More than likely, the truth. Lately Linux has been big on exposing, and then fixing, it's faults.
I don't know about this. Over the last 5 years or so, Linux has fixed lots of bugs and crufty features. The problem I have is they don't seem to be doing much as far as making fundamental changes to the architecture to make it a lot better. OS X has added a lot of new, architectural features and in many ways looks a lot better than Linux for desktop use. A lot of what is done on Linux seems to be optimized for server use, which is great, unless you want to use it on the desktop. Why isn't SELinux in default Linux distros and used by default apps? Where are system services? Where are signed app frameworks? Core data? Application bundles?
I use Kubuntu daily, but it really seems to me that Linux makes a better server than a desktop these days, while OS X seems to be pulling away on the desktop.
Aside from that, I find myself searching google when I need one of the many applications that is missing from the package repos.
They definitely have different methods of application discovery. For example, stopping by BestBuy or Frys and browsing is not much of an option for Linux. When looking online a good first place to look is here.
So yes, OS X has basic functionality out of the box, but it's a long way from competing with Linux.
Are you comparing the two solely on one criteria? I agree Linux wins on package management and several other features, but it also loses on quite a few. It sure wins on handling OSS software, but loses on commercial.
It makes sense to me that Union Carbide, Cytec and KMG should have the same regulations imposed on them regarding future pollution.
Just as MS, Apple and Redhat are subject to the same regulations. The thing is, the regulations say you can't leverage a monopoly in one market to gain in another. Apple is likely to be ordered to make changes to how they handle iPods very soon, especially if they keep gaining market share. In fact, if these same regulations were not enforced, IBM would have killed MS in the early days, but antitrust restrictions stopped them.
Furthermore, it makes more sense to get them to pay a sum of money to all injured parties rather than requiring them to run hospitals, tree planting operations and so on.
What if the damage is ongoing? Should they have to pay a lump sum, or should they have to pay for all the medical care required due to the damage they caused? Opera loses money every day because MS has not yet stopped their criminal action. All their asking is that MS be forced to stop one of their criminal actions that is hurting them, which seems more than fair to me.
They are not likely to either have expertise in these areas or take the tasks to heart.
So your argument by analogy is that MS doesn't have the expertise to stop bundling Windows or stop shipping IE that intentionally breaks Web standards?
You got to be kidding. I hope you are not working on increasing the market share of desktop Linux.
You don't remember back in the day we all used to do this. You just kept Mozilla on a CD and installed it when you setup a system. It sure wasn't hard and people are a lot more likely to have multiple systems now than then.
How is removing IE from the Start Menu not removing it from the perspective of those 90% of users?
It is significantly different in the overall effect. You have to consider how it affects developers. If they can't target it, then they have to change the way they develop Web pages and Web applications. This in turn changes the choices users have.
As I mentioned in the other post, you can also remove iexplorer.exe at will.
It doesn't matter so much what you can add and remove as what is on the default system.
That said, I do hope the fact that OS\X is artificially tied to a particular hardware platform is considered when comparing.
I haven't been able to read it either, but the comparison can either look at it from a purely technical perspective or they can go into it from a practical, what the user will experience mode. Lack of hardware choice for OS X is a serious consideration, but then lack of mainstream software titles on Linux is also an issue. Neither is a technical issue, just the result of the F'd up market.
Similarly the need to go to websites to find, install and upgrade software is also a great disadvantage for Apple's platform: Fink/Macports have fairly measley offerings compared to most desktop Linux distributions and both still suffer from the kinds of dependency problems plaguing Linux users 10 years ago (at least that is my experience on Tiger). It's 2007: where's my one-click-system upgrade?
Actually there are a couple of nice package managers for OS X that cover native apps as well as ports, but the lack of one by default and unification is a drawback. On the other hand, Linux's failure to support OpenStep/GnuStep by default places it at a serious disadvantage for programs you do download from the Web... and let's face it that includes most commercial/for-pay software. Publishers just aren't happy about losing control of distribution of their packages and a lot of software ships on CDs and DVDs. Linux package managers are lousy at supporting software from anywhere but official repositories. I'd really like to see OpenStep extended to work with a package manager, many repositories, and software registration for commercial apps.
Of course all this makes sense. OS X was founded on commercial software from the Web and Linux has always relied primarily on OSS software. Neither is very good at handling the other.
While I use OS\X fairly often, these two factors - along with the inflexible bolt-on windowing environment - rule out OS\X as a good general purpose operating system.
I use Kubuntu and OS X daily. I actually find the integration between the Windowing system and the CLI better on OS X and usually prefer apps that are OS X native, all other things equal. I have an extensive comparison of Linux, OS X, and Vista that lists pros and cons of each platform and none of them win on everything. I wish I could read this article to see if they have anything I missed. The main places Linux is behind right now include application bundles, system services (a big one for me), and hardware upgrades. Linux wins big on package management, OSS software compatibility, and flexibility. For an application written natively for each OS, I mainly choose OS X because I can use system services to quickly and easily customize and add functionality. Adding English->German translation to iChat or Adium is as easy as downloading a file and dropping it in my Services folder. Doing the same with Kopete or Gaim on Linux requires I find an engineer to customize it with a new library and recompile it every time there is an update. I keep waiting for Kparts to be brought into the modern era, but it almost seems like major, architectural improvements to Linux have stopped in favor of minor improvements to the way things are already done. I like Linux and use it for a lot of applications, but it does seem to be quite a bit behind in a lot of ways these days and falling further behind rather than catching up. I hope it is not brain drain from so many Linux people jumping ship to OS X, but that is one possibility. I sometimes wish Linux developers would stop focusing on cloning Windows features and start working on cloning OS X features.
My guess is that OLPC has established a bunch of Jabber or IRC servers as part of the product.
They use XMMP, which is the Jabber protocol, combined with ZerConf for local discovery. In fact, they can probably see and chat with Macs running iChat.
How cool is it going to be for kids to click on the 'Chat' icon or whatever and suddenly be talking to other kids on the other side of the world?
There is more to it than that. Because they can auto-discover other local users without any configuration and because they rely on a central server, with other kids in the project they can not only chat, but collaborate using the majority of the core applications. They can collaborate on musical compositions, play games together, record and transmit pictures, video, and audio, or work on a school project.
Seriously, I'm sure their are a lot of school teachers in the US that wish Windows had incorporated ZeroConf and there were such rich, collaborative software packages available. The OLPC is not just cheap, it is superior for the purpose of educating children.
No surprises in the article - in fact it sounds like a typical experience of a small child given any computer and allowed to just play with it.
I disagree... slightly. On an average computer they would probably not be playing with the educational software or talking to kids in a third word country. For the most part, however, I think the OLPC in the hands of this child is wasted. The point is getting this to a kid who otherwise would have little or no access to a computer, textbooks, the internet, or telecommunications. The secondary point, is these things are designed to work together and with a central server to facilitate group learning. Without a curriculum and other students collaborating via these machines, they lose a lot of their usefulness.
You do realize that "unbundling IE" can be as simple as removing all shortcuts to Internet Explorer and the iexplore.exe file itself? Afterwards, you can install any default browser you like. Your argument doesn't hold water.
You're misunderstanding the term. "Bundling" is one of the classic forms of "tying" specifically mentioned in both US and EU antitrust law. Shipping the two together in the same box, even if IE is on a separate CD, would qualify as bundling, regardless of if it can be easily removed. Also, Opera was apparently calling for MS to separate out Trident with clearly defined APIs so that not only the IE application but also the rendering engine could be replaced by OEMs.
How is Microsoft costing Opera money?
First, all the users that Use IE simply because it is the default are not using Opera. If given a choice or if OEMs are given a choice some non-zero number would choose Opera giving them greater market share and more money from contracts with search engine providers. Second, MS's taking over the browser market and intentionally breaking the standards has led to the Web filled with IE-only pages that do not render properly in Opera or other compliant browsers. This makes it harder for Opera to license their browser to cell phone makers and other hardware companies. Likewise the domination of IE by unfair means has resulted in Web application lock in, providing a serious financial barrier to transition to neutral technologies. All this costs Opera hard cash.
Lack of awareness of alternatives is not the fault of Microsoft!
Ahh, but the awareness of IE is the direct result not of MS's marketing savvy, or because the product is well reviewed, but because MS has leveraged a monopoly in the desktop OS market. It is criminal to leverage a monopoly in one market to your advantage in another.
To put in your analogy, asking the EU to enforce development to "accepted web-standards" is akin to forcing the Manson family to commit their crimes only with "accepted weapon standards".
No, that isn't silly at all. Charlie Manson is forced to stop killing people by being put in prison. That is how he is forced to obey the standards. It isn't silly at all.
Name one artificial problem with Opera caused by a deliberate, malicious act on the part of Microsoft.
Sure, Opera can't read some Web pages that include either proprietary MS technologies, or broken standards (like IE's broken CSS support). That is caused directly by MS's illegal bundling coupled with their intentionally broken implementation.
I would say the same to you. Every argument you've provided has held no substance and reeks of anti-Microsoft bias that its not even funny.
Arguing that a criminal should be stopped from committing a crime is now prejudiced against the criminal? Please. You're a terrible MS apologist.
Even Wired doesn't agree with Opera.
I won't bother to read your link but you think "Wired" is the place to go for an educated view of anti-trust actions?
The sad part is, I actually like their browser!
No the sad part is that in a free market, most users would probably choose Opera or Firefox or Safari or something else and have a better user experience. In a free market IE would be better than it is because it would be competing fairly against the others for market share and their would be incentive for MS to fix it. The saddest part is people like you who think it is okay for one player to break the market and the law, simply because you don't understand how the economic system works or why we have antitrust laws in the first place and instead of educating yourself you instead try to defend a overly simplistic market model that ignores all we've learned from the antitrust horrors of history. Please, please, please go read up on monopolies and antitrust before trying to assert your opinion. At best you appear ignorant and at worst you could convince someone to make the world a worse place.
Actually if he's connected to a Jabber server and that server is connected to the internet, he can talk to anyone on any internet-connected Jabber server.
This is true, he can probably chat with GTalk users and the like, but there is a difference in that he can't "see" them since it only autodiscovers users connected to a given server (if I recall correctly). For other users he'd have to know their address (bob@gmail.com or whatever). I'm not even sure if the built in chat function has a UI element to do that (although it probably will eventually).
This sounds a lot like WGA and DRM to me. The machine "checks in" with the server to make sure it's still authorized. What else does it report to the server?
Sort of, except it works at the discretion of the user. Owners of the machine can request a key and take control if they want, but this is supposed to be targeting minors for educational purposes, so it makes sense to keep them centrally controlled by the school to some degree. The laptops also keep a log of activity for each student, so teachers can see which projects they've been working on (did they really spend 2 hours on composing that essay, or did they spend 15 minutes then play SimCity for the rest? I don't know if this information is uploaded to the server though.
But also require Apple to unbundle Safari from MacOSX and Redhat to unbundle Firefox from Fedora
Why? Apple and Redhat have committed no crime. Neither has a monopoly in the desktop OS space and neither is leveraging that monopoly via their browser. You might as well argue that it is fair to fine Union Carbide and for them to pay for cleanup for poisoning a huge area in India and killing a bunch of people, but that Cytec and KMG should be forced to pay fines and clean up other areas of India as well, since those companies also manufacture chemicals. MS is the only one breaking the law and costing Opera money in the process and should be the only one forced to redress that problem.
These days a browser is a requirement rather than an optional add on. Unbundling it would mean that users will not be able to use their newly installed operating system at all, even to find out where to buy/download a browser.
This is a trivial problem. OEMs could bundle a browser of their choice, which takes care of 90% of people. The remaining 10% who install their own OS know enough to grab one using another system or FTP. Or, MS could install a package manager so people could download their browser of choice directly, even building that feature into the installer and letting people pick one at that point.
However, OEMs should be permitted to bundle an alternative browser and de-emphasize IE by removing it from Start menu.
This is not good enough. If OEMs cannot easily remove IE entirely and replace it, then the economics of the situation will still favor keeping IE. Worse, since IE will still be on every system, while a standards compliant browser may or may not be, developers will still target the broken version of the standards.
MS is winning the browser war only among people who don't really care that much about what browser they're using.
Yes they are. This group encompasses most people. The question is, are they winning that market share fairly and legally, or are they doing so by breaking the law?
Almost every single one of my tech-savvy friends (with a few exceptions) uses Firefox or some other alternative browser. If all of the casual internet users weren't tallied up, I'm sure Firefox and Opera would have a much greater percentage of users.
Why does this matter? Opera is losing money. They are making less money on their search partnership because they have fewer users. They're making less money selling their browser to cell phone makers, because a lot of pages don't follow standards as a result of MS's actions. The courts have already ruled those actions on MS's part are illegal.
Are you telling me that if you were running a business and another business was convicted of breaking the law, and that criminal act was costing your company money, you would not bring suit against them seeking to make them at least stop the illegal action?
Here's an analogy. You run a resort on a lake. A little ways up a river that empties into the lake, is a company that is convicted of dumping poisons into the water and is paying fines, but has not yet stopped dumping the poisons. You see a sharp decline in customers because people are afraid of the water there. Another resort on the lake sues them, gets a big settlement and sells their land to an industrial consortium who does not care about the water quality, decreasing the value of your resort. You have to change your marketing strategy completely and try to add new activities that don't involve the water. You're still popular among a few people, but you could be making a lot more money. Would you sue the company that is still dumping poison into the water?
In this case, the water is Web standards and MS is intentionally poisoning them for profit.
First of all, complain to the OEMS. They are the ones that can unbundle IE from the OS and install your browser...
Do you have evidence to indicate that they are contractually allowed and have not been coerced by MS's monopoly influence into keeping it? Are there parts of Windows built specifically to rely upon IE?
Microsoft is under no obligation to include competitor software on a CD they publish and distribute (unless Opera wants to pay them to do so).
Microsoft is breaking the law in a way that costs Opera money. They've been convicted in numerous criminal and civil cases now. MS is obligated to reach a settlement with Opera or the courts will award whatever damages and injunctions they see fit.
Secondly, the EU is in no position to try to enforce MS to using international standards. That's Microsoft's choice.
The EU is sovereign government body and can pass whatever laws they want. MS is already convicted of breaking those laws, so yeah, the EU can pretty much order MS to do whatever they see fit as punishment for those crimes. I don't think you're really looking at this in the proper perspective. For an analogy, try imagining a surviving victim of the Manson family murders. There is no longer doubt of a crime and if that person brings civil suit against Charles Manson the courts may well award them all the money from Manson's new book deal. Arguing that Manson is not obligated to give away money he is earning himself, is a bit naive.
If they want to go propietary, let them and compete on your own merits.
Microsoft does not compete. That is the whole point. Rather than users or even OEMs having a choice, MS introduces artificial problems with competing products, by subverting the standards using their overwhelming influence in the desktop OS market. This is criminal in the EU and US.
Christ, this ticks me off enough that I'm actually thinking of sending a nastygram to Opera.
Go ahead, but if you want to be taken seriously I suggest you educate yourself on the topic first.
The only programs I've found that don't honour the default are Yahoo Messenger and City of Heroes - apparently they prefer to hardcode to launch IE, which is their choice.
Although one might note, it is a choice facilitated by the fact that those developers can count on IE being installed on every copy of Windows, and cannot count on other browsers. I suspect if OEMs had a choice and shipped with different, default browsers installed, developers would stop hard coding the browser and use the proper method, pretty quickly.
Right analogy, wrong direction. It would actually be like Ford being forced to take the CD player and FM radio out of all of their cars because it competes with XM or Sirius radio. The idea is ludicrous.
...assuming Ford made their own radios and Ford was the only car company on the planet and Ford radios were designed to shift frequency slightly every X seconds, forcing most radio broadcasters to do the same and violating the broadcasting standards.
Why should Opera get a free (forced) ride for distribution?
Because Microsoft is breaking the law in a way that makes Opera lose money.
Next, you'd have to assume, it would be unfair for Toshiba to make a bedroom tv that has a built in DVD player because it locks out all other DVD player manufacturers.
Well, if Toshiba had a monopoly on making TVs, then yes. Why is it so hard to understand the monopoly part of this equation? Are people really so uneducated they don't even understand the basics of monopolies and antitrust law? I went to school for engineering, but this was covered in freshman economics. Next time you make an analogy, try making it one where a company has a monopoly.
Try electrical power distribution, for example. Just as Microsoft has monopoly influence in the desktop OS market, the local power company has a monopoly on power distribution. How about if the power company upped your bill by $80 a month and then bundled a "free" cell phone with "free" service. Would that be fair to you as a customer? What if the phone and service where crappy, so you ended up paying for both that phone and another one? Suppose not only did they provide you with this "free" cell phone, but it had a bunch of patented connectors so you had to buy chargers from them as well and suppose the other phone companies pretty much all went out of business. There was just the power company cell phone and one, premium priced alternative for people who used solar panels, and all the connectors for those phones followed the standards, meaning they did not work with the patented connectors used in everything else to work with the power company' phones. Now, that is a proper analogy.
I could think of a 1000 examples without even trying.
Great, how many can you think of where the company in question has a monopoly on one market and is illegally using that to take over another market, to the detriment of customers and competitors?
Because their current bundling is against the law. They've already lost this case in the past, the difference is Opera isn't looking for a cash settlement, they're looking to stop the abuse.
Unbundling it would mean the OS doesn't have a functioning browser (not to mention it's built-in to the OS, so removal would be only a cosmetic feat (removing the icon) not actually removing the browser).
Unbundling may well require removal of Trident from the OS, so no it would not just be cosmetic. Just because Windows does not ship with a browser, does not make much difference to end users. OEMs, like Dell are still free to include whatever software they want, including Trident+IE, or Gecko+Firefox. Anyone savvy enough to install an OS is savvy enough to install a browser too.
Including other browsers makes more sense, but won't it make Windows even more bloaty?
You can fit Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Konquerer in under 150 Mb, so even if they're all installed by default, that isn't much footprint difference compared to the several Gb install that is Vista. Users are free to delete them to regain the space, and OEMs are free to delete any they don't want on machines they ship.
Is this just a sandy vagina move, or do they have a point?
If Web developers can be assured that every Windows box has Firefox or Opera or another standards compliant browser installed on it, then "Error, your browser IE, cannot properly read this page. Please click here to launch Opera" becomes a viable option for many Web developers. It saves them all the time and effort needed to work around all of IE's intentional violations of the standard and promotes those standards in the future, pressuring MS to fix IE. Basically, it helps to redress MS's current monopoly abuse by making them compete with other browsers on features, rather than winning based upon being the default choice because MS has a monopoly.
It doesnt[sic] really matter what your usability studies say, a one button mose[sic] is really annoying.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what geology experiments say either, the earth is only 4000 years old.
Whats even more annoying is people who have started to dual boot macbooks which only have one mouse button on their trackpad (!!).
Novice users only want one anyway. Advanced users who take the time to learn the two-finger method in OS X, or assign chording in Windows can do things faster than with two buttons, since you don't have to move your left hand off the keys. The only people it really is a problem for are people who think they're advanced... but aren't advanced enough (or are too stubborn) to learn how to use the interface properly.
In addition to this, you cant tap the pad, like every single other computer, and have it count as a click.
Yes, you can. In fact it is better than most because you can tap with one or two fingers for different actions.
Its more in a long line of apple usability nightmares.
Obviously spoken by someone who has not used OS X enough to know what it does, and who has no expertise in usability and has done no research.
So the mac solution is to redesign the entire interface for 5% of idiot users.
No. They design for novices and for expert users. They just don't design it to work just like Windows fo Windows users who don't want to learn a better way.
Man, if apple was a car company they would swap the gas and break because steve jobs is left footed.
Umm, the Mac design predates Windows, remember?
Its a cult, a million studies arent going to change the reality...
I think the guy who has decided what is truth and is not interested in scientific evidence or studies is the one who is in danger of espousing a religious, or cult-like view.
Yeah, thats why it takes so long to do even simple things on a mac.
Heh, and your scientific evidence of this is? Where are the usability studies where the actions are timed? Oh, all you can find are ones that contradict your belief, well I'm sure that won't be a problem for you, all you need is a little faith.
People like you just cant admit that a one button mouse is a completely stupid idea and is single handedly regressing computers back to 1986.
A one button mouse is great for novice users. A multi-button mouse is better for advanced users. A mouse that can switch between both modes depending on which user is logged in is better yet. Note, this has nothing to do with trackpads, which are a different matter, since both hands are normally on the keyboard at the time which changes the usability significantly.
Why is it stubborn twits like yourself can't base their opinions on factual data and admit that a mouse that is more flexible is better. Personally, as a rather advanced user I have a four button trackball. Guess what, it works better on a Mac, because there is one fewer wasted button on context menus the develop of an app thought I'd want to have. Instead I can assign functions I want to use. Gee the creators of Wordpad might have thought I'd want to right-click and select copy, but I never do that. I prefer using a keyboard combo for that. so the right-click menu is about useless. Under OS X, using TextEdit, I've assigned that menu to hold six common text reformatting scripts, offer spelling corrections, grammar corrections, and lookup words in the dictionary and thesaurus. Would you care to explain to me how the Windows+Wordpad+useless menu is better than OS X+TextEdit+menu I get to define???
The only people who complain about the multi-button use on OS X, are people who only know how to use Windows and are opposed to gaining functionality because then they'd have to learn something.
All of the sudden, Jobs seems like a fucking genius keeping Apple's tech support bill so low, eh?:)
You joke, but pretty much anyone who has ever done usability testing on modern computer systems has run into difficulty with right and left mouse buttons. It is the single, number one, most common usability problem. The worst are users (about 5%) who always click both buttons at the same time, usually resulting in a left click, but occasionally (and apparently randomly to them) their other finger wins the race and they right click. The problem is not even solely that of novice users. When you use software to record the screen as people work, you see the problem for advanced users, most of whom do not even notice. I saw this once for one of the top security architects for one of the biggest tier 1 ISPs in the US, and he was a really bright guy.
Apple has largely solved this problem with two major things. First, all systems ship in single button configuration, so developers almost never require right-clicking for any action. (aside from one pro graphics company and a few bad ports of Windows/Linux apps). This means everything accessed by right-clicking is a secondary way to get to that function and can be used for quick shortcuts. The second thing they did was the invention of the mighty mouse. It isn't perfect and I don't use one myself, but they change a mouse from single button to multi-button in software, so different users of the same hardware can have either a simple mouse or an advanced mouse. This is the best thing ever for public machines, family computers, and other shared systems.
I suppose having actual experience with formal, scientific testing in this area is why all the idiotic comments about 1 button mice and ridicule of people who have problems is so annoying to me.
Alright. One by one. Because I was bated[sic]. My entire Office runs 2007 now. Within 2 months of release. I doubt we are alone. I think 99% is optimistic.
And your office doesn't have to exchange files with any other offices, companies, or government agencies that don't support the xdoc format?
It is not an engineers job to destroy non metric screws.
No, it is, however, 100% an engineer's job to recommend against buying and using them in products they design, especially when they have so many drawbacks and no advantages yet. We're talking about whether we should include OOXML in OSS products being built and in so doing encourage their use in products that want to interoperate.
Samba has nothing to do with LDAP.
Umm, okay. Sure. Why do I bother trying to educate the uneducated?
Samba was original an SMB/CIFS implementation, which came around LONG before MS started to use Kerberos and LDAP.
Yeah, and no one had ever heard of it until it morphed into an attempt to reverse engineer compatibility with MS's broken recreations of the standards. Samba is a reverse engineering project and has been for a long, long time.
It has only been since Windows 2000 that Active Directory (that involves stuff like Kerberos and LDAP) has come onto the scene.
Sigh, what MS calls their crap doesn't matter. It doesn't change what it is.
Similarily, they created OOXML because ODF *SUCKS BALLS* to implement for MS Office type use cases. Definition of *SUCKS BALLS* varies depending who you are.
Please. Have you read the specs? OOXML is not even implementable by anyone else. It isn't a "standard" at all in the normal sense of the term. Every single function is specifically designed to reproduce either exactly how MS Office does things, instead of generically define a function, or exactly reproduce how one other existing vendor implements something that MS Office can't do. It is terrible and unusable.
You claim ODF sucks in comparison to OOXML, but there are already ODF plug-ins for MS Office from more than one source and they conform to the spec. Aside from MSOffice 2007, there are zero OOXML implementations that conform to that spec because it is impossible to implement as pointed out in the hundreds of comments from different countries and organizations that reviewed it for approval as a standard.
I really hope you're being paid to astroturf, because otherwise you've just lowered the bar, even for MS fanboys.
I fully agree with you, but I think you're missing a key factor. The next big AAA game will sell 1 million copies. The next 'big' casual pc game (snood, geometry wars, etc) will sell a couple of thousand copies.
I think we're getting terms mixed up here. I've been using the terms "hardcore" and "casual" to separate games into the market segments they target, not to indicate how much money was spent developing them. For very small titles with small budgets, I'd refer to them as "low budget" or "indy" games. Most "indy" games like this tend to target PCs rather than consoles... and this discussion has been about consoles up until now. The big news with regard to the Wii is that they've tapped a new market segment, appealing to and selling to many "casual" gamers who previously have not owned any console. Many of these people are very young children, the elderly, and the busy middle-aged professional who probably has a family and limited free time in which to play games. Many analysts have been referring to this new segment as the "casual" gaming market.
Using the definitions above, there is no reason a "AAA" title (gods what an annoying marketing term) cannot also be a "casual" game. For the PC market, I'd argue "The Sims" exemplifies this. They spent a lot of money making it and it has sold more than probably any other game, but it appeals to people who probably buy one or two games a year and only want to play for a few hours a week.
We're starting to see casual gamers migrating from the PC to the DS and Wii. If publishers examine the PC business model, they stand to make massive profits.
Agreed, but I think it is also pulling in users who are not in the PC market at all (for example the phenomenon of sales to homes for the elderly).
It is changing that. The question is "how much is it changing that?" People who previously spent their time and money elsewhere are now buying video game consoles. The main difference between a video game and a board game has been ease of use and willingness of customers to try them.
The attachment rates for the other two systems in this generation are quite a bit higher, for the record, especially in terms of third-party games.
Yup and the rate of console sales is significantly lower. Why do you suppose that is? Have you heard of many old folks homes or even older people buying Xbox360's in large numbers? Nope, because the other consoles are mostly selling to the traditional "hardcore" market where people are more likely to be buying many games, as opposed to the casual gaming market where people generally buy fewer in a given year. The Wii market is more like the PC gaming market than consoles have traditionally been. Most people who buy games for their PC buy one or two a year and the number one seller for a long time has been "The Sims." That is the casual gaming market. They don't spend a pile of money on titles every year. They don't play every day. Ease of use and the ability to play for 20 minute spurts is more important than the latest graphics.
The point is, the Wii, like the iPod before it is catering to a new market segment and a more mainstream one. Why would buying fewer games be a better indicator of popularity than the number of actual consoles sold?
No, but it will hurt their reputation with game developers, which is a huge long-term problem.
Game developers care about overall sales and that is what they will look at. They will have to adapt somewhat to the different audience on the Wii, but since it has different controls, that is a given anyway. I have little doubt that Wii buyers will tend to buy fewer titles per year, per console than other manufacturers. They will probably be played by more people per console, but for less time per person. The average Wii buyer might play for an hour a couple times a week, but they won't be doing any 48 hour gaming marathons. It is a different market, but sure seems to be a viable and profitable one.
The reason why it's not a problem for the iPod to have a low attachment rate is because an MP3 will work on any MP3 player; music sales won't be affected because hardcore consumers are buying the same commodity as casual ones. A Wii game, on the other hand, will only work on the Wii, so if people don't buy games for it, developers will make games for other systems instead.
Umm, you do know Apple was selling Fairplay encoded AAC files that for a long time only played on iPods, right? Like Apple, Nintendo has not built their business model on blades, but upon razors. They make money on console sales and game sales is just a bonus. Third party developers don't seem too concerned that they're going to lose money developing for the platform, since every major publisher did an about face and announced a commitment to it. I'm sure they ran the numbers first.
That does appear to be happening, if you look on eBay.
I've looked on ebay. Since you can still sell a Wii for more than you can get in a store (average of 53% more), tell me how are you separating out:
Users who bought a Wii to use, didn't like it, and are selling it to get rid of it
People who bought the Wii with the intention of reselling at a higher price
People who bought the Wii with the intention of keeping it, but decided to resell for a profit and buy another in the future when prices come down
It is hard to find good numbers on total ebay sales, but assuming the sale rate of Nintendo systems there has been about constant since their last report, ebay re-sales account for less than 5% of all Wii sold. Subtract out what percentage is profiteering, and anyway you look at it, it still doesn't dent the Wii's lead over othe
You don't get my point. Microsoft is going to make the Windows-using world use OOXML, and I don't think there's anything we can do to stop them, much as we'd love to.
Now is the time to try to stop them and there is no harm in trying. Projects don't need OOXML support right now because basically no one is using it yet and everyone using it needs to interoperate with people who have not migrated.
Their market share is so great that they can quite easily push OOXML onto Office users, and as they provide a nice upgrade path from.doc format, nobody will really complain.
Ahh, but not until they can get most users to upgrade to Office 2008, which will take a lot of time, if it ever happens. And people are already complaining. Municipalities and governments and large companies are passing laws and regulations requiring the use of ODF. More will do so if pressured and if OOXML is not wrongly seen as a viable alternative with the same benefits.
Even if we do manage to stop them getting OOXML ratified as an ISO standard, it'll still take.doc's place as the dominant document format.
Sort of like Vista has taken WinXP's place as the dominant OS? MS is competing on two fronts here, with their own.doc which has better interoperability and lower cost right now and with ODF which also has lower cost and which brings new benefits. Giving up on one front right now benefits us not at all since no one needs OOXML yet. Why not push for ODF all the way as the new standard and if it loses to OOXML in the long run, at least OOXML will have been weakened and it can be implemented at a later date with no loss of revenue.
The problem with the analogy is that we already know that everyone likes to listen to music...
Ahh but everyone doesn't like to listen to music, and more specifically, not everyone wants to invest money to have a large selection of music on a portable device.
We don't know that everyone likes to play video games...
To continue the analogy, we do know that a significant portion of the population likes to play games, the question is "will the Wii be easy and fun enough to gain market share among people who normally play bridge or cribbage or hide and seek or racquetball?" Based on sales numbers, it seems that yes it is.
And considering the low attachment rate that the Wii has, it's still an open question.
The "attachment rate" of games is always likely to be low, but that does not really indicate much of anything. You could make the same argument about iPods and the number of songs people put on them relative to other MP3 players. Hardcore Nomad users typically had 20 GB of music on their systems, while the typical iPod only has a "song attachment rate" of about 3 GB. This is not at all surprising or indicative of the imminent failure of the iPod. When you open the market to more casual users, they devote fewer resources to the use of the device, be it an MP3 player or a gaming console. This could be troubling for the viability of the console in the market if Nintendo relied upon game sales to make a proit, but they don't; they actually make money on each console sold so it is not like selling lots of onsoles and few games will hurt them financially as it would Sony or MS.
The only really troubling statistic for Nintendo would be if a large percentage of users bought Wii intending to use it for their own purposes, then resold it without the intention to repurchase a new one in the future. Such numbers, of course, would be hard to come by, but I have seen no such indications. The Wii is dominating in sales and seems to be a winner. Even if sales slow down drastically, it has already succeeded in opening up the market and changing the way the "game" is played.
Prevent anyone from needing to open a "very important" OOXML file from work at home.
As far as I can tell Office 2007 is already released.
Yeah it is. Try sending an OOXML file to 99% of the populace and they'll ask you to resend it in a different format because it is not yet a de facto standard.
Where did you come up with the idea that it was somehow the mission of every open source or free software advocate to destroy any and all ideas that are not ours?
Destroy ideas? We're not talking about ideas. We're discussing standards. You might as well ask when it became every mechanical engineer's mission to "destroy" the idea of using a new kind of bolt that isn't quite metric, but is similar, but the size and wrenches that can use them are patented and cannot be made freely by tool makers unless they license it, oh and some of it is secret and there is no easy way to find that part out. When the "idea" I want to destroy is, "hey let's make it hard for everyone else to create good products by intentionally breaking their interoperability with ours," then yeah I think it is the mission of free software advocates to oppose it.
Hence why things like Samba exist.
You know why Samba exists? It isn't because MS had a good, new idea. They took an already existing idea and standards (LDAP & Kereberos) that others were already using, and then intentionally broke parts of it to make their version (SMB) incompatible. It introduced no new functionality, it was the same damn thing except broken so it would not work with things other than Windows, and it is broken in secret ways. The Samba project is an attempt to reverse engineer the secret, broken parts so that other products can interoperate, but it would be better for everyone and the wold as a whole if MS had simply adhered to the LDAP standard so there would be no need for Samba to even exist. Ask any member of the Samba team if they could go back in time and stop MS from creating SMB and instead get them to use LDAP, if they would do so. Samba is a hack trying to solve a problem that only exists in the first place because MS created said problem intentionally. MS is trying to do the same thing with OOXML. Nothing is stopping them from implementing ODF, but they refuse to do so because they want interoperability to be broken because it makes them money.
Why are you forcing this on us? We have a great standard. It is ODF. The effort to get OOXML working on free software is seperate from this.
Forcing something on you? Do you mean OOXML is separate from ODF, just like SMB is separate from LDAP? It is a deliberate attempt to undermine standards and a blatant attempt to lie to the world by claiming to be "open" when in fact it is a closed, proprietary format. OOXML exists only to break things, which is why I think anyone interested in things working well, should try to discourage its adoption.
Also, the MP3 player was already a proven concept by the time the iPod came out, while waggle wasn't.
Actually the iPod and the Wii are very analogous in their conception and delivery. When the iPod was released there were other MP3 players and they were selling, but only to a tiny market. Most people used portable CD players instead, simply because the overall experience with MP3 players was not easy enough for the general populace. Apple did not really cut into the market of existing MP3 players, mostly owned by geeks, but opened up the market to the average Joe in the mainstream by making it easy enough to rip CD collections, download songs, buy songs, manage songs, load songs onto the device, and actually work the controls. They sold oodles more than any other manufacturer because of this new market segment.
The market for gaming consoles has traditionally been bigger than the market for MP3 players was, but Nintendo took a page from Apple's book, and rather than try to compete for the same users with MS and Sony, they tried to expand the market by making a console for people who would otherwise not buy any console. They designed a system for young children, older people, and very casual gamers. So far it has worked admirably and the demand for them has kept up, because of the word of mouth reputation. It's not like old folks homes were going to buy gaming consoles because of any TV ad they saw, but after a few folks played with them at their kid's house, suddenly every old folks home in the country is trying to get a few.
If three years ago you'd told me my father would be buying a game console, I would have laughed in your face. This is the guy who last year watched a DVD for the first time, on the DVD player I bought him... and he actually "rewound" the DVD by scanning backwards through the whole thing before ejecting it. He bought Wii two weeks ago for the grandkids, and enjoys Wii Sports.
I don't see there being any real danger that many people were "tricked" into buying the Wii and they're all going to decide it really sucks and they don't want it anymore. I do think some hardcore gamers who bought it because of the reviews will find they spend a lot more time on the 360 or PS3, but that will partially be mitigated by which games are offered on which platform. What confuses the issue is that a lot of the people writing reviews or even with opinions here on Slashdot are hardcore gamers and they assume people buying the Wii are "like them" when in truth the Wii is successful because it appeals to and is selling to an untapped segment of the gaming market, casual gamers.
I'll quote that to you in a few years when you find you can't open that dreadfully important OOXML file from work on your home computer.
The point of not appearing to officially support OOXML and of refusing to implement it until ODF is fully supported is to try to prevent that from ever happening. We have a choice, either in three years we will have the same situation we do now, except with OOXML instead of.doc, or we'll have a real standard format that can be fully implemented by everyone. The moves we make make now determine how likely each of those futures is. Personally, I see nothing wrong with adamantly refusing to support OOXML until such a time as that support is invaluable. If it becomes the de facto standard, fine add support to cut our losses. Right now we should be focused on making sure it does not become a de facto standard in the first place. For the foreseeable future, Word will support.doc format and so should anyone interested in collaboration (as much as that is possible). Going forward, however, wouldn't it make more sense to do everything we can to make sure the new standard is a real open standard so things can actually get better?
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I don't know about this. Over the last 5 years or so, Linux has fixed lots of bugs and crufty features. The problem I have is they don't seem to be doing much as far as making fundamental changes to the architecture to make it a lot better. OS X has added a lot of new, architectural features and in many ways looks a lot better than Linux for desktop use. A lot of what is done on Linux seems to be optimized for server use, which is great, unless you want to use it on the desktop. Why isn't SELinux in default Linux distros and used by default apps? Where are system services? Where are signed app frameworks? Core data? Application bundles?
I use Kubuntu daily, but it really seems to me that Linux makes a better server than a desktop these days, while OS X seems to be pulling away on the desktop.
They definitely have different methods of application discovery. For example, stopping by BestBuy or Frys and browsing is not much of an option for Linux. When looking online a good first place to look is here.
So yes, OS X has basic functionality out of the box, but it's a long way from competing with Linux.Are you comparing the two solely on one criteria? I agree Linux wins on package management and several other features, but it also loses on quite a few. It sure wins on handling OSS software, but loses on commercial.
Just as MS, Apple and Redhat are subject to the same regulations. The thing is, the regulations say you can't leverage a monopoly in one market to gain in another. Apple is likely to be ordered to make changes to how they handle iPods very soon, especially if they keep gaining market share. In fact, if these same regulations were not enforced, IBM would have killed MS in the early days, but antitrust restrictions stopped them.
Furthermore, it makes more sense to get them to pay a sum of money to all injured parties rather than requiring them to run hospitals, tree planting operations and so on.What if the damage is ongoing? Should they have to pay a lump sum, or should they have to pay for all the medical care required due to the damage they caused? Opera loses money every day because MS has not yet stopped their criminal action. All their asking is that MS be forced to stop one of their criminal actions that is hurting them, which seems more than fair to me.
They are not likely to either have expertise in these areas or take the tasks to heart.So your argument by analogy is that MS doesn't have the expertise to stop bundling Windows or stop shipping IE that intentionally breaks Web standards?
You got to be kidding. I hope you are not working on increasing the market share of desktop Linux.You don't remember back in the day we all used to do this. You just kept Mozilla on a CD and installed it when you setup a system. It sure wasn't hard and people are a lot more likely to have multiple systems now than then.
How is removing IE from the Start Menu not removing it from the perspective of those 90% of users?It is significantly different in the overall effect. You have to consider how it affects developers. If they can't target it, then they have to change the way they develop Web pages and Web applications. This in turn changes the choices users have.
As I mentioned in the other post, you can also remove iexplorer.exe at will.It doesn't matter so much what you can add and remove as what is on the default system.
I haven't been able to read it either, but the comparison can either look at it from a purely technical perspective or they can go into it from a practical, what the user will experience mode. Lack of hardware choice for OS X is a serious consideration, but then lack of mainstream software titles on Linux is also an issue. Neither is a technical issue, just the result of the F'd up market.
Similarly the need to go to websites to find, install and upgrade software is also a great disadvantage for Apple's platform: Fink/Macports have fairly measley offerings compared to most desktop Linux distributions and both still suffer from the kinds of dependency problems plaguing Linux users 10 years ago (at least that is my experience on Tiger). It's 2007: where's my one-click-system upgrade?Actually there are a couple of nice package managers for OS X that cover native apps as well as ports, but the lack of one by default and unification is a drawback. On the other hand, Linux's failure to support OpenStep/GnuStep by default places it at a serious disadvantage for programs you do download from the Web... and let's face it that includes most commercial/for-pay software. Publishers just aren't happy about losing control of distribution of their packages and a lot of software ships on CDs and DVDs. Linux package managers are lousy at supporting software from anywhere but official repositories. I'd really like to see OpenStep extended to work with a package manager, many repositories, and software registration for commercial apps.
Of course all this makes sense. OS X was founded on commercial software from the Web and Linux has always relied primarily on OSS software. Neither is very good at handling the other.
While I use OS\X fairly often, these two factors - along with the inflexible bolt-on windowing environment - rule out OS\X as a good general purpose operating system.I use Kubuntu and OS X daily. I actually find the integration between the Windowing system and the CLI better on OS X and usually prefer apps that are OS X native, all other things equal. I have an extensive comparison of Linux, OS X, and Vista that lists pros and cons of each platform and none of them win on everything. I wish I could read this article to see if they have anything I missed. The main places Linux is behind right now include application bundles, system services (a big one for me), and hardware upgrades. Linux wins big on package management, OSS software compatibility, and flexibility. For an application written natively for each OS, I mainly choose OS X because I can use system services to quickly and easily customize and add functionality. Adding English->German translation to iChat or Adium is as easy as downloading a file and dropping it in my Services folder. Doing the same with Kopete or Gaim on Linux requires I find an engineer to customize it with a new library and recompile it every time there is an update. I keep waiting for Kparts to be brought into the modern era, but it almost seems like major, architectural improvements to Linux have stopped in favor of minor improvements to the way things are already done. I like Linux and use it for a lot of applications, but it does seem to be quite a bit behind in a lot of ways these days and falling further behind rather than catching up. I hope it is not brain drain from so many Linux people jumping ship to OS X, but that is one possibility. I sometimes wish Linux developers would stop focusing on cloning Windows features and start working on cloning OS X features.
They use XMMP, which is the Jabber protocol, combined with ZerConf for local discovery. In fact, they can probably see and chat with Macs running iChat.
How cool is it going to be for kids to click on the 'Chat' icon or whatever and suddenly be talking to other kids on the other side of the world?There is more to it than that. Because they can auto-discover other local users without any configuration and because they rely on a central server, with other kids in the project they can not only chat, but collaborate using the majority of the core applications. They can collaborate on musical compositions, play games together, record and transmit pictures, video, and audio, or work on a school project.
Seriously, I'm sure their are a lot of school teachers in the US that wish Windows had incorporated ZeroConf and there were such rich, collaborative software packages available. The OLPC is not just cheap, it is superior for the purpose of educating children.
I disagree... slightly. On an average computer they would probably not be playing with the educational software or talking to kids in a third word country. For the most part, however, I think the OLPC in the hands of this child is wasted. The point is getting this to a kid who otherwise would have little or no access to a computer, textbooks, the internet, or telecommunications. The secondary point, is these things are designed to work together and with a central server to facilitate group learning. Without a curriculum and other students collaborating via these machines, they lose a lot of their usefulness.
You're misunderstanding the term. "Bundling" is one of the classic forms of "tying" specifically mentioned in both US and EU antitrust law. Shipping the two together in the same box, even if IE is on a separate CD, would qualify as bundling, regardless of if it can be easily removed. Also, Opera was apparently calling for MS to separate out Trident with clearly defined APIs so that not only the IE application but also the rendering engine could be replaced by OEMs.
How is Microsoft costing Opera money?First, all the users that Use IE simply because it is the default are not using Opera. If given a choice or if OEMs are given a choice some non-zero number would choose Opera giving them greater market share and more money from contracts with search engine providers. Second, MS's taking over the browser market and intentionally breaking the standards has led to the Web filled with IE-only pages that do not render properly in Opera or other compliant browsers. This makes it harder for Opera to license their browser to cell phone makers and other hardware companies. Likewise the domination of IE by unfair means has resulted in Web application lock in, providing a serious financial barrier to transition to neutral technologies. All this costs Opera hard cash.
Lack of awareness of alternatives is not the fault of Microsoft!Ahh, but the awareness of IE is the direct result not of MS's marketing savvy, or because the product is well reviewed, but because MS has leveraged a monopoly in the desktop OS market. It is criminal to leverage a monopoly in one market to your advantage in another.
To put in your analogy, asking the EU to enforce development to "accepted web-standards" is akin to forcing the Manson family to commit their crimes only with "accepted weapon standards".No, that isn't silly at all. Charlie Manson is forced to stop killing people by being put in prison. That is how he is forced to obey the standards. It isn't silly at all.
Name one artificial problem with Opera caused by a deliberate, malicious act on the part of Microsoft.Sure, Opera can't read some Web pages that include either proprietary MS technologies, or broken standards (like IE's broken CSS support). That is caused directly by MS's illegal bundling coupled with their intentionally broken implementation.
I would say the same to you. Every argument you've provided has held no substance and reeks of anti-Microsoft bias that its not even funny.Arguing that a criminal should be stopped from committing a crime is now prejudiced against the criminal? Please. You're a terrible MS apologist.
Even Wired doesn't agree with Opera.I won't bother to read your link but you think "Wired" is the place to go for an educated view of anti-trust actions?
The sad part is, I actually like their browser!No the sad part is that in a free market, most users would probably choose Opera or Firefox or Safari or something else and have a better user experience. In a free market IE would be better than it is because it would be competing fairly against the others for market share and their would be incentive for MS to fix it. The saddest part is people like you who think it is okay for one player to break the market and the law, simply because you don't understand how the economic system works or why we have antitrust laws in the first place and instead of educating yourself you instead try to defend a overly simplistic market model that ignores all we've learned from the antitrust horrors of history. Please, please, please go read up on monopolies and antitrust before trying to assert your opinion. At best you appear ignorant and at worst you could convince someone to make the world a worse place.
This is true, he can probably chat with GTalk users and the like, but there is a difference in that he can't "see" them since it only autodiscovers users connected to a given server (if I recall correctly). For other users he'd have to know their address (bob@gmail.com or whatever). I'm not even sure if the built in chat function has a UI element to do that (although it probably will eventually).
Sort of, except it works at the discretion of the user. Owners of the machine can request a key and take control if they want, but this is supposed to be targeting minors for educational purposes, so it makes sense to keep them centrally controlled by the school to some degree. The laptops also keep a log of activity for each student, so teachers can see which projects they've been working on (did they really spend 2 hours on composing that essay, or did they spend 15 minutes then play SimCity for the rest? I don't know if this information is uploaded to the server though.
Why? Apple and Redhat have committed no crime. Neither has a monopoly in the desktop OS space and neither is leveraging that monopoly via their browser. You might as well argue that it is fair to fine Union Carbide and for them to pay for cleanup for poisoning a huge area in India and killing a bunch of people, but that Cytec and KMG should be forced to pay fines and clean up other areas of India as well, since those companies also manufacture chemicals. MS is the only one breaking the law and costing Opera money in the process and should be the only one forced to redress that problem.
These days a browser is a requirement rather than an optional add on. Unbundling it would mean that users will not be able to use their newly installed operating system at all, even to find out where to buy/download a browser.This is a trivial problem. OEMs could bundle a browser of their choice, which takes care of 90% of people. The remaining 10% who install their own OS know enough to grab one using another system or FTP. Or, MS could install a package manager so people could download their browser of choice directly, even building that feature into the installer and letting people pick one at that point.
However, OEMs should be permitted to bundle an alternative browser and de-emphasize IE by removing it from Start menu.This is not good enough. If OEMs cannot easily remove IE entirely and replace it, then the economics of the situation will still favor keeping IE. Worse, since IE will still be on every system, while a standards compliant browser may or may not be, developers will still target the broken version of the standards.
Yes they are. This group encompasses most people. The question is, are they winning that market share fairly and legally, or are they doing so by breaking the law?
Almost every single one of my tech-savvy friends (with a few exceptions) uses Firefox or some other alternative browser. If all of the casual internet users weren't tallied up, I'm sure Firefox and Opera would have a much greater percentage of users.Why does this matter? Opera is losing money. They are making less money on their search partnership because they have fewer users. They're making less money selling their browser to cell phone makers, because a lot of pages don't follow standards as a result of MS's actions. The courts have already ruled those actions on MS's part are illegal.
Are you telling me that if you were running a business and another business was convicted of breaking the law, and that criminal act was costing your company money, you would not bring suit against them seeking to make them at least stop the illegal action?
Here's an analogy. You run a resort on a lake. A little ways up a river that empties into the lake, is a company that is convicted of dumping poisons into the water and is paying fines, but has not yet stopped dumping the poisons. You see a sharp decline in customers because people are afraid of the water there. Another resort on the lake sues them, gets a big settlement and sells their land to an industrial consortium who does not care about the water quality, decreasing the value of your resort. You have to change your marketing strategy completely and try to add new activities that don't involve the water. You're still popular among a few people, but you could be making a lot more money. Would you sue the company that is still dumping poison into the water?
In this case, the water is Web standards and MS is intentionally poisoning them for profit.
Do you have evidence to indicate that they are contractually allowed and have not been coerced by MS's monopoly influence into keeping it? Are there parts of Windows built specifically to rely upon IE?
Microsoft is under no obligation to include competitor software on a CD they publish and distribute (unless Opera wants to pay them to do so).Microsoft is breaking the law in a way that costs Opera money. They've been convicted in numerous criminal and civil cases now. MS is obligated to reach a settlement with Opera or the courts will award whatever damages and injunctions they see fit.
Secondly, the EU is in no position to try to enforce MS to using international standards. That's Microsoft's choice.The EU is sovereign government body and can pass whatever laws they want. MS is already convicted of breaking those laws, so yeah, the EU can pretty much order MS to do whatever they see fit as punishment for those crimes. I don't think you're really looking at this in the proper perspective. For an analogy, try imagining a surviving victim of the Manson family murders. There is no longer doubt of a crime and if that person brings civil suit against Charles Manson the courts may well award them all the money from Manson's new book deal. Arguing that Manson is not obligated to give away money he is earning himself, is a bit naive.
If they want to go propietary, let them and compete on your own merits.Microsoft does not compete. That is the whole point. Rather than users or even OEMs having a choice, MS introduces artificial problems with competing products, by subverting the standards using their overwhelming influence in the desktop OS market. This is criminal in the EU and US.
Christ, this ticks me off enough that I'm actually thinking of sending a nastygram to Opera.Go ahead, but if you want to be taken seriously I suggest you educate yourself on the topic first.
Although one might note, it is a choice facilitated by the fact that those developers can count on IE being installed on every copy of Windows, and cannot count on other browsers. I suspect if OEMs had a choice and shipped with different, default browsers installed, developers would stop hard coding the browser and use the proper method, pretty quickly.
...assuming Ford made their own radios and Ford was the only car company on the planet and Ford radios were designed to shift frequency slightly every X seconds, forcing most radio broadcasters to do the same and violating the broadcasting standards.
Why should Opera get a free (forced) ride for distribution?Because Microsoft is breaking the law in a way that makes Opera lose money.
Next, you'd have to assume, it would be unfair for Toshiba to make a bedroom tv that has a built in DVD player because it locks out all other DVD player manufacturers.Well, if Toshiba had a monopoly on making TVs, then yes. Why is it so hard to understand the monopoly part of this equation? Are people really so uneducated they don't even understand the basics of monopolies and antitrust law? I went to school for engineering, but this was covered in freshman economics. Next time you make an analogy, try making it one where a company has a monopoly.
Try electrical power distribution, for example. Just as Microsoft has monopoly influence in the desktop OS market, the local power company has a monopoly on power distribution. How about if the power company upped your bill by $80 a month and then bundled a "free" cell phone with "free" service. Would that be fair to you as a customer? What if the phone and service where crappy, so you ended up paying for both that phone and another one? Suppose not only did they provide you with this "free" cell phone, but it had a bunch of patented connectors so you had to buy chargers from them as well and suppose the other phone companies pretty much all went out of business. There was just the power company cell phone and one, premium priced alternative for people who used solar panels, and all the connectors for those phones followed the standards, meaning they did not work with the patented connectors used in everything else to work with the power company' phones. Now, that is a proper analogy.
I could think of a 1000 examples without even trying.Great, how many can you think of where the company in question has a monopoly on one market and is illegally using that to take over another market, to the detriment of customers and competitors?
Because their current bundling is against the law. They've already lost this case in the past, the difference is Opera isn't looking for a cash settlement, they're looking to stop the abuse.
Unbundling it would mean the OS doesn't have a functioning browser (not to mention it's built-in to the OS, so removal would be only a cosmetic feat (removing the icon) not actually removing the browser).Unbundling may well require removal of Trident from the OS, so no it would not just be cosmetic. Just because Windows does not ship with a browser, does not make much difference to end users. OEMs, like Dell are still free to include whatever software they want, including Trident+IE, or Gecko+Firefox. Anyone savvy enough to install an OS is savvy enough to install a browser too.
Including other browsers makes more sense, but won't it make Windows even more bloaty?You can fit Opera, Safari, Firefox, and Konquerer in under 150 Mb, so even if they're all installed by default, that isn't much footprint difference compared to the several Gb install that is Vista. Users are free to delete them to regain the space, and OEMs are free to delete any they don't want on machines they ship.
Is this just a sandy vagina move, or do they have a point?If Web developers can be assured that every Windows box has Firefox or Opera or another standards compliant browser installed on it, then "Error, your browser IE, cannot properly read this page. Please click here to launch Opera" becomes a viable option for many Web developers. It saves them all the time and effort needed to work around all of IE's intentional violations of the standard and promotes those standards in the future, pressuring MS to fix IE. Basically, it helps to redress MS's current monopoly abuse by making them compete with other browsers on features, rather than winning based upon being the default choice because MS has a monopoly.
Yeah, it doesn't matter what geology experiments say either, the earth is only 4000 years old.
Whats even more annoying is people who have started to dual boot macbooks which only have one mouse button on their trackpad (!!).Novice users only want one anyway. Advanced users who take the time to learn the two-finger method in OS X, or assign chording in Windows can do things faster than with two buttons, since you don't have to move your left hand off the keys. The only people it really is a problem for are people who think they're advanced... but aren't advanced enough (or are too stubborn) to learn how to use the interface properly.
In addition to this, you cant tap the pad, like every single other computer, and have it count as a click.Yes, you can. In fact it is better than most because you can tap with one or two fingers for different actions.
Its more in a long line of apple usability nightmares.Obviously spoken by someone who has not used OS X enough to know what it does, and who has no expertise in usability and has done no research.
So the mac solution is to redesign the entire interface for 5% of idiot users.No. They design for novices and for expert users. They just don't design it to work just like Windows fo Windows users who don't want to learn a better way.
Man, if apple was a car company they would swap the gas and break because steve jobs is left footed.Umm, the Mac design predates Windows, remember?
Its a cult, a million studies arent going to change the reality...I think the guy who has decided what is truth and is not interested in scientific evidence or studies is the one who is in danger of espousing a religious, or cult-like view.
Yeah, thats why it takes so long to do even simple things on a mac.Heh, and your scientific evidence of this is? Where are the usability studies where the actions are timed? Oh, all you can find are ones that contradict your belief, well I'm sure that won't be a problem for you, all you need is a little faith.
People like you just cant admit that a one button mouse is a completely stupid idea and is single handedly regressing computers back to 1986.A one button mouse is great for novice users. A multi-button mouse is better for advanced users. A mouse that can switch between both modes depending on which user is logged in is better yet. Note, this has nothing to do with trackpads, which are a different matter, since both hands are normally on the keyboard at the time which changes the usability significantly.
Why is it stubborn twits like yourself can't base their opinions on factual data and admit that a mouse that is more flexible is better. Personally, as a rather advanced user I have a four button trackball. Guess what, it works better on a Mac, because there is one fewer wasted button on context menus the develop of an app thought I'd want to have. Instead I can assign functions I want to use. Gee the creators of Wordpad might have thought I'd want to right-click and select copy, but I never do that. I prefer using a keyboard combo for that. so the right-click menu is about useless. Under OS X, using TextEdit, I've assigned that menu to hold six common text reformatting scripts, offer spelling corrections, grammar corrections, and lookup words in the dictionary and thesaurus. Would you care to explain to me how the Windows+Wordpad+useless menu is better than OS X+TextEdit+menu I get to define???
The only people who complain about the multi-button use on OS X, are people who only know how to use Windows and are opposed to gaining functionality because then they'd have to learn something.
You joke, but pretty much anyone who has ever done usability testing on modern computer systems has run into difficulty with right and left mouse buttons. It is the single, number one, most common usability problem. The worst are users (about 5%) who always click both buttons at the same time, usually resulting in a left click, but occasionally (and apparently randomly to them) their other finger wins the race and they right click. The problem is not even solely that of novice users. When you use software to record the screen as people work, you see the problem for advanced users, most of whom do not even notice. I saw this once for one of the top security architects for one of the biggest tier 1 ISPs in the US, and he was a really bright guy.
Apple has largely solved this problem with two major things. First, all systems ship in single button configuration, so developers almost never require right-clicking for any action. (aside from one pro graphics company and a few bad ports of Windows/Linux apps). This means everything accessed by right-clicking is a secondary way to get to that function and can be used for quick shortcuts. The second thing they did was the invention of the mighty mouse. It isn't perfect and I don't use one myself, but they change a mouse from single button to multi-button in software, so different users of the same hardware can have either a simple mouse or an advanced mouse. This is the best thing ever for public machines, family computers, and other shared systems.
I suppose having actual experience with formal, scientific testing in this area is why all the idiotic comments about 1 button mice and ridicule of people who have problems is so annoying to me.
And your office doesn't have to exchange files with any other offices, companies, or government agencies that don't support the xdoc format?
It is not an engineers job to destroy non metric screws.No, it is, however, 100% an engineer's job to recommend against buying and using them in products they design, especially when they have so many drawbacks and no advantages yet. We're talking about whether we should include OOXML in OSS products being built and in so doing encourage their use in products that want to interoperate.
Samba has nothing to do with LDAP.Umm, okay. Sure. Why do I bother trying to educate the uneducated?
Samba was original an SMB/CIFS implementation, which came around LONG before MS started to use Kerberos and LDAP.Yeah, and no one had ever heard of it until it morphed into an attempt to reverse engineer compatibility with MS's broken recreations of the standards. Samba is a reverse engineering project and has been for a long, long time.
It has only been since Windows 2000 that Active Directory (that involves stuff like Kerberos and LDAP) has come onto the scene.Sigh, what MS calls their crap doesn't matter. It doesn't change what it is.
Similarily, they created OOXML because ODF *SUCKS BALLS* to implement for MS Office type use cases. Definition of *SUCKS BALLS* varies depending who you are.Please. Have you read the specs? OOXML is not even implementable by anyone else. It isn't a "standard" at all in the normal sense of the term. Every single function is specifically designed to reproduce either exactly how MS Office does things, instead of generically define a function, or exactly reproduce how one other existing vendor implements something that MS Office can't do. It is terrible and unusable.
You claim ODF sucks in comparison to OOXML, but there are already ODF plug-ins for MS Office from more than one source and they conform to the spec. Aside from MSOffice 2007, there are zero OOXML implementations that conform to that spec because it is impossible to implement as pointed out in the hundreds of comments from different countries and organizations that reviewed it for approval as a standard.
I really hope you're being paid to astroturf, because otherwise you've just lowered the bar, even for MS fanboys.
I think we're getting terms mixed up here. I've been using the terms "hardcore" and "casual" to separate games into the market segments they target, not to indicate how much money was spent developing them. For very small titles with small budgets, I'd refer to them as "low budget" or "indy" games. Most "indy" games like this tend to target PCs rather than consoles... and this discussion has been about consoles up until now. The big news with regard to the Wii is that they've tapped a new market segment, appealing to and selling to many "casual" gamers who previously have not owned any console. Many of these people are very young children, the elderly, and the busy middle-aged professional who probably has a family and limited free time in which to play games. Many analysts have been referring to this new segment as the "casual" gaming market.
Using the definitions above, there is no reason a "AAA" title (gods what an annoying marketing term) cannot also be a "casual" game. For the PC market, I'd argue "The Sims" exemplifies this. They spent a lot of money making it and it has sold more than probably any other game, but it appeals to people who probably buy one or two games a year and only want to play for a few hours a week.
We're starting to see casual gamers migrating from the PC to the DS and Wii. If publishers examine the PC business model, they stand to make massive profits.Agreed, but I think it is also pulling in users who are not in the PC market at all (for example the phenomenon of sales to homes for the elderly).
It is changing that. The question is "how much is it changing that?" People who previously spent their time and money elsewhere are now buying video game consoles. The main difference between a video game and a board game has been ease of use and willingness of customers to try them.
The attachment rates for the other two systems in this generation are quite a bit higher, for the record, especially in terms of third-party games.
Yup and the rate of console sales is significantly lower. Why do you suppose that is? Have you heard of many old folks homes or even older people buying Xbox360's in large numbers? Nope, because the other consoles are mostly selling to the traditional "hardcore" market where people are more likely to be buying many games, as opposed to the casual gaming market where people generally buy fewer in a given year. The Wii market is more like the PC gaming market than consoles have traditionally been. Most people who buy games for their PC buy one or two a year and the number one seller for a long time has been "The Sims." That is the casual gaming market. They don't spend a pile of money on titles every year. They don't play every day. Ease of use and the ability to play for 20 minute spurts is more important than the latest graphics.
The point is, the Wii, like the iPod before it is catering to a new market segment and a more mainstream one. Why would buying fewer games be a better indicator of popularity than the number of actual consoles sold?
No, but it will hurt their reputation with game developers, which is a huge long-term problem.
Game developers care about overall sales and that is what they will look at. They will have to adapt somewhat to the different audience on the Wii, but since it has different controls, that is a given anyway. I have little doubt that Wii buyers will tend to buy fewer titles per year, per console than other manufacturers. They will probably be played by more people per console, but for less time per person. The average Wii buyer might play for an hour a couple times a week, but they won't be doing any 48 hour gaming marathons. It is a different market, but sure seems to be a viable and profitable one.
The reason why it's not a problem for the iPod to have a low attachment rate is because an MP3 will work on any MP3 player; music sales won't be affected because hardcore consumers are buying the same commodity as casual ones. A Wii game, on the other hand, will only work on the Wii, so if people don't buy games for it, developers will make games for other systems instead.
Umm, you do know Apple was selling Fairplay encoded AAC files that for a long time only played on iPods, right? Like Apple, Nintendo has not built their business model on blades, but upon razors. They make money on console sales and game sales is just a bonus. Third party developers don't seem too concerned that they're going to lose money developing for the platform, since every major publisher did an about face and announced a commitment to it. I'm sure they ran the numbers first.
That does appear to be happening, if you look on eBay.
I've looked on ebay. Since you can still sell a Wii for more than you can get in a store (average of 53% more), tell me how are you separating out:
It is hard to find good numbers on total ebay sales, but assuming the sale rate of Nintendo systems there has been about constant since their last report, ebay re-sales account for less than 5% of all Wii sold. Subtract out what percentage is profiteering, and anyway you look at it, it still doesn't dent the Wii's lead over othe
Now is the time to try to stop them and there is no harm in trying. Projects don't need OOXML support right now because basically no one is using it yet and everyone using it needs to interoperate with people who have not migrated.
Their market share is so great that they can quite easily push OOXML onto Office users, and as they provide a nice upgrade path fromAhh, but not until they can get most users to upgrade to Office 2008, which will take a lot of time, if it ever happens. And people are already complaining. Municipalities and governments and large companies are passing laws and regulations requiring the use of ODF. More will do so if pressured and if OOXML is not wrongly seen as a viable alternative with the same benefits.
Even if we do manage to stop them getting OOXML ratified as an ISO standard, it'll still takeSort of like Vista has taken WinXP's place as the dominant OS? MS is competing on two fronts here, with their own .doc which has better interoperability and lower cost right now and with ODF which also has lower cost and which brings new benefits. Giving up on one front right now benefits us not at all since no one needs OOXML yet. Why not push for ODF all the way as the new standard and if it loses to OOXML in the long run, at least OOXML will have been weakened and it can be implemented at a later date with no loss of revenue.
Ahh but everyone doesn't like to listen to music, and more specifically, not everyone wants to invest money to have a large selection of music on a portable device.
We don't know that everyone likes to play video games...To continue the analogy, we do know that a significant portion of the population likes to play games, the question is "will the Wii be easy and fun enough to gain market share among people who normally play bridge or cribbage or hide and seek or racquetball?" Based on sales numbers, it seems that yes it is.
And considering the low attachment rate that the Wii has, it's still an open question.The "attachment rate" of games is always likely to be low, but that does not really indicate much of anything. You could make the same argument about iPods and the number of songs people put on them relative to other MP3 players. Hardcore Nomad users typically had 20 GB of music on their systems, while the typical iPod only has a "song attachment rate" of about 3 GB. This is not at all surprising or indicative of the imminent failure of the iPod. When you open the market to more casual users, they devote fewer resources to the use of the device, be it an MP3 player or a gaming console. This could be troubling for the viability of the console in the market if Nintendo relied upon game sales to make a proit, but they don't; they actually make money on each console sold so it is not like selling lots of onsoles and few games will hurt them financially as it would Sony or MS.
The only really troubling statistic for Nintendo would be if a large percentage of users bought Wii intending to use it for their own purposes, then resold it without the intention to repurchase a new one in the future. Such numbers, of course, would be hard to come by, but I have seen no such indications. The Wii is dominating in sales and seems to be a winner. Even if sales slow down drastically, it has already succeeded in opening up the market and changing the way the "game" is played.
Prevent anyone from needing to open a "very important" OOXML file from work at home.
As far as I can tell Office 2007 is already released.Yeah it is. Try sending an OOXML file to 99% of the populace and they'll ask you to resend it in a different format because it is not yet a de facto standard.
Where did you come up with the idea that it was somehow the mission of every open source or free software advocate to destroy any and all ideas that are not ours?Destroy ideas? We're not talking about ideas. We're discussing standards. You might as well ask when it became every mechanical engineer's mission to "destroy" the idea of using a new kind of bolt that isn't quite metric, but is similar, but the size and wrenches that can use them are patented and cannot be made freely by tool makers unless they license it, oh and some of it is secret and there is no easy way to find that part out. When the "idea" I want to destroy is, "hey let's make it hard for everyone else to create good products by intentionally breaking their interoperability with ours," then yeah I think it is the mission of free software advocates to oppose it.
Hence why things like Samba exist.You know why Samba exists? It isn't because MS had a good, new idea. They took an already existing idea and standards (LDAP & Kereberos) that others were already using, and then intentionally broke parts of it to make their version (SMB) incompatible. It introduced no new functionality, it was the same damn thing except broken so it would not work with things other than Windows, and it is broken in secret ways. The Samba project is an attempt to reverse engineer the secret, broken parts so that other products can interoperate, but it would be better for everyone and the wold as a whole if MS had simply adhered to the LDAP standard so there would be no need for Samba to even exist. Ask any member of the Samba team if they could go back in time and stop MS from creating SMB and instead get them to use LDAP, if they would do so. Samba is a hack trying to solve a problem that only exists in the first place because MS created said problem intentionally. MS is trying to do the same thing with OOXML. Nothing is stopping them from implementing ODF, but they refuse to do so because they want interoperability to be broken because it makes them money.
Why are you forcing this on us? We have a great standard. It is ODF. The effort to get OOXML working on free software is seperate from this.Forcing something on you? Do you mean OOXML is separate from ODF, just like SMB is separate from LDAP? It is a deliberate attempt to undermine standards and a blatant attempt to lie to the world by claiming to be "open" when in fact it is a closed, proprietary format. OOXML exists only to break things, which is why I think anyone interested in things working well, should try to discourage its adoption.
Actually the iPod and the Wii are very analogous in their conception and delivery. When the iPod was released there were other MP3 players and they were selling, but only to a tiny market. Most people used portable CD players instead, simply because the overall experience with MP3 players was not easy enough for the general populace. Apple did not really cut into the market of existing MP3 players, mostly owned by geeks, but opened up the market to the average Joe in the mainstream by making it easy enough to rip CD collections, download songs, buy songs, manage songs, load songs onto the device, and actually work the controls. They sold oodles more than any other manufacturer because of this new market segment.
The market for gaming consoles has traditionally been bigger than the market for MP3 players was, but Nintendo took a page from Apple's book, and rather than try to compete for the same users with MS and Sony, they tried to expand the market by making a console for people who would otherwise not buy any console. They designed a system for young children, older people, and very casual gamers. So far it has worked admirably and the demand for them has kept up, because of the word of mouth reputation. It's not like old folks homes were going to buy gaming consoles because of any TV ad they saw, but after a few folks played with them at their kid's house, suddenly every old folks home in the country is trying to get a few.
If three years ago you'd told me my father would be buying a game console, I would have laughed in your face. This is the guy who last year watched a DVD for the first time, on the DVD player I bought him... and he actually "rewound" the DVD by scanning backwards through the whole thing before ejecting it. He bought Wii two weeks ago for the grandkids, and enjoys Wii Sports.
I don't see there being any real danger that many people were "tricked" into buying the Wii and they're all going to decide it really sucks and they don't want it anymore. I do think some hardcore gamers who bought it because of the reviews will find they spend a lot more time on the 360 or PS3, but that will partially be mitigated by which games are offered on which platform. What confuses the issue is that a lot of the people writing reviews or even with opinions here on Slashdot are hardcore gamers and they assume people buying the Wii are "like them" when in truth the Wii is successful because it appeals to and is selling to an untapped segment of the gaming market, casual gamers.
The point of not appearing to officially support OOXML and of refusing to implement it until ODF is fully supported is to try to prevent that from ever happening. We have a choice, either in three years we will have the same situation we do now, except with OOXML instead of .doc, or we'll have a real standard format that can be fully implemented by everyone. The moves we make make now determine how likely each of those futures is. Personally, I see nothing wrong with adamantly refusing to support OOXML until such a time as that support is invaluable. If it becomes the de facto standard, fine add support to cut our losses. Right now we should be focused on making sure it does not become a de facto standard in the first place. For the foreseeable future, Word will support .doc format and so should anyone interested in collaboration (as much as that is possible). Going forward, however, wouldn't it make more sense to do everything we can to make sure the new standard is a real open standard so things can actually get better?