On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Uri Bruck wrote:
>
>
> I think the newsforge article misses an important point. From the article:
>
> "
> I have friends who work for Microsoft, and they are perfectly nice people.
> But I'm sorry, this is over the line. A company that makes this kind of
> threat in response to requests that it follow the basic rules of free
> enterprise and competitive capitalism
> "
>
> Microsoft *is* playing by the rules of competitive capitalism. That's how
> it got to a big near-monopoly. The emergence of such monstrosities is an
> inevitable consequence of a free market economy.
>
What? Can you honestly call the U.S. market, much less the global market,
a Laissez-Faire Capitalism one? I don't.
The reason Microsoft became so big is because it used many techniques
which its competitors did not. Most of which were and are legitimate.
(refer to the Corel-Draw thread for a small example). In an LFC economy,
other companies would have had the sense to do the same. Or they would
have revolted against Microsoft and endors an alternative to Win3.11,
MS-DOS, Win95, and the rest of Microsoft gaining-power trail.
It is possible that a completely free market will have a monopoly. But
this monoply will not be abusive AFA its costumers is concerned. An
anti-trust law is a kludge on top of a cob-web of kludgy acts that aim to
make the situation better by incrementaly changing the law system instead
of re-factoring it and removing destructive laws.
I'll give you an example:
1. Copyright has to be protected.
2. Computers and Digital Communication make it very easy for it to be
violated.
Therefore:
3. Let's enact the DMCA that will make it illegal to break content
scrambling schemes, despite the fact that they can never be failproof.
And this is just a small example.
And here's a funny quote about the subject (I think it's from the FreeBSD
fortunes):
<<<
There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the
two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit
inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent
postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor,
the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo
recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback,
magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave
radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical
digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one
got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?
>>>
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> Thanks,
> Uri
> http://translation.israel.net
>
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Amir Tal wrote:
>
> > Didn't know if I should laugh or cry when I saw a post at Newsforge that
> > says the following :
> >
> > "Microsoft management is now threatening to stop shipping Windows
> > completely if the next federal court decision goes against them"
> >
> > How real, and how logic this so called "threat" sounds ?
> > I, for one. Think its ridicules, and just shows how desperate MS are
> > about the blow they are about
> > To suffer from the federal court.
> >
> > Full article at newsforge :
> > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/05/0232253&mode=thread
> > Little pole a am having at whatsup.co.il about this :
> > http://whatsup.homelinux.com/pollBooth.php?op=results&pollID=11&mode=&or
> > der=&thold=
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> > Amir Tal, System Administrator
> > Whatsup - Linux related news
> > And support - in hebrew !
> > icq : 15748705
> > http://www.whatsup.co.il
> > ------------------------------
> >
> >
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
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