As opposed to a legal monopoly, or a technical monpoly. Microsoft has a legal monopoly on operating systems for PC compliant hardware, despite the fact that there are competing products in the space. Microsoft has a technical monopoly in the same market, because it has pricing power there.
Apple has a literal monopoly on nearly everything that touches their systems -- they are the sole supplier of those components or applications.
Hardware is invariably more stable than software of equal complexity. There is no hardware of complexity equal to Windows 3.0, to say nothing of Linux 0.94, and there never has been, despite the fact that the complexity of either one of which is dwarfed by the complexity of a modern web browser.
I went to the page a UMass-Lowell, and then priced out the Dimension E505 at Home Premium and 1GB ram at $429, and $399 w/ Home Basic. I don't see where the extra cost he reports comes from. (I confirm his other prices -- it costs roughly $50 to add Vista to any of the others.)
No -- if you put me in a soul-crushing job with no future, I'm going to go look for a new one while I'm still employed by you. Then, I can say "I'm looking for a better job than my current one" without bad-mouthing you.
You probably could get the FreeBSD userland to work with a Linux kernel, too. Possibly, but, IMHO, unlikely. There are a lot of subtle but important differences. And your system still be contaminated by gcc; does FreeBSD itself even build on pcc any more?
Amazingly, there are a number of such names. For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware... And all of them have one thing in common: they're all particular implementations of GNU/Linux.
Have you looked at the hardware specs for the "fairly stripped down device"? The Samsung ARM 9 processor alone is quite a bit beefier than you appear to realize.
No, actually, he does not. He gave up [the right to require acknowledgment] when he licensed them with the GPL. I've read the GPL awfully closely, and I don't see a "you can't ask for credit" clause. You are certainly right that he gave up the right to require acknowledgment -- but there's nowhere that he gave up the right to ask for it.
And, if Linux is "just a kernel", as I'm often reminded, then there should be a distinct name for the kernel + userspace + toolchain, precisely for cases where they have different properties.
You're right: Linux the kernel isn't called GNU/Linux, which is why I differentiated between Linux and GNU/Linux in my original post. Linux plus the GNU toolchain, though? You know what? Stallman has every right to require that his fat, bloated, unstable, and poorly structured set of Unix tool replacements be credited. So I do so, when I'm talking about the whole mess.
Here's a thought: perhaps the OLPC software does require the extra space? I'm really tired of the chronic mantra that "Linux/FreeBSD/whatever doesn't need memory/CPU speed/whatever" -- it's a classic piece of misdirection. Yes, Linux itself can run on a stripped-down system -- but GNU/Linux is a memory hog, particularly when GUI interfaces are involved.
I think it's far more likely that Negroponte followed the lead of his brother who believed in flowers-and-candy welcomes on the basis of a serial con-man he should have seen through. Go back to the early pieces on OLPC: how many people kept saying that (Nick) Negroponte was either deluded or lying about the cost, and that by the time it came out, the OLPC would cost almost exactly what a cheap laptop with Windows cost? Surprise -- that's exactly what happened.
Yes, it is. A corporation's fiscal year is typically unrelated to the calendar year. In fact, what I came to my current employer, I took me a while to get used to a company which actually ran on CY FY's.
Actually, subterranean helium four is a renewable resource. It's generated by the same process that keeps the Earth's core molten: the alpha decay of heavy atoms. (What do you think those alpha particles become once they become electrically neutral, anyway?) It's actually a waste product of natural gas extraction -- but, unlike natural gas, the supply of subterranean helium is constantly replenished.
Being at the bottom of shit creek, however, would entail being submerged in shit. Your tastes may vary, of course -- and, of course, there's nothing wrong with that -- but I'd prefer to remain floating on top of the creek, if that's the alternative.
Of course, my preference would be to stay away completely, all things considered.
Since TFA is all about work done on metamaterial filters for terahertz radiation done at the University of Utah, I think you can probably assume that there's still work going on there.
Do you mean that the gross income of these two divisions is greater than Microsoft's gross income because of the sums that the loss-making divisions subtract from that gross income, or that their gross income is greater than Microsoft's _net_ income.
The latter -- Client and infoworker make more gross than the company does as whole net.
This is the same for _every_ company (and for that matter, nearly every person), because net income is gross income - expenses. Thus, unless one has no expenses (in which case net income will be equal to gross income), gross income will always be more than net income.
In the case of Microsoft, though, the two divisions that I listed, Windows Client and Information Worker, make more in gross income (~24G/yr) taken alone than the company as a whole makes taken together. If one ignores the expenses of those two divisions -- as other have done, and as you have not -- then it appears that the rest of the company must lose money. In fact, most of the company's divisions would be profitable corporations in their own right, even were they spun off.
As you say, both in spite of and because of their incredible earning power, Information Worker and Windows Client are now drags on the company's growth. Given Microsoft's niggling dividends, their non-contribution to the share price is bad, not good. As a shareholder, I'd like to see that change -- either the two divisions should be spun off as an industrial-style dividend yielding corporation, or the per share dividend from MSFT should be raised.
Again, I'm not really disagreeing with you, just clarifying what I mean by my use of percentages.
The total ("gross") income from Windows Client and Office does, in fact, exceed the "net" income of the company -- that means that one can pretend that the rest of the company, taken together, along with the expenses of Windows and Office, loses money. Don't lie, though -- that is pretense, and nothing more. The Windows Client and Office divisions are far and away the largest portions of the company, and earn less per employee than, say, SQL or Exchange. The truth is that SQL and Exchange, neither or which leverages either of the monopolies, are both hugely profitable.
MS loses money on Home and Entertainment and on the CRM division. H&E is dragged down by the XBox, which is still not profitable. CRM is just a money sink, which, IMHO as a shareholder, they should spin off.
Windows and Office are pretty much the only things making Microsoft that cash. Nearly every other portion of the company either contributes very little to the bottom line, or actually loses Microsoft money.
Um...sorry, but that just isn't true. Exchange alone make the company $1.2-1.6B per year, and SQL server (again, alone) does even better. Neither of those two products is part of Windows or of Office, yet I think most companies would be extraordinarily happy with either income stream.
The problem most Slashbots have here is that Windows and Office make such an unbelievable amount of money that it's hard to see that MS has a lot of other products in its stables making boatloads of money.
That's two-year-old data, and there's no question that MS took a hammering on the the 360 when it was first released. I *think* the GP was talking about how things are now, though: iSuppli has published an estimate -- sorry, can't find the link -- indicating the MS makes money on the premium system now, and breaks even on the cheap one.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue has been widely debated -- she issued the necessary declaration. Nagin was at best wrong, and, at worst, lying.
As opposed to a legal monopoly, or a technical monpoly. Microsoft has a legal monopoly on operating systems for PC compliant hardware, despite the fact that there are competing products in the space. Microsoft has a technical monopoly in the same market, because it has pricing power there.
Apple has a literal monopoly on nearly everything that touches their systems -- they are the sole supplier of those components or applications.
I went to the page a UMass-Lowell, and then priced out the Dimension E505 at Home Premium and 1GB ram at $429, and $399 w/ Home Basic. I don't see where the extra cost he reports comes from. (I confirm his other prices -- it costs roughly $50 to add Vista to any of the others.)
The forking attorney bomb is self-limiting: the lawyers stop spawning when they run out of space.
No -- if you put me in a soul-crushing job with no future, I'm going to go look for a new one while I'm still employed by you. Then, I can say "I'm looking for a better job than my current one" without bad-mouthing you.
glibc is contamination, at least to a BSD adherent. GCC -> GLIBC -> contamination of your binary by LGPL code.
Have you looked at the hardware specs for the "fairly stripped down device"? The Samsung ARM 9 processor alone is quite a bit beefier than you appear to realize.
And, if Linux is "just a kernel", as I'm often reminded, then there should be a distinct name for the kernel + userspace + toolchain, precisely for cases where they have different properties.
You're right: Linux the kernel isn't called GNU/Linux, which is why I differentiated between Linux and GNU/Linux in my original post. Linux plus the GNU toolchain, though? You know what? Stallman has every right to require that his fat, bloated, unstable, and poorly structured set of Unix tool replacements be credited. So I do so, when I'm talking about the whole mess.
Here's a thought: perhaps the OLPC software does require the extra space? I'm really tired of the chronic mantra that "Linux/FreeBSD/whatever doesn't need memory/CPU speed/whatever" -- it's a classic piece of misdirection. Yes, Linux itself can run on a stripped-down system -- but GNU/Linux is a memory hog, particularly when GUI interfaces are involved.
I think it's far more likely that Negroponte followed the lead of his brother who believed in flowers-and-candy welcomes on the basis of a serial con-man he should have seen through. Go back to the early pieces on OLPC: how many people kept saying that (Nick) Negroponte was either deluded or lying about the cost, and that by the time it came out, the OLPC would cost almost exactly what a cheap laptop with Windows cost? Surprise -- that's exactly what happened.
Yes, it is. A corporation's fiscal year is typically unrelated to the calendar year. In fact, what I came to my current employer, I took me a while to get used to a company which actually ran on CY FY's.
Actually, subterranean helium four is a renewable resource. It's generated by the same process that keeps the Earth's core molten: the alpha decay of heavy atoms. (What do you think those alpha particles become once they become electrically neutral, anyway?) It's actually a waste product of natural gas extraction -- but, unlike natural gas, the supply of subterranean helium is constantly replenished.
The original songwriter still gets his composition royalties. They're the same for the cover as they are for the original.
I don't know if there are banks for shit creek. There might be ATMs, though.
Being at the bottom of shit creek, however, would entail being submerged in shit. Your tastes may vary, of course -- and, of course, there's nothing wrong with that -- but I'd prefer to remain floating on top of the creek, if that's the alternative.
Of course, my preference would be to stay away completely, all things considered.
Since TFA is all about work done on metamaterial filters for terahertz radiation done at the University of Utah, I think you can probably assume that there's still work going on there.
Won't you please think of the children of the Rockstar employees?
As you say, both in spite of and because of their incredible earning power, Information Worker and Windows Client are now drags on the company's growth. Given Microsoft's niggling dividends, their non-contribution to the share price is bad, not good. As a shareholder, I'd like to see that change -- either the two divisions should be spun off as an industrial-style dividend yielding corporation, or the per share dividend from MSFT should be raised.
Again, I'm not really disagreeing with you, just clarifying what I mean by my use of percentages.
The total ("gross") income from Windows Client and Office does, in fact, exceed the "net" income of the company -- that means that one can pretend that the rest of the company, taken together, along with the expenses of Windows and Office, loses money. Don't lie, though -- that is pretense, and nothing more. The Windows Client and Office divisions are far and away the largest portions of the company, and earn less per employee than, say, SQL or Exchange. The truth is that SQL and Exchange, neither or which leverages either of the monopolies, are both hugely profitable.
MS loses money on Home and Entertainment and on the CRM division. H&E is dragged down by the XBox, which is still not profitable. CRM is just a money sink, which, IMHO as a shareholder, they should spin off.
The problem most Slashbots have here is that Windows and Office make such an unbelievable amount of money that it's hard to see that MS has a lot of other products in its stables making boatloads of money.
That's two-year-old data, and there's no question that MS took a hammering on the the 360 when it was first released. I *think* the GP was talking about how things are now, though: iSuppli has published an estimate -- sorry, can't find the link -- indicating the MS makes money on the premium system now, and breaks even on the cheap one.