It was ALCOA who had the monopoly, not on mines but on smelting process and technology. They knew how to produce aluminum cheaper than their competitors. After WWII the US government sold plants that ALCOA had helped build, but they prevented Alcoa from bidding, they ended up going to Reynolds and Kaiser for pennies on the dollar.
There was also a lot of political wrangling, Alcoa had their initial case overturned on appeal, but then they lost again. Alcoa is still fighting off anti-trust issues to this day, some 60 years later. Back in like '99 they were going to buy a can making plant from Reynolds but it was blocked by the DOJ.
Of all the various anti-trust cases in the past, the ALCOA one has the most parallels to the Microsoft case.
You might wish to start over and logically construct your argument.
The previous poster started out with "I think not", which I agreed with. You're unfortunately continuing this trend.
BTW, the Sun/Microsoft Java licensing agreement was concluded last year as part of a different lawsuit. This also has nothing to do with mandating the installation of the OS(which never occured), or has any bearing of similarity herewith.
"Microsoft isn't smarter than their competitors, they just have deeper pockets. "
And where did they get the deep pockets from?
This isn't some chicken and the egg question, Microsoft clearly dominates markets because they listen to consumer feedback and improve their products over time.
In every case I can think of where Microsoft took over a competitors marketshare it has been because the MS product line kept improving over time, whereas the competitor released a really crappy major upgrade.
Lotus Smartsuite 96 WordPerfect for Windows(multiple versions) Novell Netware 4.x Netscape 4.x Palm(to a certain extent, they just didn't improve over time and let MS take some share) etc.
In the cases where Microsoft has not taken over a market it has been because the competitor is smart, nimble and produced good product.
Quicken Oracle database Apache web server
The problem with your au contraire, besides it being a stupid french saying, is that you cannot backup your contrary statement with facts. If your theory was correct, then in each and every market where Microsoft competes they would be the dominant player.
"Microsoft makes more mistakes than anyone else, but it doesn't matter: They can just afford to make mistakes that would bankrupt anyone else."
Microsoft wasn't always a wealthy company, they became that way for a reason. Because they were willing to try things, and they were willing to risk failure. That, my friend, is how you succeed in this world! You don't succeed by sitting around like a whimpering cry baby.
"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate." -- Thomas Watson
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas Edison
"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." -- Thomas Edison
And BTW, I love the/. mentality that a post is Offtopic if it hits too close to the truth and shatters your preconceived notions.
"The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence "
Ahh, but the reality is that there has been gross technical or corporate incompetence. Microsoft may use some strong-armed tactics, but the reality is they just also happen to be a lot smarter than their competitors. This case resembles more the ALCOA anti-trust trial than AT&T.
Your basic desire is to handicap the players, which is understandable, but there's a difference between making a jockey carry an extra 20 pounds of lead on his horse, and tying one jockey's arm behind his back... You see, even in a handicapped race the dominate player is still going to win quite frequently.
"So anything that helps competition's return helps me."
I'd rather see companies promote interesting technologies than interesting lawsuits.
What happens in 3 years time when Sun has lost it's marketshare in the Unix server world and files for bankruptcy? Even though it is Linux which eroding this market, will it be Microsoft's fault?
Again, this goes right back to corporate incompetence.
"PC manufacturers (Compaq, Dell, etc.) have long been forced to include OEM versoins of MS operating systems with their PCs - because they signed a contract that mandated them to do so! "
Of course you forget the basic construct of the contract, that being that the OEMs were negotiating to buy Windows from Microsoft.
So you really can't call it a mandate, since they negotiated the terms and the price.
Correct me if I'm not calculating this properly...
Ok, so let's say they can continue this out... $300 per quarter for 4 quarters. That's $1.2 Million in profits.
There are 170 Million shares outstanding. So that'd make their EPS about $.007... so less than 1 cent per share.
So then their Price to Earnings ratio would be about $6 divided by $.007 or 857.
Yeah, I'd say they are overvalued.:)
Re:Book, benchmarks and other things...
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 2
"Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers."
That sounds interesting, and I would like to help. I tried contacting you via the contactus page on your website.
If that doesn't work, it's easier to figure out my email address as it's anything @ sodablue.org.:)
"It offers open source access to the kernel, so you can see the actual code for the operating system and how it interacts with many different types of hardware."
That's great if you are taking the OS track of ComSci... But that's only one small part of the entire CS curriculuum.
"If all you want is to be an MCSE, then why waste you time with college?"
The MCSE is a systems administrator certification. Presumably if you are in ComSci you intend to learn more about software development, so this argument appears to be a non-sequitor.
"Real computer science education, where you gain a fundamental understanding of both high and low level concepts of the computer requires more than just clicking a start button."
When I was in ComSci the students didn't even know how to load paper in the printer. I'd have to say some fundamentals of computer use are probably important. Disappointing perhaps, but important.
Actually slashcode wasn't released for a long time(like 2 years after OSDN bought them). Quite a number of people got on their case about that, as here they were actively promoting the GPL but they weren't willing to use it themselves. It was probably more of a case of laziness than planned.
The SourceForge stuff on the other hand stopped being released right about the time they went from being VA Linux to VA Software. They appear to have come to this understanding that you can't make money selling Linux, so they looked at their successful SourceForge project and decided they could sell that as a development solution.
But you can't very well sell something you are giving away for free, so they stopped offering it for free under the GPL.
Does Tim have a legit beef? I don't know, perhaps. But I also think the VA shareholders would have a legit beef if VA didn't do whatever they had to do to become profitable. The GPL is all nice and dandy until it comes to the reality of putting food on the table.
Microsoft doesn't have a history of buying companies to kill competition, they buy them to take over their product lines and drive them against other competitors.
"After all its the UML modelling software that MS wants, and if the IBM purchase of Rational goes through then MS has no modeller for their developers."
MS is setting up Visio as their UML modelling tool. We've found it to be more stable than Rose, even if it has fewer features. I wouldn't worry about that.
I was questioning why MS would want Borland at all, and then I see that Borland recently bought Starbase.
Starbase makes a reasonably decent SCM called StarTeam, and a Requirements Management piece called CaliberRM. Those are two areas that Microsoft needs some help in.
But I still don't see it, I think Microsoft's best interests are served with a partnership with Borland... so they remain as a competitor. Borland has committed to.NET tools, etc.
"This was a far cry from the original Borland marketing philosophy: Great product, great price. I really miss the days of Turbo C / Borland C++"
The original Borland marketing philosophy was to sell Turbo Pascal for $39.95 when everybody else was selling compilers for $500 or more.
I agree, they started getting into trouble when they decided they could sell Delphi or Java tools for $5k and abandoned their early philosophy of low-priced quality tools for everyone. Their new strategy seems to be "How much are people willing to pay to not use Microsoft?"
"no, they don't sound like Bose, but dammit, that's $150 for a 5.1 home theater"
This made me laugh.:-)
Audio snobs don't listen to Bose because they sound pretty lousy... bad imaging and such.
The best mass market speakers I've heard come from Infiniti. On the smaller market side while still being affordable I like B&W or PSB, but you don't find those at Best Buy.
"OS/2 included the Internet Access Kit (or some such), including the WebExplorer browser"
WHAT!? In 1997 one of the reasons we were moving off of OS/2 was the lack of a decent web browser. The IBM one stunk, and the Netscape port blew chunks.
I think you've confused Team OS/2 propaganda with reality.
"mainframe computers via SNA with M$ won't or can't support but OS2 does nicely."
SNA is supported by Microsoft using what was called SNA Server and is now called Host Integration Server. They've been selling this solution for many years, I first saw it used in 1997.
It's less of an issue these days as you simply configure TCP/IP on the Mainframe and the desktops can then talk to it directly from their 3270 emulator app(like Attachmate). I guess the point is supporting SNA was more of an issue a few years ago than it is today.
I think perhaps the issue is a confusion of a platform versus a language.
What makes.NET powerful is the platform as well as the languages like C#..NET is not a clone of Java, because it offers so much more than just Java. C# is a clone of the Java grammar, perhaps.
Then to make it even more confusing, nothing precludes you from running Python on top of.NET.
I happen to like C# as well as.NET for what it provides to me as a developer. Back in '97 or so I took a look at Java and while I did like the language grammar, I was rather appalled with the platform and it's implementations. We do have some people using Java here at work and many of those implementation problems with the platform still exist. I think Sun made some horrid design decisions, and doesn't have the fortitude to stand behind those and fix them. I don't have that same concern with Microsoft.
From a religious perspective maybe that's an issue to you, but I am more concerned with my ability to provide technical solutions. I try to avoid religion when possible.
"PHP is much better for working with various aspects of the network, Operating System and even other languages. PHP is to ASP as a remote controlled car using standard parts is to a Radio Shack special that welds and glues all the proprietary parts together... that and it only turns in reverse and only a right hand turn at that. YAY!"
PHP is much better than ASP.
ASP.NET is much better than PHP.
Hopefully that helps you gain some perspective on what's being discussed here.
Who cares. I prefer freedom over coercive licenses like the GPL.
"Last I heard it was a non-commerical educational crap license."
You heard wrong. There's nothing in the licenses for.Net SDK or Web Matrix which precludes you using them for commercial purposes. I just read through the Matrix one now and see nothing of that nature.
"OS code and design aside, it's hard to automate housekeeping system tasks in Windows - that's why Linux will run a lot longer."
Well actually this is one of those myths that's widely regarded to be true on/. but isn't in the real world.
Perhaps you should offer specific examples of what types of system tasks you wish to automate on Windows. Then we can see whether you are being honest, or perhaps you just aren't aware of the solution.
"MS is currently trying to become the world's biggest producer of game consoles (or at least a serious competitor), and it doesn't seem to be working very well from what I've heard."
A few years ago people were saying the same thing about WinCE in relation to Palm.
We're now starting to see news indicating PocketPC is outselling Palm in many markets.
If Microsoft feels they can't do well in the market, they'll dump out of it like they did with UltimateTV, Bob, etc. That's one of the key reasons why Microsoft is successful, they'll admit their mistakes frankly and either improve the product or abandon it. Right now MS feels they have a chance with XBox and based on their sales performance I would agree. They're the #2 seller of game consoles right now, which is not a bad position to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you have your history all confused.
It was ALCOA who had the monopoly, not on mines but on smelting process and technology. They knew how to produce aluminum cheaper than their competitors. After WWII the US government sold plants that ALCOA had helped build, but they prevented Alcoa from bidding, they ended up going to Reynolds and Kaiser for pennies on the dollar.
There was also a lot of political wrangling, Alcoa had their initial case overturned on appeal, but then they lost again. Alcoa is still fighting off anti-trust issues to this day, some 60 years later. Back in like '99 they were going to buy a can making plant from Reynolds but it was blocked by the DOJ.
Of all the various anti-trust cases in the past, the ALCOA one has the most parallels to the Microsoft case.
You might wish to start over and logically construct your argument.
The previous poster started out with "I think not", which I agreed with. You're unfortunately continuing this trend.
BTW, the Sun/Microsoft Java licensing agreement was concluded last year as part of a different lawsuit. This also has nothing to do with mandating the installation of the OS(which never occured), or has any bearing of similarity herewith.
"Microsoft isn't smarter than their competitors, they just have deeper pockets. "
/. mentality that a post is Offtopic if it hits too close to the truth and shatters your preconceived notions.
And where did they get the deep pockets from?
This isn't some chicken and the egg question, Microsoft clearly dominates markets because they listen to consumer feedback and improve their products over time.
In every case I can think of where Microsoft took over a competitors marketshare it has been because the MS product line kept improving over time, whereas the competitor released a really crappy major upgrade.
Lotus Smartsuite 96
WordPerfect for Windows(multiple versions)
Novell Netware 4.x
Netscape 4.x
Palm(to a certain extent, they just didn't improve over time and let MS take some share)
etc.
In the cases where Microsoft has not taken over a market it has been because the competitor is smart, nimble and produced good product.
Quicken
Oracle database
Apache web server
The problem with your au contraire, besides it being a stupid french saying, is that you cannot backup your contrary statement with facts. If your theory was correct, then in each and every market where Microsoft competes they would be the dominant player.
"Microsoft makes more mistakes than anyone else, but it doesn't matter: They can just afford to make mistakes that would bankrupt anyone else."
Microsoft wasn't always a wealthy company, they became that way for a reason. Because they were willing to try things, and they were willing to risk failure. That, my friend, is how you succeed in this world! You don't succeed by sitting around like a whimpering cry baby.
"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate." -- Thomas Watson
"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." -- Thomas Edison
"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." -- Thomas Edison
And BTW, I love the
"The systems (Mozilla, the OSes) you mention, as well as Java, are at a competitive disadvantage not because of technical or corporate incompetence "
Ahh, but the reality is that there has been gross technical or corporate incompetence. Microsoft may use some strong-armed tactics, but the reality is they just also happen to be a lot smarter than their competitors. This case resembles more the ALCOA anti-trust trial than AT&T.
Your basic desire is to handicap the players, which is understandable, but there's a difference between making a jockey carry an extra 20 pounds of lead on his horse, and tying one jockey's arm behind his back... You see, even in a handicapped race the dominate player is still going to win quite frequently.
"So anything that helps competition's return helps me."
I'd rather see companies promote interesting technologies than interesting lawsuits.
What happens in 3 years time when Sun has lost it's marketshare in the Unix server world and files for bankruptcy? Even though it is Linux which eroding this market, will it be Microsoft's fault?
Again, this goes right back to corporate incompetence.
"I think not..."
I think you should have stopped there.
"PC manufacturers (Compaq, Dell, etc.) have long been forced to include OEM versoins of MS operating systems with their PCs - because they signed a contract that mandated them to do so! "
Of course you forget the basic construct of the contract, that being that the OEMs were negotiating to buy Windows from Microsoft.
So you really can't call it a mandate, since they negotiated the terms and the price.
I'm shocked that I don't see Ellen Feiss or Natalie Portman on the list.
"And Dreamweaver is kicking FrontPage's ass."
Please define "kicking ass".
My guess is Frontpage outsells Dreamweaver by at least 4 to 1.
"furthering .NET? Has .NET even left the starting gate in all seriousness? Other than the msn portal."
.NET?
MSN portal? What the hell does the msn portal have to do with
Correct me if I'm not calculating this properly...
:)
Ok, so let's say they can continue this out... $300 per quarter for 4 quarters. That's $1.2 Million in profits.
There are 170 Million shares outstanding. So that'd make their EPS about $.007... so less than 1 cent per share.
So then their Price to Earnings ratio would be about $6 divided by $.007 or 857.
Yeah, I'd say they are overvalued.
"Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers."
:)
That sounds interesting, and I would like to help. I tried contacting you via the contactus page on your website.
If that doesn't work, it's easier to figure out my email address as it's anything @ sodablue.org.
"It offers open source access to the kernel, so you can see the actual code for the operating system and how it interacts with many different types of hardware."
That's great if you are taking the OS track of ComSci... But that's only one small part of the entire CS curriculuum.
"If all you want is to be an MCSE, then why waste you time with college?"
The MCSE is a systems administrator certification. Presumably if you are in ComSci you intend to learn more about software development, so this argument appears to be a non-sequitor.
"Real computer science education, where you gain a fundamental understanding of both high and low level concepts of the computer requires more than just clicking a start button."
When I was in ComSci the students didn't even know how to load paper in the printer. I'd have to say some fundamentals of computer use are probably important. Disappointing perhaps, but important.
Actually slashcode wasn't released for a long time(like 2 years after OSDN bought them). Quite a number of people got on their case about that, as here they were actively promoting the GPL but they weren't willing to use it themselves. It was probably more of a case of laziness than planned.
The SourceForge stuff on the other hand stopped being released right about the time they went from being VA Linux to VA Software. They appear to have come to this understanding that you can't make money selling Linux, so they looked at their successful SourceForge project and decided they could sell that as a development solution.
But you can't very well sell something you are giving away for free, so they stopped offering it for free under the GPL.
Does Tim have a legit beef? I don't know, perhaps. But I also think the VA shareholders would have a legit beef if VA didn't do whatever they had to do to become profitable. The GPL is all nice and dandy until it comes to the reality of putting food on the table.
Why did Microsoft buy Visio?
Why did Microsoft buy Frontpage?
Why did Microsoft buy SQL Server?
Why did Microsoft buy SourceSafe?
Why did Microsoft buy Great Plains?
Microsoft doesn't have a history of buying companies to kill competition, they buy them to take over their product lines and drive them against other competitors.
"After all its the UML modelling software that MS wants, and if the IBM purchase of Rational goes through then MS has no modeller for their developers."
.NET tools, etc.
MS is setting up Visio as their UML modelling tool. We've found it to be more stable than Rose, even if it has fewer features. I wouldn't worry about that.
I was questioning why MS would want Borland at all, and then I see that Borland recently bought Starbase.
Starbase makes a reasonably decent SCM called StarTeam, and a Requirements Management piece called CaliberRM. Those are two areas that Microsoft needs some help in.
But I still don't see it, I think Microsoft's best interests are served with a partnership with Borland... so they remain as a competitor. Borland has committed to
"This was a far cry from the original Borland marketing philosophy: Great product, great price. I really miss the days of Turbo C / Borland C++"
The original Borland marketing philosophy was to sell Turbo Pascal for $39.95 when everybody else was selling compilers for $500 or more.
I agree, they started getting into trouble when they decided they could sell Delphi or Java tools for $5k and abandoned their early philosophy of low-priced quality tools for everyone. Their new strategy seems to be "How much are people willing to pay to not use Microsoft?"
Hmm. Our system is entirely IMS based and we use Attachmate with TCP/IP connectivity all the time.
:)
Granted, I don't monitor much in the way of details... The mainframe is something the old greybeards maintain.
"no, they don't sound like Bose, but dammit, that's $150 for a 5.1 home theater"
:-)
This made me laugh.
Audio snobs don't listen to Bose because they sound pretty lousy... bad imaging and such.
The best mass market speakers I've heard come from Infiniti. On the smaller market side while still being affordable I like B&W or PSB, but you don't find those at Best Buy.
"OS/2 included the Internet Access Kit (or some such), including the WebExplorer browser"
WHAT!? In 1997 one of the reasons we were moving off of OS/2 was the lack of a decent web browser. The IBM one stunk, and the Netscape port blew chunks.
I think you've confused Team OS/2 propaganda with reality.
"mainframe computers via SNA with M$ won't or can't support but OS2 does nicely."
SNA is supported by Microsoft using what was called SNA Server and is now called Host Integration Server. They've been selling this solution for many years, I first saw it used in 1997.
It's less of an issue these days as you simply configure TCP/IP on the Mainframe and the desktops can then talk to it directly from their 3270 emulator app(like Attachmate). I guess the point is supporting SNA was more of an issue a few years ago than it is today.
I think perhaps the issue is a confusion of a platform versus a language.
.NET powerful is the platform as well as the languages like C#. .NET is not a clone of Java, because it offers so much more than just Java. C# is a clone of the Java grammar, perhaps.
.NET.
.NET for what it provides to me as a developer. Back in '97 or so I took a look at Java and while I did like the language grammar, I was rather appalled with the platform and it's implementations. We do have some people using Java here at work and many of those implementation problems with the platform still exist. I think Sun made some horrid design decisions, and doesn't have the fortitude to stand behind those and fix them. I don't have that same concern with Microsoft.
What makes
Then to make it even more confusing, nothing precludes you from running Python on top of
I happen to like C# as well as
From a religious perspective maybe that's an issue to you, but I am more concerned with my ability to provide technical solutions. I try to avoid religion when possible.
"PHP is much better for working with various aspects of the network, Operating System and even other languages. PHP is to ASP as a remote controlled car using standard parts is to a Radio Shack special that welds and glues all the proprietary parts together... that and it only turns in reverse and only a right hand turn at that. YAY!"
PHP is much better than ASP.
ASP.NET is much better than PHP.
Hopefully that helps you gain some perspective on what's being discussed here.
"But is it a GPL-compatible license?"
.Net SDK or Web Matrix which precludes you using them for commercial purposes. I just read through the Matrix one now and see nothing of that nature.
Who cares. I prefer freedom over coercive licenses like the GPL.
"Last I heard it was a non-commerical educational crap license."
You heard wrong. There's nothing in the licenses for
"But is .NET the only way in which that goal could have been achieved? I mean, Java or Python would have worked well too."
.NET.
Does Java or Python give you easy access to the DTC? MSMQ? Win32 APIs like WMI?
Java, Python, Delphi and such are nice solutions to some of the problems offered from VB, but not to the extent Microsoft has provided with
Actually I'm not even sure why you mentioned Python.
"OS code and design aside, it's hard to automate housekeeping system tasks in Windows - that's why Linux will run a lot longer."
/. but isn't in the real world.
Well actually this is one of those myths that's widely regarded to be true on
Perhaps you should offer specific examples of what types of system tasks you wish to automate on Windows. Then we can see whether you are being honest, or perhaps you just aren't aware of the solution.
"MS is currently trying to become the world's biggest producer of game consoles (or at least a serious competitor), and it doesn't seem to be working very well from what I've heard."
A few years ago people were saying the same thing about WinCE in relation to Palm.
We're now starting to see news indicating PocketPC is outselling Palm in many markets.
If Microsoft feels they can't do well in the market, they'll dump out of it like they did with UltimateTV, Bob, etc. That's one of the key reasons why Microsoft is successful, they'll admit their mistakes frankly and either improve the product or abandon it. Right now MS feels they have a chance with XBox and based on their sales performance I would agree. They're the #2 seller of game consoles right now, which is not a bad position to be in.