When there is a monopoly, whether government sanctioned or driven by market forces, there has to be regulation or the consumer will be screwed.
Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention. Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.
Cable companies are wonderful examples. Monopolies created and sustained by (typically municipal) governments. Why do you think Cox (or whoever they bought out in your area, more likely) was allowed to lay all that cable across both public and private land, but no one else can lay a competing network the same way?
I wonder how many Windows 95 machines are still running and in actual use. Anyone here still running a variant of Win95?
Absolutely. The machine I'm typing on now is running 98SE, customised with 98lite using the explorer.exe from 95. Runs every win32 program I need on a desktop, and does it noticeably faster than machines with significantly more powerful hardware running later versions. Reasonably stable, considering it is windows after all - it gets uptime close to the Win2k boxes they have at work actually.
If you had any doubt that the answer to your question would be yes, this will really blow your mind - I've also got DOS 6.22 and WfW on a CD on a shelf across the room, I haven't actually used it in months (haven't used WfW in years, but DOS 6 really does come in very handy at times.)
So, we might as well have kept our 286's, because these 486's and "Pentiums" bring in too many hassles....
You're implying a false dilemma, it's not one or the other. There are in fact still 286s being used, that doesn't stop you from buying a P4 now does it?
No one expects non-technical users to teach themselves to be kernel hackers. That's just a silly straw man.
The point is that you can hire a kernel hacker to do the work. Linus and the rest of the gang doing the volunteer work don't want to support the stuff that's running your business anymore? Hire someone else to do it. It's an option, and in some cases it can be a very good one.
Whereas with unfree software, whether from MS or Sun or whoever, that option just doesn't exist.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't know this - the man pages on a linux system will be mostly way out of date anyway. You should be using info instead, you'll have much better luck with it, as that's the documentation that's actually up to date, in most cases.
With certain exceptions a firearm may be made by a nonlicensee provided it is not for sale and the maker is not prohibited from possessing firearms. However, a person is prohibited from making a semiautomatic assault weapon or assembling a nonsporting semiautomatic rifle or nonsporting shotgun from imported parts. In addition, the making of an NFA firearm requires a tax payment and approval by ATF. An application to make a machinegun will not be approved unless documentation is submitted showing that the firearm is being made for a federal or state agency. [18 U. S. C. 922( o), (r), (v), and 923, 27 CFR 178.39, 178.40, 178.41 and
None of which is actually relevant, seeing as this is not a firearm. There may be applicable laws (I'm sure there are, but probably not any) but the stuff you are referencing simply doesn't apply to gauss guns anymore than it does a homemade crossbow or staff-sling (either of which would probably be comparable for destructive capability with this guys gauss gun, if he ever gets it working, btw.)
Just 'X' is fine, but 'X Windows' is not something you're going to hear from people that know what they're talking about generally, it's a mistake of a very similar sort to the one of the poster you were correcting to begin with - I suppose the irony of that is what prompted me to correct you. If you didn't seem otherwise fairly well clued I wouldn't have bothered. It just seems that someone that does have a clue wouldn't want to be broadcasting that he doesn't - which is really what you are doing there. If someone says 'bullet' when they refer to a cartridge, that indicates clearly that he doesn't know much about firearms. It's not an indication that he's a bad person or anything, but you'd be a fool to rely on their expertise in that field, because they obvously don't have any. In the same way, talking about 'X Windows' just broadcasts to anyone that knows enough to pick up on it that you don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway, like I said, I only mentioned it because you seemed otherwise to be reasonably well clued - which made that mistake stick out like a sore thumb, as the cliché goes...
Well, that might have been true when English was a dialect of German. But after a few centuries of people trying to use English as if it were a corrupt form of Latin, we've got all kinds of inflectional structures we're basically stuck with. I still hesitate to split an infinitive!
Actually, despite all of those years of prescription against it, the language has nonetheless been shedding inflectional structures at record pace. ESI (English sin infleción) is actually understandable in most cases, though it sounds funny. Try that even in Chaucers day and it would have been total gibberish.
"When I split an infinitive, I split it so it goddamn-well stays split." - Raymond Chandler.
Prescriptive grammarians tend to slavishly expect English to follow Latin. In reality, English is closer to Chinese than Latin in structure (though not, of course, in vocabulary.) 'Verbing' is a common zero-transform in Germanic languages generally, and that tendency is most pronounced in English.
A majority, even if it were not so ludicrously defined, would not entitle you to tax me to pay to indoctrinate my child in your religion. I haven't lied about anything, and all that stands is you've proven your ignorance yet again.
Lots of people who believe in a god or higher power are NOT Christians. That's just ignorant, and offensive. We have a right not to have our taxes used to take our children away and indoctrinate them in Christianity.
Why is what I said wrong? Everyone you mentioned in retort still had basic Christian beliefs with the exception of Jefferson. And why are Paine and Voltaire atheists? Is this your personal label of them? Voltaire would be on the possibly side based of his writings but not Paine.
Umm Paine was called an atheist by the priesthood of the day, and a blasphomer, and even a satanist. He was actually a Deist, which is still in no wise a Christian or even close. Jefferson was a Deist too. I'm not sure about Paine. As was pointed out also, many were Unitarians as well, and Unitarians repudiate doctrines considered essential to Christianity by every mainstream Church. In fact, the people who bring this sort of suit to this day are very often Unitarians.
The issue is a simple one, the first amendment clearly rules out any ability of Congress to spend tax money to endorse or indoctrinate any religion. You can believe whatever you want. You can say any pledge you want as a private citizen. You cannot take my tax money and spend it to indoctrinate my kid in your religion. That's totally over the line.
Seriously, I run straight WindowMaker even on newer hardware, sure on a fast machine I bring up a gnome panel occassionally to mess around with, but I honestly never really understood why people seem to think they have to have KDE or GNOME on a machine - particularly an older one of course. Install the libs, and whatever applications you have to have, and they'll run just fine without any panels or the like...
If you don't understand the value of being able to choose your apps then I've got to wonder why I'm bothering to talk to you at all.
If you want to use another tool, you can install it and use it on Windows XP as well. But you cant remove the HTML renderer because Windows needs it to access Windows Update and a number of other core OS features.
On earlier versions you can remove it, with some difficulty, so MS has tied it into even more subsystems. I'm sure they'll eventually be able to figure out a way to make the whole OS break without it no matter what you do. That doesn't say anything about any need for it in a technical sense - it just means they've figured out how to make stuff break if you do something they don't want you to. As I say, I remove this junk immediately on boxes running earlier versions, all the way up to Win2k boxes, I am quite familiar with the technical details. And no, windows update doesn't 'break' - I have all critical updates installed just fine thanks. What 'breaks' is largely cosmetic features that appear to have been invented simply to provide a rationale to tell the court they couldn't remove IE. No other OS has such 'features' and there are several that are easily as capable as XP.
If you use another browser, why do you care some components of IE are installed, doing rendering for parts of the OS UI?
For several reasons. Removing IE entirely improves the OS in numerous ways. The system cycles faster, it runs faster in less memory, it takes less storage space and it has FAR fewer security holes without IE. This is not speculation, this is experience.
I think an OS that is useful without additional commercial software is valuable. OS X has a browser, email, text editor out of the box. And free dev tools. As a consumer, I think thats a *good* thing.
It is a good thing. But OS X doesn't try and prevent you from removing those tools and replacing them.
Not common, but essential ones. Like a browser, text editor, email reader, media viewer, and the like. And that list evolves over time. Today it includes a browser, 8 years ago it didnt. What about other applications, like email, TCP/IP or disk defraggers? Are you suggesting we should all be buying our email app, our TCP/IP stack, or our disk defragger like we did 10 years ago, rather than having it come with the OS?
No, silly, of course not. I'm suggesting that users should be able to cleanly replace the implementations shipped in favour of their chosen implementations if they so choose.
MSOffice could be a system component too.
There is already Wordpad/Notepad and Outlook Express for the essential functions. But if integrating Office gave me spellcheck in every text area rather than just Office apps, I'd love it.
You can remove notepad and wordpad and replace them with, for instance, NTEmacs. Make the proper registry entries and everything works fine. That's a totally different case from IE, where a great deal of time has obviously been spent pulling all kinds of bullshit to make it as difficult as possible to remove it and replace it with Mozilla. There is no technical reason it should be difficult, it's simply a matter of MS making technical decisions for political reasons. If you want to add things like global spellcheckers, btw, that's not something all that hard to write. You don't need to have a monstrosity like Office around to do it, and you certainly don't need to *integrate* Office like IE to do that.
Of course Microsoft was not declared a monopoly until after these decisions were made. You cant suggest that their decisions on pricing of IE should have been made with the forsight that they'd later be declared a monopoly.
The first sentence is true, and it does hint towards some substantial theoretical problems with antitrust law. Just for the record, I'm not in favour of our antitrust laws. But it's ridiculous to think that MS wasn't aware that they had a monopoly which they were leveraging to gain another one - their own emails made that fact incredibly clear. They knew what they were doing was illegal - they didn't know that they would actually be *charged* or *convicted* for it, true, but that's hardly an excuse.
How many consumer desktop OS's ship without a browser? Its clearly a key feature for any OS - so key that its an essential part, like email. You cant deliver a consumer OS w/o it.
It's a commonly used application. There are plenty others. None of them have any business being "integrated" into an OS for technical reasons - and even if that was not true, it's clear that the actual reasons for the integration were to force usage of IE for business reasons, not technical ones. Do you understand the difference between an OS and an application?
By your logic, should't all common applications be "integrated" with the OS? MSOffice could be a system component too. How many "consumer" computers are used without an internet connection? Maybe MSN should just be integrated into the OS too?
An OS isn't an application program. OSs which work well are designed by those who understand that fact. They provide a critical abstraction layer between applications and the hardware, enabling the users to run the applications they choose with the minimal of unecessary effort. That's ALL they do. "Integrating" applications is bad design, from a technical point of view. But very good design, of course, if you are a monopolist trying to leverage your monopoly to capture new markets...
Microsoft gave away their browser for free! Those bastards! Of course, this complaint was loudly made in Congress by Netscape, who gained their market dominance by giving away their browser for free, which was hypocritical at best. The obvious cure for this problem is to force Microsoft to open-source their browser, i.e. give it away for free.... Oh, wait....
The problem wasn't just giving the browser away, it was leveraging their OS monopoly to obtain a browser monopoly. Yes, legally, if you have a monopoly there are some things you can't do that everyone else can do.
Microsoft has done a lot of work to integrate their browser into their operating system as an interface tool, perhaps as a defense against the anti-trust attacks, but since the late 90s, that's been a Technically Right Choice to make. It would be nice if they'd done it a bit better, and used a bit less non-standards- based content to do it, but it's still the right choice.
It's never been 'a Technically Right Choice' in any sense of the word, that's just horseshit. It's been done for one reason and one reason only - to sabotage the consent decree.
Microsoft wholesale contracts to PC hardware makers were aggressively obnoxious about "you must pay us for a copy of Windows on every box you ship if you want to get the best wholesale prices", which means that consumers who don't want Windows did end up paying about $30 more per PC than if they could have bought the bare metal. Perhaps this gets into anti-trust territory for the Feds, but Microsoft was backing down on this before the states got into the game.
They were? Huh? They still use the same tactics today.
Gentoo's great, if you have a Pentium-or-better machine (for the partially-built distro) and a bootable CD-ROM. Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD, and good luck if you try to do a "live" install from an existing Linux installation.
False. You can install it on anything that has a bootable floppy, a network connection and enough storage. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34318&cid=3714 118 for instructions.
LFS is a good project, but spreading FUD about Gentoo is not.
Of course you're right, but you're also overlooking something. The downfall of remote operations that will remain, after the engineering has been done, will be vulnerability to jamming. Oh sure, against third world forces these toys are impressive, but against an enemy with a noticeable electronic warfare capability the usefulness of remotely operated platforms will stay limited for the conceivable future. There has to be some signal carrying the data between the remote and the operator, and signals can be jammed.
He's not the only one. I'm still open to offers, but for the past 6 months I've been working crappy temporary work applying for real job after real job and not gotten one. Back in the fall a LOT of people got laid off - every job I apply for they get a huge stack, and some of the people have better credentials on paper, so I'm lucky to get an interview even.
Luckily, I got a job offer in another field where at least I'll get to travel in Europe, which I've always wanted to do, so it's not all bad. But the situation in the field, at least in certain areas, is really very poor. There's still a market, for sure, but it's now a buyers market, and a lot of sellers are moving on to greener pastures.
Everyone I know who works in IT now is going nuts watching systems degrade because policymakers have no idea how they work. I predict booming business for antivirus companies at least.
You definately have a point. However, running 8 OSs as you mention is a lot more than 2, or 3. And there are often very good reasons to use more than one OS - Win32 clients are common, but some form of *nix is still really called for on a server. Then in many areas there are also good reasons to have at least a few X-Terminals or Workstations available. And pc-appliances, router boxes for an obvious example, call for another OS again.
Hard to see why any organisation that isn't simply huge would need more than 3 or 4 OSs, personally, but it's definately not always bad to have more than one. It's great when the viruses don't take your system down, too.
So only add another OS when you have a good reason to do so, and otherwise really it shouldn't be a worry.
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Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention. Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.
Cable companies are wonderful examples. Monopolies created and sustained by (typically municipal) governments. Why do you think Cox (or whoever they bought out in your area, more likely) was allowed to lay all that cable across both public and private land, but no one else can lay a competing network the same way?
Absolutely. The machine I'm typing on now is running 98SE, customised with 98lite using the explorer.exe from 95. Runs every win32 program I need on a desktop, and does it noticeably faster than machines with significantly more powerful hardware running later versions. Reasonably stable, considering it is windows after all - it gets uptime close to the Win2k boxes they have at work actually.
If you had any doubt that the answer to your question would be yes, this will really blow your mind - I've also got DOS 6.22 and WfW on a CD on a shelf across the room, I haven't actually used it in months (haven't used WfW in years, but DOS 6 really does come in very handy at times.)
You're implying a false dilemma, it's not one or the other. There are in fact still 286s being used, that doesn't stop you from buying a P4 now does it?
No one expects non-technical users to teach themselves to be kernel hackers. That's just a silly straw man.
The point is that you can hire a kernel hacker to do the work. Linus and the rest of the gang doing the volunteer work don't want to support the stuff that's running your business anymore? Hire someone else to do it. It's an option, and in some cases it can be a very good one.
Whereas with unfree software, whether from MS or Sun or whoever, that option just doesn't exist.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't know this - the man pages on a linux system will be mostly way out of date anyway. You should be using info instead, you'll have much better luck with it, as that's the documentation that's actually up to date, in most cases.
None of which is actually relevant, seeing as this is not a firearm. There may be applicable laws (I'm sure there are, but probably not any) but the stuff you are referencing simply doesn't apply to gauss guns anymore than it does a homemade crossbow or staff-sling (either of which would probably be comparable for destructive capability with this guys gauss gun, if he ever gets it working, btw.)
Just 'X' is fine, but 'X Windows' is not something you're going to hear from people that know what they're talking about generally, it's a mistake of a very similar sort to the one of the poster you were correcting to begin with - I suppose the irony of that is what prompted me to correct you. If you didn't seem otherwise fairly well clued I wouldn't have bothered. It just seems that someone that does have a clue wouldn't want to be broadcasting that he doesn't - which is really what you are doing there. If someone says 'bullet' when they refer to a cartridge, that indicates clearly that he doesn't know much about firearms. It's not an indication that he's a bad person or anything, but you'd be a fool to rely on their expertise in that field, because they obvously don't have any. In the same way, talking about 'X Windows' just broadcasts to anyone that knows enough to pick up on it that you don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway, like I said, I only mentioned it because you seemed otherwise to be reasonably well clued - which made that mistake stick out like a sore thumb, as the cliché goes...
'X Windows'? WTF is that?
I believe you meant the X Window System, X, or X11. There is no such thing as 'X Windows' never has been, never was.
Other than that, you're quite correct of course.
Actually, despite all of those years of prescription against it, the language has nonetheless been shedding inflectional structures at record pace. ESI (English sin infleción) is actually understandable in most cases, though it sounds funny. Try that even in Chaucers day and it would have been total gibberish.
Prescriptive grammarians tend to slavishly expect English to follow Latin. In reality, English is closer to Chinese than Latin in structure (though not, of course, in vocabulary.) 'Verbing' is a common zero-transform in Germanic languages generally, and that tendency is most pronounced in English.
A majority, even if it were not so ludicrously defined, would not entitle you to tax me to pay to indoctrinate my child in your religion. I haven't lied about anything, and all that stands is you've proven your ignorance yet again.
Lots of people who believe in a god or higher power are NOT Christians. That's just ignorant, and offensive. We have a right not to have our taxes used to take our children away and indoctrinate them in Christianity.
Umm Paine was called an atheist by the priesthood of the day, and a blasphomer, and even a satanist. He was actually a Deist, which is still in no wise a Christian or even close. Jefferson was a Deist too. I'm not sure about Paine. As was pointed out also, many were Unitarians as well, and Unitarians repudiate doctrines considered essential to Christianity by every mainstream Church. In fact, the people who bring this sort of suit to this day are very often Unitarians.
The issue is a simple one, the first amendment clearly rules out any ability of Congress to spend tax money to endorse or indoctrinate any religion. You can believe whatever you want. You can say any pledge you want as a private citizen. You cannot take my tax money and spend it to indoctrinate my kid in your religion. That's totally over the line.
Where does the Constitution give Congress power to be involved in education, period?
That's funny. I don't begrudge them their tax free status, I just think it's unfair for everyone not to have it.
Seriously, I run straight WindowMaker even on newer hardware, sure on a fast machine I bring up a gnome panel occassionally to mess around with, but I honestly never really understood why people seem to think they have to have KDE or GNOME on a machine - particularly an older one of course. Install the libs, and whatever applications you have to have, and they'll run just fine without any panels or the like...
If you don't understand the value of being able to choose your apps then I've got to wonder why I'm bothering to talk to you at all.
On earlier versions you can remove it, with some difficulty, so MS has tied it into even more subsystems. I'm sure they'll eventually be able to figure out a way to make the whole OS break without it no matter what you do. That doesn't say anything about any need for it in a technical sense - it just means they've figured out how to make stuff break if you do something they don't want you to. As I say, I remove this junk immediately on boxes running earlier versions, all the way up to Win2k boxes, I am quite familiar with the technical details. And no, windows update doesn't 'break' - I have all critical updates installed just fine thanks. What 'breaks' is largely cosmetic features that appear to have been invented simply to provide a rationale to tell the court they couldn't remove IE. No other OS has such 'features' and there are several that are easily as capable as XP.
For several reasons. Removing IE entirely improves the OS in numerous ways. The system cycles faster, it runs faster in less memory, it takes less storage space and it has FAR fewer security holes without IE. This is not speculation, this is experience.
It is a good thing. But OS X doesn't try and prevent you from removing those tools and replacing them.
No, silly, of course not. I'm suggesting that users should be able to cleanly replace the implementations shipped in favour of their chosen implementations if they so choose.
You can remove notepad and wordpad and replace them with, for instance, NTEmacs. Make the proper registry entries and everything works fine. That's a totally different case from IE, where a great deal of time has obviously been spent pulling all kinds of bullshit to make it as difficult as possible to remove it and replace it with Mozilla. There is no technical reason it should be difficult, it's simply a matter of MS making technical decisions for political reasons. If you want to add things like global spellcheckers, btw, that's not something all that hard to write. You don't need to have a monstrosity like Office around to do it, and you certainly don't need to *integrate* Office like IE to do that.
The first sentence is true, and it does hint towards some substantial theoretical problems with antitrust law. Just for the record, I'm not in favour of our antitrust laws. But it's ridiculous to think that MS wasn't aware that they had a monopoly which they were leveraging to gain another one - their own emails made that fact incredibly clear. They knew what they were doing was illegal - they didn't know that they would actually be *charged* or *convicted* for it, true, but that's hardly an excuse.
It's a commonly used application. There are plenty others. None of them have any business being "integrated" into an OS for technical reasons - and even if that was not true, it's clear that the actual reasons for the integration were to force usage of IE for business reasons, not technical ones. Do you understand the difference between an OS and an application?
By your logic, should't all common applications be "integrated" with the OS? MSOffice could be a system component too. How many "consumer" computers are used without an internet connection? Maybe MSN should just be integrated into the OS too?
An OS isn't an application program. OSs which work well are designed by those who understand that fact. They provide a critical abstraction layer between applications and the hardware, enabling the users to run the applications they choose with the minimal of unecessary effort. That's ALL they do. "Integrating" applications is bad design, from a technical point of view. But very good design, of course, if you are a monopolist trying to leverage your monopoly to capture new markets...
The problem wasn't just giving the browser away, it was leveraging their OS monopoly to obtain a browser monopoly. Yes, legally, if you have a monopoly there are some things you can't do that everyone else can do.
It's never been 'a Technically Right Choice' in any sense of the word, that's just horseshit. It's been done for one reason and one reason only - to sabotage the consent decree.
They were? Huh? They still use the same tactics today.
False. You can install it on anything that has a bootable floppy, a network connection and enough storage. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34318&cid=3714 118 for instructions.
LFS is a good project, but spreading FUD about Gentoo is not.
Mike Lawrey's own story
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Of course you're right, but you're also overlooking something. The downfall of remote operations that will remain, after the engineering has been done, will be vulnerability to jamming. Oh sure, against third world forces these toys are impressive, but against an enemy with a noticeable electronic warfare capability the usefulness of remotely operated platforms will stay limited for the conceivable future. There has to be some signal carrying the data between the remote and the operator, and signals can be jammed.
He's not the only one. I'm still open to offers, but for the past 6 months I've been working crappy temporary work applying for real job after real job and not gotten one. Back in the fall a LOT of people got laid off - every job I apply for they get a huge stack, and some of the people have better credentials on paper, so I'm lucky to get an interview even.
Luckily, I got a job offer in another field where at least I'll get to travel in Europe, which I've always wanted to do, so it's not all bad. But the situation in the field, at least in certain areas, is really very poor. There's still a market, for sure, but it's now a buyers market, and a lot of sellers are moving on to greener pastures.
Everyone I know who works in IT now is going nuts watching systems degrade because policymakers have no idea how they work. I predict booming business for antivirus companies at least.
You definately have a point. However, running 8 OSs as you mention is a lot more than 2, or 3. And there are often very good reasons to use more than one OS - Win32 clients are common, but some form of *nix is still really called for on a server. Then in many areas there are also good reasons to have at least a few X-Terminals or Workstations available. And pc-appliances, router boxes for an obvious example, call for another OS again.
Hard to see why any organisation that isn't simply huge would need more than 3 or 4 OSs, personally, but it's definately not always bad to have more than one. It's great when the viruses don't take your system down, too.
So only add another OS when you have a good reason to do so, and otherwise really it shouldn't be a worry.