True, one needs to narrow the market in question to "Portable Digital Music Players that play untranscoded iTunes songs". Once the market is narrowed sufficiently, its difficult to argue that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on said market.
Many of you demanded that Government stick its nose into the tech business, so why are you crying about it now? Did you really think that Government interference would go no further than that DOJ/MS case?
Microsoft releases security patches once a month every 2nd Tuesday of each month (one month last year required no patches, and occasionally (rarely) a super-critical flaw requires an out-of-cycle patch)), which means that this same story appears on slashdot each month so fanboys can orgasm over the fact that another set of patches is being released.
Of course, according to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=617 98, Apple releases security patches more-or-less monthly as well (not quite as often as MS) yet we see no headline stories on slashdot regarding those patches.
According to the article, "We can't say IE is any less safe," explained Levy, "because we choose to use an unpatched version [of each browser.] We were trying to understand the number of [spyware] threats, so if we used unpatched browsers then we would see more threats."
So reporting this on CNN and the like wouldn't have the impact that you hope it would. In fact, this study might be useful in studying malware but is meaningless in comparing FF with IE regarding security (as they rightfully admit).
This is upsetting, considering Bungie started out as a Mac-only publisher. Now that Bill and company have purchased them, they're making the game that was supposed to be computer first (not XBOX) into a MS-only game. Great.
Halo2 was an Xbox-targetted game from its inception. It was never primarily targetted to PCs, and there was never any indication that there'd be a Mac version. So what are you talking about?
Antitrust complaints? Who, pray tell, is going to bring forth a case because Halo2 only runs on Vista? Apple? And what "vertical monopoly"? Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC fisrt person shooters.
You can save your breath. This is a case where the slashdotters are pretending to not know the difference between hacking and general malware (virus, spyware, trojan) so they can continue to bitch and moan. (Well, the knowledgeable ones are pretending to not know the difference, the rest are just ignorant (not necessarily their fault) and don't WANT to know the difference (which is their fault).)
First, your analysis is flawed because Microsoft is still providing security updates for free. It's funny that so many here that consider themselves technically savvy confuse system flaws with trojans, spyware, and the like. There's no way to make a system that's secure from such malware. A system can limit the damage through limited user accounts, and the default account in Vista will be non-admin. What more can Microsoft do?
Red Hat gives the product away for free to make money on support. Since they depend on support they have a disinsentive to make the proverbial "perfect" software, software that is so easy and powerful that it requires no support. Red Hat intentionally makes hard to use systems to force you to call them for support. Sounds like extortion.
I know it's probably in your nature to have knee-jerk reactions against Microsoft products, but you might want to check out PC Mag's reviews of Money 2005 vs Quicken 2005 Finance Packages: Money Edges Out Quicken.
Here's an excerpt:
This is usually a tight race, but this time around, Money is our Editors' Choice. Its new depth options, better online connections, and closer attention to spending and categorization make an already capable, sophisticated, and highly usable finance program even better. That said, Quicken remains a worthy adversary, and users committed to that platform will be served perfectly well by upgrading rather than switching. But if you've been mulling a switch, or are new to personal-finance software, Money is currently king of the hill.
"First of all, they are charging $10,00 for that. OSS need not apply."
There are plenty of OSS companies that can afford that fee. And there are plenty of closed source companies that can't afford it. Being OSS or not has nothing to do with being able to pay a fee.
"Second of all, even though there is boat loads of it, I doubt the documentation is comprehensive. Note that the DoJ is upset that Microsoft has not released documentation it agreed to do so in the 2001 settlement. Furthermore, all avaliable evidence suggests that the Documentation currently offered to the EU is effectively broken"
The "available evidence" that you refer to is that one European dev was unable to implement the protocols in four days. That means nothing.
Judging MSDN documentation vs OSS documentation, I'm sure that Microsoft's documentation much more comprehensive than OSS documentation (and Apple's for that matter). But even for a dev that's too incompetent to understand the documentation, MS is offering 500 hours of *free* tech support. If the dev is still too stupid to implement the protocols, then Microsoft is now offering the code. What more do you want?
Dictatorships "nationalized" companies (factories and the like) against their will in the past, to the detriment of those country's economies. This doesn't happen much today. Today, if a country wanted to "nationalize" a company's assets, they'd have to pay for the assets at a reasonable market value, or risk running afoul of international trade agreements.
Microsoft already provided 1200 (or 12000, I forget which) pages of documentation plus 500 hours of free tech support for any dev that's trying to implement the protocols in question. The EU is full of crap. They are going to declare Microsoft to be "out of compliance" no matter what Microsoft does, just so that they can levy fines to fill the coffers in Brussels. This is an old fashioned shake down, nothing more, nothing less.
The code isn't meant to be "compilable". It's to be used as reference material to supplement the already 1200 pages of documentation and 500 hours of free technical support that Microsoft is already offering for the network protocols in question. The EU keeps moving the goal posts, and it's really obvious that they're just trying to shake down a non-European company.
"They actually have a page where they spell out what they mean by Do No Evil. It doesn't mean, do no evil by the standards of every human in America. Their guidelines very clearly indicate that doing no evil means acting in good faith rather than trying to dupe users. It has more to do with returning honestly ranked search results, not installing spyware, and making programs you install easy to uninstall."
*That's* all that "Do no evil" means? LOL You actually buy that? If that's all it meant, then there'd be no need for a slogan, particularly a *public* slogan. Sorry, "Do no evil" is code for saying, "we're holier than the rest, beyond reproach, righteous (self-righteous, is more like it); we polish our halos and fluff our wings every day".
One who's truly "not evil" wouldn't need a public slogan proclaiming such. In fact, the very existence of such a public slogan should be reason for suspicion rather than evidence of righteousness.
"I, for one, consider this a worthy moral dilemma. It's by no means obvious to me that "provide nothing" is less evil than "provide partial.""
The real problem is that guys like you, most slashdotters, and Google itself, have devalued the word "evil" so much that it's lost any significant meaning. When I think of "evil", I think of guys like Hitler. As far as corporations go, "evil" would apply to companies like Enron, WorldCom, meat packing plants of the 1920's, companies that abuse their workforce, companies that wontonly pollute the environment.
But sadly, slashdotters, Google, and others, have cheapened the word "evil" by applying it to companies like Microsoft (which is absurd). It's very easy for Google to cross the line of "evil" when the definition of "evil" has been weakened thusly.
LOL I can't believe so many of you bought into that "Do no evil" crap. Google is a company like any other, except that they proclaim themselves to be "holier than thou" every chance they get. Brings to mind the Pharisees, who proclaimed themselves to be more righteous than anyone else, and even prayed outdoors just so that passersby could see how "righteous" they were. In reality, the Pharisees were the biggest hypocrites in Judea.
Show me someone that *continuously* claims that he's not evil, and I'll show you a hypocrite. Someone that's *really* "not evil" wouldn't need a slogan proclaiming such.
Why bother with all of that, when that same "Monopoly Software Co." can convert their apps to "web apps" and use all the GPL code they want without releasing their code as GPL stands today? See Google, for example.
"Worthy to note that AOL serves up Google results, both paid and organic. Google's total marketshare, by those numbers, is 46.4%."
In the context of this story, that's irrelevant. Regardless of how AOL obtains its search results that amount to 9.9% of total searches, those results are being turned over to the DOJ. The marketshare that Google controls as to whether they get turned over to the DOJ is only 36.5%.
Slashdot Mirror
How would Napster be a monopoly when there are multiple sources of DRM'ed WMA music?
Anyway, I don't like this case, but if you get an idiot like Judge Jackson deciding the case, who knows what will happen?
True, one needs to narrow the market in question to "Portable Digital Music Players that play untranscoded iTunes songs". Once the market is narrowed sufficiently, its difficult to argue that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on said market.
Many of you demanded that Government stick its nose into the tech business, so why are you crying about it now? Did you really think that Government interference would go no further than that DOJ/MS case?
Microsoft releases security patches once a month every 2nd Tuesday of each month (one month last year required no patches, and occasionally (rarely) a super-critical flaw requires an out-of-cycle patch)), which means that this same story appears on slashdot each month so fanboys can orgasm over the fact that another set of patches is being released.
7 98, Apple releases security patches more-or-less monthly as well (not quite as often as MS) yet we see no headline stories on slashdot regarding those patches.
Of course, according to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61
Slashdot at its finest!!
According to the article, "We can't say IE is any less safe," explained Levy, "because we choose to use an unpatched version [of each browser.] We were trying to understand the number of [spyware] threats, so if we used unpatched browsers then we would see more threats."
So reporting this on CNN and the like wouldn't have the impact that you hope it would. In fact, this study might be useful in studying malware but is meaningless in comparing FF with IE regarding security (as they rightfully admit).
Yep. Slashdot at its finest!! :-)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/01/sgi_moves_ bishop/
"SGI's transition away from MIPS and IRIX to Linux on Itanium has proved disastrous."
This is upsetting, considering Bungie started out as a Mac-only publisher. Now that Bill and company have purchased them, they're making the game that was supposed to be computer first (not XBOX) into a MS-only game. Great.
Halo2 was an Xbox-targetted game from its inception. It was never primarily targetted to PCs, and there was never any indication that there'd be a Mac version. So what are you talking about?
Um, you do realize that there is a Mac version of Halo 1, don't you?
Antitrust complaints?
Who, pray tell, is going to bring forth a case because Halo2 only runs on Vista? Apple?
And what "vertical monopoly"? Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC fisrt person shooters.
You can save your breath. This is a case where the slashdotters are pretending to not know the difference between hacking and general malware (virus, spyware, trojan) so they can continue to bitch and moan. (Well, the knowledgeable ones are pretending to not know the difference, the rest are just ignorant (not necessarily their fault) and don't WANT to know the difference (which is their fault).)
First, your analysis is flawed because Microsoft is still providing security updates for free. It's funny that so many here that consider themselves technically savvy confuse system flaws with trojans, spyware, and the like. There's no way to make a system that's secure from such malware. A system can limit the damage through limited user accounts, and the default account in Vista will be non-admin. What more can Microsoft do?
Red Hat gives the product away for free to make money on support. Since they depend on support they have a disinsentive to make the proverbial "perfect" software, software that is so easy and powerful that it requires no support. Red Hat intentionally makes hard to use systems to force you to call them for support. Sounds like extortion.
Here's an excerpt:
There hasn't been a good AI book that contained both theory and concrete programming since McDermott and Cherniak's offerings of the 80's. ;-)
"First of all, they are charging $10,00 for that. OSS need not apply."
There are plenty of OSS companies that can afford that fee.
And there are plenty of closed source companies that can't afford it.
Being OSS or not has nothing to do with being able to pay a fee.
"Second of all, even though there is boat loads of it, I doubt the documentation is comprehensive. Note that the DoJ is upset that Microsoft has not released documentation it agreed to do so in the 2001 settlement. Furthermore, all avaliable evidence suggests that the Documentation currently offered to the EU is effectively broken"
The "available evidence" that you refer to is that one European dev was unable to implement the protocols in four days. That means nothing.
Judging MSDN documentation vs OSS documentation, I'm sure that Microsoft's documentation much more comprehensive than OSS documentation (and Apple's for that matter). But even for a dev that's too incompetent to understand the documentation, MS is offering 500 hours of *free* tech support. If the dev is still too stupid to implement the protocols, then Microsoft is now offering the code. What more do you want?
There are search engines besides Google. It's not like Google's presence in China is "essential" to getting any information.
Dictatorships "nationalized" companies (factories and the like) against their will in the past, to the detriment of those country's economies. This doesn't happen much today. Today, if a country wanted to "nationalize" a company's assets, they'd have to pay for the assets at a reasonable market value, or risk running afoul of international trade agreements.
Microsoft already provided 1200 (or 12000, I forget which) pages of documentation plus 500 hours of free tech support for any dev that's trying to implement the protocols in question. The EU is full of crap. They are going to declare Microsoft to be "out of compliance" no matter what Microsoft does, just so that they can levy fines to fill the coffers in Brussels. This is an old fashioned shake down, nothing more, nothing less.
The code isn't meant to be "compilable". It's to be used as reference material to supplement the already 1200 pages of documentation and 500 hours of free technical support that Microsoft is already offering for the network protocols in question. The EU keeps moving the goal posts, and it's really obvious that they're just trying to shake down a non-European company.
"They actually have a page where they spell out what they mean by Do No Evil. It doesn't mean, do no evil by the standards of every human in America. Their guidelines very clearly indicate that doing no evil means acting in good faith rather than trying to dupe users. It has more to do with returning honestly ranked search results, not installing spyware, and making programs you install easy to uninstall."
*That's* all that "Do no evil" means? LOL You actually buy that? If that's all it meant, then there'd be no need for a slogan, particularly a *public* slogan. Sorry, "Do no evil" is code for saying, "we're holier than the rest, beyond reproach, righteous (self-righteous, is more like it); we polish our halos and fluff our wings every day".
One who's truly "not evil" wouldn't need a public slogan proclaiming such. In fact, the very existence of such a public slogan should be reason for suspicion rather than evidence of righteousness.
"I, for one, consider this a worthy moral dilemma. It's by no means obvious to me that "provide nothing" is less evil than "provide partial.""
The real problem is that guys like you, most slashdotters, and Google itself, have devalued the word "evil" so much that it's lost any significant meaning. When I think of "evil", I think of guys like Hitler. As far as corporations go, "evil" would apply to companies like Enron, WorldCom, meat packing plants of the 1920's, companies that abuse their workforce, companies that wontonly pollute the environment.
But sadly, slashdotters, Google, and others, have cheapened the word "evil" by applying it to companies like Microsoft (which is absurd). It's very easy for Google to cross the line of "evil" when the definition of "evil" has been weakened thusly.
LOL
I can't believe so many of you bought into that "Do no evil" crap. Google is a company like any other, except that they proclaim themselves to be "holier than thou" every chance they get. Brings to mind the Pharisees, who proclaimed themselves to be more righteous than anyone else, and even prayed outdoors just so that passersby could see how "righteous" they were. In reality, the Pharisees were the biggest hypocrites in Judea.
Show me someone that *continuously* claims that he's not evil, and I'll show you a hypocrite.
Someone that's *really* "not evil" wouldn't need a slogan proclaiming such.
Why bother with all of that, when that same "Monopoly Software Co." can convert their apps to "web apps" and use all the GPL code they want without releasing their code as GPL stands today? See Google, for example.
This isn't a big deal.r sity/ntsrclicensees.aspx
r sity/NTSrcLicInfo.aspx
Microsoft has already licensed Windows source code to over 100 universities, listed here:
http://research.microsoft.com/collaboration/unive
More details:
http://research.microsoft.com/collaboration/unive
"Worthy to note that AOL serves up Google results, both paid and organic. Google's total marketshare, by those numbers, is 46.4%."
In the context of this story, that's irrelevant. Regardless of how AOL obtains its search results that amount to 9.9% of total searches, those results are being turned over to the DOJ. The marketshare that Google controls as to whether they get turned over to the DOJ is only 36.5%.