Patents also encourage people to invent and innovate. Basically, any invention or novel piece of engineering would immediately be copied by competitors. If you make some nifty widget, as soon as you come to market with it, much larger and more established companies will immediate copy and undersell you (economies of scale).
Folks like Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway, along with a host of other things) wouldn't exist without patents. They enable and encourage individuals and smaller companies to be inventive, because they will be able to capitalize on their idea. Patents allow people to be professional inventors, much like copyrights allow people to be professional authors or musicians.
So, I'd argue against your premise that they 'do nothing but slow down an industry and promote laziness'. A patent-less industry would immediately boil down to the biggest manufacturers. Soviet Russia is an example of a such an industry...technological development lagged very much behind the west.
No, they aren't happy. Hating Microsoft makes them anti-establishment and 'cool'. Nevermind that it's not objective, and makes them look like an idiot.
Have the previous cases not established precedent that pre-installing non-essential features into the operating system constitutes anti-competitive behavior?
So, if you're a company that makes an operating system, you can never again add additional features to your product?
It's called progress. Every major OS vendor, including Apple, Mandrake and Redhat, adds features to their base operating system as their customer base requires it. When was the last time you saw an operating system without a web browser, tcp stack, or file manager? They were all 'non-essential' features at some point in time.
Especially on the desktop front, the only way to be competive is the feature set of your OS. End consumers largely aren't going to notice (nor care) about the efficiency of the VM subsystem, number of transactions/second you can wring out, or memory footprint (discounting extremely large footprints). The only way to sell new OS software to desktop users is to improve the features.
The burden on Microsoft is to do this without being anti-trustish. If they make the components removable, expose APIs so that 3rd parties may install their own functionality into them (Apple writing an iTunes plug-in for WMPlayer for example), and ensure that competing products are easily installable, I don't see how that's bad.
I've got a Fujitsu Lifebook 3000 TabletPC, and I'm very happy with it. It's got a 1024x768 display, Pentium M 1.4 GHz, 512 MB of RAM and a 40 gig hard drive.
The first Tablets to market (and most of them, at this point) run on low-voltage Pentium 3's or Celerons, or worse yet, Crusoes. As such, they all ran like crap (underpowered, slow).
I can squeeze nearly four hours out of a battery, and my laptop is about as fast as my AthlonXP desktop. And it's 4 lbs. It's got all the power of a non-tablet, while also having slick tablet functionality. The keyboard is extremely nice for a compact notebook as well. I'm happy with it, and would happily recommend it to you.
I want to thank all of Slashdot for not being typically "Slashdot" on this article. I've not read any comments containing knee-jerk blurbs that are so old they're cliche (SCO, RIAA, Microsoft, Linux, etc).
I'm happy to know that this mass of people, who so often harangue each other without consideration, taste, humility or respect, can still display those qualities.
this isn't a book review
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
it's a rant against Microsoft. I'd suggest criticizing the book from the context in which it was written.
Re:Imagine this other African language.....
on
Whistle While You Work
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For the guys in the B-29's I suspect the island was considered pretty important and needed little dramatisation.
Sure thing. However, the Iwo Jima campaign incurred 28,000 casualties, with nearly 7,000 killed. It sure didn't save 7,000 folks in bomber crews.
I was just correcting the original post, which stated
Considering how important Iwo Jima was to winning the war in the Pacific
Iwo Jima had its bit, but the war would've been won, without much more difficulty, if the US didn't invade it. You could argue the US didn't need to do any more invading once it achieved naval and air supremecy because of the eventual use of atomic weapons. (Not a good argument, mind you, because it wasn't decided to use nuclear weapons until after the Iwo Jima campaign.)
Re:Imagine this other African language.....
on
Whistle While You Work
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Iwo Jima wasn't particularly important to the end of WWII. It was taken to serve as an emergency landing site for damaged B-29's coming back from Japan. It was used as a base for P-51 Mustangs, flying as bomber escorts.
Folks like to dramaticize the importance of the island, simply because it was hard won, the famous picture was taken there, etc. Most military historians will tell you that the US had the war in hand at that point, and Iwo Jima could've been skipped over for a less defended island (the US skipped many islands on its Pacific campaign--after naval supremecy was achieved, the Japanese troops on those islands didn't go anywhere).
You're right. I'm stupid enough and I've enough free time that I create fictitious documents that are easily discoutable by anyone who has a copy of frontpage.
Go get a copy of frontpage 2k3 and try it yourself. Microsoft offers evaluation versions (although I don't remember if you download it, or get it on CD, like the Office2k3 beta).
What a lot of folks don't realize about Word's ugly XML-html is that allows you to save a Word doc as html, reload it in Word and have no data loss. The formatting of your document that couldn't (or shouldn't) be expressed in a web browser (such as margins, page settings) is maintained. It's the ultimate in portability--the content is easily viewable anywhere (because browsers ignore all the crap they can't understand), and you don't sacrifice any of the niceties Word provides.
That said, Word isn't a very good web page generator. FrontPage is Microsoft's dedicated web page generator. If you're making a web page, use FrontPage.
Bogus claim of submitter
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Rather, it goes on to really ask, who needs the RIAA anymore?
No, it doesn't. If the the submitter had read the article without his anti-RIAA glasses on, he would've realized that the article just questions the relevance of radio in a world dominated by the internet and visual media.
The article specifically mentions Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken. Kelly received quite a bit of radio play, while Clay was seldom heard on the airwaves but still outsold Ms. Clarkson. Quote: But the heir to her throne, runner-up but reigning king, Clay Aiken, didn't have as much luck with radio. Deejays across the country mocked him, didn't take him seriously, and often refused to play his music. Well the joke just might be on them.
Despite little radio play, Aiken's debut album went double platinum in its first week of release, out-selling Clarkson's album by a landslide. Aiken's success serves as a shining example of the power television now has over the music industry, and the arguably insignificant power radio has these days. (emphasis mine)
This article addresses radio's lessened impact on the recording industry, and not the recording industry's impact on society.
I imagine that Open Source clients are not eligable for the license because anyone with access to the source probably could get around the encryption (as they'd know where to look in memory for the plaintext data).
It's an issue of DRM not being compatible with Open Source.
My point is that non-MS app's can utilize DRM, and view DRM'd content that was produced with MS's apps.
You make valid points on scripting in email, which as far as I know, is disabled in the current version of Outlook. The issue we were talking about is executable attachments. Outlook since XP does not allow users to download attachments which have offending file extensions (.exe,.scr,.vbs, etc). You can disable this feature with the correct registry key.
One of Outlook's features as far as usability is concerned, is to double-click on the attachment and have windows launch the correct program to view/use the attachment. Outlook could've chosen to nerf that feature when the attachment is executable, but they went a step further and made it unavailable. This forces folks to rename the executable, compress it, or otherwise work around the block.
It's a pain in the ass, but it forces both sender and receiver to know what they're doing. The collective internet is probably better off for it, but power users (such as grandparent post) are embittered.
Real is the spawn of Satan, and should die of a sexually transmitted disease. If I was forced at gunpoint to run Real, I think I'd run it inside a virtual machine.
My workplace has Exchange 2k3. As such, I have OWA 2k3 available to me. It's a very nice web client for remote access to my mail.
If you run your own webserver, and want OWA to run from it, then get a copy of exchange 2k3 by all means. Without doing that, I guess your options are limited.
I just responded to someone pointing them to MS's free trial of OWA (go google). If you'd like, you can look at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents also encourage people to invent and innovate. Basically, any invention or novel piece of engineering would immediately be copied by competitors. If you make some nifty widget, as soon as you come to market with it, much larger and more established companies will immediate copy and undersell you (economies of scale).
Folks like Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway, along with a host of other things) wouldn't exist without patents. They enable and encourage individuals and smaller companies to be inventive, because they will be able to capitalize on their idea. Patents allow people to be professional inventors, much like copyrights allow people to be professional authors or musicians.
So, I'd argue against your premise that they 'do nothing but slow down an industry and promote laziness'. A patent-less industry would immediately boil down to the biggest manufacturers. Soviet Russia is an example of a such an industry...technological development lagged very much behind the west.
No, they aren't happy. Hating Microsoft makes them anti-establishment and 'cool'. Nevermind that it's not objective, and makes them look like an idiot.
Have the previous cases not established precedent that pre-installing non-essential features into the operating system constitutes anti-competitive behavior?
So, if you're a company that makes an operating system, you can never again add additional features to your product?
It's called progress. Every major OS vendor, including Apple, Mandrake and Redhat, adds features to their base operating system as their customer base requires it. When was the last time you saw an operating system without a web browser, tcp stack, or file manager? They were all 'non-essential' features at some point in time.
Especially on the desktop front, the only way to be competive is the feature set of your OS. End consumers largely aren't going to notice (nor care) about the efficiency of the VM subsystem, number of transactions/second you can wring out, or memory footprint (discounting extremely large footprints). The only way to sell new OS software to desktop users is to improve the features.
The burden on Microsoft is to do this without being anti-trustish. If they make the components removable, expose APIs so that 3rd parties may install their own functionality into them (Apple writing an iTunes plug-in for WMPlayer for example), and ensure that competing products are easily installable, I don't see how that's bad.
Not much you could've done about it then :)
Did you know that it was a desktop chip before you bought the laptop? Seems that you'd have to know a little about what you were jumping in to...
I'd guess that if he asked Microsoft, they would've sent him a copy to review.
He could've also used Microsoft's Trial CD. $8 shipping is all it takes.
I've got a Fujitsu Lifebook 3000 TabletPC, and I'm very happy with it. It's got a 1024x768 display, Pentium M 1.4 GHz, 512 MB of RAM and a 40 gig hard drive.
The first Tablets to market (and most of them, at this point) run on low-voltage Pentium 3's or Celerons, or worse yet, Crusoes. As such, they all ran like crap (underpowered, slow).
I can squeeze nearly four hours out of a battery, and my laptop is about as fast as my AthlonXP desktop. And it's 4 lbs. It's got all the power of a non-tablet, while also having slick tablet functionality. The keyboard is extremely nice for a compact notebook as well. I'm happy with it, and would happily recommend it to you.
I want to thank all of Slashdot for not being typically "Slashdot" on this article. I've not read any comments containing knee-jerk blurbs that are so old they're cliche (SCO, RIAA, Microsoft, Linux, etc).
I'm happy to know that this mass of people, who so often harangue each other without consideration, taste, humility or respect, can still display those qualities.
it's a rant against Microsoft. I'd suggest criticizing the book from the context in which it was written.
Well written. Kudos :)
Sure thing. However, the Iwo Jima campaign incurred 28,000 casualties, with nearly 7,000 killed. It sure didn't save 7,000 folks in bomber crews.
I was just correcting the original post, which stated
Iwo Jima had its bit, but the war would've been won, without much more difficulty, if the US didn't invade it. You could argue the US didn't need to do any more invading once it achieved naval and air supremecy because of the eventual use of atomic weapons. (Not a good argument, mind you, because it wasn't decided to use nuclear weapons until after the Iwo Jima campaign.)
Iwo Jima wasn't particularly important to the end of WWII. It was taken to serve as an emergency landing site for damaged B-29's coming back from Japan. It was used as a base for P-51 Mustangs, flying as bomber escorts.
Folks like to dramaticize the importance of the island, simply because it was hard won, the famous picture was taken there, etc. Most military historians will tell you that the US had the war in hand at that point, and Iwo Jima could've been skipped over for a less defended island (the US skipped many islands on its Pacific campaign--after naval supremecy was achieved, the Japanese troops on those islands didn't go anywhere).
until MS decides that music can only be downloaded from Windows onto their player
Whatever. If it happens, I'll just use my old copy of Windows and my old mp3 player. MS will probably realize that fact.
Remember folks: if you don't like it, don't buy it.
more portable MP3 players = more features to choose from in the market + lower prices
Even if MS's player is crap, we'll win.
You're right. I'm stupid enough and I've enough free time that I create fictitious documents that are easily discoutable by anyone who has a copy of frontpage.
Go get a copy of frontpage 2k3 and try it yourself. Microsoft offers evaluation versions (although I don't remember if you download it, or get it on CD, like the Office2k3 beta).
...but I lack the prehensile tail.
(sigh)
I guess. :) I haven't noticed any FP banner ads. The last Microsoft ad I recall seeing on /. was for Visual Studio.
I have a copy of Office2k3, and I figured folks would be interested in FP's output.
Word2003 lets you save as 'Web Page' or 'Web Page, filtered'. The filtered html is much cleaner than the standard html.
What a lot of folks don't realize about Word's ugly XML-html is that allows you to save a Word doc as html, reload it in Word and have no data loss. The formatting of your document that couldn't (or shouldn't) be expressed in a web browser (such as margins, page settings) is maintained. It's the ultimate in portability--the content is easily viewable anywhere (because browsers ignore all the crap they can't understand), and you don't sacrifice any of the niceties Word provides.
That said, Word isn't a very good web page generator. FrontPage is Microsoft's dedicated web page generator. If you're making a web page, use FrontPage.
<html>
d >
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>FYI</title>
</hea
<body>
<p>This was generated by FrontPage 2003.</p>
</body>
</html>
Rather, it goes on to really ask, who needs the RIAA anymore?
No, it doesn't. If the the submitter had read the article without his anti-RIAA glasses on, he would've realized that the article just questions the relevance of radio in a world dominated by the internet and visual media.
The article specifically mentions Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken. Kelly received quite a bit of radio play, while Clay was seldom heard on the airwaves but still outsold Ms. Clarkson. Quote:
But the heir to her throne, runner-up but reigning king, Clay Aiken, didn't have as much luck with radio. Deejays across the country mocked him, didn't take him seriously, and often refused to play his music. Well the joke just might be on them.
Despite little radio play, Aiken's debut album went double platinum in its first week of release, out-selling Clarkson's album by a landslide. Aiken's success serves as a shining example of the power television now has over the music industry, and the arguably insignificant power radio has these days. (emphasis mine)
This article addresses radio's lessened impact on the recording industry, and not the recording industry's impact on society.
I imagine that Open Source clients are not eligable for the license because anyone with access to the source probably could get around the encryption (as they'd know where to look in memory for the plaintext data).
It's an issue of DRM not being compatible with Open Source.
My point is that non-MS app's can utilize DRM, and view DRM'd content that was produced with MS's apps.
You make valid points on scripting in email, which as far as I know, is disabled in the current version of Outlook. The issue we were talking about is executable attachments. Outlook since XP does not allow users to download attachments which have offending file extensions (.exe, .scr, .vbs, etc). You can disable this feature with the correct registry key.
One of Outlook's features as far as usability is concerned, is to double-click on the attachment and have windows launch the correct program to view/use the attachment. Outlook could've chosen to nerf that feature when the attachment is executable, but they went a step further and made it unavailable. This forces folks to rename the executable, compress it, or otherwise work around the block.
It's a pain in the ass, but it forces both sender and receiver to know what they're doing. The collective internet is probably better off for it, but power users (such as grandparent post) are embittered.
Real is the spawn of Satan, and should die of a sexually transmitted disease. If I was forced at gunpoint to run Real, I think I'd run it inside a virtual machine.
My workplace has Exchange 2k3. As such, I have OWA 2k3 available to me. It's a very nice web client for remote access to my mail.
If you run your own webserver, and want OWA to run from it, then get a copy of exchange 2k3 by all means. Without doing that, I guess your options are limited.
I just responded to someone pointing them to MS's free trial of OWA (go google). If you'd like, you can look at it.