it takes people to have the guts and will to take to the streets and make their feelings known before things change
Absolutely true, but it's a lot easier to get that courage when you've communicated ahead of time with thousands of others and you know they'll be there too.
I wouldn't be surprised if (at least in significant part) this is to push early sales of Windows 7 licenses. Kind of funny - leverage the reluctance to leave the old(est) OS for fear of ending up with the old(er) OS to make sales of your new OS go up.
I can see why an XP shop would go ahead and get Windows 7 licenses for new machines ASAP so they could downgrade them to XP rather than being stuck with a heterogeneous (XP and Vista) configuration and having to support two OSes.
2 years ago I got an Athlon FX-2 6000+, a motherboard that supports 16 gigs of ram, a GeForce 8600 GTS (512MB), 4 gigs of ram, and a 256 GB SATAII hard drive for about $5-600 total and just threw it in an existing case with other peripherals. At today's prices I can upgrade the ram to 16 gigs and the vid card to something more recent pretty dang cheap.
The CPU is a bit dated but not much of what I do is CPU bound anyway. I run a lot of concurrent VMs that mostly just sit around and play a game here or there.
Just gotta shop around a bit when you buy. When I bought that stuff it was hardly high end - it all cost less than $600.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voters.
Fixed it for ya. Problem here is that the voters don't care enough to make sure the elections are working the way they should. They want to care about it once every 4 years, 2 years at best, and then go back to caring about their MySpace page. If people cared more about the politics running their nation in general they'd raise more of a fuss about things like voting machines' discrepancies.
Most likely this was a microsite that a small marketing company pitched to either ASUS or Microsoft. Marketing companies frequently get little ideas like this and approach someone that isn't currently their client with them. Because of their low cost they get approved pretty often and you end up with a bunch of little non-uniform sites representing the end-client all around the interspace.
Essentially you just dump a list of installed packages to a file then when you re-install you tell apt to install them. Tricks like that and having a separate/home partition brought my time from re-install to up and running like normal to practically nothing.
I can see why you'd think that if you hadn't been using PHP. For a long time PHP has supported this:
$myArray['arbitraryString'] = $value;
Or:
$myArray[$arbitraryNumber] = $value;
It would create that member of that array and assign the value. So since I'm allowed to put anything I want between the [] and it'd work, it makes sense that if I didn't care what the index value was I could leave it blank and one would be automatically assigned.
I'm thrilled there isn't a law against me being alcohol in gas stations in Utah. The Draconian laws of physics and chemistry prevent me from being alcohol everywhere in other states. How lame.
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
Not entirely true. Qt Assistant puts MSDN to shame, and the documentation on php.net isn't so bad either. Sure there isn't good documentation in every arena that open source touches, but it touches many many arenas. In some ( like the above mentioned Qt Assistant) open source stuff trumps MSDN.
I feel as though I have a right to digital copies so that I can make a backup copy in the event that the physical media is damaged
I feel the same way. I asked the same question in a DMCA seminar at my college
The response was that the DMCA states that benefiting directly or indirectly from a copy is violation of copyright law. In this case you have the indirect benefit of escaping the normal wear and tear of the method of purchase you chose (CD), and are in violation.
That, to me, destroys the credibility of the DMCA.
This is another reason it'd be smart for Microsoft to say that Linux is a bigger competitor than Apple if they fear Apple. It would be smart for them to downplay Apple as a competitor as much as they can so people will think that Apple isn't about to change the nature of the market (and thus they should not bother to consider switching to Apple or adopting a cross-platform strategy).
Linux is held at large as being a minor player and a hacker's OS. So if they can say "Even Linux is a bigger player than Apple" then they are effectively saying "Apple is irrelevant, you may safely ignore them."
Ok - bad example on my part. A better one would be hiking prices for their competitors and only their competitors (or finding a more shifty way to do that in a slightly less blatant but effectively similar fashion).
A free market does not guarantee choice to be free of marginal costs. A free market does not guarantee you the right to get whatever you want from whomever you want, at whatever price you want.
Absolutely correct
A free market does not guarantee choice to be free of marginal costs.A free market does not guarantee you the right to get whatever you want from whomever you want, at whatever price you want.
Also absolutely correct. But what I'm arguing here is that it's not a marginal cost. It's a very significant cost - up to double in some cases, more in others. That's not marginal -- and a very large non-marginal price difference, while not a literal barrier to purchase, is a practical enough one in enough cases that the choice is just a token gesture. It's not a feasible choice, and nobody will choose it without making great sacrifice. If that discrepancy between the feasibility of the choices is introduced by an entity that has power over both options we have a very unlevel playing field.
So... it's somehow my fault everyone loves my food and the other food producers can't compete? Ok, moving on...
Nope, as a matter of fact congrats to the winner in this matter - there is not a problem with having a monopoly by any existing economic model I know of. There's a problem with unfairly leveraging it. You can have all the market share you want - just be fair with it.
I'm going to assume by your analogy that you have a pretty negative opinion of Windows or MS by comparing it to hemlock, which makes your analogy inherently biased.
You seem to miss the part where I said:
The analogy only applies as far as "there are LOTS of people that want to buy one and don't want to buy the other".
So the food/hemlock analogy is explicitly stated to apply only to the demand for one and not the other, and for reference in the sentence before that I also explicitly stated that I was not even implying that XP is to Vista as food is to poison. I was very specific in the scope of the analogy, so your assumption in the face of a direct clarification to the opposite gives me the impression you were expecting to hear something, and believed you did.
Now I completely agree with your points about the bulk discount on hemlock and the lack of cost on non-bulk purchased items and the like -- all that made plenty of sense, and in this analogy you're absolutely right so hat's off to you there, but this is where we verged in logic:
Of course, you can always grow your own organic food, or open your own market and have people come and buy food from you.
At that point I broke out of the analogy realizing it doesn't apply, because people can't make their own Windows. Many people are trying really hard (wine... reactos) but they have to reverse engineer it and navigate a patent minefield with little to no budget for lawyers. So when we realize that (and it's my fault for the imperfection of the analogy in this particular respect) we realize the option (jumping back to the analogy) is that they can't make their own food. They really do HAVE to get it from the guy with the monopoly this case.
Ultimately, PC makers can't seem to make money on systems with Linux installed.
I agree, but I also mentioned in the post you responded to that that's because people need Windows because of 3rd party apps that are Windows only, or (like the Adobe suite) are Win/Mac but they balk at the cost of a Mac.
Well for one it would take most end users I know more than 2 hours to install XP on a new machine that they have no driver disks for, and if they bought it without an OS it's once in a blue moon that it comes with drivers. So if they're not going to pay someone they'll be spending a day.
Two - It also takes time to find a machine at a suitable price and suitable specs that doesn't come with an OS preloaded. The major (IE affordable) vendors don't sell them or limit which ones (usually low end) you can buy without an OS. The small vendors offer less reliable support and higher prices, as well as limited options. The lack of options inherently means it will take much longer to find a suitable machine.
All of this is an unreasonable thing to expect from an average end user - they will either be too intimidated of screwing it up or they'll end up spending hours and hours shopping around and then a long time (or yet more money) paying a geek to install it for them. So it's give up or pony up, and it's not a small fee (in both time and money involved). This is not an absolute propellant, but it's strong enough that it can easily be construed as an unfair one.
The option becomes "don't get a PC" or "get a PC with Vista" in most peoples' eyes because the uninformed employee at best buy says "you can't get it without Vista" or they happen to be more informed than most and understand how to get one without Vista, but the task is too daunting and would put a stop to their already busy and demanding lives for a damaging amount of time.
It's not an unsurmountable barrier, but neither is being a Doctor - most people don't get there.
UI elements that look like they come from some amateur 1990s Mac/Windows clone
Well I don't know about a lot of the other stuff you mentioned because apparently it doesn't matter enough to me to be important, but I'll say this - Linux desktops are, to date, the only ones I can successfully use a dark theme on all the time. I really like dark themes because they're much easier on my eyes and increase the length of my work day, and especially for coding they're great - your syntax highlighting works wonders on a black background vs. a white one for visual recognition.
In windows and OSX (haven't used Mac before OSX) there were always dialogs or UI elements that didn't understand that borders between elements, fonts, etc shouldn't be black. The few (but not non-existent) people that cared about such things apparently aren't enough to warrant commercial developers' time, but were enough to fix it themselves and submit a patch when they ran into the issue. There are countless third party apps that don't respect system themes (either in whole or in places), a decent number of first party apps that don't, and sometimes the theming engine itself doesn't give you the control necessary to make a dark theme. To be fair I haven't tried this stuff with Vista, but if you want to talk about bad UI well... that's the reason I haven't tried Vista. Just their file selection dialog gives me instant ADD and makes me lose the clarity and focus I have on every other OS, including earlier versions of Windows.
As far as amateur UI elements - it really depends what desktop environments you use and what theme you apply. I'd agree most of the default themes aren't too hot, but that's why you can switch themes. I remember using the Windows machines at a lab back in 2005 and every day when I came home to my (well themed) *nix machine I thought "You know... that really is beautiful".
Now I've noticed some text and fonts not behaving well in KDE (and none of the others), but other than that none of your critiques have ever so much as come to my attention so they must not be all that major to everyone.
I think a scenario more realistic than Google using their advertising monopoly (if they have one - I haven't really verified this to my content) is Google using their advertising monopoly to promote their other products.
For instance, advertising Google docs for free (hey it's their product, why charge themselves?) but charging companies for Microsoft Office advertisements( I phrased it this way because MS outsources some of them).
I think a monopoly in marketing is a powerful position indeed. I currently like Google, but that's because they haven't made too many shifty moves yet. I'll be keeping an eye on them. I'd really like for them to just keep doing what they do well legally.
The catch is that you can't downgrade home editions of vista.
I think that's the problem we're discussing. If you want XP you have to pay for a business version of Vista, no matter what kind of XP machine you're running. Afterwards you often have the privilege of paying OEM fees (like the $20 dell charge mentioned in the article).
The OEM fees can't be blamed on Microsoft until you realize that Microsoft encouraged OEMs to support Vista only by default and the same goes for hardware manufacturers and their drivers. Then it makes plenty of sense.
Disclaimer: I am an advocate of Linux and haven't used Windows (other than an occasional VM or a customer's machine) for a few years.
Support costs for another OS are far from insignificant. If a large organization sells machines with an OS they have to be able to support it if they want to compete, and training or hiring techs for a completely different OS just isn't cheap.
The inroad that I think Linux may have with big OEMs is that eventually the training costs will offset the savings in license costs. If it hasn't yet, or if it wasn't perceived to have done so by management, it would make sense for them to drop it.
Personally I think companies that are looking more long term will be the first to realize it's worth it and really commit.
They're only allowed to profit from a free market, and a free market requires choices. Remove the choices and you remove the freedom. People can still choose XP sure, but they have to pay for Vista first, which means they can't choose not to buy Vista to get XP, so they have the choice of buying Vista or buying XP and Vista, or switching to a platform that likely doesn't yet have the one damn program they need to do their jobs, making it useless to them.
And if you think they can buy XP without buying Vista keep in mind that XP is only available to OEMs now, and the OEMs that still offer XP machines either charge (enough that you may as well have bought Vista) more for them or are really small shops that can't offer the same guarantees that the large shops offer: in other words a big enough risk that monetarily you may as well have paid a lot more.
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it takes people to have the guts and will to take to the streets and make their feelings known before things change
Absolutely true, but it's a lot easier to get that courage when you've communicated ahead of time with thousands of others and you know they'll be there too.
I wouldn't be surprised if (at least in significant part) this is to push early sales of Windows 7 licenses. Kind of funny - leverage the reluctance to leave the old(est) OS for fear of ending up with the old(er) OS to make sales of your new OS go up.
I can see why an XP shop would go ahead and get Windows 7 licenses for new machines ASAP so they could downgrade them to XP rather than being stuck with a heterogeneous (XP and Vista) configuration and having to support two OSes.
Amen, brother! Over here in Idaho I get *so* sick of all the corvettes I see. They're EVERYWHERE!
2 years ago I got an Athlon FX-2 6000+, a motherboard that supports 16 gigs of ram, a GeForce 8600 GTS (512MB), 4 gigs of ram, and a 256 GB SATAII hard drive for about $5-600 total and just threw it in an existing case with other peripherals. At today's prices I can upgrade the ram to 16 gigs and the vid card to something more recent pretty dang cheap.
The CPU is a bit dated but not much of what I do is CPU bound anyway. I run a lot of concurrent VMs that mostly just sit around and play a game here or there.
Just gotta shop around a bit when you buy. When I bought that stuff it was hardly high end - it all cost less than $600.
The machines that protect democracy include jet fighters, naval warcraft, guns, rockets, bombs ---- and voters.
Fixed it for ya. Problem here is that the voters don't care enough to make sure the elections are working the way they should. They want to care about it once every 4 years, 2 years at best, and then go back to caring about their MySpace page. If people cared more about the politics running their nation in general they'd raise more of a fuss about things like voting machines' discrepancies.
Right here.
Most likely this was a microsite that a small marketing company pitched to either ASUS or Microsoft. Marketing companies frequently get little ideas like this and approach someone that isn't currently their client with them. Because of their low cost they get approved pretty often and you end up with a bunch of little non-uniform sites representing the end-client all around the interspace.
If you know ahead of time that you'll be re-installing you can save/restore your package selections and save a bunch of time: http://jwoffenden.blogspot.com/2009/03/yet-another-great-trick-with-apt-get.html
/home partition brought my time from re-install to up and running like normal to practically nothing.
Essentially you just dump a list of installed packages to a file then when you re-install you tell apt to install them. Tricks like that and having a separate
I can see why you'd think that if you hadn't been using PHP. For a long time PHP has supported this:
$myArray['arbitraryString'] = $value;
Or:
$myArray[$arbitraryNumber] = $value;
It would create that member of that array and assign the value. So since I'm allowed to put anything I want between the [] and it'd work, it makes sense that if I didn't care what the index value was I could leave it blank and one would be automatically assigned.
Holy shit, there are other /.ers in Idaho?
I'm thrilled there isn't a law against me being alcohol in gas stations in Utah. The Draconian laws of physics and chemistry prevent me from being alcohol everywhere in other states. How lame.
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
Not entirely true. Qt Assistant puts MSDN to shame, and the documentation on php.net isn't so bad either. Sure there isn't good documentation in every arena that open source touches, but it touches many many arenas. In some ( like the above mentioned Qt Assistant) open source stuff trumps MSDN.
I feel as though I have a right to digital copies so that I can make a backup copy in the event that the physical media is damaged
I feel the same way. I asked the same question in a DMCA seminar at my college
The response was that the DMCA states that benefiting directly or indirectly from a copy is violation of copyright law. In this case you have the indirect benefit of escaping the normal wear and tear of the method of purchase you chose (CD), and are in violation.
That, to me, destroys the credibility of the DMCA.
I checked and it's not registered yet. Am I the only one that's disappointed in /.?
This is another reason it'd be smart for Microsoft to say that Linux is a bigger competitor than Apple if they fear Apple. It would be smart for them to downplay Apple as a competitor as much as they can so people will think that Apple isn't about to change the nature of the market (and thus they should not bother to consider switching to Apple or adopting a cross-platform strategy).
Linux is held at large as being a minor player and a hacker's OS. So if they can say "Even Linux is a bigger player than Apple" then they are effectively saying "Apple is irrelevant, you may safely ignore them."
Ok - bad example on my part. A better one would be hiking prices for their competitors and only their competitors (or finding a more shifty way to do that in a slightly less blatant but effectively similar fashion).
A free market does not guarantee choice to be free of marginal costs. A free market does not guarantee you the right to get whatever you want from whomever you want, at whatever price you want.
Absolutely correct
A free market does not guarantee choice to be free of marginal costs.A free market does not guarantee you the right to get whatever you want from whomever you want, at whatever price you want.
Also absolutely correct. But what I'm arguing here is that it's not a marginal cost. It's a very significant cost - up to double in some cases, more in others. That's not marginal -- and a very large non-marginal price difference, while not a literal barrier to purchase, is a practical enough one in enough cases that the choice is just a token gesture. It's not a feasible choice, and nobody will choose it without making great sacrifice. If that discrepancy between the feasibility of the choices is introduced by an entity that has power over both options we have a very unlevel playing field.
So... it's somehow my fault everyone loves my food and the other food producers can't compete? Ok, moving on...
Nope, as a matter of fact congrats to the winner in this matter - there is not a problem with having a monopoly by any existing economic model I know of. There's a problem with unfairly leveraging it. You can have all the market share you want - just be fair with it.
I'm going to assume by your analogy that you have a pretty negative opinion of Windows or MS by comparing it to hemlock, which makes your analogy inherently biased.
You seem to miss the part where I said:
The analogy only applies as far as "there are LOTS of people that want to buy one and don't want to buy the other".
So the food/hemlock analogy is explicitly stated to apply only to the demand for one and not the other, and for reference in the sentence before that I also explicitly stated that I was not even implying that XP is to Vista as food is to poison. I was very specific in the scope of the analogy, so your assumption in the face of a direct clarification to the opposite gives me the impression you were expecting to hear something, and believed you did.
Now I completely agree with your points about the bulk discount on hemlock and the lack of cost on non-bulk purchased items and the like -- all that made plenty of sense, and in this analogy you're absolutely right so hat's off to you there, but this is where we verged in logic:
Of course, you can always grow your own organic food, or open your own market and have people come and buy food from you.
At that point I broke out of the analogy realizing it doesn't apply, because people can't make their own Windows. Many people are trying really hard (wine... reactos) but they have to reverse engineer it and navigate a patent minefield with little to no budget for lawyers. So when we realize that (and it's my fault for the imperfection of the analogy in this particular respect) we realize the option (jumping back to the analogy) is that they can't make their own food. They really do HAVE to get it from the guy with the monopoly this case.
Ultimately, PC makers can't seem to make money on systems with Linux installed.
I agree, but I also mentioned in the post you responded to that that's because people need Windows because of 3rd party apps that are Windows only, or (like the Adobe suite) are Win/Mac but they balk at the cost of a Mac.
Well for one it would take most end users I know more than 2 hours to install XP on a new machine that they have no driver disks for, and if they bought it without an OS it's once in a blue moon that it comes with drivers. So if they're not going to pay someone they'll be spending a day.
Two - It also takes time to find a machine at a suitable price and suitable specs that doesn't come with an OS preloaded. The major (IE affordable) vendors don't sell them or limit which ones (usually low end) you can buy without an OS. The small vendors offer less reliable support and higher prices, as well as limited options. The lack of options inherently means it will take much longer to find a suitable machine.
All of this is an unreasonable thing to expect from an average end user - they will either be too intimidated of screwing it up or they'll end up spending hours and hours shopping around and then a long time (or yet more money) paying a geek to install it for them. So it's give up or pony up, and it's not a small fee (in both time and money involved). This is not an absolute propellant, but it's strong enough that it can easily be construed as an unfair one.
The option becomes "don't get a PC" or "get a PC with Vista" in most peoples' eyes because the uninformed employee at best buy says "you can't get it without Vista" or they happen to be more informed than most and understand how to get one without Vista, but the task is too daunting and would put a stop to their already busy and demanding lives for a damaging amount of time.
It's not an unsurmountable barrier, but neither is being a Doctor - most people don't get there.
Almost random colour choice for UI elements
UI elements that look like they come from some amateur 1990s Mac/Windows clone
Well I don't know about a lot of the other stuff you mentioned because apparently it doesn't matter enough to me to be important, but I'll say this - Linux desktops are, to date, the only ones I can successfully use a dark theme on all the time. I really like dark themes because they're much easier on my eyes and increase the length of my work day, and especially for coding they're great - your syntax highlighting works wonders on a black background vs. a white one for visual recognition.
In windows and OSX (haven't used Mac before OSX) there were always dialogs or UI elements that didn't understand that borders between elements, fonts, etc shouldn't be black. The few (but not non-existent) people that cared about such things apparently aren't enough to warrant commercial developers' time, but were enough to fix it themselves and submit a patch when they ran into the issue. There are countless third party apps that don't respect system themes (either in whole or in places), a decent number of first party apps that don't, and sometimes the theming engine itself doesn't give you the control necessary to make a dark theme. To be fair I haven't tried this stuff with Vista, but if you want to talk about bad UI well... that's the reason I haven't tried Vista. Just their file selection dialog gives me instant ADD and makes me lose the clarity and focus I have on every other OS, including earlier versions of Windows.
As far as amateur UI elements - it really depends what desktop environments you use and what theme you apply. I'd agree most of the default themes aren't too hot, but that's why you can switch themes. I remember using the Windows machines at a lab back in 2005 and every day when I came home to my (well themed) *nix machine I thought "You know... that really is beautiful".
Now I've noticed some text and fonts not behaving well in KDE (and none of the others), but other than that none of your critiques have ever so much as come to my attention so they must not be all that major to everyone.
I think a scenario more realistic than Google using their advertising monopoly (if they have one - I haven't really verified this to my content) is Google using their advertising monopoly to promote their other products.
For instance, advertising Google docs for free (hey it's their product, why charge themselves?) but charging companies for Microsoft Office advertisements( I phrased it this way because MS outsources some of them).
I think a monopoly in marketing is a powerful position indeed. I currently like Google, but that's because they haven't made too many shifty moves yet. I'll be keeping an eye on them. I'd really like for them to just keep doing what they do well legally.
I would assume it is implied knowledge, but a business is obligated to be as profitable as lawfully possible to their shareholders and employees.
(Emphasis mine)
Oh snap. You seem to have missed a detail.
The catch is that you can't downgrade home editions of vista.
I think that's the problem we're discussing. If you want XP you have to pay for a business version of Vista, no matter what kind of XP machine you're running. Afterwards you often have the privilege of paying OEM fees (like the $20 dell charge mentioned in the article).
The OEM fees can't be blamed on Microsoft until you realize that Microsoft encouraged OEMs to support Vista only by default and the same goes for hardware manufacturers and their drivers. Then it makes plenty of sense.
Disclaimer: I am an advocate of Linux and haven't used Windows (other than an occasional VM or a customer's machine) for a few years.
Support costs for another OS are far from insignificant. If a large organization sells machines with an OS they have to be able to support it if they want to compete, and training or hiring techs for a completely different OS just isn't cheap.
The inroad that I think Linux may have with big OEMs is that eventually the training costs will offset the savings in license costs. If it hasn't yet, or if it wasn't perceived to have done so by management, it would make sense for them to drop it.
Personally I think companies that are looking more long term will be the first to realize it's worth it and really commit.
They're only allowed to profit from a free market, and a free market requires choices. Remove the choices and you remove the freedom. People can still choose XP sure, but they have to pay for Vista first, which means they can't choose not to buy Vista to get XP, so they have the choice of buying Vista or buying XP and Vista, or switching to a platform that likely doesn't yet have the one damn program they need to do their jobs, making it useless to them.
And if you think they can buy XP without buying Vista keep in mind that XP is only available to OEMs now, and the OEMs that still offer XP machines either charge (enough that you may as well have bought Vista) more for them or are really small shops that can't offer the same guarantees that the large shops offer: in other words a big enough risk that monetarily you may as well have paid a lot more.