And just so you know, most of those "countless dumbasses," as you so quaintly called them, are using Windows because their business runs better with it. Sure, my giant database here works under Novell, but it crashes repeatedly. But, under NT, it has only crashed twice in the past 7 months.
Just for that comment, I hope everyone sends you Word and Excel files.
You are one of those assholes on the Linux boards who responds with "look it up" when the person was looking for help in the first place, aren't you?
Once again, you have proven that you can post something without it being insightful. Your "smart quotes suck" statement really changed my mind about how things work, and I am about to make a sweeping change to my life.
Just because people are supporting MS on these issues does not mean for one second that we are "microsofties." Believe me, if there was something better that was reliable and would run all my apps and support all my hardware, I would switch to it. What you don't seem to realize (and many others, from what I am reading) is that if the DOJ is not careful, they could really HURT the industry.
Stop bashing MS just because it is cool to do so in front of your friends. If you really thought about this some, you would see what was really going on - that being ultra-successful these days makes people jealous, and they will do what is necessary to get what the successful person has, even if it is stooping to the lawsuit level.
I have never been a spokesperson for poor people, and have not claimed to be. And I am happy about the decreasing cost of computers, my statement about how poor people (usually) do not worry about computers or internet access has nothing to do with it. There are exceptions (such as you) to everything.
As for the corporation=individual thing, I know far better than to think that. Years of college and working in large corporations have made that pretty clear. But the fact of the matter is, MS is a business, and is out to turn a profit. There is no profit in altruism, like some of you people think they should be practicing.
MS in no way impeded the market. People are still buying Netware, Unix, Linux, and all those other OSes. If they were impeding the market, and therefore be a monopoly, they would be out to destroy all those other OSes, and would be the only OS available. The Antitrust laws were created to stop the guys who were in control of ALL the steel, ALL the oil, with no competition on the market at all. MS is not in that situation, they were just the victim of a bunch of whiny crybaby companies who realized they could not outprogram MS, and decided to sue them.
I know the law, semesters of Business Law has burned it into my head . . .
What an ass . . . You don't know me, and you have no idea the sheer volume of work that I do. I work in a place with 400 PCs, like I stated before, with only 3 people in the IS department. I handle everything from simple computer crashes to network wide data line drops and router blowouts. If you only knew the amount of stuff I did, you would quickly recind that statement and shove it.
As long as Intel continues to hammer out new processors all the time, computers will take a long time to get really low in price.
Linux MIGHT stand a chance if the following things happened -
Linux was easier to install and maintain.
More applications became available
Those same applications were easier to install
Decent documentation became available for Linux
The creators of each different distribution of Linux would stop their infighting and really work together to make some common grounds
Linux is not easy to install, period. There are a lot of free apps available for it, but they are not always good. When you do get one of these apps, you have to figure out how to decompress the tarballs, and then figure out which method to get it complied and installed. If you are lucky, you will get it in an RPM, but those are few and far between. Then you run into trouble, and go looking for help on the web, and you get a bunch of assholes who say "If you don't know, go look it up," which is what you were doing in the first place! And I will not even get started on the process to update your kernel!
Face it, MS has the market because they made something easy to use, and something everyone is familiar with. My tech calls are real nice since I know everyone is using MS Windows. I can only imagine the problems involved with everyone using a different distribution of Linux. My job would be a living hell.
Poor people don't need computers with internet access. Last time I looked they were more concerned with work, or where the next meal is coming from. I won't even go into what this dropping $5 computers idea sounds like . . .
Re:What's wrong with old laws to stop new monopoli
on
A Post-Microsoft World
·
· Score: 1
Laws do have their flaws, our legal system would be totally different if everything worked perfectly. Since we are humans, though, we make mistakes. We do learn from these mistakes. Most of the time.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is a very old act brought to being to stop certain huge companies from gouging people left and right. Steel and oil companies were running the whole show in the marketplace at the time, and were charging outrageous prices for their goods. They were determined to be monopolies and they were broken up. In the end, consumers benefitted because the competition made prices go down.
Now, back to the present.
MS has been accused of being a monopoly. I fail to see how this even applies to them. Linux is still out there, as are Novell, Unix, BeOS, and tons of other choices for what to use. The fact of the matter is that MS made a product that everyone can use, and made PCs more accessible for the masses. They are charging roughly the same price as competeing OSes in their particular market. Win98 is still the same price as Apple OS9. NT is roughly the same price as getting Unix or Novell. If they were a monopoly, they would be selling Windows as the ONLY operating system out there, and there would be NO other OSes. They would also be selling the OS for about $700 a pop, and would just sit back and rake in the profits.
The Sherman law was made to help the consumers in the case of a company that was using its dominance to screw people over. MS has only been helping consumers, by making computers and the internet more accessable to everyone. They have also been a major factor in the prices of PCs becoming cheaper and cheaper, because more and more people are buying them.
I am not saying the Sherman laws should be repealed, I think they need to be reworked, be brought more up to date.
While I may not be a big fan of MS, I have to realize that it is because of them that I have a job in the IT industry on this very day. I work in a large healthcare office that currently uses over 400 PCs and 6 servers. The 400 PCs run either Win95 or Win98 (with one or two 3.1xs in there) and the servers run a mixture of NT4, NT3.51, Netware, Linux Debian, or UNIX. I was hired because of my familiarity with Microsoft products (OSs, apps, etc.) as well as my ability to use the other systems mentioned above.
Enough about me, on to my thoughts on this matter . ..
Todays litigious society is always ready to jump on someone for some slight, whether real or imagined. You just look at someone wrong on the wrong day, and you could face a lawsuit amounting to millions of dollars. When this happens, there are always several other people who are ready to jump in on it, to get their piece of the proverbial pie.
Face it, MS put out a damn good operating system and made it so ANYONE can use it. This is no way was hurting the consumers. This was actually helping consumers. Windows 95 made PCs enter the realm of the regular user. As a result, prices on PCs have fallen considerably in the past years. I bought my first Pentium machine for $1500, and it was not even top of the line at the time. Now I can get a top of the line PC for under $1000. More and more people have been buying computers because they are easy to use. This is way it should be.
Windows crashes all the time . ..
Yeah, it does crash regularly. There are times on my home PC that I am ready to toss it out the window. But, in the 400 PCs that line my offices, it is rare when I get crashes. All problems are reported to me and I am aware of what goes on. Overall, the 400 PCs here crash far less often than my home PC.
On the same note, I have claimed 2gigs of my hard drive on my laptop for RedHat 6.1. I like Linux, it has a lot of good features and a lot of potential, but I am still regularly upset with it, because I cannot get sound to load, or I cannot figure out how to get it on the network. My Windows PC I have up and running on the network, sharing files and queueing print jobs, in roughly 45 minutes. I have been TRYING to get Linux to do everything I want it to do for a month or so.
Microsoft illegally tied the IE browser to their operating system, thereby shutting Netscape out of the market.
Question, what browser are you using right now? If you are in Windows, you might be using IE or Netscape. If you are in Linux, you are using Netscape. Those of you using Netscape are probably happy with the browser, but many people do not feel the same, and that is for a reason.
Netscape is an inferior product. Plain and simple. Microsoft (who had in the past included the deplorable older versions of IE) saw that they could make something better and did so. They in no way told people that they HAD to use IE. There was still the option to go download the Netscape browser. If Netscape really had a good browser, people would have still been buying it and using it.
The Sherman Antitrust laws are too old to apply to today's society. They way it stands, if you enter the market and have a tough time with it because a larger competitor has most of the market share, you can say they are making the marketplace unfair to you, and bring an Antitrust suit against them.
If you want to compete in this marketplace, make a product that is worth a damn. Netscape and the other people on the antitrust bandwagon have yet to put out anything that I qualify as worthwhile. Maybe if they put out a decent product, then maybe, just maybe, they might stand a chance to gain some market share.
Oh yeah! We sure showed him! We proved that someone can bust their hump for 25 years, make a superior product and be ultra-successful (the "American Dream"). Then, when his competitors cannot hold up to the new competition in the marketplace, they can throw a hundred year old Act at them and make them suffer! Wahoo!
Some bully. The way it looks, the bully is not Bill, but the government, and the crybaby companies that cannot write a decent line of code to save their lives.
This whole thing makes me sick . . .
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
While I may not be a big fan of MS, I have to realize that it is because of them that I have a job in the IT industry on this very day. I work in a large healthcare office that currently uses over 400 PCs and 6 servers. The 400 PCs run either Win95 or Win98 (with one or two 3.1xs in there) and the servers run a mixture of NT4, NT3.51, Netware, Linux Debian, or UNIX. I was hired because of my familiarity with Microsoft products (OSs, apps, etc.) as well as my ability to use the other systems mentioned above.
Enough about me, on to my thoughts on this matter . ..
Todays litigious society is always ready to jump on someone for some slight, whether real or imagined. You just look at someone wrong on the wrong day, and you could face a lawsuit amounting to millions of dollars. When this happens, there are always several other people who are ready to jump in on it, to get their piece of the proverbial pie.
Face it, MS put out a damn good operating system and made it so ANYONE can use it. This is no way was hurting the consumers. This was actually helping consumers. Windows 95 made PCs enter the realm of the regular user. As a result, prices on PCs have fallen considerably in the past years. I bought my first Pentium machine for $1500, and it was not even top of the line at the time. Now I can get a top of the line PC for under $1000. More and more people have been buying computers because they are easy to use. This is way it should be.
Windows crashes all the time . ..
Yeah, it does crash regularly. There are times on my home PC that I am ready to toss it out the window. But, in the 400 PCs that line my offices, it is rare when I get crashes. All problems are reported to me and I am aware of what goes on. Overall, the 400 PCs here crash far less often than my home PC.
On the same note, I have claimed 2gigs of my hard drive on my laptop for RedHat 6.1. I like Linux, it has a lot of good features and a lot of potential, but I am still regularly upset with it, because I cannot get sound to load, or I cannot figure out how to get it on the network. My Windows PC I have up and running on the network, sharing files and queueing print jobs, in roughly 45 minutes. I have been TRYING to get Linux to do everything I want it to do for a month or so.
Microsoft illegally tied the IE browser to their operating system, thereby shutting Netscape out of the market.
Question, what browser are you using right now? If you are in Windows, you might be using IE or Netscape. If you are in Linux, you are using Netscape. Those of you using Netscape are probably happy with the browser, but many people do not feel the same, and that is for a reason.
Netscape is an inferior product. Plain and simple. Microsoft (who had in the past included the deplorable older versions of IE) saw that they could make something better and did so. They in no way told people that they HAD to use IE. There was still the option to go download the Netscape browser. If Netscape really had a good browser, people would have still been buying it and using it.
The Sherman Antitrust laws are too old to apply to today's society. They way it stands, if you enter the market and have a tough time with it because a larger competitor has most of the market share, you can say they are making the marketplace unfair to you, and bring an Antitrust suit against them.
If you want to compete in this marketplace, make a product that is worth a damn. Netscape and the other people on the antitrust bandwagon have yet to put out anything that I qualify as worthwhile. Maybe if they put out a decent product, then maybe, just maybe, they might stand a chance to gain some market share.
Slashdot Mirror
NEVER? Doubtful . . .
And just so you know, most of those "countless dumbasses," as you so quaintly called them, are using Windows because their business runs better with it. Sure, my giant database here works under Novell, but it crashes repeatedly. But, under NT, it has only crashed twice in the past 7 months.
Just for that comment, I hope everyone sends you Word and Excel files.
You are one of those assholes on the Linux boards who responds with "look it up" when the person was looking for help in the first place, aren't you?
Once again, you have proven that you can post something without it being insightful. Your "smart quotes suck" statement really changed my mind about how things work, and I am about to make a sweeping change to my life.
You are not a good debater. Back yourself up.
Wow, this guy is the king of the pointless, droning, one-liners.
Do you have anything insightful to post, or are you just trolling for attention?
Just because people are supporting MS on these issues does not mean for one second that we are "microsofties." Believe me, if there was something better that was reliable and would run all my apps and support all my hardware, I would switch to it. What you don't seem to realize (and many others, from what I am reading) is that if the DOJ is not careful, they could really HURT the industry.
Stop bashing MS just because it is cool to do so in front of your friends. If you really thought about this some, you would see what was really going on - that being ultra-successful these days makes people jealous, and they will do what is necessary to get what the successful person has, even if it is stooping to the lawsuit level.
I have never been a spokesperson for poor people, and have not claimed to be. And I am happy about the decreasing cost of computers, my statement about how poor people (usually) do not worry about computers or internet access has nothing to do with it. There are exceptions (such as you) to everything.
As for the corporation=individual thing, I know far better than to think that. Years of college and working in large corporations have made that pretty clear. But the fact of the matter is, MS is a business, and is out to turn a profit. There is no profit in altruism, like some of you people think they should be practicing.
MS in no way impeded the market. People are still buying Netware, Unix, Linux, and all those other OSes. If they were impeding the market, and therefore be a monopoly, they would be out to destroy all those other OSes, and would be the only OS available. The Antitrust laws were created to stop the guys who were in control of ALL the steel, ALL the oil, with no competition on the market at all. MS is not in that situation, they were just the victim of a bunch of whiny crybaby companies who realized they could not outprogram MS, and decided to sue them.
I know the law, semesters of Business Law has burned it into my head . . .
The repitition of your name on personal attacks on someone who has their own opinion and is free to express it is getting even more annoying.
What an ass . . . You don't know me, and you have no idea the sheer volume of work that I do. I work in a place with 400 PCs, like I stated before, with only 3 people in the IS department. I handle everything from simple computer crashes to network wide data line drops and router blowouts. If you only knew the amount of stuff I did, you would quickly recind that statement and shove it.
Linux MIGHT stand a chance if the following things happened -
Linux is not easy to install, period. There are a lot of free apps available for it, but they are not always good. When you do get one of these apps, you have to figure out how to decompress the tarballs, and then figure out which method to get it complied and installed. If you are lucky, you will get it in an RPM, but those are few and far between. Then you run into trouble, and go looking for help on the web, and you get a bunch of assholes who say "If you don't know, go look it up," which is what you were doing in the first place! And I will not even get started on the process to update your kernel!
Face it, MS has the market because they made something easy to use, and something everyone is familiar with. My tech calls are real nice since I know everyone is using MS Windows. I can only imagine the problems involved with everyone using a different distribution of Linux. My job would be a living hell.
Poor people don't need computers with internet access. Last time I looked they were more concerned with work, or where the next meal is coming from. I won't even go into what this dropping $5 computers idea sounds like . . .
Laws do have their flaws, our legal system would be totally different if everything worked perfectly. Since we are humans, though, we make mistakes. We do learn from these mistakes. Most of the time.
The Sherman Antitrust Act is a very old act brought to being to stop certain huge companies from gouging people left and right. Steel and oil companies were running the whole show in the marketplace at the time, and were charging outrageous prices for their goods. They were determined to be monopolies and they were broken up. In the end, consumers benefitted because the competition made prices go down.
Now, back to the present.
MS has been accused of being a monopoly. I fail to see how this even applies to them. Linux is still out there, as are Novell, Unix, BeOS, and tons of other choices for what to use. The fact of the matter is that MS made a product that everyone can use, and made PCs more accessible for the masses. They are charging roughly the same price as competeing OSes in their particular market. Win98 is still the same price as Apple OS9. NT is roughly the same price as getting Unix or Novell. If they were a monopoly, they would be selling Windows as the ONLY operating system out there, and there would be NO other OSes. They would also be selling the OS for about $700 a pop, and would just sit back and rake in the profits.
The Sherman law was made to help the consumers in the case of a company that was using its dominance to screw people over. MS has only been helping consumers, by making computers and the internet more accessable to everyone. They have also been a major factor in the prices of PCs becoming cheaper and cheaper, because more and more people are buying them.
I am not saying the Sherman laws should be repealed, I think they need to be reworked, be brought more up to date.
While I may not be a big fan of MS, I have to realize that it is because of them that I have a job in the IT industry on this very day. I work in a large healthcare office that currently uses over 400 PCs and 6 servers. The 400 PCs run either Win95 or Win98 (with one or two 3.1xs in there) and the servers run a mixture of NT4, NT3.51, Netware, Linux Debian, or UNIX. I was hired because of my familiarity with Microsoft products (OSs, apps, etc.) as well as my ability to use the other systems mentioned above.
.
.
Enough about me, on to my thoughts on this matter . .
Todays litigious society is always ready to jump on someone for some slight, whether real or imagined. You just look at someone wrong on the wrong day, and you could face a lawsuit amounting to millions of dollars. When this happens, there are always several other people who are ready to jump in on it, to get their piece of the proverbial pie.
Face it, MS put out a damn good operating system and made it so ANYONE can use it. This is no way was hurting the consumers. This was actually helping consumers. Windows 95 made PCs enter the realm of the regular user. As a result, prices on PCs have fallen considerably in the past years. I bought my first Pentium machine for $1500, and it was not even top of the line at the time. Now I can get a top of the line PC for under $1000. More and more people have been buying computers because they are easy to use. This is way it should be.
Windows crashes all the time . .
Yeah, it does crash regularly. There are times on my home PC that I am ready to toss it out the window. But, in the 400 PCs that line my offices, it is rare when I get crashes. All problems are reported to me and I am aware of what goes on. Overall, the 400 PCs here crash far less often than my home PC.
On the same note, I have claimed 2gigs of my hard drive on my laptop for RedHat 6.1. I like Linux, it has a lot of good features and a lot of potential, but I am still regularly upset with it, because I cannot get sound to load, or I cannot figure out how to get it on the network. My Windows PC I have up and running on the network, sharing files and queueing print jobs, in roughly 45 minutes. I have been TRYING to get Linux to do everything I want it to do for a month or so.
Microsoft illegally tied the IE browser to their operating system, thereby shutting Netscape out of the market.
Question, what browser are you using right now? If you are in Windows, you might be using IE or Netscape. If you are in Linux, you are using Netscape. Those of you using Netscape are probably happy with the browser, but many people do not feel the same, and that is for a reason.
Netscape is an inferior product. Plain and simple. Microsoft (who had in the past included the deplorable older versions of IE) saw that they could make something better and did so. They in no way told people that they HAD to use IE. There was still the option to go download the Netscape browser. If Netscape really had a good browser, people would have still been buying it and using it.
The Sherman Antitrust laws are too old to apply to today's society. They way it stands, if you enter the market and have a tough time with it because a larger competitor has most of the market share, you can say they are making the marketplace unfair to you, and bring an Antitrust suit against them.
If you want to compete in this marketplace, make a product that is worth a damn. Netscape and the other people on the antitrust bandwagon have yet to put out anything that I qualify as worthwhile. Maybe if they put out a decent product, then maybe, just maybe, they might stand a chance to gain some market share.
about time the bully got his due!
Oh yeah! We sure showed him! We proved that someone can bust their hump for 25 years, make a superior product and be ultra-successful (the "American Dream"). Then, when his competitors cannot hold up to the new competition in the marketplace, they can throw a hundred year old Act at them and make them suffer! Wahoo!
Some bully. The way it looks, the bully is not Bill, but the government, and the crybaby companies that cannot write a decent line of code to save their lives.
While I may not be a big fan of MS, I have to realize that it is because of them that I have a job in the IT industry on this very day. I work in a large healthcare office that currently uses over 400 PCs and 6 servers. The 400 PCs run either Win95 or Win98 (with one or two 3.1xs in there) and the servers run a mixture of NT4, NT3.51, Netware, Linux Debian, or UNIX. I was hired because of my familiarity with Microsoft products (OSs, apps, etc.) as well as my ability to use the other systems mentioned above.
.
.
Enough about me, on to my thoughts on this matter . .
Todays litigious society is always ready to jump on someone for some slight, whether real or imagined. You just look at someone wrong on the wrong day, and you could face a lawsuit amounting to millions of dollars. When this happens, there are always several other people who are ready to jump in on it, to get their piece of the proverbial pie.
Face it, MS put out a damn good operating system and made it so ANYONE can use it. This is no way was hurting the consumers. This was actually helping consumers. Windows 95 made PCs enter the realm of the regular user. As a result, prices on PCs have fallen considerably in the past years. I bought my first Pentium machine for $1500, and it was not even top of the line at the time. Now I can get a top of the line PC for under $1000. More and more people have been buying computers because they are easy to use. This is way it should be.
Windows crashes all the time . .
Yeah, it does crash regularly. There are times on my home PC that I am ready to toss it out the window. But, in the 400 PCs that line my offices, it is rare when I get crashes. All problems are reported to me and I am aware of what goes on. Overall, the 400 PCs here crash far less often than my home PC.
On the same note, I have claimed 2gigs of my hard drive on my laptop for RedHat 6.1. I like Linux, it has a lot of good features and a lot of potential, but I am still regularly upset with it, because I cannot get sound to load, or I cannot figure out how to get it on the network. My Windows PC I have up and running on the network, sharing files and queueing print jobs, in roughly 45 minutes. I have been TRYING to get Linux to do everything I want it to do for a month or so.
Microsoft illegally tied the IE browser to their operating system, thereby shutting Netscape out of the market.
Question, what browser are you using right now? If you are in Windows, you might be using IE or Netscape. If you are in Linux, you are using Netscape. Those of you using Netscape are probably happy with the browser, but many people do not feel the same, and that is for a reason.
Netscape is an inferior product. Plain and simple. Microsoft (who had in the past included the deplorable older versions of IE) saw that they could make something better and did so. They in no way told people that they HAD to use IE. There was still the option to go download the Netscape browser. If Netscape really had a good browser, people would have still been buying it and using it.
The Sherman Antitrust laws are too old to apply to today's society. They way it stands, if you enter the market and have a tough time with it because a larger competitor has most of the market share, you can say they are making the marketplace unfair to you, and bring an Antitrust suit against them.
If you want to compete in this marketplace, make a product that is worth a damn. Netscape and the other people on the antitrust bandwagon have yet to put out anything that I qualify as worthwhile. Maybe if they put out a decent product, then maybe, just maybe, they might stand a chance to gain some market share.