but there just has to be a middle ground between estabishing monopolies on the one side, and punishing success of the other side.
I had to address this too.
Microsoft is not being punished "for succeeding". Being a monopoly is never illegal. It is, however, illegal to use your monopoly status to leverage your way into new markets and to keep competitors out.
Thus, this anti-trust stuff is the middle ground you seek. It's perfectly fine to be a monopoly, but punishes abuse of the monopoly status (e.g. pushing OEMs to sign deals to exclude BeOS boy I wish that OEM licensing deals would see the light of day!).
honestly, they did bring innovation (and pushed Apple to innovate), they established a de-facto standard for personal computing, and they made owning computers easy and accessible, which stimulated the demand, driving the prices down.
I disagree. I think it was the heavy competition between equal vendors, coupled with vastly increasing volume that brought prices down.
like having to explain to family members why the you haven't played the fantastic game that they emailed to you as an.exe file.
You mean rootmerootmerootme.exe? I thought it was a pretty lame game until I realized that it was a mixed-reality game that acted like it was a virus....
I'd like to hear some specifics on what is wrong with the current state of accessibility in linux and what is wrong with the current commitment.
Then you should read the article I pointed to by Korn above. There are certain classes of disability which Linux doesn't (yet) accomodate well. They're relatively uncommon, IIRC, but they exist notwithstanding.
Regardless, Microsoft being held up as the shining example of accesibility support is ludicrous in the extreme.
It should be possible for anyone interested to add hooks for screenreaders / etc.
Actually, it should be noted that it already is. Well, within sane accesibility implementations, namely MacOS, Solaris, and Linux/GNOME (and maybe KDE; I don't recall). The problem is that Microsoft's accesibility framework is crap, and hooks have to be added into the accesibility method for each application to be made accessible. So the solution would be to use OpenOffice + Linux, Solaris, or MacOS.
et I type this out on Windows XP, an operating system where if I want updates I need to "verify" my copy. Oh wait! 30 seconds on Google and a 500kb download, problem solved.
Or, you could not use Windows....
Is it sad that we will have to go to these measures to get a usable OS just to play games?
Or, you could not use Windows....
The more people use BSD/Linux/Amiga/whatever, the more companies will develop games for BSD/Linux/Amiga/whatever.
Right now, you'll get the great graphics, but game devs have to do ALOT more work for input, audio and networking.
No kidding. OpenGL is great. Now, if only we had a Simple, direct media layer to plug into. If that were coupled with an Open Audio Library for 3D audio, surely people would make a ton of cross-platform games!
Every OS is buggy. Every OS is vunerable. Windows has a dominating market share, so Windows is targeted. UNIX systems, Linux systems, OSX systems, Windows systems - all have been hacked, cracked, broken, virused up, exploited, and brought to its knees.
For it's last-line defense, Linux has a onetwo punch in store.
The point is that I don't believe it's a solvable issue.
My point was that you're wrong. My new point is that there are a number of ways to solve the long-latency-time issue, aside from going fat-client whole hog.
he moment you need to do X over a VPN to allow people in other sites to do the same work, you might as well shoot yourself in the head now and save your users doing it to you in 6 months time.
These are at least Open, if not Free Software packages, and included in your distro (I've not found one yet that doesn't have them, what with them being FOSS and all.) To use them:
emerge [hpijs|hpoj|hplip]
and then the drivers will show up in your printer listing in CUPS (you have have to restart; I don't remember. I use the web interface; use whatever you're comfortable with). If appropriate, you can select the scanner in SANE; it just appears.
It is precisely because of this great support that I will be buying an HP Office Jet in the near future. It also makes sense on their part--the software is a way to sell printers, which is a way to sell ink.;)
Yeah, after manually running./configure --prefix=/opt/pwn3d && make && sudo make install, the virus will run quite well.
No kidding. The Unix Way sucks. The Microsoft Way is much better--after a long time of trying to buy out the virus's vendor, they just bought out a competing virus and it will be installed in every copy of Windows Vista! How's that for service?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is not being punished "for succeeding". Being a monopoly is never illegal. It is, however, illegal to use your monopoly status to leverage your way into new markets and to keep competitors out.
Thus, this anti-trust stuff is the middle ground you seek . It's perfectly fine to be a monopoly, but punishes abuse of the monopoly status (e.g. pushing OEMs to sign deals to exclude BeOS boy I wish that OEM licensing deals would see the light of day!).
I thought that probation was about...
well... you know...
keeping you from doing the stuff you got in trouble for .
Then so much of the latest stuff has been a bad batch....
Regardless, Microsoft being held up as the shining example of accesibility support is ludicrous in the extreme.
MOD PARENT UP! This is right on the money
It's a game. I.e. a luxury item. I.e. you don't have to buy it.
Or, you could not use Windows....
The more people use BSD/Linux/Amiga/whatever, the more companies will develop games for BSD/Linux/Amiga/whatever.
My apologies for the sarcasm. I guess I'm just a wee bit bitter.
s/ just( sold their students to MS)/$1 a long long time ago/;
Use NX or FreeNX as your X.
the Xorg and other x server devs are aware of the problem, and they're working towards solving it.
These are at least Open, if not Free Software packages, and included in your distro (I've not found one yet that doesn't have them, what with them being FOSS and all.) To use them:
and then the drivers will show up in your printer listing in CUPS (you have have to restart; I don't remember. I use the web interface; use whatever you're comfortable with). If appropriate, you can select the scanner in SANE; it just appears.It is precisely because of this great support that I will be buying an HP Office Jet in the near future. It also makes sense on their part--the software is a way to sell printers, which is a way to sell ink. ;)
Thanks, HP!
Of course, all this electrocution business just goes to show how much safer Edison's DC power would be, now doesn't it?
Hmm. Makes me wonder what kind of power source this vendor (or its backer) is hyping....