or, better yet, you seem to forget that all your reasons are applicable to the other argument in both cases.
Companies with buggy or poorly written software don't grow large in any of the two cases. Guess what, windows was as good on the desktop as any of its competitors at the time for most people.
Good code in a closed source company is still highly valued because your future depends on your ability to write good code. Getting fired is a lot worse than having your boss say "well, this hacked code you put together to grab weather data could be written better" and have a much more detrimental effect on your career(because of the value of past recommendations).
Open source software has no incentive to do any testing. In open source, you release code and hope others are kind enough to test out and search for the hard to find bugs. In open source, you have an incentive to release lower quality code because others can catch and fix your mistakes.
Saying that hiring someone to fix software is a possible recourse is just idiotic. How much do you think it would cost for me to go get someone to learn firefox to fix a bug in it I don't like? I hell of a lot more than I am willing to pay. Private people don't do this. Small companies almost never do this. Only the big boys can really afford that recourse.
So it seems open source isn't a holy grail. Worse yet, the more unpopular an open source project is, the worse it will end up being. None of the programmers have any reason to go above and beyond. But in closed source, there is a definite reason, its called hunger. And it has played out that way many times. It is usually the underdog that quickly innovates and releases a far superior product to earn market share.
And further, it doesn't matter how much you program for a living, if I give you the firefox code for the first time with a mediocre bug, I guarantee that without previous experience you would take a long time to hunt down this bug. It wouldn't be obvious, as you seem to think it is.
There are no holy grails in programming. And there aren't any in science either. Only basic science uses the peer review system ubiquitously.
then, if assuming people are some what rational, that simply means they don't mind those laws benefitting the people who they are benefitting. Yes, you seem to care, but if another person doesn't it doesn't make your position superior. It simply means Joe over there values cheap SUV's and plasma tv over whether or not music from 50 years ago becomes free.
Hell, what am I say, I value getting my car a few thousand cheaper and paying less for gas and having a nice TV or whether or not I can listen to beatles music for free because frankly, I don't give a damn about their music.
fine, if it must be made clear to you:
skilled musicians aren't a dime a dozen....
happy?
or , even better:
Musicians whose works are highly valued by society are far from a dime a dozen.
you're first one was much more difficult than this.
guess what, society didn't give a damn about your grand father in the coal mines because coal miners were a dime a dozen back then, get over it. My grand father was the same, a peanut farmer in india. It just happens to be that that coke snorting musician is a helluva a lot harder to come by than a coal miner, get used to that too. It's supply and demand. Are you worried that someone might cash it a bit too much on a musical creation(i.e. copyrightable material?)? If that is the case, then copyright should only cover up to a certain amount of earnings.
Furthermore, my point about estate tax is still valid, if you spend your time studying economics. so maybe I should have clarified. A 100% estate tax would simply say any money and whatever the property value of what you inherit is taxed, in herently this means you would have to pay the full depreciated value of all copyrights/patents/whatever you inherit.
as to your final point, as soon as that song was written, it became part of our history. That is a null point.
Now, I disagree with retroactively extending copyrights because that is unfair to the investments made by people into those things(i.e. net present value will probably increase, meaning bad decisions may have been made). and I also feel 100 years is too long, but that doesn't change any of the facts. Those are my opinions. I see nothing wrong with someone cashing in on the genius of a parent/grandparent which you seem to fundamentally oppose.
I think you and the GP are hitting the same idea, but correct me if I'm wrong. I would say the real problem is people being intolerant of someone who has a different hobby. I have known both the introverted and only slightly eccentric nerds in my life. It seems the major difference was that the one who could socialize had the distinct benefit of going to school where he could learn to itneract with lots of people.
I also question the idea that nerds/geeks/otaku as a group prefer less social contact than others. I wonder if being ostracized for so many years has made them cautious of any social interaction?
lastly, how can this not be a good thing if it's a place where geeks can escape persecution.
That one is kinda easy. It all comes down to what you said. It doesn't help to have a section of society outcast itself. The kind of change you want has to go both ways. Geeks also have to reach out and try to show other people where they are coming from.
And a lot of those anti social behaviors are destructive. No one needs to be a conformist, but a lot of things in this world are done in a way that requires contact and interaction with many people. I think its important that everyone learns to do this and not casting blame on any group, geeks are usually ones to lack the ability to really interact effectively(in my experience).
now you are just confusing the fact that laws change. Why was it legal for people in Utah to have many wives and now, I'm limited to only 1? Guess what, whether or not you agree with it, laws can change. And that is the explanation(unless in these specific exampes some form of liscensing agreement existed/international laws weren't as standardized at that time).
What did anyone do to get to live off the success of their parents and grandparents? nothing except be born to them. Get over it. We could, of course, raise the estate tax to 100%(a true 100%) if you wanted to stop this completely. But that is a different issue.
that is actually pretty darn easy, 10000!=100 years. howz that for parsing why the two are comparable? Also, who is to say that person has given nothing back? thats pretty darn shortsighted to say nothing can be learned or taken away from copyrighted material. Music artists, including Michael Jackson, have helped to change the face of pop music, adn guess what, their works were copyrighted. YOu sure they haven't given much more back by revolutionizing an industry? seems pretty fair to me actually. You get all the stuff from the past and then give us a new future.
because on the other extreme, we all know that everyone who downloads that crappy music does so because they have nothing better to do(i.e. not entranced at all by the idea of getting the same thing for free)./begin We all know that same quality music that sold 15 years ago would still sell today, if only artists were just as good and the companies were the same, right?? right?? oh please say my limited view of why things are done isn't wrong!!/end{sarcasm}
Why is it someone has to complain that it is the quality of music that has changed which is why people go online and download music. Seems to me to be a waste of time to hunt down music that you don't like.
neither their computing power nor their cash is anything to be in awe over. Neither are truly top contenders when it comes to the computing industry, unless you take the time to wonder why this is impressive.
Remember, almost all of those servers are needed for what they are currently working on, sot hey don't really have anywhere near that kind of computing power. I would be willing to bet that if they threw every free cycle at this, they have closer to 20%. Further, most of these servers are for moving data around, from what I have read, almost none of them are high end number crunchers(what is needed for MT).
They have no where near the cash of a lot of the big fish in the computer industry, so don't think they can out muscle people like Intel or IBM, much less the true heavy weight, Miscrosoft
What makes Google's situation unique is they are in the best position to do this stuff in the group of companies that actually care to spend time on this project. This is the impressive part. A company that thrives on free material doing something so complex. things like google map are incredibly simple and only involve indexing available information. that isn't what this is by any means, this is a company attempting to break out of an niche and enter into the more revolutionary side of computing( I have yet to see a service by google that is actually this).
I'm interested to see how much hype it all is. Hopefully, I can give it some tough japanese and see how well it holds up when it goes beta(the enternal state of any google project).
An old friend of mine used to be a cop on the road and stopped a guy for a burnt out tail light. When he went to tell the driver, found a bad stench of alcohol on his breath so made him do the sobriety test. Passed it with flying colors except the breathylizer, the guy blew a.24, three times the limit here in florida. There are lots of people who were alocholics for a time being that now have a really high tolerance for drinking.
He was a lifetime alcoholic so that much alcohol wasn't much for him. The issue isn't something like what the GP has hinted at though. He has said that if a person responsibly lowers their speed then it should be fine if they have had some drinks beyond the limit. But then we would need a sliding scale for different people. This is much too difficult so the government goes with an amount of alcohol that impairs the vast majority of drivers.
If any of you are of average size(about 170 pounds I believe, and around 5'8''), try it to see what the government is talking about. Take four shots quickly and wait 18 minutes or so(on an empty stomach). see how 'sober' you feel. that is the legal limit. Now do double that and see just how sober you feel at the level the GP is talking about(8 shots then wait 18 minutes).
Usually, people get to the limit a lot slower and because they slowly go from sober to drunk, they don't realize just how drunk they are. If you think the legal limit isn't very far from being sober, try this first.
Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to realize he is a hypocrit who just wants everything that he doesn't like in games to be there.
How often do you see a Guard walking around with anything more than a pistol with one extra clip? Then get over the fact taht in the beginning of a game that starts all nice and cozy, thats all you get.
You can't complain about these things and then bitch and moan about realism.
The complaints about the jumping puzzles should really come down to a person being able to look down at their feet. The puzzle itself is still valid, it teaches you to get used to the body you are in. It was just designed poorly.
His valid points are ones that have been made over and over, AI problems, imersion problems, etc. And of course, he asks businesses to stop caring about business. Sure, he talks about how it is short run that they are only looking at, but there he is just wrong. This just sounds like a person living in his parent's basement, bitching about things he has heard others complian about.
actually, current count right now for Mozilla vs. IE, both up and running and actually several more mozilla windows running.
IE: 59.8 MB
Mozilla: 41.3 MB
on the virtual memory look.
Now as RAM goes, mozilla is using a lot more, but its not the memory hog for me you seem to have a problem with. and I bet firefox is much lighter(though I don't have it on this particular computer)
for someone so passionate about this, it seems pretty darn hypocritical.
I have every right say say what they should and shouldn't do with anything, even if it is theirs. That is called freedom. We are allowed to comment on what each person does(yeah, its that same freedom you invoke to bitch when CUSTOMERS are complaining about the product).
This is also a way to give the studio's a heads up as to how they can improve there product. This is all part of the open market. It lets them know there is a market for doing things a different way.
Why do we care so much about just a show? we like the damn thing. I could say the same thing about anything some holds dear in their life. Why do you care about that dog? Why that picture of your grandmother? or more relavent, why are people getting so uppity about gorrillas becoming endagered? They don't own them so obviously they have no right to comment, right?
um.... I thought that is how they restore old paintings:
http://www.artworksaustin.com/restoration.html
look at step five, is it pretty common to do this. I've seen them talk about it on the history channel. It is very small, but it is done.
It is done on old cartoons. When they clean up cells, it involves basically this process. There are small touch ups done by hand. But this is exactly what you said, going in and cleaning it up manually.
The problem has nothing to do with changing cartoons, you're just as ignorant as the parent poster you deride.
It's quality control that everyone is getting up in arms about. These companies are releasing these videos to give a more permanent collectors edition but in the rush to do it quickly and cheaply, they are using techniques that somtimes noticably changes the cartoons.
This is much more akin to intel rushing production of a processor and having a defect in all processors, making them less effective but still usable to some people.
some people would consider this even more important. As these cartoons represent a very large part of American cultural history, some feel these cartoons should be preserved as close to the original as possible.
Personally, I think your best bet if you are concerned is to use an offshore ISP.
or better yet, just don't share copyrighted materials with those people who haven't obtained a lisence. these services are not set up with the goal of making it easier to evade the law while trading pirated materials(at least not explicitly). There are people working on anonymous P2P though. YOu can find that easy enough.
two points:
check apple's website, regular warranty for this stuff is only 12 months, I quote:
"If your iPod is more than a year old and you're not covered by the AppleCare Protection Plan for iPod, you can send in your iPod for battery service for $99."
and people should just read what is on apple's website, they say you shoudl only expect 300-500 recharges, someone who uses their iPod every day will only get a little over a year, maybe a year and a half if you are lucky(a lot as in recharge it every day). You shouldn't expect more than this if you are smart but knowing how uninformed most people are, they don't realize that apple only has a 1 year warranty becasue that is all you can honestly expect out of the iPod under heavy use.
I guess I should have clarified within the frame work of the US legal system. A monopoly itself is not illegal. That is usually considered simply being better than everyone else. What I was referring to are those practices that aren't illegal. The tying of IE to the OS and creating contracts that prevent companies from including Netscape on a new system is illegal. Simply saying you have some great product in the pipeline(with the correct disclaimers) or announcing your product early is not.
they earned that monopoly for windows by simply being the most cut throat. Granted, it helps when your competition is as arrogant as Apple and IBM were back then(and still to a great degree are).
well.. ok.. I can't argue much if you think its MS's fault that people don't get educated about the options.
They have no economic incentive for making their software interoperable and they have no reason to not try to outdo the competition by good PR. I don't understand your complaint about this other than you dislike the fact they are better at business than the competition.
Of course, you can argue from some moral high ground about how those particular past practices are terrible, but then, that is all relative.
note I'm not talking about them being convicted as a monopolist. Those practices were/are illegal. But things like interoperability and early announcements are illegal.
but ignorance is bliss, and MS has a way of taking all their backgrounded programs and calling them something random in the task manager, that way you don't 'know' your memory is being used by metro, per se. Only that there is some task the system requires that is eating up loads of memory.
but your forgetting, if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document. After Adobe is dead, they can start to charge for a "full featured" document editor and leave simple edits and reading to word(or as a stand alone program). Either way, they can use this to kill adobe pretty damn easily.
It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.
of course, this is all banking on their ability to come out with a format that is at least almost as good at pdf. But if they do, it will still take a few years to begin unseating Adobe because businesses are slow to change even with incentives.
come on, give them some credit. Its not really their fault most people who buy their products now adays don't realize how much they suck and for what reasons. I mean, they have competition all over the place today.
They are just doing what is best to do as a business, as are all other for profit businesses out there. It just happens to be they are better at taking advantage of computer stupid people.
Slashdot Mirror
and when you say corps like that you do mean every government in business in the world, or at least a vast, vast majority of all economic players.
its not a corps like that thing. its every corporation in the world type of thing.
or, better yet, you seem to forget that all your reasons are applicable to the other argument in both cases.
Companies with buggy or poorly written software don't grow large in any of the two cases. Guess what, windows was as good on the desktop as any of its competitors at the time for most people.
Good code in a closed source company is still highly valued because your future depends on your ability to write good code. Getting fired is a lot worse than having your boss say "well, this hacked code you put together to grab weather data could be written better" and have a much more detrimental effect on your career(because of the value of past recommendations).
Open source software has no incentive to do any testing. In open source, you release code and hope others are kind enough to test out and search for the hard to find bugs. In open source, you have an incentive to release lower quality code because others can catch and fix your mistakes.
Saying that hiring someone to fix software is a possible recourse is just idiotic. How much do you think it would cost for me to go get someone to learn firefox to fix a bug in it I don't like? I hell of a lot more than I am willing to pay. Private people don't do this. Small companies almost never do this. Only the big boys can really afford that recourse.
So it seems open source isn't a holy grail. Worse yet, the more unpopular an open source project is, the worse it will end up being. None of the programmers have any reason to go above and beyond. But in closed source, there is a definite reason, its called hunger. And it has played out that way many times. It is usually the underdog that quickly innovates and releases a far superior product to earn market share.
And further, it doesn't matter how much you program for a living, if I give you the firefox code for the first time with a mediocre bug, I guarantee that without previous experience you would take a long time to hunt down this bug. It wouldn't be obvious, as you seem to think it is.
There are no holy grails in programming. And there aren't any in science either. Only basic science uses the peer review system ubiquitously.
then, if assuming people are some what rational, that simply means they don't mind those laws benefitting the people who they are benefitting. Yes, you seem to care, but if another person doesn't it doesn't make your position superior. It simply means Joe over there values cheap SUV's and plasma tv over whether or not music from 50 years ago becomes free.
Hell, what am I say, I value getting my car a few thousand cheaper and paying less for gas and having a nice TV or whether or not I can listen to beatles music for free because frankly, I don't give a damn about their music.
fine, if it must be made clear to you: skilled musicians aren't a dime a dozen.... happy? or , even better: Musicians whose works are highly valued by society are far from a dime a dozen.
you're first one was much more difficult than this.
guess what, society didn't give a damn about your grand father in the coal mines because coal miners were a dime a dozen back then, get over it. My grand father was the same, a peanut farmer in india. It just happens to be that that coke snorting musician is a helluva a lot harder to come by than a coal miner, get used to that too. It's supply and demand. Are you worried that someone might cash it a bit too much on a musical creation(i.e. copyrightable material?)? If that is the case, then copyright should only cover up to a certain amount of earnings.
Furthermore, my point about estate tax is still valid, if you spend your time studying economics. so maybe I should have clarified. A 100% estate tax would simply say any money and whatever the property value of what you inherit is taxed, in herently this means you would have to pay the full depreciated value of all copyrights/patents/whatever you inherit.
as to your final point, as soon as that song was written, it became part of our history. That is a null point.
Now, I disagree with retroactively extending copyrights because that is unfair to the investments made by people into those things(i.e. net present value will probably increase, meaning bad decisions may have been made). and I also feel 100 years is too long, but that doesn't change any of the facts. Those are my opinions. I see nothing wrong with someone cashing in on the genius of a parent/grandparent which you seem to fundamentally oppose.
I think you and the GP are hitting the same idea, but correct me if I'm wrong. I would say the real problem is people being intolerant of someone who has a different hobby. I have known both the introverted and only slightly eccentric nerds in my life. It seems the major difference was that the one who could socialize had the distinct benefit of going to school where he could learn to itneract with lots of people.
I also question the idea that nerds/geeks/otaku as a group prefer less social contact than others. I wonder if being ostracized for so many years has made them cautious of any social interaction?
lastly, how can this not be a good thing if it's a place where geeks can escape persecution.
That one is kinda easy. It all comes down to what you said. It doesn't help to have a section of society outcast itself. The kind of change you want has to go both ways. Geeks also have to reach out and try to show other people where they are coming from.
And a lot of those anti social behaviors are destructive. No one needs to be a conformist, but a lot of things in this world are done in a way that requires contact and interaction with many people. I think its important that everyone learns to do this and not casting blame on any group, geeks are usually ones to lack the ability to really interact effectively(in my experience).
now you are just confusing the fact that laws change. Why was it legal for people in Utah to have many wives and now, I'm limited to only 1? Guess what, whether or not you agree with it, laws can change. And that is the explanation(unless in these specific exampes some form of liscensing agreement existed/international laws weren't as standardized at that time).
What did anyone do to get to live off the success of their parents and grandparents? nothing except be born to them. Get over it. We could, of course, raise the estate tax to 100%(a true 100%) if you wanted to stop this completely. But that is a different issue.
that is actually pretty darn easy,
10000!=100 years. howz that for parsing why the two are comparable?
Also, who is to say that person has given nothing back? thats pretty darn shortsighted to say nothing can be learned or taken away from copyrighted material. Music artists, including Michael Jackson, have helped to change the face of pop music, adn guess what, their works were copyrighted. YOu sure they haven't given much more back by revolutionizing an industry? seems pretty fair to me actually. You get all the stuff from the past and then give us a new future.
hows that;-)?
because on the other extreme, we all know that everyone who downloads that crappy music does so because they have nothing better to do(i.e. not entranced at all by the idea of getting the same thing for free). /begin /end{sarcasm}
We all know that same quality music that sold 15 years ago would still sell today, if only artists were just as good and the companies were the same, right?? right?? oh please say my limited view of why things are done isn't wrong!!
Why is it someone has to complain that it is the quality of music that has changed which is why people go online and download music. Seems to me to be a waste of time to hunt down music that you don't like.
neither their computing power nor their cash is anything to be in awe over. Neither are truly top contenders when it comes to the computing industry, unless you take the time to wonder why this is impressive.
l /main662452.shtml
Remember, almost all of those servers are needed for what they are currently working on, sot hey don't really have anywhere near that kind of computing power. I would be willing to bet that if they threw every free cycle at this, they have closer to 20%. Further, most of these servers are for moving data around, from what I have read, almost none of them are high end number crunchers(what is needed for MT).
They have no where near the cash of a lot of the big fish in the computer industry, so don't think they can out muscle people like Intel or IBM, much less the true heavy weight, Miscrosoft
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/22/nationa
(just to give you an idea as to how much cash MS can use to crush competitors, its not an issue of can't, it's an issue of not wanting to)
What makes Google's situation unique is they are in the best position to do this stuff in the group of companies that actually care to spend time on this project. This is the impressive part. A company that thrives on free material doing something so complex. things like google map are incredibly simple and only involve indexing available information. that isn't what this is by any means, this is a company attempting to break out of an niche and enter into the more revolutionary side of computing( I have yet to see a service by google that is actually this).
I'm interested to see how much hype it all is. Hopefully, I can give it some tough japanese and see how well it holds up when it goes beta(the enternal state of any google project).
An old friend of mine used to be a cop on the road and stopped a guy for a burnt out tail light. When he went to tell the driver, found a bad stench of alcohol on his breath so made him do the sobriety test. Passed it with flying colors except the breathylizer, the guy blew a .24, three times the limit here in florida. There are lots of people who were alocholics for a time being that now have a really high tolerance for drinking.
He was a lifetime alcoholic so that much alcohol wasn't much for him. The issue isn't something like what the GP has hinted at though. He has said that if a person responsibly lowers their speed then it should be fine if they have had some drinks beyond the limit. But then we would need a sliding scale for different people. This is much too difficult so the government goes with an amount of alcohol that impairs the vast majority of drivers.
If any of you are of average size(about 170 pounds I believe, and around 5'8''), try it to see what the government is talking about. Take four shots quickly and wait 18 minutes or so(on an empty stomach). see how 'sober' you feel. that is the legal limit. Now do double that and see just how sober you feel at the level the GP is talking about(8 shots then wait 18 minutes).
Usually, people get to the limit a lot slower and because they slowly go from sober to drunk, they don't realize just how drunk they are. If you think the legal limit isn't very far from being sober, try this first.
Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to realize he is a hypocrit who just wants everything that he doesn't like in games to be there.
How often do you see a Guard walking around with anything more than a pistol with one extra clip? Then get over the fact taht in the beginning of a game that starts all nice and cozy, thats all you get.
You can't complain about these things and then bitch and moan about realism.
The complaints about the jumping puzzles should really come down to a person being able to look down at their feet. The puzzle itself is still valid, it teaches you to get used to the body you are in. It was just designed poorly.
His valid points are ones that have been made over and over, AI problems, imersion problems, etc. And of course, he asks businesses to stop caring about business. Sure, he talks about how it is short run that they are only looking at, but there he is just wrong. This just sounds like a person living in his parent's basement, bitching about things he has heard others complian about.
actually, current count right now for Mozilla vs. IE, both up and running and actually several more mozilla windows running. IE: 59.8 MB Mozilla: 41.3 MB on the virtual memory look. Now as RAM goes, mozilla is using a lot more, but its not the memory hog for me you seem to have a problem with. and I bet firefox is much lighter(though I don't have it on this particular computer)
for someone so passionate about this, it seems pretty darn hypocritical.
I have every right say say what they should and shouldn't do with anything, even if it is theirs. That is called freedom. We are allowed to comment on what each person does(yeah, its that same freedom you invoke to bitch when CUSTOMERS are complaining about the product).
This is also a way to give the studio's a heads up as to how they can improve there product. This is all part of the open market. It lets them know there is a market for doing things a different way.
Why do we care so much about just a show? we like the damn thing. I could say the same thing about anything some holds dear in their life. Why do you care about that dog? Why that picture of your grandmother? or more relavent, why are people getting so uppity about gorrillas becoming endagered? They don't own them so obviously they have no right to comment, right?
um.... I thought that is how they restore old paintings: http://www.artworksaustin.com/restoration.html look at step five, is it pretty common to do this. I've seen them talk about it on the history channel. It is very small, but it is done. It is done on old cartoons. When they clean up cells, it involves basically this process. There are small touch ups done by hand. But this is exactly what you said, going in and cleaning it up manually.
The problem has nothing to do with changing cartoons, you're just as ignorant as the parent poster you deride.
It's quality control that everyone is getting up in arms about. These companies are releasing these videos to give a more permanent collectors edition but in the rush to do it quickly and cheaply, they are using techniques that somtimes noticably changes the cartoons.
This is much more akin to intel rushing production of a processor and having a defect in all processors, making them less effective but still usable to some people.
some people would consider this even more important. As these cartoons represent a very large part of American cultural history, some feel these cartoons should be preserved as close to the original as possible.
At least he gives you the compiled format and there are no restrictions decompiling. Hell, if he did any more, it might not be any fun.
Personally, I think your best bet if you are concerned is to use an offshore ISP.
or better yet, just don't share copyrighted materials with those people who haven't obtained a lisence. these services are not set up with the goal of making it easier to evade the law while trading pirated materials(at least not explicitly). There are people working on anonymous P2P though. YOu can find that easy enough.
two points: check apple's website, regular warranty for this stuff is only 12 months, I quote: "If your iPod is more than a year old and you're not covered by the AppleCare Protection Plan for iPod, you can send in your iPod for battery service for $99." and people should just read what is on apple's website, they say you shoudl only expect 300-500 recharges, someone who uses their iPod every day will only get a little over a year, maybe a year and a half if you are lucky(a lot as in recharge it every day). You shouldn't expect more than this if you are smart but knowing how uninformed most people are, they don't realize that apple only has a 1 year warranty becasue that is all you can honestly expect out of the iPod under heavy use.
I guess I should have clarified within the frame work of the US legal system. A monopoly itself is not illegal. That is usually considered simply being better than everyone else. What I was referring to are those practices that aren't illegal. The tying of IE to the OS and creating contracts that prevent companies from including Netscape on a new system is illegal. Simply saying you have some great product in the pipeline(with the correct disclaimers) or announcing your product early is not.
they earned that monopoly for windows by simply being the most cut throat. Granted, it helps when your competition is as arrogant as Apple and IBM were back then(and still to a great degree are).
well.. ok.. I can't argue much if you think its MS's fault that people don't get educated about the options.
They have no economic incentive for making their software interoperable and they have no reason to not try to outdo the competition by good PR. I don't understand your complaint about this other than you dislike the fact they are better at business than the competition.
Of course, you can argue from some moral high ground about how those particular past practices are terrible, but then, that is all relative.
note I'm not talking about them being convicted as a monopolist. Those practices were/are illegal. But things like interoperability and early announcements are illegal.
but ignorance is bliss, and MS has a way of taking all their backgrounded programs and calling them something random in the task manager, that way you don't 'know' your memory is being used by metro, per se. Only that there is some task the system requires that is eating up loads of memory.
but your forgetting,
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document. After Adobe is dead, they can start to charge for a "full featured" document editor and leave simple edits and reading to word(or as a stand alone program). Either way, they can use this to kill adobe pretty damn easily.
It helps when your stuff comes pre-installed. YOu just need to bundle it right to kill off competition.
of course, this is all banking on their ability to come out with a format that is at least almost as good at pdf. But if they do, it will still take a few years to begin unseating Adobe because businesses are slow to change even with incentives.
come on, give them some credit. Its not really their fault most people who buy their products now adays don't realize how much they suck and for what reasons. I mean, they have competition all over the place today.
They are just doing what is best to do as a business, as are all other for profit businesses out there. It just happens to be they are better at taking advantage of computer stupid people.
wow, who'd've thunk it, the day when a program would require more RAM than it does hard drive space;-)