I know, Google is big and scary now as well, but I am pretty happy to see a new 300 pound gorilla in the room standing up to Microsoft.
The world is better with the dominant operating system open for competition. A court understood this once ( http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm ), but clearly the DOJ is not going to enforce it without Google (and others with the wherewithal to do so) being vocal about it.
The quote is accurate.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_LAN :
"On July 21, 1999, AirPort debuted at the Macworld Expo in New York City with Steve Jobs picking up an iBook supposedly to give the cameraman a better shot as he surfed the Web. Applause quickly built as people realized there were no wires. This was the first time Wireless LAN became publicly available at consumer pricing and easily available for home use. Before the release of the Airport, Wireless LAN was too expensive for consumer use and used exclusively in large corporate settings."
(if you don't trust wikipedia, I'm sure you can find 100 other sources that will say the same thing)
The percentage that are using AirPort today is irrelevant to whether or not AirPort introduced Wi-fi to a mainstream audience.
If you don't remember, there was a trial that forced microsoft to open up and play more fairly in those other things you mention. If the governments, as well as "whiney little bitches" weren't keeping microsoft in check, things would be a lot worse.
The monopoly they have has made them incredibly, incredibly rich. With it comes a cost. Things like this.
In my opinion, de facto-standard operating systems are no different than phone companies -- they tend to be natural network monopolies. It is in everyone's interest to have them open and modular so that there is competition for everything practicable. Web browsers, media players, search utilities. Just about everything but the kernel.
I guess I am the only one here wishing the government was even more aggressively leveling the playing field.
Google may be big and powerful, but they don't have a network monopoly....in almost everything they do, they compete on their merits, not on their network advantage. That is a very important difference.
Apple could shut down tomorrow and it would adversely effect less than 10% of all PC users out there.
Obviously, you don't understand a thing about economics or competition. Companies without competition produce crappy, overpriced products. Windows users would most definitely be adversely affected by Apple going away.
My post simply said that companies are operating here for our benefit (and yes, if the owners and employees and stockholders are citizens, theirs as well), and we therefore can make laws that tell them what is ok and what is not ok in their products and business practices. Antitrust laws are an example of that, product safety laws are another. (the issue at question is an antitrust issue, it is not just whether the purchaser of the product likes the product)
You sure as hell do NOT have the right to elect leaders to make and prosecute laws to stop doing stuff just because you don't like it. They are elected to make laws to serve the MAJORITY, not you.
Ummm...thanks Einstein. I am aware that I am not the only voter...that's known as a dictatorship. I think others who read my post understood what I meant.
Monopolies cause harm to people, and not just the people who buy the product: also to people who are denied products that never come into being because of the effects of network economics. The harm, while indirect, is no less real.
I strongly suggest reading the findings of fact from the MS antitrust trial if you don't understand the harm caused by such things.
If I choose to make a product, it's my business how I make it.
Not if the product or your practices in making or selling it is deemed illegal. Believe it or not, companies are answerable to the government, and, in a democracy, the government is answerable to the people. If the people decide that having the product on the market is not in their benefit, they can (through voting for representatives) have laws made that make that product illegal.
Try making and selling housepaint with lead in it and tell us how that works out for you.
Keep in mind that before Google came in with a powerful search capability, Microsoft didn't have one yet. For all you know, if Google hadn't done one, Microsoft never would have done anything but the piss-poor dog-slow search they had previously. You think the next company will bother, if Microsoft is allowed to continually squash any product it decides it wants to squash?
The world is better with competition whereever competition isn't grossly inefficient. I see no good reason there shouldn't be competition in local search. Let Microsoft compete on its merits, not on its monopoly. I'm getting off my soap box now. Thank you.
well do you really expect anyone to integrate a third party search into their OS? If they want to conduct business in a country where I'm a voter....well, yes, I indeed expect them to do whatever the hell I want them to do. If they choose to do things that don't benefit me, I have the right to elect leaders that make and prosecute laws that prevent them from continuing it. Luckily, many of those laws are already in place since the days when Standard Oil, AT&T and others tried to abuse their respective monopolies.
why dont people sue apple for Spotlight? Apple hasn't been been convicted as a monopolist. Also Google search seems to integrate well with Spotlight....Apple apparently did a decent job of exposings it's innards to 3rd parties in this case.
When you say "it won't", do you mean, in the next 5 years, the next 20, the next 1000, or are you actually making this prediction forever, till after the sun has burned out and we've moved on to other star systems? I always wonder this when people make such bold predictions and fail to qualify them with even an "any time soon".
I see no reason why a webkit based browser might not be just as popular as firefox or even IE at some point in the (relatively near) future. With the big bucks of Apple supporting the development if the "hard stuff", that is, rendering and javascript engines --- and then being open source people can do whatever they want with it like Firefox, such as add extensions and the like.
Why not? The complaints I hear about Safari are all things that are just choices on the part of Apple (such as inability to resize by all edges, or to use different keyboard shortcuts), not technical inadequacies.
Well, I guess I don't care too much about the cost of sending letters, I probably spend about a buck a month sending snail mail these days. So low tech....
That makes no sense. Just because you can train a system to work better at converting speach to text if it knows your voice pattern, doesn't mean that it can uniquely identify someone from the voice pattern. Those are two different things.....you can't just tell it to run the algorithm in reverse and expect there to be enough information. In fact, you aren't even running it in reverse if you don't have the text version of what they said.
Manufacturers who are unable to find customers (whether direct customers or people who would resell thier product) wouldn't be able to sell thier products and so wouldn't manufacture anything. Products that people really need or want would be manufactured. Marketing, in many cases, simply creates an artificial want or need. Not always, but often. I don't think the economy would be any worse off without most marketing, especially if you are measuring it in terms of "quality of life" which would factor in the annoyance of seeing ads everywhere, and whether I was working more hours to pay for things that I only want because I was exposed to marketing.
Regardless, I have no problem with advertising that comes solely at the advertisers' expense -- TV commercials or ads on web sites make it so I get content for free, so I'm ok with that. Spam wastes my time and make things like internet service more expensive (and make it more expensive for google to run gmail, which means I have to look at more ads or they can't spend as much money on improving the service). Any way you look at it, it eventually costs me, and that annoys me.
I'm against junk snail mail as well. Even though it doesn't cost me per se, it wastes my time, and unlike tv and web ads, I don't get anything in return for it.
Yes, its not Google's fault Docs didn't work on Safari, as Safari didn't, until now, have rich text editing support built in. I wouldn't be surprised if Google helped Apple out on that, since they've been promising that Docs would work on Safari soon. It would have been a nightmare to make it work without browser support....probably easier to help Apple get a proper rich text editor rather than trying to do it all in DHTML or something.
I'm very happy to see that Safari has fixed this omission...it was the main reason I don't use Safari. (I also like to use the occasional formatting in an email, to make something bold, add a bulleted list, or color some text [for function, e.g. "red text is new additions", rather than aesthetics])
If it annoys or befuddles you that someone can whole-heartedly believe that God would become a man and be a willing sacrifice to atone for all the evil crap that we humans do, try sitting down and lend an honest ear to what that a Christian has to say about it Well please do explain that. Specifically, how one can "atone" for the evil of another. I mean, someone can't, say, go to jail on behalf of another...it doesn't make sense. By my understanding, the point of punishment is to deter people from committing evil/crime/wrongdoing. You can't stop the person from committing the crime after the fact, but the more consistently a society punishes those who commit crimes, the more people should be deterred from commiting crimes.
I suspect the reason people buy into the "Jesus atoned for our sins" sort of reasoning is that human tend to understand many concepts in simplistic ways....it doesn't matter if you think that atonement/punishment for evil is something done to bring some sort of necessary balance to the universe, vs. simply a pragmatic thing that has evolved in order to keep said evil in check (to the benefit of those advocating the punishing). As long as you implement it, it doesn't matter the reason you think that people should "pay for their wrongdoing".
But then, what happens when you take that very rational concept and twist it around to think that one person, by being punished in a particularly depraved way (although a pretty common way back in the day), can somehow "atone" for other people's evil? Yes, I've thought that through, and it still makes no sense. I'm willing to listen to anyone who wants to try to explain it, though, so please do feel free.
No offense, but isn't just being a Christian kinda embarrassing? I mean, the whole concept seems rather silly and preposterous. Jesus died for our sins? Have you thought that through?
Just because 90% of the country buys into it doesn't make it any less absurd.
I think Netscape lives on in Firefox and other Gecko based browsers (of which the one currently called "Netscape" is just one). It's just a name change.
Sure, there was a complete rewrite from the original netscape, but at least initially, that was mostly done by employees of netscape (well, the netscape division of AOL).
People get too hung up on the names, in my opinion. If Firefox was just called "Netscape The Next Generation" and this thing was just called "AOL's branded version of Netscape TNG", the only real difference between today would be that no one could claim that Netscape was dead.
...that if you are that paranoid, you should just use a different email address than the one known to your girlfriend. I just don't see this as a problem.
I think you are missing the point. You can always copy the data to new media and new file formats. As long as yous store it on something reasonable and in a reasonably common format, there will always be a path to store it to the next thing, without excessive expense or hassle. And it gets easier and cheaper with every generation of technology (even as our demands for quality continually increase).
Slashdot Mirror
I know, Google is big and scary now as well, but I am pretty happy to see a new 300 pound gorilla in the room standing up to Microsoft.
The world is better with the dominant operating system open for competition. A court understood this once ( http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm ), but clearly the DOJ is not going to enforce it without Google (and others with the wherewithal to do so) being vocal about it.
The quote is accurate. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_LAN : "On July 21, 1999, AirPort debuted at the Macworld Expo in New York City with Steve Jobs picking up an iBook supposedly to give the cameraman a better shot as he surfed the Web. Applause quickly built as people realized there were no wires. This was the first time Wireless LAN became publicly available at consumer pricing and easily available for home use. Before the release of the Airport, Wireless LAN was too expensive for consumer use and used exclusively in large corporate settings."
(if you don't trust wikipedia, I'm sure you can find 100 other sources that will say the same thing)
The percentage that are using AirPort today is irrelevant to whether or not AirPort introduced Wi-fi to a mainstream audience.
If you don't remember, there was a trial that forced microsoft to open up and play more fairly in those other things you mention. If the governments, as well as "whiney little bitches" weren't keeping microsoft in check, things would be a lot worse.
Well, it sucks to be them.
The monopoly they have has made them incredibly, incredibly rich. With it comes a cost. Things like this.
In my opinion, de facto-standard operating systems are no different than phone companies -- they tend to be natural network monopolies. It is in everyone's interest to have them open and modular so that there is competition for everything practicable. Web browsers, media players, search utilities. Just about everything but the kernel.
I guess I am the only one here wishing the government was even more aggressively leveling the playing field.
Google may be big and powerful, but they don't have a network monopoly....in almost everything they do, they compete on their merits, not on their network advantage. That is a very important difference.
I strongly suggest reading the findings of fact from the MS antitrust trial if you don't understand the harm caused by such things.
Try making and selling housepaint with lead in it and tell us how that works out for you.
Keep in mind that before Google came in with a powerful search capability, Microsoft didn't have one yet. For all you know, if Google hadn't done one, Microsoft never would have done anything but the piss-poor dog-slow search they had previously. You think the next company will bother, if Microsoft is allowed to continually squash any product it decides it wants to squash?
The world is better with competition whereever competition isn't grossly inefficient. I see no good reason there shouldn't be competition in local search. Let Microsoft compete on its merits, not on its monopoly. I'm getting off my soap box now. Thank you.
Evil organizationss won't be able to use Linux or other GPL'd software.
When you say "it won't", do you mean, in the next 5 years, the next 20, the next 1000, or are you actually making this prediction forever, till after the sun has burned out and we've moved on to other star systems? I always wonder this when people make such bold predictions and fail to qualify them with even an "any time soon".
I see no reason why a webkit based browser might not be just as popular as firefox or even IE at some point in the (relatively near) future. With the big bucks of Apple supporting the development if the "hard stuff", that is, rendering and javascript engines --- and then being open source people can do whatever they want with it like Firefox, such as add extensions and the like.
Why not? The complaints I hear about Safari are all things that are just choices on the part of Apple (such as inability to resize by all edges, or to use different keyboard shortcuts), not technical inadequacies.
Interesting.
Well, I guess I don't care too much about the cost of sending letters, I probably spend about a buck a month sending snail mail these days. So low tech....
But still, interesting, I hadn't thought of that.
That makes no sense. Just because you can train a system to work better at converting speach to text if it knows your voice pattern, doesn't mean that it can uniquely identify someone from the voice pattern. Those are two different things.....you can't just tell it to run the algorithm in reverse and expect there to be enough information. In fact, you aren't even running it in reverse if you don't have the text version of what they said.
Regardless, I have no problem with advertising that comes solely at the advertisers' expense -- TV commercials or ads on web sites make it so I get content for free, so I'm ok with that. Spam wastes my time and make things like internet service more expensive (and make it more expensive for google to run gmail, which means I have to look at more ads or they can't spend as much money on improving the service). Any way you look at it, it eventually costs me, and that annoys me.
I'm against junk snail mail as well. Even though it doesn't cost me per se, it wastes my time, and unlike tv and web ads, I don't get anything in return for it.
Yes, its not Google's fault Docs didn't work on Safari, as Safari didn't, until now, have rich text editing support built in. I wouldn't be surprised if Google helped Apple out on that, since they've been promising that Docs would work on Safari soon. It would have been a nightmare to make it work without browser support....probably easier to help Apple get a proper rich text editor rather than trying to do it all in DHTML or something.
I'm very happy to see that Safari has fixed this omission...it was the main reason I don't use Safari. (I also like to use the occasional formatting in an email, to make something bold, add a bulleted list, or color some text [for function, e.g. "red text is new additions", rather than aesthetics])
No offense, but isn't just being a Christian kinda embarrassing? I mean, the whole concept seems rather silly and preposterous. Jesus died for our sins? Have you thought that through?
Just because 90% of the country buys into it doesn't make it any less absurd.
It could have a St. Bernard head and a little keg of whiskey on it's collar....
...by sending you a verification email you have to click a link in.
It really hurts me to take microsoft's side.
I think Netscape lives on in Firefox and other Gecko based browsers (of which the one currently called "Netscape" is just one). It's just a name change.
Sure, there was a complete rewrite from the original netscape, but at least initially, that was mostly done by employees of netscape (well, the netscape division of AOL).
People get too hung up on the names, in my opinion. If Firefox was just called "Netscape The Next Generation" and this thing was just called "AOL's branded version of Netscape TNG", the only real difference between today would be that no one could claim that Netscape was dead.
...that if you are that paranoid, you should just use a different email address than the one known to your girlfriend. I just don't see this as a problem.
I think you are missing the point. You can always copy the data to new media and new file formats. As long as yous store it on something reasonable and in a reasonably common format, there will always be a path to store it to the next thing, without excessive expense or hassle. And it gets easier and cheaper with every generation of technology (even as our demands for quality continually increase).