Cost only comes in in that if that value winds up being less than the expected overall cost of producing the product over time, the product is discontinued. unless the company is Microsoft. [itworld.com]
Or Sony. Or Nintendo. Or Sega.
All console manufacturers have used this tactic since at least 1988.
MICROS~1 (damn I love that one) have had a *tremendous*, almost entirely negative, impact on all of our lives (directly or indirectly). They've kept computing and civilisation back decades.
I have one word for you:
Bullshit.
If you truly believe that, why not explain why you think that's the case. Because if you think civilisation has been held back, you obviously must have some kind of crystal ball - or examples of what was "quashed" by Microsoft.
And if you don't have those, you're just a bitter biased fool.
please stop telling people "what the average joe" wants
they want things that work, and people some how thing windows does that?
That's because outside of your Slashdot la-la land, Windows works much better than Linux for the average joe. They think it works better because it does work better.
The problem has nothing to do with the company releasing open source software. The problem is that, while it's difficult-but-doable to make your own video codec, it's extremely hard to produce an exactly compatible player without format information. This has nothing to do with Apple, Real, or Microsoft having better designers -- it has to do with none of them having to reimplement someone *else*'s codec without technical information... of course, none of that takes into account the fact that they're redistributing those DLLs illegally, in violation of the licenses for that software.
But hey, I guess if it's MPlayer that's getting ripped off, people jump up and down - but if they're ripping off others, it's a-ok.
My point is, why is that the flat amount is the egalitarian option? Why can't some other relation be equal? Would you say that everyone should pay a flat amount of taxes? Maybe you would say everyone should pay a flat rate of taxes, but not amount. And this is what is being said here: a flat rate may be more fair.
If you really want true fairness, you have to ditch the concept of "speeding" tickets entirely, and instead, ticket bad drivers. That means people who speed, but who are safe drivers don't get tickets. People who observe the limit, but weave all over the road in their SUV while babbling into their cellphone, or who do 40mph in rush-hour, forcing everyone behind them to percolate to a slow boil.
You still haven't explained why the British Isles, separated from mainland Europe by 20 miles of sea but connected via a tunnel, isn't part of Europe yet Hawaii, separated from mainland US by several hundred miles of sea and Alaska, separated from mainland US by several thousand miles of Canada, are parts of the US.
The United States is a political construct. (North America is the geographical construct which forms the mainland United States)
Before you bomb us Europeans, can we please have back: - All your BMW and Mercedes cars
- The jet engines from your aircraft (invented by Sir Frank Whittle in Britain in 1945)
You seem to be under the misguided impression that Britain actually enjoys being part of Europe.
Last time there was a poll on the matter (by The Sun), the majority of people in the UK wanted to be part of the US more than they wanted to be part of Europe.
My point was that it was not a definite "do it now!".
That'd be because the EU cannot claim that doing so would be good for consumers with a straight face, given that the competition is malware/spyware like RealPlayer.
I've got to take exception with your classifying quicktime under 'horrible stuff'.
Given that it takes over the MIME type for (amongst other things) PNG images when it installs on Windows, and their implementation is more broken than IE's implementation, I'd consider it "horrible stuff".
We're paying to have this software developed - we might as well get a copy of it!... which is why it should be released under the Public Domain, and not under any Open Source license.
That, after all, is one of the legal requirements that the government is held to - and for good reason.
Intervideo's WinDVD and Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for example, have to compete with an equal footing on the Windows desktop as DVD player applications?
Why should Microsoft's applications have an advantage purely because they make the OS and can integrate their apps into into Windows so tightly you cannot remove them?
Funny you mention those two- because Windows Media Player doesn't play DVDs unless you install an application which adds that support to Windows Media Player - which both of the aforementioned applications *willingly do*.
Microsoft's competitors have realized that competing on level ground with Microsoft is damn near impossible
Ergo, if all of Microsoft's competitors cannot successfully compete on a level playing field with Microsoft, then all of Microsoft's competitors are incompetent in comparison.
After MS included the browser for free, loaded on the machine, and excluded any other browsers, Netscape was forced to enter the "Free" browser market and simply make money on server products. (They're not free, Netscape had to try to leverage it's server market products market-share to support the "free" browser.)
Are you sure that it was Microsoft who forced them to enter the "Free" browser market, and not Mosaic?
How about the guys who wrote Lynx? Did they force Netscape to release their browser for free?
You seem to have this odd idea that Microsoft were the first people to put out a browser for free. Were you actually around for the whole start of the WWW, or are you one of these people who came later?
A load of junk characters equivalent to the two-byte Japanese kana characters appear on the screen, reducing the display to jibberish. That is, if you are lucky to see anything at all.
Been there and done that.
Given that I can read Japanese webpages, and enter japanese text using the IME into Wordpad on English XP, I find your statement rather... well... hard to believe.
Admit it - you were trying it on Windows 95, weren't you?
Try reading the posts you're responding to in future.
So Microsoft is giving us the priviledge of letting us translate their products for them.
Sounds like a fair trade. After all, for nearly 10 years you've been able to download the before-and-after translation databases for the Office suites, for free, for use in your own applications.
Helps if you've got a simple app that you want to translate to (say) Italian.
MPlayer plays back more video types than Windows Media Player, and also is more fault-tolerant, uses less resources, is easier to use, and is more stable.... and is more illegal, as it uses pirated software that they don't have permission to redistribute to do so.
And we pay them more than a car mechanic simply because humans are that much more complicated and it takes more years of school to learn how to fix them.
Another difference is that car mechanics don't typically work on engines while they are running. They can turn them off. You can't do that with a human - at least, not without losing any kind of repeat business.
Rather than just stating that it doesn't, think about why it doesn't. Is it because of the technical superiority of Windows? Or the superior innovation coming out of Microsoft? Do you think they wrote all those drivers themselves?
They did for a huge chunk of the earlier drivers, yes. IIRC, Windows 95's drivers were initially all written by Microsoft - or at least a huge chunk of them were.
The point here is that if not for the money from Microsoft, SCO wouldn't be able to sue anyone
Of course they would. They're getting money from Sun Microsystems as well, remember?
Personally, I can't work out what the "Halloween" email is about - whether it's talking about licensing deals, about straight out loans, about cooperative licensing deals (eg. Microsoft comes up with a solutions package, and passes customers for some of the back-end systems over to SCO), or what. It may even have been faked. There's only one shifty possibility here, but everyone jumps at it.
Disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for 9 months in 1998
Actually, from what I've read, the X-Box is the only console which is being sold significantly below cost. The PS2 and Gamecube are sold at approximately cost. (at least were originally; I honestly don't know if the current lower prices are still at cost. However, as they've been on the market for a couple years, part prices have gone down and manufacturing has become streamlined, it's not unreasonable to assume.)
As recently as a year ago, Sony was losing AU$150 on each system sold, IIRC.
Slashdot Mirror
Cost only comes in in that if that value winds up being less than the expected overall cost of producing the product over time, the product is discontinued. unless the company is Microsoft. [itworld.com]
Or Sony. Or Nintendo. Or Sega.
All console manufacturers have used this tactic since at least 1988.
I have one word for you:
Bullshit.
If you truly believe that, why not explain why you think that's the case. Because if you think civilisation has been held back, you obviously must have some kind of crystal ball - or examples of what was "quashed" by Microsoft.
And if you don't have those, you're just a bitter biased fool.
Microsoft defines a limited number of valid licences for a product.
These licences can not legaly be produced by any other company.
Consequently, there are a limited number of licences for every Microsoft product.
Thus there is a limited supply of these products.
However, that does not limit others from producing alternatives - which is the whole point of the previous poster's argument.
Your argument is that Microsoft has a monopoly because only Microsoft can sell Microsoft's software. That's a specious and flawed argument.
please stop telling people "what the average joe" wants
they want things that work, and people some how thing windows does that?
That's because outside of your Slashdot la-la land, Windows works much better than Linux for the average joe. They think it works better because it does work better.
The problem has nothing to do with the company releasing open source software. The problem is that, while it's difficult-but-doable to make your own video codec, it's extremely hard to produce an exactly compatible player without format information. This has nothing to do with Apple, Real, or Microsoft having better designers -- it has to do with none of them having to reimplement someone *else*'s codec without technical information ... of course, none of that takes into account the fact that they're redistributing those DLLs illegally, in violation of the licenses for that software.
But hey, I guess if it's MPlayer that's getting ripped off, people jump up and down - but if they're ripping off others, it's a-ok.
My point is, why is that the flat amount is the egalitarian option? Why can't some other relation be equal? Would you say that everyone should pay a flat amount of taxes? Maybe you would say everyone should pay a flat rate of taxes, but not amount. And this is what is being said here: a flat rate may be more fair.
If you really want true fairness, you have to ditch the concept of "speeding" tickets entirely, and instead, ticket bad drivers. That means people who speed, but who are safe drivers don't get tickets. People who observe the limit, but weave all over the road in their SUV while babbling into their cellphone, or who do 40mph in rush-hour, forcing everyone behind them to percolate to a slow boil.
You still haven't explained why the British Isles, separated from mainland Europe by 20 miles of sea but connected via a tunnel, isn't part of Europe yet Hawaii, separated from mainland US by several hundred miles of sea and Alaska, separated from mainland US by several thousand miles of Canada, are parts of the US.
The United States is a political construct. (North America is the geographical construct which forms the mainland United States)
Europe is a geographical construct.
...except, of course, the World Wide Web as invented by Tim Berners-Lee - that means all the eCommerce is ours also.
Not much use without hypertext, as invented by Vannevar Bush.
Or a graphical user interface - courtesy of Xerox.
Or a hard drive - courtesy of IBM.
Or an Intel CPU (and derivatives).
Before you bomb us Europeans, can we please have back:
- All your BMW and Mercedes cars
- The jet engines from your aircraft (invented by Sir Frank Whittle in Britain in 1945)
You seem to be under the misguided impression that Britain actually enjoys being part of Europe.
Last time there was a poll on the matter (by The Sun), the majority of people in the UK wanted to be part of the US more than they wanted to be part of Europe.
My point was that it was not a definite "do it now!".
That'd be because the EU cannot claim that doing so would be good for consumers with a straight face, given that the competition is malware/spyware like RealPlayer.
I've got to take exception with your classifying quicktime under 'horrible stuff'.
Given that it takes over the MIME type for (amongst other things) PNG images when it installs on Windows, and their implementation is more broken than IE's implementation, I'd consider it "horrible stuff".
My main concern is that all the alternate video players seem to be nothing more than skins over WMP, so you still aren't getting rid of it.
You mean that, like Windows Media Player, they're all just thin skins over the DirectShow libraries?
Oh mercy! That's so horrible!
Now, please tell me: how many Linux media players are merely thin skins over libavcodec?
Do you know the difference?
Somehow, I doubt it.
I think Eddie Izzard was also widely tipped as the new doctor, though I can't see it not turning into a comedy had he played the doctor.
A good rule of thumb:
The best comedians make the best dramatic actors. People who know how to make you laugh, also know how to make you cry.
We're paying to have this software developed - we might as well get a copy of it! ... which is why it should be released under the Public Domain, and not under any Open Source license.
That, after all, is one of the legal requirements that the government is held to - and for good reason.
Intervideo's WinDVD and Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for example, have to compete with an equal footing on the Windows desktop as DVD player applications?
Why should Microsoft's applications have an advantage purely because they make the OS and can integrate their apps into into Windows so tightly you cannot remove them?
Funny you mention those two- because Windows Media Player doesn't play DVDs unless you install an application which adds that support to Windows Media Player - which both of the aforementioned applications *willingly do*.
You say:
Microsoft's competitors have realized that competing on level ground with Microsoft is damn near impossible
Ergo, if all of Microsoft's competitors cannot successfully compete on a level playing field with Microsoft, then all of Microsoft's competitors are incompetent in comparison.
Are you sure you meant that statement?
After MS included the browser for free, loaded on the machine, and excluded any other browsers, Netscape was forced to enter the "Free" browser market and simply make money on server products. (They're not free, Netscape had to try to leverage it's server market products market-share to support the "free" browser.)
Are you sure that it was Microsoft who forced them to enter the "Free" browser market, and not Mosaic?
How about the guys who wrote Lynx? Did they force Netscape to release their browser for free?
You seem to have this odd idea that Microsoft were the first people to put out a browser for free. Were you actually around for the whole start of the WWW, or are you one of these people who came later?
A load of junk characters equivalent to the two-byte Japanese kana characters appear on the screen, reducing the display to jibberish. That is, if you are lucky to see anything at all.
Been there and done that.
Given that I can read Japanese webpages, and enter japanese text using the IME into Wordpad on English XP, I find your statement rather... well... hard to believe.
Admit it - you were trying it on Windows 95, weren't you?
Try reading the posts you're responding to in future.
So Microsoft is giving us the priviledge of letting us translate their products for them.
Sounds like a fair trade. After all, for nearly 10 years you've been able to download the before-and-after translation databases for the Office suites, for free, for use in your own applications.
Helps if you've got a simple app that you want to translate to (say) Italian.
MPlayer plays back more video types than Windows Media Player, and also is more fault-tolerant, uses less resources, is easier to use, and is more stable. ... and is more illegal, as it uses pirated software that they don't have permission to redistribute to do so.
And we pay them more than a car mechanic simply because humans are that much more complicated and it takes more years of school to learn how to fix them.
Another difference is that car mechanics don't typically work on engines while they are running. They can turn them off. You can't do that with a human - at least, not without losing any kind of repeat business.
Rather than just stating that it doesn't, think about why it doesn't. Is
it because of the technical superiority of Windows? Or the superior innovation
coming out of Microsoft? Do you think they wrote all those drivers themselves?
They did for a huge chunk of the earlier drivers, yes. IIRC, Windows 95's drivers were initially all written by Microsoft - or at least a huge chunk of them were.
It's pretty logic that Microsoft is behind all that. Otherwise the anti-Linux FUD spread by SCO just doesn't make any sense.
Likewise, it's pretty logical that pro-OSS/Linux guys forged this email - after all, it's Anti-Microsoft/anti-SCO FUD.
*shrugs*
That's the trouble with logic - it cuts both ways.
The point here is that if not for the money from Microsoft, SCO wouldn't be able to sue anyone
Of course they would. They're getting money from Sun Microsystems as well, remember?
Personally, I can't work out what the "Halloween" email is about - whether it's talking about licensing deals, about straight out loans, about cooperative licensing deals (eg. Microsoft comes up with a solutions package, and passes customers for some of the back-end systems over to SCO), or what. It may even have been faked. There's only one shifty possibility here, but everyone jumps at it.
Disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for 9 months in 1998
Actually, from what I've read, the X-Box is the only console which is being sold significantly below cost. The PS2 and Gamecube are sold at approximately cost. (at least were originally; I honestly don't know if the current lower prices are still at cost. However, as they've been on the market for a couple years, part prices have gone down and manufacturing has become streamlined, it's not unreasonable to assume.)
As recently as a year ago, Sony was losing AU$150 on each system sold, IIRC.