OS to other OEMs and making it for themselves does not constitute a transaction in the market. Further, it does not matter if Dell can choose Linux. Windows constitutes a monopoly because they don't choose anything but Windows for numerous reasons. As a result, MS has a great deal of power to break capitalism in other markets (like portable document tools). Luckily, the laws around the world forbid them from driving out superior competitors in markets they have no monopolized with an inferior product using their market influence.
1. Microsoft are not a monopoly
Microsoft has a monopoly. A company can't be a monopoly, they can be a monopolist.
2. Amongst Microsoft's many products, only the MS Windows desktop OS has been ruled to be a monopoly (a political monopoly) . In economic terms, none of Microsoft's products constitute monopolies
Windows is a monopoly both in economic and legal terms as ruled by courts around the world. Find me a serious, professional economist who claims otherwise.
Except this "XPS generator" isn't being "bundled" with Windows, it's *part of* Windows.
That makes no functional difference to the user and no difference at all to the courts. You see this cheese isn't being bundles with your electrical service, it is an integral part of the electric-cheese experience.
Saying OS functionality is "bundled" with OSes is like saying engines are "bundled" with cars.
Sure and had someone monopolized cars before engines were put in them it would be just the same thing. If you're thinking of automobiles, however, they never existed without engines. OS's have certainly done just fine without portable document creation tools being built into them, however so it is bundling. The important thing is the markets. There is a market for car engines and a market for cars. This is analogous to a company with a monopoly on one component of the car (like the transmission) building engine-transmission bundles to drive all existing transmission makers out of business. It is illegal and anti-capitalist.
Which means - if you're going to define every little piece of software as having its own "market" - that they can't improve Windows.
It isn't about my defining anything. Is another company currently selling and making money delivering portable document tools? Yes. That is called a market.
Neither Firefox nor Opera provide the functionality IE does, that Windows uses.
Actually, they do provide the functionality, Windows just doesn't use it.
I shall also point out here that your argument essentially denies Microsoft the ability to use good software development practices (ie: modularity and reusable code) because any functionality that they might create which is implemented as a shared library, which is also sold by third parties, would be considered an antitrust violation.
No, it encourages modularity so that pieces can be sold separately. It encourages good, clean, documented APIs which would fix a lot of MS's security woes. Note, anti-trust only covers functionality currently being sold into a market. So they need only pay attention to libraries being currently offered.
OTOH, if you go back to ca. 1997-98, you would find *many* people who thought IE was the best product out there.
So what? Are you arguing that capitalism should reward the first company to create a good product, not the currently best one? So because Ford once made the best, most affordable car they should be guaranteed a monopoly on automobiles with their model T and just because Chevy produces the S-10 pickup that is superior the market should not be free to move towards it? That is a recipe for exactly the stagnation and lack of innovation we've seen in IE over the last 8 years.
This sounds suspiciously like you consider any advantage gained via trade secrets to be "artificial barriers".
I never mentioned trade secrets at all. No merely anything that gives one product an advantage based upon the fact that that company has a monopoly on a different product. For example, a trade secret that is an undocumented communication between MS's desktop monopoly and server is illegal, as the courts have ruled. A trade secret that is how Windows loads graphics so quickly, is not. So long as the trade secret is not a tie between a monopoly product and another product they are in the clear.
For this to support your argument, you would have to show that a) consumer demand existed for those features and b) no other alternative existed that implemented them.
Actually, no I don't. I simply have to ask impartial users which is better, the currently most popular product (bundled) or any other product on the market which is not popular. The fact that the market has not moved to embrace alternatives is pretty damning by itself. Honestly, do you really think if IE was never bundled with Windows and if OEMs were given a choice it would be both the most popular browser and have the same, weak feature set for so long? Really consider this objectively. What is your opinion?
No, you can't. You might be able to in the future, but you most certainly cannot right now. The only way to get a copy of OS X is to buy an intel-based Macintosh. Added to that, Apple *specifically require* that you only run their OS on their hardware for it to be legally licensed.
Okay, whatever. It does not matter since if they do sell boxed OS's their share of the market is too small to matter.
This is not the market consumers shop in.
So? Most consumers never buy a car engine by itself, they buy a car. Tell me again how that is relevant to antitrust actions against a company with a monopoly on car engines, which it sells to auto makers?
Please make your mind up. A second ago you were saying Apple sell "desktop x86 OSes".
Apple does sell OS's by themselves (even if the x86 version has not yet hit the market, it will with leopard). However, their share of that market is too small to make a difference. The majority of their sales is in the computer system market.
But, by definition, Microsoft would then be the only producer of Windows PCs and identical to Apple with their Macintoshes.
If MS bought out the PC manufacturers and started selling complete systems, then yes they would be in the computer system market the same as Apple. That does not mean they would not have taken over so much of it so as to be a monopolist.
If you were going to try and argue Microsoft could be a monopoly of such a market, you would have to similarly argue Apple are a monopoly right now.
Apple competes with Dell and Gateway and Lenovo and many others. If MS stopped selling Windows to those companies and started selling compete systems with Windows there are several possibilities. One is that All those companies would lose all their market share. One is that they would adopt other OS's. Then, depending on how much of the market for computer systems they had taken over, they would wield monopoly power or they wouldn't. I'm not sure I'd hazard a guess.
What people buy is a more valid benchmark to use.
No it isn't because individuals make up a small portion of the buyers in the desktop operating system market. Most OS's are purchased by OEMs.
Your argument would exclude all except retail sales and ignore the market dynamics in all other markets.
People buy Windows PCs. People buy Macs (because they run OS X). People buy Linux PCs (because they run Linux). Etc.
Yes they do and it is a healthy market, but one Microsoft is not in. Microsoft does not sell "Windows PCs." They are in the desktop operating system market.
Microsoft are in the same market as the alternatives consumers look at to make their decision.
Really how many general purpose computers did Microsoft sell last year? None. Gee I wonder how they made billions in that market considering they did not sell anything.
By the argument you are presenting, however, they *would* now be a monopoly of the "electric-engined car market" (assuming no other manufacturer did the same thing).
No they wouldn't because markets are defined by functional alternatives available to that market. If Ford introduces a new barf colored car are they a monopolist on barf colored cars because no one else makes one? No, because the color is not the defining characteristic of a car it is a component of a car, just like an electric engine is.
The problem with your analogy is that there *are* functionally equivalent alternatives to Windows PCs and there *are* functionally equivalent alternatives to Windows.
It does not matter. There are functional equivalents to buying power form the electric company. It makes them no less a monopoly. Even assuming many computers don't run Windows, does not matter because that is not the market MS has monopolized. They've monopolized the market for one component of computers, the OS. OS
And if other security products won't work, it will be because of _them_ using undocumented API calls, which MS is under no obligation to support.
Are those APIs necessary for feature parity with MS's offering in the security market? If so then MS is obligated by law to support them.
Not to mention, what Symantec is really upset about here is that their entire business model is under threat.
No, they're upset that another company can abuse their monopoly to offer a product that is no better or even not as good, but still take over the market using illegal bundling.
My parents wouldn't have been able to do that, at least not in 10 secs.
Why should they have to. Dell or HP or Lenovo is free to bundle a solution from MS or Adobe as they please.
ALL other competitors are allowed to have FREE Save-As-PDF functionality (OO, OSX, Writely). However Adobe doesn't want MS to offer PDF support for free. Because of that now it'll take a stupid patch to enable PDF support, as well as XPS (which MS took out also). This is total crap from Adobe.
It's called fair competition. Why should MS automatically take over a market because they control a different market. Let Adobe and MS both offer a product the same way and may the best product win.
MS took out XPS support from O12 and will be included in the same patch that enables PDF functionality. They were under no obligation to remove it, they did is as a sign of good faith.
Ha ha ha! It is hilarious that not breaking the law is considered a sign of good faith from MS. It is a criminal offense for MS to bundle their XPS tools with their OS in both the US and EU. They pulled that particular criminal act out because attention had been drawn to it at the courts were being pressured to respond.
Do you honestely think that even if you could remove IE, for example, from Windows, OEM manufacturers would remove it?? If you wouldn't have IE shipped with Windows, how would you get Firefox easily?
If IE was not bundled, Web developers would never have begun relying upon it to be there and would instead have coded to standards, thus preventing lock-in. If IE was not bundled by MS now, I think most OEMs would probably add it themselves because too much lock-in has been built up. Had it never been bundled, however, OEMs would have made different choices about which browser to bundle, and people would gravitate to the computer with the better one. Right now that is Firefox, but in this alternative world, MS would have had motivation to work on and improve IE, so who knows which would be better. Not that it matters, since consumers would be getting a better browser either way.
Look at Apple - can you remove Safari? Heck no. I don't like it, so i use firefox/camino.
I don't see why it matters, but you can just drag it to the trash and it is gone. It's not very hard.
That's because of a grudge on MS, not because of logical arguments. As much as I bitch about MS, I hate Symantec and Adobe more for the shit they've done with their products, and MS is in a lose-lose situation.
It's funny you accuse someone of making emotive decisions and then justify your own beliefs based upon your dislike of other companies. I think you're misguided because you are not the average user and don't understand the common market case. Windows is a component. Without hardware and additional software it is useless. As such, most people buy a compete system from Dell or HP or someone. There is no reason that MS being banned from bundling should in any way reduce the functionality of this end product. Dell can bundle Windows and Adobe and other MS software all they want. What the law says, however, is MS can't force Dell to include their XPS tools just because they need Windows. MS has to offer it separately to them, just like Adobe does so they don't get an unfair advantage.
If it is bad and they are still locking out these vendors and it's market share, sales, etc. aren't dropping then it can't be that bad, the overall goodness of the product is greater than the overall badness of the product.
Capitalism, not regulated to stop monopoly abuse, does not work. Monopolies just expand until you're left with only a few huge companies selling inferior products at high prices. It is basically the same as socialism at that point.
So, leave this to the economists, or more specifically the Free Market Economists (The other ones suck).
Any real economist you talk to will tell you MS's actions are illegal for good reason. It's not like the EU made up this law to attack foreign companies. Almost every nation on earth has a law banning monopolistic bundling because it removes all the benefits of innovation and competition afforded by capitalism. It allows for people acting correctly in their own best interests to buy an inferior product because of artificial barriers to the superior one.
We covered this in introduction to economics, didn't you?
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft is allowed to add any feature they choose to add. It is THEIR operating system. If they want built in virus protection for example, then so be it. Why shouldn't they be allowed to add it in?
Because it breaks capitalism and leads to the same problems as hardline communist countries had.
Do you know why monopolistic bundling is illegal? Okay here's my stock example for the day. The electric company has a monopoly on power distribution to your house. You have only one option. Sure you can buy a generator, or set up hundreds of expensive windmills, but they won't be as cost effective. Now suppose you run the local bakery. You make the best bread in town. You sell it for good prices too. Then the power company decides to enter the baked goods business, but instead of competing with you on the quality or price of the bread, they just bundle it with everyone's power service. Now everyone pays $20 a month more on their power bill, but gets free bread. You can't compete with that. I mean you make better bread for less money, but no one is buying it since they already have bread. You go out of business.
Who lost in the above scenario? You did, because you went out of business despite being the best baker. The consumers did because they are paying more money for lower quality products. The state of the industry did because the power company has no motivation to make better quality bread. In fact the only person that did not lose, was the monopolist.
Allowed to take these actions, monopolies expand dominating more and more markets with inferior goods and high prices. Capitalism itself fails. That is why it is illegal everywhere.
Now let me paraphrase your question. "It is THEIR electrical service. If they want built in bread delivery for example, then so be it. Why shouldn't they be allowed to add it in?
if your machine didn't have a TCP/IP stack by default you'd be limited in how to even acquire one, so on that point i agree. drawing, layout, and publishing tools are a completely different story however.
Repeat after me. "The personal computer system market is not the same thing as the desktop OS market." The law forbids MS from integrating additional products into their monopoly. It does not forbid anyone else. If you buy a computer from Dell or HP or Lenovo it will ship with a TCP/IP stack because that is what customers want, just as if you buy a car from Ford or Honda it will ship with an engine. If you're assembling your own computer from components or your own car from components, you presumably know how to add all the pieces.
It is illegal for MS to force Dell or HP to buy any additional product from and existing market just because they have to buy Windows.
Back to our car analogy, imagine if there was only one source for car engines (EngineCo) to go in Fords, Chevy, and Hondas. Toyota made their own engines, but did not sell them and they were not compatible. EngineCo, as a monopolist is forbidden from bundling. They can't take over the car stereo business by refusing to sell stand alone engines and only selling a bundle of engines plus an EngineCo brand stereo. The reason for this is because it would force most other the car stereo makers out of business, even if their product was not as good or as cheap. When that happens, capitalism has failed and EngineCo moves on to bundling rear view mirrors and then tires and then something else. Consumers get screwed because EngineCo has no motivation to make good stereos, since they will be able to sell them to Ford and Chevy anyway.
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Nice attempt to paint his comment as like unto Epimenides' Paradox, but it fails in that "honesty" and "truthfulness" are not the same thing. All lies are dishonest, but not all dishonesty is wholly untruthful. Further, Epimenides' Paradox is just a philosophical exercise. It very obviously doesn't apply in real life. Liars tell the truth all the time-- you just don't know when.
This person claimed that their decision making process was to assume all members of society were lying. It is certainly logical to point out why that point of view is not a reasonable method of making decisions. The truth is you have to evaluate all the data and make the best decision you can based upon it. In the context of his assertions, my rebuttal was wholly appropriate.
I would have to agree with this. A lot of 'scientific' reports are funded by political organizations that want to push an agenda. I find it hypocritical that SlashDot will rip apart and condemn a MS SQL benchmark article (for example) that has some MS funding but completely believe a scientific report on a political issue like global climate change - and yes, these days, it is a political issue.
I think there are fundamentally two kinds of thinking and everyone does both of them to some degree. You can develop an opinion and then look to find support, or you can analyze the data and use it to form an opinion. If you predominantly do the former you'll end up with opinions like you just expressed. People don't like MS and thus show reasons their numbers are wrong. People do like the idea of global warming, so they don't find reasons their numbers are wrong. I can sort of understand that perspective.
The other way to think is to look at the numbers from a MySQL study and see if they hold up, logically. Are all the number presented and the data to evaluate it including error or is it just PR? Use this analysis to form opinions on the study. Apply the same technique to the global warming studies. In this case, finding one study to be credible and another to not be is in no way hypocritical.
As for trying to judge the credibility of those presenting data to lie, well we look at motivations. Do people conducting a study for MS have motivation to skew the results in favor of the product MS is trying to generate marketing material for? Do the scientists who conducted this study have motivation to come up with false positives?
This particular study is culled from multiple, publicly available sources and includes that underlying data and the margin of error. Your approach of disbelieving everything is not a workable model as it is useless. Making decisions based upon emotion and then trying to support them is even worse for accuracy. The best we can do is look at the data and the people presenting it and make our judgment based upon that. I suggest you rethink your decision making processes.
No, I'm just so disillusioned by society that I don't think anything is done honestly anymore.
Assuming you're right, that means you're probably lying since you're part of society. Assuming you're wrong, means you're mistaken. Thus, your opinion kind of defines itself as irrelevant, huh?
It all depends on which agenda they're pushing, or who's funding them.
Are you and the previous poster both, by any chance, on the payroll of Phillip Morris? Either state facts as to how this study does or does not show statistical significance for their conclusions and error bars or stop spreading this "all science is just opinion" bull crap.
It has a lot to do with how much said company contributes each year to taxes.
Usually it has more to do with how much the company contributes to election campaigns, not taxes.
Those taxes fund government programs such as welfare, foodstamps, education, defense, etc.
So what? If a billionaire pays a million dollars in taxes each year should we ask the EU not to convict them for armed robbery when we convicted them of the same offense two years ago?
Sure, it may not be what you want but the govt is actually looking out for its bottom line, not the company it's lobbying for.
Nope. They are looking out for their slush funds and bribes. Both the companies who asked the EU look into this issue and who are the victims whose money is being unlawfully redirected are American companies whose taxes also fund the US government. How does MS paying taxes on their portable document and antivirus tools businesses benefit the US any more than Adobe and Symantec doing the same?
Other than the (dubious) 'reason' "because I hate Microsoft!" why should anyone complain that the United States government was lifting a finger to possibly help one of its interests?
Because it was the politician's interest, not the American people's. We convicted them of the same crime and after certain lobbying suddenly our corrupt politicians replaced the people overseeing the case and did not punish MS for their guilt. The US is supposed to look out for the people as a whole, but here they are spending our tax dollars to work against the interests of the US people by trying to get criminals, who coincidentally donated lots of money to them, off the hook.
I don't know about you, but I sort of dislike obvious corruption and abuse within our government.
In wonder, though, if when Apple starts suing EU companies for using the letters "pod" in their products' names people will expect (demand) the U.S. government to rattle some sabers on their behalf...
This is such a straw man I won't even go into it.
Am I the only one who remembers all the red coats and that "rather unpleasant matter concerning tea" up in Boston? Sure, we're shoulder-to-shoulder against the world, but when it comes right down to it it's us-against-them in the oldest rivalry our nation knows...
Do you really think like this? Is everything in your beliefs based not upon "right and wrong" or "just and unjust" or "beneficial versus detrimental" and instead based upon "us versus them?" Do you really pick sides on an issue based entirely upon who is on each side? A few of us actually look at each issue and make up our minds based upon the facts, rather than who is arguing. I agree with a lot of things the EU does and disagree with a lot of them. The same goes for the US. I'll not support corruption, bribery, or dishonesty whether it is being done by a Republican, Democrat, American, European, christian, voodoo priest, or illegal alien. It is not who is doing something that determines if it is right, it is what they are doing.
Apple didn't come up with this word, so what the hell are they playing at?
Sigh. Podcast is obviously derived from iPod. Apple is cool with that. Go ahead and call it Podcasting. The problem is when some company decided to trademark "Podcast ready" which includes the derivative term from iPod. I think any company would be more than a little worried about such a thing. In fact, it might lead to their losing their trademark on the term iPod and then Microsoft and Sony could release their own products called iPods, confusing and misleading customers. Apple basically said, "don't try to trademark common terms that refer to terms we've already trademarked."
Ahhh ... that is exactly what I said up above (and for which I was called a fool), only I used slightly different words (I called it "negotiating with the community") - which amounts to essentially getting somebody to approve your bug fix in the public source tree.
Well, there is not usually any negotiation involved. You just submit a patch with an explanation.
So I wasn't far off base after all. In the end, either you have your own source tree (i.e. your own distribution, by which I mean not just config changes on top of a public distribution) and make bug fixes there, or you use the "public" source tree, periodically (at your choice of intervals) pulling a new tree, and then trying to convince the distribution managers to include your bug fix.
This is not a dichotomy. No one in their right mind deploys the latest cutting edge fixes to everything in their production environment. I don't know any structured environment that rolls out an unmodified Linux build either, since it is easier to preconfigure the software packages you want and the configurations for your environment and then roll that out. It also makes testing easier. As for "convincing maintainers" that is usually not an issue at all. There is usually no back an forth at all and if their is it is usually something like, "Cool thanks" or "does this touch X as well? with the occasional, "thanks, but we've already got a fix for this rolled in in branch Foo."
So as a sysadmin you build a snapshot to roll out you simply issue the commands to build from the version you're using and to pull in fixes, configs, and packages from your tree as well. Bringing some part of the system to a more up to date version is a single line command.
So there is some risk, when you re-sync, that your fix gets overwritten with a version that doesn't have your fix.
Only if you're really clueless. Remember this is how everyone operates so the whole system is built to make this as easy as possible.
Thanks for the clarification.
No problem. Open source is not ideal for everything, but it is a model that has significant advantages for the end user. Since the developers of open source projects usually are the end users, this follows logically. They can out compete most closed source solutions because a commercial closed source project needs to make money, while an open source project can break even and be just fine.
Apple is a trademark whore. They seem sue anybody using a term that might be related to thier products even if the term itself is not trademarked. But they don't concern themselves at the onset. They wait to see if something actually becomes popular to send in the wolves.
Bullshit. Apple likes the fact that the term podcast is popular and based on their existing brand. It is as though everyone started calling modding pickups for racing toyotafizzing. Toyota would be cool with that too. The problem is when another company or companies apply for trademarks that include your trademark and try to lock down terms to that only they can sell things in that market. If some company tried to trademark the term "Toyotafizzle" to use in their aftermarket mods of all trucks, not just Toyotas, you can bet your sweet ass Toyota would send them a nasty letter in short order too.
Is your argument that ignoring copyright on phonorecordings is morally justified?
I don't know about the previous poster, but I believe ignoring copyright on phono-recordings is laudable and a form of civil disobedience that will hopefully bring about meaningful improvements.
I suppose it also depends on how comfortable you are managing your own distribution.
But they aren't managing their own distribution, they're managing their own customizations, just like many companies do with Windows, but with more options. They're using an existing Linux distro which is already kept up to date for them, and then rolling out customizations to it.
I frankly am skeptical that it makes sense to keep your own source tree and "hire a guy to fix a nasty bug" as the grandparent suggested, but I have minimal understanding of the OSS model so I can't really say for sure.
Here's the way it works, here and most places I've worked that use Linux or other open platforms. You keep your platform up to date by periodically testing new versions with fixes from thousands of different places. If you run into a specific bug, you need fixed, you pay someone to fix it, either an internal employee, a company you've contracted for support, or an independent contractor. You can even take bids from all three to get the best deal. Then you add that software package patch to your repository and submit it back to the maintainers of your Linux distro, who usually roll it into the main tree eventually. The same goes for applications you add. The benefit is that your bug fixes are soon the standard and you get all the bug fixes from everyone else for free. That means not only can you get bug fixes, you can get them when you want at an affordable price and most often for free.
Since all of this is standard operating procedure, it is also really, really easy to do.
> When the moral right to infringe on another's copyright is elevated to the same status as the fight against the Ku Klux Klan... I know I am hearing the voice of the eternal adolescent.
Actually, I think the right to infringe on copyright is very, very important to our society in ways you probably do not appreciate. Cultures are often judged by history based upon their art. Art is often what defines a culture and information and ideas are conveyed by it. One insightful, entertaining book, movie or song can bring about real change. The Klu Klux Clan was as devastated by the post WWII superman cartoons/radio shows depicting him taking on the Klan than they were by affirmative action laws. Superman was America and clansmen throughout the south felt ashamed to let their children know they were members for the very first generation. It broke a cycle of hate.
So might think, "just pay for the copyrighted works." The problem is, that is not an option for most works. You heard me. Most copyrighted works are not available to the general public at all. Thousands upon thousands of books, movies and songs were copyrighted when released, sold for a time, then taken off the market and stored in warehouse or not at all. Every day the last copy of some book is destroyed. Every day the last recording of some song vanishes, and it is illegal to save them. Many of these works are owned by unknown parties who have no idea they even own the rights to a work.
So now maybe you're thinking, "but if they were good, they'd still be on the market. After all, if they are good people will buy them." That too is wrong. Executives at media distribution houses are not the best judges of what is and is not good. Almost all of the longest running, most award winning TV shows, for example, were cancelled or almost cancelled in their first season and then saved by chance. That is because they were different and different is risky, something big business avoids. A good anecdotal example is "It's a Wonderful Life." It is a timeless classic Christmas story and, I dare-say, part of our culture. It was also a box office flop that was tossed in a warehouse after its first run and never saw the light of day again, until the copyright on it expired. Then PBS aired it and people saw it again and were hooked. Through some legal machinations it somehow became re-copyrighted and now is no longer free for everyone to enjoy. More importantly, due to the bribes from the industry, copyrights don't expire anymore. Theoretically they do, but in fact there is no reason to think anything will ever enter the public domain again. Thus, all those great works like "It's a Wonderful Life" are gone, forever or known only to one or two collectors, forbidden by law from sharing. Great works are rarely popular right away. I would go so far as to say the best works of American art are probably unrecognized and the law will stop them from ever being recognized. Thus our society loses out. Losing innovation in art is a hallmark of a dying empire. We remake old movies, but rarely introduce new ones. We stagnate.
In my opinion it is not only the right, but the duty of every American to disobey copyright laws in a display of public protest to such a degree that the lawmakers will realize they can use copyright reform to get votes and will save our broken copyright system and fix it. After all, copyright is not a natural right, but a government imposed monopoly that is supposed to provide advantages to our society, not gut our culture of its heritage.
Please rethink your views on copyright and its effects upon society. It is much more important in fundamental ways, than you give it credit for.
Ok[sic] all you did was bash that collaboration software. Setup a second workstation for it all? No? I can run everything mentioned on 2 Blades.
Are you telling me you don't even know the difference between a workstation and a server? A workstation is on your desk. A server is in the server room and might take blades. Since a lot of people need Linux development environments and those workstations aren't running Windows you need a second workstation for those employees just to run the Windows only client software you're recommending. Almost every other collaboration package has clients for Linux, OS X, Solaris, etc. so workers on those platforms don't need a second machine just to run them.
Oh and greatplanes is accounting software.
Do you Mean "Great Plains" software, which was bought out by Microsoft and their product renamed to "Dynamics" six years ago?
Now you still didnt[sic] tell me what Linux can do in it's[sic] place.
Well i could ask you what functionality you find necessary that you can't find on Linux, but I don't think it will make any difference. You obviously have no idea what runs on Linux and have never tried it. You're just talking out of your butt. I suspect you've never tried to run a business on any platform, since you don't know the difference between a server and a workstation and don't even know the name of the software you're recommending. Please stop wasting everyones time with your uneducated, clueless assertions.
The manufacturers should have the firmware require a password change after the initial set-up. If everyone did this, this wouldn't be a problem. Of course, I also blame my bank!
A lot of companies avoid this because machines are first used in a test lab, or set up by an installation company and then finally configured/stocked by the bank. This leads to incidents where the bank is calling and wants to know the password, but it has been changed from the default. So companies leave a default in, but tell customers to change it. It saves them some support costs with incompetent customers.
Yeah...find me support for all that hardware.
Umm, we sell servers on 8 different server platforms and have never had a problem with Linux supporting it. Nor have we had any problem with the Thinkpads, powerbooks, and towers we buy. Obviously you've never tried using Linux in a business environment.
I take it you mean you admit your sig is wrong, in that you can't find me a way MS does what I need 20 times better. Gee, what a surprise.
Also show me what Linux can do over Sharepoint, CRM, Portal server, GreatPlanes and other nice things Microsoft integrates with the business man.
Please, collaboration is easy enough without all the crappy MS junk that can't even talk to other platforms. As a company we have to interact with other professional companies that develop on Linux and the BSDs and that means engineering needs it. Buying a second workstation just to run collaboration software is horribly inefficient and it is dumb to lock yourself into a single supplier for all this software, rather than going with open standards so that you can get competing bids without throwing away your investment. For most people, the free software collaboration tools are more than sufficient and much cheaper.
I have no idea what GreatPlanes is, but since I've never needed it I can pretty much assume it is not useful to me or has a replacement. You don't seem to have a lot to back up your assertions. Have you ever run a business on Linux?
This is like Linux vs. Windows. Open Sorce[sic] vs closed sorce[sic].
Not really. This is a study of the state of the industry across a variety of open, closed and mixed open and closed source development processes. It is a bit disorganized, but it shows number of publicly known bugs and bugs speed of fixing bugs once they are public. We can speculate as to how much the popularity of a browser contributes to said, number of bugs, but the speed to fix is a lot more interesting, especially in this case.
People say Windows has many holes. Its[sic] not that they have many holes its[sic] just people choose to find thoes[sic] holes in the OS over Linux because the majority of users use windows.
It is hard to quantify the number of people searching for bugs on a given platform, but it is certainly not effected only by the number of users. For example, because Linux is open source, a lot of academics and hobbyists will view the code and incidentally find bugs. And then there is the level of concern. No one runs Windows as a secure platform. No really. Unless your tech people are morons they recognize that Windows is wholly unsuited to a task as a secure workstation. It was not designed for that role and because modifying the code is unsupportable, it cannot be modified to work well in that capacity. Thus, people really really concerned with security and with lots of headcount to devote to securing their systems (like the NSA) use Linux or UNIX variants. They consequently spend a lot of time auditing the code and finding bugs.
Linux could have more problems its[sic] just people dont[sic] care about Linux because most businesses[sic] use windows.
Linux and Windows both re-use a lot of code between their server and desktop versions. The majority of people concerned about security aside from secure workstations (who don't use Windows) are people running servers. Realistically, the risk of a server being compromised or DoSed is much higher and has much worse consequences than a desktop. The people operating them, in general, have lot more ability to find security holes. For server environments, Linux is still in the majority. Ergo, more bugs should be showing up in Linux than Windows.
Now whats[sic] happening is that more and more people are using firefox and now people are begining[sic] to search for problems with firefox because alot[sic] of people use it now. The truth now comes out that Open sorce[sic] software can have just as many if not more problems than closed sorce[sic].
Sigh, open or closed source software will have bugs and the development process is not the only thing that determines how many of those bugs will be found. Now that Firefox is more popular, it is attacked more often than IE is, but it is almost never compromised. This is because it had 1 day worth of time so far, when there was a vulnerability exposed without a patch. IE has had 9 days worth of time so far, and the type of vulnerability has been much more exploitable. Their are unpatched vulnerabilities for IE right now, being exploited in the wild. Will more malware authors target Firefox as it becomes more popular? Sure. Will it be compromised as much as IE if they both reach equal market share? Not likely. While open source development is not the only factor in making software secure, it is a contributing factor, as is design methodology aimed at making the users happy, rather than just the developers. I don't know where you're getting your ideas, but find some new sources of information. IE is a disaster and the fact that it is bundled with Windows is not the only reason that is the case.
P.S. Your sig reads, "Show me what Linux can do for a business, and I'll show you how Microsoft does it 20 times better." Are you a troll or a very ignorant Windows fan? For my business can you show me how I can get 100 workstation and 50 unlimited server licenses for free. Also, will you show me where I can get modifiable source code for Windows that I can strip down and use to easily make a super secure server that I can resell without paying any licensing fees? Because that is what I"m using Linux for at my business. Also, apparently Linux can spellcheck.
Comparing the "number of vulnerabilities" is irrelevant to me. How many of them have actually been exploited in the wild? How many of them have caused users to lose data or unintentionally host malware? How many have resulted in people's identities being stolen?
The study does not give exact numbers for any of these things, but it does nicely summarize the state of these things by saying all the widespread exploits were for IE and none for any other browser.
This study shows me nothing useful.
The study itself does have a few useful tidbits in it, but the write ups so far seem to have all focused on one misleading graphic. More revealing are the comparisons of each browser between last year and this year as a study in how many people are looking at each browser's security.
It turns out that Firefox leads the pack with 47 vulnerabilities, compared to 38 for Internet Explorer.
This is very misleading. These are the numbers of vulnerabilities reported to Symantec and which the vendor has acknowledged to Symantec. The total number of vulnerabilities reported to Symantec are 50 for Firefox and 57 for IE.
If you add to this the quote from Symantec, "at the time of writing, no widespread exploitation of any browser except Microsoft Internet Explorer has occurred..." you start to see that this is mostly spin with little substance. Firefox is not really being attacked, and while they have bugs they fix them an order of magnitude faster and have an open process that responds to the community. This bug count includes all the bugs the Firefox team found, but who knows what percentage of bugs Microsoft and partners found that they deemed not worth fixing and which do not show up in this study? It is debatable that in theory, Firefox is more secure, but attempts like this to twist numbers to make is seem like maybe Firefox is not more secure in practice, are misleading and simply a way to get attention. I declare the summary here to be FUD.
Have you ever studied economics?
Yes.
Importantly, these are direct competitors (i.e. desktop operating systems that can be installed on PC hardware), and not mere substitutes (Mac OS X could arguably be considered a substitute, since it provides similar benefits, but requires Mac hardware).
Since you're an expert on economics, perhaps you know what a market is? It is the criteria for a monopoly since to have a monopoly you have to monopolize a market. The market MS monopolizes is desktop OS's and the consumers are mostly OEMs like Dell and Gateway. OS X is not in this market because they don't sell their OS to other OEMs and making it for themselves does not constitute a transaction in the market. Further, it does not matter if Dell can choose Linux. Windows constitutes a monopoly because they don't choose anything but Windows for numerous reasons. As a result, MS has a great deal of power to break capitalism in other markets (like portable document tools). Luckily, the laws around the world forbid them from driving out superior competitors in markets they have no monopolized with an inferior product using their market influence.
1. Microsoft are not a monopoly
Microsoft has a monopoly. A company can't be a monopoly, they can be a monopolist.
2. Amongst Microsoft's many products, only the MS Windows desktop OS has been ruled to be a monopoly (a political monopoly) . In economic terms, none of Microsoft's products constitute monopolies
Windows is a monopoly both in economic and legal terms as ruled by courts around the world. Find me a serious, professional economist who claims otherwise.
Except this "XPS generator" isn't being "bundled" with Windows, it's *part of* Windows.
That makes no functional difference to the user and no difference at all to the courts. You see this cheese isn't being bundles with your electrical service, it is an integral part of the electric-cheese experience.
Saying OS functionality is "bundled" with OSes is like saying engines are "bundled" with cars.
Sure and had someone monopolized cars before engines were put in them it would be just the same thing. If you're thinking of automobiles, however, they never existed without engines. OS's have certainly done just fine without portable document creation tools being built into them, however so it is bundling. The important thing is the markets. There is a market for car engines and a market for cars. This is analogous to a company with a monopoly on one component of the car (like the transmission) building engine-transmission bundles to drive all existing transmission makers out of business. It is illegal and anti-capitalist.
Which means - if you're going to define every little piece of software as having its own "market" - that they can't improve Windows.
It isn't about my defining anything. Is another company currently selling and making money delivering portable document tools? Yes. That is called a market.
Neither Firefox nor Opera provide the functionality IE does, that Windows uses.
Actually, they do provide the functionality, Windows just doesn't use it.
I shall also point out here that your argument essentially denies Microsoft the ability to use good software development practices (ie: modularity and reusable code) because any functionality that they might create which is implemented as a shared library, which is also sold by third parties, would be considered an antitrust violation.
No, it encourages modularity so that pieces can be sold separately. It encourages good, clean, documented APIs which would fix a lot of MS's security woes. Note, anti-trust only covers functionality currently being sold into a market. So they need only pay attention to libraries being currently offered.
OTOH, if you go back to ca. 1997-98, you would find *many* people who thought IE was the best product out there.
So what? Are you arguing that capitalism should reward the first company to create a good product, not the currently best one? So because Ford once made the best, most affordable car they should be guaranteed a monopoly on automobiles with their model T and just because Chevy produces the S-10 pickup that is superior the market should not be free to move towards it? That is a recipe for exactly the stagnation and lack of innovation we've seen in IE over the last 8 years.
This sounds suspiciously like you consider any advantage gained via trade secrets to be "artificial barriers".
I never mentioned trade secrets at all. No merely anything that gives one product an advantage based upon the fact that that company has a monopoly on a different product. For example, a trade secret that is an undocumented communication between MS's desktop monopoly and server is illegal, as the courts have ruled. A trade secret that is how Windows loads graphics so quickly, is not. So long as the trade secret is not a tie between a monopoly product and another product they are in the clear.
For this to support your argument, you would have to show that a) consumer demand existed for those features and b) no other alternative existed that implemented them.
Actually, no I don't. I simply have to ask impartial users which is better, the currently most popular product (bundled) or any other product on the market which is not popular. The fact that the market has not moved to embrace alternatives is pretty damning by itself. Honestly, do you really think if IE was never bundled with Windows and if OEMs were given a choice it would be both the most popular browser and have the same, weak feature set for so long? Really consider this objectively. What is your opinion?
What's the difference ?
Function versus brand.
No, you can't. You might be able to in the future, but you most certainly cannot right now. The only way to get a copy of OS X is to buy an intel-based Macintosh. Added to that, Apple *specifically require* that you only run their OS on their hardware for it to be legally licensed.
Okay, whatever. It does not matter since if they do sell boxed OS's their share of the market is too small to matter.
This is not the market consumers shop in.
So? Most consumers never buy a car engine by itself, they buy a car. Tell me again how that is relevant to antitrust actions against a company with a monopoly on car engines, which it sells to auto makers?
Please make your mind up. A second ago you were saying Apple sell "desktop x86 OSes".
Apple does sell OS's by themselves (even if the x86 version has not yet hit the market, it will with leopard). However, their share of that market is too small to make a difference. The majority of their sales is in the computer system market.
But, by definition, Microsoft would then be the only producer of Windows PCs and identical to Apple with their Macintoshes.
If MS bought out the PC manufacturers and started selling complete systems, then yes they would be in the computer system market the same as Apple. That does not mean they would not have taken over so much of it so as to be a monopolist.
If you were going to try and argue Microsoft could be a monopoly of such a market, you would have to similarly argue Apple are a monopoly right now.
Apple competes with Dell and Gateway and Lenovo and many others. If MS stopped selling Windows to those companies and started selling compete systems with Windows there are several possibilities. One is that All those companies would lose all their market share. One is that they would adopt other OS's. Then, depending on how much of the market for computer systems they had taken over, they would wield monopoly power or they wouldn't. I'm not sure I'd hazard a guess.
What people buy is a more valid benchmark to use.
No it isn't because individuals make up a small portion of the buyers in the desktop operating system market. Most OS's are purchased by OEMs.
Your argument would exclude all except retail sales and ignore the market dynamics in all other markets.
People buy Windows PCs. People buy Macs (because they run OS X). People buy Linux PCs (because they run Linux). Etc.
Yes they do and it is a healthy market, but one Microsoft is not in. Microsoft does not sell "Windows PCs." They are in the desktop operating system market.
Microsoft are in the same market as the alternatives consumers look at to make their decision.
Really how many general purpose computers did Microsoft sell last year? None. Gee I wonder how they made billions in that market considering they did not sell anything.
By the argument you are presenting, however, they *would* now be a monopoly of the "electric-engined car market" (assuming no other manufacturer did the same thing).
No they wouldn't because markets are defined by functional alternatives available to that market. If Ford introduces a new barf colored car are they a monopolist on barf colored cars because no one else makes one? No, because the color is not the defining characteristic of a car it is a component of a car, just like an electric engine is.
The problem with your analogy is that there *are* functionally equivalent alternatives to Windows PCs and there *are* functionally equivalent alternatives to Windows.
It does not matter. There are functional equivalents to buying power form the electric company. It makes them no less a monopoly. Even assuming many computers don't run Windows, does not matter because that is not the market MS has monopolized. They've monopolized the market for one component of computers, the OS. OS
And if other security products won't work, it will be because of _them_ using undocumented API calls, which MS is under no obligation to support.
Are those APIs necessary for feature parity with MS's offering in the security market? If so then MS is obligated by law to support them.
Not to mention, what Symantec is really upset about here is that their entire business model is under threat.
No, they're upset that another company can abuse their monopoly to offer a product that is no better or even not as good, but still take over the market using illegal bundling.
My parents wouldn't have been able to do that, at least not in 10 secs.
Why should they have to. Dell or HP or Lenovo is free to bundle a solution from MS or Adobe as they please.
ALL other competitors are allowed to have FREE Save-As-PDF functionality (OO, OSX, Writely). However Adobe doesn't want MS to offer PDF support for free. Because of that now it'll take a stupid patch to enable PDF support, as well as XPS (which MS took out also). This is total crap from Adobe.
It's called fair competition. Why should MS automatically take over a market because they control a different market. Let Adobe and MS both offer a product the same way and may the best product win.
MS took out XPS support from O12 and will be included in the same patch that enables PDF functionality. They were under no obligation to remove it, they did is as a sign of good faith.
Ha ha ha! It is hilarious that not breaking the law is considered a sign of good faith from MS. It is a criminal offense for MS to bundle their XPS tools with their OS in both the US and EU. They pulled that particular criminal act out because attention had been drawn to it at the courts were being pressured to respond.
Do you honestely think that even if you could remove IE, for example, from Windows, OEM manufacturers would remove it?? If you wouldn't have IE shipped with Windows, how would you get Firefox easily?
If IE was not bundled, Web developers would never have begun relying upon it to be there and would instead have coded to standards, thus preventing lock-in. If IE was not bundled by MS now, I think most OEMs would probably add it themselves because too much lock-in has been built up. Had it never been bundled, however, OEMs would have made different choices about which browser to bundle, and people would gravitate to the computer with the better one. Right now that is Firefox, but in this alternative world, MS would have had motivation to work on and improve IE, so who knows which would be better. Not that it matters, since consumers would be getting a better browser either way.
Look at Apple - can you remove Safari? Heck no. I don't like it, so i use firefox/camino.
I don't see why it matters, but you can just drag it to the trash and it is gone. It's not very hard.
That's because of a grudge on MS, not because of logical arguments. As much as I bitch about MS, I hate Symantec and Adobe more for the shit they've done with their products, and MS is in a lose-lose situation.
It's funny you accuse someone of making emotive decisions and then justify your own beliefs based upon your dislike of other companies. I think you're misguided because you are not the average user and don't understand the common market case. Windows is a component. Without hardware and additional software it is useless. As such, most people buy a compete system from Dell or HP or someone. There is no reason that MS being banned from bundling should in any way reduce the functionality of this end product. Dell can bundle Windows and Adobe and other MS software all they want. What the law says, however, is MS can't force Dell to include their XPS tools just because they need Windows. MS has to offer it separately to them, just like Adobe does so they don't get an unfair advantage.
If it is bad and they are still locking out these vendors and it's market share, sales, etc. aren't dropping then it can't be that bad, the overall goodness of the product is greater than the overall badness of the product.
Capitalism, not regulated to stop monopoly abuse, does not work. Monopolies just expand until you're left with only a few huge companies selling inferior products at high prices. It is basically the same as socialism at that point.
So, leave this to the economists, or more specifically the Free Market Economists (The other ones suck).
Any real economist you talk to will tell you MS's actions are illegal for good reason. It's not like the EU made up this law to attack foreign companies. Almost every nation on earth has a law banning monopolistic bundling because it removes all the benefits of innovation and competition afforded by capitalism. It allows for people acting correctly in their own best interests to buy an inferior product because of artificial barriers to the superior one.
We covered this in introduction to economics, didn't you?
As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft is allowed to add any feature they choose to add. It is THEIR operating system. If they want built in virus protection for example, then so be it. Why shouldn't they be allowed to add it in?
Because it breaks capitalism and leads to the same problems as hardline communist countries had.
Do you know why monopolistic bundling is illegal? Okay here's my stock example for the day. The electric company has a monopoly on power distribution to your house. You have only one option. Sure you can buy a generator, or set up hundreds of expensive windmills, but they won't be as cost effective. Now suppose you run the local bakery. You make the best bread in town. You sell it for good prices too. Then the power company decides to enter the baked goods business, but instead of competing with you on the quality or price of the bread, they just bundle it with everyone's power service. Now everyone pays $20 a month more on their power bill, but gets free bread. You can't compete with that. I mean you make better bread for less money, but no one is buying it since they already have bread. You go out of business.
Who lost in the above scenario? You did, because you went out of business despite being the best baker. The consumers did because they are paying more money for lower quality products. The state of the industry did because the power company has no motivation to make better quality bread. In fact the only person that did not lose, was the monopolist.
Allowed to take these actions, monopolies expand dominating more and more markets with inferior goods and high prices. Capitalism itself fails. That is why it is illegal everywhere.
Now let me paraphrase your question. "It is THEIR electrical service. If they want built in bread delivery for example, then so be it. Why shouldn't they be allowed to add it in?
if your machine didn't have a TCP/IP stack by default you'd be limited in how to even acquire one, so on that point i agree. drawing, layout, and publishing tools are a completely different story however.
Repeat after me. "The personal computer system market is not the same thing as the desktop OS market." The law forbids MS from integrating additional products into their monopoly. It does not forbid anyone else. If you buy a computer from Dell or HP or Lenovo it will ship with a TCP/IP stack because that is what customers want, just as if you buy a car from Ford or Honda it will ship with an engine. If you're assembling your own computer from components or your own car from components, you presumably know how to add all the pieces.
It is illegal for MS to force Dell or HP to buy any additional product from and existing market just because they have to buy Windows.
Back to our car analogy, imagine if there was only one source for car engines (EngineCo) to go in Fords, Chevy, and Hondas. Toyota made their own engines, but did not sell them and they were not compatible. EngineCo, as a monopolist is forbidden from bundling. They can't take over the car stereo business by refusing to sell stand alone engines and only selling a bundle of engines plus an EngineCo brand stereo. The reason for this is because it would force most other the car stereo makers out of business, even if their product was not as good or as cheap. When that happens, capitalism has failed and EngineCo moves on to bundling rear view mirrors and then tires and then something else. Consumers get screwed because EngineCo has no motivation to make good stereos, since they will be able to sell them to Ford and Chevy anyway.