Slashdot Mirror
How Many Applications Depend On Windows?
Alternatively, is anyone astonished that a number so arbitrary (in either direction) is considered a serious point of evidence? Not that there's a great way to weight the importance of programs in isolation from each other, but [random shareware X, even if business related] doesn't match the importance of, say, a major word processor in the real world. Isn't the flexibility that a given OS offers to create new programs, and the rate of change in the number of available programs, more important than the existing number anyhow?
Updated 20:05 by timothy: PJ Doland, Webmaster of the Cato Institute writes: "The article on Microsoft that you mention is now online at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-380es.html. I'm a slashdot addict. When I saw your link to the Institute's site, I convinced the higher-ups to let me post the report early for your readers. The full report is in PDF."
Here's my summary of some of the points from the report:
Don't take my word for it, read it for yourselves, its very poorly reasoned and uses the same types of arguments that it claims are bad when Judge Jackson used them.
Yes, but how many of these MS platform applications can't be ported to a different operating system, are unmaintained, or are running on a version of Windows that needs to be upgraded? Embedded systems in my experience don't usually get large OS revision upgrades, just service packs to fix broken features. If a company is developing for a platform, and the platform changes, don't they usually just account for the changes, rewrite what needs to be implemented differently, and continue on from there?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
you are ultimately thrilled and desperate
sky high and fucked
let's stop praying for someone to save us and start saving ourselves
let's stop this and start over
let's go out.. let's get going
Oh, and, uh, 70000 is way on the low end. Depending on how you define application.
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
I don't have images on, but if it hasn't changed since I saw it last, it's supposed to make him look like one of the Borg from Star Trek.
hth
mike
--
Liberty uber alles.
Whilst this may have been true in the days of WFW3.11, now that Windows 2000 is here, unix is becoming obsolete.
For once, I have to strongly disagree with the Libertarian/Wall Street Journal crowd. Windoze got where it is by means of business practices that were found to be in violation of the law. To allow it to stand as is (and put this all behind us...) is to provide a brass ring to the next company that figures it can exhaust the legal opposition after performing illegal and un-ethical acts.
Remeber when Windows 2000 came out? There were 65,000 documented bugs. This is eerily close to the number of "applications" that they say it has.... coincidence?
It's supposed to be the borg.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Unfortionatly, your app doesn;t rely on the windows OS.. ;-P I can simply recompile for nearly any compiler out there.. ;-P
That's french for a standard API. Win32 doesn't have one..
I do, however, agree with your point. It's not the number of apps. It if I can open that neato word document that my grammy just emailed me from prison. Interoprability is the key, not app count.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Stop, you're breaking my heart! Those "companies who choose to sell tobacco" and "chumps who got addicted" have it so rough, what with the having to deal with the consequences of their actions and all...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You are correct! A simple search on Google reveals:
Google results 1-10 of about 1,670,000 for windows applications. Search took 0.10 seconds.
Of course, this is way to scientific compared to the 70,000 number.
adi.
Kind on/off topic (depends on your perspective)
I'm not disputing Cato's claims or Microsoft's. I'm just saying be aware that the Cato Institute has their own agenda.
Cato self labels itself as "market liberalism". But if you also search a little deeper in the other links, you will see a link to the Institute of Objectivist Studies. And in case you don't know what Objectivism is, it is based on Ayn Rand.
I bring this up only because these guys are a bit aggressive and not very open about the ties between them and IOS/Ayn Rand. Everyone remeber the John Stossel Report "GREED"? Well, ALL of his experts were from Cato or IOS. So the whole report was basically a platform for Objectivism. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see the agenda behind all the rest of John Stossel's "insightful" reports. So perhaps Stossel really is an "objective" reporter :-)
If you read up on their site, you will find discussion about how they (Objectivists) are actively trying to place Objectivist professors at the head of philosophy departments.
So, as with all things on slashdot, I would take their arguments with a grain of salt, remembering their perspective and view. Because that is how you think critically. Taking in all the facts.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Out of the mouth of an Anonymous Coward comes the truth.
It is not a violation of anti-trust to win in market competition and therefore dominate over 90% of a commodity market. That just means you have a good sales department.
It's not even really a violation if a market is suddenly dependent on your company for survival. Companies will always try to work with a market leader if they can.
It becomes a violation when you abuse that position to stifle competition, fix prices, diminish consumer choice, and generally f* up the free market system.
A good example is what the auto industry allegedly did in the early 20th Century. According to some historians, they bought out as many public transportation systems as they could, in order to close or downgrade them, so people would need to buy cars.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I guess what I'm really saying is that Linux was dependent on having a niche to fill (and thankfully that niche has grown tremendously). If there had been no need, there would have been no OS.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
And with three-letter/digit file extensions, the 70,000 applications are forced to share less than 50,000 document types... (say, 36 x 36 x 36...)
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
At least mine runs and does what it's supposed to! I think it's a little less "cargo cult" to have an ugly program that works than one that looks like your idea of good style, but doesn't actually work.
What part of "There's more than one way to do it." don't you understand?
--------
So, to make sure the lawyers get their pound of tasty flesh, all companies that choose to sell tobbacco (even a brand new company which has never done anything wrong) must pay into the settlement escrow. That way, all companies that sell tobbacco have the same costs, allowing companies to fix prices on cigarettes to guarantee a steady profit to pay the settlement. All this money comes out of the pockets of the smokers... mostly working-class chumps who got addicted when they were 12 or 13.
What kind of criterion do you use when you say "a brand new [tobacco] company which has never done anything wrong"?
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
yea shure but is quick basic it self a program (or 4 or 4.5 or 5 depending on how you count)
and what about word for DOS & Word for windows (both of witch could run under windows) Or a macro for word that prints the users name.
it all depends on who is counting.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
pronoblem
Thank you, that IS what I meant. Amazing how often people engage the Slashdot Reflex: "He defended Windows? Quick! Poke holes in his logic!" (although I didn't defend Windows in any way, but whatever...)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
1 Bug Free. (ain't tellin' which, neither! :)
Is it a "Hello World" app by any chance?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
its at least score 2 interesting. :)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Probably a lot, but they still count towards the 70,000. Example: A lot of cash registers are old XT-class boxes running DOS.
If a company is developing for a platform, and the platform changes, don't they usually just [...] rewrite?
Not if they don't have to. Why drag your customers through upgrades they neither need nor want? The only time you might have to upgrade is if their hardware dies and can't be replaced with anything equivalent, but even DOS 6.22 still runs on modern PCs.
They just count all the "Hello World" programs students write as "applications".
That aside, tobbacco is a legal product, and any company that enters the market now faces a stiff legal fine when no legal wrongdoing on their part exists. I wasn't discussing the moral debate about tobbacco use, because it is obviously not an issue from the perspective of a government that wants to keep it legal and profit from it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I know corporation bashing is popular on /., I guess that's why your computer was hand crafted by a tribe of indigenous people from the amazon, right?
That's a no-no also, as it implies trade between countries, i.e. Global Capitalism. Shudder to think that those durned fur'ners might have made your floppy drive.
The truly 'socially responsible' computer is one built at cost by a local peoples' cooperative using indigenous materials.
--
... that number includes all the 'Hello Worlds' compiled under under Windows ;)
** Sig-a-licious **
I thought Microsoft had only one application-Windows- with everything else being an integrated part of the OS.
Seriously, I wonder if Internet Explorer was counted in the 70,000...
MC
Do you have ESP?
Count up the sales for Visual Basic and Visual C++.
Figure at least 1 Hello World for each sale.
That must be at least 70,000.
ten apps is still more then most people use
as far as one mouse button
I sell alot of computers to first time
users and they can't even figure out
how to use the left button on windows
never mind the right one
http://Lenny.com
This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
The NYTimes report I read on this study implied that they are just counting commercial applications. Your thosands of internal applications and all the other internal apps aren't in the figure.
Even if it's corrent, the statistic is useless.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
"Just think: If companies could not turn a profit, most every product they sell would be much, much cheaper.
Just think: If companies could not turn a profit, why would they bother making any products in the first place?
"It's funny to me that hardcore capitalists, who complain so often about others feeling entitled to welfare, unemployment, medicare, etc., bitch and moan when they don't feel they're getting the opportunity to turn a profit that they feel "entitled" to.
Kinda like a number of /.ers (not all) bitch and moan when people do turn a profit, because "Everything Should be Free [Beer]!" and they're not getting all the free goodies that they feel "entitled" to.
--
--
The real Captain Derivative has a Slashdot ID.
You're resorting to that tired old statement that capitalists are motivated by greed. It wasn't true when the Communist Party said it in the former Soviet Union, and it isn't true now.
You might be surprised to know that capitalists (those who believe in private ownership of the means of production) want lower profit margins too. Razor-thin profit margins are a sign of healthy competition.
Adam Smith, one of the fathers of capitalism, denounced profit as evil, saying it was an indicator of inefficiencies in the marketplace (which are often due to over-regulation and political corruption).
Sorry about the sarcasm in the previous post. I have been very sarcastic today for some reason.
--
The flaw in this argument is that the antitrust case is not about Microsoft's operating system monopoly. The actual cause of this monopoly (which in my opinion is a vicious cycle of application availability forcing users to use Windows, which forces software firms to write programs for Windows - but that's not important right now) is irrelevant. Microsoft has monopoly power. Anyone who questions that needs an emergency rectalcraniectomy.
...if Microsoft did what
monopolists are supposed to do: restrict
sales in order to raise the company's prices
and profits.
The reason Microsoft is being punished is because they misused their monopoly power, not to press their OS, but rather for other applications, such as IE vs. Netscape. You can argue all you want that Jackson's numbers are wrong; so what? He just needed to say, "Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems." Why waste a lot of time on something so obvious? Even M$ made at best only a half-hearted attempt to claim not to be a monopoly. The real case was what they did with their monopoly power.
The author also fails to understand the nature of antitrust law. An example:
The classic example of an antitrust case is the Standard Oil case. Standard Oil had a practice of buying out competing gas stations. If they wouldn't sell, SO would build a station nearby and undercut prices (even accepting a loss) until their competitors were out of business. This is not about restricting sales or raising prices - it is about preventing others from entering the market. If the author understood antitrust law, he would see that this, not the "restricting sales in order to raise the company's prices and profits," is the "misuse of power" that requires antitrust cases.
I don't think that they mean 'programs' when they say 'applications'. I've written 10 programs in the past 2 weeks, (small network programs) but I don't think that those count. As far as I'm concerned, I've yet to write an application.
When I think app, I think StarOffice and Quake 3, anything that involves over 100,000 lines of code.
My 2 cents.
--------------
--------------
$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
Ok, a few thousand shareware and freeware apps, say 10,000 , 8,000+ titles at amazon, 10,000 viruses (I question that it's valid to identify every virus as a program... is every script a program? are Word Macros programs? but, OK, 10,000+), and 3,891 "programs" on your NT machine... So what do we have
10,000 shareware and freeware programs
8,000 Amazon-available programs
10,000 Viruses
4,000 "programs" on your NT "work"station...
32,000 in total.
20,000 vertical market programs (why not be generous)
52,000 in total
Where's the other 18,000?
I find your argument unconvincing without more support.
No matter how you count, this number is accurate in the sense of "insert random big number here." But not all applications are created equal. Judging just by the number of apps you can by at Amazon.com seems silly to me but it does prove a point. Many applications are not widely used and would not be missed by a user who switches from the Windows platform to the MacOS or Linux.
While most Windows users will use Microsoft Office at some point, very few will use, say World's Greatest Paper Airplanes. Those 70,000 (and probably more) Windows applications will include many games, obsolete or otherwise crappy applications, and small utilities that are only useful on that platform. It will also include many applications that also run on platforms other than Windows. (For example, MS Office also runs on the MacOS, Wordperfect also runs on Linux, Doom runs just about anywhere). The average (and even the above average) user will never use more than a few hundred applications at most. And most users will probably use the same few hundred applications for most of their work.
In the end, there doesn't seem to be much point in arguing over how many applications run on one particular platform. The important questions are:
Anything else is just statistical masturbation.
My own personal guess is that the number of Windows applications out there will ultimately be judged to be either irrelevant or a relatively minor consideration compared to the seriousness or non-seriousness of Microsoft's transgressions.
Does this
No. If you read my post you would see that I consider phillip morris to be part of the problem. They, along with the lawyers on both sides, are violating anti-trust. They fooled you. They fooled nearly everybody. They are big winners in all of this, and most people will not notice for years how good for phillip morris these settlements really were.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"It seems that their marketing behavior has come back to bite them," Mr. McKenzie said in an interview.
By George I think he's got it!
--
Infuriate left and right
Microsoft Office Pro, Microsoft Office Deluxe, Microsoft Office Enterprise, Microsoft Office.Net. . .
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Funny I used to visit Slashdot for Linux news,
nowadays all I see around here is posts about MS and some other OS called Mac.
As a longtime Mac user with a three-button mouse (Contour UniMouse- very comfortable) I've never been quite sure why they went with, and stick with, a one-button mouse.
Then, on a helpdesk contract, I had to spend 20 godawful minutes explaining to someone how to right-click and get the Properties for a shortcut on a Win98 desktop. I repeat, twenty (20) minutes.
After that experience I undertsand why Apple's original research tended towards a no-button mouse. That might have been overkill on ease of use, and probably been a killer for RSI, but I can see where they were going with the idea.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
If you stop to think that we are 5 millions programmers worldwide...
70k seems so small ...
wiZd0m
For those of you who are too lazy to do the search for yourselves and haven't seen it before, details on how to activiate the flight simulator bug can be found at this site.
"You can't fight in here! This is the war room" --Dr. Stra
The internet is the future of publishing, and like publishing there is no natural monopoly. The physical reasons for telcom monopoly are fading as fast as analog coper wire. Government control of internet access and publishing is tantamount to a regulated and censored press. No one has to listen, but I have the right to publish. Society is better off when that right is respected.
The Cato Institute's analysts parrot the agenda of corporate America, trying to influence policy and legislation to benefit the wealthiest groups and individuals in the country.
/., I guess that's why your computer was hand crafted by a tribe of indigenous people from the amazon, right?
Oh, please. The Cato Institute published well thought out papers that are Libertarian in nature and are dedicated to getting the government of your back.
I know corporation bashing is popular on
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Then, on a helpdesk contract, I had to spend 20 godawful minutes explaining to someone how to right-click and get the Properties for a shortcut on a Win98 desktop. I repeat, twenty (20) minutes.
Amen! Most PC users don't even realize they have more than one mouse button - it's easier to ask someone to hold down the "control" key while they click than to explain the concept of the "right-click" to them. Apple had the right idea for the majority of users by staying with a single-button mouse.
Power users who want more mouse buttons know how to hook a new one up, and can buy them pretty easily. Apple really should offer one or more alternative mice in their build-to-order, though. I wouldn't have minded an option to leave the mouse out for a $10 or $20 price break.
Naked.
You can pick any single genre and usually you can amass an application count in the thousands. It is exceedingly easy to believe that there are well over 70,000 currently maintained applications for the Win32 platform, and that's purely considering the huge myriad of productivity apps. Add in thousands of games, tens or hundreds of thousands of utilities, etc.
This is a really stupid topic for discussion on Slashdot, though I think it does clearly separate those who are in the industry and known the generalities of the marketplace, and those who live in dream worlds of Linuxland (I'm talking about the posts by people who agree with the findings of that "study"). From reading some prelims on how these people deduced their numbers it sounds like their method was EXTREMELY dubious and they really don't have a clue what they're talking about. Sure everyone can pretend they're a scientist or statistician : The problem is when they are given the airwaves to yap their nonsense.
... on a Pentium :-)
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
...or not! Whatever the fine points, the 70K figure underestimates the discreet number of applications which use Windows. I wouldn't think that even business applications could be covered under a 70k umbrella.
-r
The article does make several points that are indeed valid, in that the judge made a big deal about some thing he didn't have to, and didn;t about some thing he should have..
The first thing addressed, or not, in the above article is that, yes, indeed, the judge *IS* making up a new meaning for a monopoly. In the past *NOTHING* of any value could simply be copied billions and billions of times at little cost. I can mass mail an application to a million people, at the total cost of 19.95. Heck, run a little banner ad proggy, and it's *FREE*. *NEVER* in *HISTORY* has a situation like this been present. No one could ever argue that Microsoft has not stopped people from developing alternate operating systems. They haven't. What they have done is ensure a closed and private 'public' standard.
Think about someone having a patent on the internal cumbustion engine. I'm sure someone had a patent at one point in time that applied. Now, along comes the car. Suddenly, you're forced to only buy the patents owners gas. And by the way, you'll need to buy a new engine for your car every few years, so you can run the new gas. Certainly, in no way has this patent holder stopped anyone from coming up with a new means of power. But if they can manage to get enough people using it, you *DO* have a monopoly.
Personally, I do not like Microsoft. I don't like their company, or how it treats its customers. Sure, they have some good apps. And yes, they've done some damned good buisness deals, and been sucessfull as hell. But at some point, it has to stop. At some point, it has to be said that you've simply made *to* much money, and you've locked in to good of a nestbed.
Anything that ends up being used widely in the public needs to be open eventually. It's in the general good of the public. In the past, things moved slower. No one could lock the public in, becouse of the length of time it would take. Microsoft locked over 90% of the OS market into place within a few short years, becouse of the success of the PC.
Whoever came up with the tarred road had a damned good idea. What if he was still recieving money for the idea? What if it cost the government millions of dollars, paying for the use of the idea? It's certainly in the good of the public to have these roads. It's also in the good of the public to have a well defined, standardized computing environment.
I'm blathering, I'll shadap and read some other opinions now..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
what they didn't specify is that the 70,000 applications were all copies of the same application in many computer languages. "Hello World" strikes back!
(`._(`._( , , . JimmyPop[nL] . , , )_.)_.)
That may be what they "seem to believe" to you, but having meet many of these people I know that not to be the case.
As for the cable companies, pretty good argument for why they should have never received benifits from the government in the first place, isn't it? The fact is that the cable companies OWN all that infrastructure, no matter what grants allowed them to build it. Now we are crying because the won't share it... well, too bad. You shouldn't have let yourself get suckered by the greedy bastards in the first place.
Subsidizing ISP's to "compete" with them will only make the problem worse, extending the government/corporate marriage to a few more companies.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nevermind the fact that their networks never could have been built without the government's permission and help (both financial and legislative).
Cable companies are legally protected monopolies.
Your argument is that because of this, their competitors should be allowed access to their network.
Instead of this, how about opening the cable market up to competition, and allowing more than one cable provider in a given region? In other words, why don't we get rid of the laws that create these monopolies?
I hear a lot of arguments saying something to the effect of 'Well, they're given special treatment by the government, so we have to also give special treatment to their competitors.'
This invariably results in layer upon layer of special treatment, and a convoluted legal code base.
Libertarians want to *eliminate* the special treatment across the board. What's so bad about that?
--
That add up to 70,009
I guess between the time this article was first posted online 'til when ackthpt posted his comments, 9 new apps that we don't know 'bout were created...that seems kinda slow though...oh well...
Yep. I expect 70,000 for the whole history of MS computing is a pretty conservative number.
I wonder what figure you'd get if you toted up the (sales/download figures) for every Windows (programming language/development environment) ever (sold/given away), and then assumed that only, say, 5% were actually used to create meaningful applications?
"the mere existence of a large number of Windows-based applications proves that Microsoft has stirred competition among software developers"
Let's get Mac off the pipe for a second and analyze this:
1. These are applications not operating systems, that is where the monopoly lies.
2. How many of these applications are available for other operating systems?
3. If you produced a weighted index based on the number of users of these applications, and then calculated the availability of the applications, what would you get?
4. The real definition of a monopoly has to do with the price elasticity of a product. If Microsoft raised the price of office by 50% would they still sell as many copies? (Yes, they in fact raised the price by approximately 50% between 95/97 if I remember correctly.)
I normally like stuff from the Cato Institute, but I have to wonder how much billg paid for this... I mean I was a mere Economics major, not professor and I can still do the calculations to prove Microsoft is a monopoly!
dmp
Stop talking about who's to blame when all that counts is how to change --"Born of Frustration" - James
I added it up with the Windows calculator ;-)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Many companies and individuals today hide their greed behind the good name of capitalism, just as many dictators hid behind the name of Communism. Unfortunately, I let myself fall into the incorrect usage of the term as well, and must apologize for letting my emotions run away with my typing.
Why not? They have a point about old versions and utility programs, but they completely ignore internal corporate development - which has always dwarfed the shrink-wrap market. Every company I've worked for had at least a few, and as many as a few hundred internally developed systems, each comprised of quite a number of individual programs.
Look at it another way. Is it fair to assume that for every Windows compiler sold, at least one application was created? How many copies of VB, C/C++, etc... have been sold for the Windows platform?
They're right about one thing, though - the judges ruling effectively says that Microsoft was wrong to allow the creation of 70,000 programs for Windows. Apple is obviously much better, since they only have 12,000. Obviously, a completely unsupported operating system, with zero (0) applications, would be considered optimal. As if inertia is in and of itself monopolistic.
The more I see after the fact, the more convinced I am that this case should be heard by the appeals court, not the Supremes. This is just to wrong-headed a ruling (at least in significant parts) to be allowed to stand as precedent at the Supreme Court level, and would be a complete waste of their time.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
The Cato Institute is scary in that they seem to believe that corporations should be running everything rather than government. They always rant about government regulation of business. They're running a piece now about the opening of broadband cable networks to ISPs where they claim that it's a violation of the cable company's free speech rights to make them open their networks to the ISPs. Nevermind the fact that their networks never could have been built without the government's permission and help (both financial and legislative). Nevermind that people don't want every damn ISP out there digging up our streets to lay cable for their own networks. There are many compelling reasons to make the cable companies open up access. Do the cable companies think they should be able to receive those benefits that give them a big boost in the market without having any responsibilities as well?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
lemme guess: notepad?
Nope, it terminates each line with CR/LF.
Punished? You're being rewarded for it! When you come down with emphysema, lung cancer, and all the other goodies your habit causes, that extra money will go to paying for your medical care. You may not like tobacco, but I have every right to use it. If you can breathe, just STFU
Do you have a right to use my tax money to pay for your heart-lung machine? Do you have a right to make me breathe your second hand smoke, and compromise my own health? Do you have a right to force me out of public places with your smoke, in order to protect my own lungs? Why don't you look at the facts objectively, instead of only thinking about yourself?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Viruses make your computer crash less often.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
70,000 apps? It wouldn't shock me if there were seventy million.
Chances are very good that Windows will still be around in some form well after everyone reading this is dead.
Kato *was* on crack (prolly still is), and he was the reason the Columbians murdered Ms. Simpson; he stole the drug money she owed them for the party she threw for the football team where she got nekkid in front of them all.
and Linux r00lz
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The article is a big fat red herrring and completely ignores the important aspect of software monopolies: ownership of interfaces.
Microsoft 'owns' the interfaces that most consumer software is coded in. Similarly, it 'owns' the interface that defines how most office documents are encoded. Both of these serve as a compatibility barrier and serves to define a set of functionality that any OS competitor must replicate.
This 'functionality' exists above and beyond the mere system software. It also includes binary driver compatibility: another 'MS owned interface'.
These are the real barriers, not the bulk numbers of how many applications Be would have to replicate.
Eventhough that alone would be a considerable burden.
An OS competitor would need to either replicate all 'relevant' 3rd party apps and drivers or convince others to do so on their behalf.
An OS competitor is in the uneviable position of 'running their own national phone network' or 'building their own national rail system'.
Either of these would be considered relevant market barriers by any sane or honest economist or pundit.
Cato simply has it's own agenda that it persues regardless of sanity or reason.
If all of them wrote one executable by random key strokes and mouse clicks, how many "I Love You's" would be written.
If 1% of those scripts worked, how many programs would you have?
Would it write a novel?
This is a tragic free speach issue.
Cato rests it's case.
Re your sig
Hrm. An non-OS reliant java app that requires IE 5.0 and flash. Sounds like exactly what those java engineers had in mind. Blech.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Personally, I have no problem with the existence and operation of large corporations. As you suggest, many of the fine technological products I utilize on a daily basis are the result of corporate developments. I do not simply "bash" corporations; rather, I argue against the policies and would-be politicos that try to hand them control of the world's governments on a silver platter.
Tons of ways. Think about how easy it is to install a virus on your system. Many times, you don't even know it's happening. It usually proceeds normally after simply clicking (or double clicking) on the installer program. It rarely gives you error messages, or makes you want to beat your head against a wall wishing it would just finish, dammit. You don't spend hours on the phone with tech support to get a virus installed, and the installation process doesn't give you an ulcer and drive you to drink.
Microsoft only wishes it could say those things about windows!
because you live in a society that rewards greed more than compassion, and measures personal worth by personal wealth.
You make that sound like a bad thing or something. If you ahve such an aversion to wealth, no one is stop you from giving away your money, etc.... You don't need to make those decisions for the rest of us, thank you very much.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Then, too, those applications that are crucial may be impossible for a competitor to provide, due to proprietary file formats and protocols. (Ask any OS/2 user...) So overall, I have to disagree with them.
Linux may kick Window's ass in many ways, but it certainly isn't kicking it economically or in market penetration
--meredith
--meredith
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis
Yeah right. What about OEM computers as a critically important resource?
Before this anti-trust trial, it was IMPOSSIBLE for an alternative intel-based OS to get any real distribution to most people, because Microsoft had exclusive agreements with OEM's that prevented them from selling machines with alternative operating systems present (aside from hidden on the drive, out of view).
Thanks in large part to Jean-Louis Gassee for making a big deal out of this, and the anti-trust trial, more and more OEM's are not as afraid to bundle alternatives like Linux and BeOS with their computers.
I doubt this would have come about without the trial. So as far as I'm concerned, it's already done some good.
Mackenzie and Cato can shove it.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Yep... if they'd bundle that in with a ban on books and video games, I'd never be in debt again!
Why should it matter how many applications are written for/depend on Windows. Is Microsoft trying to say that if they are broken up these applications will be at risk? Are the Microsoft OS's suddenly going to go away?
This issue is irrelevant to the central issue of Microsoft being an abusive monopoly, and whether they should be broken up to prevent future abuses.
Misspelling on my part, thanks.
The tobacco settlement was big, but would have been bigger if he hadn't pocketed enough to fund a US Senate campaign.
Not to mention the fact that his law firm bankrolled the Skip Humphrey for Governor campeign, as well.
Mark Dayton may be in some obscure way my boss (I think he's the largest individual shareholder in Target Corp., which his ancestors founded), but I'm still glad he's ahead of Ciresi.
Swell... just what we need... another member of the Rockefeller family sent to Washington. (For those who don't know, Dayton married a Rockefeller, and has used some of their personal fortune to run several high-profile campaigns for Senator in the past. He's at it again this year.) Old money never goes away. (sigh)
Needless to say, my preferred candidate, Jerry Janezich, is way back in 4th place. He's from a mining town and owns a bar. He even has the DFL endorsement. How could he fail?
I'll though I am a conservative, I will take an good ol' honest left-wing radical over the two-faced bastards running the Democratic Party any day of the week. I really hope Janezich gains ground.
The guy I wanted already dropped out of the race. Tim Penny has been the Democratic Party's best asset in Minnesota for a long time now. He's a Senior Fellow at the U of M's Humphrey Institute, an experienced leader, and (funnilly enough) a Fellow of Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute.
On the bright side, I understand that Wellstone intends to step down from the Senate in a couple years (he promised to be a two-term-only guy), so maybe Penny will run for that seat.
Oddly enough, Rod Grams can't seem to please anybody. The Republicans in Washington hate him because they consider him to be far too moderate, but here in the People's Republic of Minnesota, he is painted as some kind of far-right conservative.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
They forgot to count Melissa, bubble boy, I Love U series and alike. There are much more then this estimation.
I don't have a choice in running NT for a workstation.
Now you do!
I work for a company that is totally MS-based, but I run Linux and '98 on my PC.
(shameless plug follows)
I love VMWare!
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Why's that???? You need the government to make you quit?
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Well, lets see here
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.exe | wc -l
1764
[abimer]/> find / -print | grep -i \.com | wc -l
2127
I haven't even started on vertical apps that never get mass-marketed.
I don't think that 70k Windows programs is likely to be an over-estimate, its more likely to be an under-estimate. Given that in ten minutes of looking I identified some 3,000 titles that were over-looked by McKenzie, and that he complete ignored the vertical app market (where by some estimates 90% of programmers are employed), I don't think the number is high enough.
[1] I have the cyg-win toolkit installed. I don't have a choice in running NT for a workstation.
Unless you've overloaded the operator >>, which you haven't.
J
We have 2000 applications in our database here at Shell Extension City. Does this mean we have 2.8 percent of all applications ever made for the PC? Heh heh, I'm glad to hear that. Geeze, what a tremendously useful site we are.... (Uh..software for geeks, doncha know?)
DAILY ROTATION
This economist has obviously never been to freshmeat before.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Nobody seems to listen -- do you get second hand smoke outdoors or in my home? I NEVER claimed that I have the right to smoke anywhere I please. See the parent posts. I'm talking about breathing, as in clean air, not smoky. When you ban smoking on the grounds, that's a different story. That's just being an ass. My father is a hypertensive diabetic who has smoked for the majority of his (coincidentally) 57 year life. I think that your mother could have lived at least that long, with or without exposure to second hand smoke. Not to sound unsympathetic, I'm just thinking you misphrased that somehow.
Do you think corporate lawyers work on contingency? They're on retainer, buddy.
end comment */
(end comment) */ }
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
When are people going to recognize that consumer advocate law firms and union bosses are just like the pigs in Orwell's "Animal Farm"? They have gradually become that which they once set out to conquer.
Wow, you ruined a perfectly rational post by turning it into a straw-man generalisation. I suppose all CEOs are like the farmers, metaphorically enslaving, killing, and eating their workers?
And what do libertarians have against unions, anyway? It's the free market answer to economic injustice, no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
70,000 figure might actually represent the number of applications that have been written during the entire history of the personal computer industry.
Oh, come on. This is what happens when you have ivory tower academics weighing in on things. I've been with companies that have serveral thousand of their own internal applications... entire history of the industry indeed.
Hell, there have probably been around 70,000 bad first person shooters in the past few years....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
DFL = Democrats for Life, or am I off the mark?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
At last the sticky white cock juice stopped blasting out of his
hard-on. Patty popped the big, wet cock out of her mouth, panting as
she stared intently at the cock knob. She felt completely depraved
now, unable to suppress her constant craving to fuck and suck with
her own son. If she'd gone this far with him, she might as well go
the rest of the way. It had been a long, long time since she'd felt
a prick anywhere near as huge as her son's boring into her tender
little shitter.
"You're....you're a dirty boy, Walter," Patty panted, still
jacking his fuck pole slow and hard. "You're a dirty boy for wanting
to fuck your mother like this. Don't you feel dirty for letting
Mommy suck your cock?"
"No."
"I'll....I'll bet you fantasize about fucking Mommy's tight
little asshole too, don't you? That would be just like you. Do you
fantasize about fucking my hot little asshole when you jack off,
honey? Is that where you'd like to shove this big cock of yours
next?"
Walter just grinned in response, his prick throbbing harder than
ever. Patty rose unsteadily to her feet. The idea of asshole
fucking was morally repugnant to her, but that meant nothing to the
puckered, pink hole that was now already throbbing lewdly in and out.
It just happened to be the case that Patty had been born with an
unusually sensitive, itchy little asshole. Whenever her cunt got
wet, her asshole usually felt hot and tingly too.
"You'd better get some Vaseline from the bathroom, Walter. I
guess you're never going to get over your sick desire to fuck your
mother unless I let you fuck my asshole too."
Walter disappeared into the bathroom. Patty grabbed a pillow,
thrusting it under her belly to elevate her hips. She felt
completely ashamed of herself, knowing how badly she needed this
torrid session of assfucking with her son. Shamefully she gripped
her rounded little white ass globes, spreading them wide, revealing
her pink, puckered shit orifice to her only son.
Walter returned to the bedroom, finding his mother sprawled on
her stomach, holding her ass cheeks open. He grinned, again joining
her on the bed. Patty heard him moving behind her, uncapping the
Vaseline jar. She whimpered as her boy started pasting the lube
liberally all over her little shitter.
"Stick your fingers in, Walter. Get Mommy's little asshole nice
and juicy."
Walter did as his mother asked, straightening his fingers,
thrusting them into the gripping interior of his mother's shit
tunnel. Patty groaned, fucking her tight, itchy asshole onto his
hand. Then she heard a new sound behind her as her son basted his
huge cock liberally with Vaseline.
"That's enough, Walter. Time to fuck Mommy's asshole now,
honey. Hurry, honey, give Mommy's asshole a good, hard ass fucking!"
Walter mounted his naked mother, aiming his swollen cock tip at
her rubbery shit hole. Patty gasped with intense pleasure as she
felt the cock cleaving into her bowels, instantly stretching her
burning asshole to the bursting point around the invading thickness
of his prick.
It had been so, so long since her last asshole reaming. Patty's
asshole was already sucking and spasming needfully in response to her
son's cock, sucking and gripping Walter's prick to welcome it into
her body. Patty bit her lip, suppressing the slight pain she felt as
her asshole stretched to accommodate his cock. Then she started
humping again, wiggling at the same time, trying to help her hung son
stuff every inch of his fuck pole into her narrow, gripping ass.
"Fuck your mother, fuck Mommy's little asshole!" she pleaded.
Patty released her buns, no longer needing to hole them open.
She thrust her hand under her belly and started finger fucking,
rubbing her aching clitty as hard as she could.
"Mommy needs assfucking, Walter!" she panted. "Deeper, baby,
really ram it in now! Oh, fuck, oh, shit, fuck Mommy's asshole as
deep as you can!"
Still, I don't see your point. How connected are these groups really? My web page has links to NASA and AIAA, but they only mildly influence my thoughts. Oh my, non sequetor! That's a serious error for a philosopy student. Perhaps you could use an new proffesor.
EVERYONE'S OUT TO GET YOU MOTHER FUCKER!
Whether their arguments are well thought out or merely drivel, you have to judge for yourself. In my opinion, most of their arguments are intellectually lightweight, based on polemics and hot button phrases, without deeper reflection, sound economic analysis, or hard data. They appear to be arguing and judging from the position of reasonably well off middle class academics, often missing the point behind the social policies they are pontificating about entirely.
Marketing spin usually uses statistics to propogate lies (nevermind that the statistics are pulled straight out of the ass end of some subsidiary, this subsidiary is a 'non-partial' party).
Outright lying is much easier. You don't need to do nearly as much 'research'.
Bite my yammer.
I am the victim of "big tobacco", so why am I being punished for it? It now costs twice as much as it did three years ago to engage a a legal habit that I enjoy.
Don't flame me for being a smoker. Look at the facts objectively. You may not like tobacco, but I have every right to use it. If you can breathe, just STFU.
end comment */
(end comment) */ }
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
No fair counting *each* Windows build as a separate Operating System!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What if 'letting loose' meant you got to take home 100% of what you "make" each week, and coincidentally ended corporate welfare and influence at the same time?
The libertarians are about one thing, and one thing only, more - not less - freedom from government intervention in our lives.
How many of you guys got kicked off Napster, courtesy of our government's courts? Harry Browne felt THAT decision should have been left to the marketplace!
How about DeCSS; shouldn't THAT be a marketplace issue as well? Let's see, I can pay $99.95 for a Windows program to play 'The Matrix', or I can use this DeCSS derivative free player to do the same thing. Which one do I use? That's a marketplace decision! Duhh, which one do I go with?
Harry Browne is the Libertarian party's candidate for President this year; If you're interested in IP issues or the dilution of our First and Second Amendment rights, you OWE it to yourself to at least check him out.
If you choose the easy way out, if you vote for the "lesser of two evils" because you'll be throwing your vote away otherwise, well, you've only got yourself to blame when Slashdot gets shut down a year and a half from now for "illegal linking."
Can't happen? Already has; find a link to DeCSS on 2600.
Face it folks, this Open Source crowd is nothing but a bunch of pirates and thieves, and this Slashdot site is always linking and posting all this "subversive" material.
You've got nothing to lose! Visit Harry Browne's site and decide for yourself.
--
Dave Walker
More than 70,000 I bet. Unless the average Windows developer has written less than one application, the number has got to be a lot higher than this.
Of course, it all depends on how you define "application". Does Hello World count? Does a screen saver count? Certainly a freeware app distributed over the Internet counts. Shrink-wrapped software counts. Does in-house custom work count? I've written apps in all these categories except shrink-wrapped.
If I had to put a number to it, I'd say I've written at least 10 apps, 2 or 3 of which are currently being used by at least one person other than me. I'm not counting the countless little test applications and scripts I've written that run in a Windows environment. If I did, the number would probably be in the hundreds.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Being a mac user since the begining of time.
Ive had to listen to that stupid crap from day one.
When in reality most people don't use more then
3 or 4 apps on a regular basis (excluding nerds)
so what if they have 70,000 apps
this is the brake down
25,000 games
20,000 that won't work on your PC
25,000 viri
http://Lenny.com
Smokers save us money. They die quickly at a young age of heart attacks and lung cancer. Their hospital stays are short and painful, and mostly covered by raiding their estate.
It is the non-smokers like us that run up huge tabs when we are 95, living in a managed care facility, and on a kidney machine 24/7... long after our money ran out and we were put on public assistance programs.
By smoking, they are doing us all a huge favor by shuffling this mortal coil before they can collect any Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The guy's name is Mike Ciresi, and from what I can tell he is a grade A scumbag, even for a lawyer. The tobacco settlement was big, but would have been bigger if he hadn't pocketed enough to fund a US Senate campaign.
.com TLD. I think that says it all.
Mark Dayton may be in some obscure way my boss (I think he's the largest individual shareholder in Target Corp., which his ancestors founded), but I'm still glad he's ahead of Ciresi.
Needless to say, my preferred candidate, Jerry Janezich, is way back in 4th place. He's from a mining town and owns a bar. He even has the DFL endorsement. How could he fail?
The other DFL candidate is Rebecca Yanisch. Her website is in the
Of course, all of them are vastly preferable to Rod Grams.
--
--
E_NOSIG
If I'm correct, according to this page, freshmeat alone contains over 10k apps (look for the appindex figure). So...
Many Unices claim 10,000 applications or more written for them, so 70,000 written for M$ OSes doesn't seem out of line to me.
Do you feel guns should be outlawed because someone might misuse one? How about DeCSS or Napster?
Once you start arbitrairally banning certain things because of their possible, but unlikely, harm, where do you draw the line? Or are you just whining that it is not your fault, because the government hasn't banned cigarettes, and therefore the government, and by extension "society," is at fault because you can't quit.
Do you wish to be free men or slaves? Free men do as they please, and accept the consequences of their actions. Slaves do as they are told.
Disclaimer: I am not a smoker. I convinced my mom and wife to stop smoking, and will not allow my daughter to smoke. But, damnit if you want to smoke I have no business trying to make it illegal for you to smoke.
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
The playing field would have to be leveled first, then let loose, if there was to be any chance of a true open market and all its potential benefits. Personally, I don't think that would be such a bad idea, but I don't see much popular support for the idea of simply pulling the big corporations apart and starting over.
How many windows developers are there? Surely, a magnitude more than 70k. So, the average windows developer has written less than one program.
I think this 'wild guess' is way below the real number of apps ever written for windows.
Jilles
This is silly ....
I did a quick survey on the "Norman virus scanner, it knows about 18.284 viruses, that is more than 25% of all programs written according to the "Cato Institute". That simply has to be wrong, their estimate of 70.000 programs is way to low.
RFC1925
I dunno how many progams exist, but I do know that I really feel sorry for the guy that had to run then all to count them.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Damn, don't you ever test anything? You obviously can't write a working program without having the compiler point out your errors through 10 or 20 iterations.
The fact remains that my 1-minute hack written for humorous purposes worked, yet you took my working code, made minor modifications to suit your idea of good style (without significantly improving readability or performance) and came out with code that doesn't run. And now you've done it again.
It's not that you're not making a good models of landing lights with your split coconuts, it's just that the planes still aren't landing.
(Or do you even have the slightest glimmer of understanding for the "cargo cult" analogy you attempt to insult me with?)
--------
not getting all the free goodies that they feel "entitled" to.
That's funny I have been reading slashdot for a long time now and I have never ever read anybody say that.
Oops I forget it's ok to lie if you are capitilist never mind.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Everyone manipulates figures for their own benefit. Microsoft just does it more then most. Personally, I can think of several programs that cannot run on Windows, because I've talked to the developers of those programs.
As for there being 70,000 programs that run on the various incarnations of Windows, it would only be possible if they counted each new version of the program as a seperate program. If that's the case, there's easily 70,000 programs for Windows.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Funded by Clouseau no doubt...
This is about scumbag lawyers and polititians profiting from an industry that they know is dangerous, but are not interested in stopping. This is about graft for lawers in exchange for campeign contributions.
If anybody should be sued for the harmfull effects of tobbacco, it should be the government, who SUBSIDIZES tobbacco farms, then turns around and tells us how noble they are for fighting big tobbacco.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
{rant} You're right! And that's the problem. I shouldn't have to pay for someone else's health problems... smoking, heart, whatever. Yet the government insists on covering financially any ying-yang that partakes in something that isn't healthy. Bitch at insurance companies all you want, but they balance the cost of coverage against the risks. If I'm a smoker than I pay higher premiums. If I'm obese I pay higher premiums. Conversely if I'm healthy I pay lower premiums. Not so with Uncle Sam. We all pay the same flat fee. A chunk of my paycheck goes to covering smokers, fat folk, idiots who ride motorcycles without helmets, etc. So instead of making policy whereby they (the gvm't) start banning / taxing "habits" in the name of cost saving I say let people keep their habits and get rid of Medicare completely (or at least cut it back to the bare min.) {/rant}
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
People didn't believe Cato when he testified at the OJ trial, and they're really not going to believe him now. This is a bit out of his league.
OK, Linux is not (in market share) greater than Windows, but it is growing rapidly. Several computers I have gotten had windows on them, and fdisk was the solution (all right-disk druid). Windows dies, Linux takes over. Some Companies, ship the computer without an OS (Alpha-264-600MHz for 29000 w/shipping) which results in less linux count. I know lots of people who have lots of computers running linux, 5+ (I only have 4 installed (just got a debian 2,2 cd set +2 or more), and 2 for the rest of the family). That means that there are for my family (assuming 10%linux, 90% windows) 72 people running linux. Other friends have 13+ (I think) running linux, and there are 117 windows users per one of them? Give me a break, and I am too tired to preview it.
eg: If it's written in FoxPro 2.6 you are/have been screwed.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Every body who made any money from a product that killed and tortured human beings (trust me cancer is worse then torture) are the true scumbags of the earth. they deserver whatever they got and much worse. Those billionaire CEOS are still living high on the hog and laughing at people like you who still defend them.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
If you had bothered to read either the Times article or the Cato swill, you would know that McKenzie was not talking about utilities...nor viruses, and certainly not any executable as others have mindlessly suggested. He sure as shit wasn't talking about "Hello, World!"
What point is it that yo think you are making?
doesn't Linux really depend on Windows? I mean, if there had already been a powerful, stable, open, commonly-used Unix-like system, I don't think that Linus would have had much impetus to do what he's done (not to mention the countless others).
Notice the word open. While the incentive to create something like Linux might have been there for Linus, would people around the world have caught on to Linux, or would they have already been wrapped up in the "other" open UNIX-like system? I do agree that it has nothing specifically to do with Windows itself, but rather the fact that open systems weren't prevalent at that time.
BAM!
From my reading of the article, I got the impression that they were talking not just about those programs authored by Microsoft, but in fact every program ever sold/distributed that was designed to run on Windows. You write an application using Delphi/VB/etc and make it available for download on your website, and yours is included in the 70,000 estimate. If this is the case, I would say the numbers (70,000 ever, 10,000 current) are not that unrealistic. Sure, it IS marketing spin designed to generate a reaction, but it is certainly not outright lying.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Yes.
Duh.
Did you even read Animal Farm in school???
And what do libertarians have against unions, anyway? It's the free market answer to economic injustice, no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
You answered your own question. What libertarians have against unions is that they are no different than collusion between firms to raise prices.
You just earned your second "duh".
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I know internally most financial companies have around 1200 applications in the windows environment. This number is pretty consistent within the top 50 financial companies. I would say about 70 percent of these applications are written in house. The number of these that are in use is significantly smaller. I'd say about 100 of them are actively used, but they all have to be working and installable because they are so specialized. I don't know any of the numbers for OTC apps but i'd say a good 20000 - 30000 of that 70k number are accounted for this way.
Seems to me this "report" serves more to justify M$ inocence than to provide actual figures into how many apps are available. The problem with it is the way it presents the facts, stating that there are no entry barriers for other OSes, but it misses several important points.
Drivers: Not an application per se but when you consider that in the Windows world most drivers come with tuning applications attached, whereas in the Alternative OS world if you have a binary driver you have to thank god six times in Swahili while you dance around a candle or something...
Office Applications: Oh yeah, we've got StarOffice, Abi, KOffice and their ilk, but since M$ changes file formats every three days you're facing incompatible/unformatteable files.
Vertical Applications: He's not going to find those on Amazon for sure but there are at least 70.000 custom vertical apps developed around the world. The cost of migrating those pieces of often klunky and badly documented code? Better not talk about it.
Games: The turning point of the Windows world, right now Alternative OS users are for the better part left out in the cold, it's changing but slowly. And if I count the number of games released every month around the world for Windows PC's only (Including stuff like card and hunting cames) you have around 100 games out per month.
Multimedia: Windows have at least 8 media players, 10 DVD players and at least 100 different media utilities not including music or specific software like codecs. Where are those for BeOS or OpenBSD?
Only there in those categories, you've got a 50:1 relationship between Windows apps and other OS apps.
He also talks about M$ not enforcing monopolistic pricing... WTF? does he at least compare prices in the Windows world?
For Office 2000 Professional you pay $240, for Lotus SmartSuite Millenium you pay $89 for the same exact features (And no annoying talking clip), for Corel is around $120... so in average M$ charges 200% more than their competition, and why do they remain the first choice? FUD, strong arming of OEM's and a lock in file formats.
And let's not talk about server software... sheesh...
In the end what could've been an interesting report (Despite the pro M$ bias) ends up being a big FUD spitting piece. It might raise some interesting points like the real availability of shelf windows apps but the narrow minded view enforced by the author really kills all chances of enlightenment or at least food for thought.
ZoeSch
I hate to agree with davecrazy but...
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, they do. Amazon discovered in Christmas '98 that they had difficulty supplying customers using Just In Time distrubution methods, and have since built several very large "distribution centers"[1] (aka "warehouses") to enable better product flow to customers.
Has anyone considered researching their arguments before pressing submit? It would certainly improve things around here.
-jerdenn
some industries almost require an oligopolistic market to be profitable, because there are substantial startup costs that small firms can't handle.
Taxation and over-regulation also serve as barriers to market entry. Some industries have so many byzantine rules and regulations that it's impossible for any company to enter the market unless they are enormous, heavily capitalized, and have several hundred lawyers.
Another complication is economies of scale, where only large oligopolies or monopolies have the capacities necessary to realize low per-unit costs.
A large company can easily be outdone in the marketplace by a decentralized network of independent firms, in a manner similar to distributed supercomputing. Examples include Linux, which gets contributions from hundreds of companies worldwide, and Mom & Pop ISPs, which rose up out of nowhere in 1995 and totally walked over the big telcos.
Good post.
--
to the simple mathematical truth I'll relate below
NumberOfAppsWhichRunOnWindows NumberOfAppsWhichCrashOnWindows
Why is this so astounding? Well, it's kind of like discovering "Hey I really can cram 2 liters of coke into a dixie cup without spilling any!"
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
If you think about all the shareware/freeware/open source applications that run on, or can run on windows, it's really not that hard to believe that there are 70,000, but I wouldn't count every little tic-tac-toe game as an actual application. If you really want to get technical, every UNIX[like] box has anywhere from several hundred to several thousand on it too, the only difference is, most of them are useful.
Just think: If companies could not turn a profit, most every product they sell would be much, much cheaper. It would more than make up for the lack of six-figure salaries out there, and might even start to ease up the exploitation of the developing world by those nations that became industrial powerhouses long ago.
It's funny to me that hardcore capitalists, who complain so often about others feeling entitled to welfare, unemployment, medicare, etc., bitch and moan when they don't feel they're getting the opportunity to turn a profit that they feel "entitled" to. Yes, of course you're better than everyone else because you drive a Beamer -- you've earned it, and everything else that you get because you live in a society that rewards greed more than compassion, and measures personal worth by personal wealth.
Of course not all of those are necessarily "windows applications" but most of them certainly are. Of course, we're dodging the essencial question. Does the body of applications that have been developed for MS-Windoze present a barrier to entry for other operating systems? The answer is tricky, obviously many of us here on /. use non-MS operating systems. Clearly there is no significant barrier to entry for the technically proficient portion of the computer market.
However, to the other 99% of computer users MS applications present a totally insurmountable barrier to entry. It is not possible for any alternative operating systems vendor to develop applications that would draw a significant portion of end-users away from MS products. This impossibility was created by MS and is vigerously maintained by MS through predatory buisness practices.
The problem is inherent to the buisness model of MS. It cannot be 'fixed' with less than the most dramatic of methods because the factors which created the MS model forged modern software/OS development. The only way to remove MS's abuse of it's monopolistic position is to fundamentally alter the way software is developed and sold. Shattering MS into pieces might do the trick. It could also turn Sun or Oracle into the same kind of monster in another 20 years.
RTFM or loki's website.
clipped (spacing editing)
Minimum System Requirements
Linux Kernel 2.2.9 or higher
(see that? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^)
GNU C Libraries (glibc) 2.0 or 2.1
Processor/Video Pentium 233 MHZ with 8 MB video card*, or Pentium II 266 MHz with 4 MB video card*, or AMD K6-350 MHZ with 4 MB video card*
CD-ROM 4x CD-ROM drive (600 KB/s sustained transfer rate)
RAM 64 MB
Sound OSS compatible sound card
etc...
Perhaps you didn't try? It runs fine under a friend's RH 6.2 (or is it Corel 1.0?)
Maybe, Oh look, I am going to see a problem, and quit.
66,372 Applications which suck and never should have been marketed by anybody.
1,654 Games.
1,104 Applications which cling to life even as Microsoft threatens their very existence.
795 Microsoft applications which have built in flight simulators which make install take up half of disk.
47 Fun Games.
36 Applications which actually perform some sort of work.
1 Bug Free. (ain't tellin' which, neither! :)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Second of all, whether there are 10, 100, 1000, or 1000000 applications, most people only use about six.
Slashdotters already know this. Else, why would Linux folks be bothering to try to duplication the "office suite" applications? Why? Because we know that once you get folks away from Word and Excel, the rest can follow.
Those two types of applications, plus a user interface that any random, semi-trained human can use would just about do it for the vast majority of Windows users.
Please think about that for a second: if the Linux world didn't agree with what I just said, then why are we bothering to build office suites or fix up the UI?
What question are we trying to answer?
How many applications depend on Windows?
How many applications run on Windows?
How many applications Windows users can use?
The first two are both mentioned in the Slashdot summary, but the three are largely unrelated. Consider programs that run on multiple platforms (via porting), consider Java, consider mainframe apps with customized (or telnet) front ends. I'm sure MS Marketing and MS Legal are both exploiting the vagueness of English to pull the wool over our eyes. Don't let's help them with misleading (and even contradictory!) news stories.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I noticed in the article that part of the research was done at amazon. The researcher conducted a search based on "productivity applications" and a list was returned with totaled some 8,000 apps. Not to defend Microsoft, but that does exclude the large number of applications that are targeted for other users: games, music, general entertainment, educational, graphics, communications, etc. While I don't think that this comes anywhere near 70,000 apps, that has got to take the total well past 10,000.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
We know, if they just counted programs from scratch, it would only be 1 program, Hello world from the sample, then everyone modified that.
Would Microsoft say something that's not true? Naaahhhh. Say it ain't so!
Fight Spammers!
How they calculated the 70k number is completely irrelevant. The 70k number comes up only in making the the point that the base of existing applications for Windows presents an impenetrable barrier to market entry. No rational observer, from the Cato Institute or elsewhere, could possibly dispute this. Even Microsoft didn't, apparently. If the Cato estimate claimed there were only 10 Windows applications out there, well they might be right, but they would also have to admit there are only 11 applications total. Arguing about this number is just a bizarre exercise in miscommunication.
The Cato Institute's analysts parrot the agenda of corporate America, trying to influence policy and legislation to benefit the wealthiest groups and individuals in the country. How they came to be considered authorities on anything and everything economic is beyond me.
"How Many Applications Depend On Windows?"
Too many. Which is why I have to log into Citrix to access my companies Lotus Notes stuff.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
First, America has not had a capitalist economy since at least the early 1900's. It's now a mixed economy - part capitalist, part socialist.
Second, the countries that have the freest economies also have the highest life expectancies. This includes the U.S., which has the 4th freest economy in the world. Conversely, the countries with the least free economies have the lowest life expectancies. Coincidence? Nope. You see, free people live long and prosper. People in chains die.
--
What makes the operating-system market so "impregnable" is that we're already being F-ed by M$ every day!
Well if that's allthey got then the Amiga has them handily beat. Take a look aminet http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/ and see for yourselves. I have been a Linux user for about 9 months now. I don't know about applications, but the last time I looked around in my Red Hat distro I found what has to be at least 500,000 little somethings that depend on linux!
the amount of Microsoft applications should be reduced to the amount that people actually pay for... paying customers are the only ones who will suffer a loss... and this might cut out another 80% of that huge amount of apps that they claim... and hey, they would probably agree since they think that Linux software is insignificant anyway... and its free too.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Java, Java, Java. Damn OS dependacies!
The ultimate Java app.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Did the total number of phones in existance come into play before determining whether to break up the phone company years ago?
The idea that most people only use a few programs only emphasizes MS monopoly power. MS has used its OS dominance to foist a pathetic office suite on unsuspecting victims.
I tend to agree with those who say that the Justice Dept.'s focus on bundling Explorer is misplaced. There have been many complaints that MS has hidden APIs and done other things to try to prevent competing software producers from utilizing new Windows features. That is the real abuse of monopoly power. They wait someone to come up with a good program and develop a market for it, then write their own version and coerce people into using theirs instead.
The antivirus software on my office PC protects against about 40000 viri...
:-)
On my office Solaris box there is no antivirus S/W nor on my Linux box at home
I cna think of 1000's of apps for windows. And you add the ones who have Windows Versions or ones that 50% of all sales for are Microsoft version Based. Plus all the little guys you have a lot of appilications. Just because they have more applications then Linux shouldn't make you green with envy.
Ben
This is yet more evidence that Microsoft is having more trouble keeping their lies^H^H^H^H facts straight. Maybe what finally destroys Microsoft will be the ensuing battle between Legal and Marketing (the two most innovative divisions of the company).
Too bad your karma notices that too, Zico...
Really? Guess that's why I'm posting this one with a +1 bonus. Sure, it'll get (legitimately) moderated down, but Slashdot karma's not as important to me as it apparently is to you.
Hint: More people will be able to see and/or appreciate your flame if you ever grow some balls and decide to not post as an AC with a starting score of 0. HTH, HAND.
Cheers,
I would have to say that it is probably true that there are 70000+ Microsoft apps. Look at how many software products and operating systems Microsoft has released over the years. You could get Microsoft apps for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, as well as other early 80's computers.
Plus, you could also look at all of the apps that came with the operating systems that they've launched over the years: The Windows family, MS-DOS and XENIX. They released most of the major apps for those. Every version of MS-DOS past version three came with around 50 apps in themselves. Just look inside C:\WINNT\ or C:\WINDOWS\ and you'll also see a significant number of things to play with. Some which serve little or no use, but they are there.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
I love these kinds of figures -- they're just about as meaningless as crowd estimates.
I think it's rather funny that these figures are bandied about as if they have any authority behind them to begin with. I mean, okay. So you say Windows has 70,000 apps available for it. How do you count those? Are we talking strictly in terms of polished, shrinkwrapped product on store shelves and in catalog warehouses? Well, then we lose things like WinZip (pretty freakin' important, if you ask me) and other shareware programs.
Or what if you do count shareware/freeware? Are DJGPP and GCC/Win32 the same beast? I doubt Cygnus would say so. And is Sun StarOffice the same beast as the pre-buyout product?
The fact is that if this figure was truly part of the Microsoft trial, whoever used it was blowing smoke and should have known it.
/Brian
cout >> "Hello World";
I'm aware that this dependency isn't the same kind of dependency that they're talking about, but it is something to keep in mind.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
This comment may be redundant by the time that you read it. If people read the the PDF, then you will understand where the 70,000 number comes up from.
It comes from John Rose from Compaq who made the original claim that "approximately" 70,000 applications had been written for Windows, which was the "prime reason" that Compaq shipped PCs with Windows loaded.
All of this M$ Software is not necessarily a shrink wrapped package, buyable off the shelf at any given time. It may be different versions (service packs) and my guess would include all the different utilities that you find on the CDs when you get software such as Exchange server which has utilities to low level MAPI login to the database to change, view and delete entries in the database.
I would say the number of 70,000 probably came from something that John Rose got from within Microsoft itself, possibly a listing of all the different software releases from one of the source archives.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
At my job there are 20 programmers working on one application...
I just finished looking over the study (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa380.pdf), and I can't believe how flawed it is.
The starting premise, that Judge Jackson's analysis depended on brick-and-mortar concepts, rather than e-business concepts, is almost certainly correct. However, the study authors then go and apply those same brick-and-mortar concepts to their analysis!
For example, they used the survey of MBA students to 'show' that 1/5th of computer users could be satisfied with an OS that supported 'a few hundred well-chosen applications'. And, since a fifth of the market is estimated at $2 billion, that's surely enough for a creditable challenge.
However, they totally ignore the fact that most of the users in the market are tied, in some way, to a business (either business users, or they learned to use computers because of their work). So, you'll have to convince 20% of *businesses* that a potentially incompatable program is a good idea - a much harder proposition! In Brick-and-mortar, this wouldn't matter as much, but when talking incompatable file formats and data exchange, it does indeed matter.
In fact, our in-house s/w where I work is all Microsoft, because the bosses want compatability. Even showing that StarOffice can do all that we need for free, and that Apache on Linux would also service our web needs better than MS, is insufficient to convince them... compatability is all.
And don't start me on their harping about sales restrictions and raising prices being the ign of a monopoly... not only is this 'old-tech', not only is this not true in law (simply one possible symptom), but they go on to claim that '[e]ven if Microsoft has been charging monopoly prices [...] it does not follow that Microsoft has, on balance, harmed consumers' simply because of everyone else's lower prices because of volume!
And self-contradictory? The premise that there is no real 'Application Barrier' is certainly weakened by their arguments that a developer is more likely to write for an OS that is more widely deployed, and that an OS is more widely deployed because more developers write for it!
I could go on and on... (MS 'could be said to have used the aggressive tactics it did to defend the interests of developers '?!? Please!) but let's not.
It's flawed, it's bad, it's illogical and self-contradictory... isn't that enough?
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
A few weeks ago I started working with an app that provided a nice work around for right-clicking. This app runs under Win9x and the right mouse button cannot be used in it. Instead, when selecting an object it presents a number of small icons next to the object that make up the right-click menu. IMHO, this is a very nice alternative to the right-click popup menu.
Oh, by the way, the application is called Bryce 3D and is a 3D modelling and drawing application.
---
---
"Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a sick mind." (Terry Pratchett)
Windows does have some incredibly cool stuff written for it. But why does my winamp stutter if I'm downloading mail?? Sigh, stuck in a world where I can only play shockwave games in Windows and only play Dannivision with sound.
~Hammy
P.S. Don't watch Dannivision with winamp on. There's all kinda higgledy-piggedly...
Let's hope he did more than go to Amazon to do his research.
If searching Amazon is legit, then I've got some Google "research" you might want to see:
Google results 1-10 of about 41,800,000 for good. Search took 0.10 seconds.
Google results 1-10 of about 3,210,000 for evil. Search took 0.08 seconds
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
15 PRINT "Kato is on cakcr!"
20 PRINT "That number is too low"
30 GOTO 10
Look! I've shown that the number's too high and too low, and that Kato's on crack (in an amusing style, no less!), and in the process made the 70,001st 'program' under Windoze (although not on the weekend - if I was doing it at the weekend under Linux, I'd have done this thousands of times by now).
HTH. HAND.
Mike
PS: Do I get my karma now? :o)
MikeJ
Mikesroom.org
MacKenzie has one important and valid overriding point to make which is that if the courts are going to take "too many applications" as evidence of monopoly power, we need to be specific about this. How many apps is too many? The court probably should should not have accepted and relied upon the claim "Windows has 70,000 applications for it" without a little clarification. He did clarify where such numbers might have come from and why they were probably poorly defended and were misused by the judge.
But then MacKenzie muddled matters by being pretty vague as to what he considers an application. The definition implied by his treatment seems to be "an extra program you pay money for that comes in a box with a manual and isn't yet obsolete." By his definition, Windows 2000 doesn't come with hundreds of "applications" pre-installed. Calculator.exe and minesweeper.exe don't count for him, nor does anything on http://www.jumbo.com . That's not the standard definition of "application" in the industry, so our confusion is understandable.
Also, the claim that his students are more likely to use lots of apps than most people, strikes me as unreasonable. (My contrary hunch: people who work full time as managers while getting a degree on the side are atypically busy people and thus less likely than the norm to have installed or used a great many applications.)
In all, this looks like a pretty sloppy report. As a Cato supporter, I'm disappointed that their review process let this one slip through. It needed a more critical review committee.
[(*) reasons for skepticism: (1) Game programs in particular tend not to be sold in as many versions or bundle types as apps are; Doom and Doom 2 are objectively different games. (2) Amazon only quite recently got into the software market and certainly doesn't dominate it the way they do the book market. (3) Much software is not sold in stores but is sold on line or via direct-mail and mail-order catalogs. (4) Much software isn't sold at all but is still available for use (ie, shareware)]
I play Nerd-Folk!
HERE
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
A few points here folks..
.. I'd argue its fewer than 10000 the DEPEND on Windows. I read that as 'applications that couldn't be ported to something else'. Dependancy implies that it'd be impossible to get these applications running on anything else.. Well, there are Windows emulators of Linux, Mac and SGI that I know of.. With a lot of work it'd be possible to get stuff like DirectX emulated.. (Does Wine have DirectX support yet? Don't know, I don't use it) then we'd not really need a Microsoft product to run multimedia apps.. (Just a lot of cash to deal with the court case..)
1: Slight misquote of the original, part 40.. Even if the contender attracted several thousand compatible applications, it would still look like a gamble from the consumer's perspective next to Windows, which supports over 70,000 applications.. Note use of the word OVER.. doesn't say how many more.
2: Do 70,000 Computer Programs Depend on Windows or Fewer Than 10,000?
3: Not sure where msnomer got this from.. disputing the claim that there are 70,000 Microsoft applications.. I can believe there are less than 70000 MS applications.. written by MS.. I think its more of a misunderstanding there.
Fact is, there are more than 70000 Windows applications.. but most of them don't depend on Windows, they simply run on it. Going on and on about there being lots of programs is a waste of time. Read the article, and the court statement that the article refers to, first, rather than leaping high onto the 'lets-bash-MS' bandwagon.. Onion
http://twitter.com/onion2k
...but how many of them are virii?
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Isn't the flexibility that a given OS offers to create new programs, and the rate of change in the number of available programs, more important than the existing number anyhow?
No. That's actually a pretty dumb question. "Flexibility that a given OS offers to create new programs?" Yeah, have fun measuring that. In your mind, you probably think that it would be some kind of point for Linux. Guess again. (Wheeeee, all GCC, all the time!)
As for your other point, rate of change in the number of available programs is pointless, since it's easy to have a high rate when you only have a handful of apps. Hell, if I wrote a couple of OS/2 apps this year, its rate would rocket skyward. Whoop-dee-doo. Nice try at making an insightful point, though, Timmy, we readers really appreciate it.
Cheers,
#include
int main()
{
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 70000; i++)
{
printf("#include <stdio.h>\n\n");
printf("int main()\n");
printf("{\n");
printf(" printf(\"I'm unique program #%i\\n\");\n", i);
printf(" return 0;\n");
printf("}\n");
}
return 0;
}
Lets see how many your M$ has stolen.
I suspect Microsoft's "70,000" can easily be justified or villified, based on your definition of application.
It's all a matter of complexity and perspective. Like most things in life.
I tend to think of an "application" as a collection of programs and libraries that work together in to provide a solution. I wrote a specialized encryption program today, in a few hundred lines of console-based Visual C++; I don't consider this to be an application. In the last decade, I've created a couple of hundred Windows-based EXE/DLL/OCX files, but I've written perhaps a dozen "applications."
Considering the number of people who code for Windows, however, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are 70,000 (or more) pieces of executable code for it. Hell, my Windows NT 4.0SP6 box has 3500 EXEs and DLLs alone, and I'm sure that doesn't even scratch the surface...
All about me
You forgot to mention how a Beowulf cluster factors into the scheme of things.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Bite the hand.
- w
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
Microsoft has some very "sticky" software, including Microsoft Office, financial software, custom developed software, proprietary codecs, and proprietary device drivers. The cost for any customer to switch away from those to a competing product is prohibitive, both in terms of disruption of business processes, retraining, and replacement. With that kind of cost structure, Microsoft could afford to be much worse or much more expensive than anybody else and people still wouldn't switch.
In fact, that's what you see: StarOffice, Lotus, and other packages are quite usable and essentially free, yet people stick with Microsoft office.
Everyone is forgetting about enterprise applications. You ever wonder why Visual Basic is so popular? It's not because of milling swarms of newbies who are afraid of C. It's because countless corporations use Visual Basic to write custom internal applications. Most of these end up being form-based database front ends with snippets of more traditional code here and there, but they're still programs, and they are heavily relied upon. If you still don't understand, I'm talking about utilities for managing intranets, internal database front ends, phone list managers, employee time trackers, programs for collecting and processing sales data, and so on. This is a big part of the programming world, which is why "enterprise computing" is such a buzzword. Several times I've seen statistics claims that several times more new programs are written for internal corporate use than for the shrinkwrap market. (Microsoft also claims that over 50% of all new programs are written in Visual Basic for the same reason, if you want to believe them.)
After all, given the large volume of bug fixes, security alerts/patches, and "Hey wouldn't it be neat to..." accessories such as the power toys, wouldn't Windows itself satisfy the 70,000 number?
The way I read what he said was that the lack of affordable Unix systems, combined with Microsoft's shittiness, lead to Linux starting Linux. Here's a quote from Linus which seems to explain it:
It kind of evolved through luck and happenstance into an OS, simply because there was very much a void where there wasn't much choice for someone like me. I couldn't afford some of the commercial OSes and I didn't want to run DOS or Windows -- I don't even know, did Windows really exist then? source
The same page talks about how delays to BSD gave Linux early momentum. I think you could throw in there Microsoft's and IBM's inablility to ship a consumer 386-based OS in the late 80s as something that generally ticked PC users off. And UNIX solutions (from say SCO) were ungodly expensive for an individual.
I think it's fair to say that if someone was selling a 386-based UNIX for $100 in 1990, Linus at least wouldn't have invented Linux. FreeBSD would still be around though.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Why, I just saw an Amiga representative on ZDTV boast about the 70,000 Amiga applications sure to be run on their updated/platform-indy OS.
Of course, if the question were: "How many Applications _run_ in Windows," then, of course, we'd have to say "zero." Anyone up for an explorer crash?
Kind of a silly attack...
It isn't an attack on the Cato institute. It is a bit of context, in order to provide people with a sense of Cato's political and social agenda. This is valuable information if one is to read the report and weigh its value appropriately.
The Cato Institute is a very conservative, libertarian thinktank of sorts. They have some interesting ideas and arguments, and a lot with which I take personal issue (and disagree). Nevertheless I have a copy of the constitution in my home, published by the Cato Institute (and given to me by a friend who is running for congress on the Libertarian ticket).
I am not a supporter or opponent of Cato, although I think it fair to say I disagree with them more than I agree with them.
My point? It is important to know the agenda and slant behind the argument, whether it is my slant with respect to Cato (noted above), or Cato's slant with respect to Microsoft.
The Cato Institute opposes anti-trust law in general and the DOJ trial against Microsoft in particular. This is relevant information, when one is reading an allegedly unbiased report aimed at the Findings of Fact and Law in the DOJ trial.
To describe a post pointing these biases out as an "attack on Cato" is IMHO very erroneous.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I'm sorry, but if you're referring to Cato's Other Links Of Interest page, you didn't look closely enough. Heck, they link to the Brookings Institute too; can we claim on that basis that they are secretly Democratic Party supporters, advocates of greater regional planning and a "fair" living wage? I think not. That page is simply collection of links to various and sundry think tanks that might be of interest to Cato browsers. There's a libertarianish bias to the list but there are also a lot of outliers. IOS no more exemplifies Cato's core focus than does Brookings or Hoover or the Urban Institute.
Side note: I'm personally a Cato sponsor. And nope, I've got no interest in supporting the IOS.
I play Nerd-Folk!
And how are they classifying "application"? I write a quick utility, it runs, I put it on the internet. Bam, "application". Are we talking applications sold commercially (even still, the number sounds too low).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
For those interested, AvantGo has Cato Daily Commentary and Cato Daily Dispatch channels.
It took me fifteen minutes to find those 52,000 programs.
I find it highly likely that if casual information gathering can find that many in fifteen minutes, that full fledged research would turn up a considerably larger number.
I'd also wager that vertical Windows apps alone number higher than 70k. For example, at the company I'm onsight at, we have more than twenty different vertical apps with Windows only clients that we sell to clients plus an in-house time reporting system based on Windows and an in-house project management system based on Windows. I'm sure that there is more that I am not aware since I'm just a grunt programmer.
How many large IT companies that produce vertical apps are there? I'd wager the number is at least in the tens of thousands.
How does this keep them from splitting up microsoft? Just because the baby bells aren't known as Bell Telephone doesn't mean the telephone that came with the house I live in BEFORE the split up stopped working. The same would of course apply to Micro$oft. WinAmp wont suddenly cease to work because Micro$oft got split up. Not a PR stunt, a legal stunt.
I think a metric like app count is a bit ridiculous.
voila (stick it in a file like "manyapps.pl" and run with "perl manyapps.pl"):
#manyapps.pl
#create 100,000 C++ applications, each of which
#sums a different number of integer inputs
#you can test them with something like:
#"yes 1 | add100000"
`mkdir manyapps`;
for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++){
open CURFILE, ">manyapps/temp.cpp";
print CURFILE<<'END';
#include <iostream.h>
int main(){
long sum=0;
for(unsigned long i=0; i<
END
$num=$i+2;
print CURFILE "$num; i++)\{\n";
print CURFILE<<'END';
long addthis;
cin>>addthis;
sum+=addthis;
}
cout<<sum<<endl;
return 1;
}
END
close CURFILE;
print "g++ -o manyapps/add$num manyapps/temp.cpp\n";
`g++ -o manyapps/add$num manyapps/temp.cpp`;
}
#end of Perl code
--------
70000 seems a lot.
Maybe they used a faulty Pentium to count that... Anyways, I hope that the master list isn't in MSWord format...
Well, I *thought* it was food!
J:P
--- Worst tagline ever.
As other posters have said, "Is the hello world program an application"?
The number also depends on what you count. If you look at in-house applications as well as anything sold in the shops, or on internet sites as freeware/shareware, then 70,000 might be incredibly low. There may in fact be hundreds of thousands of applications if you include everything.
If you include only shrink-wrap boxes on shelves, and only add one per app (not per version of the app), you're probably talking a few thousand.
What's my point? The thing is - few people in the general populace have any skepticism any more. People just lap up the tabloid journalism that Fox News at Nine pump out every evening, being wowed by the sensationalism then believe it without question. This means the kind of spin such as "70,000 applications" works with the general population because they don't even think to question it.
And this lack of skepticism is why Microsoft's marketing is so successful. Most of the population aren't people any more, they are sheeple who blindly follow the marketing man.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Buy me a copy and (assuming you don't have to have administrator privs to install it) I'll put it on my workstation. ;)
Thanks.
A new definition of the term 'monopoly' due to the 'new' economy may be a good point, but in a report that, as one of its main points, condemns Judge Jackson's legal reasoning as being innovative and not being on solid ground because it has no legal precedent, it is somewhat hypocritical to then introduce an innovative new definition for monopoly that has no legal precedent.
Microsoft has long clammed they have more apps than anyone else.
This clame dates back to the first relases of Windows..
Or in reality it dates back to Dos when IBM made this clame of the PC.
IBM made this clame by comparing the software the PC ran to the software than ran on populare home computers.
This was to prove the IBM PCs strength in the busness market.
However the only busness computer in that list was the Apple II the rest were primarlly entertainment machines such as the Commodore 64.
The Commodore 64 etc had a larg number of busness apps and this helpped IBMs case but thats not the target market.
It is likely most of the appications in IBMs list were CP/M apps running in emulation. CP/M at the time had a stronger marketshare in busness than IBM PCs.
Also this list was to convence managers that other PC clones did not run those apps.
However the number of PC apps that ran only on IBM brand PCs and not on clones was very small.
Jump forward...
Windows had a software toolkit before other PC GUIs however by this time Amiga, Mac and Atari ST allready had software develupment tool and a decent amount of software.
Microsoft would clame Windows had more apps than anyone else. This seemed unlikely sence there were so few Windows apps accually on the shelfs vs other platforms.
It was likely this number included the ammount of Dos applications allready on the market. Such apps ran on PC GUIs and in emulation on the Amiga, Mac and Atari ST.
[The Amiga and ST also running Mac apps creating a very larg total number of appications available for those platforms]
Then Microsoft clammed Windows had more users. It appeared at the time Microsoft was dubble and posably tripple counting.
To explain.. Most PCs had Windows 3.11 preinstalled.. Many offices needed network ready PCs. Some would strip Windows off the PCs and use Dos, Os/2 or Sco/Xenix.
Many would replace Windows 3.11 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
The removed systems and workgroups systems are dubble count systems sence they get counted a second time.
The Workgroup boxes giving Microsoft 2 machines when they have 1 OS/2 giving them 1 when they have none.
But wait.. Microsoft made this clame shortly after the release of Windows 95...
Tripple count... now machines running 3.11 workgroups were being counted a third time with Windows 95.
Admittedly Machines going from OS/2 to 95 were also tripple count but in this case Microsoft counting 2 where they had 1 and IBM counting 1 when they had none.
Then Linux....
Microsoft counting 1 when they had none.. Linux counting nothing when they had one...
While Windows was in larg use the statistics were overwhelming and I did not see that in the real world.
I saw XTs, Amigas, Macs and Unix boxes with significant marketshare.
I would find at least 1 non Windows machine for every 3 Windows boxes. This did not sit with Microsofts overwhelming majority clame.
I long came to suspect Microsoft statistics were fudged... Lot's of Windows boxes.. lot's of everythinge else.
Sence then Microsoft would clame [Insert Os here] did not have a significant amount of software.
Amiga was dead.. Atari ST was dying (fallen over the cliff waiting for the splat..).
But Mac had a significant amount of software....
This clame sits even harder with Linux. Microsoft still counting Dos apps... But with Linux only counting the apps for Linux on the shelfs.
But Linux only had Doom and even that wasn't on the shelfs for Linux. Linux had the whole body of GNU software that formed the foundation of Linux.
It also had a larg body of free software for Unix that ran on Linux.
When counting free applications I find more stuff for Linux than I do for Windows.
Example... I know of only ONE security camra program for Windows. It relys on ONE obsolete QuickCam (Obsolete not in that it's old but in that it's not produced anymore)Linux has a few. Two I have tried are motion and gspy...
Motion runs as a deamon gspy as a client... very good software...
There is an older application doing the same job but it's now missing... I've found others but havn't tried them and don't know if they are working yet.
The single Windows appication is good for guarding your office or cubical. This becouse it relys on a camra that can not be far from the computer.
The Linux counterparts are for sereous security as they can use any number of camras including existing survalence camras.
I am currently trying this out however have the problem that our camras are bad and generate the illusion of motion by having an unstable image.
Linux is lacking software in certen areas. This is to be expected. However Linux coders are filling this gap.
This is due not to a lack of programmers or a defecentcy in Linux but a void of anyone using Linux in that area.
If there are 70,000 Windows apps there are likely at least 60,000 Linux apps... I however tend to think there are more Linux apps not less...
I can find more software at Metalabs than I can at Office Depo...
I suspect this remains true for Mac and BeOS... and of course BSD should have more or less the same amount of software as Linux... with a few BSD only and a few Linux only programs..
I don't actually exist.
2 different issues actually. I like my job, I just do not like the tools that I am reqired to use right now, i.e., I do not have a "windows" job I am a Logistician. As stated, I am planning to change that.
An issue related to your statement, is that using and running Linux at home does not carry much weight in job world. Several places have called me for Linux jobs, because it is on resume, but insist on candidates having used it at their "regular job".
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This looks like just another piece of Microsoft-sponsored astroturfing to me.
--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
> The day of the compiled app is comming to a quick and sudden end.
;-)
You don't have a glue how games are written do you?
Right now, my hot-rod system (the Pentium III 500 with 320 MB of SDRAM and a GeForce2) runs Windows 2000. I like it cause all the Id Software titles Q2 and after (and all the total conversions from the engine] were designed to at least run on NT. Since they used DirectX to run full screen, and DirectSound for sound, under Windows 2000, it runs with the swiftness of 98, but it's stable as NT. Until Linux can compete with something like that, Q3 will be more popular on Windows 2000.
I tried to get Q3 running on my Linux box, but I read the readme and it says that I need kernel 2.9 and glibc 2.0 or greater. I'm fine on the C libraries, but my kernel is 2.2.14, which is from RedHat 6.2. Q3 works just fine on Windows 95, so why this compatibility juxtaposition?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
A) Microsoft knowingly lied in 1997 about the number of applications written for Windows.
B) Microsoft saw that the large number of reported applications was going to cause the judge to move toward a break-up.
C) Microsoft didn't correct the mistake.
D) Microsoft continues to validate it's false claim...
Doesn't this look like a classic case of a criminal that wants to be caught?
I'm not surprized that they continue to deny the truth. Every one of you knows as well as I do that as long as the general public hears "70,000 applications!", they'll believe it. Of course Microsoft wants to appear to have bukoos of applications for it's OS. Of course it doesn't want the public to know that their inflated number "counts programs written for all available operating systems, including Red Hat Linux, IBM OS/2, and Apple Mac, as well as Microsoft Windows" and that "many of the software programs are also listed several times in the various subcategories".
At some point, Microsoft just wants this whole thing to be over, too. Like anyone that's done anything deviant in secret, sometimes you are ready to even face the consequences, as long as the situation just comes to an end.
--SpookComix
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
"upgrades" everybody has to buy that are actually bug fixes:
Or it may be an exaggeration based on the fact that many software programs go through multiple versions during their life spans. Or maybe it's all the obselete software everybody has laying around?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Microsoft has 666 applications right?
--
you are not what you own
it's a sig, wtf?
This executable needs windows - does it qualify? (who cares?!) WINE makes it able to run on other platforms. However, does this mean it is stricken from the Windows only list?
What in the world is going on with the Bill Gates graphic? I don't understand what that thing around his head is.
Come on now, with all the variants of all the branches of all the OSS programs out there, don't you think we could come up with a similar number? 70,000? That's not that big.
:)
Shoot, I bet there are at least that many text editors.
http://kered.org
See the MS marketing department and the MS legal department duke it out of what set of numbers to use!!! This will be a no holds barred deathmatch in the steel cage of the DOJ! The Battle of the Bulge begins at 7AM pacific, 10AM eastern. Buy your tickets where ever you feel like because in this match SOMEONE WILL BE BROKEN UP!!!
*this is not a ticketmaster event, but feel free to complain to them anyways
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I'm the Cato Institute's webmaster (as well as a Slashdot reader). I convinced the people upstairs to let me post the report a early because of Slashdot. It's at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-380es.html I hope this will clear up some questions.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
(since that's what is running on my work system).
/usr/bin /usr/bin/X11 /sbin /usr/sbin 2>/dev/null | wc -l
/usr/local/bin, /freeware/bin, etc. (since I didn't want to include GNU duplicates of existing Unix programs, which would probably be all right, though).
/usr/bin/X11 probably has a few -- and all those other things I can find on Freshmeat that usually build on my platform.
$ ls -1
1018
And most of these are STANDARD with Tru64 Unix... that is, I didn't include
This includes Netscape (comes standard with Tru64), but not Apache, MySQL, Oracle, Informix, and all those other programs that people with Alpha systems tend to run.
Admittedly, this is just a frozen point in time; with each release, there are some utilities that are obsoleted, and new utilities added.
But the point can be made that any Unix system would have a similar number of standard utilities as well, especially if you include X11, etc.
Of course, this doesn't include vertical applications (banking software, instrumentation programs, chemical analysis programs), games -- although
Maybe the author was counting the number of brain cells in his head... [smile]
(Oh yeah... how many times have CS newbies written "Hello, world!" programs????)
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
What twisted, bizarre logic. How do you take dependence on a lack of open Unixes and call that dependence on Windows? If it hadn't been for Windows, then something else would have filled the void. Are you suggesting that void-filler would have been an open Unix? What open Unix? BSD was in legal limbo, and I don't see any other open Unix contenders, especially in 1991. Linus would have still had his incentive.
I don't wanna get flamey, but what you're saying doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Slow, Bandwidth,Dead.
Sig it.
1. MS Word
2. MS Excel
3. MS Access
I am stuck with a MSWin machine at work because everything that I do must comply with the above 3 programs.
I do not run them at home, no longer do any work related to the above stuff at home and am currently devising a plot to recreate all of my output on a FreeBSD (or Linux, if Oracle for Linux will not run on FBSD) and Oracle 8i machine.
Perhaps at that time I can actually complete a database app without running out of memory every hour.
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This is the Cato Institute, not Cato Calin.
The Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank, Cato Calin thinks about as often as a fish tank.
Who cares that means that there are 70,000 extinct or soon to become extinct applications. Take a look people very seldome do I use applications that do not run on the web. The day of the compiled app is comming to a quick and sudden end.
Got Code?
--Fesh
"Citizens have rights. Consumers only have wallets." - gilroy
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
This cracks me up. Because there are so few applications available for Windows, Microsofts monopoly on desktop productivity software (MS Office) is vulerable to losing marketshare to a no-cost productivity suite.
In other words, MS isn't a monopoly because their product that cost hundreds of dollars per license might lost marketshare to a competeing product that costs $0.
Can someone explain this to me in a way that makes sense?
Very few. 3DSMAX would never make it into X; it'd have to do the same exact thing that Q2 and Q3 do: make a separate viewport in MesaGL. Meanwhile, in Windows 2000, you can have multiple programs using MMSYSTEM without conflict (so long as you do it in moderation; the same program usually recycles the window for the next WAV or MP3. DirectSound is still first come, first served, but then again, it's designed that way for responsive sound output, as in Q3, Unreal Tournament, basically every live-sound application.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Not to sound like bill clinton here. But it really depends on how this study defines an application. The way my company defines them. I've written almost 3 this year by myself. They are all web based apps. None of them are all that remarkable.
I suspect that the 70,000 figure Cato is talking about marketed horizontal applications for Cato. Otherwise 70,000 is ridiculously low.
My Weblog
For Windows, what it comes down to is that most things are incovenient to do with it out of the box, and inconvenient to fix with a little script. To address that inconvenience, you usually need to shell out $20-$100 to buy some shareware or commercial utility. Each of those programs requires installation, updates, and maintenance. No wonder that Windows is so popular with software developers. And no wonder that Windows TCO is so high, with all these niggling little hidden costs and limitations.
In terms of actual application software diversity, Windows is actually looking more and more bleak, as Microsoft and a few other companies take over one application software market after the other.
I don't understand why this is news on slashdot. You are disputing the number? Are you seriously that out of touch with the marketplace?
70,000 sounds quite low actually. That must be commercial apps, not all the custom in-house stuff companies write.
When you consider there is something like 5 million registered users of Visual Studio...
Seriously, has anyone counted how many programs depend on connecting to an X server?
Well? Probably in the tens of thousands as well. Check freshmeat.net, and your local University's Computer Science majors.
I'm pretty sure this is an amazingly meaningless statistic.
|/usr/games/fortune
Not flamebait!
Not to defend Microsoft here, but their numbers could be correct. How? I used to work for a fairly large software company. The product that I worked on had a Windows version and a Mac version. On top of that we supported 5 different languages. Then on top of that, we had 4 different packages that included different sets of 3rd party software. Then we had 2 different bundles that it went in with other software from my company. So, when it came down to it, we had:
1 product * 2 platforms * 5 languages * 4 distrobutions * 2 bundles = 80 different shippable CD and box sets. All from one single application.
From an engineering perspective, each of these shippables was considered to be a separate product due to the testing we needed to do to make sure everything worked as intended.
I can imagine that Microsoft has hundreds of applications that they sell, then all the languages that they support, plus bundles, plus patches, etc, would lead to an extremely large number of shippables.
Now I could imagine that your average marketing person could take those numbers of shippables and massage them into some kind of data saying Microsoft has 70,000 applications. Which is not correct. They may have 70,000 shippables, but not applications.
Was the criteria for an application laid out? Stacker used to be an app; now it's in NT/W2k. Word/Excel/etc used to be separate entities; now they're bundled. And who can forget our friend Internet Exploder^h^h^hrer.
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
Sheesh, I had to maintain a Foxpro 2.6 app for a few years there, once. That fucking sucked! I could never get FoxPro to work right under WinOS/2, so I had to boot real DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.1. Funny how right after that project died, my job got sooo much easier.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That number is way too high
That number is way too low
Are they counting all the virii/Hello Worlds/shareware programs/versions of Windows?
Kato is on crack
I coded more applications on my weekend
Linux r00lz
Any obligatory joke about Micro$oft
You're welcome.
Typical case of "if you let me choose the metric, I can come up with any number I want". As with many "studies", they just looked for numbers to support a pre-defined conclusions. If you think about it for, like, 3 seconds, you'll realize that the "number of applications written" is a totally irrelevant figure for *any* OS, Linux included. It doesn't *mean* anything, simply because it's impossible to define "application"
Does the "Hello world" sample cited by other posters count as an application? Does a throw-away internal utlity written in Perl? If I write something in Perl and run it on a Windows box, does that count as a Windows application?
I doubt that Microsoft will support this figure, BTW: if they want to count the number of applications written for Windows, they'll no doubt take a look at the number of Windows logo certified apps, as well as at the number of applications worth mentioning in their solutions directory developed by their authorized solution providers.
But, all conspiry theories(tm) aside, I really don't see the point of this metric at all. Does anyone really need any convincing that Windows is the dominant consumer/corporate desktop OS? Really??
What the hell makes the Green Hornet's sidekick an authority on computer programs anyway???
--
The shareholder is always right.
It all depends on what you define as windows software. There are shops still running windows 3.11 and apps written for 3.11 - doubt he counted that. Does that finding also include freeware/shareware? Not on Amazon...
How about all the MS applications created by things like visual basic, foxpro, java, etc...?
The most exaggerated metric to show a low marker is to say "current software sold by Amazon". Please - I don't for one moment believe they sell every possible piece of software for windows out there.
That question and those like it can never really be answered honestly because no one will ever define what gets counted.
Does that junker up on blocks behind your neighbor's house count? Maybe. What about that 1948 Ford that's rusting in the creak down near the mill? Probably not.
When it comes to cars, I'd say the right count would be the number of registered automobiles.
With applications, I think the count would be the number of products on the shelf plus those actively supported by in-house staffs.
I can't say that 70,000 sounds all that unreasonable. There are hundreds of thousands of companies in the United States alone. If just a quarter of that number wrote one application, you could easily hit 70,000. Add to that all your shrinkwrap commercial products and shareware and you've got far more than 70,000.
Heck, looking at all the legacy crap I've got to support, built by employees who have long since moved on to bigger and better things and I can come up with almost that many applications at my company alone.
InitZero
CATO is NOT the 'free market' champion they proport to be, but is in truth a corporate
apologizer who has turned a blind eye towards Microsoft's abuses. As a (former) CATO contributor, my attempts to explain the Microsoft case to CATO received only rude and condecending rebuttal.
What CATO fails to acknoledge is that Microsoft is the beneficiary of a government sanctioned monopoly by virtue of CopyRight Law. This case does not deal with "normal" economic principles but instead wrestles with the use and abuse of government monopoly power provided by CopyRight. The original intent of CopyRights and Patents, to promote and reward intellectual pursuit, is today distorted to the point that both can be used as weapons that can actually destroy intellectual pursuit.
Bill Gates is the leading innovator of leveraging governemnt power in the form of CopyRights.
oh....my!
420
Keeping hundreds of thousands of help desk folks the world over gainfully employed. IF Windows wasn't broke the world economy would collapse. It's kind of like the crime 'problem'. If we could solve it then an entire sector of the economy focused on underclass management would stop.
The reasons? I can only speculate that by doing this Microsoft continues their vague and ambiguous (albeit futile) attempt to rule the world by producing 'crazy old man stories' to confuse the people that read Slashdot. But seriously, 70,000 applications in the entire history of computing? Yeah, this is a little too typical of big brother.
Self-sufficiency tends to fall apart with extended periods of megalomania...
Disclaimer: I am a smoker. I don't like the fact that I smoke, but all my quitting attempts have so far been unsuccessful. This is the reason why I don't think tobacco products should be sold. A government-enforced ban on smoking would probably be the best thing to happen to me in my life.
I bet a government-enforced ban on smoking would be real successful, just like alcohol Prohibition and the War on Drugs.
Just what we need, more violence in our streets, adulterated tobacco, people stealing to support their nicotine habit, and no discernible reduction in smoking.
Disclaimer: I'm a smoker too. I've quit twice for 6 months each time, and am determined to quit once and for all. They say that most smokers quit 3 times before quitting for good. It's painfully difficult to quit, but where there's a will there's a way.
I still think that I am the person who is best equipped to make decisions for myself. Not Dubya, Gore, Nader or any other person with a tie and a thirst for power over others. It's my body, my life, and my choice for better or for worse. Whatever happened to the concept of personal responsibility?
--
Having written programs under Windows for over 7 years, I have a definite opinion on Microsoft's strategy to attract developers. At first, we were coaxed to Windows when MS opened up the APIs. Not open as in source, but you could actually buy a book that explained the Windows API. A friend of mine was a Mac coder back in the bad old days, and he was always struggling to find the appropriate API call for something or another. Now Windows has come full circle! With the "unpublished APIs" used by Office, you are back squarely in 1990.
Gotta love progress.
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
Would you care to define exactly how outlight lying and a marketing spin are different.
I never noticed a difference.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
--Mike--