And yet another Slashdot anti-MS conspiracy threory bites the dust. LOL There are two sad things about this. 1. Slashdotters demand that Microsoft document their API, yet are quite ignorant of the vast documentation that already exists. 2. You can be sure that in the future, a slashdotter filled with irrational MS-hatred and his own self-righteousness will cite this bypassing of the HOST file as evidence of Microsoft's evil, totally unaware of his absolute ignorance on the subject (or worse, well-aware that these functions are documented, but ignoring that so as to make is ill-founded point).
According to threads at AVSForum, HD-DVD players went on sale at Best Buy and the like, and some posters there have bought them and posted pics as proof. Doesn't sound like there's a delay to me. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=66 7248
The things that Microsoft did were perfectly acceptable business practices for non-monopolies. But at the time Microsoft did them, they weren't yet declared a monopoly. So in order for Microsoft to not run afoul of the antitrust law, they would've had to police themselves into not doing things that every other company was free to do, just in case Microsoft would be declared to be a monopoly at some time in the future. Do you see how f'ed up that is? Such retroactive "convictions" are only allowed in antitrust because antitrust is civil law. Had antitrust been criminal law, such retroactive BS wouldn't be allowed.
Being a closed system that they work under (both software and business) we'll never really know.
And yet Mozilla/Firefox keeps security bugs off of the public bugs list until they are fixed, so you don't know how long Mozilla devs know about security bugs before fixing them either.
PDF isn't "open". A small subset of PDF is ECMA standard, but Adobe controls the whole of PDF. They do provide specs for creating new PDF docs and reading PDF for the purpose of displaying the contents. But I don't know about editing existing PDF docs; seems that only Adobe products can edit PDF (maybe due to the PDF license?).
Dismiss the other replies to your post saying that Office 2007 formats are "XML but not standard", as they post out of willfull ignorance.:-)
Office 2007 formats (aka OpenXML) are not the same as Office 2003 XML (which weren't standards recognized by an independent body). OpenXML is open and is going through the ECMA process right now.
http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx is the home page of the organization pushing the standard. The founding members of this organization (shown here http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/03/18/Ope nXmlDeveloperGroup.aspx) include Microsoft (of course), Apple, Intel, other tech companies, businesses, some government entities, libraries, researchers). OpenXML is the default format for Office 2007, but you do not need Office 2007 to read, write, manipulate documents stored as OpenXML, in fact the site that I cite has examples of Java code tht manipulates the formats.
Microsoft is betting that they can compete on features rather than document format "lock-in", which many here have preached is the only reason for MS Office's dominance.
I like how slashdot zealots like yourself on the one hand proclaim how great "competition" is but on the other hand demand that everyone adopt their pet software. Do you really want *every* browser to be Gecko based, so there's no competition in that area? Just like your wet dream is to have *every* OS unix-derived, as if unix is the be-all and end-all. You guys are too much.
Let FF and IE and other browsers compete to make each other better. If not for IE, we'd be stuck with the mess that was Netscape. If not for FF, IE would be stuck in it's current outdated state with no improved version on the horizon.
Having multiple browsers (not all Gecko based) allows competition to make all browsers better. If Microsoft dumped IE, FF would likely languish, or at least slowdown in its development. More importantly, hackers would target FF (they'd have no choice) and we all know FF has holes to be exploited.
The law wouldn't require ODF, but open data formats (of which ODF is just one; or is on it's way to being one, it's in the EMCA and/or process right now as is MS Office 2007 formats).
I commend MN for being consistent, and not throwing in PDF has MASS did, which showed MASS utter hypocrisy (only a small subset of PDF is recognized by EMCA as a standard; the full PDF is proprietary controlled by Adobe, yet MASS blessed it).
Companies can compete on features, but you miss the parent's point that if all protocols must be "open" then one company would've spent the money developing the protocol and everyone else would use the protocol for free. Saying that they can still compete on features (I'm grateful you didn't say "support";-)), doesn't address the fact that the creator of the protocol was screwed. At least let the government pay a hefty fee to the protocol creator to "open" it (I say let the government do this, since in your scenario it's the government that is forcing the protocol to be open). If the government forces Microsoft to open the Exchange protocol for everyone to use, the government should *fairly* compensate Microsoft since Microsoft spent the money to create it.
" Microsoft could add ODF support to its next version of MS Office (which they'll of course try to resist for as long as possible, as it'll kill their market lock-in)"
Office 2007's default formats are going to be open standards anyway; they're going through the EMCA process as we speak, to be followed by ISO.
Microsoft will resist supporting ODF because ODF was built around OpenOffice's already existing code base. It doesn't even support all of MS Office's featureset besides not being geared to MS's codebase.
From an OS/OEM relationship standpoint, buing a Mac without OSX is different than buying a PC without an OS. But from a consumer standpoint, the standpoint that we should be giving a damn about, how is it any different? Why shouldn't I be able to buy a Mac without an OS for lower price than an OSX'ed Mac, and let me install whatever OS I want on it (OSX, XP, or Linux)? Again, I ask from a consumer standpoint, so forget the legal mumbo/jumbo, I don't care if one is "legal" and the other isn't, I care about what's better for the consumer. Apple consumers are locked in far more than other consumers, yet Apple gets away with anything they do; they can bundle whatever software they want. They can bundle Photoshop competitors, Office competitors, dev tools (they killed off CodeWarrior by not providing the info needed to create Universal Binaries), and on and on, and nobody bats an eyelash?
But malware could write random bits to random portions of the harddrive, without any HFS+ driver. If those random portions of the harddrive happen to be your OSX install, you're screwed.
"Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple's superior hardware now that we use Intel processors," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in a voice dripping with disdain.
You have a point about the logo, but the above comment is ripping on the hardware of PC makers rather than XP.
download.com is nice, but I'm wondering how you associate it with "freedom". Most of the stuff there is not OSS, so you don't have "free as in speech" (which is a bastardization of the "freedom of speech" phrase, anyway, but I digress); and most of the stuff (the higher-quality stuff, anyway) requires payment after a trial of 30-days or so, so you don't get "free as in beer" either.
Is that why Linux's OS share is at 0.32% (according to the same folks that are the source of the recent story about Firefox's breaking 10% in browser share)?
And why do slashdotters insist on turning a Mac/Windows story into a Linux one (with the very first post, no less)? Do you guys think of anything other than Linux?
So what? It's still Bethesda's doing, not Microsoft's. (A post above disputes whether there are free mods available for the PC version, saying that Bethesda has not released the mod kit enabling users to make free ones.)
"The real story is what this does to Microsoft's current business "partners." There really aren't technology niches that aren't threatened by Microsoft. I know I certainly wouldn't be interested in building my business on Microsoft's technology. Sure, someone gets rich when Microsoft enters a market as they invariably buy someone. However, everyone else gets crushed. Competing with Microsoft is ridiculously hard under the best of circumstances, but it is impossible when you have to purchase Microsoft technology to use your own product."
What about OSS? Doesn't OSS crush everyone else since it's impossible to compete with "free"? What about Oracle? They bought PeopleSoft (in a hostile fashion, BTW) with the expressed purpose of shutting it down so as to remove them as a source of competition. What about Apple? They're doing as best as they can to lock up all Mac software development for themselves.
So while I'm sure UMD movies wouldn't be unwatchable, I'm betting their quality is more on a VHS or maybe SVHS level than a DVD level. You would probably notice on any reasonable setup.
I agree with the thrust of your post (although you seem to be comparing horizontal resolutions, when normally vertical resolution is used for comparisons), but I'll just add:
If I recall correctly, VHS = ~250 lines, SVHS = ~400 lines, DVD = 480 lines. So yeah, UMD at 270 is just above VHS, but not in the league of SVHS. And supposedly VCD =~ VHS, but the handful of VCDs I've seen are horrible compared to VHS recorded at SP mode. VCD seems more like VHS at EP mode (or even worse).
"IIRC, initially Navigator was not free ($25 or something). It was only after MS started giving away IE that they started offering Navigator for free. Free browsers were great for the consumer in the short term, but bad in the long term. Its only recently that the consumers have started recovering from this."
Browsers were historically free before Netscape; MS merely returned browsers to "free". Secondly, Netscape was only *ostensibly* not free. For "students" it was free, and for "beta users" it was free, and for "evaluation users" it was free (you could "evaluate" it for free for a certain amount of time). Netscape didn't bother to enforce any of these provisions, so in reality it was free for the general populace (however, businesses that wanted to use it in a legit fashion did pay (not at $25 per copy; they got a site lisence that was nearly free)).
Netscape's business model wasn't to charge for the browser; it was to give the browser away in order to increase popularity of the Internet and then make money on Netscape web servers. Apache blew that business model apart by giving internet servers away for free, which was the real reason for Netscape's downfall.
"You, and many others, make the assumption that creative people only create for monetary gain."
I don't make that assumption, but many things take a lot of money to create. Each LOTR movie cost over 100 million dollard to make (or so I've read). There's no way in hell such would be made without return on investment. Most books wouldn't be written at all (sorry, most books are indeed written for profit). The high-quality video games wouldn't be produced. You think 24 or Battlestar Gallactica would be made for free? Etc, etc.
If you want to restrict humanity to low-budget *everything* then fine, but admit that up front. I prefer the option to enjoy or not enjoy the high-budget offerings whose existence necessitates money (yes, that evil money). And the low-budget offerings that also require money (such as novels).
Remixes and the like are fine, but it seems that if the remixes are being sold for profit, then the original artist should get a cut. But it depends on how "mixed" the "remix" is.
But how about a movie that uses songs as background music. The entire song isn't used and the song's "sound" is "mixed" with the movie's "foreground" audio. Should the creator of the song get a cut of that?
Or how about commercials that use jingles based on pop tunes. The jingles normally don't usse the original recording and often have altered the original words so the jingle isn't an exact copy of the original recording. Why shouldn't the original creator get something for use of his song in a commercial? They do today and it hasn't hurt the TV/Radio ad industry any.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet another Slashdot anti-MS conspiracy threory bites the dust. LOL
There are two sad things about this.
1. Slashdotters demand that Microsoft document their API, yet are quite ignorant of the vast documentation that already exists.
2. You can be sure that in the future, a slashdotter filled with irrational MS-hatred and his own self-righteousness will cite this bypassing of the HOST file as evidence of Microsoft's evil, totally unaware of his absolute ignorance on the subject (or worse, well-aware that these functions are documented, but ignoring that so as to make is ill-founded point).
According to a post below, it's just the opposite this year.
But I think I've also seen HP TabletPCs in use this year on 24 by the good guys.
According to threads at AVSForum, HD-DVD players went on sale at Best Buy and the like, and some posters there have bought them and posted pics as proof. Doesn't sound like there's a delay to me.6 7248
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=6
The things that Microsoft did were perfectly acceptable business practices for non-monopolies. But at the time Microsoft did them, they weren't yet declared a monopoly. So in order for Microsoft to not run afoul of the antitrust law, they would've had to police themselves into not doing things that every other company was free to do, just in case Microsoft would be declared to be a monopoly at some time in the future. Do you see how f'ed up that is? Such retroactive "convictions" are only allowed in antitrust because antitrust is civil law. Had antitrust been criminal law, such retroactive BS wouldn't be allowed.
Being a closed system that they work under (both software and business) we'll never really know.
And yet Mozilla/Firefox keeps security bugs off of the public bugs list until they are fixed, so you don't know how long Mozilla devs know about security bugs before fixing them either.
Ignorance, thy name is "twitter".
PDF isn't "open". A small subset of PDF is ECMA standard, but Adobe controls the whole of PDF. They do provide specs for creating new PDF docs and reading PDF for the purpose of displaying the contents. But I don't know about editing existing PDF docs; seems that only Adobe products can edit PDF (maybe due to the PDF license?).
Dismiss the other replies to your post saying that Office 2007 formats are "XML but not standard", as they post out of willfull ignorance. :-)
e nXmlDeveloperGroup.aspx) include Microsoft (of course), Apple, Intel, other tech companies, businesses, some government entities, libraries, researchers). OpenXML is the default format for Office 2007, but you do not need Office 2007 to read, write, manipulate documents stored as OpenXML, in fact the site that I cite has examples of Java code tht manipulates the formats.
Office 2007 formats (aka OpenXML) are not the same as Office 2003 XML (which weren't standards recognized by an independent body). OpenXML is open and is going through the ECMA process right now.
http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx is the home page of the organization pushing the standard. The founding members of this organization (shown here http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/03/18/Op
Microsoft is betting that they can compete on features rather than document format "lock-in", which many here have preached is the only reason for MS Office's dominance.
I like how slashdot zealots like yourself on the one hand proclaim how great "competition" is but on the other hand demand that everyone adopt their pet software. Do you really want *every* browser to be Gecko based, so there's no competition in that area? Just like your wet dream is to have *every* OS unix-derived, as if unix is the be-all and end-all. You guys are too much.
Let FF and IE and other browsers compete to make each other better. If not for IE, we'd be stuck with the mess that was Netscape. If not for FF, IE would be stuck in it's current outdated state with no improved version on the horizon.
Having multiple browsers (not all Gecko based) allows competition to make all browsers better. If Microsoft dumped IE, FF would likely languish, or at least slowdown in its development. More importantly, hackers would target FF (they'd have no choice) and we all know FF has holes to be exploited.
Yeah, and Microsoft's MacBU site http://mactopia.com/ doesn't run on OSX Server. So much for MacBU embracing Macs. /sarcasm
You can be sure that if Apple did release OSX for general use on any PC, they'd add Activation to it.
The law wouldn't require ODF, but open data formats (of which ODF is just one; or is on it's way to being one, it's in the EMCA and/or process right now as is MS Office 2007 formats).
I commend MN for being consistent, and not throwing in PDF has MASS did, which showed MASS utter hypocrisy (only a small subset of PDF is recognized by EMCA as a standard; the full PDF is proprietary controlled by Adobe, yet MASS blessed it).
Companies can compete on features, but you miss the parent's point that if all protocols must be "open" then one company would've spent the money developing the protocol and everyone else would use the protocol for free. Saying that they can still compete on features (I'm grateful you didn't say "support" ;-)), doesn't address the fact that the creator of the protocol was screwed. At least let the government pay a hefty fee to the protocol creator to "open" it (I say let the government do this, since in your scenario it's the government that is forcing the protocol to be open). If the government forces Microsoft to open the Exchange protocol for everyone to use, the government should *fairly* compensate Microsoft since Microsoft spent the money to create it.
" Microsoft could add ODF support to its next version of MS Office (which they'll of course try to resist for as long as possible, as it'll kill their market lock-in)"
Office 2007's default formats are going to be open standards anyway; they're going through the EMCA process as we speak, to be followed by ISO.
Microsoft will resist supporting ODF because ODF was built around OpenOffice's already existing code base. It doesn't even support all of MS Office's featureset besides not being geared to MS's codebase.
From an OS/OEM relationship standpoint, buing a Mac without OSX is different than buying a PC without an OS. But from a consumer standpoint, the standpoint that we should be giving a damn about, how is it any different? Why shouldn't I be able to buy a Mac without an OS for lower price than an OSX'ed Mac, and let me install whatever OS I want on it (OSX, XP, or Linux)? Again, I ask from a consumer standpoint, so forget the legal mumbo/jumbo, I don't care if one is "legal" and the other isn't, I care about what's better for the consumer. Apple consumers are locked in far more than other consumers, yet Apple gets away with anything they do; they can bundle whatever software they want. They can bundle Photoshop competitors, Office competitors, dev tools (they killed off CodeWarrior by not providing the info needed to create Universal Binaries), and on and on, and nobody bats an eyelash?
But malware could write random bits to random portions of the harddrive, without any HFS+ driver. If those random portions of the harddrive happen to be your OSX install, you're screwed.
download.com is nice, but I'm wondering how you associate it with "freedom". Most of the stuff there is not OSS, so you don't have "free as in speech" (which is a bastardization of the "freedom of speech" phrase, anyway, but I digress); and most of the stuff (the higher-quality stuff, anyway) requires payment after a trial of 30-days or so, so you don't get "free as in beer" either.
Is that why Linux's OS share is at 0.32% (according to the same folks that are the source of the recent story about Firefox's breaking 10% in browser share)?
= 2
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid
And why do slashdotters insist on turning a Mac/Windows story into a Linux one (with the very first post, no less)? Do you guys think of anything other than Linux?
So what? It's still Bethesda's doing, not Microsoft's.
(A post above disputes whether there are free mods available for the PC version, saying that Bethesda has not released the mod kit enabling users to make free ones.)
"The real story is what this does to Microsoft's current business "partners." There really aren't technology niches that aren't threatened by Microsoft. I know I certainly wouldn't be interested in building my business on Microsoft's technology. Sure, someone gets rich when Microsoft enters a market as they invariably buy someone. However, everyone else gets crushed. Competing with Microsoft is ridiculously hard under the best of circumstances, but it is impossible when you have to purchase Microsoft technology to use your own product."
What about OSS? Doesn't OSS crush everyone else since it's impossible to compete with "free"?
What about Oracle? They bought PeopleSoft (in a hostile fashion, BTW) with the expressed purpose of shutting it down so as to remove them as a source of competition.
What about Apple? They're doing as best as they can to lock up all Mac software development for themselves.
So while I'm sure UMD movies wouldn't be unwatchable, I'm betting their quality is more on a VHS or maybe SVHS level than a DVD level. You would probably notice on any reasonable setup.
I agree with the thrust of your post (although you seem to be comparing horizontal resolutions, when normally vertical resolution is used for comparisons), but I'll just add:
If I recall correctly, VHS = ~250 lines, SVHS = ~400 lines, DVD = 480 lines. So yeah, UMD at 270 is just above VHS, but not in the league of SVHS.
And supposedly VCD =~ VHS, but the handful of VCDs I've seen are horrible compared to VHS recorded at SP mode. VCD seems more like VHS at EP mode (or even worse).
"IIRC, initially Navigator was not free ($25 or something). It was only after MS started giving away IE that they started offering Navigator for free. Free browsers were great for the consumer in the short term, but bad in the long term. Its only recently that the consumers have started recovering from this."
Browsers were historically free before Netscape; MS merely returned browsers to "free".
Secondly, Netscape was only *ostensibly* not free. For "students" it was free, and for "beta users" it was free, and for "evaluation users" it was free (you could "evaluate" it for free for a certain amount of time). Netscape didn't bother to enforce any of these provisions, so in reality it was free for the general populace (however, businesses that wanted to use it in a legit fashion did pay (not at $25 per copy; they got a site lisence that was nearly free)).
Netscape's business model wasn't to charge for the browser; it was to give the browser away in order to increase popularity of the Internet and then make money on Netscape web servers. Apache blew that business model apart by giving internet servers away for free, which was the real reason for Netscape's downfall.
"You, and many others, make the assumption that creative people only create for monetary gain."
I don't make that assumption, but many things take a lot of money to create. Each LOTR movie cost over 100 million dollard to make (or so I've read). There's no way in hell such would be made without return on investment. Most books wouldn't be written at all (sorry, most books are indeed written for profit). The high-quality video games wouldn't be produced. You think 24 or Battlestar Gallactica would be made for free? Etc, etc.
If you want to restrict humanity to low-budget *everything* then fine, but admit that up front. I prefer the option to enjoy or not enjoy the high-budget offerings whose existence necessitates money (yes, that evil money). And the low-budget offerings that also require money (such as novels).
Remixes and the like are fine, but it seems that if the remixes are being sold for profit, then the original artist should get a cut. But it depends on how "mixed" the "remix" is.
But how about a movie that uses songs as background music. The entire song isn't used and the song's "sound" is "mixed" with the movie's "foreground" audio. Should the creator of the song get a cut of that?
Or how about commercials that use jingles based on pop tunes. The jingles normally don't usse the original recording and often have altered the original words so the jingle isn't an exact copy of the original recording. Why shouldn't the original creator get something for use of his song in a commercial? They do today and it hasn't hurt the TV/Radio ad industry any.