If you have a sloppy code base, yes, it could be very expensive to come into compliance. Possibly even so expensive that it's just impossible to do business there anymore without significant liability.

Exactly the same approach?

You have a failed understanding of history and current affairs.

You're perfect. Have any of the major news organizations asked you to apply to work for them?

No, obviously I know about the other stuff. I have an IBM AIX workstation in my collection that is Microchannel architecture. It's a Power 1 architecture system. The Power 1 chipset is on one of the microchannel cards.

But their microchannel Initiative in the PC market was their failed attempt to pull things back in a proprietary direction after their Open Architecture got way out of their control.

IBM did a ton of things with Minicomputers and Mainframes that I didn't mention.

IBM was a data processing company (punched card decks as databases, with card sorters, readers, printers to print selected fields off of cards, etc.) long before computers even existed. They were an IT company before the digital computer was invented.

IBM designed and championed the open architecture. The ISA bus, with slots with a particular pinout. The BIOS source code for machines up to the PC-AT was published in the tech ref manual which any customer could purchase. And not just the BIOS source code on the motherboard. The BIOS extensions on the EGA card and on the Hard Disk controller card (Xebec generation) were published in source code form. Also stuff like the schematics for the floppy drive, hard drive, power supply, etc. They were very open.

The memory map, the I/O model, the DMA controller model, etc. Some of what they picked was from Intel's reference design but not all of it. They chose the 8250 for the USART instead of Intel's 8251. That's quite a significant departure from Intel's reference design.

Some of their choices were even boneheaded and stunted, like cramming I/O and peripherals at the top of the meory map, boxing the memory scheme into just 640K. (when the IBM-PC first came out, the early motherboards had one row of 16K chips soldered on and three rows of sockets for another 48K of 16K chips. Memory beyond that had to go in a card on the ISA slot)

And what IBM 'created' was an open architecture. They didn't prohibit other vendors from producing ISA bus cards or even motherboards that incorporated ISA bus slots.

They poisoned the 'BIOS cloning' market by publishing the full BIOS source code. Most of the people qualified to write a BIOS clone would have already looked at IBM's commented source code, thus contaminating them as possible programmers to develop a 'compatible' BIOS.

Intel started out in the late 60's as primarily a supplier of DRAM to IBM, incidentally.

On Facebook, what else would it be?

We need a filter on slashdot. When the words 'nazi' and 'faggot' appear in a comment it is automatically modded to -2 and a 5 day ip ban is imposed.

People who accuse another of being a nazi and who call somebody else a 'faggot' are completely different. Antifaschists are not homophobes. It's just a crapflooder who needs an ip ban.

A lot of third parties do much better than Google. Google dabbles in a lot of directions, at the whim of their loose and often undirected management.

He blew it. The proper thing to do would be to have designed and introduced a trojan/worm into the security system. When it reached critical mass, it would be triggered to open all the doors, continue to reopen the doors, and defend itself against removal.

I have it on my shelf to read, but I've been stalled in the middle of the Baroque cycle for so long that Stephenson's newer books are road blocked off.

The existence of the Indian market for cellphone companies to market to is a boon to frugal cellphone customers here in the US. The Galaxy J3 and J7 are hella-good budget handsets targeted to the India market, but they're darn fine for cheapskates like me in the US. I recently upgraded from a J3 to a J7. The J7 is an awesome piece of gear for $150 when you can find one for that price. The J3 is a lot of goodness for just $60 these days. It's kinda the iPhone SE for the frugal.

Times change. My comment was meant as a historical reference. IBM is huge in India now.

IBM is somewhat huge in India now. I referred to the period of the 1960s, when IBM punished India technologically for their nativism.

IBM did succeed in defining most of what mainstream PC technology grew into.

Okay, they pushed hard for Microchannel, which didn't stay in the mainstream hardware. PCI isn't IBM's thing. But the whole x86 architecture, the hardware/software stack, is something that IBM started.

We all, even Apple these days, have hardware that lives in IBM's shadow.

An important detail: they are all people who left India to be successful. Sure, they're keen on locating proles there to do the heavy lifting. They're not staying there and working as management under the Indian government's regime.

They understand India and the Indian market better than westerners would.

Is that cheap? It sounds very expensive. These people will then ram through no-cost-too-high restrictions on private industry.

Yes, it's 'cheap' when all you have is a megaphone and all you want to do is burn things down.