I remember Illustrator 88, and used to tile pages with hot wax to send to the printer (digital file? what's that?).
Although Adobe's UI has always been better than FH, FH has always had a few more powerful features than AI. Until recently you couldn't even use a TIFF in AI.
Despite having used AI professionally for about 15 years, I still can't figure out why the selection tool and the direct selection tool are two separate tools. FH manages to do exactly the same job with just one, single, selection tool. And they introduced drag-and-drop color editing, as well as the live blending their current patent case is talking about. And they've always had a better autotrace tool (though since Adobe stopped trying to push Streamline so much they seem to have improved AI's).
So yes, I've done some design work with just about every version of FH and AI since they have been commercially available. Whle the Adobe UI is better, FH has won on features for about a decade now (as well as most magazine review shootouts)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I wasn't commenting on the Waco incident at all, merely pointing out that one (local) law enforcement agency was responsible for finding that another agency (national) had been inaccurate in their reports (when claiming that NO incindiary devices were used).
Its just a decent example of one agency being able to independently check another (and high-profile enough that people would recognize it).
No Waco conspiracies from me...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Huh? How would having one single graphics company with 90% market share improve the products? When Adobe bought Aldus years ago we all thought the competition was going to be gone, luckily Macromedia managed to form itself out of the remains of the last small-time competitors in the graphics arena.
And the small print on the Aldus Freehand contract meant that Adobe didn't get to kill it like they'd planned to (and thus make Illustrator the only game in town), instead it reverted back to he developers and they went on to make the company we know and love today...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
For science and peace's sake, if you really want to fund space projects outside NASA, support the Russian sapce agency.
Uh, buddy, we HAVE been funding the russian space agency. You'd be shocked to find out how much of the US NASA funding goes to russia both directly and indirectly.
Quite frankly the ISS could have been finished years ago if we weren't hell-bent on including the Russians, throwing money at their space agency and watching it get embezzeled out the back door. They have been late on everything because the money disappears. Feel free to send them a check, though -- I'm sure they'd love to get it!...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Competition in law enforcement? You mean more than we have now?
We have county sheriffs, city police, state police, and the FBI (national police). Their jurisdictions overlap significantly, so they ARE constantly competing for investigations, as well as checking each other.
Don't forget it was the [sherriff|state trooper] in Texas who brought out all the evidence of the FBI using incindiary devices out in the open. Checks and balances, baby...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
MS specifically points out in their NTFS docs that temp files are unencrypted, so the user would have to be very diligent about garbage management with old temp files. Otherwise you'll likely have both encrypted and unencrypted versions of the same file on the disk that you can compare...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is
Most every computer on earth spends more time waiting for the user than vice-versa. So yes, almost all computers are "underutilized" if you mean that they don't run at 100% CPU 24 hours a day.
But yes, playing a game can max out many CPUs (though more recent processors have more headroom thanks to the advent of consumer-level 3d graphics chips to offload processing).
Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1
It depends what games you're talking about -- graphics intensive games with little "math" behind them work great on consoles -- not much processing required beyond pushing polygons around.
But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war/strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).
Tetris doesn't require a P3, and neither does Quake 3 (it requires a decent 3d card), but you'd be hard-pressed to make a "big world" type of game on a playstation because it's about more than graphics.
The original poster was correct, though, that games are what pushes the technology in computers (along with video). Not many other apps can actually hit 100% CPU on a P3, and have a customer base willing to shell out the cash to improve that.
I do 3d graphics and remember the bad old days of paying $1000 for an OpenGL card with 2 megs of memory (this was like 1997, not so long ago). Thanks to 3Dfx and the game market, every consumer has 10 times that power, and it's good for us all...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
he rest of the world considers the 50 united states of america to be "america".. then there is south america and canada.. you rarely even hear the term north america..
You don't travel abroad much, do you?
Son, I've been on 6 continents and I can assure you that whenever I say I'm an American there has not been a single human being who spoke any language who misinterpreted that statement.
America is generally understood to mean the United States, and all the pedantic geographic posturing won't change that every other human being on earth seems to function just fine with this meaning.
If you want to reference the two contintents, it's generally considered proper to say "The Americas"...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Calm down on the zealotry, big guy. He's talking about Killer Apps, of which only Apache and Sendmail would make someone install a Unix to run the app.
I doubt there's a particularly large number of people who have formatted their drives and installed *nix JUST so they can run that great app everyone has been talking about -- StarOffice...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Of course Babelfish is at babel.altavista.com, not "bable". You'd think with all the bucks in/. the guys could afford to implement a link-checker in their production system.
On another note, I love the quasi-translations out of babelfish; for some reason one of the other mixed headlines makes me crack up: "Network against Kinderporno".
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
From a marketing standpoint, yes -- using IE3 as a browser was unusual.
Unlike Netscrape, it won't lock up my computer, hose X, or do any of the other nasty things that Netscrape can do
I understand NN on X is pretty bad, haven't used it much myself. I personally dislike having a browser (IE) that will take Explorer down with it if it crashes. Tie everything together and it's like a house of cards. If NS crashes, then you just have to restart the app, not all of Windows.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Yes, and the browser integration didn't begin until version 4, which was better than Netscape's 4.x products. They didn't integrate 3.x and earlier
And it began with v4 because, in MS's own words -- the version 4 browsers were a wash. Neither had any superiority, and they had to tie theirs to the OS and use exclusive contracts to get anyone to change from NS (since there was no technical reason to do so).
Actually, a bunch of people did Well, a "bunch" of people weren't very important in the marketplace. let me rephrase -- only a significant minority of the market chose/used it.
Umm, NT4 had IE2, which nobody used except for downloading IE 3 and above or Netscape 2 and above. Maybe you got 'em confused and that's why you thought nobody used IE3? No, I was thinking of Win95 which came with IE3.0 (or was that OEMSR2?). NT with IE2/Mosaic is a truly frightening sight, though.
The fact that they have the best browser by far is a ringing endorsement of their technology The fact that you achieved "best" with no competition (ie, "best of one") is hardly bragging rights.
What difference does it make how long it took? It didn't take 4 years anyway, seeing as IE4 was already better than Netscape 4, despite Netscape's huge headstart.
IE4 and NN4 were about even -- MS said so themselves in their arguments for bundling. There was no real superiority either way. It wasn't until 5.0 that you could say IE was demonstrably "better" in a technical sense (and it still has quirks NN doesn't have). Of course, NN5 didn't come out because the company had no resources to keep fighting the battle. "We can do better R&D than a bankrupt company!" Quite a slogan, that.
Just how had Netscape been "devalued so much" when IE4 first came out? What is it that caused them to release such a shoddy product? Keep in mind that Netscape 4 came out much earlier than IE4 and its integration into Windows
Netscape hadn't been devalued when IE4 came out -- it was the act of windows (and office) requiring IE4 that devalued the company. Once that happened, investors saw the writing on the wall (and rightly so) that NS would lose, simply because it's unrealistic to expect/demand that users have multiple browsers. If you have one without any choice, few people want to complicate their lives by adding another.
Technical merits had nothing to do with it (in the 4.0 generation), as MS readily admits -- the reviews were even and their own research showed people unwilling to change for little if any benefit. The only way to force their users to change was, well, to FORCE their users to change.
Oh wait, you really thought that the DoJ was suing on behalf of the American people? LOL! That's cute.
Thanks, I think it's cute how everyone thinks it must be a piece of cake to get a federal criminal antitrust lawsuit started. Just takes a phone call from some disgruntled competitor, right? Maybe a few bucks in donations? Right -- the DOJ felt like going up against the most valuable company in the world as a favor to a company that was going bankrupt. Good career move, no doubt, considering MS would be around to give donations a lot longer than NS.
But please, continue your conspiracy theories. I'm sure it was coincidental that the DOJ had consent decrees with MS before Netscape was ever founded. The fact that the DOJ, Japan, most of Europe, and the FTC all had investigations into MS must have just been a clever setup, because they knew that someday the WWW would be invented and a company would need their help. No problem.
Why do you think it was that one of the proposed settlements of U.S. vs. MS was that Microsoft would have to bundle Netscape with Windows?
Uh, because they were the one company that could show a measurable damage? Of course, it wasn't to bundle NN, it was to offer it as a choice on the CD, but regardless it was a pretty lame idea. And the other browsers weren't explicitly in the offer because the other browsers had never been "market competitors". It's the same reason you can't get matching funds from the Federal Election Commission unless you have a certain level of support. Not every nutball who makes a browser has a realistic chance of it being a viable competitor, but if Opera were ever to garner 15% market share then they'd have to be included in the deal, too.
Opera decided they wanted to make their money based on the quality of their engineers, not the quality of their lawyers.
Well when MS starts making decisions based on the quality of tech, I'll be the first to sing Kumbaya with you, Zico.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
DHL invented overnight shipping -- contrary to popular belief (g).
They've been doing it since the 30s or 40s as I recall -- fedex and others didn't jump in until decades later, and that's why their international capabilities still lag far behind DHL.
I think DHL used to do a lot of government/big business stuff exclusively, which is why a lot of people don't know about them. Fedex and UPS did a good job selling the service to the "general public" (including small businesses), and they got the financial rewards for it.
But for international, DHL can still get a package delivered an order of magnitude faster than fedex/UPS...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
And you won't get any of this stupid screwing around like you describe either. They know what they're doing, they don't toss stuff on the next plane going that direction and hope for the best:)
Yes and no -- you're right that DHL is best for overseas shipping, but it still is pretty crappy. They subcontract to local folks everywhere (that's why they're better -- they've got 50 years worth of international contacts, not 20) so you're still at the mercy of the locals.
We had a $3000 computer held up in "customs" in Ecuador last year -- our rep went to pick it up from the shippers, and the local shipping company said they needed $2000 CASH or they wouldn't hand it over. We spent 6 months fighting with DHL to have them bring it back to us (similar to this guy's UPS experience -- they want to charge you to return the package!?).
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
We all know it certainly had nothing to do with the fact that Netscape's browser did indeed sucketh hard, right?
Compared to the other browsers at the time? You must be kidding, right?
Even MS admits that their own browsers didn't hold a candle to Netscape until version 4+. Nobody chose IE3 over NN3 when given a choice. I'm still amazed when I load an NT4 system (which has IE3 by default) just how bad that browser was.
Saying that 4 years after the fact MS managed to ship a superior browser (IE5) is hardly a ringing endorsement of their technology, considering by that point their only competitor had been devalued so much that they had to sell themselves to stay in business.
Netscape knew that their dreck would never win in the marketplace, so they sued.
I don't recall NS ever suing MS.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I brought a Picturebook to the North Pole about two months ago, and two other VAIOs (non-picturebooks) have travelled around the jungles of South America and the Himalayas.
It may be a matter of general laptop construction getting better -- they used to be all-plastic (you said "paint started peeling") but now any decent one is magnesium alloy (maybe other metals), which is a hell of a lot stronger for the same weight. The VAIOs we have today are all anodized alloys of some sort, and it would be pretty impossible for anything to peel off them (and its been pretty tough to get a dent in them, too!)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I'm starting to think the end of the open-source movement will come due to RMS single-handedly declaring everything incompatible with the GPL.
It's hard to claim tens of thousands of applications (as MS does) are open-source if the foremost advocate spends so much time looking to exclude them from the club...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I've always wondered, is there a difference in penalty for WILLFUL and UNWILLFUL violations? Really, I imagine there isn't..
Of course there's a difference. We recognize the motive in many crimes that are prosecuted -- if you kill someone by accident you'll probably get less time than if you do it on purpose.
Similarly, if you accidentally copy something (say you don't realize that what you're doing is a copyright violation), you'll likely be told to stop doing it.
If you do it over and over after being told to stop (and being informed it's a violation of copyright), it's pretty clear you're doing it IN SPITE of the law, and you'll get a harsher penalty...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Now you can tell me she didn't know the coffee was hot?
I've spilled hot coffee on myself before without burning myself. I had solid rocket fuel ignite in my hand once, and got second-degree burns from it that took a week to heal.
Third degree burns from coffee? That's boiling oil hot. In fact, it's so hot that it's PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a human being to drink it without being burned. And if you sell a food product that's not safely consumable by human beings, that's against the law.
It was so hot, in fact, that McDonald's had an entire filing cabinet of letters from individuals who had been burned.
So when she was burned and had to go to the burn ward at the hospital to have emergency skin grafts, it seemed McDonald's could have at least said "we're sorry" and paid thre medical bills (all she asked for). But they preferred to tell her it was HER fault that their coffee was served at 180 degrees farenheit.
In fact, it was not the victim (who asked for medical fees) but the JURY who decided that punitive damages were necessary -- they were appalled at the arrogance of McDonalds' attorneys and management during the case.
And of course, the judge reduced the punitive damages to a measly $400,000 (about 6 hours worth of McDonalds' coffee profits) the day after the jury spoke. But I guess that didn't make the front page...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
You gotta wonder what juries are thinking - they'll award $1 in damages for anticompetive business practices, but millions and millions in cases like the (yes, overused) McDonald's Hot Coffee incident.
Maybe the difference is that MS has never actually given an old lady third degree burns that left her bedridden. And been proven that they knew all along it was happening and did nothing about it...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Isn't that kinda being hypocritical? Many scientist insist that the conditions are way to harsh for life. But then they go and put really strict measures on the sterility of the spacecraft.
Nothing hypocritical about it -- it is being extremely cautious (possibly OVERLY cautios). But as I said, we only have to screw up once to blow another chain of life out of existence, so spending a little more time and energy to ensure we don't contaminate is hardly a waste.
And while most other bodies in the system are too hostile for OUR life, we know very well that some bacteria here on earth could survive there. Whether they would live and reproduce is another question, but many bacterial forms are capable of entering "hibernation" for millenia and thus surviving interplanetary travel and waiting for an opportune time/environment to wake up.
As an example, a biologist i was talking to a few weeks back is studying a form of bacteria that has 4 sets of DNA so that radiation and mutation don't affect it -- it compares its DNA and automatically fixes any mutations. This bacteria could easily survive on the surface of Mars because the main problem there is harsh radiation. But that doesn't mean Mars has the resources for the bacteria to really survive and grow, just that it wouldn't automatically be killed the way most Earth life would.
So yes, while many scientists correctly say that the conditions off earth are too harsh for life, we don't have perfect enough knowledge of astrobiology to risk it. And saying it's too harsh to survive is different from saying it's too harsh to be present (meaing it could still be present from an earlier age and currently in stasis waiting for a better environment, as earth bacteria do).
And yes, a great deal of material has been swapped, but not necessarily in the right time frame. Life has been present on earth a lot less time than the planets have been swapping material -- it's entirely possible that no significant material has been swapped FROM Earth TO Europa since life began here.
If we do discover life on another body, we have to determine how long it's been there, which isn't that hard once we commit -- but the possibility of contamination will taint the first results. The main wuestion will be if it's of the same genesis as life on earth. If we find life on mars or europa that's unrelated to that on earth, we know it's not an issue of contamination. If there truly was a second genesis, it SHOULD be pretty damn obvious that this bacteria or whatever has no place in our biological tree (as diverse as earth life is, it's pretty easy on a biological level to prove that a microbe and an elephant and a dinasour fossil are all sprouted from the same basic seed).
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there. Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Slashdot Mirror
That WAS Unix -- it was an SGI desktop (hence it looking so cool cutting-edge 3D and all)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Have I done any design work?
I remember Illustrator 88, and used to tile pages with hot wax to send to the printer (digital file? what's that?).
Although Adobe's UI has always been better than FH, FH has always had a few more powerful features than AI. Until recently you couldn't even use a TIFF in AI.
Despite having used AI professionally for about 15 years, I still can't figure out why the selection tool and the direct selection tool are two separate tools. FH manages to do exactly the same job with just one, single, selection tool. And they introduced drag-and-drop color editing, as well as the live blending their current patent case is talking about. And they've always had a better autotrace tool (though since Adobe stopped trying to push Streamline so much they seem to have improved AI's).
So yes, I've done some design work with just about every version of FH and AI since they have been commercially available. Whle the Adobe UI is better, FH has won on features for about a decade now (as well as most magazine review shootouts)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I wasn't commenting on the Waco incident at all, merely pointing out that one (local) law enforcement agency was responsible for finding that another agency (national) had been inaccurate in their reports (when claiming that NO incindiary devices were used).
Its just a decent example of one agency being able to independently check another (and high-profile enough that people would recognize it).
No Waco conspiracies from me...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I'd actually like to see one buy out the other
Huh? How would having one single graphics company with 90% market share improve the products? When Adobe bought Aldus years ago we all thought the competition was going to be gone, luckily Macromedia managed to form itself out of the remains of the last small-time competitors in the graphics arena.
And the small print on the Aldus Freehand contract meant that Adobe didn't get to kill it like they'd planned to (and thus make Illustrator the only game in town), instead it reverted back to he developers and they went on to make the company we know and love today...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
For science and peace's sake, if you really want to fund space projects outside NASA, support the Russian sapce agency.
Uh, buddy, we HAVE been funding the russian space agency. You'd be shocked to find out how much of the US NASA funding goes to russia both directly and indirectly.
Quite frankly the ISS could have been finished years ago if we weren't hell-bent on including the Russians, throwing money at their space agency and watching it get embezzeled out the back door. They have been late on everything because the money disappears. Feel free to send them a check, though -- I'm sure they'd love to get it!...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Competition in law enforcement? You mean more than we have now?
We have county sheriffs, city police, state police, and the FBI (national police). Their jurisdictions overlap significantly, so they ARE constantly competing for investigations, as well as checking each other.
Don't forget it was the [sherriff|state trooper] in Texas who brought out all the evidence of the FBI using incindiary devices out in the open. Checks and balances, baby...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
MS specifically points out in their NTFS docs that temp files are unencrypted, so the user would have to be very diligent about garbage management with old temp files. Otherwise you'll likely have both encrypted and unencrypted versions of the same file on the disk that you can compare...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Hee-hee. You have no idea at all how underutilized the typical game-playing PC is
/strategy / flight simulator like Longbow spent more than half the processing power at the time on keeping track of the hundreds of units on the battlefield. Very little of the processing power was shown on the screen (but Voodoo sure made it look better!).
Most every computer on earth spends more time waiting for the user than vice-versa. So yes, almost all computers are "underutilized" if you mean that they don't run at 100% CPU 24 hours a day.
But yes, playing a game can max out many CPUs (though more recent processors have more headroom thanks to the advent of consumer-level 3d graphics chips to offload processing).
Heck, there are games on the five year old PlayStation that outgun high-end PC games, which is damn amazing considering that the PS has about 1/3 the graphics power of a Voodoo 1
It depends what games you're talking about -- graphics intensive games with little "math" behind them work great on consoles -- not much processing required beyond pushing polygons around.
But there is more to the game world than first-person shooters, and a persistent war
Tetris doesn't require a P3, and neither does Quake 3 (it requires a decent 3d card), but you'd be hard-pressed to make a "big world" type of game on a playstation because it's about more than graphics.
The original poster was correct, though, that games are what pushes the technology in computers (along with video). Not many other apps can actually hit 100% CPU on a P3, and have a customer base willing to shell out the cash to improve that.
I do 3d graphics and remember the bad old days of paying $1000 for an OpenGL card with 2 megs of memory (this was like 1997, not so long ago). Thanks to 3Dfx and the game market, every consumer has 10 times that power, and it's good for us all...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
he rest of the world considers the 50 united states of america to be "america" .. then there is south america and canada.. you rarely even hear the term north america..
You don't travel abroad much, do you?
Son, I've been on 6 continents and I can assure you that whenever I say I'm an American there has not been a single human being who spoke any language who misinterpreted that statement.
America is generally understood to mean the United States, and all the pedantic geographic posturing won't change that every other human being on earth seems to function just fine with this meaning.
If you want to reference the two contintents, it's generally considered proper to say "The Americas"...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Calm down on the zealotry, big guy. He's talking about Killer Apps, of which only Apache and Sendmail would make someone install a Unix to run the app.
I doubt there's a particularly large number of people who have formatted their drives and installed *nix JUST so they can run that great app everyone has been talking about -- StarOffice...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
he was saying that this is the RIAA's version of DeCSS...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Of course Babelfish is at babel.altavista.com, not "bable". You'd think with all the bucks in /. the guys could afford to implement a link-checker in their production system.
On another note, I love the quasi-translations out of babelfish; for some reason one of the other mixed headlines makes me crack up: "Network against Kinderporno".
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I guess I'm "nobody," then.
From a marketing standpoint, yes -- using IE3 as a browser was unusual.
Unlike Netscrape, it won't lock up my computer, hose X, or do any of the other nasty things that Netscrape can do
I understand NN on X is pretty bad, haven't used it much myself. I personally dislike having a browser (IE) that will take Explorer down with it if it crashes. Tie everything together and it's like a house of cards. If NS crashes, then you just have to restart the app, not all of Windows.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Yes, and the browser integration didn't begin until version 4, which was better than Netscape's 4.x products. They didn't integrate 3.x and earlier
And it began with v4 because, in MS's own words -- the version 4 browsers were a wash. Neither had any superiority, and they had to tie theirs to the OS and use exclusive contracts to get anyone to change from NS (since there was no technical reason to do so).
Actually, a bunch of people did
Well, a "bunch" of people weren't very important in the marketplace. let me rephrase -- only a significant minority of the market chose/used it.
Umm, NT4 had IE2, which nobody used except for downloading IE 3 and above or Netscape 2 and above. Maybe you got 'em confused and that's why you thought nobody used IE3?
No, I was thinking of Win95 which came with IE3.0 (or was that OEMSR2?). NT with IE2/Mosaic is a truly frightening sight, though.
The fact that they have the best browser by far is a ringing endorsement of their technology
The fact that you achieved "best" with no competition (ie, "best of one") is hardly bragging rights.
What difference does it make how long it took? It didn't take 4 years anyway, seeing as IE4 was already better than Netscape 4, despite Netscape's huge headstart.
IE4 and NN4 were about even -- MS said so themselves in their arguments for bundling. There was no real superiority either way. It wasn't until 5.0 that you could say IE was demonstrably "better" in a technical sense (and it still has quirks NN doesn't have). Of course, NN5 didn't come out because the company had no resources to keep fighting the battle. "We can do better R&D than a bankrupt company!" Quite a slogan, that.
Just how had Netscape been "devalued so much" when IE4 first came out? What is it that caused them to release such a shoddy product? Keep in mind that Netscape 4 came out much earlier than IE4 and its integration into Windows
Netscape hadn't been devalued when IE4 came out -- it was the act of windows (and office) requiring IE4 that devalued the company. Once that happened, investors saw the writing on the wall (and rightly so) that NS would lose, simply because it's unrealistic to expect/demand that users have multiple browsers. If you have one without any choice, few people want to complicate their lives by adding another.
Technical merits had nothing to do with it (in the 4.0 generation), as MS readily admits -- the reviews were even and their own research showed people unwilling to change for little if any benefit. The only way to force their users to change was, well, to FORCE their users to change.
Oh wait, you really thought that the DoJ was suing on behalf of the American people? LOL! That's cute.
Thanks, I think it's cute how everyone thinks it must be a piece of cake to get a federal criminal antitrust lawsuit started. Just takes a phone call from some disgruntled competitor, right? Maybe a few bucks in donations? Right -- the DOJ felt like going up against the most valuable company in the world as a favor to a company that was going bankrupt. Good career move, no doubt, considering MS would be around to give donations a lot longer than NS.
But please, continue your conspiracy theories. I'm sure it was coincidental that the DOJ had consent decrees with MS before Netscape was ever founded. The fact that the DOJ, Japan, most of Europe, and the FTC all had investigations into MS must have just been a clever setup, because they knew that someday the WWW would be invented and a company would need their help. No problem.
Why do you think it was that one of the proposed settlements of U.S. vs. MS was that Microsoft would have to bundle Netscape with Windows?
Uh, because they were the one company that could show a measurable damage? Of course, it wasn't to bundle NN, it was to offer it as a choice on the CD, but regardless it was a pretty lame idea. And the other browsers weren't explicitly in the offer because the other browsers had never been "market competitors". It's the same reason you can't get matching funds from the Federal Election Commission unless you have a certain level of support. Not every nutball who makes a browser has a realistic chance of it being a viable competitor, but if Opera were ever to garner 15% market share then they'd have to be included in the deal, too.
Opera decided they wanted to make their money based on the quality of their engineers, not the quality of their lawyers.
Well when MS starts making decisions based on the quality of tech, I'll be the first to sing Kumbaya with you, Zico.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
DHL invented overnight shipping -- contrary to popular belief (g).
They've been doing it since the 30s or 40s as I recall -- fedex and others didn't jump in until decades later, and that's why their international capabilities still lag far behind DHL.
I think DHL used to do a lot of government/big business stuff exclusively, which is why a lot of people don't know about them. Fedex and UPS did a good job selling the service to the "general public" (including small businesses), and they got the financial rewards for it.
But for international, DHL can still get a package delivered an order of magnitude faster than fedex/UPS...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
And you won't get any of this stupid screwing around like you describe either. They know what they're doing, they don't toss stuff on the next plane going that direction and hope for the best :)
Yes and no -- you're right that DHL is best for overseas shipping, but it still is pretty crappy. They subcontract to local folks everywhere (that's why they're better -- they've got 50 years worth of international contacts, not 20) so you're still at the mercy of the locals.
We had a $3000 computer held up in "customs" in Ecuador last year -- our rep went to pick it up from the shippers, and the local shipping company said they needed $2000 CASH or they wouldn't hand it over. We spent 6 months fighting with DHL to have them bring it back to us (similar to this guy's UPS experience -- they want to charge you to return the package!?).
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
We all know it certainly had nothing to do with the fact that Netscape's browser did indeed sucketh hard, right?
Compared to the other browsers at the time? You must be kidding, right?
Even MS admits that their own browsers didn't hold a candle to Netscape until version 4+. Nobody chose IE3 over NN3 when given a choice. I'm still amazed when I load an NT4 system (which has IE3 by default) just how bad that browser was.
Saying that 4 years after the fact MS managed to ship a superior browser (IE5) is hardly a ringing endorsement of their technology, considering by that point their only competitor had been devalued so much that they had to sell themselves to stay in business.
Netscape knew that their dreck would never win in the marketplace, so they sued.
I don't recall NS ever suing MS.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I brought a Picturebook to the North Pole about two months ago, and two other VAIOs (non-picturebooks) have travelled around the jungles of South America and the Himalayas.
It may be a matter of general laptop construction getting better -- they used to be all-plastic (you said "paint started peeling") but now any decent one is magnesium alloy (maybe other metals), which is a hell of a lot stronger for the same weight. The VAIOs we have today are all anodized alloys of some sort, and it would be pretty impossible for anything to peel off them (and its been pretty tough to get a dent in them, too!)...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Trade? What trading took place?
They took advertiser's money and delivered unlicensed music to anyone who could "prove" they owned (or borrowed) the CD.
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I'm starting to think the end of the open-source movement will come due to RMS single-handedly declaring everything incompatible with the GPL.
It's hard to claim tens of thousands of applications (as MS does) are open-source if the foremost advocate spends so much time looking to exclude them from the club...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
They WERE trading MP3s illegally. That's why they have to pay the damages...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
I've always wondered, is there a difference in penalty for WILLFUL and UNWILLFUL violations? Really, I imagine there isn't..
Of course there's a difference. We recognize the motive in many crimes that are prosecuted -- if you kill someone by accident you'll probably get less time than if you do it on purpose.
Similarly, if you accidentally copy something (say you don't realize that what you're doing is a copyright violation), you'll likely be told to stop doing it.
If you do it over and over after being told to stop (and being informed it's a violation of copyright), it's pretty clear you're doing it IN SPITE of the law, and you'll get a harsher penalty...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Now you can tell me she didn't know the coffee was hot?
I've spilled hot coffee on myself before without burning myself. I had solid rocket fuel ignite in my hand once, and got second-degree burns from it that took a week to heal.
Third degree burns from coffee? That's boiling oil hot. In fact, it's so hot that it's PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for a human being to drink it without being burned. And if you sell a food product that's not safely consumable by human beings, that's against the law.
It was so hot, in fact, that McDonald's had an entire filing cabinet of letters from individuals who had been burned.
So when she was burned and had to go to the burn ward at the hospital to have emergency skin grafts, it seemed McDonald's could have at least said "we're sorry" and paid thre medical bills (all she asked for). But they preferred to tell her it was HER fault that their coffee was served at 180 degrees farenheit.
In fact, it was not the victim (who asked for medical fees) but the JURY who decided that punitive damages were necessary -- they were appalled at the arrogance of McDonalds' attorneys and management during the case.
And of course, the judge reduced the punitive damages to a measly $400,000 (about 6 hours worth of McDonalds' coffee profits) the day after the jury spoke. But I guess that didn't make the front page...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
You gotta wonder what juries are thinking - they'll award $1 in damages for anticompetive business practices, but millions and millions in cases like the (yes, overused) McDonald's Hot Coffee incident.
Maybe the difference is that MS has never actually given an old lady third degree burns that left her bedridden. And been proven that they knew all along it was happening and did nothing about it...
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.
Isn't that kinda being hypocritical? Many scientist insist that the conditions are way to harsh for life. But then they go and put really strict measures on the sterility of the spacecraft.
Nothing hypocritical about it -- it is being extremely cautious (possibly OVERLY cautios). But as I said, we only have to screw up once to blow another chain of life out of existence, so spending a little more time and energy to ensure we don't contaminate is hardly a waste.
And while most other bodies in the system are too hostile for OUR life, we know very well that some bacteria here on earth could survive there. Whether they would live and reproduce is another question, but many bacterial forms are capable of entering "hibernation" for millenia and thus surviving interplanetary travel and waiting for an opportune time/environment to wake up.
As an example, a biologist i was talking to a few weeks back is studying a form of bacteria that has 4 sets of DNA so that radiation and mutation don't affect it -- it compares its DNA and automatically fixes any mutations. This bacteria could easily survive on the surface of Mars because the main problem there is harsh radiation. But that doesn't mean Mars has the resources for the bacteria to really survive and grow, just that it wouldn't automatically be killed the way most Earth life would.
So yes, while many scientists correctly say that the conditions off earth are too harsh for life, we don't have perfect enough knowledge of astrobiology to risk it. And saying it's too harsh to survive is different from saying it's too harsh to be present (meaing it could still be present from an earlier age and currently in stasis waiting for a better environment, as earth bacteria do).
And yes, a great deal of material has been swapped, but not necessarily in the right time frame. Life has been present on earth a lot less time than the planets have been swapping material -- it's entirely possible that no significant material has been swapped FROM Earth TO Europa since life began here.
If we do discover life on another body, we have to determine how long it's been there, which isn't that hard once we commit -- but the possibility of contamination will taint the first results. The main wuestion will be if it's of the same genesis as life on earth. If we find life on mars or europa that's unrelated to that on earth, we know it's not an issue of contamination. If there truly was a second genesis, it SHOULD be pretty damn obvious that this bacteria or whatever has no place in our biological tree (as diverse as earth life is, it's pretty easy on a biological level to prove that a microbe and an elephant and a dinasour fossil are all sprouted from the same basic seed).
I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
Q.Tell me what the trail was.