With all considerable respect due to Hemos, I'd say this is also an ending of sorts. Hopefully it will become more and more difficult for people to pretend that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
You can still be a legitimate supporter of Microsoft and yet face facts that MS is an monopoly. Hopefully know we can have a more intelligent debate about what if anything should be done about it.
..is one of the best albums ever made. Paul Weller is certainly a genius and an extremely worthy soul. But would there have even been a Jam without the Who? In any case, I can't beleive that either of them even slightly worry about it. I imagine that there's just mutual admiration.
"Trying to forget your generation...your generation don't mean a thing to me."
I'd love to justify one of these puppies for my work, and could probably even convince Someone Else tm to pay for it, but no go, as I can't even justify it to myself.
I do almost all Java development and got all hot and bothered because there was a fairly recent vintage Ultra 5 available for my use at a research center I was visiting. Yum, right? Wrong. After installing all the requisite software (yuck!) I started up my app and found the performance on the Sun box was significantly slower than I was used to. I ended up aborting the whole thing and going back to an older NT box that was lying around.
Ironically, at least for more desktop oriented stuff, Java actually seems to be slower on Sun boxes. I'd love to find a reasonably priced ultra fast Java development box, but right now thats a Windows x86 box running NT. Hopefully with IBM's release of their blazing JDK on Linux, things will change, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd love to hear from anyone who can contradict me or add anything. It'd be nice to work on something else; I even find myself coding on my Mac from time to time!
No doubt. What you say makes sense though..there's such a huge stretch between knowing illegal practices are going on and proving it. Intention is almost impossible to prove without a smoking gun. It'll be interesting to see what comes of the current legal situation.
BTW, your mention of RCA reminded me about the recent short piece in the New Yorker comparing RCA's 1920s-30s stock chart and cultural importance to AOLs. (Huge boom, huge bust.) Alsmost as good a comparison could be made with Microsoft. We could hope to see MS bust as badly as RCA, but perhaps it wouldn't make a difference anyway.
Its not like modern day radio sucks less because RCA isn't running it. Welcome to late capitalism.
Right, none if this information is even close to being news to me, but if you read my original post carefully (perhaps I just didn't make the point strongly enough) this is precisely the issue I was asking about. Thats the problem with discussion threads, everyone assumes LCD. So I'll try again, but more explicitly this time:
Couldn't one make an argument that this aquisition threatens competition in the overall productivity applications market? For instance, spreadsheets, word processors, personal databases, mail readers, etc.., all used to have healthy seperate markets. With the introduction of suites, these markets became irrelevant in the face of the Microsoft jugernaut. Same thing in the OS market. There used to be a lot more utilities, add-ons, etc.., MS has essentially destroyed this market too. I'm not arguning whether this is a Good Thing, but it is undeniable that these used to be seperate markets, and now they are not.
Couldn't the same argument be made about Visio? If it is integrated into the Office product line for instance, than this will clearly be a use of monopoly power to dominate the digramming tools market. Further, by creating a situation where no healthy third party digramming packages exist this creates a situation where it is unlikely that strong packages will be developed for other platforms either.
I know its a bit of a stretch but not that great of one. Microsoft really is trying to engineer a situation where they will be selling one must-have uber client suite, one uber server suite, and one uber developer suite. If everyone 'must-have' the suite, there will be almost zero incentive to buy anything but Microsoft products. Oh wait a minute, why am I talking in future tense? Visio was just about the only significant Windows product not made by Microsoft. To ignore this or pretend that all of these supposedly 'separate' markets is ignoring the obvious.
Are you sure about this? Yes, of course I understand that having a monopoly is not illegal..thats not what I was asking. I thought that extending by buying with or merging with other companies is, or at least is regulated in some way by the FTC.
For instance, if Standard Oil tried to buy Podunk Oil, it might be a problem. I mean, isn't this the reason that the FTC puts M&As under such rigorous review? This kind of review happens all the time, for instance in transportation and telecommunications. When Conrail was sold, fed regulators made Norfolk Southern and CSX split the assets instead of allowing one company to flat out aquire the other. Regulators carefully oversee Airline mergers to prevent one Airline from establishing a lock on a particular market.
What do people think of the anti-trust implications of this? I know that it would be very hard to make this case, buit if you look at the software productivity applications market as a whole, and not just individual markets, then its pretty clear that Microfot is trying to extend its Monopoly through aquisition which isn't legal. Any thoughts?
"Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that.
Where do you get that? That's not implied in 'pure' (whatever that means) Communism at all. And I think your modern use of commune and semantic definition of communism kind of miss the point.
But I agree that attitude or intention is important, if you will. And I don't think that most people give software away just as an afterthought. I think its actually motivating and nice to be able to just give something away, knowing that other people will find it useful, don't you think. Perhaps some people really do just realease freeware as an afterthought, but for a lot of folks its a real statement, not just of alturism, but ideals.
In any case, it does take some of you rtime and energy to give software away. Even if its just to ftp it somewhere, that's some effort that you're putting in that is providing no incremental benefit to you at all! In reality, you probably put more care and features into it knowing that other people will see and use it.
IMO, a lot of people have taken Ayn Rand, who had a lot of good things to say so much to heart that they're ideoligcally offended by basic genoristy. I don't think this is or should be the real libertarian ideal.
I think that Marx assumed that an economy (thanks to capitalism) capable of basically taking care of everyone would be a neccesary precursor to Communism. So you would need a culture of abundance, not scarcity. So I'm not sure that your argument applies.
I think when we are really free, then we can gradually afford to be generous and willingly give away the products of our minds and efforts. But this process will develop naturally, has to be entirely voluntary and can't be forced in any way. This is where all the so-called communists dictators got it wrong.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact same thing as Communists.
Not true. *() implies a method call since it implies paramaters; so this is definetly the form object.method(), and the original poster is right, this is obviously fake code written by someone who wasn't thinking about how real code is written.
OK, it was raining, but it was at least eighty degrees. Sounded better before you called me on it though. Re LUG, nope didn't even know there was one. I'm only a Linux wannabe anyway; got it on a few machines, but don't use it much yet. Waiting for a decent java vm..
"Just thinking about someone wearing one of those stupid-ass vests from the gap is enough to make me gag."
You said it. I saw two high school age Future Fraternity Members of America wearing these yesterday. In August. In Washington, D.C. You didn't see me calling them names or threatening to club them to death.
No, instead I reflected for a moment and realized that they were poor ignorant victims of a marketing machine.
Pet theory: A group of Gap marketeers (Gap owns Old Navy as well, btw) at a meeting earlier this year were kicking ideas around getting a little crazy and one of them said:
"I'll bet we have these little idiots so far under our spell that we can convince them to wear anything."
"Anything? I don't think so..."
"OK, I'll prove it. We'll design some cheap ass useless little vests, and if I can get more than 50% of the boomer brats to wear them, you owe me a case of White Zinfandel."
"You're on!"
I feel even worse because I'll have to be very carfeul where I wear the spiffy new Marker vest my wife bought me for skiing. Oh s***, I hope that doesn't mean that I've fallen under the spell too.... Help!!
But Matt, isn't it kind of funny precisely because it is the kind of comment that you can barely get away with? I mean, I thought it was a pretty good hit on people who are so paranoid about their sexual identity that they'd shy away from a site that even had the taint of gayness to it. That was my read anyway. I mean it was obviously meant ironically.
Its like this I think true stroy I heard that happened at Harvard:
Back when recycling hit big, and people first started putting all of these bins around for all kinds of recycled products, you know they'd have "White Paper" "Colored Paper" "Plastic Bottles" "Aluminum Cans".
Well, someone replaced one of the "Colored Paper" signs with a sign that read "Paper of Color". I thought that it was a kind of hilarious satire on people missing the basic point for all their concentration on labels and such, but apparantly the thought police at Harvard decided it was an evil joke and subjected the guy to disciplinary action and made hime make a Cultural-revolution style public confession.
I'm not dissing you, and it probably gets old seeing these kinds of jokes, but some of them (like Big gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride), really do help open the discussion up instead of closing it down.
I think one of the major reasons that relations between whites and blacks in this country are so largely f'ud up is that there is this huge taboo about talking or heaven forbid, even joking about race in public. So all of our little impressions, pet peeves, jokes, etc.. happen between memebrs of like minded groups, instead of being shared, and this drives people even farther apart.
I know its a very thin line, but we should be careful about making everything so serious, while of course speaking out against cruelty and hostility. What we need os more tolerance, and that means for obnoxious jokes too, not less.
Re:A bit'of history: No RAD Tools->Mac RIP in Bidn
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Beats me. These are just two great tastes that seem to go together. So yes, replace Wintel with Windows if it'll make you happy!
RAD is a good thing for some things
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Delphi for Linux
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Like the previous poster said, I'm not sure you really understand what RAD is.
IMO, RAD was good because it allowed programmers to do an end run around all the software engineering experts that would take a year to approve, specify, analyse, test, etc.., ad naseum, a simple corporate address book implementation, when someone could simply hack one out in a couple of days using a RAD tool, and easily fix any problems noticed after the users get a hold of it.
Not the methodology to use to design an MRI console or a Nuclear power plant, but works just great for some situations.
A bit'of history: No RAD Tools->Mac RIP in Bidness
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As others have pointed out, this is big news indeed, and critical to the future success of Linux.
Although this is often overlooked, especially by mainstream press, and was certainly missed by 'bad-old-days' Apple execs, the thing that really killed the Mac in business settings was not a lack of productivity apps, cost or bad marketing. It was the lack of a decent RAD environment. Not having tools that allowed you to easily create crossplatform frontends to corporate databases [so 4D doesn't count here] left the Mac in a ghetto for corporate creative professionals, scientists, etc.. [PowerBuilder was too little to late, and just took too many resources.] When standarization really took hold in the mid 90s, it was no wonder that Macs around the country got the boot. Its too bad Delphi was never made available for the Mac. (IIRC, Phillip Kahn hated the Macintosh, Bedrock notwithstanding, or perhaps withstanding!)
It's a fact: more than productivity apps, email, or anything else, corporate machines live and breath on custom database applications. And even with new models like distributed objects, etc.., don't expect mainline 4GL tools to go away _anytime_ soon.
I'm now one of those rah-rah Java distributed objects guys myself. But though I don't use Delphi (don't do much RDBMS development at all anymore), having it available for Linux is just the ticket, and is just as imporant as having a good office suite. This is good news for Borland, who will have the _only_ mainstream object-based RAD 4GL tool that will run on both Wintel and Linux. It is great news for Linux, and might be a significant milestone for an end to Wintel hegemony.
Bravo Borland!
Don't take all the criticism to heart John
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I think people's hatred of the one-eyed monster got the better of them.
Slashdot Mirror
With all considerable respect due to Hemos, I'd say this is also an ending of sorts. Hopefully it will become more and more difficult for people to pretend that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
You can still be a legitimate supporter of Microsoft and yet face facts that MS is an monopoly. Hopefully know we can have a more intelligent debate about what if anything should be done about it.
Time for a celebratory Drink!
Cheers!!
That's "Daddy Snookums" to you as long as you hide behind your pathetic anonymous existence.
Hope you're not carrying all that anger around IRL. Sounds like you're about reaady to go postal on someone.
..but, I hasten to add, still not as scary as anonymous cowards who can't help being nasty and, worse, are too cowardly to sign their name to it.
People who forget to log in before posting are really scary.
...
na na na na na na na na Batman!!
na na na na na na na na
na na na na na na na na
Batman!!
Batman!!!
..is one of the best albums ever made. Paul Weller is certainly a genius and an extremely worthy soul. But would there have even been a Jam without the Who? In any case, I can't beleive that either of them even slightly worry about it. I imagine that there's just mutual admiration.
"Trying to forget your generation...your generation don't mean a thing to me."
Sham 69
I'd love to justify one of these puppies for my work, and could probably even convince Someone Else tm to pay for it, but no go, as I can't even justify it to myself.
I do almost all Java development and got all hot and bothered because there was a fairly recent vintage Ultra 5 available for my use at a research center I was visiting. Yum, right? Wrong. After installing all the requisite software (yuck!) I started up my app and found the performance on the Sun box was significantly slower than I was used to. I ended up aborting the whole thing and going back to an older NT box that was lying around.
Ironically, at least for more desktop oriented stuff, Java actually seems to be slower on Sun boxes. I'd love to find a reasonably priced ultra fast Java development box, but right now thats a Windows x86 box running NT. Hopefully with IBM's release of their blazing JDK on Linux, things will change, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd love to hear from anyone who can contradict me or add anything. It'd be nice to work on something else; I even find myself coding on my Mac from time to time!
"And isn't it ironic..."
--The whole thing's kind of depressing, actually.
No doubt. What you say makes sense though..there's such a huge stretch between knowing illegal practices are going on and proving it. Intention is almost impossible to prove without a smoking gun. It'll be interesting to see what comes of the current legal situation.
BTW, your mention of RCA reminded me about the recent short piece in the New Yorker comparing RCA's 1920s-30s stock chart and cultural importance to AOLs. (Huge boom, huge bust.) Alsmost as good a comparison could be made with Microsoft. We could hope to see MS bust as badly as RCA, but perhaps it wouldn't make a difference anyway.
Its not like modern day radio sucks less because RCA isn't running it. Welcome to late capitalism.
Right, none if this information is even close to being news to me, but if you read my original post carefully (perhaps I just didn't make the point strongly enough) this is precisely the issue I was asking about. Thats the problem with discussion threads, everyone assumes LCD. So I'll try again, but more explicitly this time:
Couldn't one make an argument that this aquisition threatens competition in the overall productivity applications market? For instance, spreadsheets, word processors, personal databases, mail readers, etc.., all used to have healthy seperate markets. With the introduction of suites, these markets became irrelevant in the face of the Microsoft jugernaut. Same thing in the OS market. There used to be a lot more utilities, add-ons, etc.., MS has essentially destroyed this market too. I'm not arguning whether this is a Good Thing, but it is undeniable that these used to be seperate markets, and now they are not.
Couldn't the same argument be made about Visio? If it is integrated into the Office product line for instance, than this will clearly be a use of monopoly power to dominate the digramming tools market. Further, by creating a situation where no healthy third party digramming packages exist this creates a situation where it is unlikely that strong packages will be developed for other platforms either.
I know its a bit of a stretch but not that great of one. Microsoft really is trying to engineer a situation where they will be selling one must-have uber client suite, one uber server suite, and one uber developer suite. If everyone 'must-have' the suite, there will be almost zero incentive to buy anything but Microsoft products. Oh wait a minute, why am I talking in future tense? Visio was just about the only significant Windows product not made by Microsoft. To ignore this or pretend that all of these supposedly 'separate' markets is ignoring the obvious.
Are you sure about this? Yes, of course I understand that having a monopoly is not illegal..thats not what I was asking. I thought that extending by buying with or merging with other companies is, or at least is regulated in some way by the FTC.
For instance, if Standard Oil tried to buy Podunk Oil, it might be a problem. I mean, isn't this the reason that the FTC puts M&As under such rigorous review? This kind of review happens all the time, for instance in transportation and telecommunications. When Conrail was sold, fed regulators made Norfolk Southern and CSX split the assets instead of allowing one company to flat out aquire the other. Regulators carefully oversee Airline mergers to prevent one Airline from establishing a lock on a particular market.
This sucks. I also liked Visio.
What do people think of the anti-trust implications of this? I know that it would be very hard to make this case, buit if you look at the software productivity applications market as a whole, and not just individual markets, then its pretty clear that Microfot is trying to extend its Monopoly through aquisition which isn't legal. Any thoughts?
"Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that.
Where do you get that? That's not implied in 'pure' (whatever that means) Communism at all. And I think your modern use of commune and semantic definition of communism kind of miss the point.
But I agree that attitude or intention is important, if you will. And I don't think that most people give software away just as an afterthought. I think its actually motivating and nice to be able to just give something away, knowing that other people will find it useful, don't you think. Perhaps some people really do just realease freeware as an afterthought, but for a lot of folks its a real statement, not just of alturism, but ideals.
In any case, it does take some of you rtime and energy to give software away. Even if its just to ftp it somewhere, that's some effort that you're putting in that is providing no incremental benefit to you at all! In reality, you probably put more care and features into it knowing that other people will see and use it.
IMO, a lot of people have taken Ayn Rand, who had a lot of good things to say so much to heart that they're ideoligcally offended by basic genoristy. I don't think this is or should be the real libertarian ideal.
I think that Marx assumed that an economy (thanks to capitalism) capable of basically taking care of everyone would be a neccesary precursor to Communism. So you would need a culture of abundance, not scarcity. So I'm not sure that your argument applies.
I think when we are really free, then we can gradually afford to be generous and willingly give away the products of our minds and efforts.
But this process will develop naturally, has to be entirely voluntary and can't be forced in any way. This is where all the so-called communists dictators got it wrong.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact same thing as Communists.
He's propably a programor...you know how they are.
Not true. *() implies a method call since it implies paramaters; so this is definetly the form object.method(), and the original poster is right, this is obviously fake code written by someone who wasn't thinking about how real code is written.
OK, it was raining, but it was at least eighty degrees. Sounded better before you called me on it though. Re LUG, nope didn't even know there was one. I'm only a Linux wannabe anyway; got it on a few machines, but don't use it much yet. Waiting for a decent java vm..
"Just thinking about someone wearing one of those stupid-ass vests from the gap is enough to make me gag."
You said it. I saw two high school age Future Fraternity Members of America wearing these yesterday. In August. In Washington, D.C. You didn't see me calling them names or threatening to club them to death.
No, instead I reflected for a moment and realized that they were poor ignorant victims of a marketing machine.
Pet theory: A group of Gap marketeers (Gap owns Old Navy as well, btw) at a meeting earlier this year were kicking ideas around getting a little crazy and one of them said:
"I'll bet we have these little idiots so far under our spell that we can convince them to wear anything."
"Anything? I don't think so..."
"OK, I'll prove it. We'll design some cheap ass useless little vests, and if I can get more than 50% of the boomer brats to wear them, you owe me a case of White Zinfandel."
"You're on!"
I feel even worse because I'll have to be very carfeul where I wear the spiffy new Marker vest my wife bought me for skiing. Oh s***, I hope that doesn't mean that I've fallen under the spell too.... Help!!
But Matt, isn't it kind of funny precisely because it is the kind of comment that you can barely get away with? I mean, I thought it was a pretty good hit on people who are so paranoid about their sexual identity that they'd shy away from a site that even had the taint of gayness to it. That was my read anyway. I mean it was obviously meant ironically.
Its like this I think true stroy I heard that happened at Harvard:
Back when recycling hit big, and people first started putting all of these bins around for all kinds of recycled products, you know they'd have "White Paper" "Colored Paper" "Plastic Bottles" "Aluminum Cans".
Well, someone replaced one of the "Colored Paper" signs with a sign that read "Paper of Color". I thought that it was a kind of hilarious satire on people missing the basic point for all their concentration on labels and such, but apparantly the thought police at Harvard decided it was an evil joke and subjected the guy to disciplinary action and made hime make a Cultural-revolution style public confession.
I'm not dissing you, and it probably gets old seeing these kinds of jokes, but some of them (like Big gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride), really do help open the discussion up instead of closing it down.
I think one of the major reasons that relations between whites and blacks in this country are so largely f'ud up is that there is this huge taboo about talking or heaven forbid, even joking about race in public. So all of our little impressions, pet peeves, jokes, etc.. happen between memebrs of like minded groups, instead of being shared, and this drives people even farther apart.
I know its a very thin line, but we should be careful about making everything so serious, while of course speaking out against cruelty and hostility. What we need os more tolerance, and that means for obnoxious jokes too, not less.
Beats me. These are just two great tastes that seem to go together. So yes, replace Wintel with Windows if it'll make you happy!
...
Like the previous poster said, I'm not sure you really understand what RAD is.
IMO, RAD was good because it allowed programmers to do an end run around all the software engineering experts that would take a year to approve, specify, analyse, test, etc.., ad naseum, a simple corporate address book implementation, when someone could simply hack one out in a couple of days using a RAD tool, and easily fix any problems noticed after the users get a hold of it.
Not the methodology to use to design an MRI console or a Nuclear power plant, but works just great for some situations.
As others have pointed out, this is big news indeed, and critical to the future success of Linux.
Although this is often overlooked, especially by mainstream press, and was certainly missed by 'bad-old-days' Apple execs, the thing that really killed the Mac in business settings was not a lack of productivity apps, cost or bad marketing. It was the lack of a decent RAD environment. Not having tools that allowed you to easily create crossplatform frontends to corporate databases [so 4D doesn't count here] left the Mac in a ghetto for corporate creative professionals, scientists, etc.. [PowerBuilder was too little to late, and just took too many resources.] When standarization really took hold in the mid 90s, it was no wonder that Macs around the country got the boot. Its too bad Delphi was never made available for the Mac. (IIRC, Phillip Kahn hated the Macintosh, Bedrock notwithstanding, or perhaps withstanding!)
It's a fact: more than productivity apps, email, or anything else, corporate machines live and breath on custom database applications. And even with new models like distributed objects, etc.., don't expect mainline 4GL tools to go away _anytime_ soon.
I'm now one of those rah-rah Java distributed objects guys myself. But though I don't use Delphi (don't do much RDBMS development at all anymore), having it available for Linux is just the ticket, and is just as imporant as having a good office suite. This is good news for Borland, who will have the _only_ mainstream object-based RAD 4GL tool that will run on both Wintel and Linux. It is great news for Linux, and might be a significant milestone for an end to Wintel hegemony.
Bravo Borland!
I think people's hatred of the one-eyed monster got the better of them.
IIRC, minutes seconds (and even hours??!) are a relatively new measuremnt; like late middle ages at the earliest, again IIRC. Anyone know for sure?