This is the difference between using Service Packs and using individual patches for individual packages/applications. It's a Monolith versus granular approach.
You do realise a SP is basically just a bunch of individual patches bundled up together into a single, easily installable entity, right ? Like, say, Red Hat does with their regular repackaging to "RHAS 4 Update 3", etc.
Anyone who's interested in information other that parroted anti-Microsoft FUD.
The real fact to consider is that IE resulted in an immediate plunge in Netscape's market share, from over 80% in 1996 to being a minority a year later.
Rubbish. It took years for IE to displace Navigator. In 1999, the market was only just starting to see IE use exceed Navigator use. Further, Navigator's decline lines up exactly with its increasing levels of suckiness.
That's leverage.
Indeed. The "leverage" of a superior product. Cunning and dastardly work, to be sure.
Part of that leverage in 1997 was MS using threats of delaying Office for Mac to get Apple to sign an exclusive deal to only put IE on the Mac desktop.
Undoubtedly without that extra 1% or so of marketshare such a deal represented, IE would have been an abject failure.
"In July of 1997, the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft appeared to vanish with the announcement a new cooperative partnership. Why did Microsoft invest millions in a partnership with its most obvious remaining competitor in the desktop operating system market? "
I've read the site before and it is an excellent example of anti-Microsoft FUD and conspiracy theories. Presumably you're quoting it here to take advantage of the general anti-Microsoft sentiment of Slashdot.
I agree that Netscape screwed up its own game.
Which is all that really matters, given that most of your arguments are hanging off the example of Netscape's failure being somehow due to underhanded and/or illegal Microsoft machinations.
However, MS not only put a bullet into Netscape's head, but further monopolized the browser market, to the point where the only competitors since have been a free project and a few niche micro-minorities: Opera on mobiles, and Safari on the Mac. That is not an open market.
At which time in the past were you thinking of when the browser "market" _wasn't_ made up of one or two giants and a handful of "micro-niche minorities" ? First there was Mosaic, then there was Navigator and Mosaic, then there was Navigator and IE, then there was IE, now there is IE and Firefox.
How is the current situation in any way unusual, given the history of the web browser ?
Your comments about there being no market for Linux or Mac OS X on PCs fallacious; if you don't know how OEM contracts work, go look it up.
Then why aren't people out there raking in money hand-over-fist selling PCs running Linux, if the demand is so high ? Forget the major sellers, if - as you imply - people are desparate to buy Linux PCs, why aren't there dozens of startups selling them as fast as they can put them together ?
There is no open market for PC OS and hasn't been since the early 90s.
It has always been trivial to buy a PC with the OS you want, or without an OS at all.
Apple could not find licensees the same way Linux can't get OEMs to offer it outside of a token hobbyist offering. Those contracts were all tied up by MS.
Ridiculous. The last time Apple licensed clone Macs it nearly killed them. While Macs are much more competitively priced these days, significantly reducing the likelihood of that happening again, "whitebox Macs" would work directly against the main things that makes Apple "cool" - exclusivity and perceived premium.
Steve Jobs has *zero* interest in Macintoshes being sold by anyone except Apple. Unlike you, he has an excellent understanding of what it is that makes Apple successful, and why people buy (or covet) Apple products. I only wish I'd had more money on hand to plough into Apple stock back in '97 when he took over as CEO.
Nothing is free. If you want the browser to be free, and MS to provide it, you are inviting MS to run your desktop.
I don't care who provides it. I use Firefox on all my PCs, regardless of whether they're running Windows, Linux, OS X, S
In addition to leveraging its monopoly position on 98% of the world's PCs to instantly create overwhelming market share for IE almost instantly in 1997, [...]
Except that's not what *actually* happened.
The first version of IE to really start taking marketshare off Navigator, was IE4. At the time, IE4 was only available via download (or through your ISP, magazine covers, etc - the point being it wasn't included in Windows).
IE4 surpassed Navigator in marketshare some time in 1999. *Long* before anything close to a majority of end users had changed to Windows 98.
There was no "manufacturered" demand for IE via the "monopoly position". The demand was generated by the market, because IE4 was better than Navigator (3 at the time, but also 4 when it came out). When you look at the actual patterns of IE takeup, this is blatantly obvious, because the version of IE that was destroying Navigator in the marketplace was doing so in a way that could not be related to its integration into Windows.
[...] MS also added proprietary extensions to IE to distort the market of the web itself. That allowed MS to kill Netscape's revenue from servers.
In actual fact, this was a tactic Netscape was using to lock-in their Navigator client to proprietry extensions of their server product. Microsoft's extensions were all client-side and, at the time, this was considered completely normal in the fast-paced world of browser development.
IE didn't compete with Netscape as a product until Netscape itself began to fail with the fiasco of Communicator 4. IE 1-3 were junk. IE 4-6 were better than what Netscape offered only because the company had been vanquished and was no longer offering anything.
Utter tripe. IE3 was a quite capable alternative to Navigator 3, although it was never really popular due to Navigator's inertia. When IE4 was released in 1997, Navigator dominated the browser market with something like 80% - 90% marketshare. IE4, being at the time vastly superior to Navigator, started taking marketshare off it - *long* before Windows 98 was ever released.
Netscape was in a commanding position when IE4 was released. They were driving the industry. Then, instead of making a better product (resulting in the disaster that was Navigator 4) they chose to expend money and effort playing stupid legal games.
Microsoft didn't _need_ to "kill" Netscape - Netscape did a perfectly good job of committing suicide.
Google faces the same impossible leverage.
Yes, Google does face the same situation. They are market leaders whose product has essentially been unmatched, now having to go up against an alternative that is, by all reports, much better. No wonder they're running to the Government for help.
While MS can "compete" against Google desktop or browser tools, it can't compete in web search and marketing. So it is using its monopoly desktop position to roll out integrated search that can't be disabled or replaced by third party vendors. Once MS establishes market share on the basis of disposable PCs being replaced, and not consumer choice, it can then start directing all web search to its own servers exclusively.
More tripe.
Google currently has to fund Mozilla's Firefox to the tune of about $50 million a year to maintain an alternative browser. That reminds one of the fact that the only competition to Windows on the desktop PC is Linux, which is free. Microsoft has still managed to prevent OEMS from bundling it.
Microsoft don't "prevent" OEMs from bundling Linux, they don't bundle it because hardly anyone is interested in buying it.
There is no free market in PC desktop OSs (Apple could not sign up OEMs, and even the free Linux struggles to gain adoption)
Heh, now that's comedy. Blaming Apple single-sourcing MacOS X hardware on Microsoft.
There is no free market in desktop application suites (Office is rivaled mainly by free OpenOffice)
Which, (assuming sarcasm on your part), wouldn't rule out the virtualisation restrictions being a contributory factory in to poor vista sales.
Certainly. However, I think it's safe to assume - as my sarcasm intended - that EULA-limited virtualisation is only something a tiny minority of users would take into account.
(Especially since a quite reasonable interpretation of the EULA doesn't prevent you from, say, virtualising a copy of Vista on your Mac running OS X - ie: the most common end-user virtualisation scenario.)
I think we can take the poor sales as a given - if vista was flying off the shelves, MS wouldn't trouble with a "fact rich" campaign to persuade potential customers to "proceed with confidence". Whether or not sales is the same thing as popularity is another question, although Microsoft fans don't usually have a problem with the notion when contrasting Windows against Linux.
As with Office, Microsoft's biggest competitor to Vista is Windows XP. Vista sales are slow not because it is "bad", but because XP is well and truly "good enough". Hence, the take-up rate of Vista is basically that of new/replacement PC sales.
But let's not get sidetracked. Even if virtualisation isn't causing Vista's sales problems, it could still be seen as doing so, internally. For that matter, if MS were going to relent a little on the more controversial features of Vista, they're more likely to give ground over virtualisation than they are to back pedal over DRM, for example. And there's probably nothing they can do at this late stage about the hardware issues. So if they were inclined to throw the potential buyer a bone, it would pretty much have to be over virtualisation.
Not really much of a bone. The proportion of customers such an annoucement would sway is miniscule by any reasonable argument. I don't think even the craziest of sales droids believe that a meaningful (hell, even statistically valid) portion of their userbase is holding back because of perceived problems with virtualising certain versions of Vista.
Obviously, you don't remember your history that well, either, because this case was much worse than you say here.
The irony...
MS didn't include a product similar to Stacker in DOS. MS included Stacker itself: they actually copied Stac's code outright. Stac of course sued for copyright infringement et al, and MS finally lost the court case, but it was too late for Stac, which went under. The judgment probably got split up amongst the shareholders, but in the end the company died, and MS had succeeded in putting a perceived competitor out of business as they intended, though it came at a small (to MS) monetary cost.
In actual fact, Microsoft v Stac was a patent case and had zero to do with copyright. Software patents are bad, remember, so Stac *should* have lost the case.
Also, as I said elsewhere, what killed Stacker (along with the 3 or 4 other identical programs that were on the market at the time) was plummeting hard disk prices, massive disk growth and a fundamentally fragile-and-prone-to-catastrophic-data-loss application design. Unfortunately for Stac, their buggy whips were no longer a compelling product in the days of the horseless carriage.
You kids are probably too young to remember Stacker, but basically it was a way of compressing files to increase harddrive space by compressing on-the-fly. They were doing great until Microsoft decided to include a similar product in DOS, and then they were fucked. Victims of Microsoft's "Oh, sorry about including a feature that fucks up your business" mentality.
Stac was killed by plummeting storage prices, incredibly fast drive size growth and fragile, easily-catastrophically-broken software. Exactly the same reasons that people stopped using MS-DOS's and DR-DOS's equivalents. Who in their right mind would roll the corruption dice with Stacker (or Double/DriveSpace or SuperStor) when disks were suddenly dirt cheap ?
I *do* remember Stacker. I bought it - cost significantly more than DOS itself from memory (although still cheaper than buying more hard disk space in about 1991). I've even got one of their 16-bit ISA "compression coprocessor" cards at home somewhere.
How long before the EULA says that you can only run microsoft software on it?
Given that the vast, vast majority of Windows PCs are bought to run some non-Microsoft software, and hardly anyone would be interested in a general-purpose OS that wasn't general-purpose, I'd be willing to say a very, very long time.
I suspect (hope) that desperation with the lack of popularity of Vista will force Microsoft's hand.
Right. Because it's obviously that miniscule proportion of people who a) want to virtualise and b) won't just ignore the EULA that is responsible for the "lack of popularity".
It's simple price discrimination. Every business of any notable size does it, but apparently when Microsoft is concerned it's something uniquely evil, because I don't recall similar howls of outrage about, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux only "supports" two physical CPUs.
That hasn't been a core OS function until now suddenly, obviously.
Apple (and their customers) would disagree.
So would anyone who's been using indexed searches in Windows since the mid-90s (albeit via different functionality than in Vista).
Furthermore the complaint wasn't so much Microsoft making the function available in a stock install, but Microsoft closing the door for alternatives, so that you'd end up being stuck with 2 hard drive munching indexers if you don't choose to use Microsoft's.
Microsoft don't "close the door" in any way. You are free to install any alternative indexer/search you want. You (or the software developers) are free to disable Vista's builtin search at any time.
Microsoft have been providing some form of search in their OS since at least Windows 95. Since DOS 1.0, if you consider dir [/s] *file* a "search" (and given how many people seem to consider find / -name "*file" a "search", that's not unreasonable).
The indexing searching of Vista is a clear and predictable evolution of functionality that's been present in Windows since before Google even existed.
Admittedly, they should have done so decades ago, but they didn't need to because they have a monopoly, and developing features for customers costs money. Instead, third parties, including Google, invested time and effort to provide the feature to Microsoft vict\\\\ customers, and by doing so added value to the Windows platform.
This is a non-sequitur. Pretty much every piece of moderately advanced functionality in every OS appeared via "third party" software first.
Microsoft then belatedly implemented their own version of the feature, and therefore became competitors to the desktop search providers.
False. Microsoft announced "desktop search" would be in Vista (then Longhorn) a year before GDS was even available as a beta.
In addition, they made sure their own search tool also connected to their MSN search if the customer performed an internet search using the same tool.
Look at Vista, then look at OS X. Do you really see no link between the two? The two interfaces bear more than a passing resemblance, [...]
Sure, in the same sense all GUIs bear "more than a passing resemblence" to each other. Other than that, however, they're quite different in both form and function (and Vista's GUI is a lot more like Windows 95's than it is like OS X's).
Window management, window manipulation, task-switching (both methodology and model), program launching, file management and keyboard accessibility, are just a few significant features off the top of my head that are meaningfully different between Vista and OS X.
It's much easier to find ways they are different, than ways they are similar - unless you're comparing in the kind of abstract terms that would make DOS and UNIX "bear more than a passing resemblence", in which case even bringing it up is pretty much pointless.
Compared to XP, sure. Compared to Vista's built-in search (ie: what Microsoft were talking about back in 2003, a year before GDS was even in beta), not so much.
Now that GDS is available, MS have upped their game and built it into Vista, nice and deep.
No, Microsoft were going to do it long before GDS was available.
If MS address this in a future service pack, you can just bet it will be a command-line config or a registry setting that will obey the letter of the law, but be utterly useless in addressing the real complaint.
There is no "real complaint". There's just Google's baseless whining about "problems" that don't exist.
Well, that's not ALL we're talking about. Remember, this was an MS-made replacement for Google's desktop search and Microsoft only made it AFTER seeing Google's product, at which point they merged it into Windows at a fairly deep level.
Rubbish. Microsoft first said Vista (Longhorn at the time) would have "Desktop Search" a year before before Google's first GD beta (and two years before Apple released Spotlight). Further, they'd been talking about the broad concept since at least the mid 90s.
In other words, I don't really care what they put into their OS, but WHY they put it in there: to kill off competitors (Google) and their products.
The idea that it was a "response" to Google's product (and hence some deliberate, targeted attack), doesn't even pass the laugh test.
if so, why don't we seen businesses demanding open standards used when they make the buying decisions ?
Because businesses are interested in the real results of improved productivity and profitability, rather than the typically nebulous feel-good advantages of "open standards".
is this uninformed people being in charge or what ?
Quite the contrary. It's just they're more informed about the _business_ than the _technology_. Which is to say, nearly the complete opposite of the average Slashdotter.
If there is no other price that gets discounted, then how can you call it a discount?
Perhaps you'd prefer the word "bundled". Regardless, the meaning is the same.
It's only a discount if it's less than the retail price. In this case there is no other price.
Ie: the price for _just_ an iPhone is infinite.
So no discount. If they later start selling it with no contract requirement and a higher price, *then* the contract price will be a discount. But right now there's no discount, only a single price with an accompanying contract requirement.
Regardless of the euphamism you want to use, the iPhone is locked into a contract and, hence, it's actual price is obfuscated.
And if customers hate the idea of contracts so much, why do so many of them sign up?
Some common reasons:
* No alternative (How else can you get an iPhone ? No pay as you go plans.)
* Little alternative (Can't afford the phone up-front, have to pay it off monthly on a contract.)
* Artificially skewed pricing models (same call patterns on a pay-as-you-go plan costs 3x as much as on a contract)
* Stupidity (Sure, I'll be happy to sign on for 3 years, just gimme the phone. [time passes] What's that ? You're doubling your rates just like the contract allows you to ?)
Do you think most cell customers hate the contract they're on, but put up with it for the discounted phone?
I think most people, at best, _tolerate_ the contract they're on. Have you ever met anyone of reasoanble intelligence who, all else being equal, would prefer to be tied to a fixed-length contract for a given service or be able to move between providers at will ?
I'm not saying you're wrong because I doubt either of us have numbers, but I would guess there are a lot of them (like me) who aren't planning to change carriers anyway, so give up nothing in exchange for a hardware discount. Could be Apple thinks the same thing - that the requirement for a contract isn't going to significantly slow iPhone sales.
I doubt it will either, given the demographic who will probably be buying most of them. However, I know *I* would never buy a phone that was irretrievably tied to a particular carrier - but in Australia I'm used to a mobile phone market that finds it a bit more difficult to screw over the end users.
In hindsight, perhaps "arbitrary" would have been a better word.
A patch is structured, and further, contains specific (nonrandom) information on how to transform an input file into a previously created output file. It is, by definition, derived from two input files.
An SSH public keyfile, too, is structured, and further, contains specific (nonrandom) information that facilitates transforming input data into output data.
An SSH public keyfile, however, is still just a few strings of randomly generated characters.
Furthermore, you appear to believe that a derivative work must somehow have structure or purpose similar to that of the original work.
I believe that a derivative work must bear some resemblence to the work from whence it is derived and must actually be a coherent "work" in and of itself. After all, if that were not a requirement, surely any random jumbling of sounds or words that just happened to also be present in another piece of music or literature could be deemed derivative (or vice versa), could it not ?
Personally I find the whole concept of a "derivative work" - pretending for the moment I believe in the concept of "intellectual property" at all - to be forced, counter-intuitive and fundamentally ignorant. A "derivative" work is either so similar to the original that the differences are irrelevant (and they are effectively identical), or it is different enough to stand on its own merits and therefore warrants discrete recognition. Further, since all "works" are influenced in some way by the "works" that have preceded them, surely all "works" are derivative ?
A patch does not contain random information, but nice strawman.
Yes, it does. A patch (typically) cannot stand on its own as usable, compilable software and usually doesn't even contain syntactically correct statements. It is source-code gibberish, meaningless without the source it is patching.
In that, it is similar to my analogy. Certainly, by pulling out random notes and sounds you will get the occasional grammatically correct sentence fragment, short tune, or proper chord - but without the context of the original document or music, they are simply random, meaningless, words and sounds.
And it's Sun's fault because they chose their license second, without (as far as I could tell) giving a clear explanation why a GPLv2-compatible license would have been impractical for them.
It's important to note that when the FSF says "the GPL is compatible with license X" it means that in the same way Microsoft does when it says "our standard is compatible with standard X".
That is, it's one-way "compatibility". You can take "license-Xed" code and GPL it, but you can't take GPLed code and "license-X" it.
Great, so we're going to pay twice as much, than if the entire market was de-regulated and Telstra was completely sold.
You think Telstra's prices would go *DOWN* if that happened ?
WAITER ! I'll have what he's having !
Name one time government did any good.
That's easy. Building the phone system in the first place. Now can you name one time privatising a government-held utilities monopoly improved service and prices ?
I saw "our brilliant Prime Minister" on TV last night, he was talking to a guy sitting at a PC and asking insightfull questions such as: "How long does it take to download a movie?".
Seems pretty germane, given that movies, MP3s and warez^H^H^H^H^Hlinux distros are what 99% of people want a fat pipe for...
Slashdot Mirror
This is the difference between using Service Packs and using individual patches for individual packages/applications. It's a Monolith versus granular approach.
You do realise a SP is basically just a bunch of individual patches bundled up together into a single, easily installable entity, right ? Like, say, Red Hat does with their regular repackaging to "RHAS 4 Update 3", etc.
Who cares?
Anyone who's interested in information other that parroted anti-Microsoft FUD.
The real fact to consider is that IE resulted in an immediate plunge in Netscape's market share, from over 80% in 1996 to being a minority a year later.
Rubbish. It took years for IE to displace Navigator. In 1999, the market was only just starting to see IE use exceed Navigator use. Further, Navigator's decline lines up exactly with its increasing levels of suckiness.
That's leverage.
Indeed. The "leverage" of a superior product. Cunning and dastardly work, to be sure.
Part of that leverage in 1997 was MS using threats of delaying Office for Mac to get Apple to sign an exclusive deal to only put IE on the Mac desktop.
Undoubtedly without that extra 1% or so of marketshare such a deal represented, IE would have been an abject failure.
"In July of 1997, the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft appeared to vanish with the announcement a new cooperative partnership. Why did Microsoft invest millions in a partnership with its most obvious remaining competitor in the desktop operating system market? "
I've read the site before and it is an excellent example of anti-Microsoft FUD and conspiracy theories. Presumably you're quoting it here to take advantage of the general anti-Microsoft sentiment of Slashdot.
I agree that Netscape screwed up its own game.
Which is all that really matters, given that most of your arguments are hanging off the example of Netscape's failure being somehow due to underhanded and/or illegal Microsoft machinations.
However, MS not only put a bullet into Netscape's head, but further monopolized the browser market, to the point where the only competitors since have been a free project and a few niche micro-minorities: Opera on mobiles, and Safari on the Mac. That is not an open market.
At which time in the past were you thinking of when the browser "market" _wasn't_ made up of one or two giants and a handful of "micro-niche minorities" ? First there was Mosaic, then there was Navigator and Mosaic, then there was Navigator and IE, then there was IE, now there is IE and Firefox.
How is the current situation in any way unusual, given the history of the web browser ?
Your comments about there being no market for Linux or Mac OS X on PCs fallacious; if you don't know how OEM contracts work, go look it up.
Then why aren't people out there raking in money hand-over-fist selling PCs running Linux, if the demand is so high ? Forget the major sellers, if - as you imply - people are desparate to buy Linux PCs, why aren't there dozens of startups selling them as fast as they can put them together ?
There is no open market for PC OS and hasn't been since the early 90s.
It has always been trivial to buy a PC with the OS you want, or without an OS at all.
Apple could not find licensees the same way Linux can't get OEMs to offer it outside of a token hobbyist offering. Those contracts were all tied up by MS.
Ridiculous. The last time Apple licensed clone Macs it nearly killed them. While Macs are much more competitively priced these days, significantly reducing the likelihood of that happening again, "whitebox Macs" would work directly against the main things that makes Apple "cool" - exclusivity and perceived premium.
Steve Jobs has *zero* interest in Macintoshes being sold by anyone except Apple. Unlike you, he has an excellent understanding of what it is that makes Apple successful, and why people buy (or covet) Apple products. I only wish I'd had more money on hand to plough into Apple stock back in '97 when he took over as CEO.
Nothing is free. If you want the browser to be free, and MS to provide it, you are inviting MS to run your desktop.
I don't care who provides it. I use Firefox on all my PCs, regardless of whether they're running Windows, Linux, OS X, S
One of the major motivators to switch to Vista was their new file system, but as it is we're stuck with NTFS for Windows and a plethora for *NIX.
No, it wasn't. WinFS is not - and never was - a filesystem.
In addition to leveraging its monopoly position on 98% of the world's PCs to instantly create overwhelming market share for IE almost instantly in 1997, [...]
Except that's not what *actually* happened.
The first version of IE to really start taking marketshare off Navigator, was IE4. At the time, IE4 was only available via download (or through your ISP, magazine covers, etc - the point being it wasn't included in Windows).
IE4 surpassed Navigator in marketshare some time in 1999. *Long* before anything close to a majority of end users had changed to Windows 98.
There was no "manufacturered" demand for IE via the "monopoly position". The demand was generated by the market, because IE4 was better than Navigator (3 at the time, but also 4 when it came out). When you look at the actual patterns of IE takeup, this is blatantly obvious, because the version of IE that was destroying Navigator in the marketplace was doing so in a way that could not be related to its integration into Windows.
[...] MS also added proprietary extensions to IE to distort the market of the web itself. That allowed MS to kill Netscape's revenue from servers.
In actual fact, this was a tactic Netscape was using to lock-in their Navigator client to proprietry extensions of their server product. Microsoft's extensions were all client-side and, at the time, this was considered completely normal in the fast-paced world of browser development.
IE didn't compete with Netscape as a product until Netscape itself began to fail with the fiasco of Communicator 4. IE 1-3 were junk. IE 4-6 were better than what Netscape offered only because the company had been vanquished and was no longer offering anything.
Utter tripe. IE3 was a quite capable alternative to Navigator 3, although it was never really popular due to Navigator's inertia. When IE4 was released in 1997, Navigator dominated the browser market with something like 80% - 90% marketshare. IE4, being at the time vastly superior to Navigator, started taking marketshare off it - *long* before Windows 98 was ever released.
Netscape was in a commanding position when IE4 was released. They were driving the industry. Then, instead of making a better product (resulting in the disaster that was Navigator 4) they chose to expend money and effort playing stupid legal games.
Microsoft didn't _need_ to "kill" Netscape - Netscape did a perfectly good job of committing suicide.
Google faces the same impossible leverage.
Yes, Google does face the same situation. They are market leaders whose product has essentially been unmatched, now having to go up against an alternative that is, by all reports, much better. No wonder they're running to the Government for help.
While MS can "compete" against Google desktop or browser tools, it can't compete in web search and marketing. So it is using its monopoly desktop position to roll out integrated search that can't be disabled or replaced by third party vendors. Once MS establishes market share on the basis of disposable PCs being replaced, and not consumer choice, it can then start directing all web search to its own servers exclusively.
More tripe.
Google currently has to fund Mozilla's Firefox to the tune of about $50 million a year to maintain an alternative browser. That reminds one of the fact that the only competition to Windows on the desktop PC is Linux, which is free. Microsoft has still managed to prevent OEMS from bundling it.
Microsoft don't "prevent" OEMs from bundling Linux, they don't bundle it because hardly anyone is interested in buying it.
There is no free market in PC desktop OSs (Apple could not sign up OEMs, and even the free Linux struggles to gain adoption)
Heh, now that's comedy. Blaming Apple single-sourcing MacOS X hardware on Microsoft.
There is no free market in desktop application suites (Office is rivaled mainly by free OpenOffice)
Which, (assuming sarcasm on your part), wouldn't rule out the virtualisation restrictions being a contributory factory in to poor vista sales.
Certainly. However, I think it's safe to assume - as my sarcasm intended - that EULA-limited virtualisation is only something a tiny minority of users would take into account.
(Especially since a quite reasonable interpretation of the EULA doesn't prevent you from, say, virtualising a copy of Vista on your Mac running OS X - ie: the most common end-user virtualisation scenario.)
I think we can take the poor sales as a given - if vista was flying off the shelves, MS wouldn't trouble with a "fact rich" campaign to persuade potential customers to "proceed with confidence". Whether or not sales is the same thing as popularity is another question, although Microsoft fans don't usually have a problem with the notion when contrasting Windows against Linux.
As with Office, Microsoft's biggest competitor to Vista is Windows XP. Vista sales are slow not because it is "bad", but because XP is well and truly "good enough". Hence, the take-up rate of Vista is basically that of new/replacement PC sales.
But let's not get sidetracked. Even if virtualisation isn't causing Vista's sales problems, it could still be seen as doing so, internally. For that matter, if MS were going to relent a little on the more controversial features of Vista, they're more likely to give ground over virtualisation than they are to back pedal over DRM, for example. And there's probably nothing they can do at this late stage about the hardware issues. So if they were inclined to throw the potential buyer a bone, it would pretty much have to be over virtualisation.
Not really much of a bone. The proportion of customers such an annoucement would sway is miniscule by any reasonable argument. I don't think even the craziest of sales droids believe that a meaningful (hell, even statistically valid) portion of their userbase is holding back because of perceived problems with virtualising certain versions of Vista.
I'm really not trying to troll, but wasn't that based on the DB-like filesystem, which didn't make it into Vista?
Probably. Although it's not really relevant.
Also, WinFS wasn't a filesystem. It was a layer that sat on top of the filesystem. It's also (allegedly) going to be part of Longhorn server.
Obviously, you don't remember your history that well, either, because this case was much worse than you say here.
The irony...
MS didn't include a product similar to Stacker in DOS. MS included Stacker itself: they actually copied Stac's code outright. Stac of course sued for copyright infringement et al, and MS finally lost the court case, but it was too late for Stac, which went under. The judgment probably got split up amongst the shareholders, but in the end the company died, and MS had succeeded in putting a perceived competitor out of business as they intended, though it came at a small (to MS) monetary cost.
In actual fact, Microsoft v Stac was a patent case and had zero to do with copyright. Software patents are bad, remember, so Stac *should* have lost the case.
Also, as I said elsewhere, what killed Stacker (along with the 3 or 4 other identical programs that were on the market at the time) was plummeting hard disk prices, massive disk growth and a fundamentally fragile-and-prone-to-catastrophic-data-loss application design. Unfortunately for Stac, their buggy whips were no longer a compelling product in the days of the horseless carriage.
You kids are probably too young to remember Stacker, but basically it was a way of compressing files to increase harddrive space by compressing on-the-fly. They were doing great until Microsoft decided to include a similar product in DOS, and then they were fucked. Victims of Microsoft's "Oh, sorry about including a feature that fucks up your business" mentality.
Stac was killed by plummeting storage prices, incredibly fast drive size growth and fragile, easily-catastrophically-broken software. Exactly the same reasons that people stopped using MS-DOS's and DR-DOS's equivalents. Who in their right mind would roll the corruption dice with Stacker (or Double/DriveSpace or SuperStor) when disks were suddenly dirt cheap ?
I *do* remember Stacker. I bought it - cost significantly more than DOS itself from memory (although still cheaper than buying more hard disk space in about 1991). I've even got one of their 16-bit ISA "compression coprocessor" cards at home somewhere.
How long before the EULA says that you can only run microsoft software on it?
Given that the vast, vast majority of Windows PCs are bought to run some non-Microsoft software, and hardly anyone would be interested in a general-purpose OS that wasn't general-purpose, I'd be willing to say a very, very long time.
I suspect (hope) that desperation with the lack of popularity of Vista will force Microsoft's hand.
Right. Because it's obviously that miniscule proportion of people who a) want to virtualise and b) won't just ignore the EULA that is responsible for the "lack of popularity".
It's simple price discrimination. Every business of any notable size does it, but apparently when Microsoft is concerned it's something uniquely evil, because I don't recall similar howls of outrage about, say, Red Hat Enterprise Linux only "supports" two physical CPUs.
That hasn't been a core OS function until now suddenly, obviously.
Apple (and their customers) would disagree.
So would anyone who's been using indexed searches in Windows since the mid-90s (albeit via different functionality than in Vista).
Furthermore the complaint wasn't so much Microsoft making the function available in a stock install, but Microsoft closing the door for alternatives, so that you'd end up being stuck with 2 hard drive munching indexers if you don't choose to use Microsoft's.
Microsoft don't "close the door" in any way. You are free to install any alternative indexer/search you want. You (or the software developers) are free to disable Vista's builtin search at any time.
MS didn't provide this feature in their OS.
Microsoft have been providing some form of search in their OS since at least Windows 95. Since DOS 1.0, if you consider dir [/s] *file* a "search" (and given how many people seem to consider find / -name "*file" a "search", that's not unreasonable).
The indexing searching of Vista is a clear and predictable evolution of functionality that's been present in Windows since before Google even existed.
Admittedly, they should have done so decades ago, but they didn't need to because they have a monopoly, and developing features for customers costs money. Instead, third parties, including Google, invested time and effort to provide the feature to Microsoft vict\\\\ customers, and by doing so added value to the Windows platform.
This is a non-sequitur. Pretty much every piece of moderately advanced functionality in every OS appeared via "third party" software first.
Microsoft then belatedly implemented their own version of the feature, and therefore became competitors to the desktop search providers.
False. Microsoft announced "desktop search" would be in Vista (then Longhorn) a year before GDS was even available as a beta.
In addition, they made sure their own search tool also connected to their MSN search if the customer performed an internet search using the same tool.
I.e. just like Google do with GDS.
Personally, I'm not finding that to be particularly effective. All the companies I hate and refuse to buy from seem to still be thriving.
I know what you mean. I'm having the same trouble trying to get my local representative of the Nazi Party elected.
Look at Vista, then look at OS X. Do you really see no link between the two? The two interfaces bear more than a passing resemblance, [...]
Sure, in the same sense all GUIs bear "more than a passing resemblence" to each other. Other than that, however, they're quite different in both form and function (and Vista's GUI is a lot more like Windows 95's than it is like OS X's).
Window management, window manipulation, task-switching (both methodology and model), program launching, file management and keyboard accessibility, are just a few significant features off the top of my head that are meaningfully different between Vista and OS X.
It's much easier to find ways they are different, than ways they are similar - unless you're comparing in the kind of abstract terms that would make DOS and UNIX "bear more than a passing resemblence", in which case even bringing it up is pretty much pointless.
GDS completely kicks ass.
Compared to XP, sure. Compared to Vista's built-in search (ie: what Microsoft were talking about back in 2003, a year before GDS was even in beta), not so much.
Now that GDS is available, MS have upped their game and built it into Vista, nice and deep.
No, Microsoft were going to do it long before GDS was available.
If MS address this in a future service pack, you can just bet it will be a command-line config or a registry setting that will obey the letter of the law, but be utterly useless in addressing the real complaint.
There is no "real complaint". There's just Google's baseless whining about "problems" that don't exist.
Well, that's not ALL we're talking about. Remember, this was an MS-made replacement for Google's desktop search and Microsoft only made it AFTER seeing Google's product, at which point they merged it into Windows at a fairly deep level.
Rubbish. Microsoft first said Vista (Longhorn at the time) would have "Desktop Search" a year before before Google's first GD beta (and two years before Apple released Spotlight). Further, they'd been talking about the broad concept since at least the mid 90s.
In other words, I don't really care what they put into their OS, but WHY they put it in there: to kill off competitors (Google) and their products.
The idea that it was a "response" to Google's product (and hence some deliberate, targeted attack), doesn't even pass the laugh test.
if so, why don't we seen businesses demanding open standards used when they make the buying decisions ?
Because businesses are interested in the real results of improved productivity and profitability, rather than the typically nebulous feel-good advantages of "open standards".
is this uninformed people being in charge or what ?
Quite the contrary. It's just they're more informed about the _business_ than the _technology_. Which is to say, nearly the complete opposite of the average Slashdotter.
If there is no other price that gets discounted, then how can you call it a discount?
Perhaps you'd prefer the word "bundled". Regardless, the meaning is the same.
It's only a discount if it's less than the retail price. In this case there is no other price.
Ie: the price for _just_ an iPhone is infinite.
So no discount. If they later start selling it with no contract requirement and a higher price, *then* the contract price will be a discount. But right now there's no discount, only a single price with an accompanying contract requirement.
Regardless of the euphamism you want to use, the iPhone is locked into a contract and, hence, it's actual price is obfuscated.
And if customers hate the idea of contracts so much, why do so many of them sign up?
Some common reasons:
* No alternative (How else can you get an iPhone ? No pay as you go plans.)
* Little alternative (Can't afford the phone up-front, have to pay it off monthly on a contract.)
* Artificially skewed pricing models (same call patterns on a pay-as-you-go plan costs 3x as much as on a contract)
* Stupidity (Sure, I'll be happy to sign on for 3 years, just gimme the phone. [time passes] What's that ? You're doubling your rates just like the contract allows you to ?)
Do you think most cell customers hate the contract they're on, but put up with it for the discounted phone?
I think most people, at best, _tolerate_ the contract they're on. Have you ever met anyone of reasoanble intelligence who, all else being equal, would prefer to be tied to a fixed-length contract for a given service or be able to move between providers at will ?
I'm not saying you're wrong because I doubt either of us have numbers, but I would guess there are a lot of them (like me) who aren't planning to change carriers anyway, so give up nothing in exchange for a hardware discount. Could be Apple thinks the same thing - that the requirement for a contract isn't going to significantly slow iPhone sales.
I doubt it will either, given the demographic who will probably be buying most of them. However, I know *I* would never buy a phone that was irretrievably tied to a particular carrier - but in Australia I'm used to a mobile phone market that finds it a bit more difficult to screw over the end users.
Please. OS X is not BSD. It's a mostly new OS that was built on top of NextStep, [...]
It would be more accurate to say it's mostly NeXTSTEP (5.x) with a new shell and display system.
OS X is to NeXTSTEP as Vista is to Windows 2003.
You clearly do not understand the word random.
In hindsight, perhaps "arbitrary" would have been a better word.
A patch is structured, and further, contains specific (nonrandom) information on how to transform an input file into a previously created output file. It is, by definition, derived from two input files.
An SSH public keyfile, too, is structured, and further, contains specific (nonrandom) information that facilitates transforming input data into output data.
An SSH public keyfile, however, is still just a few strings of randomly generated characters.
Furthermore, you appear to believe that a derivative work must somehow have structure or purpose similar to that of the original work.
I believe that a derivative work must bear some resemblence to the work from whence it is derived and must actually be a coherent "work" in and of itself. After all, if that were not a requirement, surely any random jumbling of sounds or words that just happened to also be present in another piece of music or literature could be deemed derivative (or vice versa), could it not ?
Personally I find the whole concept of a "derivative work" - pretending for the moment I believe in the concept of "intellectual property" at all - to be forced, counter-intuitive and fundamentally ignorant. A "derivative" work is either so similar to the original that the differences are irrelevant (and they are effectively identical), or it is different enough to stand on its own merits and therefore warrants discrete recognition. Further, since all "works" are influenced in some way by the "works" that have preceded them, surely all "works" are derivative ?
A patch does not contain random information, but nice strawman.
Yes, it does. A patch (typically) cannot stand on its own as usable, compilable software and usually doesn't even contain syntactically correct statements. It is source-code gibberish, meaningless without the source it is patching.
In that, it is similar to my analogy. Certainly, by pulling out random notes and sounds you will get the occasional grammatically correct sentence fragment, short tune, or proper chord - but without the context of the original document or music, they are simply random, meaningless, words and sounds.
And it's Sun's fault because they chose their license second, without (as far as I could tell) giving a clear explanation why a GPLv2-compatible license would have been impractical for them.
It's important to note that when the FSF says "the GPL is compatible with license X" it means that in the same way Microsoft does when it says "our standard is compatible with standard X".
That is, it's one-way "compatibility". You can take "license-Xed" code and GPL it, but you can't take GPLed code and "license-X" it.
I would consider a patch to be a derivative work.
Huh ? Would you consider random notes pulled out of a musical performance, or random words pulled out of a book, to be a "derivative work" as well ?
Great, so we're going to pay twice as much, than if the entire market was de-regulated and Telstra was completely sold.
You think Telstra's prices would go *DOWN* if that happened ?
WAITER ! I'll have what he's having !
Name one time government did any good.
That's easy. Building the phone system in the first place. Now can you name one time privatising a government-held utilities monopoly improved service and prices ?
I saw "our brilliant Prime Minister" on TV last night, he was talking to a guy sitting at a PC and asking insightfull questions such as: "How long does it take to download a movie?".
Seems pretty germane, given that movies, MP3s and warez^H^H^H^H^Hlinux distros are what 99% of people want a fat pipe for...