I dont[sic] know much about this and am curious why it is so important. Wont[sic] open source continue to be open source independent of what the EU decides?
First this is more about open standards than open source software. Some organizations certainly will use them regardless, but lacking a clear directive, the status quo rules, and that tends to be proprietary formats and protocols now dominating the industry and harming interoperability and reducing competition.
Or is this saying that the EU gov'ts will only use open source programs, and that is defined by this document?
Originally this document established a preference for more open formats that are more likely to be usable to later generations and which provide more choice of both IT vendors and clients going forward. This was a recognition of the importance of open and documented protocols and formats. Note, nothing in this was pro or con of any given vendor. Rather it was in favor of open standardization where all vendors could compete instead of just one vendor (read Microsoft). The idea was that it is important for say word processing in EU governments to standardize on a format where any company could create an interoperable solution so governments could take competitive bids on a level playing field.
There are lots of people out there interested in cyber security. "Hackers" are in all the movies and are kind of cool. But the ability to become a legitimate security expert is limited, partly because the government which hires tons of people to perform physical investigations and fire guns, has failed to keep up with the times. Look at the military, for example. If you want to be a well paid cyber security expert, or even an important one, you basically have to go into the private sector. You're sure never getting promoted within the ranks of the armed forces, or even well paid so why deal with being constantly undervalued? And their focus is completely wrong. First unlike the private sector they care about how physically fit you are much more than about how competent you are. Second, they care a lot more about credentials and conformity than the industry does. Computer, especially computer security is a young field. I've worked with lots of network security experts that had a PhD and wore a suit, but I've worked with just as many that had no degree (or a degree in jazz) and wore lewd t-shirts or dressed like The Cure. Industry considers this latter category to be a huge asset and even makes sure to show them off to clients; we have those quirky genius types on staff. The government just writes them off as not real experts because they didn't give up a $100k job doing real security to go back and get a degree they don't need.
And frankly, while the industry has respect for the NSA, it has pretty much written off the rest of the government as a lost cause when it comes to security. They're too firmly in the pockets of corporate interests, useless contractors, and bureaucratic nonsense. How many competent security experts have refused or quit working for homeland defense saying it was impossible to do the job given the resources and idiotic policies?
Seriously, if the government does not think there are enough experts, start handing out scholarships and setting up internships. The NSA already does so. Better yet, start hiring security people with actual authority and discretion, like experts in some other fields have. Put security experts in charge of hiring, retaining, promoting, and running security, instead of being beholden to superiors who want to run them like they do the motor pool.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem.
Odd, I could say the same thing about your comment.
You seem emotionally invested in this discussion. Your comment doesn't even make any sense. I didn't make excuses for any engineering flaw in anything because I was not defending any engineering, just pointing out a well known problem.
So enforcing uniform standards is a bad thing?
This is a straw man argument.
Every OS and it's dog has a recommended way of doing things which always scatters things across the file system.
That is the case with legacy OS's and versions of some OS's but it is not good engineering. OS X, for example, stores entire apps in a single, special folder. The only thing outside that folder are shared frameworks and config files (which are cascading and needed for upgrading and remote applications. One of the hardest parts of using SE Linux is that Linux application in general don't have a simple location all the time, so allowing them to modify their own files but not anything else can take significant expertise.
What Google has done in this case is introduce a limitation that exacerbates that problem even more.
Linux and OSX have similar systems.
You clearly aren't familiar with OS X and some Linux variants that have been more recently engineered to have more sane practices.
Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
This I think is where you misunderstood me. You can distribute as a single package but what you should be doing is creating a proper install for Android rather then just dumping it wherever (I.E. putting your large art assets into/SDCard/YourGame).
Applications should be distributed as single bundles and stored as single bundles. This makes it much much easier to transfer applications, run applications remotely, install and uninstall applications cleanly, upgrade applications cleanly, restrict applications for security purposes, and backup applications. Android not only did not provide a cleaner and more compact installation that the average Linux distro, but actually made the install messier with limitations on where apps can be run from, resulting in applications being spread out more. Now you can have applications fail to run if either of two storage types fails.
It's a flaw and Google knows it's a flaw and people are working on fixing the flaw. I don't see how anyone can rationally conclude otherwise.
I did not hear about the data being handed over to the Department of Homeland defense, but I do know a bit about the Census Bureau. Federal law prohibits all employees of the Census Bureau from releasing this data. So if the government wants to restore my faith in it and set a good precedent to prevent future abuse, arrest everyone involved in the 2003-2004 data breach, convict them and send them to prison for 5 years.
Actually the OP was talking about Google services not Android...
They may have alluded to that, but the title was about only having 5 apps, a common oversimplification of the complaint with regard to the memory issue.
There is no problem with porting games to Android, you just have to do it properly rather then balling everything up and putting a "supports Android" sticker on the box.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem. As I said, the issue is not insurmountable, but it's piss poor engineering to scatter bits of your application across multiple volumes and being forced to do so truly sucks. Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
Note, I'm impartial here, I don't own either or really care. I was just trying to help people understand the topic.
Android would be a lot better if Google hadn't crippled the app capability so you are forced to do everything online
How are Android apps crippled?
The previous poster is talking about the inability of Android to run apps stored anywhere but the internal memory, significantly limiting devices like this one, with significant storage capacity, because that capacity cannot be easily used to store applications, just data. Some game makers, for example, have said they cannot port to most android phones because their games are larger than the internal storage.
Hopefully Google will be able to resolve this issue going forward and some app developers are already working around it by installing data packages for their apps to Flash and referencing them from within their application. It's not a good solution, but it helps some.
True, but those laws are not the highest laws of the land.
Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
Actually, many government officials think they are above the law and can apply state secrets laws indiscriminately and without regard for constitutionality. It has been a huge problem throughout the history of the US, because it is very difficult for the fourth estate and the judicial branch of our government to provide the proper checks to balance misuse of that power because of the secrecy involved. What Wikileaks has been doing in many (but not all) cases is protected whistleblowing, protected freedom of the press, and protected free speech that the courts most likely will rule as constitutionally protected if they ever actually make it to court.
I'm recommending anyone that asks me what to choose, to try that[Opera].
Every major release I download it and try it out and every time I dismiss it. All other things being equal, OS X is my preferred OS for the Web and Opera still kind of sucks. It still doesn't support my mouse gestures, trained spell checker, grammar checker, translation software, etc. Until they can support the basic, native functions of the OS, they're a non-stater.
So when will Apple finally be forced to stop bundling and dang near malware installing Safari every time I want an iTunes or Quicktime patch?
That's the news article *I* want to see.
Just as soon as Apple's market share for media playing software reaches 70%... or to put it another way, never.
Google is tying its search to AdWords. All ads that I see on the results page are served by Google. Google does not give me the option to choose another ad provider.
How so? When I advertise using adwords, I don't get Google search or have to use Google search. Google had in the high 60's of percentage in search last I looked, not enough to qualify as having monopoly influence, so supplying only their ads with that would not be illegal tying even if they were ruled separate markets, i.e. people are making a profit off searches not using ads.
but the whole concept of why market share matters perplexes me. How do free browsers, which do nothing but display webpages, make ANY money whatsoever?
Some sell their search bar to search engine/advertisers. Some enable the sale of hardware (Safari sells Macs). Some license themselves to console and phone makers (Opera). They all benefit from IE losing market share because currently they spend a lot of money and dev time working around broken Web pages designed for IE that don't follow the standards and whose behavior has to be reverse engineered by looking at what IE does. So to answer your question, increased market share helps them in various ways and decreased market share of IE saved them money on development.
What the hell is the point of comparing "market share" of something like this? I don't see how this translates into anything benefiting the company in the lead.
Currently it benefits MS a lot by keeping the Web from being a viable platform for cross platform applications that can let people move away from IE. For other companies, being the top browser is less beneficial because they follow standards and have no lock-in, but they benefit greatly by the Web becoming standardized and the state of the art moving forward so they can offer better Web services without being blocked by a huge portion of users with a crippled browser.
That seems like an overly simple solution. Wouldn't whatever OS that takes its place present the same issues after people decide to try exploiting it?
Monopolies undermine the free market by removing the basic incentive of the monopolist to cater to the needs of users via innovation. This is one of the main reasons they are considered poison to economies and are severely restricted by law. So, no if another OS had the largest market share it would not necessarily have the same problems as Windows with security. If no one OS had a huge market share, competition would let the free market solve the problem.
Moreover, OSS provides further incentive. No Linux OS maker can ever monopolize the OS because of the licensing (unless they can cripple the OSS license using patents or other legal shenanigans). So even if Linux took 99% of the market, since no one company controls Linux, forks that had better security would always appear and users would move to them because they addressed the need for security. Because the developers of Linux are also the users, they have direct incentive to solve user problems with security, just as Apple has direct incentive today to do the same. So long as one closed source OS is not hugely dominant, the problem more or less solves itself and OS's are developed with sufficient security to work for normal people in the real world.
The later article didn't explain what illegal tying, but did you know Google also pays people to tie their products in - almost all of Firefox revenue is coming from Google and in turn they set Google as the default search engine. Same thing for Opera and other browsers and even some manufacturers (I think HP)
Okay, just to clarify here. Illegal tying is when you take two products you make from separate markets and tie them together such that the second market benefits from the first market. The first market in this case must have overwhelming influence in the market (for purposes of discussion you can just say 70%).
The most common form of tying is bundling, so that a consumer buys one product and gets a second product included for "free". Grocers do this all the time, excepting that since neither of the products has overwhelming influence, it does not undermine the operation of the market.
An example of illegal bundling is that Ma Bell required consumers to rent a telephone set from them for exorbitant rates in order to purchase a telephone line, they bundled the two together so you had to buy them as a package. It was not until the courts intervened that telephone technology moved forward again, with touch tone, answering machines, hold, colors other than black, etc.
So MS was found guilty of bundling IE with the monopolized Windows desktop OS. Google may have overwhelming market share in online search advertising, but what do they bundle with that? In order to advertise with them, what is required? What do you allege they bundle with their online search advertising?
Continuing on, Opera has no overwhelming market share in any market. So they lack even the capability to illegally bundle if they wanted to. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think you understand what illegal tying is and how it works or why it is illegal. If you do, please clarify by telling me what the two markets involved are and specifically what you allege constitutes illegal tying.
The iPad doesn't do these things cheaper than others...
Cheaper than a stack of regular textbooks? That may or may not be the case, but it is irrelevant since I specifically said I was not arguing that the iPad is going to be a successful device or is a converging device. The assertion was that only things that fit in your pocket converge, thus anything larger that seems to be such an instance will fail... a theory I find absurd.
Plus your analogy using bookbags is just retarded...
It wasn't an analogy it was an example. Your understanding of what I wrote seems a little... retarded.
Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
*parry*
No, but they are in and of themselves oversized pockets, or in other words, a space where weight and size are more important than pure functionality.
I notice you neglect my other examples, but that's okay they serve only to show that convergence happens for all sorts of things that don't fit in a pocket. Rather, items that people carry with them or use when they have limited space. Can we agree upon that?
If I'm carrying a netbook around already...
Who says you are? More importantly, who says the average consumer is?
...then the iPad needs to be either lighter, smaller, or much more useful than the netbook in order to be worth the space.
Or cheaper or easier to use for the average person or easier to hold in one hand while walking or less cumbersome as a book reader. Or it could provide functionality in the form of accessible content, just as the iPod did when it took over the digital music player market.
If my phone has most or all of the same functionality as the iPad, just scaled down, and my netbook covers much of the rest, scaled up, then the iPad is not a device to fit in the "pocket convergence" area.
Again you assume most people carry both a smartphone and a netbook, but that is likely not the case. The idea of "pocket convergence" is flawed in and of itself, as I pointed out. Whether or not the iPad will succeed and whether or not it actually is a convergence of e-book readers and umm PDAs (was that your theory) has nothing to do with whether or not it will fit in a pocket.
The Swiss Army knife is an example of convergence: it has scissors, tweezers, knives, files, screwdrivers, etc. It does nothing perfectly and everything adequately. The iPhone is like that. But if someone got you a "Swiss Army" kitchen utensil, with a spatula and a ladle and tongs and a couple knives in a single sheath, you would think it was the stupidest thing in the world. "And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
The problem is, Mr. Schell is trying to apply rules but doesn't really understand them at the heart of the matter. It's not just things that fit in our pockets that we want to converge, but items we carry in our daily lives, when we have limited space. Cars and stereo systems don't fit in our pockets, but for some reason cars all have built in stereos. We could all just bring boom boxes with us in the car, but we don't because the benefit of having the stereo there all the time outweighs the duplication and the fact that car stereos are usually not as high of quality due to space and cost concerns.
Ask college students if they want all their textbooks to converge into a single device, if it can be done so without increasing cost or removing important features. Items like backpacks, luggage, sunglasses, clothing, personal transport, etc. are instances where convergence is desired by the general public. When was the last time you saw a student carrying a laptop case and a separate bag for their books? Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
Now I don't plan on buying an iPad anytime soon, nor would I venture to guess how successful of a product it is going to be without trying one out. But this sort of overgeneralization as a method of prediction is weak tea.
...full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started.
But they weren't/aren't tablet OSs. They're desktop OSs with touchscreen "support" crowbarred in. The OS may talk to the hardware properly, but the interface for both the OS and the applications weren't adapted to it.
Well, that summarizes points 2, 4, & 5 from the article.
The headline makes it sound like Amazon is doing something bad. But Amazon is twisting publishers' arms to sell their books for less than they would otherwise.
Generally when a corporations threatens to stop doing business with you altogether, including with regard to different products and different markets, most people consider that to be doing harm to the person or organization they're doing business with. For example, publishers publish whatever book they think will make money. If they can't sell books designed for smaller markets at a higher price, those books may simply no longer be a viable business move for them to publish so they don't get made. And since Amazon will stop publishing the books in print as well as e-book the publisher is given extra incentive to not make them at all.
Publishers have wanted to charge excessively high prices for their books. And Apple has been trying to lure them by letting them get away with it.
In this instance Apple is being an impartial conduit, which is not great, but Amazon is not motivated by anyone's best interests but their own. Their goal is to become a single gatekeeper for book publishing and that's not something any rational person should be rooting for.
The employees had no idea if it was from them or not.
Actually some of the published communications seem to indicate they though at least some content was in violation of copyright. They did not know for certain, but that is not what the law cares about right now.
Once again, this is the copyright holder's responsibility, not Youtube's.
Legally, that hasn't been true for a while. Look up "contributory copyright infringement". In the US it is illegal to knowingly profit from violations of copyright if you can be shown to know about them, have the means to stop them, and don't qualify for an exemption.
As long as Youtube was assisting in these efforts as required by law, I see nothing wrong here, let alone "evil".
We're not talking right or wrong here, nor good or evil. We were just discussing legality, which Youtube may well have been on the wrong side of. Napster didn't upload any content either and complied with takedown notices, they still lost big in court.
If those financial partners only provided service by telegraph, you wouldn't be blaming Western Union for failing to upgrade your telegraphy machines on demand.
If Western Union had been shown in court to be illegally abusing a monopoly in order to make sure it was in companies' best financial interest to only provide service by telegraph, then yes I'd blame Western Union. Did you even read the "embrace, extend, extinguish" documents?
Here's what I don't get about your argument.
Even if an employee thinks that a video is copyrighted, does the employee have a responsibility to determine whether the person who posted the video actually held the copyright?
You seem unfamiliar with current US copyright law. Everything is copyrighted by default. Not everything is a registered copyright, but pretty much everything is copyrighted.
So if an employee suspects that content is copyrighted (because, unless they posted it themselves, they couldn't really know), in order to discover that it was illegal they would then need to ask the poster about the copyright ownership. Does the employee have the responsibility to do this? Does the employee even have an ethical obligation to do so?
If it can be shown that employees thought the works were being posted in violation of copyrights and the company profited from it, and they had the means to remove it and do not qualify for an exemption as a common carrier (don't ban any content); then they will likely be found guilty of the crime of contributory copyright infringement and have damages levied against them.
A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.
They seem to have taken a more blended approach. A separate project was revamping many of the servers at the same time. They did immediately move away from MS Office to OpenOffice and ODF because they could do so without having to worry about the servers and they laud it as one of the biggest benefits so far. I don't know of any good reason why they should have held off on that. The problem with a top down migration is that many times you don't know what all the services inside your organization and out are actually used. So rolling out a series of Linux clients in every department allows you to discover what your platform specific dependencies are. In some cases they changed the Linux client to work with those services and in some they changed the services to work with Linux.
A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure);
The problem here is in your first step you may have broken a bunch of things and users will have to start changing the way they work. From their perspective you've downgraded the system. That's because they're using a client that does not work as well with your new servers as your Linux clients will. So you've just given the majority of your users a bad taste for the whole thing and generated tons of pushback that can kill your whole migration.
I think it would make more sense to switch to as many platform agnostic applications as possible, first. Then implement the servers and desktops simultaneously in one part of the company, while letting the users have access to their old desktop via a remote session. Fix the compatibility problems and move on to the next chunk of the company until you can start repurposing the old servers and getting rid of the remote desktop sessions altogether.
But they can buy a desktop GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, which have a "Wine" toolkit that can run many applications designed for Windows.
That's absolutely true and Linux is a valid competitor.
How does Linux fail to break Microsoft's market power?
Because Linux cannot run all Windows software and Windows compatible hardware, there are still serious limitations to its suitability for a significant portion of users. But that's not how antitrust law works anyway. There are no antitrust laws that discuss operating systems and application compatibility. Instead the issue is the amount of influence on party has over any market. The most basic and obvious criteria used as an indicator of this is market share. In a typical case anything over 70% and the courts step in and typically companies start segregating their really popular products from other markets long before then to avoid any issue. MS has about 99% of the relevant market to date and it has been reviewed and determined to have monopoly influence by at least three different court systems in different countries that I know of.
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I dont[sic] know much about this and am curious why it is so important. Wont[sic] open source continue to be open source independent of what the EU decides?
First this is more about open standards than open source software. Some organizations certainly will use them regardless, but lacking a clear directive, the status quo rules, and that tends to be proprietary formats and protocols now dominating the industry and harming interoperability and reducing competition.
Or is this saying that the EU gov'ts will only use open source programs, and that is defined by this document?
Originally this document established a preference for more open formats that are more likely to be usable to later generations and which provide more choice of both IT vendors and clients going forward. This was a recognition of the importance of open and documented protocols and formats. Note, nothing in this was pro or con of any given vendor. Rather it was in favor of open standardization where all vendors could compete instead of just one vendor (read Microsoft). The idea was that it is important for say word processing in EU governments to standardize on a format where any company could create an interoperable solution so governments could take competitive bids on a level playing field.
There are lots of people out there interested in cyber security. "Hackers" are in all the movies and are kind of cool. But the ability to become a legitimate security expert is limited, partly because the government which hires tons of people to perform physical investigations and fire guns, has failed to keep up with the times. Look at the military, for example. If you want to be a well paid cyber security expert, or even an important one, you basically have to go into the private sector. You're sure never getting promoted within the ranks of the armed forces, or even well paid so why deal with being constantly undervalued? And their focus is completely wrong. First unlike the private sector they care about how physically fit you are much more than about how competent you are. Second, they care a lot more about credentials and conformity than the industry does. Computer, especially computer security is a young field. I've worked with lots of network security experts that had a PhD and wore a suit, but I've worked with just as many that had no degree (or a degree in jazz) and wore lewd t-shirts or dressed like The Cure. Industry considers this latter category to be a huge asset and even makes sure to show them off to clients; we have those quirky genius types on staff. The government just writes them off as not real experts because they didn't give up a $100k job doing real security to go back and get a degree they don't need.
And frankly, while the industry has respect for the NSA, it has pretty much written off the rest of the government as a lost cause when it comes to security. They're too firmly in the pockets of corporate interests, useless contractors, and bureaucratic nonsense. How many competent security experts have refused or quit working for homeland defense saying it was impossible to do the job given the resources and idiotic policies?
Seriously, if the government does not think there are enough experts, start handing out scholarships and setting up internships. The NSA already does so. Better yet, start hiring security people with actual authority and discretion, like experts in some other fields have. Put security experts in charge of hiring, retaining, promoting, and running security, instead of being beholden to superiors who want to run them like they do the motor pool.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem.
Odd, I could say the same thing about your comment.
You seem emotionally invested in this discussion. Your comment doesn't even make any sense. I didn't make excuses for any engineering flaw in anything because I was not defending any engineering, just pointing out a well known problem.
So enforcing uniform standards is a bad thing?
This is a straw man argument.
Every OS and it's dog has a recommended way of doing things which always scatters things across the file system.
That is the case with legacy OS's and versions of some OS's but it is not good engineering. OS X, for example, stores entire apps in a single, special folder. The only thing outside that folder are shared frameworks and config files (which are cascading and needed for upgrading and remote applications. One of the hardest parts of using SE Linux is that Linux application in general don't have a simple location all the time, so allowing them to modify their own files but not anything else can take significant expertise.
What Google has done in this case is introduce a limitation that exacerbates that problem even more.
Linux and OSX have similar systems.
You clearly aren't familiar with OS X and some Linux variants that have been more recently engineered to have more sane practices.
Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
This I think is where you misunderstood me. You can distribute as a single package but what you should be doing is creating a proper install for Android rather then just dumping it wherever (I.E. putting your large art assets into /SDCard/YourGame).
Applications should be distributed as single bundles and stored as single bundles. This makes it much much easier to transfer applications, run applications remotely, install and uninstall applications cleanly, upgrade applications cleanly, restrict applications for security purposes, and backup applications. Android not only did not provide a cleaner and more compact installation that the average Linux distro, but actually made the install messier with limitations on where apps can be run from, resulting in applications being spread out more. Now you can have applications fail to run if either of two storage types fails.
It's a flaw and Google knows it's a flaw and people are working on fixing the flaw. I don't see how anyone can rationally conclude otherwise.
I did not hear about the data being handed over to the Department of Homeland defense, but I do know a bit about the Census Bureau. Federal law prohibits all employees of the Census Bureau from releasing this data. So if the government wants to restore my faith in it and set a good precedent to prevent future abuse, arrest everyone involved in the 2003-2004 data breach, convict them and send them to prison for 5 years.
Actually the OP was talking about Google services not Android...
They may have alluded to that, but the title was about only having 5 apps, a common oversimplification of the complaint with regard to the memory issue.
There is no problem with porting games to Android, you just have to do it properly rather then balling everything up and putting a "supports Android" sticker on the box.
I think you're making excuses for an engineering problem. As I said, the issue is not insurmountable, but it's piss poor engineering to scatter bits of your application across multiple volumes and being forced to do so truly sucks. Applications as single bundles have many advantages including simplicity for the sake of security.
Note, I'm impartial here, I don't own either or really care. I was just trying to help people understand the topic.
Android would be a lot better if Google hadn't crippled the app capability so you are forced to do everything online
How are Android apps crippled?
The previous poster is talking about the inability of Android to run apps stored anywhere but the internal memory, significantly limiting devices like this one, with significant storage capacity, because that capacity cannot be easily used to store applications, just data. Some game makers, for example, have said they cannot port to most android phones because their games are larger than the internal storage.
Hopefully Google will be able to resolve this issue going forward and some app developers are already working around it by installing data packages for their apps to Flash and referencing them from within their application. It's not a good solution, but it helps some.
There are national security laws for a reason.
True, but those laws are not the highest laws of the land.
Why anyone using/working on Wikileaks thinks they are above the law, I have never understood.
Actually, many government officials think they are above the law and can apply state secrets laws indiscriminately and without regard for constitutionality. It has been a huge problem throughout the history of the US, because it is very difficult for the fourth estate and the judicial branch of our government to provide the proper checks to balance misuse of that power because of the secrecy involved. What Wikileaks has been doing in many (but not all) cases is protected whistleblowing, protected freedom of the press, and protected free speech that the courts most likely will rule as constitutionally protected if they ever actually make it to court.
I'm recommending anyone that asks me what to choose, to try that[Opera].
Every major release I download it and try it out and every time I dismiss it. All other things being equal, OS X is my preferred OS for the Web and Opera still kind of sucks. It still doesn't support my mouse gestures, trained spell checker, grammar checker, translation software, etc. Until they can support the basic, native functions of the OS, they're a non-stater.
So when will Apple finally be forced to stop bundling and dang near malware installing Safari every time I want an iTunes or Quicktime patch? That's the news article *I* want to see.
Just as soon as Apple's market share for media playing software reaches 70%... or to put it another way, never.
Google is tying its search to AdWords. All ads that I see on the results page are served by Google. Google does not give me the option to choose another ad provider.
How so? When I advertise using adwords, I don't get Google search or have to use Google search. Google had in the high 60's of percentage in search last I looked, not enough to qualify as having monopoly influence, so supplying only their ads with that would not be illegal tying even if they were ruled separate markets, i.e. people are making a profit off searches not using ads.
but the whole concept of why market share matters perplexes me. How do free browsers, which do nothing but display webpages, make ANY money whatsoever?
Some sell their search bar to search engine/advertisers. Some enable the sale of hardware (Safari sells Macs). Some license themselves to console and phone makers (Opera). They all benefit from IE losing market share because currently they spend a lot of money and dev time working around broken Web pages designed for IE that don't follow the standards and whose behavior has to be reverse engineered by looking at what IE does. So to answer your question, increased market share helps them in various ways and decreased market share of IE saved them money on development.
What the hell is the point of comparing "market share" of something like this? I don't see how this translates into anything benefiting the company in the lead.
Currently it benefits MS a lot by keeping the Web from being a viable platform for cross platform applications that can let people move away from IE. For other companies, being the top browser is less beneficial because they follow standards and have no lock-in, but they benefit greatly by the Web becoming standardized and the state of the art moving forward so they can offer better Web services without being blocked by a huge portion of users with a crippled browser.
That seems like an overly simple solution. Wouldn't whatever OS that takes its place present the same issues after people decide to try exploiting it?
Monopolies undermine the free market by removing the basic incentive of the monopolist to cater to the needs of users via innovation. This is one of the main reasons they are considered poison to economies and are severely restricted by law. So, no if another OS had the largest market share it would not necessarily have the same problems as Windows with security. If no one OS had a huge market share, competition would let the free market solve the problem.
Moreover, OSS provides further incentive. No Linux OS maker can ever monopolize the OS because of the licensing (unless they can cripple the OSS license using patents or other legal shenanigans). So even if Linux took 99% of the market, since no one company controls Linux, forks that had better security would always appear and users would move to them because they addressed the need for security. Because the developers of Linux are also the users, they have direct incentive to solve user problems with security, just as Apple has direct incentive today to do the same. So long as one closed source OS is not hugely dominant, the problem more or less solves itself and OS's are developed with sufficient security to work for normal people in the real world.
The later article didn't explain what illegal tying, but did you know Google also pays people to tie their products in - almost all of Firefox revenue is coming from Google and in turn they set Google as the default search engine. Same thing for Opera and other browsers and even some manufacturers (I think HP)
Okay, just to clarify here. Illegal tying is when you take two products you make from separate markets and tie them together such that the second market benefits from the first market. The first market in this case must have overwhelming influence in the market (for purposes of discussion you can just say 70%).
The most common form of tying is bundling, so that a consumer buys one product and gets a second product included for "free". Grocers do this all the time, excepting that since neither of the products has overwhelming influence, it does not undermine the operation of the market.
An example of illegal bundling is that Ma Bell required consumers to rent a telephone set from them for exorbitant rates in order to purchase a telephone line, they bundled the two together so you had to buy them as a package. It was not until the courts intervened that telephone technology moved forward again, with touch tone, answering machines, hold, colors other than black, etc.
So MS was found guilty of bundling IE with the monopolized Windows desktop OS. Google may have overwhelming market share in online search advertising, but what do they bundle with that? In order to advertise with them, what is required? What do you allege they bundle with their online search advertising?
Continuing on, Opera has no overwhelming market share in any market. So they lack even the capability to illegally bundle if they wanted to. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't think you understand what illegal tying is and how it works or why it is illegal. If you do, please clarify by telling me what the two markets involved are and specifically what you allege constitutes illegal tying.
The iPad doesn't do these things cheaper than others...
Cheaper than a stack of regular textbooks? That may or may not be the case, but it is irrelevant since I specifically said I was not arguing that the iPad is going to be a successful device or is a converging device. The assertion was that only things that fit in your pocket converge, thus anything larger that seems to be such an instance will fail... a theory I find absurd.
Plus your analogy using bookbags is just retarded...
It wasn't an analogy it was an example. Your understanding of what I wrote seems a little... retarded.
So, your problem with his generalization is that he made it short, pithy and memorable, rather than long-winded and full of exceptions?
No, my problem is that he made an overgeneralization in the first place. If you prefer memorable but incorrect rules, by all means enjoy.
Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
*parry* No, but they are in and of themselves oversized pockets, or in other words, a space where weight and size are more important than pure functionality.
I notice you neglect my other examples, but that's okay they serve only to show that convergence happens for all sorts of things that don't fit in a pocket. Rather, items that people carry with them or use when they have limited space. Can we agree upon that?
If I'm carrying a netbook around already...
Who says you are? More importantly, who says the average consumer is?
...then the iPad needs to be either lighter, smaller, or much more useful than the netbook in order to be worth the space.
Or cheaper or easier to use for the average person or easier to hold in one hand while walking or less cumbersome as a book reader. Or it could provide functionality in the form of accessible content, just as the iPod did when it took over the digital music player market.
If my phone has most or all of the same functionality as the iPad, just scaled down, and my netbook covers much of the rest, scaled up, then the iPad is not a device to fit in the "pocket convergence" area.
Again you assume most people carry both a smartphone and a netbook, but that is likely not the case. The idea of "pocket convergence" is flawed in and of itself, as I pointed out. Whether or not the iPad will succeed and whether or not it actually is a convergence of e-book readers and umm PDAs (was that your theory) has nothing to do with whether or not it will fit in a pocket.
Is that it's not an open platform.
That's an important point to many of us here.
My issues are: No multitasking in the iPhone OS. Even cell phone OSes can do that.
...and you immediately drop yourself into the category of people who don't know what they're talking about.
The Swiss Army knife is an example of convergence: it has scissors, tweezers, knives, files, screwdrivers, etc. It does nothing perfectly and everything adequately. The iPhone is like that. But if someone got you a "Swiss Army" kitchen utensil, with a spatula and a ladle and tongs and a couple knives in a single sheath, you would think it was the stupidest thing in the world. "And that's why everyone hates the iPad."
The problem is, Mr. Schell is trying to apply rules but doesn't really understand them at the heart of the matter. It's not just things that fit in our pockets that we want to converge, but items we carry in our daily lives, when we have limited space. Cars and stereo systems don't fit in our pockets, but for some reason cars all have built in stereos. We could all just bring boom boxes with us in the car, but we don't because the benefit of having the stereo there all the time outweighs the duplication and the fact that car stereos are usually not as high of quality due to space and cost concerns.
Ask college students if they want all their textbooks to converge into a single device, if it can be done so without increasing cost or removing important features. Items like backpacks, luggage, sunglasses, clothing, personal transport, etc. are instances where convergence is desired by the general public. When was the last time you saw a student carrying a laptop case and a separate bag for their books? Those have pretty much converged at this point... but contrary to Mr. Schell's assertion you can't fit either in your pocket.
Now I don't plan on buying an iPad anytime soon, nor would I venture to guess how successful of a product it is going to be without trying one out. But this sort of overgeneralization as a method of prediction is weak tea.
...full OS tablets existed before the iPad rumors even started.
But they weren't/aren't tablet OSs. They're desktop OSs with touchscreen "support" crowbarred in. The OS may talk to the hardware properly, but the interface for both the OS and the applications weren't adapted to it.
Well, that summarizes points 2, 4, & 5 from the article.
The headline makes it sound like Amazon is doing something bad. But Amazon is twisting publishers' arms to sell their books for less than they would otherwise.
Generally when a corporations threatens to stop doing business with you altogether, including with regard to different products and different markets, most people consider that to be doing harm to the person or organization they're doing business with. For example, publishers publish whatever book they think will make money. If they can't sell books designed for smaller markets at a higher price, those books may simply no longer be a viable business move for them to publish so they don't get made. And since Amazon will stop publishing the books in print as well as e-book the publisher is given extra incentive to not make them at all.
Publishers have wanted to charge excessively high prices for their books. And Apple has been trying to lure them by letting them get away with it.
In this instance Apple is being an impartial conduit, which is not great, but Amazon is not motivated by anyone's best interests but their own. Their goal is to become a single gatekeeper for book publishing and that's not something any rational person should be rooting for.
The employees had no idea if it was from them or not.
Actually some of the published communications seem to indicate they though at least some content was in violation of copyright. They did not know for certain, but that is not what the law cares about right now.
Once again, this is the copyright holder's responsibility, not Youtube's.
Legally, that hasn't been true for a while. Look up "contributory copyright infringement". In the US it is illegal to knowingly profit from violations of copyright if you can be shown to know about them, have the means to stop them, and don't qualify for an exemption.
As long as Youtube was assisting in these efforts as required by law, I see nothing wrong here, let alone "evil".
We're not talking right or wrong here, nor good or evil. We were just discussing legality, which Youtube may well have been on the wrong side of. Napster didn't upload any content either and complied with takedown notices, they still lost big in court.
If those financial partners only provided service by telegraph, you wouldn't be blaming Western Union for failing to upgrade your telegraphy machines on demand.
If Western Union had been shown in court to be illegally abusing a monopoly in order to make sure it was in companies' best financial interest to only provide service by telegraph, then yes I'd blame Western Union. Did you even read the "embrace, extend, extinguish" documents?
Here's what I don't get about your argument. Even if an employee thinks that a video is copyrighted, does the employee have a responsibility to determine whether the person who posted the video actually held the copyright?
You seem unfamiliar with current US copyright law. Everything is copyrighted by default. Not everything is a registered copyright, but pretty much everything is copyrighted.
So if an employee suspects that content is copyrighted (because, unless they posted it themselves, they couldn't really know), in order to discover that it was illegal they would then need to ask the poster about the copyright ownership. Does the employee have the responsibility to do this? Does the employee even have an ethical obligation to do so?
If it can be shown that employees thought the works were being posted in violation of copyrights and the company profited from it, and they had the means to remove it and do not qualify for an exemption as a common carrier (don't ban any content); then they will likely be found guilty of the crime of contributory copyright infringement and have damages levied against them.
A better approach might have been to do a vertical top-down migration: Servers: first roll out a directory server infrastructure, then a CIFS strategy etc.; Clients: migrate away from MSIE / Active X, then to CUPS, then away from MS Office etc.. And then, finally, to change the desktop OS out from underneath.
They seem to have taken a more blended approach. A separate project was revamping many of the servers at the same time. They did immediately move away from MS Office to OpenOffice and ODF because they could do so without having to worry about the servers and they laud it as one of the biggest benefits so far. I don't know of any good reason why they should have held off on that. The problem with a top down migration is that many times you don't know what all the services inside your organization and out are actually used. So rolling out a series of Linux clients in every department allows you to discover what your platform specific dependencies are. In some cases they changed the Linux client to work with those services and in some they changed the services to work with Linux.
A suggested strategy for those planning something similar: 1: migrate the server services (and create a shiny new unified and consistent infrastructure);
The problem here is in your first step you may have broken a bunch of things and users will have to start changing the way they work. From their perspective you've downgraded the system. That's because they're using a client that does not work as well with your new servers as your Linux clients will. So you've just given the majority of your users a bad taste for the whole thing and generated tons of pushback that can kill your whole migration.
I think it would make more sense to switch to as many platform agnostic applications as possible, first. Then implement the servers and desktops simultaneously in one part of the company, while letting the users have access to their old desktop via a remote session. Fix the compatibility problems and move on to the next chunk of the company until you can start repurposing the old servers and getting rid of the remote desktop sessions altogether.
But they can buy a desktop GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, which have a "Wine" toolkit that can run many applications designed for Windows.
That's absolutely true and Linux is a valid competitor.
How does Linux fail to break Microsoft's market power?
Because Linux cannot run all Windows software and Windows compatible hardware, there are still serious limitations to its suitability for a significant portion of users. But that's not how antitrust law works anyway. There are no antitrust laws that discuss operating systems and application compatibility. Instead the issue is the amount of influence on party has over any market. The most basic and obvious criteria used as an indicator of this is market share. In a typical case anything over 70% and the courts step in and typically companies start segregating their really popular products from other markets long before then to avoid any issue. MS has about 99% of the relevant market to date and it has been reviewed and determined to have monopoly influence by at least three different court systems in different countries that I know of.