The problem with all of those actions is that they distort the economy a good bit. They are swift and sure in the present, but they don't seem to move the price of software back to the free market level. Instead, they institute penalties and a bureaucracy to monitor, both of which tend to be more associated with failed planned economies than with competitive markets.
Moving forward, if R&D takes place in the US company, it is not at all clear what a "fair" price for the European product will be, how much they should pay for the R&D. That is what competition is so good at figuring out and why rememdies should be relentlessly structural.
The breakup proposed by the American courts seems so "small government" in contrast. It is clearly the correct libertarian path.
Sorry for not being clear. I used the word "remedy" because things like fines are punishments, and have the effect of raising prices even higher than the monopolist has already raised them. The goal is to get the prices down.
If an international company has a monopoly position, behavioral restraints in its home country can have an effect, as can breakup. But internationally I don't see that as as effective.
stop and think about the above points, as this helps no one.
you may have an tech certificate from Microsoft, but you don't know much about anti-trust: the charge against a monopolist is that they charge unfairly high prices to take advantage of the consumer's dependence. This sort of behavior eliminates the primary benefit of free markets: low prices. There is no point in having a free market if you allow monopolies. So, actions taken against monopolists are designed to get them to stop being monopolists and lower their prices.
The actions taken agains monopolists do not stop their products from being made available. You should keep these points in mind:)
And as to your gripe about unix lovers: why don't you Microsoft lovers start your own Slashdot and lick Bill Gates boots over there? People who love unix love it for very good and clear technical reasons. Microsoft products have almost none of the features that unix people love. Can't we just love unix in piece and not have to listen to the constant importunings of the provincial users of an arcane collection of proprietary APIs and lame programming languages? Now, before you accuse me of flaming or trolling, check the Computer Science laboratories at the top schools, MIT, Stanford, CMU, et al: there is very limited use of Microsoft development tools, and very broad use of unix. We know what we like, and we know what we dislike. Otherwise, let the market decide.
a US company can be split up in a US courts, and it's relatively harmless to the economy because all the same assets continue to exist, and with the same shareholders. In fact, in many ways it is economically more efficient because then shareholders can decide which pieces to own instead of having to buy the lot. With AT&T and the baby bells we have seen the benefits of a breakup.
But when dealing with a foreign company that simply imports products, what will the EC do? Impose tariffs? Fines? It is difficult for them to remedy or ameliorate the situation without harming their consumers.
I'm not saying that nifty new features in HTML will go away, heck, more will continue to be added. But I often wish my browser had a little toolbar like this to be able to selectively turn off HTML features to make sites produced by overzealous webmasters a little more readable.
Now, guys, no matter how good an idea this is, do not delay shipping Mozilla for it. We've been down that path...:)
Actually, I thought the point of revoluion was just within earth's circumference.
that's not different than I said. I believe it's something like 1000mi below the surface, the radius being 4000mi.
Earth-Terra
this raises a question I was thinking about when I was reading about the naming of the outer planets: in modern day Greece, do they refer to the planets the way we do (Roman gods) or do they use the names of the Greek gods?
to illustrate with an other example, sometimes companies introduce products that fail to earn a profit, an unpopular CD for example. After lowering the price to stimulate sales, the price they charge does not cover the cost to manufacture (note that I'm using "price" and "cost" accurately, unlike your post). In this case, the investors in the company pay the advertising (and lose money), not the customer. And you are quite right, if they lose money too frequently, there will be no more produced.
To reiterate, "price" is a function of the market at the time of the sale. If it covers costs, there is a profit, if not, there is not. Customers pay for final products and services, not for factors of production.
You pay for that [radio] music every time you buy a product from somebody that advertises.
I do understand what you are saying, but it is not economically accurate. When you purchase a product, you make the decision "I'd rather have the product than the money" sheerly on the basis of how you value the alternative uses for the money and the use of the product. You do not consider the advertising in your decision.
And it is not accurate to reply, "but the price is higher because of the advertising" because prices are determined solely by what the market will bear, not by cost of ingredients or manufacture.
I'm willing to put up with it if it doesn't cost me anything, but if I'm being charged, I want something better.
I know what you mean, yes, but please articulate a little more accurately: price is not a binary yes/no, it's a linear scale. You are already investing some time in the endeavor and time is money as they say. How about, "So far I've been willing to use Napster to a certain extent for free. If there were a charge, the more I had to pay, the more service I'd expect to get to continue using it at the level I do now. Otherwise, my usage would drop by some fraction."
A planet has to orbit a star....Maybe I understand it wrong?
maybe I didn't say it right? Earth's moon does not "orbit the earth". Rather, Earth and Luna orbit around a common point at their center of mass, much closer to Earth's surface than to Earth's center. That two planetoid system can be said to orbit the sun. In the case of Jupiter's moons (and the Earth-Luna system compared to the sun), the mass of the satellites is much smaller than Jupiter so they don't move the center of mass of the system much away from Jupiter's center, so it is easier to make the approximation that they "orbit the planet" without much error.
I was only making the point that when drawing arbitraty distinctions to classify celestial bodies, one must make note of what are the important details you are trying to capture. Sphere-ness and atmosphere are meaningful indicators of size, telling a lot about what to expect to see looking at the body. Looking at the Earth-Luna system, who orbits who is thrown into more doubt.
In the case of Pluto, how it was formed would seem to be the most interesting question to answer about it, and would determine where we wind up classifying it. It behaves like a planet today by many definitions, but if it didn't form the same way as the others we might rethink the classifications.
Ganymede and Titan are larger than Mercury. Does it mean that Mercury is not a planet, or that Ganymede and Titan are planets?
they're all planets.
The most meaningful definition of planetoid is "enough gravity to be 'spherical'", and planet "enough gravity to hold an atmosphere". Our planet+moon system rotates around the center of mass of both bodies, and neither deserves the "credit" for that, but our spherical moon planetoid has no atmosphere.
linux is going incredibly slow[ly]? it didn't even exist a short time ago. It was small a short time after that. It never got mentioned in the press a short time after that... so therefore it will never catch up? You've just recapitulated the mistake of Zeno's paradox! I guess Microsoft and Compaq will never overtake IBM on the desktop...:)
We don't really have rights unless we have the right to sign those rights away.
actually, not many "great thinkers" agree with you. the definition of "rights" that is used, for instance in the Bill of Rights, are rights that cannot be signed away. You can't sign away your right to free speech, you can't sign away your right to vote, you can't sign away your right to an attorney. You may waive your rights (choose not to exercise) at certain points, but you can always change your mind.
The 14th Amendment (anti-slavery, or "involuntary servitude") would be meaningless if employers could make you sign away your rights to freedom in order to get a job.
The idea is not for every app to change the scrollbars, but for the user to be able to change them one time and have all apps obey. Windows is several times farther from there than X is.
X's network abilities are completely irrelevant to you? Do you work in a network environment? If you are, you are talking nonsense.
why would the gnome team spend time working on porting other non-componentized applications?
to achieve buy-in from established teams, to prove that using their model was feasible for established products and not just from the ground up, to prove that in switching you could reuse and not reinvent the wheel, blah blah.
regarding your software engineering talents... we agree to disagree;)
yes, starting with the definition. you are thinking of software architecture, aren't you.:)
oh, I forgot to address the other point: the replacement shells do not actually change the UI in terms of window borders, scroll bars, widgets, focus behavior etc., i.e. they don't change the window manager as much as they just give you a new file manager and a couple of applets. And, so many Windows apps mung the title bar and ventilator on their own that you'll soon switch back to the standard.
X got it more right in other ways such as separating the client and server, incredibly powerful in a network world and something Windows users can only dream about.
I've mostly avoid windows coding, so I'm sorry I can't be remember more clearly, but it certainly is the case that a number of NT features are specific to the windows message loop, and if you want to use them, you need a window. Basically, you've got to decide very early on if you want to link against MFC.
And that's not to mention that 98 and NT are completely different from one another... so much for code reusability:)
I can't imagine either model is what Miguel wants to work toward.
jim, I take your point about the applications framework, that's a good one. But the approach Gnome has taken is to create an entirely new way, Yet Another Yet Another. In what way are they actually solving the problem rather than simply introducing more forking? If he admires windows so much why not use their application framework: wouldn't that make porting important apps over much easier? And is Gnome spending time retrofitting existing popular unix apps with their better way.
I think I've demonstrated here that I know more about Software Engineering than you and Miguel combined. You can't say "everbody keeps rewriting, so we are going to rewrite for the last time!" with any credibility.
And I addressed your misimpressions about DOS in another post.
Many window managers is quite simply, not a problem. he said that and he's wrong. He might have had a point if he had proposed a modular way to reuse code so that we could have many window managers. Gnome could borrow much more or work more interchangeably with the rest of X.
Note, by the way, that the Microsoft style he loves so much, has produced a windows manager which is embedded so deeply in the rest of the operating system that there is no way to have end-user choice, and many windows daemons have to have an invisible window, not for UI purposes, but because it's the only way they can get messages from the OS. The guy responsible for that mess, Bill Gates, has managed much larger and much more successful projects than Miguel, and I don't listen to Bill's opinions about software architecture either.
Microsoft was working on and selling Xenix (now SCO) in-house in the early days of DOS. Furthermore, Multiplan and Word were developed cross platform on a PDP-11 running unix.
Yes, the guy who originally wrote DOS did model it after CP/M (which was modelled after Digital's RT11 or RSX11), but when Microsoft got hold of it they set about adding subdirectories and IO redirection a la the Unix that everyone at Microsoft was using every day.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with all of those actions is that they distort the economy a good bit. They are swift and sure in the present, but they don't seem to move the price of software back to the free market level. Instead, they institute penalties and a bureaucracy to monitor, both of which tend to be more associated with failed planned economies than with competitive markets.
Moving forward, if R&D takes place in the US company, it is not at all clear what a "fair" price for the European product will be, how much they should pay for the R&D. That is what competition is so good at figuring out and why rememdies should be relentlessly structural. The breakup proposed by the American courts seems so "small government" in contrast. It is clearly the correct libertarian path.
If an international company has a monopoly position, behavioral restraints in its home country can have an effect, as can breakup. But internationally I don't see that as as effective.
you may have an tech certificate from Microsoft, but you don't know much about anti-trust: the charge against a monopolist is that they charge unfairly high prices to take advantage of the consumer's dependence. This sort of behavior eliminates the primary benefit of free markets: low prices. There is no point in having a free market if you allow monopolies. So, actions taken against monopolists are designed to get them to stop being monopolists and lower their prices.
The actions taken agains monopolists do not stop their products from being made available. You should keep these points in mind :)
And as to your gripe about unix lovers: why don't you Microsoft lovers start your own Slashdot and lick Bill Gates boots over there? People who love unix love it for very good and clear technical reasons. Microsoft products have almost none of the features that unix people love. Can't we just love unix in piece and not have to listen to the constant importunings of the provincial users of an arcane collection of proprietary APIs and lame programming languages? Now, before you accuse me of flaming or trolling, check the Computer Science laboratories at the top schools, MIT, Stanford, CMU, et al: there is very limited use of Microsoft development tools, and very broad use of unix. We know what we like, and we know what we dislike. Otherwise, let the market decide.
But when dealing with a foreign company that simply imports products, what will the EC do? Impose tariffs? Fines? It is difficult for them to remedy or ameliorate the situation without harming their consumers.
Now, guys, no matter how good an idea this is, do not delay shipping Mozilla for it. We've been down that path... :)
go to the site, click on the ad, and write an email to the sponsor telling them you don't like to see their name associated with such stupidity.
that's not different than I said. I believe it's something like 1000mi below the surface, the radius being 4000mi.
Earth-Terra
this raises a question I was thinking about when I was reading about the naming of the outer planets: in modern day Greece, do they refer to the planets the way we do (Roman gods) or do they use the names of the Greek gods?
to illustrate with an other example, sometimes companies introduce products that fail to earn a profit, an unpopular CD for example. After lowering the price to stimulate sales, the price they charge does not cover the cost to manufacture (note that I'm using "price" and "cost" accurately, unlike your post). In this case, the investors in the company pay the advertising (and lose money), not the customer. And you are quite right, if they lose money too frequently, there will be no more produced.
To reiterate, "price" is a function of the market at the time of the sale. If it covers costs, there is a profit, if not, there is not. Customers pay for final products and services, not for factors of production.
I do understand what you are saying, but it is not economically accurate. When you purchase a product, you make the decision "I'd rather have the product than the money" sheerly on the basis of how you value the alternative uses for the money and the use of the product. You do not consider the advertising in your decision.
And it is not accurate to reply, "but the price is higher because of the advertising" because prices are determined solely by what the market will bear, not by cost of ingredients or manufacture.
I know what you mean, yes, but please articulate a little more accurately: price is not a binary yes/no, it's a linear scale. You are already investing some time in the endeavor and time is money as they say. How about, "So far I've been willing to use Napster to a certain extent for free. If there were a charge, the more I had to pay, the more service I'd expect to get to continue using it at the level I do now. Otherwise, my usage would drop by some fraction."
maybe I meant to say "class M planet" :)
maybe I didn't say it right? Earth's moon does not "orbit the earth". Rather, Earth and Luna orbit around a common point at their center of mass, much closer to Earth's surface than to Earth's center. That two planetoid system can be said to orbit the sun. In the case of Jupiter's moons (and the Earth-Luna system compared to the sun), the mass of the satellites is much smaller than Jupiter so they don't move the center of mass of the system much away from Jupiter's center, so it is easier to make the approximation that they "orbit the planet" without much error.
I was only making the point that when drawing arbitraty distinctions to classify celestial bodies, one must make note of what are the important details you are trying to capture. Sphere-ness and atmosphere are meaningful indicators of size, telling a lot about what to expect to see looking at the body. Looking at the Earth-Luna system, who orbits who is thrown into more doubt.
In the case of Pluto, how it was formed would seem to be the most interesting question to answer about it, and would determine where we wind up classifying it. It behaves like a planet today by many definitions, but if it didn't form the same way as the others we might rethink the classifications.
they're all planets.
The most meaningful definition of planetoid is "enough gravity to be 'spherical'", and planet "enough gravity to hold an atmosphere". Our planet+moon system rotates around the center of mass of both bodies, and neither deserves the "credit" for that, but our spherical moon planetoid has no atmosphere.
linux is going incredibly slow[ly]? it didn't even exist a short time ago. It was small a short time after that. It never got mentioned in the press a short time after that... so therefore it will never catch up? You've just recapitulated the mistake of Zeno's paradox! I guess Microsoft and Compaq will never overtake IBM on the desktop... :)
And did you know you are using racist slang, you nitwit
actually, not many "great thinkers" agree with you. the definition of "rights" that is used, for instance in the Bill of Rights, are rights that cannot be signed away. You can't sign away your right to free speech, you can't sign away your right to vote, you can't sign away your right to an attorney. You may waive your rights (choose not to exercise) at certain points, but you can always change your mind.
The 14th Amendment (anti-slavery, or "involuntary servitude") would be meaningless if employers could make you sign away your rights to freedom in order to get a job.
some advertisers on slashdot use doubleclick and slashdot dutifully puts up their ads. truth.
X's network abilities are completely irrelevant to you? Do you work in a network environment? If you are, you are talking nonsense.
to achieve buy-in from established teams, to prove that using their model was feasible for established products and not just from the ground up, to prove that in switching you could reuse and not reinvent the wheel, blah blah.
regarding your software engineering talents... we agree to disagree ;)
yes, starting with the definition. you are thinking of software architecture, aren't you. :)
X got it more right in other ways such as separating the client and server, incredibly powerful in a network world and something Windows users can only dream about.
And that's not to mention that 98 and NT are completely different from one another... so much for code reusability :)
I can't imagine either model is what Miguel wants to work toward.
I think I've demonstrated here that I know more about Software Engineering than you and Miguel combined. You can't say "everbody keeps rewriting, so we are going to rewrite for the last time!" with any credibility.
And I addressed your misimpressions about DOS in another post.
Note, by the way, that the Microsoft style he loves so much, has produced a windows manager which is embedded so deeply in the rest of the operating system that there is no way to have end-user choice, and many windows daemons have to have an invisible window, not for UI purposes, but because it's the only way they can get messages from the OS. The guy responsible for that mess, Bill Gates, has managed much larger and much more successful projects than Miguel, and I don't listen to Bill's opinions about software architecture either.
Microsoft was working on and selling Xenix (now SCO) in-house in the early days of DOS. Furthermore, Multiplan and Word were developed cross platform on a PDP-11 running unix.
Yes, the guy who originally wrote DOS did model it after CP/M (which was modelled after Digital's RT11 or RSX11), but when Microsoft got hold of it they set about adding subdirectories and IO redirection a la the Unix that everyone at Microsoft was using every day.