It makes sense that yesterday's high-end brand is today's low-end. If you've been buying "Pentiums" in the past couple years, they've been old, out of date chips,
AFAIK the Pentium (brand) hadn't been dead for very long before they brought it back- the point at which you're suggesting this logic would have been applied in the repositioning.
so the old brand is tarnished, replaced by something newer and shinier, but still holding on, as warehouses of P4s and Pentium-Ds are still selling well, but only at fire-sale prices.
No offence, but this comes across as an over-thought post-rationalisation of Intel's rather badly-thought out choice.
I doubt they applied that logic, and I doubt that the people Intel marketing had in mind when choosing names (i.e. mildly-informed computer buyers and business manager types who don't know nor care much about CPUs beyond intended purpose and price segment) would think about it that way either.
Far more likely that someone in marketing recognised that- gasp!- the recently-buried Pentium name still had a lot of brand recognition and they wanted to somehow exploit that, but were too late to kill off the new "Core" name that had replaced it in terms of positioning, so contrived some pointless, half-baked new "sort-of-budget-but-not-as-cheap-as-the-Celeron" segment that they could use the "Pentium" name for.
Really, who gives a s*** anyway, Intel's naming scheme is a mess, and that's all we really need to know.:-) Probably what you get with too many marketing twonks trying to justify their own pointless, over-salaried jobs and get noticed.
To do the car analogy for those that need it, it's like arguing that Volvo should update the in-car computer for their cars when you don't even own a Volvo.
Not exactly, everyone's entitled to have an opinion on what Volvo should do to their cars' computers (in general) whether they own one or not.
It's more like demanding that Volvo update the computer on *your* Volvo when you don't even own a Volvo (though perhaps that was what you meant anyway?!)
Toy Story isn't 3d, but stop-motion animation arguably is...
Er... what point are you trying to make?
Stop motion *can* be made in (stereoscopic pseudo-)3D, but usually wasn't until recently... just like CGI animation can be made in 3D, but usually wasn't until recently(!)
For those of you who are a bit slower, my point is that the reason the web browser or many other applications designed for the Internet were not installed in Windows by default, is that Microsoft was still hoping they were products they could sell to you
Remember also that Microsoft were trying to push their own, proprietary MSN (the original version of their AOL-alike network, not later uses of the brand) in preference to the Internet at that point. Seems laughable in hindsight, but they obviously thought that they could do it. I even remember reading a magazine around the time that the Internet had just exploded into the public consciousness (circa 1994) and even they were injecting a sceptical note into whether the Internet would be a success or whether the mass market would end up being routed into closed systems operated over big businesses' lines.
Well, that didn't happen back then, but 17 years on, the "walled garden" threat is back- now that Apple has shown that the public *will* stand for it, I'm sure MS and others will be trying too.
It's not the "sorta Celeron" it's the "Celeron of their server CPUs", the little brother to the Xeon. people were (are) buying desktop boards and putting them in cheap, low-end servers. This fills that gap, but still lets you use a full-featured server board.
Perhaps, but you've missed the point- my rant wasn't about what the chips did nor who they were (supposedly) aimed at, it was a criticism of their poor and confusing naming scheme.
Specifically:-
(a) too many names in areas where it wasn't necessary (i.e. Celeron, i3, i5 and i7 are already more than enough to differentiate the consumer/business desktop segment),
(b) reusing names for slightly different purposes to what they had stood for for years (e.g. Pentium-XXX used to be the mainstream/flagship desktop line, now it's a semi-budget brand in an area where it isn't needed anyway, see (a)), and
(c) Using the same name for multiple distinct uses at the same time, e.g. Pentium is a sort-of-budget desktop chip, er... and it's also the "celeron of their server CPUs", so wouldn't "Celeron Xeon" have been clearer about that, given that Celeron was always de facto a budget or cut/down version of their mainstream chips?
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here and here, for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
Try this [bricktestament.com]. I may just be a prude or paranoid, but if I lived in the States, I wouldn't want to be caught showing that to a child. I'd end up on the Sex Offender Registry.
Nope, that's the ether that causes meth labs to explode.
This is also a problem when modern network equipment burns, as the combusion causes its constituents to separate. Net isn't a big problem, but the Ether given off certainly is.
Some have suggested going back to Token Ring for safety's sake, but while both Toke n' Ring are harmless when separated, paranoia about the former's Cannabis-related uses have stopped the introduction of this potentially life-saving measure.
It didn't help that they never wrote a decent compiler for it.
Well, given that the EPIC design of Itanium is explicitly reliant on the quality of the code generated by the compiler, I'd say that this was a rather more fundamental issue than you imply(!)
Recall the Itanium from Intel and HP. [..] Unfortunately, Bulldozer may end up with a similar fate. The big difference is that Intel had its regular desktop cpu line-up to finance the Itanium disaster.
Yeah- but OTOH, although I don't know how much AMD spent on Bulldozer, I'm willing to bet that regardless of how expensive it was to develop, that figure would pale in comparison with the cost of developing Itanium... which AFAIK was mindbogglingly expensive.
I'm sure I heard a few years ago (probably not that long after Itanium came out) that Intel had spent so much developing it that it was effectively a "bet the farm" type project that *had* to succeed. Well, it didn't, and Intel are still here, so evidently it wasn't.
psssst... In America, there are multiple governmental municipalities. No one said anything about externalized governmental entities.
Just smile and let the embarrassment pass, we'll forget all about it.
While the article may have been about the US, the specific comment being replied to in this sub-thread was *clearly* discussing the situation in the UK, with no clearly-indicated shift of that context in subsequent responses. Given this, it's a reasonable assumption to take the more general meaning of "governments" rather than one particular meaning specific to the US (and possibly other countries, but certainly not all).
Regardless of whether "Shentino" intentionally meant to use "governments" in that particular, US-centric sense, it smacks of subsequent commenters not paying attention to what they were actually replying to.
Just smile and let the embarrassment pass, we'll forget all about it.
Ho ho.... ironically 1337 5p34k is an *excellent* example of a playful linguistic Internet fad that rose (it was everywhere a few years ago) and fell (how often do you see it now except in an occasional half-arsed "ironic" comment?)
I've said it before, but what (in hindsight) was its fairly rapid decline occurred around the time that mainstream newspaper articles explaining the phenomenom to every man and his dog started appearing- not a coincidence, I suspect. Many such phenomena rely on a mixture of geeky esotericness and fashion, and when some teenager's parents know all about it, it kills them both, along with such geeks' younger siblings wanting their *own* fads. This will probably explain- and predict- a major turnover of such phenomena.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
indeed, I am going to be Occupying some beer while Occupy(put favorite football team here) game.
It's far more likely that the beer will be occupying *you* (in Soviet Russia or anywhere else for that matter).
If there is an offline version of this, it involves a garbage bag full of shredded 5$ bills and some scotch tape.
Yeah, but the question is whether they shred each bag separately, or more likely shred the notes en masse, jumble them up, then fill each bag with 5lbs of arbitrary shredded bits. That'd mean that unless each note was lined up with the shredding edges identically you'd be unlikely to have all the bits required to complete the vast majority of notes.
(I know, I'm overthinking the reply to what was a joke!)
Do you reckon this is why they're charging a whopping $45 for what is otherwise (and still is, really) a 5lb bagful of worthless paper- people who actually think they might make money out of this? Or (more likely) are there enough people who'd get $45's worth of "buzz" out of knowing that they sort-of (but really, *really* didn't) got $10,000 worth of notes for a fraction of its face value?
Please don't blame Canada for that movie. We didn't write it, we didn't direct it, we didn't produce it. We just provided facilities and most of the cast and crew, not the creative team that actually made the film.
You're right- it was basically made in Canada around the same time that a lot of US TV series were being made in Canada for reasons of cost- it was still made by a US company with the US market in mind.
They compromised it a lot to appeal to the Americans and it still didn't succeed- America is such a big market that they're used to getting stuff that panders specifically do them, and IMHO it's clear that they will never be able to make Doctor Who appeal to a *mainstream* (i.e. non-"cult") US mass audience without totally losing what makes it Doctor Who.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actually co-funded the first few new series of Doctor Who, but (apparently) didn't stick their noses in too much.
Having a language ratified as an ECMA standard is fairly binding I find. You might want to update your trolling.
While ECMA supposedly requires that all patented technologies standardised by them be made available under a "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", you might want to note the Wikipedia article which states that parts of.Net *not* covered by ECMA include "Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET". Even if the ECMA-standardised parts of.Net are safe from patent infringement, this doesn't necessarily cover the rest.
And realistically,.Net applications *will* be written assuming the whole ecosystem is available. One may argue that the core ECMA-covered parts are useful in themselves, but I suspect that this will miss what most people want (and expect) ".Net compatibility" to deliver. This is in addition to MS being in control of the language and thus always one step ahead of the competition.
Never had to pay anything more than the advertised fare + tax + a couple bucks for currency conversion / fees (since I don't live in the UK).
Well, I don't know where you are, but they're still doing bullshit scams like forcing people to pay via their *own* prepaid debit card to avoid fees. But of course, if you forget to cancel that card after 6 months, they charge you £2.50 a month for inactivity, and another £10 if it goes into the red because of the fee.
Given that you have to use this card to avoid paying the "additional" card fee, this is an absolutely blatant attempt to set up ludicrous hoops to be jumped through and then scam them anyway if they try jumping through them. No question that Ryanair are operating in even remotely good faith here.
Anyone know's seen O'Leary being interviewed knows that he clearly isn't disturbed by the fact that people think he's a prick whose attitude towards complainants and customers in general borders on contempt, nor that they dislike Ryanair- so long as they keep on flying with them.
I suspect his logic is that people like to bitch about shitty service and the like, but when push comes to shove they'll still fly with Ryanair because they're the cheapest, so it's worth getting publicity regardless of whether it's flattering or not.
Personally, if I know that they're that desparate to shaft me whichever way I turn and find some other way of costing me money even if I do manage to jump through their hoops without a mistake... am I actually getting it cheap?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Red Alert.
I'm having horrible flashbacks to C&C: Music Factory.
It makes sense that yesterday's high-end brand is today's low-end. If you've been buying "Pentiums" in the past couple years, they've been old, out of date chips,
AFAIK the Pentium (brand) hadn't been dead for very long before they brought it back- the point at which you're suggesting this logic would have been applied in the repositioning.
so the old brand is tarnished, replaced by something newer and shinier, but still holding on, as warehouses of P4s and Pentium-Ds are still selling well, but only at fire-sale prices.
No offence, but this comes across as an over-thought post-rationalisation of Intel's rather badly-thought out choice.
:-) Probably what you get with too many marketing twonks trying to justify their own pointless, over-salaried jobs and get noticed.
I doubt they applied that logic, and I doubt that the people Intel marketing had in mind when choosing names (i.e. mildly-informed computer buyers and business manager types who don't know nor care much about CPUs beyond intended purpose and price segment) would think about it that way either.
Far more likely that someone in marketing recognised that- gasp!- the recently-buried Pentium name still had a lot of brand recognition and they wanted to somehow exploit that, but were too late to kill off the new "Core" name that had replaced it in terms of positioning, so contrived some pointless, half-baked new "sort-of-budget-but-not-as-cheap-as-the-Celeron" segment that they could use the "Pentium" name for.
Really, who gives a s*** anyway, Intel's naming scheme is a mess, and that's all we really need to know.
To do the car analogy for those that need it, it's like arguing that Volvo should update the in-car computer for their cars when you don't even own a Volvo.
Not exactly, everyone's entitled to have an opinion on what Volvo should do to their cars' computers (in general) whether they own one or not.
It's more like demanding that Volvo update the computer on *your* Volvo when you don't even own a Volvo (though perhaps that was what you meant anyway?!)
Toy Story isn't 3d, but stop-motion animation arguably is...
Er... what point are you trying to make?
Stop motion *can* be made in (stereoscopic pseudo-)3D, but usually wasn't until recently... just like CGI animation can be made in 3D, but usually wasn't until recently(!)
For those of you who are a bit slower, my point is that the reason the web browser or many other applications designed for the Internet were not installed in Windows by default, is that Microsoft was still hoping they were products they could sell to you
Remember also that Microsoft were trying to push their own, proprietary MSN (the original version of their AOL-alike network, not later uses of the brand) in preference to the Internet at that point. Seems laughable in hindsight, but they obviously thought that they could do it. I even remember reading a magazine around the time that the Internet had just exploded into the public consciousness (circa 1994) and even they were injecting a sceptical note into whether the Internet would be a success or whether the mass market would end up being routed into closed systems operated over big businesses' lines.
Well, that didn't happen back then, but 17 years on, the "walled garden" threat is back- now that Apple has shown that the public *will* stand for it, I'm sure MS and others will be trying too.
It's not the "sorta Celeron" it's the "Celeron of their server CPUs", the little brother to the Xeon. people were (are) buying desktop boards and putting them in cheap, low-end servers. This fills that gap, but still lets you use a full-featured server board.
Perhaps, but you've missed the point- my rant wasn't about what the chips did nor who they were (supposedly) aimed at, it was a criticism of their poor and confusing naming scheme.
Specifically:-
(a) too many names in areas where it wasn't necessary (i.e. Celeron, i3, i5 and i7 are already more than enough to differentiate the consumer/business desktop segment),
(b) reusing names for slightly different purposes to what they had stood for for years (e.g. Pentium-XXX used to be the mainstream/flagship desktop line, now it's a semi-budget brand in an area where it isn't needed anyway, see (a)), and
(c) Using the same name for multiple distinct uses at the same time, e.g. Pentium is a sort-of-budget desktop chip, er... and it's also the "celeron of their server CPUs", so wouldn't "Celeron Xeon" have been clearer about that, given that Celeron was always de facto a budget or cut/down version of their mainstream chips?
johnny gang banger whom sold your sister 3 lbs of meth while raping your grandmother and slitting your kid brother's throat
All at the same time? Damn, that's what I call multitasking!
Basically these days "Core" is Intel's mainstream and high end brand. Everything from about $120 up is branded Core. Pentiums are their budget brand, the $60-100 range. Celerons are their extreme budget brand. $40-50 (only sold to OEMs).
Good grief, Intel's marketing department really needs a good slapping.
Their brand positioning used to make sense when you knew that Celeron was their budget line (though sometimes quite decent) and Pentium-XXX (later replaced by Core-XXX) the standard midrange, with Xeon for servers.
So when they brought back Pentium, I was confused until (as you say) realising that it was meant as a kind-of-lower-priced line, but not as cheap as the Celeron (*). Confused partly because they still had the Core 2 (**) then i3/i5/i7 lines as their mainstream brand which Pentium used to represent.
In other words, they brought back the Pentium name due (presumably) to some vague consumer recognition, but not for what it was used before and for some vaguely-defined semi-budget segment.
Worse, it isn't even necessary because the current "Core" line is split into i3, i5 and i7, which is an easily-understood hierarchy, and along with the "Celeron", there's absolutely no need for another damn confusing name.
*Now* they're making things even more of a cluster**** by using the Pentium name on low-end *server* (not mainstream) processors.
Please note that I'm *not* talking about the underlying architecture, which marketing doesn't necessarily follow, and which the man on the street probably doesn't care about much. I'm simply talking about incompetent marketing and positioning in that there are a mess of names that no longer represent their intended price segment and/or use clearly.
Then again, perhaps confusion is the aim of the game, as it makes it easier for sales people to bamboozle the public and upsell more expensive CPUs than they need? But I suspect not.
(*) You say that Celeron is now an ultra-cheap OEM-only thing, but I can still apparently purchase boxed versions here and here, for example.
(**) And while I'm here, "Core" and "Core 2" were absolutely stupid choices for a processor name, as "core" already had a technologically-defined use we all know well, and "Core" (the name) was thus guaranteed to confused anyone not in the field, e.g. a dual-core Core, etc. etc..... "Core 2" was even worse, as it's going to get easily confused with "dual core" and terms like "Core 2 Quad" (i.e. a four-core "Core 2"!) are just a confusing mess for Joe Public. I know of at least one alleged computer technician (i.e. someone who *could* be expected to know this) who thought that "Core 2" in itself meant that it was a dual-core processor! I'll give them a free pass on the fact that the original "Core" line didn't actually feature the "Core" architecture, as I was complaining about bad marketing, and marketing doesn't normally mention internal architectures anyway.
Try this [bricktestament.com]. I may just be a prude or paranoid, but if I lived in the States, I wouldn't want to be caught showing that to a child. I'd end up on the Sex Offender Registry.
Damn, that's almost as dubious as Drew's original classic, "Lego porn" (NSFW!) from a decade or so back.
Nope, that's the ether that causes meth labs to explode.
This is also a problem when modern network equipment burns, as the combusion causes its constituents to separate. Net isn't a big problem, but the Ether given off certainly is.
Some have suggested going back to Token Ring for safety's sake, but while both Toke n' Ring are harmless when separated, paranoia about the former's Cannabis-related uses have stopped the introduction of this potentially life-saving measure.
So instead the proposal is that we go back to Econet, running on BBC Microcomputers.
What?!!
(Posting to neutralise incorrect moderation, sorry folks)
It didn't help that they never wrote a decent compiler for it.
Well, given that the EPIC design of Itanium is explicitly reliant on the quality of the code generated by the compiler, I'd say that this was a rather more fundamental issue than you imply(!)
Recall the Itanium from Intel and HP. [..] Unfortunately, Bulldozer may end up with a similar fate. The big difference is that Intel had its regular desktop cpu line-up to finance the Itanium disaster.
Yeah- but OTOH, although I don't know how much AMD spent on Bulldozer, I'm willing to bet that regardless of how expensive it was to develop, that figure would pale in comparison with the cost of developing Itanium... which AFAIK was mindbogglingly expensive.
I'm sure I heard a few years ago (probably not that long after Itanium came out) that Intel had spent so much developing it that it was effectively a "bet the farm" type project that *had* to succeed. Well, it didn't, and Intel are still here, so evidently it wasn't.
I agree somewhat with your statement of why it went out of fashion, and would like to propose the reason it fell out of use was that we grew up.
Well, yeah, there was that factor too. :-)
Everyone insisted on comparing the PR166 against the P166 which cost significantly more
Well, that's probably because Cyrix invited the comparison themselves with their choice of name/code and the implication it carried.
Maybe it *was* a good chip for the money (I don't know, never had one), but you can't say Cyrix were blameless there!
This kid [evenweb.com] actually won an international programming contest when he was 6 years old.
Don't follow the link, it's another goatse.
Oh my God! You mean... the Goatse man won a programming contest when he was six years old?!
:-O
I'm sure this says something about programming, just not what. Not sure that I want to know either
psssst... In America, there are multiple governmental municipalities. No one said anything about externalized governmental entities. Just smile and let the embarrassment pass, we'll forget all about it.
While the article may have been about the US, the specific comment being replied to in this sub-thread was *clearly* discussing the situation in the UK, with no clearly-indicated shift of that context in subsequent responses. Given this, it's a reasonable assumption to take the more general meaning of "governments" rather than one particular meaning specific to the US (and possibly other countries, but certainly not all).
Regardless of whether "Shentino" intentionally meant to use "governments" in that particular, US-centric sense, it smacks of subsequent commenters not paying attention to what they were actually replying to.
Just smile and let the embarrassment pass, we'll forget all about it.
f1r5t p05t
Ho ho.... ironically 1337 5p34k is an *excellent* example of a playful linguistic Internet fad that rose (it was everywhere a few years ago) and fell (how often do you see it now except in an occasional half-arsed "ironic" comment?)
I've said it before, but what (in hindsight) was its fairly rapid decline occurred around the time that mainstream newspaper articles explaining the phenomenom to every man and his dog started appearing- not a coincidence, I suspect. Many such phenomena rely on a mixture of geeky esotericness and fashion, and when some teenager's parents know all about it, it kills them both, along with such geeks' younger siblings wanting their *own* fads. This will probably explain- and predict- a major turnover of such phenomena.
indeed, I am going to be Occupying some beer while Occupy(put favorite football team here) game.
It's far more likely that the beer will be occupying *you* (in Soviet Russia or anywhere else for that matter).
But not for long.
If there is an offline version of this, it involves a garbage bag full of shredded 5$ bills and some scotch tape.
Yeah, but the question is whether they shred each bag separately, or more likely shred the notes en masse, jumble them up, then fill each bag with 5lbs of arbitrary shredded bits. That'd mean that unless each note was lined up with the shredding edges identically you'd be unlikely to have all the bits required to complete the vast majority of notes.
(I know, I'm overthinking the reply to what was a joke!)
For those who didn't get the reference.
Do you reckon this is why they're charging a whopping $45 for what is otherwise (and still is, really) a 5lb bagful of worthless paper- people who actually think they might make money out of this? Or (more likely) are there enough people who'd get $45's worth of "buzz" out of knowing that they sort-of (but really, *really* didn't) got $10,000 worth of notes for a fraction of its face value?
Please don't blame Canada for that movie. We didn't write it, we didn't direct it, we didn't produce it. We just provided facilities and most of the cast and crew, not the creative team that actually made the film.
You're right- it was basically made in Canada around the same time that a lot of US TV series were being made in Canada for reasons of cost- it was still made by a US company with the US market in mind.
They compromised it a lot to appeal to the Americans and it still didn't succeed- America is such a big market that they're used to getting stuff that panders specifically do them, and IMHO it's clear that they will never be able to make Doctor Who appeal to a *mainstream* (i.e. non-"cult") US mass audience without totally losing what makes it Doctor Who.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actually co-funded the first few new series of Doctor Who, but (apparently) didn't stick their noses in too much.
[BSD/Apache are] not really "free software" licenses in the "freedom" sense...
Bzzzt! Bzzt! Going to Orange Alert on the yet-another-BSD-vs.-GPL-holy-war-thread-hijack warning scale.
Incident has not occurred yet, but danger of tedious rabid zealots taking over the thread with a repeat of the same boring discussion is high.
I can get the "nickle-and-diming" argument when talking about in-flight food, but seriously? It's not exactly essential.
The "nickel and diming" bit referred to the bits that you either *have* to pay, but they weasel out of mentioning in the quoted price, or that you have to jump through ludicrous hoops to avoid paying, and then they find some way to shaft you anyway if you manage that.
Having a language ratified as an ECMA standard is fairly binding I find. You might want to update your trolling.
While ECMA supposedly requires that all patented technologies standardised by them be made available under a "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", you might want to note the Wikipedia article which states that parts of .Net *not* covered by ECMA include "Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET". Even if the ECMA-standardised parts of .Net are safe from patent infringement, this doesn't necessarily cover the rest.
.Net applications *will* be written assuming the whole ecosystem is available. One may argue that the core ECMA-covered parts are useful in themselves, but I suspect that this will miss what most people want (and expect) ".Net compatibility" to deliver. This is in addition to MS being in control of the language and thus always one step ahead of the competition.
And realistically,
Never had to pay anything more than the advertised fare + tax + a couple bucks for currency conversion / fees (since I don't live in the UK).
Well, I don't know where you are, but they're still doing bullshit scams like forcing people to pay via their *own* prepaid debit card to avoid fees. But of course, if you forget to cancel that card after 6 months, they charge you £2.50 a month for inactivity, and another £10 if it goes into the red because of the fee.
Given that you have to use this card to avoid paying the "additional" card fee, this is an absolutely blatant attempt to set up ludicrous hoops to be jumped through and then scam them anyway if they try jumping through them. No question that Ryanair are operating in even remotely good faith here.
Anyone know's seen O'Leary being interviewed knows that he clearly isn't disturbed by the fact that people think he's a prick whose attitude towards complainants and customers in general borders on contempt, nor that they dislike Ryanair- so long as they keep on flying with them.
I suspect his logic is that people like to bitch about shitty service and the like, but when push comes to shove they'll still fly with Ryanair because they're the cheapest, so it's worth getting publicity regardless of whether it's flattering or not.
Personally, if I know that they're that desparate to shaft me whichever way I turn and find some other way of costing me money even if I do manage to jump through their hoops without a mistake... am I actually getting it cheap?