I did read your entire post, and this statement -- that synthesizing traditional oil is just as easy as growing vegetable oil -- is what I'm objecting to! Synthesizing oil is much harder than growing it, and the amount of oil that would need to be grown is not impractically high. If you'd read my post, you would have understood that.
IE: Safari is free. IE can't make money on the Mac platform. Why would MS keep putting money into something that they can't make money on?
Firefox is free. IE can't make money on the Windows platform. Why would MS keep putting money into something that it can't make money on?
Virtual PC: Again, MS can't make money with this. Parellels[sic] and VMWare kick Virtual PC in the ass and they decided to focus on improving their Windows version. Who would buy Virtual PC 2007 for Mac if it was released next year?
At the time, neither Parallels nor VMware (using OS X as the host OS) existed. In fact, VMware still doesn't! If MS had chosen to continue developing VirtualPC it could have probably beaten both of the competitor products to market.
Never releasing Access, Project, or Visio for the Mac: So now it's anticompetitive to not spend millions of dollars making every piece of software cross platform?
The OP asserts that enough demand for those programs on a Mac platform that it would be profitable. Therefore, MS could be forgoing that profit for only one reason: to tie Office to Windows. Yes Virginia, for a monopoly, product tying is illegal.
Killing Windows Media Player for Mac: This is the closest thing you have to unethical. I would be surprised if it's illegal, and if it was than the law is too far reaching. The only reason this is a problem is that it locks the proprietary DRM to Windows. There should be a solution to this (e.g. opening up the DRM format for 3rd party players, easier said than done for obvious security reasons).
Once again, you're ignoring the fact that the rules become different after the DoJ rules a company to be abusing its monopoly!
I think they should use the same subset for Office scripting so that people can port their VBA to VB.NET.
VBA and VB.NET are like Javascript and Java -- not even slightly the same thing.
But make no mistake, this is not anticompetitive. If anything it's pro competition because it gives their customers a reason to look at alternatives like OO where they had no reason before.
No, it's anticompetitive because it attempts to force companies with a large "investment" in VBA to switch from Mac OS to Windows.
It's not restraint, it's using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
Although I agree with you, it's still partly due to restraint too. Without restraint, we could just nuke the whole of Iraq into glass and be done with it.
"MPEG-4/MP3" and "H.264/AAC" are still proprietary formats. What I'm upset about is that this video hasn't been made available in an Ogg container with Theora and Vorbis streams.
They don't quite Bill's 6 second boot time either - but both systems clock in right around 10 seconds, and that's pretty hard to complain about.
And yet, as a Mac user I can manage to do it! My 3-year-old iBook has always woken from sleep in approximately one second. Six seconds -- let alone ten -- would be unbearably long in comparison.
Each new release, each patch, each service pack I keep waiting for the perfect, all-right-I'll-settle-for-well-behaved advanced power control.
If you want that, get a Mac. My iBook has been waking from sleep reliably (and almost instantaneously!) since 2003, and the new Intel Macs can hibernate, too.
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Not to mention that those "expert strategic moves" you mention are also "illegal anticompetitive moves" when carried out by a monopoly convicted of abusing its position, such as Microsoft.
I didn't say they used Java as an intro language; by the time students learn Java they've already had a semester based on either Python or Matlab.
Now, a really good intro language is Scheme (which is what was taught before the switch to Python and Matlab). IMHO, it's best to instill the idea of programming without side-effects early, and Scheme does a much better job of that than imperative languages like Python, Matlab, Java, or C.
Junior level? No, pointers come in the third CS class, which for any self-respecting CS major is taken first semester of sophomore year. At Tech, the progression for CS majors goes "Python->Java->C" (although when I was doing it, it went "Scheme->Java->C" instead). For everybody else (i.e., engineering students) it goes "Matlab->Java," which is unfortunate because I think Scheme did a better job of teaching fundamental programming concepts than Matlab.
So what? For once, that's a political position I can actually support! : )
Your description is biased, not informative.
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You're misrepresenting the situation. People are actually using two different definitions for QoS: it can mean prioritizing by protocol (i.e. HTTP vs. VOIP vs. IRC vs. BitTorrent vs. SMTP), as you mentioned, but it can also mean prioritizing by origin (i.e. HTTP from MSN vs. HTTP from Google, or VOIP from Vonage vs. VOIP from Comcast).
The people opposed to Net Neutrality claim that it will be used only for the first type of prioritization, which is by protocol. This group primarily includes the ISPs. If this really is the kind of QoS that would happen, there's really no reason for anyone to oppose it.
On the other hand, the people in favor of Net Neutrality claim that the kind of QoS the ISPs really want to do is the second kind, for their own benefit. For example, they say the ISPs want to pit content providers like MSN and Google against each other to see who'll pay more money to get their content delivered at higher priority. Or as another example, the ISP could try suffocate Vonage by prioritizing its own VOIP service over Vonage's. This is the type of QoS that what would lead to stifling of competition and free speech, if it were to be implemented.
He is trying to capitalize on it! He's complaining that the computer charged him $72 -- which would have been correct, if he hadn't been erroneously quoted "two one-thousandths of a cent per kilobyte" to begin with. The reason he's failing to make any headway is that the Verizon dumbasses can't comprehend that when you multiply.002 CENTS times however many kilobytes, that the answer is still in CENTS -- they keep reading the result as dollars.
Re:My God ... where do tey find those guys?
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'll bet an English teacher would get equally mad with you.
Vegetable oil is still a hydrocarbon fuel, and releases various gases and particles upon combustion. Furthermore, vegetable oil is no more a 'renewable' fuel than standard ff oil.
There's one key fact you're forgetting: we can grow more! Not only is that what makes it "renewable" (as opposed to fossil fuels, which we can't make more of on a large scale short of waiting a hundred million years or so), but it also negates the last major unsolved problem* of those "various gases" because the new plants absorb the CO2 produced from burning the old ones!
You're mighty arrogant for someone so completely wrong. You might want to fix that.
(*NOx, particulates, etc. aren't really problems anymore because they can be filtered out of the exhaust.)
So all the people who make films and songs are idiots?
No, you're the idiot because you seem to have incredible difficulty understanding this fact:
The people who made those films and songs did so with full knowledge of the state of copyright law at that time. If that was unsatisfactory, then they shouldn't have made it in the first place. If it was satisfactory, they have nothing to complain about now. Either way, they have no grounds to retroactively change the agreement!
This petition is nothing but bullshit motivated by petty greed. Did I make it clear enough for you?
LOL (literally)! That's the most incredibly amazing idea on this subject I've ever heard! Either start lobbying about it or email it to the EFF RIGHT NOW!
Perfect! You've illustrated exactly the reason estate taxes exist here in the US: we specifically noted the example of the British nobility, and sought to prevent the same thing from happening here.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you've never used a Mac. Get one, and all the "suckitude" (that's related to power management, at least) will magically disappear.
I did read your entire post, and this statement -- that synthesizing traditional oil is just as easy as growing vegetable oil -- is what I'm objecting to! Synthesizing oil is much harder than growing it, and the amount of oil that would need to be grown is not impractically high. If you'd read my post, you would have understood that.
Firefox is free. IE can't make money on the Windows platform. Why would MS keep putting money into something that it can't make money on?
At the time, neither Parallels nor VMware (using OS X as the host OS) existed. In fact, VMware still doesn't! If MS had chosen to continue developing VirtualPC it could have probably beaten both of the competitor products to market.
The OP asserts that enough demand for those programs on a Mac platform that it would be profitable. Therefore, MS could be forgoing that profit for only one reason: to tie Office to Windows. Yes Virginia, for a monopoly, product tying is illegal.
Once again, you're ignoring the fact that the rules become different after the DoJ rules a company to be abusing its monopoly!
VBA and VB.NET are like Javascript and Java -- not even slightly the same thing.
No, it's anticompetitive because it attempts to force companies with a large "investment" in VBA to switch from Mac OS to Windows.
Although I agree with you, it's still partly due to restraint too. Without restraint, we could just nuke the whole of Iraq into glass and be done with it.
Stop looking at people's MySpace pages!
"MPEG-4/MP3" and "H.264/AAC" are still proprietary formats. What I'm upset about is that this video hasn't been made available in an Ogg container with Theora and Vorbis streams.
And yet, as a Mac user I can manage to do it! My 3-year-old iBook has always woken from sleep in approximately one second. Six seconds -- let alone ten -- would be unbearably long in comparison.
Yeah, right -- I bet it had a buffer overflow in printf or something!
If you want that, get a Mac. My iBook has been waking from sleep reliably (and almost instantaneously!) since 2003, and the new Intel Macs can hibernate, too.
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Not to mention that those "expert strategic moves" you mention are also "illegal anticompetitive moves" when carried out by a monopoly convicted of abusing its position, such as Microsoft.
I didn't say they used Java as an intro language; by the time students learn Java they've already had a semester based on either Python or Matlab.
Now, a really good intro language is Scheme (which is what was taught before the switch to Python and Matlab). IMHO, it's best to instill the idea of programming without side-effects early, and Scheme does a much better job of that than imperative languages like Python, Matlab, Java, or C.
Junior level? No, pointers come in the third CS class, which for any self-respecting CS major is taken first semester of sophomore year. At Tech, the progression for CS majors goes "Python->Java->C" (although when I was doing it, it went "Scheme->Java->C" instead). For everybody else (i.e., engineering students) it goes "Matlab->Java," which is unfortunate because I think Scheme did a better job of teaching fundamental programming concepts than Matlab.
You know why schools teach Java instead of C++? So they don't have to teach pointers first. At least that's how it seems to work at Georgia Tech...
Not necessarily, but I don't think it's the government's job to decide.
So what? For once, that's a political position I can actually support! : )
You're misrepresenting the situation. People are actually using two different definitions for QoS: it can mean prioritizing by protocol (i.e. HTTP vs. VOIP vs. IRC vs. BitTorrent vs. SMTP), as you mentioned, but it can also mean prioritizing by origin (i.e. HTTP from MSN vs. HTTP from Google, or VOIP from Vonage vs. VOIP from Comcast).
The people opposed to Net Neutrality claim that it will be used only for the first type of prioritization, which is by protocol. This group primarily includes the ISPs. If this really is the kind of QoS that would happen, there's really no reason for anyone to oppose it.
On the other hand, the people in favor of Net Neutrality claim that the kind of QoS the ISPs really want to do is the second kind, for their own benefit. For example, they say the ISPs want to pit content providers like MSN and Google against each other to see who'll pay more money to get their content delivered at higher priority. Or as another example, the ISP could try suffocate Vonage by prioritizing its own VOIP service over Vonage's. This is the type of QoS that what would lead to stifling of competition and free speech, if it were to be implemented.
You know, I've argued with you about this before. That being the case, I'll just reiterate the fact that you're a dumbass and move on, okay?
He is trying to capitalize on it! He's complaining that the computer charged him $72 -- which would have been correct, if he hadn't been erroneously quoted "two one-thousandths of a cent per kilobyte" to begin with. The reason he's failing to make any headway is that the Verizon dumbasses can't comprehend that when you multiply .002 CENTS times however many kilobytes, that the answer is still in CENTS -- they keep reading the result as dollars.
I'll bet an English teacher would get equally mad with you.
my charset doesn't have capital letters, you insensitive clod!
(man that joke would have been better if slashdot accepted japanese characters...)
There's one key fact you're forgetting: we can grow more! Not only is that what makes it "renewable" (as opposed to fossil fuels, which we can't make more of on a large scale short of waiting a hundred million years or so), but it also negates the last major unsolved problem* of those "various gases" because the new plants absorb the CO2 produced from burning the old ones!
You're mighty arrogant for someone so completely wrong. You might want to fix that.
(*NOx, particulates, etc. aren't really problems anymore because they can be filtered out of the exhaust.)
No, you're the idiot because you seem to have incredible difficulty understanding this fact:
The people who made those films and songs did so with full knowledge of the state of copyright law at that time. If that was unsatisfactory, then they shouldn't have made it in the first place. If it was satisfactory, they have nothing to complain about now. Either way, they have no grounds to retroactively change the agreement!
This petition is nothing but bullshit motivated by petty greed. Did I make it clear enough for you?
LOL (literally)! That's the most incredibly amazing idea on this subject I've ever heard! Either start lobbying about it or email it to the EFF RIGHT NOW!
Perfect! You've illustrated exactly the reason estate taxes exist here in the US: we specifically noted the example of the British nobility, and sought to prevent the same thing from happening here.
I hate to break it to Johnny boy, but copyright is a possession!