A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
And you're suggesting he use MySQL? He said he NEEDED to be ABLE to deal with null fields and weird data...
I'd try postgres and just give MySQL a miss... it won't give you any warning when it changes your data, unless they've made major changes very recently.
Communism doesn't fail horribly in practice. It's being successfully used by a large portion of the human race even as we speak.
Most of the venom attached to communism lies in the fact that we have been propagandised to equate communism with dictatorship, when it's actually an economic system that could just as easily be run as a democracy. It doesn't really have much to do with individuals having more "stuff", it has to do with private vs public ownership of the means of production.
That's an old idea, largely discredited... from the days when the math teachers where the computer science teachers.
Programming isn't maths.. maybe simple algebra, but it's a lot more about creativity and logically solving problems. I've been programming professionally now for 15 years and never needed more than rudimentary maths knowledge - nor can I imagine any situation when I would actually need it.
Algorithms are worth learning, but algorithms aint maths either.. they're just the 'known best' way to solve problems.
Well, I used to work for a web/animation shop, and they had a mathmatics professor on call to work with programmers developing lightwave plugins. I would have been doing it myself if I'd stuck around there. Just to give you an example since you're imaginationally-challenged and all:P
Price fixing may be illegal, but it is nevertheless the way the world works. If you don't like it, you'd better act yourself because the politician you elected isn't going to.
My set up is pretty comfy. I've got an L shaped desk with 3 monitors pulled up to the very front of it, and a large comfy recliner set up so that the foot of it extends way under the desk when you're in full recline position leaving the monitors readable, being pulled right up to the front. Add a wireless keyboard, wireless optical mouse, coffee maker and beer fridge and you're set to work until you pass out then wake up and do it again. Literally... I've been a little behind on Mondays launch and want to go clubbing this weekend, so in my efforts to get done by Friday I haven't been out of this chair for 2 days (with the obvious biologically driven exceptions).
No, that would be putting words into my mouth, because I never said that. I just said that your initial statement was full of shit, and Bills statement wasn't.
Unix wasn't designed to network computers together any more than Windows was. Unix was designed to have multiple keyboards and monitors connected to it, Windows wasn't. Still only one computer in either case.
So in comparision we have Googles "Gmail" which is free, public, only email, and is very clearly marked on every page as comming from Google
On the other, we have this "G-mail" which is tied into a coperate program which I assume costs a decent amount of money and is clearly not from Google.
I don't see how they have much of a case since it would be nearly impossible for anyone to actually confuse the two services or substitute Gmail for "G-mail"
Then you're completely blind. How easy do you think it is for this company to sell G-Mail now? No one is going to recognize them as being distinct from Google's service if they aren't already aware of them...
Google should rename their service to GoogleMail. Or perhaps G-Mail should rename their service to GoogleMail?
Oh yeah... you know what? We're not all pencil necked geeks around here. I've hospitalized rapists with my hands, run gangs crack dealers out of my neighbourhood and had guns in my face. I can kill a man with my hands and kill a man consistently with an M-16 from 600 meters, which is a good 200 meters past it's rated operational capacity. I'm not afraid to put myself on the line for whats right and have proven it more than once. This abhorant, selfish, sorry excuse for a moral philosophy is definatly one that I will be fighting against with whatever means are at my disposal.
Save your crap for the Greens and the Hippies. You ever put that attitude on with someone like me where he can see you, and you'll regret it.
I'm with this guy. That sort of shit just isn't punny at all. Something should be pun. These punks need to be punished. As Jar-Jar would say, "As you be sowin, so you be reapun."
I've always been a little more selective in the company I keep... but who knows? I'll get some libertarians, some racists, some fascists, maybe a couple of embezzlers, throw in a few thieves, murdurers and traitors and we'll all sit down and have a little chat. I'm sure understanding things from their perspective will do great things to broaden my mind. I mean, I wouldn't want to be closed-minded about things.
Hell, maybe I should just visit the States and go see the White House.
Oh, and spitting might not be sophisticated or intellectually stimulating, but it's one of the most effective and degrading ways to communicate your utter disgust with a person to them. It's something I generally reserve for provoking an attack from someone I want to give me an excuse, but I think I'd make an exception if I met someone face to face who actually purported to believe in this idiotic selfish antisocial crap.
What can I say... they're plainly stupid to think that 6 billion and growing people on a tiny little planet with finite resources and no central planning would be good for anyone.
That link you posted reads almost exactly like my platform for Model Parliment in high school, except I constructed my platform as a way to conduct a covert social experiment on my classmates and understand why they valued the laws that exist, whereas these bozos are actually serious.
I've never actually met a Libertarian, but I'd really like to. I honestly think it would be fun to just up and punch him (or her) in the mouth and drive him to the ground, with no warning or discussion.
Then when he asks why I did it, I can tell him that I consider one of the essential characteristics that motivates my desire to see laws protecting my fellow man is that we are all in this together and that we have a social responsibility to each other, but that because of his political views he is not a part of my society but merely a self-centered interloper no more deserving of those protections than a rock in my driveway. Then, having gotten that off my chest, I could spit on him and quickly walk away whistling a cheerful tune before the authorities arrived.
Come on, Dogpile on the ShieldWolf... wonder if I'll manage to hit (-5: WMD) with this puppy?
Without the government to enforce it, you have no property rights. The land is not a thing you can own, it is a thing you move upon. Before the eurpoeans came to North America, there was no large government to enforce property ownership, and thus, there was none. You just accept it as the natural order of things because it was how you were raised, in a Capitalist system.
Libertarians are such a joke... it's like they have blinders on. I'll tell you, the first thing I would do if they ever managed to tear the government down is find myself a nice big house owned by a libertarian and go kick him out of it and take it at gunpoint. The only thing that is keeping me from doing it right now is the government with their troops and guns.
You have an awfully narrow defination of music. Where does it say that music has to have any of those things?
Large corporate offices. Who else would define these things? This isn't self-expression, you know... if you're going to create a product that will appeal to the lowest common denominator and still grow annoying before the next big hit comes out, you need to follow rules!
The only reason it could be taking so long is either a) they are idiots and can't program or b) they did a drastic rewrite of the whole OS from ground up.
c) They had all sorts of ideas on things they wanted to add to the existing code base, but most of them didn't work and had to be pulled back out. They don't really have anything that would justify a release aside from DRM, but they need something new so they're pushing it out the door anyways.
To sum up: the word does not mean what you think it does. Arrogance only meets the definition of elitism when the feeling of superiority is paired with a sense of increased entitlement, and that definition does not accurately describe this community."
To sum it up, the word means exactly what I think it does. Believe it or not you are not bearing a torch and enlightening the ignorant here.
Ok. I will concede that I may be incorrect. It happens from time to time. In this instance, I used the dictionary as my reputable source. So, what exactly do you have to back up your view? It evidently wasn't the dictionary.
The population is only increasing because the baby boomers haven't died yet. And the problem will start when they retire, not when they die. When they retire and come to discover that the long life their medicine has brought them is of little comfort when there simply are not enough young people to care for them when they can no longer work. They are going to discover that when that happens, the riches they sacrificed their family for are of scant comfort when they are all competing for the aid and attention of the few young people whose hands are not to arthritic to hold a tool and market forces then drive massive inflation. You will find many, many old people at that point waving their entire life savings in the air looking for someone to help them, and there simply won't be enough healthy young people to help them all at any price.
The point is not to breed more to solve this problem; short of a massive wave of immigration by mature adults, this problem simply will not be fixed. The bed is made and they are going to have to lie in it. The point is not to repeat the mistakes of our parents and grandparents and sell out our family life and our future in exchange for endless labour, empty alcolades and hollow materialism.
When the baby boomers actually start to die off, you're going to see a LOT of empty houses.
The whole point, which you completely missed, is that the elitism the GP is referring to DOES NOT EXIST. None of these individuals is attempting to subjugate other people on the basis of their tech savyness.
If I tell you that because I'm an elite tech savy guy and you have to do what I say, that's elitism.
If, on the other hand, you come to me and say "oh great tech savy guy, please help me" and I tell you to go away and leave me alone, that is NOT elitism. At all.
If the tech savy community thinks that they are superior to those who have to struggle to figure out a mouse WITHIN THE SHARPLY DELIMITED PRIORITIES AND BOUNDS OF THEIR COMMUNITY, then they are simply correctly assessing the situation. If they think they are superior in a general sense on that basis, then they are arrogant, but still not elitist.
The most elitist aspect of the open source community, quite frankly, is their belief that they are enlightened and because they are more enlightened everyone should listen to them in their call to reject closed source software. But then, that is a common quality of every small group with a vision, from the largest political party to the smallest cult, from the largest religious organization to the smallest activist group.
To sum up: the word does not mean what you think it does. Arrogance only meets the definition of elitism when the feeling of superiority is paired with a sense of increased entitlement, and that definition does not accurately describe this community.
I'm going to be lazy and reuse an old post here, slightly edited because you're not acting like a tool like the last guy was and are thus less deserving of my venomous bile...
As I was attempting to communicate in my original post above (though perhaps not with complete success), the perceived attitude of the Linux community is one of elitism.
Elitist:
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
2.
a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
Ok, now what is there in this definition that matches the developers? Are they expecting favoured treatment from someone because they are developers? No. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are developers? No. Are they attempting to use their developer status to control anyone? No.
Now, lets apply this test to the user. Are users expecting favoured treatment from developers because they are users? Yes, they're demanding that the developers should cater to their needs. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are a user? Yes, they appear to think that being the user makes them the King, and apparently they're used to being listened to when they make stupid demands like changing colors etc. Are they attempting to use their "user" status to control anyone? Well, your whole point was that there is some natural order to things that places them at the top of the heap because they are users, and that developers should bow to their wishes.
So, I guess what I'm basically saying is go learn what the word means before you use it in public. Elitism is based in a fundimental way upon a preoccupation with pecking order and thus with other people. Self-motivated developers who care nothing for others are not demonstrating that they are even vaguely elitist, on the contrary they are being utterly dismissive of the preoccupations that define the term.
No, no link, my brother is a student of genetic engineering and he was telling me about it last night. I think he did actually say it was about the cromosomes. My brother and sister are both bio-geeks and I'm more comfortable in the world of math, computers and physics, so I tend to pick up the gist of a lot of things but screw up the terminology:P
Considering the intermixing between cultures that occurs in modern society, as a species we're better off with as much genetic diversity as we can get until we manage to get off planet and remove the risk of a single superbug wiping us all out.
There is actually more genetic diversity within a 'race' than there are between them. Mixing them is not contributing significantly to greater diversity.
My point was that earlier in our history, a nasty virus could wipe out an entire pocket of humanity without having the opportunity to spread to others, but in our modern world it has ample opportunity to spread making genetic diversity that much more important. When we manage to get off planet, we'll reach that point again where a disease could, for example, wipe out every human on Earth, and from a "survival of man" perspective, that just means a whole "new" frontier for the survivors off Earth.
Open standards and Open Source have nothing to do with each other. There is plenty of closed source software that supports open standards.
Yes, but there is also plenty of closed source software that is unable to compete with open source projects on quality, and maintains an undeserved prominence within society solely on the basis of their closed standard, which creates a divide on the issue with a lot of the same players as in the OSS debate.
MS and Office is a great example. They are a bunch of useless hacks, and therefore they need to use these tactics or no one would use their crap anymore.
Contrast this with Adobe. They use existing open standards and release the specifications for the standards they create, yet because of the quality of their work, they securely maintain their position.
You can really gauge the quality of a successful software company by their attitude towards open standards. If they are happy to support them, they must have confidence in the quality of their product and see a benefit in opening the door for more software that can consume the data they produce. If, on the other hand, they are afraid of them and fight them at every step, then they reveal a lack of confidence in their products quality and an understanding at the organizational level that they are getting away with unloading their crap on the public mainly because they hold them hostage and must continue to do so if they are to remain successful.
It also occurs to me that there is a lot of new money in the software industry for those who are prepared to sell out their userbase. The big drive for DRM is a great example... large companies who are so confident that people will be forced to buy their software based on the closed-standard lock-in that they are pursuing money from the entertainment giants in exchange for turning our own computers against us. When you can accept money from third parties as payment for crippling and sabotaging your own product to the detriment of your customers and still achieve record sales, that's a pretty screaming indicator that you're unfairly controlling the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!
And you're suggesting he use MySQL? He said he NEEDED to be ABLE to deal with null fields and weird data...
I'd try postgres and just give MySQL a miss... it won't give you any warning when it changes your data, unless they've made major changes very recently.
Microsoft found a great way to make their browser more secure than the competition. They pay their staff to contribute code to Mozilla!
Communism doesn't fail horribly in practice. It's being successfully used by a large portion of the human race even as we speak.
Most of the venom attached to communism lies in the fact that we have been propagandised to equate communism with dictatorship, when it's actually an economic system that could just as easily be run as a democracy. It doesn't really have much to do with individuals having more "stuff", it has to do with private vs public ownership of the means of production.
That's an old idea, largely discredited... from the days when the math teachers where the computer science teachers.
:P
Programming isn't maths.. maybe simple algebra, but it's a lot more about creativity and logically solving problems. I've been programming professionally now for 15 years and never needed more than rudimentary maths knowledge - nor can I imagine any situation when I would actually need it.
Algorithms are worth learning, but algorithms aint maths either.. they're just the 'known best' way to solve problems.
Well, I used to work for a web/animation shop, and they had a mathmatics professor on call to work with programmers developing lightwave plugins. I would have been doing it myself if I'd stuck around there. Just to give you an example since you're imaginationally-challenged and all
Price fixing may be illegal, but it is nevertheless the way the world works. If you don't like it, you'd better act yourself because the politician you elected isn't going to.
My set up is pretty comfy. I've got an L shaped desk with 3 monitors pulled up to the very front of it, and a large comfy recliner set up so that the foot of it extends way under the desk when you're in full recline position leaving the monitors readable, being pulled right up to the front. Add a wireless keyboard, wireless optical mouse, coffee maker and beer fridge and you're set to work until you pass out then wake up and do it again. Literally... I've been a little behind on Mondays launch and want to go clubbing this weekend, so in my efforts to get done by Friday I haven't been out of this chair for 2 days (with the obvious biologically driven exceptions).
No, that would be putting words into my mouth, because I never said that. I just said that your initial statement was full of shit, and Bills statement wasn't.
Unix wasn't designed to network computers together any more than Windows was. Unix was designed to have multiple keyboards and monitors connected to it, Windows wasn't. Still only one computer in either case.
So in comparision we have Googles "Gmail" which is free, public, only email, and is very clearly marked on every page as comming from Google
On the other, we have this "G-mail" which is tied into a coperate program which I assume costs a decent amount of money and is clearly not from Google.
I don't see how they have much of a case since it would be nearly impossible for anyone to actually confuse the two services or substitute Gmail for "G-mail"
Then you're completely blind. How easy do you think it is for this company to sell G-Mail now? No one is going to recognize them as being distinct from Google's service if they aren't already aware of them...
Google should rename their service to GoogleMail. Or perhaps G-Mail should rename their service to GoogleMail?
Oh yeah... you know what? We're not all pencil necked geeks around here. I've hospitalized rapists with my hands, run gangs crack dealers out of my neighbourhood and had guns in my face. I can kill a man with my hands and kill a man consistently with an M-16 from 600 meters, which is a good 200 meters past it's rated operational capacity. I'm not afraid to put myself on the line for whats right and have proven it more than once. This abhorant, selfish, sorry excuse for a moral philosophy is definatly one that I will be fighting against with whatever means are at my disposal.
Save your crap for the Greens and the Hippies. You ever put that attitude on with someone like me where he can see you, and you'll regret it.
Nothing except try to tear down the fabric of society.
I'm with this guy. That sort of shit just isn't punny at all. Something should be pun. These punks need to be punished. As Jar-Jar would say, "As you be sowin, so you be reapun."
I've always been a little more selective in the company I keep... but who knows? I'll get some libertarians, some racists, some fascists, maybe a couple of embezzlers, throw in a few thieves, murdurers and traitors and we'll all sit down and have a little chat. I'm sure understanding things from their perspective will do great things to broaden my mind. I mean, I wouldn't want to be closed-minded about things.
Hell, maybe I should just visit the States and go see the White House.
Oh, and spitting might not be sophisticated or intellectually stimulating, but it's one of the most effective and degrading ways to communicate your utter disgust with a person to them. It's something I generally reserve for provoking an attack from someone I want to give me an excuse, but I think I'd make an exception if I met someone face to face who actually purported to believe in this idiotic selfish antisocial crap.
Psssssst.....hey buddy, women read slashdot!
I know it's annoying when ppl correct your spelling, but you spelled woman with an e...
What can I say... they're plainly stupid to think that 6 billion and growing people on a tiny little planet with finite resources and no central planning would be good for anyone.
That link you posted reads almost exactly like my platform for Model Parliment in high school, except I constructed my platform as a way to conduct a covert social experiment on my classmates and understand why they valued the laws that exist, whereas these bozos are actually serious.
I've never actually met a Libertarian, but I'd really like to. I honestly think it would be fun to just up and punch him (or her) in the mouth and drive him to the ground, with no warning or discussion.
Then when he asks why I did it, I can tell him that I consider one of the essential characteristics that motivates my desire to see laws protecting my fellow man is that we are all in this together and that we have a social responsibility to each other, but that because of his political views he is not a part of my society but merely a self-centered interloper no more deserving of those protections than a rock in my driveway. Then, having gotten that off my chest, I could spit on him and quickly walk away whistling a cheerful tune before the authorities arrived.
Come on, Dogpile on the ShieldWolf... wonder if I'll manage to hit (-5: WMD) with this puppy?
Without the government to enforce it, you have no property rights. The land is not a thing you can own, it is a thing you move upon. Before the eurpoeans came to North America, there was no large government to enforce property ownership, and thus, there was none. You just accept it as the natural order of things because it was how you were raised, in a Capitalist system. Libertarians are such a joke... it's like they have blinders on. I'll tell you, the first thing I would do if they ever managed to tear the government down is find myself a nice big house owned by a libertarian and go kick him out of it and take it at gunpoint. The only thing that is keeping me from doing it right now is the government with their troops and guns.
You have an awfully narrow defination of music. Where does it say that music has to have any of those things?
Large corporate offices. Who else would define these things? This isn't self-expression, you know... if you're going to create a product that will appeal to the lowest common denominator and still grow annoying before the next big hit comes out, you need to follow rules!
The only reason it could be taking so long is either a) they are idiots and can't program or b) they did a drastic rewrite of the whole OS from ground up.
c) They had all sorts of ideas on things they wanted to add to the existing code base, but most of them didn't work and had to be pulled back out. They don't really have anything that would justify a release aside from DRM, but they need something new so they're pushing it out the door anyways.
Can I have c for $1000.00 Alex?
To sum up: the word does not mean what you think it does. Arrogance only meets the definition of elitism when the feeling of superiority is paired with a sense of increased entitlement, and that definition does not accurately describe this community."
To sum it up, the word means exactly what I think it does. Believe it or not you are not bearing a torch and enlightening the ignorant here.
Ok. I will concede that I may be incorrect. It happens from time to time. In this instance, I used the dictionary as my reputable source. So, what exactly do you have to back up your view? It evidently wasn't the dictionary.
The population is only increasing because the baby boomers haven't died yet. And the problem will start when they retire, not when they die. When they retire and come to discover that the long life their medicine has brought them is of little comfort when there simply are not enough young people to care for them when they can no longer work. They are going to discover that when that happens, the riches they sacrificed their family for are of scant comfort when they are all competing for the aid and attention of the few young people whose hands are not to arthritic to hold a tool and market forces then drive massive inflation. You will find many, many old people at that point waving their entire life savings in the air looking for someone to help them, and there simply won't be enough healthy young people to help them all at any price.
The point is not to breed more to solve this problem; short of a massive wave of immigration by mature adults, this problem simply will not be fixed. The bed is made and they are going to have to lie in it. The point is not to repeat the mistakes of our parents and grandparents and sell out our family life and our future in exchange for endless labour, empty alcolades and hollow materialism.
When the baby boomers actually start to die off, you're going to see a LOT of empty houses.
The whole point, which you completely missed, is that the elitism the GP is referring to DOES NOT EXIST. None of these individuals is attempting to subjugate other people on the basis of their tech savyness.
If I tell you that because I'm an elite tech savy guy and you have to do what I say, that's elitism.
If, on the other hand, you come to me and say "oh great tech savy guy, please help me" and I tell you to go away and leave me alone, that is NOT elitism. At all.
If the tech savy community thinks that they are superior to those who have to struggle to figure out a mouse WITHIN THE SHARPLY DELIMITED PRIORITIES AND BOUNDS OF THEIR COMMUNITY, then they are simply correctly assessing the situation. If they think they are superior in a general sense on that basis, then they are arrogant, but still not elitist.
The most elitist aspect of the open source community, quite frankly, is their belief that they are enlightened and because they are more enlightened everyone should listen to them in their call to reject closed source software. But then, that is a common quality of every small group with a vision, from the largest political party to the smallest cult, from the largest religious organization to the smallest activist group.
To sum up: the word does not mean what you think it does. Arrogance only meets the definition of elitism when the feeling of superiority is paired with a sense of increased entitlement, and that definition does not accurately describe this community.
I'm going to be lazy and reuse an old post here, slightly edited because you're not acting like a tool like the last guy was and are thus less deserving of my venomous bile...
As I was attempting to communicate in my original post above (though perhaps not with complete success), the perceived attitude of the Linux community is one of elitism.
Elitist:
1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.
2.
a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.
b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
Ok, now what is there in this definition that matches the developers? Are they expecting favoured treatment from someone because they are developers? No. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are developers? No. Are they attempting to use their developer status to control anyone? No.
Now, lets apply this test to the user. Are users expecting favoured treatment from developers because they are users? Yes, they're demanding that the developers should cater to their needs. Are they making demands that they feel they have an intrinsic entitlement to because they are a user? Yes, they appear to think that being the user makes them the King, and apparently they're used to being listened to when they make stupid demands like changing colors etc. Are they attempting to use their "user" status to control anyone? Well, your whole point was that there is some natural order to things that places them at the top of the heap because they are users, and that developers should bow to their wishes.
So, I guess what I'm basically saying is go learn what the word means before you use it in public. Elitism is based in a fundimental way upon a preoccupation with pecking order and thus with other people. Self-motivated developers who care nothing for others are not demonstrating that they are even vaguely elitist, on the contrary they are being utterly dismissive of the preoccupations that define the term.
No, no link, my brother is a student of genetic engineering and he was telling me about it last night. I think he did actually say it was about the cromosomes. My brother and sister are both bio-geeks and I'm more comfortable in the world of math, computers and physics, so I tend to pick up the gist of a lot of things but screw up the terminology :P
Considering the intermixing between cultures that occurs in modern society, as a species we're better off with as much genetic diversity as we can get until we manage to get off planet and remove the risk of a single superbug wiping us all out.
There is actually more genetic diversity within a 'race' than there are between them. Mixing them is not contributing significantly to greater diversity.
My point was that earlier in our history, a nasty virus could wipe out an entire pocket of humanity without having the opportunity to spread to others, but in our modern world it has ample opportunity to spread making genetic diversity that much more important. When we manage to get off planet, we'll reach that point again where a disease could, for example, wipe out every human on Earth, and from a "survival of man" perspective, that just means a whole "new" frontier for the survivors off Earth.
Open standards and Open Source have nothing to do with each other. There is plenty of closed source software that supports open standards.
Yes, but there is also plenty of closed source software that is unable to compete with open source projects on quality, and maintains an undeserved prominence within society solely on the basis of their closed standard, which creates a divide on the issue with a lot of the same players as in the OSS debate.
MS and Office is a great example. They are a bunch of useless hacks, and therefore they need to use these tactics or no one would use their crap anymore.
Contrast this with Adobe. They use existing open standards and release the specifications for the standards they create, yet because of the quality of their work, they securely maintain their position.
You can really gauge the quality of a successful software company by their attitude towards open standards. If they are happy to support them, they must have confidence in the quality of their product and see a benefit in opening the door for more software that can consume the data they produce. If, on the other hand, they are afraid of them and fight them at every step, then they reveal a lack of confidence in their products quality and an understanding at the organizational level that they are getting away with unloading their crap on the public mainly because they hold them hostage and must continue to do so if they are to remain successful.
It also occurs to me that there is a lot of new money in the software industry for those who are prepared to sell out their userbase. The big drive for DRM is a great example... large companies who are so confident that people will be forced to buy their software based on the closed-standard lock-in that they are pursuing money from the entertainment giants in exchange for turning our own computers against us. When you can accept money from third parties as payment for crippling and sabotaging your own product to the detriment of your customers and still achieve record sales, that's a pretty screaming indicator that you're unfairly controlling the marketplace.