Seems to me that Lindows chose that name specifically to leech off of Microsoft's mindshare. Let's face it, can you give me another reason that would explain that choice in names?
And it seems to me that Microsoft chose the name "Windows" to leech off the collective mindshare of such projects as Xwindows. If they didn't have a problem with their trademark only differing by one letter from an already established project back then, they shouldn't be able to target new projects now.
I think they should have told MS to pick a better trademark if they didn't want other projects having simlar names. They already knew about Xwindows.
I think their whole tradmark is bunk. This is like naming a program "email" or "compiler" and tradmarking it.
No, Google's argument is that it's not a parody if you're actively and specifically using it to make money. Then, it's just a really funny trademark infringement.
Which is pretty much what I said, just stated in terms that don't make google look quite as dumb.
What your first sentence is saying is that making money and parody are supposedly mutually exclusive. So if you want to have a parody, it can't make any money, which is ridiculous. Ever hear of Mad magazine?
Booble.com is a clear mockery of google.com. It uses titties for O's fer chrissake. Trademark infringement is when you use someone else's trademark or something that looks close enough that most people would mistake it for the real trademark. Even if someone misses the titties on the front page and the bright red warning, they're gonna catch on that it's not google when the only search results they get are for porn.
What google is doing is anagous to a company suing mad magazine for trademark infringement over on of its ad parodies. Sure Mad magazine is for-profit, and the names of the products are similar to real products, but it's still a very obvious parody.
When you broadcast something, you shouldn't expect it to remain private.
If you want it to remain private, do something.
Encrypt it, or don't send it out to everybody.
Yep. That used to be they way it was for all radio broadcasts. It was legal to build a reciever that could recieve anything (DC to daylight), and if you didn't want people listening, you had to encrypt/obfuscate the data.
Then, some buttmunch decided that cellphones should transmit an unencrypted, analog signal, receiveable by any radioshack scanner. Instead of realizing that someone made a big mistake, the FCC just banned scanners that could receive cell frequencies.
Of, course, it's still trivial to recieve cell frequencies, but now it's "illegal". And now that everyone is switching to digial anyways, the law is still in place and the precendent has been set. Why bother to design things properly when you can just buy a law?
It's obviously a parody. Google's basic argument is that it's a successful parody. So you're not allowed to parody a website unless no one visits it?
What a stupid viewpoint. Do that mean it's only ok to make jokes about corporations as long as no one laughs? After all, funny jokes are marketable, crappy one aren't. (Except here on slashdot.)
Apple is going to make hay while the sun shines and plenty of people are going to pony up the bucks for the first gen player. These should be $199 by summer and maybe $149 by fall or XMas. And maybe Apple will drop a $99 1 or 2 GB bomb, at which popint they will totally 0wn the mp3 player market.
Except that all their cometitor's prices will be falling as well.
Please explain to me how increasing the cost of goods sold to America makes Americans better off?
Sure. The problem is "the race to the bottom". It's basically the concept that, with free trade, you're always competing with the hungriest people on th eplanet for jobs, and the only way to get them is to be just as cheap.
How about a simple thought experiment here?
Imagine that all the jobs in the US were outsourced. Every single one of them. Goods are cheaper as a result, but guess what? No one has any money to buy them!
That's the part of the equation you're not looking at. If you outsource one thing, it results in a cheaper product. If you outsource everything, it trashes the domestic economy.
Of course tariffs increase the price of goods, but the economic health of a given country is affected by more than just the price of goods. If domestic prices go up, and domestic pay goes up, exports may go down, but it's still possible to be better off in the long run.
It sucks though when you're in an industry that can't compete anymore.
The problem is that no one can compete with cheap labor, without being.....cheap labor. Do a search on the phrase "race to the bottom" to get an understanding of this.
Sure, they are examples where traiffs have been applied stupidly, I was using Flint as an example of the devestation that would happen to all of America if our jobs were outsourced. You were supposed to recognize that perhaps the human cost is not being figured into the equation when a company decides to ship jobs overseas.
What formats can it record to? 48KHz or 44.1KHz WAV or just MP3? What's the maximum recording length? Battery life while recording, etc?
48KHz via optical input, 44.1KHz otherwise (line input, ext mic or int mic).
Records to both MP3 and WAV.
There is no maximum recording length that I'm aware of. Maybe hitting the 2 GB FAT maximum file size? (Which would require recording for a very long time.) I haven't hit any limit yet.
Battery life seems normal when recording, it doesn't get terrible when you hit record, unlike minidisc.
... and are you actually trying to claim that politics has no influence on the US/world economy?
If you want to sit there and wait for your job to be shipped overseas, go for it, but some people just might be interested in preventing it from happening in the first place.
I've never been able to get my iPod to skip. And believe me, I've tried. Never happened.
Pretty cool having a 32 MB RAM buffer, huh?
I was referring to the key click that you must have because there is no tactile feedback, not skipping you silly goose.
Heh. Whatever you say, junior. You do know that Apple uses an off-the-shelf USB2 controller in the G4, right? Same as everybody else's.
I was referring to Apple's USB implementation in the ipod, not whatever you were hooking it up to. That should be obvious to anyone who has even the slightest grasp of the technical details involved.
Cause we're talking about a PORTABLE MUSIC PLAYER.
Actually you have just a portable music player, but I have a device that's the same size as yours that's a player, recorder, and FM radio. If you pretend those features don't exist, then they're not very useful, obviously.
In other words, you can't listen to iTunes music on your player.
Because I was just dying to give some money to the RIAA. You do know that there are other places to get music right? Non-evil places?
But you know what's coolest about this whole sitch? The fact that you felt so compelled to climb on Slashdot and DEFEND your choice of music player. iPod owners feel no such compulsion.
Funny, you're not extolling the virtues of your ipod right now? I think the thing this particular ipod owner has trouble feeling is "irony".
The reason businesses choose to hire cheap programmers is because that is how much they are willing to pay. If you artificially try to raise that price, they will not hire programmers at the higher price; the projects will simply go away.
You will not make your job come back. It is gone FOREVER.
Bullshit. You're making all kinds of invalid assumptions by saying this.
The demand curve for a product is not a cliff! If it costs more, the demand decreases, not disappears. The market will get smaller, in terms of quantity sold, but some demand will still be there for the product at a higher price.
What you're saying is like saying "People are willing to buy DVD players for $40, but not for $50". It's a completely silly assumption.
Fuck politics.
No, politics are fucking you. Welcome to the "race to the bottom". They only way to fix it is with politics. I repeat, this is the only way to prevent our standard of living from falling to that of a third-world nation.
You want to penalise companies that outsource, yet this cost will be passed on to their customers, who might not buy enough resulting in job losses anyway.
But the consumers won't have money anyways, because all their jobs were shipped to India.
Get it? That's the problem. It's called the "race to the bottom". In a world with totally free trade, wages would quickly become as low as possible. I'm talking "don't ever think about owning a car or buying a house" low. This is not a good thing. What you end up with is not this magic thing where "everyone gets uplifted". What you get is companies bargain-shopping for the hungriest people.
Sure, tariffs and such can hurt if relied on to much, be they exist for a very good reason.
If you want to know what you're talking about, you should do a little research on Flint, Michigan. Sure those cars got made cheaper, but do you think any of those new workers in Mexico could afford to buy one? And what about the total devistation of Flint? There's more to worry about that "costs being passed on to consumers". There are things like human costs.
The ihp-120 doesn't compete with the mini ipod, it competes with the regular models, where it is at a very competitively price, and has a much better feature set (especially if you want to do any recording).
The ipod mini has 1/5 the space of the iriver, obviously that means it's cheaper.
In other words, it has moving parts that can break.
Are you actually suggesting that your ipod has no moving parts? LOL!
Maybe you like listening to music like this:
"We're Sgt. Pepper's CLICK lonely CLICK CLICK band. We hope you will CLICK the show."
but I'd perfer to hear my music instead.
Firewire's considerably faster. I know this because I've tested my third-gen iPod with both the Firewire interface and the USB2 interface on my G4. Firewire is CONSIDERABLY faster.
Maybe Apple's USB implementation sucks. Neither one maxed out the possible bandwidth, did it?
Besides, the only correct solution is to have both. If yours doesn't, it's inferior.
Maybe I'd rather have useful things like fiberoptic input and output, an FM radio, and the ability to record in stereo over having needlessly redundant interfaces. Your ipod doesn't have a corkscrew, does that mean it sucks?
Some features aren't worth having. Like DRM. My iRiver doesn't have that, your ipod does.
Dragging and dropping files is not easy as pie. Well, maybe it's as easy as homemade pie, what with the making dough and whatnot.
If your software can't handle organizing files on a hard disk (what the iriver shows up as), then you've got some seriously crappy software.
I don't understand why people don't get that. Any software that can organize mp3s on a HD can organize mp3s on a USB mass storage device.
Just fine. It actually has tactile feed back, so I don't have to listen to clicking while I queue up my next song.
How well does it integrate with your computer's music management tools?
I just drag and drop files onto it, easy as pie.
Does it also work as an address book?
Nope, it would make a crappy address book, why bother? You can read text files on it though, so you could have a read-only type.
A hard drive?
It's a standard USB mass storage device.
Does it have Firewire as well?
It has USB 2.0. Firewire would be pointless. USB is present on more computers, and on ANY computer with a firewire port. The USB 2.0 interface can already go faster than any drive inside an mp3 player can keep up with.
LCD wired remote...blech, I've seen it. Better than the iPod...ha!
I doubt you're seen the remote if you think it's not better than the ipod's.
Ooh, great you got all kinds of free stuff. Trouble is, it's all cheap-o crap you'd never use in public:
Are these the words of yet another apple fanboy in the throws of cognitive dissonance after paying too much for an ipod?
How do you like that nonexistent digital recording input on your ipod? Or how about the FM tuner, or the digital output?....wait you don't have those either.
external mic...yeah, if you like the sound of a hurricane every time you record!
First, if they were caught their companies would very quickly go out of business in the ugliest, most litigious (sp) and scandalous manner. Could you imagine how the mainstream press would react to something like this? Corporate attorneys? The rest of the computer industry?
And how are they going to get caught?
You're basing your logic on the assumption that a criminal plans on being caught, quite a flawed assumption.
The logic is more along the lines of:
"Hey, if we produce some new viruses, our sales will go up 10%."
Step one, they write a virus. (All the info to do this can be retrieved anonymously.) Next, they release it into the wild, anonymously again. Finally, they just decide to make sure they have a valid ourside source before adding the virus to the list in their AV software.
As long as none of the dates for the documents are provable, they can easily claim that any documentation on the virus was produced via reverse engineering, after it was found in the wild. They would only need to trust one programmer, who they could afford to pay quite well.
The Oekokrim trials were clearly about establishing precedent for Norway on an important matter, not about punishing him directly.
Maybe that was the part of the case the was important to you, but this case was most definately about punishing him directly. If he lost, that's what would have happened.
I'm sure it all seems like it just this abstract case about precedent to you, but your career was not at stake. If someone decided to try and use you to "set an example" in a totally B.S. manner, I bet you would want compensation for your wasted time and trauma as well.
Right now we have multiple private companies duplicating effort trying to find a cure for AIDS. Once this cure is found, it will be the property of that single company and they will be able to charge whatever they want for it. If you don't understand what's wrong with that perhaps you should read about the recent battle over the production of generic AIDS drugs in Africa.
God forbid we actually think about stopping this madness and working together to cure disease because that would be *gasp* socialism.
The medical industry is a perfect example of a field where there has been an ongoing "market failure". Everyone's health insurance premiums keep going up, while the quality of care keeps going down. But don't ever question a giant corporation's right to gouge poor people and countries on the prices of drugs which are actually fairly cheap to produce (the most significant cost is R&D) or you're some kind of commie pinko leftist bastard.
How dare someone think that medical research should be publicly funded and public domain.
Maybe with MS have been "forcing suppliers to include its own media software", but have MS been preventing suppliers from also supplying other media software? The BBC article does not make clear.
You're forgetting the way MS does things.
They take application software and bundle it with their OS for "free". This kills their competition, because to get windows (the product they have a monopoly with) you must also buy their media player, browser, cd burning sofware, compressed drive software, etc.
What MS is doing is FORCING you to buy their application software, when you buy their OS. That's clearly an abuse of their monopoly position in the OS market.
Let me explain in more absract terms:
Say you have a monopoly on widget A, which works with widget B. What MS is doing is, jacking up the price of widget A and including widget B for "free." This gives them a monopoly on widget B, beacuse you can't use widget B by itself and if you buy a widget A, they force you to buy a widget B as well. It's a pretty clear violation of antitrust law.
If you want your widgets A and B to play well together, that's fine, but it doesn't need to come at such a high price.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that Lindows chose that name specifically to leech off of Microsoft's mindshare. Let's face it, can you give me another reason that would explain that choice in names?
And it seems to me that Microsoft chose the name "Windows" to leech off the collective mindshare of such projects as Xwindows. If they didn't have a problem with their trademark only differing by one letter from an already established project back then, they shouldn't be able to target new projects now.
I think they should have told MS to pick a better trademark if they didn't want other projects having simlar names. They already knew about Xwindows.
I think their whole tradmark is bunk. This is like naming a program "email" or "compiler" and tradmarking it.
No, Google's argument is that it's not a parody if you're actively and specifically using it to make money. Then, it's just a really funny trademark infringement.
Which is pretty much what I said, just stated in terms that don't make google look quite as dumb.
What your first sentence is saying is that making money and parody are supposedly mutually exclusive. So if you want to have a parody, it can't make any money, which is ridiculous. Ever hear of Mad magazine?
Booble.com is a clear mockery of google.com. It uses titties for O's fer chrissake. Trademark infringement is when you use someone else's trademark or something that looks close enough that most people would mistake it for the real trademark. Even if someone misses the titties on the front page and the bright red warning, they're gonna catch on that it's not google when the only search results they get are for porn.
What google is doing is anagous to a company suing mad magazine for trademark infringement over on of its ad parodies. Sure Mad magazine is for-profit, and the names of the products are similar to real products, but it's still a very obvious parody.
When you broadcast something, you shouldn't expect it to remain private. If you want it to remain private, do something. Encrypt it, or don't send it out to everybody.
Yep. That used to be they way it was for all radio broadcasts. It was legal to build a reciever that could recieve anything (DC to daylight), and if you didn't want people listening, you had to encrypt/obfuscate the data.
Then, some buttmunch decided that cellphones should transmit an unencrypted, analog signal, receiveable by any radioshack scanner. Instead of realizing that someone made a big mistake, the FCC just banned scanners that could receive cell frequencies.
Of, course, it's still trivial to recieve cell frequencies, but now it's "illegal". And now that everyone is switching to digial anyways, the law is still in place and the precendent has been set. Why bother to design things properly when you can just buy a law?
That is just a bunch of B.S.
It's obviously a parody. Google's basic argument is that it's a successful parody. So you're not allowed to parody a website unless no one visits it?
What a stupid viewpoint. Do that mean it's only ok to make jokes about corporations as long as no one laughs? After all, funny jokes are marketable, crappy one aren't. (Except here on slashdot.)
. would TURN OFF those blasted "Your mail has a virus!" auto-replies. They accomplish nothing but the generation of yet more useless traffic.
Actually, the right way to do it would be to turn it off only if that particular virus is known to forge the address.
And I've seen the UI for the iRiver ones. The iPod is far superior, even if you're just counting pixels.
That's funny, seeing as they have the exact same number of pixels.
ipod:
160x128
iriver
160x128
I highly doubt you have seen one one of the iriver ihp-xxx devices. Perhaps you should before you make claims about its UI.
Apple is going to make hay while the sun shines and plenty of people are going to pony up the bucks for the first gen player. These should be $199 by summer and maybe $149 by fall or XMas. And maybe Apple will drop a $99 1 or 2 GB bomb, at which popint they will totally 0wn the mp3 player market.
Except that all their cometitor's prices will be falling as well.
Please explain to me how increasing the cost of goods sold to America makes Americans better off?
Sure. The problem is "the race to the bottom". It's basically the concept that, with free trade, you're always competing with the hungriest people on th eplanet for jobs, and the only way to get them is to be just as cheap.
How about a simple thought experiment here?
Imagine that all the jobs in the US were outsourced. Every single one of them. Goods are cheaper as a result, but guess what? No one has any money to buy them!
That's the part of the equation you're not looking at. If you outsource one thing, it results in a cheaper product. If you outsource everything, it trashes the domestic economy.
Of course tariffs increase the price of goods, but the economic health of a given country is affected by more than just the price of goods. If domestic prices go up, and domestic pay goes up, exports may go down, but it's still possible to be better off in the long run.
It sucks though when you're in an industry that can't compete anymore.
The problem is that no one can compete with cheap labor, without being.....cheap labor. Do a search on the phrase "race to the bottom" to get an understanding of this.
Sure, they are examples where traiffs have been applied stupidly, I was using Flint as an example of the devestation that would happen to all of America if our jobs were outsourced. You were supposed to recognize that perhaps the human cost is not being figured into the equation when a company decides to ship jobs overseas.
What formats can it record to? 48KHz or 44.1KHz WAV or just MP3? What's the maximum recording length? Battery life while recording, etc?
48KHz via optical input, 44.1KHz otherwise (line input, ext mic or int mic).
Records to both MP3 and WAV.
There is no maximum recording length that I'm aware of. Maybe hitting the 2 GB FAT maximum file size? (Which would require recording for a very long time.) I haven't hit any limit yet.
Battery life seems normal when recording, it doesn't get terrible when you hit record, unlike minidisc.
It is how it is; it cannot be otherwise.
... and are you actually trying to claim that politics has no influence on the US/world economy?
What are you, Yoda?
If you want to sit there and wait for your job to be shipped overseas, go for it, but some people just might be interested in preventing it from happening in the first place.
the iRiver had WMA(with DRM, nonetheless) support
It has WMA support, but no DRM support, just like the Rio Volt and numerous other devices.
I've never been able to get my iPod to skip. And believe me, I've tried. Never happened. Pretty cool having a 32 MB RAM buffer, huh?
I was referring to the key click that you must have because there is no tactile feedback, not skipping you silly goose.
Heh. Whatever you say, junior. You do know that Apple uses an off-the-shelf USB2 controller in the G4, right? Same as everybody else's.
I was referring to Apple's USB implementation in the ipod, not whatever you were hooking it up to. That should be obvious to anyone who has even the slightest grasp of the technical details involved.
Cause we're talking about a PORTABLE MUSIC PLAYER.
Actually you have just a portable music player, but I have a device that's the same size as yours that's a player, recorder, and FM radio. If you pretend those features don't exist, then they're not very useful, obviously.
In other words, you can't listen to iTunes music on your player.
Because I was just dying to give some money to the RIAA. You do know that there are other places to get music right? Non-evil places?
But you know what's coolest about this whole sitch? The fact that you felt so compelled to climb on Slashdot and DEFEND your choice of music player. iPod owners feel no such compulsion.
Funny, you're not extolling the virtues of your ipod right now? I think the thing this particular ipod owner has trouble feeling is "irony".
The reason businesses choose to hire cheap programmers is because that is how much they are willing to pay. If you artificially try to raise that price, they will not hire programmers at the higher price; the projects will simply go away. You will not make your job come back. It is gone FOREVER.
Bullshit. You're making all kinds of invalid assumptions by saying this.
The demand curve for a product is not a cliff! If it costs more, the demand decreases, not disappears. The market will get smaller, in terms of quantity sold, but some demand will still be there for the product at a higher price.
What you're saying is like saying "People are willing to buy DVD players for $40, but not for $50". It's a completely silly assumption.
Fuck politics.
No, politics are fucking you. Welcome to the "race to the bottom". They only way to fix it is with politics. I repeat, this is the only way to prevent our standard of living from falling to that of a third-world nation.
You want to penalise companies that outsource, yet this cost will be passed on to their customers, who might not buy enough resulting in job losses anyway.
But the consumers won't have money anyways, because all their jobs were shipped to India.
Get it? That's the problem. It's called the "race to the bottom". In a world with totally free trade, wages would quickly become as low as possible. I'm talking "don't ever think about owning a car or buying a house" low. This is not a good thing. What you end up with is not this magic thing where "everyone gets uplifted". What you get is companies bargain-shopping for the hungriest people.
Sure, tariffs and such can hurt if relied on to much, be they exist for a very good reason.
If you want to know what you're talking about, you should do a little research on Flint, Michigan. Sure those cars got made cheaper, but do you think any of those new workers in Mexico could afford to buy one? And what about the total devistation of Flint? There's more to worry about that "costs being passed on to consumers". There are things like human costs.
The ihp-120 doesn't compete with the mini ipod, it competes with the regular models, where it is at a very competitively price, and has a much better feature set (especially if you want to do any recording).
The ipod mini has 1/5 the space of the iriver, obviously that means it's cheaper.
In other words, it has moving parts that can break.
Are you actually suggesting that your ipod has no moving parts? LOL!
Maybe you like listening to music like this:
"We're Sgt. Pepper's CLICK lonely CLICK CLICK band. We hope you will CLICK the show."
but I'd perfer to hear my music instead.
Firewire's considerably faster. I know this because I've tested my third-gen iPod with both the Firewire interface and the USB2 interface on my G4. Firewire is CONSIDERABLY faster.
Maybe Apple's USB implementation sucks. Neither one maxed out the possible bandwidth, did it?
Besides, the only correct solution is to have both. If yours doesn't, it's inferior.
Maybe I'd rather have useful things like fiberoptic input and output, an FM radio, and the ability to record in stereo over having needlessly redundant interfaces. Your ipod doesn't have a corkscrew, does that mean it sucks?
Some features aren't worth having. Like DRM. My iRiver doesn't have that, your ipod does.
Dragging and dropping files is not easy as pie. Well, maybe it's as easy as homemade pie, what with the making dough and whatnot.
If your software can't handle organizing files on a hard disk (what the iriver shows up as), then you've got some seriously crappy software.
I don't understand why people don't get that. Any software that can organize mp3s on a HD can organize mp3s on a USB mass storage device.
'Even if x were true, it'd still be false.'
:-P
I don't care who is he is, that offends me as a programmer.
What if x wasn't instantiated?
And how's the UI?
Just fine. It actually has tactile feed back, so I don't have to listen to clicking while I queue up my next song.
How well does it integrate with your computer's music management tools?
I just drag and drop files onto it, easy as pie.
Does it also work as an address book?
Nope, it would make a crappy address book, why bother? You can read text files on it though, so you could have a read-only type.
A hard drive?
It's a standard USB mass storage device.
Does it have Firewire as well?
It has USB 2.0. Firewire would be pointless. USB is present on more computers, and on ANY computer with a firewire port. The USB 2.0 interface can already go faster than any drive inside an mp3 player can keep up with.
leather case...you mean pleather, right
No. Leather.
LCD wired remote...blech, I've seen it. Better than the iPod...ha!
I doubt you're seen the remote if you think it's not better than the ipod's.
Ooh, great you got all kinds of free stuff. Trouble is, it's all cheap-o crap you'd never use in public:
Are these the words of yet another apple fanboy in the throws of cognitive dissonance after paying too much for an ipod?
How do you like that nonexistent digital recording input on your ipod? Or how about the FM tuner, or the digital output?....wait you don't have those either.
external mic...yeah, if you like the sound of a hurricane every time you record!
As opposed to this gem for the ipod? I hope you didn't want to record anything in stereo......
Sometimes it pays to not be blindly loyal to a particular brand. I was shocked at how much extra stuff was in the box.
First, if they were caught their companies would very quickly go out of business in the ugliest, most litigious (sp) and scandalous manner. Could you imagine how the mainstream press would react to something like this? Corporate attorneys? The rest of the computer industry?
And how are they going to get caught?
You're basing your logic on the assumption that a criminal plans on being caught, quite a flawed assumption.
The logic is more along the lines of:
"Hey, if we produce some new viruses, our sales will go up 10%."
Step one, they write a virus. (All the info to do this can be retrieved anonymously.) Next, they release it into the wild, anonymously again. Finally, they just decide to make sure they have a valid ourside source before adding the virus to the list in their AV software.
As long as none of the dates for the documents are provable, they can easily claim that any documentation on the virus was produced via reverse engineering, after it was found in the wild. They would only need to trust one programmer, who they could afford to pay quite well.
The Oekokrim trials were clearly about establishing precedent for Norway on an important matter, not about punishing him directly.
Maybe that was the part of the case the was important to you, but this case was most definately about punishing him directly. If he lost, that's what would have happened.
I'm sure it all seems like it just this abstract case about precedent to you, but your career was not at stake. If someone decided to try and use you to "set an example" in a totally B.S. manner, I bet you would want compensation for your wasted time and trauma as well.
Yes, let's think about the medical industry.
Right now we have multiple private companies duplicating effort trying to find a cure for AIDS. Once this cure is found, it will be the property of that single company and they will be able to charge whatever they want for it. If you don't understand what's wrong with that perhaps you should read about the recent battle over the production of generic AIDS drugs in Africa.
God forbid we actually think about stopping this madness and working together to cure disease because that would be *gasp* socialism.
The medical industry is a perfect example of a field where there has been an ongoing "market failure". Everyone's health insurance premiums keep going up, while the quality of care keeps going down. But don't ever question a giant corporation's right to gouge poor people and countries on the prices of drugs which are actually fairly cheap to produce (the most significant cost is R&D) or you're some kind of commie pinko leftist bastard.
How dare someone think that medical research should be publicly funded and public domain.
Maybe with MS have been "forcing suppliers to include its own media software", but have MS been preventing suppliers from also supplying other media software? The BBC article does not make clear.
You're forgetting the way MS does things.
They take application software and bundle it with their OS for "free". This kills their competition, because to get windows (the product they have a monopoly with) you must also buy their media player, browser, cd burning sofware, compressed drive software, etc.
What MS is doing is FORCING you to buy their application software, when you buy their OS. That's clearly an abuse of their monopoly position in the OS market.
Let me explain in more absract terms:
Say you have a monopoly on widget A, which works with widget B. What MS is doing is, jacking up the price of widget A and including widget B for "free." This gives them a monopoly on widget B, beacuse you can't use widget B by itself and if you buy a widget A, they force you to buy a widget B as well. It's a pretty clear violation of antitrust law.
If you want your widgets A and B to play well together, that's fine, but it doesn't need to come at such a high price.