That's like saying Enron's business model was going to jail. Being found a monopoly is a problem MS has to address, but it isn't a business model. In addition, you merely prepending the adjective "monopoly" in front of desktop is neither proof nor even an argument supporting the idea that being a monopoly is MS business model.
"But even today most computers sold to consumers are not general-purpose. They are cell phones or game consoles or PDAs. Smaller, cheaper, special-purpose computers that use the distributed power of the network may actually really be the Next Big Thing this time."
Actually the number of special purpose computers have always dwarfed the number of PCs. The question is what can you do with them and how many different devices would be required to replace the PC. Cell phones, game consoles and PDA's really can't replace the PC because the form-factors are all wrong. The interesting thing about these devices, however, is that they are attempting to be more and more general over time (even if their customers prefer that they would remain simple). They're becoming more bloated but they'll never replace the PC unless they expand to laptop size which is about the minimum size for serious work.
In any case, this thread is not about whether MS will go down hill, but whether they will do so because of a threat from Google and Yahoo.
Take the total revenue made by the company over it's entire life and then subtract all the money invested in the company since it was created. In the case of Google, the result is a negative number.
"Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo"
Google and Yahoo's entire business model is web-based and advertisement based. One could just as easily argue that they deserve blame for having such a fragile model. It's not clear if building these web-based applications will be profitable or sustainable. Google in particular seems to be enjoying the same kind of unquestioning support that many dead dot-comms enjoyed.
Yesterday I took a look at the preferences page and noticed that you can change the default moderation for an AC. So instead of setting your threshold to -1, you could change your AC default to 1 to effectively make AC posts exactly like named posts. Of course you may be happy with your current settings.
Dad: "You can play your XBox 10 for another hour, then it's bedtime. Don't get assimilated by Microsoft Borg, boys. Ha Ha."
Son #1: Looks at his younger brother rolls his eyes. "Er, we won't Dad"
Dad leaves the room.
Son #2: What's dad talking about?
Son #1: I think he went to school with a guy named Gates who was always throwing chairs or something. Don't ask him about it - we'll get a long boring story.
I disagree with your Gore point, but I feel your moderation pain. Moderation's major purpose is to keep unpopular opinions from disturbing the Slashdot masses. My advice is to ignore the moderation, set your threshold to -1 and make up your own mind on the merits of each post.
"Al Gore played absolutely no role whatsoever in creating what people knew as "The Internet" when he made his completely BS comment. He knew exactly what he was trying to make people think"
Yes he did and what he was trying to make people think wasn't that he invented invented Internet technologies. Although the American people are incredibly gullible at times (WMDs in Iraq are a threat to the US, etc), they're not dumb enough to believe that any politician is a software engineer and no politician including Gore would attempt to make such a silly claim.
The fact is that this whole Gore "inventing the Internet" claim was simply just another dirty trick by the Bush gang. I doubt that Gore lost any votes over the issue, but cheaters are never confident enough to play fair, so the Bush campaign cooked up this lie.
"there are many people who get sick and tired of answering the same question over and over again when it is clearly explained in the manual and they know it."
Of course, the logical thing to do in that situation is just ignore the question and move on. I think anyone who responds with RTFM must have a lot of more time on their hands than they would have us believe.
"We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening."
Sorry about the (nearly) duplicate posts. My first response appeared to end up in the Slashdot bitbucket so I had to rewrite and repost it. Then the first showed up after all.
"Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy?"
No. Every post must stand on its own.
You accused someone of being a liar or a shill without a shred of evidence simply because you disagreed with what they said. That sounds like zealot behavior to me.
If you disagree with him, fine. Can't he just be mistaken then? Why does he have to be a liar or a shill?
"Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy?"
I don't have any obligation to research your opinions other than the one I'm responding to. Each post has to stand on it's own.
You accused somebody of lying or being a shill without any evidence to back it up. Then you prattle on and on about Soviet Russia as if this proves something.
If I'm wrong about you being anti-MS than I'm sorry, but when I saw that you felt the need to call somebody a liar just because they said something you disagree with, that strikes me as zealot behavior.
If you believe his conclusions are wrong, fine. Can't the guy just be mistaken? Why does he have to be a liar?
The parent illustrates exactly what I was talking about in my other post. People who don't want their belief systems challenged will not accept any evidence to the contrary. These people will plug their ears and shout to avoid hearing anything that they don't want to believe.
It's really about some people on Slashdot who don't want their belief system challenged in any way. For them MS is totally evil and no evidence to the contrary will every be accepted.
"Yeah, and this is why America has so much oil flooding the market that prices have dropped immensly"
Well, the Bush administration screwed up their own plans by giving the reconstruction job to people with the same political philosphy but no apparent skill at reconstruction.
Just because your incompetent, doesn't mean your not evil.
To answer your question: It's not OK to exploit people whether you make money on it or not, but nobody exploits people unless it's for money, power or other benefit. So your question really has no practical value.
Portability is more of a religious issue than a practical one for most applications.If Linux ever became the #1 OS, I suspect that portability will fade from importance on Slashdot. It's really an outsider's issue.
"That's a major result of the rising complexity of the technology. Back in the 1980s, one geek could stay up all night and crank out an Atari 2600 game in raw machine code."
Actually, we used assembly language. If you think that current game systems are technically more complex than the 2600 or that a decent 2600 game could be programmed in one night, you obviously never tried it.
I know this will sound like your grandfather's story about walking to school in the snow but the 2600 had no interrupts, no BIOS or OS, 128 bytes of RAM, video registers that had to be reloaded every scan line (at least) by your code, time-based horizontal positioning, video blanking performed by your code, etc.
The days when video games were primarily a software writer's achievement ended with the first video game crash. That's a good thing because most of us weren't experts in game design, graphics, or sound.
"So yes, if you wanted to run it you had to toss away any and all DOS/Win3.1 applications. You had to buy the basics anew."
I hate to mess up your theory, but you're completely wrong. Many DOS and Win3.1 applications ran without problems on NT 3.1. Some even ran on the Alpha version.
Windows NT 3.1 includes a Virtual Dos Machine (VDM) that allows DOS programs to run. Within the VDM there is layer called Windows on Win32 (WOW) that allows 16-bit Windows applications to run.
So legacy issues have been a consideration in every Windows version including NT 3.1.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying Enron's business model was going to jail. Being found a monopoly is a problem MS has to address, but it isn't a business model. In addition, you merely prepending the adjective "monopoly" in front of desktop is neither proof nor even an argument supporting the idea that being a monopoly is MS business model.
"But even today most computers sold to consumers are not general-purpose. They are cell phones or game consoles or PDAs. Smaller, cheaper, special-purpose computers that use the distributed power of the network may actually really be the Next Big Thing this time."
Actually the number of special purpose computers have always dwarfed the number of PCs. The question is what can you do with them and how many different devices would be required to replace the PC. Cell phones, game consoles and PDA's really can't replace the PC because the form-factors are all wrong. The interesting thing about these devices, however, is that they are attempting to be more and more general over time (even if their customers prefer that they would remain simple). They're becoming more bloated but they'll never replace the PC unless they expand to laptop size which is about the minimum size for serious work.
In any case, this thread is not about whether MS will go down hill, but whether they will do so because of a threat from Google and Yahoo.
"And Microsoft's entire business model is monopoly based."
Sorry but being a monopoly isn't a business model.
Take the total revenue made by the company over it's entire life and then subtract all the money invested in the company since it was created. In the case of Google, the result is a negative number.
"Gates deserves blame for missing the wave of Web-based software that has propelled Google and Yahoo"
Google and Yahoo's entire business model is web-based and advertisement based. One could just as easily argue that they deserve blame for having such a fragile model. It's not clear if building these web-based applications will be profitable or sustainable. Google in particular seems to be enjoying the same kind of unquestioning support that many dead dot-comms enjoyed.
Yesterday I took a look at the preferences page and noticed that you can change the default moderation for an AC. So instead of setting your threshold to -1, you could change your AC default to 1 to effectively make AC posts exactly like named posts. Of course you may be happy with your current settings.
"There's just a little too much noise at -1"
Perhaps, but keep in mind that an upopular opinion expressed by an AC will by moded to -1.
Dad: "You can play your XBox 10 for another hour, then it's bedtime. Don't get assimilated by Microsoft Borg, boys. Ha Ha."
Son #1: Looks at his younger brother rolls his eyes. "Er, we won't Dad"
Dad leaves the room.
Son #2: What's dad talking about?
Son #1: I think he went to school with a guy named Gates who was always throwing chairs or something. Don't ask him about it - we'll get a long boring story.
Somebody had to say it.
I disagree with your Gore point, but I feel your moderation pain. Moderation's major purpose is to keep unpopular opinions from disturbing the Slashdot masses. My advice is to ignore the moderation, set your threshold to -1 and make up your own mind on the merits of each post.
"Al Gore played absolutely no role whatsoever in creating what people knew as "The Internet" when he made his completely BS comment. He knew exactly what he was trying to make people think"
Yes he did and what he was trying to make people think wasn't that he invented invented Internet technologies. Although the American people are incredibly gullible at times (WMDs in Iraq are a threat to the US, etc), they're not dumb enough to believe that any politician is a software engineer and no politician including Gore would attempt to make such a silly claim.
The fact is that this whole Gore "inventing the Internet" claim was simply just another dirty trick by the Bush gang. I doubt that Gore lost any votes over the issue, but cheaters are never confident enough to play fair, so the Bush campaign cooked up this lie.
"there are many people who get sick and tired of answering the same question over and over again when it is clearly explained in the manual and they know it."
Of course, the logical thing to do in that situation is just ignore the question and move on. I think anyone who responds with RTFM must have a lot of more time on their hands than they would have us believe.
"We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening."
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Sorry about the (nearly) duplicate posts. My first response appeared to end up in the Slashdot bitbucket so I had to rewrite and repost it. Then the first showed up after all.
OK. I went back and looked at some of your writings and there is evidence that you're not a zealot. I'm sorry for calling you that.
"Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy?"
No. Every post must stand on its own.
You accused someone of being a liar or a shill without a shred of evidence simply because you disagreed with what they said. That sounds like zealot behavior to me.
If you disagree with him, fine. Can't he just be mistaken then? Why does he have to be a liar or a shill?
"Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy?"
I don't have any obligation to research your opinions other than the one I'm responding to. Each post has to stand on it's own.
You accused somebody of lying or being a shill without any evidence to back it up. Then you prattle on and on about Soviet Russia as if this proves something.
If I'm wrong about you being anti-MS than I'm sorry, but when I saw that you felt the need to call somebody a liar just because they said something you disagree with, that strikes me as zealot behavior.
If you believe his conclusions are wrong, fine. Can't the guy just be mistaken? Why does he have to be a liar?
The parent illustrates exactly what I was talking about in my other post. People who don't want their belief systems challenged will not accept any evidence to the contrary. These people will plug their ears and shout to avoid hearing anything that they don't want to believe.
It's really about some people on Slashdot who don't want their belief system challenged in any way. For them MS is totally evil and no evidence to the contrary will every be accepted.
"Yeah, and this is why America has so much oil flooding the market that prices have dropped immensly"
Well, the Bush administration screwed up their own plans by giving the reconstruction job to people with the same political philosphy but no apparent skill at reconstruction.
Just because your incompetent, doesn't mean your not evil.
To answer your question: It's not OK to exploit people whether you make money on it or not, but nobody exploits people unless it's for money, power or other benefit. So your question really has no practical value.
Portability is more of a religious issue than a practical one for most applications.If Linux ever became the #1 OS, I suspect that portability will fade from importance on Slashdot. It's really an outsider's issue.
and what have you done with the real Slashdotter's who don't admit a mistake even under pain of death. Sometimes, I don't either. Thanks.
"That's a major result of the rising complexity of the technology. Back in the 1980s, one geek could stay up all night and crank out an Atari 2600 game in raw machine code."
Actually, we used assembly language. If you think that current game systems are technically more complex than the 2600 or that a decent 2600 game could be programmed in one night, you obviously never tried it.
I know this will sound like your grandfather's story about walking to school in the snow but the 2600 had no interrupts, no BIOS or OS, 128 bytes of RAM, video registers that had to be reloaded every scan line (at least) by your code, time-based horizontal positioning, video blanking performed by your code, etc.
The days when video games were primarily a software writer's achievement ended with the first video game crash. That's a good thing because most of us weren't experts in game design, graphics, or sound.
"So yes, if you wanted to run it you had to toss away any and all DOS/Win3.1 applications. You had to buy the basics anew."
I hate to mess up your theory, but you're completely wrong. Many DOS and Win3.1 applications ran without problems on NT 3.1. Some even ran on the Alpha version.
Windows NT 3.1 includes a Virtual Dos Machine (VDM) that allows DOS programs to run. Within the VDM there is layer called Windows on Win32 (WOW) that allows 16-bit Windows applications to run.
So legacy issues have been a consideration in every Windows version including NT 3.1.