Re:Overhead, look at cereals in your grocery store
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
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· Score: 1
"What about DVDs, let alone Blu-Ray. Thirty for a blu-ray version compared to 14.99 for the regular? Is there really that much more in cost in making it?"
There probably is at the moment due to economies of scale. DVDs sell in vastly greater numbers than Blu-Ray, so their unit costs will be lower without taking into account the fact that Blu-Ray disk mastering and pressing requires a significant investment in new equipment, and they're also more expensive in terms of the materials used to manufacture them.
Another important factor is of course that they're hoping the early higher prices which are (probably) currently justified for Blu-Ray will be sustainable when its popularity grows, which is more or less what happened with CDs (they're going down in price now, but the recording industry promised this in the 1980s, and it's taken nearly 20 years for it to happen despite the fact that the production costs of the media themselves were dropping steadily during the intervening years). Whether they can get away with this in an age where piracy is so easy does of course remain to be seen, but I have no doubts that they'd like us all to pay rather more for their products if they can find a way of doing so without driving too many customers to torrents or the cheap commercial disks that will inevitably appear if the format becomes popular enough.
"Surely they "invented" vendor lock-in with Windows."
Vendor lock-in goes back to the dawn of commercial computers, when every machine had its own instruction set and peripherals, and they were frequently completely incompatible with other products from the same manufacturers, let alone those of other companies. This wasn't deliberate at first, but it didn't take long for business types to realise that this could be used to ensure that their customers would stay with them because it was fairly easy to design various aspects of systems in ways that made the costs (in both lost productivity and money) of porting both software and data to those of a competitor competitor prohibitive.
"Back in the 90's, MS gave us great development tools"
Microsoft's development tools during most of the '90s were utter shite when compared with those from competitors such as Borland, Zortech, and a bunch of others who either got bought out by big companies that later dropped the products, or became the victims of corporate mismanagement by a series of "business professionals" who didn't understand either the products or the people who used them (Borland).
" the settling of America (and subsequent fights for independence) basically started the roles of private home/land owner. Prior to this, everything was owned by some monarchy somewhere and could only be granted by said monarchy."
Yet another case of an American claiming that Americans invented something that had already been around for thousands of years. Perhaps you should patent it, just like Americans patented Basmati rice, another great American invention.
"Many parts of our US legal system are based on ownership rights."
I suggest you check to see where they actually came from, together with legal precedent, an adversarial system where defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and a jury of one's peers. It's the same place you got your language from, and a lot of places whose names are the same as their towns and cities with "New" tacked on the front of them.
"Often overlooked and we take it for granted, but it was all highly revolutionary when proposed"
So revolutionary in fact that mediaeval English common law already had a name for it long before Christopher Columbus went looking for a quick way to India -- "fee simple" (most other feudal nations of the period had a similar concept, but with a different name). This is pretty much identical to the modern concept of land ownership: the owner could sell or otherwise transfer the property and use it to secure loans, but had to pay an annual property tax to his lord, and was also liable to pay a percentage of the price that he sold the property for (a lien). Many inns were owned in this way, e.g. St. Peter in Salzberg Austria, founded in 810, and still in business today.
There were also other forms of more limited private land ownership under feudal systems, some of which still exist:
A life estate was a property that a person had free use of until their death. It was non-transferable, and could not be used to secure a loan. Fee tail was inheritable but non-transferable. Much of the rest of Europe used the old Roman law term of "legitime" for this type of ownership. Leasehold. Ownership for a fixed number of years that is transferrable and inheritable.
"People hated XP. It was a resource hog, particularly the way it ate up memory just to display an ugly "fancy" theme. It didn't run all their programs. It didn't have enough drivers...""
There were also lots of complaints from both geeks and some in the computing press about the need for activation, which was going to be Microsoft's death knell because people wouldn't put up with having to reactivate whenever they changed certain pieces of hardware, and would therefore flock to Linux in droves.
"The EU already dropped that case after Apple talked the music distributors into more uniform pricing."
Stating that they welcome Apple's commitment to end discriminatory pricing within a specific time frame does not mean the case has been dropped. It is still open until Apple have actually complied with EU law, and are seen to do so for the long term. Note also that it wasn't Apple who made the music companies change their pricing, but the fear of EC regulators, who were also investigating their role in the iTunes store's pricing discrepancies.
"EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva spoke publicly about compatibility issues being an antitrust concern"
You conveniently neglect to mention the fact that she clarified her position by stating that she wasn't suggesting any legal action should take place, or that Helen Kearns, acting on behalf of the European Commission, said "I don't think she was stating it as a definitive policy position. At this stage it is her gut instinct", i.e. it was a personal opinion that has no bearing whatsoever on what the Commission itself will do.
"Then Philip Lowe (head of the EU commission) spoke in Munich with regard to her statements and said they were "looking into" whether competition was healthy or not given Apple's domination with the iPod, but also mentioning new entrants like the Zune."
Philip Lowe actually said the following: "We wouldn't at this stage regard this as an instance of major concern until we've seen further market developments. Apple obtained its strong market position in open competition with many similar players, including some with their own Web sites". He made no reference to the Zune whatsoever because it's not sold in the EC, despite what the EFF document you obviously got this piece of rubbish from says.
"I can forgive you for being ignorant of these facts".
What facts? All you've provided is one Commissioner's personal opinion, and a deliberate distortion of what another Commissioner said to prop up your assertions about the EU being concerned with the anti-trust implications of iPods.
"perhaps in future you could at least give people the benefit of the doubt and ask to what specific events they are referring instead of assuming that the last incident you remember is the last one that anyone knows about"
At this time, the only EU investigation that has been conducted into Apple's practices is the one concerning the iTunes Store's pricing discrepancies between the UK and other EC countries, and despite your claims to the contrary, it is still open and pending until Apple have actually remedied the situation rather than merely promising to do so, and will continue to be open for a fair while thereafter to ensure that they are complying on a permanent basis. The European Commission doesn't start "looking into" what specific companies do unless they receive complaints that warrant an investigation, and many of the investigations they do initiate result in no action being taken, just as many police investigations end without any charges being brought.
NB: regulators in Norwayare demanding that Apple either remove DRM from the iTunes Store or license it to competitors. Norway is not however a member of the EU, so it isn't bound by EC laws, and any decisions it makes in this regard have no relevance whatsoever to the EU and its members.
"No such ruling has been made against Apple in the portable music market, and for good reason."
"...because the courts are really slow to act? The EU is looking into that possibility right now."
The EU is looking into the iTunes store forcing people to use their own local version instead of being able to buy from anywhere in the EC, which is contrary to EU trading laws, and the music companies who seem to be behind this are likewise being investigated. This has nothing whatsoever to do with iPods and whether they are a monopoly in the music player market that Apple is abusing (having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal).
"I live in fucking Europe and public transport sucks."
"and the government's anti-car crusade sucks"
From the second comment, it's obvious that you live in the UK, which is so far from the European norm for public transport (and other things such as rubbish collection) that it might as well be on another continent (Africa or Antarctica are obvious candidates for places where Britain's public transport system might get only get a rating of "very poor" instead of the expletive-laden derision that would be heaped upon it on any of the other 5 continents).
And became non-private in virtually all first-world countries a long time ago because of certain common problems with private brigades, e.g. starting fires that they'd later charge to put out, brigades fighting each other over who got to put out the most lucrative fires while premises were burning, not bothering to put out unprofitable fires or those in places that hadn't paid "protection", etc.
"The police and army are part of the military"
Police forces in most Western democracies are civilian organisations, not military ones.
"Scientists don't give a shit about listening to establishment."
Because accepting a large body of work by others without testing any of it for one's self isn't "listening to establishment" when scientists do it.
"Only if you have no understanding as to how the scientific process works can you confuse the matter and simply think that there is some cabal called "science" which makes unsubstantiated -- and likely to be wrong -- claims by virtue of authority."
I suggest you do some reading about the history of science (just the 19th and 20th centuries will suffice -- there's no need to go back any further) before asserting that scientists en masse don't accept unsubstantiated, wrong information from authorities. One excellent example was the conviction that atoms were immutable and indivisible, which persisted until the early 20th century, and resulted in considerable resistance to Rutherford's 1902 suggestion that atoms of some elements could degrade into atoms of other elements.
"The EU isn't a sovereign nation, but the member states are."
It is however the European Commission that's investigating Microsoft, not the member states.
"The member countries in the EU can change the rules and treaties."
Member countries _acting in concert_ can make new treaties, but they can't change existing ones by any other means. Once a treaty has been ratified by the EC member states, its rules (and rules that aren't covered by any treaties) cannot be changed without consent from the European Parliament, so the member countries have at best limited legislative powers even on the rare occasions when enough of them agree on something to get a bill they can send to parliament.
NB: EC copyright law, which you claimed could be removed by the EC from Microsoft's products, is derived from the Berne Convention, which countries must sign before being considered for membership. I can therefore guarantee that any attempt to do something like this would be successfully challenged by Microsoft in the ECJ, which would award considerable amounts of damages. The ECJ doesn't permit _any_ EU body punish one form of illegal act with another illegal act.
"No, but it passes directives which must be implemented in the member countries legal systems."
The key here is "member countries". The EU is far more like a club with rules that members are required to follow (many of which must already be in place before applying for membership) than a government, because joining is a strictly voluntary act, and countries are free to leave at any time if they wish to. Furthermore, the EC has no police or military to force member states into compliance with either its rules or ECJ decisions, so as with other clubs, its final recourse with a rogue state would be expulsion (this has however never happened, despite the fact that many member states have ignored European laws when it's convenient for them to do so).
"Who is instigating this investigation and/or how is it decided to pursue MS?"
The European Commission instigates the investigation. A decision to pursue is usually made in response to complaints about monopoly abuses as defined by EC law. The exception to to this is mergers, consolidations, or agreements between companies that have the potential to significantly reduce competition in a particular market or set of markets, which must be pre-approved by the Commission, and will therefore be investigated automatically.
It was (past tense because Apple patched it in 2006) strictly a local exploit, and therefore of negligible risk. This is why the same milwOrm.com site lists a bunch of them for other UNIX variants that have excellent security records, e.g. AIX, Solaris, and HP/UX, and even QNX.
"Mac OS X simply has not been a valuable enough target in the past to be attacked in a meaningful way."
Or perhaps it's due to the fact that milw0rm.com has a total of 9 _remote vulnerabilities_ for OS X and various programs that run on it, the last of which was reported in March 2007, while their listing for Windows and software for Windows contains well over 30 entries reported in 2008 (which isn't even two months old yet!).
"From the link: "There's also HDCP support built in, so future support for Blu-ray and HD DVD is not out of the question.""
I suggest you reread the article, because the reviewer was referring to the fact that the ATI Radeon graphics hardware in the iMacs supports HDCP, not OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
"Well, Asus alone plans to sell about 50% more Eee PCs (5 million) than Apple sells Macs (3 million) in 2008"
Where did you get the "3 million" figure for Mac sales from? Apple sold 2.32 million of the things in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, and 7.83 million of them during the entire year, compared to 5.66 million sold in 2006. It would therefore be a notably disastrous year for Apple if their Mac sales suddenly drop to 3 million in 2008.
Ars tecnica has sales figures taken from Apple's quarterly reports here:
"Fine, but then talking of Free Software's market share is using a foolish metric at best then."
If you mean "free as in beer", then yes, it would indeed be a foolish metric. That's why I said that the term "market share" is likely to indicate that they're counting machines sold with desktop Linux on them, and perhaps boxed sets and other commercial packages, not usage figures (which are extremely difficult to calculate reliably for any item).
"I can sell "Big PC Maker" that license I was talking about. They can do their own serial number sticker or I can even say that my serial number must match the MS serial number for the same machine? Then I get "Big PC Maker" to add one cent to the sale price of each machine and now I have a market share... And my unit market share goes way up? My dollar market share is nothing to speak of though."
The system you describe would indeed mean that your figures give you a share of the "operating system market". Note also that it's quite common to also express market share by revenue, market share by units shipped, etc., although these are always qualified, so unqualified market share figures will be the percentage of units of a specific product that were sold.
"Also, re incorrect usage... that may be right but may suffer the same fate as the hacker versus cracker fight..."
You may well be correct in terms of popular usage, but it should be noted that unlike the hacker / cracker thing which involved fairly recent techno-slang, market share is a term that's been unambiguously defined for a long time, and those who study fields where knowing about it is important will continue to be taught that definition as part of their curricula.
"You are telling me that MS sells to those OEMs one copy at a time?"
They sell both individual copies to small OEMs, and serial-numbered licenses printed on obligatory Microsoft stickers to large ones. Most OEMs put one of these stickers somewhere on the machine they sell you (usually on the back of desktops, and the bottom of laptops).
"How is what they are doing different than my suggestion to sell 100,000 units at once for a reasonable price?"
The difference lies in the fact that there is no mechanism for associating each of those licenses with a user, or in the case of MS OEM licenses (but not their full retail ones), a specific machine, which is what OEMs are paying them for. Like most commercial vendors, MS is extremely enthusiastic about keeping track of things like this, because some companies have made "unfortunate mistakes" such as "accidentally" selling the same license to lots of different people.
"Aldo, re the thought that for "market share" numbers to be valid, a sale must be made, what's up with all of these pages:"
They're using the term incorrectly. Feed "market share definition" into Google, click on some links, note what they say market share is (some include the formula for calculating it), and why things that aren't sold don't constitute "a market".
"I would point out, however, that I have worked extensively with copyright holders and trademark owners, including the RIAA and the MPAA acting as their representation. When law enforcement makes a seizure of articles, a counterfeit copy of Microsoft Office for example, both the industry and the government assign the amount that the industry was protected at the MSRP."
If your claim about representing such bodies is true, then you obviously know the legal difference between counterfeiting and copyright violation. Why then are you trying to pretend that damage calculations for one category of illegal act are applicable to a different one?
Clue: counterfeit goods don't have to be either copies of existing goods, or carry identical trademarks or other manufacturer identification information.
"So why do they count the forced bundled XP that came on my notebook and never even booted, being replaced by linux from the break as a windows sale? (I grant it was in fact a sale of a sorts but one that certainly deserves an asterisk at the very least. And if they had any sane return policy, should go down as a sale and a refund.)"
You're missing the fact that Microsoft's sale wasn't to you, but to the OEM who bundled it with your computer, just like many other things in that computer will have been made by another company who sold them to the final computer manufacturer. Each of those suppliers counts the components that end up in your computer as a sale, despite the fact that they didn't sell them to you directly, so those sales will show up in market share figures for the companies who make disk drives, CPUs, graphics processors, sound subsystems, TFT panels, etc., etc., etc. And as with for example in-built wireless networking, the fact that you choose to use cabled networks instead doesn't mean that the manufacturer of the wireless networking components is obliged to not count those components as sales.
NB: items returned for refunds don't count as sales.
"Sure, so I sell you a license for 100,000 units of drew's custom distro"
That counts as one license, i.e. one sale, so you get a market share of one unit, not 100,000 of them. The only way for it to count as 100,000 sales would be if I then sold a license to each individual copy for a nominal sum, e.g. 1 cent. Ever wonder why Microsoft are so strict about big companies auditing exactly how many copies of various items they actually install with those expensive corporate "all you can eat" site licenses despite the fact that they don't charge extra for the copies? It lets them claim each installation as a sale even if it ends up costing the customer a few cents, and the fact that the licenses are renewed every year means they can also log all those copies as a new sale every year, and this is reflected in their annual market share figures.
"And for an unlimited time, this special bonus offer. You can receive absolutely gratis (free for those wondering) the right to make another 100,000 and so on simply by sending me an email telling me you will be doing so."
Free gifts don't count as sales.
"OK, so should we try this and report all these hundreds of thousands of shipments?"
It would certainly be fun to try, but unfortunately those sort of tricks have been attempted in the past by companies trying to present false market share figures to raise their share price or attract other forms of investment, so the people who gather market share statistics won't count them as either shipped or sold units.
The key is "market share", which is a percentage of units sold over a particular period of time. Note the "sold" part, which all those Slashdotters who get into long arguments about the market share for X being really much higher than the market share of Y should take note of, because they're actually talking about usage figures, which market share doesn't claim to measure.
Slashdot Mirror
"What about DVDs, let alone Blu-Ray. Thirty for a blu-ray version compared to 14.99 for the regular? Is there really that much more in cost in making it?"
There probably is at the moment due to economies of scale. DVDs sell in vastly greater numbers than Blu-Ray, so their unit costs will be lower without taking into account the fact that Blu-Ray disk mastering and pressing requires a significant investment in new equipment, and they're also more expensive in terms of the materials used to manufacture them.
Another important factor is of course that they're hoping the early higher prices which are (probably) currently justified for Blu-Ray will be sustainable when its popularity grows, which is more or less what happened with CDs (they're going down in price now, but the recording industry promised this in the 1980s, and it's taken nearly 20 years for it to happen despite the fact that the production costs of the media themselves were dropping steadily during the intervening years). Whether they can get away with this in an age where piracy is so easy does of course remain to be seen, but I have no doubts that they'd like us all to pay rather more for their products if they can find a way of doing so without driving too many customers to torrents or the cheap commercial disks that will inevitably appear if the format becomes popular enough.
"Surely they "invented" vendor lock-in with Windows."
Vendor lock-in goes back to the dawn of commercial computers, when every machine had its own instruction set and peripherals, and they were frequently completely incompatible with other products from the same manufacturers, let alone those of other companies. This wasn't deliberate at first, but it didn't take long for business types to realise that this could be used to ensure that their customers would stay with them because it was fairly easy to design various aspects of systems in ways that made the costs (in both lost productivity and money) of porting both software and data to those of a competitor competitor prohibitive.
"Back in the 90's, MS gave us great development tools"
Microsoft's development tools during most of the '90s were utter shite when compared with those from competitors such as Borland, Zortech, and a bunch of others who either got bought out by big companies that later dropped the products, or became the victims of corporate mismanagement by a series of "business professionals" who didn't understand either the products or the people who used them (Borland).
" the settling of America (and subsequent fights for independence) basically started the roles of private home/land owner. Prior to this, everything was owned by some monarchy somewhere and could only be granted by said monarchy."
Yet another case of an American claiming that Americans invented something that had already been around for thousands of years. Perhaps you should patent it, just like Americans patented Basmati rice, another great American invention.
"Many parts of our US legal system are based on ownership rights."
I suggest you check to see where they actually came from, together with legal precedent, an adversarial system where defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and a jury of one's peers. It's the same place you got your language from, and a lot of places whose names are the same as their towns and cities with "New" tacked on the front of them.
"Often overlooked and we take it for granted, but it was all highly revolutionary when proposed"
So revolutionary in fact that mediaeval English common law already had a name for it long before Christopher Columbus went looking for a quick way to India -- "fee simple" (most other feudal nations of the period had a similar concept, but with a different name). This is pretty much identical to the modern concept of land ownership: the owner could sell or otherwise transfer the property and use it to secure loans, but had to pay an annual property tax to his lord, and was also liable to pay a percentage of the price that he sold the property for (a lien). Many inns were owned in this way, e.g. St. Peter in Salzberg Austria, founded in 810, and still in business today.
There were also other forms of more limited private land ownership under feudal systems, some of which still exist:
A life estate was a property that a person had free use of until their death. It was non-transferable, and could not be used to secure a loan.
Fee tail was inheritable but non-transferable. Much of the rest of Europe used the old Roman law term of "legitime" for this type of ownership.
Leasehold. Ownership for a fixed number of years that is transferrable and inheritable.
"Apple's cheapest dongle is close to $1000"
$599 is indeed close to $1000 according to certain definitions of the word "close". $1 is also close to $1000 by certain definitions of "close" too.
"People hated XP. It was a resource hog, particularly the way it ate up memory just to display an ugly "fancy" theme. It didn't run all their programs. It didn't have enough drivers...""
There were also lots of complaints from both geeks and some in the computing press about the need for activation, which was going to be Microsoft's death knell because people wouldn't put up with having to reactivate whenever they changed certain pieces of hardware, and would therefore flock to Linux in droves.
"The EU already dropped that case after Apple talked the music distributors into more uniform pricing."
Stating that they welcome Apple's commitment to end discriminatory pricing within a specific time frame does not mean the case has been dropped. It is still open until Apple have actually complied with EU law, and are seen to do so for the long term. Note also that it wasn't Apple who made the music companies change their pricing, but the fear of EC regulators, who were also investigating their role in the iTunes store's pricing discrepancies.
"EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner Meglena Kuneva spoke publicly about compatibility issues being an antitrust concern"
You conveniently neglect to mention the fact that she clarified her position by stating that she wasn't suggesting any legal action should take place, or that Helen Kearns, acting on behalf of the European Commission, said "I don't think she was stating it as a definitive policy position. At this stage it is her gut instinct", i.e. it was a personal opinion that has no bearing whatsoever on what the Commission itself will do.
"Then Philip Lowe (head of the EU commission) spoke in Munich with regard to her statements and said they were "looking into" whether competition was healthy or not given Apple's domination with the iPod, but also mentioning new entrants like the Zune."
Philip Lowe actually said the following: "We wouldn't at this stage regard this as an instance of major concern until we've seen further market developments. Apple obtained its strong market position in open competition with many similar players, including some with their own Web sites". He made no reference to the Zune whatsoever because it's not sold in the EC, despite what the EFF document you obviously got this piece of rubbish from says.
"I can forgive you for being ignorant of these facts".
What facts? All you've provided is one Commissioner's personal opinion, and a deliberate distortion of what another Commissioner said to prop up your assertions about the EU being concerned with the anti-trust implications of iPods.
"perhaps in future you could at least give people the benefit of the doubt and ask to what specific events they are referring instead of assuming that the last incident you remember is the last one that anyone knows about"
At this time, the only EU investigation that has been conducted into Apple's practices is the one concerning the iTunes Store's pricing discrepancies between the UK and other EC countries, and despite your claims to the contrary, it is still open and pending until Apple have actually remedied the situation rather than merely promising to do so, and will continue to be open for a fair while thereafter to ensure that they are complying on a permanent basis. The European Commission doesn't start "looking into" what specific companies do unless they receive complaints that warrant an investigation, and many of the investigations they do initiate result in no action being taken, just as many police investigations end without any charges being brought.
NB: regulators in Norwayare demanding that Apple either remove DRM from the iTunes Store or license it to competitors. Norway is not however a member of the EU, so it isn't bound by EC laws, and any decisions it makes in this regard have no relevance whatsoever to the EU and its members.
"No such ruling has been made against Apple in the portable music market, and for good reason."
"...because the courts are really slow to act? The EU is looking into that possibility right now."
The EU is looking into the iTunes store forcing people to use their own local version instead of being able to buy from anywhere in the EC, which is contrary to EU trading laws, and the music companies who seem to be behind this are likewise being investigated. This has nothing whatsoever to do with iPods and whether they are a monopoly in the music player market that Apple is abusing (having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal).
"I live in fucking Europe and public transport sucks."
"and the government's anti-car crusade sucks"
From the second comment, it's obvious that you live in the UK, which is so far from the European norm for public transport (and other things such as rubbish collection) that it might as well be on another continent (Africa or Antarctica are obvious candidates for places where Britain's public transport system might get only get a rating of "very poor" instead of the expletive-laden derision that would be heaped upon it on any of the other 5 continents).
"Fire brigades were originally private."
And became non-private in virtually all first-world countries a long time ago because of certain common problems with private brigades, e.g. starting fires that they'd later charge to put out, brigades fighting each other over who got to put out the most lucrative fires while premises were burning, not bothering to put out unprofitable fires or those in places that hadn't paid "protection", etc.
"The police and army are part of the military"
Police forces in most Western democracies are civilian organisations, not military ones.
"Scientists don't give a shit about listening to establishment."
Because accepting a large body of work by others without testing any of it for one's self isn't "listening to establishment" when scientists do it.
"Only if you have no understanding as to how the scientific process works can you confuse the matter and simply think that there is some cabal called "science" which makes unsubstantiated -- and likely to be wrong -- claims by virtue of authority."
I suggest you do some reading about the history of science (just the 19th and 20th centuries will suffice -- there's no need to go back any further) before asserting that scientists en masse don't accept unsubstantiated, wrong information from authorities. One excellent example was the conviction that atoms were immutable and indivisible, which persisted until the early 20th century, and resulted in considerable resistance to Rutherford's 1902 suggestion that atoms of some elements could degrade into atoms of other elements.
"The EU isn't a sovereign nation, but the member states are."
It is however the European Commission that's investigating Microsoft, not the member states.
"The member countries in the EU can change the rules and treaties."
Member countries _acting in concert_ can make new treaties, but they can't change existing ones by any other means. Once a treaty has been ratified by the EC member states, its rules (and rules that aren't covered by any treaties) cannot be changed without consent from the European Parliament, so the member countries have at best limited legislative powers even on the rare occasions when enough of them agree on something to get a bill they can send to parliament.
NB: EC copyright law, which you claimed could be removed by the EC from Microsoft's products, is derived from the Berne Convention, which countries must sign before being considered for membership. I can therefore guarantee that any attempt to do something like this would be successfully challenged by Microsoft in the ECJ, which would award considerable amounts of damages. The ECJ doesn't permit _any_ EU body punish one form of illegal act with another illegal act.
"No, but it passes directives which must be implemented in the member countries legal systems."
The key here is "member countries". The EU is far more like a club with rules that members are required to follow (many of which must already be in place before applying for membership) than a government, because joining is a strictly voluntary act, and countries are free to leave at any time if they wish to. Furthermore, the EC has no police or military to force member states into compliance with either its rules or ECJ decisions, so as with other clubs, its final recourse with a rogue state would be expulsion (this has however never happened, despite the fact that many member states have ignored European laws when it's convenient for them to do so).
"Dante's Inferno is a work of fiction not a religious text"
There is no objective way of differentiating between works of fiction and religious texts.
"Who is instigating this investigation and/or how is it decided to pursue MS?"
The European Commission instigates the investigation. A decision to pursue is usually made in response to complaints about monopoly abuses as defined by EC law. The exception to to this is mergers, consolidations, or agreements between companies that have the potential to significantly reduce competition in a particular market or set of markets, which must be pre-approved by the Commission, and will therefore be investigated automatically.
"it is never a good idea to get into a standoff with a sovereign nation"
The EU isn't a nation, sovereign or otherwise.
"The EU could invalidate all intellectual property protections for microsoft products in the EU."
This would be a contravention of the EC's rules and treaties.
"Remember that the right of the corporation to even exist as an entity in the EU is at the sufferance of the government."
The EU isn't a government.
"This is from 2006 and is a fairly basic security flaw. http://milw0rm.com/exploits/1545 "
It was (past tense because Apple patched it in 2006) strictly a local exploit, and therefore of negligible risk. This is why the same milwOrm.com site lists a bunch of them for other UNIX variants that have excellent security records, e.g. AIX, Solaris, and HP/UX, and even QNX.
"Mac OS X simply has not been a valuable enough target in the past to be attacked in a meaningful way."
Or perhaps it's due to the fact that milw0rm.com has a total of 9 _remote vulnerabilities_ for OS X and various programs that run on it, the last of which was reported in March 2007, while their listing for Windows and software for Windows contains well over 30 entries reported in 2008 (which isn't even two months old yet!).
"Yup, unless you have a G3 or a G4 slower than 867MHz in which case you can't install Leopard."
This free hack allows Leopard to be installed on many older Macs:
http://www.mac.profusehost.net/leopardassist
"From the link: "There's also HDCP support built in, so future support for Blu-ray and HD DVD is not out of the question.""
I suggest you reread the article, because the reviewer was referring to the fact that the ATI Radeon graphics hardware in the iMacs supports HDCP, not OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
"Well, Asus alone plans to sell about 50% more Eee PCs (5 million) than Apple sells Macs (3 million) in 2008"
Where did you get the "3 million" figure for Mac sales from? Apple sold 2.32 million of the things in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, and 7.83 million of them during the entire year, compared to 5.66 million sold in 2006. It would therefore be a notably disastrous year for Apple if their Mac sales suddenly drop to 3 million in 2008.
Ars tecnica has sales figures taken from Apple's quarterly reports here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080122-last-quarter-brought-highest-revenue-in-apples-history.html
"Fine, but then talking of Free Software's market share is using a foolish metric at best then."
If you mean "free as in beer", then yes, it would indeed be a foolish metric. That's why I said that the term "market share" is likely to indicate that they're counting machines sold with desktop Linux on them, and perhaps boxed sets and other commercial packages, not usage figures (which are extremely difficult to calculate reliably for any item).
"I can sell "Big PC Maker" that license I was talking about. They can do their own serial number sticker or I can even say that my serial number must match the MS serial number for the same machine? Then I get "Big PC Maker" to add one cent to the sale price of each machine and now I have a market share... And my unit market share goes way up? My dollar market share is nothing to speak of though."
The system you describe would indeed mean that your figures give you a share of the "operating system market". Note also that it's quite common to also express market share by revenue, market share by units shipped, etc., although these are always qualified, so unqualified market share figures will be the percentage of units of a specific product that were sold.
"Also, re incorrect usage... that may be right but may suffer the same fate as the hacker versus cracker fight..."
You may well be correct in terms of popular usage, but it should be noted that unlike the hacker / cracker thing which involved fairly recent techno-slang, market share is a term that's been unambiguously defined for a long time, and those who study fields where knowing about it is important will continue to be taught that definition as part of their curricula.
"all the best,
drew"
Thanks. Have a pleasant weekend.
"You are telling me that MS sells to those OEMs one copy at a time?"
They sell both individual copies to small OEMs, and serial-numbered licenses printed on obligatory Microsoft stickers to large ones. Most OEMs put one of these stickers somewhere on the machine they sell you (usually on the back of desktops, and the bottom of laptops).
"How is what they are doing different than my suggestion to sell 100,000 units at once for a reasonable price?"
The difference lies in the fact that there is no mechanism for associating each of those licenses with a user, or in the case of MS OEM licenses (but not their full retail ones), a specific machine, which is what OEMs are paying them for. Like most commercial vendors, MS is extremely enthusiastic about keeping track of things like this, because some companies have made "unfortunate mistakes" such as "accidentally" selling the same license to lots of different people.
"Aldo, re the thought that for "market share" numbers to be valid, a sale must be made, what's up with all of these pages:"
They're using the term incorrectly. Feed "market share definition" into Google, click on some links, note what they say market share is (some include the formula for calculating it), and why things that aren't sold don't constitute "a market".
"I would point out, however, that I have worked extensively with copyright holders and trademark owners, including the RIAA and the MPAA acting as their representation. When law enforcement makes a seizure of articles, a counterfeit copy of Microsoft Office for example, both the industry and the government assign the amount that the industry was protected at the MSRP."
If your claim about representing such bodies is true, then you obviously know the legal difference between counterfeiting and copyright violation. Why then are you trying to pretend that damage calculations for one category of illegal act are applicable to a different one?
Clue: counterfeit goods don't have to be either copies of existing goods, or carry identical trademarks or other manufacturer identification information.
"So why do they count the forced bundled XP that came on my notebook and never even booted, being replaced by linux from the break as a windows sale? (I grant it was in fact a sale of a sorts but one that certainly deserves an asterisk at the very least. And if they had any sane return policy, should go down as a sale and a refund.)"
You're missing the fact that Microsoft's sale wasn't to you, but to the OEM who bundled it with your computer, just like many other things in that computer will have been made by another company who sold them to the final computer manufacturer. Each of those suppliers counts the components that end up in your computer as a sale, despite the fact that they didn't sell them to you directly, so those sales will show up in market share figures for the companies who make disk drives, CPUs, graphics processors, sound subsystems, TFT panels, etc., etc., etc. And as with for example in-built wireless networking, the fact that you choose to use cabled networks instead doesn't mean that the manufacturer of the wireless networking components is obliged to not count those components as sales.
NB: items returned for refunds don't count as sales.
"Sure, so I sell you a license for 100,000 units of drew's custom distro"
That counts as one license, i.e. one sale, so you get a market share of one unit, not 100,000 of them. The only way for it to count as 100,000 sales would be if I then sold a license to each individual copy for a nominal sum, e.g. 1 cent. Ever wonder why Microsoft are so strict about big companies auditing exactly how many copies of various items they actually install with those expensive corporate "all you can eat" site licenses despite the fact that they don't charge extra for the copies? It lets them claim each installation as a sale even if it ends up costing the customer a few cents, and the fact that the licenses are renewed every year means they can also log all those copies as a new sale every year, and this is reflected in their annual market share figures.
"And for an unlimited time, this special bonus offer. You can receive absolutely gratis (free for those wondering) the right to make another 100,000 and so on simply by sending me an email telling me you will be doing so."
Free gifts don't count as sales.
"OK, so should we try this and report all these hundreds of thousands of shipments?"
It would certainly be fun to try, but unfortunately those sort of tricks have been attempted in the past by companies trying to present false market share figures to raise their share price or attract other forms of investment, so the people who gather market share statistics won't count them as either shipped or sold units.
"How do they come up with this figure?"
The key is "market share", which is a percentage of units sold over a particular period of time. Note the "sold" part, which all those Slashdotters who get into long arguments about the market share for X being really much higher than the market share of Y should take note of, because they're actually talking about usage figures, which market share doesn't claim to measure.