You miss the parents point: as long as you already have a dependency on Windows, a dependency on Jet is not an additional one, as Jet has been packaged with Windows since Win95/NT4 (?).
I'll grant that its SQL feature set is probably better than Jet's, but Jet is adequate for at least 90% of applications. Therefore, why bother packaging the additional code rather than using what the platform already provides?
The problem is that it uses binary win32 codecs to decode things like WMV3 and some Quicktime. Not only is this completely illegal (not that I care)
Why is this illegal? I own a copy of Windows that came with my PC. Quicktime is available for free download. I therefore have the right to use these products in any reasonable way I want to.
it also dosen't work on x86-64, ppc, sparc, arm, etc.
I understood that you could run the x86 parts of the process in a virtual Linux PC using QEMU, although I don't know what performance you'd get. As long as you had a reasonably modern machine, I'd have thought it would be reasonable, though.
If Microsoft moves out and people switch to alternative products, doesn't that just prove they weren't a monopoly?
No. If the electricity supplier (assuming there were only one) in my area decided not to sell electricity to me, so I switched all my appliances to run on gas or batteries, it wouldn't mean that the electricity supplier wasn't a monopoly.
If the product available isn't equivalent in every way that a reasonable customer is likely to care about, then it's availability doesn't stop the original supplier from being a monopoly.
OSX and Linux (the only practical competitors) are not equivalent to Windows. There are many applications which are only available to Windows users and will not run on either of these systems, therefore they are not an acceptable substitute for many users.
If everyone buys my donuts and the competition goes out of business, am I now forced to sell abusive customers donuts because I'm the only donut company left?
If there is some practical reason why nobody could set up in competition to you (e.g. the "applications barrier to entry" of the Microsoft case) and your original competitors would have served those customers, then yes, I'd say you're morally obliged to serve them. Legally, it depends on the branch of your government that deals with competition regulation and what regulations they want to enforce on you.
Microsoft can get out of this legally, because there's no government that has the authority to force them to do business in Korea. Morally, I don't think they can.
I've been using OpenOffice for novels for about 18 months now. While it does crash every now and then, it has always been able to autosave a completely up-to-date version of the documents I was working on (because it detects the failure and instigates an autosave at that point). This is a good thing. I've also looked at its document save code, and I don't think it is possible for it to save a corrupted document. Either it will save all the document into a valid file, or it will crash while saving it and not replace the original. I suppose there are possibilities like a branch of the document in memory being replaced with a pointer to an empty branch, or something like that, which would result in a technically valid file without the information you want in it, but that kind of problem is rare compared to those that would cause complete failure.
Word's file format just isn't as fault tolerant. It contains binary offsets and stuff like that that are very easy to screw up, and as you note it does sometimes. This might be why MS are moving over to XML based formats.
I used to be a WordPerfect user back in the DOS days, and can't say as I remember it ever crashing. I think WP's format is quite sensible: just text with embedded codes to control layout.
I've also used every Winword version from 1.0 up to 2003 in the interrim and have never been entirely happy with them, although I've found 97 to be more stable than most.
I did some admin work in a law office once. They didn't use WordPerfect, though. They actually used a collaborative document creation / e-mail system that ran on a VAX, sort of similar to Lotus Notes, except with a terminal based interface. I understand they were preparing to switch over to Word/Outlook just a few months after I left them, although I never did find out how that went.
If I don't want to sell you something, by what moral principle could you compel me to do so anyway?
It is a regulation that is frequently applied to monopolies. The idea is that by destroying most of the competition in the marketplace, the company has become obliged to perform whatever work the destroyed competitors would have undertaken.
It seems reasonable to me, at least. I don't want (e.g.) British Telecom to turn around and say I can't have phone service because I paid them late too many times last year. That would place an unreasonable burden on me, as I would have difficulty getting an equivalent service from anybody else.
Yes. It's still popular in the publishing industry. Many writers are still using WP5.1. It does everything they need... why would they want to upgrade?
Except that their executives said at the time of the Mass. decision that they wouldn't. Now the developers are saying different things to what the execs told us then. Who do we believe? (The devs, of course... they know what they're working on)
anarchy Audio pronunciation of "anarchy" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nr-k) n. pl. anarchies
1. Absence of any form of political authority.
2. Political disorder and confusion.
3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.
[New Latin anarchia, from Greek anarkhi, from anarkhos, without a ruler : an-, without; see a-1 + arkhos, ruler; see -arch.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Your definition of anarchy is not the common one used by most people, and really isn't part of the true meaning of the word (which simply means 'without a ruler'). I'd certainly say that "political disorder and confusion" is what they intend it to mean here, so the word is a good choice for that.
The problem with this approach is that the WinXP activation system is a huge administrative hassle for MS. You'll note that they've stated that they'll abandon it for future versions of Windows, and I doubt this has anything to do with user complaints. They're just fed up with constantly dealing with people upgrading their hardware enough that the automatic reactivation flags up an issue that has to be dealt with by a real person, I'll bet.
And have you ever wondered what happens when WinXP's support period ends? Yep, no more WinXP for anyone (other than those willing to use no-activation cracks).
I don't know about everyone else, but I much preferred the "you have to have the manual available" style copy protection, like Civ 1 used. And I suspect it's just as effective, because downloading and installing a crack is about as difficult (even for non-technical users; they'll just ask a friend who knows what to do) as copying the relevent info out of the manual.
Of course you can find obviously made up articles on the Onion. But they do also have some that are a touch more subtle, like "FDA Approves Sale of Prescription Placebo," where it is possible to not understand the joke, at which point it reads like a real article. Even quotes like "That's the beauty, and the mystery, of placebo. It's all-purpose. Think of it like aspirin, but without any of the analgesic properties" aren't so outrageous if you don't know what either a placebo or an analgesic is.
For example, Microsoft Office 2003 only works on Windows versions 2000 or later, whereas Microsoft Office 97 runs best in a bottle that emulates Windows 98.
I've had no problem running office 97 on Microsoft's Win2K or XP. Is this a problem with Wine's implementation of those platforms, or a problem with Office I haven't encountered?
Wouldn't this be covered under the parody rulings made based on the First amendment?
Not necessarily. They can say the same things equally effectively without attaching the seal to them, so I don't see that it is necessary for them to have such protection.
Actually, I think there's an existing law to cover this kind of thing. Most countries do have protection on symbols of their government, usually dating from before trademark protection became available.
I mean... they could find somebody dull enough to believe the Onion was actually a real presidential announcement.
The point is, though, that the seal is used to indicate official documents, etc. Using it on the Onion does make it look official, to the uninitiated. I'd suggest they should use a modified version, like whitehouse.org does.
PayPal UK used to use the same technique to validate you were the owner of a credit card: make a small reverse payment and ask you how much it was. Then they got proper integration with the banks and stopped doing it like that.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss the parents point: as long as you already have a dependency on Windows, a dependency on Jet is not an additional one, as Jet has been packaged with Windows since Win95/NT4 (?).
I'll grant that its SQL feature set is probably better than Jet's, but Jet is adequate for at least 90% of applications. Therefore, why bother packaging the additional code rather than using what the platform already provides?
The problem is that it uses binary win32 codecs to decode things like WMV3 and some Quicktime. Not only is this completely illegal (not that I care)
Why is this illegal? I own a copy of Windows that came with my PC. Quicktime is available for free download. I therefore have the right to use these products in any reasonable way I want to.
it also dosen't work on x86-64, ppc, sparc, arm, etc.
I understood that you could run the x86 parts of the process in a virtual Linux PC using QEMU, although I don't know what performance you'd get. As long as you had a reasonably modern machine, I'd have thought it would be reasonable, though.
Meanwhile, most of our crime rates are lower than those in Europe
I'd like to know where you get that information, 'cause mine contradicts it.
Murder: 0.04 per 1000 capita for the US, most European countries sitting around 0.01.
Total prosecutions: 48 per 1000 capita US, highest in Europe around 30 per 1000
Total crimes: 80 per 1000 capita US, some European countries have higher, but average is around 60 per 1000
If Microsoft moves out and people switch to alternative products, doesn't that just prove they weren't a monopoly?
No. If the electricity supplier (assuming there were only one) in my area decided not to sell electricity to me, so I switched all my appliances to run on gas or batteries, it wouldn't mean that the electricity supplier wasn't a monopoly.
If the product available isn't equivalent in every way that a reasonable customer is likely to care about, then it's availability doesn't stop the original supplier from being a monopoly.
OSX and Linux (the only practical competitors) are not equivalent to Windows. There are many applications which are only available to Windows users and will not run on either of these systems, therefore they are not an acceptable substitute for many users.
If everyone buys my donuts and the competition goes out of business, am I now forced to sell abusive customers donuts because I'm the only donut company left?
If there is some practical reason why nobody could set up in competition to you (e.g. the "applications barrier to entry" of the Microsoft case) and your original competitors would have served those customers, then yes, I'd say you're morally obliged to serve them. Legally, it depends on the branch of your government that deals with competition regulation and what regulations they want to enforce on you.
Microsoft can get out of this legally, because there's no government that has the authority to force them to do business in Korea. Morally, I don't think they can.
bringing fraudulent lawsuits against them and their ISPs is, well, criminal. Or if it's not, then it should be.
It is. And therefore, of course, encouraging other people to do it is as well...
I've been using OpenOffice for novels for about 18 months now. While it does crash every now and then, it has always been able to autosave a completely up-to-date version of the documents I was working on (because it detects the failure and instigates an autosave at that point). This is a good thing. I've also looked at its document save code, and I don't think it is possible for it to save a corrupted document. Either it will save all the document into a valid file, or it will crash while saving it and not replace the original. I suppose there are possibilities like a branch of the document in memory being replaced with a pointer to an empty branch, or something like that, which would result in a technically valid file without the information you want in it, but that kind of problem is rare compared to those that would cause complete failure.
Word's file format just isn't as fault tolerant. It contains binary offsets and stuff like that that are very easy to screw up, and as you note it does sometimes. This might be why MS are moving over to XML based formats.
I used to be a WordPerfect user back in the DOS days, and can't say as I remember it ever crashing. I think WP's format is quite sensible: just text with embedded codes to control layout.
I've also used every Winword version from 1.0 up to 2003 in the interrim and have never been entirely happy with them, although I've found 97 to be more stable than most.
I did some admin work in a law office once. They didn't use WordPerfect, though. They actually used a collaborative document creation / e-mail system that ran on a VAX, sort of similar to Lotus Notes, except with a terminal based interface. I understand they were preparing to switch over to Word/Outlook just a few months after I left them, although I never did find out how that went.
If I don't want to sell you something, by what moral principle could you compel me to do so anyway?
It is a regulation that is frequently applied to monopolies. The idea is that by destroying most of the competition in the marketplace, the company has become obliged to perform whatever work the destroyed competitors would have undertaken.
It seems reasonable to me, at least. I don't want (e.g.) British Telecom to turn around and say I can't have phone service because I paid them late too many times last year. That would place an unreasonable burden on me, as I would have difficulty getting an equivalent service from anybody else.
WordPerfect - is anybody using that anymore?
Yes. It's still popular in the publishing industry. Many writers are still using WP5.1. It does everything they need... why would they want to upgrade?
it comes as no suprise that MS would do the same
Except that their executives said at the time of the Mass. decision that they wouldn't. Now the developers are saying different things to what the execs told us then. Who do we believe? (The devs, of course... they know what they're working on)
anarchy Audio pronunciation of "anarchy" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nr-k)
n. pl. anarchies
1. Absence of any form of political authority.
2. Political disorder and confusion.
3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.
[New Latin anarchia, from Greek anarkhi, from anarkhos, without a ruler : an-, without; see a-1 + arkhos, ruler; see -arch.]
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Your definition of anarchy is not the common one used by most people, and really isn't part of the true meaning of the word (which simply means 'without a ruler'). I'd certainly say that "political disorder and confusion" is what they intend it to mean here, so the word is a good choice for that.
semicolons: 0
0.5. Python permits semicolons, it just doesn't require them.
Civ III was crap :) In particular the technology trees are awful.
OK, I'll bite. What's wrong with the tech trees?
The problem with this approach is that the WinXP activation system is a huge administrative hassle for MS. You'll note that they've stated that they'll abandon it for future versions of Windows, and I doubt this has anything to do with user complaints. They're just fed up with constantly dealing with people upgrading their hardware enough that the automatic reactivation flags up an issue that has to be dealt with by a real person, I'll bet.
And have you ever wondered what happens when WinXP's support period ends? Yep, no more WinXP for anyone (other than those willing to use no-activation cracks).
I don't know about everyone else, but I much preferred the "you have to have the manual available" style copy protection, like Civ 1 used. And I suspect it's just as effective, because downloading and installing a crack is about as difficult (even for non-technical users; they'll just ask a friend who knows what to do) as copying the relevent info out of the manual.
I love Rockstar for making these classics available for download, but I'd also like to see GTA London (expansion) available as well.
There's a link in TFA.
That's true, but for all the Sim games, it is macroscopic, whereas this is microscopic.
How about Elite? Back in '85 or whenever it was, and just as open and first-person-perspective as GTA.
No, clearly they didn't generate the meme; they just posted a humorous article about how ridiculous the meme was.
Then people seriously repeating and believing the meme started quoting their article as justification.
[...] assuming Blizzard's HR department isn't run by crackheads.
And you make this assumption based on what evidence?
I can imagine people going to their doctors and asking if they can have these new placebos prescribed for them, 'cause they sound good... :)
Of course you can find obviously made up articles on the Onion. But they do also have some that are a touch more subtle, like "FDA Approves Sale of Prescription Placebo," where it is possible to not understand the joke, at which point it reads like a real article. Even quotes like "That's the beauty, and the mystery, of placebo. It's all-purpose. Think of it like aspirin, but without any of the analgesic properties" aren't so outrageous if you don't know what either a placebo or an analgesic is.
For example, Microsoft Office 2003 only works on Windows versions 2000 or later, whereas Microsoft Office 97 runs best in a bottle that emulates Windows 98.
I've had no problem running office 97 on Microsoft's Win2K or XP. Is this a problem with Wine's implementation of those platforms, or a problem with Office I haven't encountered?
Wouldn't this be covered under the parody rulings made based on the First amendment?
Not necessarily. They can say the same things equally effectively without attaching the seal to them, so I don't see that it is necessary for them to have such protection.
Actually, I think there's an existing law to cover this kind of thing. Most countries do have protection on symbols of their government, usually dating from before trademark protection became available.
I mean... they could find somebody dull enough to believe the Onion was actually a real presidential announcement.
The point is, though, that the seal is used to indicate official documents, etc. Using it on the Onion does make it look official, to the uninitiated. I'd suggest they should use a modified version, like whitehouse.org does.
PayPal UK used to use the same technique to validate you were the owner of a credit card: make a small reverse payment and ask you how much it was. Then they got proper integration with the banks and stopped doing it like that.
And WTF is this modded 'offtopic'?