This will not surprise anyone who knows about computer

[fpb]

How in the name of Hell and of every variety of evil did Norton Antivirus ever become the best-selling commercial protection software? The damned thing is as damaging as the viruses it's supposed to fight. It has just caused me the most elaborate and unmanageable computer crash I have ever seen, which even led to me being physically injured (as I was removing the battery and the power cable, the only way I could see to shut the machine down, it fell over straight on my ankle, where it cut right into the flesh). To misquote the old song, Norton is a moron.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So much for the unthinking believers in the wonders of the free market and the efficiency of private corporations.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

*bitter laughter* Odd how this topic keeps coming up so much of late.

I really, really *want* to like Linux, you know? I'm always, ideologically, rooting for the underdog in the tech world. Linux. Mac. Nintendo. The guys who are *different*, who don't follow the monolithic corporate groupthink of Microsoft and Sony.

"If you can get it to work, Linux works beautifully." Well, so far, I haven't gotten past the first clause of that sentence. Once I do, I'm sure I'll rejoice and never look back.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that without the free market and the private corporations, we probably wouldn’t have computers at all; and if we did, the operating system would be written and maintained by some department of the state. Bureaucracy is odious wherever we find it. The sole advantage of Mr. Gates’s bureaucracy is that Microsoft can go out of business if enough people choose to stop buying its products. If we voted on operating systems, there would be no legal alternative anywhere.

I can forgive the free market many of its sins because it lets me take my business across the road. As Churchill said of democracy, capitalism is the worst of all economic systems, except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You speak as though big business had anything to do with the free market. Oligopoly, let alone monopoly, is not free market.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Where a free market exists on any significant scale, big business is bound to arise, because a market that forces businesses to remain small is not free. Of course oligopoly is not a free market; it’s a disease that afflicts free markets.

—But abusus non tollit usum; and in this case the abusus arises from the free decision of businesses and consumers to ignore alternatives. Freedom unfortunately includes the freedom to make foolish choices. As long as those alternatives remain viable, the market is doing a job that regulation has never accomplished and isn’t suited for.