"it's precisely because we don't have true AI yet that such robots aren't perfectly able to walk"
Insects must be pretty bright then, because they not only manage to walk and fly around an extremely complex and variable environment without bumping into things, falling over, or falling out of the sky, but can even do it whilst simultaneously performing a variety of other tasks.
"However, that's rapidly changing, with things like BigDog"
Which can walk nearly as well as any arbitrary insect in two dimensions (many insects of course can walk up vertical surfaces too), but not while doing any of the other things they manage at the same time.
"ASIMO II"
See above.
"military grade exoskeletons"
See above.
"planes/drones that fly with AI"
An AI that can't even do what a housefly does in terms of negotiating obstacles in three dimensions, and houseflies are notably poor when compared to some of the predatory flying insects such as dragonflies.
"If you aren't seeing any progress towards real AI, you're not paying attention."
It's people who cite the ability to (poorly) emulate a small subset of the capabilities of simple arthropods as being advances in machine intelligence who aren't paying attention. Social insects like ants for example are pretty well-endowed in the brain department compared with the non-social ones, yet theirs still only have 250,000 cells, so they aren't six-legged chassis carrying biological supercomputers running complex sets of software at blinding speeds. And the fact that other insects with much smaller brains manage to perform the same basic physical tasks at least as well as their bigger-brained social brethren is an excellent indictor of the fact that these physical tasks are mostly inherent in, and managed by their basic hardware, hence their ability to function quite effectively after sustaining massive amounts of damage to a wide variety of systems.
Nature used basic engineering to solve the problems of swimming, flying, crawling and walking quite a long time before anything we'd describe as a central "brain" appeared, so claiming that machines should require anything remotely approaching any reasonable description of "intelligence" to do the same things is utterly ludicrous.
"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS."
Apple moved away because IBM repeatedly failed to produce a low-power G5 suitable for laptop / notebook PCs. Being stuck with the ageing and increasingly anaemic-looking G4 line for portables was making Apple's offerings look worse in comparison with the competition every year, so Jobs eventually got fed up with being made to look like an idiot by repeatedly promising things that IBM said would be Available Real Soon(TM), and then failed to deliver.
NB: the Cell microprocessor is a member of the IBM POWER line, so Sony are just as saddled with the PowerPC architecture as MS (and indeed Nintendo).
"This is like the EU deciding what oil individuals should use in all their cars."
Except of course for the fact that nothing in the current strategy is concerned with citizens or companies, and nothing in any proposed future ones will have an effect on them either. The existing EU open source strategy is solely concerned with software the European Commission uses internally, with the document that all the current furore is about being a proposal for future legislation concerning procurement policies in other EU institutions and national / local governments in member states.
"The decision to use open source is not a governmental decision."
The decision to use open source within a government is very much a decision for that government.
"If a government says to me "build a bridge from point A to point B," then I decide what piece of software is best for calculating the mass of the bridge. I can use an open source product, or a closed source product."
And you'll still be able to make that decision under both current and proposed future EU legislation. The only limitation will be that you'll have to use software that's capable of working with the same data as the government you're contracted by, and if your chosen closed source software can't do that, then it's your problem if they pass you over for a company who is willing to use software that's compatible with theirs.
"But it would be absurd for my decision to be affected by what some guy in another country, who has no idea what software is, to make that decision for me."
Then it's a good thing that they're not proposing to make your decisions for you.
To make things clear:
-- The proposals do not place any limits on any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to offer their products at at retail or via OEMs.
-- They do not limit any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to sell corporate volume licenses to companies under any terms that both sides are willing to accept (subject of course to whatever contract and other laws may be applicable).
Belgium's pretty typical of most of Western Europe in my experience. Windows dominates the desktop at home and in the workplace (around 90%) just about everywhere, with Linux mostly being found in server rooms and universities. Macs are growing their market share quickly, partly because of the iPod / iPhone "halo effect", but the fact that both iPod and iPhone penetration levels are much lower than in the US means that the halo effect is less pronounced, so Macs typically have around half their US share of typical Western European markets (about 5% to 6%).
"Of course, the holy grail of having all object communicate with each other while running under their respective VM (or natively) is still a ways away. I'm not even sure if that's a goal."
I thought that both GNOME and KDE (or more correctly, GTK+ and QT) had recently settled on D-BUS for inter-process messages on a single machine. There are D-BUS bindings for a variety of native (i.e. compiled) languages, and also for most popular interpreters and VMs, e.g. Python, Java, Mono, Ruby, Perl, etc., so it's certainly at least theoretically possible for objects in different languages and run-time environments to communicate with one another over it.
NB: I say "theoretically possible" because the quality, maturity, and completeness of D-BUS bindings varies quite considerably, so one cannot yet assume that things which work well with some sets of bindings will work equally well (or indeed at all) with all of them.
" the end users don't really care how badly it misinterprets CSS2, or how slow its JS engine is."
They would care if the MS monopoly hadn't made it into a de-facto standard whose idiosyncrasies have to catered for by every mass-market web site.
"So long as it opens their homepage and YouTube, they couldn't care less."
Which of course it wouldn't do if it hadn't gained such an enormous installed base by being the only browser that's allowed to be bundled with OEM Windows, because web designers would only code to the published standards that it can't render properly, so those end users wouldn't be able to use YouTube, their bank's site, FaceBook and its ilk, Amazon, EBay, web-based EMAIL, etc., etc,, etc.
"It might be a good thing but that argument has nothing to do with identifying the EU's true motive."
The EU's true motive is their being obliged to investigate any complaint of anti-trust law violations within their areas of jurisdiction made by one or more companies or organisations that offer goods or services in that jurisdiction.
"I'm more likely to think that they are just acting in their own economic interests with no regard for the consumer"
If the EU is doing this for its own economic interests, then please show me the evidence for them having initiated the investigation on their own behalf, and not in response to a complaint from one or more companies / organisations that offer goods or services within their jurisdiction.
"regardless if you accept the eula or not, you generally can't return software"
Many software companies (including MS) will refund the purchase price of stuff that's been actually been bought (i.e. there's entry on an invoice for that specific item together with how much was paid for it, or some other evidence of purchase) if it's returned within a specific time frame, usually between one and two months, depending on the company. This includes software that's been opened and installed as long as all the original packaging is returned, but they usually require it to be accompanied by evidence of purchase, e.g. an invoice, credit card statement, etc.
OEM versions are usually specifically excluded from most company refund policies on the grounds that their customer was the OEM, so that OEM is responsible for handling refund claims from people who they sold devices to. This is actually the standard way all component makers work, hence the fact that you don't go directly to a transistor manufacturer for a remedy if one fails in your stereo system within the warranty period.
NB: one notable exception to the above is games, which are distributed by companies who take a "life's tough" position when customers complain about problems on their systems or just the fact that they paid for something that turned out to be a piece of shit.
"I've found that the Apple upgrades suck in a different way. Most of the time the OS itself upgrades just fine."
Most of the time isn't all the time, though. I saw one Mac at a place where I was working get completely hosed by an upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4, and there were only about four Macs in the company, so the rest of them stayed with 10.3 until the problem with the first one had been diagnosed (this wasn't my job, so I don't know whether they managed to resolve it or not). Note that although this is purely anecdotal, it wasn't an isolated case by any means, although I've no real idea of the percentage of OS X upgrades that mess up Macs to at least some degree.
NB: software that doesn't work after an upgrade isn't necessarily an indication of something going awry with the upgrade process itself. Every major version of OS X breaks at least some things written for prior versions, so it can be simply a matter of stuff not working because it's incompatible with the new OS.
"Just because a new version comes out doesn't mean that you need to get rid of the old one. Of course that mindset is the antithesis of Microsoft's business model, and that's where a lot the friction comes from."
It's also apparently becoming the antithesis of Apple's business model, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing OS X software of their own with components that only work on Intel Macs, despite the fact that their compilers can easily produce executables containing code for both PPC and Intel CPUs.
"It doesn't matter what the OS is, be it Windows, OSX or *nix. Sooner or later an update will be applied, and there will be a version incompatibility with some app on the system and blammo... time to restore from backups because the stupid thing won't boot anymore."
Complete system hosings are quite rare with minor version updates (i.e. service packs, security updates, bug fixes, etc.), although software breakage can and does happen, especially with stuff that uses undocumented, deprecated, or "note that this feature may change in the future" APIs. Major version updates (i.e. upgrades) are of course another matter entirely...
"Or it boots but some random "business critical application" won't load. Or the stupid app loads, but every time you try to commit a transaction, it borks... or... or... or... You get the idea."
I do indeed get the idea, and so do corporate IT people, hence the fact that they frequently stick with old OS versions that are guaranteed to work with every piece of software and peripheral device that their company uses.
"On the mac, it "breaks existing software" if more than 5% of their apps stop working."
I couldn't put a definite figure on the compatibility level of the PPC "in process" OS 9 system, and I don't have any anecdotal evidence because I've only been a Mac user for around four years, which isn't long enough to have a collection of pre-OS X software.
"Maybe it's a case that mac users just plain wouldn't put up with that sort of treatment?"
They've put up with some pretty shabby treatment in the compatibility department over the years. The transition between OS 6 and OS 7 for example supposedly broke lots of apps (I say supposedly because I wasn't a Mac user in those days, so I can't personally confirm it); each new version of OS X breaks at least some things that worked on prior ones; and the Intel transition not only relegated all older Mac software (including some OS X stuff that used PPC 5 instructions) to history's dustbin, but has resulted in a progressive move on Apple's part towards Intel-only components in their own software for OS X, so people who spent a lot of money on top-end hardware three years ago have essentially been told that it's obsolete as far as Apple are concerned.
NB: the "classic" environment isn't supported in OS X 10.5 even for people with PPC systems, so anyone who still wants to use older Mac software will either have to stay with a prior version (10.4 or earlier), or keep one around in a dual-boot setup.
"What I find odd about this whole issue is that in this case the 'market' under discussion is one where every single product (browser) is free of charge. "
This is very true.
"Any definition of 'market' I can think of involves an exchange of some kind."
EU competition law isn't solely restricted to markets. Article 82(2)B) of the Treaty Of Rome for example says that a monopoly which is "limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers" is abusing its dominant position.
"Or to put it better, if it *is* monopoly abuse then we are looking at a very liberal interpretation of some fundamental concepts such as "what is a market", "what is a product", and "what is an operating system" and "what is abuse" which may set precedents for a long time to come and cause some very scary unintended consequences."
The laws were intended from the outset to handle a wide range of different products and services, including nominally free ones such as TV and radio broadcasts, where the only "product" is electromagnetic waves that require special equipment to decode. They've been doing this rather successfully since 1957, and have not as yet resulted in scary unintended consequences, despite the fact that the justice level of some decisions made under them are, as is the case with all legal decisions both inside and outside the EU, debatable.
"As much as I like to criticize large players like MS and Google, I don't want to live in a world where anybody successful becomes hamstrung and too afraid to ever innovate or compete vigorously in whatever field they are successful in."
I also doubt you'd want to live in a world where unregulated giant companies could raise such high barriers of entry to all areas that they control or want to control that no form of effective competition is possible. Anti-trust legislation can sometimes be heavy-handed, and the people administering it get things wrong sometimes just like everyone else, but it's still IMO better than the alternative of a few corporate behemoths dividing the world up, and being allowed to crush anyone who dares to try and compete with any of them.
Please see my replies to others who raised the same point for the reason why my claim that EU anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft is correct despite the fact that the EU itself doesn't.
"I also always do a clean install for everything except OS X upgrades."
OS X upgrades can and do hose systems, either partially, or completely (i.e. it won't boot). I've seen this happen, although not on my own Mac, where I always select the "archive and install" option rather than "upgrade"; this puts the entirety of the old system into a folder, does a clean install, and then moves user settings, progs, etc. from the archived folder back into the new OS.
People in occupied France often served the Nazis with food and wine that wasn't quite up to their usual standards. The idea behind this was that nobody would want to stay in a country where every sauce was a little lumpy, every vegetable was limp through overcooking, and every glass of wine was a tad on the sour side, so the Germans would rapidly tire of France and leave of their own accord.
The flaw in this otherwise cunning plan was of course the fact that the German idea of good food and wine is based on quantity rather than quality, so they weren't at all put off by pate served at slightly the wrong temperature if there was lots of it and they didn't get diarrhoea or indigestion from eating it.
"Well, has Microsoft ever released something with poor driver support before?"
All the NT series had dreadful driver support up to and including XP. People tend to forget how bad XP was at the beginning because it's been around for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that there was lots of hardware for Win9X that's never worked with it; large amounts of 9X and DOS software didn't run on it at all it at all, or was annoyingly problematic (especially games); getting XP Home in particular to integrate with an existing Win9X network involved so much pissing around that a lot of people gave up in despair; it had hefty hardware requirements by 2001 standards; and its authentication mechanism was universally hated hated by both customers and the computing press.
All of the above problems led to predictions by some in the press and most FOSS supporters of a combination of both a mass exodus from Windows and legions of people refusing to upgrade from Win9X due to the fact that it ran faster on old hardware than XP did on new systems, and worked with the peripherals and software people already had. And if this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it's because it _is_ hauntingly familiar, just as it was hauntingly familiar to those who remember all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when MS ditched Windows 3.X for 9X, and then again when they replaced the NT 3.1 UI with the 4.X one.
"That's a real problem, from that it sounds like Windows 7 is a pig."
Windows 7 is also a beta, which means that (gasp!) it's likely to lack some things that will be in the shipping version, have other things that won't be in the shipping version, and a bunch of other things will unstable, slow, or lacking certain features because they haven't finished writing them yet.
"Apple has no qualms about dropping support of their newest software on older machines. However, what happens if they lie about it and say that older machines are supported and they aren't?"
Don't confuse Apple's shipping versions of OS X with their betas, which can be and frequently are very different indeed in terms of hardware requirements, software compatibility, performance, and APIs from what they eventually release.
"Heck, Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X happened in what, 2001? OK that was a major breaker for software and hardware alike"
It wasn't really a breaker for software, because Apple shipped a special version of OS 9 with their OS X PowerPC Macs that could be used to run older software "inside" OS X if required (it wasn't installed by default, but could easily be added from the media that came with the machine).
OS X also supported plenty of older Apple hardware prior to 10.4, which required a system with USB built into it (i.e. not ones that USB had been added to). They've been progressively pushing older systems off the supported list since then: 10.5 won't install on anything whose CPU clock rate is below 800MHz; and Snow Leopard might well be Intel-only, so even top-of-the-line machines bought three years ago from Apple won't be able to use it.
"We Dutch had the same guns on our trade- and war ships in that time"
The Spanish were notably impressed by Dutch gun makers, and commissioned lots of cannon and ammo for their armada from them. Unfortunately, the fact that they were occupying Holland by force at the time meant that the Dutch hated them, so archaeologists have found Dutch cannonballs on Spanish wrecks that had been "accidentally" made just slightly too big or just a smidgeon too small for the intended cannon.
These differences in tolerances were small enough to ensure that they looked as if they were the right size to Spanish inspections. Attempting to fire them at the English however would have had tragi-comic results such as swearing gunners being unable to force some cannonballs into the muzzles of their guns, while others formed such a poor seal that most of the gases from the burning powder went round them, so the initial "bang" was followed by the sound of a ball rolling sluggishly along the muzzle, and then a "plop" as it fell into the sea.
The strangest part of all this is of course that archaeological evidence from non-Spanish wrecks indicates that the Dutch ammunition tolerance problem didn't occur in stuff they made for themselves or sold to countries who weren't occupying them at the time. Some historians believe that this notable discrepancy may well have been behind the famous rant from King Philip II, where he threw his throne at a courtier while screaming "I'll kill those fucking Dutch!"...
" I am made suddenly suspicious noting that EU anti-trust laws cannot have existed prior to 1993"
The EU is a three pillar system. One of these pillars is the European Community (EC), and it has exactly the same role as it did prior to the existence of the EU, i.e. economic, social, and environmental policy and enforcement thereof. The EU is therefore an expansion that defines other areas of cooperation between member states, not a newer version of the EC that either replaces it or changes its role, structure, or laws.
One of the roles the EC pillar has by way of being responsible for economic matters is compliance with anti-trust legislation within the EC's zone of influence, with both the role and the body of law that applies to it having been established in 1957 by articles 81 to 87 of The Treaty Of Rome. it's therefore perfectly correct to say that the EU's anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft despite the fact that the EU itself doesn't, because the EC's anti-trust laws are by definition the EU's anti-trust laws, and will continue to be the EU's anti-trust laws unless the entire structure of the EU is revised at some point.
They could exist before Microsoft did because the EU's anti-trust laws are the EC's anti-trust laws, which were codified by the Treaty Of Rome in 1957. When the EU was established, the EC became one of its three pillars, and it still has the same responsibilities, roles, and powers as it did before there was an EU.
"I persume you're trying to pretend the pre-existing treaties means it existed longer than anyone anywhere in the world recognizes it?"
I suggest that you read what I actually wrote before sarcastically claiming that I'm pretending anything, because I said _the EU's anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft_, not that the EU did. They were established by articles 81 to 87 of the Treaty Of The European Community (Treaty Of Rome) in 1957, and are still entirely administered by the European Community, which is the EU pillar that's (among other things) responsible for all economic matters within the EU.
"Big government agencies require more people and the president can and will stack those agencies and panels with insiders."
While I agree that they have (but not necessarily need) more people, there's no demonstrable correlation between the size of a government and its propensity for cronyism.
"Look at how the Bush energy committee that Cheney headed was stacked with industry insiders."
That was due to the US' notable deficiency in rules about political conflicts of interest, not the size of the government. There are plenty of other countries with big governments who do have such rules, and aren't in the least reticent about using them to not only summarily dismiss, but also prosecute politicians who try and pull the sorts of stunts that Bush and Cheney got away with.
"it's easier for a small government to be more transparent"
And it's also easier for them to hide things if they want to, because there are less eyes and ears around when decisions are being made, so there's a lower probability of whistles being blown if somebody decides to put their own interests above those of their country. Transparency is entirely a function of a government's will to be transparent, not it's size, hence the fact that absolute monarchies and dictatorships, which are the smallest forms of government, are also the most secretive, corrupt, and crony-ridden ones.
"big government can be somewhat transparent but because it's bigger more watchers are needed."
Being bigger means that there _are_ more watchers. The smaller a government is, the easier it becomes to (a) ensure that those within it are loyal to that government rather than the country it's in, and (b) monitor everyone to ensure that those whose loyalty shows any signs of wavering are removed before they have a chance to do any damage.
"with more people more can insert whatever they want into legislation"
Any government can insert whatever it wants into legislation. You only have to look at the amount of long-winded tripe law firms with a total of 20 people in them can churn out to see how word processors have made it very easy for a small number of people to produce deluges of boiler-plate text with the eight relevant paragraphs scattered throughout them in unlikely places.
"Recently, members of congress admitted no one read the entire Stimulus package. Back when congress voted for the PATRIOT Act again no one read the whole thing."
All that proves is that dereliction of duty is endemic in the US congress. I will refer you once again to law firms, who are often faced with having to wade through tens of thousands of pages to find a few relevant bits of information for a single case which has a total of one lawyer and a couple of paralegals assigned to it. Any congress critter who was really serious about actually doing what they're paid for could also use a couple of paralegals to read through any bills and produce a summary of what's actually relevant to the bill itself, where the pork is and who benefits from it, and if there's any unrelated stuff they're trying to sneak through. The fact that they don't _choose_ do this has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the size of the government.
"At several hundred pages nobody should have to read an entire bill."
If that's their job, then they should be doing it, or paying someone to do it for them like people in the business world do.
"bills should be broken down into specific and smaller bills, each one dealing with one specific thing."
Which would mean there'd be hundreds of little bills that they wouldn't read instead of half a dozen big ones they don't read. The problem is a political culture where its perfectly acceptable to vote on legislation without knowing anything about it, so making bills shorter won't make a smidgeon of difference to people who think their job is making speeches at banquets and finding ways to become as important and wealthy as possible.
"big government wants big bills"
Governments who are hoping to get legislation passed without it being read want big bills. Not they need them in a political culture where voting is much more important than actually knowing anything about what you're voting for or against.
And TV companies all over the world, many of whom not only use the same AP news feeds as print media, but also subscribe to a special set of video services run by AP (Reuters offers a similar mix).
Slashdot Mirror
"it's precisely because we don't have true AI yet that such robots aren't perfectly able to walk"
Insects must be pretty bright then, because they not only manage to walk and fly around an extremely complex and variable environment without bumping into things, falling over, or falling out of the sky, but can even do it whilst simultaneously performing a variety of other tasks.
"However, that's rapidly changing, with things like BigDog"
Which can walk nearly as well as any arbitrary insect in two dimensions (many insects of course can walk up vertical surfaces too), but not while doing any of the other things they manage at the same time.
"ASIMO II"
See above.
"military grade exoskeletons"
See above.
"planes/drones that fly with AI"
An AI that can't even do what a housefly does in terms of negotiating obstacles in three dimensions, and houseflies are notably poor when compared to some of the predatory flying insects such as dragonflies.
"If you aren't seeing any progress towards real AI, you're not paying attention."
It's people who cite the ability to (poorly) emulate a small subset of the capabilities of simple arthropods as being advances in machine intelligence who aren't paying attention. Social insects like ants for example are pretty well-endowed in the brain department compared with the non-social ones, yet theirs still only have 250,000 cells, so they aren't six-legged chassis carrying biological supercomputers running complex sets of software at blinding speeds. And the fact that other insects with much smaller brains manage to perform the same basic physical tasks at least as well as their bigger-brained social brethren is an excellent indictor of the fact that these physical tasks are mostly inherent in, and managed by their basic hardware, hence their ability to function quite effectively after sustaining massive amounts of damage to a wide variety of systems.
Nature used basic engineering to solve the problems of swimming, flying, crawling and walking quite a long time before anything we'd describe as a central "brain" appeared, so claiming that machines should require anything remotely approaching any reasonable description of "intelligence" to do the same things is utterly ludicrous.
"MS on the other hand have saddled themselves with a multi-core PowerPC architecture, that even Apple was moving aware from in their competition with MS."
Apple moved away because IBM repeatedly failed to produce a low-power G5 suitable for laptop / notebook PCs. Being stuck with the ageing and increasingly anaemic-looking G4 line for portables was making Apple's offerings look worse in comparison with the competition every year, so Jobs eventually got fed up with being made to look like an idiot by repeatedly promising things that IBM said would be Available Real Soon(TM), and then failed to deliver.
NB: the Cell microprocessor is a member of the IBM POWER line, so Sony are just as saddled with the PowerPC architecture as MS (and indeed Nintendo).
"This is like the EU deciding what oil individuals should use in all their cars."
Except of course for the fact that nothing in the current strategy is concerned with citizens or companies, and nothing in any proposed future ones will have an effect on them either. The existing EU open source strategy is solely concerned with software the European Commission uses internally, with the document that all the current furore is about being a proposal for future legislation concerning procurement policies in other EU institutions and national / local governments in member states.
"The decision to use open source is not a governmental decision."
The decision to use open source within a government is very much a decision for that government.
"If a government says to me "build a bridge from point A to point B," then I decide what piece of software is best for calculating the mass of the bridge. I can use an open source product, or a closed source product."
And you'll still be able to make that decision under both current and proposed future EU legislation. The only limitation will be that you'll have to use software that's capable of working with the same data as the government you're contracted by, and if your chosen closed source software can't do that, then it's your problem if they pass you over for a company who is willing to use software that's compatible with theirs.
"But it would be absurd for my decision to be affected by what some guy in another country, who has no idea what software is, to make that decision for me."
Then it's a good thing that they're not proposing to make your decisions for you.
To make things clear:
-- The proposals do not place any limits on any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to offer their products at at retail or via OEMs.
-- They do not limit any proprietary closed source software vendor's ability to sell corporate volume licenses to companies under any terms that both sides are willing to accept (subject of course to whatever contract and other laws may be applicable).
Belgium's pretty typical of most of Western Europe in my experience. Windows dominates the desktop at home and in the workplace (around 90%) just about everywhere, with Linux mostly being found in server rooms and universities. Macs are growing their market share quickly, partly because of the iPod / iPhone "halo effect", but the fact that both iPod and iPhone penetration levels are much lower than in the US means that the halo effect is less pronounced, so Macs typically have around half their US share of typical Western European markets (about 5% to 6%).
"Of course, the holy grail of having all object communicate with each other while running under their respective VM (or natively) is still a ways away. I'm not even sure if that's a goal."
I thought that both GNOME and KDE (or more correctly, GTK+ and QT) had recently settled on D-BUS for inter-process messages on a single machine. There are D-BUS bindings for a variety of native (i.e. compiled) languages, and also for most popular interpreters and VMs, e.g. Python, Java, Mono, Ruby, Perl, etc., so it's certainly at least theoretically possible for objects in different languages and run-time environments to communicate with one another over it.
NB: I say "theoretically possible" because the quality, maturity, and completeness of D-BUS bindings varies quite considerably, so one cannot yet assume that things which work well with some sets of bindings will work equally well (or indeed at all) with all of them.
" the end users don't really care how badly it misinterprets CSS2, or how slow its JS engine is."
They would care if the MS monopoly hadn't made it into a de-facto standard whose idiosyncrasies have to catered for by every mass-market web site.
"So long as it opens their homepage and YouTube, they couldn't care less."
Which of course it wouldn't do if it hadn't gained such an enormous installed base by being the only browser that's allowed to be bundled with OEM Windows, because web designers would only code to the published standards that it can't render properly, so those end users wouldn't be able to use YouTube, their bank's site, FaceBook and its ilk, Amazon, EBay, web-based EMAIL, etc., etc,, etc.
"It might be a good thing but that argument has nothing to do with identifying the EU's true motive."
The EU's true motive is their being obliged to investigate any complaint of anti-trust law violations within their areas of jurisdiction made by one or more companies or organisations that offer goods or services in that jurisdiction.
"I'm more likely to think that they are just acting in their own economic interests with no regard for the consumer"
If the EU is doing this for its own economic interests, then please show me the evidence for them having initiated the investigation on their own behalf, and not in response to a complaint from one or more companies / organisations that offer goods or services within their jurisdiction.
"regardless if you accept the eula or not, you generally can't return software"
Many software companies (including MS) will refund the purchase price of stuff that's been actually been bought (i.e. there's entry on an invoice for that specific item together with how much was paid for it, or some other evidence of purchase) if it's returned within a specific time frame, usually between one and two months, depending on the company. This includes software that's been opened and installed as long as all the original packaging is returned, but they usually require it to be accompanied by evidence of purchase, e.g. an invoice, credit card statement, etc.
OEM versions are usually specifically excluded from most company refund policies on the grounds that their customer was the OEM, so that OEM is responsible for handling refund claims from people who they sold devices to. This is actually the standard way all component makers work, hence the fact that you don't go directly to a transistor manufacturer for a remedy if one fails in your stereo system within the warranty period.
NB: one notable exception to the above is games, which are distributed by companies who take a "life's tough" position when customers complain about problems on their systems or just the fact that they paid for something that turned out to be a piece of shit.
"I've found that the Apple upgrades suck in a different way. Most of the time the OS itself upgrades just fine."
Most of the time isn't all the time, though. I saw one Mac at a place where I was working get completely hosed by an upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4, and there were only about four Macs in the company, so the rest of them stayed with 10.3 until the problem with the first one had been diagnosed (this wasn't my job, so I don't know whether they managed to resolve it or not). Note that although this is purely anecdotal, it wasn't an isolated case by any means, although I've no real idea of the percentage of OS X upgrades that mess up Macs to at least some degree.
NB: software that doesn't work after an upgrade isn't necessarily an indication of something going awry with the upgrade process itself. Every major version of OS X breaks at least some things written for prior versions, so it can be simply a matter of stuff not working because it's incompatible with the new OS.
"Just because a new version comes out doesn't mean that you need to get rid of the old one. Of course that mindset is the antithesis of Microsoft's business model, and that's where a lot the friction comes from."
It's also apparently becoming the antithesis of Apple's business model, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing OS X software of their own with components that only work on Intel Macs, despite the fact that their compilers can easily produce executables containing code for both PPC and Intel CPUs.
"It doesn't matter what the OS is, be it Windows, OSX or *nix. Sooner or later an update will be applied, and there will be a version incompatibility with some app on the system and blammo... time to restore from backups because the stupid thing won't boot anymore."
Complete system hosings are quite rare with minor version updates (i.e. service packs, security updates, bug fixes, etc.), although software breakage can and does happen, especially with stuff that uses undocumented, deprecated, or "note that this feature may change in the future" APIs. Major version updates (i.e. upgrades) are of course another matter entirely...
"Or it boots but some random "business critical application" won't load. Or the stupid app loads, but every time you try to commit a transaction, it borks... or... or... or... You get the idea."
I do indeed get the idea, and so do corporate IT people, hence the fact that they frequently stick with old OS versions that are guaranteed to work with every piece of software and peripheral device that their company uses.
"On the mac, it "breaks existing software" if more than 5% of their apps stop working."
I couldn't put a definite figure on the compatibility level of the PPC "in process" OS 9 system, and I don't have any anecdotal evidence because I've only been a Mac user for around four years, which isn't long enough to have a collection of pre-OS X software.
"Maybe it's a case that mac users just plain wouldn't put up with that sort of treatment?"
They've put up with some pretty shabby treatment in the compatibility department over the years. The transition between OS 6 and OS 7 for example supposedly broke lots of apps (I say supposedly because I wasn't a Mac user in those days, so I can't personally confirm it); each new version of OS X breaks at least some things that worked on prior ones; and the Intel transition not only relegated all older Mac software (including some OS X stuff that used PPC 5 instructions) to history's dustbin, but has resulted in a progressive move on Apple's part towards Intel-only components in their own software for OS X, so people who spent a lot of money on top-end hardware three years ago have essentially been told that it's obsolete as far as Apple are concerned.
NB: the "classic" environment isn't supported in OS X 10.5 even for people with PPC systems, so anyone who still wants to use older Mac software will either have to stay with a prior version (10.4 or earlier), or keep one around in a dual-boot setup.
"What I find odd about this whole issue is that in this case the 'market' under discussion is one where every single product (browser) is free of charge. "
This is very true.
"Any definition of 'market' I can think of involves an exchange of some kind."
EU competition law isn't solely restricted to markets. Article 82(2)B) of the Treaty Of Rome for example says that a monopoly which is "limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers" is abusing its dominant position.
"Or to put it better, if it *is* monopoly abuse then we are looking at a very liberal interpretation of some fundamental concepts such as "what is a market", "what is a product", and "what is an operating system" and "what is abuse" which may set precedents for a long time to come and cause some very scary unintended consequences."
The laws were intended from the outset to handle a wide range of different products and services, including nominally free ones such as TV and radio broadcasts, where the only "product" is electromagnetic waves that require special equipment to decode. They've been doing this rather successfully since 1957, and have not as yet resulted in scary unintended consequences, despite the fact that the justice level of some decisions made under them are, as is the case with all legal decisions both inside and outside the EU, debatable.
"As much as I like to criticize large players like MS and Google, I don't want to live in a world where anybody successful becomes hamstrung and too afraid to ever innovate or compete vigorously in whatever field they are successful in."
I also doubt you'd want to live in a world where unregulated giant companies could raise such high barriers of entry to all areas that they control or want to control that no form of effective competition is possible. Anti-trust legislation can sometimes be heavy-handed, and the people administering it get things wrong sometimes just like everyone else, but it's still IMO better than the alternative of a few corporate behemoths dividing the world up, and being allowed to crush anyone who dares to try and compete with any of them.
Please see my replies to others who raised the same point for the reason why my claim that EU anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft is correct despite the fact that the EU itself doesn't.
"What I want to know is this: WTF is a quad-core Athlon and where can I get one?"
Perhaps they custom built it using a piece of silicon and a very, very fine chisel.
"I also always do a clean install for everything except OS X upgrades."
OS X upgrades can and do hose systems, either partially, or completely (i.e. it won't boot). I've seen this happen, although not on my own Mac, where I always select the "archive and install" option rather than "upgrade"; this puts the entirety of the old system into a folder, does a clean install, and then moves user settings, progs, etc. from the archived folder back into the new OS.
"Anyone who has dealt with Microsoft OS's knows that the upgrades suck."
Anyone who's dealt with Apple's OS also knows that upgrades suck.
People in occupied France often served the Nazis with food and wine that wasn't quite up to their usual standards. The idea behind this was that nobody would want to stay in a country where every sauce was a little lumpy, every vegetable was limp through overcooking, and every glass of wine was a tad on the sour side, so the Germans would rapidly tire of France and leave of their own accord.
The flaw in this otherwise cunning plan was of course the fact that the German idea of good food and wine is based on quantity rather than quality, so they weren't at all put off by pate served at slightly the wrong temperature if there was lots of it and they didn't get diarrhoea or indigestion from eating it.
"Well, has Microsoft ever released something with poor driver support before?"
All the NT series had dreadful driver support up to and including XP. People tend to forget how bad XP was at the beginning because it's been around for a long time, but the fact of the matter is that there was lots of hardware for Win9X that's never worked with it; large amounts of 9X and DOS software didn't run on it at all it at all, or was annoyingly problematic (especially games); getting XP Home in particular to integrate with an existing Win9X network involved so much pissing around that a lot of people gave up in despair; it had hefty hardware requirements by 2001 standards; and its authentication mechanism was universally hated hated by both customers and the computing press.
All of the above problems led to predictions by some in the press and most FOSS supporters of a combination of both a mass exodus from Windows and legions of people refusing to upgrade from Win9X due to the fact that it ran faster on old hardware than XP did on new systems, and worked with the peripherals and software people already had. And if this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it's because it _is_ hauntingly familiar, just as it was hauntingly familiar to those who remember all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when MS ditched Windows 3.X for 9X, and then again when they replaced the NT 3.1 UI with the 4.X one.
"That's a real problem, from that it sounds like Windows 7 is a pig."
Windows 7 is also a beta, which means that (gasp!) it's likely to lack some things that will be in the shipping version, have other things that won't be in the shipping version, and a bunch of other things will unstable, slow, or lacking certain features because they haven't finished writing them yet.
"Apple has no qualms about dropping support of their newest software on older machines. However, what happens if they lie about it and say that older machines are supported and they aren't?"
Don't confuse Apple's shipping versions of OS X with their betas, which can be and frequently are very different indeed in terms of hardware requirements, software compatibility, performance, and APIs from what they eventually release.
"I've been trying to make peace with myself over this horrible atrocity for some time."
Anybody who describes selling software with proprietary lock-in as a horrible atrocity is in desperate need of a sense of proportion.
"Heck, Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X happened in what, 2001? OK that was a major breaker for software and hardware alike"
It wasn't really a breaker for software, because Apple shipped a special version of OS 9 with their OS X PowerPC Macs that could be used to run older software "inside" OS X if required (it wasn't installed by default, but could easily be added from the media that came with the machine).
OS X also supported plenty of older Apple hardware prior to 10.4, which required a system with USB built into it (i.e. not ones that USB had been added to). They've been progressively pushing older systems off the supported list since then: 10.5 won't install on anything whose CPU clock rate is below 800MHz; and Snow Leopard might well be Intel-only, so even top-of-the-line machines bought three years ago from Apple won't be able to use it.
"We Dutch had the same guns on our trade- and war ships in that time"
The Spanish were notably impressed by Dutch gun makers, and commissioned lots of cannon and ammo for their armada from them. Unfortunately, the fact that they were occupying Holland by force at the time meant that the Dutch hated them, so archaeologists have found Dutch cannonballs on Spanish wrecks that had been "accidentally" made just slightly too big or just a smidgeon too small for the intended cannon.
These differences in tolerances were small enough to ensure that they looked as if they were the right size to Spanish inspections. Attempting to fire them at the English however would have had tragi-comic results such as swearing gunners being unable to force some cannonballs into the muzzles of their guns, while others formed such a poor seal that most of the gases from the burning powder went round them, so the initial "bang" was followed by the sound of a ball rolling sluggishly along the muzzle, and then a "plop" as it fell into the sea.
The strangest part of all this is of course that archaeological evidence from non-Spanish wrecks indicates that the Dutch ammunition tolerance problem didn't occur in stuff they made for themselves or sold to countries who weren't occupying them at the time. Some historians believe that this notable discrepancy may well have been behind the famous rant from King Philip II, where he threw his throne at a courtier while screaming "I'll kill those fucking Dutch!"...
" I am made suddenly suspicious noting that EU anti-trust laws cannot have existed prior to 1993"
The EU is a three pillar system. One of these pillars is the European Community (EC), and it has exactly the same role as it did prior to the existence of the EU, i.e. economic, social, and environmental policy and enforcement thereof. The EU is therefore an expansion that defines other areas of cooperation between member states, not a newer version of the EC that either replaces it or changes its role, structure, or laws.
One of the roles the EC pillar has by way of being responsible for economic matters is compliance with anti-trust legislation within the EC's zone of influence, with both the role and the body of law that applies to it having been established in 1957 by articles 81 to 87 of The Treaty Of Rome. it's therefore perfectly correct to say that the EU's anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft despite the fact that the EU itself doesn't, because the EC's anti-trust laws are by definition the EU's anti-trust laws, and will continue to be the EU's anti-trust laws unless the entire structure of the EU is revised at some point.
They could exist before Microsoft did because the EU's anti-trust laws are the EC's anti-trust laws, which were codified by the Treaty Of Rome in 1957. When the EU was established, the EC became one of its three pillars, and it still has the same responsibilities, roles, and powers as it did before there was an EU.
"I persume you're trying to pretend the pre-existing treaties means it existed longer than anyone anywhere in the world recognizes it?"
I suggest that you read what I actually wrote before sarcastically claiming that I'm pretending anything, because I said _the EU's anti-trust laws pre-date Microsoft_, not that the EU did. They were established by articles 81 to 87 of the Treaty Of The European Community (Treaty Of Rome) in 1957, and are still entirely administered by the European Community, which is the EU pillar that's (among other things) responsible for all economic matters within the EU.
"Big government agencies require more people and the president can and will stack those agencies and panels with insiders."
While I agree that they have (but not necessarily need) more people, there's no demonstrable correlation between the size of a government and its propensity for cronyism.
"Look at how the Bush energy committee that Cheney headed was stacked with industry insiders."
That was due to the US' notable deficiency in rules about political conflicts of interest, not the size of the government. There are plenty of other countries with big governments who do have such rules, and aren't in the least reticent about using them to not only summarily dismiss, but also prosecute politicians who try and pull the sorts of stunts that Bush and Cheney got away with.
"it's easier for a small government to be more transparent"
And it's also easier for them to hide things if they want to, because there are less eyes and ears around when decisions are being made, so there's a lower probability of whistles being blown if somebody decides to put their own interests above those of their country. Transparency is entirely a function of a government's will to be transparent, not it's size, hence the fact that absolute monarchies and dictatorships, which are the smallest forms of government, are also the most secretive, corrupt, and crony-ridden ones.
"big government can be somewhat transparent but because it's bigger more watchers are needed."
Being bigger means that there _are_ more watchers. The smaller a government is, the easier it becomes to (a) ensure that those within it are loyal to that government rather than the country it's in, and (b) monitor everyone to ensure that those whose loyalty shows any signs of wavering are removed before they have a chance to do any damage.
"with more people more can insert whatever they want into legislation"
Any government can insert whatever it wants into legislation. You only have to look at the amount of long-winded tripe law firms with a total of 20 people in them can churn out to see how word processors have made it very easy for a small number of people to produce deluges of boiler-plate text with the eight relevant paragraphs scattered throughout them in unlikely places.
"Recently, members of congress admitted no one read the entire Stimulus package. Back when congress voted for the PATRIOT Act again no one read the whole thing."
All that proves is that dereliction of duty is endemic in the US congress. I will refer you once again to law firms, who are often faced with having to wade through tens of thousands of pages to find a few relevant bits of information for a single case which has a total of one lawyer and a couple of paralegals assigned to it. Any congress critter who was really serious about actually doing what they're paid for could also use a couple of paralegals to read through any bills and produce a summary of what's actually relevant to the bill itself, where the pork is and who benefits from it, and if there's any unrelated stuff they're trying to sneak through. The fact that they don't _choose_ do this has absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the size of the government.
"At several hundred pages nobody should have to read an entire bill."
If that's their job, then they should be doing it, or paying someone to do it for them like people in the business world do.
"bills should be broken down into specific and smaller bills, each one dealing with one specific thing."
Which would mean there'd be hundreds of little bills that they wouldn't read instead of half a dozen big ones they don't read. The problem is a political culture where its perfectly acceptable to vote on legislation without knowing anything about it, so making bills shorter won't make a smidgeon of difference to people who think their job is making speeches at banquets and finding ways to become as important and wealthy as possible.
"big government wants big bills"
Governments who are hoping to get legislation passed without it being read want big bills. Not they need them in a political culture where voting is much more important than actually knowing anything about what you're voting for or against.
"Who pays for AP? Newspapers."
And TV companies all over the world, many of whom not only use the same AP news feeds as print media, but also subscribe to a special set of video services run by AP (Reuters offers a similar mix).