There's also a difference between a monopoly and being the market leader.
Google may have the majority, but millions of people still use Yahoo!, MSN, and others daily. The numbers are far less skewed than the OS, office suite, and browser markets are. The fact that there is nothing that Google does where there aren't popular and viable alternatives to says a lot about it not being a monopoly. Aside from search there's very little that they're even the dominant player in.
The other factor is that they aren't showing any monopolistic signs. Microsoft, long ago, started purposfully designing their software so that the only way to interoperate (their word) properly with firms using their software was to use their software within your firm. Combine that with how little they're trying to change the technical difficulties they've created for programs to run under different operating systems and you have a monopoly. Google hasn't done anything to make the web less searchable by other companies. They don't make products that specifically block people from choosing competitors. They don't prevent you from deciding that you like Yahoo! better and typing your search there. They're even working on "federating" IM so that users can use whatever client they want.
So, yeah, being the best doesn't make you a monopoly. It doesn't excuse Microsoft from being one either.
Well, the best reasoning for using this combination is that you can make it work on such a wide range of platforms and you aren't tying yourself to anything proprietary.
If you go with XUL you have a similar argument, but you are tying yourself to a particular browser. Java, utopian language it may be, is slow under most RTEs and ultimately is proprietary. Though I don't know anyone who ever felt bad for coding with it... unless the end result ran like molasses. Flash seems under-used for legitimate applications, but the good Macromedia IDE is expensive and the whole thing is proprietary. XAML is, well, Microsoft's. If you're pro-Microsoft then that works, but then you might as well weigh your options about just making a "heavy" application with tried-and-true Windows forms.
AJAX + (X)HTML has its place, and can be used in some pretty large applications. A friend of mine recently finished an application that allows clients to submit forms directly to the SEC using an AJAX + HTML (I don't know if it conforms to XHTML) front end. That's pretty huge. Some of the forms have the possibility for hundreds of pieces of information to be included. The result is amazing, the user experience is on par with a stand-alone application. Best of all he doesn't care what platform or browser the client is using, so long as they're within this millennia on technology.
Junk filter? IMAP? Yeah, a lot has changed in nearly a decade.
In-browser interfaces are just too good and too convenient for me to pass up right now. I gave up on my pop account and set it to forward everything but definite spam to my Gmail account.
And doing it in an IFrame can get around one of the biggest disadvantages of XMLHTTPRequest, the broken browser back button.
Your disadvantage is my advantage. Sometimes you don't want that user to hit the back button to get to the last page, like when that last page was a form that you don't want them to reuse. It's annoying that I've had to develop methods to avoid duplicate submissions just because people hit a button twice or decide that the proper way to correct a mistake is to hit back then submit again.
Frames also didn't solve all the problems. IFrames came much closer, but still no cigar. One of the problems is that sometimes you just need a round trip to the server to tell script to do something to the page, you can accomplish that with a hidden IFrame or Frame, but that's not really what they were designed for and it requires the browser to interpret the result and attempt to render a page. That slows everything down just enough to be noticable.
p.s. I used Pegasus as my primary mail client some 8-10 years ago. For that time it was pretty good, is it really that bad now that it gets a "don't ask"?
I personally find it a little odd too but who is going to be offended by this? With all the religions and traditions in our society you'd think people would be more understanding and accepting of differences. Offended by an LCD screen on a tombstone?
I'd imagine people might be justifiably offended by the celebration of life that'll be included in Ron Jeremy's tomb stone.
It doesn't exactly work that way. Yes, a person could be a psychopath (have an antisocial personality disorder) and be a genius, but one in no way infers the other. Psychopathes do not feel remorse or guilt for their actions, in there minds it does not matter if they harm or kill someone so long as there is gain to be had from doing it. Psychopathes do not neccessarily have bad tempers, though. In fact, they're much more likely to seem calm until greatly provoked because they tend to care a lot less about things.
I don't think that everyone should be screened, nor do I neccessarily think that all top executives should be. It wouldn't be a bad idea to screen those with the most power, though.
Just reading the initial reactions from the community I'd say that people are concentrating much more on the trademarking scheme than they are on lambasting those who dare criticize the scheme's participants. Perhaps we should save the knee-jerk "any open source criticism will be flamed to death" responses.
As an example I'll use my nephew. When he was 5 years old my brother-in-law bought a new computer, after two years of me pleading that he accept that his Packard Bell Pentium 133 wasn't up to playing 99% of available video games. When he did this we almost immediately bought my nephew several K-3 educational video games. At first he really liked them and was excited to play them, until someone gave him their old playstation. Now you can't pull him away from your standard lot of sports and kids games. These games do little to teach more than hand-eye coordination. They are more fun, though, so he'll stick to them.
This I disagree with. While I am 100% against video cameras in the PUBLIC space I am not against video cameras in a private space (i.e. dressing rooms of a store). My feelings for personal privacy have no weight in a privately owned store that is using video cameras as a theft prevention mechanism. I do however have an equal weight with regards to my feelings about public spaces being spied upon.
The benefit of cameras in dressing rooms is incredibly little. Cameras are easy to block or trick when you're trying to steal something. That makes it less effective than other measures. The privacy concerns heavily outweigh the effectiveness. What if a minor goes in to the dressing room? Are there tapes being generated that could later be sold (illicitly or not)? Do we really know the gender of the security guard?
It's just wasteful and stupid to pay someone to watch cameras when you could pay that same person to sit outside the dressing rooms and enforce strict policy on the customers. Only three items allowed; no bags in the room; all items must be returned to the guard before purchase or restock; etc... Much more effective and no privacy issues.
Out in public issues occur if the law specifies that cameras are to be used for enforcement instead of just evidence gathering. Red light cameras are enforcement, and they are a big problem because they're not always accurate, they can't take context into accountm, and they're considered so indisputable that some courts won't hear the case until after you pay the fine. A system that silently watches and then uses cameras as evidence if need be is far less intrusive. Sure it might record 24/7, but if no one is looking at those recordings then it's not a big deal. That's why no one complains that they're on tape at ever convenience store and bank.
Probably 1/3rd of those users (2% of IE userbase) weren't average joes. The other 2/3rds probably consist of those who switched during the height of hype over phishing and those who were switched by the first 3rd when they had spyware cleaned.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would switch an average joe to IE7 beta, where as geeks switch average joes to FireFox every day.
This got me thinking about IE7 and it's possibilities to sway the stats. Perhaps that margin of usage is people testing IE7 for compatibility and bugs. If early adopters and web developers are using IE7 then that would take away from FireFox's user base. It was the "average joe" part of the grandparent's post that threw me from this initially.
With that said, the description of the statistics is too vague to know if this is true. IE7 could even be at 1% during this month which would probably wane in future months. It could just be a blip. We can't know because we don't have details, like margin of error.
The average joe that you mention doesn't know how to get the beta of IE7. Longhorn doesn't ship for quite some time, too early to attribute it to a slip in FireFox usage.
Maxtor has had reliability issues for some time now. I remember when I was a young teen and my father liked Maxtor because they were cheap and he did back-ups. When one died - we had a lot so there were deaths frequently - we'd send it back to them, warrantee or not. If it was under warrantee then we'd get a new one for free, if not then we had to pay substantially less than had we not returned the drive.
Seagate, on the other hand, I don't remember ever having to return one of their drives. I remember them running until they were replaced for higher capacity models. Thus, I always associated Seagate with higher quality. They were also more expensive.
The trade off was little. We spent about the same amount buying cheap drives and returning them as we did expensive drives that lasted.
Things to consider: All this happened almost 15 years ago, quality control can change a lot in that time. I typically buy on price now and haven't had a drive fail in years. The Maxtor drives were IDE while the Seagate ones were SCSI. If back-ups are involved then concern only becomes which drive you think will have the lowest cost when averaged over it's lifetime. That lifetime consists of operational and functional (a 4GB drive today isn't good for much more than swap).
I'm obviously a bit late to this conversation, but I like to read threads if I come across an interesting metamod.
What's so interesting about this thread is how completely clueless the posters seem to be about Scion, and even GM.
Scion wasn't some huge awakening with billions spent. It's the re-branding of vehicles that Toyota has sold for years in Japan. The xB is a typical Japanese-style car, minimized footprint with maximize space. It also steals most of it's design from the Nissan Cube. So what is the revolutionary concept that Toyota should be credited for with Scion? They FINALLY brought vehicles that the rest of the world enjoys to the US! That's it. It's not a huge engineering revolution; it's not that these vehicles were designed to fit the hip-hop scene; and it surely isn't why they're gaining on GM.
GM is actually another car company that recently realized that they might do well to import models sold in other countries. The problem is that they picked Australia, instead of Europe. Europe enjoys a wide range of stylish and economic vehicles. Americans tend to get the high end of those vehicles but miss out on the low end. There might be technical reasons why they don't do this, but if Toyota, Honda, and Ford can design world platforms why can't GM, right?
Well, the reasoning why GM has so many problems designing a world car goes straight to the heart of why they're losing market share. They have not innovated since the early 80's at best. They've been spending too much time fighting with the unions, fighting with management that thinks people want new cars the drive like old cars, and trying to figure out any way they can to lower the cost of making cars. They have no time or money to spend on figuring out more efficient manufacturing. The Japanese have had nothing but that time, they were growing their infrastructure, not trying to reshape it.
So, while Toyota was developing a process where every component provider was held to strict standards and thoroughly inspected GM was trying to keep every contract as cheap as possible. While Toyota was honing their assembly lines to have the minimal amount of work done with maximal results (more hands almost always means more chances to mess up) GM was busy fighting with unions that streamlining would cause job cuts and robots replaced a few humans. While Toyota was looking for a practical, if temporary, solution to the world's limited oil supply GM was forced to spend all its research money on hydrogen fuel cell technology in an effort to beat them to the next big thing. (People screaming "Honda!" should take note that GM has spent more on research into the technology to make decent vehicles from it and how to make the fuel more efficiently, GM has fuel cell vehicles but doesn't have the money to put out a small fleet of them at a loss just for PR.)
GM should do everything it can to track and reward it's brand loyalty because that's all GM has right now. Their management finally is starting to "get it", but it really seems to be too little too late. I doubt that the government will let them completely fold (they bailed out Chrysler in the past), but they will lose the number one spot, and they won't get it back in the foreseeable future. In the mean time, who really cares considering that all the foreign companies are producing much of their products in the US anyway. There's more US manufacturing going on in the 2006 line up of Toyotas than there is in Chrysler.
I mean..they can use them, but does OSI have to list EVERY compatible license for use? If they changed that then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. I think they should just list the major OS licenses (GPL, BSD, CC:SA, etc) and hide the complete list where only those really worried about a particular license are going to look for it.
I have a feeling it just depends on where you live as far as the shipping time. Although, Blockbuster seems to recognize movies as arriving and then wait until the next day to ship. Netflix normally ships the same day as the return (with the exception of any throttling that may happen).
You're right though, you can't judge a service by one user's experience, or even a small number of experiences. You have to take broader statistics or at least a larger survey. Unfortunately, I don't know of one and don't have the means to perform one. That's why I shared my experiences and the experiences that I'm personally aware of. I don't think it reads as a broadly sweeping assessment that everyone should use. If it wasn't clear enough then I apologize.
Also, my comments about Amazon being quick are certainly situational. I'm sure that not everyone gets most super saver items within the first few days. Even I have had instances where items were back ordered and took weeks to get there, though I didn't mention that because it wouldn't be important when dealing with a queue of movies.
I still think that the two in store free rentals is a huge advantage of the blockbuster service. If people in my area had better turn-around times on the movie rentals then I'd probably switch services just to get that. Then again, the thought of standing in line to rent a movie seems kinda passe at this point.
I, and a few friends, have been using Netflix for a couple years now. I've heard of the throttling but never experienced it. I've gone through times when I watched a movie the night I got it every time, and times when I've gone a couple monthes without bothering to watch any movies. I can't say that I ever noticed a big difference.
However, even if Netflix waits a day to process the movies that's still a four day turn around. During his trial at Blockbuster's service he noticed no less than a five day turn around. It's still one day better.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't even link to in the review and I believe it's already slashdotted anyway
Google may have the majority, but millions of people still use Yahoo!, MSN, and others daily. The numbers are far less skewed than the OS, office suite, and browser markets are. The fact that there is nothing that Google does where there aren't popular and viable alternatives to says a lot about it not being a monopoly. Aside from search there's very little that they're even the dominant player in.
The other factor is that they aren't showing any monopolistic signs. Microsoft, long ago, started purposfully designing their software so that the only way to interoperate (their word) properly with firms using their software was to use their software within your firm. Combine that with how little they're trying to change the technical difficulties they've created for programs to run under different operating systems and you have a monopoly. Google hasn't done anything to make the web less searchable by other companies. They don't make products that specifically block people from choosing competitors. They don't prevent you from deciding that you like Yahoo! better and typing your search there. They're even working on "federating" IM so that users can use whatever client they want.
So, yeah, being the best doesn't make you a monopoly. It doesn't excuse Microsoft from being one either.
If you go with XUL you have a similar argument, but you are tying yourself to a particular browser. Java, utopian language it may be, is slow under most RTEs and ultimately is proprietary. Though I don't know anyone who ever felt bad for coding with it... unless the end result ran like molasses. Flash seems under-used for legitimate applications, but the good Macromedia IDE is expensive and the whole thing is proprietary. XAML is, well, Microsoft's. If you're pro-Microsoft then that works, but then you might as well weigh your options about just making a "heavy" application with tried-and-true Windows forms.
AJAX + (X)HTML has its place, and can be used in some pretty large applications. A friend of mine recently finished an application that allows clients to submit forms directly to the SEC using an AJAX + HTML (I don't know if it conforms to XHTML) front end. That's pretty huge. Some of the forms have the possibility for hundreds of pieces of information to be included. The result is amazing, the user experience is on par with a stand-alone application. Best of all he doesn't care what platform or browser the client is using, so long as they're within this millennia on technology.
In-browser interfaces are just too good and too convenient for me to pass up right now. I gave up on my pop account and set it to forward everything but definite spam to my Gmail account.
I should check out Pegasus just for nostalgia.
Your disadvantage is my advantage. Sometimes you don't want that user to hit the back button to get to the last page, like when that last page was a form that you don't want them to reuse. It's annoying that I've had to develop methods to avoid duplicate submissions just because people hit a button twice or decide that the proper way to correct a mistake is to hit back then submit again.
p.s. I used Pegasus as my primary mail client some 8-10 years ago. For that time it was pretty good, is it really that bad now that it gets a "don't ask"?
I'd imagine people might be justifiably offended by the celebration of life that'll be included in Ron Jeremy's tomb stone.
I believe that if Windows does what you're asking it's documented here. [caution, pdf link]
I don't think that everyone should be screened, nor do I neccessarily think that all top executives should be. It wouldn't be a bad idea to screen those with the most power, though.
For more information read the Wikipedia article
Just reading the initial reactions from the community I'd say that people are concentrating much more on the trademarking scheme than they are on lambasting those who dare criticize the scheme's participants. Perhaps we should save the knee-jerk "any open source criticism will be flamed to death" responses.
As an example I'll use my nephew. When he was 5 years old my brother-in-law bought a new computer, after two years of me pleading that he accept that his Packard Bell Pentium 133 wasn't up to playing 99% of available video games. When he did this we almost immediately bought my nephew several K-3 educational video games. At first he really liked them and was excited to play them, until someone gave him their old playstation. Now you can't pull him away from your standard lot of sports and kids games. These games do little to teach more than hand-eye coordination. They are more fun, though, so he'll stick to them.
It's spelled like the beer, cause those are the people that started it. They did it to try and curb bar fights over useless statistics.
It could be argued just as effectively that, since that distance was not of our world, what Voyager did doesn't qualify for a world record.
Unless the FCC claims the whole of our solar system in it's domain.
That wouldn't surprise me.
Aside from that... what spectrum did Voyager use, was it unlicensed?
The benefit of cameras in dressing rooms is incredibly little. Cameras are easy to block or trick when you're trying to steal something. That makes it less effective than other measures. The privacy concerns heavily outweigh the effectiveness. What if a minor goes in to the dressing room? Are there tapes being generated that could later be sold (illicitly or not)? Do we really know the gender of the security guard?
It's just wasteful and stupid to pay someone to watch cameras when you could pay that same person to sit outside the dressing rooms and enforce strict policy on the customers. Only three items allowed; no bags in the room; all items must be returned to the guard before purchase or restock; etc... Much more effective and no privacy issues.
Out in public issues occur if the law specifies that cameras are to be used for enforcement instead of just evidence gathering. Red light cameras are enforcement, and they are a big problem because they're not always accurate, they can't take context into accountm, and they're considered so indisputable that some courts won't hear the case until after you pay the fine. A system that silently watches and then uses cameras as evidence if need be is far less intrusive. Sure it might record 24/7, but if no one is looking at those recordings then it's not a big deal. That's why no one complains that they're on tape at ever convenience store and bank.
Doh! Good call.
Probably 1/3rd of those users (2% of IE userbase) weren't average joes. The other 2/3rds probably consist of those who switched during the height of hype over phishing and those who were switched by the first 3rd when they had spyware cleaned.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would switch an average joe to IE7 beta, where as geeks switch average joes to FireFox every day.
This got me thinking about IE7 and it's possibilities to sway the stats. Perhaps that margin of usage is people testing IE7 for compatibility and bugs. If early adopters and web developers are using IE7 then that would take away from FireFox's user base. It was the "average joe" part of the grandparent's post that threw me from this initially.
With that said, the description of the statistics is too vague to know if this is true. IE7 could even be at 1% during this month which would probably wane in future months. It could just be a blip. We can't know because we don't have details, like margin of error.
The average joe that you mention doesn't know how to get the beta of IE7. Longhorn doesn't ship for quite some time, too early to attribute it to a slip in FireFox usage.
Seagate, on the other hand, I don't remember ever having to return one of their drives. I remember them running until they were replaced for higher capacity models. Thus, I always associated Seagate with higher quality. They were also more expensive.
The trade off was little. We spent about the same amount buying cheap drives and returning them as we did expensive drives that lasted.
Things to consider: All this happened almost 15 years ago, quality control can change a lot in that time. I typically buy on price now and haven't had a drive fail in years. The Maxtor drives were IDE while the Seagate ones were SCSI. If back-ups are involved then concern only becomes which drive you think will have the lowest cost when averaged over it's lifetime. That lifetime consists of operational and functional (a 4GB drive today isn't good for much more than swap).
What's so interesting about this thread is how completely clueless the posters seem to be about Scion, and even GM.
Scion wasn't some huge awakening with billions spent. It's the re-branding of vehicles that Toyota has sold for years in Japan. The xB is a typical Japanese-style car, minimized footprint with maximize space. It also steals most of it's design from the Nissan Cube. So what is the revolutionary concept that Toyota should be credited for with Scion? They FINALLY brought vehicles that the rest of the world enjoys to the US! That's it. It's not a huge engineering revolution; it's not that these vehicles were designed to fit the hip-hop scene; and it surely isn't why they're gaining on GM.
GM is actually another car company that recently realized that they might do well to import models sold in other countries. The problem is that they picked Australia, instead of Europe. Europe enjoys a wide range of stylish and economic vehicles. Americans tend to get the high end of those vehicles but miss out on the low end. There might be technical reasons why they don't do this, but if Toyota, Honda, and Ford can design world platforms why can't GM, right?
Well, the reasoning why GM has so many problems designing a world car goes straight to the heart of why they're losing market share. They have not innovated since the early 80's at best. They've been spending too much time fighting with the unions, fighting with management that thinks people want new cars the drive like old cars, and trying to figure out any way they can to lower the cost of making cars. They have no time or money to spend on figuring out more efficient manufacturing. The Japanese have had nothing but that time, they were growing their infrastructure, not trying to reshape it.
So, while Toyota was developing a process where every component provider was held to strict standards and thoroughly inspected GM was trying to keep every contract as cheap as possible. While Toyota was honing their assembly lines to have the minimal amount of work done with maximal results (more hands almost always means more chances to mess up) GM was busy fighting with unions that streamlining would cause job cuts and robots replaced a few humans. While Toyota was looking for a practical, if temporary, solution to the world's limited oil supply GM was forced to spend all its research money on hydrogen fuel cell technology in an effort to beat them to the next big thing. (People screaming "Honda!" should take note that GM has spent more on research into the technology to make decent vehicles from it and how to make the fuel more efficiently, GM has fuel cell vehicles but doesn't have the money to put out a small fleet of them at a loss just for PR.)
GM should do everything it can to track and reward it's brand loyalty because that's all GM has right now. Their management finally is starting to "get it", but it really seems to be too little too late. I doubt that the government will let them completely fold (they bailed out Chrysler in the past), but they will lose the number one spot, and they won't get it back in the foreseeable future. In the mean time, who really cares considering that all the foreign companies are producing much of their products in the US anyway. There's more US manufacturing going on in the 2006 line up of Toyotas than there is in Chrysler.
I mean..they can use them, but does OSI have to list EVERY compatible license for use? If they changed that then maybe we wouldn't be having this discussion. I think they should just list the major OS licenses (GPL, BSD, CC:SA, etc) and hide the complete list where only those really worried about a particular license are going to look for it.
Obviously XP has better hardware support. I just look for the submarine with the Windows logo on it at Best Buy.
You're right though, you can't judge a service by one user's experience, or even a small number of experiences. You have to take broader statistics or at least a larger survey. Unfortunately, I don't know of one and don't have the means to perform one. That's why I shared my experiences and the experiences that I'm personally aware of. I don't think it reads as a broadly sweeping assessment that everyone should use. If it wasn't clear enough then I apologize.
Also, my comments about Amazon being quick are certainly situational. I'm sure that not everyone gets most super saver items within the first few days. Even I have had instances where items were back ordered and took weeks to get there, though I didn't mention that because it wouldn't be important when dealing with a queue of movies.
I still think that the two in store free rentals is a huge advantage of the blockbuster service. If people in my area had better turn-around times on the movie rentals then I'd probably switch services just to get that. Then again, the thought of standing in line to rent a movie seems kinda passe at this point.
However, even if Netflix waits a day to process the movies that's still a four day turn around. During his trial at Blockbuster's service he noticed no less than a five day turn around. It's still one day better.