MS is the WRONG company to be speaking out about this. Well, since you seem to get other problems in your line of sight to not see this case clearly, here's other complaints on Google's practices: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=730
You can see Yahoo involved now too, right? That was pretty much the top link from the first Google search I tried. You should try the same some time.
Look, Google does not have a monopoly. I was never saying this. But should we wait until they are? Do the same mistake as with Microsoft? It's a much dirtier and harder job to disrupt a monopoly than trying to stop one from happening. As has been proven with the Microsoft OEM history, for example. It's not because Microsoft is doing a mighty intelligent work at upholding that monopoly. They don't even have to. The customers are doing it for them. Just like the ad market will once Google grows big enough there. Google will be able to give the advertisers the best deals thanks to their economy in the market and that's that.
Frankly, I do not think you are being real. No insult intended, but let's be real here. Microsoft is no golden child intent on helping the industry do anything any longer (unless it gets a cut of the pie). Microsoft is a pit, dark and deep. Its intent is to keep others from gaining dominance, anywhere. Was I saying otherwise? Really, did you see that anywhere?
Let's talk about Google and stop hiding behind Microsoft's bad motives. The article is about what Google is doing and the bulk of your post is blatantly off-topic.
As someone else here has said by now which I was essentially saying: Tu quoque.
If it was a small company, I would listen. But this is a MONSTER company, with a LONG reputation of doing anything illegal to keep their monopoly. I don't think a company should be ignored depending on their reputation. I personally think Google is on thin ice here and would personally not like to see this deal go through. The only reason I'm starting to belive Google isn't doing evil things in the OEM bundling business is because that monopoly is already occupied. Google has seen their chance in the online ad business and they'll do anything in their power to build a monopoly there. But sure, you just go ahead and point fingers at Microsoft.
Yeah. Check those "Senator Stevens" pipe charts and substitute "file formats" for "ads". Sweet, sweet irony. I'd like to note that personally, although MS has a bad reputation here, I'm inclined to agree with them. And MS' bad reputation here shouldn't justify Google's actions. It's a bit frightening how big in the online ad market Google is becoming. It's also easy to draw conclusions of how cool Microsoft was early on, and how evil they are now. I'm already starting to see it happen with Google... They've already got the private information networking done, and now they're going after dominance and purchasing market via company mergers.
If a company has a patent rejected and it even seems abusive to the system, they'll risk a penalty of not being able to get *any* patent through for some time period. Just so this idiocity is actually *felt* by the company so clearly abusing the system and trying to sneak things in. It would be a nail in the coffin for companies that are pretty much founded with this idea as their business model! It doesn't have to be much, but enough so it's felt and companies need to think things through before taking risks with overly stupid patents.
To be serious here, I think they'll narrow it down enough to exlude e.g. the Incas by including pyramid characteristics in more detail, and making it much more than a copyright of a geometric shape. There's a lot of more to the Egyptian pyramids than their shape, and even to the point of being clearly distinguished from Incan pyramids to one who know what they are more than from a vague history study memory. Having said that, it still comes across as strange to me. I think copyrighting any historic monements would, or any modern structure for that matter. Copyrighting the Statue of Liberty would also be weird to me, for example.
As usual with these predictions, they seem to think of 2008 as some far future. For example, Linux getting much more common on the desktop won't just take "Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive" because people don't care much for running computers with 10 GB drives and 128 MB RAM. What rather makes a difference is what operating systems new PC's use to come with and how well marketed this OS is. I don't really see a paradigm shift here among OEM's and what's still often a grass roots movement of Linux (noticeable especially when Ubuntu of all distros is the most popular on desktops, and not Novell's distro, etc). It's interesting to see Linux getting increasingly more interesting for desktop use, but far more still needs to happen than what I think can take place in 2008 before "Surfing--and everything else computer-related--will open" will happen.
The best part is, it's really simple and appears to be mass producible for cheap - two things Nintendo does well already. Yeah, and what companies usually look for in employees -- ways to come up with the cool, simple things that have some use. It's usually harder than one can imagine and why we haven't had vids on this on YouTube before. I think he ranks above many Nintendo people already.:-)
Suing people that post facts he somehow dislikes, but letting others remain in hopes of them selling his damn books, not because they may be funny or anything...
Here's his own response to those satire sites:
Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, "Against All Odds?" They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, "The Justice Riders," released this month. *rolls eyes*
This is also a blatant red herring, but he additionally don't understand evolution and think it tells how things evolve "by random chance", when in reality it of course in the opposite way (also said in response to satire):
It's funny. It's cute. But here's what I really think about the theory of evolution: It's not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live. We are not creations of random chance. We are not accidents. There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me. We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures. By the way, without Him, I don't have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things--and so can you." All this just adds up to me in how he's an ignorant, egoistic person who cares more about pushing his agenda -- religiously or economically -- rather than just being laid back about it all. It's just jokes, dammit.
Read the comments on the "I'm feeling a bit better" page.
One from the real Steve Jobs:
Joel said...
RSJ just responded to my email, saying, "I think this is a joke."
I'm a bit annoyed by this, since I was defending you, and now look something of a fool. And another who had mailed the same:
Diogenes said... I wrote a bit of an inflammatory email to sjobs@apple.com, and actually got a response. Here is the text of the conversation (read bottom to top, of course)...
I think this is all a joke. And I think you fell for it. Steve
On Dec 22, 2007, at 5:29 PM, Steve Jobs wrote: What, praytell, are you talking about?
On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:01 PM, Gary Baldwin wrote: I'm an admitted Apple fanboy, but I can't say I admire this. I would have thought you all would have appreciated the affectionate satire rather than being unaccountable assholes. Gary Baldwin The amazing part to me here is that Steve Jobs is replying to mails in person. With a short delay, at a Christmas-y time like December 22nd...
They'd need funding for another rover mission though... But let's tell Bush that "fresh soil" almost sounds like "fresh oil" and maybe he'll approve.:-)
That's why IE has ActiveX disabled by default nowadays. If enabled, then yes, it acts like any other executable file running under your user privilegies.
It's simple. If you read/., you'll be stuck in an endless loop here until a product with open sourced specs and hardware interface is released with EFF's blessings.
Those of you watching from home from an IE browser, please don't attempt the Acid2 test, or you might do further damage to the test. But the same can be said about Firefox 2, right? Or maybe not, because this is Slashdot.
I would love this site if it just wasn't for comments like those. It would be pretty much everything I would be looking for, but then these things keep coming back to remind the readers that it's just a site on the level of OS X or Windows (yes they exist) fan sites. It's a bit sad, but it seems you just have to live with it, because there are no good options out there with as reasonable quality comments across the board elsewhere. I just wish we could take one step further one day.
Uh, there's a lot of things gone wrong at Microsoft, but I'd be more than surprised if that would be abandoned for the RTM version of IE 8 after announced on the IEBlog. Barely anything announced for IE 7 was skipped for the RTM. But sure, I'll keep your comment in mind when it's released and see who of us is right.
Bollocks. That's exactly what a professional athlete should be doing if they want to win. They get paid millions for their performance. I don't know about how it works in some other countries, but I'm a Swede from the same country as these two athletes in the article, and we have a fairly strong sense of ethics in our organizations. I can understand if this takes a back seat in your nation, wherever you live, with you having this opinion. But it doesn't do over here at least, and that's why high profile Swedish doping cases are exceedingly rare. I can only think of Ludmila Enqvist in recent memory, and she felt she had to escape the country when it was discovered. Yes, we feel this strongly about these things and upholding morale in sports. You're probably freaked out by it, but freak out by cheating. Culture collision? Perhaps. But maybe you understand us better now and why we want a clean sport.
I know it's just picking out keywords from the query and matching them to the sites, not trying to parse the natural language, but it works pretty damn well. This is because Google uses a popularity-dependent algorithm. It's not popular to ask/answer questions like "What does a duck eat?" where duck was in the meaning of ducking, or something like that. Obviously, a natural language processor should use the same mechanism. There'd only be confusion here if two different meanings of the word competed for the top results (i.e. both being popularly asked), *or* if you searched for an unusual meaning of the word, but in a context that made it look like some other question.
I don't see how and why "Why did WW1 start" and "What does a duck eat" should give a popularity based algorithm problems. After all, it is fairly common questions in pretty simple context. Try finding info on what James Bond earns according to the mythology as a secret agent though with What does Bond earn? and you'll get some more trouble. It's not a common question to wonder about, but some that may have an answer. But it's far more common to ask what a bond trader earns, so...
It might be helpful for you to calculate the area that the Tunguska Blast caused devastation, divide by the surface area of the earth, multiply it by the surface area of our major population centers, and then multiply it by the probability of this type of event occurring in the next 50 years. But this is boring and lacks the 'scary thinking' and drama, right? What are you even implying? That your parent said "Wow, wouldn't it be cool if this hit a major population center"? It can happen, and it's getting increasingly more likely as we populate the world. The effects would be far greater than it hitting a big shrubbery, and thus it is more interesting to contemplate the aftermath, even from a purely scientific perspective due to e.g. the economic effects and to society.
Just chill down a little and don't be such a classic sociopath geek that assumes people are all after cool clips on YouTube. There was nothing here indicating he didn't look for a high cool factor and video clips overlaid with heavy metal music. Nothing.
It would be great news if they then donated the domain to a fan based organization who could then preserve, maintain and preferably enhance the whole website and continue to move it forwards. I agree. I'd personally love to see Memory Alpha get this new domain, with a suitable re-branding on top. It's the web site most rich in general Star Trek info I know, movies, TV series, and otherwise. It's also yet a great example of a successful wiki.
Slashdot Mirror
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=730
You can see Yahoo involved now too, right? That was pretty much the top link from the first Google search I tried. You should try the same some time. Look, Google does not have a monopoly. I was never saying this. But should we wait until they are? Do the same mistake as with Microsoft? It's a much dirtier and harder job to disrupt a monopoly than trying to stop one from happening. As has been proven with the Microsoft OEM history, for example. It's not because Microsoft is doing a mighty intelligent work at upholding that monopoly. They don't even have to. The customers are doing it for them. Just like the ad market will once Google grows big enough there. Google will be able to give the advertisers the best deals thanks to their economy in the market and that's that.
Let's talk about Google and stop hiding behind Microsoft's bad motives. The article is about what Google is doing and the bulk of your post is blatantly off-topic.
As someone else here has said by now which I was essentially saying: Tu quoque.
Sweet, sweet irony. I'd like to note that personally, although MS has a bad reputation here, I'm inclined to agree with them. And MS' bad reputation here shouldn't justify Google's actions. It's a bit frightening how big in the online ad market Google is becoming. It's also easy to draw conclusions of how cool Microsoft was early on, and how evil they are now. I'm already starting to see it happen with Google... They've already got the private information networking done, and now they're going after dominance and purchasing market via company mergers.
Yeah, when I noticed that, I promptly closed the PDF after reading the first three pages. ;-)
If a company has a patent rejected and it even seems abusive to the system, they'll risk a penalty of not being able to get *any* patent through for some time period. Just so this idiocity is actually *felt* by the company so clearly abusing the system and trying to sneak things in. It would be a nail in the coffin for companies that are pretty much founded with this idea as their business model! It doesn't have to be much, but enough so it's felt and companies need to think things through before taking risks with overly stupid patents.
To be serious here, I think they'll narrow it down enough to exlude e.g. the Incas by including pyramid characteristics in more detail, and making it much more than a copyright of a geometric shape. There's a lot of more to the Egyptian pyramids than their shape, and even to the point of being clearly distinguished from Incan pyramids to one who know what they are more than from a vague history study memory. Having said that, it still comes across as strange to me. I think copyrighting any historic monements would, or any modern structure for that matter. Copyrighting the Statue of Liberty would also be weird to me, for example.
As usual with these predictions, they seem to think of 2008 as some far future. For example, Linux getting much more common on the desktop won't just take "Your correspondent has been happily using Gutsy Gibbon on a ten-year-old desktop with only 128 megabytes of RAM and a tiny 10 gigabyte hard-drive" because people don't care much for running computers with 10 GB drives and 128 MB RAM. What rather makes a difference is what operating systems new PC's use to come with and how well marketed this OS is. I don't really see a paradigm shift here among OEM's and what's still often a grass roots movement of Linux (noticeable especially when Ubuntu of all distros is the most popular on desktops, and not Novell's distro, etc). It's interesting to see Linux getting increasingly more interesting for desktop use, but far more still needs to happen than what I think can take place in 2008 before "Surfing--and everything else computer-related--will open" will happen.
"I has disproven you"
^-- sounds like something from a LOLCAT image... One of those particularly serious looking lolcats.
Here's his own response to those satire sites: Who knows, maybe these made up one-liners will prompt young people to seek out the real facts as found in my recent autobiographical book, "Against All Odds?" They may even be interested enough to check out my novels set in the Old West, "The Justice Riders," released this month. *rolls eyes*
This is also a blatant red herring, but he additionally don't understand evolution and think it tells how things evolve "by random chance", when in reality it of course in the opposite way (also said in response to satire): It's funny. It's cute. But here's what I really think about the theory of evolution: It's not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live. We are not creations of random chance. We are not accidents. There is a God, a Creator, who made you and me. We were made in His image, which separates us from all other creatures. By the way, without Him, I don't have any power. But with Him, the Bible tells me, I really can do all things--and so can you." All this just adds up to me in how he's an ignorant, egoistic person who cares more about pushing his agenda -- religiously or economically -- rather than just being laid back about it all. It's just jokes, dammit.
It is.
One from the real Steve Jobs: Joel said...
RSJ just responded to my email, saying, "I think this is a joke."
I'm a bit annoyed by this, since I was defending you, and now look something of a fool. And another who had mailed the same: Diogenes said...
I wrote a bit of an inflammatory email to sjobs@apple.com, and actually got a response.
Here is the text of the conversation (read bottom to top, of course)
I think this is all a joke. And I think you fell for it.
Steve
On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:35 PM, Gary Baldwin wrote:
I'm not sure who I've reached here, but in the interest of finishing what you start, this is what I'm referring to:
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/thanks-for-your-support.html
On Dec 22, 2007, at 5:29 PM, Steve Jobs wrote:
What, praytell, are you talking about?
On Dec 22, 2007, at 2:01 PM, Gary Baldwin wrote:
I'm an admitted Apple fanboy, but I can't say I admire this. I would have thought you all would have appreciated the affectionate satire rather than being unaccountable assholes.
Gary Baldwin The amazing part to me here is that Steve Jobs is replying to mails in person. With a short delay, at a Christmas-y time like December 22nd...
No format war. Please!
They'd need funding for another rover mission though... But let's tell Bush that "fresh soil" almost sounds like "fresh oil" and maybe he'll approve. :-)
That's why IE has ActiveX disabled by default nowadays. If enabled, then yes, it acts like any other executable file running under your user privilegies.
It's simple. If you read /., you'll be stuck in an endless loop here until a product with open sourced specs and hardware interface is released with EFF's blessings.
I would love this site if it just wasn't for comments like those. It would be pretty much everything I would be looking for, but then these things keep coming back to remind the readers that it's just a site on the level of OS X or Windows (yes they exist) fan sites. It's a bit sad, but it seems you just have to live with it, because there are no good options out there with as reasonable quality comments across the board elsewhere. I just wish we could take one step further one day.
Uh, there's a lot of things gone wrong at Microsoft, but I'd be more than surprised if that would be abandoned for the RTM version of IE 8 after announced on the IEBlog. Barely anything announced for IE 7 was skipped for the RTM. But sure, I'll keep your comment in mind when it's released and see who of us is right.
I don't see how and why "Why did WW1 start" and "What does a duck eat" should give a popularity based algorithm problems. After all, it is fairly common questions in pretty simple context. Try finding info on what James Bond earns according to the mythology as a secret agent though with What does Bond earn? and you'll get some more trouble. It's not a common question to wonder about, but some that may have an answer. But it's far more common to ask what a bond trader earns, so...
For that, the top hit on Google is:
"The daily destination for women, with horoscopes, health and pregnancy information, message boards and blogs, celebrity gossip, beauty and more."
I think it's pretty much on the money there too!
Just chill down a little and don't be such a classic sociopath geek that assumes people are all after cool clips on YouTube. There was nothing here indicating he didn't look for a high cool factor and video clips overlaid with heavy metal music. Nothing.
Sorry, should be Iraq war of course. :-) I'm thinking too much of what'll probably happen sooner rather than later if they'll have their ways.