Microsoft recognises this, and therefore sells their operating system with a device which plays media.
Microsoft also uses the default bundling and their monopoly OS status to leverage into other markets.
Having a monopoly is not illegal. However, leveraging a monopoly to gain unfair advantage is. The latter is what the EU commission is trying to rein in.
This seems reasonable - why should someone be able to sell a competing product that does the same thing as a domain controller of global catalog server after they've been able to look at Microsoft's secret APIs?
When you have a monopoly, you have to behave differently. Microsoft didn't. Microsoft was convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly. Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is now violating the terms of their punishment for breaking the law. It is really that simple.
The OpenBSD guys response was "Can't you read! I want documentation NOW or I'm going to take my OS and go home."
It is a shame that you so grossly misrepresent the position of the OpenBSD people, and try to spin your ex-employer's position in a more positive light.
The OpenBSD people have a deadline on the near horizon, and they wanted to be able to include a non-buggy version of the driver in that release. They have been asking Adaptec for help for months, but to no avail. Then, when the OpenBSD people went public, Adaptec suddenly wonders what is the problem.
What I find sad in all this is that the OpenBSD people are being criticized for wanting to deliver free, quality, reliable, supported software to the users of OpenBSD. Our community should give them more support, not non-constructive criticism.
I'm feeding the troll here, but #1 why not? and #2 damn right. Opera does one thing and does it well. Firefox is mostly buzz these days as most of the features aren't user-friendly, swift, or light on memory.
I'm not sure why you thought my message was a troll, it was intended as such. Indeed, if you could see my user agent string, you'd see that I use Opera (currently 8.0b2, build 7483).
I thought my comment was a simple accurate observation, not a troll.
Correct. However, Opera is falling behind in mindshare now that FireFox has all the buzz. So the best thing for Opera to do is to put up a standards challenge to Microsoft.
That accomplishes two things: (1) some free PR for Opera, and (2) if anyone really follows through with it, it is far easier for Opera to adapt to the results than Microsoft. Opera has only a miniscule installed base that it needs to stay compatible with.
Yes, "have to". AOL caused a public relations problem, and they will have to fix it.
And it looks like they are fixing it.
America Online said late Monday that it plans to revise its user agreement in response to concerns that instant messages sent through the company's service could be monitored.
Yahoo! needs to make their servers far more reliable than they are. I often experience delays of tens of seconds when I try to log in. Their message boards have just come off of a two week period where messages disappeared, users were unable to post, users were unable to access the message boards, etc.
If Yahoo! is trying to make a name for itself in the search arena, then they should consider making the search feature within the message boards a lot more capable. As it stands now, it is all but useless, and a very poor indication of Yahoo!'s search engine capabilities.
And finally, has anyone here actually gotten any useful information in response to an email that was sent to Yahoo!'s customer service area?;-)
Then you should also be concerned about the contracts for the new Presidential helicopters, and the tax benefits that are given to corporations who move their corporate headquarters offshore, etc.
You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.
There is the sense of industry standard which means little more than widely used.
Then there is standard which should have some manner of ISO, ECMA or IEEE, etc. moniker.
Up until the time that Open Source software started to hit the radar screens of the mainstream IT trade press, Microsoft software was commonly referred to as Microsoft's industry standard software. One of the many improvements that Open Source brought to the scene is that the IT trade press began to refer to Microsoft's software more correctly as proprietary software instead of the industry standard.
This is nonsense. Netscape and IE were always alternatives to each other. Firefox is "the new Netscape", so nothing has really changed.
Yes, something has changed. And it is not Firefox being the "new Netscape". That is a specious mischaracterization. But what has changed is that Firefox is gaining marketshare, and Opera is losing marketshare. To your earlier point, downloads do not equal usage. Firefox is showing up in the stats, Opera isn't.
Blaming the stats programs for that is not going to help Opera.
Shrinking market share? They are reporting record downloads, dude.
The percentage of hits by Opera browsers on websites is decreasing.
Please, just because Firefox is doing well, that doesn't mean that Opera is dying.
I did not say that Opera was dying, nor did I say that it was dying because Firefox was doing well. I just said that Opera's marketshare is decreasing.
But more important than Opera's decreasing marketshare is that Opera is no longer the IE alternative it once was. That position has now been taken over by Firefox. I also see a lot more willingness for webmasters to listen to me when I ask them to adjust their site to support Firefox than I ever did when I asked them to support Opera.
I like Opera, I use Opera. Indeed, this reply is being composed in Opera. However, Opera has to do some pretty good marketing lest they be forgotten.
If you release the product, then there is an implicit commitment for supporting that product for a period of years. There is no such commitment with beta-level products.
So a company can release a product under the umbrella of a beta release to test the waters and see how much demand there is for the product. If the demand isn't there, the beta "test version" is pulled back in.
These betas are testing the market as much as they are testing the software.
With the increasing popularity of Firefox, Opera needed to do something to try to reverse its shrinking marketshare of the browser market. It is good to see Opera getting a little of the publicity it so desparately needs.
I read the article (!). And it didnt say anything about area codes. It just said it would be easier to get phone numbers for VOIP phones.
It did mention area codes, though implicitly when it spoke of 10-digit phone numbers. The gist is that the 10-digit phone numbers are allotted to VoIP vendors, and not the states. Since (here in the US) the first three digits of the phone number are the area code, the implication is that the VoIP vendor, and not the state in which the user is located, will determine the value of the area code assigned to a VoIP user.
By keeping his prices too low, he's driving competitors out of business. By keeping prices to high, he's driving consumers out of business.
By keeping the prices extra high for the products that have the monopoly (Windows OS and MS Office) Gates is able to charge low prices on the products whose competitors he is trying to kill off (Windows Media, Internet Explorer, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
It is their monopoly, they abused it, they were found guilty of the crime. Now they should grow up and accept the punishment given to them.
Why was that amount of personal data allowed to be on a laptop in the first place?
Microsoft also uses the default bundling and their monopoly OS status to leverage into other markets.
Having a monopoly is not illegal. However, leveraging a monopoly to gain unfair advantage is. The latter is what the EU commission is trying to rein in.
If they had not broken the law, yes. However, they did break the law, so things change.
When you have a monopoly, you have to behave differently. Microsoft didn't. Microsoft was convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly. Microsoft broke the law. Microsoft is now violating the terms of their punishment for breaking the law. It is really that simple.
It is a shame that you so grossly misrepresent the position of the OpenBSD people, and try to spin your ex-employer's position in a more positive light.
The OpenBSD people have a deadline on the near horizon, and they wanted to be able to include a non-buggy version of the driver in that release. They have been asking Adaptec for help for months, but to no avail. Then, when the OpenBSD people went public, Adaptec suddenly wonders what is the problem.
What I find sad in all this is that the OpenBSD people are being criticized for wanting to deliver free, quality, reliable, supported software to the users of OpenBSD. Our community should give them more support, not non-constructive criticism.
Having read the article, it does not convince me that Microsoft will release a version of Windows that obsoletes all current Windows software.
"The page cannot be found"
It was not intended as such. (sometimes I wonder why I miss those egregious typos when I proofread my comments.....)
Didn't someone earlier today comment on how Windows XP still runs programs from 1981?
There ain't no way Microsoft is going to scrap the Win32 API anytime in our lifetimes. They cannot. Their lifeline of revenue depends upon it.
I'm not sure why you thought my message was a troll, it was intended as such. Indeed, if you could see my user agent string, you'd see that I use Opera (currently 8.0b2, build 7483).
I thought my comment was a simple accurate observation, not a troll.
Correct. However, Opera is falling behind in mindshare now that FireFox has all the buzz. So the best thing for Opera to do is to put up a standards challenge to Microsoft.
That accomplishes two things: (1) some free PR for Opera, and (2) if anyone really follows through with it, it is far easier for Opera to adapt to the results than Microsoft. Opera has only a miniscule installed base that it needs to stay compatible with.
And it looks like they are fixing it.
America Online said late Monday that it plans to revise its user agreement in response to concerns that instant messages sent through the company's service could be monitored.
http://news.com.com/AOL+clarifies+IM+privacy+guara ntee/2100-1030_3-5616543.html?tag=nefd.top
I've never seen any problem at Google go unrepaired for more than a few minutes.
Maybe the best advice I can give to Yahoo! is to stop trying to do everything poorly, and pick a few things to do well.
AOL will have to change the ToS. The cat is out of the bag. Drudge Report is carrying the story as of this morning.
If Yahoo! is trying to make a name for itself in the search arena, then they should consider making the search feature within the message boards a lot more capable. As it stands now, it is all but useless, and a very poor indication of Yahoo!'s search engine capabilities.
And finally, has anyone here actually gotten any useful information in response to an email that was sent to Yahoo!'s customer service area? ;-)
[mod: feel free to mark as off-topic :-) ]
There is the sense of industry standard which means little more than widely used. Then there is standard which should have some manner of ISO, ECMA or IEEE, etc. moniker. Up until the time that Open Source software started to hit the radar screens of the mainstream IT trade press, Microsoft software was commonly referred to as Microsoft's industry standard software. One of the many improvements that Open Source brought to the scene is that the IT trade press began to refer to Microsoft's software more correctly as proprietary software instead of the industry standard.
Judging by what I've read here so far, I doubt if any advertising that Orbitz gets from this exposure is beneficial.
Yes, something has changed. And it is not Firefox being the "new Netscape". That is a specious mischaracterization. But what has changed is that Firefox is gaining marketshare, and Opera is losing marketshare. To your earlier point, downloads do not equal usage. Firefox is showing up in the stats, Opera isn't. Blaming the stats programs for that is not going to help Opera.
The percentage of hits by Opera browsers on websites is decreasing.
Please, just because Firefox is doing well, that doesn't mean that Opera is dying.
I did not say that Opera was dying, nor did I say that it was dying because Firefox was doing well. I just said that Opera's marketshare is decreasing.
But more important than Opera's decreasing marketshare is that Opera is no longer the IE alternative it once was. That position has now been taken over by Firefox. I also see a lot more willingness for webmasters to listen to me when I ask them to adjust their site to support Firefox than I ever did when I asked them to support Opera.
I like Opera, I use Opera. Indeed, this reply is being composed in Opera. However, Opera has to do some pretty good marketing lest they be forgotten.
So a company can release a product under the umbrella of a beta release to test the waters and see how much demand there is for the product. If the demand isn't there, the beta "test version" is pulled back in.
These betas are testing the market as much as they are testing the software.
With the increasing popularity of Firefox, Opera needed to do something to try to reverse its shrinking marketshare of the browser market. It is good to see Opera getting a little of the publicity it so desparately needs.
It did mention area codes, though implicitly when it spoke of 10-digit phone numbers. The gist is that the 10-digit phone numbers are allotted to VoIP vendors, and not the states. Since (here in the US) the first three digits of the phone number are the area code, the implication is that the VoIP vendor, and not the state in which the user is located, will determine the value of the area code assigned to a VoIP user.
By keeping the prices extra high for the products that have the monopoly (Windows OS and MS Office) Gates is able to charge low prices on the products whose competitors he is trying to kill off (Windows Media, Internet Explorer, etc.).