I would take the marketing material from the CPU manufacturers with a grain of salt since they are the ones that will benefit from people chucking their hardware out and buying the latest and greatest. If VIA's shit can run Vista, just about anything as far back as the Pentium III 800MHz/Athlon 800MHz or further probably can.
There's only a tiny fraction of EU citizens that will ever be affected by this ruling. The most benefit is to be had by US competitors to Microsoft. The EU is acting as an attack dog for US corporations just like the US was in the last anti-trust trial with MS.
If IBM gained a monopoly on providing support for GPLed software, the EU could look a them and say "FREE MONEY!" and take them to court. Really, they could probably do it now if they had enough people willing to just go along with milking whoever they wanted.
They are justified by the current system and their responsibility to their shareholders may eventually REQUIRE them to use the patents to prevent a loss in share value from "unfair" "patent infringing" competition.
It is commonly agreed that Netscape 4.x and the first releases of Netscaped 6 sucked big juicy donkey nuts. I can't imagine them keeping any sort of lead over IE even if MS only offered it as a free download. In fact, they were getting owned by IE4 before Win98 was ever released.
I might suggest not whoring the Apple iPod with an apple logo and the iTunes with apple logo and the iTunes Music Stores on the www.apple.com website and bundling iTunes and advertising iPods at the point of sale with Apple Macs... Apple definately isn't waist deep in the music business...
The ability to program for the interface is probably mostly already in VS 2k3 and 2005. Neither Office or VS blend into Windows and each other, so I don't think blending in with one another is a driving factor among those teams. More likely they just make sure their interface doesn't turn into shit when ran on a different version of Windows or the next release. That means doing their own widgets for most of the interface;o
Dual cores aren't much use because software developers haven't been taking advantage of threads and processes outside of servers. I would be surprised if there wasn't a ton of stuff in MS Office that could be parallelized into threads internally to speed processing of data.
The average user isn't affected by Luna anyway. I think most tests have shown that the whole turn off Luna for better performance thing is just a placebo effect.
I believe the number one problem with Windows developers and the progress bar is splitting a task into multiple small ones and reusing the progress bar for each one by restarting it.:P Heaven forbid they use a second one and show us the progress of the entire task as well. Some of them don't even label the damn thing or bother to change it after reseting the bar:o
In a world where consumers have no choice but to sign papers stating the other party may change the terms at any time (it's not a contract, it's a terms of service document!) in order to get through their daily lives, what do you propose people do? The government basically lets corporations trample citizens because it's the corporations that line the government coffers and not those mere "citizens"...
The tiered tax system means that the people the government works the hardest for (the corporations/stinking rich, then the wealthy, then the middle class, then the poor) pay for the THEIR fair share of the work being done for THEM. Anything else would mean lowering the tax on the rich and increasing the tax on the non-rich to the breaking point to make up for it while the government continues to go to war to protect the interests of only the wealhty.
I don't know if being the fifth or sixth guy on their list is a "nomination". They nominated the first and maybe second and third guys. After those were rejected, the list was probably more like "people we don't THINK will fk us". They were obviously wrong.
I'm more surprised they didn't reject them all and fine Microsoft for not complying with their demands for a list of candidates. I also find the 5 year contract interesting. The EU essentially said they intend to milk Microsoft for non-compliance for a MINIMUM of 5 years and they're counting on this guy to keep the charade going. If Microsoft came into compliance on the deadline, there wouldn't be much of a need to give the guy a 5 year contract. Throw in a few blood thirsty competitors (one of which was a monopolist themselves) who want Microsoft smashed to bits and you have a pretty secure revenue stream.
I don't know if intentionally exposing them to forbidden court material is "ill-conceived". It's kind of hard to accidentally send transcripts to witnesses... I'm sure she'll get to write a book about the trial.
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I would take the marketing material from the CPU manufacturers with a grain of salt since they are the ones that will benefit from people chucking their hardware out and buying the latest and greatest. If VIA's shit can run Vista, just about anything as far back as the Pentium III 800MHz/Athlon 800MHz or further probably can.
Competitors...the same ones that touched off the lawsuit? The "nominee" that was fifth on the list and apparently isn't even a programmer?
In a system where judges are elected, they start to rule based on getting elected again rather than on the law.
There's only a tiny fraction of EU citizens that will ever be affected by this ruling. The most benefit is to be had by US competitors to Microsoft. The EU is acting as an attack dog for US corporations just like the US was in the last anti-trust trial with MS.
If IBM gained a monopoly on providing support for GPLed software, the EU could look a them and say "FREE MONEY!" and take them to court. Really, they could probably do it now if they had enough people willing to just go along with milking whoever they wanted.
Well, most of it will likely work regardless or their OEM sent them a disc of drivers with the laptop that will make them work.
They are justified by the current system and their responsibility to their shareholders may eventually REQUIRE them to use the patents to prevent a loss in share value from "unfair" "patent infringing" competition.
It is commonly agreed that Netscape 4.x and the first releases of Netscaped 6 sucked big juicy donkey nuts. I can't imagine them keeping any sort of lead over IE even if MS only offered it as a free download. In fact, they were getting owned by IE4 before Win98 was ever released.
I might suggest not whoring the Apple iPod with an apple logo and the iTunes with apple logo and the iTunes Music Stores on the www.apple.com website and bundling iTunes and advertising iPods at the point of sale with Apple Macs... Apple definately isn't waist deep in the music business...
Apple isn't associated with any music selling? WTF? They have the iPod and iTunes on their website. How could someone not connect those dots?
If they won't provide the manpower to do the work now, why do you think they'd pay for manpower + profit to a contractor?
It's hard to consider the United States Xenophobic when most of the world really does hate us.
The ability to program for the interface is probably mostly already in VS 2k3 and 2005. Neither Office or VS blend into Windows and each other, so I don't think blending in with one another is a driving factor among those teams. More likely they just make sure their interface doesn't turn into shit when ran on a different version of Windows or the next release. That means doing their own widgets for most of the interface ;o
Dual cores aren't much use because software developers haven't been taking advantage of threads and processes outside of servers. I would be surprised if there wasn't a ton of stuff in MS Office that could be parallelized into threads internally to speed processing of data.
fork creates a child process, not a thread.
The average user isn't affected by Luna anyway. I think most tests have shown that the whole turn off Luna for better performance thing is just a placebo effect.
They should fire them because nobody is accusing Microsoft of not having graphics as good as OS X...oh wait.
OpenOffice.org is not mostly written in Java. Having too much Java in some OO.o 2.0 stuff got everyone up in a fuss...
And a large number of domains on Apache/Linux are servers in a geek's mother's basement that are equally non-productive to the rest of us.
I believe the number one problem with Windows developers and the progress bar is splitting a task into multiple small ones and reusing the progress bar for each one by restarting it. :P Heaven forbid they use a second one and show us the progress of the entire task as well. Some of them don't even label the damn thing or bother to change it after reseting the bar :o
In a world where consumers have no choice but to sign papers stating the other party may change the terms at any time (it's not a contract, it's a terms of service document!) in order to get through their daily lives, what do you propose people do? The government basically lets corporations trample citizens because it's the corporations that line the government coffers and not those mere "citizens"...
The tiered tax system means that the people the government works the hardest for (the corporations/stinking rich, then the wealthy, then the middle class, then the poor) pay for the THEIR fair share of the work being done for THEM. Anything else would mean lowering the tax on the rich and increasing the tax on the non-rich to the breaking point to make up for it while the government continues to go to war to protect the interests of only the wealhty.
I don't know if being the fifth or sixth guy on their list is a "nomination". They nominated the first and maybe second and third guys. After those were rejected, the list was probably more like "people we don't THINK will fk us". They were obviously wrong.
I'm more surprised they didn't reject them all and fine Microsoft for not complying with their demands for a list of candidates. I also find the 5 year contract interesting. The EU essentially said they intend to milk Microsoft for non-compliance for a MINIMUM of 5 years and they're counting on this guy to keep the charade going. If Microsoft came into compliance on the deadline, there wouldn't be much of a need to give the guy a 5 year contract. Throw in a few blood thirsty competitors (one of which was a monopolist themselves) who want Microsoft smashed to bits and you have a pretty secure revenue stream.
I don't know if intentionally exposing them to forbidden court material is "ill-conceived". It's kind of hard to accidentally send transcripts to witnesses... I'm sure she'll get to write a book about the trial.