Then why in the deal would Real want access to Microsoft's Media technologies and codecs? If Real knew they had the best product, they wouldn't have even requested this in the settlement.
That's like saying OpenOffice wouldn't want access to the.doc format if they knew they had a better product. They want the MS codecs for compatibility, that's all.
Think People, Real was not the ONLY competing product, they just had enough money to sue the easy cash cow. What about tons of other pieces of software that 'should' have been affected and weren't. Like Winamp? Winamp is a popular as it has EVER been. They made a product a lot of people liked better, period.
Erm, look at some stats, winamp sank enormously over that period. It's dropped to about a tenth of the market if that. Nullsoft didn't get bought because they were enormously successful and growing, they basically collapsed and were bought up cheaply. Is winamp even developed anymore?
It really should read that consumers are paying Real 750 million dollars. Microsoft isn't going anywhere, hence everyone who buys a preloaded PC or uses services of someone who did will indirectly pay this fine.
Consumers will not be paying any more. Why? Because MS is already charging them as much as it can. The money will come out of MS's profits
Unless a company is driven under by penalty for their actions there is no real loss.
Just like unless a person is driven bankrupt by their fines for criminal actions there is no real loss.
One set of shareholders sees a smaller return compared to another. Those shareholders are probably the only "real" people affected directly by the exchange.
And that's as it should be. They are the people who ultimately control the corporation. Some of them will invest elsewhere instead. MS stocks go down. To a company, its stock is its life.
Real has been horrid bloatware/adware for God knows how long.
Real was horrid bloatware and now isn't, really. Try it.
OS X includes iTunes, and nobody complains about that.
In case you didn't notice, Apple could eat dead babies and still get love and justifications from the slashdot crowd.
Most Linux distros include XMMS, and nobody cries.
Firstly, most of them include a variety of players, often including realplayer. Secondly, none of them is trying to make money off their streaming server.
RealNetworks has done more damage to themselves than anyone else could, through the overpromotion of unstable software, with annoying ads, and 192352398235 different taskbar crapplets that nobody wants.
Nevertheless, MS did a lot of damage to them. Look at an "average joe"'s desktop machine for proof that unstable software with annoying ads and horrible taskbar applets can succeed enormously.
After most streaming sources went to either streaming MP3 or WMA, Real pretty much died.
Remind me when that happened? I've yet to see a site that doesn't at least offer real as an option for streaming videos, and for music if it supports wma it will almost certainly support real.
They lost a market they created due to poor management and bad software. Nobody cares about them anymore, and frankly, I wish they'd just get bought or disappear alltogether.
The market is still there. They're the only people even offering a client for Linux. They've learnt from their mistakes, I know a lot of people will never forgive them for the travesty that was realplayer 8 but the modern player is actually pretty good, certainly compared to the alternatives. And no matter how bad you think they are, they deserve justice when they are wronged like anyone else.
I'm going to have to side with MS on this one. Real released a crappy product with a shady web site.
Then why couldn't MS have beaten them by playing fair? Say what you like about them, Real were wronged here and deserve compensation, no matter how bad whatever else they've done.
If you ship a shoddy product you deserve to be in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation. It's more damned-for-shipping-an-insecure-os-in-the-first-pl ace.
HTML-based e-mails are the main reason I use a CLI (text-ui) e-mail reader. More exactly, Mutt. HTML messages get rendered using a CLI web browsers (w3m).
How the hell is that going to make any difference?
Well, that is something impressive. But having looked at both bytecodes, if that's possible wouldn't it be just as easy (easier in fact) to do it in the other direction, compiling java bytecodes to.net ones? In which case both basically support the same things.
Instead they have used approximations using newtonian theories? WTF? No wonder they came out wrong!
There's a reason no-one came up with relativity before the last century, you know. The differences are insignificant at speeds below a large fraction of the speed of light.I can live with newtonian approximations on a solar system level, but doing cosmology on the scale of galaxies, the age of the universe it self and so forth they really should have used the sharpest tool in the tool box.
We can't even model the motion 3 bodies in newtonian gravity truly accurately. To do a whole galaxy you need to make as many simplifying assumptions as you can, and even then you'll need weeks on a huge cluster to run the simulation.
Note that this is the LaTeX source files for the paper, not source code. What would you do with a GPL scientific paper -- change some things and put your own name on it?
Provide patches for bugs like missing full stops? Go into more depth where it needs it? Add features (details) you think should be in there?
Since when did scientists start behaving like fundies?
Since forever. It's a sad truism that a theory only dies after the people who invented it. Seriously, do you expect scientists to be that much better than "normal" people?
If Redhat stopped sponsoring the OSS projects they do, gcc alone would grind to a halt, and a good number of other projects would be impaired as well.
No it wouldn't. It would slow, stumble, trip, but it would keep going. Red Hat's disappearance would be an enormous blow to the OSS community. It would take us years to recover. But OSS disappearing would destroy Red Hat entirely.
I don't hate them, or if I do a bit it's only because of their fans. Why would you see them any differently than, say, HP? I don't buy their products myself, they're not value for money for what I want, but if I did I wouldn't particularly love or hate them. I don't see why they have this holy status among their fans.
As for Apple being "just the same," well, it may come as a surprise to you, but Apple is a corporation, not an order of monks. Without profitable computers and software, they're gone. So, yeah, the computer business is very tough.
You wouldn't know it from the way people here talk about them. Apple gets so much rabid adulation it's not even funny.
Maybe, but not necessarily a *good* user experience.
No, if there's anything Java should have taught people it's that identical look-and-feel on all platforms is not a good thing. But some people prefer consistency over quality.
Though I'd question the 'identical' part too - how hard to build a web app of that level of complexity that will run identically in IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera?
I'm not much of a web developer but looking at what web apps people have been making recently I think it's doable, and Google is constantly pushing what can be done on a web page, look at maps. (Though maps horribly doesn't work in konqueror, I hope they don't go the same way with their next thing)
I'm a huge python fan, but what you stated is blatantly false. Python is around 700 times slower than java, on a good day. Perl is around 95 times slower than java.
You can throw all the benchmarks you like at me, but just try using programs in each for ten minutes.
For any gui related work though you'd never know it, the "responsivess" of an application depends on the gui toolkit. In java , just don't use swing if you want an app that feels fast.
Fair enough, but in that case:
Java isn't "write once run anywhere" for GUI programs
Java is then slower, though only a little, than other languages with the same features, since we can compare to modern compiled languages.
Java's standard library is horribly pointlessly bloated.
Use SWT or GTK, its quite simple.
Java people wave this around, why don't the applications do it?
Gui applications do things in discrete steps, so a python app can feel as fast as a java app because nothing is usually happening for more than a few milliseconds.
But then java apps should feel as fast as python apps, when they feel much slower.
Implementing any heavy performance servers or just about anything else that requires heavy duty calculations (like 100 million calculations per second) you just can't do in python. I use python all the time, but don't be naive and look past its limitations.
I haven't looked at heavy performance stuff, I'm just comparing desktop applications that I use.
Perl does some byte-compilation but also is an order of magnitute slower than truely compiled languages such as Java, C++ and C#
Java is no more truly compiled than perl or python. They just had the marketing genius to make the byte-compiler a separate program, making people claim Java runs much faster.
(Java and C# being just-in-time compiled, which is about as good as compiled in advanced with todays technology, and theoretically could even outperform)
It could never outperform, people making these comparisons always forget the cost of doing this compilation.
The latter three are about 10% within each others range, most benchmarks I have done indicate C++ is fastest, Java about 0-30% slower, and C# about 10% slower than Java (C# tests done 1 year ago).
I've seen benchmark after benchmark telling me that Java is not slow, but my real-world experience is that it is.
All tests are library/API neutral, i.e. I did not test the speed of some C++ GUI toolkit such as Qt versus a Java GUI toolkit such as AWT/Swing, but only tested pure language features and "core" stuff.
Swing is part of the Java language and a large part of the reason for its slowness. I suppose you can't compare to C++ since that has no included toolkit, but it's still a comparison that should be made.
Claiming that python, clearly an order of magnitude slower than compiled languages, is faster than Java is an absolute joke and proves that you have never done or read some serious benchmarks.
I've read plenty of benchmarks. Benchmarks don't mean shit when it takes half a second after clicking on the button before a menu will appear.
There is no technical reason at all that Java can't do the same thing Python can (binding in lots of existing modules)
No. But the Java culture is not to do that, and not to use the bindings that exist, because Java people refuse to admit that Java is too slow to do a good gui toolkit in.
Bill Gates is a paranoid loser, that's why. He's got more than enough money. He's got more than enough power. But he still let's other people's excellence bother him. Ha ha ha, he'll never be happy and that is what a loser is.
No, they have the potential to destroy him and what he stands for. He could become the statue in the desert who used to have a huge empire but then lost it all. As long as he's alive he wants to be on top, otherwise he goes through the experience of losing it. No-one likes to see everything they built crumble away.
so what exactly would a web office suite bring to the table, aside from the coolness factor?
Crossplatformness. You get an identical user experience on any machine. Furthermore, you can use your own customised setup on any machine, anywhere, OS, location, etc. don't matter.
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That's like saying OpenOffice wouldn't want access to the .doc format if they knew they had a better product. They want the MS codecs for compatibility, that's all.
Think People, Real was not the ONLY competing product, they just had enough money to sue the easy cash cow. What about tons of other pieces of software that 'should' have been affected and weren't. Like Winamp? Winamp is a popular as it has EVER been. They made a product a lot of people liked better, period.
Erm, look at some stats, winamp sank enormously over that period. It's dropped to about a tenth of the market if that. Nullsoft didn't get bought because they were enormously successful and growing, they basically collapsed and were bought up cheaply. Is winamp even developed anymore?
Consumers will not be paying any more. Why? Because MS is already charging them as much as it can. The money will come out of MS's profits
Unless a company is driven under by penalty for their actions there is no real loss.
Just like unless a person is driven bankrupt by their fines for criminal actions there is no real loss.
One set of shareholders sees a smaller return compared to another. Those shareholders are probably the only "real" people affected directly by the exchange.
And that's as it should be. They are the people who ultimately control the corporation. Some of them will invest elsewhere instead. MS stocks go down. To a company, its stock is its life.
Real has been horrid bloatware/adware for God knows how long.
Real was horrid bloatware and now isn't, really. Try it.
In case you didn't notice, Apple could eat dead babies and still get love and justifications from the slashdot crowd.
Most Linux distros include XMMS, and nobody cries.
Firstly, most of them include a variety of players, often including realplayer. Secondly, none of them is trying to make money off their streaming server.
RealNetworks has done more damage to themselves than anyone else could, through the overpromotion of unstable software, with annoying ads, and 192352398235 different taskbar crapplets that nobody wants.
Nevertheless, MS did a lot of damage to them. Look at an "average joe"'s desktop machine for proof that unstable software with annoying ads and horrible taskbar applets can succeed enormously.
After most streaming sources went to either streaming MP3 or WMA, Real pretty much died.
Remind me when that happened? I've yet to see a site that doesn't at least offer real as an option for streaming videos, and for music if it supports wma it will almost certainly support real.
They lost a market they created due to poor management and bad software. Nobody cares about them anymore, and frankly, I wish they'd just get bought or disappear alltogether.
The market is still there. They're the only people even offering a client for Linux. They've learnt from their mistakes, I know a lot of people will never forgive them for the travesty that was realplayer 8 but the modern player is actually pretty good, certainly compared to the alternatives. And no matter how bad you think they are, they deserve justice when they are wronged like anyone else.
Then why couldn't MS have beaten them by playing fair? Say what you like about them, Real were wronged here and deserve compensation, no matter how bad whatever else they've done.
W3m displays pictures using the linux framebuffer, at least when I'm using it.
If you ship a shoddy product you deserve to be in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation. It's more damned-for-shipping-an-insecure-os-in-the-first-pl ace.
How the hell is that going to make any difference?
It gets better, if you don't have the time to put it together yourself ebay will sell you a new or used W80 Warhead.
Well, that is something impressive. But having looked at both bytecodes, if that's possible wouldn't it be just as easy (easier in fact) to do it in the other direction, compiling java bytecodes to .net ones? In which case both basically support the same things.
Versign - Bad Guy...
Interesting fact: you contain about a thousand atoms of any historical personage (Napoleon, Caesar, any king or queen) you care to think of.
There's a reason no-one came up with relativity before the last century, you know. The differences are insignificant at speeds below a large fraction of the speed of light.I can live with newtonian approximations on a solar system level, but doing cosmology on the scale of galaxies, the age of the universe it self and so forth they really should have used the sharpest tool in the tool box.
We can't even model the motion 3 bodies in newtonian gravity truly accurately. To do a whole galaxy you need to make as many simplifying assumptions as you can, and even then you'll need weeks on a huge cluster to run the simulation.
Provide patches for bugs like missing full stops? Go into more depth where it needs it? Add features (details) you think should be in there?
Since forever. It's a sad truism that a theory only dies after the people who invented it. Seriously, do you expect scientists to be that much better than "normal" people?
No it wouldn't. It would slow, stumble, trip, but it would keep going. Red Hat's disappearance would be an enormous blow to the OSS community. It would take us years to recover. But OSS disappearing would destroy Red Hat entirely.
I don't hate them, or if I do a bit it's only because of their fans. Why would you see them any differently than, say, HP? I don't buy their products myself, they're not value for money for what I want, but if I did I wouldn't particularly love or hate them. I don't see why they have this holy status among their fans.
Google uses python all the time.
You wouldn't know it from the way people here talk about them. Apple gets so much rabid adulation it's not even funny.
In Korea, only old people like the FTC!
No, if there's anything Java should have taught people it's that identical look-and-feel on all platforms is not a good thing. But some people prefer consistency over quality.
Though I'd question the 'identical' part too - how hard to build a web app of that level of complexity that will run identically in IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera?
I'm not much of a web developer but looking at what web apps people have been making recently I think it's doable, and Google is constantly pushing what can be done on a web page, look at maps. (Though maps horribly doesn't work in konqueror, I hope they don't go the same way with their next thing)
You can throw all the benchmarks you like at me, but just try using programs in each for ten minutes.
For any gui related work though you'd never know it, the "responsivess" of an application depends on the gui toolkit. In java , just don't use swing if you want an app that feels fast.
Fair enough, but in that case:
- Java isn't "write once run anywhere" for GUI programs
- Java is then slower, though only a little, than other languages with the same features, since we can compare to modern compiled languages.
- Java's standard library is horribly pointlessly bloated.
Use SWT or GTK, its quite simple.Java people wave this around, why don't the applications do it?
Gui applications do things in discrete steps, so a python app can feel as fast as a java app because nothing is usually happening for more than a few milliseconds.
But then java apps should feel as fast as python apps, when they feel much slower.
Implementing any heavy performance servers or just about anything else that requires heavy duty calculations (like 100 million calculations per second) you just can't do in python. I use python all the time, but don't be naive and look past its limitations.
I haven't looked at heavy performance stuff, I'm just comparing desktop applications that I use.
Java is no more truly compiled than perl or python. They just had the marketing genius to make the byte-compiler a separate program, making people claim Java runs much faster.
(Java and C# being just-in-time compiled, which is about as good as compiled in advanced with todays technology, and theoretically could even outperform)
It could never outperform, people making these comparisons always forget the cost of doing this compilation.
The latter three are about 10% within each others range, most benchmarks I have done indicate C++ is fastest, Java about 0-30% slower, and C# about 10% slower than Java (C# tests done 1 year ago).
I've seen benchmark after benchmark telling me that Java is not slow, but my real-world experience is that it is.
All tests are library/API neutral, i.e. I did not test the speed of some C++ GUI toolkit such as Qt versus a Java GUI toolkit such as AWT/Swing, but only tested pure language features and "core" stuff.
Swing is part of the Java language and a large part of the reason for its slowness. I suppose you can't compare to C++ since that has no included toolkit, but it's still a comparison that should be made.
Claiming that python, clearly an order of magnitude slower than compiled languages, is faster than Java is an absolute joke and proves that you have never done or read some serious benchmarks.
I've read plenty of benchmarks. Benchmarks don't mean shit when it takes half a second after clicking on the button before a menu will appear.
No. But the Java culture is not to do that, and not to use the bindings that exist, because Java people refuse to admit that Java is too slow to do a good gui toolkit in.
No, they have the potential to destroy him and what he stands for. He could become the statue in the desert who used to have a huge empire but then lost it all. As long as he's alive he wants to be on top, otherwise he goes through the experience of losing it. No-one likes to see everything they built crumble away.
Crossplatformness. You get an identical user experience on any machine. Furthermore, you can use your own customised setup on any machine, anywhere, OS, location, etc. don't matter.