This is still idiotic. It's like saying how much of a disaster it was to make the WinXP 'candy' (or whatever it's called) desktop the default, when everyone wanted to keep the 'classic' desktop. Well guess what? I'm sure there will be a checkbox to make your system boot into the Win7 UI every time.

Seriously, people are just grasping at straws to hate this thing!

We're getting an OS that:
1) is a superset of Win7 (everything on Win7 will run on Win8),
2) easily switches from a touch UI to a classic desktop UI,
3) will work on various CPU architectures for phones, tablets, and PCs,
4) will allow seamless connectivity, application, and data sharing between all your computing devices,
5) and will run on a crappy atom CPU,
and people here are complaining?!

Slashdot is now officially full of luddites! Go read the engadget review of the developer preview to get a sense of how this OS fits in the modern world.

Obligatory hedge: "I have karma to burn, so go ahead and flame away"

True, but it does highlight the danger of the government and enterprises moving their email service to Google and the 'cloud'. My company requires me to use an RSA token to log in to corporate mail or VPN, so simple phishing won't be successful. I'm aware of the recent RSA hack but in some ways, that's the point of two-factor authentication: you can completely compromise one factor but still have time to fix things before the other factor fails.

As someone who has worked in a corporate environment for a number of years, I would say bringing someone's boss into a spat is childish enough. Bringing someone's boss in via bcc is downright shitty.

First, oligopoly is a far cry from monopoly. Barring collusion (which is illegal under anti-trust law) oligopoly markets can be extremely competitive, leading to razor-thin profit margins, low prices, rapid technological change, and consumer choice: compare the current mobile OS market to Windows in the 90s, or even the cell phone service market to pre-1980s AT&T.

Second, successful companies continue to grow to achieve scale efficiencies, but at some point, 'bigger' starts to bring its own problems of lack of agility and innovation and uncoordinated management. Anyone who watched Microsoft or Detroit's big three stumble can see this. So there's a limit to how large a company can/should grow based on the nature of its business.

Third, whether a market becomes an oligopoly or not depends on the overall size of the market relative to the efficient size of a company. The extreme case of a natural monopoly happens when the size of the market is smaller than the efficient size of the company (so there's room for only one), but in most cases, the market is large enough to accommodate several firms of efficient size.

Finally, just because a market is an oligopoly doesn't mean the same players remain successful and continue to control the market. Changing technology and innovation create a lot of churn (Schumpeter's creative destruction). This is particularly true in the IT world where leaders can quickly lose their edge to small upstarts and the game is changing at break-neck speed. A few years ago, Asus was a name known only to geeks, now it's a household name churning out millions of netbooks each year. A year ago, nobody gave a shit about 'tablets', now it's the rage with a few unlikely names poised for success (Samsung?!). There's still plenty of room for 'garage' innovation here, and lots of venture capital to see it through to commercial success.

Ever heard of venture capital? In a normal economy (perhaps not right now!) a garage company with a proven idea and a serious business plan would have no trouble raising the necessary millions to grow.

Only on slashdot would such economic bullshit (and the socioeconomic bullshit referenced within) get modded +5 insightful and repeated ad-nauseum. Free markets do NOT tend towards monopolies eventually. The vast majority of markets are not monopolies and are in no danger of becoming so, regardless of government intervention or regulation. The evidence on this is so overwhelming I wouldn't know where to begin. In fact, there are so few examples of natural/existing monopolies (where the efficient scale of production exceeds the size of the market) that we tend to use the same examples over and over in classrooms and textbooks (public utilities).

The internet and information goods have some interesting characteristics (e.g. network effects) that tend to encourage consolidation, but even in this area, changing technology and consumer preferences tend to overthrow dominant firms (e.g. Microsoft).

And yes, I'm an economist.

I'm not asking you to give me examples of what *you* consider vanishingly small. I'm asking for references that "vanishingly small" probability is the same as "zero" probability. You've provided none.

Just because "almost surely" and "almost everywhere" are precise mathematical concepts (which they are) doesn't mean "vanishingly small" also is. Ditto with "infinitesimals".

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

From a Google search on "vanishingly small", you can see that the phrase is used to describe something very small, but not equal to zero. In this case, the probability *is* zero, so "vanishingly small" is incorrect. Of course, you're free to prove me wrong and provide a credible reference where the phrase is used the way you describe.

We're having a discussion about mathematics. Let's not screw things up by using language incorrectly!

Just because you were caught posting with your pants down ( -- allusion!) doesn't mean you have to be rude to me :)

Enjoy getting the final word in after this post. Bye.

If you're trying to provide better intuition, don't increase the number of doors to infinity! Most people don't understand or intuit infinity. In fact, the parent doesn't understand infinity, because with an infinite number of doors,, the probability that you picked the car is exactly zero, not "vanishingly small", and the odds are not "very, very high" but exactly 1 that you picked a goat to start with.

Stick with about 1000 doors - that usually delivers the intuition without confusing people!