Does it really get down to this -- that everyone is entitled to compete for what's currently deemed popular, or in demand?
Where is this coming from? We're talking about anti-trust, which was created in order to help the citizenry from the abuses inherent in a natural monopoly situation, namely the entrenchment and further encroachment of a superdominant company. It's not in the long-term consumer interest to have such a superdominant company; read any basic economic textbook if you disagree with this premise. It's not about the "right to compete in a pwned market" or any such gibberish. It's that the citizenry is best served by competition amongst (approximate) equals. Pure capitalism breaks down in the presence of a superdominant company; the company is essentially immune to ordinary market pressures and simply takes over more and more and more of the market, drives prices higher and higher, and gives the consumers less and less.
[...]do I have the right to go make lightbulbs? aren't there patents on lightbulbs? It seems that I can't get into that business. Already I'm not on equal footing. right?
That is patent law, not anti-trust, and it's not the topic at hand, which is anti-trust. To answer your question, yes. You are not on equal footing. This is temporary (expires in 20 years in the US), and theoretically in the general interst of the public (i.e. the increased income will stimulate increased research and development). Whether or not patents and copyright adequately serve their purpose is even more tangential to this thread, so we will drop it here.
So the real issue is what do you do when you can't get people to use a perfectly good FREE product, or relatively cheap one, when the whole world is paying for something that won't talk to the free tool, and when that interoperability is necessary for getting benefit out of the fruit of that tool.. Yeah, with population levels as they are now, that's a tough one.
No, The problem is what to do when a superdominant company begins tying and taking over new markets due to their superdominant position. The solution is anti-trust with teeth. Get the specs out to competitors so they can finally compete on even footing with the superdominant company. Break up the original company into different, competing parts. Restrict the superdominant company from taking over further markets or further abusing their position. Basically, do what needs to be done to re-establish competition amongst equals
Following through on your idea, imagine that you could play, say SOCOM (a PS2 online shooter) on your PC. You'd get higher resolution, higher framerates, and with some work you could probably get mouse aiming working instead of an analog stick. Basically, you'd have a massive advantage in online play.
Hmm. Interesting hypothetical. It's not what's going on here. A known box is one situation; this is competing on a wide variety of platforms, so it's absolutely fair, provided that you agree that it's fair that someone can have a joystick or higher-performing video card than another player. (interesting that, in your proverb, the "linux" user has a competitive advantage...:)
Regarding known hardware versus the hodge-podge that is a PC, I'd say that It should be fair and not just blocked. Obviously, if they're going through the work to detect the platform, they could set it up as a flag on a user profile, and you can elect to let certain classes of player play or not. After all, even a console is not 100% identical between iterations.
Should they tell the user that they support WOW only on paticular brands of Linux?
Yes. Or--heavens--choose one. Chances are good that the community will get it to swallow the minor inconsistencies between various mainstream distros. Writing to the LSB is also a good start.
Both of those platforms offer two things the Linux platform does not, support and consistency.
And yet, dispite the much-vaunted "inconsistencies", there's plenty of proprietary software that works 100% on Linux.
What if a company got to be super dominant simply because it had a better product?
Then it shouldn't start tying in new crap. Academic what-ifs aside, most products do not rise to prominence when they require a wholly separate economy. Rather, a product rises to dominance and then starts tying crap in to take over new markets.
Its well within their rights to select which platforms the game can be played off of.
I would agree that it may be legal (due to copyright; IANAL), but not ethical. IMHO, you should be able to play it on whatever platform you can get it to play on. Don't expect support, but don't expect to be banned either.
If someone who's winning is lording it over me, running up the scoreboard in the final minutes, and otherwise behaving like an ass, and the game itself sucks, I can do both. They're not mutually exclusive.
Thank the Lord that games are discretionary income. If Blizzard is gonna treat me like crap, I don't have to buy their game. I won't lose money or time or anything. There are plenty of other ways to waste my free time. For the record, "like crap" includes not making a native Linux client (which is why I bought NWN and not NWN2, OK Atari?).
Well, unless it's entertaining enough and on the $10 shelf:)
So if Ford created a car that would only use Ford tyres, only burn Ford petrol, etc. you would be OK with that?
I would be fine with it. The problem comes when they do that and are super-dominant (aka "are a monopoly").
In the presence of real competition, there are many other cars that run just fine and do the exact same thing or (more likely, since it'd decrease overall costs for everybody concerned and only takes one producer to do it to get the ball rolling), the competitors would be more interoperable, and so Ford would be committing corporate suicide. Heck, there'd be a whole add-on market to convert Fords to Chevys and back and forth (provided they each tied you to their own platform), since there would be a large market for each car and hence a large demand for interoperability.
But when a single player is super-dominant, they are practically immune to market pressures. If they make their car uninteroperable, the add-on market would be tiny, since there would be little demand from the drivers to switch car vendors. Sure, there'd be some, but not very much at all, and they'd be struggling to make a living. The other cars could interoperate as much as possible, but nobody would switch to them, because they'd be more expensive (economies of scale), and not able to interoperate 100% with the superdominant competitor (e.g. Excel macros in OpenOffice). Sure, they could maybe get up to 99% compatibility, but reverse-engineering the proprietary interfaces would require a huge effort, while (again due to their small market size) they're still strugging to survive. And since they're superdominant, almost all gas stations, roads, and service stations would only work with the superdominant competitor (the "ecosystem" built around the superdominant competitor), further excluding cars which don't comply with their proprietary interface 100%.
The real kicker, though, is this: to the driver, who Just Wants to Go Somewhere, is familiar only with Fords, and has learned all of the quirks of his/her current Ford, will find any competitor annoying due to its differences and (however minor!) incompatibilities, and will blame the competitor for the market situation!
The Linux devs will not standardise their driver ABI, meaning each time you upgrade the kernel the NVIDIA module goes with it. If they would stabilise their ABI, this would rarely be necessary, and it could certainly be easier to work with than it currently is.
Arguably, but what does this have to do with the sucky driver installer that nvidia has?
Also, X11 is unable to switch card drivers on the fly (i.e. without completely closing X and reopening it).
Yes, this annoys me too. The good news is that the X hackers are working on this problem even as we waste time.
So far, every machine I've installed Linux on I've had serious compatibility issues in every case. I'm not trying to install Linux on my alarm clock here, these are every day, very common PC parts. I've yet to have a smooth Linux installation. It's simply not for mom and pop yet.
Mom and pop don't install Linux. Mom and pop don't install Windows. Linux is just as ready for them as Windows is (in fact, it's arguably superior in several categories). However, it does require vendor cooperation--just like Windows
Microsoft volume licenses are upgrade only. I.e. you must already have an upgradeable (or downgradeable; downgrade "rights" are not universal) version of Windows installed to be able to use the license. source
Could you please be more specific? A Dr. Dobbs article showed Visual C++ 2005 as being pretty good standards-wise, from some test suite they did (more compliant than gcc 3-something, iirc). I don't know how they chose their tests, however. I'm pretty sure it wasn't complete, though.
Oh, I should also add that they are within the law, not "within their rights," as nobody possesses the innate right to prevent other people from copying ideas. Rather, copyright is an artificial (i.e. government-imposed) force to impinge on the rights of its citizenry in the interest of promoting something--here, software development.
They may be within their rights, but I'm also within mine to not give them money. Luckily, they don't have a monopoly, so it's still pretty easy to avoid this particular company.
Is Microsoft Office Genuine (dis)Advantage going to flag Wine/Crossover Office users as legit, or illegitimate? Will Codeweavers be sued into oblivion by Microsoft if they work around it? Inquiring minds want to know!
He said he didn't know it could be resized while mounted
Still been able to do it for years. I don't know if it's every filesystem, but certainly some.
it's also pretty fun (read: dangerous) to resize NTFS using Linux (which I use alongside WinXP) in the best of cases.
I've not had a problem with it thus far, but given how much Microsoft has told the Linux developers (namely nothing), it shouldn't suprise you if it has bugs to be worked out, as every change must be painstakingly tracked.
if you didn't know you could resize hard disk partitions, you really need to get out more. It was awsome when Linux was doing it back several years ago. Aside from volume shadow copies (cool tech, I agree), all of the above are available today in Linux (admittedly Direct3D 10 is OpenGL, but still).
Slashdot Mirror
You were being wrong, is what you were. Funny is, naturally, in the eyes of the beholder, and your zealotry was not as amusing to me as to you.
I said:
You said:
Can you spot the difference? It's plain as day to me.
Where is this coming from? We're talking about anti-trust, which was created in order to help the citizenry from the abuses inherent in a natural monopoly situation, namely the entrenchment and further encroachment of a superdominant company. It's not in the long-term consumer interest to have such a superdominant company; read any basic economic textbook if you disagree with this premise. It's not about the "right to compete in a pwned market" or any such gibberish. It's that the citizenry is best served by competition amongst (approximate) equals. Pure capitalism breaks down in the presence of a superdominant company; the company is essentially immune to ordinary market pressures and simply takes over more and more and more of the market, drives prices higher and higher, and gives the consumers less and less.
That is patent law, not anti-trust, and it's not the topic at hand, which is anti-trust. To answer your question, yes. You are not on equal footing. This is temporary (expires in 20 years in the US), and theoretically in the general interst of the public (i.e. the increased income will stimulate increased research and development). Whether or not patents and copyright adequately serve their purpose is even more tangential to this thread, so we will drop it here.
No, The problem is what to do when a superdominant company begins tying and taking over new markets due to their superdominant position. The solution is anti-trust with teeth. Get the specs out to competitors so they can finally compete on even footing with the superdominant company. Break up the original company into different, competing parts. Restrict the superdominant company from taking over further markets or further abusing their position. Basically, do what needs to be done to re-establish competition amongst equals
Hmm. Interesting hypothetical. It's not what's going on here. A known box is one situation; this is competing on a wide variety of platforms, so it's absolutely fair, provided that you agree that it's fair that someone can have a joystick or higher-performing video card than another player. (interesting that, in your proverb, the "linux" user has a competitive advantage... :)
Regarding known hardware versus the hodge-podge that is a PC, I'd say that It should be fair and not just blocked. Obviously, if they're going through the work to detect the platform, they could set it up as a flag on a user profile, and you can elect to let certain classes of player play or not. After all, even a console is not 100% identical between iterations.
And yet, dispite the much-vaunted "inconsistencies", there's plenty of proprietary software that works 100% on Linux.
Then it shouldn't start tying in new crap. Academic what-ifs aside, most products do not rise to prominence when they require a wholly separate economy. Rather, a product rises to dominance and then starts tying crap in to take over new markets.
I would agree that it may be legal (due to copyright; IANAL), but not ethical. IMHO, you should be able to play it on whatever platform you can get it to play on. Don't expect support, but don't expect to be banned either.
If someone who's winning is lording it over me, running up the scoreboard in the final minutes, and otherwise behaving like an ass, and the game itself sucks, I can do both. They're not mutually exclusive.
Thank the Lord that games are discretionary income. If Blizzard is gonna treat me like crap, I don't have to buy their game. I won't lose money or time or anything. There are plenty of other ways to waste my free time. For the record, "like crap" includes not making a native Linux client (which is why I bought NWN and not NWN2, OK Atari?).
Well, unless it's entertaining enough and on the $10 shelf :)
I would be fine with it. The problem comes when they do that and are super-dominant (aka "are a monopoly").
In the presence of real competition, there are many other cars that run just fine and do the exact same thing or (more likely, since it'd decrease overall costs for everybody concerned and only takes one producer to do it to get the ball rolling), the competitors would be more interoperable, and so Ford would be committing corporate suicide. Heck, there'd be a whole add-on market to convert Fords to Chevys and back and forth (provided they each tied you to their own platform), since there would be a large market for each car and hence a large demand for interoperability.
But when a single player is super-dominant, they are practically immune to market pressures. If they make their car uninteroperable, the add-on market would be tiny, since there would be little demand from the drivers to switch car vendors. Sure, there'd be some, but not very much at all, and they'd be struggling to make a living. The other cars could interoperate as much as possible, but nobody would switch to them, because they'd be more expensive (economies of scale), and not able to interoperate 100% with the superdominant competitor (e.g. Excel macros in OpenOffice). Sure, they could maybe get up to 99% compatibility, but reverse-engineering the proprietary interfaces would require a huge effort, while (again due to their small market size) they're still strugging to survive. And since they're superdominant, almost all gas stations, roads, and service stations would only work with the superdominant competitor (the "ecosystem" built around the superdominant competitor), further excluding cars which don't comply with their proprietary interface 100%.
The real kicker, though, is this: to the driver, who Just Wants to Go Somewhere, is familiar only with Fords, and has learned all of the quirks of his/her current Ford, will find any competitor annoying due to its differences and (however minor!) incompatibilities, and will blame the competitor for the market situation!
to the one, lonely Microsoft site? Seems like it dropped off the list. Anyone know the story?
Stunning profits as soon as it's pre-installed on millions of PCs worldwide.
Arguably, but what does this have to do with the sucky driver installer that nvidia has?
Yes, this annoys me too. The good news is that the X hackers are working on this problem even as we waste time.
You realize who makes the nvidia drivers, don't you? Why is it Linux's fault that Nvidia's driver installation sucks?
Mom and pop don't install Linux. Mom and pop don't install Windows. Linux is just as ready for them as Windows is (in fact, it's arguably superior in several categories). However, it does require vendor cooperation--just like Windows
Microsoft volume licenses are upgrade only . I.e. you must already have an upgradeable (or downgradeable; downgrade "rights" are not universal) version of Windows installed to be able to use the license. source
any links you could provide for verification?
Could you please be more specific? A Dr. Dobbs article showed Visual C++ 2005 as being pretty good standards-wise, from some test suite they did (more compliant than gcc 3-something, iirc). I don't know how they chose their tests, however. I'm pretty sure it wasn't complete, though.
Oh, I should also add that they are within the law, not "within their rights," as nobody possesses the innate right to prevent other people from copying ideas. Rather, copyright is an artificial (i.e. government-imposed) force to impinge on the rights of its citizenry in the interest of promoting something--here, software development.
They may be within their rights, but I'm also within mine to not give them money. Luckily, they don't have a monopoly, so it's still pretty easy to avoid this particular company.
Is Microsoft Office Genuine (dis)Advantage going to flag Wine/Crossover Office users as legit, or illegitimate? Will Codeweavers be sued into oblivion by Microsoft if they work around it? Inquiring minds want to know!
With signed modules and SELinux/AppArmor, having root will get you precious little.
Still been able to do it for years. I don't know if it's every filesystem, but certainly some.
I've not had a problem with it thus far, but given how much Microsoft has told the Linux developers (namely nothing), it shouldn't suprise you if it has bugs to be worked out, as every change must be painstakingly tracked.
if you didn't know you could resize hard disk partitions, you really need to get out more. It was awsome when Linux was doing it back several years ago. Aside from volume shadow copies (cool tech, I agree), all of the above are available today in Linux (admittedly Direct3D 10 is OpenGL, but still).