Yes, but the point still stands: 1) OpenGL can advance, DX9 cannot 2) OpenGL supports more platforms than DX10 3) Targetting advanced features in OpenGL will give you a broader customer base than targetting DX10
That is not what I heard. I heard that if no GL driver existed, Microsoft's default GL driver would map to DirectX, to supply a minimal amount of hardware performance.
As soon as AMD gets to 65nm, Intel is moving to 45nm. Intel can already clock past 3.5GHz, 4GHz with some serious tweaking, today. Intel has lots of headroom with 65nm, and loads more with 45nm.
In other words, as soon as AMD releases a faster CPU, so can Intel.
The question holds, what can AMD pull out of their hat to BEAT Intel?
Well, from my understanding: DX3 shipped on NT4 DX4, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, and DX9 ship for Windows 2k DX4, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, and DX9 ship for Windows XP
DX10 only ships on Vista.
So the difference that would allow OpenGL to become dominant is that, at least overnight with the release of Vista, you can install OpenGL on your Windows2k, WindowsXP, and your Vista OSes, whereas a game written in DX10 is only playable in Vista.
A game coded in OpenGL is therefore open to more users, a bigger customer base, and potentially more profit, than a game coded in DX10. As per support for geometry shaders, I guess it depends on whether the GLSL has it or not, I wouldn't know myself.
Why do you think Microsoft "getting it" has anything to do with Microsoft's dominance? Microsoft's "getting it" as espoused by the OP is more in line with making good products, not about winning market share.
In a similar vein, after 20+ years, Apple is "getting it" and is growing in dominance in the living room with their iPod and their iTMS service.
The difference is that Microsoft gets "good consumer design" and Apple gets "good business decisions".
1997 called and wants it's transparent colored plastics back.
Since 2001 they have released the Titanium PowerBook, the all white iBook, the Aluminum PowerBook, the Aluminum PowerMac, the all white iMac, the all white eMac, the new all white iMac, and the new black MacBook.
Apple has not had any associated with colored PCs since 2001, five years running now.
If you include the iPod, the ONLY color they played with is blue, green, gold, silver, and pink on the iPod mini released in 2004 and retired in 2005.
So if everyone is emulating Apple, they are five years out of date.
1) Why do you believe AMD can do something Intel cannot? 2) If AMD does not match Intel, they will be forced to create coprocessors to supplement the CPU because Intel currently has the faster CPU 3) The time it takes AMD to match Intel gives Intel the same amount of time to stay ahead. The real question: If AMD were really ahead of Intel, why didn't AMD create an Opteron/Athlon killer in the time it took Intel to create their C2D? 4) Intel's shortcoming was sticking to Netburst two years too long. AMD's advantage then was having a better architecture; why haven't they maintained this advantage then?
There is no reason to believe AMD will become the king of server processors if Intel can continue to create better CPUs and they too add: 1) On die memory controller 2) Glueless CPU logic
Grandparents will want to watch more than 1 video at a time:)
A 3:1 chat for example: Grandparents + Grandchild (in college) + Child (at home) + Son-in-law (traveling)
If each one is encoded in H.264 at 1024x760, each connection would need to simultaneously encode one stream and decode three other streams.
Just decoding each stream would require something like a 1.83 GHz Core Duo or 2.8GHz P4, so three cores at 1.83GHz is already needed. In order to encode, in real time, you would need an additional core, at least, plus another for the OS and application.
Then there is security cameras, virtual classrooms, virtual meeting rooms, etc. And then some people will do more than one at once.
They would conceptually be thought of as frames, since they are all independent elements. You would have one container page, which WOULD be serial, that gets composed when all the other elements are complete. So the banner, navigation bar, content, link-box, and footer would all get spun off to five different cores to be rendered simultaneously, and when they are all complete the sixth core would compose all five elements.
If people can write frames manually, they can continue to write pages intended for parallel rendering. No different than people doing ray tracing definitions by hand, but rendered by a ray tracer, or writing code by hand and a compiler compiles it. In this case you might have to write a serial page by hand and let a composer/compiler parallelize it... or if you are sufficiently skilled, write it completely parallel to begin with.
The problem we are running into is that webpages were designed to be parsed serially; if they were designed to be parsed in parallel, then they would be woefully inefficient being parsed serially, which until now has been the norm. The same with your printer example.
So imagine a situation where a webpage was DESIGNED to be parsed in parallel. The page hierarchy would be formatted into independent chunks that could be assigned to different threads and cores without first preparsing it. It would be like having an index built into the webpage such that different elements on the page could automatically, without additional effort, be spun off to different cores. A navigation bar, a banner, the main content, a link-box, and a footer, for example, could all be defined in a webpage such that as soon as the render saw that there exists five elements on the page each element is spun off to a different core to be handled.
The same with a printer; if the printing language were designed up front to be parallel, rather than serial, you could see speedups in rendering, though such gains is probably negligible. An image, such as an embedded jpeg in a document, would be split into four, for four cores, and then rendered into the appropriate printing language, which might come in handy when 10 megapixel pictures become common. Imagine a printer with four print heads, now. You could conceivably send four streams of data at once, which again could be fed by four cores (or a single core of course, if it pre-computed the data needed to be sent to the printer).
Decoding video: Uh, take a look at HD... that's pretty hardcore:) No imagine decoding on the fly HD video chat; unlike HD DVD, on the fly encoded video will not have the best encoding/compression/compute values, but rather an average one. No imagine multi-chat, in which four people are talking, and four HD video streams are being decoded at once.
Encoding video: Imagine now encoding an HD video chat on the fly:) My parents, for example, talking to their grand-daughter in HD, is clearly superior to seeing a 640x480 image, which is again clearly superior to 320x240. Multiple cores would allow for a much nicer, cleaner, 30fps 1024x768 video stream, especially if background tasks are occurring.
AI: I think you misunderstand. One AI enemy which formulates, simultaneously, five DIFFERENT responses from the same data structures... in other words, an AI of split mind. In the same way I can imagine writing four different responses to you, but only acting on one of them, an AI with multiple responses, but only a single action, becomes much richer, more unpredictable, and unbelievably more complex.
Physics: Physics is really a generic superset of graphics. Graphics is merely how light interacts with the data structures. Throw in gravity, sound, friction, and mass, and you have physics. The same reason why graphics can use multiple cores, then physics can too. Imagine if the 3d sound effects were split among two CPUs, just like frames are? Sound can be trivially represented as frames, much like graphics. Imagine the same with gravity being calculated by two CPUs every other frame, or friction, etc. You can calculate, for example, the spray pattern of a shotgun in time; the trajectory is known, the number of pellets are known, and the environment is known. Right now we approximate the intersection of a shotgun blast with the intersection of a player or a structure, but with additional compute resources you can actually trace each pellet individually!
The same with falling rocks, a flooding room, etc.
Most problems ARE parallelizable, I think, the only real question is approaching the problem from the onset with multiple cores in mind.
Uh, all your examples are only serial in implementation, not serial in nature.
A webpage, for example, need not be parsed serial, though the performance of current systems is high enough that you get nothing in attempting to parallelize the renderer. A printer, however, can trivially be designed to be parallel, especially if you have unusually high DPI. Think of a printer rendering to a paper in the same way that a graphics card renders to a framebuffer. If you can use multiple pipelines, GPUs, and cards to accelerate video display, why wouldn't the same be possible for printing? The neat thing about printers and printed data is that there is no dependence, the image in the upper right exists independent of the image on the lower right, and etc etc. In theory you could have a core assigned to every PIXEL printed on a page, and a corresponding printhead with a printhead for each core, and you would be able to print an entire page in a cingle CPU cycle. Technically.
So there are plenty of other things that could be executed on multiple cores:
Decoding video (playback) Encoding video (storage, rendering, chat) AI for games (imagine simulating a multitasking AI on multiple cores) Physics for games (uncoupled events can be processed independently and coupled events require access to the same data)
Yes, everything has a serial bottleneck, such as data access, but once properly set up most things can also be set up to be multicore as well. Saving a file, for example, can be multicore if you imagine the write as happening all at once, rather than serially, with each core assigned to a write head, each write head then operating independently... Etc.
They will make money, of course. That is their true motivation (to an extent, the engineers like making cool stuff, the marketers like selling cool stuff, in the end everyone gets a paycheck).
It is irrelevant whether Intel leads or follows except insofar as it achieves their agenda of technical, marketing, and profit superiority.
Intel will wait until the technology is mature, the market is ready, and their competition UNready, if they have the choice.
If a movie can make you cry, and your game has a NON interactive movie in it, then of course, it's trivial (from a film-maker's perspective). If the game has a fully interactive movie in it, then it is still possible, but it isn't the game making you cry so much as your choices and the reactions elicited from the game's responses that make you cry. Finally if the game is fully interactive and fully immersive (insofar as 2D video technology and controllers allow), then it is quite possible that a game that creates scenes in which you make choices you will cry over.
The license happens to be a side effect of the way copyright and IP is handled in our country. I don't think there is any false advertising, fraud, or bait and switch. Buying a copy does not give you the right to download or upload a copy (copyright restrictions on IP).
What false dichotomy? I said, "We will only be able to find a cure for Alzheimer's or MCD by pure luck unless we also happen to have a decent understanding of how the brain works."
If we have no knowledge, I call in luck because there is no direction. As soon as we do have knowledge we can apply direction. Without direction we cast blindly, which again returns back to luck. I never said that luck operated in exclusion to knowledge, nor knowledge in exclusion to luck. If I had said, "We will only be able to find a cure... by pure luck or a thorough understanding of how the brain works," then I would be espousing a false dichotomy.
Notice I never said "or", but "unless", which is different. Or means one of the conditions must be true. Unless weakens the precondition; we can have pure luck OR we can have luck PLUS knowledge, without excluding luck at all.
We don't know, and that is why this kind of research is important. We don't know enough yet to know whether deja vu is a malfunction, a short circuit, correct, incorrect, or a dysfunction.
My view is based on current information + world view. If research uncovers new information then I update my world view.
What's wrong with an "assumption based on world view"? I certainly can't rely on "assumption based on evidence" or "assumption based on test" since I do not have either evidence nor test data.
I do hope you're joking and not serious. Being able to understand how something works (like the brain) as well as how it works incorrectly (like deja vu) is pretty important in figuring out how to fix it when something really breaks (like Alzheimer's or dementia or psychosis).
Research is research. Understanding how the brain works is vital in progressing the state of the art. We will only be able to find a cure for Alzheimer's or MCD by pure luck unless we also happen to have a decent understanding of how the brain works. Science is not at all directed, as most people imagine, but much more like evolution; a hundred million different approaches all aiming for different goals, filtered through successful applications, and then repeated all over again.
Who knows but maybe the cure to Alzheimer's is FOUND because we understand how the brain triggers recall, which is touched upon when deja vu is wrongly invoked?
They have contributed patches and fixes to GCC, they have released their WebKit, based on KHTML, as open source which was recently adopted by Nokia for their web browser, and they host the source for several of their own in house projects, such as Bonjour, Darwin (though out of date), Quicktime/Darwin Streaming Server, and others.
So they have full time developers working on open source projects (GCC), release their own source, and contribute to existing projects. Are you just pissed that Apple hasn't adopted Linux and moved it forward?
When it is the uninformed user who keeps upsetting your equilibrium? All Apple has done is release source, adopted open source products internally, and contribute to other open source projects.
If Apple users smarten up, it in no way changes what Apple has done and continues to do: use open source when beneficial.
His primary legal right: Innocent until proven guilty. Their primary legal right: The right to control distribution.
If they cannot find him guilty, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have, they can't stick anything to him. So first they have to prove he downloaded Meet the Fockers before they can levy anything else. What is the proof they have?
I'm sorry, I never intended to stray either. Let me address your original point then:
Bundling is not bad. It is a way to add value to the system. I don't think it's wrong for Microsoft to bundle IE, Movie Maker, or WMP, but the reason the tangent occurred is because I do think it is wrong for Microsoft to punish OEMs who choose to bundle Netscape/Firefox over IE, or choose to develop their own OS instead of using Windows.
Does the market correct itself? Of course, even without government intervention, but on a scale of corporate lifetimes, rather than system lifetimes.
Anyway, the way the government split the Bells was stupid, by granting them regional monopolies. Splitting up Microsoft into different companies would have meant each company would produce products that itself is a local monopoly, such as office and OS, but that the entertainment division or the services division would have to succeed on their own without the support of the OS or office cash reserves. Instead we have Microsoft blowing through six million to establish the Zune and six billion to establish the XBox and XBox 360 without having made a profit yet.
In the end Microsoft will grow or die, and it doesn't really matter.
The key difference here is that the anti competitive behavior here is self destructive. Lowering prices to sweeten a deal, while maintaining profitability, is one thing, but what Microsoft has been doing is withholding product entirely, something that would definitely eat into their bottom line.
In other words, they would cut off their own arm and salt their own fields to prevent their enemies from acquiring a resource.
My point is simple. If we don't allow individuals to act in this manner, such as making threats against other individuals, I don't think it is kosher if we allow corporations to do the same thing. Of course this is tempered, a corporation is certainly allowed to poison its own well if it isn't a monopoly because it is very stupid and profit risking to do so, but a monopoly is held to a different standard because it can, technically, wipe out half the market in order to destroy it's competitors and still survive. I think the government actually had an effect on Microsoft's behavior; look at how it is being treated in Europe, for example, after we declared them to be a monopoly and an abusive one at that. Did our government do enough? I don't think so, I think they should have split the company into an OS company, an applications company, and a services company.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the point still stands:
1) OpenGL can advance, DX9 cannot
2) OpenGL supports more platforms than DX10
3) Targetting advanced features in OpenGL will give you a broader customer base than targetting DX10
That is not what I heard. I heard that if no GL driver existed, Microsoft's default GL driver would map to DirectX, to supply a minimal amount of hardware performance.
As soon as AMD gets to 65nm, Intel is moving to 45nm. Intel can already clock past 3.5GHz, 4GHz with some serious tweaking, today. Intel has lots of headroom with 65nm, and loads more with 45nm.
In other words, as soon as AMD releases a faster CPU, so can Intel.
The question holds, what can AMD pull out of their hat to BEAT Intel?
Well, from my understanding:
DX3 shipped on NT4
DX4, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, and DX9 ship for Windows 2k
DX4, DX5, DX6, DX7, DX8, and DX9 ship for Windows XP
DX10 only ships on Vista.
So the difference that would allow OpenGL to become dominant is that, at least overnight with the release of Vista, you can install OpenGL on your Windows2k, WindowsXP, and your Vista OSes, whereas a game written in DX10 is only playable in Vista.
A game coded in OpenGL is therefore open to more users, a bigger customer base, and potentially more profit, than a game coded in DX10. As per support for geometry shaders, I guess it depends on whether the GLSL has it or not, I wouldn't know myself.
Why do you think Microsoft "getting it" has anything to do with Microsoft's dominance? Microsoft's "getting it" as espoused by the OP is more in line with making good products, not about winning market share.
In a similar vein, after 20+ years, Apple is "getting it" and is growing in dominance in the living room with their iPod and their iTMS service.
The difference is that Microsoft gets "good consumer design" and Apple gets "good business decisions".
1997 called and wants it's transparent colored plastics back.
Since 2001 they have released the Titanium PowerBook, the all white iBook, the Aluminum PowerBook, the Aluminum PowerMac, the all white iMac, the all white eMac, the new all white iMac, and the new black MacBook.
Apple has not had any associated with colored PCs since 2001, five years running now.
If you include the iPod, the ONLY color they played with is blue, green, gold, silver, and pink on the iPod mini released in 2004 and retired in 2005.
So if everyone is emulating Apple, they are five years out of date.
1) Why do you believe AMD can do something Intel cannot?
2) If AMD does not match Intel, they will be forced to create coprocessors to supplement the CPU because Intel currently has the faster CPU
3) The time it takes AMD to match Intel gives Intel the same amount of time to stay ahead. The real question: If AMD were really ahead of Intel, why didn't AMD create an Opteron/Athlon killer in the time it took Intel to create their C2D?
4) Intel's shortcoming was sticking to Netburst two years too long. AMD's advantage then was having a better architecture; why haven't they maintained this advantage then?
There is no reason to believe AMD will become the king of server processors if Intel can continue to create better CPUs and they too add:
1) On die memory controller
2) Glueless CPU logic
There is nothing stopping Intel.
That is why my example had three HD decoding streams and one encoded stream.
Grandparents will want to watch more than 1 video at a time :)
A 3:1 chat for example:
Grandparents + Grandchild (in college) + Child (at home) + Son-in-law (traveling)
If each one is encoded in H.264 at 1024x760, each connection would need to simultaneously encode one stream and decode three other streams.
Just decoding each stream would require something like a 1.83 GHz Core Duo or 2.8GHz P4, so three cores at 1.83GHz is already needed. In order to encode, in real time, you would need an additional core, at least, plus another for the OS and application.
Then there is security cameras, virtual classrooms, virtual meeting rooms, etc. And then some people will do more than one at once.
They would conceptually be thought of as frames, since they are all independent elements. You would have one container page, which WOULD be serial, that gets composed when all the other elements are complete. So the banner, navigation bar, content, link-box, and footer would all get spun off to five different cores to be rendered simultaneously, and when they are all complete the sixth core would compose all five elements.
If people can write frames manually, they can continue to write pages intended for parallel rendering. No different than people doing ray tracing definitions by hand, but rendered by a ray tracer, or writing code by hand and a compiler compiles it. In this case you might have to write a serial page by hand and let a composer/compiler parallelize it... or if you are sufficiently skilled, write it completely parallel to begin with.
The problem we are running into is that webpages were designed to be parsed serially; if they were designed to be parsed in parallel, then they would be woefully inefficient being parsed serially, which until now has been the norm. The same with your printer example.
:) No imagine decoding on the fly HD video chat; unlike HD DVD, on the fly encoded video will not have the best encoding/compression/compute values, but rather an average one. No imagine multi-chat, in which four people are talking, and four HD video streams are being decoded at once.
:) My parents, for example, talking to their grand-daughter in HD, is clearly superior to seeing a 640x480 image, which is again clearly superior to 320x240. Multiple cores would allow for a much nicer, cleaner, 30fps 1024x768 video stream, especially if background tasks are occurring.
So imagine a situation where a webpage was DESIGNED to be parsed in parallel. The page hierarchy would be formatted into independent chunks that could be assigned to different threads and cores without first preparsing it. It would be like having an index built into the webpage such that different elements on the page could automatically, without additional effort, be spun off to different cores. A navigation bar, a banner, the main content, a link-box, and a footer, for example, could all be defined in a webpage such that as soon as the render saw that there exists five elements on the page each element is spun off to a different core to be handled.
The same with a printer; if the printing language were designed up front to be parallel, rather than serial, you could see speedups in rendering, though such gains is probably negligible. An image, such as an embedded jpeg in a document, would be split into four, for four cores, and then rendered into the appropriate printing language, which might come in handy when 10 megapixel pictures become common. Imagine a printer with four print heads, now. You could conceivably send four streams of data at once, which again could be fed by four cores (or a single core of course, if it pre-computed the data needed to be sent to the printer).
Decoding video: Uh, take a look at HD... that's pretty hardcore
Encoding video: Imagine now encoding an HD video chat on the fly
AI: I think you misunderstand. One AI enemy which formulates, simultaneously, five DIFFERENT responses from the same data structures... in other words, an AI of split mind. In the same way I can imagine writing four different responses to you, but only acting on one of them, an AI with multiple responses, but only a single action, becomes much richer, more unpredictable, and unbelievably more complex.
Physics: Physics is really a generic superset of graphics. Graphics is merely how light interacts with the data structures. Throw in gravity, sound, friction, and mass, and you have physics. The same reason why graphics can use multiple cores, then physics can too. Imagine if the 3d sound effects were split among two CPUs, just like frames are? Sound can be trivially represented as frames, much like graphics. Imagine the same with gravity being calculated by two CPUs every other frame, or friction, etc. You can calculate, for example, the spray pattern of a shotgun in time; the trajectory is known, the number of pellets are known, and the environment is known. Right now we approximate the intersection of a shotgun blast with the intersection of a player or a structure, but with additional compute resources you can actually trace each pellet individually!
The same with falling rocks, a flooding room, etc.
Most problems ARE parallelizable, I think, the only real question is approaching the problem from the onset with multiple cores in mind.
Uh, all your examples are only serial in implementation, not serial in nature.
A webpage, for example, need not be parsed serial, though the performance of current systems is high enough that you get nothing in attempting to parallelize the renderer. A printer, however, can trivially be designed to be parallel, especially if you have unusually high DPI. Think of a printer rendering to a paper in the same way that a graphics card renders to a framebuffer. If you can use multiple pipelines, GPUs, and cards to accelerate video display, why wouldn't the same be possible for printing? The neat thing about printers and printed data is that there is no dependence, the image in the upper right exists independent of the image on the lower right, and etc etc. In theory you could have a core assigned to every PIXEL printed on a page, and a corresponding printhead with a printhead for each core, and you would be able to print an entire page in a cingle CPU cycle. Technically.
So there are plenty of other things that could be executed on multiple cores:
Decoding video (playback)
Encoding video (storage, rendering, chat)
AI for games (imagine simulating a multitasking AI on multiple cores)
Physics for games (uncoupled events can be processed independently and coupled events require access to the same data)
Yes, everything has a serial bottleneck, such as data access, but once properly set up most things can also be set up to be multicore as well. Saving a file, for example, can be multicore if you imagine the write as happening all at once, rather than serially, with each core assigned to a write head, each write head then operating independently... Etc.
They will make money, of course. That is their true motivation (to an extent, the engineers like making cool stuff, the marketers like selling cool stuff, in the end everyone gets a paycheck).
It is irrelevant whether Intel leads or follows except insofar as it achieves their agenda of technical, marketing, and profit superiority.
Intel will wait until the technology is mature, the market is ready, and their competition UNready, if they have the choice.
If a movie can make you cry, and your game has a NON interactive movie in it, then of course, it's trivial (from a film-maker's perspective).
If the game has a fully interactive movie in it, then it is still possible, but it isn't the game making you cry so much as your choices and the reactions elicited from the game's responses that make you cry.
Finally if the game is fully interactive and fully immersive (insofar as 2D video technology and controllers allow), then it is quite possible that a game that creates scenes in which you make choices you will cry over.
Uh, you're buying a physical object, a DVD.
The license happens to be a side effect of the way copyright and IP is handled in our country. I don't think there is any false advertising, fraud, or bait and switch. Buying a copy does not give you the right to download or upload a copy (copyright restrictions on IP).
What false dichotomy? I said, "We will only be able to find a cure for Alzheimer's or MCD by pure luck unless we also happen to have a decent understanding of how the brain works."
If we have no knowledge, I call in luck because there is no direction. As soon as we do have knowledge we can apply direction. Without direction we cast blindly, which again returns back to luck. I never said that luck operated in exclusion to knowledge, nor knowledge in exclusion to luck. If I had said, "We will only be able to find a cure... by pure luck or a thorough understanding of how the brain works," then I would be espousing a false dichotomy.
Notice I never said "or", but "unless", which is different. Or means one of the conditions must be true. Unless weakens the precondition; we can have pure luck OR we can have luck PLUS knowledge, without excluding luck at all.
We don't know, and that is why this kind of research is important. We don't know enough yet to know whether deja vu is a malfunction, a short circuit, correct, incorrect, or a dysfunction.
My view is based on current information + world view. If research uncovers new information then I update my world view.
What's wrong with an "assumption based on world view"? I certainly can't rely on "assumption based on evidence" or "assumption based on test" since I do not have either evidence nor test data.
I do hope you're joking and not serious. Being able to understand how something works (like the brain) as well as how it works incorrectly (like deja vu) is pretty important in figuring out how to fix it when something really breaks (like Alzheimer's or dementia or psychosis).
Research is research. Understanding how the brain works is vital in progressing the state of the art. We will only be able to find a cure for Alzheimer's or MCD by pure luck unless we also happen to have a decent understanding of how the brain works. Science is not at all directed, as most people imagine, but much more like evolution; a hundred million different approaches all aiming for different goals, filtered through successful applications, and then repeated all over again.
Who knows but maybe the cure to Alzheimer's is FOUND because we understand how the brain triggers recall, which is touched upon when deja vu is wrongly invoked?
They have contributed patches and fixes to GCC, they have released their WebKit, based on KHTML, as open source which was recently adopted by Nokia for their web browser, and they host the source for several of their own in house projects, such as Bonjour, Darwin (though out of date), Quicktime/Darwin Streaming Server, and others.
So they have full time developers working on open source projects (GCC), release their own source, and contribute to existing projects. Are you just pissed that Apple hasn't adopted Linux and moved it forward?
When it is the uninformed user who keeps upsetting your equilibrium? All Apple has done is release source, adopted open source products internally, and contribute to other open source projects.
If Apple users smarten up, it in no way changes what Apple has done and continues to do: use open source when beneficial.
His primary legal right: Innocent until proven guilty.
Their primary legal right: The right to control distribution.
If they cannot find him guilty, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have, they can't stick anything to him. So first they have to prove he downloaded Meet the Fockers before they can levy anything else. What is the proof they have?
In your post, it says "I give up sometimes I really do..."
:P
NO YOU DON'T, YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME explaining, "This page is intentionally left blank" SO YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN UP!!!
I'm sorry, I never intended to stray either. Let me address your original point then:
Bundling is not bad. It is a way to add value to the system. I don't think it's wrong for Microsoft to bundle IE, Movie Maker, or WMP, but the reason the tangent occurred is because I do think it is wrong for Microsoft to punish OEMs who choose to bundle Netscape/Firefox over IE, or choose to develop their own OS instead of using Windows.
Does the market correct itself? Of course, even without government intervention, but on a scale of corporate lifetimes, rather than system lifetimes.
Anyway, the way the government split the Bells was stupid, by granting them regional monopolies. Splitting up Microsoft into different companies would have meant each company would produce products that itself is a local monopoly, such as office and OS, but that the entertainment division or the services division would have to succeed on their own without the support of the OS or office cash reserves. Instead we have Microsoft blowing through six million to establish the Zune and six billion to establish the XBox and XBox 360 without having made a profit yet.
In the end Microsoft will grow or die, and it doesn't really matter.
The key difference here is that the anti competitive behavior here is self destructive. Lowering prices to sweeten a deal, while maintaining profitability, is one thing, but what Microsoft has been doing is withholding product entirely, something that would definitely eat into their bottom line.
In other words, they would cut off their own arm and salt their own fields to prevent their enemies from acquiring a resource.
My point is simple. If we don't allow individuals to act in this manner, such as making threats against other individuals, I don't think it is kosher if we allow corporations to do the same thing. Of course this is tempered, a corporation is certainly allowed to poison its own well if it isn't a monopoly because it is very stupid and profit risking to do so, but a monopoly is held to a different standard because it can, technically, wipe out half the market in order to destroy it's competitors and still survive. I think the government actually had an effect on Microsoft's behavior; look at how it is being treated in Europe, for example, after we declared them to be a monopoly and an abusive one at that. Did our government do enough? I don't think so, I think they should have split the company into an OS company, an applications company, and a services company.