The free market is broken when a buyer is forced to buy one product because they need a completely different product, thus they don't choose the product that is best for them.
So, basically, according to you any product that does more than one thing is "breaking" the "free market" ?
(Actually, this does line up pretty well with all your other posts, basically saying Microsoft aren't allowed to improve Windows, because that would be an antitrust violation. I can't say I see any benefit for consumers, however.)
Wow! OSX's market share must have jumped lately. I did not realize they had taken over more than 70% of the desktop OS market, crushing Windows. It is strange the press has not bothered to report on this. Strange indeed.
For someone who falls back on the "monopoly" argument with boring monotony, you seem to have a problem with basic facts.
* Monopoly status is not dependent on marketshare.
* Microsoft are not a monopoly in the "desktop OS market" (personally, I'd argue they aren't a monopoly in any market).
* Apple and Microsoft (at least according to the market Microsoft was determined to be a monopoly in) do not compete in the same market.
A daemon that sits around on top of the file system monitoring every read/write for virus signatures is, in my opinion, not part of the OS. It isn't necessary for basic interaction with the hardware.
Neither is a shell or a TCP/IP stack. How easy do you think it would be to market an OS today to consumers without either of those ?
Actually, yes, we can, and we do, and it's not just us "M$ IS TEH SUXXORZ" geeks, it's the American legal system. Said "double standard" is called the Sherman Antitrust Act (among, I believe, other laws), and it says that when you become a monopoly, you have to play by different rules, primarily regarding pushing into other markets on the strength of your monopoly power.
Indeed, and it was clearly dreamed up by someone with a "we had to destroy the village to save it" mentality.
The problem is not that M$ is getting sued for bundling products. As others have pointed out, they have a nasty habit of making those bundled products frustratingly difficult or downright impossible to disable.
Like what ?
Safari, or the widgets are easy to remove and the user is free to use whatever they wish as a replacement. IE, as we all know, is not.
Yes, it is. You do it exactly the same way you do it with Safari - delete the executable file.
Sigh, you miss the point. Adobe can't do anything about MS fairly competing with them. What MS is doing, however, is unfairly competing. Suppose you have to buy Windows (like most people). It is after all, the only OS that will run most programs. Windows ships with a PDF creation tool. You paid for the developers salaries to create that tool with part of your Windows license fee. You don't have any choice about paying for it. Now, are you going to go and download different tools and pay for them too? Maybe, if they are significantly better. What if the Adobe tools are better, but only a little bit. Are you going to pay for both MS's tools and Adobe's tools, for only a slightly better product? Probably not. So you don't. Capitalism has failed. You just bought an inferior product because MS bundled it. The market did not successfully reward Adobe for making better software.
Can you explain why your argument applies to a PDF creator, but doesn't apply to, say, the TCP/IP stack ? Or the GUI ? Or the CLI ? Or.NET ? Or Notepad ?
I can't believe how many people here on Slashdot don't even understand the basics of capitalism and monopolies. Is Econ 101 no longer a requirement for a bachelors degree?
I can't believe how many people on Slashdot come up with ridiculously unrealistic examples and analogies to try get everyone else to help carry around the massive chip they have on their shoulder about Microsoft. Yet they do, every day.
Did anyone who responded to this article actually READ the damn article? MS isn't offering PDF creation in Vista - AT ALL!!!
That's because when they tried to include it in the new version of Office, Adobe threatened to sue.
They should, as *nix and OS X have done for years, all OS's should have Print/Export to PDF built into the OS. HOWEVER, MS is planning on releasing Vista with an MS homegrown "PDF Killer". As the MS Office suite moves to XML based file formats, they are building a PDF-Like file export into Vista called XML Paper Specification (or XPS). So all you happy like MS lovers chiming in on this little article, and how MS is entitled to include PDF in Vista since it's an open standard are going to be in for a bit of a surprise when your files come out as "MyHomework.xps".
As usual, no matter *what* Microsoft tries to do, they can't win. They can't include PDF, because Adobe will sue them. They can't come up with their own alternative to PDF, because (surprise) Adobe will sue them.
As usual, the only losers here are the consumers whose wants and needs Microsoft are (at least in the EU, it appears) *legally disallowed* from meeting.
If that law did not exist, IBM (one of the biggest Linux contributors) would have bundled OS2 with their machines and locked out Windows in the first place, and MS would have died before they did anything.
You need to revise your history. Not only are you flat out wrong (IBM did, in fact, sell PCs with OS/2, with little success), but your timeline is *way* off (Microsoft was already fat from DOS sales to both IBM and cloners before OS/2 even appeared).
The EU is the only one who has thus far proven to have the balls to actually make them do anything about it or pay for it.
More accurately, the EU is the only one thus far with sufficient contempt for consumers of Windows to fuck them over for the sake of little more than sheer bloody-mindedness.
And before you start pointing to Linux (I really hate when people do that shit.), almost every distro in the world allows you to customize your packages and programs and none of the items are embedded into the OS or included as some sort of system preferred default.
Something that is a significant contributor to Linux's lack of success in the consumer market.
It allows people to visit a Web site, and have their system immediately subverted, as in the case of the flaw last month, which even DHS thought was bad enough to warn the public about.
Only if people are running it as a high-privileged used. It is no different to any other buggy application, in this regard.
Surely you'll admit to at least a qualitative difference, as it's had the worst security record of any widely deployed browser, by at least an order of magnitude?
Certainly not by an order of magnitude (and marketshare pretty much covers that disparity on its own).
You appear to be claiming that IE has some mysterious high-privileges hooks into Windows that other applications do not and because of this, it represents an inherently greater security risk. My point is that it does not, and cannot cause any more damage that any other software component.
There is nothing "qualitatively" "special" about IE from a technical perspective. It's just like KHTML in KDE, WebKit/WebCore in OS X, and the GNOME equivalent that I can never remember the name of. It's just like any other reusable user-space software component.
But that said, ObjectiveC and Cocoa were designed back in the 80's, too, and they're quite pleasant to work with. I have to assume, of course, that Cocoa's evolved quite a bit, but the principles of how those apps work are essentially the same as they were 15 years ago. Cocoa's a robust API, and it's aged nicely.
Yes, but I think you'll find all the stuff that went into NeXT was done with the 20/20 hindsight that was gained from MacOS Classic.
You have *got* to be kidding. Half the UI elements in OS X are there primarily because they look cool and not because they exhibit good usability. The Dock is, of course, the most notable example, but there are plenty of others.
Personally I found this part far more interesting:
Also, Expose becomes less useful as the number of Windows increases. This is more of an issue in Windows than the mac because in general users have more applications open on a Windows machine than a Mac.
This mirrors my experiences between Windows and OS X (and I use both regularly). I typically have *far* more applications/windows running/open on Windows than I do in OS X. Much of this has to do with OS X's overall GUI sluggishness and relatively poor multitasking (which isn't especially good to start with and degrades rapidly as load increases), but it's equally because of the awful models for switching between apps/windows. Expose certainly improved the situation immensely, but it still becomes unusable due to clutter with large numbers of windows.
Also, OSX features can be run on most G3 and up Macs [...]
I think you mean "walked". OS X barely "runs" on machines only a year old.
[...] whereas Microsoft's excessiveness in programming won't run AERO in on a video card with significantly more capabilities.
Note that OS X doesn't use the video card for those fancy effects on low end Macs that don't have sufficiently advanced GPUs, it does them all in software on the main CPU. The only difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft didn't bother writing any software fallback to handle the eye candy on old, less capable machines. There are numerous perfectly valid reasons why Microsoft and Apple approached this issue in different ways, and none of them have anything to do with "excessiveness in programming".
(I find it hilarious that an OS X advocate is attacking another platform for "excessiveness in programming". This is an OS that struggles to be responsive on a barely loaded 2Ghz G5-based machine).
The main problem with Vista is that "there is nothing new invented here". All of the applications in use today cannot be improved by going to 64 bit (accept a small set of engineering & scientific apps). Nobody can name a single benifit of Vista for Internet usage, playing music or watching movies.
Well, that's largely because there simply isn't anything new that needs to be done for such basic, single-purpose tasks. If all you want is a dumb terminal to run a handful of applications now and then, there haven't been any improvements for ~15 years.
When M$ can invent something new and productive, then it will be good.
There's not really anything "new and productive" that *can* be invented, by the standards you appear to be using.
Not quite, I'm 44. Growing up my dad had a reel to reel and I fell in love with it. So when I got the chance to buy one when I was in Germany I did. Unfortunately some tyme after I came back I loaned it to a friend and he lost it, he pawned it and didn't pay the loan back in tyme.
In general I'm pro patent and copyright but I may be facing a real problem with a new project. How can I be sure I'm not infringing on some one else's patent? Is the first sign the lawsuit?
I do have to wonder how you can be "pro patent" "in general", but then say you're facing "real problems" that only exist *because of the fundamental way patents work*...
The MS HTML control is used throughout the system, by more components than I can think of, including the default shell. That may be running in user mode, but it's run by so many applications that it needs to be considered part of the OS.
You haven't explained how it's different to its contemporaries on other systems or, indeed, any other of the multitude of similar shared components on both Windows and other platforms.
"Being widely reused by the system" is *the whole freaking point* of using shared components like IE. Are you similarly ambivalent towards glibc on Linux ?
False positives: millions of machines are used by government and by businesses, which will A) not have personal and credit card info to steal and B) will be wiped and restored far sooner than a consumer machine.
You seem to be missing the point. No matter which way you cut it, the chances of a Windows machine having something "interesting" are *vastly* higher than the chances of a Mac.
And what is going to be more valuable information: the credit card number of a consumer plunking down two grand on a Macbook Pro or large screen iMac, or the buyer of one of those $400 Dell systems?
Well, the PC buyer is probably more likely to have money in the bank since they aren't spending it on expensive toys...
Nonsense. There are more Macs out there today than Windows machines when the first PC viruses started going around.
This is such a ridiculous comparison it's difficult to understand how you even dreamt it up. IN what frame of mind do you need to be to consider the dynamics of virus propogation in the early '80s and the dynamics of virus propogation today even *remotely* similar ?
It wouldn't crash corporate networks like Code Red did, but that's because most corporate networks are made up entirely of Wintel PC's.
It's got nothing to do with "crashing corporate networks", it's simple mathematics. All else being equal, a virus is going to spread orders of magnitude quicker on Windows machines than Macs.
No, Windows has been a cesspool security wise because of Microsoft's piss poor design decisions, not because of marketshare.
Which design decisions would those be ?
If Apple had Active X, Internet Explorer, Outlook, auto-installing internet applications, and left ports and services open all over the place, they too would have a rotten record on security.
Only if someone could be bothered writing them. Even back in their heyday, Macs had a relatively tiny number of viruses, and they certainly didn't have any technoligical means of better protection.
If Microsoft had decent privledge separation, started using a firewall with Windows 98 and had some decent security models for their web apps, they would have a much better record on security.
Doubtful. Most malicious code gets onto the machine by suckering the user into running it deliberately.
And the big traffic-stopping-billion-dollar-costing viruses have not been written to collect data, but for kudos or "because they could." And what is going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth network crashing Windows virus, or write the first ever Mac crashing virus?
The Windows one of course. Who is even going to notice if you crash a few thousand Macs ? Crash a few thousand PCs in the right place, though, and you could conceivably bring an entire country to a halt.
The first OS X viruses were already written long ago. Of course, since they never actually got around to many machines because of the reasons I've already outlined, they were described as "proof of concept". Well, the only difference between "proof of concept" and "massive virus outbreak" is the number of machines that get infected.
I have a nice big plasma hooked up to a digital tuner... and in Australia digital tv is very prevalent (as in, every station that used to transmit analog now also transmit's digital with very very few exceptions). On top of that alot of progs are 1080p, and a htpc looks great at that res too:)
No-one in Australia transmits anything at 1080p. ABC and SBS "HD" are 576p, although they have almost no "real" HD content - most all of it is upsampled SD. Seven is also 576p, although I think their "HD" broadcasts actually have 1080i sources. Both Nine and Ten broadcast in 1080i (even sport, which kind of sucks).
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So, basically, according to you any product that does more than one thing is "breaking" the "free market" ?
(Actually, this does line up pretty well with all your other posts, basically saying Microsoft aren't allowed to improve Windows, because that would be an antitrust violation. I can't say I see any benefit for consumers, however.)
By that standard, alternatives to Windows practically install themselves whenever you turn your back for too long.
For someone who falls back on the "monopoly" argument with boring monotony, you seem to have a problem with basic facts.
* Monopoly status is not dependent on marketshare.
* Microsoft are not a monopoly in the "desktop OS market" (personally, I'd argue they aren't a monopoly in any market).
* Apple and Microsoft (at least according to the market Microsoft was determined to be a monopoly in) do not compete in the same market.
Neither is a shell or a TCP/IP stack. How easy do you think it would be to market an OS today to consumers without either of those ?
Uh, no they don't. Most viruses operate due to end user mistakes.
AV software is not there to protect the user from OS flaws, it's there to protect the user from himself.
Indeed, and it was clearly dreamed up by someone with a "we had to destroy the village to save it" mentality.
Like what ?
Safari, or the widgets are easy to remove and the user is free to use whatever they wish as a replacement. IE, as we all know, is not.
Yes, it is. You do it exactly the same way you do it with Safari - delete the executable file.
Can you explain why your argument applies to a PDF creator, but doesn't apply to, say, the TCP/IP stack ? Or the GUI ? Or the CLI ? Or .NET ? Or Notepad ?
I can't believe how many people here on Slashdot don't even understand the basics of capitalism and monopolies. Is Econ 101 no longer a requirement for a bachelors degree?
I can't believe how many people on Slashdot come up with ridiculously unrealistic examples and analogies to try get everyone else to help carry around the massive chip they have on their shoulder about Microsoft. Yet they do, every day.
Macintoshes (more accurately, machines that can run OS X).
That's because when they tried to include it in the new version of Office, Adobe threatened to sue.
They should, as *nix and OS X have done for years, all OS's should have Print/Export to PDF built into the OS. HOWEVER, MS is planning on releasing Vista with an MS homegrown "PDF Killer". As the MS Office suite moves to XML based file formats, they are building a PDF-Like file export into Vista called XML Paper Specification (or XPS). So all you happy like MS lovers chiming in on this little article, and how MS is entitled to include PDF in Vista since it's an open standard are going to be in for a bit of a surprise when your files come out as "MyHomework.xps".
As usual, no matter *what* Microsoft tries to do, they can't win. They can't include PDF, because Adobe will sue them. They can't come up with their own alternative to PDF, because (surprise) Adobe will sue them.
As usual, the only losers here are the consumers whose wants and needs Microsoft are (at least in the EU, it appears) *legally disallowed* from meeting.
You need to revise your history. Not only are you flat out wrong (IBM did, in fact, sell PCs with OS/2, with little success), but your timeline is *way* off (Microsoft was already fat from DOS sales to both IBM and cloners before OS/2 even appeared).
More accurately, the EU is the only one thus far with sufficient contempt for consumers of Windows to fuck them over for the sake of little more than sheer bloody-mindedness.
And before you start pointing to Linux (I really hate when people do that shit.), almost every distro in the world allows you to customize your packages and programs and none of the items are embedded into the OS or included as some sort of system preferred default.
Something that is a significant contributor to Linux's lack of success in the consumer market.
That's just as easy. Find Outlook Express's .exe file and delete it.
Don't use Windows.
Only if people are running it as a high-privileged used. It is no different to any other buggy application, in this regard.
Surely you'll admit to at least a qualitative difference, as it's had the worst security record of any widely deployed browser, by at least an order of magnitude?
Certainly not by an order of magnitude (and marketshare pretty much covers that disparity on its own).
You appear to be claiming that IE has some mysterious high-privileges hooks into Windows that other applications do not and because of this, it represents an inherently greater security risk. My point is that it does not, and cannot cause any more damage that any other software component.
There is nothing "qualitatively" "special" about IE from a technical perspective. It's just like KHTML in KDE, WebKit/WebCore in OS X, and the GNOME equivalent that I can never remember the name of. It's just like any other reusable user-space software component.
Yes, but I think you'll find all the stuff that went into NeXT was done with the 20/20 hindsight that was gained from MacOS Classic.
You have *got* to be kidding. Half the UI elements in OS X are there primarily because they look cool and not because they exhibit good usability. The Dock is, of course, the most notable example, but there are plenty of others.
Personally I found this part far more interesting:
This mirrors my experiences between Windows and OS X (and I use both regularly). I typically have *far* more applications/windows running/open on Windows than I do in OS X. Much of this has to do with OS X's overall GUI sluggishness and relatively poor multitasking (which isn't especially good to start with and degrades rapidly as load increases), but it's equally because of the awful models for switching between apps/windows. Expose certainly improved the situation immensely, but it still becomes unusable due to clutter with large numbers of windows.
I think you mean "walked". OS X barely "runs" on machines only a year old.
[...] whereas Microsoft's excessiveness in programming won't run AERO in on a video card with significantly more capabilities.
Note that OS X doesn't use the video card for those fancy effects on low end Macs that don't have sufficiently advanced GPUs, it does them all in software on the main CPU. The only difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft didn't bother writing any software fallback to handle the eye candy on old, less capable machines. There are numerous perfectly valid reasons why Microsoft and Apple approached this issue in different ways, and none of them have anything to do with "excessiveness in programming".
(I find it hilarious that an OS X advocate is attacking another platform for "excessiveness in programming". This is an OS that struggles to be responsive on a barely loaded 2Ghz G5-based machine).
Well, that's largely because there simply isn't anything new that needs to be done for such basic, single-purpose tasks. If all you want is a dumb terminal to run a handful of applications now and then, there haven't been any improvements for ~15 years.
When M$ can invent something new and productive, then it will be good.
There's not really anything "new and productive" that *can* be invented, by the standards you appear to be using.
FYI: It's spelled "time".
I do have to wonder how you can be "pro patent" "in general", but then say you're facing "real problems" that only exist *because of the fundamental way patents work*...
You haven't explained how it's different to its contemporaries on other systems or, indeed, any other of the multitude of similar shared components on both Windows and other platforms.
"Being widely reused by the system" is *the whole freaking point* of using shared components like IE. Are you similarly ambivalent towards glibc on Linux ?
You seem to be missing the point. No matter which way you cut it, the chances of a Windows machine having something "interesting" are *vastly* higher than the chances of a Mac.
And what is going to be more valuable information: the credit card number of a consumer plunking down two grand on a Macbook Pro or large screen iMac, or the buyer of one of those $400 Dell systems?
Well, the PC buyer is probably more likely to have money in the bank since they aren't spending it on expensive toys...
Nonsense. There are more Macs out there today than Windows machines when the first PC viruses started going around.
This is such a ridiculous comparison it's difficult to understand how you even dreamt it up. IN what frame of mind do you need to be to consider the dynamics of virus propogation in the early '80s and the dynamics of virus propogation today even *remotely* similar ?
It wouldn't crash corporate networks like Code Red did, but that's because most corporate networks are made up entirely of Wintel PC's.
It's got nothing to do with "crashing corporate networks", it's simple mathematics. All else being equal, a virus is going to spread orders of magnitude quicker on Windows machines than Macs.
No, Windows has been a cesspool security wise because of Microsoft's piss poor design decisions, not because of marketshare.
Which design decisions would those be ?
If Apple had Active X, Internet Explorer, Outlook, auto-installing internet applications, and left ports and services open all over the place, they too would have a rotten record on security.
Only if someone could be bothered writing them. Even back in their heyday, Macs had a relatively tiny number of viruses, and they certainly didn't have any technoligical means of better protection.
If Microsoft had decent privledge separation, started using a firewall with Windows 98 and had some decent security models for their web apps, they would have a much better record on security.
Doubtful. Most malicious code gets onto the machine by suckering the user into running it deliberately.
And the big traffic-stopping-billion-dollar-costing viruses have not been written to collect data, but for kudos or "because they could." And what is going to get a script kiddie more kudos: writting the thousandth network crashing Windows virus, or write the first ever Mac crashing virus?
The Windows one of course. Who is even going to notice if you crash a few thousand Macs ? Crash a few thousand PCs in the right place, though, and you could conceivably bring an entire country to a halt.
The first OS X viruses were already written long ago. Of course, since they never actually got around to many machines because of the reasons I've already outlined, they were described as "proof of concept". Well, the only difference between "proof of concept" and "massive virus outbreak" is the number of machines that get infected.
No-one in Australia transmits anything at 1080p. ABC and SBS "HD" are 576p, although they have almost no "real" HD content - most all of it is upsampled SD. Seven is also 576p, although I think their "HD" broadcasts actually have 1080i sources. Both Nine and Ten broadcast in 1080i (even sport, which kind of sucks).