That's moronic. At least 40% of the country is actively against Kerry too, should they all show up if Kerry wins, to try to stop Kerry from taking office too?
Typical liberal attitude, thinking that everybody in the country is really on your side, that you just can't get your message out.
Just curious since we are sort of on the subject of DMCA and encryption. If I make something and I put weak encryption on it (let's say all I do is XOR it with a number that is hard-coded in the source), and then somebody breaks that encryption through relatively trivial means, does that mean they are violating the DMCA?
While I tend to agree with what you are saying, it's not quite the same thing as it was in the past. Ultimately, the US has the power to destroy every living thing on the planet. Unless somebody comes up with something that can stop our nukes from reaching their cities, the US will remain a super-power.
Sure, China and the EU, and even Russia will be equally powerful, insofar as it won't be possible for somebody else to invade their country. Even France has enough nukes at this time to pretty much guarantee that nobody will ever invade their country again.
If these large super-power countries ever fall apart, it will be from inside, not from outside.
Still, it's important that the US keep developing technology. If China ever developed a way to prevent US nukes from reaching their shores, then ultimately China could destroy the US. I think that sort of technology is possible, so it's vital that we remain in the forefront in these areas.
In gaseous form the hydrogen/helium in the balloon isn't going to add up to much energy for thrust. After all, it has to weigh less than the air it is displacing and then some.
Typical slashdot, if a point of view you don't agree with is expressed, you moderate it down. Wouldn't want the lemmings hearing the other side of the story, they might actually think it makes sense.
You would think that Linux users would appreciate hearing some points of view that might explain why their love-toy (linux) can't compete.
Here's a hint, quit crying about how Microsoft is a big bully and trying making a better product than they have for once. No, contrary to popular slashdot belief, linux is not a better product. Linux certainly has some stuff it does very well, but you need to have cross your T's if you want to be anything but a footnote.
So, open source software can't make it on it's own, so you want to take the money people paid to Microsoft, presumably because they like the product (I know I like Windows), and give it to a bunch of losers whose product nobody is willing to spend a nickle on so maybe they can make it better. Yeah, that makes sense.
Linux can't compete in the free market, so they want daddy government to bail them out, weenies.
Actually, the game companies don't much care for the rating system. You just won't find a retailer anywhere who will carry your title on the shelf unless it has been rated.
The game companies were perfectly happy having the content unrated, but the buyers wanted a bit of guidance regarding what they were buying, after all, parents can't very well be hip enough on the game-scene to know for sure what games are appropriate, after all, Leisure Suit Larry sounds like a good kids game title doesn't it?
But, the system is in place now and it works reasonably well. The V-Chip system for TV's works fantastic too. My new TV will auto-block content from my kids (6, 8, 9, 11) on a per-program basis based on the rating. I just program the TV which ratings I want to let through. If the material doesn't fit the rating, they have to enter a passcode.
It works for games, it works for movies, it works for television, and I don't see any free-speech rights getting infringed upon in any significant manner. It's easy enough to find as vile of content as your heart desires. I don't see why a similar scheme couldn't be done for internet content.
Those who cry about free-speech issues, are just anal or incapable of the critical thinking necessary to realize that there really is no issue there.
As a parent of 4 young kids, all I want our some tools that make the job a little easier. I can't be standing over the shoulder of my kid 24/7 while they are on the computer, and despite my best efforts to teach them right from wrong, curiosity and the crass way that ad's popup will no doubt lead them to some material I find inappropriate.
Some scheme whereby the nature of the content is labelled would have zero impact on adults as they simply would ignore those labels. The scheme doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to get the stuff that is obviously and patently inappropriate for kids.
Again, I am not trying to avoid my parental duties, just asking for some very reasonable tools that make it easier...raising kids is hard enough.
Given how the victims of this virus are closely aligned with the sworn enemies of the Linux community, and given that the Linux community is generally ripe with coders skilled enough to do such a thing, it doesn't seem like too far of a stretch of the imagination to suspect that some misguided Linux user is a likely culprit.
Why does the Linux community take such offense to the notion that one of their own might be a less than decent fellow? There are millions of Linux users, do you really live in such a fantasy world that you believe all of them are benevolent, simply by virtue of having chosen Linux?
It is indeed unfortunate that the acts of one zealot might tarnish the image of the Linux community as a whole -- an image that is every bit as important to Linux as some corporations image is to themselves. How about a little less hypocricy here, the Linux community routines blames Microsoft for anything that goes wrong...if the shoe fits....
This is no different than a government subsidy. It would be really easy for the United States to completely take over say the bicycle industry, just have the government start subsidizing bike makers so they could sell the bikes for dirt-cheap overseas. Of course, foreign countries would counter by imposing tariffs on US bikes so as to not put their own bike makers out of business and the next thing you know you have a nice little trade-war going on.
I don't see how software is any different from bikes. If asian governments start funding software development and make it such that US products (ie. Windows) can't compete, then the US would respond be putting tariffs on other products produced in those countries, again, nice little trade war where everybody loses.
I wonder how quickly Korea would quit making AsianOS when we slapped a 20% tariff on Hyndai vehicles (effectively putting Hyndai out of business in the US). Or how about Toyota, Honda, or Sony?
It's all too easy for them now to sit back and decide to make their own OS, as they have no presence in the OS industry now to speak of. But they are nuts if they think the US is going to just roll over quietly as they subsidize out of asian existence a multi-billion dollar industry that we are dominant in.
It's relatively easy to come up with the set of C statements that would mimick a particular set of asm statements that you wish to decompile, but the end result would be a C program that was not much easier to read to the original asm was. Changing various assembly operations into C operations does get you back the information you really need.
The symbolic names make up the bulk of the lost information, but often times programmers will organize a sequence of code in a certain way to make it easier to understand. The compiler will often rearrange that code in a manner that makes it easier for the computer to understand. Compilers will do screwy things like increment a variable on the stack, while holding the original in a register for later usage. Where the original C code might have had the variable increment at the end like this:
while (x 10) {// do a bunch of stuff using x
x++; }
The way the compiler optimizes register usage may cause the assembly to actually increment x just after doing the conditional, then hold the non-incremented value in a register for use down below. The decompiled asm might look like this:
while (x 10) {
int temp = x;
x++;// do stuff with temp }
While this may seem like a trivial difference in the C code, it can often distort the intent of the algorithm. When a C programmer sees a construct like the latter, they naturally assume that the temp variable was used because more natural constructs would not. The C programmer then wastes time mulling it over only to discover that it was just dumb.
I am currently on a project where I am maintaining some pretty poorly written code. I can't tell you how much time I waste looking at a particularly ugly algorithm trying to figure out why they are doing all these screwy things, only to discover they were just idiots.
My point is, that the compiler and optimizer are going to mangle the logical order of the code in such a manner that it will be far more difficult to read.
Like I said at the beginning, simple translation of assembly to C is easy, getting back the meaning that gives the endeavor any value at all is much more difficult.
My bet is that they will get greedy and end up killing the technology by overpricing it. Their mindset will go a little like this. Well, they are paying upwards of $4 to rent a DVD at blockbuster now and they have to hassle to return it and it may not be there, so we ought to be able to charge $5 for these things.
Blockbuster won't buy into this, they get something like half their revenue from late fees. But, this isn't really targetted toward blockbuster, this is a way for the movie studios to directly cut in on blockbusters gig.
Right now, Blockbuster will buy one DVD movie and rent it out 50 times. The movie studios make a one time fee of maybe $10. With the new scheme they can get $1 from each of the 50 copies, and consumer usage will go way up to boot.
How many times have you gone to the rental store and found out they were out of the new-release you wanted, so you ended up not renting anything, and never bothered to ever rent it again? How many times have you found 5 movies that you wanted to rent, but knew you would only have time to watch 2 of them within the 2-5 day rental period?
The biggest hassle of the rental business is managing the rental process, getting the movies returned and restocked, blah blah blah. These are so simple, every retailer on the planet (including 24 hour/day grocery stores) will have a complete selection of the latest movies. You can haphazardly pick up everything you might possibly want to ever see and just have it sitting around for those times when you are bored.
I see no downside here, unless it drives the price of permanent DVD's higher by canabalizing standard DVD sales.
I got the impression from the article that they may be able to tune the technology to expire in whatever length of time they want, which opens up other purchasing possibilities.
Can't wait until some Taiwan DVD maker comes out with a drive that can read bad-colored discs... Especially nice if they wait until the technology is commonplace before doing so. I plan on keeping all my bad-colored discs around just in case.
The Patriot Act is harmless. I seriously doubt the majority of posters on this board have even read it, or understand the changes it actually makes compared to what we have had forever.
The spying ability everybody is paranoid about is simply common-sense stuff, hardly a serious invasion of the average joe's privacy by any stretch of the imagination. I suspect most people are simply repeating the misinformation they heard the last time the subject came up.
The government can't simply spy on anybody, they have to get a warrant. The problem with the old scheme was that they had to share classified intelligence information with an open-court in order to justify the warrant, a process that by its very nature screwed things up. The new scheme simply allows them to deal with a court that has been given security clearences and keeps the proceedings secret in order to obtain the warrant. The same checks and balances are in place. This hardly effects the average joe, as the only reason the government would even use this special court is if the proof for getting the warrant were classified.
Then there are a few other things like roaming wire taps that everybody cries about. Boo hoo, so they have a warrant to tap your phone, but if you walk across the street and use the pay-phone, they can't tap that???? How is that an invasion of privacy (remember, they have already justified a wire-tap on every phone they think you might use). It's only common sense that once you get a warrant to tap a particular person that the tap should be on the person (and follow that person) as opposed to being on a particular phone they might use.
I'm sure there are few other clauses that many would find objectionable, but the vast majority of them are common-sense and trivial changes to systems already in place.
The problem is, groups like the ACLU see any movement no matter how minor in giving the government power as a massive power-grab and infringement of the constitution.
Slashdot readers should educate themselves...the American public may certainly be sheep, but slashdot readers are no better, they just have a different shepherd.
Sorry to disappoint everybody, but I already have a patent covering this idea. My licensing fees are very reasonable though, so I don't expect it to be a problem.
That's the real key. Now days, recompiling well written software for different CPU's is trivial, provided the OS API is the same. If Windows runs on an Itanium well, I can likely just recompile my software and be done. If it can emulate 80x86 well enough to let me run old Windows programs, that's game-set-match.
I realize/. doesn't like the view of the world through Microsoft colored glasses, but that's the reality that is out there. If it runs their software quickly, users couldn't care less about what the CPU type is, and that includes high-end server applications as well.
This isn't the end. The Challenger disaster took 2 years to work out, and that was only because they had a hard time figuring out what went wrong, and they had to do a major redesign of the booster rockets.
Also, at the time of the Challenger accident, there had been few enough flights that they were still fairly insecure about the effectiveness of their systems. After 100+ successful flights, I think it is safe to say that the shuttle isn't fundamentally flawed, and that if you dot the i's and cross the t's, the odds are way in your favor that you will have a safe flight.
With this disaster, I suspect they will figure out what went wrong fairly quickly (most likely that foam hitting the front side of the wing is my bet...those leading edge wing tiles are far more critical than any other tiles). The foam has only been a problem for the last 3 flights based on some changes they made. They will change back to the old foam system (that had the popcorn problem) and be back up and running in no time.
Another thing to note, funding and public support for NASA increased substantially after the Challenger disaster, I think we will see a similar effect here.
My prediction is the crew on the ISS will be retrieved by a space-shuttle before the end of June, mark my words.
I don't think you give the industry enough credit. If Microsoft ever stops providing good products (and for all it's quirks, Windows and Office are still pretty dang good products), then I have no doubt that somebody else in the industry will push them out of the way. Just like WordPerfect pushed Wordstar out of existence overnight, and Microsoft pushed Wordperfect out of existence overnight, so too will somebody else push Microsoft out of the market, and I am fairly confident that somebody will be Linux.
Let's face it, there is only so much more you can do to a word processor...Microsoft has to constantly innovate just to try to get people to upgrade...they are their own worst competitor right now.
The problem with monopolies stems far deeper than just Microsoft too. The industry in general has a strong tendency to shift as a whole. Whether it is operating systems or word-processors, for the past 20 years of personal computing, market share has always tended toward monopolistic. If Microsoft didn't have the monopoly, somebody else would.
The reason for this is that standards are a business necessity, both from the development end and the consumer end. That is complicated by the industry moving so quickly technologically, that it depends on proprietary pseudo standards...even little things like the.m3u file-format which start out as proprietary quickly become the standard. From the consumer point of view, applications themselves become the standard. It would not be practical for me to use any other word-processor other than MS Word, because that is what everybody else I am working with uses.
Microsoft's monopoly is more indicative of the nature of the industry than it is of their marketting practices. Granted in the case of operating system dominance, this gives Microsoft a god-like position, but overall I think they have been reasonably benevolent given their position.
Slashdot Mirror
That's moronic. At least 40% of the country is actively against Kerry too, should they all show up if Kerry wins, to try to stop Kerry from taking office too?
Typical liberal attitude, thinking that everybody in the country is really on your side, that you just can't get your message out.
Isn't it obvious this in intended to knock Al Jazeera off the air in the middle east?
Just curious since we are sort of on the subject of DMCA and encryption. If I make something and I put weak encryption on it (let's say all I do is XOR it with a number that is hard-coded in the source), and then somebody breaks that encryption through relatively trivial means, does that mean they are violating the DMCA?
Besides, that's the whole idea, hit them while staying far enough away that they can't hit you :).
While I tend to agree with what you are saying, it's not quite the same thing as it was in the past. Ultimately, the US has the power to destroy every living thing on the planet. Unless somebody comes up with something that can stop our nukes from reaching their cities, the US will remain a super-power.
Sure, China and the EU, and even Russia will be equally powerful, insofar as it won't be possible for somebody else to invade their country. Even France has enough nukes at this time to pretty much guarantee that nobody will ever invade their country again.
If these large super-power countries ever fall apart, it will be from inside, not from outside.
Still, it's important that the US keep developing technology. If China ever developed a way to prevent US nukes from reaching their shores, then ultimately China could destroy the US. I think that sort of technology is possible, so it's vital that we remain in the forefront in these areas.
In gaseous form the hydrogen/helium in the balloon isn't going to add up to much energy for thrust. After all, it has to weigh less than the air it is displacing and then some.
Typical slashdot, if a point of view you don't agree with is expressed, you moderate it down. Wouldn't want the lemmings hearing the other side of the story, they might actually think it makes sense.
You would think that Linux users would appreciate hearing some points of view that might explain why their love-toy (linux) can't compete.
Here's a hint, quit crying about how Microsoft is a big bully and trying making a better product than they have for once. No, contrary to popular slashdot belief, linux is not a better product. Linux certainly has some stuff it does very well, but you need to have cross your T's if you want to be anything but a footnote.
Yeah, I'm sure you have all sorts of great ideas that you just can't seem to do because of Microsoft...damn them, damn them all....moron
So, open source software can't make it on it's own, so you want to take the money people paid to Microsoft, presumably because they like the product (I know I like Windows), and give it to a bunch of losers whose product nobody is willing to spend a nickle on so maybe they can make it better. Yeah, that makes sense.
Linux can't compete in the free market, so they want daddy government to bail them out, weenies.
Actually, the game companies don't much care for the rating system. You just won't find a retailer anywhere who will carry your title on the shelf unless it has been rated.
The game companies were perfectly happy having the content unrated, but the buyers wanted a bit of guidance regarding what they were buying, after all, parents can't very well be hip enough on the game-scene to know for sure what games are appropriate, after all, Leisure Suit Larry sounds like a good kids game title doesn't it?
But, the system is in place now and it works reasonably well. The V-Chip system for TV's works fantastic too. My new TV will auto-block content from my kids (6, 8, 9, 11) on a per-program basis based on the rating. I just program the TV which ratings I want to let through. If the material doesn't fit the rating, they have to enter a passcode.
It works for games, it works for movies, it works for television, and I don't see any free-speech rights getting infringed upon in any significant manner. It's easy enough to find as vile of content as your heart desires. I don't see why a similar scheme couldn't be done for internet content.
Those who cry about free-speech issues, are just anal or incapable of the critical thinking necessary to realize that there really is no issue there.
As a parent of 4 young kids, all I want our some tools that make the job a little easier. I can't be standing over the shoulder of my kid 24/7 while they are on the computer, and despite my best efforts to teach them right from wrong, curiosity and the crass way that ad's popup will no doubt lead them to some material I find inappropriate.
Some scheme whereby the nature of the content is labelled would have zero impact on adults as they simply would ignore those labels. The scheme doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to get the stuff that is obviously and patently inappropriate for kids.
Again, I am not trying to avoid my parental duties, just asking for some very reasonable tools that make it easier...raising kids is hard enough.
Given how the victims of this virus are closely aligned with the sworn enemies of the Linux community, and given that the Linux community is generally ripe with coders skilled enough to do such a thing, it doesn't seem like too far of a stretch of the imagination to suspect that some misguided Linux user is a likely culprit.
Why does the Linux community take such offense to the notion that one of their own might be a less than decent fellow? There are millions of Linux users, do you really live in such a fantasy world that you believe all of them are benevolent, simply by virtue of having chosen Linux?
It is indeed unfortunate that the acts of one zealot might tarnish the image of the Linux community as a whole -- an image that is every bit as important to Linux as some corporations image is to themselves. How about a little less hypocricy here, the Linux community routines blames Microsoft for anything that goes wrong...if the shoe fits....
Unions or lower prices, unions or lower prices, hmmm, lower prices. If they don't like working there, they can go some place else, geesh.
So, they have the lowest prices right? I can live with that...
This is no different than a government subsidy. It would be really easy for the United States to completely take over say the bicycle industry, just have the government start subsidizing bike makers so they could sell the bikes for dirt-cheap overseas. Of course, foreign countries would counter by imposing tariffs on US bikes so as to not put their own bike makers out of business and the next thing you know you have a nice little trade-war going on.
I don't see how software is any different from bikes. If asian governments start funding software development and make it such that US products (ie. Windows) can't compete, then the US would respond be putting tariffs on other products produced in those countries, again, nice little trade war where everybody loses.
I wonder how quickly Korea would quit making AsianOS when we slapped a 20% tariff on Hyndai vehicles (effectively putting Hyndai out of business in the US). Or how about Toyota, Honda, or Sony?
It's all too easy for them now to sit back and decide to make their own OS, as they have no presence in the OS industry now to speak of. But they are nuts if they think the US is going to just roll over quietly as they subsidize out of asian existence a multi-billion dollar industry that we are dominant in.
It's relatively easy to come up with the set of C statements that would mimick a particular set of asm statements that you wish to decompile, but the end result would be a C program that was not much easier to read to the original asm was. Changing various assembly operations into C operations does get you back the information you really need.
// do a bunch of stuff using x
// do stuff with temp
The symbolic names make up the bulk of the lost information, but often times programmers will organize a sequence of code in a certain way to make it easier to understand. The compiler will often rearrange that code in a manner that makes it easier for the computer to understand. Compilers will do screwy things like increment a variable on the stack, while holding the original in a register for later usage. Where the original C code might have had the variable increment at the end like this:
while (x 10)
{
x++;
}
The way the compiler optimizes register usage may cause the assembly to actually increment x just after doing the conditional, then hold the non-incremented value in a register for use down below. The decompiled asm might look like this:
while (x 10)
{
int temp = x;
x++;
}
While this may seem like a trivial difference in the C code, it can often distort the intent of the algorithm. When a C programmer sees a construct like the latter, they naturally assume that the temp variable was used because more natural constructs would not. The C programmer then wastes time mulling it over only to discover that it was just dumb.
I am currently on a project where I am maintaining some pretty poorly written code. I can't tell you how much time I waste looking at a particularly ugly algorithm trying to figure out why they are doing all these screwy things, only to discover they were just idiots.
My point is, that the compiler and optimizer are going to mangle the logical order of the code in such a manner that it will be far more difficult to read.
Like I said at the beginning, simple translation of assembly to C is easy, getting back the meaning that gives the endeavor any value at all is much more difficult.
My bet is that they will get greedy and end up killing the technology by overpricing it. Their mindset will go a little like this. Well, they are paying upwards of $4 to rent a DVD at blockbuster now and they have to hassle to return it and it may not be there, so we ought to be able to charge $5 for these things.
Blockbuster won't buy into this, they get something like half their revenue from late fees. But, this isn't really targetted toward blockbuster, this is a way for the movie studios to directly cut in on blockbusters gig.
Right now, Blockbuster will buy one DVD movie and rent it out 50 times. The movie studios make a one time fee of maybe $10. With the new scheme they can get $1 from each of the 50 copies, and consumer usage will go way up to boot.
How many times have you gone to the rental store and found out they were out of the new-release you wanted, so you ended up not renting anything, and never bothered to ever rent it again? How many times have you found 5 movies that you wanted to rent, but knew you would only have time to watch 2 of them within the 2-5 day rental period?
The biggest hassle of the rental business is managing the rental process, getting the movies returned and restocked, blah blah blah. These are so simple, every retailer on the planet (including 24 hour/day grocery stores) will have a complete selection of the latest movies. You can haphazardly pick up everything you might possibly want to ever see and just have it sitting around for those times when you are bored.
I see no downside here, unless it drives the price of permanent DVD's higher by canabalizing standard DVD sales.
I got the impression from the article that they may be able to tune the technology to expire in whatever length of time they want, which opens up other purchasing possibilities.
Can't wait until some Taiwan DVD maker comes out with a drive that can read bad-colored discs... Especially nice if they wait until the technology is commonplace before doing so. I plan on keeping all my bad-colored discs around just in case.
Actually, if these self-expiring cars cost 1/4 what an equivalent non-expiring car would cost, sign me up. That is what we are talking about here.
The Patriot Act is harmless. I seriously doubt the majority of posters on this board have even read it, or understand the changes it actually makes compared to what we have had forever.
The spying ability everybody is paranoid about is simply common-sense stuff, hardly a serious invasion of the average joe's privacy by any stretch of the imagination. I suspect most people are simply repeating the misinformation they heard the last time the subject came up.
The government can't simply spy on anybody, they have to get a warrant. The problem with the old scheme was that they had to share classified intelligence information with an open-court in order to justify the warrant, a process that by its very nature screwed things up. The new scheme simply allows them to deal with a court that has been given security clearences and keeps the proceedings secret in order to obtain the warrant. The same checks and balances are in place. This hardly effects the average joe, as the only reason the government would even use this special court is if the proof for getting the warrant were classified.
Then there are a few other things like roaming wire taps that everybody cries about. Boo hoo, so they have a warrant to tap your phone, but if you walk across the street and use the pay-phone, they can't tap that???? How is that an invasion of privacy (remember, they have already justified a wire-tap on every phone they think you might use). It's only common sense that once you get a warrant to tap a particular person that the tap should be on the person (and follow that person) as opposed to being on a particular phone they might use.
I'm sure there are few other clauses that many would find objectionable, but the vast majority of them are common-sense and trivial changes to systems already in place.
The problem is, groups like the ACLU see any movement no matter how minor in giving the government power as a massive power-grab and infringement of the constitution.
Slashdot readers should educate themselves...the American public may certainly be sheep, but slashdot readers are no better, they just have a different shepherd.
Sorry to disappoint everybody, but I already have a patent covering this idea. My licensing fees are very reasonable though, so I don't expect it to be a problem.
That's the real key. Now days, recompiling well written software for different CPU's is trivial, provided the OS API is the same. If Windows runs on an Itanium well, I can likely just recompile my software and be done. If it can emulate 80x86 well enough to let me run old Windows programs, that's game-set-match.
/. doesn't like the view of the world through Microsoft colored glasses, but that's the reality that is out there. If it runs their software quickly, users couldn't care less about what the CPU type is, and that includes high-end server applications as well.
I realize
This isn't the end. The Challenger disaster took 2 years to work out, and that was only because they had a hard time figuring out what went wrong, and they had to do a major redesign of the booster rockets.
Also, at the time of the Challenger accident, there had been few enough flights that they were still fairly insecure about the effectiveness of their systems. After 100+ successful flights, I think it is safe to say that the shuttle isn't fundamentally flawed, and that if you dot the i's and cross the t's, the odds are way in your favor that you will have a safe flight.
With this disaster, I suspect they will figure out what went wrong fairly quickly (most likely that foam hitting the front side of the wing is my bet...those leading edge wing tiles are far more critical than any other tiles). The foam has only been a problem for the last 3 flights based on some changes they made. They will change back to the old foam system (that had the popcorn problem) and be back up and running in no time.
Another thing to note, funding and public support for NASA increased substantially after the Challenger disaster, I think we will see a similar effect here.
My prediction is the crew on the ISS will be retrieved by a space-shuttle before the end of June, mark my words.
God bless them all.
I don't think you give the industry enough credit. If Microsoft ever stops providing good products (and for all it's quirks, Windows and Office are still pretty dang good products), then I have no doubt that somebody else in the industry will push them out of the way. Just like WordPerfect pushed Wordstar out of existence overnight, and Microsoft pushed Wordperfect out of existence overnight, so too will somebody else push Microsoft out of the market, and I am fairly confident that somebody will be Linux.
.m3u file-format which start out as proprietary quickly become the standard. From the consumer point of view, applications themselves become the standard. It would not be practical for me to use any other word-processor other than MS Word, because that is what everybody else I am working with uses.
Let's face it, there is only so much more you can do to a word processor...Microsoft has to constantly innovate just to try to get people to upgrade...they are their own worst competitor right now.
The problem with monopolies stems far deeper than just Microsoft too. The industry in general has a strong tendency to shift as a whole. Whether it is operating systems or word-processors, for the past 20 years of personal computing, market share has always tended toward monopolistic. If Microsoft didn't have the monopoly, somebody else would.
The reason for this is that standards are a business necessity, both from the development end and the consumer end. That is complicated by the industry moving so quickly technologically, that it depends on proprietary pseudo standards...even little things like the
Microsoft's monopoly is more indicative of the nature of the industry than it is of their marketting practices. Granted in the case of operating system dominance, this gives Microsoft a god-like position, but overall I think they have been reasonably benevolent given their position.