Them charging higher price than necessary will allow competitors to step in easier. If the result is a price war (in which the monopolist has the advantage) then prices will come down, and fast.
Or the monopolist getting lazy (e.g.: MS) also allows competitors in the market, such as Linux/Android in the OS market and Safari/Firefox/Opera in the browser market.
And I wonder whether such bahaviour from Google's side would become an abuse of a monopoly. Or isn't their search market share big enough to be considered a monopolist?
Indeed. I can not believe Google is the one and only company that provide such an advertising service. Sure they are the biggest and best known, but there must be others too.
MS having a monopoly with Windows is perfectly legal; no problem there.
MS using their Windows monopoly to enter the browser market with IE by using that monopoly to get IE on everyone's desktop instead of Netscape, that's not fine.
Google having a search monopoly, that's also no problem, as long as they do not leverage their search monopoly to one way or another put competing advertising companies in a disadvantage. Afaik they do not do so.
Whether it was a good idea to allow Google to buy up Doubleclick - I don't know, that depends on how much of a monopoly Google resp. Doubleclick had at the time in the search market.
Now Google has gained a monopoly in small-scale advertising (not sure about the big guys, at least all small-scale web sites seem to use Google's advertising), which again is fine, as long as they do not leverage that monopoly to do other things.
Doesn't Yahoo offer similar ads as well? Or any other providers? Google can hardly be the only one, and for the web site in question here it shouldn't really matter who provides ads for them.
And the news? Good grief - I watched UK news and the whole time it was just people talking about facts and things. There wasn't a SINGLE ARGUMENT or fight during the entire show. What the hell kind of news reporting is that?
Personally I am quite happy when news outlets do their best to separate facts and opinions. Arguments/debates do not belong in a news broadcast, unless the debate itself is the news.
Even though US laws are inherited largely from UK laws that won't work. If only for the different government/legal structures.
That will qualify as at least one fair use of the 'Fair use' laws.
Isn't the text of laws in the public domain already? If so there is no "fair use" needed. Any use is fair use (except probably claiming you're the author when you aren't).
You tell your subjects you're testing one thing, but you're testing another (with or without the knowledge of the tester).
With these lights one could set up two groups; saying you want to test who has more problems getting out of bed in the morning, those with a traditional alarm or those with the light-based alarm clock (which is what I know these devices for). And then over the course of a month or two you interview the subjects every week and in that interview ask about getting up, but actually rate them on depression/happiness. This way you at least eliminate (most of) the placebo effect, and may get some interesting side results too, like whether they actually work to get you out of bed easier, albeit those results are likely less reliable.
Some 20 years ago I first heard about winter depression and light therapy to solve it, as winter depression is caused by not enough light. People are always happier when the sun shines than when it's cloudy all day: light is considered the reason.
At the time the suggestion was to wear some headgear that would shine two fairly bright lights in your eyes from above (similar to the sun: it's direct light hits your eye, but doesn't blind you as you're not looking at it directly). Said to work quite well.
I've been in the north of Norway during July (permanent day!), and the locals also told me that it's very easy to get depressed in winter due to the lack of daylight, and how everyone is looking forward to the return of the sun.
It may be me but that linked article very much reads like one big advertisement. Having the sponsor's name all over the place isn't helping of course. Anyhow great marketing, they even managed to get it on slashdot while it has nothing to do with tech whatsoever - and light therapy isn't something new either.
According to this story, Symbian may not be dead yet (and of course phones with it installed will continue to be sold for the time being), but the future doesn't seem too bright.
Indeed yesterday looking for a new phone for myself I do recall having seen Symbian running Nokia's on display next to Android running Nokia's. Not sure though I am primarily interested in Android not Symbian, and those Nokias were out of my budget so didn't pay too close attention.
Microsoft's lock-in isn't the Windows platform as such, it's their applications. Most notable IE6 with all it's proprietary extensions (see regular/. stories on how companies just can't retire it), and MS Office's file formats. That's what keeps people stuck to Windows. And as a result the many other software applications that are Windows-only.
OSX is nice too, sure. How could I forget typing this on an iBook.
And this discussion is not about the average Joe, it's a level higher. Corporate choices, government work, computer/phone manufacturers. The ones that decide what Average Joe can choose from later. And Joe generally chooses "a PC" or "an Apple". And on top of that China Mobile is definitely not in the desktop computer market.
The problem of OSX, just like iOS, is that it's restricted. Yes on one hand it's a big player, some 5% or so for OSX, I don't know the market share of the iPhone in the smartphone market but I guess double digits and iPad is doing quite well too. On the other hand they're niche players: iOS is available on like half a dozen devices or so (the iPad and a few iPhone incarnations, iPod Touch maybe too, not keeping track too well). Even Windows Mobile is available on more different devices. Android comes on maybe a couple hundred different products right now, with more being released all the time. And don't even thing of building your own computer or mobile phone and loading Apple's OS on it: you can't. Technically maybe; legally not; so it's not a serious option overall.
When you buy a computer, and are looking for an OS with it, OSX is not an option. If you want OSX then you must buy an Apple computer. When you want to build a tablet like the iPad, you can't go and install iOS on it. So for example for Nokia, iOS is not an option. Android is. ChromeOS too. And so is Windows Mobile. And that's what we're talking about here.
And I hope it's not going to be replaced by a Linux monopoly - as at the moment, the serious choices are Linux and Windows for OS. Even in mobile (Chrome OS and Android are Linux derivatives, and Symbian is dying if not dead).
More like the current web browser market: basically WebKit, IE, Mozilla (I forgot it's engine's name). Three html kits that are packed in various shells. IE still a bit big at some 60-70%, Webkit should grow more. Nicely fragmented, requiring attention to standards, and switching becomes trivial as everything still works. That's what we need for competition.
However there is such a thing as "red flag Linux" or so - a Chinese state-initiated, localised distribution. No idea how much it's used as I'm used to seeing Windows all over the place.
Open Source is pretty communist in a way: open for everyone, free to go around and for all to use. But the main reason China and many other countries in the world outside US (e.g. India, Russia, Brazil) are supporting Linux or one of it's varieties is to become independent from foreign software. This has to do with control, economic security, and stimulation of local software development instead of importing it.
It's hard for US mobile phone providers to compete with the lines of China Mobile and China Unicom (the #2 in China, afaik there are only two, thanks to state regulations). China Mobile has over half a billion subscribers - that's more than the entire US population. China has the advantage in numbers.
In other words, please correct me if I'm wrong: Alice logs on to her Facebook account over https to keep her password safe, but Bob who's sitting at the other side of the coffee shop can still hijack her session after Facebook falls back to http for the rest of the communication, as Bob can sniff out Alice her session cookie (the session cookie is sent to the site as part of each http request, and unless https is used, travels over the connection in the clear).
So now Bob can access Facebook as if he's Alice, without knowing Alice's password, simply because he has sniffed her session cookie out of the air.
Also makes me wonder why sites are so reluctant to use ssl - is it so computationally expensive to encrypt everything? Or are their other reasons for this?
Serious question: is wireless encryption nowadays already up to par with ssl encryption (which I think we can safely consider to be uncrackable with today's tech)? WPE is known to be insecure (crackable); WPA I haven't heard much better about.
I've encryption enabled on my AP, with fairly simple password, mainly as I'm not interested to be ISP for accidental passers-by. For the rest I don't consider it really secure, and will use https when possible instead. Or just assume I'm on an insecure connection (like the one I'm typing this post on - it's all wired on my side, but still only http).
Vietnamese made the switch already, with the addition of numerous accents. Chinese has been tried, failed, because there are too many homophones, especially if the tones are left out. Mandarin nowadays is learned using Pinyin romanisation. And the convenience of using the same script for various related dialects/languages which is a great plus for their character script.
That notwithstanding it's a bitch to learn.
Other Asian languages: Japanese has a phonetic version already; afaik there is a way to write that language 100% phonetic. Korean is some character script again. Thai is written phonetic, using their own letters, as Russian and Arabic. India not sure, has several languages/scripts. Tibetan is phonetic, with their own script. Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog (Philippines) also use the Western script without any extras like Vietnamese. Other languages I don't know.
That are all native Chinese speakers, who have learned English as second language.
I don't know of any native English that can type Chinese (because learning to speak it is hard so westerners in Hong Kong do not even try, learning to read/write is even harder so basically no non-Chinese ever becomes anywhere near native-quality in that).
After living eight years in Hong Kong I can have a simple conversation in Chinese, can read most of the menu in restaurants, and bits and pieces elsewhere. With that I'm way ahead of most Westerners.
Comparing input speeds (in words per minute) the speeds people quote themselves (I learned that from reading many resumes - admittedly no hard data) for English are roughly double that of Chinese, and always a lot higher.
Chinese characters using Changjie input (one of the hardest to learn but most used at least for input of traditional characters as it's a pretty efficient one) require 3-4 keystrokes each; English words are on average about 5 letters. Not counting spaces.
Plus the fact that a spoken language changes - good chance you would not be able to understand English as it was spoken say 500 years ago. They would not only have used different words, also used a different pronunciation.
Spelling is much more fixed, and will contain artifacts of old pronunciations as well.
And when it comes to phonetic scripts, English is actually a quite poor example. Many European languages are pronounced much more like their spelling than English is.
It is surely harder than entering English, if only looking at the learning curve. The same I see around me regarding Chinese (I can't type Chinese but I see other people do it).
Just like Japanese it's a hack: you only use QWERTY because it was the standard already, before computers came to Asia. Then Asian input was patched on top of that. Were the Asians to have invented the computer, the keyboard would surely have looked very very different.
Sometimes I am wondering how the computing world would have looked like if the computer had been invented in Japan or in China, instead of in the US. Just thinking of the script they use, which is of course much harder to design a keyboard for than English or most other Western languages. Even Russian would be trivial to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Them charging higher price than necessary will allow competitors to step in easier. If the result is a price war (in which the monopolist has the advantage) then prices will come down, and fast.
Or the monopolist getting lazy (e.g.: MS) also allows competitors in the market, such as Linux/Android in the OS market and Safari/Firefox/Opera in the browser market.
And I wonder whether such bahaviour from Google's side would become an abuse of a monopoly. Or isn't their search market share big enough to be considered a monopolist?
Indeed. I can not believe Google is the one and only company that provide such an advertising service. Sure they are the biggest and best known, but there must be others too.
MS having a monopoly with Windows is perfectly legal; no problem there.
MS using their Windows monopoly to enter the browser market with IE by using that monopoly to get IE on everyone's desktop instead of Netscape, that's not fine.
Google having a search monopoly, that's also no problem, as long as they do not leverage their search monopoly to one way or another put competing advertising companies in a disadvantage. Afaik they do not do so.
Whether it was a good idea to allow Google to buy up Doubleclick - I don't know, that depends on how much of a monopoly Google resp. Doubleclick had at the time in the search market.
Now Google has gained a monopoly in small-scale advertising (not sure about the big guys, at least all small-scale web sites seem to use Google's advertising), which again is fine, as long as they do not leverage that monopoly to do other things.
Doesn't Yahoo offer similar ads as well? Or any other providers? Google can hardly be the only one, and for the web site in question here it shouldn't really matter who provides ads for them.
And the news? Good grief - I watched UK news and the whole time it was just people talking about facts and things. There wasn't a SINGLE ARGUMENT or fight during the entire show. What the hell kind of news reporting is that?
Personally I am quite happy when news outlets do their best to separate facts and opinions. Arguments/debates do not belong in a news broadcast, unless the debate itself is the news.
I suppose they can copy the US laws verbatim.
Even though US laws are inherited largely from UK laws that won't work. If only for the different government/legal structures.
That will qualify as at least one fair use of the 'Fair use' laws.
Isn't the text of laws in the public domain already? If so there is no "fair use" needed. Any use is fair use (except probably claiming you're the author when you aren't).
Yes, that comes natural and it's called night. Incidentally it's also something that's lacking up north in summertime.
I understand your joke, but it can still be done.
You tell your subjects you're testing one thing, but you're testing another (with or without the knowledge of the tester).
With these lights one could set up two groups; saying you want to test who has more problems getting out of bed in the morning, those with a traditional alarm or those with the light-based alarm clock (which is what I know these devices for). And then over the course of a month or two you interview the subjects every week and in that interview ask about getting up, but actually rate them on depression/happiness. This way you at least eliminate (most of) the placebo effect, and may get some interesting side results too, like whether they actually work to get you out of bed easier, albeit those results are likely less reliable.
Some 20 years ago I first heard about winter depression and light therapy to solve it, as winter depression is caused by not enough light. People are always happier when the sun shines than when it's cloudy all day: light is considered the reason.
At the time the suggestion was to wear some headgear that would shine two fairly bright lights in your eyes from above (similar to the sun: it's direct light hits your eye, but doesn't blind you as you're not looking at it directly). Said to work quite well.
I've been in the north of Norway during July (permanent day!), and the locals also told me that it's very easy to get depressed in winter due to the lack of daylight, and how everyone is looking forward to the return of the sun.
It may be me but that linked article very much reads like one big advertisement. Having the sponsor's name all over the place isn't helping of course. Anyhow great marketing, they even managed to get it on slashdot while it has nothing to do with tech whatsoever - and light therapy isn't something new either.
According to this story, Symbian may not be dead yet (and of course phones with it installed will continue to be sold for the time being), but the future doesn't seem too bright.
Indeed yesterday looking for a new phone for myself I do recall having seen Symbian running Nokia's on display next to Android running Nokia's. Not sure though I am primarily interested in Android not Symbian, and those Nokias were out of my budget so didn't pay too close attention.
Microsoft's lock-in isn't the Windows platform as such, it's their applications. Most notable IE6 with all it's proprietary extensions (see regular /. stories on how companies just can't retire it), and MS Office's file formats. That's what keeps people stuck to Windows. And as a result the many other software applications that are Windows-only.
OSX is nice too, sure. How could I forget typing this on an iBook.
And this discussion is not about the average Joe, it's a level higher. Corporate choices, government work, computer/phone manufacturers. The ones that decide what Average Joe can choose from later. And Joe generally chooses "a PC" or "an Apple". And on top of that China Mobile is definitely not in the desktop computer market.
The problem of OSX, just like iOS, is that it's restricted. Yes on one hand it's a big player, some 5% or so for OSX, I don't know the market share of the iPhone in the smartphone market but I guess double digits and iPad is doing quite well too. On the other hand they're niche players: iOS is available on like half a dozen devices or so (the iPad and a few iPhone incarnations, iPod Touch maybe too, not keeping track too well). Even Windows Mobile is available on more different devices. Android comes on maybe a couple hundred different products right now, with more being released all the time. And don't even thing of building your own computer or mobile phone and loading Apple's OS on it: you can't. Technically maybe; legally not; so it's not a serious option overall.
When you buy a computer, and are looking for an OS with it, OSX is not an option. If you want OSX then you must buy an Apple computer. When you want to build a tablet like the iPad, you can't go and install iOS on it. So for example for Nokia, iOS is not an option. Android is. ChromeOS too. And so is Windows Mobile. And that's what we're talking about here.
And I hope it's not going to be replaced by a Linux monopoly - as at the moment, the serious choices are Linux and Windows for OS. Even in mobile (Chrome OS and Android are Linux derivatives, and Symbian is dying if not dead).
More like the current web browser market: basically WebKit, IE, Mozilla (I forgot it's engine's name). Three html kits that are packed in various shells. IE still a bit big at some 60-70%, Webkit should grow more. Nicely fragmented, requiring attention to standards, and switching becomes trivial as everything still works. That's what we need for competition.
Honestly I can not answer that question directly.
However there is such a thing as "red flag Linux" or so - a Chinese state-initiated, localised distribution. No idea how much it's used as I'm used to seeing Windows all over the place.
Open Source is pretty communist in a way: open for everyone, free to go around and for all to use. But the main reason China and many other countries in the world outside US (e.g. India, Russia, Brazil) are supporting Linux or one of it's varieties is to become independent from foreign software. This has to do with control, economic security, and stimulation of local software development instead of importing it.
I don't understand your remark, nor the mod.
It's hard for US mobile phone providers to compete with the lines of China Mobile and China Unicom (the #2 in China, afaik there are only two, thanks to state regulations). China Mobile has over half a billion subscribers - that's more than the entire US population. China has the advantage in numbers.
In other words, please correct me if I'm wrong: Alice logs on to her Facebook account over https to keep her password safe, but Bob who's sitting at the other side of the coffee shop can still hijack her session after Facebook falls back to http for the rest of the communication, as Bob can sniff out Alice her session cookie (the session cookie is sent to the site as part of each http request, and unless https is used, travels over the connection in the clear).
So now Bob can access Facebook as if he's Alice, without knowing Alice's password, simply because he has sniffed her session cookie out of the air.
Also makes me wonder why sites are so reluctant to use ssl - is it so computationally expensive to encrypt everything? Or are their other reasons for this?
Serious question: is wireless encryption nowadays already up to par with ssl encryption (which I think we can safely consider to be uncrackable with today's tech)? WPE is known to be insecure (crackable); WPA I haven't heard much better about.
I've encryption enabled on my AP, with fairly simple password, mainly as I'm not interested to be ISP for accidental passers-by. For the rest I don't consider it really secure, and will use https when possible instead. Or just assume I'm on an insecure connection (like the one I'm typing this post on - it's all wired on my side, but still only http).
Vietnamese made the switch already, with the addition of numerous accents. Chinese has been tried, failed, because there are too many homophones, especially if the tones are left out. Mandarin nowadays is learned using Pinyin romanisation. And the convenience of using the same script for various related dialects/languages which is a great plus for their character script.
That notwithstanding it's a bitch to learn.
Other Asian languages: Japanese has a phonetic version already; afaik there is a way to write that language 100% phonetic. Korean is some character script again. Thai is written phonetic, using their own letters, as Russian and Arabic. India not sure, has several languages/scripts. Tibetan is phonetic, with their own script. Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog (Philippines) also use the Western script without any extras like Vietnamese. Other languages I don't know.
That are all native Chinese speakers, who have learned English as second language.
I don't know of any native English that can type Chinese (because learning to speak it is hard so westerners in Hong Kong do not even try, learning to read/write is even harder so basically no non-Chinese ever becomes anywhere near native-quality in that).
After living eight years in Hong Kong I can have a simple conversation in Chinese, can read most of the menu in restaurants, and bits and pieces elsewhere. With that I'm way ahead of most Westerners.
Maybe Facebook should talk to this guy instead. Creating an on-line file drop is so yesterday!
Comparing input speeds (in words per minute) the speeds people quote themselves (I learned that from reading many resumes - admittedly no hard data) for English are roughly double that of Chinese, and always a lot higher.
Chinese characters using Changjie input (one of the hardest to learn but most used at least for input of traditional characters as it's a pretty efficient one) require 3-4 keystrokes each; English words are on average about 5 letters. Not counting spaces.
Plus the fact that a spoken language changes - good chance you would not be able to understand English as it was spoken say 500 years ago. They would not only have used different words, also used a different pronunciation.
Spelling is much more fixed, and will contain artifacts of old pronunciations as well.
And when it comes to phonetic scripts, English is actually a quite poor example. Many European languages are pronounced much more like their spelling than English is.
It is surely harder than entering English, if only looking at the learning curve. The same I see around me regarding Chinese (I can't type Chinese but I see other people do it).
Just like Japanese it's a hack: you only use QWERTY because it was the standard already, before computers came to Asia. Then Asian input was patched on top of that. Were the Asians to have invented the computer, the keyboard would surely have looked very very different.
Sometimes I am wondering how the computing world would have looked like if the computer had been invented in Japan or in China, instead of in the US. Just thinking of the script they use, which is of course much harder to design a keyboard for than English or most other Western languages. Even Russian would be trivial to use.