Or they could just offer one big fat full price edition of everything. We'd be complaining about that too.
I've seen many folks talk about how customizable their Ubuntu OS is. Joe consumer won't know what they can remove or add from that installation. It is much easier to give them a feature list and say, for these features, install this edition. For these additional features, install this edition.
MS is simple engaging in smart business. Rather than offering a one size fits all solution, they tailor both the server and workstation products to the uses that customer needs. It doesn't make sense for me to have clustering features in my Windows home server or my web server. Thus specific versions for those uses. Linux distros do this to a point but in order to be successful marketing to the clueless general public they really ought to take a look at what MS has made billions doing.
1. While Ballmer is optimistic, the official release date is still January 2010. Ballmer would love to see Windows 7 come out early and be successful, because the reality is that his future with MS hinges on its success. 2. They are already hyping it. Get out from under the rock. No, it's not close to release yet so we haven't seen a TV and web media blitz. 3. Vista was released in February of 2007. 7 is scheduled for January 2010, about 3 years. WFW 3.11 was released in 1992, Windows 95 in 1995. Next release was Windows 98 in mid 1998. Then you had Windows 2000 in 2000. XP was 2002. The reality is, there was an extraordinarily long delay in shipping Vista; OS releases from MS have traditionally been on a 3 year schedule. Windows 7 looks like no exception. 4. If you actually read your source completely, you would realize that the reason they are calling the code 6.1 internally is for better backward compatibility for applications - not because the code is not significantly changed from the 6.0 Vista code. Would you say that XP was really just windows 2000, just because internally the code is version 5.1?
Fresh on the heels of the story of the individual from Belkin, does it surprise you that the online review fiasco delves into other industries? Big producers such as Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and others probably have thousands of employees in their marketing departments, and it would not surprise me in the least that part of their job is to go online and give positive reviews to thier films (and maybe negative reviews to competitor's films). Personally I don't give much credence to any online review of product simply because the results are uncontrolled, I don't know the people giving the reviews, and there is no way of knowing whether they are competent or not (not to mention completely bogus).
A dozen years ago, in the schools we were working in, we had to drag the teachers and staff kicking and screaming away from their Macs.
You aren't going to get them to switch to Linux any easier - in fact, since the Linux experience isn't even close to the Mac experience, it will be even more difficult to sell them on Linux. Plenty of schools are running linux on the back end now, but it really boils down to the site sysadmin and what he/she and staff are trained for.
The desktop may become smaller, more portable, and have different functions - but it will never cease to be relevant. As long as people have to use a computer for actual work it will always be the primary productivity device.
Yes you are right it's all a big word game because nobody can agree on what FOSS really means.
That's why wikipedia has separate entries for "Free software" and "Free and Open Source Software", and for that matter, "Freeware".
The "Free" part of FOSS is defined namely as the part which allows a user to make and distribute copies of the software without paying a licensing fee (such as the GNU license). The "Open Source" part refers to the free as in libre ability to make changes to the source code, thus Open Source. This is how I see it and I think is the prevailing view.
The bottom line is everything costs something, whatever it is labeled.
The failure or success of companies to make a profit depends entirely on how seriously they take the moniker of "FOSS". Figuring out to make people think the software is free and still have them pay for it is a marketing a sales problem and if they can do it, or package it around a product offering like Sun does, they will be successful.
Investors want to fund companies that will turn a profit, and a good enough profit to make their investment worthwhile compared to other investments they could have made. So if a FOSS driven company wants investment capital via private or public offering, they had best be able to turn a good profit or once that initial funding dries up they are going to go under.
So rather than a paradigm, or principle, the FOSS based companies have to deal with the paradox of producing good enough product that no support is needed, yet having as their only source of income being supporting said product.
Let's face it - nothing is free. If you get your software for absolutely nothing, someone else is wasting long hours of programming or some investor is investing money and getting no return. If a company uses OSS and pays a employed or contracted programmer to fix bugs and add features, that OSS is not FOSS to that company. If they have to pay an annual support contract for each software license a la commercial redhat, it is not FOSS to that company.
Nobody cares about "linux devices". The real market share we are looking at growing is consumer desktops and laptops. Never mind millions of routers or switches with embedded linux. Never mind any other machines, electronics or gadgets with embedded linux.
Whenever somebody talks about the widespread growth of "linux devices" I tend to think that those people care little about Linux becoming viable competition on the desktop and more about getting linux embedded into devices where it seems to really be finding its niche.
Fair enough. It's an interesting discussion though and it is one in which the line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere in order to balance free speech with liveable society.
Fortunately we are nowhere near there here in the US, where freedom of speech is probably the most liberally applied. That may be because of some of the restrictions that have been put in place over the years.
So you are saying that you believe the right of 50 people in a restaurant to have a peaceful dinner is trumped by the right of somebody saying "fuckity fuckity shit you dick" at his table. You are saying that it is ok to walk down the sidewalk in your neighborhood yelling obscenities and racial slurs at your neighbors. You are saying those people should all just leave so they don't have to listen to you. I don't agree. I don't believe that freedom of speech is a greater freedom to uphold than my freedom to live a peaceable life. In fact, freedom of speech is better defined as freedom to express one's opinion. Freedom of expression is a subset of freedom of speech, and it is generally agreed that there are limits to freedom of expression as suggested by men like John Stuart Mill and Joel Feinberg; at the heart of which are two premises called the "harm principle" and the "offense principle".
See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/ for a detailed analysis of this and also how it relates to hate speech, pornography, etc. It is principles such as these that are put in place in government that help to make a society a better place to live in, without restricting someone's right to express their opinions in a manner respecting those who are around them.
There's something called respect which it seems that a lot of people are missing these days. If by exercising your right to free speech you deliberately offend others - that is, you could have said what you meant without using language that you know will offend others - then what happens to their freedoms? Fortunately there are some people in government who still know what that respect means and choose to regulate rather than deliberately offend people. People like to interpret freedom of speech to mean that they can say anything that they want to anywhere they want to. Freedom of speech is really about being able to express your opinions - it doesn't necessarily grant you the all-consuming right to vulgarity in doing so. In reality most people don't want to have to live their lives around people who talk like this, so in a democratic country like ours we can create laws to govern this. Without those laws, you risk disruption of society.
It's called protecting my desire to not be surrounded by it. It's on the same level as public nudity or lewd behavior. The burden shouldn't be on me to remove myself from that in a public location or for that matter on broadcast TV. And I think it is the government's job to set a law ahead of time because we as a people have proven that we can longer regulate or control our own behavior.
If it's on cable that's my problem - I'm paying for it. I would expect broadcast TV to uphold some standard of decency, and they aren't regulating that themselves so the FCC has to. We expect those types of standards at nearly all public events in the US, and publicly available broadcast television should be no exception. If you want to be a potty mouth go do it with your potty mouth friends, don't do it in front of me.
This is very true and it should apply to both Windows and Linux.
The problem with Linux being that the lag time from product release, to linux driver development, and then inclusion with the newest release of Ubuntu or whatever distro you like, can be months. I just want it to be easier to load a driver for a device when said driver is not included with the distro I like. Windows has accomplished this for 99.9% of devices. Somebody praised the linux repositories and package managers over Windows update, but I don't think this is comparing apples to apples at all. Besides, it is difficult to find anything worthy of downloading in the linux repositories due to the vast amount of material there.
Unless hardware manufacturers start taking Linux seriously enough to provide drivers in the box, lots of people are going to continue to be frustrated.
Free speech can only go so far. If you were to be constantly swearing in front of my kids I would call the police on you and they would make you go away or stop. There's free speech and then there is offensive speech. It's the FCC's job to decide what it considers offensive and regulate it. People need to learn to speak the language and not fill in the blanks with a bunch of foul mouthed gutter filth.
Yes but even though that may be the case, Linux still only owns 18% of that market and it's a far less lucrative market. 74% of Survey respondents indicated that they would not be using an open source embedded OS on their next project.
However, as a free open source OS, what does Linux have to gain by being used? Is anybody profiting from it? Maybe it helps the device manufacturer's bottom line a little bit if they don't have to pay for licensing. But as far as Linux goes or any of the linux developers, they gain nothing with that sales model.
"I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's -- yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."
Sure they've got a huge percentage of the smallest markets out there. For all that they are missing 99% of the desktop market primarily because noone has matured the desktop Linux OS to anywhere near the point where Windows is, let alone MacOS. Windows has matured to the point it is largely because of the architecture of being the base for further development and applications. Linux has tried to be the one stop shop by including everything you need. I don't think it will succeed on the desktop until they stop trying to make everything part of the OS. Mac only succeeds with this business model because of good marketing and a limited hardware selection to write for and support.
This may be true, but which OS is handicapped by it?
The only advantage to Linux is the more frequent release schedule which allows it to stay current with drivers.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Also of note is the influx of what you might call "Basic functionality" drivers for devices such as scanners and multifunction printers - often full feature drivers are not available for these devices even though they technically work on Linux.
Not only does it take actual desire on their part to move to something better, it takes actual realization that for a lot of people, Linux does not qualify as "better" for their particular usage. It may just be a matter of going into a support forum (something linux users seem to know alot about) and getting some answers as to why AVG is interfering with the wireless connection in the first place. Perhaps submitting a support request with a bug report would be enough to get the problem fixed with the next program update.
What I resent most is a linux junkie who tells a user that "ubuntu is better, therefore thou must switch to my better OS" with no regard for the hassle it is for that user to get acclimated to new software, find software to replace existing software, and get used to an entirely new interface, even if the interface is judged to be better and more intuitive by said linux junkie, and then still having to dual-boot windows on the machine to run games.
Us techies know about PAE but typically a user is not going to know what it is or how to enable it.
I'm not familiar with the linux memory layout but with Windows it reserves 1GB for the kernel. Each app by default can use a max of 2GB unless you use the/3GB switch to start the kernel.
Either way, windows or linux 32 bit desktop versions out of the box do not see more than 4GB.
My wife is as non-techie as they get. All she wants to do most of the time is check email and her friends blogs. She chooses Vista over Ubuntu every time. She doesn't like the layout, she hates how when she's online and wants to install something she can't just click the link, she hates how certain flash applets don't work in firefox correctly so she can't use them. She doesn't care that all the software is in a list, in fact there's too much in the list and she finds it hard to find a program that will do what she wants. Again, she'd rather just click the link and have a friendly installer wizard come up.
Personally I like Ubuntu for web browsing because it boots fast and runs fast. That's about where it ends but I do have that going for me...
IMO there's a difference between laws that only affect you and laws that affect other people if you break them. If there was a law that said you must stand on your head at noon every day, if you failed to do so it would not affect the lives of anyone else.
Illegally distributing music or movies hurts the artists because that is their livelihood. How would you like it if someone arbitrarily decided to start taking $1 per week out of your paycheck every week. Maybe not so bad, but what if 1000 people decided to do it? Hey each guy is only stealing $1, that's not bad is it, it's only a buck, right?
Basically, when you break a law you are taking a calculated risk that you will not be caught and prosecuted for it. For instance your example of a certain religion not being allowed - many Christians in China, Russia, and other communist or muslim nations have continued to practice their faith underground, knowing that there would be dire consequences if they were caught. Religion is a touchy subject. I believe in freedom of religion - however, my choice in religion doesn't necessarily impact anyone else negatively. But if someone's religion for example required killing an innocent person, that is no longer the case - besides being a serious moral issue. Then again, in the absence of religion, the law of the country will also shape one's morals as well. That "incentive to do or not do certain things" plays a part in the mind of someone determining whether something is right or wrong.
In reality, if Apple wanted to go into business as a software vendor, they wouldn't be undercutting MS to do it. They would gain market share, not on price but because people would be convinced through marketing that MacOS will work better with their Ipods. Apple does not want to get into supporting their OS on any hardware, because, frankly, it might be worse than Windows at doing it. If they took that step and failed, they might never recover from it. Like you said, they want to stay in business and right now the best way is to keep their hardware and software development tight and market the hell out of it.
The point is not whether there is a services GUI. That was your example. The point is the multitude of things that are not available to perform in the GUI. You seem to enjoy doing things via the command line because you find it quicker, but not every user has the know-how to do this and needs a graphical interface to figure it out. Too many functions involve going online and researching how to do something or why something doesn't work, and having to run a number of commands in your terminal window in order to solve the problem or perform the task. What MacOS and Windows have both done is make this entirely unnecessary either by making the task intuitive or at least providing a GUI for it that you can get help to use.
The law as passed by the Senate specifically allows for both criminal and civil forfeiture. The law does not change Civil forfeiture. It simply specifically includes unauthorized distribution of copyrighted media as set forth in the act. All they have done is draw the line in the sand a bit clearer so that the existing law can be applied.
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Or they could just offer one big fat full price edition of everything.
We'd be complaining about that too.
I've seen many folks talk about how customizable their Ubuntu OS is. Joe consumer won't know what they can remove or add from that installation. It is much easier to give them a feature list and say, for these features, install this edition. For these additional features, install this edition.
MS is simple engaging in smart business. Rather than offering a one size fits all solution, they tailor both the server and workstation products to the uses that customer needs. It doesn't make sense for me to have clustering features in my Windows home server or my web server. Thus specific versions for those uses. Linux distros do this to a point but in order to be successful marketing to the clueless general public they really ought to take a look at what MS has made billions doing.
1. While Ballmer is optimistic, the official release date is still January 2010. Ballmer would love to see Windows 7 come out early and be successful, because the reality is that his future with MS hinges on its success.
2. They are already hyping it. Get out from under the rock. No, it's not close to release yet so we haven't seen a TV and web media blitz.
3. Vista was released in February of 2007. 7 is scheduled for January 2010, about 3 years. WFW 3.11 was released in 1992, Windows 95 in 1995. Next release was Windows 98 in mid 1998. Then you had Windows 2000 in 2000. XP was 2002. The reality is, there was an extraordinarily long delay in shipping Vista; OS releases from MS have traditionally been on a 3 year schedule. Windows 7 looks like no exception.
4. If you actually read your source completely, you would realize that the reason they are calling the code 6.1 internally is for better backward compatibility for applications - not because the code is not significantly changed from the 6.0 Vista code. Would you say that XP was really just windows 2000, just because internally the code is version 5.1?
Fresh on the heels of the story of the individual from Belkin, does it surprise you that the online review fiasco delves into other industries?
Big producers such as Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and others probably have thousands of employees in their marketing departments, and it would not surprise me in the least that part of their job is to go online and give positive reviews to thier films (and maybe negative reviews to competitor's films).
Personally I don't give much credence to any online review of product simply because the results are uncontrolled, I don't know the people giving the reviews, and there is no way of knowing whether they are competent or not (not to mention completely bogus).
A dozen years ago, in the schools we were working in, we had to drag the teachers and staff kicking and screaming away from their Macs.
You aren't going to get them to switch to Linux any easier - in fact, since the Linux experience isn't even close to the Mac experience, it will be even more difficult to sell them on Linux. Plenty of schools are running linux on the back end now, but it really boils down to the site sysadmin and what he/she and staff are trained for.
The desktop may become smaller, more portable, and have different functions - but it will never cease to be relevant. As long as people have to use a computer for actual work it will always be the primary productivity device.
Yes you are right it's all a big word game because nobody can agree on what FOSS really means.
That's why wikipedia has separate entries for "Free software" and "Free and Open Source Software", and for that matter, "Freeware".
The "Free" part of FOSS is defined namely as the part which allows a user to make and distribute copies of the software without paying a licensing fee (such as the GNU license). The "Open Source" part refers to the free as in libre ability to make changes to the source code, thus Open Source. This is how I see it and I think is the prevailing view.
The bottom line is everything costs something, whatever it is labeled.
The failure or success of companies to make a profit depends entirely on how seriously they take the moniker of "FOSS". Figuring out to make people think the software is free and still have them pay for it is a marketing a sales problem and if they can do it, or package it around a product offering like Sun does, they will be successful.
Investors want to fund companies that will turn a profit, and a good enough profit to make their investment worthwhile compared to other investments they could have made. So if a FOSS driven company wants investment capital via private or public offering, they had best be able to turn a good profit or once that initial funding dries up they are going to go under.
So rather than a paradigm, or principle, the FOSS based companies have to deal with the paradox of producing good enough product that no support is needed, yet having as their only source of income being supporting said product.
Let's face it - nothing is free. If you get your software for absolutely nothing, someone else is wasting long hours of programming or some investor is investing money and getting no return. If a company uses OSS and pays a employed or contracted programmer to fix bugs and add features, that OSS is not FOSS to that company. If they have to pay an annual support contract for each software license a la commercial redhat, it is not FOSS to that company.
Nobody cares about "linux devices". The real market share we are looking at growing is consumer desktops and laptops.
Never mind millions of routers or switches with embedded linux.
Never mind any other machines, electronics or gadgets with embedded linux.
Whenever somebody talks about the widespread growth of "linux devices" I tend to think that those people care little about Linux becoming viable competition on the desktop and more about getting linux embedded into devices where it seems to really be finding its niche.
Fair enough. It's an interesting discussion though and it is one in which the line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere in order to balance free speech with liveable society. Fortunately we are nowhere near there here in the US, where freedom of speech is probably the most liberally applied. That may be because of some of the restrictions that have been put in place over the years.
So you are saying that you believe the right of 50 people in a restaurant to have a peaceful dinner is trumped by the right of somebody saying "fuckity fuckity shit you dick" at his table.
You are saying that it is ok to walk down the sidewalk in your neighborhood yelling obscenities and racial slurs at your neighbors.
You are saying those people should all just leave so they don't have to listen to you.
I don't agree.
I don't believe that freedom of speech is a greater freedom to uphold than my freedom to live a peaceable life.
In fact, freedom of speech is better defined as freedom to express one's opinion. Freedom of expression is a subset of freedom of speech, and it is generally agreed that there are limits to freedom of expression as suggested by men like John Stuart Mill and Joel Feinberg; at the heart of which are two premises called the "harm principle" and the "offense principle".
See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/ for a detailed analysis of this and also how it relates to hate speech, pornography, etc.
It is principles such as these that are put in place in government that help to make a society a better place to live in, without restricting someone's right to express their opinions in a manner respecting those who are around them.
There's something called respect which it seems that a lot of people are missing these days. If by exercising your right to free speech you deliberately offend others - that is, you could have said what you meant without using language that you know will offend others - then what happens to their freedoms?
Fortunately there are some people in government who still know what that respect means and choose to regulate rather than deliberately offend people.
People like to interpret freedom of speech to mean that they can say anything that they want to anywhere they want to. Freedom of speech is really about being able to express your opinions - it doesn't necessarily grant you the all-consuming right to vulgarity in doing so. In reality most people don't want to have to live their lives around people who talk like this, so in a democratic country like ours we can create laws to govern this. Without those laws, you risk disruption of society.
It's called protecting my desire to not be surrounded by it. It's on the same level as public nudity or lewd behavior. The burden shouldn't be on me to remove myself from that in a public location or for that matter on broadcast TV. And I think it is the government's job to set a law ahead of time because we as a people have proven that we can longer regulate or control our own behavior.
If it's on cable that's my problem - I'm paying for it.
I would expect broadcast TV to uphold some standard of decency, and they aren't regulating that themselves so the FCC has to. We expect those types of standards at nearly all public events in the US, and publicly available broadcast television should be no exception. If you want to be a potty mouth go do it with your potty mouth friends, don't do it in front of me.
This is very true and it should apply to both Windows and Linux.
The problem with Linux being that the lag time from product release, to linux driver development, and then inclusion with the newest release of Ubuntu or whatever distro you like, can be months. I just want it to be easier to load a driver for a device when said driver is not included with the distro I like. Windows has accomplished this for 99.9% of devices. Somebody praised the linux repositories and package managers over Windows update, but I don't think this is comparing apples to apples at all. Besides, it is difficult to find anything worthy of downloading in the linux repositories due to the vast amount of material there.
Unless hardware manufacturers start taking Linux seriously enough to provide drivers in the box, lots of people are going to continue to be frustrated.
Free speech can only go so far. If you were to be constantly swearing in front of my kids I would call the police on you and they would make you go away or stop. There's free speech and then there is offensive speech. It's the FCC's job to decide what it considers offensive and regulate it. People need to learn to speak the language and not fill in the blanks with a bunch of foul mouthed gutter filth.
Yes but even though that may be the case, Linux still only owns 18% of that market and it's a far less lucrative market. 74% of Survey respondents indicated that they would not be using an open source embedded OS on their next project.
However, as a free open source OS, what does Linux have to gain by being used? Is anybody profiting from it? Maybe it helps the device manufacturer's bottom line a little bit if they don't have to pay for licensing. But as far as Linux goes or any of the linux developers, they gain nothing with that sales model.
"I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's -- yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."
Sure they've got a huge percentage of the smallest markets out there. For all that they are missing 99% of the desktop market primarily because noone has matured the desktop Linux OS to anywhere near the point where Windows is, let alone MacOS. Windows has matured to the point it is largely because of the architecture of being the base for further development and applications. Linux has tried to be the one stop shop by including everything you need. I don't think it will succeed on the desktop until they stop trying to make everything part of the OS. Mac only succeeds with this business model because of good marketing and a limited hardware selection to write for and support.
This may be true, but which OS is handicapped by it?
The only advantage to Linux is the more frequent release schedule which allows it to stay current with drivers.
Every windows release has come with a fairly current and comprehensive driver list. Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Also of note is the influx of what you might call "Basic functionality" drivers for devices such as scanners and multifunction printers - often full feature drivers are not available for these devices even though they technically work on Linux.
Not only does it take actual desire on their part to move to something better, it takes actual realization that for a lot of people, Linux does not qualify as "better" for their particular usage. It may just be a matter of going into a support forum (something linux users seem to know alot about) and getting some answers as to why AVG is interfering with the wireless connection in the first place. Perhaps submitting a support request with a bug report would be enough to get the problem fixed with the next program update.
What I resent most is a linux junkie who tells a user that "ubuntu is better, therefore thou must switch to my better OS" with no regard for the hassle it is for that user to get acclimated to new software, find software to replace existing software, and get used to an entirely new interface, even if the interface is judged to be better and more intuitive by said linux junkie, and then still having to dual-boot windows on the machine to run games.
Us techies know about PAE but typically a user is not going to know what it is or how to enable it.
I'm not familiar with the linux memory layout but with Windows it reserves 1GB for the kernel. Each app by default can use a max of 2GB unless you use the /3GB switch to start the kernel.
Either way, windows or linux 32 bit desktop versions out of the box do not see more than 4GB.
Or for that matter, any 32 bit linux flavor.
It's a memory addressing issue and a 32 bit memory address simply can't access more than 4GB of RAM.
I have a laptop with Ubuntu and Vista on it.
My wife is as non-techie as they get. All she wants to do most of the time is check email and her friends blogs.
She chooses Vista over Ubuntu every time. She doesn't like the layout, she hates how when she's online and wants to install something she can't just click the link, she hates how certain flash applets don't work in firefox correctly so she can't use them. She doesn't care that all the software is in a list, in fact there's too much in the list and she finds it hard to find a program that will do what she wants. Again, she'd rather just click the link and have a friendly installer wizard come up.
Personally I like Ubuntu for web browsing because it boots fast and runs fast. That's about where it ends but I do have that going for me...
IMO there's a difference between laws that only affect you and laws that affect other people if you break them. If there was a law that said you must stand on your head at noon every day, if you failed to do so it would not affect the lives of anyone else.
Illegally distributing music or movies hurts the artists because that is their livelihood. How would you like it if someone arbitrarily decided to start taking $1 per week out of your paycheck every week. Maybe not so bad, but what if 1000 people decided to do it? Hey each guy is only stealing $1, that's not bad is it, it's only a buck, right?
Basically, when you break a law you are taking a calculated risk that you will not be caught and prosecuted for it. For instance your example of a certain religion not being allowed - many Christians in China, Russia, and other communist or muslim nations have continued to practice their faith underground, knowing that there would be dire consequences if they were caught. Religion is a touchy subject. I believe in freedom of religion - however, my choice in religion doesn't necessarily impact anyone else negatively. But if someone's religion for example required killing an innocent person, that is no longer the case - besides being a serious moral issue. Then again, in the absence of religion, the law of the country will also shape one's morals as well. That "incentive to do or not do certain things" plays a part in the mind of someone determining whether something is right or wrong.
In reality, if Apple wanted to go into business as a software vendor, they wouldn't be undercutting MS to do it. They would gain market share, not on price but because people would be convinced through marketing that MacOS will work better with their Ipods.
Apple does not want to get into supporting their OS on any hardware, because, frankly, it might be worse than Windows at doing it. If they took that step and failed, they might never recover from it. Like you said, they want to stay in business and right now the best way is to keep their hardware and software development tight and market the hell out of it.
The point is not whether there is a services GUI. That was your example.
The point is the multitude of things that are not available to perform in the GUI. You seem to enjoy doing things via the command line because you find it quicker, but not every user has the know-how to do this and needs a graphical interface to figure it out. Too many functions involve going online and researching how to do something or why something doesn't work, and having to run a number of commands in your terminal window in order to solve the problem or perform the task. What MacOS and Windows have both done is make this entirely unnecessary either by making the task intuitive or at least providing a GUI for it that you can get help to use.
The law as passed by the Senate specifically allows for both criminal and civil forfeiture. The law does not change Civil forfeiture. It simply specifically includes unauthorized distribution of copyrighted media as set forth in the act. All they have done is draw the line in the sand a bit clearer so that the existing law can be applied.