The company claims to be able to find "a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video."
This is nonsense, setting aside the fact that such things are quite probably fair use. Having any kind of complete catalog of "digital fingerprints" for a given work is (practically) impossible. At best, a few select snippets of a given document could be fingerprinted. Changing even a single bit will change a one-way encryption hash (which is, presumably, the method used here), and it won't change the fingerprint in a predictable way. One would need to catalog hashes for every subset of the given document, and the number of such hashes would grow as n^2, where n is the "word-size" of the document.
If you think any company can afford to give private offices to anybody but it's most important employees, you're deluding yourself.
There is a lot of griping about cubicles, but they are considerably better than open bull pens, and it's important to realize that *that* is your alternative. Nobody is going to give their code monkeys private offices -- they can't afford to. In that light, cubicles are a good thing.
They're just a couple of businessmen. You have to do something much more impressive that make a shit-load of money peddling software before you can be called a hero.
Oh, that predates Apple or iMacs. I was having this problem with my Mom back in 1983 (when I was 10), explaining my uncle's scorching hot 8088 (or was it an 8086?). And that was before even the first Macintosh. I blame the TV.
I am a very strong supporter of teh privitization of many Government agencies. I'm sick and tired of seeing my tax dollars being wasted by over payed gum chewing counter people who have no clue.
What a brilliant idea! Then you'll have all of the waste, fraud and corruption, and none of the oversight!
Simply brilliant!
*rolls eyes"
Having worked in corporate America for many years, let me assure you that such spending abuses are quite common there, too. Probably much, much more common, given that the process is generally very opaque in corporate America. If the boss doesn't care, there will be no audit. When the boss is *in on it,* mention of an audit will get you fired. Such problems, while still existent, are less pronounced in the public sector. And the public sector is subject to a form of scrutiny that is generally impossible in the private sector.
At *best* such privatization would add overhead and gain you nothing. At worst (and most likely) it'd turn government into a craven mess of bribery and kickbacks, reduce services, and give you a less effective government at a higher price, to boot.
I'll bet you I understand mathematics (it's a small 'm') just as good, or better, than you. I know a whole hell of a lot of it.
But as to your audacious statement that there is no correlation between age and years of experience: that is complete bullshit. COMPLETE bullshit. You are saying the correlation is not 1 -- no shit. Wasn't trying to claim it was. But there *is* a correlation. You claim a correlation of zero. Nonsense.
The mere fact that a 50 year old has been able to work 27 years as a professional (compared to the 20-year-old's 2 years) *guarantees* that there will be a correlation greater than zero, between age and years of experience. Further, that correlation will be fairly significant. Only a fool would try to dispute this. You seem to say that there will be cases where a 50 year old will have 2 years of experience, and from this pull great meaning. Well, it has no meaning. It's the population as a whole I am interested in, not individuals, and there will be a strong correlation between age and years worked. It won't be a perfect correlation, but I don't need one for my point to be valid.
You completely failed to address the point I made, while you spent a lot of time trying to make yourself sound smart (or maybe you're just trying to be playfully cheeky and I'm missing it, who knows with textual communication). Programming is a young field. You won't dispute this. Most people in a professional field don't spend their later years retraining and hopping from field to field. A 50 year old IT worker is more than likely to have been in IT for a long time. The fact that IT is a very young field drastically diminishes the pool of people that would be working in IT at 50. It's as simple as that, and I'll bet you good money that that makes up more than 70-90% of the reason why their aren't a whole hell of a lot of IT gray beards.
Unlike cobblers, there are no 10th generation programmers. It's a trivially simple statement, and you don't dispute it. It's also THE reason why there aren't a hell of a lot of 60 year old programmers.
PS -> Sorry, the writing in this post is choppy and redundant, but I'm tired and don't feel like editing it up right.
Think about the question for a minute. Assume, for the sake of argument, that one starts coding for a living right out of college.
If you're 40, that's starting a job as a coder in 1987. If you're 50, that's starting a job as a coder in 1977. If you're 60, that's starting a job as a coder in 1967.
Do you notice anything about those dates? Unlike, say, plumbers, in which you would expect there to be plenty of guys who were plumbing in 1967, you don't expect there to have been nearly as much demand for programmers in 1967 or 1977 as there was in 1987, and in 1997 the demand was much greater than in 1987.
It's simply an expression of the reality that programming is, as a human profession, in its infancy.
There is no way for an English word to "officially" become a word.
Languages like French and Spanish which have an official language academy that supposedly dictates what is or is not in the language could make a (very dubious) claim to officiating words.
No such thing exists for the English language. It's a stupid idea, anyway. 'podcast' was a word the minute Apple coined it. If you and I both know what it means, and communicate with it, it's a word. Period. When your grade school teacher told you "ain't wasn't a word" she/he was full of shit. Which is why the retort was "ain't ain't a word and I ain't s'posed to say it." Funny, considering 3/11 of that sentence is composed of a non-word, it's still completely clear what it means...
Methinks you missed my point. Common usage has nothing to do with "correct" in your way of thinking.
The reality is, common usage is what defines correct, it is not the other way around. There is no "correct" to begin with, only after a consensus of usage is reached, does correct even exist in language. That consensus changes, as it may change to accept "should of" whether you like it or not.
Indeed, Google is a really silly measure to use, as the spoken language is where you'd find "should of" the most, in all likelihood.
I though knight in german was "Ritter." I've never heard the german word "Knicht" so I queried the wife (she's from Hamburg). She said the closest word she could think of was "knecht," which means something like "servant."
Sorry, I just meant that it 'knight' would be pronounced like some imaginary German word spelled 'knicht,' not that 'knicht' was a German word. I said it poorly. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols.) has the whole history of words like this, all the way back to Old English when it is known. It's pretty cool for such things.
You need to be extremely careful about this kind of black-or-white thinking.
Some very bright people don't have the chance to learn 'academic' English. It doesn't mean they are stupid or lazy (it might, but it does not necessitate that). One's dialect will tell you something about that person's education. It most certainly will NOT tell you anything about their character.
Put it another way: the Latin you read today was not the 'vulgar' Latin, it was the elite Latin. One was a dialect for the intellectuals, and one was a dialect for the common folks. But the reality is, both were equally as expressive as a language.
That's reality. The ebonics dialect that so many people like to ridicule? It is 100% as expressive as Shakespeare's English. Picking one over the other as "good" is arbitrary and it's about things well beyond the scope of language.
Judging from the tone of your post, you will think I am full of shit, I suspect. But what I am telling you is reality, whether you like it or not. You'd understand if you lived in 13-14C England, when English was the talk of gutter trash, and French was the language of intellectuals, that's for sure. That's a more stark example, but the dynamic at work is exactly the same today.
You keep a saying that phrase. I no think it means what you think it means (in Inigo Montoya voice).
If a lot of people use "should of" it is common usage, it doesn't matter if its derivation is apocryphal or whether not you like it or whether or not it is accepted academic or professional usage.
Common usage means exactly what it sounds like it means: usage that is common.
You are absolutely correct that language evolves. However, you can't honestly claim that substituting "of" for "have" in any of the above examples is sensible, readable english because 'of' is a preposition. It might be acceptable in speech from the slurring of "should've" but that does not make it grammatically correct.
You came so close! And then you shot yourself in the foot.
Language evolves. When it does so, what "grammatically correct" means also evolves. It is entirely possible, even probable, that at some point in the future "should of" will be grammatically correct.
After all, grammatically correct means whatever we want it to mean. One just has to decide that 'of' is now also an auxiliary verb, as well as a preposition. Once most people decide it is (which many already have), it becomes grammatically correct.
That's stupid because 100/3 != 33, it's completely incorrect
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't understand linguistics at all, yet feel fully comfortable arguing what's "right" like this. (And they get modded up for it!)
You can make a logical proof as to why 100/3 = 33.33..., so you can make a very good case that anything else is wrong.
Here's a little thought exercise for you: make the same kind of proof to show that "should of" is wrong.
Guess what? You're going to have no choice but make the fallacy of argument by authority. You're going to have to say that "should of" is wrong because X says so, for whatever definition of X you want to use.
And that's the point you need to learn about language: it is arbitrary. Wholly arbitrary. It is not math. It is only an agreed upon convention. What you will find is that the convention that is agreed upon changes, and it changes by little mistakes like this being made.
That's language. It doesn't really matter whether you like it or not.
At the end of the day you are arguing over whether the whale is singing his song correctly.
Knight was pronounced with a hard 'k' before the 'n,' and the 'gh' was a glottal sound like the 'ch' in German.
It is knicht of you know any German. And I don't care if you 'buy it', that's the way it was.
The original poster is pretty far off in his attempt at making a transliteration, but it is very well established fact that the word was pronounced with a hard 'k.' It was, at most, 2 syllables, though, and the 'g' was actually part of a digraph with 'gh' to make the equivalent noise that 'ch' makes in German.
(Hint: 'knight' is a germanic word. Knowledge is also, and according to the OED, does not share a root with gnosis. The etymology of 'knowledge' is complicated and the word is ancient (aryan), so several sound changes would have to be taken into account for the Greek-English relationship to be of use, if indeed there is a relationship)
This is basically what I've found, too. Spotlight has some neat uses, and I like it (except the searching as I type thing).
But I don't use it that often, because I organize my stuff, and I always know right where it is. I get to it faster in the Finder than I do by using Spotlight most of the time.
Really empty criticism. All of the problems you mention are also problems with the directory heierachy system.
Your post boils down to: I fear change.
Which is fine, change is a pain in the ass. But that's all it is.
Plus, your line about Apple helping stupid users with Spotlight contradicts yourself earlier, where you seem to be saying users are too stupid to use a database filesystem.
Really poorly thought out post. One wonders how it got modded up.
Actually, I don't think it's loss of human life they are scared of. They abhor that, and will work damn hard to avoid it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
What they are afraid of is being unfunded. The American people are, on a good day, very ambivalent about NASA. There is a sizable chunk of folks that would like the entire program cut. NASA is afraid of spectacular failure, because right now their mission is vague and quite suspect to a lot of the country. If they look like they foul up whatever it is they do, they become a prime candidate for the chopping block in these times of massive deficits as far as the eye can see.
Putting a box with almost 4 year old unpatched OS is stupid and should not have been included in the test. To include the original XP and not lets say RedHat 7 for example shows a bit of a skewed results.
I guarantee you there are millions of Windows XP SP1 machines on the 'net right now. How many RedHat 7s are out there? Not so many. First off, Linux is much less common in general, and second, Linux is much more likely to be administered by professionals, and thus properly patched.
So sorry, to NOT include Windows XP SP1 would have been the stupid thing to do.
It would have been interesting to see what would happen to an older Linux distro, but it would have been trivia compared to what happens to SP1. I'm actually surprised they included any non-Windows OSs at all, though.
Now I remember why I never post on Slashdot: direct observation of the way monopolies work: that's zealotry. (So what's the zealot part, anyway? That is SOP for a monopoly: lower prices to the point that no one can compete with the monopolists other-market subsidized price. No zealotry there, just a straightforward description. Is MS a monopoly? Convicted in a court of law for that crime. Seems like as a good a definition as any of 'monopolist.')
Bullshit statements completely removed from the thing we like to call "reality:" that's insightful
Which is why we have laws and lawyers and such to determine when a company is abusing a monopoly position so much as to risk turning free market into command economy, a la Standard Oil.
That is, really, one of the silliest things I'v ever heard. What do you mean? Are you referring to the intangible nature of software, or what?
A certain amount of money went into the development of a software product. A certain amount goes into the upkeep. If one spends more on those two than they charge, they're selling at a loss. A company can't keep up that way, or they go out of business -- unless they have some other cash cow product to keep the losing department afloat. MS has that in Office and Windows.
It's true that software is partially an artificial economy, such that each unit is very cheap in physical terms. But it is only partially so.
Do they have a monopoly in those markets? Why yes, they do!
Think for just a second or two before you post. It's about entering new markets.
Their behavior is neither new nor surprising. It is why we have anti-trust laws, as it is completely predictable. Get a stranglehold on the market with product A. Thereafter, to enter new markets, use the excessive profit generated by product A to subsidize a loss on product B, until such time as all competitors are out of business. At which point, product B joins the ranks of product A, and prices go up, and it's time to find new markets to kill with yet another product.
MS is a monopoly. When they enter a new market, they sell their products at a loss, with the express purpose of driving their competition out of business.
The question is, does the price stay down and the innovation keep up? Not unless basic economic theory is fundamentally wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The company claims to be able to find "a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video."
This is nonsense, setting aside the fact that such things are quite probably fair use. Having any kind of complete catalog of "digital fingerprints" for a given work is (practically) impossible. At best, a few select snippets of a given document could be fingerprinted. Changing even a single bit will change a one-way encryption hash (which is, presumably, the method used here), and it won't change the fingerprint in a predictable way. One would need to catalog hashes for every subset of the given document, and the number of such hashes would grow as n^2, where n is the "word-size" of the document.
I wrote two articles on it on my blog, one general, one mathematical. Read 'em if you'd like. Beware the Digital Snake Oil How Many Substrings in a Given Text?
If you think any company can afford to give private offices to anybody but it's most important employees, you're deluding yourself.
There is a lot of griping about cubicles, but they are considerably better than open bull pens, and it's important to realize that *that* is your alternative. Nobody is going to give their code monkeys private offices -- they can't afford to. In that light, cubicles are a good thing.
Neither of these guys are heros to me.
They're just a couple of businessmen. You have to do something much more impressive that make a shit-load of money peddling software before you can be called a hero.
Duh.
Oh, that predates Apple or iMacs. I was having this problem with my Mom back in 1983 (when I was 10), explaining my uncle's scorching hot 8088 (or was it an 8086?). And that was before even the first Macintosh. I blame the TV.
I am a very strong supporter of teh privitization of many Government agencies. I'm sick and tired of seeing my tax dollars being wasted by over payed gum chewing counter people who have no clue.
What a brilliant idea! Then you'll have all of the waste, fraud and corruption, and none of the oversight!
Simply brilliant!
*rolls eyes"
Having worked in corporate America for many years, let me assure you that such spending abuses are quite common there, too. Probably much, much more common, given that the process is generally very opaque in corporate America. If the boss doesn't care, there will be no audit. When the boss is *in on it,* mention of an audit will get you fired. Such problems, while still existent, are less pronounced in the public sector. And the public sector is subject to a form of scrutiny that is generally impossible in the private sector.
At *best* such privatization would add overhead and gain you nothing. At worst (and most likely) it'd turn government into a craven mess of bribery and kickbacks, reduce services, and give you a less effective government at a higher price, to boot.
I'll bet you I understand mathematics (it's a small 'm') just as good, or better, than you. I know a whole hell of a lot of it.
But as to your audacious statement that there is no correlation between age and years of experience: that is complete bullshit. COMPLETE bullshit. You are saying the correlation is not 1 -- no shit. Wasn't trying to claim it was. But there *is* a correlation. You claim a correlation of zero. Nonsense.
The mere fact that a 50 year old has been able to work 27 years as a professional (compared to the 20-year-old's 2 years) *guarantees* that there will be a correlation greater than zero, between age and years of experience. Further, that correlation will be fairly significant. Only a fool would try to dispute this. You seem to say that there will be cases where a 50 year old will have 2 years of experience, and from this pull great meaning. Well, it has no meaning. It's the population as a whole I am interested in, not individuals, and there will be a strong correlation between age and years worked. It won't be a perfect correlation, but I don't need one for my point to be valid.
You completely failed to address the point I made, while you spent a lot of time trying to make yourself sound smart (or maybe you're just trying to be playfully cheeky and I'm missing it, who knows with textual communication). Programming is a young field. You won't dispute this. Most people in a professional field don't spend their later years retraining and hopping from field to field. A 50 year old IT worker is more than likely to have been in IT for a long time. The fact that IT is a very young field drastically diminishes the pool of people that would be working in IT at 50. It's as simple as that, and I'll bet you good money that that makes up more than 70-90% of the reason why their aren't a whole hell of a lot of IT gray beards.
Unlike cobblers, there are no 10th generation programmers. It's a trivially simple statement, and you don't dispute it. It's also THE reason why there aren't a hell of a lot of 60 year old programmers.
PS -> Sorry, the writing in this post is choppy and redundant, but I'm tired and don't feel like editing it up right.
Think about the question for a minute. Assume, for the sake of argument, that one starts coding for a living right out of college.
If you're 40, that's starting a job as a coder in 1987.
If you're 50, that's starting a job as a coder in 1977.
If you're 60, that's starting a job as a coder in 1967.
Do you notice anything about those dates? Unlike, say, plumbers, in which you would expect there to be plenty of guys who were plumbing in 1967, you don't expect there to have been nearly as much demand for programmers in 1967 or 1977 as there was in 1987, and in 1997 the demand was much greater than in 1987.
It's simply an expression of the reality that programming is, as a human profession, in its infancy.
There is no way for an English word to "officially" become a word.
Languages like French and Spanish which have an official language academy that supposedly dictates what is or is not in the language could make a (very dubious) claim to officiating words.
No such thing exists for the English language. It's a stupid idea, anyway. 'podcast' was a word the minute Apple coined it. If you and I both know what it means, and communicate with it, it's a word. Period. When your grade school teacher told you "ain't wasn't a word" she/he was full of shit. Which is why the retort was "ain't ain't a word and I ain't s'posed to say it." Funny, considering 3/11 of that sentence is composed of a non-word, it's still completely clear what it means...
Ooh, what a fun game.
Let's try this:
"analyze:" 44,300,000 hits
"analyse:" 22,800,000 hits.
So the Brits are just wrong, huh?
Methinks you missed my point. Common usage has nothing to do with "correct" in your way of thinking.
The reality is, common usage is what defines correct, it is not the other way around. There is no "correct" to begin with, only after a consensus of usage is reached, does correct even exist in language. That consensus changes, as it may change to accept "should of" whether you like it or not.
Indeed, Google is a really silly measure to use, as the spoken language is where you'd find "should of" the most, in all likelihood.
I though knight in german was "Ritter." I've never heard the german word "Knicht" so I queried the wife (she's from Hamburg). She said the closest word she could think of was "knecht," which means something like "servant."
Sorry, I just meant that it 'knight' would be pronounced like some imaginary German word spelled 'knicht,' not that 'knicht' was a German word. I said it poorly. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols.) has the whole history of words like this, all the way back to Old English when it is known. It's pretty cool for such things.
You need to be extremely careful about this kind of black-or-white thinking.
Some very bright people don't have the chance to learn 'academic' English. It doesn't mean they are stupid or lazy (it might, but it does not necessitate that). One's dialect will tell you something about that person's education. It most certainly will NOT tell you anything about their character.
Put it another way: the Latin you read today was not the 'vulgar' Latin, it was the elite Latin. One was a dialect for the intellectuals, and one was a dialect for the common folks. But the reality is, both were equally as expressive as a language.
That's reality. The ebonics dialect that so many people like to ridicule? It is 100% as expressive as Shakespeare's English. Picking one over the other as "good" is arbitrary and it's about things well beyond the scope of language.
Judging from the tone of your post, you will think I am full of shit, I suspect. But what I am telling you is reality, whether you like it or not. You'd understand if you lived in 13-14C England, when English was the talk of gutter trash, and French was the language of intellectuals, that's for sure. That's a more stark example, but the dynamic at work is exactly the same today.
"Common Usage"
You keep a saying that phrase. I no think it means what you think it means (in Inigo Montoya voice).
If a lot of people use "should of" it is common usage, it doesn't matter if its derivation is apocryphal or whether not you like it or whether or not it is accepted academic or professional usage.
Common usage means exactly what it sounds like it means: usage that is common.
You are absolutely correct that language evolves. However, you can't honestly claim that substituting "of" for "have" in any of the above examples is sensible, readable english because 'of' is a preposition. It might be acceptable in speech from the slurring of "should've" but that does not make it grammatically correct.
You came so close! And then you shot yourself in the foot.
Language evolves. When it does so, what "grammatically correct" means also evolves. It is entirely possible, even probable, that at some point in the future "should of" will be grammatically correct.
After all, grammatically correct means whatever we want it to mean. One just has to decide that 'of' is now also an auxiliary verb, as well as a preposition. Once most people decide it is (which many already have), it becomes grammatically correct.
That's stupid because 100/3 != 33, it's completely incorrect
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't understand linguistics at all, yet feel fully comfortable arguing what's "right" like this. (And they get modded up for it!)
You can make a logical proof as to why 100/3 = 33.33..., so you can make a very good case that anything else is wrong.
Here's a little thought exercise for you: make the same kind of proof to show that "should of" is wrong.
Guess what? You're going to have no choice but make the fallacy of argument by authority. You're going to have to say that "should of" is wrong because X says so, for whatever definition of X you want to use.
And that's the point you need to learn about language: it is arbitrary. Wholly arbitrary. It is not math. It is only an agreed upon convention. What you will find is that the convention that is agreed upon changes, and it changes by little mistakes like this being made.
That's language. It doesn't really matter whether you like it or not.
At the end of the day you are arguing over whether the whale is singing his song correctly.
Oops. 'gh' is not glottal but velar.
Oh, how cute. You don't buy it.
Knight was pronounced with a hard 'k' before the 'n,' and the 'gh' was a glottal sound like the 'ch' in German.
It is knicht of you know any German. And I don't care if you 'buy it', that's the way it was.
The original poster is pretty far off in his attempt at making a transliteration, but it is very well established fact that the word was pronounced with a hard 'k.' It was, at most, 2 syllables, though, and the 'g' was actually part of a digraph with 'gh' to make the equivalent noise that 'ch' makes in German.
(Hint: 'knight' is a germanic word. Knowledge is also, and according to the OED, does not share a root with gnosis. The etymology of 'knowledge' is complicated and the word is ancient (aryan), so several sound changes would have to be taken into account for the Greek-English relationship to be of use, if indeed there is a relationship)
This is basically what I've found, too. Spotlight has some neat uses, and I like it (except the searching as I type thing).
But I don't use it that often, because I organize my stuff, and I always know right where it is. I get to it faster in the Finder than I do by using Spotlight most of the time.
Really empty criticism. All of the problems you mention are also problems with the directory heierachy system.
Your post boils down to: I fear change.
Which is fine, change is a pain in the ass. But that's all it is.
Plus, your line about Apple helping stupid users with Spotlight contradicts yourself earlier, where you seem to be saying users are too stupid to use a database filesystem.
Really poorly thought out post. One wonders how it got modded up.
Actually, I don't think it's loss of human life they are scared of. They abhor that, and will work damn hard to avoid it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
What they are afraid of is being unfunded. The American people are, on a good day, very ambivalent about NASA. There is a sizable chunk of folks that would like the entire program cut. NASA is afraid of spectacular failure, because right now their mission is vague and quite suspect to a lot of the country. If they look like they foul up whatever it is they do, they become a prime candidate for the chopping block in these times of massive deficits as far as the eye can see.
Putting a box with almost 4 year old unpatched OS is stupid and should not have been included in the test. To include the original XP and not lets say RedHat 7 for example shows a bit of a skewed results.
I guarantee you there are millions of Windows XP SP1 machines on the 'net right now. How many RedHat 7s are out there? Not so many. First off, Linux is much less common in general, and second, Linux is much more likely to be administered by professionals, and thus properly patched.
So sorry, to NOT include Windows XP SP1 would have been the stupid thing to do.
It would have been interesting to see what would happen to an older Linux distro, but it would have been trivia compared to what happens to SP1. I'm actually surprised they included any non-Windows OSs at all, though.
Now I remember why I never post on Slashdot: direct observation of the way monopolies work: that's zealotry. (So what's the zealot part, anyway? That is SOP for a monopoly: lower prices to the point that no one can compete with the monopolists other-market subsidized price. No zealotry there, just a straightforward description. Is MS a monopoly? Convicted in a court of law for that crime. Seems like as a good a definition as any of 'monopolist.')
Bullshit statements completely removed from the thing we like to call "reality:" that's insightful
Oy vey...
Which is why we have laws and lawyers and such to determine when a company is abusing a monopoly position so much as to risk turning free market into command economy, a la Standard Oil.
That is, really, one of the silliest things I'v ever heard. What do you mean? Are you referring to the intangible nature of software, or what?
A certain amount of money went into the development of a software product. A certain amount goes into the upkeep. If one spends more on those two than they charge, they're selling at a loss. A company can't keep up that way, or they go out of business -- unless they have some other cash cow product to keep the losing department afloat. MS has that in Office and Windows.
It's true that software is partially an artificial economy, such that each unit is very cheap in physical terms. But it is only partially so.
Do they have a monopoly in those markets? Why yes, they do!
Think for just a second or two before you post. It's about entering new markets.
Their behavior is neither new nor surprising. It is why we have anti-trust laws, as it is completely predictable. Get a stranglehold on the market with product A. Thereafter, to enter new markets, use the excessive profit generated by product A to subsidize a loss on product B, until such time as all competitors are out of business. At which point, product B joins the ranks of product A, and prices go up, and it's time to find new markets to kill with yet another product.
MS is a monopoly. When they enter a new market, they sell their products at a loss, with the express purpose of driving their competition out of business.
The question is, does the price stay down and the innovation keep up? Not unless basic economic theory is fundamentally wrong.