You're an idiot. Of course MS isn't growing, it's a monopoly covering one area and has a serious difficulty in cracking other markets without a DoJ investigation.
The way that you make it sound there's limitless growth potential. Apple got really lucky in that the DoJ has been turning a blind eye to its antitrust violations, same goes for Google.
Microsoft have the one problem - their success. Most of it was due to luck - Corporate America chose Microsoft as the OS of choice, beginning with MS-DOS. Windows 95 to the present have only grown because the market for PCs expanded until pretty much everyone had one. The problem is - how do you force people to buy a new version of the OS when they don't want to?
There are millions of people on Windows XP and older versions, who see no point as long as their computers do what they want of them. They don't need no damn extreme experience. Only when their computers die or they decide it's time for a new one will they change - and a lot of them will not be happy because the new version isn't like their old version and they have to fight with it just to do the basics of what they've known before. There's some sickness in the Windows division that says, "We must change everything around with each release." Vista made corporate buyers shy away when they saw what a turd it was. I know we're still running a lot of XP systems, ourselves.
So grow in other areas? Microsoft have effectively bought their way into other areas on the strength of Windows, Office and server income. Try as they might to barge into other areas, they have all the sexy appeal of Kmart or Walmart. The playing field changed while they were fumbling around and now Apple and Google are flooding new markets, leaving little room for Microsoft to move into. Microsoft haven't a proven product in the Phone or Tablet field (the XP tablets, eh) They're now a marginal player, trying to find a way to wedge themselves in, while holding back Android with flimsy patent suits.
While they have a good hold on a large market, that market has changed and will continue to change. Microsoft hasn't had the vision to capture anything, playing pretender and following the leaders. Until Microsoft rolls out something people didn't know they always wanted, but never saw before, it's going to be a steadily declining market.
Anything that makes Microsoft or Microsoft shareholders unhappy is a good thing, IMHO.
Until one considers people with a pension plan, IRA, or 401K. For many of these people with the later two they don't pick individual stocks, they pick funds that are managed by a "pro". Many of these funds own Microsoft.
Wow. Expecting Microsoft to take care of them.. that's like socialism.
Indeed. It was genius, even if it wasn't intentional. When a phone drops calls or has data hiccups, who gets blamed? It's ALWAYS the cell carrier. Let someone else get all the blame. Funny thing though, my AT&T service was always fine until all the iPhone users appeared and clogged stuff up. Now the wireless network is getting clogged with people talking to Siri? Argh.
This is all part of the evolution of communications.
Remember why the dotcom bubble burst? Because, despite all the brilliant ideas everyone had, the infrastructure was two copper wires, all the neat tricks to get 5Mbps were still in development, and so many technologies ran into the bandwidth wall. Now we can do 6 (or more) Mbps over copper (particularly if we live close to the switch) but the flood of iPhone traffic revealed the flimsy network for cellular was never intended for high bandwidth. Well, the carriers learned (particularly AT&T after the mess in NYC) and technology has been rapidly improving (though taking more time to roll out in some areas than others.)
Voice bandwidth needs were tiny, like 3KHz on old copper. Imagine compressing that in a digital stream. With people websurfing, streaming music and video and now mucking about with the "Cloud" for documents, spreadsheets, The Bob knows what else, that bandwith must become higher or customers go to another carrier who can hack it (a good thing to have multiple carriers in any area!)
... there's absolutely nothing in this ruling that actually prohibits UBB... it only prohibits charging more than the amount that was agreed to. Simply put, once a customer has used up the bandwidth that they've paid for in a month, they will have to go and buy more.
It cuts out the suprise bills at the end when you find out just how much bandwidth you really used last month, but it doesn't really stop ISP's from charging consumers based on how much bandwidth they actually use, or, more specifically, they intend to use.
So how does that work for them having any ability to throttle your usage?
The depth of delusion on Slashdot surprises me to this day.
Anybody who's used Chrome or the web browser on Android has benefited from Apple's work on WebKit. But the zealots will try to rewrite history on that too.
OpenSource for other projects, but not in the development of any of their products. Not if they could help it anyway.
On a good day, Wifi (802.11a/b/g/n) can travel about 900 feet between devices. Even with a directional antenna and some good hardware, you're looking at a maximum of about one mile transmitting distance between devices... Not sure how you could have any kind of sustainable network within these limited parameters.
So just up the wattage on relays. You might cook a few pigeons in the process, too.
I hate to speak ill of the man so soon after death but I always felt Apple was always too restrained by him. Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community. Yes, the same could have been said of Microsoft but Apple seemed off the deep end. This did offer some of the benefits of Job's vision but I think Apple may be poised in a better position now. Time will tell.
Jobs was entirely NON-open source. He was obsessive in needing the absolute control from beginning to end of any product, only in that way could the iPhone and iPad have become the successes they have. Apple succeeds because they product is entirely engineered by them, materials, components, software, hardware - Jobs hated the idea of having to be reliant upon a multiple of vendors who could do one thing slightly different, which would introduce changes in the software from device to device (say, a timing issue for internal storage) They wrote the specs and the vendor made it exactly the way they wanted it, period. Unlike Microsoft who let their OS run on some gargantuan possible combinations of hardware.
Jobs did understand that there was a significant market for a device people could just use, they didn't need to know where in the control panel to find ____. Had to be completely consumer oriented or nothing. I love Linux for what it allows me to do, but 99% of the people don't come close to my technical knowledge. The complete control to put everything into making a small number of models (based upon memory) allowed Jobs and Apple to focus in a way nobody else has.
Even more importantly, at what point do disruptions to both other unlicensed users and to, more importantly, licensed users operating as primary users of spectrum that's also allowed for unlicensed use, cause the FCC to come down on such a scheme to destroy it? Granted, it would probably have to be pretty flagrant, but a hundred-thousand devices from one manufacturer in a metro area is probably enough to where they'd take notice, evaluate the usage on that spectrum, and possibly make a ruling...
Wifi on 2.4 and 5.8GHz is already posing problems enough, and those are intentionally very limited in range and power level...
The obsessive in Jobs would have meant all these towers, relays, backbone and employees would be Apple people because only in that way could he have had complete control over it. Yeah, FCC might have said, "You're behaving like a monopoly and your dues aren't paid!"
This would not have been feasible, which is why it didn't work. the idea of a carrier pushing through a wifi network with enough coverage space is laughable. The 3g/4g wireless spectrum operates entirely different than wifi because wifi is limited in many ways..
The point is, we can all sit around and throw ideas and himhaw back and forth, but if things don't pass engineering/financial spec the don't get done. Applauding Jobs as a visionary for an idea that failed on technical and financial merit is kinda stupid.
The walled garden would have replaced the internet.
Not his walled garden, he'd have left the door for Microsoft to walk in and do it. As inept as Redmond has been with wireless and smart phones, this would have made them. And in turn they would have dominated the market because Apple didn't learn anything from past failures.
At the very least it would have justified the initial absurd price per phone.
Yeah, but Apple trying to be a player in a global Wi-Fi network wouldn't have happened. They succeeded because they let the phone companies bear the burden of satellites and tower contracts, fibre trunks, maintenance, etc.
Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
Which would have worked, if you were only willing to go about with something like the iTouch. While popular, the evolution to hand-held computer, camera, game-device and phone became a bit mostly on the latter.
I visualised such a network years before the iPhone and realise how much it wouldn't have happened. There was some network in the SF Bay Area meant to do something similar, but you had to be paying to be on it and these sorts of things didn't come cheap. Even taking advantage of economies of scale, you'd be running up against those who own the cell towers. My cousin is in that racket and don't underestimate the costs and other problems inherent there. Going with cellular was the only way it was going to work.
I can't be the only person in the world who it never occurred to that Mario was wearing actual fur, can I? I always assumed he was putting on a costume, not wrapping himself in actually animal parts. I mean, do they think he's crawling inside the dead husk of giant, man sized frogs as well?
It's actual fur in the same sense as Mario is an actual Italian from the Apennine peninsula
Most likely the the harm in the game is negligible compared to the harm of rampant anthropomorphisation - Tanuki is an animal which will bite, when cornered, not some happy, smiling little dude willing to share his skin with a plumber.
And why breaking up your writing into paragraphs is a good idea, as a wall of text is immediately daunting by the shape recognition of 10+ lines of words without a gap.
My experience has been that placeholder words like 'um' and 'like' mostly indicate that the speaker isn't done yet and a 'meaningful pause' invites interruption.
Skilled speakers practice pauses, but not filled with umms or errrs. Example of harnessing a stammer into pauses in The King's Speech is a fair example.
After so many lies and disappointments from this administration, I'm curious why you or anyone would expect otherwise, though I disagree with your "corporatocracy" remark as this is an expansion of government power.
Yep, this means corporations are writing the laws. You can only be criminal for breaking laws. Breaking ToS is criminal, therefore they have written laws.
This seems like a really foolish thing for a convicted monopoly to do. I could see a clear case being made that Microsoft is leveraging their postion in the PC market to dominate in the mobile phone market. That and the NDAs alone should really get the justice department hopping mad. Well that and an election and the fact that Google is more loved than Microsoft and people are in a "mega corps bad" mood these days and an election is coming.
Business friendly Bush administration let Microsoft out of the noose. But then Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson spoke when he should have kept his trap shut, exposing a whiff of perceived bias, helped them no end when his Break-Up-Microsoft plan was thrown out.
The Bush administration, loading of courts helped some large companies get away with near murder, also failed to investigate throroughly or prosecute when it should have.
Even if Microsoft's claims are weakened or thrown out, be aware the party of the President can still help them.
The summary sentence is just that. There are probably (trivial) differences in the detailed description somewhere. I can't be bothered to look up the actual patents there myself, of course.
Wouldn't they have to posess patents on Computer Mice as Input Devices, before they could do claim that?
Mice as input devices are very old, pre-dating the PC.
There's quite obviously an assload of prior art for them too.
LOL! Good point. I could come up with some myself.
Simply adding weight to the argument "trivial patent", as in, this shouldn't even have been awarded, but you have to settle those separately with the US Patent Office.
The N900 was nice though. Nokia used to be better. They were fostering Qt, after all, and Qt is awesome. This is just...absurdly evil. 90s Microsoft, cartoonish evil. How did they possibly think this was a good idea?
Perhaps the chair struck back and in his delirium Ballmer thought it was a sane strategy.
Have to say, it smacks of the sort of desperation Microsoft (under Bill Gates) sought to destroy Java.
Looks like Microsoft is still pursuing the security by obscurity model - and its not working out well.
I sat a.net security session at a developers conference. After 45 minutes of taking notes, the presenter hadn't repeated himself and as I realized that I put down my pen - this is why I don't develop in.net, except as stand-alone desktop apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Raise your hand if you think it will be fully adopted by Facebook.
And Microsoft will probably come up with their own standard...
You're an idiot. Of course MS isn't growing, it's a monopoly covering one area and has a serious difficulty in cracking other markets without a DoJ investigation.
The way that you make it sound there's limitless growth potential. Apple got really lucky in that the DoJ has been turning a blind eye to its antitrust violations, same goes for Google.
Microsoft have the one problem - their success. Most of it was due to luck - Corporate America chose Microsoft as the OS of choice, beginning with MS-DOS. Windows 95 to the present have only grown because the market for PCs expanded until pretty much everyone had one. The problem is - how do you force people to buy a new version of the OS when they don't want to?
There are millions of people on Windows XP and older versions, who see no point as long as their computers do what they want of them. They don't need no damn extreme experience. Only when their computers die or they decide it's time for a new one will they change - and a lot of them will not be happy because the new version isn't like their old version and they have to fight with it just to do the basics of what they've known before. There's some sickness in the Windows division that says, "We must change everything around with each release." Vista made corporate buyers shy away when they saw what a turd it was. I know we're still running a lot of XP systems, ourselves.
So grow in other areas? Microsoft have effectively bought their way into other areas on the strength of Windows, Office and server income. Try as they might to barge into other areas, they have all the sexy appeal of Kmart or Walmart. The playing field changed while they were fumbling around and now Apple and Google are flooding new markets, leaving little room for Microsoft to move into. Microsoft haven't a proven product in the Phone or Tablet field (the XP tablets, eh) They're now a marginal player, trying to find a way to wedge themselves in, while holding back Android with flimsy patent suits.
While they have a good hold on a large market, that market has changed and will continue to change. Microsoft hasn't had the vision to capture anything, playing pretender and following the leaders. Until Microsoft rolls out something people didn't know they always wanted, but never saw before, it's going to be a steadily declining market.
Anything that makes Microsoft or Microsoft shareholders unhappy is a good thing, IMHO.
Until one considers people with a pension plan, IRA, or 401K. For many of these people with the later two they don't pick individual stocks, they pick funds that are managed by a "pro". Many of these funds own Microsoft.
Wow. Expecting Microsoft to take care of them .. that's like socialism.
I'll get my coat.
Indeed. It was genius, even if it wasn't intentional. When a phone drops calls or has data hiccups, who gets blamed? It's ALWAYS the cell carrier. Let someone else get all the blame. Funny thing though, my AT&T service was always fine until all the iPhone users appeared and clogged stuff up. Now the wireless network is getting clogged with people talking to Siri? Argh.
This is all part of the evolution of communications.
Remember why the dotcom bubble burst? Because, despite all the brilliant ideas everyone had, the infrastructure was two copper wires, all the neat tricks to get 5Mbps were still in development, and so many technologies ran into the bandwidth wall. Now we can do 6 (or more) Mbps over copper (particularly if we live close to the switch) but the flood of iPhone traffic revealed the flimsy network for cellular was never intended for high bandwidth. Well, the carriers learned (particularly AT&T after the mess in NYC) and technology has been rapidly improving (though taking more time to roll out in some areas than others.)
Voice bandwidth needs were tiny, like 3KHz on old copper. Imagine compressing that in a digital stream. With people websurfing, streaming music and video and now mucking about with the "Cloud" for documents, spreadsheets, The Bob knows what else, that bandwith must become higher or customers go to another carrier who can hack it (a good thing to have multiple carriers in any area!)
... there's absolutely nothing in this ruling that actually prohibits UBB... it only prohibits charging more than the amount that was agreed to. Simply put, once a customer has used up the bandwidth that they've paid for in a month, they will have to go and buy more.
It cuts out the suprise bills at the end when you find out just how much bandwidth you really used last month, but it doesn't really stop ISP's from charging consumers based on how much bandwidth they actually use, or, more specifically, they intend to use.
So how does that work for them having any ability to throttle your usage?
http://opensource.apple.com/
The depth of delusion on Slashdot surprises me to this day.
Anybody who's used Chrome or the web browser on Android has benefited from Apple's work on WebKit. But the zealots will try to rewrite history on that too.
OpenSource for other projects, but not in the development of any of their products. Not if they could help it anyway.
On a good day, Wifi (802.11a/b/g/n) can travel about 900 feet between devices. Even with a directional antenna and some good hardware, you're looking at a maximum of about one mile transmitting distance between devices... Not sure how you could have any kind of sustainable network within these limited parameters.
So just up the wattage on relays. You might cook a few pigeons in the process, too.
I hate to speak ill of the man so soon after death but I always felt Apple was always too restrained by him. Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community. Yes, the same could have been said of Microsoft but Apple seemed off the deep end. This did offer some of the benefits of Job's vision but I think Apple may be poised in a better position now. Time will tell.
Jobs was entirely NON-open source. He was obsessive in needing the absolute control from beginning to end of any product, only in that way could the iPhone and iPad have become the successes they have. Apple succeeds because they product is entirely engineered by them, materials, components, software, hardware - Jobs hated the idea of having to be reliant upon a multiple of vendors who could do one thing slightly different, which would introduce changes in the software from device to device (say, a timing issue for internal storage) They wrote the specs and the vendor made it exactly the way they wanted it, period. Unlike Microsoft who let their OS run on some gargantuan possible combinations of hardware.
Jobs did understand that there was a significant market for a device people could just use, they didn't need to know where in the control panel to find ____. Had to be completely consumer oriented or nothing. I love Linux for what it allows me to do, but 99% of the people don't come close to my technical knowledge. The complete control to put everything into making a small number of models (based upon memory) allowed Jobs and Apple to focus in a way nobody else has.
Even more importantly, at what point do disruptions to both other unlicensed users and to, more importantly, licensed users operating as primary users of spectrum that's also allowed for unlicensed use, cause the FCC to come down on such a scheme to destroy it? Granted, it would probably have to be pretty flagrant, but a hundred-thousand devices from one manufacturer in a metro area is probably enough to where they'd take notice, evaluate the usage on that spectrum, and possibly make a ruling...
Wifi on 2.4 and 5.8GHz is already posing problems enough, and those are intentionally very limited in range and power level...
The obsessive in Jobs would have meant all these towers, relays, backbone and employees would be Apple people because only in that way could he have had complete control over it. Yeah, FCC might have said, "You're behaving like a monopoly and your dues aren't paid!"
This would not have been feasible, which is why it didn't work. the idea of a carrier pushing through a wifi network with enough coverage space is laughable. The 3g/4g wireless spectrum operates entirely different than wifi because wifi is limited in many ways..
The point is, we can all sit around and throw ideas and himhaw back and forth, but if things don't pass engineering/financial spec the don't get done. Applauding Jobs as a visionary for an idea that failed on technical and financial merit is kinda stupid.
The success was in the not doing it.
The walled garden would have replaced the internet.
Not his walled garden, he'd have left the door for Microsoft to walk in and do it. As inept as Redmond has been with wireless and smart phones, this would have made them. And in turn they would have dominated the market because Apple didn't learn anything from past failures.
At the very least it would have justified the initial absurd price per phone.
Yeah, but Apple trying to be a player in a global Wi-Fi network wouldn't have happened. They succeeded because they let the phone companies bear the burden of satellites and tower contracts, fibre trunks, maintenance, etc.
Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
Which would have worked, if you were only willing to go about with something like the iTouch. While popular, the evolution to hand-held computer, camera, game-device and phone became a bit mostly on the latter.
I visualised such a network years before the iPhone and realise how much it wouldn't have happened. There was some network in the SF Bay Area meant to do something similar, but you had to be paying to be on it and these sorts of things didn't come cheap. Even taking advantage of economies of scale, you'd be running up against those who own the cell towers. My cousin is in that racket and don't underestimate the costs and other problems inherent there. Going with cellular was the only way it was going to work.
I can't be the only person in the world who it never occurred to that Mario was wearing actual fur, can I? I always assumed he was putting on a costume, not wrapping himself in actually animal parts. I mean, do they think he's crawling inside the dead husk of giant, man sized frogs as well?
It's actual fur in the same sense as Mario is an actual Italian from the Apennine peninsula
Most likely the the harm in the game is negligible compared to the harm of rampant anthropomorphisation - Tanuki is an animal which will bite, when cornered, not some happy, smiling little dude willing to share his skin with a plumber.
PETA has really outdone themselves this time.
Yeah, side scrolling skinless animal is a pretty interesting concept.
I agree with PETA on a number of issues, but this ... this really is the sort of extreme that will lose more support than gain it.
This is why we are bugged by bad spelling.
And why breaking up your writing into paragraphs is a good idea, as a wall of text is immediately daunting by the shape recognition of 10+ lines of words without a gap.
My experience has been that placeholder words like 'um' and 'like' mostly indicate that the speaker isn't done yet and a 'meaningful pause' invites interruption.
Skilled speakers practice pauses, but not filled with umms or errrs. Example of harnessing a stammer into pauses in The King's Speech is a fair example.
I always suspected that I read like that. I only have to spell words I don't know, or chop them up into syllables.
Tougher for me, I have to recognise by a few shapes for each word, with my dyslexia.
After so many lies and disappointments from this administration, I'm curious why you or anyone would expect otherwise, though I disagree with your "corporatocracy" remark as this is an expansion of government power.
Yep, this means corporations are writing the laws. You can only be criminal for breaking laws. Breaking ToS is criminal, therefore they have written laws.
This seems like a really foolish thing for a convicted monopoly to do. I could see a clear case being made that Microsoft is leveraging their postion in the PC market to dominate in the mobile phone market. That and the NDAs alone should really get the justice department hopping mad. Well that and an election and the fact that Google is more loved than Microsoft and people are in a "mega corps bad" mood these days and an election is coming.
Business friendly Bush administration let Microsoft out of the noose. But then Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson spoke when he should have kept his trap shut, exposing a whiff of perceived bias, helped them no end when his Break-Up-Microsoft plan was thrown out.
The Bush administration, loading of courts helped some large companies get away with near murder, also failed to investigate throroughly or prosecute when it should have.
Even if Microsoft's claims are weakened or thrown out, be aware the party of the President can still help them.
The summary sentence is just that. There are probably (trivial) differences in the detailed description somewhere. I can't be bothered to look up the actual patents there myself, of course.
Wouldn't they have to posess patents on Computer Mice as Input Devices, before they could do claim that?
Mice as input devices are very old, pre-dating the PC.
There's quite obviously an assload of prior art for them too.
LOL! Good point. I could come up with some myself.
Simply adding weight to the argument "trivial patent", as in, this shouldn't even have been awarded, but you have to settle those separately with the US Patent Office.
The N900 was nice though.
Nokia used to be better. They were fostering Qt, after all, and Qt is awesome.
This is just...absurdly evil. 90s Microsoft, cartoonish evil. How did they possibly think this was a good idea?
Perhaps the chair struck back and in his delirium Ballmer thought it was a sane strategy.
Have to say, it smacks of the sort of desperation Microsoft (under Bill Gates) sought to destroy Java.
Looks like Microsoft is still pursuing the security by obscurity model - and its not working out well.
I sat a .net security session at a developers conference. After 45 minutes of taking notes, the presenter hadn't repeated himself and as I realized that I put down my pen - this is why I don't develop in .net, except as stand-alone desktop apps.
This is the only way Microsoft can make any money on OPEN SOURCE.
and of course the best kind of money made is from someone else.
Microsoft isn't so much an innovator as a parasite. Rather like in that Cloverfield film. Here it suddenly is, it all its glory, exposed.