Don't get me wrong. Not only did I love my Atari 1040ST, I even still have it! But it only took me a year and a half to realize what a truly feeble rip-off of the Mac GEM was. I mean, come on. It combined the most trivial parts of the Mac's GUI with the most annoying aspects of MS-DOS (I know, it's really CP/M that's to blame for that). I could go on for hours about the ways Finder+MacOS was/is better than GEM+CP/M.
The single greatest thing about the Atari ST was that it could boot in 1 second, and that has nothing to do with GEM. In fact, most of what made the ST great was its hardware, and had nothing to do with GEM. GEM was never more than a third-rate GUI.
As near as I can tell, there's not one single thing in GEM that even Macs of the same time didn't do better, albeit a little slower (they were clocked at 7.1 MHz, vs. 8 MHz). Let's not even get started talking about X-Windows. Even (shudder) Windows 3.0 was better in many ways (worse in others).
Yes, I loved my Atari ST. But I am truly glad that I saw the light and never have to go back to GEM again.
My GeoCities site has no pop-up ads, take two
on
Generative Quickies
·
· Score: 1
All you have to do is insert the following code after <BODY> on each page: <!--#geoguide-->
Then click the button to enable geoguides on all your pages.
Spread the word! Offer to make the change _for_ people just so you won't have to suffer!
If you don't see angle brackets, cut me some slack; I'm having some trouble previewing this.
Slashdot is all about news for nerds, remember? Some of us nerds care about all the interesting news, not just news about God^H^H^HLinux. Some of us look for excellence wherever we can find it, and speaking plainly, Apple has done some excellent things. At the very least, some of the things they do are indeed newsworthy to nerds. They have earned the right to be covered in these pages, same as Linux, SGI, Microsoft, or George Lucas.
At the risk of trying to continue an already-dead thread...
BinaryBits' basic assertion that consumers have a choice not to use MS products is, in my experience, false. Just because other products exist that perform a similar function does not necessarily mean that using those competing products is really an option. In my interactions with customers, it is typically agreed that all files exchanged shall conform to the customer's corporate standard. This standard is invariably the MS Office suite, often the newest version.
In these situations, "choice" really isn't there. The economic need to have customers forces me to use MS Office.
I don't have answers to all of your quesions, but...
When a company sells me a product for less than it costs them to make it, just long enough to drive competitors out of my market, I call that predatory pricing. If a company sells a product for less than it costs their competitor to make it, that's hardball competition.
When potential competitors know you can outlast them, and are willing to do it as often as neccesary, they won't even mount a challenge. Then you get to set and keep your high prices.
It doesn't take 100% market share to be a monopoly, either. There's a world of difference between 90% market share and 50% share.
The other way to hold onto a monopoly (assuming you already have one, which you do if you start out with one) is to seal up your market tight as a drum and use every means at your disposal to prevent any other party from challenging it. This takes lots of extra resources, which you pay for with the extra income you get from your monopoly rents.
Once you get the technique down, then you extend your grasp a little bit at a time until, eventually, you are more of an economic force of nature than a commercial entity. You are the friction in every financial transaction, and the "lost" energy goes right into your pocket. Nice work if you can get it, and you don't have to worry about making your customers happy.
Oh, never mind, you're absolutely right. All I'm saying is, using every trick in the book (legal or otherwise, including stealing and extortion) to smash potential competition constitutes "very specialized cases".
In general, in a competitive situation, I respect the idea that companies keep secrets to maintain a competitive edge. I dislike the notion of secret interfaces and APIs intensely, but can't think of a good reason for forbidding them in normal circumstances.
Windows is not a normal circumstance. For all practical purposes, it is the only game in town. You cannot do business (computationally speaking, duh) in today's world without being able to interoperate with Windows-based systems. Where economics alone don't force that condition, politics help out. Windows is a monopoly.
Given this situation, the usual rules (much as I dislike them anyway) do not apply. Since application developers are essentially forced to develop for Windows, MS cannot be permitted to keep any secrets in the OS APIs. That would give MS's application developers a huge boost in this game that everyone else is already being forced to play. It's like playing poker against someone who gets to look at all the cards.
If developers had the option of not playing, I would (grudingly) say, fine. But they don't. A large and constantly increasing percentage of potential customers won't even accept a compatible product that works on another OS. It's Windows or nothing. To decide to develop for a non-Windows platform is, in many fields, to decide not to do business.
Given this reality, it is necessary to force the monopoly player (MS) to fully publish and share all of their platform (OS) APIs with the rest of the application developers as freely as they do with their own. This is the only measure that can prevent the monopoly player from steamrollering every market they wish to.
If you think it's fine for one giant conglomerate to control the whole market, great. Many people don't seem to think monopolies hurt them. I do. The US government seems to agree. Look at some markets that are controlled by giant, monopolistic conglomerates and tell me how much better they are than competitive ones. Tell me how much better the consumer is served. Tell me how much less the customer gets reamed by monopolies than competitive companies.
Dumping is just a nasty name for predatory pricing
on
RMS on Dealing with MS
·
· Score: 1
And predatory pricing is another aspect of antitrust/pro-competitive legislation. Dumping looks good for the customer in the short term... until every player in the market but one is destroyed, and the victor gains back the revenue they lost during the price war by gouging everybody for the next few years or decades. It happens. I pay "monopoly rent" every time I fly somewhere.
...what matters is whether it's good science or bad science. Someone's gotta pay for it. While it is quite likely that MS commissioned Mindcraft to perform bad science (they have shown this tendancy in the past), it was certainly within their power instead to commission a fair study.
I'm all for applying critical thinking and considering the motivation of the speaker. I'm against automatically assuming a claim is false just because someone we dislike made it. I've seen plenty of usenet flamewars in which entirely true study findings were discounted solely on the basis of who paid for them. That's just closed-minded.
On the other hand, specific point-by-point rebuttals are right-on. Producing evidence that refutes the claim based on better science in golden.
I guess it's just easier to be a mindless naysayer and pretend to be a sophisticated skeptic than it is to approach disagreeable ideas with an open mind and use logic and rationality to pick them apart, and risk having to admit being wrong.
That article was nearly as much of a Linux suck-up as the Mindcraft study was a MS one. While it's nice to read, I would never call it objective. So before we pour the champagne, let's start talking about how we're going to smoke that nasty ol' SMP/RAID NT system in a fair test!
Given: RMS wants GNU to get some mindshare by putting it in the name.
Given: Most of us think compound names are pretty dorky.
Therefore: We call it Lignux. See, we can even pronounce it almost the same, just pretend the 'n' has a tilde over it. Like "Lin-yucks". And it'll make the francophones happy, too!
Lignux it is. Everyone's happy. Everyone get back to work.:-)
As someone who has been a big fan of RMS's free software products since well before Linus started his train rolling (I think 1988 counts as well before), I do think RMS/FSF deserve tons of credit for getting us where we are today.
I do agree that the OS (Kernel + essential FS and utils) should be called Linux. I do NOT agree that fully packaged distros should automatically be called Linux. E.g., what I have at home I call Red Hat, a product that consists of Linux plus a bunch of applications and cool added value utils.
That was a great friggin' article. Let me know when you're ready to move to an even less hip town than Chi that happens to have RoadRunner.:-)
They already offer that -- see this story
on
Open Source Windows
·
· Score: 1
I don't know what the real price is, but what you propose is the literal truth. Anyone willing to pay the asking price has, in plain fact, been able to get access to the NT source code for years. Probably going all the way back to pre-release, I would guess. I remember reading about the flap a year ago when MS decided to revoke the source code license it had granted to AT&T. Apparently, MS didn't appreciate AT&T using their NT source code to make NT interoperate better with Unix.:-)
Many Americans become lawyers just because they still don't know what to do with themselves when they graduate from college. "Hmm, I have this BA, which overcomes the main barrier to employment, but I still have no practical skills, and I sure don't want to be a high school teacher or an academic. I don't want to be a secretary or work in advertising, either. Medical school is too hard, and I'm not old enough for business school. Hmm, maybe I'll just try to get into law school and put off the decision for two more years."
The thing that troubles me about this mess is, you're not supposed to be able to stop anyone from interpreting your language! Oh, yeah, IANAL. As, I recall, this was all hashed out in the early '90s during the great Look 'n' Feel lawsuits. In the Lotus 123/Borland Quattro suit, the court ruled that you cannot sue your competitor for making a product that responds to your command language, even if you invented it. IIRC.
This 3dfx bullshit (that's what it is, so sue me if my language singes your virgin ears (oops, there I go again)) looks to me like exactly the same situation. They may restrict people from using their SDK, but going after "Clide" or any other totally reverse-engineered interpreter is crossing the line.
Will wonders never cease? Al Gore invented the Open Source Web Site, Al Gore invented the electron, and now... Richard Stallman has been a Linux fan since 1984! Those ZDNet reporters are really unearthing some long-buried secrets!
1. I know a 120wpm QWERTY typist. I've seen it done. (It's scary.)
2. Dvorak wasn't the only study. My analysis of the Maltron keyboard is that it's nearly the same layout as Dvorak's.
3. My experience with Dvorak is that some keys are in *STUPID* places! Please, swap the I and U at the very least! While we're at it, let's call the L back in from Siberia.
4. I actually type faster on QWERTY than Dvorak when I really get going, but Dvorak hurts my hands less. Either that, or it's switch-hitting between the two. I use Dvorak about 75% of the time now.
Interesting stuff behind that link. Starts out very good, spirals rapidly out of control. Long on fiery rhetoric and short on details. I love paranoid conspiracies as much as the next guy ("Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you"), but... Where's the beef? Oh, and just because you say something twice doesn't remedy the lack of substance.
...was the subject of an I got yesterday morning. "How extremely convenient," I thought. "How very fortunate we are that MS is looking out for us, providing a fix almost before we even knew there was a threat."
Reminds me of a story I know where the alleged "criminal" is tricked by the "victim" into implicating himself to the authorities before the crime takes place. ("An Inspector Calls")
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get me wrong. Not only did I love my Atari 1040ST, I even still have it! But it only took me a year and a half to realize what a truly feeble rip-off of the Mac GEM was. I mean, come on. It combined the most trivial parts of the Mac's GUI with the most annoying aspects of MS-DOS (I know, it's really CP/M that's to blame for that). I could go on for hours about the ways Finder+MacOS was/is better than GEM+CP/M.
The single greatest thing about the Atari ST was that it could boot in 1 second, and that has nothing to do with GEM. In fact, most of what made the ST great was its hardware, and had nothing to do with GEM. GEM was never more than a third-rate GUI.
As near as I can tell, there's not one single thing in GEM that even Macs of the same time didn't do better, albeit a little slower (they were clocked at 7.1 MHz, vs. 8 MHz). Let's not even get started talking about X-Windows. Even (shudder) Windows 3.0 was better in many ways (worse in others).
Yes, I loved my Atari ST. But I am truly glad that I saw the light and never have to go back to GEM again.
All you have to do is insert the following code after <BODY> on each page:
<!--#geoguide-->
Then click the button to enable geoguides on all your pages.
Spread the word! Offer to make the change _for_ people just so you won't have to suffer!
If you don't see angle brackets, cut me some slack; I'm having some trouble previewing this.
All you have to do is insert the following code after :
Then use the site manager to enable your geoguides.
Spread the word! Beat up anyone who doesn't submit! (Okay, don't beat anyone up.)
Slashdot is all about news for nerds, remember? Some of us nerds care about all the interesting news, not just news about God^H^H^HLinux. Some of us look for excellence wherever we can find it, and speaking plainly, Apple has done some excellent things. At the very least, some of the things they do are indeed newsworthy to nerds. They have earned the right to be covered in these pages, same as Linux, SGI, Microsoft, or George Lucas.
At the risk of trying to continue an already-dead thread...
BinaryBits' basic assertion that consumers have a choice not to use MS products is, in my experience, false. Just because other products exist that perform a similar function does not necessarily mean that using those competing products is really an option. In my interactions with customers, it is typically agreed that all files exchanged shall conform to the customer's corporate standard. This standard is invariably the MS Office suite, often the newest version.
In these situations, "choice" really isn't there. The economic need to have customers forces me to use MS Office.
I don't have answers to all of your quesions, but...
When a company sells me a product for less than it costs them to make it, just long enough to drive competitors out of my market, I call that predatory pricing. If a company sells a product for less than it costs their competitor to make it, that's hardball competition.
When potential competitors know you can outlast them, and are willing to do it as often as neccesary, they won't even mount a challenge. Then you get to set and keep your high prices.
It doesn't take 100% market share to be a monopoly, either. There's a world of difference between 90% market share and 50% share.
The other way to hold onto a monopoly (assuming you already have one, which you do if you start out with one) is to seal up your market tight as a drum and use every means at your disposal to prevent any other party from challenging it. This takes lots of extra resources, which you pay for with the extra income you get from your monopoly rents.
Once you get the technique down, then you extend your grasp a little bit at a time until, eventually, you are more of an economic force of nature than a commercial entity. You are the friction in every financial transaction, and the "lost" energy goes right into your pocket. Nice work if you can get it, and you don't have to worry about making your customers happy.
Oh, never mind, you're absolutely right. All I'm saying is, using every trick in the book (legal or otherwise, including stealing and extortion) to smash potential competition constitutes "very specialized cases".
In general, in a competitive situation, I respect the idea that companies keep secrets to maintain a competitive edge. I dislike the notion of secret interfaces and APIs intensely, but can't think of a good reason for forbidding them in normal circumstances.
Windows is not a normal circumstance. For all practical purposes, it is the only game in town. You cannot do business (computationally speaking, duh) in today's world without being able to interoperate with Windows-based systems. Where economics alone don't force that condition, politics help out. Windows is a monopoly.
Given this situation, the usual rules (much as I dislike them anyway) do not apply. Since application developers are essentially forced to develop for Windows, MS cannot be permitted to keep any secrets in the OS APIs. That would give MS's application developers a huge boost in this game that everyone else is already being forced to play. It's like playing poker against someone who gets to look at all the cards.
If developers had the option of not playing, I would (grudingly) say, fine. But they don't. A large and constantly increasing percentage of potential customers won't even accept a compatible product that works on another OS. It's Windows or nothing. To decide to develop for a non-Windows platform is, in many fields, to decide not to do business.
Given this reality, it is necessary to force the monopoly player (MS) to fully publish and share all of their platform (OS) APIs with the rest of the application developers as freely as they do with their own. This is the only measure that can prevent the monopoly player from steamrollering every market they wish to.
If you think it's fine for one giant conglomerate to control the whole market, great. Many people don't seem to think monopolies hurt them. I do. The US government seems to agree. Look at some markets that are controlled by giant, monopolistic conglomerates and tell me how much better they are than competitive ones. Tell me how much better the consumer is served. Tell me how much less the customer gets reamed by monopolies than competitive companies.
And predatory pricing is another aspect of antitrust/pro-competitive legislation. Dumping looks good for the customer in the short term... until every player in the market but one is destroyed, and the victor gains back the revenue they lost during the price war by gouging everybody for the next few years or decades. It happens. I pay "monopoly rent" every time I fly somewhere.
...what matters is whether it's good science or bad science. Someone's gotta pay for it. While it is quite likely that MS commissioned Mindcraft to perform bad science (they have shown this tendancy in the past), it was certainly within their power instead to commission a fair study.
I'm all for applying critical thinking and considering the motivation of the speaker. I'm against automatically assuming a claim is false just because someone we dislike made it. I've seen plenty of usenet flamewars in which entirely true study findings were discounted solely on the basis of who paid for them. That's just closed-minded.
On the other hand, specific point-by-point rebuttals are right-on. Producing evidence that refutes the claim based on better science in golden.
I guess it's just easier to be a mindless naysayer and pretend to be a sophisticated skeptic than it is to approach disagreeable ideas with an open mind and use logic and rationality to pick them apart, and risk having to admit being wrong.
That article was nearly as much of a Linux suck-up as the Mindcraft study was a MS one. While it's nice to read, I would never call it objective. So before we pour the champagne, let's start talking about how we're going to smoke that nasty ol' SMP/RAID NT system in a fair test!
Isn't stepping on big toes what Linux is all about?
Make of it what you will. I think it supports my position that the ratio is about 4:1.
Given: RMS wants GNU to get some mindshare by putting it in the name.
:-)
Given: Most of us think compound names are pretty dorky.
Therefore: We call it Lignux. See, we can even pronounce it almost the same, just pretend the 'n' has a tilde over it. Like "Lin-yucks". And it'll make the francophones happy, too!
Lignux it is. Everyone's happy. Everyone get back to work.
Linux: 2,279,937
GNU: 582,413
It's not even 4:1.
As someone who has been a big fan of RMS's free software products since well before Linus started his train rolling (I think 1988 counts as well before), I do think RMS/FSF deserve tons of credit for getting us where we are today.
I do agree that the OS (Kernel + essential FS and utils) should be called Linux. I do NOT agree that fully packaged distros should automatically be called Linux. E.g., what I have at home I call Red Hat, a product that consists of Linux plus a bunch of applications and cool added value utils.
I got my geek girl, but I'm not sharing her with any of you, nyah, nyah! :-)
That was a great friggin' article. Let me know when you're ready to move to an even less hip town than Chi that happens to have RoadRunner. :-)
I don't know what the real price is, but what you propose is the literal truth. Anyone willing to pay the asking price has, in plain fact, been able to get access to the NT source code for years. Probably going all the way back to pre-release, I would guess. I remember reading about the flap a year ago when MS decided to revoke the source code license it had granted to AT&T. Apparently, MS didn't appreciate AT&T using their NT source code to make NT interoperate better with Unix. :-)
Many Americans become lawyers just because they still don't know what to do with themselves when they graduate from college. "Hmm, I have this BA, which overcomes the main barrier to employment, but I still have no practical skills, and I sure don't want to be a high school teacher or an academic. I don't want to be a secretary or work in advertising, either. Medical school is too hard, and I'm not old enough for business school. Hmm, maybe I'll just try to get into law school and put off the decision for two more years."
The thing that troubles me about this mess is, you're not supposed to be able to stop anyone from interpreting your language! Oh, yeah, IANAL. As, I recall, this was all hashed out in the early '90s during the great Look 'n' Feel lawsuits. In the Lotus 123/Borland Quattro suit, the court ruled that you cannot sue your competitor for making a product that responds to your command language, even if you invented it. IIRC.
This 3dfx bullshit (that's what it is, so sue me if my language singes your virgin ears (oops, there I go again)) looks to me like exactly the same situation. They may restrict people from using their SDK, but going after "Clide" or any other totally reverse-engineered interpreter is crossing the line.
Will wonders never cease? Al Gore invented the Open Source Web Site, Al Gore invented the electron, and now... Richard Stallman has been a Linux fan since 1984! Those ZDNet reporters are really unearthing some long-buried secrets!
Some counter-arguments:
1. I know a 120wpm QWERTY typist. I've seen it done. (It's scary.)
2. Dvorak wasn't the only study. My analysis of the Maltron keyboard is that it's nearly the same layout as Dvorak's.
3. My experience with Dvorak is that some keys are in *STUPID* places! Please, swap the I and U at the very least! While we're at it, let's call the L back in from Siberia.
4. I actually type faster on QWERTY than Dvorak when I really get going, but Dvorak hurts my hands less. Either that, or it's switch-hitting between the two. I use Dvorak about 75% of the time now.
*sigh* I told Steve it was a bad idea to build an Appleseed cluster out of all those unsold PowerBook 5300s!
Interesting stuff behind that link. Starts out very good, spirals rapidly out of control. Long on fiery rhetoric and short on details. I love paranoid conspiracies as much as the next guy ("Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you"), but... Where's the beef? Oh, and just because you say something twice doesn't remedy the lack of substance.
...was the subject of an I got yesterday morning. "How extremely convenient," I thought. "How very fortunate we are that MS is looking out for us, providing a fix almost before we even knew there was a threat."
Reminds me of a story I know where the alleged "criminal" is tricked by the "victim" into implicating himself to the authorities before the crime takes place. ("An Inspector Calls")