If your target market is 20-50 customers and it's a niche piece of software, you're dreaming if you think anyone is going to do any work on it, much less submit patches back.
That depends very much upon who those customers are, how big they are, if they have in-house development (as they might if the poster does) and how much work needs to go into customizing it.
Throughout the 80s and 90s this sort of thing was very common in the networking field and tier-1 ISPs, universities, and hardware vendors would collaborate on projects each devoting significant code. I worked on a project where 30 different organizations and companies developed some very high-profile UNIX software that is the basis for much of the internet's infrastructure today. Everyone threw in code because they did not want the responsibility to maintain and update it, but they all needed to use it. Thus, it can certainly happen in the right field.
You're essentially giving your $2 million of R&D away for free with no gain for the company.
Did you read the post? The gain is twofold, free development from other companies (assuming it is the right kind of project) and free publicity. Nothing quite makes a company's reputation like being the keeper of the keys and originator for a large project everyone depends upon and uses. The two million dollars is spent and gone and was needed. Now the question is can more benefit be gained by selling it for cash or opening it?
Obviously without knowing the particulars this is very hard to judge. Things to consider are will academia be interested and likely to spend Uncle Sam's money improving your system for you? Will the other players in your market? What kind of licensing is appropriate to protect your investment but still draw in contributors? Do you lose a competitive advantage by letting others use it?
I did not mean to demean your accomplishments. I think NeoOffice/J is a great free office application on the mac. I make use of it upon occasion (although my version is a bit dated). What I meant to say is that when a user is accustomed to MS Office, using NeoOffice gives the user a pretty poor impression. First, it loads very slowly (as does the X11 version). Next the UI elements don't look quite right because they are not native and nothing behaves exactly the way programs with the native UI do. This left me with the initial impression that it was a port trying to fit in. things don't scroll as smoothly or redraw as well. It just seems sort of choppy compared to most other applications. Finally, although I may be the exception rather than the rule, I make heavy use of system services and not having them available for manipulating text in particular is enough of a reason for me to avoid it as a production application.
Most of the items you list as ways NeoOffice integrates with OS X are great, but they are what is expected of an application on OS X and are notable more by their lack than their presence. I know it seems unfair and I'm sure it is a lot of work, but making an application behave normally is not a feature in the minds of most end users, especially mac users.
That said, I do make use of your spotlight plug-in regularly to search for OpenOffice documentation created by my Linux using peers. I use Pages or Word to view.doc files, but have used NeoOffice in the past to deal with corrupted.doc files, which it has a knack for opening. I've recommended your product to a number of people some of whom use it regularly. Good luck and thanks.
I can't believe you're trying to defend your idiotic analogy.
You're the one making blanket declarative statements. "Fish and cheese have NOTHING in common." Except they are both foods, both sold in the U.S. both animal products and a few thousand other things. And then you don't even own up to being wrong. Do you still insist that they have nothing in common?
Businesses today have many PC options other than Microsoft: Sun, IBM, Apple, and Novell to name a few.
Congratulations you just completely changed your argument. You first argued MS was a monopoly, but what they were doing was ok, then you switched to MS isn't a monopoly. This is especially interesting because I specifically asked about this point earlier.
You don't understand the Sherman Antitrust Act very well, do you?
In 1962 the supreme court ruled that bundling was violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act when the bundled products were being used to extend a monopoly on one product into a second monopoly. And you claim I don't understand it?
Engaging in anti-competitive practices is what makes a monopoly illegal
See the above, bundling has already specifically been listed as violation of the Sherman Act and described in some detail, almost as if MS's actions were being described.
You have absolutely no way to back up a claim that we are "5-10 years behind". That's just rhetorical nonsense. And if that's the extent of your argument, then I don't think Microsoft has anything to worry about in court.
Heh, no logical argument eh? Ask any expert in computer science who has been an expert since the 70's what has happened. How long did it take to get tabbed browsing on IE after it was introduced? How long before they added internet capabilities to windows after all other OS's added it? As for court, well I won't be arguing in court and I doubt anyone will. You see they have been spreading their ill gotten gains pretty liberally among politicians and we all know the system can definitely be bought.
Like it or not MS has been ruled a monopoly in three different courts in three different countries and are a textbook example of an antitrust violation. You're either a very deluded MS apologist or you're a paid shill. I hope the latter since then at least you are profiting from the ruin of the computing industry instead of just cheering it on like a lackwit.
The right to be secure in your papers and person? Having people enter your home or place of business, search it, take things, and prevent you from using your freedom of speech to even tell your neighbors or the press is definitely a violation of basic human rights. In any case my comment about basic human rights was not specifically about the recent change in the law, but the behavior of the U.S. government in general as a evaluation of the threat they pose to a person's liberty. Perhaps imprisoning and torturing people without a trial or chance to defend themselves counts? Or do you think that giving more, unnecessary power to government is a good thing?
...view records for a terrorism investigation going to cause us to plunge into chaos and anarchy?
Terrorist investigation? The FBI stated plainly that they have been using the patriot act provisions in the pursuit of normal criminal investigations with great success. And who said anything about chaos or anarchy? No what we are looking at is a very orderly and controlled descent into a totalitarian government. I'd much prefer anarchy and chaos to totalitarianism, but then I'm one of those people who still values freedom and is not scared by the big bad terrorists that have in the last 10 years managed to kill as many people as moped accidents. In fact I think we should change our focus to a war on mopeds, at least that will be fun.
Even so, neooffice is a java application and while better than running the x11 version is way behind the regular openoffice in terms of features and codebase and still does not properly integrate into osx. It does not work properly with services, does not use native UI elements, and performs very poorly. I don't think Apple will ship such a monstrosity. More likely they would stick with Pages and add a spreadsheet.
Another hardware vendor would put some pressure on Apple to smarten up.
Yeah, having one of the worst ranked computer makers for reliability start making machines will pressure one of the best ranked to make their machines more reliable? Sorry, the effect would be just the opposite. Dell sells really cheap crap with the cheapest components they can find and their machines break more than any other major manufacturer. If Apple were to compete with them on price they'd have to stop buying some of the not-quite-bottom-of-the-line components they do now and go with even cheaper ones. Just take a look at the consumer reports ratings for Dell and Apple. You ibook may have problems but in general Apple is three stars above Dell on building reliable gear.
Re:Automatic DDoS mitigation at backbone level
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· Score: 1
You can't mandate compliance by writing an RFC. I don't think the money an ISP could make redirecting to a antivirus manufacturer would recoup their losses from customers who move elsewhere because of the inconvenience or from paying all the people they need to answer the phones and tell customers why they are being redirected or to explain to them why the automated system thinks they have a worm. Give it time, eventually the automated tools will mature to the point that the cost is not as bad and, hopefully, consumer machines will harden a bit to lessen the problem as well.
Re:Automatic DDoS mitigation at backbone level
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· Score: 2, Interesting
ISPs can already detect incoming DoS attacks and offramp them with existing tools and a few ISPs are now offering automated blocking to their enterprise customers. They can also easily generate a list of zombies in their network. The real problem is notifying infected machine owners and dealing with the customer service aspect costs too much money and is generally not worth the return.
Well, ignoring the fact that the EU doesn't have jurisdiction over the rest of the world, even if you did that, you'd also have to force them to charge a certain price. Then they'll just start bundling something else,
There is already a tried and true way of dealing with the lack of competition caused by bundling. It is the same one the U.S. originally declared before being paid off. You split the company into multiple companies. Two get the OS and two get the applications. Then all four companies compete in the market with each other and with any other companies that enter the market. Greed keeps them from subsidizing each other and capitalism works. It's a lot easier and more effective than any of the other solutions proposed, including abolishing copyright. I know copyright law is very messed up and needs to be rewritten, but it is not going to be abolished and would cause a lot of problems if it was. Split em up.
They also wore SHOES so the FBI should be able to rifle through records at shoe companies without a warrant and have the power to throw the people at those companies in jail if they tell anyone. And you know what they also drove CARS so the FBI should be able to look though the contents of any car without a warrant too right? Gee we have to stop the terrorists, think of the children, etc. Terrorists are so much less of a threat to the people of the U.S. than a government that does not respect basic human rights there is no comparison. If a terrorist tries to kill me I'll try to kill him right back. What am I supposed to do about the FBI giving the reading lists of the republican parties opponents to that party's leaders though? Overthrow the government?
Operating a computer should be like operating heavy machinary. You need to pass a test that says you're qualified to do it.
You need to pass a test because lives are at risk, not bandwidth. Realistically their should be some basic instruction, hopefully provided in schools, but at that same time most computers should be much, much, much, much, much harder to remotely take over and turn into a zombie. Windows is the worst of the bunch, but pretty much all OSs could be a lot easier to use securely. I imagine they would be too, except for the fact that since MS gained their monopoly, innovation has slowed to a crawl. I want default sandboxes for new applications, services off by default, and easy built in standards compliant encryption and authentication schemes.
I agree that there will always be really stupid users that will get their machines taken over and agree to the most ridiculous risks to see the little bunny cartoon, but at least make the user click a button that says "Let this program do anything it wants to my computer" right next to the "run it in a sandbox and give it no access to the internet or my files" button.
I was referring to the fact that although there is a Dashboard.app application in the Applications directory it is really just a Widget launcher and the processes are maintained by the Dock application. You have to remove both of these (eliminating your dock) in order to really remove the dashboard feature.
It's not really a direct competitor you know. Apple sells and makes money on computers. They include an OS as an incentive to buy those computers, but it is unlikely the could survive in the current market just selling Mac OS X even if they sold it for x86. MS is still a monopoly as much as it ever was. Now if Apple starts selling OS X for x86 to other companies or even to end users and MS does not crush them with money or by threatening the PC manufacturers and sales outlets and gain a significant market share (say 15%) I'd probably agree with you. Right now though your argument is a bit like saying the power company does not have monopoly on power distribution because you can buy car batteries from Walmart.
Fish and cheese have nothing to do with one another: fish is certainly not a platform for cheese.
You are wrong. Fish and cheese do go together, they are both foods and sometimes complementary ones. Fish is literally a platform for cheese in some cases, i.e. grilled salmon topped with mozzarella.
Let's say a grill company becomes a monopoly somehow because its propane grill commands a 90% market share... And despite the fact that every other grill company also bundles utensils with their grills, the utensil companies blame only ONE company -- PropaneUSA -- for their falling sales.
You are even more wrong. The problem is you are contradicting yourself. If a grill company has a monopoly then, practically speaking, there are no other grill companies to also bundle utensils. To make your analogy more correct look at this theoretical market situation. If it was the case then there would be only one propane grill manufacturer to buy from, and propane grills would have to be integral to doing business for pretty much every even moderately sized company on the planet. Now you can get a build your own propane grill kit made up by a bunch of people who are fed up with the fact that PropaneUSA grills explode occasionally and often can't be lit properly so they invented their own (but can't successfully sell it commercially because no grill sales outlet can risk offending PropaneUSA). You can buy a pear brand electric cooking system that works pretty well, but is not really the same thing and is only given away built into the pear brand of houses. Now we're starting to get a market that resembles the current OS market.
In this market utensil manufacturers are very justified in complaining that they have been pushed out of the market by the PropaneUSA company's illegal extension of its monopoly. Sure maybe they saw the writing on the wall when PropaneUSA put all the propane tank manufacturers out of business and all the apron manufacturers, but if the trend continues, they will be putting the automobile manufactures out of business in another 10 years. It's not like people should choose what business to go into based upon which one a monopoly is going to take over next with an inferior product that they bundle.
The problem with your analogy as you wrote it was you say "gained a monopoly" but then treat them as if they were not a monopoly for the rest of your argument. Maybe you don't believe MS is a monopoly or maybe you just don't understand what a monopoly really is and just how badly it can be abused. If there were no more advances in propane grill technology, utensils, or aprons well I think we could all live with that. We're not talking about propane grills with MS though. We're talking about the entire field of software slowly grinding to a halt. We're already 5-10 years behind where we would be with a healthy market and it is only going to get worse unless the laws are actually enforced... laws that have stopped this same thing before.
What advantage does a web browser and media player bring to the consumer?
Do you know what a strawman argument is? It is when you set up a false argument then knock it down to prove yourself right. If you start you post by asking a question and trying to make it seem like that is the question I asked you're presenting a strawman argument.
I never asked, "What advantage does a web browser and media player bring to the consumer?" I asked Where is the added value in bundling the products when sold by MS? Here are two possibilities MS bundles Windows with it's other apps and charges for all of them at once or MS does not bundle them and charges for them separately. Do you agree?
In the first case consumers and OEMs can buy and pay for Windows and all the applications now bundled separately. If I want to buy Windows but prefer Firefox and specifically don't want the media player I can buy that and without MS's illegal abuse IT WILL COST LESS because I don't have to pay for the development of IE and windows media player. That is a huge advantage to me as the consumer.
In the second situation (the one we are in now) I have to pay for a whole slew of products I don't want. Right now if you buy Windows you have to pay for developers to work on other software because you have no choice. Your argument is that choice is of no benefit to the consumer, but the flaw in your logic is that you are failing to understand the alternative. You think it is a choice between pay and get something or pay the same amount and get even more. That is the same mistake the EU judges made (as I explained in my original post). It does no good to make MS offer a version without the media player if they still charge you for the development of the media player. The law needs to force them to offer their products separately for separate prices to ensure that MS is not overcharging you for Windows to subsidize their other offerings.
Finally, you are mistaking bundling on the level of the manufacturer with bundling at purchase time. If Dell wants to sell computers with all sorts of software bundled on them, there is no problem. The consumer gets a better deal because Dell gets to negotiate with several competing suppliers to get the best media player or other software for their customers. The problem is that right now, Dell does not have a choice. They are forced to pay for one of the options already, just to stay in business, and paying a second time for a competitor's product is only an option if the bundled version is unusable.
I find it amazing how so many people can't seem to grasp the concept that bundling something with a monopolized product bypasses competition in the market and gives consumers less choice, less innovation, worse products, and higher prices. How anyone can think this is a good thing is beyond me. "Yay! look I was forced to buy this product! isn't is great that I don't have to pay for it now because I was already forced to pay for it before! How wonderful!"
De-bundling FREE SOFTWARE like WMP, IE, MSN, etc. SHOULDN'T cut down from the cost, because there's no cost in creating it.
I see the software has no value. It was created for free by volunteers and MS did not have to pay developers to produce it. I did not realize that. Or maybe it is only free because you already paid for the development when you bought a computer with Windows on it and they just rolled the cost into that? If the ice cream is given away for free then it has no cost either right? Hell the electric company can even give it away to people who don't have electricity (that 1% or less) because they can afford to after raising the rates of everyone who does. Idiot.
They're not bundling seperate products, they're adding value to an existing product.
Bullshit. Adding cheese to fish adds to its value too. Whatever. These could easily be separate products, used to be separate products, and should be separate products. Why are they bundled? What advantage does it bring to the consumer? OEMs should choose what applications to put together and sell to customers. OS manufacturers should not. The minute MS started giving discounts to OEMs that agreed not bundle competitors products or agreed to bundle MS products (like office) they broke the law. They abused their monopoly position and the proper course of action was to break them up into OS and application companies. That is what the courts ruled too, before certain very large campaign contributions were made.
So if Apple reached 85%+ marketshare you think it would be better for consumers for them to strip out Safari, Quicktime, Spotlight, etc.?
If Apple were to reach 85% of the market and they were to then take actions to stifle competition then they should not only be prevented from selling bundled applications and OSs, but bundled computers as well. I think it would be a lot better for customers if that were to happen.
Consumers have a much better out of the box experience, and developers can develop against components that they can rely on since they know these components are part of the product. Everyone wins, except for the stupid companies who try and make money off of a commoditized technology.
OEMs who actually sell to customers and customers themselves should be the ones choosing what set of products they want, not component manufacturers. I'm sure if Sony were to manage a monopoly on TVs they'd agree it is better for the customers end user experience if they had to buy the integrated playstation and the integrated stereo system and the integrated DVD sony-proprietary-digital-video-disk player as well. As for everyone winning, it sure as hell isn't happening right now. Innovation in the industry has crawled to a snail's pace, consumer choices are fewer than ever, and almost all the cool new technologies are available only on non-mainstream systems. Consumers are overcharged, and charged multiple times. Hell just take a look at Linux. When a system written by people in their spare time and given away for free is the largest competitor to a proprietary, for sale one, you know the market is unhealthy. As for stupid companies, that would be every single company on the planet. Basic economic theory shows what happens when monopolies are unregulated. They expand into more an more markets until there is only one company. Then you are in the same situation as communist Russia was, but achieved by going in the opposite direction.
I sure hope MS pays you to make posts like this because otherwise, you're pretty blind to how bad the computer industry really is these days. MS has bought and killed more cool technologies than have been released over the last 10 years. As a computer aficionado I'm disgusted by how bad it has become.
Any program that actually supports the freedesktop.org desktop entry file is readily accessible to the user
Any program can be run by the user, and probably uninstalled? How about edited? Docs? Resources?
Coming from OS X, where this has been solved very elegantly I can say there are definite advantages to having self-contained applications that can be moved and organized anywhere, installed by dragging from a remote volume and uninstalled with a quick drop in the trash. It is nice to not have to hunt for resources. Want a picture or sound used in a game, well it's all in one place. I never realized what a pain applications that are scattered in bits and pieces around my directory structure was until that pain went away.
I believe that the playing field should be kept level, and that other companies should be treated just as Microsoft was by the EU.
I agree as soon as Apple is declared by the courts to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems I think they should be forced to comply with all the anti-trust regulations that would then apply to them. Oh wait, the same laws do apply it's just that Apple is not a monopoly and MS is.
Yes you can uninstall all of those applications from OS X very easily with the exception of Dashboard which is actually a part of the OS and is built into the UI. It can be removed with a little know how though. All of that, however, is immaterial.
The problem is not with companies bundling things together in general. If someone wants to sell fish and cheese together, great, good luck. The problem is that if one company has a monopoly on something and only sells that that something bundled with something else it drives everyone else out of business. That is why their are special rules for monopolies, because they can upset free trade by coercing their customers. MS has and is doing just that. They can sell all the cheese they want and all the fish they want, but they can't sell only fish and cheese bundles once they have established a monopoly on fish.
Or perhaps the actions were useless because they were poorly designed and did not address the real problem? OK bundling is bad because it allows a monopoly to extend their monopoly. Forcing MS to offer a version without the bundled application is useless because everyone who buys Windows still has to pay for it.
Here comes the inevitable analogy...
The electric company has a monopoly on electricity distribution in any given area. If you want electricity you have to buy from them or go to great lengths to create your own. Imagine if the electric company raised everyone's rates by $10 a month. Now imagine they took that $10 and bought ice cream which they gave away for free to all their customers. Not all of their customers wanted the ice cream and but some liked it. Now the ice cream manufacturers all lost all their business, complained, and sued. The government, in its infinite wisdom decreed that the electric company had to offer electricity without free ice cream, they did not, however, say it had to be cheaper than the other package. The result is nothing. The solution does not stop the bad behavior.
The media player part of the settlement was completely useless. The only parts that were not useless were the parts requiring sharing interoperability information and even those are severely watered down. Obviously if your choice is $60 for electricity or $60 for electricity and ice cream most people will choose the latter. What needs to happen is MS needs to be required to offer the media player only as a separate application. OEMs can add it or Realplayer or both or neither but MS can't give incentives or breaks to OEMs that include windows media player. That would fix the problem. That will likely never happen because MS has too much money and politicians are too corrupt.
It doesn't meant that the BSA is doing any good statistical analysis, but I'm just saying that your argument doesn't necessarily prove them wrong.
True, but then it is impossible to make a negative, logical proof. The onus is on them to prove that the claims they are making are true. A brief glance at their methodology is proof enough that their numbers are complete garbage and if they have the correct number it is by sheer chance, not because they conducted any valid research. I might as well claim copyright infringement has cost me a million dollars because I once wrote down the number 1,000,000, divided it by my brother's age, and then multiplied it by my other brother's age plus two years. Useless numbers that anyone with any sort of an education can see are just an attempt to come up with a big and completely wrong number to give to the press.
If ads bother you so much, start the DVD, go make your popcorn, and by the time you come back, you're good to go.
Mostly it is the principal. I can guess how long the ads are start a DVD playing and then come back, but I'm sure as hell not going to evacuate my living room for 15 minutes because I foolishly bought a DVD instead of a VCR tape. I'd rather just have a working fast forward, and for that matter a system I control instead of one Disney does. Sure I can leave the room or for that matter rip the DVD to a non-DRMed format. One is annoying, the other is annoying and illegal. Buying a VCR tape is easier yet and sends a message to people who sell DVDs, sell a format that pisses me off, lose a sale.
Don't you just love how technology improves our lives? 1985 you can fast forward through any part of any movie. 2005 you can fast forward through the parts that the maker wants you to be able to. What progress!
That is more or less why non-commercial copyright infringement was not a crime up until the 70's. More important in this particular study, however, is that they are just guessing how many pieces of software are on an average computer, multiplying by the number of known computers in operation, subtracting purchases known to the BSA, and claiming that is the amount of pirated software. Then they multiply by the average cost of software.
So where does the copy of FreeBSD I downloaded and installed on a computer without an OS fit in? It's easy, I didn't buy the OS or any of the software so this is counted as one whole computer worth of pirated software. Where does the Windows machine I have sitting here only to run Firefox, IE, and Cygwin fit in? It is probably considered by their study to be half a dozen pirated programs. All freeware, small shareware, or just computers that don't run as much software as the BSA thinks the do (should?) are counted as piracy and lost revenue.
This is nothing more than a blatant attempt to lie to the public and to many governments in order to provide justification for their unjustifiable actions. Sad and sickening.
One of the main reasons I prefer to watch movies at home rather than the theater is because of the ads. I don't want to sit thru 15 minutes of ads before I watch a movie. Guess what? I've never bought a VCR tape of a movie that has ads on it. Guess what? I've never tried to fast forward through something at the beginning of a VCR tape and have my player tell me "NO! the maker of this DVD insists that you have to watch an ad first! Just because you bought it does not mean you can skip the ads! Sucker!"
I record TV shows to DVD and buy shows on DVD that I know don't have ads on them, but for the most part I prefer VCR. I'd rather forgo the convenience of not having to rewind if it means I am not supporting a system that will eventually be used to force me to play more ads in my home. I'm sick to death of all the inane chatter and insipid "buy me and you'll be cool" shit. I'm sure as hell not going to pay for more of it.
Oh yeah, and VCR tapes, despite being more expensive to manufacture, are cheaper (even if you factor in the cost of a blank DVD for me to encode it on).
Wow. I didn't know Microsoft was part of the American political system. Hmm...
Then perhaps you should pay more attention to the millions of dollars MS has given to the republican and democratic parties to buy favors from the U.S. government? Perhaps you missed that MS is a U.S. corporation founded and run by Americans and that much of the world judges America by the behaviors of our big companies. Or perhaps you should consider that while MS may not be legally obligated to uphold the principals of our country, our country, its citizens, and its government have every right to be appalled at MS's unamerican activities and fully justified in stopping all purchases from them either as individuals or with the use of American tax dollars.
I thought they just made software...
Well they do that, but they also provide services to make sure a lot of people never read the word "freedom" if it isn't part of a piece of propaganda.
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If your target market is 20-50 customers and it's a niche piece of software, you're dreaming if you think anyone is going to do any work on it, much less submit patches back.
That depends very much upon who those customers are, how big they are, if they have in-house development (as they might if the poster does) and how much work needs to go into customizing it.
Throughout the 80s and 90s this sort of thing was very common in the networking field and tier-1 ISPs, universities, and hardware vendors would collaborate on projects each devoting significant code. I worked on a project where 30 different organizations and companies developed some very high-profile UNIX software that is the basis for much of the internet's infrastructure today. Everyone threw in code because they did not want the responsibility to maintain and update it, but they all needed to use it. Thus, it can certainly happen in the right field.
You're essentially giving your $2 million of R&D away for free with no gain for the company.
Did you read the post? The gain is twofold, free development from other companies (assuming it is the right kind of project) and free publicity. Nothing quite makes a company's reputation like being the keeper of the keys and originator for a large project everyone depends upon and uses. The two million dollars is spent and gone and was needed. Now the question is can more benefit be gained by selling it for cash or opening it?
Obviously without knowing the particulars this is very hard to judge. Things to consider are will academia be interested and likely to spend Uncle Sam's money improving your system for you? Will the other players in your market? What kind of licensing is appropriate to protect your investment but still draw in contributors? Do you lose a competitive advantage by letting others use it?
I did not mean to demean your accomplishments. I think NeoOffice/J is a great free office application on the mac. I make use of it upon occasion (although my version is a bit dated). What I meant to say is that when a user is accustomed to MS Office, using NeoOffice gives the user a pretty poor impression. First, it loads very slowly (as does the X11 version). Next the UI elements don't look quite right because they are not native and nothing behaves exactly the way programs with the native UI do. This left me with the initial impression that it was a port trying to fit in. things don't scroll as smoothly or redraw as well. It just seems sort of choppy compared to most other applications. Finally, although I may be the exception rather than the rule, I make heavy use of system services and not having them available for manipulating text in particular is enough of a reason for me to avoid it as a production application.
Most of the items you list as ways NeoOffice integrates with OS X are great, but they are what is expected of an application on OS X and are notable more by their lack than their presence. I know it seems unfair and I'm sure it is a lot of work, but making an application behave normally is not a feature in the minds of most end users, especially mac users.
That said, I do make use of your spotlight plug-in regularly to search for OpenOffice documentation created by my Linux using peers. I use Pages or Word to view .doc files, but have used NeoOffice in the past to deal with corrupted .doc files, which it has a knack for opening. I've recommended your product to a number of people some of whom use it regularly. Good luck and thanks.
I can't believe you're trying to defend your idiotic analogy.
You're the one making blanket declarative statements. "Fish and cheese have NOTHING in common." Except they are both foods, both sold in the U.S. both animal products and a few thousand other things. And then you don't even own up to being wrong. Do you still insist that they have nothing in common?
Businesses today have many PC options other than Microsoft: Sun, IBM, Apple, and Novell to name a few.
Congratulations you just completely changed your argument. You first argued MS was a monopoly, but what they were doing was ok, then you switched to MS isn't a monopoly. This is especially interesting because I specifically asked about this point earlier.
You don't understand the Sherman Antitrust Act very well, do you?
In 1962 the supreme court ruled that bundling was violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act when the bundled products were being used to extend a monopoly on one product into a second monopoly. And you claim I don't understand it?
Engaging in anti-competitive practices is what makes a monopoly illegal
See the above, bundling has already specifically been listed as violation of the Sherman Act and described in some detail, almost as if MS's actions were being described.
You have absolutely no way to back up a claim that we are "5-10 years behind". That's just rhetorical nonsense. And if that's the extent of your argument, then I don't think Microsoft has anything to worry about in court.
Heh, no logical argument eh? Ask any expert in computer science who has been an expert since the 70's what has happened. How long did it take to get tabbed browsing on IE after it was introduced? How long before they added internet capabilities to windows after all other OS's added it? As for court, well I won't be arguing in court and I doubt anyone will. You see they have been spreading their ill gotten gains pretty liberally among politicians and we all know the system can definitely be bought.
Like it or not MS has been ruled a monopoly in three different courts in three different countries and are a textbook example of an antitrust violation. You're either a very deluded MS apologist or you're a paid shill. I hope the latter since then at least you are profiting from the ruin of the computing industry instead of just cheering it on like a lackwit.
So what "basic human right" aren't we respecting?
The right to be secure in your papers and person? Having people enter your home or place of business, search it, take things, and prevent you from using your freedom of speech to even tell your neighbors or the press is definitely a violation of basic human rights. In any case my comment about basic human rights was not specifically about the recent change in the law, but the behavior of the U.S. government in general as a evaluation of the threat they pose to a person's liberty. Perhaps imprisoning and torturing people without a trial or chance to defend themselves counts? Or do you think that giving more, unnecessary power to government is a good thing?
Terrorist investigation? The FBI stated plainly that they have been using the patriot act provisions in the pursuit of normal criminal investigations with great success. And who said anything about chaos or anarchy? No what we are looking at is a very orderly and controlled descent into a totalitarian government. I'd much prefer anarchy and chaos to totalitarianism, but then I'm one of those people who still values freedom and is not scared by the big bad terrorists that have in the last 10 years managed to kill as many people as moped accidents. In fact I think we should change our focus to a war on mopeds, at least that will be fun.
Even so, neooffice is a java application and while better than running the x11 version is way behind the regular openoffice in terms of features and codebase and still does not properly integrate into osx. It does not work properly with services, does not use native UI elements, and performs very poorly. I don't think Apple will ship such a monstrosity. More likely they would stick with Pages and add a spreadsheet.
Another hardware vendor would put some pressure on Apple to smarten up.
Yeah, having one of the worst ranked computer makers for reliability start making machines will pressure one of the best ranked to make their machines more reliable? Sorry, the effect would be just the opposite. Dell sells really cheap crap with the cheapest components they can find and their machines break more than any other major manufacturer. If Apple were to compete with them on price they'd have to stop buying some of the not-quite-bottom-of-the-line components they do now and go with even cheaper ones. Just take a look at the consumer reports ratings for Dell and Apple. You ibook may have problems but in general Apple is three stars above Dell on building reliable gear.
You can't mandate compliance by writing an RFC. I don't think the money an ISP could make redirecting to a antivirus manufacturer would recoup their losses from customers who move elsewhere because of the inconvenience or from paying all the people they need to answer the phones and tell customers why they are being redirected or to explain to them why the automated system thinks they have a worm. Give it time, eventually the automated tools will mature to the point that the cost is not as bad and, hopefully, consumer machines will harden a bit to lessen the problem as well.
ISPs can already detect incoming DoS attacks and offramp them with existing tools and a few ISPs are now offering automated blocking to their enterprise customers. They can also easily generate a list of zombies in their network. The real problem is notifying infected machine owners and dealing with the customer service aspect costs too much money and is generally not worth the return.
Well, ignoring the fact that the EU doesn't have jurisdiction over the rest of the world, even if you did that, you'd also have to force them to charge a certain price. Then they'll just start bundling something else,
There is already a tried and true way of dealing with the lack of competition caused by bundling. It is the same one the U.S. originally declared before being paid off. You split the company into multiple companies. Two get the OS and two get the applications. Then all four companies compete in the market with each other and with any other companies that enter the market. Greed keeps them from subsidizing each other and capitalism works. It's a lot easier and more effective than any of the other solutions proposed, including abolishing copyright. I know copyright law is very messed up and needs to be rewritten, but it is not going to be abolished and would cause a lot of problems if it was. Split em up.
They also wore SHOES so the FBI should be able to rifle through records at shoe companies without a warrant and have the power to throw the people at those companies in jail if they tell anyone. And you know what they also drove CARS so the FBI should be able to look though the contents of any car without a warrant too right? Gee we have to stop the terrorists, think of the children, etc. Terrorists are so much less of a threat to the people of the U.S. than a government that does not respect basic human rights there is no comparison. If a terrorist tries to kill me I'll try to kill him right back. What am I supposed to do about the FBI giving the reading lists of the republican parties opponents to that party's leaders though? Overthrow the government?
Operating a computer should be like operating heavy machinary. You need to pass a test that says you're qualified to do it.
You need to pass a test because lives are at risk, not bandwidth. Realistically their should be some basic instruction, hopefully provided in schools, but at that same time most computers should be much, much, much, much, much harder to remotely take over and turn into a zombie. Windows is the worst of the bunch, but pretty much all OSs could be a lot easier to use securely. I imagine they would be too, except for the fact that since MS gained their monopoly, innovation has slowed to a crawl. I want default sandboxes for new applications, services off by default, and easy built in standards compliant encryption and authentication schemes.
I agree that there will always be really stupid users that will get their machines taken over and agree to the most ridiculous risks to see the little bunny cartoon, but at least make the user click a button that says "Let this program do anything it wants to my computer" right next to the "run it in a sandbox and give it no access to the internet or my files" button.
I was referring to the fact that although there is a Dashboard.app application in the Applications directory it is really just a Widget launcher and the processes are maintained by the Dock application. You have to remove both of these (eliminating your dock) in order to really remove the dashboard feature.
they have a strong competitor now and that's OSX
It's not really a direct competitor you know. Apple sells and makes money on computers. They include an OS as an incentive to buy those computers, but it is unlikely the could survive in the current market just selling Mac OS X even if they sold it for x86. MS is still a monopoly as much as it ever was. Now if Apple starts selling OS X for x86 to other companies or even to end users and MS does not crush them with money or by threatening the PC manufacturers and sales outlets and gain a significant market share (say 15%) I'd probably agree with you. Right now though your argument is a bit like saying the power company does not have monopoly on power distribution because you can buy car batteries from Walmart.
Fish and cheese have nothing to do with one another: fish is certainly not a platform for cheese.
You are wrong. Fish and cheese do go together, they are both foods and sometimes complementary ones. Fish is literally a platform for cheese in some cases, i.e. grilled salmon topped with mozzarella.
Let's say a grill company becomes a monopoly somehow because its propane grill commands a 90% market share... And despite the fact that every other grill company also bundles utensils with their grills, the utensil companies blame only ONE company -- PropaneUSA -- for their falling sales.
You are even more wrong. The problem is you are contradicting yourself. If a grill company has a monopoly then, practically speaking, there are no other grill companies to also bundle utensils. To make your analogy more correct look at this theoretical market situation. If it was the case then there would be only one propane grill manufacturer to buy from, and propane grills would have to be integral to doing business for pretty much every even moderately sized company on the planet. Now you can get a build your own propane grill kit made up by a bunch of people who are fed up with the fact that PropaneUSA grills explode occasionally and often can't be lit properly so they invented their own (but can't successfully sell it commercially because no grill sales outlet can risk offending PropaneUSA). You can buy a pear brand electric cooking system that works pretty well, but is not really the same thing and is only given away built into the pear brand of houses. Now we're starting to get a market that resembles the current OS market.
In this market utensil manufacturers are very justified in complaining that they have been pushed out of the market by the PropaneUSA company's illegal extension of its monopoly. Sure maybe they saw the writing on the wall when PropaneUSA put all the propane tank manufacturers out of business and all the apron manufacturers, but if the trend continues, they will be putting the automobile manufactures out of business in another 10 years. It's not like people should choose what business to go into based upon which one a monopoly is going to take over next with an inferior product that they bundle.
The problem with your analogy as you wrote it was you say "gained a monopoly" but then treat them as if they were not a monopoly for the rest of your argument. Maybe you don't believe MS is a monopoly or maybe you just don't understand what a monopoly really is and just how badly it can be abused. If there were no more advances in propane grill technology, utensils, or aprons well I think we could all live with that. We're not talking about propane grills with MS though. We're talking about the entire field of software slowly grinding to a halt. We're already 5-10 years behind where we would be with a healthy market and it is only going to get worse unless the laws are actually enforced... laws that have stopped this same thing before.
What advantage does a web browser and media player bring to the consumer?
Do you know what a strawman argument is? It is when you set up a false argument then knock it down to prove yourself right. If you start you post by asking a question and trying to make it seem like that is the question I asked you're presenting a strawman argument.
I never asked, "What advantage does a web browser and media player bring to the consumer?" I asked Where is the added value in bundling the products when sold by MS? Here are two possibilities MS bundles Windows with it's other apps and charges for all of them at once or MS does not bundle them and charges for them separately. Do you agree?
In the first case consumers and OEMs can buy and pay for Windows and all the applications now bundled separately. If I want to buy Windows but prefer Firefox and specifically don't want the media player I can buy that and without MS's illegal abuse IT WILL COST LESS because I don't have to pay for the development of IE and windows media player. That is a huge advantage to me as the consumer.
In the second situation (the one we are in now) I have to pay for a whole slew of products I don't want. Right now if you buy Windows you have to pay for developers to work on other software because you have no choice. Your argument is that choice is of no benefit to the consumer, but the flaw in your logic is that you are failing to understand the alternative. You think it is a choice between pay and get something or pay the same amount and get even more. That is the same mistake the EU judges made (as I explained in my original post). It does no good to make MS offer a version without the media player if they still charge you for the development of the media player. The law needs to force them to offer their products separately for separate prices to ensure that MS is not overcharging you for Windows to subsidize their other offerings.
Finally, you are mistaking bundling on the level of the manufacturer with bundling at purchase time. If Dell wants to sell computers with all sorts of software bundled on them, there is no problem. The consumer gets a better deal because Dell gets to negotiate with several competing suppliers to get the best media player or other software for their customers. The problem is that right now, Dell does not have a choice. They are forced to pay for one of the options already, just to stay in business, and paying a second time for a competitor's product is only an option if the bundled version is unusable.
I find it amazing how so many people can't seem to grasp the concept that bundling something with a monopolized product bypasses competition in the market and gives consumers less choice, less innovation, worse products, and higher prices. How anyone can think this is a good thing is beyond me. "Yay! look I was forced to buy this product! isn't is great that I don't have to pay for it now because I was already forced to pay for it before! How wonderful!"
De-bundling FREE SOFTWARE like WMP, IE, MSN, etc. SHOULDN'T cut down from the cost, because there's no cost in creating it.
I see the software has no value. It was created for free by volunteers and MS did not have to pay developers to produce it. I did not realize that. Or maybe it is only free because you already paid for the development when you bought a computer with Windows on it and they just rolled the cost into that? If the ice cream is given away for free then it has no cost either right? Hell the electric company can even give it away to people who don't have electricity (that 1% or less) because they can afford to after raising the rates of everyone who does. Idiot.
They're not bundling seperate products, they're adding value to an existing product.
Bullshit. Adding cheese to fish adds to its value too. Whatever. These could easily be separate products, used to be separate products, and should be separate products. Why are they bundled? What advantage does it bring to the consumer? OEMs should choose what applications to put together and sell to customers. OS manufacturers should not. The minute MS started giving discounts to OEMs that agreed not bundle competitors products or agreed to bundle MS products (like office) they broke the law. They abused their monopoly position and the proper course of action was to break them up into OS and application companies. That is what the courts ruled too, before certain very large campaign contributions were made.
So if Apple reached 85%+ marketshare you think it would be better for consumers for them to strip out Safari, Quicktime, Spotlight, etc.?
If Apple were to reach 85% of the market and they were to then take actions to stifle competition then they should not only be prevented from selling bundled applications and OSs, but bundled computers as well. I think it would be a lot better for customers if that were to happen.
Consumers have a much better out of the box experience, and developers can develop against components that they can rely on since they know these components are part of the product. Everyone wins, except for the stupid companies who try and make money off of a commoditized technology.
OEMs who actually sell to customers and customers themselves should be the ones choosing what set of products they want, not component manufacturers. I'm sure if Sony were to manage a monopoly on TVs they'd agree it is better for the customers end user experience if they had to buy the integrated playstation and the integrated stereo system and the integrated DVD sony-proprietary-digital-video-disk player as well. As for everyone winning, it sure as hell isn't happening right now. Innovation in the industry has crawled to a snail's pace, consumer choices are fewer than ever, and almost all the cool new technologies are available only on non-mainstream systems. Consumers are overcharged, and charged multiple times. Hell just take a look at Linux. When a system written by people in their spare time and given away for free is the largest competitor to a proprietary, for sale one, you know the market is unhealthy. As for stupid companies, that would be every single company on the planet. Basic economic theory shows what happens when monopolies are unregulated. They expand into more an more markets until there is only one company. Then you are in the same situation as communist Russia was, but achieved by going in the opposite direction.
I sure hope MS pays you to make posts like this because otherwise, you're pretty blind to how bad the computer industry really is these days. MS has bought and killed more cool technologies than have been released over the last 10 years. As a computer aficionado I'm disgusted by how bad it has become.Any program that actually supports the freedesktop.org desktop entry file is readily accessible to the user
Any program can be run by the user, and probably uninstalled? How about edited? Docs? Resources?
Coming from OS X, where this has been solved very elegantly I can say there are definite advantages to having self-contained applications that can be moved and organized anywhere, installed by dragging from a remote volume and uninstalled with a quick drop in the trash. It is nice to not have to hunt for resources. Want a picture or sound used in a game, well it's all in one place. I never realized what a pain applications that are scattered in bits and pieces around my directory structure was until that pain went away.
I believe that the playing field should be kept level, and that other companies should be treated just as Microsoft was by the EU.
I agree as soon as Apple is declared by the courts to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems I think they should be forced to comply with all the anti-trust regulations that would then apply to them. Oh wait, the same laws do apply it's just that Apple is not a monopoly and MS is.
Yes you can uninstall all of those applications from OS X very easily with the exception of Dashboard which is actually a part of the OS and is built into the UI. It can be removed with a little know how though. All of that, however, is immaterial.
The problem is not with companies bundling things together in general. If someone wants to sell fish and cheese together, great, good luck. The problem is that if one company has a monopoly on something and only sells that that something bundled with something else it drives everyone else out of business. That is why their are special rules for monopolies, because they can upset free trade by coercing their customers. MS has and is doing just that. They can sell all the cheese they want and all the fish they want, but they can't sell only fish and cheese bundles once they have established a monopoly on fish.
Perhaps the EU's actions were unnecessary?
Or perhaps the actions were useless because they were poorly designed and did not address the real problem? OK bundling is bad because it allows a monopoly to extend their monopoly. Forcing MS to offer a version without the bundled application is useless because everyone who buys Windows still has to pay for it.
Here comes the inevitable analogy...
The electric company has a monopoly on electricity distribution in any given area. If you want electricity you have to buy from them or go to great lengths to create your own. Imagine if the electric company raised everyone's rates by $10 a month. Now imagine they took that $10 and bought ice cream which they gave away for free to all their customers. Not all of their customers wanted the ice cream and but some liked it. Now the ice cream manufacturers all lost all their business, complained, and sued. The government, in its infinite wisdom decreed that the electric company had to offer electricity without free ice cream, they did not, however, say it had to be cheaper than the other package. The result is nothing. The solution does not stop the bad behavior.
The media player part of the settlement was completely useless. The only parts that were not useless were the parts requiring sharing interoperability information and even those are severely watered down. Obviously if your choice is $60 for electricity or $60 for electricity and ice cream most people will choose the latter. What needs to happen is MS needs to be required to offer the media player only as a separate application. OEMs can add it or Realplayer or both or neither but MS can't give incentives or breaks to OEMs that include windows media player. That would fix the problem. That will likely never happen because MS has too much money and politicians are too corrupt.
It doesn't meant that the BSA is doing any good statistical analysis, but I'm just saying that your argument doesn't necessarily prove them wrong.
True, but then it is impossible to make a negative, logical proof. The onus is on them to prove that the claims they are making are true. A brief glance at their methodology is proof enough that their numbers are complete garbage and if they have the correct number it is by sheer chance, not because they conducted any valid research. I might as well claim copyright infringement has cost me a million dollars because I once wrote down the number 1,000,000, divided it by my brother's age, and then multiplied it by my other brother's age plus two years. Useless numbers that anyone with any sort of an education can see are just an attempt to come up with a big and completely wrong number to give to the press.
If ads bother you so much, start the DVD, go make your popcorn, and by the time you come back, you're good to go.
Mostly it is the principal. I can guess how long the ads are start a DVD playing and then come back, but I'm sure as hell not going to evacuate my living room for 15 minutes because I foolishly bought a DVD instead of a VCR tape. I'd rather just have a working fast forward, and for that matter a system I control instead of one Disney does. Sure I can leave the room or for that matter rip the DVD to a non-DRMed format. One is annoying, the other is annoying and illegal. Buying a VCR tape is easier yet and sends a message to people who sell DVDs, sell a format that pisses me off, lose a sale.
Don't you just love how technology improves our lives? 1985 you can fast forward through any part of any movie. 2005 you can fast forward through the parts that the maker wants you to be able to. What progress!
That is more or less why non-commercial copyright infringement was not a crime up until the 70's. More important in this particular study, however, is that they are just guessing how many pieces of software are on an average computer, multiplying by the number of known computers in operation, subtracting purchases known to the BSA, and claiming that is the amount of pirated software. Then they multiply by the average cost of software.
So where does the copy of FreeBSD I downloaded and installed on a computer without an OS fit in? It's easy, I didn't buy the OS or any of the software so this is counted as one whole computer worth of pirated software. Where does the Windows machine I have sitting here only to run Firefox, IE, and Cygwin fit in? It is probably considered by their study to be half a dozen pirated programs. All freeware, small shareware, or just computers that don't run as much software as the BSA thinks the do (should?) are counted as piracy and lost revenue.
This is nothing more than a blatant attempt to lie to the public and to many governments in order to provide justification for their unjustifiable actions. Sad and sickening.
One of the main reasons I prefer to watch movies at home rather than the theater is because of the ads. I don't want to sit thru 15 minutes of ads before I watch a movie. Guess what? I've never bought a VCR tape of a movie that has ads on it. Guess what? I've never tried to fast forward through something at the beginning of a VCR tape and have my player tell me "NO! the maker of this DVD insists that you have to watch an ad first! Just because you bought it does not mean you can skip the ads! Sucker!"
I record TV shows to DVD and buy shows on DVD that I know don't have ads on them, but for the most part I prefer VCR. I'd rather forgo the convenience of not having to rewind if it means I am not supporting a system that will eventually be used to force me to play more ads in my home. I'm sick to death of all the inane chatter and insipid "buy me and you'll be cool" shit. I'm sure as hell not going to pay for more of it.
Oh yeah, and VCR tapes, despite being more expensive to manufacture, are cheaper (even if you factor in the cost of a blank DVD for me to encode it on).
Wow. I didn't know Microsoft was part of the American political system. Hmm...
Then perhaps you should pay more attention to the millions of dollars MS has given to the republican and democratic parties to buy favors from the U.S. government? Perhaps you missed that MS is a U.S. corporation founded and run by Americans and that much of the world judges America by the behaviors of our big companies. Or perhaps you should consider that while MS may not be legally obligated to uphold the principals of our country, our country, its citizens, and its government have every right to be appalled at MS's unamerican activities and fully justified in stopping all purchases from them either as individuals or with the use of American tax dollars.
I thought they just made software...
Well they do that, but they also provide services to make sure a lot of people never read the word "freedom" if it isn't part of a piece of propaganda.