There is no legal basis for robots.txt that i am aware of.
What if I devise a system whereby i am allowed to touch all womens boobies unless they have a sign on their back saying "No touching my Boobies".
Even if my system (no-touch-boobies.txt) becomes very popular I don't think it would give you any legal protection for touching a womens boobies unless it's recognised in law.
If you have a much better way to make the millions of dollars needed to create say, an internet search engine, you are free to start your own business.
If the funding mechanism you devise truly is better then you should be able to wipe out the evil ad funded Google pretty quick and make a total killing!
There are people like engineers, programmers, farmers, teachers, machinists, etc, who do productive work. These people *create* goods and services. They *generate* stuff that people enjoy, the result of their work is more than the input.
Unfortunately a lot of those fantastic selfless engineers and programmers are paid for their work by that evil advertising revenue. The majority of software developed for the interweb is one small example.
How long will it be, before Judges and courtrooms are sick of these petty charges, and start only allowing the larger criminals who actually sell and distribute?
Or they could spend their time prosecuting price fixing media cartels.
Products outside the scope of the market definition are irrelevant to determining whether that market has been monopolised and the monopoly abused.
No, because all those programs can if Microsoft choose just become "part" of the Operating System like Internet Explorer.
For example by bundling anti-virus into the operating system it could be deemed to be using anti-competitive practices. If they increase the price of windows by $5 but include anti-virus in the Operating System then people will stop buying Norton Antivirus.
Your argument is like saying that Microsoft's lack of presence in the server market at the time demonstrated they weren't a monopoly. huh?
Apple's existence (or lack thereof) has zero bearing on Microsoft's classification as a monopoly.
Yes, but it can make a hell of a difference when arguing whether or not you are illegally abusing your position as a monopoly through the use of anti competitive practices.
For example if Microsoft allows Apple to retain some market share and develops various apps for both windows and mac then it helps them when arguing whether or not Messenger lock-ins, Office format lock-ins, DRM lock-ins, Exchange lock-ins, IE bundling, antivirus bundling, etc, etc, are anti-competitive.
Later on of course Microsoft can drop Apple support as they see fit.
Namely, they make money on hardware not software. I thought this too, but actually I checked the price of the macmini and at the time I brought one it was cheaper like-for-like than a dell (maybe they had a good deal with intel at the time, right after the switch). Right now I think it is a bit more (in the UK at least) but if you consider they are bundling osX on the system too they can't be making massive margins on the hardware.
If they sold half the number of boxes but sold, say, 3x more copies of osX they could potentially increase their revenue. They would obviously need pre-install distribution deals with dell, etc, Of course if they did this then the current excellent hardware support would not be so great and apples support costs would be greater, but they could have a similar hardware/driver verification scheme with stickers similar to Microsoft.
Also these days more and more software is sold as a "service" often an "access anywhere" service. If they improved.mac (a lot!) and gave it away with osX or did a deal with google to provide contacts,email,calendaring,docs,etc, then buying a copy of OSX cheaper than you can get windows starts to look like a really good deal for the average home user.
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it
All they have to do is decrease the discount they give dell on OEM copies of Windows to bring them back into line. They can give any number of reasons for doing this because the agreement would be confidential. This is already how they get Dell to "Recommend Windows".
Just rewriting the GUI in Flash or Flex would be a mammoth undertaking and the end result would almost certainly not look like Photoshop, but some other product. It is possible they will deliver it this way, but, I would guess, unlikely.
My money would be on some kind on some thin client based web solution.
I agree that there are serious issues with the whole AWT-Swing debacle. But I don't personally believe that is what killed off desktop Java. I think the original GPL-incompatible Java license killed off Linux desktop Java development and Microsoft (probably correctly from maintaining a monopoly perspective) killed off Windows desktop Java by dropping it and making.NET.
There was hardly much point in Sun fixing all the issues with desktop application development given that desktop Java was hardly deployed anywhere.
Also it suffers from the fact that the Operating System vendors always want to make the latest greatest proprietary OS features available to developers and Java's guaranteed cross-platform-ness prevents them from doing this through Java in a well integrated way.
It's not about who "has" the runtime, it's about who *distributes* the runtime.
So yes, it's entirely up to *Microsoft* to decide whether or not to distribute a Sun compatible Java or an in-compatible Java clone like.NET.
Originally Microsoft went with a Sun compatible Java, but then as Java started to become popular they tried to break the Sun licensing terms by making an incompatible version of Java that would lock people into using Windows. When the court ruled against Microsoft they decided to drop Java support altogethor (effectively killing desktop Java). Then they ripped off the Java language and runtime by making a windows only version AKA.NET.
But this is old news, my point was merely that anyone who wanted to use a modern Java like language to develop desktop apps and deploy onto Windows had to flock to.NET because Microsoft stopped distributing Java. Quite a familiar formula for Microsoft really see: Internet Explorer versus Netscape.
Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created. Right?
LOL! The fact that thousands of developers flocked to it was because Microsoft had killed off the original Java by not distributing a compliant runtime.
It's more like taking a highly trafficked road, blowing it up and then building an identical one. "Look at all the people using the new road! Bet people are really glad we built that!"
(Except of course the new road only support Ford cars, but that's another story)
I think it's untrue to say the law can't change it, sure it can't stop it altogethor. But, if enough people sue Google for infinging their copyright (such as when they published news stories) then google has to consider a more co-operative strategy.
In fact copyright law is quite frequently used to force take downs of illegally republished content on the web. Generally if you are a big company that can afford lawyers you can prevent a lot of illegal republishing and in some cases sue for consequential loss.
the fact that you uploaded it is what granted the permission
I have no idea what you are talking about. Uploading something does not give anyone permission to republish it. No more so than printing a book gives people permission to reprint it.
Or are you just saying that is how you think copyright law should work?
While my analogy wasn't great yours is even worse.
A lawyer could argue that a sign saying "take me" had granted consent for the items to be taken - therefore it may no longer be theft.
No lawyer in his right mind would argue that the lack of a robots.txt file on a website means you have granted an unrestricted non-exclusive license to republish any data from the website.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has been around a while now and has no real history of being dirty
Well I'm not sure what you mean by dirty but I certainly wouldn't blindly trust a company that produced the Google-Ministry-for-Truth and Google-For-Domain-Squatters projects.
There is no legal basis for robots.txt that i am aware of.
What if I devise a system whereby i am allowed to touch all womens boobies unless they have a sign on their back saying "No touching my Boobies".
Even if my system (no-touch-boobies.txt) becomes very popular I don't think it would give you any legal protection for touching a womens boobies unless it's recognised in law.
Matt.
If you have a much better way to make the millions of dollars needed to create say, an internet search engine, you are free to start your own business.
If the funding mechanism you devise truly is better then you should be able to wipe out the evil ad funded Google pretty quick and make a total killing!
Matt.
There are people like engineers, programmers, farmers, teachers, machinists, etc, who do productive work. These people *create* goods and services. They *generate* stuff that people enjoy, the result of their work is more than the input.
Unfortunately a lot of those fantastic selfless engineers and programmers are paid for their work by that evil advertising revenue.
The majority of software developed for the interweb is one small example.
Well one reason might be because the .NET runtime is on more desktops than the Java runtime. Given they are both huge this can be an issue.
You think there is a lot of piracy in the UK, I hear it's way worse in America.
Put them on the bloody watch list!
The clever slashdotter with a little cash to gamble with should buy some mysql hold it for a year and dump it.
Yeah hold onto it until Larry Ellison buys it which, let's face it won't be long!
Sure but lawyers have to do something. What would you rather?
How long will it be, before Judges and courtrooms are sick of these petty charges, and start only allowing the larger criminals who actually sell and distribute?
Or they could spend their time prosecuting price fixing media cartels.
Products outside the scope of the market definition are irrelevant to determining whether that market has been monopolised and the monopoly abused.
No, because all those programs can if Microsoft choose just become "part" of the Operating System like Internet Explorer.
For example by bundling anti-virus into the operating system it could be deemed to be using anti-competitive practices. If they increase the price of windows by $5 but include anti-virus in the Operating System then people will stop buying Norton Antivirus.
Your argument is like saying that Microsoft's lack of presence in the server market at the time demonstrated they weren't a monopoly.
huh?
Apple's existence (or lack thereof) has zero bearing on Microsoft's classification as a monopoly.
Yes, but it can make a hell of a difference when arguing whether or not you are illegally abusing your position as a monopoly through the use of anti competitive practices.
For example if Microsoft allows Apple to retain some market share and develops various apps for both windows and mac then it helps them when arguing whether or not Messenger lock-ins, Office format lock-ins, DRM lock-ins, Exchange lock-ins, IE bundling, antivirus bundling, etc, etc, are anti-competitive.
Later on of course Microsoft can drop Apple support as they see fit.
That would be news for nerds.
If in the future unrestricted chips can't play the majority of content then most people will want the "restricted" version.
sadly.
erm yes, isn't the issue whether or not increased sales of OsX would be worth more or less than the loss in hardware margin?
Namely, they make money on hardware not software.
.mac (a lot!) and gave it away with osX or did a deal with google to provide contacts,email,calendaring,docs,etc, then buying a copy of OSX cheaper than you can get windows starts to look like a really good deal for the average home user.
I thought this too, but actually I checked the price of the macmini and at the time I brought one it was cheaper like-for-like than a dell (maybe they had a good deal with intel at the time, right after the switch). Right now I think it is a bit more (in the UK at least) but if you consider they are bundling osX on the system too they can't be making massive margins on the hardware.
If they sold half the number of boxes but sold, say, 3x more copies of osX they could potentially increase their revenue. They would obviously need pre-install distribution deals with dell, etc,
Of course if they did this then the current excellent hardware support would not be so great and apples support costs would be greater, but they could have a similar hardware/driver verification scheme with stickers similar to Microsoft.
Also these days more and more software is sold as a "service" often an "access anywhere" service. If they improved
Microsoft might be concerned that they don't get their money for this, but then again it would be against the law for them to do anything like force Dell not to do it
All they have to do is decrease the discount they give dell on OEM copies of Windows to bring them back into line. They can give any number of reasons for doing this because the agreement would be confidential. This is already how they get Dell to "Recommend Windows".
Just rewriting the GUI in Flash or Flex would be a mammoth undertaking and the end result would almost certainly not look like Photoshop, but some other product. It is possible they will deliver it this way, but, I would guess, unlikely.
My money would be on some kind on some thin client based web solution.
Why not?
Clearly you have never used FlashMX studio.
Oh yes that's logical. They'll entirely rewrite one of the most complex C/C++ apps ever written - in Actionscript.
I agree that there are serious issues with the whole AWT-Swing debacle. But I don't personally believe that is what killed off desktop Java. I think the original GPL-incompatible Java license killed off Linux desktop Java development and Microsoft (probably correctly from maintaining a monopoly perspective) killed off Windows desktop Java by dropping it and making .NET.
p portInSwt/index.html
There was hardly much point in Sun fixing all the issues with desktop application development given that desktop Java was hardly deployed anywhere.
Also it suffers from the fact that the Operating System vendors always want to make the latest greatest proprietary OS features available to developers and Java's guaranteed cross-platform-ness prevents them from doing this through Java in a well integrated way.
With regard to ActiveX in desktop Java, have you tried SWT rather than Swing? http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-ActivexSu
It's not about who "has" the runtime, it's about who *distributes* the runtime.
.NET.
.NET.
.NET because Microsoft stopped distributing Java. Quite a familiar formula for Microsoft really see: Internet Explorer versus Netscape.
So yes, it's entirely up to *Microsoft* to decide whether or not to distribute a Sun compatible Java or an in-compatible Java clone like
Originally Microsoft went with a Sun compatible Java, but then as Java started to become popular they tried to break the Sun licensing terms by making an incompatible version of Java that would lock people into using Windows.
When the court ruled against Microsoft they decided to drop Java support altogethor (effectively killing desktop Java). Then they ripped off the Java language and runtime by making a windows only version AKA
But this is old news, my point was merely that anyone who wanted to use a modern Java like language to develop desktop apps and deploy onto Windows had to flock to
Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created. Right?
LOL!
The fact that thousands of developers flocked to it was because Microsoft had killed off the original Java by not distributing a compliant runtime.
It's more like taking a highly trafficked road, blowing it up and then building an identical one.
"Look at all the people using the new road! Bet people are really glad we built that!"
(Except of course the new road only support Ford cars, but that's another story)
I think it's untrue to say the law can't change it, sure it can't stop it altogethor. But, if enough people sue Google for infinging their copyright (such as when they published news stories) then google has to consider a more co-operative strategy.
In fact copyright law is quite frequently used to force take downs of illegally republished content on the web.
Generally if you are a big company that can afford lawyers you can prevent a lot of illegal republishing and in some cases sue for consequential loss.
the fact that you uploaded it is what granted the permission
I have no idea what you are talking about. Uploading something does not give anyone permission to republish it. No more so than printing a book gives people permission to reprint it.
Or are you just saying that is how you think copyright law should work?
While my analogy wasn't great yours is even worse.
A lawyer could argue that a sign saying "take me" had granted consent for the items to be taken - therefore it may no longer be theft.
No lawyer in his right mind would argue that the lack of a robots.txt file on a website means you have granted an unrestricted non-exclusive license to republish any data from the website.