Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month.
Yeah, because passing laws in the U.S. is a great way to control what other countries do, in their own countries, with their own hardware and networks that they built and paid for. Brilliant! This is just another politician trying to capitalize on the "us versus them" sentiments trying to be pushed by a number of factions in the U.S.
There is no reason why any one country should run a single point of failure for a resource vital to communications and commerce throughout the world, especially when most of the gear it is running on, paid for by, and resides in those other countries. The world has spoken, they want a democratic solution with representation for everyone. They don't want to keep paying large fees to U.S. corporations for a naming service that was free before the big corporations got involved and can be free, or nearly free again. Most of all, they don't like an increasingly aggressive and deceptive country to be able to severely damage the economy of another country at their whim. No one trusts the U.S. to be a benevolent dictator and they would be foolish if they did. It is time to remember some of those American ideals, like democracy and representation for all are far more important than the new American ideals of making money and bullying the rest of the world.
To put it simply, the internet is a global enterprise made up of hardware and software running in and paid for countries all around the world. Those countries deserve a say in how the naming scheme works and this sort of "America is superior to the rest of the world" nationalist bullshit is not only useless chest thumping, but it makes the U.S. look like even more of a vicious bully in the eyes of the world. You should be ashamed of yourself Mr. Coleman.
If you don't have proof that you ran those tools, you may not have to worry about being completely shut out of the network. You may just be admitted onto the network in a restricted way.
What garbage. First, their are already products that run scans on an entire network and base access upon those results. They work well and do not require a client-side component. Second, if Cisco requires third parties to register/license with them it will eventually become a tax on connecting to the network, paid to Cisco and most open source will be shut out since they can't pay. Third, if Cisco provides their own tools they will suck just as badly as all the other flakey client-side programs they have provided. Finally, anyone care to comment if Cisco is eating their own dogfood here, or do they still rely upon the better solutions provided by their competitors to police their own network?
Cisco is a company that provides half-assed solutions, based upon companies they buy cheaply just as they are on the brink of being bankrupted by better, competing solutions. They rely upon their huge market share in routing and name recognition to sell these half-assed products to admins who don't know any better. The sad thing is there are about three companies who provide this sort of service, but do it right and have solutions that actually work properly, but most IT people don't take the time to properly evaluate the offerings, they just add another item to their quarterly order to Cisco and assume it will work.
Well, no, not right now anyway. The shows they are offering now are commercial free. (As far as traditional commercials go. They do still contain product placement ads.) In future I could see Apple providing them free of cost, but with advertisements included. I hope they do not go this route though, since it will also mean that Apple will almost certainly exclude an easy 30 second jump ahead button in all their player software and hardware.
I certianly wouldn't want to buy any of these right now, sure the bit rate is good for the iPod video, or even a computer screen, but blowing them up on a TV must suck!
Most TV's have worse resolution than the average monitor. These are acceptable, but not great for either.
Combine that with the fact that an average season (22-24 episodes) would cost $43.78 - $47.76 and I would much rather spend that money buying something that can be displayed on my TV!
Full seasons cost less than the price of all their episodes, just as full albums cost less than the price of all their songs. These episodes do end up undercutting DVDs, but not by a lot. The strength of this offering is in the instant gratification, easier portability, and granularity. Just as many people want to buy just that one song they like from an album, many people also want to buy just that one episode they missed or a TV show.
I assume the DRM is FairPlay
So they say, although seeing as FairPlay is an Apple trademark term, FairPlay could be something different for video than audio. I expect it will be the same or very similar and hopefully, locked down to the same degree,
Why pay $1.99 per episode when you can just take the video you saved using Mythtv and download it to your ipod. You could even take out the commercials if you like. I could see Tivo making out well if they made it easy for ipod video users to sync to their PVR.
I heard a somewhat informal statement that Elgato, who make PVR hardware and software that works with macs, are adding an "export to ipod" option to automatically format shows for viewing on the ipod in the very near future, so you're not the only one who thinks it is an opportunity.
I work in a shop where most of us do dev work on linux boxes... but we all have windows partitions for Exchange. So damn handy for scheduling meetings, knowing who is in and who is out of town.
It's handy to have to reboot your machine to look up meeting times and information on where people in your company are? That's just fricking sad. Solutions like exchange that only work on one platform are pathetic. There are plenty of nice, cross-platform solutions. Your IT people really need to get a clue. If you need to use one particular OS, especially an OS that costs money and part of your company cannot use as their primary OS, just to obtain and publish basic information you have chosen the wrong solution. Please gather your things and leave quietly mister crappy decision maker.
The value you are getting is: it's already pre-ripped and encoded for your video iPod. You can get yesterday's show for a semi-reasonable price.
Also, the value over the TV version is you don't have to view, skip, or edit out commercials and the value over DVD is granularity and instant gratification. I don't plan to buy a video iPod, and although I might buy an episode of a TV show as an experiment, I can't see paying that much for that low of quality of shows. If the quality was brought up to even regular cable TV quality and the store expanded a huge amount and a better broadband than the cable model became available I might end as a customer, but only if all those things happened and the DRM did not get in my way. As it is now, the cheapest fast internet I can get is a cable modem and it is actually cheaper to get cable TV + broadband than just internet from either the cable company, wireless, or DSL.
One thing I think a lot of people looking at this new distribution model are missing is that although the broadcast streams of TV people watch now suck because you can't watch them when you want (PVR work around) and suck because they are riddled with commercials (same work around) they have an often recognized advantage in that they are mixed into channels. A lot of people like to just turn the TV on in the background and let whatever play and still more people use the TV to discover content by randomly browsing. The first half of this can be solved by nifty, dynamic playlists, but the second half is an unsolved problem right now.
For the record, my PVR happily snags all sorts of shows for me, with my favorites dutifully archived to DVD, the others stored and deleted, and lots of old movies and educational TV ready to go at any time. Apple has a long, uphill battle before they can compete with that, given the other realities of the market.
...it was not valid for the utilities like Napstar, Morpheus, etc. to simply sell / give away software that is being used for illegal activities.
Yes it was and is just fine for companies to sell to anyone provided they do not specifically encourage or market their product for illegal purposes and provided they do not restrict the sale of that software in some cases and not others, or implement a system that tracks that illegal activity.
Sellers of handguns etc. etc.
Sellers of handguns have only been found liable for damages due to crimes committed with those handguns when a jury ruled their product development and marketing was specifically directed towards criminal elements.
To address the topic at hand, if U.S. companies sell to resellers, that is fine. If U.S. companies sell to resellers that they know are going to sell to countries on the sanction list, that makes them liable for resulting damages in U.S. courts. Since these companies should now have a pretty good idea that the resellers they have sold to are likely to sell to those countries, selling to those same resellers may make them liable. Knowingly providing updates and support may make them liable. All of this is pretty clear cut, so what is the issue?
Gee, I wonder why, so the EU looks like it's important and so they can quash speech, so Russia does...something and so China and quash speech. Theres a huge leap from "The company running.com for the entire world once, without warning, redirected and failed requests to for-profit advertisements" to China's saying there is no Tibet and no Taiwan.
Yeah, the EU wants to, umm, stop free speech by controlling the root domains, I'm sure that is it. I'm sure it has nothing to do with their stated reasons or that they don't like the U.S. having the ability to arbitrarily shut off their vital infrastructure, infrastructure they built and paid for I might add. You don't think it is a huge leap from a U.N. body controlling the root servers to China suddenly having the ability to dictate random changes to said body? It's not like China can't already stop DNS lookup via ISPs in their country and it is not like this has any ability to stop people outside of China from looking things up using a server elsewhere. I doubt France or Sweden will agree to censor all entries containing "taiwan" and I doubt China will have any more luck stopping people tunneling to DNS servers in those countries than it does now.
You're still asking everyone to trust the U.S. instead of a an elected group from the whole world and the whole world still does not trust the U.S., nor should it.
First, they will legislate that ISPs operating in their countries will no be allowed to use root DNS servers other than their own...
Why would they do that? and if they did, and kept non-conflicting entries synched why would it be a problem?
Then, their citizens will realize that this effectively isolates them from anyone smart enough to stick with the current, very functional, system.
Yeah, they will be isolated from the U.S. and not the rest of the world and the U.S. will be isolated from them. Sorry the U.S. is not as big of an economy as the rest of the world and most people are interested in sites and services primarily located in their own countries and offered in languages they speak. I don't think most people will miss the U.S. as much as the U.S. will miss doing business with Europe, Chine, Russia, the middle east, etc.
Then, the break away group will begin bickering back and forth as some members want to use their control of DNS to influence both local and international political views.
This is possible, but all the big players already have control over the local internet and it is unlikely they will be able to gain control over non-local given that the main purpose of this is to insure that no one can do so.
It will further splinter into smaller useless segments.
Yeah, because they are all stupid and will each decide to make a move that will make their access useless. Non-americans are all so dumb.
At some point the citizenry in some of the smarter countries that broke away will realize how stupid this is when they can't use credit cards controlled by US banks, or interact with US companies easily.
You know most businesses, banks, governments, etc. that people in foreign countries need to do business with are not in the U.S. I'd be much more interested to see how multinational corporations in the U.S. handle not having accurate access to the global markets, most of the labor pool, the international banks and commodities and currency markets, etc.
This whole thing is about controlling the flow of information. The currect (US led) system has 0 political control of domains. The US government doesn't tell ICANN to remove a root DNS entry if they have a problem.
Actually no one can no know that for certain. Do you really think it is reasonable for Iran to trust the U.S. to not disrupt their access? Because pretty much no one else trusts the U.S. not to.
We bitch about the government restricting freedom of speech here in the US in general, but Europeans and especially China and the middle east are the the people with no real freedom in that respect...
Perhaps you haven't been watching the news this decade. The days of the U.S. having the high ground there are long gone. We have surveillance and gag orders left and right. We have "national security," being used to avoid paying patent fees and prevent courts from hearing evidence. We have tax payer funded propaganda campaigns. We have no real laws to protect the privacy of citizens or prevent the collection of random data on them by the government or corporations. We have people arrested for wearing t-shirts that say, "protect our civil liberties" and people ushered to fenced in "free speech zones" during political campaigns.
Some countries have more restrictive laws and some less restrictive. Your solution of going with one single point of failure because you happen to trust it is naive and foolish. The system needs to be distributed, redundant, and not in the control of any single interest. I wish I shared your optimism and trust of the U.S. government, but they are lacking in trustworthiness these days. After breaking so many treaties, repeatedly lying to the U.N., and going on an all out campaign to alienate every foreign power possible, the world does not trust the U.S. and would be foolish if they did.
This would require everyone in the EU to reconfigure the nameservers to point at a different set of root servers overnight.
Yeah, because everyone in the EU has their servers configured to point at boxes in the U.S. right? Sorry, thanks for playing. Most of the actual, physical root server boxes are not in the U.S. Taking control of those boxes will redirect most eyeballs wherever the U.N. member agree upon. Laws stating that all ISPs and large businesses must show the U.N. authoritative DNS results will take care of a good chunk of the rest outside the U.S. There is no reason ISPs cannot even resolve conflicting DNS entries by providing both results, U.S. and worldwide and letting the client choose the proper address (would require some work, but is not undoable).
I might, overtime, add some additional EU nameservers if they are none disruptive but this will be a gradual process.
As a U.S. citizen who does a lot business overseas, I imagine I'd add them PDQ, and if the U.S. gov. does not like it, that is their problem. I don't expect this is exactly the route that will be taken though. I expect the U.N. to decide upon a plan, and give plenty of warning before they set up a functional root DNS alternative and I expect to have plenty of time to prepare for it properly.
You are completely correct. This is a case of the EU wanting to "fix" something that isn't broken and by "fixing" I mean allow governments the ability to shut down speech.
You think it is proper to expect Iran, and every other country with which the U.S. is not friendly to trust the U.S. not to shut off their internet or censor their freedom of speech? It's not like the U.S. or ICANN has an impeccable record here. The company running.com for the entire world once, without warning, redirected and failed requests to for-profit advertisements, thus breaking critical functionality around the world, and they still have control of the.com TLD. Sorry, but even I, as an American, can't say that I trust the government to not cripple the economy of Iran or some other country by abusing this power, and I certainly don't think it is reasonable to expect them to trust us. We have broken so many treaties and been caught lying so many times our trustworthiness is in the toilet. This just follows from that situation. Not even our allies trust us. The Internet was founded on distributed control and redundancy. If the U.S. controlled DNS root is a single point of failure, the internet needs to be fixed so that the failure can be "routed around the damage."
Anyway most of the physical boxes running the root domains are located outside the U.S., so all the U.N. needs to do is to get buy in from those countries and pass laws that say conflicts must be resolved to show the U.N. specified authoritative DNS. It does not even need to preclude showing the U.S. one if the U.S. is stubborn and decides not to stay in synch with the rest of the world. This is not as big of a problem as people are making it out to be.
P.S. your characterization of this as the EU trying to take control is incorrect. The EU, China, Russia, and most other big players in the U.N. are on board. This is as close to the U.S. vs. the rest of the world as I have ever seen.
I will be happy when gtalk works with my jabber account in iChat.
I'm not sure I follow you. Gtalk works just fine when configured as a jabber account in iChat, Google even has instructions up on their page as to how to configure it. Or did you mean when/if Google allows Gtalk to talk to other jabber accounts than Google ones (which is an issue unrelated to ichat or any other client)?
Yes, there is a place for open source, but I don't think this is it. I'm willing to hear reasons why Google's desire to have a open server-to-server federation will be good for a product that already offers me everything I need (at the moment).
Scenario: I run a small business and I want to be able to run an internal server that lets my employees chat and video chat with one another and transfer files in a secure, encrypted fashion. Due to security concerns and government regulations I can't use someone else's server. Further I would like to enable my employees to chat with people in other companies and with anyone else they feel like either through a mostly secure, encrypted messaging system or an unencrypted messaging system. I'd like users to be able to choose the client that suits them and that runs on any given platform. Finally, I don't want to poke a half a dozen holes in my firewall and I don't want every user to have to run five different accounts to talk to all the different people they know.
The proper answer to this problem is for the industry to move to an open standard. It works just fine for e-mail, and there is no reason it won't work for chat.
First, AOL owns a lot of things that are useful and well used, many of which compete with Google offerings. Second AOL has a lot of subscribers still and by merging mapquest and google maps, gtalk and AIM and ICQ, AOL search and Google search, both parties can benefit from shared development and marketing costs. Third Google Talk is still in beta, and an early beta at that. Fourth, Google talk is just a jabber setup, and jabber already supports running a conduit to connect to other services, like AIM and ICQ. I imagine Google wants AOLs subscribers and install base and is willing to pony up new technologies to get them. If AIM and ICQ migrated to use the jabber protocols, it would be a happy day for instant messaging as chat became as server/platform/client agnostic as e-mail.
In the MIT experiment, the boat was arguably a very poor replica of a trireme. It was painted black to optimize the energy transfer (which in the end didn't matter).
Actually a lot of the boats of the time were black. In any case, they would probably have targeted the sails if they were unfurled, being higher and easier targets.
Highly polished silver on a superflat surface would have been the closest thing that the ancient greeks could have had
I think bronze, or white bronze seems a lot more likely.
The greeks would have had people holding the mirrors, not tables and stands.
Because the greeks had not yet invented tables or stands?
At 100 feet, your each soldier's heartbeat would have defocused the weapon, even if he could otherwise hold perfectly still...
Again, because they had not invented stands yet?
To protect the soldiers from archers, Archimedes' weapon would have to hold focus at a much greater distance.
Or they could be standing behind big sheets of bronze.
All these things the MythBusters got much close to right and the MIT folks avoided.
I seriously doubt that. Now I'll be the first to admit, I'm no expert on light, reflection, or focal instruments. Similarly, I'm not an expert on Greek history and technology or Archimedes. I do, however, have my aptitudes, some of which have been touched upon by other Mythbusters episodes. It makes you want to cry when you see them making fundamental mistake after fundamental mistake, applying constants that are wrong by three orders of magnitude, and basically making all sorts of assumptions without any real research. Mythbusters are entertainers. They blow things up and make stuff that looks neat on TV, while trying simultaneously trying to address various topics in a very informal, half-assed sort of way. To assume that these jokers can "bust the myth" that a genius figured out how to do something that they are unable to in their five days of quickly throwing crap together without any real expertise or research is the real joke.
Note, I'm not saying this legend is true, but I am saying I'd never believe that it is not based upon the posturing of these twits.
If anybody reading this is not a fan of the luxury of charging what the market will bear, then great -- figure out how much it would cost you to barely scrape by for a year without vacations or other discretionary spending, and then talk to your boss on Thursday about reducing your salary.
I don't recall my salary being paid by the public, at the expense of one of their fundamental human rights. Sorry but copyright is a restriction of free speech that is supposed to be for the good of the people. The extremely long copyright lengths should not be determined by "what the market will bear" but by what is necessary to induce creations to be made, and that is a vital component of this equation you have overlooked. The cost of producing these shows is negligible compared to the cost charged customers. The last time I looked at the numbers, the production and distribution on DVD of every show on cable TV could be paid in full if each TV owner paid $7 a month. Music is much, much, much cheaper to produce and distribute. Both of these forms of media are then milked for decades despite having paid for themselves a thousand times over. This, in my opinion, is a travesty.
What are the capabilities of it? Does it support menu and dvd navigation from ripped dvd's? Can it play ISO images of dvd's stored on an external drive? Is it the first part of a mac based dvd jukebox device?
The details are pretty sketchy. It can play DVDs in the drive, free mpeg-4 files from apple's database (this is movie trailers right now), music, DRM'ed video, and it says, 'home movies" which may be the one you are looking for, although it does not say what formats, etc. Personally, I'm more interested in watching TV recordings I grab from cable and have stored if the UI and remote are nice enough. I already have an old mac serving as a PVR, media jukebox and this might make it much nicer.
The market microsoft was held to have a monopoly in is "x86 desktop operating systems"
I thought I had clarified this for you. The court defined the market as "Intel compatible PC operating systems" not "x86 desktop operating systems" but they further go on to define that market in detail and explain why Apple is not in the same market and does not provide a reasonable alternative in that market based upon a list of criteria including the incompatibility of software, hardware, cost to switch, and the fact that apple's OS only runs on Apple hardware. Apple is in a different market, that of complete workstation solutions, which is the same one Dell and Sun are in. The important defining characteristics are those of the market and the effect upon the market, not the technical details of the product. You have not argued MS's effect upon that market, only that you don't like the definition of the market, even though you do not seem to have read that definition or the explanations of it.
If you want an alternative to an Apple machine, you can buy a Dell or a Sun workstation. If you want an alternative to Windows, you cannot buy OS X and expect it to work. More importantly, the markets behave in such a way as to reflect that.
I hope that is a joke, MS was nowhere near first to market and were preceded by dozens of other players.
I had tabbed browsing 5 years ago. Any user in the world could have downloaded Opera or Mozilla.
Not true, because they did not know that Opera or Mozilla existed, because they were impossible to market successfully against a monopoly. After its introduction tabbed browsing existed for well over 5 years without being introduced to the general public because MS did not have to compete against it, that is holding back progress.
Thats not a crime.
No it is damage, damage done by MS's crime.
Microsoft isn't stopping anyone from developing products according to any standard's body.
No, but you see competition is normally what drives the advancement of technology. People use products that support the newest and best features. In this case their is no competition, thus the better products don't win and the state of technology stagnates. In this case inferior products are in the hands of the vast majority of people, that is damage done by MS's monopoly.
And yet they do. They both need each other. MS can't afford to lose Dell and neither can Dell afford to lose Microsoft. Its business.
Got any proof to back that up? In a healthy market Dell would sell multiple operating systems from multiple competing suppliers (just like they do with every other part of their machines). And yet, they don't pre-install linux, or even sell boxes without Windows for less than the cost of the same machine with Windows. All this despite the market demand for such a product. I've had purchase orders for hundreds of PC's destined to run Linux come across my desk and we still had to pay for Windows on all of them. I personally know of purchase orders for tens of thousands of machines all including a Windows license that was not going to be used since the buyer already had a corporate license that covered them. That is not a healthy or fair market.
If MS cut off Dell's air supply by raising Windows pricing Dell would slowly die, but HP, Gateway, etc. would pick up the slack. MS does not need Dell, and has them over a barrel and everyone knows it. The only thing Dell has going for it is legal action against MS for it's anti-competative actions, but given past court ruling only a fool would bet a successful company on that. Thus, the market is illegally restrained.
As far as I can see innovation proceeds in a quick pace with or without Microsoft. Have you heard of Linux? Java? Google? Firefox? Apple? Google them, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Please. I work in the industry and can see first hand how bad things are. A decade for fast searching to appear and then from a handful of companies unrelated to MS and unable to reach most users. Linux makes great strides as a server, but still has to implement hacks to work around MS's desktop monopoly. Java is years behind where they would have been without MS's intentional destruction of their standard, and MS has since reworked Windows to make write once, run anywhere as hard as possible, while at the same time copying the concept with.net, but implementing lock-ins to protect their monopoly. Firefox is just a basic browser, designed as an alternative to the crappy IE foisted upon most people. The majority of users don't even know it exists. Apple has made a few nice innovations, but again they reach only a tiny handful. They are the closest thing MS has to competition, but not enough to drive innovation. Sorry, but when was the last real, major innovation that made it into Windows? When was the last time they bothered to even release a new version? Windows has hardly advanced at all in half a decade and most people still have to buy it anyway.
Blame the users, there are alternatives.
Yeah, because it is not like MS has contracts that keep anyone from selling boxes with Linux on them, Oh wait, ye
So a product only qualifies if it represents a company's core business? Nope, sorry, doesn't work right that.
A product qualifies when there is no competition. There is none, because no one else sells desktop OS's and makes a profit so doing. They are a monopoly because they are the only one selling into the space and because even though competitors emerged and tried to enter the space with superior products they failed because of MS's dominance and business practices. Finally, they are a monopoly because only a monopoly can get away with holding an entire industry at gunpoint and making their customers sign away rights that are in no way in their best interests. When the seller is dictating all the terms, there is a problem.
So tell me, what makes you think you are more qualified to judge what is and is not a monopoly than every U.S. judge the case has been brought before, than the EU commission legal counsel, and than all the other countries legal systems that have thus far declared MS a monopoly? Do you have any documentation or statements from any sort of reputable economist or legal expert not paid by Microsoft to support your opinion?
Your other claims are likewise wholly unsupported. If you bothered to read the U.S. court findings you'll see they ruled that MS had a monopoly on "Intel compatible PC operating systems" and specifically address the reasons for that in the the section labeled "Substitutability." Monopolies are restricted based upon the fact that monopolies are bad for the economy and bad for consumers due to their effects upon the market. Can you honestly argue that you don't think MS is having those adverse effects upon the market and damaging both consumers and industry with their stranglehold on the market? Can you honestly argue that without MS's monopoly internet technologies would not be years ahead of where they are today? Sorry, I just can't agree with you. MS is choking the life out of the entire computing industry and holding it back as much as they can. As someone who has to deal with writing to partially implemented six year old specifications of technology I can say the damage is real and severe and without remedies to restore competition I don't see how it will get any better.
Media Player was included in Windows since Win95... I'm pretty sure Media Player pre-dates Real Player. I could be wrong.
It was introduced and bundled with Windows 98 SE. That was long after they acquired a monopoly.
Really? Played some Atari lately?
Yes I have actually, but while Atari was a monopoly, it was also first to market, which is always a monopoly for a short time. We're talking about established monopolies in mature markets, not companies that are de facto monopolies in emerging markets just because no one has released a competing product yet.
Microsoft has to tred carefully not lose is market share. Look at IE, MS got arrogant and lost 10% of the market to Firefox.
Yeah, by completely abandoning all development and advancement for nearly five years on one of the single most popular parts of the computing experience, MS lost almost 10% of the market, while not losing any of their primary monopoly market. Gee, that sounds like their is healthy competition alright.
Poor..Real
Yeah, I get it... you don't care if MS breaks the law or behaves unfairly because you worship Bill Gates or something. You don't care if the entire computing industry rots, because innovation is stifled. Thanks to MS it took nearly five years for users to get tabbed browsing, if that isn't holding progress back then I'm a lemur. Hell, I still have to design web pages to conform to partially implemented six year old specifications because IE still does not support any of the newer HTML, XHTML, or CSS specifications since that time. They are single-handedly holding internet technologies back and that is bad for everyone. The only reason they can do that is because they have a monopoly and are abusing it.
And in some cases MS pays out huge subsidies because a manufacturer like Dell jiggles the "Linux-bell"..You see, business, like life, is not fair.
Ummm, you have no idea what you are talking about do you? Dell has no power to threaten MS. They survive at MS's whim and they know it. Dell makes sales based upon having the lowest price, which they have do to volume. MS can re-negotiate their OEM windows contract and increase their per-unit prices to no longer be competitive. That will kill them. What do you think Dell can do, pre-intall linux and sell it? Sorry but the market is just not there. 99% of people want a Windows box from them and if they can't offer that at the best price, they die.
You've spent a great deal of time here apologizing for the illegal behaviors of a corporation that has done huge amounts of damage to the computing industry and held back progress in the field as long as possible. I sure hope they are paying you, because otherwise I can't think why you would spend your time trying to defend their unethical and damaging actions. Why you think they should exempt from antitrust laws and how that would help anyone is beyond me.
if - say - GM were the only automaker (or close enough to be considered a monopoly), would you argue that it should be illegal for them to bundle e.g. a sterio[sic] with their products, since there are companies which produce aftermarket sterios[sic]?
Assuming they acquired that monopoly right now, probably not, since car stereos are already accepted as a normal part of a car. If, however, they decided to start including another related product from a separate market, like gasoline bundled with their car, that would be illegal. Mind you it would be perfectly legal for them to either sell gas separately or make cars run on electricity, but it would be illegal for them to include a lifetime supply of gas with the car (and raise prices to reflect that inclusion). This could severely restrict GM in it's future business ventures, but then again we'd all be in pretty bad shape if GM was the only kind of car you can buy, sort of the way the computing industry is in such bad shape due to MS's monopoly.
WinFS (when released) will severly[sic] cut into desktop search products from Yahoo and Google, in fact there will be no need from products from Yahoo and Google.
Perhaps, but they are competing against what has long been a part of the OS, just a poorly implemented part. One could argue the case for this being anticompetitive, but it is a grey area. What is your point?
Microsoft is already paying for this, not by the fines, but by the speedy adoption of Linux on desktop and server systems. In the short term, monopoly wins, in the long-term it loses because people do move to alternatives.
MS isn't losing much ground in server OS's and has never had a monopoly there. As for people moving away from monopolies, that is not supported by history or economics.
And how is Windows locking out Real? Anyone can download it anytime.
First because OEMs have no choice but to pre-install WMP, whereas Real has to provide them with incentives to do the same with Realplayer. Second, it is rumored that part of the large settlement is due to evidence Real has of MS disallowing OEMs to include Realplayer under penalty of higher Windows prices for that OEM. Third, by refusing advertising dollars from Real to advertise Realplayer on MSN because Real was a competitor.
Would those be the same companies that either pay Dell or severly subsidize their software to be include on a Dell system?
Yes, in some cases because MS does not have to pay, they have an unfair advantage. In other cases if MS did not bundle a piece of software there would be a paying market for that software, and in many cases there was a paying market before MS entered the space.
Something Apple phans may not know: Real supported Linux when nobody else did. Only windows/apple people seem to bitch about Real.
I did not know there were such things as windows/apple people. Personally I use OS X, Windows, Linux and other OS's on a daily basis, but I can certainly understand disliking Real. Any company that ships malware with their products is deserving of ridicule, even if they don't port that malware to all the OS's they support.
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Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, said his nonbinding resolution would protect the Internet from a takeover by the United Nations that's scheduled to be discussed at a summit in Tunisia next month.
Yeah, because passing laws in the U.S. is a great way to control what other countries do, in their own countries, with their own hardware and networks that they built and paid for. Brilliant! This is just another politician trying to capitalize on the "us versus them" sentiments trying to be pushed by a number of factions in the U.S.
There is no reason why any one country should run a single point of failure for a resource vital to communications and commerce throughout the world, especially when most of the gear it is running on, paid for by, and resides in those other countries. The world has spoken, they want a democratic solution with representation for everyone. They don't want to keep paying large fees to U.S. corporations for a naming service that was free before the big corporations got involved and can be free, or nearly free again. Most of all, they don't like an increasingly aggressive and deceptive country to be able to severely damage the economy of another country at their whim. No one trusts the U.S. to be a benevolent dictator and they would be foolish if they did. It is time to remember some of those American ideals, like democracy and representation for all are far more important than the new American ideals of making money and bullying the rest of the world.
To put it simply, the internet is a global enterprise made up of hardware and software running in and paid for countries all around the world. Those countries deserve a say in how the naming scheme works and this sort of "America is superior to the rest of the world" nationalist bullshit is not only useless chest thumping, but it makes the U.S. look like even more of a vicious bully in the eyes of the world. You should be ashamed of yourself Mr. Coleman.
If you don't have proof that you ran those tools, you may not have to worry about being completely shut out of the network. You may just be admitted onto the network in a restricted way.
What garbage. First, their are already products that run scans on an entire network and base access upon those results. They work well and do not require a client-side component. Second, if Cisco requires third parties to register/license with them it will eventually become a tax on connecting to the network, paid to Cisco and most open source will be shut out since they can't pay. Third, if Cisco provides their own tools they will suck just as badly as all the other flakey client-side programs they have provided. Finally, anyone care to comment if Cisco is eating their own dogfood here, or do they still rely upon the better solutions provided by their competitors to police their own network?
Cisco is a company that provides half-assed solutions, based upon companies they buy cheaply just as they are on the brink of being bankrupted by better, competing solutions. They rely upon their huge market share in routing and name recognition to sell these half-assed products to admins who don't know any better. The sad thing is there are about three companies who provide this sort of service, but do it right and have solutions that actually work properly, but most IT people don't take the time to properly evaluate the offerings, they just add another item to their quarterly order to Cisco and assume it will work.
But will the downloads have commercials?
Well, no, not right now anyway. The shows they are offering now are commercial free. (As far as traditional commercials go. They do still contain product placement ads.) In future I could see Apple providing them free of cost, but with advertisements included. I hope they do not go this route though, since it will also mean that Apple will almost certainly exclude an easy 30 second jump ahead button in all their player software and hardware.
I certianly wouldn't want to buy any of these right now, sure the bit rate is good for the iPod video, or even a computer screen, but blowing them up on a TV must suck!
Most TV's have worse resolution than the average monitor. These are acceptable, but not great for either.
Combine that with the fact that an average season (22-24 episodes) would cost $43.78 - $47.76 and I would much rather spend that money buying something that can be displayed on my TV!
Full seasons cost less than the price of all their episodes, just as full albums cost less than the price of all their songs. These episodes do end up undercutting DVDs, but not by a lot. The strength of this offering is in the instant gratification, easier portability, and granularity. Just as many people want to buy just that one song they like from an album, many people also want to buy just that one episode they missed or a TV show.
I assume the DRM is FairPlay
So they say, although seeing as FairPlay is an Apple trademark term, FairPlay could be something different for video than audio. I expect it will be the same or very similar and hopefully, locked down to the same degree,
Why pay $1.99 per episode when you can just take the video you saved using Mythtv and download it to your ipod. You could even take out the commercials if you like. I could see Tivo making out well if they made it easy for ipod video users to sync to their PVR.
I heard a somewhat informal statement that Elgato, who make PVR hardware and software that works with macs, are adding an "export to ipod" option to automatically format shows for viewing on the ipod in the very near future, so you're not the only one who thinks it is an opportunity.
I work in a shop where most of us do dev work on linux boxes... but we all have windows partitions for Exchange. So damn handy for scheduling meetings, knowing who is in and who is out of town.
It's handy to have to reboot your machine to look up meeting times and information on where people in your company are? That's just fricking sad. Solutions like exchange that only work on one platform are pathetic. There are plenty of nice, cross-platform solutions. Your IT people really need to get a clue. If you need to use one particular OS, especially an OS that costs money and part of your company cannot use as their primary OS, just to obtain and publish basic information you have chosen the wrong solution. Please gather your things and leave quietly mister crappy decision maker.
The value you are getting is: it's already pre-ripped and encoded for your video iPod. You can get yesterday's show for a semi-reasonable price.
Also, the value over the TV version is you don't have to view, skip, or edit out commercials and the value over DVD is granularity and instant gratification. I don't plan to buy a video iPod, and although I might buy an episode of a TV show as an experiment, I can't see paying that much for that low of quality of shows. If the quality was brought up to even regular cable TV quality and the store expanded a huge amount and a better broadband than the cable model became available I might end as a customer, but only if all those things happened and the DRM did not get in my way. As it is now, the cheapest fast internet I can get is a cable modem and it is actually cheaper to get cable TV + broadband than just internet from either the cable company, wireless, or DSL.
One thing I think a lot of people looking at this new distribution model are missing is that although the broadcast streams of TV people watch now suck because you can't watch them when you want (PVR work around) and suck because they are riddled with commercials (same work around) they have an often recognized advantage in that they are mixed into channels. A lot of people like to just turn the TV on in the background and let whatever play and still more people use the TV to discover content by randomly browsing. The first half of this can be solved by nifty, dynamic playlists, but the second half is an unsolved problem right now.
For the record, my PVR happily snags all sorts of shows for me, with my favorites dutifully archived to DVD, the others stored and deleted, and lots of old movies and educational TV ready to go at any time. Apple has a long, uphill battle before they can compete with that, given the other realities of the market.
Yes it was and is just fine for companies to sell to anyone provided they do not specifically encourage or market their product for illegal purposes and provided they do not restrict the sale of that software in some cases and not others, or implement a system that tracks that illegal activity.
Sellers of handguns etc. etc.
Sellers of handguns have only been found liable for damages due to crimes committed with those handguns when a jury ruled their product development and marketing was specifically directed towards criminal elements.
To address the topic at hand, if U.S. companies sell to resellers, that is fine. If U.S. companies sell to resellers that they know are going to sell to countries on the sanction list, that makes them liable for resulting damages in U.S. courts. Since these companies should now have a pretty good idea that the resellers they have sold to are likely to sell to those countries, selling to those same resellers may make them liable. Knowingly providing updates and support may make them liable. All of this is pretty clear cut, so what is the issue?
Gee, I wonder why, so the EU looks like it's important and so they can quash speech, so Russia does...something and so China and quash speech. Theres a huge leap from "The company running .com for the entire world once, without warning, redirected and failed requests to for-profit advertisements" to China's saying there is no Tibet and no Taiwan.
Yeah, the EU wants to, umm, stop free speech by controlling the root domains, I'm sure that is it. I'm sure it has nothing to do with their stated reasons or that they don't like the U.S. having the ability to arbitrarily shut off their vital infrastructure, infrastructure they built and paid for I might add. You don't think it is a huge leap from a U.N. body controlling the root servers to China suddenly having the ability to dictate random changes to said body? It's not like China can't already stop DNS lookup via ISPs in their country and it is not like this has any ability to stop people outside of China from looking things up using a server elsewhere. I doubt France or Sweden will agree to censor all entries containing "taiwan" and I doubt China will have any more luck stopping people tunneling to DNS servers in those countries than it does now.
You're still asking everyone to trust the U.S. instead of a an elected group from the whole world and the whole world still does not trust the U.S., nor should it.
First, they will legislate that ISPs operating in their countries will no be allowed to use root DNS servers other than their own...
Why would they do that? and if they did, and kept non-conflicting entries synched why would it be a problem?
Then, their citizens will realize that this effectively isolates them from anyone smart enough to stick with the current, very functional, system.
Yeah, they will be isolated from the U.S. and not the rest of the world and the U.S. will be isolated from them. Sorry the U.S. is not as big of an economy as the rest of the world and most people are interested in sites and services primarily located in their own countries and offered in languages they speak. I don't think most people will miss the U.S. as much as the U.S. will miss doing business with Europe, Chine, Russia, the middle east, etc.
Then, the break away group will begin bickering back and forth as some members want to use their control of DNS to influence both local and international political views.
This is possible, but all the big players already have control over the local internet and it is unlikely they will be able to gain control over non-local given that the main purpose of this is to insure that no one can do so.
It will further splinter into smaller useless segments.
Yeah, because they are all stupid and will each decide to make a move that will make their access useless. Non-americans are all so dumb.
At some point the citizenry in some of the smarter countries that broke away will realize how stupid this is when they can't use credit cards controlled by US banks, or interact with US companies easily.
You know most businesses, banks, governments, etc. that people in foreign countries need to do business with are not in the U.S. I'd be much more interested to see how multinational corporations in the U.S. handle not having accurate access to the global markets, most of the labor pool, the international banks and commodities and currency markets, etc.
This whole thing is about controlling the flow of information. The currect (US led) system has 0 political control of domains. The US government doesn't tell ICANN to remove a root DNS entry if they have a problem.
Actually no one can no know that for certain. Do you really think it is reasonable for Iran to trust the U.S. to not disrupt their access? Because pretty much no one else trusts the U.S. not to.
We bitch about the government restricting freedom of speech here in the US in general, but Europeans and especially China and the middle east are the the people with no real freedom in that respect...
Perhaps you haven't been watching the news this decade. The days of the U.S. having the high ground there are long gone. We have surveillance and gag orders left and right. We have "national security," being used to avoid paying patent fees and prevent courts from hearing evidence. We have tax payer funded propaganda campaigns. We have no real laws to protect the privacy of citizens or prevent the collection of random data on them by the government or corporations. We have people arrested for wearing t-shirts that say, "protect our civil liberties" and people ushered to fenced in "free speech zones" during political campaigns.
Some countries have more restrictive laws and some less restrictive. Your solution of going with one single point of failure because you happen to trust it is naive and foolish. The system needs to be distributed, redundant, and not in the control of any single interest. I wish I shared your optimism and trust of the U.S. government, but they are lacking in trustworthiness these days. After breaking so many treaties, repeatedly lying to the U.N., and going on an all out campaign to alienate every foreign power possible, the world does not trust the U.S. and would be foolish if they did.
This would require everyone in the EU to reconfigure the nameservers to point at a different set of root servers overnight.
Yeah, because everyone in the EU has their servers configured to point at boxes in the U.S. right? Sorry, thanks for playing. Most of the actual, physical root server boxes are not in the U.S. Taking control of those boxes will redirect most eyeballs wherever the U.N. member agree upon. Laws stating that all ISPs and large businesses must show the U.N. authoritative DNS results will take care of a good chunk of the rest outside the U.S. There is no reason ISPs cannot even resolve conflicting DNS entries by providing both results, U.S. and worldwide and letting the client choose the proper address (would require some work, but is not undoable).
I might, overtime, add some additional EU nameservers if they are none disruptive but this will be a gradual process.
As a U.S. citizen who does a lot business overseas, I imagine I'd add them PDQ, and if the U.S. gov. does not like it, that is their problem. I don't expect this is exactly the route that will be taken though. I expect the U.N. to decide upon a plan, and give plenty of warning before they set up a functional root DNS alternative and I expect to have plenty of time to prepare for it properly.
You are completely correct. This is a case of the EU wanting to "fix" something that isn't broken and by "fixing" I mean allow governments the ability to shut down speech.
You think it is proper to expect Iran, and every other country with which the U.S. is not friendly to trust the U.S. not to shut off their internet or censor their freedom of speech? It's not like the U.S. or ICANN has an impeccable record here. The company running .com for the entire world once, without warning, redirected and failed requests to for-profit advertisements, thus breaking critical functionality around the world, and they still have control of the .com TLD. Sorry, but even I, as an American, can't say that I trust the government to not cripple the economy of Iran or some other country by abusing this power, and I certainly don't think it is reasonable to expect them to trust us. We have broken so many treaties and been caught lying so many times our trustworthiness is in the toilet. This just follows from that situation. Not even our allies trust us. The Internet was founded on distributed control and redundancy. If the U.S. controlled DNS root is a single point of failure, the internet needs to be fixed so that the failure can be "routed around the damage."
Anyway most of the physical boxes running the root domains are located outside the U.S., so all the U.N. needs to do is to get buy in from those countries and pass laws that say conflicts must be resolved to show the U.N. specified authoritative DNS. It does not even need to preclude showing the U.S. one if the U.S. is stubborn and decides not to stay in synch with the rest of the world. This is not as big of a problem as people are making it out to be.
P.S. your characterization of this as the EU trying to take control is incorrect. The EU, China, Russia, and most other big players in the U.N. are on board. This is as close to the U.S. vs. the rest of the world as I have ever seen.
I will be happy when gtalk works with my jabber account in iChat.
I'm not sure I follow you. Gtalk works just fine when configured as a jabber account in iChat, Google even has instructions up on their page as to how to configure it. Or did you mean when/if Google allows Gtalk to talk to other jabber accounts than Google ones (which is an issue unrelated to ichat or any other client)?
Yes, there is a place for open source, but I don't think this is it. I'm willing to hear reasons why Google's desire to have a open server-to-server federation will be good for a product that already offers me everything I need (at the moment).
Scenario: I run a small business and I want to be able to run an internal server that lets my employees chat and video chat with one another and transfer files in a secure, encrypted fashion. Due to security concerns and government regulations I can't use someone else's server. Further I would like to enable my employees to chat with people in other companies and with anyone else they feel like either through a mostly secure, encrypted messaging system or an unencrypted messaging system. I'd like users to be able to choose the client that suits them and that runs on any given platform. Finally, I don't want to poke a half a dozen holes in my firewall and I don't want every user to have to run five different accounts to talk to all the different people they know.
The proper answer to this problem is for the industry to move to an open standard. It works just fine for e-mail, and there is no reason it won't work for chat.
First, AOL owns a lot of things that are useful and well used, many of which compete with Google offerings. Second AOL has a lot of subscribers still and by merging mapquest and google maps, gtalk and AIM and ICQ, AOL search and Google search, both parties can benefit from shared development and marketing costs. Third Google Talk is still in beta, and an early beta at that. Fourth, Google talk is just a jabber setup, and jabber already supports running a conduit to connect to other services, like AIM and ICQ. I imagine Google wants AOLs subscribers and install base and is willing to pony up new technologies to get them. If AIM and ICQ migrated to use the jabber protocols, it would be a happy day for instant messaging as chat became as server/platform/client agnostic as e-mail.
In the MIT experiment, the boat was arguably a very poor replica of a trireme. It was painted black to optimize the energy transfer (which in the end didn't matter).
Actually a lot of the boats of the time were black. In any case, they would probably have targeted the sails if they were unfurled, being higher and easier targets.
Highly polished silver on a superflat surface would have been the closest thing that the ancient greeks could have had
I think bronze, or white bronze seems a lot more likely.
The greeks would have had people holding the mirrors, not tables and stands.
Because the greeks had not yet invented tables or stands?
At 100 feet, your each soldier's heartbeat would have defocused the weapon, even if he could otherwise hold perfectly still...
Again, because they had not invented stands yet?
To protect the soldiers from archers, Archimedes' weapon would have to hold focus at a much greater distance.
Or they could be standing behind big sheets of bronze.
All these things the MythBusters got much close to right and the MIT folks avoided.
I seriously doubt that. Now I'll be the first to admit, I'm no expert on light, reflection, or focal instruments. Similarly, I'm not an expert on Greek history and technology or Archimedes. I do, however, have my aptitudes, some of which have been touched upon by other Mythbusters episodes. It makes you want to cry when you see them making fundamental mistake after fundamental mistake, applying constants that are wrong by three orders of magnitude, and basically making all sorts of assumptions without any real research. Mythbusters are entertainers. They blow things up and make stuff that looks neat on TV, while trying simultaneously trying to address various topics in a very informal, half-assed sort of way. To assume that these jokers can "bust the myth" that a genius figured out how to do something that they are unable to in their five days of quickly throwing crap together without any real expertise or research is the real joke.
Note, I'm not saying this legend is true, but I am saying I'd never believe that it is not based upon the posturing of these twits.
If anybody reading this is not a fan of the luxury of charging what the market will bear, then great -- figure out how much it would cost you to barely scrape by for a year without vacations or other discretionary spending, and then talk to your boss on Thursday about reducing your salary.
I don't recall my salary being paid by the public, at the expense of one of their fundamental human rights. Sorry but copyright is a restriction of free speech that is supposed to be for the good of the people. The extremely long copyright lengths should not be determined by "what the market will bear" but by what is necessary to induce creations to be made, and that is a vital component of this equation you have overlooked. The cost of producing these shows is negligible compared to the cost charged customers. The last time I looked at the numbers, the production and distribution on DVD of every show on cable TV could be paid in full if each TV owner paid $7 a month. Music is much, much, much cheaper to produce and distribute. Both of these forms of media are then milked for decades despite having paid for themselves a thousand times over. This, in my opinion, is a travesty.
What are the capabilities of it? Does it support menu and dvd navigation from ripped dvd's? Can it play ISO images of dvd's stored on an external drive? Is it the first part of a mac based dvd jukebox device?
The details are pretty sketchy. It can play DVDs in the drive, free mpeg-4 files from apple's database (this is movie trailers right now), music, DRM'ed video, and it says, 'home movies" which may be the one you are looking for, although it does not say what formats, etc. Personally, I'm more interested in watching TV recordings I grab from cable and have stored if the UI and remote are nice enough. I already have an old mac serving as a PVR, media jukebox and this might make it much nicer.
The market microsoft was held to have a monopoly in is "x86 desktop operating systems"
I thought I had clarified this for you. The court defined the market as "Intel compatible PC operating systems" not "x86 desktop operating systems" but they further go on to define that market in detail and explain why Apple is not in the same market and does not provide a reasonable alternative in that market based upon a list of criteria including the incompatibility of software, hardware, cost to switch, and the fact that apple's OS only runs on Apple hardware. Apple is in a different market, that of complete workstation solutions, which is the same one Dell and Sun are in. The important defining characteristics are those of the market and the effect upon the market, not the technical details of the product. You have not argued MS's effect upon that market, only that you don't like the definition of the market, even though you do not seem to have read that definition or the explanations of it.
If you want an alternative to an Apple machine, you can buy a Dell or a Sun workstation. If you want an alternative to Windows, you cannot buy OS X and expect it to work. More importantly, the markets behave in such a way as to reflect that.
So was Microsoft =)
I hope that is a joke, MS was nowhere near first to market and were preceded by dozens of other players.
I had tabbed browsing 5 years ago. Any user in the world could have downloaded Opera or Mozilla.
Not true, because they did not know that Opera or Mozilla existed, because they were impossible to market successfully against a monopoly. After its introduction tabbed browsing existed for well over 5 years without being introduced to the general public because MS did not have to compete against it, that is holding back progress.
Thats not a crime.
No it is damage, damage done by MS's crime.
Microsoft isn't stopping anyone from developing products according to any standard's body.
No, but you see competition is normally what drives the advancement of technology. People use products that support the newest and best features. In this case their is no competition, thus the better products don't win and the state of technology stagnates. In this case inferior products are in the hands of the vast majority of people, that is damage done by MS's monopoly.
And yet they do. They both need each other. MS can't afford to lose Dell and neither can Dell afford to lose Microsoft. Its business.
Got any proof to back that up? In a healthy market Dell would sell multiple operating systems from multiple competing suppliers (just like they do with every other part of their machines). And yet, they don't pre-install linux, or even sell boxes without Windows for less than the cost of the same machine with Windows. All this despite the market demand for such a product. I've had purchase orders for hundreds of PC's destined to run Linux come across my desk and we still had to pay for Windows on all of them. I personally know of purchase orders for tens of thousands of machines all including a Windows license that was not going to be used since the buyer already had a corporate license that covered them. That is not a healthy or fair market.
If MS cut off Dell's air supply by raising Windows pricing Dell would slowly die, but HP, Gateway, etc. would pick up the slack. MS does not need Dell, and has them over a barrel and everyone knows it. The only thing Dell has going for it is legal action against MS for it's anti-competative actions, but given past court ruling only a fool would bet a successful company on that. Thus, the market is illegally restrained.
As far as I can see innovation proceeds in a quick pace with or without Microsoft. Have you heard of Linux? Java? Google? Firefox? Apple? Google them, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Please. I work in the industry and can see first hand how bad things are. A decade for fast searching to appear and then from a handful of companies unrelated to MS and unable to reach most users. Linux makes great strides as a server, but still has to implement hacks to work around MS's desktop monopoly. Java is years behind where they would have been without MS's intentional destruction of their standard, and MS has since reworked Windows to make write once, run anywhere as hard as possible, while at the same time copying the concept with .net, but implementing lock-ins to protect their monopoly. Firefox is just a basic browser, designed as an alternative to the crappy IE foisted upon most people. The majority of users don't even know it exists. Apple has made a few nice innovations, but again they reach only a tiny handful. They are the closest thing MS has to competition, but not enough to drive innovation. Sorry, but when was the last real, major innovation that made it into Windows? When was the last time they bothered to even release a new version? Windows has hardly advanced at all in half a decade and most people still have to buy it anyway.
Blame the users, there are alternatives.
Yeah, because it is not like MS has contracts that keep anyone from selling boxes with Linux on them, Oh wait, ye
So a product only qualifies if it represents a company's core business? Nope, sorry, doesn't work right that.
A product qualifies when there is no competition. There is none, because no one else sells desktop OS's and makes a profit so doing. They are a monopoly because they are the only one selling into the space and because even though competitors emerged and tried to enter the space with superior products they failed because of MS's dominance and business practices. Finally, they are a monopoly because only a monopoly can get away with holding an entire industry at gunpoint and making their customers sign away rights that are in no way in their best interests. When the seller is dictating all the terms, there is a problem.
So tell me, what makes you think you are more qualified to judge what is and is not a monopoly than every U.S. judge the case has been brought before, than the EU commission legal counsel, and than all the other countries legal systems that have thus far declared MS a monopoly? Do you have any documentation or statements from any sort of reputable economist or legal expert not paid by Microsoft to support your opinion?
Your other claims are likewise wholly unsupported. If you bothered to read the U.S. court findings you'll see they ruled that MS had a monopoly on "Intel compatible PC operating systems" and specifically address the reasons for that in the the section labeled "Substitutability." Monopolies are restricted based upon the fact that monopolies are bad for the economy and bad for consumers due to their effects upon the market. Can you honestly argue that you don't think MS is having those adverse effects upon the market and damaging both consumers and industry with their stranglehold on the market? Can you honestly argue that without MS's monopoly internet technologies would not be years ahead of where they are today? Sorry, I just can't agree with you. MS is choking the life out of the entire computing industry and holding it back as much as they can. As someone who has to deal with writing to partially implemented six year old specifications of technology I can say the damage is real and severe and without remedies to restore competition I don't see how it will get any better.
Media Player was included in Windows since Win95... I'm pretty sure Media Player pre-dates Real Player. I could be wrong.
It was introduced and bundled with Windows 98 SE. That was long after they acquired a monopoly.
Really? Played some Atari lately?
Yes I have actually, but while Atari was a monopoly, it was also first to market, which is always a monopoly for a short time. We're talking about established monopolies in mature markets, not companies that are de facto monopolies in emerging markets just because no one has released a competing product yet.
Microsoft has to tred carefully not lose is market share. Look at IE, MS got arrogant and lost 10% of the market to Firefox.
Yeah, by completely abandoning all development and advancement for nearly five years on one of the single most popular parts of the computing experience, MS lost almost 10% of the market, while not losing any of their primary monopoly market. Gee, that sounds like their is healthy competition alright.
Poor..Real
Yeah, I get it... you don't care if MS breaks the law or behaves unfairly because you worship Bill Gates or something. You don't care if the entire computing industry rots, because innovation is stifled. Thanks to MS it took nearly five years for users to get tabbed browsing, if that isn't holding progress back then I'm a lemur. Hell, I still have to design web pages to conform to partially implemented six year old specifications because IE still does not support any of the newer HTML, XHTML, or CSS specifications since that time. They are single-handedly holding internet technologies back and that is bad for everyone. The only reason they can do that is because they have a monopoly and are abusing it.
And in some cases MS pays out huge subsidies because a manufacturer like Dell jiggles the "Linux-bell"..You see, business, like life, is not fair.
Ummm, you have no idea what you are talking about do you? Dell has no power to threaten MS. They survive at MS's whim and they know it. Dell makes sales based upon having the lowest price, which they have do to volume. MS can re-negotiate their OEM windows contract and increase their per-unit prices to no longer be competitive. That will kill them. What do you think Dell can do, pre-intall linux and sell it? Sorry but the market is just not there. 99% of people want a Windows box from them and if they can't offer that at the best price, they die.
You've spent a great deal of time here apologizing for the illegal behaviors of a corporation that has done huge amounts of damage to the computing industry and held back progress in the field as long as possible. I sure hope they are paying you, because otherwise I can't think why you would spend your time trying to defend their unethical and damaging actions. Why you think they should exempt from antitrust laws and how that would help anyone is beyond me.
if - say - GM were the only automaker (or close enough to be considered a monopoly), would you argue that it should be illegal for them to bundle e.g. a sterio[sic] with their products, since there are companies which produce aftermarket sterios[sic]?
Assuming they acquired that monopoly right now, probably not, since car stereos are already accepted as a normal part of a car. If, however, they decided to start including another related product from a separate market, like gasoline bundled with their car, that would be illegal. Mind you it would be perfectly legal for them to either sell gas separately or make cars run on electricity, but it would be illegal for them to include a lifetime supply of gas with the car (and raise prices to reflect that inclusion). This could severely restrict GM in it's future business ventures, but then again we'd all be in pretty bad shape if GM was the only kind of car you can buy, sort of the way the computing industry is in such bad shape due to MS's monopoly.
WinFS (when released) will severly[sic] cut into desktop search products from Yahoo and Google, in fact there will be no need from products from Yahoo and Google.
Perhaps, but they are competing against what has long been a part of the OS, just a poorly implemented part. One could argue the case for this being anticompetitive, but it is a grey area. What is your point?
Microsoft is already paying for this, not by the fines, but by the speedy adoption of Linux on desktop and server systems. In the short term, monopoly wins, in the long-term it loses because people do move to alternatives.
MS isn't losing much ground in server OS's and has never had a monopoly there. As for people moving away from monopolies, that is not supported by history or economics.
And how is Windows locking out Real? Anyone can download it anytime.
First because OEMs have no choice but to pre-install WMP, whereas Real has to provide them with incentives to do the same with Realplayer. Second, it is rumored that part of the large settlement is due to evidence Real has of MS disallowing OEMs to include Realplayer under penalty of higher Windows prices for that OEM. Third, by refusing advertising dollars from Real to advertise Realplayer on MSN because Real was a competitor.
Would those be the same companies that either pay Dell or severly subsidize their software to be include on a Dell system?
Yes, in some cases because MS does not have to pay, they have an unfair advantage. In other cases if MS did not bundle a piece of software there would be a paying market for that software, and in many cases there was a paying market before MS entered the space.
Something Apple phans may not know: Real supported Linux when nobody else did. Only windows/apple people seem to bitch about Real.
I did not know there were such things as windows/apple people. Personally I use OS X, Windows, Linux and other OS's on a daily basis, but I can certainly understand disliking Real. Any company that ships malware with their products is deserving of ridicule, even if they don't port that malware to all the OS's they support.