Re: OT, Yorktown stuff, again

r.e.ballard_at_usa.net
Date: 07/17/05 

Date: 17 Jul 2005 14:37:26 -0700

billwg wrote:
> "Rick" <none@nomail.com> wrote in message
> news:pan.2005.07.16.22.36.10.761626@nomail.com...
> :
> : Taliban? You mean those guys living as if they were still in the 1800's.
> : Beeg Deel. BTW, Bin Lauden and his guys seem to be able to blow things up
> : all over the world.
> :
> Only in places they can walk to, Rick. And only now and then. I think it
> will spur the development of things that can be used to keep better track of
> explosive materials and other things that can be used to create widespread
> harm.

One problem. Bin Ladin was CIA Trained to fight the best troops of the
Soviet Union and eventually drove out the USSR.

The CIA taught him how to make plastique with bottles of aspirin,
rubbing alcohol, and battery acid (sulfuric acid). None of these are
hard to aquire.

C4 is similarly easy to make and doesn't take much more.

Given that our CIA taught him how to do this, I'm sure he has had no
trouble teaching all of his followers and recruits how to do this.

We can't keep the terrorists off the planes, but we can keep Ted
Kennedy from appearing at a series of rallies and fund raisers during
the final stages of a political election.

The DHS has turned the patriot act into a means to circumvent the
constitution by including everything from drug smugglers to stock
brokers in the overall umbrelly of "Terrorists". If a known terrorist
calls his broker to trade stock, the broker could become a "terrorist".
 The patriot act says that we can wiretap any phone that might be used
by a terrorist. Find the 10 people most frequently called by the known
terrorists phone, then find the most frequently called numbers used by
those 10 people, and you can wire tap those phones because the
terrorist might be using one of those phones.

If you just happened to hear about a drug deal or a shady stock trade
in the process, that could still be used in court because you were
wiretapping a terrorist.

One of the "hit list" is a noncustodial parent behind on child support
by 3 months, pick him up and send him to guantanimo. One of those
"potential terrorists" mentions a shady tax practice - send him to
Guantanimo.

It seems that the constitution no longer applies if you are associated
with a terrorist.

Ben Franklin once said:

  Those who give up liberty for security, will lose both.

He was right.

This is just a dressed up version of the McCarthy With Hunts of the
1950s. Instead of going after anyone who might have associated with a
Communist, we are simply replacing the word Communist with Terrorist,
and instead of public senate hearings, we're sending them to an island
across from a sworn enemy, which means that the press, lawyers, and
other public "watch dogs" cannot just snoop around any time they feel
like it.

If someone gets a cold and I give him 10 ml of eppeniphrine, that's
medical treatment. But if I give him 30 ml/hour for 30 days, I can
keep him in chemical terror and sleep deprived for 30 days - that's
torture.

There's a lot of medical equipment down there at Guantanimo.

> : > : > If you really want to have an effect on things, take Windows and add
> : > : I did improve it. I took it off my computer.
> : > Is that the best you can do?
> : Well... yes. It can't do anything to my data anymore.
> :
> Well, I think that it is silly to try to supplant a completely dominant
> product like Windows in a market that size with a new product offering and
> do it on a shoestring budget as is being touted here. Marketing theory says
> that will never happen. Never.

Economic theory says that it's inevitable. You see, econmic theory of
supply and demand says that a monopoly, which is a single supplier
controlling sold distribution to many customers - will fail to
innovate, will maximize it's profits, and will attempt to extend it's
control.

In taking these actions, the high-profit revenue causes more
competitiors to enter the market. They will attempt to build a bigger
better product, and sell it cheaper, because they can still make such
huge profits.

The customers will ultimately want the competition because each
competitor will attempt to offer innovations and features and will
offer these at lower prices than those offered by the monopoly. The
customer gets more product for less money.

Marketing theory asserts that it is possible to alter demand and reduce
the number of suppliers by agressively marketing those features over
which you have exclusive control. Eventually, your brand becomes so
well known compared to your competitors that you can charge a higher
price and get bigger profits than your competitors.

Ironically, Microsoft plays both economics and marketing theory
together. Microsoft refuses to allow the OEMS any flexibility in the
configuration of their products. In effect, all OEMs are competing
with exactly the same products, even down to the "Microsoft Certified
Hardware Platform". As a result, the OEMs are making almost no profit,
because they are selling exactly the same product as their competitor.
They can tweak - adding more RAM, faster CPUs, or bigger hard drives,
but essentially, it's same product from many suppliers.

At the same time, Microsoft uses Marketing theory to maintain it's own
profit margins. When Microsoft first got it's monopoly, the average PC
only had 1 floppy drive, and MS-DOS took about 1/3 of that floppy.
There simply wasn't room for another operating system on the floppy.

When Windows came out, most hard drives were about 40 megabytes. This
was actually big enough for multiple operating systems as demonstrated
by IBM who sold OS/2 and Windows 3.1 running concurrently on the same
machine. However, Microsoft had established such a strong control over
the market, that they were able to persuade most OEMs to offer Windows
3.1 exclusively.

Just before Windows 95 came out, hard drives had grown to over 200
megabytes and many had over 400 megabytes. This was more than enough
room for Windows and Linux to be installed on the same machine. A user
could easily boot into either Windows or Linux each time the machine
was powered up or rebooted.

Microsoft solved this problem by "wiping the drive clean", wiping out
the boot partition and partition mapping table and creating a single
partition which was formatted before Windows 95 was installed. Many of
the very first custsomers to attempt to upgrade from Windows 3.1 to
Windows 95 were unpleasantly surprised by this behavior. It was
deliberate sabotage, and had the customer not clicked a "signature"
accepting the terms of the Microsoft EULA, it would have been criminal
and illegal - a violation of a law which made it illegal to tamper with
a computer's data or configuration - without the user's express
permission. In clicking the EULA acceptance button (usually without
reading it), the user had given his express permission.

Microsoft also had new terms for the OEMs ,ESPECIALLY IBM. They were
not allowed to alter the boot sequence or partitioning in any way. The
machine would boot Windows, only Windows, and would only run those
applications installed by Microsoft - when the machine was first booted
by the end-user. Again, this would have been illegal callusion, but
the OEMs agreed to it and competitors such as Red Hat didn't have the
deep pockets needed to fight it.

To get IBM to sign, they resorted to blackmail and extortion,
threatening to stop selling IBM ANY version of Windows. They also
demanded $30 million in cash for machines that were shipped with OS/2
but not with Windows - because IBM couldn't PROVE that they weren't
shipped with Windows.

Microsoft and Bill Gates had actually turned Windows into "corporate
cocaine". It gave the corporations the ability to be more productive -
when it wasn't crashing - but now OEMs and Corporate customers couldn't
even consider using any substitute. Even using Linux as "corporate
methadone", a way to taper off of Windows and switch to a free-market
competitive environment, wasn't possible because Microsoft was running
license audits of every corporate desktop using a feature they had
wired into Windows 95. A CIO who didn't upgrade when he was expected
to, or who was to flexible about using Linux, could find his company
being audited for unpurchased software ranging from pkzip or winzip to
Windows or Netscape Navigator. Since even unregistered shareware
constitutes a copyright violation punishable by up to 5 years/offense
and $150,000/offense in fines, plus damages, it was enough incentive to
cave into Microsoft's demands for a shut-out of Linux and upgrade
orders at Microsoft's schedule.

Marketing 101 says that you can motivate individuals with sex,
prestige, and self-esteem. You can motivate corporate officials with
power, profits, and productivity. But the other side of Marketing 101
is that you can ALSO motivate purchases by THREATENING these things.
Remember the mouthwash ads that suggested that you might have
"halitosis" and not even know it? Well, Microsoft could threaten to
"pull the plug" on Windows licenses, which could adversely impact
productivity, profits, and power or influence within the organization.
It was a form of extortion actually, but the terms of the Microsoft
Corporate Licensing agreement gave Microsoft the right to revoke the
licenses at any time, for pretty much any cause. A single machine that
had not been proven to be properly licensed (upgraded to a newer
version of Word for example) could mean that ALL Windows licenses could
be unilaterally revoked.

Again, the corporate officer agreed to these terms, often without
properly consulting the company's legal department, or even against the
advice of corporate council. Had they not agreed to these terms in
advance, such a threat would have constituted extortion. Microsoft was
threatening to effectively shut down every PC in the company, giving
them no time to perform back-ups, to formulate a transition plan, or
even print out documents which had been store or archived on Windows
workstations and Windows servers. This would have bankrupted any
company and effectively shut them down. Microsoft knew this. It was
also a very effective way to force corporate customers to sign even
more restrictive agreements when the time came for renewals.

> If there is a shortcoming within Windows that offers an opportunity to
> service all or even a subset of the Windows users,

For example offering Cygwin as a way to offer Linux software to Windows
users?

This is one element of an effective transition plan that can make it
possible for corporate customers to transition to Linux in a very short
time frame.

> it is far more reasonable
> to just create the product and offer it for sale.

Or give it away as the case may be.
It seem like any really successful product or feature that gets
marketed successfully to Windows users very quickly ends up being
userped by an inferior Microsoft shovelware offering.

If the "Brief" text editor is getting installed on 20% of the Windows
machines, let's make "notepad" a standard feature on every single
Windows machine. If Netscape Navigator is being installed on 30% of
the machines - let's rebrand their earlier product (Mosaic) as IE and
put it on every machine. If RealPlayer is being installed on 60% of
the Windows machines, then let's take an inferior product, add some
wiretapping features, and make it part of the standard installation of
every Windows machine.

I can't think of a company in the last 10 years, since the release of
Windows 95 who has introduced a significant improvement to Windows, and
is still in business today. Microsoft tried to stomp AntiVirus but
their implementation was no bad and so poorly supported that
Semantic/Nortan barely even slipped.
Adobe Acrobat Reader came out before Windows 95 and is still mostly a
free download.

> Even if MS responds by
> offering their own feature, you will have stolen a march on Redmond by some
> time period and can reap large rewards.

Unfortunately, if you have any debts, investors, or legal obligations,
you will likely be facing bankruptcy or worse. If you want to market a
product for Windows and want to make a "quick buck", then you had
better be ready to close up shop on a moment's notice.

> People talk about Stac Electronics
> as a poster child for MS aggressive market tactics, but consider that the
> Stac founders only spent a short amount of time and got back over a hundred
> million dollars in overall profits before they were laid to rest. That is
> not such a horrible fate, IMO, and it was enabled by a need in the DOS
> environment.

Stac was interesting, because it was a trivial application of a well
known concept. Limpel-Ziv compression had been around for years. And
compressing files as you stored them wasn't new either, unix had been
doing it for decades and pkzip had been around for quite a while too.

Ironically, Microsoft had created the demand for compression by failing
to expand the FAT filesystem. The 16 bit FAT file system was hitting
it's limits, and Microsoft's Shovelware for Windows was eating up over
1/2 the space on the drive. In addition, Linux was available by this
time, and Linux could easily read uncompressed FAT partitions but
coudn't read stacker compressed FAT partitions.

By the time the Stack case was settled (most of the profit you mention
seems to have come from that lawsuit), Windows had Fat32, and BIOS had
been redesigned to support logical mapping. In addition, most files
were now being stored in compressed form. Jpeg, MPEG, MP3, GIF, zip,
and qt formats were all compressed, and the compression was optimized
to the media format. For example, greater Video compression efficiency
was available by comparing one frame to the previous frame, and
compressing the deltas. Greater audio compression was available by
comparing the difference in amplitude a a log of the amplitude and then
compressing the deltas. JPEG compression compared the previous line,
then compressed the deltas.

> If you want to replace Microsoft, you have a hard task ahead. If you only
> want to get rich off your idea, you have a built-in road to success.

About the only thing that seems to provide any real revenue in the
Windows market is shareware. People publish kitchen-table software via
the web, people download, and if they really like it, they send a
payment via pay-pal or some other payment service.

Linspire has a very similar model. Users can download the typical
Linux applications, but they can also download numerous commercial
applications as well. In some cases, the user pays for the software
"up front" and can get a refund if they decide they didn't like it. In
other cases, the user gets an evaluation license and can register for a
permanant license if they want it.

Novell/SuSE, Red Hat, and Mandrake actually include the commercial
software in their distribution media. This usually means that the
application has been tested with the rest if the distribution and will
probably work with little more than a selection of the software during
software installation.

One of the good things about RPM based distributions such as Red Hat
and SuSE (or any other United Linux distribution) is that the package
manager can coordinate not only software installations, but also
software removal. For example, if you want to remove an application
that installed a library which is being used by others, RPM is smart
enough to know that you don't want to remove the library. Some times
RPM is too smart, insisting that you need a libarry that has been
replaced by a newer version which will also work. There are ways to
override these checks, but generally it's not necessary.

Almost any time I need to remove software from Windows, I end up doing
a full backup of all of my personal data to a USB or FireWire hard
drive, because I know that this Windows machine is not long for the
world. Most penquinistas refer to this as "DLL hell".

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