That's funny. I got Apache to install just fine on my home machine (I am not a professional developer; I was just doing it to tinker). Apache competes with IIS, right?
I got MySQL to install on the same machine just fine. MySQL competes with a slew of MS DBMS's, does it not?
I got PHP5 to install on the same machine just fine. PHP competes with ASP and whatever else MS uses to do similar stuff, right?
It's in Microsoft's best interest to allow as much software to run on its systems as possible, even if some of that software competes with its own.
If Office doesn't provide what you need, then just don't fucking buy it. Don't force your decisions on the rest of the country via the government.
"It is almost like saying if you have 2 employees and 1 works 8 hrs a week and the other 32 hrs, and each of them want a new office. Who would you give it to?"
Depends on who actually gets more work done (translates into "who provides my company with more value"). If 8 Hour Guy can do more for my company in those 8 hours than 32 Hour Guy can, then, guess what, the office is going to 8HG.
Sirlin writes from the perspective that, at their core, all competitve activities are the same, whether they be video games, card games, other games, or real life. His philosophy is simple: "play to win". In fact, if you Google "play to win", one of his articles on his site (sirlin.net)comes up in the first page.
His argument would be that competitive activities that have lots of room in their "strategy space" are good ones. Activities that quickly expose the fact that there are only a few (or possibly just one) viable strategies in it are inferior. This is why he likes games like Street Fighter, Starcraft and Warcraft, as they have many opportunities to reward strategic, skillful play, and dislikes WoW, as there's little strategy, skill, or thought in just mindlessly "levelling up".
Personally, I agree with him that if you are going to participate in a competitve activity (and I would place "real life" in that category), you should do whatever it takes to win, provided that you stay within the rules of the activity.
I remember hearing a story on NPR about a city in Oregon (I think it might have been Portland) where if you didn't make more than $15/hr, the high cost of living would force you to choose between food and shelter.
Users are free to choose a plethora of other operating systems. Indeed, many are happy without using Windows. How is this a monopoly?
Why does the Linux-fanboy, anti-Microsoft crowd always crow about Linux's superiority, then whine about how it's not possible to compete against Microsoft without government intervention?
While a lack of compatibility with an application is completely reasonable, being unable to interact with one's operating system as one wishes is a whole other matter
Seems that this is a problem that markets should solve, not governments.
Are you telling me that you would refuse to invent a snow plow to clear your driveway, even though you needed it cleared because someone could copy that invention once you created it?
If I thought that I couldn't recoup my R&D costs (i.e. if I thought the time and effort I spent R&D'ing a snow plow didn't justify itself over the "old way"), then yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Even if I did decide to invent a snow plow, I should have the opportunity to be granted a limited monopoly over the production of said snow plow. I'm not an altruist. I don't do things for the benefit of society. I do things for the benefit of me (and my family/friends, of course).
Are you saying, that if friends, neighbors and people wanted to buy and use the same snow-plow for their own use, and were willing to pay you for it, you would turn them and their cash away because someone else could copy it?
If I thought that I couldn't recoup my R&D costs because someone copied my idea, then, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I won't subsidize vultures that are trying to put me out of business.
Maybe I would do something for the benefit of society. I don't know. But the choice of whether to do it for society or for my wallet should be mine, and mine alone. The patent system gives me that choice (well, it used to, anyway).
(I assume we're speaking metaphorically about a snowplow, as it doesn't really have any R&D costs at this point)
If everyone were free to copy others' inventions, nobody would invent anything. We'd all be in a never ending Mexican standoff, waiting for somebody else to pay the up-front costs of research and development on a new idea so that we could capitalize on it. It doesn't take much thought to realize such stagnation is devastating to an economy.
By and large, people are motivated by the betterment of self, not the betterment of society. The patent system gives us the best of both worlds. If someone wants to make a profit off of his/her ideas, the patent system allows that (and yes, if I have an original idea, I have a right to try and make a profit off of it). If someone wants to give his/her idea "for the betterment of society" then he/she is free to take that route too.
If I invent something that lots of people want, I alone (well, and the free market, should I choose that route) should be the one who decides what my reward is. If somebody in the government says "your only reward for that invention is the satisfaction of doing something useful" I'm going to say "fuck you" and move somewhere that will let me choose how I benefit from it. And I'd bet a year's salary that most people who invent something feel similarly.
This is not to say that I think the patent system doesn't need reform. It was supposed to protect the people that took risks on R&D (like RIM), not predators who come up with a half-baked plan and don't ever take any risks to implement it (like NTP). But patents are necessary to protect innovation.
Drill into their heads that you cannot cause permanent damage to the computer merely by using it[1]. You cannot cause permanent damge to the computer merely by using it. You cannot cause permanent damage to the computer merely by using it.
Then, throw them to the wolves. Let them experiment on their own. Let them get themselves into trouble and don't bail them out. Being the always-rushing-to-the-rescue "computer guy" is like being the omnipresent government. You don't really fix anything for good. You just get people dependent on you instead of being self sufficient.
I see this with my mom. She's used a computer for almost 15 years. She cranks out all kinds of cool lesson plans, assignments, and tests for her students (she's a HS Spanish teacher) with Word. She's not computer-dumb (I wouldn't say she's computer-smart either, but...). But if she gets into a problem and I show up to fix it, she wants to be the one sitting at the chair so "she can remember how to do it next time." As soon as I arrive on scene, all of her computer knowledge goes out the window. Downloading and unzipping files? Not a clue. Opening My Computer? Nope. Finding an "options" dialog? No way. She doesn't get that 99% of computer problem solving is improvised. She just expects that I know the exact order in the menus and dialogs. Even after I walk her through it (which is like pulling teeth, because she has forgotten how to do anything) I can count on her not remembering it and having to do the same thing some time later.
So, for God's sake, next time, when someone asks you what you do for a living, tell them you solve hard math problems. Don't tell them you work on computers.
[1]Obviously, doing things like changing voltages and overclocking can cause permanent damage, but how many people in this book's target audience are going to be doing things like that?
"what happens if 2 years down the road someone speeds that API up 10x and then your code is recompiled and *it* becomes the bottleneck?"
Then you look at your code and see how the API optimization affects you, and decide if it's worth the time and effort (and of course, those translate to "money") to refactor your code. You'll only drive yourself and your fellow programmers insane if you try to predict future optimizations to your API and code around them in the present.
Write the best code you can with the tools you have today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring (or won't bring, as the case may be). It's not here yet.
Obviously there aren't any anti-shoplifting devices on gasoline like there are on things you buy in a store. But, since the receipt is optional at a pay-at-the-pump setup, if you don't get a receipt, you don't have much proof that you've paid for the gas. Considering that both of the states I "live" in (I live in a bistate area) have laws that include a driver's license suspension for stealing gas, I have a pretty strong desire to be able to walk away from the pump with a physical verification that money has changed hands. Similarly, if you pay for something using this paperless technology at the Apple store, and security stops you, you don't have a quick and easy way to show that you've paid for it.
There's also the problem of store security. If the cashier fails to deactivate any anti-shoplifting devices and I trigger them as I walk out of the store, how am I supposed to prove that I paid for it?
That's why I always get a paper receipt when I pay-at-the-pump for gasoline.
"There's 200 million users out there that don't have a choice."
They have the same choice that you and I do.
If they're unaware that they have a choice, that's their problem. Not yours, not mine, and not Microsoft's. Caveat emptor.
If they are aware that they have a choice and don't care, that's their choice. Not yours, not mine, and not Microsoft's. They voluntarily entered into the sales contract.
If they actively choose to use Microsoft's products, who the hell are you to tell them that you know their wants and needs better than they?
If, after the purchase, the consumer feels he did not get his money's worth, that's between him, Microsoft, and lawyers if it gets that far. The government may or may not need to get involved at that point, but it's certainly outside the realm of anti-trust.
Is Microsoft the only player in town, in the EU or the US?
Why does the EU get to tell Microsoft to spill what MS wants kept secret? If the idea is to help MS's competition, how can you then say MS is an anticompetitve monopoly?
"I'd suggest Catch-22. It will provide lots of laugh out loud moments."
Catch-22 is my favorite book, but it's definitely not for everyone. If the intended recipient doesn't get or like obscure humor, satire, and/or cannot cope with the discontinuous storyline, something else would probably be better.
I think you're talking to a brick wall. Along the way, it seems some members of the open source community forgot that if you want people to use your widget you have to be responsive to those people.
Some members of the OS community(SMOTOSC): We want people to have the freedom to use their computer however they choose! Our software helps them do that. We like it when people can use our software; it makes us feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
User: Yeah, that's great! By the way, Program X doesn't do task Y correctly, could you fix it?
SMOTOSC: FIX IT YOURSELF OR SHUT THE HELL UP! YOU DIDN'T GIVE US ANY MONEY!
User: I thought you liked it when people used your software and that it made you feel warm and fuzzy...
SMOTOSC: You gave us no money. We don't have to listen to your tripe.
User:...
If you want more users, you don't get them by treating your existing users like crap. I thought that was common knowledge.
(And yes, I realize that not all members of the OS community act like this)
I've had 1 blue screen in the past year with XP. It was when I tried to install DaemonTools on a new machine I had just built. The problem was that I transferred the DT install from my old machine (in which I had just put a new Gb Ethernet card; my new board had Gb ports on it) to my new one. Something slightly corrupted the file transfer (not enough to make it puke on execution, the install popped up the EULA and asked me where to install just fine), and that's why it bluescreened. I downloaded a fresh copy from DT's site, and the problem went away.
I also noticed that the article convieniently forgot to mention "DLL hell". Maybe that's because 1) "DLL hell" isn't really a problem for average XP users anymore and 2) "dependency hell" is just as bad, yet it's a problem that's easy to get (it was for me, anyway, with Ubuntu Hoary).
Toddestan pretty much summed up why I don't like it. I also don't like having eleventy billion different media players for the eleventy billion different movie formats out there. Just install codecs so that either WMP or Media Player Classic (my preferred player) will play your files.
Oh wait, I had that set up with MPC and QuickTime Alternative, but iTunes wasn't interested in playing nice with QTA. It doesn't matter what order I install stuff, either QTA is getting broken by iTunes or QTA will break iTunes by breaking the real QT.
***GAME DEVELOPERS*** do not support Linux. Not the other way around.
No. The business model does not support Linux. Publishers decide that the Linux gamer marketshare is not worth the extra time/effort/money to develop on Linux. As soon as someone thinks it's profitable it will be done. And hopefully it'll be done better than Savage was done, with critical bugs that went unpatched for over two months.
I refuse to pay for an O/S that had ads in it. I refuse to pay more for the privlege of having an ad-free O/S. If you build ads into Windows, you'll just force me to migrate to Linux or something else. I don't want to do that, but I will if I have to.
I don't remember signing anything when I was born, nor nothing since then, stating that it was my responsibility to see as many ads as possible in as many media as possible.
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That's funny. I got Apache to install just fine on my home machine (I am not a professional developer; I was just doing it to tinker). Apache competes with IIS, right?
I got MySQL to install on the same machine just fine. MySQL competes with a slew of MS DBMS's, does it not?
I got PHP5 to install on the same machine just fine. PHP competes with ASP and whatever else MS uses to do similar stuff, right?
It's in Microsoft's best interest to allow as much software to run on its systems as possible, even if some of that software competes with its own.
If Office doesn't provide what you need, then just don't fucking buy it. Don't force your decisions on the rest of the country via the government.
"It is almost like saying if you have 2 employees and 1 works 8 hrs a week and the other 32 hrs, and each of them want a new office. Who would you give it to?"
Depends on who actually gets more work done (translates into "who provides my company with more value"). If 8 Hour Guy can do more for my company in those 8 hours than 32 Hour Guy can, then, guess what, the office is going to 8HG.
Sirlin writes from the perspective that, at their core, all competitve activities are the same, whether they be video games, card games, other games, or real life. His philosophy is simple: "play to win". In fact, if you Google "play to win", one of his articles on his site (sirlin.net)comes up in the first page.
His argument would be that competitive activities that have lots of room in their "strategy space" are good ones. Activities that quickly expose the fact that there are only a few (or possibly just one) viable strategies in it are inferior. This is why he likes games like Street Fighter, Starcraft and Warcraft, as they have many opportunities to reward strategic, skillful play, and dislikes WoW, as there's little strategy, skill, or thought in just mindlessly "levelling up".
Personally, I agree with him that if you are going to participate in a competitve activity (and I would place "real life" in that category), you should do whatever it takes to win, provided that you stay within the rules of the activity.
I remember hearing a story on NPR about a city in Oregon (I think it might have been Portland) where if you didn't make more than $15/hr, the high cost of living would force you to choose between food and shelter.
Users are free to choose a plethora of other operating systems. Indeed, many are happy without using Windows. How is this a monopoly?
Why does the Linux-fanboy, anti-Microsoft crowd always crow about Linux's superiority, then whine about how it's not possible to compete against Microsoft without government intervention?
While a lack of compatibility with an application is completely reasonable, being unable to interact with one's operating system as one wishes is a whole other matter
Seems that this is a problem that markets should solve, not governments.
Are you telling me that you would refuse to invent a snow plow to clear your driveway, even though you needed it cleared because someone could copy that invention once you created it?
If I thought that I couldn't recoup my R&D costs (i.e. if I thought the time and effort I spent R&D'ing a snow plow didn't justify itself over the "old way"), then yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Even if I did decide to invent a snow plow, I should have the opportunity to be granted a limited monopoly over the production of said snow plow. I'm not an altruist. I don't do things for the benefit of society. I do things for the benefit of me (and my family/friends, of course).
Are you saying, that if friends, neighbors and people wanted to buy and use the same snow-plow for their own use, and were willing to pay you for it, you would turn them and their cash away because someone else could copy it?
If I thought that I couldn't recoup my R&D costs because someone copied my idea, then, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I won't subsidize vultures that are trying to put me out of business.
Maybe I would do something for the benefit of society. I don't know. But the choice of whether to do it for society or for my wallet should be mine, and mine alone. The patent system gives me that choice (well, it used to, anyway).
(I assume we're speaking metaphorically about a snowplow, as it doesn't really have any R&D costs at this point)
If everyone were free to copy others' inventions, nobody would invent anything. We'd all be in a never ending Mexican standoff, waiting for somebody else to pay the up-front costs of research and development on a new idea so that we could capitalize on it. It doesn't take much thought to realize such stagnation is devastating to an economy.
By and large, people are motivated by the betterment of self, not the betterment of society. The patent system gives us the best of both worlds. If someone wants to make a profit off of his/her ideas, the patent system allows that (and yes, if I have an original idea, I have a right to try and make a profit off of it). If someone wants to give his/her idea "for the betterment of society" then he/she is free to take that route too.
If I invent something that lots of people want, I alone (well, and the free market, should I choose that route) should be the one who decides what my reward is. If somebody in the government says "your only reward for that invention is the satisfaction of doing something useful" I'm going to say "fuck you" and move somewhere that will let me choose how I benefit from it. And I'd bet a year's salary that most people who invent something feel similarly.
This is not to say that I think the patent system doesn't need reform. It was supposed to protect the people that took risks on R&D (like RIM), not predators who come up with a half-baked plan and don't ever take any risks to implement it (like NTP). But patents are necessary to protect innovation.
Drill into their heads that you cannot cause permanent damage to the computer merely by using it[1]. You cannot cause permanent damge to the computer merely by using it. You cannot cause permanent damage to the computer merely by using it.
Then, throw them to the wolves. Let them experiment on their own. Let them get themselves into trouble and don't bail them out. Being the always-rushing-to-the-rescue "computer guy" is like being the omnipresent government. You don't really fix anything for good. You just get people dependent on you instead of being self sufficient.
I see this with my mom. She's used a computer for almost 15 years. She cranks out all kinds of cool lesson plans, assignments, and tests for her students (she's a HS Spanish teacher) with Word. She's not computer-dumb (I wouldn't say she's computer-smart either, but...). But if she gets into a problem and I show up to fix it, she wants to be the one sitting at the chair so "she can remember how to do it next time." As soon as I arrive on scene, all of her computer knowledge goes out the window. Downloading and unzipping files? Not a clue. Opening My Computer? Nope. Finding an "options" dialog? No way. She doesn't get that 99% of computer problem solving is improvised. She just expects that I know the exact order in the menus and dialogs. Even after I walk her through it (which is like pulling teeth, because she has forgotten how to do anything) I can count on her not remembering it and having to do the same thing some time later.
So, for God's sake, next time, when someone asks you what you do for a living, tell them you solve hard math problems. Don't tell them you work on computers.
[1]Obviously, doing things like changing voltages and overclocking can cause permanent damage, but how many people in this book's target audience are going to be doing things like that?
"what happens if 2 years down the road
someone speeds that API up 10x and then your code is recompiled and *it*
becomes the bottleneck?"
Then you look at your code and see how the API optimization affects you, and decide if it's worth the time and effort (and of course, those translate to "money") to refactor your code. You'll only drive yourself and your fellow programmers insane if you try to predict future optimizations to your API and code around them in the present.
Write the best code you can with the tools you have today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring (or won't bring, as the case may be). It's not here yet.
Obviously there aren't any anti-shoplifting devices on gasoline like there are on things you buy in a store. But, since the receipt is optional at a pay-at-the-pump setup, if you don't get a receipt, you don't have much proof that you've paid for the gas. Considering that both of the states I "live" in (I live in a bistate area) have laws that include a driver's license suspension for stealing gas, I have a pretty strong desire to be able to walk away from the pump with a physical verification that money has changed hands. Similarly, if you pay for something using this paperless technology at the Apple store, and security stops you, you don't have a quick and easy way to show that you've paid for it.
There's also the problem of store security. If the cashier fails to deactivate any anti-shoplifting devices and I trigger them as I walk out of the store, how am I supposed to prove that I paid for it?
That's why I always get a paper receipt when I pay-at-the-pump for gasoline.
"There's 200 million users out there that don't have a choice."
They have the same choice that you and I do.
If they're unaware that they have a choice, that's their problem. Not yours, not mine, and not Microsoft's. Caveat emptor.
If they are aware that they have a choice and don't care, that's their choice. Not yours, not mine, and not Microsoft's. They voluntarily entered into the sales contract.
If they actively choose to use Microsoft's products, who the hell are you to tell them that you know their wants and needs better than they?
If, after the purchase, the consumer feels he did not get his money's worth, that's between him, Microsoft, and lawyers if it gets that far. The government may or may not need to get involved at that point, but it's certainly outside the realm of anti-trust.
Is Microsoft the only player in town, in the EU or the US?
Why does the EU get to tell Microsoft to spill what MS wants kept secret? If the idea is to help MS's competition, how can you then say MS is an anticompetitve monopoly?
They had no problems regulating Janet Jackson's breast.
"I'd suggest Catch-22. It will provide lots of laugh out loud moments."
Catch-22 is my favorite book, but it's definitely not for everyone. If the intended recipient doesn't get or like obscure humor, satire, and/or cannot cope with the discontinuous storyline, something else would probably be better.
Haven't you heard? It's an innovative new approach for lawyers to get rich.
I think you're talking to a brick wall. Along the way, it seems some members of the open source community forgot that if you want people to use your widget you have to be responsive to those people.
...
Some members of the OS community(SMOTOSC): We want people to have the freedom to use their computer however they choose! Our software helps them do that. We like it when people can use our software; it makes us feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
User: Yeah, that's great! By the way, Program X doesn't do task Y correctly, could you fix it?
SMOTOSC: FIX IT YOURSELF OR SHUT THE HELL UP! YOU DIDN'T GIVE US ANY MONEY!
User: I thought you liked it when people used your software and that it made you feel warm and fuzzy...
SMOTOSC: You gave us no money. We don't have to listen to your tripe.
User:
If you want more users, you don't get them by treating your existing users like crap. I thought that was common knowledge.
(And yes, I realize that not all members of the OS community act like this)
I've had 1 blue screen in the past year with XP. It was when I tried to install DaemonTools on a new machine I had just built. The problem was that I transferred the DT install from my old machine (in which I had just put a new Gb Ethernet card; my new board had Gb ports on it) to my new one. Something slightly corrupted the file transfer (not enough to make it puke on execution, the install popped up the EULA and asked me where to install just fine), and that's why it bluescreened. I downloaded a fresh copy from DT's site, and the problem went away.
I also noticed that the article convieniently forgot to mention "DLL hell". Maybe that's because 1) "DLL hell" isn't really a problem for average XP users anymore and 2) "dependency hell" is just as bad, yet it's a problem that's easy to get (it was for me, anyway, with Ubuntu Hoary).
That's former Chief Justice of Alabama, thank you very much. They threw his ass out a while ago.
Actually I hope somebody gets charged under the DMCA for publishing this. Maybe then people will pick up on just how absurd the law is.
Toddestan pretty much summed up why I don't like it. I also don't like having eleventy billion different media players for the eleventy billion different movie formats out there. Just install codecs so that either WMP or Media Player Classic (my preferred player) will play your files.
Oh wait, I had that set up with MPC and QuickTime Alternative, but iTunes wasn't interested in playing nice with QTA. It doesn't matter what order I install stuff, either QTA is getting broken by iTunes or QTA will break iTunes by breaking the real QT.
Funny, I installed iTunes yesterday and it came with mandatory Quicktime (and its stupid tray application and its stupid quick launch shortcut).
Quicktime is my second to last choice for video files, right above Realplayer.
***GAME DEVELOPERS*** do not support Linux. Not the other way around.
No. The business model does not support Linux. Publishers decide that the Linux gamer marketshare is not worth the extra time/effort/money to develop on Linux. As soon as someone thinks it's profitable it will be done. And hopefully it'll be done better than Savage was done, with critical bugs that went unpatched for over two months.
I refuse to pay for an O/S that had ads in it. I refuse to pay more for the privlege of having an ad-free O/S. If you build ads into Windows, you'll just force me to migrate to Linux or something else. I don't want to do that, but I will if I have to.
I don't remember signing anything when I was born, nor nothing since then, stating that it was my responsibility to see as many ads as possible in as many media as possible.