Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Operating systems are irrelevant
a less than brilliant David Gelernter wrote: (01)
>Some argue for Linux on economic and cultural grounds: Microsoft, people
>say, has driven up prices and suppressed innovation. But this is a ticklish
>argument at best: after all, over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony,
>computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper. Innovation has thrived. Our
>software is innovative; it has not been suppressed. On the contrary, more
>and more people get interested. (02)
Of course this completely ignores the fundamental problems of having
one's communications infrastructure dictate content decisions. Have the
phone company not only decide who you can call, but what you can say
after you connect.... "the music playing in the background during your
conversation has triggered a use fee and has caused the CD in your player
to self destruct"... If microsoft simply produced an OS that was simply
a platform on which technology could grow, then I think a much smaller
group of people would have problems. (03)
Palladium & hailstorm stand out as good examples of the types of controls
that monopoly power facilitates. The concept of a single, non democratic
trust authority for all commercial content certainly has the ring of
"I should care". Or perhaps the issue of granting root privileges on all
your hardware and software to an unsupervised, profit-based corporate
entity? Again, sure seems like I would care about things like that. (04)
While it may be true that we _should_ only care about OSes as much as we
care about the CPU, I think Gelertner should familiarize himself with
some of the extremely rudimentary arguments made in Code & Other
Laws of Cyberspace, by larry lessig. From that perspective, the rules
that govern the OS and the infrastructure are akin to laws of physics
in the less-virtual world. (05)
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I hope everyone is reading their license agreements from their
OS manufacturer these days.. (07)
bcl (08)