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PC Makers See Little Reason to Deploy XP N
suitepotato writes "In this article, Ingrid Marson reports to CNet News that in a small survey of companies such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, there are no real plans to deploy Microsoft's Windows XP N which was the version required by the European Union. It would seem that despite the rants of anger towards Microsoft that they were unfairly bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP, the public at large would not seem to agree and is not actually demanding any such stripped down version. Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?"
Of course the EU sanctions were misguided. That is what happens when you ask Microsoft's competitors for input rather than their customers.
Most people don't care if they're using quicktime, realplayer, windows media player etc. They probably won't even notice the difference. But if there wasn't the choice, then they would notice, because the media player available would suck if it had no competition to drive it on. People don't realise it's important to them that there's competition between MS and real (if they did, there wouldn't be any need for the EU to act, people could sort it out themselves). But that doesn't mean it isn't.
I am trolling
Internet explorer is critical amongst these as it is the foundation of the MS help system. Media player is critical as consumers expect at least a basic capability to view media locally and online "out-of-the-box."
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
"I'm not even a fan of the KDE Konqueror(SP?) browser being integrated"
.*htm* and it will happily do it.
Konq isn't a web browser. It is a KParts container. It just so happens that a very popular Kpart is to load in it is KHTML. Though KHTML can ofcourse be loaded into other KDE apps as well. On top of that, you don't have to use KHTML as the renderer for Konq looking at web pages...there is a Gecko based KPart too (though not as mature). Or...heck, just tell KDE/Konq to use Mozilla/Firefox for
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Acually you can still be convicted for abuse of a monopoly, even if there is a small amount of competition. 90% is a sufficient market share to be able to abuse it. Usually you do not want things to get too bad before taking action against the offenders.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I believe that the playing field should be kept level, and that other companies should be treated just as Microsoft was by the EU.
I agree as soon as Apple is declared by the courts to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems I think they should be forced to comply with all the anti-trust regulations that would then apply to them. Oh wait, the same laws do apply it's just that Apple is not a monopoly and MS is.
Yes you can uninstall all of those applications from OS X very easily with the exception of Dashboard which is actually a part of the OS and is built into the UI. It can be removed with a little know how though. All of that, however, is immaterial.
The problem is not with companies bundling things together in general. If someone wants to sell fish and cheese together, great, good luck. The problem is that if one company has a monopoly on something and only sells that that something bundled with something else it drives everyone else out of business. That is why their are special rules for monopolies, because they can upset free trade by coercing their customers. MS has and is doing just that. They can sell all the cheese they want and all the fish they want, but they can't sell only fish and cheese bundles once they have established a monopoly on fish.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
WMP for Mac
WMP for Mac very rarely actually works, since it seems to support VERY few codecs, but every once in awhile I'll get an asf file that MPlayer and VLC can't play, but WMP can. It's far more common to find a file that MPlayer can play fine, but that WMP doesn't recognize.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That MS's competitors seem to think that they should be able to make an inferior, or at best equal product that costs money and sell it, and if they don't it's MS's anti-competitivness that's stopping them.
Personally I think it's fine, I think the goal should be to make a BETTER product, so you want to buy it. I've purchased a number of products to which MS has free included version, because the 3rd party solutions are better, and I use others that are free alternatives. For exmaple:
1) Diskeeper. It's a disk defragmentation program. Actually the included Windows version is based on it, but is very strippend down and much slower. The more optimized, faster algorithms combined with background operation made it worth the money to me.
2) UltraEdit. Notepad does edit text documents, but it pretty basic. I found it worth the money to get UNIX break support, syntax highlighting, regex searching, macros, etc, etc.
3) Mozilla. IE has problems with support of features I want, such as transparant PNGs, so I use Mozilla instead, despite it's slightly inferior rendering engine.
4) Winamp. WMP is fine for video, but I dislike it for audio. Winamp is just what I want. It even has an adapter to use my professional DirectX plugins.
5) Kerio Personal Firewall. Windows Firewall is nice and all, but too simplistic for my tastes. I need to make more complex rules for apps, and I like how it monitors if an app is changed. The campus wher eI work actually shelled out for a site license of this.
6) Nero. Windows can burn CDs allegedly, but I wonldn't know. I love Nero's interface so that's all I ever use.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I can think of right now. The point is, all of these are better than the MS alternatives. However I find both Real and QuickTime to be highly inferior to Media Player. So bad, in fact, I dislike installing them, and get QuickTime Alternative and Real Alternative instead.
It seems to me, rather than whining about MS including an acceptable solution, they should be working to make a great solution so that you'll ignore what MS has and get their's anyhow. I understand for many people, iTunes is such a solution. MS has some included online media purchasing system, but I've heard nothing of it. Seems if people purchase their music that way, iTunes is how they do it, despite it not being bundled.
Kids today... I don;t know... when _I_ were a lad...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
All well and good, but the Websters definition does not encompass what the antitrust laws actually say:
monopoly
n. a business or inter-related group of businesses which controls so much of the production or sale of a product or kind of product as to control the market, including prices and distribution. Business practices, combinations and/or acquisitions which tend to create a monopoly may violate various federal statutes which regulate or prohibit business trusts and monopolies or prohibit restraint of trade. However, limited monopolies granted by a manufacturer to a wholesaler in a particular area are usually legal, since they are like "licenses." Public utilities such as electric, gas and water companies may also hold a monopoly in a particular geographic area since it is the only practical way to provide the public service, and they are regulated by state public utility commissions.
This is from the law.com online dictionary.
As you can see, no requirement that the monopolists extert "exclusive" control. The market percentages I gave above come from U.S. antitrust caselaw.
Also, here's the definition from Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage:"
"Monopoly is generally understood to mean 'control by one supplier or producer over the commercial market within a given region.' Nonlawyers often believe that this control must be complete, but the law in various jurisdictions now sets the level of control at a fraction of the overall market. In England, for example, under the Monopolies and Mergers Acts of 1948 and 1965, a monopoly existed when the level of control reached one-third of a local or national market. That propertion was lessened by the Fair Trading Act of 1973, under which companies can be prevented from controliing more than one-fourth of the supply of a product or service."
So, it appears that in England, a 25% market share is sufficient for a monopoly -- hardly an "exclusive" situation. The dictionary definitions are all well and good, but since this is more-or-less a legal discussion, the LEGAL definitions of monopoly are the ones we should bepaying attention to.
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
As far as I'm concerned, OS == kernel. If you were to take a CS course in operating systems, or read a textbook on OS design, you sure as hell wouldn't find any mention of media players or HTML rendering engines.
the layman's guide to computer science
One thing lots of people forget is that internet explorer is more than just a web browser.
Internet explorer is a set of internet access DLLs (like wininet.dll for doing HTTP & friends), a HTML rendering engine/widget (mshtml.dll and shdocvw.dll with other dlls for JavaScript, JScript, VBScript, images and so on), ancillary dlls (like msxml.dll for doing XML related stuff) and then a web browser (iexplore.exe) that sits on top of the HTML rendering widget and the other dlls.
Removing the HTML rendering widget and internet DLLs (which is what most people think of when they say "Internet Explorer") would break many things including (but not limited to):
HTML Help
Explorer (i.e. the web integration)
Visual Studio (including MSDN)
Netscape 8 (with the IE embedding)
Half-Life (just ask the WINE people about the links between Half-Life and Internet Explorer)
MSN Messenger (including at least one 3rd party MSN client that uses wininet.dll to access MSN)
and no doubt others that I havent mentioned.