The problem is that some of us want to have access to content that will be produced with Silverlight, inventing a better system will not make the Silverlight content magically be transformed or accessible to us.
Well, guess what: US law gives a 20-year monopoly on access to that content to Microsoft. If you want access to that content, get a Microsoft system and have at it.
nobody is in any position to force you to stop using whatever other technology happens to be your favorite one.
Well, that's patently false (pun intended.)
I've never liked Gnome, so I'm less affected than others who do use it. Even I, however, have a hard time avoiding GTK applications unless I want to, for instance, recode OpenOffice.org for personal use.
As a result, when Microsoft's lawyers send a "cease and desist" order against non-Novell users of the Gnome/GTK software that's been infected with "their" technology, they will be in a position to force them -- and me -- to stop using our favorite technologies.
Now, I don't happen to like the fact that my country is run that way. I'm sure that there are people in places like Egypt who don't like the way their countries are run, too. However, I'm not quite prepared to leave it and in the meantime am doing my best to deal with the reality.
Thus, to return your advice: the ostrich strategy also known as the "i-cant-hear-you" strategy: pretend that Microsoft's patent threat does not exist and hope that by ignoring it, it will go away and vanish.
No thanks. If MS has the patents that they claim to, I'm going to obey the law and not use "their" technology until the law is changed.
Dang -- this is the first big "feature war" review I've seen since MS wiped out the office-suite competition in the early 90s.
Arguably feature wars are bad for the state of the art since they favor disorganized shopping-list programming rather than coherent (**cough** Apple **cough**) design, but at least they beat stagnation.
This could be fun. On the one hand, MS is the past master of adding checklist features to bulk up for these kinds of review. On the other, it's hard to crank features faster than a swarm of geeks.
2. Pricing is always driven by cost, there may just be other revenue sources (think about complimentary products like Office, also think about different pricing schedules, re: price discrimination) which can make up the difference in pricing (by the way, price is not the same thing as cost). Also, revenue-cost=profit, profit being what firms usually try to maximize. Although trying to increase revenue is part of profit maximizing, you make it sound like they ignore costs, which is most likely false.
Gross revenues are proceeds of sale less cost of production, actually. That's why you see financials state "revenues of X on sales of Y."
In a competitive market, the main limit on sales pricing is elasticity due to competition. Since competitors presumably have similar cost structures, vendors either match the most efficient producer or go under; either way, the price that buyers pay is closely related to cost of production. In the case of a monopoly, the only limit on sales pricing is the marginal utility of the product: the price is set at the point where any increase in price will reduce the total amount sold.
Microsoft, in case you haven't noticed, is not pricing their products to compete. They are, according to several prominant economists, pricing them at the classical monopoly revenue-maximization point. Raising that price to cover a "patent tax" would only reduce sales so much that the total proceeds would drop -- which isn't a good way to cover increased costs, nie?
That "patent tax" isn't being paid by purchasers -- it's being paid by Microsoft's stockholders.
Microsoft's pricing isn't driven by their costs, it's driven by revenue maximization. A change in their cost structure has no effect on the prices they charge; raising prices would reduce their gross revenues, which would be quite counterproductive.
>>> strike one against you - being in the left lane while not passing someone in the right.
Absofuckinglutely goddamn right.
*Those* sick fuckers are the worst threat on the road and the primary cause of traffic.
Ah, the supreme and unshakable certainty of the totally ignorant.
Of course, you've never seen a freeway with more than two lanes, right? For the record, SR101 through Scottsdale has three through lanes plus an acceleration/deceleration lane on the right. During rush hour, all four are typically parking lots. However, I'll pass along your demand that the traffic stay out of the left lanes. That should help tremendously.
Single vehicle wrecks? Next you're going to tell us that the Golden Gate Bridge is the deadliest bridge in the country.
Yes, single-vehicle wrecks. Some genius decides to wind it up to 120 mph and then loses it. The curves are pretty gentle -- at 65 mph. Twice that and the cornering forces are four times as great, your tires are hotter than they're designed to be, and everything is happening in less time than you're used to. Lane changes to avoid other vehicles are especially tricky since there's so little time.
They do not make them safers. Almost all accidents are cause by not paying attention. A red light recorder will not fix this. The remaining offenders are people who don't care. Again, intalling a light monitor won't stop this.
The "almost" qualifier is hard to argue against, but your "not paying attention" runs counter to the plain fact that a lot of people respond to a yellow light by speeding up.
I've seen some pretty ugly red-light violations, including one involving serious injury, where the one running the red light was absolutely paying attention to the extent of swerving between lanes to avoid people who were stopping in order to run a red and T-bone a car coming through on green. It's all well and good to have eyewitnesses, but again from personal experience the witnesses don't always stick around.
As for the "they don't make them safer," there is hard data on that from Phoenix and Scottsdale -- and the body count is down at intersections with cameras.
The city of Scottsdale, AZ installed speed cameras on a stretch of State Route 101. The stretch is one of the deadliest in the State, with fatal single-vehicle wrecks at well over 100 mph.
However, in the course of a disagreement between Scottsdale and the State, use of the cameras to generate citations was stopped but the data was still collected for analysis by a local professor. It seems that during that time, a lot of law-enforcement cruisers were caught going far over the limit without lights, etc.
On top of that (IIRC) there was a wreck a bit ago involving a private vehicle and law enforcement; needless to say, the private driver was cited by the cop. Said private driver's attorney subpoena'd the speed cameras and guess what?
I've also heard of other cities where the red-light cameras where police involved in wrecks at intersections wrote up the other party only to have the camera results subpoena'd and turn the tables. Fine by me -- a red-light camera would have saved me a lot of time and expense several years ago.
IMHO you can argue speed cameras either way but red lights should just plain have recorders, period.
Hmmm -- how, you ask? Well, you have a copyright on your flipping grocery lists. It's automatic under US law. Write just about anything and it's automatically copyrighted, you don't have to register it.
Under this proposal, you also instantly become above the law.
Back in the 1970s (yeah, I know) I was working for the automotive group of $BIG_SEMICONDUCTOR_COMPANY and some genius had the idea of replacing the speedometer dial with a digital readout. Some of us pointed out the (now obvious) drawback that tenth-of-an-mph precision isn't valuable, but read time (as in, eyes off the road) most certainly is.
Needless to say, the customer ended up with way-cool digital readouts. For one model year.
I don't know if they quietly settled the lawsuits, if any, or what. Notice, however, that the experience was profound enough that the auto industry seems to have actually learned from experience. Since "quick on the uptake" is not something anyone would have called Detroit in the 70s, the trauma must have been pretty severe.
Microsoft didn't get where they are today by enabling their customers to leave.
Miguel's role in the world is to make it possible for Linux developers to get locked into Microsoft technologies, In due time Microsoft can harvest them in any number of ways. If he thinks otherwise, he needs to reconsider his choices in recreational chemistry.
I'm not that old. Manufacturer-set minimum prices were more the rule than the exception until the 1980s (as I roughly recall.)
That's where the "membership stores" like Costco really got going: they could, through a legal fiction, sell at below the set price. When the law changed, they lost (at least some of) their advantages, and quite a few (anyone remember FedCo?) went Tango Uniform. Costco (or, as it was here, Price Club) was one of the survivors.
Well, if the Court votes price fixing back in then I guess a lot of Wally Worlds will turn into Sam's Clubs.
Slashdot Mirror
Some spelling errors aren't.
Maybe he's bluffing. If you think so, ante up.
I've never liked Gnome, so I'm less affected than others who do use it. Even I, however, have a hard time avoiding GTK applications unless I want to, for instance, recode OpenOffice.org for personal use.
As a result, when Microsoft's lawyers send a "cease and desist" order against non-Novell users of the Gnome/GTK software that's been infected with "their" technology, they will be in a position to force them -- and me -- to stop using our favorite technologies.
Now, I don't happen to like the fact that my country is run that way. I'm sure that there are people in places like Egypt who don't like the way their countries are run, too. However, I'm not quite prepared to leave it and in the meantime am doing my best to deal with the reality.
Thus, to return your advice: the ostrich strategy also known as the "i-cant-hear-you" strategy: pretend that Microsoft's patent threat does not exist and hope that by ignoring it, it will go away and vanish.
No thanks. If MS has the patents that they claim to, I'm going to obey the law and not use "their" technology until the law is changed.
Call us again in a few years when the patents (whichever they are) have expired. Say, about 2026.
Military censorship of all troops' correspondence is not exactly new.
to "kicking bot and posting names."
Arguably feature wars are bad for the state of the art since they favor disorganized shopping-list programming rather than coherent (**cough** Apple **cough**) design, but at least they beat stagnation.
This could be fun. On the one hand, MS is the past master of adding checklist features to bulk up for these kinds of review. On the other, it's hard to crank features faster than a swarm of geeks.
Someone post the source code to the OS, drivers, and player and we'll have a look.
Oh, wait ...
Much better stated.
Gross revenues are proceeds of sale less cost of production, actually. That's why you see financials state "revenues of X on sales of Y."
In a competitive market, the main limit on sales pricing is elasticity due to competition. Since competitors presumably have similar cost structures, vendors either match the most efficient producer or go under; either way, the price that buyers pay is closely related to cost of production. In the case of a monopoly, the only limit on sales pricing is the marginal utility of the product: the price is set at the point where any increase in price will reduce the total amount sold.
Microsoft, in case you haven't noticed, is not pricing their products to compete. They are, according to several prominant economists, pricing them at the classical monopoly revenue-maximization point. Raising that price to cover a "patent tax" would only reduce sales so much that the total proceeds would drop -- which isn't a good way to cover increased costs, nie?
Microsoft's pricing isn't driven by their costs, it's driven by revenue maximization. A change in their cost structure has no effect on the prices they charge; raising prices would reduce their gross revenues, which would be quite counterproductive.
... how far would WINE have to go to get ahead of MSWinVista64 on backward compatibility?
Of course, you've never seen a freeway with more than two lanes, right? For the record, SR101 through Scottsdale has three through lanes plus an acceleration/deceleration lane on the right. During rush hour, all four are typically parking lots. However, I'll pass along your demand that the traffic stay out of the left lanes. That should help tremendously.
I've seen some pretty ugly red-light violations, including one involving serious injury, where the one running the red light was absolutely paying attention to the extent of swerving between lanes to avoid people who were stopping in order to run a red and T-bone a car coming through on green. It's all well and good to have eyewitnesses, but again from personal experience the witnesses don't always stick around.
As for the "they don't make them safer," there is hard data on that from Phoenix and Scottsdale -- and the body count is down at intersections with cameras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_ custodes%3F
However, in the course of a disagreement between Scottsdale and the State, use of the cameras to generate citations was stopped but the data was still collected for analysis by a local professor. It seems that during that time, a lot of law-enforcement cruisers were caught going far over the limit without lights, etc.
On top of that (IIRC) there was a wreck a bit ago involving a private vehicle and law enforcement; needless to say, the private driver was cited by the cop. Said private driver's attorney subpoena'd the speed cameras and guess what?
I've also heard of other cities where the red-light cameras where police involved in wrecks at intersections wrote up the other party only to have the camera results subpoena'd and turn the tables. Fine by me -- a red-light camera would have saved me a lot of time and expense several years ago.
IMHO you can argue speed cameras either way but red lights should just plain have recorders, period.
Hmmm -- how, you ask? Well, you have a copyright on your flipping grocery lists. It's automatic under US law. Write just about anything and it's automatically copyrighted, you don't have to register it.
Under this proposal, you also instantly become above the law.
Needless to say, the customer ended up with way-cool digital readouts. For one model year.
I don't know if they quietly settled the lawsuits, if any, or what. Notice, however, that the experience was profound enough that the auto industry seems to have actually learned from experience. Since "quick on the uptake" is not something anyone would have called Detroit in the 70s, the trauma must have been pretty severe.
Miguel's role in the world is to make it possible for Linux developers to get locked into Microsoft technologies, In due time Microsoft can harvest them in any number of ways. If he thinks otherwise, he needs to reconsider his choices in recreational chemistry.
That's where the "membership stores" like Costco really got going: they could, through a legal fiction, sell at below the set price. When the law changed, they lost (at least some of) their advantages, and quite a few (anyone remember FedCo?) went Tango Uniform. Costco (or, as it was here, Price Club) was one of the survivors.
Well, if the Court votes price fixing back in then I guess a lot of Wally Worlds will turn into Sam's Clubs.
Won't Get Fooled Again
There's nothing in the streets
...
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
It reads like the Pamela Jones version of an Andrew Dice Clay monologue.