"In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos , alone or single + polein , to sell) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it."
> They never really did
Whateva, what kind of trolling is that? you can't seriously be believing your own bullsh!t there? The US Department of Justice and European Union have both ruled on this an hence your statement is a factually deficient piece of turd (disapointing given your nice low Slashdot membership number). The presence of Apple and Linux (yaye!) doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly position in operating systems, since MS still get to *determine significantly* how others get access to it (eg. their tyrrany over system makers with Windows OEM licensing terms).
> There was really no reason for them not to be able to bundle their own software in their own OS. Why isn't Apple being told not to include Safari and iTunes and iCal and iWhateverthefuck in their OS? A software company should be able to include whatever they want, and if people don't like it then either don't buy it or stop complaining.
Sorry bud, you are quite wrong. It is illegal (in the US at least) for Microsoft because they had a (legal) monopoly in the operating system space and attempted to use this to attain a monopoly in the web browser space (illegal in US to use one monopoly to gain another). Other companies don't have the same monopoly so are not subject to the same restrictions. While Europe may not have the exact same law they do have competition regulators to ensure competition remains in the market, so are sensitive so similar extensions of monopoly into other domains resulting in reduced customer choice.
Incidentally the default deployment of IE has retarded the progress of the web. This of course was Microsoft's plan all along, they want you to have a much better experience on their desktop than the web and do everything they can, legitimate or not, to ensure this. Fortunately some competition has emerged while Microsoft were asleep and the web and browsers are starting to make progress again (to everyone's benefit, even Microsoft's).
How about encouraging them through a subscription to a non-pulp magazine when they're a bit older. Having something like Popular Science or National Geographic lying around they're bound to dip in and read from time to time. It certainly got me more interested in a whole bunch of things (not only science, history and other cultures too) and might get them interested by osmosis - without shoving it at them so they eventually reject it.
Meanwhile, how about you do cool stuff with them, encourage questions and explain as best you can (plenty of parents can be inadvertantly dismissive when tired). Don't discourage tales of legend and magic, but it turns out that you can get quite a few stories out of history and science itself. They probably won't end up as scientists, but that's ok too as long as they're happy and fulfilled in other ways.
Java was not Free at that time but it has always included a license for compatible implementations over the whole stack (see the JDK license). Not so with C#.NET.
Just to put some facts into perspective (you unfortunately appear to have crossed some facts, otherwise your post is otherwise relatively sound - must all be the weed you're getting)
Opium poppies are used to produce opium and can then be refined into heroin. Initially the Taliban (who are not Al Qaeda, but host them) were against drug production but have now resorted to hosting drug lords to fund their fight against the Western infidels (this really does remove what little moral high ground they might claim to have had).
Cocaine is derived from coca leaves (mostly grown in South America, which is rather far away from Afghanistan), and the Columbian government has had some success in reducing this (during its grinding war against FARC that has picked up successful momentum).
In both cases (Afghanistan, Columbia) the drug trade (opium, cocaine) is used to fund rebellion against the central government. Destroy the drugs and the rebellion struggles. The Afghan farmers complain that legitimate crops pay poorly compared to poppies so pressure the Afghan government to resist Western suggestions of aerial crop eradication. It is unlikely that demand in the West for recreational drugs will be reduced completely (the recession helps aparently) so it crop eradication is a better bet in winning the drug war. Saffron is a substitute that pays better than wheat (provided it can be grown successfully).
Consider past history. If people obeyed all laws, no matter how ridiculous, then there would be no USA (the separatists defied the dictates of Britain). At one time in Europe the Church had enforceable legal powers which didn't work so well for Galileo and others. The Civil Rights movement in the 60's was founded on disobedience (breaking laws) to highlight how laws were unjustly hurting the progression of society.
Today is no different (present history). You can be pro-business without having to accept and obey laws that a large number of people consider as detrimental to society as a whole. The ability to share 'digitally' has removed the barriers that physical sharing required of 'property'. Sharing music and movies ought to be as illegal as it is to read a book or newspaper in your local library. The reality is that RIAA and MPAA are simply Luddites resisting inevitable change whereby the middleman are removed between the producers (bloggers and musicians) and consumers.
FYI: Not only is Java Open Source, it is actually 'Free Software' and has been for a while now. The license of Java also always gave a grant for compatible implementations, even when it was not Free Software (hence GCJ/Classpath, Kaffe etc. were never under any threat). For this reason I usually recommend Java rather than other equivalent technologies (which I shall not name lest its proponents tarnish me as 'troll'). Yes, it is a shame in this day and age we cannot even standardise on video codecs due to competing business interests ("my business is more important than my users)".
Yeah, half a dozen Prefetch processes and another half dozen miscellaneous Log services [$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log)] lastalive1.dat., SYSTEM.LOG etc.
Not big writes but still chipping away at the drive (not good for USB drive, my original point).
Thanks for pointing that out but that simplistic explanation doesn't cover it. Besides a 1Hz pulse there are also irregular flashes and occurs when applications are not open (so it's not just web caching etc). I also don't get this stuff on Ubuntu. It is something that happens in Windows only. No problem for USB if it is read-only but I don't think it is.
Actually, back at the beginning operating systems and tools were originally open source. Once managers muscled the engineers aside stuff started getting closed up. Open sharing is what Stallman wants to get back to.
You pay too much for the software you obtain due to a lack of competition in the marketplace. Microsoft have been found guilty (in California at least) of setting arbitrary pricing of their products due to their monopoly situation. This term "rape' is used with poetic license to describe this situation. It is good you are a satisfied customer, but please take your blinkers off.
Genuinely better than what? those products you mention have some nice language features but their lack of platform independence makes then useless for many types of work (like enterprise apps on Big Iron, or embedded devices with non x86 processors, or on Linux or Mac OS X, or Android, or the iPhone....). Also, the extra language fads put in those languages make it harder for large teams compare to Java where they eschew most new language features deliberately to keep it simpler. Computing is not just the desktop mate.
Yes. If you Windows weenies want a synchophantic windows site then go any of the pc/windows users site out there where they fawn over the latest transparency in wordpad. Let the rest of us vent in peace, kthanxbai.
I'm trying Win7 at the moment. It is simply Vista but with less bad performance. Device compatibility is an issue, it supports fewer devices out-of-the-box than the Ubuntu 9.04 install I put on the same machine. You can use the Vista drivers for most hardware (which is why you know it's actually just a re-branded Vista) but that doesn't always work.
One thing I noticed is that my hard drive light it pulsing every few seconds. I wonder whether that is a background indexing service doing its thing? Anyway, given the finite number of writes to a USB drive getting written to every second would destroy your device within months (there are 86400 seconds in a day).
Oh yeah, I haven't installed Windows for a while so I'd forgotten that for the 8GB install you pretty much only get Notepad and Wordpad. Just so lame compared to Linux on a stick.
It is good to see Microsoft making progress in this area, but Windows 7 is usable but still a pretty average product (despite the fanboi hype working overtime).
It is not commonly known within this country but an agency of the NZ Government monitors all internet traffic and telephone calls. While we are signatories to UN Human Rights treaties we don't have a constitution so there is actually no constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable seizure etc.
Scott McNealy of Sun once said, "Privacy is dead, get over it". Unfortunately this appears to be true, even in little 'ole NZ. It is a shame that governments the world over feel that in order to combat crime and terrorism they are justified in stealthily eliminating privacy. It is also a shame that most citizens are far more concerned with Britney Spears latest escapades rather than the erosion of the freedoms established by their forefathers.
ATI is right up there in performance when compared to it's rival Nvidia GPU's. The problem is, Intel's Core i7 blows anything AMD has out of the water. Even the aging Intel quad-cores rival with AMD's brand new Phenom 2's.
True, but only if system cost is not factored into the equation.
At the same price-point the AMDs are actually better performers (which is why many are interested in them again). That is, the AMDs have better performance-per-dollar (or whatever your local currency is, clams anyone?).
The high end i7s give impressive benchmarks but they are in the same price range as Xeon or Opteron.
Same with the Nvidia cards, great benchmarks but for twice the price they might give as little as a 10% performance increase on the ATI 'equivalent'. If you are counting your pennies (or whatever your local currency sub-unit is, shiny beads anyone?) then the AMD and ATI actually give you better performance, which I found surprising when I started looking at the benchmarks and costs of getting a new system.
Mandatory car analogy: Yes, the $500k ferrari might win against my $100K porsche, but how many people are gonna pay the extra megabucks for them (or whatever your local currency is, electrum pieces?).
Frontpage and.Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup, but if you're the kind of imbecile who knows nothing but Frontpage, your P.O.V. is that all the other browsers suck.
Don't you get it? The reason they are released but still *intentionally* suck so badly is for two reasons:
They are released so that the competition (Mozilla, Google etc) don't get a free hand to make something compelling that will run on platforms other than Windows, and
They make the web experience slow and painful enough that their desktop seems a much better place to work.
I've been developing websites using The Google Web Toolkit lately (it is great, though does have some glitches). Google Chrome is very fast to render the Javascript-heavy pages, Firefox is ok, and IE8 is just so slow it is unusable. I think this is intentional. AJAX sites are getting close to desktop functionality (maybe not photoshop but plenty of other stuff including video) and really are a threat to Microsoft's Windows lock-in strategy.
"Sharepoint as a effective document management solution"
You must work in a completely homogenous environment with the exact same desktop image and software install. For the rest of us Sharepoint is a relatively poor solution, requiring a specific client system, and usually a specific version of the o/s and productivity suite or lots of problems arise.
When you work on client sites for very large organisations (that have lots of versions of "everything" due to accretion) you realise that the Microsoft Way of replacing everything all at once in A Big Rollout is actually quite flaw, rather than just sticking to standards that work no matter what version of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris (they're engineers, after all) is being used. With standards-based solutions you can upgrade your infrastructure piecemeal while continuing to provide access.
I've found that the bigger the organisation I've been in (national level) then Windows is only on the desktop and some servers, the real heavy lifting is done by all sorts of systems (mainframes, DataPower devices, Un!x boxen). Sometimes the admins of these systems need corporate docs too. I have found Sharepoint to be an inferior solution in this kind of environment (yes, I have used Sharepoint before, which is why I've recommended other solutions that I've found to work better).
For relatively unstructured data without versioning you could serve them over HTTP with WebDAV (Apache) and use your existing HTTP security mechanisms. You wouldn't believe how relieved I've often been when I can get my (secured) resources from home-base while located at a clients site.
My outfit uses KnowledgeTree for versioned stuff (http://www.knowledgetree.com/)
Or you could embrace your dark-side and use Microsoft SharePoint (plus, with all the Microsoft bugs you'd have a job for life until your employeer goes bust). If you are a friend to your company you won't do this, plus your outfit has engineers and the good ones can spot trash solutions.
If you users are naming their files with strange characters in them (assuming it's not due to Samba) then they will just have to live with it, you won't have time to sort out all the wierd names that (mostly MS-Word) users give to their filenames. The primary objective should be to give your users access to the files. Making the directory listing pretty ought to be a secondary concern.
Do you write code in Java? I would suggest you write something yourself and then see if it is slow.
There's never been a performance problem I haven't been able to get around - the problem was always my code not the JVM.
If more than one thread has a reference to an object then you are out of deterministic country - it is multi-threading support that makes things complicated.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
"In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos , alone or single + polein , to sell) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it."
> They never really did
Whateva, what kind of trolling is that? you can't seriously be believing your own bullsh!t there? The US Department of Justice and European Union have both ruled on this an hence your statement is a factually deficient piece of turd (disapointing given your nice low Slashdot membership number). The presence of Apple and Linux (yaye!) doesn't mean Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly position in operating systems, since MS still get to *determine significantly* how others get access to it (eg. their tyrrany over system makers with Windows OEM licensing terms).
ps. Disclaimer: IA^3 (I am an astrophysicist) :)
How about encouraging them through a subscription to a non-pulp magazine when they're a bit older. Having something like Popular Science or National Geographic lying around they're bound to dip in and read from time to time. It certainly got me more interested in a whole bunch of things (not only science, history and other cultures too) and might get them interested by osmosis - without shoving it at them so they eventually reject it. Meanwhile, how about you do cool stuff with them, encourage questions and explain as best you can (plenty of parents can be inadvertantly dismissive when tired). Don't discourage tales of legend and magic, but it turns out that you can get quite a few stories out of history and science itself. They probably won't end up as scientists, but that's ok too as long as they're happy and fulfilled in other ways.
Java was not Free at that time but it has always included a license for compatible implementations over the whole stack (see the JDK license). Not so with C#.NET.
In both cases (Afghanistan, Columbia) the drug trade (opium, cocaine) is used to fund rebellion against the central government. Destroy the drugs and the rebellion struggles. The Afghan farmers complain that legitimate crops pay poorly compared to poppies so pressure the Afghan government to resist Western suggestions of aerial crop eradication. It is unlikely that demand in the West for recreational drugs will be reduced completely (the recession helps aparently) so it crop eradication is a better bet in winning the drug war. Saffron is a substitute that pays better than wheat (provided it can be grown successfully).
Today is no different (present history). You can be pro-business without having to accept and obey laws that a large number of people consider as detrimental to society as a whole. The ability to share 'digitally' has removed the barriers that physical sharing required of 'property'. Sharing music and movies ought to be as illegal as it is to read a book or newspaper in your local library. The reality is that RIAA and MPAA are simply Luddites resisting inevitable change whereby the middleman are removed between the producers (bloggers and musicians) and consumers.
FYI: Not only is Java Open Source, it is actually 'Free Software' and has been for a while now. The license of Java also always gave a grant for compatible implementations, even when it was not Free Software (hence GCJ/Classpath, Kaffe etc. were never under any threat). For this reason I usually recommend Java rather than other equivalent technologies (which I shall not name lest its proponents tarnish me as 'troll'). Yes, it is a shame in this day and age we cannot even standardise on video codecs due to competing business interests ("my business is more important than my users)".
Yeah, half a dozen Prefetch processes and another half dozen miscellaneous Log services [$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log)] lastalive1.dat., SYSTEM.LOG etc. Not big writes but still chipping away at the drive (not good for USB drive, my original point).
Thanks for pointing that out but that simplistic explanation doesn't cover it. Besides a 1Hz pulse there are also irregular flashes and occurs when applications are not open (so it's not just web caching etc). I also don't get this stuff on Ubuntu. It is something that happens in Windows only. No problem for USB if it is read-only but I don't think it is.
My point is, we're no *better* than anyone else - and I think the original poster was asking for a better country.
The early versions of the Word format are undocumented "trade secrets". They can be reverse engineered without a problem.
Actually, back at the beginning operating systems and tools were originally open source. Once managers muscled the engineers aside stuff started getting closed up. Open sharing is what Stallman wants to get back to.
You pay too much for the software you obtain due to a lack of competition in the marketplace. Microsoft have been found guilty (in California at least) of setting arbitrary pricing of their products due to their monopoly situation. This term "rape' is used with poetic license to describe this situation. It is good you are a satisfied customer, but please take your blinkers off.
Genuinely better than what? those products you mention have some nice language features but their lack of platform independence makes then useless for many types of work (like enterprise apps on Big Iron, or embedded devices with non x86 processors, or on Linux or Mac OS X, or Android, or the iPhone ....). Also, the extra language fads put in those languages make it harder for large teams compare to Java where they eschew most new language features deliberately to keep it simpler. Computing is not just the desktop mate.
Yes. If you Windows weenies want a synchophantic windows site then go any of the pc/windows users site out there where they fawn over the latest transparency in wordpad. Let the rest of us vent in peace, kthanxbai.
It is not commonly known within this country but an agency of the NZ Government monitors all internet traffic and telephone calls. While we are signatories to UN Human Rights treaties we don't have a constitution so there is actually no constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable seizure etc.
Scott McNealy of Sun once said, "Privacy is dead, get over it". Unfortunately this appears to be true, even in little 'ole NZ. It is a shame that governments the world over feel that in order to combat crime and terrorism they are justified in stealthily eliminating privacy. It is also a shame that most citizens are far more concerned with Britney Spears latest escapades rather than the erosion of the freedoms established by their forefathers.
ATI is right up there in performance when compared to it's rival Nvidia GPU's. The problem is, Intel's Core i7 blows anything AMD has out of the water. Even the aging Intel quad-cores rival with AMD's brand new Phenom 2's.
True, but only if system cost is not factored into the equation.
Mandatory car analogy: Yes, the $500k ferrari might win against my $100K porsche, but how many people are gonna pay the extra megabucks for them (or whatever your local currency is, electrum pieces?).
Frontpage and .Net have caused immeasurable damage to the web with their completely broken markup, but if you're the kind of imbecile who knows nothing but Frontpage, your P.O.V. is that all the other browsers suck.
Don't you get it? The reason they are released but still *intentionally* suck so badly is for two reasons:
I've been developing websites using The Google Web Toolkit lately (it is great, though does have some glitches). Google Chrome is very fast to render the Javascript-heavy pages, Firefox is ok, and IE8 is just so slow it is unusable. I think this is intentional. AJAX sites are getting close to desktop functionality (maybe not photoshop but plenty of other stuff including video) and really are a threat to Microsoft's Windows lock-in strategy.
You must work in a completely homogenous environment with the exact same desktop image and software install. For the rest of us Sharepoint is a relatively poor solution, requiring a specific client system, and usually a specific version of the o/s and productivity suite or lots of problems arise.
When you work on client sites for very large organisations (that have lots of versions of "everything" due to accretion) you realise that the Microsoft Way of replacing everything all at once in A Big Rollout is actually quite flaw, rather than just sticking to standards that work no matter what version of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris (they're engineers, after all) is being used. With standards-based solutions you can upgrade your infrastructure piecemeal while continuing to provide access.
I've found that the bigger the organisation I've been in (national level) then Windows is only on the desktop and some servers, the real heavy lifting is done by all sorts of systems (mainframes, DataPower devices, Un!x boxen). Sometimes the admins of these systems need corporate docs too. I have found Sharepoint to be an inferior solution in this kind of environment (yes, I have used Sharepoint before, which is why I've recommended other solutions that I've found to work better).
I forgot to mention Alfresco as well, although I've never personally tried it.
http://www.alfresco.com/index-b2.html
If you users are naming their files with strange characters in them (assuming it's not due to Samba) then they will just have to live with it, you won't have time to sort out all the wierd names that (mostly MS-Word) users give to their filenames. The primary objective should be to give your users access to the files. Making the directory listing pretty ought to be a secondary concern.
Do you write code in Java? I would suggest you write something yourself and then see if it is slow. There's never been a performance problem I haven't been able to get around - the problem was always my code not the JVM.
If more than one thread has a reference to an object then you are out of deterministic country - it is multi-threading support that makes things complicated.