It required time, money and effort on MS's part to actively REMOVE Netscape style plugin support. Why REMOVE a used feature when leaving the code doesn't actually hurt anything and supports your current user base?
I submitted this as an article and it got rejected, but I really think that it's a good glimpse into the behind-the-scenes power struggles that go on.
I was going to submit that story too, but figured the queue already had it hundreds of times. It's hard for me to see how feuding over the control of glibc and threats of a Red Hat fork are less newsworthy here than yet another forum for pointless Microsoft bashing taken straight from CNN's front page.
I thought the most interesting bit was:
The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's success.
Oh, come on. The fact that a concept existed, or possibly had been implemented, somewhere in the world of computing doesn't make it trivial that Apple brought it to personal computing.
When the Macintosh came out, it was basically a low-cost, stripped down version of desktop workstations at the time. Desktop workstations had good graphics, built-in Ethernet networking, lots of memory, and a large screen.
And you don't thinking there's anything notable about giving PC users what MIT students and a handful of engineers had access to?
CD drives, USB, Firewire, and other technologies were developed for the PC or consumer market.
And Apple made them part of computing. There's a reason why until recently it was hard to find USB goods that weren't translucent blue.
In terms of laptops and handhelds, Apple was late to the party. The laptop form factor was most clearly described by Alan Kay with his Dynabook, more than a decade before Apple did anything. The TRS-80 Model 100 was much more portable than even today's Apple laptops. Handhelds predate the Newton by many years as well, and they were going to happen with or without Apple.
I think he's overstating Apple's importance in laptops but -- the Dynabook? Come on, at least talk about the Osborne. And while there was lots of talk about handhelds (Go!, that vaporware Microsoft came up with to crush Go!) Apple actually committed and did it.
Aside from playing R&D lab for the rest of the industry, and the fact that Apple stories here (a mainly Linux crowd) generate the interest that they do.....
I always laugh when the inevitable post pops up in an Apple story: Why are Apple zealots so enthusiastic about a company that {threatened some web site for violating an NDA; protects their IP; sells an OS that only runs on their hardware; doesn't allow clones; uses one-button mice}?
What I always wonder is how people can get so passionate about companies that make components that are 10% faster/bigger than they were the year before, manufacturers who screw those parts together or game developers who write new engines to push 10% more polys through the new machine. I mean, that stuff is all necessary but if Nvidia, AMD or Dell didn't do it, ATi, Intel or Compaq would do exactly the same thing.
For better or worse, Apple tries to make computers qualitatively _better_.
An aside: why are people so infatuated with the idea that Apple "stole" all their GUI ideas from Xerox? It's blatantly false and _somebody_ had to have done it, right? Why is it so much less painful for them to believe that work was done by Xerox and not by Apple?
Re:Been running it for a week now, great release.
on
KDE 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since Qt/KDE 2.x is fairly recent code (KDE 2.0 came out last year, fer crying out loud), I wonder what cruft might be in there. Or was it the proverbial design decision that turns out to be bad afterall, once your product has been unleashed?
It's not really like that. The decision to break binary compatability was based on the desire to use new features in Qt 3, and encouraged by the fact that gcc 3.0 is going to disrupt BC anyway. Given that decision, you may as well take the opportunity to patch up API's that could use some further improvement.
In accordance with my new resolve to better plan ahead, I hereby claim First Post on Michael's future Slashdot article "Poor, misunderstood hacker jailed by clueless, corrupt judge for anti-Code Red vigilanteism." (from the no-i-mean-cracker-no-wait-i-mean-hacker dept.)
What an idiot! I have zero sympathy for this clown who found exactly the trouble he was looking for.
I'd grab FP on Jon Katz's follow-up about geek oppression and the tyranny of global corporations but I got bored after trying to imagine the eleventh paragraph.
My question for all you Slashdotters out there is this: I would like to 'reward' the Cygwin people for giving me a great product that fits my needs, but aside from an 'attaboy' email, I don't see how I could compensate them, preferrably financially.
Don't sell the 'attaboy' email short. It's a great motivation to get some feedback beyond "You suck!" and "It doesn't work. Do I need Windows 2000?" For most small-time developers, it's probably more of an inducement to keep working than a $10 check would be. And it costs you othing but time, so be lavish!
Not that anyone would likely be offended by money.
I'll back that as well: recently I needed to have a Windows box available. (Normally I use MacOS and Unix, and I've never done a Windows install before.) I built an Athlon box, partitioned the drive and installed Win98 SE and Mandrake 8.0. Mandrake successfully detected all the hardware except for the monitor which I had to specify by reading the model number on the front and choosing it from the offered drop-down box. I still haven't gotten Windows to recognize the SMC Ethernet card and installing the driver from the floppy doesn't seem to be working.
As an added benefit, under a non-MS system you don't need to deal with the 20 irritating "utilities" that get installed with, say, a SoundBlaster card. Apparently it's not worth the trouble to port them.
MacOS is still untouched for ease of installation (boot from CD, hit OK a couple of times and go get some coffee). But from what I saw, Mandrake has Windows beat, at least for someone unfamiliar with the quirks of a Windows install.
FUD or not, it's certainly not a shibboleth. (A shibboleth is a pronounciation-based password, like when American soldiers in the Pacific used "lollapalooza" to cause Japanese intruders to make themselves known.)
As an aside, dot.kde.org has to be the only site that works _better_ after a Slashdotting. It's been down all weekend and seems relatively responsive now.
It's apparently much easier to compare against existing patents than sift through hundreds of surviving algorithms to determine if they are useful, original, and patentable.
Or, as the article puts it:
"I imagine we have done that but we don't know it," laughs Koza. To identify valuable, original results rather than simply matching patents, he explains, a human expert in the given field would need to evaluate tens of thousands of survivors.
In other words, it turns out that an infinite number of monkeys really will stumble into everything given infinite time. Frequently, solutions are simple -- it's identifying the need and fitting a solution to it that' s worthy of a patent.
Yeah, but had the satelite gone through as planned, it supposedly would have had a ride. The challenges by the Republicans created the delay that kept it from going.
It seems to me the lesson to learn is that if you're concerned about the scientific results of a project, don't let a politician prominently identify himself with it for his own aggrandizement. That's basically forcing the other side to try to stop it. This isn't abortion -- bipartisan is always the way to go.
Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?
"Vandettas" aside, (they sang back-up for Martha, right?), this project doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in me. It started out as a stunt by Al Gore, and while scientists may have come up with useful uses for it (which I'm not qualified to judge), I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about a project that was designed to do something useful in the first place.
My sense this is like the biology experiments they do on the space shuttle, something I am qualified to judge. They're worth doing, given that the shuttle is already going but they're hardly a justification for the shuttle program.
As an aside, which may make you feel better, I heard a talk recently by one of the leaders of the Chandra telescope project. Asked about the security of funding, he said that while legislators aren't going to give more money, they pretty much all appreciate astronomy and space and the stream of money isn't in jeopardy at all.
I agree with you and I've got to wonder -- does anyone at the book publishers use ebooks? I would be amazed if their editors aren't still reading paper books.
Maybe at some point it will occur to corporations and VCs to ask themselves before committing millions, "Would I pay for this?"
Eazel investors: Would you pay to remotely store an insignificant amount of data?
Online film investors: Would you pay to watch your crummy movies in a tiny window over a 56K connection?
Sure, if I were climbing K2 I'd bring one ebook reader. But for normal use -- what would I want one for today?
Re:Oh for goodness sakes!
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 2
From the article:
Now, if you've read this article all the way through and you've got bright ideas swirling in your head about doing this yourself, you're probably wondering where to get the chassis. I got mine through connections, but if you're looking to obtain one for yourself, you might want to check with your nearest Apple Authorized Service Center. Ordering the chassis cost me about $160, and the 3.5" and CD bezels should cost you about $45 total.
You guys must have some serious problems. I havn't received *ONE* nore *SEEN* one of these messages..gigabytes of files? Sounds like you need some new friends if they don't know they're sending all that crap to you!
SirCam sends mail to any addresses in your IE cache. When your address is all over a site as heavily read as Slashdot, you'll get quite a few of them. You didn't think that the readership here is really composed of Linux wizards, did you...?
In today's tidBits, there's an article about SirCam, with some Mac user gloating but also an interesting list of what the author has received. (The article, by the way, is by a Jamie McCarthy - is that our beloved Slashdot editor of whiny articles about censorship and porn-deprived children?)
So what's the most interesting thing you guys have seen? I've gotten a time card template, a cover letter for a job application at IBM and a lot of gibberish. Please don't post anyone's dirty laundry! Just wondering what the worst has been.
By the way, what's the best way for a MacOS/Linux user to view those.pif and.com files? I've never seen those formats before.
Personally, it's of zero concern to me how politically correct Ximian's work is. (I'm skeptical that it's the best use of their resources and surprised that the free software world hasn't learned yet how counterproductive it is to overhype software that's not close to done, but those are entirely different matters.) But since I've been reading lots of stuff like this, I thought I'd point out some details.
If Ximian makes a.NET compatible implementation but doesn't require you to pay money, they are evil.
But if KDE implements ActiveX in Konqueror, it's allright.
Some developers came up with a way to use WINE to use ActiveX in Konqueror. To me, at least, that seems hardly the same as the Gnome project leader flying around the country talking about how.NET is the greatest thing since transistors, and his company sinking a ton of effort into reimplementing much of it.
If TheKompany makes commercial, closed source software, it's allright.
Where do people get this idea that Gnome and KDE have to be mirror oposites? The Kompany is in no way comparable to Ximian; they make some KDE based apps. If anything, they're comparable to the companies that are going to use GTK for commercial apps -- you know, the ones that GTK zealots are always saying guarantee an LGPL library's superiority over a GPL one?
Anyway, like I said, I don't care whether Ximian uses a MS technology or not. (As though KDE and Gnome aren't both total clones of the Windows desktop already....) But I can't help but think all these folks shouting, "But what about KDE and ActiveX!?!" seem awfully defensive about a project they claim to love.
And look how many people are under the impression that this is one of those removable hard drive gadgets! I mean, the article begins:
The NickLock is meant to simplify the rather annoying process of changing the main hard drive. Usually, to change the hard drive you have to first open the case and change the IDE jumper settings and probably the cabling as well. The typical way around this inconvenience is to use a removable frame system, in which each hard drive that you plan to use is installed into its own frame. After shutting down the computer, the drives can be exchanged freely. However, this solution is not ideal if you have to do this frequently, since hard drives are sensitive to physical movement. In the worst-case scenario, you could cause a head crash if you remove the drive before the read/write heads have been securely parked. In a more harmless scenario, the bearings could get out of whack, resulting in a noisier drive in the idle state.
With the NickLock, you can avoid these kinds of hazards and inconveniences.
Go C|Net! That was an excellent example of how to frame a question and attack it in a way where you can believe your findings. Matt Lake must have really paid attention in chem lab or stat class or something.
(How not to frame a question: go to national video game competitions, use the contestants as subjects in your study and trumpet your findings as proof that "gamers are comparable to top athletes". Also not to do: have Jon Katz post a long article on it days after Slashdot has already covered it, lift lengthy paragraphs from a newspaper article without using quotes or proper attribution and then add his own, even more overblown, conclusions.)
The most interesting thing, I thought, was how responding to "Remove" addresses didn't seem to be the disaster everyone says it is.
...Bruce Sterling's latest, Zeitgeist, which may mark a departure for someone looking for "just another Bruce Sterling book." Hint: it's set in the past, not the future.
I'm not much of a Bruce Sterling fan (or a William Gibson fan, for that matter) but I really liked their collaboration The Difference Engine, a speculative history about world where the engineering had existed to make Babbage engines a reality. It does cater to the politically correct exaggerations of Lady Ada as "the first programmer" but is generally a terrific book.
Well, for one thing, utilities are something that the government has extensive experience in and a history of regulating. Even if the AOL keiretsu does acquire a level of dominance comparable to what Microsoft has in their market, I doubt if it could ever throw the same weight around. But what's really relevant here is:
MS did not threaten to raise OS prices, they threatened not to nearly give it away any more. Otherwise they'd have to pay the full price(that everyone else pays) of 89$ for the software. Same thing AOL wants to do by giving 35$ per PC. MS just did it as a credit, because they had a product that PC makers saw as valuable. AOL doesn't really have a lot that PC makers consider to add value to their product, so they pay cash.
That's precisely my point -- if you're talking about computer makers, which we are, Microsoft has tremendous power over them while AOL has none. That's why, as you say, Microsoft can rely on threats while AOL has to offer sweeteners.
I used to work at CompUSA. No commission. There are "spiffs" from individual manufacturers. Apple being one of the most generous.
I (the original poster) was talking about spiffs. As far as how Apple stands, I'm not in a position to argue with you, but it does conflict with everything else I've heard on that score. (Also, supposedly Apple is really bad about paying them off.)
The problem is that a Mac costs more, is less powerful, less expandable and has fewer applications at a higher average price than a PC. Why would anyone pay more to do less? The salesmen know this and are just trying to do the right thing for the customers.
Well, you've definitely convinced me that you used to work at CompUSA!;-) So, you're saying that the salesmen there are driven by their deep knowledge of computers and their bottomless humanitarian impulses? To quote you, yeah, right...
Apparently AOL is trying to pull the same kind of stunts that got Microsoft in trouble with the DOJ.
1) What got Microsoft into trouble wasn't what they did but that they did it with a monopoly position. AOL hardly has a monopoly and can therefore legally do all sorts of things that would be illegal for Microsoft. 2) Anyway, I don't see where there's much similarity between Microsoft threatening to raise Windows prices to prohibitive levels for computer makers who don't do what they want and AOL offering bonuses to makers who deliver users to them.
To give this some perspective, Dell, Compaq and the rest are paying catalog owners and stores to give their products good placement -- and they're paying bonuses to salesmen who successfully move their boxes. (Apple doesn't pay those bonuses, which is why CompUSA salesmen are so reluctant to sell you a Mac even when you go in and demand one.)
Yeah, but the gamer subjects in the primary study were mostly found at regional or national competitions. You may well be right that poorer children spend more time at the PlayStation but I bet the competitors with the money, organization and mental horizon* to attend national competitions are heavily skewed towards the upper and upper-middle class.
Come to think of it, the biggest hole in the study is probably that the kids at competitions, who are obviously the most skilled, competitive and energetic, are wildly unrepresentative of gamers as a whole. Maybe the conclusions are accurate for Thresh and the like, but they're being applied to every kid with a console.
* A term I made up to describe how poor children tend to be unaware that there's a world outside their neighborhood.
Slashdot Mirror
Hint: read the article.
I was going to submit that story too, but figured the queue already had it hundreds of times. It's hard for me to see how feuding over the control of glibc and threats of a Red Hat fork are less newsworthy here than yet another forum for pointless Microsoft bashing taken straight from CNN's front page.
I thought the most interesting bit was:
The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd. Work on Linux would be counter-productive to the Free Software course. Then came, what would be called embrace-and-extend if performed by the Evil of the North-West, and his claim for everything which lead to Linux's success.
When the Macintosh came out, it was basically a low-cost, stripped down version of desktop workstations at the time. Desktop workstations had good graphics, built-in Ethernet networking, lots of memory, and a large screen.
And you don't thinking there's anything notable about giving PC users what MIT students and a handful of engineers had access to?
CD drives, USB, Firewire, and other technologies were developed for the PC or consumer market.
And Apple made them part of computing. There's a reason why until recently it was hard to find USB goods that weren't translucent blue.
In terms of laptops and handhelds, Apple was late to the party. The laptop form factor was most clearly described by Alan Kay with his Dynabook, more than a decade before Apple did anything. The TRS-80 Model 100 was much more portable than even today's Apple laptops. Handhelds predate the Newton by many years as well, and they were going to happen with or without Apple.
I think he's overstating Apple's importance in laptops but -- the Dynabook? Come on, at least talk about the Osborne. And while there was lots of talk about handhelds (Go!, that vaporware Microsoft came up with to crush Go!) Apple actually committed and did it.
I always laugh when the inevitable post pops up in an Apple story: Why are Apple zealots so enthusiastic about a company that {threatened some web site for violating an NDA; protects their IP; sells an OS that only runs on their hardware; doesn't allow clones; uses one-button mice}?
What I always wonder is how people can get so passionate about companies that make components that are 10% faster/bigger than they were the year before, manufacturers who screw those parts together or game developers who write new engines to push 10% more polys through the new machine. I mean, that stuff is all necessary but if Nvidia, AMD or Dell didn't do it, ATi, Intel or Compaq would do exactly the same thing.
For better or worse, Apple tries to make computers qualitatively _better_.
An aside: why are people so infatuated with the idea that Apple "stole" all their GUI ideas from Xerox? It's blatantly false and _somebody_ had to have done it, right? Why is it so much less painful for them to believe that work was done by Xerox and not by Apple?
It's not really like that. The decision to break binary compatability was based on the desire to use new features in Qt 3, and encouraged by the fact that gcc 3.0 is going to disrupt BC anyway. Given that decision, you may as well take the opportunity to patch up API's that could use some further improvement.
What an idiot! I have zero sympathy for this clown who found exactly the trouble he was looking for.
I'd grab FP on Jon Katz's follow-up about geek oppression and the tyranny of global corporations but I got bored after trying to imagine the eleventh paragraph.
Don't sell the 'attaboy' email short. It's a great motivation to get some feedback beyond "You suck!" and "It doesn't work. Do I need Windows 2000?" For most small-time developers, it's probably more of an inducement to keep working than a $10 check would be. And it costs you othing but time, so be lavish!
Not that anyone would likely be offended by money.
As an added benefit, under a non-MS system you don't need to deal with the 20 irritating "utilities" that get installed with, say, a SoundBlaster card. Apparently it's not worth the trouble to port them.
MacOS is still untouched for ease of installation (boot from CD, hit OK a couple of times and go get some coffee). But from what I saw, Mandrake has Windows beat, at least for someone unfamiliar with the quirks of a Windows install.
As an aside, dot.kde.org has to be the only site that works _better_ after a Slashdotting. It's been down all weekend and seems relatively responsive now.
Or, as the article puts it:
"I imagine we have done that but we don't know it," laughs Koza. To identify valuable, original results rather than simply matching patents, he explains, a human expert in the given field would need to evaluate tens of thousands of survivors.
In other words, it turns out that an infinite number of monkeys really will stumble into everything given infinite time. Frequently, solutions are simple -- it's identifying the need and fitting a solution to it that' s worthy of a patent.
It seems to me the lesson to learn is that if you're concerned about the scientific results of a project, don't let a politician prominently identify himself with it for his own aggrandizement. That's basically forcing the other side to try to stop it. This isn't abortion -- bipartisan is always the way to go.
By the way, now I remember: I knew I had read about this before.
"Vandettas" aside, (they sang back-up for Martha, right?), this project doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in me. It started out as a stunt by Al Gore, and while scientists may have come up with useful uses for it (which I'm not qualified to judge), I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about a project that was designed to do something useful in the first place.
My sense this is like the biology experiments they do on the space shuttle, something I am qualified to judge. They're worth doing, given that the shuttle is already going but they're hardly a justification for the shuttle program.
As an aside, which may make you feel better, I heard a talk recently by one of the leaders of the Chandra telescope project. Asked about the security of funding, he said that while legislators aren't going to give more money, they pretty much all appreciate astronomy and space and the stream of money isn't in jeopardy at all.
Maybe at some point it will occur to corporations and VCs to ask themselves before committing millions, "Would I pay for this?"
Eazel investors: Would you pay to remotely store an insignificant amount of data?
Online film investors: Would you pay to watch your crummy movies in a tiny window over a 56K connection?
Sure, if I were climbing K2 I'd bring one ebook reader. But for normal use -- what would I want one for today?
Now, if you've read this article all the way through and you've got bright ideas swirling in your head about doing this yourself, you're probably wondering where to get the chassis. I got mine through connections, but if you're looking to obtain one for yourself, you might want to check with your nearest Apple Authorized Service Center. Ordering the chassis cost me about $160, and the 3.5" and CD bezels should cost you about $45 total.
By fancy case standards, that's not so bad.
SirCam sends mail to any addresses in your IE cache. When your address is all over a site as heavily read as Slashdot, you'll get quite a few of them. You didn't think that the readership here is really composed of Linux wizards, did you...?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
So what's the most interesting thing you guys have seen? I've gotten a time card template, a cover letter for a job application at IBM and a lot of gibberish. Please don't post anyone's dirty laundry! Just wondering what the worst has been.
By the way, what's the best way for a MacOS/Linux user to view those .pif and .com files? I've never seen those formats before.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Yes! Somebody else hates that commercial!
I don't know what it is that creeps me out about that kid* but I hit the remote the instant those commercials come on.
* As opposed to X10 ads where at least I know exactly what's so creepy about them. As another Konqueror user, though, I don't have to deal with them.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
If Ximian makes a .NET compatible implementation but doesn't require you to pay money, they are evil.
But if KDE implements ActiveX in Konqueror, it's allright.
Some developers came up with a way to use WINE to use ActiveX in Konqueror. To me, at least, that seems hardly the same as the Gnome project leader flying around the country talking about how .NET is the greatest thing since transistors, and his company sinking a ton of effort into reimplementing much of it.
If TheKompany makes commercial, closed source software, it's allright.
Where do people get this idea that Gnome and KDE have to be mirror oposites? The Kompany is in no way comparable to Ximian; they make some KDE based apps. If anything, they're comparable to the companies that are going to use GTK for commercial apps -- you know, the ones that GTK zealots are always saying guarantee an LGPL library's superiority over a GPL one?
Anyway, like I said, I don't care whether Ximian uses a MS technology or not. (As though KDE and Gnome aren't both total clones of the Windows desktop already....) But I can't help but think all these folks shouting, "But what about KDE and ActiveX!?!" seem awfully defensive about a project they claim to love.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
The NickLock is meant to simplify the rather annoying process of changing the main hard drive. Usually, to change the hard drive you have to first open the case and change the IDE jumper settings and probably the cabling as well. The typical way around this inconvenience is to use a removable frame system, in which each hard drive that you plan to use is installed into its own frame. After shutting down the computer, the drives can be exchanged freely. However, this solution is not ideal if you have to do this frequently, since hard drives are sensitive to physical movement. In the worst-case scenario, you could cause a head crash if you remove the drive before the read/write heads have been securely parked. In a more harmless scenario, the bearings could get out of whack, resulting in a noisier drive in the idle state.
With the NickLock, you can avoid these kinds of hazards and inconveniences.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
(How not to frame a question: go to national video game competitions, use the contestants as subjects in your study and trumpet your findings as proof that "gamers are comparable to top athletes". Also not to do: have Jon Katz post a long article on it days after Slashdot has already covered it, lift lengthy paragraphs from a newspaper article without using quotes or proper attribution and then add his own, even more overblown, conclusions.)
The most interesting thing, I thought, was how responding to "Remove" addresses didn't seem to be the disaster everyone says it is.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I'm not much of a Bruce Sterling fan (or a William Gibson fan, for that matter) but I really liked their collaboration The Difference Engine, a speculative history about world where the engineering had existed to make Babbage engines a reality. It does cater to the politically correct exaggerations of Lady Ada as "the first programmer" but is generally a terrific book.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
MS did not threaten to raise OS prices, they threatened not to nearly give it away any more. Otherwise they'd have to pay the full price(that everyone else pays) of 89$ for the software. Same thing AOL wants to do by giving 35$ per PC. MS just did it as a credit, because they had a product that PC makers saw as valuable. AOL doesn't really have a lot that PC makers consider to add value to their product, so they pay cash.
That's precisely my point -- if you're talking about computer makers, which we are, Microsoft has tremendous power over them while AOL has none. That's why, as you say, Microsoft can rely on threats while AOL has to offer sweeteners.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I (the original poster) was talking about spiffs. As far as how Apple stands, I'm not in a position to argue with you, but it does conflict with everything else I've heard on that score. (Also, supposedly Apple is really bad about paying them off.)
The problem is that a Mac costs more, is less powerful, less expandable and has fewer applications at a higher average price than a PC. Why would anyone pay more to do less? The salesmen know this and are just trying to do the right thing for the customers.
Well, you've definitely convinced me that you used to work at CompUSA! ;-) So, you're saying that the salesmen there are driven by their deep knowledge of computers and their bottomless humanitarian impulses? To quote you, yeah, right...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
1) What got Microsoft into trouble wasn't what they did but that they did it with a monopoly position. AOL hardly has a monopoly and can therefore legally do all sorts of things that would be illegal for Microsoft.
2) Anyway, I don't see where there's much similarity between Microsoft threatening to raise Windows prices to prohibitive levels for computer makers who don't do what they want and AOL offering bonuses to makers who deliver users to them.
To give this some perspective, Dell, Compaq and the rest are paying catalog owners and stores to give their products good placement -- and they're paying bonuses to salesmen who successfully move their boxes. (Apple doesn't pay those bonuses, which is why CompUSA salesmen are so reluctant to sell you a Mac even when you go in and demand one.)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Come to think of it, the biggest hole in the study is probably that the kids at competitions, who are obviously the most skilled, competitive and energetic, are wildly unrepresentative of gamers as a whole. Maybe the conclusions are accurate for Thresh and the like, but they're being applied to every kid with a console.
* A term I made up to describe how poor children tend to be unaware that there's a world outside their neighborhood.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.