A good way to fix this would be to make the user hold down a button or buttons (like maybe WinKey+Space or both mouse buttons). Then it doesn't work without you meaning to put in a command.
If you're pushing a button, you can just type the command and it will be faster. No, this problem was solved long ago. In MacOS 7, the built in speech recognition had the option that it only listened to commands preceded by an arbitrary word. I believe the default was, "computer, open slashdot" as opposed to "open slashdot." (It was cool, like Star Trek.) Since most geeks named their computers some obscure hostname you had commands like "cheesemonkey, open slashdot." Since the creator of a Web page exploit won't know that name, they have a hard time initiating commands.
Even better though is to filter out all output sounds from the input stream before processing. That way playing MP3s while working won't necessarily make the system nonfunctional, and you get the security benefit for free.
More than ten years ago I was playing with the speech recognition software that shipped with MacOS 7 or something and I though being able to check my e-mail without getting out of bed was pretty cool. At the time I wrote something about the technology and predicted that speech activated commands would never take off until: 1, most audio people listened to was controlled by the computer, and 2, the computer was smart enough to filter out the sounds it was emitting before processing commands. At the time a lot of people listened to music from their computer and I imagine many still do. Why can't the computer ignore all that sound? It knows it is outputting it so why not filter it? It is sad that the same missing feature is still a problem, so many years later.
Translation: Dell are "forced" to buy Windows because the potential alternatives are either a) unavailable or b) t3h suck.
No, they are "forced" to buy Windows because there are no realistic alternatives. It doesn't even have to be that there are no alternative, only that those alternatives do not significantly influence the market, s with Linux.
By your logic, I was forced to buy my Triumph Sprint ST, because it is the best motorbike in its market segment. Do you think the courts will let me sue my dealer ?
If there was only one motorcycle you could buy that would get you where you needed to go and you run a business selling something other than motorcycles (like helmets) that the only motorcycle dealer has tied to the purchase of motorcycles, then you should be able to sue them. Please stay on topic and compare apples to apples here.
"Inferior" is meaningless. Every product is an "inferior product" by some measure.
In general the product that wins a given sale is the one that best meets the customer's needs. By leveraging a monopoly I can create artificial problems with my competitor's products in that market. For example, I might give away a "free" helmet with every bike. In a market where neither helmets nor motorcycles are monopolized, this is perfectly fine. In a market where motorcycles are monopolized this means everyone was just forced to buy a helmet, even if it not the color, or style, or does not meet the safety requirements. Some will use it anyway. They bought an inferior product for them, because the monopolist artificially influenced the market, effectively doubling the price of competitor's helmets.
Fantastic logic. Microsoft aren't allowed to make their products actually do anything useful, because they are a monopoly.
MS are allowed to make products better, they just aren't allowed to tie them to Windows. For example, they can invent a new protocol (exchange) and have it talk to their server, but they can't keep that protocol secret so other server manufacturers can't use that feature of their monopolized desktop. They can make the best media player on the planet, they just can't bundle it with Windows insuring it will be everywhere, when they refuse to bundle competitor's media players as well.
Currently the most popular media jukebox software has a pretty crappy interface, does not work with the most popular portable player, and by default rips all CDs with DRM added, DRM that does not even work with most player causing many people to have to re-rip all their CDs. Does that sound like the "best" product is winning the market to you?
Where in this example are you "introducing artificial problems" into the "other product" (which can only be another electrical supply, for the analogy to be valid) ?
Once again you misunderstand. It isn't illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to leverage a monopoly into another market. In the case of cheese and electricity the artificial problem is introduced into the competitor's cheese, and it is price. If the go with electric company cheese they pay once, if not a good price. If they go with someone else they pay for the electric company cheese and for disposing of it and for the new cheese. In other forms of tying (aside from bundling) the deficiency introduced can be something else. In the case of Windows desktop and server, the problem with competitor's servers is they can't talk the native protocols Windows desktop does. That is a problem that only exists because of what MS did to their desktop. They took the existing protocol, changed it a bit to behave in ways hard to understand (but not inherently beneficial) and then patented those changes. This is an artificial problem with Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc. servers, created using their monopolized product. If some other company had monopolized the desktop OS market, MS would be unable to do this because just changing the protocols on their server does nothing. Hence, leveraging a monopoly.
The irony being, of course, that the ultimate objective of any seller in a capitalist marketplace is to become a monopoly.
This is an empty assertion. Assuming the only interest of sellers in a capitalist marketplace is to make as much money as possible, you could just as easily assert the goal of all sellers is to become dictator for life. Both are ways to unfairly accumulate large amounts of money. More realistically, however, sellers can behave legally, within the bounds of a free marketplace. We expect sellers to obey laws regarding theft so as not to disrupt the free market by simply taking funds by force. We expect sellers to obey fraud laws so as not to take funds via direct deception. How does expecting companies to obey the laws and not take funds by leveraging a monopoly differ? They all are ways the market may be undermined via breaking the law. A capitalist seller can make boatloads of money selling into a competitive marketplace. Illegally leveraging a monopoly merely lets them do so without operating within the bounds of a free market.
By definition, if consumers are making the correct decisions for their own self-interest, capitalism is working.
If the same model of TV is for sale for $50 at one vendor and an identical TV is for sale for $2000 from a different vendor, it is in the consumer's best interest to buy it for $50. Does that mean capitalism is working? What if the $50 TV is being sold by the government who subsidized it with tax dollars collected from everyone? It does not change what is in the consumer's best interest. What if the TV was stolen? Does that mean capitalism is working? Your assertion is thus proven false.
Unless, of course, you assert there is some way of defining, objectively, what "the most innovative product" is (what's the capitalist word for God ?).
That has nothing to do with it. Capitalism relies upon the motivation of the product creator and the buyer. If either of those can be subverted as shown in the example above, then capitalism can be shown to be broken. For example, it is possible to prove the government made TV in the example above cost the taxpayer a larger total amount, thus it would be in the best interests of the people as a whole to never buy TVs from the government and everyone would pay less. That doesn't mean it is not in the interests of the individual purchaser to still buy the government funded one. What is best in the long term for society (innovation, competition, lower prices) is not the same thing as what is in the best interests of an individual purchaser and even if it is, that may not be apparent to the purchaser. Either way, proper decision making for society is undermined by the monopoly. The courts don't look at available offerings to see "what is best" and then try to stop some other product if it is doing better. That would be idiotic. They simply look for monopolies that are using that monopoly to influence consumers in a different market. After all, if the monopolist has the best product in that other market, then they will win the competition anyway. The only reason to leverage the monopoly is if they would not win (or not as much). Stopping that leveraging of a monopoly hurts no one but the lawbreaker.
If Microsoft is a monopoly, why do they continually improve their products (in measurable, objective ways), especially with features the vast majority of their customers are unaware of ?
Did you see the final feature set for Vista? The lion's share of the new "features" do not benefit consumers, they benefit MS. Built in DRM allows them to move into media markets. Built in XPS allows them to move into the PDF/PS tool market, Defender allows them to move into the antivirus software market, indexed search allows them to take market from Google's toolbar, IE improvements allows them to illegally take share from Firefox, etc., etc.
There are comparatively few improvements in Vista that are not designed to attack something outside the desktop OS market.
The alternative is mutually agreeable private arbitration.
Why? Assuming the government is not stepping in, why wouldn't the more powerful of the two parties simply enforce their will, when it benefits them? How is this different than "might makes right?"
Are you talking about monopolies here or government?
In the past, monopolies have tended to grow larger and larger until they controlled the government. See standard Oil, for example. They were above the law and sometimes became the law, was as the case with the West Indies Trading Company. Already MS is one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and while convicted of breaking the law were punished with basically nothing at all (shortly after the politicians they patronized came into power).
Why don't we compare the number of violent, bloody revolts against governments in history and the number of violent bloody revolts against companies. That alone should speak for itself. The government is the one who gave MS the monopoly in the first place. We wouldn't be having this problem if MS wasn't able to use our tax dollars to protect their source code from being copied.
Sadly, human nature prevents a lack of governments. Abolish them and then a few guys get together and as a group are stronger than individuals... the next thing you know they are a small oligarchy and it goes from there. So what are you proposing? We disband the government? You think that would work? I think we're way off topic.
I would be very hard pressed to equate a software monopoly with theft. So, how exactly did Bill steal from me? Specific example please.
The term "steal" is horribly abused because it is so easy to put into analogies. The murderer stole a life. The rapist stole her virtue. Not all unethical behavior is stealing. What leveraging a monopoly does is nothing more than using our laws to skew the free market. You make a lot of money and then buy an innovative company and kill them to maintain your profit stream. Is that stealing innovation from the entire world? It does slow down progress. When you tie two products together you make an inferior product the better option so people pay more money for a crappy product and the company that makes a good product goes out of business. Did the monopolist steal that profit from the better company?
The action MS took was not stealing. It was leveraging a monopoly, which is something else entirely. Unfortunately, most people don't understand how the free market works, what a monopoly is, or how leveraging one undermines that process to the detriment of society. So let me try to explain for the bajillionth time how leveraging a monopoly works using simple examples.
Say I have a monopoly. That is fine and legal. Say it is even a natural monopoly. I found the only source of some un-synthesizable compound on the entire planet. All well and good. This substance X is very useful, say it extends life spans by 50%. Selling that substance is legal and profitable and ethical, even though it is a monopoly. Now say that I decide to expand my operations. After all, I'm a businessman now. So I decide I'm no longer selling the wonderful substance X, by itself, I'm only selling a bundle of substance X and a lifetime contract to buy food from my store at a set rate of $200 a month. Well, everyone needs or wants substance X, so people still buy it and with it they get a lifetime of groceries. Most of the other grocery stores go out of business, while I get rich. The quality of my groceries is very poor, but not so bad that people are willing to throw it all away and buy from somewhere else after having already paid me, and most people can't afford to do that anyway. In a free market, normally companies compete and the one with the lowest price and best quality wins, so companies are motivated to provide that. What is my motivation to make my
FYI: you seem to be alternating your spelling of "breach" and "breech." You want the former. The latter applies to the rear-end of your pants. Note, I'm not normally a spelling Nazi and feel free to ignore this comment as it is certainly off topic.
Spending money on "security" can mean a whole lot of different things. What type of security? What are you trying to prevent? I work at a company that produces certain security products, some of which have other applications as well. When you hand the CEO a nice graph of the DDoS attack that you got your ISP to filter for you when you subscribed to their service, show how many hours of downtime it prevented, and how much money went through the online store during that time, proving ROI is fairly easy. Other kinds of security are fuzzier. Stopping worms within your network saved IT X hours of rebuilding PCs and prevented those machines from being down this many hours times the average worker's hourly rate would have been unable to work during that time etc. and you can provide some estimates.
Before you get to that stage, however, you need to have specific security measures in mind designed to address specific security threats to your business. Some of these measures are easy to justify (need certification to do business with government agency Foo) and some are hard (better passwords make it harder for insiders to steal our customer database and sell it to Russian hackers who then use it causing a publicity problem and resulting lost customers).
I don't know the previous poster, but your comments make me very sad.
LOLOLOL How old are you, twelve?
This is an ad hominem attack, wholly illogical and worthless.
Oh, and stop using the term "evil" for anything you have a beef with. You guys overuse that word so much that it has almost no meaning around here.
Evil is, by definition, a moral judgement. The meaning is particular to an individual in any setting.
You managed to add nothing to the conversation, needlessly attacked people, and lowered the standard on the whole forum. Why don't you go post on Digg?
It's interesting that you insist monopolies are bad, yet advocate a complete government monopoly over contract enforcement.
The government is, supposedly, run by the people. What's the alternative to government enforced contracts, hiring mercenaries? At that point why bother with the contracts in the first place, just get as big an army as possible and take what you can.
Monpolies that abuse their position are typically a short lived feature of true capitalism.
Monopolies that abuse their position are typically (historically speaking) stopped by government intervention, or by a violent bloody revolt after a period of long-term, widespread poverty and suffering, where the company owners are murdered and their wealth taken back by the people. That's not exactly a recipe for stability or optimal standards of living.
MS will be no different in the long run.
Hopefully it will be the former instead of the latter.
Bill never forced you at gunpoint to purchase a copy of windows.
What does this have to do with anything? If I sneak into your house and steal all your clothes I didn't force you at gunpoint to hand them over. Does that somehow make it more ethical or legal to steal or to illegally leverage a monopoly?
No one FORCES a consumer to buy a computer with windows or from a big-name manufacturer.
You seem to have completely mistaken MS's market and the people parties who are directly harmed by MS. MS does not sell their OS to individuals, at least not in quantities that are meaningful in comparison to the number they sell to OEMs and corporations. It is Dell and Gateway and Bloomberg that are directly harmed BY MS's actions. The end results trickle down to everyone.
Suppose you were made the CEO of Dell tomorrow. Now, you're building computer systems for the desktop and OS's are one vital component if you want to get any sales. How many options do you have that won't get you fired by the end of the week? That would be Microsoft and Vista. Apple won't sell OS X to you (for good reason). Linux has not been optimized for home users and is a poor fit and very little mainstream software runs on it. If you choose it you're gambling the entire company on the slight chance that you can convince developers to target that platform and that people would rather switch and abandon their old software then go to a different vendor. That is an unacceptable risk by any objective comparison, and possibly criminal.
So buy a mac if you don't like it.
I can buy a Mac because Apple built an entire chain of supply separate from MS. What can Gateway buy?
Should a company (in this case microsoft) be penalized because consumers didn't take the time to educate themselves before making a purchase?
No, a company should be punished because they knowingly broke the law by leveraging their monopoly to take over other markets by foisting inferior products on customers. MS isn't guilty because it is impossible to buy a Mac or put together a Linux machine. Having a monopoly is perfectly legal. The problem is that they abused that monopoly. MS is guilty because if I buy a Windows system including the Vista OS (monopoly), that choice provides me with unfair incentive to use IE, Windows Media Player, PlaysForSure DRM, DirectX, XPS format, MS Office, and Windows server among other products.
This goes back to the whole cars debate. Should car manufacturers be held liable because they are used for a bad purpose? Should a car manufacturer be sued because I drove on the sidewalk and therefore used their product to kill someone?
This has absolutely nothing to do with MS's illegal acts. In your analogy, what exactly is MS, Windows Vista and the Exchange protocol? You don't seem to have a clue as to what MS did that was illegal or why it is illegal.
Again, people are not FORCED. They do have a choice.
This is a common misconception. Antitrust law has little to do with forcing people to do something and has everything to do with breaking capitalism. Assume you go to the store and there are two products that will serve your purpose. One costs three times as much as the other. Are you forced to buy the cheaper one? No, you're not. With a monopoly in one market, I can (illegally) leverage that monopoly to make the correct choice for consumers acting in their own best interest to choose the inferior product, by introducing artificial problems with the other product. For example, assume I have a monopoly on electrical distribution. Now assume I go into the cheese business. With every month of electrical service I send along a free month's supply of cheese and I raise the price of electricity to cover the cost and give me a profit. I don't force anyone to use my electricity, they can always get a generator or something. I don't force them to eat my cheese, they can throw it out and buy it from the store. Does that make this legal? No. Despite the fact that no one is being forced to do anything, I'm leveraging a monopoly to take over a new market. Cheese sellers and producers would go out of business not because I made better cheese or cheaper cheese, but because I bundled that cheese with a monopoly. And once they all go out of business except for a few premiu
I don't agree with your points (you seem determined to cast everything in the worst light... vaccinating children is possibly a net loss to the world??)
Not at all. I'm not saying that the very public donations and uses are a et loss, I'm just saying you haven't shown that they are necessarily a good thing. Say some of Warren Buffet's money was used to vaccinate children because he donated it to the B&MG foundation instead of creating another charity. Was some of it used to bribe the mexican government to standardize on MS software? Was some of that money invested in a company that uses that capital to use predatory loans to cheat the elderly out of their homes and kick them onto the street? The B&MG foundation has used their money for both purposes. Would it have been better if Mr. Buffet had created a foundation that invested more responsibly and did not try to bribe governments to buy products from MS and which vaccinated a different group of children or researched and found a cure for HIV? We don't know. I don't and you don't. The point is, you can't just assume the way things worked out is for he best. It is entirely possible the PR surrounding Gate's charitable work has redirected funds that otherwise would have done more good. You asserting otherwise with a simplistic," but, but they helped kids" is not convincing.
It would have been impossible to move around 50 billion dollars anonymously. First, how many people do you think can do that? Second, since this is stock wealth we're talking about, it'd be tracked by the SEC.
Perhaps you're right that he could not have donated it all anonymously, or maybe he could have, or maybe he could have but it would have resulted in a lot of lost money due to the liquidation. I'm no expert. I still think your arguments are naive.
The reason most rich people make anonymous donations is two reasons...
How can you make assertions about the reasons for actions of anonymous people? You can provide potential reasons, but making statements like you did is over the top. FYI, some religious groups mandate that all charitable donations be anonymous, so I'm sure at least some do it for moral reasons. I donate anonymously for ethical reasons.
Gates can actually do a lot more good by being public and raising awareness of the issues he's interested in helping, such as African children vaccinations.
This may or may not be the case. I'd argue a lot of the donations he makes are raising the awareness of causes that are treating symptoms rather than the root problems and as such are not as effective as other charitable causes. Does that mean it is a net benefit or loss to the world?
Case in point: Warren Buffet gave his huge pile of money because of the transparency of what he sees Gates doing.
You picked a terrible example to make your case. Mr. Buffet stated he would be donating the bulk of his money to charity long before the Gates foundation existed. It did not motivate him to donate money, it merely was where he chose to donate it to. Would the world be a better or worse place if he had created his own foundation or donated it elsewhere? No one can argue the B&MG foundation is the ideal charity, given their investment in so many questionable institutions. I'm not saying that the PR generated by publicly donating is not beneficial, but I don't see it as a given. It is quite possible if Gates and Buffet had agreed privately to donate anonymously the creation of the world's largest charity by anonymous parties might have created more PR than said donations with known contributors.
Unlike most people, I do not necessarily view monopolies in a free market as a bad thing.
Privately run monopolies combine the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism. The monopoly acts for the profit of the shareholders, not the good of the people, but at the same time has all the lack of incentive, consolidation of power, and unaccountability to consumers of socialism. They are, in my opinion, a necessary evil that need to be prevented from destroying additional markets. Our current anti-trust laws are quite similar to most of the rest of the world. They came about because monopolies developed, destroyed markets, killed innovation, and spread uncontrollably causing immense suffering and very nearly taking control of our government and turning us into an authoritarian regime. When monopolies abuse their position, they need to be stopped or we're all at risk.
If you have a monopoly and wish to continue to do business, you damn well better be providing a valuable service to the community, because if you don't people will have a huge incentive to come up with better alternatives.
The nature of monopolies is such that even a better alternative often cannot win market share. Otherwise, we would not need to regulate them.
I really doubt Linux would have much of a following if it weren't for MS's perceived injustices and shoddy products.
On the contrary, the Linux development model is more efficient (financially) than the classic model. If not for MS's artificial barriers to entry Linux would probably be much, much more popular and there would be huge motivation(greed) for OEMs and application developers to invest funds in developing it.
Do you have a reference for this, or do you just expect me to take your word for it? Even if it is illegal, should it be? I'm not convinced it should.
The RIAA has been convicted three times for antitrust behavior, twice for price fixing and once for payola. I don't have references handy, but I'm sure Google will provide if you're interested.
I do not view the US govt as a legitimate organization. Therefore I don't have any moral problems with lying to them.
Morals are subjective and, thus useless for discussion. Ethically, you are responsible if you lie to the US government as much as to anyone else. Whatever your views on the government, I don't see how they apply to the practical considerations. Ethically, corporations may have the right to sell whatever they want, but ethically, I can ignore patents and move onto any piece of land I want. Laws are about making compromises between the rights of individuals to achieve a stable and beneficial quality of life.
Which laws have they broken, and are they just laws created by a just organization? This seems to be the main issue for me.
They violated antitrust laws in the US, Canada, the EU, Korea, and several other countries, all of whom have similar antitrust laws. You can argue the legitimacy of all those governments I suppose, but I don't see it as practical. MS built their business model on breaking the law, then bribing officials and paying off lost lawsuits with a portion of the proceeds. In the process they have destroyed progress in the computer industry and held adoption of new technologies back for their own profit. Their actions were illegal and they result in a net negative for society. Either way you approach the issue I don't see a lot of justification for the legal existence of an entity of that sort. Corporations exist because they were invented by governments and as such their only justification is a net positive for society. MS does not fit that description, IMHO.
You don't pay taxes on the money you give away because you are giving it away. That is the only "tax advantage" that charity gives you. And trust me, the taxes you're saving will always be less than the money you're giving away.
This isn't actually true. In many cases charitable donations can result in deductions from the tax you pay. The US generally does not tax wealth, they tax income. As a result if you have 10 billion dollars, and earn 1 billion dollars a year, and donate 500 million, you may end up paying 50% less taxes, rather than 5%. Also, taxes are often applied progressively, so that spending 500 million on charity might result in a tax rate of 30% of your income instead of 40%. It certainly can and does result in paying less taxes overall.
The upshot of all of this is that there are real tax advantages to charitable donations, but in general they do not result in a net gain for the person donating, although they often don't result in nearly as large of a net loss as you seem to imply. It is entirely possible (although uncommon) for a person to donate millions and have the end result be the same amount of wealth as if they did not donate millions, but instead paid more taxes. It just means the money goes to the charity instead of the government.
I mostly don't care, and consider that PC OS technology has become a very boring field anyway.
I think you're a bit confused as to cause and effect. Remember the term "stifling innovation?" What did you think it meant? The current stagnation and glacial pace of change in the desktop OS market is not indicative that MS's monopoly does not matter, it is indicative that MS's monopoly has slowed innovation in the market.
Windows XP is a fairly stable operating system, with no serious architectural flaw for office use, software development, workstation or hobbyist use.
Windows XP and Vista are both flawed for the uses you describe because of the following:
no easy sharing of functionality between programs, e.g. write a new spellchecker for every application.
does not let users safely run untrusted binaries, a commonly needed function. Where is the default sandbox for crap from the internet?
does not inform the user what is happening. Millions of machines are spambots, why doesn't the OS inform the user when it starts sending large amounts of e-mail?
systems need to use myriad device drivers which need too much trust and can cause too much instability, the OS should be proof against crashes from drivers
users commonly move from and old machine to a new machine... this is way too difficult for no good reason
I'm sure there are other deficiencies, but that's a good start.
William H Gates III has stepped away from the company's spotlight and is leveraging his wealth in a remarkably, socially responsible way, making this accumulation truly beneficial to the world that has created it.
Gates has devoted a few percent of his wealth to charity and you think that justifies his acquisition of it by unethical and illegal means? So if I go rob a bunch of businesses, pay off the cops so I don't get punished, then donate 5% to charity I'm in the clear, ethically speaking?
Another item to not is the charitable donations Gates has made are said to be invested funding some incredibly dubious ventures including agriculture using child slave labor, cut and run health care scams, and predatory lending that swindles the elderly and poor out of their family homes.
Desktop Operating System peculiarities are growing more irrelevant every year in most domains.
Desktop operating system development has slowed to a crawl. No one wants to invest in it since the market is so broken. Only Apple is really keeping innovation going at all and they have very limited resources.
No true credible alternative OS has emerged after fifteen years of trying...
Credible OS's have emerged, they just haven't been able to take significant market share. That is expected since having a monopoly allows you to create artificial barriers to prevent no, superior alternatives from gaining shares of the market. This is a bad thing for anyone interested in having a good OS, not the other way around.
In the domain of software development, MS's contributions with.NET and C# are objectively superior to most of their predecessors...
They also have a lot of inbuilt problems designed to undermine the market further. Claiming they are good for the market is naive.
y experience, I have found out that it is easier to tweak XP to behave as a Hobbyist's or developper's UNIX box, than it os to tweak Linux...
Your working around deficiencies is indicative of something beneficial how again?
MS has singlehandedly done more damage to the effort to advance the computer industry than any other company I know of. They have broken the law and behaved as unethically as they could get away with out of simple greed, and the whole world is paying for it. Anyone who is a computer person and who values innovation and improvement should understand how much damage they have done, holding the whole industry back until they could control each aspect of it.
I see a lot of people bashing Gates in spite of his donations to charity. That's fine by me. If he's really giving the money away for the right reasons, he won't care what anyone thinks of him. But all the same, I applaud him for it.
Interestingly enough, some of the largest charitable contributions in history have been anonymous. A person more interested in doing good than getting credit should probably follow suit. I'm not wealthy, but I do donate to charity and I always do so anonymously. I think this is a much more honorable practice.
Unlike the mafia, who outright extort and launder people's money and threaten them with physical harm if they don't pay for protection services.
The key to MS's acceptability is their crimes are complicated and most people are idiots. People understand passing bad checks as theft or fraud. They don't understand abusing a monopoly position in the market because most people don't even truly understand what a monopoly is, or what a market is, or what would constitute abuse and why. So long as your crime is complex and indirect enough, outrage will be minimal. Add onto that millions spent spreading misinformation and marketing propaganda designed to confuse the issue and outright lie to people and the average person shakes their head and ignores it. It sure is easier than understanding the issue. Even here on Slashdot where most people are a little above the average, almost every discussion of monopolies results in a an analogy, which includes no monopolies. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to this. People are used to a free market instead of monopolies so they assume all markets are not monopolized, even when that is the issue at hand. Most people simply don't understand what a monopoly is so they ignore the term.
Payola is not a criminal act.
Payola is illegal under the Clayton Act and Sherman Antitrust Act. It is a criminal act. You are misinformed.
I'm not convinced that IP theft should be a criminal act.
You can see the confusion right here. There is no such thing as "IP theft."
Same with lying to the US government.
Lying in court, under oath, should not be illegal?
MS is organized (by definition since they're a corporation). They have been convicted of breaking the law. Ergo, they are organized crime.
People can complain all they want, but it doesn't make it so. It just happens to be an easy target for anti competition, anti capitalist folks.
Please educate yourself on monopolies before trying to argue this subject. Monopolies are anti-capitalist. They allow a company to break the capitalist system by undermining the benefits it normally provides, which is why almost every country in the world restricts their action. The basic idea of the capitalist method is that you can get more innovation by appealing to people's greed, using competition. Maybe three companies all duplicate the same research, development, and production facilities. That's pretty wasteful. But, because all of them are motivated by the market (greed) to deliver the best product to customers, they make good decisions and in the end consumers get a choice among several superior products instead of one inferior one.
So in a free market for some product multiple companies make them and the one that is the best for those customers wins most of the market and gets most of the money. Enter a monopoly. Say some other company has a monopoly on some other product (market actually). If they can tie their offing in both of the markets together, they can take over the second market despite not having the best offering. This is because while they may not be innovating the best solution, they can introduce artificial problems with their competitor's products. For example, IE may not be the best Web browser, but most people still use it because the cost is bundled into Windows and they can't buy Windows without it. For another example, Windows server may not be faster, more stable, cheaper, or more versatile, but is speaks a slightly modified, patented, and obfuscated version of the protocols all other servers speak, and MS's desktop OS does the same, tying, the two. As a result, the most innovative product does not win the market and consumers get an inferior product, despite the fact that they are still making the correct decisions for their own self-interest.
Theoretically speaking, unless monopolistic abuse is stopped, a capitalist market continually consolidates until there are very few companies left and what remains looks a lot like feudalism. Anyone who argues that MS is not breaking anti-trust law or is not abusing their monopoly in such a way to undermine the free market, is an idiot, or possibly just very ignorant. If you disagree with me that is fine, but please do not bother to argue this unless you actually understand how monopolies and capitalism interact. I'm very tired of having to explain over and over and over again the basics of economics to geeks that haven't bothered to read or understand anything about them, but are eager to share their uneducated opinions anyway.
...there is no doubt what MS has done for the tech industry...
Yes, they slowed innovation to a crawl and turned one of the fastest growing and most promising chunks of that market into a slow moving market that has held back related fields of study for a decade. We're easily 5 or 10 years behind where we could be if our anti-trust law was enforced.
Windows domination of the marketplace won't last forever. Complacency at the top of the market is what will kill you.
Window's domination of the desktop OS market has illegally been leveraged into MS domination of DRM, jukebox software, Web technology, gaming, office suites, Web browsers, e-mail clients, server OS's, online video players, etc. Your claim that complacency at the top will kill, is a bit misguided. MS is not complacent, they just have no motivation to improve their desktop OS, except in certain limited ways and the market cannot move to something else easily because of all the artificial lock-ins. They have a lot of motivation to innovate in ways that don't benefit the customer and add more of these lock-ins or help leverage the takeover of another market, despite not having the best product in that new market.
...but you can't really argue with Gates's way of using his riches. Even the most cynical would have to admit his heart is in the right place.
The most cynical certainly can argue against it, and I've seen many do just that. I've heard comments ranging from claims that it is part of a deal to bolster intellectual property law by keeping those issues from boiling over in the third world where patents make medicine too expensive for people; to simple comments that Melinda Gates is the driving force behind the philanthropic use of that relatively small portion of Gate's wealth. More recently, there has been a lot of very valid criticism about the practices of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's investing practices, including companies that use child slave labor, health care provider cut and run operations, and predatory lending firms that scam the elderly and poor out of their family homes.
Now I'm not saying that Bill Gates does not intend to do "good" but it is not a matter that is uncontroversial or which does not have another side to it.
Sounds was just fine for me in these games...though only stereo was tested. Where is other wise reported?
Sigh, did you RTFA? It specifically mentions Halflife 2, and Call of Duty 2 as games that revert to remedial sound support for a number of sound cards.
The audio rewrite allows for example per application sound level control so it's not "just because", although I guess the removal of HAL isn't such a good idea.
While pulling the code out of the kernel sounds like a good thing for stability, why would you need to deprecate the API in order to get per-application sound level control? Doesn't XP support this already?
Anyway, Creative has the ALchemy project which translates the old DirectSound instructions into OpenAL, and thus allows some old games to use EAX. IMO, EAX in old games isn't such a huge deal, and all the new ones will work fine.
Yes, but what about other sound card vendors that supported DirectSound? They will have poor sound performance for a good portion of existing games. Hopefully, developers will have learned their lesson and will just target OpenAL to start with.
So it is more of a "lazy sound card maker" problem than a Vista problem (NVidia and ATI did make drivers for their card didn t they ?)
From what I understand the problem is not the cards don't support Vista's new sound APIs, it's that current games don't use them and the way MS has the software work-around function defaults to not detecting hardware. From the article Creative is the only one with a working solution, using a layer to translate to OpenAL. Audigy and Soundblaster cards simply play a lot of games with really crappy sound. Nvidia has always relied upon the OpenAL API and thus has no work to do. I don't know about ATI.
Future games will probably use Windows new APIs to do the audio work in software and work fine, or use hardware support for the cards via OpenAL, but the a large portion of the current games who used the MS proprietary sound APIs, instead of the open standard OpenAL, will have spotty sound support on many cards.
Just thought I drop a link to this article that actually looks at current gaming performance on Vista for both NVIDIA and ATI:
I swear a script writes articles like the one you link to. I mean they show pages and pages of how many frames per second you get, but never once mention that the sound is degraded to complete crap for half the games they are evaluating? Did they even have the sound on? Did they even spend five minutes playing each game in person to see if they still worked properly?
One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?
Actually, MS pulled the API in vista and replaced it with one that did not run in kernel space, which is a good thing in general. The problem is they did not provide properly for backwards compatibility so games that used that API sound like crap. Other games that used OpenAL, still sound fine and at least one card manufacturer is providing a translation layer from the old API to OpenAL (sort of like WINE and DirectX). Some of the games that use the old, MS specific API are surprising. World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version. Is support for OpenAL that poor on Windows? guess they implemented DirectX as well as OpenGL too. Is their toolset just built to do both anyway or what?
A Mac user is now favorably comparing Mac's OS to Windows, because Windows is just a pretty UI but Mac has a hard-core command line interface. Has Hell officially frozen over?
I don't know if you noticed, but as of about 4 years ago Linux guys, old-school UNIX guys, security guys, and scientists of all stripes started migrating to OS X in droves. It used to be a person working on a mac laptop at the bar was probably a graphic designer. Nowadays they're just as likely to be a penetration tester or a physicist. Not everyone has moved over, of course, but the CLI on OS X gets a whole lot more use than the one on Windows, I imagine.
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A good way to fix this would be to make the user hold down a button or buttons (like maybe WinKey+Space or both mouse buttons). Then it doesn't work without you meaning to put in a command.
If you're pushing a button, you can just type the command and it will be faster. No, this problem was solved long ago. In MacOS 7, the built in speech recognition had the option that it only listened to commands preceded by an arbitrary word. I believe the default was, "computer, open slashdot" as opposed to "open slashdot." (It was cool, like Star Trek.) Since most geeks named their computers some obscure hostname you had commands like "cheesemonkey, open slashdot." Since the creator of a Web page exploit won't know that name, they have a hard time initiating commands.
Even better though is to filter out all output sounds from the input stream before processing. That way playing MP3s while working won't necessarily make the system nonfunctional, and you get the security benefit for free.
More than ten years ago I was playing with the speech recognition software that shipped with MacOS 7 or something and I though being able to check my e-mail without getting out of bed was pretty cool. At the time I wrote something about the technology and predicted that speech activated commands would never take off until: 1, most audio people listened to was controlled by the computer, and 2, the computer was smart enough to filter out the sounds it was emitting before processing commands. At the time a lot of people listened to music from their computer and I imagine many still do. Why can't the computer ignore all that sound? It knows it is outputting it so why not filter it? It is sad that the same missing feature is still a problem, so many years later.
Translation: Dell are "forced" to buy Windows because the potential alternatives are either a) unavailable or b) t3h suck.
No, they are "forced" to buy Windows because there are no realistic alternatives. It doesn't even have to be that there are no alternative, only that those alternatives do not significantly influence the market, s with Linux.
By your logic, I was forced to buy my Triumph Sprint ST, because it is the best motorbike in its market segment. Do you think the courts will let me sue my dealer ?
If there was only one motorcycle you could buy that would get you where you needed to go and you run a business selling something other than motorcycles (like helmets) that the only motorcycle dealer has tied to the purchase of motorcycles, then you should be able to sue them. Please stay on topic and compare apples to apples here.
"Inferior" is meaningless. Every product is an "inferior product" by some measure.
In general the product that wins a given sale is the one that best meets the customer's needs. By leveraging a monopoly I can create artificial problems with my competitor's products in that market. For example, I might give away a "free" helmet with every bike. In a market where neither helmets nor motorcycles are monopolized, this is perfectly fine. In a market where motorcycles are monopolized this means everyone was just forced to buy a helmet, even if it not the color, or style, or does not meet the safety requirements. Some will use it anyway. They bought an inferior product for them, because the monopolist artificially influenced the market, effectively doubling the price of competitor's helmets.
Fantastic logic. Microsoft aren't allowed to make their products actually do anything useful, because they are a monopoly.
MS are allowed to make products better, they just aren't allowed to tie them to Windows. For example, they can invent a new protocol (exchange) and have it talk to their server, but they can't keep that protocol secret so other server manufacturers can't use that feature of their monopolized desktop. They can make the best media player on the planet, they just can't bundle it with Windows insuring it will be everywhere, when they refuse to bundle competitor's media players as well.
Currently the most popular media jukebox software has a pretty crappy interface, does not work with the most popular portable player, and by default rips all CDs with DRM added, DRM that does not even work with most player causing many people to have to re-rip all their CDs. Does that sound like the "best" product is winning the market to you?
Where in this example are you "introducing artificial problems" into the "other product" (which can only be another electrical supply, for the analogy to be valid) ?
Once again you misunderstand. It isn't illegal to have a monopoly. It is illegal to leverage a monopoly into another market. In the case of cheese and electricity the artificial problem is introduced into the competitor's cheese, and it is price. If the go with electric company cheese they pay once, if not a good price. If they go with someone else they pay for the electric company cheese and for disposing of it and for the new cheese. In other forms of tying (aside from bundling) the deficiency introduced can be something else. In the case of Windows desktop and server, the problem with competitor's servers is they can't talk the native protocols Windows desktop does. That is a problem that only exists because of what MS did to their desktop. They took the existing protocol, changed it a bit to behave in ways hard to understand (but not inherently beneficial) and then patented those changes. This is an artificial problem with Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc. servers, created using their monopolized product. If some other company had monopolized the desktop OS market, MS would be unable to do this because just changing the protocols on their server does nothing. Hence, leveraging a monopoly.
The irony being, of course, that the ultimate objective of any seller in a capitalist marketplace is to become a monopoly.
This is an empty assertion. Assuming the only interest of sellers in a capitalist marketplace is to make as much money as possible, you could just as easily assert the goal of all sellers is to become dictator for life. Both are ways to unfairly accumulate large amounts of money. More realistically, however, sellers can behave legally, within the bounds of a free marketplace. We expect sellers to obey laws regarding theft so as not to disrupt the free market by simply taking funds by force. We expect sellers to obey fraud laws so as not to take funds via direct deception. How does expecting companies to obey the laws and not take funds by leveraging a monopoly differ? They all are ways the market may be undermined via breaking the law. A capitalist seller can make boatloads of money selling into a competitive marketplace. Illegally leveraging a monopoly merely lets them do so without operating within the bounds of a free market.
By definition, if consumers are making the correct decisions for their own self-interest, capitalism is working.
If the same model of TV is for sale for $50 at one vendor and an identical TV is for sale for $2000 from a different vendor, it is in the consumer's best interest to buy it for $50. Does that mean capitalism is working? What if the $50 TV is being sold by the government who subsidized it with tax dollars collected from everyone? It does not change what is in the consumer's best interest. What if the TV was stolen? Does that mean capitalism is working? Your assertion is thus proven false.
Unless, of course, you assert there is some way of defining, objectively, what "the most innovative product" is (what's the capitalist word for God ?).
That has nothing to do with it. Capitalism relies upon the motivation of the product creator and the buyer. If either of those can be subverted as shown in the example above, then capitalism can be shown to be broken. For example, it is possible to prove the government made TV in the example above cost the taxpayer a larger total amount, thus it would be in the best interests of the people as a whole to never buy TVs from the government and everyone would pay less. That doesn't mean it is not in the interests of the individual purchaser to still buy the government funded one. What is best in the long term for society (innovation, competition, lower prices) is not the same thing as what is in the best interests of an individual purchaser and even if it is, that may not be apparent to the purchaser. Either way, proper decision making for society is undermined by the monopoly. The courts don't look at available offerings to see "what is best" and then try to stop some other product if it is doing better. That would be idiotic. They simply look for monopolies that are using that monopoly to influence consumers in a different market. After all, if the monopolist has the best product in that other market, then they will win the competition anyway. The only reason to leverage the monopoly is if they would not win (or not as much). Stopping that leveraging of a monopoly hurts no one but the lawbreaker.
If Microsoft is a monopoly, why do they continually improve their products (in measurable, objective ways), especially with features the vast majority of their customers are unaware of ?
Did you see the final feature set for Vista? The lion's share of the new "features" do not benefit consumers, they benefit MS. Built in DRM allows them to move into media markets. Built in XPS allows them to move into the PDF/PS tool market, Defender allows them to move into the antivirus software market, indexed search allows them to take market from Google's toolbar, IE improvements allows them to illegally take share from Firefox, etc., etc.
There are comparatively few improvements in Vista that are not designed to attack something outside the desktop OS market.
The government is run by rich moneyed interests.
Like monopolists?
The alternative is mutually agreeable private arbitration.
Why? Assuming the government is not stepping in, why wouldn't the more powerful of the two parties simply enforce their will, when it benefits them? How is this different than "might makes right?"
Are you talking about monopolies here or government?
In the past, monopolies have tended to grow larger and larger until they controlled the government. See standard Oil, for example. They were above the law and sometimes became the law, was as the case with the West Indies Trading Company. Already MS is one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and while convicted of breaking the law were punished with basically nothing at all (shortly after the politicians they patronized came into power).
Why don't we compare the number of violent, bloody revolts against governments in history and the number of violent bloody revolts against companies. That alone should speak for itself. The government is the one who gave MS the monopoly in the first place. We wouldn't be having this problem if MS wasn't able to use our tax dollars to protect their source code from being copied.
Sadly, human nature prevents a lack of governments. Abolish them and then a few guys get together and as a group are stronger than individuals... the next thing you know they are a small oligarchy and it goes from there. So what are you proposing? We disband the government? You think that would work? I think we're way off topic.
I would be very hard pressed to equate a software monopoly with theft. So, how exactly did Bill steal from me? Specific example please.
The term "steal" is horribly abused because it is so easy to put into analogies. The murderer stole a life. The rapist stole her virtue. Not all unethical behavior is stealing. What leveraging a monopoly does is nothing more than using our laws to skew the free market. You make a lot of money and then buy an innovative company and kill them to maintain your profit stream. Is that stealing innovation from the entire world? It does slow down progress. When you tie two products together you make an inferior product the better option so people pay more money for a crappy product and the company that makes a good product goes out of business. Did the monopolist steal that profit from the better company?
The action MS took was not stealing. It was leveraging a monopoly, which is something else entirely. Unfortunately, most people don't understand how the free market works, what a monopoly is, or how leveraging one undermines that process to the detriment of society. So let me try to explain for the bajillionth time how leveraging a monopoly works using simple examples.
Say I have a monopoly. That is fine and legal. Say it is even a natural monopoly. I found the only source of some un-synthesizable compound on the entire planet. All well and good. This substance X is very useful, say it extends life spans by 50%. Selling that substance is legal and profitable and ethical, even though it is a monopoly. Now say that I decide to expand my operations. After all, I'm a businessman now. So I decide I'm no longer selling the wonderful substance X, by itself, I'm only selling a bundle of substance X and a lifetime contract to buy food from my store at a set rate of $200 a month. Well, everyone needs or wants substance X, so people still buy it and with it they get a lifetime of groceries. Most of the other grocery stores go out of business, while I get rich. The quality of my groceries is very poor, but not so bad that people are willing to throw it all away and buy from somewhere else after having already paid me, and most people can't afford to do that anyway. In a free market, normally companies compete and the one with the lowest price and best quality wins, so companies are motivated to provide that. What is my motivation to make my
FYI: you seem to be alternating your spelling of "breach" and "breech." You want the former. The latter applies to the rear-end of your pants. Note, I'm not normally a spelling Nazi and feel free to ignore this comment as it is certainly off topic.
Spending money on "security" can mean a whole lot of different things. What type of security? What are you trying to prevent? I work at a company that produces certain security products, some of which have other applications as well. When you hand the CEO a nice graph of the DDoS attack that you got your ISP to filter for you when you subscribed to their service, show how many hours of downtime it prevented, and how much money went through the online store during that time, proving ROI is fairly easy. Other kinds of security are fuzzier. Stopping worms within your network saved IT X hours of rebuilding PCs and prevented those machines from being down this many hours times the average worker's hourly rate would have been unable to work during that time etc. and you can provide some estimates.
Before you get to that stage, however, you need to have specific security measures in mind designed to address specific security threats to your business. Some of these measures are easy to justify (need certification to do business with government agency Foo) and some are hard (better passwords make it harder for insiders to steal our customer database and sell it to Russian hackers who then use it causing a publicity problem and resulting lost customers).
I don't know the previous poster, but your comments make me very sad.
LOLOLOL How old are you, twelve?
This is an ad hominem attack, wholly illogical and worthless.
Oh, and stop using the term "evil" for anything you have a beef with. You guys overuse that word so much that it has almost no meaning around here.
Evil is, by definition, a moral judgement. The meaning is particular to an individual in any setting.
You managed to add nothing to the conversation, needlessly attacked people, and lowered the standard on the whole forum. Why don't you go post on Digg?
It's interesting that you insist monopolies are bad, yet advocate a complete government monopoly over contract enforcement.
The government is, supposedly, run by the people. What's the alternative to government enforced contracts, hiring mercenaries? At that point why bother with the contracts in the first place, just get as big an army as possible and take what you can.
Monpolies that abuse their position are typically a short lived feature of true capitalism.
Monopolies that abuse their position are typically (historically speaking) stopped by government intervention, or by a violent bloody revolt after a period of long-term, widespread poverty and suffering, where the company owners are murdered and their wealth taken back by the people. That's not exactly a recipe for stability or optimal standards of living.
MS will be no different in the long run.
Hopefully it will be the former instead of the latter.
Bill never forced you at gunpoint to purchase a copy of windows.
What does this have to do with anything? If I sneak into your house and steal all your clothes I didn't force you at gunpoint to hand them over. Does that somehow make it more ethical or legal to steal or to illegally leverage a monopoly?
No one FORCES a consumer to buy a computer with windows or from a big-name manufacturer.
You seem to have completely mistaken MS's market and the people parties who are directly harmed by MS. MS does not sell their OS to individuals, at least not in quantities that are meaningful in comparison to the number they sell to OEMs and corporations. It is Dell and Gateway and Bloomberg that are directly harmed BY MS's actions. The end results trickle down to everyone.
Suppose you were made the CEO of Dell tomorrow. Now, you're building computer systems for the desktop and OS's are one vital component if you want to get any sales. How many options do you have that won't get you fired by the end of the week? That would be Microsoft and Vista. Apple won't sell OS X to you (for good reason). Linux has not been optimized for home users and is a poor fit and very little mainstream software runs on it. If you choose it you're gambling the entire company on the slight chance that you can convince developers to target that platform and that people would rather switch and abandon their old software then go to a different vendor. That is an unacceptable risk by any objective comparison, and possibly criminal.
So buy a mac if you don't like it.
I can buy a Mac because Apple built an entire chain of supply separate from MS. What can Gateway buy?
Should a company (in this case microsoft) be penalized because consumers didn't take the time to educate themselves before making a purchase?
No, a company should be punished because they knowingly broke the law by leveraging their monopoly to take over other markets by foisting inferior products on customers. MS isn't guilty because it is impossible to buy a Mac or put together a Linux machine. Having a monopoly is perfectly legal. The problem is that they abused that monopoly. MS is guilty because if I buy a Windows system including the Vista OS (monopoly), that choice provides me with unfair incentive to use IE, Windows Media Player, PlaysForSure DRM, DirectX, XPS format, MS Office, and Windows server among other products.
This goes back to the whole cars debate. Should car manufacturers be held liable because they are used for a bad purpose? Should a car manufacturer be sued because I drove on the sidewalk and therefore used their product to kill someone?
This has absolutely nothing to do with MS's illegal acts. In your analogy, what exactly is MS, Windows Vista and the Exchange protocol? You don't seem to have a clue as to what MS did that was illegal or why it is illegal.
Again, people are not FORCED. They do have a choice.
This is a common misconception. Antitrust law has little to do with forcing people to do something and has everything to do with breaking capitalism. Assume you go to the store and there are two products that will serve your purpose. One costs three times as much as the other. Are you forced to buy the cheaper one? No, you're not. With a monopoly in one market, I can (illegally) leverage that monopoly to make the correct choice for consumers acting in their own best interest to choose the inferior product, by introducing artificial problems with the other product. For example, assume I have a monopoly on electrical distribution. Now assume I go into the cheese business. With every month of electrical service I send along a free month's supply of cheese and I raise the price of electricity to cover the cost and give me a profit. I don't force anyone to use my electricity, they can always get a generator or something. I don't force them to eat my cheese, they can throw it out and buy it from the store. Does that make this legal? No. Despite the fact that no one is being forced to do anything, I'm leveraging a monopoly to take over a new market. Cheese sellers and producers would go out of business not because I made better cheese or cheaper cheese, but because I bundled that cheese with a monopoly. And once they all go out of business except for a few premiu
I don't agree with your points (you seem determined to cast everything in the worst light... vaccinating children is possibly a net loss to the world??)
Not at all. I'm not saying that the very public donations and uses are a et loss, I'm just saying you haven't shown that they are necessarily a good thing. Say some of Warren Buffet's money was used to vaccinate children because he donated it to the B&MG foundation instead of creating another charity. Was some of it used to bribe the mexican government to standardize on MS software? Was some of that money invested in a company that uses that capital to use predatory loans to cheat the elderly out of their homes and kick them onto the street? The B&MG foundation has used their money for both purposes. Would it have been better if Mr. Buffet had created a foundation that invested more responsibly and did not try to bribe governments to buy products from MS and which vaccinated a different group of children or researched and found a cure for HIV? We don't know. I don't and you don't. The point is, you can't just assume the way things worked out is for he best. It is entirely possible the PR surrounding Gate's charitable work has redirected funds that otherwise would have done more good. You asserting otherwise with a simplistic," but, but they helped kids" is not convincing.
It would have been impossible to move around 50 billion dollars anonymously. First, how many people do you think can do that? Second, since this is stock wealth we're talking about, it'd be tracked by the SEC.
Perhaps you're right that he could not have donated it all anonymously, or maybe he could have, or maybe he could have but it would have resulted in a lot of lost money due to the liquidation. I'm no expert. I still think your arguments are naive.
The reason most rich people make anonymous donations is two reasons...
How can you make assertions about the reasons for actions of anonymous people? You can provide potential reasons, but making statements like you did is over the top. FYI, some religious groups mandate that all charitable donations be anonymous, so I'm sure at least some do it for moral reasons. I donate anonymously for ethical reasons.
Gates can actually do a lot more good by being public and raising awareness of the issues he's interested in helping, such as African children vaccinations.
This may or may not be the case. I'd argue a lot of the donations he makes are raising the awareness of causes that are treating symptoms rather than the root problems and as such are not as effective as other charitable causes. Does that mean it is a net benefit or loss to the world?
Case in point: Warren Buffet gave his huge pile of money because of the transparency of what he sees Gates doing.
You picked a terrible example to make your case. Mr. Buffet stated he would be donating the bulk of his money to charity long before the Gates foundation existed. It did not motivate him to donate money, it merely was where he chose to donate it to. Would the world be a better or worse place if he had created his own foundation or donated it elsewhere? No one can argue the B&MG foundation is the ideal charity, given their investment in so many questionable institutions. I'm not saying that the PR generated by publicly donating is not beneficial, but I don't see it as a given. It is quite possible if Gates and Buffet had agreed privately to donate anonymously the creation of the world's largest charity by anonymous parties might have created more PR than said donations with known contributors.
Unlike most people, I do not necessarily view monopolies in a free market as a bad thing.
Privately run monopolies combine the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism. The monopoly acts for the profit of the shareholders, not the good of the people, but at the same time has all the lack of incentive, consolidation of power, and unaccountability to consumers of socialism. They are, in my opinion, a necessary evil that need to be prevented from destroying additional markets. Our current anti-trust laws are quite similar to most of the rest of the world. They came about because monopolies developed, destroyed markets, killed innovation, and spread uncontrollably causing immense suffering and very nearly taking control of our government and turning us into an authoritarian regime. When monopolies abuse their position, they need to be stopped or we're all at risk.
If you have a monopoly and wish to continue to do business, you damn well better be providing a valuable service to the community, because if you don't people will have a huge incentive to come up with better alternatives.
The nature of monopolies is such that even a better alternative often cannot win market share. Otherwise, we would not need to regulate them.
I really doubt Linux would have much of a following if it weren't for MS's perceived injustices and shoddy products.
On the contrary, the Linux development model is more efficient (financially) than the classic model. If not for MS's artificial barriers to entry Linux would probably be much, much more popular and there would be huge motivation(greed) for OEMs and application developers to invest funds in developing it.
Do you have a reference for this, or do you just expect me to take your word for it? Even if it is illegal, should it be? I'm not convinced it should.
The RIAA has been convicted three times for antitrust behavior, twice for price fixing and once for payola. I don't have references handy, but I'm sure Google will provide if you're interested.
I do not view the US govt as a legitimate organization. Therefore I don't have any moral problems with lying to them.
Morals are subjective and, thus useless for discussion. Ethically, you are responsible if you lie to the US government as much as to anyone else. Whatever your views on the government, I don't see how they apply to the practical considerations. Ethically, corporations may have the right to sell whatever they want, but ethically, I can ignore patents and move onto any piece of land I want. Laws are about making compromises between the rights of individuals to achieve a stable and beneficial quality of life.
Which laws have they broken, and are they just laws created by a just organization? This seems to be the main issue for me.
They violated antitrust laws in the US, Canada, the EU, Korea, and several other countries, all of whom have similar antitrust laws. You can argue the legitimacy of all those governments I suppose, but I don't see it as practical. MS built their business model on breaking the law, then bribing officials and paying off lost lawsuits with a portion of the proceeds. In the process they have destroyed progress in the computer industry and held adoption of new technologies back for their own profit. Their actions were illegal and they result in a net negative for society. Either way you approach the issue I don't see a lot of justification for the legal existence of an entity of that sort. Corporations exist because they were invented by governments and as such their only justification is a net positive for society. MS does not fit that description, IMHO.
You don't pay taxes on the money you give away because you are giving it away. That is the only "tax advantage" that charity gives you. And trust me, the taxes you're saving will always be less than the money you're giving away.
This isn't actually true. In many cases charitable donations can result in deductions from the tax you pay. The US generally does not tax wealth, they tax income. As a result if you have 10 billion dollars, and earn 1 billion dollars a year, and donate 500 million, you may end up paying 50% less taxes, rather than 5%. Also, taxes are often applied progressively, so that spending 500 million on charity might result in a tax rate of 30% of your income instead of 40%. It certainly can and does result in paying less taxes overall.
The upshot of all of this is that there are real tax advantages to charitable donations, but in general they do not result in a net gain for the person donating, although they often don't result in nearly as large of a net loss as you seem to imply. It is entirely possible (although uncommon) for a person to donate millions and have the end result be the same amount of wealth as if they did not donate millions, but instead paid more taxes. It just means the money goes to the charity instead of the government.
I mostly don't care, and consider that PC OS technology has become a very boring field anyway.
I think you're a bit confused as to cause and effect. Remember the term "stifling innovation?" What did you think it meant? The current stagnation and glacial pace of change in the desktop OS market is not indicative that MS's monopoly does not matter, it is indicative that MS's monopoly has slowed innovation in the market.
Windows XP is a fairly stable operating system, with no serious architectural flaw for office use, software development, workstation or hobbyist use.
Windows XP and Vista are both flawed for the uses you describe because of the following:
I'm sure there are other deficiencies, but that's a good start.
William H Gates III has stepped away from the company's spotlight and is leveraging his wealth in a remarkably, socially responsible way, making this accumulation truly beneficial to the world that has created it.
Gates has devoted a few percent of his wealth to charity and you think that justifies his acquisition of it by unethical and illegal means? So if I go rob a bunch of businesses, pay off the cops so I don't get punished, then donate 5% to charity I'm in the clear, ethically speaking?
Another item to not is the charitable donations Gates has made are said to be invested funding some incredibly dubious ventures including agriculture using child slave labor, cut and run health care scams, and predatory lending that swindles the elderly and poor out of their family homes.
Desktop Operating System peculiarities are growing more irrelevant every year in most domains.
Desktop operating system development has slowed to a crawl. No one wants to invest in it since the market is so broken. Only Apple is really keeping innovation going at all and they have very limited resources.
No true credible alternative OS has emerged after fifteen years of trying...
Credible OS's have emerged, they just haven't been able to take significant market share. That is expected since having a monopoly allows you to create artificial barriers to prevent no, superior alternatives from gaining shares of the market. This is a bad thing for anyone interested in having a good OS, not the other way around.
In the domain of software development, MS's contributions with .NET and C# are objectively superior to most of their predecessors...
They also have a lot of inbuilt problems designed to undermine the market further. Claiming they are good for the market is naive.
y experience, I have found out that it is easier to tweak XP to behave as a Hobbyist's or developper's UNIX box, than it os to tweak Linux...
Your working around deficiencies is indicative of something beneficial how again?
MS has singlehandedly done more damage to the effort to advance the computer industry than any other company I know of. They have broken the law and behaved as unethically as they could get away with out of simple greed, and the whole world is paying for it. Anyone who is a computer person and who values innovation and improvement should understand how much damage they have done, holding the whole industry back until they could control each aspect of it.
I see a lot of people bashing Gates in spite of his donations to charity. That's fine by me. If he's really giving the money away for the right reasons, he won't care what anyone thinks of him. But all the same, I applaud him for it.
Interestingly enough, some of the largest charitable contributions in history have been anonymous. A person more interested in doing good than getting credit should probably follow suit. I'm not wealthy, but I do donate to charity and I always do so anonymously. I think this is a much more honorable practice.
Unlike the mafia, who outright extort and launder people's money and threaten them with physical harm if they don't pay for protection services.
The key to MS's acceptability is their crimes are complicated and most people are idiots. People understand passing bad checks as theft or fraud. They don't understand abusing a monopoly position in the market because most people don't even truly understand what a monopoly is, or what a market is, or what would constitute abuse and why. So long as your crime is complex and indirect enough, outrage will be minimal. Add onto that millions spent spreading misinformation and marketing propaganda designed to confuse the issue and outright lie to people and the average person shakes their head and ignores it. It sure is easier than understanding the issue. Even here on Slashdot where most people are a little above the average, almost every discussion of monopolies results in a an analogy, which includes no monopolies. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to this. People are used to a free market instead of monopolies so they assume all markets are not monopolized, even when that is the issue at hand. Most people simply don't understand what a monopoly is so they ignore the term.
Payola is not a criminal act.
Payola is illegal under the Clayton Act and Sherman Antitrust Act. It is a criminal act. You are misinformed.
I'm not convinced that IP theft should be a criminal act.
You can see the confusion right here. There is no such thing as "IP theft."
Same with lying to the US government.
Lying in court, under oath, should not be illegal?
MS is organized (by definition since they're a corporation). They have been convicted of breaking the law. Ergo, they are organized crime.
People can complain all they want, but it doesn't make it so. It just happens to be an easy target for anti competition, anti capitalist folks.
Please educate yourself on monopolies before trying to argue this subject. Monopolies are anti-capitalist. They allow a company to break the capitalist system by undermining the benefits it normally provides, which is why almost every country in the world restricts their action. The basic idea of the capitalist method is that you can get more innovation by appealing to people's greed, using competition. Maybe three companies all duplicate the same research, development, and production facilities. That's pretty wasteful. But, because all of them are motivated by the market (greed) to deliver the best product to customers, they make good decisions and in the end consumers get a choice among several superior products instead of one inferior one.
So in a free market for some product multiple companies make them and the one that is the best for those customers wins most of the market and gets most of the money. Enter a monopoly. Say some other company has a monopoly on some other product (market actually). If they can tie their offing in both of the markets together, they can take over the second market despite not having the best offering. This is because while they may not be innovating the best solution, they can introduce artificial problems with their competitor's products. For example, IE may not be the best Web browser, but most people still use it because the cost is bundled into Windows and they can't buy Windows without it. For another example, Windows server may not be faster, more stable, cheaper, or more versatile, but is speaks a slightly modified, patented, and obfuscated version of the protocols all other servers speak, and MS's desktop OS does the same, tying, the two. As a result, the most innovative product does not win the market and consumers get an inferior product, despite the fact that they are still making the correct decisions for their own self-interest.
Theoretically speaking, unless monopolistic abuse is stopped, a capitalist market continually consolidates until there are very few companies left and what remains looks a lot like feudalism. Anyone who argues that MS is not breaking anti-trust law or is not abusing their monopoly in such a way to undermine the free market, is an idiot, or possibly just very ignorant. If you disagree with me that is fine, but please do not bother to argue this unless you actually understand how monopolies and capitalism interact. I'm very tired of having to explain over and over and over again the basics of economics to geeks that haven't bothered to read or understand anything about them, but are eager to share their uneducated opinions anyway.
Yes, they slowed innovation to a crawl and turned one of the fastest growing and most promising chunks of that market into a slow moving market that has held back related fields of study for a decade. We're easily 5 or 10 years behind where we could be if our anti-trust law was enforced.
Windows domination of the marketplace won't last forever. Complacency at the top of the market is what will kill you.
Window's domination of the desktop OS market has illegally been leveraged into MS domination of DRM, jukebox software, Web technology, gaming, office suites, Web browsers, e-mail clients, server OS's, online video players, etc. Your claim that complacency at the top will kill, is a bit misguided. MS is not complacent, they just have no motivation to improve their desktop OS, except in certain limited ways and the market cannot move to something else easily because of all the artificial lock-ins. They have a lot of motivation to innovate in ways that don't benefit the customer and add more of these lock-ins or help leverage the takeover of another market, despite not having the best product in that new market.
As peo
The most cynical certainly can argue against it, and I've seen many do just that. I've heard comments ranging from claims that it is part of a deal to bolster intellectual property law by keeping those issues from boiling over in the third world where patents make medicine too expensive for people; to simple comments that Melinda Gates is the driving force behind the philanthropic use of that relatively small portion of Gate's wealth. More recently, there has been a lot of very valid criticism about the practices of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation's investing practices, including companies that use child slave labor, health care provider cut and run operations, and predatory lending firms that scam the elderly and poor out of their family homes.
Now I'm not saying that Bill Gates does not intend to do "good" but it is not a matter that is uncontroversial or which does not have another side to it.
Sounds was just fine for me in these games...though only stereo was tested. Where is other wise reported?
Sigh, did you RTFA? It specifically mentions Halflife 2, and Call of Duty 2 as games that revert to remedial sound support for a number of sound cards.
The audio rewrite allows for example per application sound level control so it's not "just because", although I guess the removal of HAL isn't such a good idea.
While pulling the code out of the kernel sounds like a good thing for stability, why would you need to deprecate the API in order to get per-application sound level control? Doesn't XP support this already?
Anyway, Creative has the ALchemy project which translates the old DirectSound instructions into OpenAL, and thus allows some old games to use EAX. IMO, EAX in old games isn't such a huge deal, and all the new ones will work fine.
Yes, but what about other sound card vendors that supported DirectSound? They will have poor sound performance for a good portion of existing games. Hopefully, developers will have learned their lesson and will just target OpenAL to start with.
So it is more of a "lazy sound card maker" problem than a Vista problem (NVidia and ATI did make drivers for their card didn t they ?)
From what I understand the problem is not the cards don't support Vista's new sound APIs, it's that current games don't use them and the way MS has the software work-around function defaults to not detecting hardware. From the article Creative is the only one with a working solution, using a layer to translate to OpenAL. Audigy and Soundblaster cards simply play a lot of games with really crappy sound. Nvidia has always relied upon the OpenAL API and thus has no work to do. I don't know about ATI.
Future games will probably use Windows new APIs to do the audio work in software and work fine, or use hardware support for the cards via OpenAL, but the a large portion of the current games who used the MS proprietary sound APIs, instead of the open standard OpenAL, will have spotty sound support on many cards.
Just thought I drop a link to this article that actually looks at current gaming performance on Vista for both NVIDIA and ATI:
I swear a script writes articles like the one you link to. I mean they show pages and pages of how many frames per second you get, but never once mention that the sound is degraded to complete crap for half the games they are evaluating? Did they even have the sound on? Did they even spend five minutes playing each game in person to see if they still worked properly?
One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?
Actually, MS pulled the API in vista and replaced it with one that did not run in kernel space, which is a good thing in general. The problem is they did not provide properly for backwards compatibility so games that used that API sound like crap. Other games that used OpenAL, still sound fine and at least one card manufacturer is providing a translation layer from the old API to OpenAL (sort of like WINE and DirectX). Some of the games that use the old, MS specific API are surprising. World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version. Is support for OpenAL that poor on Windows? guess they implemented DirectX as well as OpenGL too. Is their toolset just built to do both anyway or what?
A Mac user is now favorably comparing Mac's OS to Windows, because Windows is just a pretty UI but Mac has a hard-core command line interface. Has Hell officially frozen over?
I don't know if you noticed, but as of about 4 years ago Linux guys, old-school UNIX guys, security guys, and scientists of all stripes started migrating to OS X in droves. It used to be a person working on a mac laptop at the bar was probably a graphic designer. Nowadays they're just as likely to be a penetration tester or a physicist. Not everyone has moved over, of course, but the CLI on OS X gets a whole lot more use than the one on Windows, I imagine.