If Microsoft were letting OEMs sell either version of Windows for vaguely similar prices, it'd be okay. The issue is that they're effectively giving away Vista, while charging for XP. Now companies often can give things away as loss leaders, but monopolists are more constrained in whether they can undertake that sort of activity.
This case is somewhat unusual because most of the lawsuits regarding dumping are e.g. giving away IE to kill Netscape, not giving away one of your products to try to kill one of your own other products. But it's possible that Washington state business law (vs. federal anti-trust law) has something that reaches that.
For example, AOL nuked paying customers' websites, some of which had been hosted there for 15+ years, with a mere 2 weeks' notice, which resulted in some people losing their sites entirely if they were out of email contact for those 2 weeks and didn't have local backups.
The Australian Labor Party that's pushing this isn't particularly known for its ties to Christianity, growing as it does out of the historically anti-religion Socialist movement.
Nobody I know who writes games is working on $20 million dollar games, though. For example, I frequently work with these folks, who do a good business for themselves on development budgets measured in the thousands of dollars (sometimes tens of thousands; never millions). It's not the high-profile stuff, but there's a lot of other stuff going on besides EA and friends.
I'm not really interested in making an incrementally better game using current techniques; more into the indie-gaming, art-gaming, and experimental scene in general. Stuff like what thesefolksare are putting out.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "only $995". SIGGRAPH is super-expensive as far as conferences go, and it costs $345 for grad students, or $800 for non-students. Most conferences are about $200 for students, $400-$500 for non-students. But then most conferences are also run by non-profit organizations, not for-profit companies trying to ream you.
I'm sort of biased against GDC, but I agree it's the place to go for the industry take. My dislike stems mostly because I heard GDC founder Chris Crawford give me his "why GDC sucks now" spiel, and it was sort of convincing. He originally started it as a more experimental-gaming conference, as a complement to the similarly oriented Journal of Computer Game Design, where developers would discuss the future of games, innovative design ideas, etc. At some point though it got dominated by AAA titles and more present rather than future of games, and then sold out to CMP and became a for-profit venture, which is why it now costs a bazillion dollars to attend.
It's definitely the place to go if you want talks on the current state of AAA titles, though. The only other place that gets any of those talks is AIIDE, and it gets only a few a year (e.g. Will Wright and Doug Church in 2005; I forget what happened 06/07; Damian Isla, Steve Rabin, and Borut Pfeiffer in 08).
I'll grudgingly accept that one person needs to rip up my street once to put in some cables. Then maybe once a decade or so they need to upgrade them. But I sure as hell don't want 5 different people all ripping up the street independently, even if they clean up after themselves, just because my local government can't get off its ass and install its own damn ethernet.
There's a reason we don't let random companies run their own electric or sewer lines to your house, either. Even in "deregulated" electric markets, there's still a last-mile monopoly on the physical wiring.
The reason we have regulated monopolies on last-mile service is that it's impractical to have thousands of start-up companies all ripping up streets to lay their own cables. We only want a handful of people to do that, and preferably not very often.
I do agree that if wireless broadband gets more widespread, this will be less of a problem, since there's enough spectrum for at least a dozen or so competitors.
I work kind of in this area as a researcher, so maybe I have a rosy-glass view, but the arguments seem a bit dated to me. Sure, in say 1999 this was a problem, and not that many people took games seriously. But in 2009? Yeah, people still like to kvetch ("games are rarely taken seriously blah blah and we aim to change that" is a standard opening move if you're writing a paper), and maybe the average person on the street doesn't, but there are plenty of inroads:
MIT Press has an entire division of books about videogames. I'm currently reading one about the Atari 2600, which, yes, even covers its role as a cultural and artistic platform.
Braid sold over $1m, despite being a kind of weird arty game made by a single guy. You can even get an MFA doing fine-arts stuff related to games.
Heck, Gamasutra itself frequently publishes about games as art, and it's semi-high-profile (at least to the extent that getting linked at Slashdot once a week counts as semi-high-profile).
I mean yeah, I'll agree that far more people respect, say, film than respect games. But it's not as if this is some novel argument and nobody has ever thought about taking games seriously before. Also, to some extent, it's the fault of people not making more interesting games: Hollywood may be crap, but there are a lot more innovative indie films out there than innovative indie games.
One tiny Microsoft investor, who admittedly doesn't even like their products, objects to their current strategy. Much, much larger Microsoft investors, such as Bill Gates, disagree with him. Since they own the company and this guy does not, their say wins out.
If he does represent a majority of Microsoft shareholders, he can of course propose a shareholder resolution and try to outvote Bill Gates at the shareholder meeting, or even replace the current MSFT directors with a new slate.
My understanding is that until recently one of the big purposes of MS Research was just prestige, not really product production. MSR has consistently produced a very large amount of academic research in some key areas, e.g. almost always accounting for more than 10% of the papers at SIGGRAPH, year in and year out. Microsoft management was of the opinion that having something like that was useful to their business in indirect ways, even if those SIGGRAPH papers didn't directly lead to deals with CG film companies or anything. Is that true? I have no idea; it's kind of hard to measure intangibles like whether having a prestigious research group attached to your company increased your reputation to the point where it tipped the balance on an important sale or contract.
I think they were also going for the Bell Labs model, where the research group pays for itself if it's left to its own devices and very occasionally invents/patents something big. I have no idea what MSR's patent portfolio is like from a business perspective. Have they licensed any significant percentage of it? More intangibly, what proportion of Microsoft's defensive patent portfolio originated from MSR?
And finally, one of the unofficial purposes of MSR for years was just to hire up everyone so nobody else could. Microsoft had a dominant lead in a number of areas, and one way to protect that is just to deny all your competitors access to talent. Kind of the model Google is currently using (they hardly need 20,000 employees otherwise).
Reiser is kind of an extreme case, in that his explanations didn't pass the laugh test. Most of what this guy seems to be talking about are things that at various times have actually held up court. We're not talking about trying to come up with circumstantial explanations for why there was blood on your driveway and a missing seat in your car on the same weekend your wife disappeared, but coming up with circumstantial explanations for why someone else might've been downloading something through your open wireless access point.
by separating the browser from the OS and the file browser, this gives consumers the option to attach whatever browser they want to the system rather than having the OS route all calls through their browser by default
That sounds like a good argument for allowing users to choose between Firefox, Safari, etc., rather than bundling Safari with OS X.
A bunch of the.NET languages, runtimes, and compiler features originated in or were developed closely with Microsoft Research, and some parts (like F#) were almost wholly developed there.
Although it's not very much liked by Slashdotters, Songsmith has also been relatively successful. Kodu is also getting a reasonable amount of press, and helping to solidify XNA's lead in the education-via-games space.
More generally, they develop prototypes of a lot of ideas that get reimplemented by the "product" side of the company. For example, MSR has been experimenting with adding machine-learning and data-mining features to MS desktop products for years, something that the product group is now starting to do with Excel. Those sorts of things are harder to quantify of course--- did the MSR experiments in that area help the product team at all? Would they have done the same anyway? Hard to say, but in general I think the advantages of having an R&D division in your company are undercounted in these "soft gains" ways, which is one reason that once companies downside their R&D divisions, the product groups stop producing as many new things as well.
I could be hanging out with the wrong scientists, but I rarely hear anyone describe what they work on as "Darwinism". There are "evolutionary biologists", who research evolution, not Darwinism. The well-accepted name for the process is evolution, and as far as I can tell nobody calls the idea Darwinism, though Darwin is widely credited as having had an important early role in its development.
We do actually speak of Newtonian mechanics, for what it's worth. Probably more than anyone in science actually speaks of Darwinian evolution. So we've sort of already done what this guy is asking for, it seems?
I'm hardly an expert in this area, but the laws of a number of countries make some explicit exceptions for derivative works that, while they would normally be illegal to distribute, are modified for the narrow purpose of interoperability.
Saying it's "overkill" implies it's a heavyweight solution for something that has a light-weight alternative solution? Or are you just implying that there ought to be one?
While I agree that reducing dependence on oil has some nice tie-in benefits for geopolitics and national security, reducing dependence on coal doesn't really, because we have a whole lot of it domestically (as does China). Unfortunately, it's by far the largest greenhouse-gas problem: there is far more CO2 left in our coal reserves, if we burnt them, than in the entire world's remaining oil reserves. And it seems like any replacement for domestic coal is likely to be either foreign or more expensive or both.
There are a large class of operations whose performance is currently killed by the fact that they sometimes have to do operations that can't be run on the GPU. This requires the roundtrip to/from system memory. If there was even a reasonably passable x86 workalike onboard, it'd open up another class of operations to GPGPU.
I doubt it makes any difference legally, but from an ethical perspective, the McCoy automatic oiler really was an innovation, which made things better than previously. The x86 instruction set isn't, really. It's just that, of the many instruction sets, we've slowly converged on one as a de-facto standard for many applications. It happened to be the x86, more for social reasons than technical ones.
I've had a few articles deletion-nominated that ended up being kept, which I'd consider not particularly close to being worthy of deletion (and they were even cited!), so the gray area does extend a bit.
The deletionist/inclusionist argument is almost exclusively waged over really, really recent stuff, and most of that related to pop culture. If you're writing about 19th-century history, you have to really try to encounter a deletionist.
It's basically an ongoing process of trying to find a good balance between erroneously/unnecessarily excluding recent and pop-culture stuff that is actually useful in an encyclopedia, and allowing Wikipedia to be used as an advertising platform by everyone with a company, book, academic CV, or piece of software to promote.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft were letting OEMs sell either version of Windows for vaguely similar prices, it'd be okay. The issue is that they're effectively giving away Vista, while charging for XP. Now companies often can give things away as loss leaders, but monopolists are more constrained in whether they can undertake that sort of activity.
This case is somewhat unusual because most of the lawsuits regarding dumping are e.g. giving away IE to kill Netscape, not giving away one of your products to try to kill one of your own other products. But it's possible that Washington state business law (vs. federal anti-trust law) has something that reaches that.
Jason Scott of textfiles.com has a nice take in Fuck the Cloud
For example, AOL nuked paying customers' websites, some of which had been hosted there for 15+ years, with a mere 2 weeks' notice, which resulted in some people losing their sites entirely if they were out of email contact for those 2 weeks and didn't have local backups.
The Australian Labor Party that's pushing this isn't particularly known for its ties to Christianity, growing as it does out of the historically anti-religion Socialist movement.
Nobody I know who writes games is working on $20 million dollar games, though. For example, I frequently work with these folks, who do a good business for themselves on development budgets measured in the thousands of dollars (sometimes tens of thousands; never millions). It's not the high-profile stuff, but there's a lot of other stuff going on besides EA and friends.
I'm not really interested in making an incrementally better game using current techniques; more into the indie-gaming, art-gaming, and experimental scene in general. Stuff like what these folks are are putting out.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by "only $995". SIGGRAPH is super-expensive as far as conferences go, and it costs $345 for grad students, or $800 for non-students. Most conferences are about $200 for students, $400-$500 for non-students. But then most conferences are also run by non-profit organizations, not for-profit companies trying to ream you.
I'm sort of biased against GDC, but I agree it's the place to go for the industry take. My dislike stems mostly because I heard GDC founder Chris Crawford give me his "why GDC sucks now" spiel, and it was sort of convincing. He originally started it as a more experimental-gaming conference, as a complement to the similarly oriented Journal of Computer Game Design, where developers would discuss the future of games, innovative design ideas, etc. At some point though it got dominated by AAA titles and more present rather than future of games, and then sold out to CMP and became a for-profit venture, which is why it now costs a bazillion dollars to attend.
It's definitely the place to go if you want talks on the current state of AAA titles, though. The only other place that gets any of those talks is AIIDE, and it gets only a few a year (e.g. Will Wright and Doug Church in 2005; I forget what happened 06/07; Damian Isla, Steve Rabin, and Borut Pfeiffer in 08).
I'll grudgingly accept that one person needs to rip up my street once to put in some cables. Then maybe once a decade or so they need to upgrade them. But I sure as hell don't want 5 different people all ripping up the street independently, even if they clean up after themselves, just because my local government can't get off its ass and install its own damn ethernet.
There's a reason we don't let random companies run their own electric or sewer lines to your house, either. Even in "deregulated" electric markets, there's still a last-mile monopoly on the physical wiring.
The reason we have regulated monopolies on last-mile service is that it's impractical to have thousands of start-up companies all ripping up streets to lay their own cables. We only want a handful of people to do that, and preferably not very often.
I do agree that if wireless broadband gets more widespread, this will be less of a problem, since there's enough spectrum for at least a dozen or so competitors.
Where free market is a market without artificial barriers to entry, collusive price-fixing, monopolistic prevention of competition, etc.
I work kind of in this area as a researcher, so maybe I have a rosy-glass view, but the arguments seem a bit dated to me. Sure, in say 1999 this was a problem, and not that many people took games seriously. But in 2009? Yeah, people still like to kvetch ("games are rarely taken seriously blah blah and we aim to change that" is a standard opening move if you're writing a paper), and maybe the average person on the street doesn't, but there are plenty of inroads:
There are journals and academic conferences on games, in both the humanities and computer science.
MIT Press has an entire division of books about videogames. I'm currently reading one about the Atari 2600, which, yes, even covers its role as a cultural and artistic platform.
There are initiatives and companies to use games for "serious" purposes. The U.S. Army in particular takes them seriously and funds development.
Braid sold over $1m, despite being a kind of weird arty game made by a single guy. You can even get an MFA doing fine-arts stuff related to games.
Heck, Gamasutra itself frequently publishes about games as art, and it's semi-high-profile (at least to the extent that getting linked at Slashdot once a week counts as semi-high-profile).
I mean yeah, I'll agree that far more people respect, say, film than respect games. But it's not as if this is some novel argument and nobody has ever thought about taking games seriously before. Also, to some extent, it's the fault of people not making more interesting games: Hollywood may be crap, but there are a lot more innovative indie films out there than innovative indie games.
One tiny Microsoft investor, who admittedly doesn't even like their products, objects to their current strategy. Much, much larger Microsoft investors, such as Bill Gates, disagree with him. Since they own the company and this guy does not, their say wins out.
If he does represent a majority of Microsoft shareholders, he can of course propose a shareholder resolution and try to outvote Bill Gates at the shareholder meeting, or even replace the current MSFT directors with a new slate.
My understanding is that until recently one of the big purposes of MS Research was just prestige, not really product production. MSR has consistently produced a very large amount of academic research in some key areas, e.g. almost always accounting for more than 10% of the papers at SIGGRAPH, year in and year out. Microsoft management was of the opinion that having something like that was useful to their business in indirect ways, even if those SIGGRAPH papers didn't directly lead to deals with CG film companies or anything. Is that true? I have no idea; it's kind of hard to measure intangibles like whether having a prestigious research group attached to your company increased your reputation to the point where it tipped the balance on an important sale or contract.
I think they were also going for the Bell Labs model, where the research group pays for itself if it's left to its own devices and very occasionally invents/patents something big. I have no idea what MSR's patent portfolio is like from a business perspective. Have they licensed any significant percentage of it? More intangibly, what proportion of Microsoft's defensive patent portfolio originated from MSR?
And finally, one of the unofficial purposes of MSR for years was just to hire up everyone so nobody else could. Microsoft had a dominant lead in a number of areas, and one way to protect that is just to deny all your competitors access to talent. Kind of the model Google is currently using (they hardly need 20,000 employees otherwise).
Reiser is kind of an extreme case, in that his explanations didn't pass the laugh test. Most of what this guy seems to be talking about are things that at various times have actually held up court. We're not talking about trying to come up with circumstantial explanations for why there was blood on your driveway and a missing seat in your car on the same weekend your wife disappeared, but coming up with circumstantial explanations for why someone else might've been downloading something through your open wireless access point.
That sounds like a good argument for allowing users to choose between Firefox, Safari, etc., rather than bundling Safari with OS X.
Microsoft Research consistently accounts for approximately 15% of the papers presented at SIGGRAPH every year.
A bunch of the .NET languages, runtimes, and compiler features originated in or were developed closely with Microsoft Research, and some parts (like F#) were almost wholly developed there.
Although it's not very much liked by Slashdotters, Songsmith has also been relatively successful. Kodu is also getting a reasonable amount of press, and helping to solidify XNA's lead in the education-via-games space.
More generally, they develop prototypes of a lot of ideas that get reimplemented by the "product" side of the company. For example, MSR has been experimenting with adding machine-learning and data-mining features to MS desktop products for years, something that the product group is now starting to do with Excel. Those sorts of things are harder to quantify of course--- did the MSR experiments in that area help the product team at all? Would they have done the same anyway? Hard to say, but in general I think the advantages of having an R&D division in your company are undercounted in these "soft gains" ways, which is one reason that once companies downside their R&D divisions, the product groups stop producing as many new things as well.
I could be hanging out with the wrong scientists, but I rarely hear anyone describe what they work on as "Darwinism". There are "evolutionary biologists", who research evolution, not Darwinism. The well-accepted name for the process is evolution, and as far as I can tell nobody calls the idea Darwinism, though Darwin is widely credited as having had an important early role in its development.
We do actually speak of Newtonian mechanics, for what it's worth. Probably more than anyone in science actually speaks of Darwinian evolution. So we've sort of already done what this guy is asking for, it seems?
I'm hardly an expert in this area, but the laws of a number of countries make some explicit exceptions for derivative works that, while they would normally be illegal to distribute, are modified for the narrow purpose of interoperability.
Saying it's "overkill" implies it's a heavyweight solution for something that has a light-weight alternative solution? Or are you just implying that there ought to be one?
While I agree that reducing dependence on oil has some nice tie-in benefits for geopolitics and national security, reducing dependence on coal doesn't really, because we have a whole lot of it domestically (as does China). Unfortunately, it's by far the largest greenhouse-gas problem: there is far more CO2 left in our coal reserves, if we burnt them, than in the entire world's remaining oil reserves. And it seems like any replacement for domestic coal is likely to be either foreign or more expensive or both.
There are a large class of operations whose performance is currently killed by the fact that they sometimes have to do operations that can't be run on the GPU. This requires the roundtrip to/from system memory. If there was even a reasonably passable x86 workalike onboard, it'd open up another class of operations to GPGPU.
I doubt it makes any difference legally, but from an ethical perspective, the McCoy automatic oiler really was an innovation, which made things better than previously. The x86 instruction set isn't, really. It's just that, of the many instruction sets, we've slowly converged on one as a de-facto standard for many applications. It happened to be the x86, more for social reasons than technical ones.
I've had a few articles deletion-nominated that ended up being kept, which I'd consider not particularly close to being worthy of deletion (and they were even cited!), so the gray area does extend a bit.
The deletionist/inclusionist argument is almost exclusively waged over really, really recent stuff, and most of that related to pop culture. If you're writing about 19th-century history, you have to really try to encounter a deletionist.
It's basically an ongoing process of trying to find a good balance between erroneously/unnecessarily excluding recent and pop-culture stuff that is actually useful in an encyclopedia, and allowing Wikipedia to be used as an advertising platform by everyone with a company, book, academic CV, or piece of software to promote.