I think a much better use of that money is an accross-the-board tax cut. There is lots of private money going around for private research, and there would be more if the government wasn't pumping so much money into it. Governments are notoriously inefficient, and I question whether government should be in the business of funding research.
There is also a fundamentally anti-scientific element to having a centralized source for all of the research funding. A scientist with a wacky idea is far more likely to get funding if there are dozens of private sources than if most of the money comes from one source.
Certainly there are worse things the government can do with a billion dollars, but I'd much rather see it returned to the people who earned it.
Because writing a new code morpher for this architecture would take R&D dollars that would be better spent emulating real like PPC or IA64 architectures with existing user bases. The small increase in performance you'd get from a "native" ISA would not justify the additional costs of writing and supporting the software for it.
Also, it sounds like they are optimising each chip to specifically support code morphing from a specific architecture. That means that x86 *is* a reasonably efficient instruction set for this particular hardware. Yes, you could probably make a faster one, but the gains would be marginal unless you actually got direct access to the underlying ISA, which defeats the whole purpose of this strategy.
One of the things that Crusoe supposedly does is it caches frequently used code in its "compiled" form. This means that you only take a performance hit the first time you run it, and then it should run pretty much at full speed.
If they give you access to the underlying architecture, then they are committed to keeping that architecture in future versions. This way they can make up a new ISA for every chip, and just tweak the code morphing layer to make it work.
This gives them a performance hit now, but as Intel is forced to continue to support the x86 architecture in hardware for every new chip, they will have to make their chips ever bigger and ever hotter. Transmeta's approach will likely prove superior in the long run.
I title my post this everytime I comment on a story and it's always true...
Anyhow, I think people make way too big a deal of the occasional flame war. I am reminded of the kids' saying: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
If I post an opinion and someone makes a post degrading my intelligence and my parentage, so what? I'll ignore that post and concentrate on the constructive ones. It usually isn't that much of a time-waster. You can usually spot a troll-post by reading the first couple of sentences.
I also have to question the line about/. being for "young white male users of one operating system." First of all, not all of us are Linux fanatics. I happen to think Linux is a decent Unix implementation, but it's nothing special as OS's go.
More importantly, Katz seems to be forgetting that the/. demographic simply reflects the demographics of the tech community. The fact is that the high-tech community is dominated by young white males. Since/. is intended as an undiluted news source for the techno-savvy, it is not surprising that its readership reflects the demographics of its target audience.
This is not to say that this is a good thing. But Rob is hardly in the position to change the makeup of an entire industry. And it would be a terrible thing for him to water down the site's content to attract non-technical users. One of/.'s great strength is that its readership is extremely bright and knowledgable. I have learned a great deal from reading arguments about the pros and cons of various products, techniques, and tools. This would be destroyed if Rob started focusing on less technical subjects to reach a wider audience.
So, I think Jon Katz needs to keep in mind that what goes on here is only words, and that a mainly-white, mainly-male community isn't the end of the world.
Like how MS mouthpiece jumps on the TW/AOL merger as further proof that Microsoft is not a monopoly? What?!
Well, the theory is that Microsoft is going to be the 600-pound gorrilla that takes over the software industry. That has always been a stretch, but it's now even more ridiculous with AOL suddenly doubling in size and getting revenue streams outside the computer industry. There's no way they are going to back down if MS tries to strong-arm them.
The main reason this is "wrong" is that it was done for no good techical reason - this "integration" was done only for the purpose of pushing Netscape out of the browser market. Simple as that.
But then you're left with the government tro determine the intentions of a company, and deciding what constituttes a "good technical reason." I'm not comfortable with the government second-guessing software companies and demanding that they prove they have a "good technical reason" for adding a feature. In Microsoft's case, it was probably largely to compete with Microsoft, but integrating a browser into the OS is not a bad idea. After all, in the old days many programs like the TCP/IP stack were seperate and are now included as the default install. If you don't like the Windows TCP/IP stack, I doubt it lets you install without it.
But, since they are covering the costs of IE development from sales of Win98, distributing it to other platforms doesn't cost them much, but it does provide them with marketing ammunition (ie, increased market share) to slam their competitors with.
So the sales of Win98 were increased by including it in Windows? Does that mean they were simply providing an added feature to the OS?
Once the competition is gone (ie, netscape), what stops them from charging for IE?
Um... iCab, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx? Besides, Netscape is free. What's going to stop people from continuing to use it forever?
Revoke Microsoft's corporate charter. Put everyone at the director level and above behind bars.
That's the most Orwellian thing I've ever heard. Jailing some of the brightest men in the world for violating a law so vague that no two lawyers can agree on exactly what it means is absurd. That they're even being punished for this is bad enough, but giving them jail time would be a national disgrace.
It's not the methods that are predatory... it's the intentions.
And that's fundamentally why I object to the whole thing. Legislating on the basis of intentions is a dangerous business, and I think this is a case where the crime is not so much anything specific MS did as it is the general fact that they have pissed people off. Microsoft hasn't done anything that many other companies have done, but because they do it better than those other companies, they are dispised. I think law should be objective, clear, and apply equally to everyone, and antittrust law is not and does not.
None of these other programs act as a barrier to third parties or even Microsoft itself selling other products in the same arena.
Sure they did. Fewer people are going to buy a telnet client if they have one for free. Ditto with Notepad and Minesweeper. Granted, those applets are much simpler than IE, and so they probably had less effect, but that's a difference of degree, not any fundamental difference that merits legal distinctions.
partially because with all the effort MS poured into IE, it actually became a better product in some ways.
In other words, they produced a better product, and you switched to it. That's really the bottom line. So they made a better product, and you chose to use it. What is there to complain about?
AME is not saying that, but disagreeing with the claim made by M$ apologists that IE's market share has nothing to do with M$' tactics and is only due to the superiority of the product. Don't put words into peoples' mouths please.
Then why did he bring up the fact that Microsoft outspent Netscape?
They have Acroread for Windows, you know.
I love how people can't distinguish between liking a company and standing up for its freedom to innovate. For the record: I avoid using Windows like the plague, do not own any MS software, and in general think they make crappy products. In the case of browsers, however, they did a decent job, and Netscape did a pretty rotten job for the last couple of years.
you obviously haven't read the Finding of Fact.
Sure I did. I just disagree with its conclusions.
There you can read about all the consumers who wanted Netscape pre-installed on their systems, but couldn't get it due to M$ licensing agreements.
My impression is that they simply required that the IE icon be on the desktop and Netscape's not be. Some liscences might have been different. But even if it were true, so what? How hard is it to go on the web and download Netscape. And if you're not computer-savvy enough to do that, does it even matter what browser you're using?
Or how heavily integrating IE into Windows98 made it difficult for consumers to control their kids' access to the internet, since IE would pop up in all kinds of situations.
How is that related to unfair business practices? This sounds to me like an OS design issue, not a legal one. After all, if Microsoft writes a buggy Window manager, or an insecure telnet client, or any number of other lousy features, that's a bad thing, but it's hardly illegal.
Microsoft did a great many things, and yes, consumers probably would have been better off had Microsoft done things differently. But consumers are far better off than they would have been had Microsoft not written a browser and integrated it into Windows. The problems you cite a piddling in comparison the the benefits competition brought to the browser market.
Re:Furthermore, here is exactly WHY you are wrong:
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I think you're vastly overestimating the influence of both CNN and AOL. They are but two among dozens of major news outlets. There are several other cable news channels, a half-dozen broadcast TV networks, hundreds of newspaper publishers, dozens of magazine publishers, thousands of internet sites, a dozen radio stations, and direct satellite TV. That's several thousand news sources owned by several companies on half a dozen different media. Two companies that have combined control over two media and maybe 2 dozen news outlets are hardly in the position to control the opinion of the American people.
Besides, the nation is getting older. Tomorrow's voters are today's youth, and they will most definitely know what a search engine is. I'd be willing to bet that your mother doesn't get all her news off of AOL anyway.
As an aside, I'm not buying the story that Netscape lost to Internet Explorer based on product quality. Internet Explorer won because the consumer usually had no choice but to have it. (Can somebody explain to me why I was required to install Internet Explorer before installing Visual C++?)
I don't know, but I don't see as it matters. After all, there are *lots* of programs that come as part of the OS, and if Microsoft shouldn't have included IE, what else are they not allowed to include. For purists modern OS's are not OS's at all but merely massive bundles of API's and utilities. But if you stripped Win95 down to its kernal, you wouldn't have much left.
So sure, the consumer was "forced" to install IE, just like they were "forced" to install Windows Explorer, Notepad, the Start menu, and dozens of other OS components. If we're going to tell Microsoft which products are allowed to be bundled with their OS, why stop with IE? Why not boot minesweeper, telnet, and probably dozens of other crappy add-ons?
There's a big difference between giving something away for free and being predatory.
Actually, my impression is that giving a product away for free to undermine a competitor is the definition of being predatory. Which is why it's such a silly concept: all companies do it, there's nothing unethical about it.
Microsoft can easily pay several hundred people full-time salaries to develop Internet Explorer because that's pocket change to their existing monopoly. Netscape can only do this until they run out of money, which isn't very long given the above situation. In the end, the quality of Netscape's product fell behind as a result. But product quality is not why Netscape lost; poor product quality was the result of their losing.
So now it's a crime to spend more money on a product than one's competitors? Sure it's "unfair" that Microsoft has more money than Netscape. But that's life. It's downright bizarre that you would fault Microsoft for outspending its rivals to get a better product. Are you saying that companies should make sure they spend the same amount on its products as the competition?
When you form a business to compete with an industry leader, you'd better have the capital and the determination to stay in business. In fact I think Netscape did that-- they managed to stay ahead of IE through version 3 at least. But today, Netscape is no better than IE, and on the Mac side I'd argue that it's an inferior product. And it's looking like IE 5 will widen that lead. Yes, it sucks for Netscape, but antitrust laws were not designed to protect businesses. They were designed to protect consumers. And the browser wars undoubtedly helped consumers by creating two vastly improved web browsers and forcing both companies to give them away for free.
I am amazed at some./ers' tendency to go on absurd power trips without any reference to the actual wrongs being committed. Yes, in an ideal world all software would be GPLed, have perfect documentation, and would have no bugs. But the fact is that writing software takes time and money, writing documentation takes time and money, running a computer store takes time and money, and publishing specification takes time and money.
What you are suggesting, in essence, is that the entire computer industry be forced to change the way it does business because you aren't satisfied with the way it is being done. You seem to have no respect for the rights of companies or the individuals who make them up. If I want to write code that uses a proprietary API, is undocumented, and only runs on one OS, that's my right. If I want to sell said product, that is also my right. For you to come in and tell me that I'm not allowed to write such code, or to force me to do all kinds of extra work for the priviledge of releasing it, is nothing short of naked aggression.
There's a reason that a lot of code is not well documented, and it's not just because coders are evil. Writing good documentation is a lot of work, and a lot of programmers are simply too busy to do it. Imposing this requirement on them would reduce productivity and force them to spend all their time filling out paperwork so they can get government approval to release their software.
I don't even want to think about the enforcement headaches or the massive disruptions this would cause due to people trying to circumvent the law. If such a law were to be passed, I would seriously consider leaving the country. The above suggestion is Orwellian in its implications. It says that you don't have the right to write or sell software unless you did it in a way the government likes.
I am appalled at this poster's lack of understanding of the way law works. He seems not to have considered that his personal open-source wet dream is not necessarily good law, and might hurt the very people it is designed to help.
Also, no more squashing a competing application by extending the OS to include the equivalent of their application.
How exactly does this benefit Microsoft? Writing a piece of software and giving it away as an OS-bundled freebie may drive out the competition, but it doesn't do them much good. Besides, there are a number of companies that create products that are already in the OS (web browsers, disk tools, text editors, etc.) The fact is that a lot of their software is so awful that people will buy the competing product even if the Microsoft alternative is being given away for free.
I'm amazed at the ability of slashdotters to interpret everything Microsoft does as evil. If any other company gave a product away for free, Slashdotters would be happy about it. But when MS does it, it's "predatory."
Similarly, it is now possible to develop a competing OS, since the only requirement is providing a fully functional API. This will be possible because the API would be fully documented.
There are already several competing OS's. They just aren't very popular because they all suck from an average user's standpoint. And there's Mac OS, which is a perfectly acceptable substitute for Windoze.
The industries accused of becoming monopolies during the congressional debates on the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act all dropped their prices more rapidly than the general price level fell during the 10 years before the Sherman Act.(6)
You object to falling prices? Has it occured to you that maybe these companies were just more efficient? Is Standard Oil supposed to make sure if doesn't cut its prices "too much" to make sure they don't "unfairly" compete? Do you have any evidence that their prices were lower than their production costs?
So, you only object to being enslaved and oppressed and denied choice if it's by the government?
No, my point is that comparing Ma Bell to Microsoft, AOL, or anyone else in the private sector is nonsensical. There is a basic difference between them. We were forced to use Ma Bell. Private companies obtain market share by the free choice of the customers.
As far as I'm concerned, being screwed by big business is just as painful as by the government.
Please explain what Big Business has done that is anywhere near as painful as the IRS, ATF, FBI, OSHA, FDA, and dozens of other federal agencies that harrass and loot us. Which corporations have the power to throw you in jail if you displease them, or prohibit you from starting a business without your permission? (Not to mention the dozens of governments that have committed mass murder) Consider also that the Federal government dwarfs even the largest US corporations. What power does Big Business have that can compare?
Re:Just say no to anti-trust
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A serious, 'better' GUI is going to be no less confounding to the pedestrian user actually.
Really? Obviously you're not going to plop a completely new user in front of a Mac or PC and expect him to be an expert in an hour. But GUI's have a number of advantages over CLI's that cut down training time and reduce frustration for novice users. The problem with most existing GUI's is that they aren't very good. Mac OS is the only one that comes close to doing it well, Windows is mediocre, and the X-based WM are just awful.
General purpose machines are simply too complicated for the sort of user you seem to be describing. This isn't elitism so much as it is a realization that the current (pretty much locked in solutions) haven't really been cutting it.
Sure they have. I have managed to teach my completely computer-illiterate grandfather to do email and web browsing. It was something of a pain, but I shudder to think what it would be like to try to accomplish the same feat under Linux.
Certainly expecting a GUI to allow users to recompile their kernals is unrealistic. But for the tasks your average user needs a computer for, a standard Windows or Mac installation does the job just fine.
Monopolies are indeed bad, but we do not have a monopoly. True, Windows has a large market share, but there are alternatives, and people are using them. And if Linux advocates are right, the future will be even more competitive, no matter what Microsoft does about it.
I really don't have a clue what you mean here. They were purchased by AOL for several billion dollars, which is a whole heck of a lot more than it was worth when they started. And even today Netscape has a little under half the browser market, with AOL giving Microsoft about 10%.
To the extent that they are "all but dead," that is largely their own fault. Netscape has not really improved much since version 3.0, and it has gotten buggier and more bloated. And IE really is a decent product in comparison. I see this as the proper result of competition: two approximately equal products each get about half the market.
Yeah, but that model is oversimplified when MegaCorp has it's hands in many diverse businesses (such as chipsets and motherboards, which is the lever Intel is applying to AMD lately).
But that's a seperate issue. The AMD-vs-Intel thing was just an example of "predatory" pricing.
Netscape didn't have a cash-cow like Windows95. They had their internet server and their portal.
Funny, I don't see them complaining. Their founders are now wealthy, and their product will soon be integrated into AOL.
Re:Just say no to anti-trust
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Back before the AOL connection to the internet, the net was still an intellectual vehicle; most people you'd find online were real techies or scientists.
Now at best you'll find mostly script kiddies or wanna be tech reporters.
Sure, from a hard-core tech perspective, the S/N ratio has probably dropped. But the point is that the signal is still there, and if you're interested in anything other than hard-core tech subjects, the usefullness of the net has increased dramatically. All those newbies you look down your nose at bring with them dollars that advertisers want, and so we get dozens of free news sites, search engines, map generators, babelfish, and dozens of other services-- all for free. Similarly, amazon.com, eBay, and others would likely not be where they are today if they got all their business from a few thousand geeks. It's that vast pool of newbies that make them viable.
Now is that more intersting? You might say the answer is no, but probably 90% of 'net users would disagree.
I'm afraid I'm seeing the same thing with Linux these days. The GUIs are all very well developed and strong; but again it's detracting people from the power and freedom of the command line.
I have news for you: 99% of the population has no need or desire to learn a command line. It is simply not worth the effort. This doesn't make them stupid or lazy, it simply means that they have different priorities. Your life (and mine) revolves around computers. Most peoples' do not. For them, the computer is a tool, just like a toaster, and the less time they have to take learning to use it, the more time they have for more important tasks.
If you don't like GUI's, fine. Uninstall X and run from the command line to your heart's content. But if Linux is ever going to be more than a fringe operating system, it needs to appeal to more than the fringe of geeks who currently use it. A better GUI is a step in that direction.
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I think a much better use of that money is an accross-the-board tax cut. There is lots of private money going around for private research, and there would be more if the government wasn't pumping so much money into it. Governments are notoriously inefficient, and I question whether government should be in the business of funding research.
There is also a fundamentally anti-scientific element to having a centralized source for all of the research funding. A scientist with a wacky idea is far more likely to get funding if there are dozens of private sources than if most of the money comes from one source.
Certainly there are worse things the government can do with a billion dollars, but I'd much rather see it returned to the people who earned it.
Because writing a new code morpher for this architecture would take R&D dollars that would be better spent emulating real like PPC or IA64 architectures with existing user bases. The small increase in performance you'd get from a "native" ISA would not justify the additional costs of writing and supporting the software for it.
Also, it sounds like they are optimising each chip to specifically support code morphing from a specific architecture. That means that x86 *is* a reasonably efficient instruction set for this particular hardware. Yes, you could probably make a faster one, but the gains would be marginal unless you actually got direct access to the underlying ISA, which defeats the whole purpose of this strategy.
One of the things that Crusoe supposedly does is it caches frequently used code in its "compiled" form. This means that you only take a performance hit the first time you run it, and then it should run pretty much at full speed.
If they give you access to the underlying architecture, then they are committed to keeping that architecture in future versions. This way they can make up a new ISA for every chip, and just tweak the code morphing layer to make it work.
This gives them a performance hit now, but as Intel is forced to continue to support the x86 architecture in hardware for every new chip, they will have to make their chips ever bigger and ever hotter. Transmeta's approach will likely prove superior in the long run.
I title my post this everytime I comment on a story and it's always true...
/. being for "young white male users of one operating system." First of all, not all of us are Linux fanatics. I happen to think Linux is a decent Unix implementation, but it's nothing special as OS's go.
/. demographic simply reflects the demographics of the tech community. The fact is that the high-tech community is dominated by young white males. Since /. is intended as an undiluted news source for the techno-savvy, it is not surprising that its readership reflects the demographics of its target audience.
/.'s great strength is that its readership is extremely bright and knowledgable. I have learned a great deal from reading arguments about the pros and cons of various products, techniques, and tools. This would be destroyed if Rob started focusing on less technical subjects to reach a wider audience.
Anyhow, I think people make way too big a deal of the occasional flame war. I am reminded of the kids' saying: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
If I post an opinion and someone makes a post degrading my intelligence and my parentage, so what? I'll ignore that post and concentrate on the constructive ones. It usually isn't that much of a time-waster. You can usually spot a troll-post by reading the first couple of sentences.
I also have to question the line about
More importantly, Katz seems to be forgetting that the
This is not to say that this is a good thing. But Rob is hardly in the position to change the makeup of an entire industry. And it would be a terrible thing for him to water down the site's content to attract non-technical users. One of
So, I think Jon Katz needs to keep in mind that what goes on here is only words, and that a mainly-white, mainly-male community isn't the end of the world.
Adolf Hitlet: Caused a world war, killed millions of people.
./ers. Violates antitrust laws, which most companies do.
Bill Gates: Writes crappy software, disliked by
He'll remain as chairman. Ballmer is still President.
If that is the case why doesn't he do it himself?
Like how MS mouthpiece jumps on the TW/AOL merger as further proof that Microsoft is not a monopoly? What?!
Well, the theory is that Microsoft is going to be the 600-pound gorrilla that takes over the software industry. That has always been a stretch, but it's now even more ridiculous with AOL suddenly doubling in size and getting revenue streams outside the computer industry. There's no way they are going to back down if MS tries to strong-arm them.
The main reason this is "wrong" is that it was done for no good techical reason - this "integration" was done only for the purpose of pushing Netscape out of the browser market. Simple as that.
But then you're left with the government tro determine the intentions of a company, and deciding what constituttes a "good technical reason." I'm not comfortable with the government second-guessing software companies and demanding that they prove they have a "good technical reason" for adding a feature. In Microsoft's case, it was probably largely to compete with Microsoft, but integrating a browser into the OS is not a bad idea. After all, in the old days many programs like the TCP/IP stack were seperate and are now included as the default install. If you don't like the Windows TCP/IP stack, I doubt it lets you install without it.
But, since they are covering the costs of IE development from sales of Win98, distributing it to other platforms doesn't cost them much, but it does provide them with marketing ammunition (ie, increased market share) to slam their competitors with.
So the sales of Win98 were increased by including it in Windows? Does that mean they were simply providing an added feature to the OS?
Once the competition is gone (ie, netscape), what stops them from charging for IE?
Um... iCab, Opera, Mozilla, Lynx? Besides, Netscape is free. What's going to stop people from continuing to use it forever?
Revoke Microsoft's corporate charter. Put everyone at the director level and above behind bars.
That's the most Orwellian thing I've ever heard. Jailing some of the brightest men in the world for violating a law so vague that no two lawyers can agree on exactly what it means is absurd. That they're even being punished for this is bad enough, but giving them jail time would be a national disgrace.
OK, so how does Microsoft get money from the Mac and Win95 users who download the product for free?
It's not the methods that are predatory... it's the intentions.
And that's fundamentally why I object to the whole thing. Legislating on the basis of intentions is a dangerous business, and I think this is a case where the crime is not so much anything specific MS did as it is the general fact that they have pissed people off. Microsoft hasn't done anything that many other companies have done, but because they do it better than those other companies, they are dispised. I think law should be objective, clear, and apply equally to everyone, and antittrust law is not and does not.
None of these other programs act as a barrier to third parties or even Microsoft itself selling other products in the same arena.
Sure they did. Fewer people are going to buy a telnet client if they have one for free. Ditto with Notepad and Minesweeper. Granted, those applets are much simpler than IE, and so they probably had less effect, but that's a difference of degree, not any fundamental difference that merits legal distinctions.
partially because with all the effort MS poured into IE, it actually became a better product in some ways.
In other words, they produced a better product, and you switched to it. That's really the bottom line. So they made a better product, and you chose to use it. What is there to complain about?
AME is not saying that, but disagreeing with the claim made by M$ apologists that IE's market share has nothing to do with M$' tactics and is only due to the superiority of the product. Don't put words into peoples' mouths please.
Then why did he bring up the fact that Microsoft outspent Netscape?
They have Acroread for Windows, you know.
I love how people can't distinguish between liking a company and standing up for its freedom to innovate. For the record: I avoid using Windows like the plague, do not own any MS software, and in general think they make crappy products. In the case of browsers, however, they did a decent job, and Netscape did a pretty rotten job for the last couple of years.
you obviously haven't read the Finding of Fact.
Sure I did. I just disagree with its conclusions.
There you can read about all the consumers who wanted Netscape pre-installed on their systems, but couldn't get it due to M$ licensing agreements.
My impression is that they simply required that the IE icon be on the desktop and Netscape's not be. Some liscences might have been different. But even if it were true, so what? How hard is it to go on the web and download Netscape. And if you're not computer-savvy enough to do that, does it even matter what browser you're using?
Or how heavily integrating IE into Windows98 made it difficult for consumers to control their kids' access to the internet, since IE would pop up in all kinds of situations.
How is that related to unfair business practices? This sounds to me like an OS design issue, not a legal one. After all, if Microsoft writes a buggy Window manager, or an insecure telnet client, or any number of other lousy features, that's a bad thing, but it's hardly illegal.
Microsoft did a great many things, and yes, consumers probably would have been better off had Microsoft done things differently. But consumers are far better off than they would have been had Microsoft not written a browser and integrated it into Windows. The problems you cite a piddling in comparison the the benefits competition brought to the browser market.
I think you're vastly overestimating the influence of both CNN and AOL. They are but two among dozens of major news outlets. There are several other cable news channels, a half-dozen broadcast TV networks, hundreds of newspaper publishers, dozens of magazine publishers, thousands of internet sites, a dozen radio stations, and direct satellite TV. That's several thousand news sources owned by several companies on half a dozen different media. Two companies that have combined control over two media and maybe 2 dozen news outlets are hardly in the position to control the opinion of the American people.
Besides, the nation is getting older. Tomorrow's voters are today's youth, and they will most definitely know what a search engine is. I'd be willing to bet that your mother doesn't get all her news off of AOL anyway.
As an aside, I'm not buying the story that Netscape lost to Internet Explorer based on product quality. Internet Explorer won because the consumer usually had no choice but to have it. (Can somebody explain to me why I was required to install Internet Explorer before installing Visual C++?)
I don't know, but I don't see as it matters. After all, there are *lots* of programs that come as part of the OS, and if Microsoft shouldn't have included IE, what else are they not allowed to include. For purists modern OS's are not OS's at all but merely massive bundles of API's and utilities. But if you stripped Win95 down to its kernal, you wouldn't have much left.
So sure, the consumer was "forced" to install IE, just like they were "forced" to install Windows Explorer, Notepad, the Start menu, and dozens of other OS components. If we're going to tell Microsoft which products are allowed to be bundled with their OS, why stop with IE? Why not boot minesweeper, telnet, and probably dozens of other crappy add-ons?
There's a big difference between giving something away for free and being predatory.
Actually, my impression is that giving a product away for free to undermine a competitor is the definition of being predatory. Which is why it's such a silly concept: all companies do it, there's nothing unethical about it.
Microsoft can easily pay several hundred people full-time salaries to develop Internet Explorer because that's pocket change to their existing monopoly. Netscape can only do this until they run out of money, which isn't very long given the above situation. In the end, the quality of Netscape's product fell behind as a result. But product quality is not why Netscape lost; poor product quality was the result of their losing.
So now it's a crime to spend more money on a product than one's competitors? Sure it's "unfair" that Microsoft has more money than Netscape. But that's life. It's downright bizarre that you would fault Microsoft for outspending its rivals to get a better product. Are you saying that companies should make sure they spend the same amount on its products as the competition?
When you form a business to compete with an industry leader, you'd better have the capital and the determination to stay in business. In fact I think Netscape did that-- they managed to stay ahead of IE through version 3 at least. But today, Netscape is no better than IE, and on the Mac side I'd argue that it's an inferior product. And it's looking like IE 5 will widen that lead. Yes, it sucks for Netscape, but antitrust laws were not designed to protect businesses. They were designed to protect consumers. And the browser wars undoubtedly helped consumers by creating two vastly improved web browsers and forcing both companies to give them away for free.
Driving out the competition is exactly the goal in and of itself.
How does that benefit them if they're giving the competing product away for free as part of the OS?
I am amazed at some
What you are suggesting, in essence, is that the entire computer industry be forced to change the way it does business because you aren't satisfied with the way it is being done. You seem to have no respect for the rights of companies or the individuals who make them up. If I want to write code that uses a proprietary API, is undocumented, and only runs on one OS, that's my right. If I want to sell said product, that is also my right. For you to come in and tell me that I'm not allowed to write such code, or to force me to do all kinds of extra work for the priviledge of releasing it, is nothing short of naked aggression.
There's a reason that a lot of code is not well documented, and it's not just because coders are evil. Writing good documentation is a lot of work, and a lot of programmers are simply too busy to do it. Imposing this requirement on them would reduce productivity and force them to spend all their time filling out paperwork so they can get government approval to release their software.
I don't even want to think about the enforcement headaches or the massive disruptions this would cause due to people trying to circumvent the law. If such a law were to be passed, I would seriously consider leaving the country. The above suggestion is Orwellian in its implications. It says that you don't have the right to write or sell software unless you did it in a way the government likes.
I am appalled at this poster's lack of understanding of the way law works. He seems not to have considered that his personal open-source wet dream is not necessarily good law, and might hurt the very people it is designed to help.
</rant>
Also, no more squashing a competing application by extending the OS to include the equivalent of their application.
How exactly does this benefit Microsoft? Writing a piece of software and giving it away as an OS-bundled freebie may drive out the competition, but it doesn't do them much good. Besides, there are a number of companies that create products that are already in the OS (web browsers, disk tools, text editors, etc.) The fact is that a lot of their software is so awful that people will buy the competing product even if the Microsoft alternative is being given away for free.
I'm amazed at the ability of slashdotters to interpret everything Microsoft does as evil. If any other company gave a product away for free, Slashdotters would be happy about it. But when MS does it, it's "predatory."
Similarly, it is now possible to develop a competing OS, since the only requirement is providing a fully functional API. This will be possible because the API would be fully documented.
There are already several competing OS's. They just aren't very popular because they all suck from an average user's standpoint. And there's Mac OS, which is a perfectly acceptable substitute for Windoze.
Yes, they formed a trust. So what?
The industries accused of becoming monopolies during the congressional debates on the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act all dropped their prices more rapidly than the general price level fell during the 10 years before the Sherman Act.(6)
You object to falling prices? Has it occured to you that maybe these companies were just more efficient? Is Standard Oil supposed to make sure if doesn't cut its prices "too much" to make sure they don't "unfairly" compete? Do you have any evidence that their prices were lower than their production costs?
So, you only object to being enslaved and oppressed and denied choice if it's by the government?
No, my point is that comparing Ma Bell to Microsoft, AOL, or anyone else in the private sector is nonsensical. There is a basic difference between them. We were forced to use Ma Bell. Private companies obtain market share by the free choice of the customers.
As far as I'm concerned, being screwed by big business is just as painful as by the government.
Please explain what Big Business has done that is anywhere near as painful as the IRS, ATF, FBI, OSHA, FDA, and dozens of other federal agencies that harrass and loot us. Which corporations have the power to throw you in jail if you displease them, or prohibit you from starting a business without your permission? (Not to mention the dozens of governments that have committed mass murder) Consider also that the Federal government dwarfs even the largest US corporations. What power does Big Business have that can compare?
A serious, 'better' GUI is going to be no less confounding to the pedestrian user actually.
Really? Obviously you're not going to plop a completely new user in front of a Mac or PC and expect him to be an expert in an hour. But GUI's have a number of advantages over CLI's that cut down training time and reduce frustration for novice users. The problem with most existing GUI's is that they aren't very good. Mac OS is the only one that comes close to doing it well, Windows is mediocre, and the X-based WM are just awful.
General purpose machines are simply too complicated for the sort of user you seem to be describing. This isn't elitism so much as it is a realization that the current (pretty much locked in solutions) haven't really been cutting it.
Sure they have. I have managed to teach my completely computer-illiterate grandfather to do email and web browsing. It was something of a pain, but I shudder to think what it would be like to try to accomplish the same feat under Linux.
Certainly expecting a GUI to allow users to recompile their kernals is unrealistic. But for the tasks your average user needs a computer for, a standard Windows or Mac installation does the job just fine.
Monopolies are indeed bad, but we do not have a monopoly. True, Windows has a large market share, but there are alternatives, and people are using them. And if Linux advocates are right, the future will be even more competitive, no matter what Microsoft does about it.
Are you kidding? THey're all but dead.
I really don't have a clue what you mean here. They were purchased by AOL for several billion dollars, which is a whole heck of a lot more than it was worth when they started. And even today Netscape has a little under half the browser market, with AOL giving Microsoft about 10%.
To the extent that they are "all but dead," that is largely their own fault. Netscape has not really improved much since version 3.0, and it has gotten buggier and more bloated. And IE really is a decent product in comparison. I see this as the proper result of competition: two approximately equal products each get about half the market.
Yeah, but that model is oversimplified when MegaCorp has it's hands in many diverse businesses (such as chipsets and motherboards, which is the lever Intel is applying to AMD lately).
But that's a seperate issue. The AMD-vs-Intel thing was just an example of "predatory" pricing.
Netscape didn't have a cash-cow like Windows95. They had their internet server and their portal.
Funny, I don't see them complaining. Their founders are now wealthy, and their product will soon be integrated into AOL.
Back before the AOL connection to the internet, the net was still an intellectual vehicle; most people you'd find online were real techies or scientists.
Now at best you'll find mostly script kiddies or wanna be tech reporters.
Sure, from a hard-core tech perspective, the S/N ratio has probably dropped. But the point is that the signal is still there, and if you're interested in anything other than hard-core tech subjects, the usefullness of the net has increased dramatically. All those newbies you look down your nose at bring with them dollars that advertisers want, and so we get dozens of free news sites, search engines, map generators, babelfish, and dozens of other services-- all for free. Similarly, amazon.com, eBay, and others would likely not be where they are today if they got all their business from a few thousand geeks. It's that vast pool of newbies that make them viable.
Now is that more intersting? You might say the answer is no, but probably 90% of 'net users would disagree.
I'm afraid I'm seeing the same thing with Linux these days. The GUIs are all very well developed and strong; but again it's detracting people from the power and freedom of the command line.
I have news for you: 99% of the population has no need or desire to learn a command line. It is simply not worth the effort. This doesn't make them stupid or lazy, it simply means that they have different priorities. Your life (and mine) revolves around computers. Most peoples' do not. For them, the computer is a tool, just like a toaster, and the less time they have to take learning to use it, the more time they have for more important tasks.
If you don't like GUI's, fine. Uninstall X and run from the command line to your heart's content. But if Linux is ever going to be more than a fringe operating system, it needs to appeal to more than the fringe of geeks who currently use it. A better GUI is a step in that direction.