They don't tailgate "for fun", but a lot of people do tailgate without thinking about it. That is, they pull right up behind you, and then drive at your speed indefinitely even though the lane next to you is open for passing. If you pull over for them, you'll see that they pass you until the next slower vehicle, and then stay right behind it. In fact, I've seen cars tailgate 18-wheeler trucks. Some people just never learned what a safety distance is.
This discussion is like the mid-1990's all over again. Virtual machines, sandboxes... it wasn't popular last time. Why should this time be any different?
Because average bandwidth to the user has gone from 56 kbps to 300 kbps or more, and because the average CPU speed has gone from 100 MHz to 2 GHz. It doesn't mean Java/.NET will succeed this time, because it may well be missing something else, but it's foolish to disregard technology just because it is 10 years old.
"First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a 'hot ration' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive process--its rumen, in particular--that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics."
Which part of "even more upset with ourselves for not catching it" did you not understand? This one is Microsoft's fault as much as any infection is Microsoft's fault ("not being more hardy against such viruses"), but "even more" so it's Apple's (which includes its factories, subcontracted or otherwise) fault. If this is bashing Microsoft, then you might say it bashes Apple "even more."
As podcasting became popular, a large number of people began to create content. A lot of this new content was not previously available (it's not a radio program, or a studio recording, or a live recording, etc), and so people gave it a general name. Similarly, "blogs" mainly referred to opinion content generated by individuals, because that sort of self-publication wasn't previously available and a new word was useful. However, the mechanism of podcasting or blogging can also be used by corporations or a political party and still be referred to as such, because most people simply aren't interested in your brand of linguistic nitpicking. That is, the President might have a blog that was written by speechwriters and double-checked by lawyers, but we'll shrug and let it be called a "blog" if it otherwise looks like one.
Thus, if a friend downloads a podcast (MP3 via RSS), he might convert an episode and email it (say, Ogg Vorbis over SMTP) to you, but still introduce it as "hey, check out this podcast". Most of us don't really care that there's a new word in the language, and don't see the need to be strict about language where no confusion actually arises. That's probably why half of the mods on your original post was "flamebait".
Some MP3 files are songs, others are audiobooks, still others are sound effects, or a soundtrack of a movie, or perhaps a recorded lecture. Are they different things even though they are all MP3s? Of course they are.
It's the content, silly rabbit. Nobody except Slashdot cares about the RSS and MP3 technologies involved, and they're sure as hell not going to call it a "RSS-fed MP3".
How do you triangulate a signal using an omni directional antenna?
I can give you a simplified explanation. Measuring the signal strength gives you an idea of how far away the signal is coming from, geographically in the form of a circle around you (assuming the transmitter is not airborne). If you take two measurements from two locations at the same time, then the transmitter is located where the two circles intersect (which is at two possible points, so you don't know for sure yet). If you take three measurements, there will only be one point where all three circles intersect, which is where the transmitter really is.
if you break our laws, even over the Internet, we have the right to subject you to those laws when you're on our territory. That's how it is anywhere in the world.
If you let this happen, and you have a website, you better not travel at all unless you know for sure that your website did not break laws in whatever country you're going to. While ignorance of the law is generally no excuse, having to understand every possible law in the world just to put up a web site is a pretty indefensible position as well.
The worker might actually be able to sustain himself on 40 hours worth of pay. The problem is that he may be trying to sustain a family (which in Chinese terms usually includes elders, not not children), or he may be trying to get ahead by working harder.
do you actually have an example of an unregulated monopolist that was able to profit from charging a "monopoly price" clearly greater than the ideal "competitive price" for the market?
Sure. Check out a phone company in the third world, such as the Philippine Long Distance Telephone company, or PLDT. For decades, PLDT was the only game in town, and getting a line can involve more than ten years of waiting, or even bribery. This is not "monopoly price" in the strict sense of a big number on your bill, but not having a phone for ten years is clearly a "price" of some sense. This changed very quickly when the government finally allowed a competitor called Bayantel to join in, and people got lines very quickly. PLDT initially still tried to sabotage this by limiting the number of trunk lines between it and Bayantel, so that a Bayantel customer calling a PLDT customer would frequently not be able to get through, forcing many businesses to have both a PLDT phone and a Bayantel phone. This is clearly another form of "monopoly price," even in the face of real competition. A truly unregulated monopoly could probably refuse to connect to competing networks at all.
Today, as I understand it, PLDT service is much better than before.
It doesn't affect the analysis, so feel free to substitute a more believable cost.
It affects the number of institutions who are able to finance the effort. For example, if only three banks could give out $3B loans, and your unregulated monopolist is a big customer, they may all value that relationship with Intel more than whatever they can make from you. Add the considerable risk of going up against an unregulated monopolist, and you may not be able to get funding at all.
What you're missing is that the Company D would be a riskier investment given what happened to Company A. If it should fail, then Company E will be an even riskier investment. The perceived risk will increase and increase until Company B finally shows signs of real weakness, and successive challengers will have a harder and harder time getting funding. Do you actually have an example of an unregulated monopolist taken down through this successive challenger idea?
I also can't help but chuckle when I saw your $10M fab. Fabs easily cost billions of dollars.
Lowering prices below market value? That is _good_ for consumers because NO business can sell for a loss forever -- the minute that they raise their prices after they've wiped the competition clean, new competition will turn up the beat them down again.
You are wrong. Every business has a barrier to entry, and a new entrant always risks losing the resources they spent overcoming that barrier. If a monopolist is allowed to sell below cost to get rid of a competitor, it creates a chilling effect even if they later raise their prices. A new competitor must consider what happens if the monopolist does it again, and if the barrier to entry is already high (a fab, for example), the competitor will think twice and walk away instead.
Sure, if competitors keep showing up, the monopolist cannot withstand the losses forever. However, everybody except the last competitor who dethrones the monopolist loses, and nobody wants to be cannon fodder.
I can drive a stick shift well enough, but I would think I would roll back a LITTLE on a hill start. You hafta take your foot off the brake and move to the gas. Is the trick to let out the clutch enough to keep from rolling while you move to give it gas?
Pull on the handbrake.
Let go of the foot brake.
Shift into gear.
Apply gas until you feel the car fighting the handbrake.
Let go of the handbrake and apply more gas to start moving.
If someone HAS cloned your SIM, and both phones are attached at the same time, the network would register a fault, as a SINGLE sim number is assiciated at two different locations. It woudl create a fault in the system which would prevent both yours and the clone SIM from working. This is actually one of the main reasons why Cellphones are not usable on Planes (even if it is prooven to be safe to the electronics). The phone woudl try to log onto multiple cells at the same time, causing a lot of strain on the network, or even malfunction.
This is contrary to my understanding.
When you switch on a cell phone, it listens on several (pre-determined) broadcast channels to see which one has the strongest signal (without roaming unnecessarily). It then registers onto that cell, which causes the cell site to notify its location registers that you are there, which then allows the network to route incoming calls to the right cell site. Thus, it is very common for the phone to see multiple cells, and it would certainly not try to register with all of them.
One problem with cell phones on aircraft, however, is that it messes with frequency re-use. The cell phone company is issued some frequencies, and instead of requiring a really large band for their entire coverage area, they re-use portions of the band whenever the transmissions don't overlap. That is, if you're on the ground you should never see two different cell sites advertising themselves on the same broadcast channel. However, if you're on a plane, you might actually see that interference. Even if you register successfully with one of the cell sites, when you try to make a call, the cell will issue your phone a particular frequency that another cell might've also issued. IOW, for cell phones to work reliably on aircraft, frequency re-use must be greatly reduced.
Maybe, if you visited another country (or performed roaming) there might be some residual temporary numbers assigned to your phone.
Huh? The whole point is to have a single phone number where people could call you even when you are roaming.
ACID2 isn't really as important as properly rendering in the first place.. All ACID2 test for is proper handling of improper or edgy code... It doesn't show what good code written to spec is supposed to look like. What's really needed are testing pages that implement one feature at a time for all the browsers to test against.
...which is why we have the W3C test suite. Your underestimation of Acid2 is also typical of somebody who has never worked on a browser. One of the worst (it's difficult, tedious, and you feel like a moron doing it) parts of the job is to find out and mimic what IE does with bad markup, because the real world is full of such, so if IE passes Acid2 there will be that much less for everybody else to do. Note also that while it's obviously easy for IE to do whatever it does with a piece of bad markup, trying to remain compatible on a browser with a different parser or renderer may not be easy at all.
Why don't they work with browser makers to "chop up" the specs into point releases that focus on just a few features at a time?
Because truly competing browser vendors do not synchronize their development schedules. They pick the features that they think their customers will want most, and implement those first. Eventually, you hope they'll all arrive at CSS 2.1 someday, but they'll get there through different paths.
Also, each browser is likely to have unique architectural weaknesses that makes it very hard to implement a portion of the spec. While the vendors all know that a substantial rewrite is inevitable, they're not going to do that kind of fix until they're ready to.
I am talking about what a game requires. User expectations are very much a part of game requirements!
Sure, a text adventure game implemented on an XBox still won't require an artist or a musician, just as it did not in 1985. However, a 2-D shooter game in 1985 might not have required a real artist or a real musician, because a reasonably knowledgeable amateur can fake it and hide under the poor capabilities of the machines at the time. A 10x10 black and white icon depicting a soldier can easily be drawn by a non-artist, and a monotonic theme song can be composed by a non-musician, and your product still wouldn't be far behind full-scale commercial games. Today, the machines are powerful enough to expose the programmer's lack of skill in the arts. The users will notice if you set your video mode to 280x192 or your icons are blocky and ugly. Your users will notice if your music is monotonic. Good graphics and music are "required" for a 2-D shooter today.
For an example, simply compare the original Lode Runner to its sequel.
I can write a flight simulator game in the form of a text adventure. Does that mean flight simulator games don't really "require" 3-D graphics?
There is nothing about modern platforms which actually require "legions of artists, programmers, musicians, sound designers, directors, producers, voice actors, motion actors, and craft services".
Back when the entire screen was 280x192 (Apple ][) with only six colors to use, even a non-artist could actually create usable game graphics simply by trial and error. You could literally add and remove pixels until it looks about right, because most things are about 10 pixels high. In the age of 32-bpp 1024x768 or better graphics, the same game character is made up of much more pixels and is much harder to draw properly.
Back when the only sound output device was a single speaker that you can toggle, even a non-musician could actually create a short title music, and add some simple sound effects. Today, people really do expect multi-track music and high fidelity sound effects.
So yes, not every game requires motion capture and voice acting, but artists and musicians are no longer optional if you would rather use the capabilities of your modern platform.
I wasn't complaining about the money. I was merely saying that the game is not installed and not being played, because I'm stuck. I would presume that this isn't what the game designer had intended, even though they had already pocketed the money. Would you be gratified if half of your customers never got to see the second half of your hard work?
As for Myst-like games, I've found that different people find different puzzles easier or harder than others. The difference with Myst was that the game came with some on-screen hints (which, IIRC, became more and more explicit as you continue to ask for help), while Riven did not. I don't mind using walkthroughs once in a while to get unstuck, but with Riven I found myself relying on it, and then eventually just no longer caring. Clearly I'm just not smart or persistent enough for the game, so it gets shelved.
Games could include everything from step 1. But then there's no sense of accomplishment. There's no sense of "oh man, I'm about to unlock/progress/complete". It's just a bunch of puzzles that you can ignore if you like. I've seen games released like this. They're not fun. Nobody plays them.
You're right, but there converse is also true. A game the is so challenging that a player gets completely stuck at is also not getting played. Sometimes it's a puzzle (Riven, for example), sometimes it's a skill (driving Gran Turismo using a paddle, for example), either way the game gets shelved and I don't get to appreciate all the hard work the developers put into it.
You could say I don't deserve to appreciate those things, and maybe that's true. But I'm simply not going to work too hard to ace a game.
So instead of buying a game that gives you 30 hours of fun you have bought a game that gives you 50 hours of fun. I would call that a good thing.
The entire problem is that only 30 of those 50 hours are actually fun, and the fun is separated by 20 hours of tedium. Think of it as a comedy show. If there are 60 jokes and the comedian tells them one a minute, you might happily sit through the hour. If there are only 20 jokes and he takes three minutes on each one just to fill up the hour, don't you think you'll be bored?
First thing Apple could do to improve the gaming situation is to sell an affordable Minitower computer with a accessible PCI-e slot, just like every other PC manufacturer on the planet.
I think you are entirely wrong. The lack of games on Macs has little to do with graphics hardware compared to the market share of MacOS X. That is, game developers are not looking at Macs and thinking that their 3-D beast just won't run on a Mac, but that writing portable code that will run in both Windows and MacOS is too hard or expensive. After all, plenty of developers write games for six-year old hardware: the PlayStation 2. I think they can manage to write good games for a Mac Mini (nevermind an iMac) if it made financial sense to do so.
Unless you mean that a minitower will dramatically improve Apple's market share and then indirectly bring about the games, but I just don't see how the minitower form factor can have that kind of effect.
I vaguely remember the days when culture had something to do with people, not just competing marketing departments...
Would this be the days when a diamond was forever, or the days when an apple a day kept the doctor away? Corporate manipulation of popular culture, despite your low user ID, probably predates you.
If you find a standard too restrictive for your purposes, just don't follow it. You'll then see whether your additional non-standard features are worth more than incompatibility to the users. Netscape and IE are both good examples of products that ignored prevailing (and slow-moving) standards that gained user acceptance. On the other hand, there are any number of computer languages that will not survive because they're not C/C++/Java and whatever they do well wasn't worth enough to developers and users.
To see the downside of competing standards, just take a close look at the US cellular phone market. The rest of the world has standardized on the very imperfect GSM, and are communicating effectively while the US continues to figure out which one is the "best". The losers of that battle - if a victor standard is ever determined - stand to lose billions in network infrastructure and training, and all users have already been suffering lots of incompatibilities over the years on even the most basic features.
It's a rant because you're asking the IRS, which operates very much under the current economic system, "interventionist government" and all, to determine the price of intellectual property as if it didn't exist. In our world, it is very much possible to get a rough idea how much intellectual property is worth in terms of "monopoly rent".
Yes, if there was no copyright law, the value of Windows might be as you describe. On the other hand, there might not be Windows at all. So why are you talking about a hypothetical world when clearly the topic is alleged tax evasion in this real world?
The problem with your viewpoint is that it becomes a massive hole for money laundering. If for whatever nefarious purpose Microsoft sells you the rights to Windows for $100, and Dell then has to pay you $50 per computer sold, they have effectively transferred billions of dollars to you despite the apparent transaction sum. What the IRS is doing here is trying to assess the true value of the transaction, while your rant on how things ought to be really doesn't accomplish much toward that necessity.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't tailgate "for fun", but a lot of people do tailgate without thinking about it. That is, they pull right up behind you, and then drive at your speed indefinitely even though the lane next to you is open for passing. If you pull over for them, you'll see that they pass you until the next slower vehicle, and then stay right behind it. In fact, I've seen cars tailgate 18-wheeler trucks. Some people just never learned what a safety distance is.
Because average bandwidth to the user has gone from 56 kbps to 300 kbps or more, and because the average CPU speed has gone from 100 MHz to 2 GHz. It doesn't mean Java/.NET will succeed this time, because it may well be missing something else, but it's foolish to disregard technology just because it is 10 years old.
"First stop was a hopper filled with Rumensin, a powerful antibiotic that No. 534 will consume with his feed every day for the rest of his life. Calves have no need of regular medication while on grass, but as soon as they're placed in the backgrounding pen, they're apt to get sick. Why? The stress of weaning is a factor, but the main culprit is the feed. The shift to a 'hot ration' of grain can so disturb the cow's digestive process--its rumen, in particular--that it can kill the animal if not managed carefully and accompanied by antibiotics."
- Power Steer, 2002
Which part of "even more upset with ourselves for not catching it" did you not understand? This one is Microsoft's fault as much as any infection is Microsoft's fault ("not being more hardy against such viruses"), but "even more" so it's Apple's (which includes its factories, subcontracted or otherwise) fault. If this is bashing Microsoft, then you might say it bashes Apple "even more."
Did I mention "even more"?
As podcasting became popular, a large number of people began to create content. A lot of this new content was not previously available (it's not a radio program, or a studio recording, or a live recording, etc), and so people gave it a general name. Similarly, "blogs" mainly referred to opinion content generated by individuals, because that sort of self-publication wasn't previously available and a new word was useful. However, the mechanism of podcasting or blogging can also be used by corporations or a political party and still be referred to as such, because most people simply aren't interested in your brand of linguistic nitpicking. That is, the President might have a blog that was written by speechwriters and double-checked by lawyers, but we'll shrug and let it be called a "blog" if it otherwise looks like one.
Thus, if a friend downloads a podcast (MP3 via RSS), he might convert an episode and email it (say, Ogg Vorbis over SMTP) to you, but still introduce it as "hey, check out this podcast". Most of us don't really care that there's a new word in the language, and don't see the need to be strict about language where no confusion actually arises. That's probably why half of the mods on your original post was "flamebait".
Some MP3 files are songs, others are audiobooks, still others are sound effects, or a soundtrack of a movie, or perhaps a recorded lecture. Are they different things even though they are all MP3s? Of course they are.
It's the content, silly rabbit. Nobody except Slashdot cares about the RSS and MP3 technologies involved, and they're sure as hell not going to call it a "RSS-fed MP3".
If you let this happen, and you have a website, you better not travel at all unless you know for sure that your website did not break laws in whatever country you're going to. While ignorance of the law is generally no excuse, having to understand every possible law in the world just to put up a web site is a pretty indefensible position as well.
The worker might actually be able to sustain himself on 40 hours worth of pay. The problem is that he may be trying to sustain a family (which in Chinese terms usually includes elders, not not children), or he may be trying to get ahead by working harder.
Sure. Check out a phone company in the third world, such as the Philippine Long Distance Telephone company, or PLDT. For decades, PLDT was the only game in town, and getting a line can involve more than ten years of waiting, or even bribery. This is not "monopoly price" in the strict sense of a big number on your bill, but not having a phone for ten years is clearly a "price" of some sense. This changed very quickly when the government finally allowed a competitor called Bayantel to join in, and people got lines very quickly. PLDT initially still tried to sabotage this by limiting the number of trunk lines between it and Bayantel, so that a Bayantel customer calling a PLDT customer would frequently not be able to get through, forcing many businesses to have both a PLDT phone and a Bayantel phone. This is clearly another form of "monopoly price," even in the face of real competition. A truly unregulated monopoly could probably refuse to connect to competing networks at all.
Today, as I understand it, PLDT service is much better than before.
It affects the number of institutions who are able to finance the effort. For example, if only three banks could give out $3B loans, and your unregulated monopolist is a big customer, they may all value that relationship with Intel more than whatever they can make from you. Add the considerable risk of going up against an unregulated monopolist, and you may not be able to get funding at all.
I also can't help but chuckle when I saw your $10M fab. Fabs easily cost billions of dollars.
You are wrong. Every business has a barrier to entry, and a new entrant always risks losing the resources they spent overcoming that barrier. If a monopolist is allowed to sell below cost to get rid of a competitor, it creates a chilling effect even if they later raise their prices. A new competitor must consider what happens if the monopolist does it again, and if the barrier to entry is already high (a fab, for example), the competitor will think twice and walk away instead.
Sure, if competitors keep showing up, the monopolist cannot withstand the losses forever. However, everybody except the last competitor who dethrones the monopolist loses, and nobody wants to be cannon fodder.
This is contrary to my understanding.
When you switch on a cell phone, it listens on several (pre-determined) broadcast channels to see which one has the strongest signal (without roaming unnecessarily). It then registers onto that cell, which causes the cell site to notify its location registers that you are there, which then allows the network to route incoming calls to the right cell site. Thus, it is very common for the phone to see multiple cells, and it would certainly not try to register with all of them.
One problem with cell phones on aircraft, however, is that it messes with frequency re-use. The cell phone company is issued some frequencies, and instead of requiring a really large band for their entire coverage area, they re-use portions of the band whenever the transmissions don't overlap. That is, if you're on the ground you should never see two different cell sites advertising themselves on the same broadcast channel. However, if you're on a plane, you might actually see that interference. Even if you register successfully with one of the cell sites, when you try to make a call, the cell will issue your phone a particular frequency that another cell might've also issued. IOW, for cell phones to work reliably on aircraft, frequency re-use must be greatly reduced.
Maybe, if you visited another country (or performed roaming) there might be some residual temporary numbers assigned to your phone.
Huh? The whole point is to have a single phone number where people could call you even when you are roaming.
Why don't they work with browser makers to "chop up" the specs into point releases that focus on just a few features at a time?
Because truly competing browser vendors do not synchronize their development schedules. They pick the features that they think their customers will want most, and implement those first. Eventually, you hope they'll all arrive at CSS 2.1 someday, but they'll get there through different paths.
Also, each browser is likely to have unique architectural weaknesses that makes it very hard to implement a portion of the spec. While the vendors all know that a substantial rewrite is inevitable, they're not going to do that kind of fix until they're ready to.
Sure, a text adventure game implemented on an XBox still won't require an artist or a musician, just as it did not in 1985. However, a 2-D shooter game in 1985 might not have required a real artist or a real musician, because a reasonably knowledgeable amateur can fake it and hide under the poor capabilities of the machines at the time. A 10x10 black and white icon depicting a soldier can easily be drawn by a non-artist, and a monotonic theme song can be composed by a non-musician, and your product still wouldn't be far behind full-scale commercial games. Today, the machines are powerful enough to expose the programmer's lack of skill in the arts. The users will notice if you set your video mode to 280x192 or your icons are blocky and ugly. Your users will notice if your music is monotonic. Good graphics and music are "required" for a 2-D shooter today.
For an example, simply compare the original Lode Runner to its sequel.
I can write a flight simulator game in the form of a text adventure. Does that mean flight simulator games don't really "require" 3-D graphics?
Back when the entire screen was 280x192 (Apple ][) with only six colors to use, even a non-artist could actually create usable game graphics simply by trial and error. You could literally add and remove pixels until it looks about right, because most things are about 10 pixels high. In the age of 32-bpp 1024x768 or better graphics, the same game character is made up of much more pixels and is much harder to draw properly.
Back when the only sound output device was a single speaker that you can toggle, even a non-musician could actually create a short title music, and add some simple sound effects. Today, people really do expect multi-track music and high fidelity sound effects.
So yes, not every game requires motion capture and voice acting, but artists and musicians are no longer optional if you would rather use the capabilities of your modern platform.
As for Myst-like games, I've found that different people find different puzzles easier or harder than others. The difference with Myst was that the game came with some on-screen hints (which, IIRC, became more and more explicit as you continue to ask for help), while Riven did not. I don't mind using walkthroughs once in a while to get unstuck, but with Riven I found myself relying on it, and then eventually just no longer caring. Clearly I'm just not smart or persistent enough for the game, so it gets shelved.
You're right, but there converse is also true. A game the is so challenging that a player gets completely stuck at is also not getting played. Sometimes it's a puzzle (Riven, for example), sometimes it's a skill (driving Gran Turismo using a paddle, for example), either way the game gets shelved and I don't get to appreciate all the hard work the developers put into it.
You could say I don't deserve to appreciate those things, and maybe that's true. But I'm simply not going to work too hard to ace a game.
The entire problem is that only 30 of those 50 hours are actually fun, and the fun is separated by 20 hours of tedium. Think of it as a comedy show. If there are 60 jokes and the comedian tells them one a minute, you might happily sit through the hour. If there are only 20 jokes and he takes three minutes on each one just to fill up the hour, don't you think you'll be bored?
I think you are entirely wrong. The lack of games on Macs has little to do with graphics hardware compared to the market share of MacOS X. That is, game developers are not looking at Macs and thinking that their 3-D beast just won't run on a Mac, but that writing portable code that will run in both Windows and MacOS is too hard or expensive. After all, plenty of developers write games for six-year old hardware: the PlayStation 2. I think they can manage to write good games for a Mac Mini (nevermind an iMac) if it made financial sense to do so.
Unless you mean that a minitower will dramatically improve Apple's market share and then indirectly bring about the games, but I just don't see how the minitower form factor can have that kind of effect.
Would this be the days when a diamond was forever, or the days when an apple a day kept the doctor away? Corporate manipulation of popular culture, despite your low user ID, probably predates you.
To see the downside of competing standards, just take a close look at the US cellular phone market. The rest of the world has standardized on the very imperfect GSM, and are communicating effectively while the US continues to figure out which one is the "best". The losers of that battle - if a victor standard is ever determined - stand to lose billions in network infrastructure and training, and all users have already been suffering lots of incompatibilities over the years on even the most basic features.
Yes, if there was no copyright law, the value of Windows might be as you describe. On the other hand, there might not be Windows at all. So why are you talking about a hypothetical world when clearly the topic is alleged tax evasion in this real world?
The problem with your viewpoint is that it becomes a massive hole for money laundering. If for whatever nefarious purpose Microsoft sells you the rights to Windows for $100, and Dell then has to pay you $50 per computer sold, they have effectively transferred billions of dollars to you despite the apparent transaction sum. What the IRS is doing here is trying to assess the true value of the transaction, while your rant on how things ought to be really doesn't accomplish much toward that necessity.