Like another poster noted, I was talking about Windows sales being supported by Office monopoly, not the other way round.
I can understand it wasn't instantly clear though, as the Microsoft monopoly in office software is not a fact (as in proven-in-court). My guess is that if they don't remove that Wine-sniffing code it will be.
I agree to your general rant, but in this case ActiveX is actually defendable - I mean, the alternative is downloading a binary and executing it locally. How is that any safer?
If it wanted to restrict the availability of patches to people whose last names when converted to ASCII sum to an odd number, they're entirely within their rights.
For the hundredth time: true, except for monopolies. It's not legal to use a monopoly (Office) to create/support another one (Windows).
I have to disagree: these things are very much related. It's simply business as you say, but we have to remember business is different for a monopoly.
Consider these facts/hypotheses:
* MS has a monopoly in office software
* MS prevents people from using legal copies of Office on Linux
In other words Microsoft is leveraging their dominance in office software to boost Windows sales. For a normal company that's ok, but for a monopoly this is illegal. The only remaining question is this: is Office really a monopoly? I believe so.
They don't have to make it easier, but if you read the discussion (or even the blurb on this page), you'll find that they are actively making it harder. And that's a pretty clear violation of anti-trust laws (as this means they are actually bundling Windows OS with the office suit).
Of course, I also have the opinion that if there's no victim then there's no crime. Take this as you will.
I'll take it as an excuse to tell a story.:)
A couple of years back a guy ran over and killed a little girl very near my home. This young man was a speed enthusiast, drove a powerful BMW and had "Stockholm Getaway" (a video of crazy speeding through a city) in the glove box. When the accident happened he was speeding through a red light.
Those are the facts. Now, to make this more interesting, let's presume that he had a habit of speeding and running red lights. It's probable that he wouldn't have got caught, at least not often, since there are not many traffic cops around here.
My take is this: if he had had a larger chance of getting caught of speeding and running red lights, he probably wouldn't have done it so often... maybe not in that particular intersection on that particular day.
You probably guessed that we disagree on 'victimless' crimes.
Actually, I dunno why they give a damn about browser marketshare, ignoring that having a dominant browser that only really works on their platform keeps people using their cash-cow OS so they can view MS-HTML websites without difficulty and reap the latest in spyware technology.
I'd guess XAML.
They want to preserve a large presence in the web browser market so that their rich-client-UI-language will automatically have a hundreds of millions of clients deployed. Compare this to the problems they had (and still have) with getting.net deployed.
It's silly that MS has to remove applications from Windows, they should be foreced not to install every single application and feature by deafult
Why? If people really want that kind of package, why should we stop Microsoft from providing it? The point of demanding Microsoft to provide an alternative is two-fold:
Let Microsoft offer their customers what the customers want.
Force Microsoft to provide a version thats reduced in features and in price - this way OEMs can offer their customers a cheaper OS with another media player. This hopefully prevents MS from abusing their monopoly. THIS WAY NO-ONE NEEDS TO INSTALL TWO APPLICATIONS.
I agree it was a PR show, and maybe a warning as well - "we're cabable of playing hardball, so behave". I also believe you are a little misinformed on the stated reason for this crusade against Microsoft.
On the multi-media side, Windows Media Player has been replaced by another proprietary hardware-software combo (iPod).
[...]
Congratulations to the stupid Euro government!
Stuff being proprietary is not the problem (or rather in my opinion it is a problem, but it's a different one, and solvable in the marketplace without legislation). The stated reason for the manouver was the abuse of monopoly position - nothing to do with proprietary hardware or software per se.
And as someone mentioned, there is no European government, stupid or otherwise. I doubt you wanted to know this, but maybe someone really was wondering who makes the decisions in the EU... The major institutions are:
Parliament (elected by peoples of the Member States);
Council (represents the governments of member countries);
Commission (driving force, executive body);
Court of Justice (ensures compliance with the law);
Court of Auditors (controls the EU budget).
The closest thing to a government would be the Comission.
I'm amazed how this PhD-pantyhose guy always manages to get good mods with his pseudo-intelligent opinions...
Mr. Pan Tarhei Hosé says Buffington wants to exploit the search engine rating systems and the whole post is pretty much based on that. He is referring to Pagerank, I suppose. I just don't understand how he gets from blogging-for-money to search engine spamming.
Your ideas intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. If you guys are sure you are better at defining 'good content' than the/. editors, set up your own site -- with superior content you'll easily dethrone Slashdot as the number one geek news site and make loads of money.
The system is pretty simple: the editors decide what's "stuff that matters" around here, we don't. we get to decide if we read the site or not...
Your comment tells me you haven't been involved in creating software that tries to interoperate with Outlook... By the way: did you read the document you linked to? It mostly lists the parts of RFC2445 Outlook does not support.
Believe me, there is no standard way to get your data out of Outlook once you put it there. Almost every method of communicating with Outlook is fundamentally flawed - the ical support is haphazard (and, in some installations, nonexistant), and the export functionality is a joke.
The Mad Magazine story is, if not true, at least a well propagated lie:
According to the story MAD published Knuths "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in 1957. In the article the basic unit of force was named "whatmeworry" and the fundamental unit of length was defined as the thickness of MAD magazine #26. These scientific breakthroughs are now known as the first publication of Professor Knuth - he must be proud.
I'm not familiar with the technical term doo-dad, but most of the stuff AdAware reports is pretty harmless - "most recently used"-lists and cookies - which you end up with on any platform.
If your Windows system gets multiple real spyware items just like that, there is something (unusually) wrong with it. I just ran AdAware for the first time in months on a win2k box that's online all the time - and found nothing. Maybe you should ask a windows guy to check your system;)
"shut the fuck up", "NOBODY gives a shit about OGG" - how constructive...
This is a chicken-egg problem, that's true. Saying that ogg is non-existant until all players accept it is false though:
A small amount of people (like me) prefer free formats, and will select devices that support ogg. If this amount grows to a certain point, even mainstream manufacturers will start implementing ogg decoders...
If you don't like ogg, don't use it. You don't have to start shouting at people if they choose otherwise.
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Your evaluation would have been a little more credible if you had even mentioned the quarterly dividends and the special 3$ dividend just two months ago...
Having 90% market share alone doesn't make you a monopoly. Having 90% market share and actively stopping consumers from switching is.
Sorry, but this is just not true... Monopoly means lack of competition and substitutes (so a 90% market share pretty much makes you a monopoly). Usually there are also barriers to market entry, but I've never seen a definition that contained "actively stopping your customers from switching".
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand it wasn't instantly clear though, as the Microsoft monopoly in office software is not a fact (as in proven-in-court). My guess is that if they don't remove that Wine-sniffing code it will be.
I agree to your general rant, but in this case ActiveX is actually defendable - I mean, the alternative is downloading a binary and executing it locally. How is that any safer?
Consider these facts/hypotheses:
* MS has a monopoly in office software
* MS prevents people from using legal copies of Office on Linux
In other words Microsoft is leveraging their dominance in office software to boost Windows sales. For a normal company that's ok, but for a monopoly this is illegal. The only remaining question is this: is Office really a monopoly? I believe so.
They don't have to make it easier, but if you read the discussion (or even the blurb on this page), you'll find that they are actively making it harder. And that's a pretty clear violation of anti-trust laws (as this means they are actually bundling Windows OS with the office suit).
Still, I'm left wondering what the grandparent meant with 'true 3D display'... It's not exactly a well defined term.
A couple of years back a guy ran over and killed a little girl very near my home. This young man was a speed enthusiast, drove a powerful BMW and had "Stockholm Getaway" (a video of crazy speeding through a city) in the glove box. When the accident happened he was speeding through a red light.
Those are the facts. Now, to make this more interesting, let's presume that he had a habit of speeding and running red lights. It's probable that he wouldn't have got caught, at least not often, since there are not many traffic cops around here. My take is this: if he had had a larger chance of getting caught of speeding and running red lights, he probably wouldn't have done it so often... maybe not in that particular intersection on that particular day.
You probably guessed that we disagree on 'victimless' crimes.
They want to preserve a large presence in the web browser market so that their rich-client-UI-language will automatically have a hundreds of millions of clients deployed. Compare this to the problems they had (and still have) with getting .net deployed.
And as someone mentioned, there is no European government, stupid or otherwise. I doubt you wanted to know this, but maybe someone really was wondering who makes the decisions in the EU... The major institutions are:
-
Parliament (elected by peoples of the Member States);
-
Council (represents the governments of member countries);
-
Commission (driving force, executive body);
-
Court of Justice (ensures compliance with the law);
-
Court of Auditors (controls the EU budget).
The closest thing to a government would be the Comission.Mr. Pan Tarhei Hosé says Buffington wants to exploit the search engine rating systems and the whole post is pretty much based on that. He is referring to Pagerank, I suppose. I just don't understand how he gets from blogging-for-money to search engine spamming.
The system is pretty simple: the editors decide what's "stuff that matters" around here, we don't. we get to decide if we read the site or not...
Believe me, there is no standard way to get your data out of Outlook once you put it there. Almost every method of communicating with Outlook is fundamentally flawed - the ical support is haphazard (and, in some installations, nonexistant), and the export functionality is a joke.
How is that any better than saying 'No one uses unsafe code in .NET'?
According to the story MAD published Knuths "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in 1957. In the article the basic unit of force was named "whatmeworry" and the fundamental unit of length was defined as the thickness of MAD magazine #26. These scientific breakthroughs are now known as the first publication of Professor Knuth - he must be proud.
http://wordpress.org/support/10/12623
If your Windows system gets multiple real spyware items just like that, there is something (unusually) wrong with it. I just ran AdAware for the first time in months on a win2k box that's online all the time - and found nothing. Maybe you should ask a windows guy to check your system ;)
Or, to put numbers on the features:
1. traces
2. geographically
3. incoming connections
XTraceRoute seems to accomplish 1 and 2. Since it doesn't do 3, it's not what the grandparent wants, right?
This is a chicken-egg problem, that's true. Saying that ogg is non-existant until all players accept it is false though: A small amount of people (like me) prefer free formats, and will select devices that support ogg. If this amount grows to a certain point, even mainstream manufacturers will start implementing ogg decoders...
If you don't like ogg, don't use it. You don't have to start shouting at people if they choose otherwise.
I'd hardly call a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft "a 3rd party company"... They're even located at Redmond.
That was a good rant, no doubt about that. Now, was there a point relating to usability guidelines somewhere?
MSFT Dividend FAQ