Oh, it's definitely not important. In the grand scheme of things, it's nothing more than power politics.
Yeah, the law is just a red herring. I'm sure the fact that the same law exists in countries around the world is unimportant and there is no reason for any of us to learn what those laws are and why they exist. After all, that would take effort. Likewise there's no reason to look at the motivations and other ruling of the EU commission to date, because, again, that would take work. Let's just make empty assertions and remain ignorant and loud about it.
Most people just want to go to the corner store and buy their lotto tickets. Tell me again how that is a reasonable argument to not throw the clerk in prison after he is arrested for burglary because he'd have to close said shop and it would inconvenience those customers.
It's likely that PC vendors will be paid money to include a company's browser with the system. As part of the agreement, it may even lockout other browsers. So you could be stuck with a worthless browser because a few dollars were passed the vendor's way.
Likewise vendors may include crappy graphics cards, overpriced monitors, unreliable hard drives, and lackluster support services. Luckily there is no monopoly on desktop computer systems or laptops so the free market rewards vendors who provide the best options to consumers. If some vendor bundles a crappy browser you can just buy from a different vendor.
When OEMs buy an OS to preinstall on the systems they are selling, however, they pretty much don't have any viable choices other than Windows... which is why the law protects them from the company with all that influence pushing other products on them as well.
Imagine a scenario in which Opera wants to charge users for their browser. So the PC vendor offers you two options: $30 for an Opera browser (the only one they offer and it's locked in, so you can't change it) or a free ad supported version of the Opera browser (again you can't change it).
First, they don't have any real way to keep me from changing the browser. Second, if they're trying that hard to do so, I'd buy from another vendor. There are a lot of them out there.
know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft and I don't like a lot of the things they do.
No, you're not "supposed" to hate them. You should, however, recognize things they do which are illegal and detrimental to the industry and individuals. If you don't understand what they're doing that is illegal and why it is illegal, there is no reason for said action to upset you. The question is, do you find out what they're doing and why it is illegal before or after you form your opinion.
. But when I get something for free (included in the price) and I can change it for free, it's hard to bitch.
Not when you understand that pretty much every time a trust is leveraged into another market, innovation in that market slows or stops. Not when, in light of that economic principal, you look at how slowly Web technologies have advanced since 1995.
The only people who are hurt by the inclusion of IE are market losers...
Market losers is an interesting description. I note you didn't say "companies offering inferior products" or "free market losers". I have no problem with either of those losing out. The problem is, because the free market is undermined, we have no way of telling what the best offering is... but it's pretty bloody unlikely it is IE.
I know exactly what the issue is. Dont talk down to me to justify your bent. THERE IS NO "monopolized" browser market.
You just demonstrated you don't know what the issue is, since MS has not been accused of having a monopoly on the browser market. You're just embarrassing yourself. How many times are you going to assert your uneducated opinions before actually bothering to read enough to understand the topic?
The COM interfaces for IE are well-defined and there is nothing stopping anyone exposing identical interfaces from their own components.
That's not the issue. Can Google include Chrome's libraries and expose their interfaces on every Windows machine shipped? No. But MS can and does, because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. That's leveraging their monopoly to gain an unfair advantage.
Also I'm not sure if I'm too interested in having to look at a bunch of licenses for linking directly to Firefox libraries or whatever...
Yeah, but what you want is not a significant consideration if MS is breaking the law. It's more about if they're illegally hurting competitors like Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Google and if it is hurting the industry as a whole.
I think you have a pretty good grasp on the situation and I tend to agree there are astroturfers here. Some of the most outrageous comments are from users who only comment on stories about Microsoft.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
I'm not 100% convinced on this one. Likely the EU will ignore the libraries, but they are (technically) still an antitrust issue. Since MS can provide their HTML rendering libraries with every copy of Windows while other vendors cannot, developers rely upon MS's version which is not in compliance with published standards. This is less of an issue than browsers today, but as Web applications and services expand, it could be a serious issue with regard to hybrid programs which have both a Web and local application component or which are Web applications that rely upon newer Web technologies that allow for offline use of online apps. Alternatively, MS's leveraging of Windows to push their HTML renderer could prevent those standards from gaining ground and instead promote proprietary alternatives.
In short, I'm unconvinced a truly effective remedy will ignore these libraries. It could mandate that they be made into a plug-in style API where OEMs could drop in the libraries of their choice or the EU could allow MS to keep them bundled but regulate their compliance with a certain level of published standards.
Please come back with an educated opinion once you know what MS's crime is. There is no law against bundling a Web browser with an OS. There is a law against undermining a market by tying a monopolized market with an un-monopolized market.
This is a big stink about nothing.
How would you know? You admit you don't understand what MS is doing that is illegal. So how would you know they aren't guilty or that the law is not a just and important one?
Talk about strawman: He didn't say the ONLY reason to work is money, but it is the *main* reason for most people.
We weren't talking about "most people" but about him. He said he would not work at all in such a case, which I find sad. He's obviously in a job he doesn't enjoy if that is his attitude so I advised him to look for a better career. You don't concur with that advice?
The fraction of people who work for the sheer enjoyment of it is certainly quite small.
Of course, nor did I ever imply that extreme socialism would work (in fact I stated pure socialism was impossible) if you actually read my comments.
Seriously? That's absolute crap. Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled.
What does what you want have to do with anything? I want a new car for $50, but that doesn't mean the cops are going to let me keep one if I buy a stolen one. MS's crime affects end users only indirectly.
The EU needs to get its head out of its a**.
Why? Because you assume MS's engineering choices have something to do with the punishment the EU will render for a crime MS hasn't even been convicted of yet and which the EU has not made any comments about what sort of punishment they intend?
Why remove the core libraries? We develop several applications which rely on it, and users will blame us if app doesn't work out of the box.
That's why. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc. don't have the option of making sure they're installed on every Windows system and their APIs are always available to companies doing development (like you). As a result you use IE instead of the best browser/engine/API available. That undermines the market for Web browsers.
That's not to say the EU will make MS remove them. They could make MS include all browsers and rendering engines, or open up the APIs and remove the libraries, but allow OEMs to drop in a replacement set of libraries of their choice (with some reengineering of Windows required of MS to make it happen). Or they could let MS keep the libraries but require them to conform to Web standards according to preset rules and set someone to make sure MS does that. Or they could do something else entirely.
I have perfectly good Dell M6300, why would I want another machine?
So you can legally run OS X and do your dev work, was my assumption.
Also, BootCamp partitions are 32GB...
I don't use Bootcamp, but I thought 32Gb was the maximum size for old versions of Windows XP to install on a FAT partition. As far as I know, bootcamp partitions can be any size you want and can fit a Windows install in.
Finally, I'm on the road a lot (I currently don't even have an apartment back home) and am already hauling around three laptops...
I hauled around multiple laptops and messed with dual booting for a while. Now I just carry a MacBook and run Windows, Linux, and Solaris in VMs on top of OS X. Saves me a lot of hassle and migrating them all to a new system is stupid easy.
If you're set on a Mac, buy a refurbished tower or other used one. Or, buy a cheaper Mac (mini?) and plug your drives into an external firewire enclosure.
What bugs me, is that they should be trying to get market share up...
They are trying, but they're doing so by appealing to the big market segments and a few specific niches. If they spread themselves too thin they lose overall share. You're one of about 1% of the population that ever adds a drive to their computer. You're part of a mostly non-intersecting group that also can't afford a pro machine. The sad truth is, you are part of a very small market segment it doesn't make business sense for Apple to go after yet. They're just one OEM and already have twice the number of models of other OEMs with half again their market share. It's a drawback to using Macs, they will never have as much hardware variety as all other PC OEMs combined.
Does calling people idiots make you feel smarter? You don't seem particularly intelligent. The section you repeat explains how the housing bubble was extended. That does not explain how the housing bubble was created and burst nor why the whole thing is happening and not just in housing but in dozens of other markets. You're talking about how one symptom was made worse and you think that explains the whole of why we have an economic crisis? Way to put on the blinders genius.
If our government ever becomes 100% Socialist...
Nice straw man. Our government will never go 100% socialist. It is practically impossible. We'll always be a blend of communism, socialism, and capitalism just like every economy. The issue is the balance of those methods.
Why bother working when I can live on the very-profitable Welfare state for the rest of my life, like a parasite?
If the only reason you work is because of the money, you chose the wrong profession. On average we spend a third of our lives working. Pick a career in something you enjoy doing, even if it pays less.
You then go on to explain how the government actions made the crisis worse, but don't explain how they created it.
The truth is, the government did create the crisis by rearranging the tax burden such that taxes on the high end did not compensate for wealth condensation resulting in runaway wealth disparity. Then they prolonged the problem by promoting unsafe lending, but they didn't need to do a lot because the banks were running out of people to loan to since half the country no longer had any net wealth.
We need to stop acting like we can control things.
But we can control a lot of things and have to the benefit of mankind. The problem is when the control is directed by a few for their own benefit instead of the benefit of all.
Yes this applies to markets, because they too follow natural rhythms. What would have been a minor recession in 2000-1 is now turning into a depression...
What causes a depression is not lack of wealth, but lack of stability. Stability fails when wealth disparity is too high because most people can no longer be strategic in spending. It's what happened during the great depression too. To solve the problem we need tax reform not deregulation. All deregulation does is allow wealth disparity to be leveraged more effectively to make the problem worse. Ideally it is not needed, but we don't live in an ideal world. Deregulation is part of what made this economic crisis as bad as it is.
In the case of operating systems, you have what is officially called monopolistic competition, where the differences between the 3 OSes are far more than just price.
The main consumers of desktop OS's are OEMs looking to use them as a component pre-installed in computer systems they sell. Apple doesn't sell to that market at all. Realistically, you just have MS with a percent or so going to Linux.
The market also does not fit well with your definitions because there is a significant barrier to entry for the desktop OS market, that being interoperability and application markets compatibility.
but "software other than Microsoft." software? Even "operating systems by Microsoft" would have been better, wouldn't it?
I think you're misunderstanding their objection. Their complaint is that you have to use a Silverlight module from a single company (Microsoft) in order to complete bids. Web services from governments should be vendor neutral. The fact is, you don't need an MS OS to make a bid, you can use OS X+Safari+Silverlight.
It is just NOT a neutral article, it seems rather anti-Microsoftly worded.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but the facts seem accurate and it is worthy of discussion.
I'm sorry, I just keep seeing all these snide remarks about monopoly abuse and I am just not seeing it.
Snide remarks? MS is being prosecuted for ongoing antitrust abuse and are going to be convicted because it is an open and shut case. If you don't see it, you must either not be looking or you have no idea what antitrust abuse is.
The state of things now is that the market is basically a dry well.
The market? Antitrust abuse almost always involves at least two, distinct markets.
...and Linux is getting to the point where it isn't so ridiculously bad that no one will even run it for free...
Are you trolling or clueless? Linux has always been used in appliances and on servers and it is doing fine in both applications. It's starting to gain on mobiles and netbooks. It's not "getting bad" from a market perspective anyway.
What amazing open source innovation is currently being held down by the evil Microsoft conspiracy? Somebody please enlighten me.
Well, the open source Web browsers are being "held down" because investment in them is so minor. The music player market is pretty well ruined by MSs monopoly abuse. The server market is hurting because of MS's abuse. A large variety of services and applications markets are currently suppressed. Mind you all this affects both OSS and closed source vendors.
This isn't like people not being allowed to make phones like with Bell...
But people were allowed to make phones with Ma Bell. Some small portion of the population even bought them. They just also had to pay to rent a phone from Ma Bell they didn't use. This is similar to how every purchaser of Windows has to pay for the development costs of IE and some don't use it but instead use an ad supported browser instead.
Anyone can make an operating system and somehow they don't-
Why would an investor invest billions to make an OS when they have basically no chance of winning regardless of that OS's merits because of MS's monopoly? Even if they were to win it would cost more and yield less return than investing in a market where they don't have to face an abusive monopolist. It's a crap investment, so no one invests.
Firefox is awful. I mean, seriously terrible.
Yeah, that's what happens when a market is undermined by a monopoly. Investment is discouraged, innovation is not financially rewarded, so products move towards suck. Why do you think antitrust abuse was made illegal?
We'll see if the greater market can create some interesting and new before Microsoft wakes up and starts throwing research and resources at it.
MS and everyone else invest little in the browser market because of MS's monopoly abuse. MS doesn't have to and no one else can profit directly.
You must be reading a different website. I only see the latter, even in situations like this where they're just creating a fairly open flash clone.
...which they're promoting via illegal means that undermine yet another market and lead to long term lack of innovation.
Are you kidding me? People here think the linux kernel is an example of modern operating system design.
By definition, it is.
... you really think the Unix world would have forged forward with lots of new innovations? Without competitive bodies like Microsoft and Apple around, people do jack.
First, Apple is the UNIX world these days. Second, there is always someone ready to innovate in a free market because it makes them money and people are greedy. The problem is when we no longer have a free market so the greed does not lead to innovation.
Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amiga were different because they t
Microsoft are propped up by monopoly grants - copyright and lately patent monopolies. It's pointless to blame the free market for their abuses because until copyright and patent monopolies are abolished they are not operating in a free market anyway
But the free market in general can work despite monopolies, so long as those monopolies are not leveraged into different markets.
That said, we desperately need copyright and (to a lesser extent) patent reform. Antitrust abuse, however, is one company breaking the law, quite different, from everyone obeying the same messed up intellectual property laws.
"If you picked MP3, MP4, OGG, and the like, OS X is much better than Windows at interoperating."
Really? I'm interested in seeing how you measure that.
It is certainly difficult to measure and you have too look case by case, but OS X does a good job with plugins for standard technologies but just look at what you can play a preview of from an OS native window. Or look at the services provided/supported by the different OS's Linux and OS X both use the open standard ZeroConf for auto discovery and work together. MS implements a proprietary protocol that other OS's need to reverse engineer or the application you;re using has to handle running the ZeroConf server itself (like Adobe CS does for discovery on Windows).
"And Apple is already taking flack for using more expensive and reliable components. "
No they aren't. They take flack for price. You are assuming they are the same.
I'm not assuming anything. Take a look at the studies performed by consumer groups and professional reviewers. Apple has been at the top of the reliability numbers for years and has prices about 20-30% above average, right in line with other companies who get similar ratings.
"People don't look at reliability when buying."
Really? I'd like to see your data on that as well.
REliability numbers don't make it into marketing literature on the side of product boxes. You see bullet points of features and if you look up in this thread you'll see dozens of people comparing the price of Apple systems to "comparable" systems based upon those bullet points. Notice how many reference published reliability numbers?
"Umm, you've heard of Time machine, right?"
Time Machine is bug-riddled. It never works for me.
Okay. Why do I care? Use something else. Ignoring time machine, how is it harder to back up OS X installs using included or third party software compared to any other OS? I don't get it.
Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented.
There is an implementable draft and it is partly implemented by basically all the browsers except IE. The point being, we're talking about pushing new technologies (which Silverlight 2 is) to solve the problem. Not that new technologies are needed, mind you, that was just for the sake of illustrating the point.
Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?
I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evidence of damages.
RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.
You RTFA. From TFA: "The gravity of this situation gave rise to a written statement sent to the European Commission." The EU commission is handling the ongoing antitrust prosecution of MS.
This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser.
That's no unique at all. Monopoly abuse removes the financial incentive to invest in making good competitors. It is to be expected. It retards innovation and artificially makes competing technologies work more poorly due to interoperability issues.
Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law.
Economics wasn't your best class was it? Apple is gaining market share by bypassing the desktop OS market entirely and refusing to license their OS to OEMs, while making desktop systems (a market which is not monopolized).
. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent.
Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.
Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.
Yeah, don't remember why we have antitrust laws do you. Your assertion is proven false by history and contradicts every economic model with any credibility.
Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it.
No, that is not socialism, either in the political or economic sense. Monopolies being abused are similar to socialism in that they remove the incentive for innovation and efficiency, but dissimilar in that they are controlled by a company whose goal is profit instead of by the people through their government theoretically for the greater good.
Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess...
The W3C and written standards are pretty much beside the point. Web technologies have not moved forward because MS is not financially motivated to make them do so and is motivated to hold them back. MS helped write a lot of those standards before writing intentionally noncompliant versions. Did you not pay attention to the facts unearthed by their court case in the US?
The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just s
Your beliefs don't stack up with reality. Even if they stop supporting silverlight on mac, Moonlight is out for linux NOW, and silverlight 2 compatibility is already alpha.
Yeah, and what do you expect? MS will maintain compatibility until they have a large market share for the technology. They always do.
This is all from a 100% open source firefox plugin. How will MS kill that?
Well they could use patents, either on already implemented features or on features they extend Silverlight with. They can just come out with Silverlight 3, shift the majority of the developer base (since they make the dev tools) and include items that are patented in it or which they obfuscate the source/API to. That's there usual method anyway. Of course since technology is moving forward they could get more creative and use a signing framework in Windows.
MS know any attempt to kill mono (or linux) with patents would do too much damage to themselves.
Yes it would... today. Once Silverlight is a well established technology, however, that will likely no longer be the case. It's not like they haven't done this before you know. It's not like we have internal memos and testimony from insiders where they discussed this exact strategy to be used to break compatibility with other Web technologies they were implementing.
IE as an example is ridiculous. It is a HTML renderer, Which BTW was a very simple spec considering the timeline of this.
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer.
There is no advantage in "appearing" cross platform. Business owners don't think like 2 year olds, they want the real thing..
They're still at the "embrace stage". That's where they get buy in, remain cross platform, and do everything to gain market share. It isn't until they have significant market share that they break cross platform compatibility.
. If they do assume, it probably means they are stupid, and if a stupid business dies, hell, that's capitalism.
Monopolies can be leveraged to undermine capitalism.
But anyway considering Linux user base is still negligible it can be safely ignored.
No one implementing new technologies today can ignore Linux. There is no guarantee it will ever have significant market share for a use, but it is a reasonable possibility to plan for as a contingency.
Besides don't you guys all use no script and ad blockers?
Us guys?
For a group of people actively trying to kill the web you sure do make a lot of demands.
The first part is a troll and for the second part, when did it become unreasonable to expect companies to obey antitrust laws that have been enforced for a hundred years now?
Lets make it more clear then, besides paranoid tin foil conspiracies, do you have any other evidence?
Where do you think "embrace, extend, extinguish" came from? It was in testimony and internal memos revealed during MS's US antitrust case. It's more than just evidence it is several sources of evidence, vetted by the courts and submitted under oath.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's definitely not important. In the grand scheme of things, it's nothing more than power politics.
Yeah, the law is just a red herring. I'm sure the fact that the same law exists in countries around the world is unimportant and there is no reason for any of us to learn what those laws are and why they exist. After all, that would take effort. Likewise there's no reason to look at the motivations and other ruling of the EU commission to date, because, again, that would take work. Let's just make empty assertions and remain ignorant and loud about it.
Most people want a default browser.
Most people just want to go to the corner store and buy their lotto tickets. Tell me again how that is a reasonable argument to not throw the clerk in prison after he is arrested for burglary because he'd have to close said shop and it would inconvenience those customers.
It's likely that PC vendors will be paid money to include a company's browser with the system. As part of the agreement, it may even lockout other browsers. So you could be stuck with a worthless browser because a few dollars were passed the vendor's way.
Likewise vendors may include crappy graphics cards, overpriced monitors, unreliable hard drives, and lackluster support services. Luckily there is no monopoly on desktop computer systems or laptops so the free market rewards vendors who provide the best options to consumers. If some vendor bundles a crappy browser you can just buy from a different vendor.
When OEMs buy an OS to preinstall on the systems they are selling, however, they pretty much don't have any viable choices other than Windows... which is why the law protects them from the company with all that influence pushing other products on them as well.
Imagine a scenario in which Opera wants to charge users for their browser. So the PC vendor offers you two options: $30 for an Opera browser (the only one they offer and it's locked in, so you can't change it) or a free ad supported version of the Opera browser (again you can't change it).
First, they don't have any real way to keep me from changing the browser. Second, if they're trying that hard to do so, I'd buy from another vendor. There are a lot of them out there.
know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft and I don't like a lot of the things they do.
No, you're not "supposed" to hate them. You should, however, recognize things they do which are illegal and detrimental to the industry and individuals. If you don't understand what they're doing that is illegal and why it is illegal, there is no reason for said action to upset you. The question is, do you find out what they're doing and why it is illegal before or after you form your opinion.
. But when I get something for free (included in the price) and I can change it for free, it's hard to bitch.
Not when you understand that pretty much every time a trust is leveraged into another market, innovation in that market slows or stops. Not when, in light of that economic principal, you look at how slowly Web technologies have advanced since 1995.
The only people who are hurt by the inclusion of IE are market losers...
Market losers is an interesting description. I note you didn't say "companies offering inferior products" or "free market losers". I have no problem with either of those losing out. The problem is, because the free market is undermined, we have no way of telling what the best offering is... but it's pretty bloody unlikely it is IE.
I know exactly what the issue is. Dont talk down to me to justify your bent. THERE IS NO "monopolized" browser market.
You just demonstrated you don't know what the issue is, since MS has not been accused of having a monopoly on the browser market. You're just embarrassing yourself. How many times are you going to assert your uneducated opinions before actually bothering to read enough to understand the topic?
The COM interfaces for IE are well-defined and there is nothing stopping anyone exposing identical interfaces from their own components.
That's not the issue. Can Google include Chrome's libraries and expose their interfaces on every Windows machine shipped? No. But MS can and does, because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. That's leveraging their monopoly to gain an unfair advantage.
Also I'm not sure if I'm too interested in having to look at a bunch of licenses for linking directly to Firefox libraries or whatever...
Yeah, but what you want is not a significant consideration if MS is breaking the law. It's more about if they're illegally hurting competitors like Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and Google and if it is hurting the industry as a whole.
I think you have a pretty good grasp on the situation and I tend to agree there are astroturfers here. Some of the most outrageous comments are from users who only comment on stories about Microsoft.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
I'm not 100% convinced on this one. Likely the EU will ignore the libraries, but they are (technically) still an antitrust issue. Since MS can provide their HTML rendering libraries with every copy of Windows while other vendors cannot, developers rely upon MS's version which is not in compliance with published standards. This is less of an issue than browsers today, but as Web applications and services expand, it could be a serious issue with regard to hybrid programs which have both a Web and local application component or which are Web applications that rely upon newer Web technologies that allow for offline use of online apps. Alternatively, MS's leveraging of Windows to push their HTML renderer could prevent those standards from gaining ground and instead promote proprietary alternatives.
In short, I'm unconvinced a truly effective remedy will ignore these libraries. It could mandate that they be made into a plug-in style API where OEMs could drop in the libraries of their choice or the EU could allow MS to keep them bundled but regulate their compliance with a certain level of published standards.
and what do you do when the rules are dumb?
You have two choices:
Why? do you think antitrust laws are no longer needed? Do you know what the antitrust laws even say?
But why would you want to?
I can think of three reasons:
Safari comes with OSX.
Please come back with an educated opinion once you know what MS's crime is. There is no law against bundling a Web browser with an OS. There is a law against undermining a market by tying a monopolized market with an un-monopolized market.
This is a big stink about nothing.
How would you know? You admit you don't understand what MS is doing that is illegal. So how would you know they aren't guilty or that the law is not a just and important one?
Talk about strawman: He didn't say the ONLY reason to work is money, but it is the *main* reason for most people.
We weren't talking about "most people" but about him. He said he would not work at all in such a case, which I find sad. He's obviously in a job he doesn't enjoy if that is his attitude so I advised him to look for a better career. You don't concur with that advice?
The fraction of people who work for the sheer enjoyment of it is certainly quite small.
Of course, nor did I ever imply that extreme socialism would work (in fact I stated pure socialism was impossible) if you actually read my comments.
Seriously? That's absolute crap. Me installing firefox does NOT mean I want IE disabled.
What does what you want have to do with anything? I want a new car for $50, but that doesn't mean the cops are going to let me keep one if I buy a stolen one. MS's crime affects end users only indirectly.
The EU needs to get its head out of its a**.
Why? Because you assume MS's engineering choices have something to do with the punishment the EU will render for a crime MS hasn't even been convicted of yet and which the EU has not made any comments about what sort of punishment they intend?
Why remove the core libraries? We develop several applications which rely on it, and users will blame us if app doesn't work out of the box.
That's why. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc. don't have the option of making sure they're installed on every Windows system and their APIs are always available to companies doing development (like you). As a result you use IE instead of the best browser/engine/API available. That undermines the market for Web browsers.
That's not to say the EU will make MS remove them. They could make MS include all browsers and rendering engines, or open up the APIs and remove the libraries, but allow OEMs to drop in a replacement set of libraries of their choice (with some reengineering of Windows required of MS to make it happen). Or they could let MS keep the libraries but require them to conform to Web standards according to preset rules and set someone to make sure MS does that. Or they could do something else entirely.
I have perfectly good Dell M6300, why would I want another machine?
So you can legally run OS X and do your dev work, was my assumption.
Also, BootCamp partitions are 32GB...
I don't use Bootcamp, but I thought 32Gb was the maximum size for old versions of Windows XP to install on a FAT partition. As far as I know, bootcamp partitions can be any size you want and can fit a Windows install in.
Finally, I'm on the road a lot (I currently don't even have an apartment back home) and am already hauling around three laptops...
I hauled around multiple laptops and messed with dual booting for a while. Now I just carry a MacBook and run Windows, Linux, and Solaris in VMs on top of OS X. Saves me a lot of hassle and migrating them all to a new system is stupid easy.
So what do I buy?
If you're set on a Mac, buy a refurbished tower or other used one. Or, buy a cheaper Mac (mini?) and plug your drives into an external firewire enclosure.
What bugs me, is that they should be trying to get market share up...
They are trying, but they're doing so by appealing to the big market segments and a few specific niches. If they spread themselves too thin they lose overall share. You're one of about 1% of the population that ever adds a drive to their computer. You're part of a mostly non-intersecting group that also can't afford a pro machine. The sad truth is, you are part of a very small market segment it doesn't make business sense for Apple to go after yet. They're just one OEM and already have twice the number of models of other OEMs with half again their market share. It's a drawback to using Macs, they will never have as much hardware variety as all other PC OEMs combined.
...we develop cross platform software for Mac and Windows... ...and don't currently have budget for a Mac to do this with using BootCamp.
You have multiple employee but can't afford $500 for a last generation Mac-mini? Sounds like whoever is allocating your budget is an idiot.
Yet another idiot who doesn't know how to read...
Does calling people idiots make you feel smarter? You don't seem particularly intelligent. The section you repeat explains how the housing bubble was extended. That does not explain how the housing bubble was created and burst nor why the whole thing is happening and not just in housing but in dozens of other markets. You're talking about how one symptom was made worse and you think that explains the whole of why we have an economic crisis? Way to put on the blinders genius.
If our government ever becomes 100% Socialist...
Nice straw man. Our government will never go 100% socialist. It is practically impossible. We'll always be a blend of communism, socialism, and capitalism just like every economy. The issue is the balance of those methods.
Why bother working when I can live on the very-profitable Welfare state for the rest of my life, like a parasite?
If the only reason you work is because of the money, you chose the wrong profession. On average we spend a third of our lives working. Pick a career in something you enjoy doing, even if it pays less.
Regulation is what CREATED this crisis.
You then go on to explain how the government actions made the crisis worse, but don't explain how they created it.
The truth is, the government did create the crisis by rearranging the tax burden such that taxes on the high end did not compensate for wealth condensation resulting in runaway wealth disparity. Then they prolonged the problem by promoting unsafe lending, but they didn't need to do a lot because the banks were running out of people to loan to since half the country no longer had any net wealth.
We need to stop acting like we can control things.
But we can control a lot of things and have to the benefit of mankind. The problem is when the control is directed by a few for their own benefit instead of the benefit of all.
Yes this applies to markets, because they too follow natural rhythms. What would have been a minor recession in 2000-1 is now turning into a depression...
What causes a depression is not lack of wealth, but lack of stability. Stability fails when wealth disparity is too high because most people can no longer be strategic in spending. It's what happened during the great depression too. To solve the problem we need tax reform not deregulation. All deregulation does is allow wealth disparity to be leveraged more effectively to make the problem worse. Ideally it is not needed, but we don't live in an ideal world. Deregulation is part of what made this economic crisis as bad as it is.
In the case of operating systems, you have what is officially called monopolistic competition, where the differences between the 3 OSes are far more than just price.
The main consumers of desktop OS's are OEMs looking to use them as a component pre-installed in computer systems they sell. Apple doesn't sell to that market at all. Realistically, you just have MS with a percent or so going to Linux.
The market also does not fit well with your definitions because there is a significant barrier to entry for the desktop OS market, that being interoperability and application markets compatibility.
but "software other than Microsoft." software? Even "operating systems by Microsoft" would have been better, wouldn't it?
I think you're misunderstanding their objection. Their complaint is that you have to use a Silverlight module from a single company (Microsoft) in order to complete bids. Web services from governments should be vendor neutral. The fact is, you don't need an MS OS to make a bid, you can use OS X+Safari+Silverlight.
It is just NOT a neutral article, it seems rather anti-Microsoftly worded.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but the facts seem accurate and it is worthy of discussion.
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer
Intentionally? Stopped reading after this. Damn.. got sucked in yet again feeding a tin foil nutjob...
Yeah, just because it was revealed as an intentional plan by internal memos and testimony during MS's trial is no reason to think it might be true.
Geez, when you think verifiable facts are tinfoil hat material you need to stop drinking the kool-aid or get better news sources.
I'm sorry, I just keep seeing all these snide remarks about monopoly abuse and I am just not seeing it.
Snide remarks? MS is being prosecuted for ongoing antitrust abuse and are going to be convicted because it is an open and shut case. If you don't see it, you must either not be looking or you have no idea what antitrust abuse is.
The state of things now is that the market is basically a dry well.
The market? Antitrust abuse almost always involves at least two, distinct markets.
...and Linux is getting to the point where it isn't so ridiculously bad that no one will even run it for free...
Are you trolling or clueless? Linux has always been used in appliances and on servers and it is doing fine in both applications. It's starting to gain on mobiles and netbooks. It's not "getting bad" from a market perspective anyway.
What amazing open source innovation is currently being held down by the evil Microsoft conspiracy? Somebody please enlighten me.
Well, the open source Web browsers are being "held down" because investment in them is so minor. The music player market is pretty well ruined by MSs monopoly abuse. The server market is hurting because of MS's abuse. A large variety of services and applications markets are currently suppressed. Mind you all this affects both OSS and closed source vendors.
This isn't like people not being allowed to make phones like with Bell...
But people were allowed to make phones with Ma Bell. Some small portion of the population even bought them. They just also had to pay to rent a phone from Ma Bell they didn't use. This is similar to how every purchaser of Windows has to pay for the development costs of IE and some don't use it but instead use an ad supported browser instead.
Anyone can make an operating system and somehow they don't-
Why would an investor invest billions to make an OS when they have basically no chance of winning regardless of that OS's merits because of MS's monopoly? Even if they were to win it would cost more and yield less return than investing in a market where they don't have to face an abusive monopolist. It's a crap investment, so no one invests.
Firefox is awful. I mean, seriously terrible.
Yeah, that's what happens when a market is undermined by a monopoly. Investment is discouraged, innovation is not financially rewarded, so products move towards suck. Why do you think antitrust abuse was made illegal?
We'll see if the greater market can create some interesting and new before Microsoft wakes up and starts throwing research and resources at it.
MS and everyone else invest little in the browser market because of MS's monopoly abuse. MS doesn't have to and no one else can profit directly.
You must be reading a different website. I only see the latter, even in situations like this where they're just creating a fairly open flash clone.
...which they're promoting via illegal means that undermine yet another market and lead to long term lack of innovation.
Are you kidding me? People here think the linux kernel is an example of modern operating system design.
By definition, it is.
... you really think the Unix world would have forged forward with lots of new innovations? Without competitive bodies like Microsoft and Apple around, people do jack.
First, Apple is the UNIX world these days. Second, there is always someone ready to innovate in a free market because it makes them money and people are greedy. The problem is when we no longer have a free market so the greed does not lead to innovation.
Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amiga were different because they t
Microsoft are propped up by monopoly grants - copyright and lately patent monopolies. It's pointless to blame the free market for their abuses because until copyright and patent monopolies are abolished they are not operating in a free market anyway
But the free market in general can work despite monopolies, so long as those monopolies are not leveraged into different markets.
That said, we desperately need copyright and (to a lesser extent) patent reform. Antitrust abuse, however, is one company breaking the law, quite different, from everyone obeying the same messed up intellectual property laws.
"If you picked MP3, MP4, OGG, and the like, OS X is much better than Windows at interoperating."
Really? I'm interested in seeing how you measure that.
It is certainly difficult to measure and you have too look case by case, but OS X does a good job with plugins for standard technologies but just look at what you can play a preview of from an OS native window. Or look at the services provided/supported by the different OS's Linux and OS X both use the open standard ZeroConf for auto discovery and work together. MS implements a proprietary protocol that other OS's need to reverse engineer or the application you;re using has to handle running the ZeroConf server itself (like Adobe CS does for discovery on Windows).
"And Apple is already taking flack for using more expensive and reliable components. "
No they aren't. They take flack for price. You are assuming they are the same.
I'm not assuming anything. Take a look at the studies performed by consumer groups and professional reviewers. Apple has been at the top of the reliability numbers for years and has prices about 20-30% above average, right in line with other companies who get similar ratings.
"People don't look at reliability when buying."
Really? I'd like to see your data on that as well.
REliability numbers don't make it into marketing literature on the side of product boxes. You see bullet points of features and if you look up in this thread you'll see dozens of people comparing the price of Apple systems to "comparable" systems based upon those bullet points. Notice how many reference published reliability numbers?
"Umm, you've heard of Time machine, right?"
Time Machine is bug-riddled. It never works for me.
Okay. Why do I care? Use something else. Ignoring time machine, how is it harder to back up OS X installs using included or third party software compared to any other OS? I don't get it.
Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented.
There is an implementable draft and it is partly implemented by basically all the browsers except IE. The point being, we're talking about pushing new technologies (which Silverlight 2 is) to solve the problem. Not that new technologies are needed, mind you, that was just for the sake of illustrating the point.
Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?
I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evidence of damages.
RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.
You RTFA. From TFA: "The gravity of this situation gave rise to a written statement sent to the European Commission." The EU commission is handling the ongoing antitrust prosecution of MS.
This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser.
That's no unique at all. Monopoly abuse removes the financial incentive to invest in making good competitors. It is to be expected. It retards innovation and artificially makes competing technologies work more poorly due to interoperability issues.
Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law.
Economics wasn't your best class was it? Apple is gaining market share by bypassing the desktop OS market entirely and refusing to license their OS to OEMs, while making desktop systems (a market which is not monopolized).
. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent.
Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.
Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.
Yeah, don't remember why we have antitrust laws do you. Your assertion is proven false by history and contradicts every economic model with any credibility.
Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it.
No, that is not socialism, either in the political or economic sense. Monopolies being abused are similar to socialism in that they remove the incentive for innovation and efficiency, but dissimilar in that they are controlled by a company whose goal is profit instead of by the people through their government theoretically for the greater good.
Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess...
The W3C and written standards are pretty much beside the point. Web technologies have not moved forward because MS is not financially motivated to make them do so and is motivated to hold them back. MS helped write a lot of those standards before writing intentionally noncompliant versions. Did you not pay attention to the facts unearthed by their court case in the US?
The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just s
Your beliefs don't stack up with reality. Even if they stop supporting silverlight on mac, Moonlight is out for linux NOW, and silverlight 2 compatibility is already alpha.
Yeah, and what do you expect? MS will maintain compatibility until they have a large market share for the technology. They always do.
This is all from a 100% open source firefox plugin. How will MS kill that?
Well they could use patents, either on already implemented features or on features they extend Silverlight with. They can just come out with Silverlight 3, shift the majority of the developer base (since they make the dev tools) and include items that are patented in it or which they obfuscate the source/API to. That's there usual method anyway. Of course since technology is moving forward they could get more creative and use a signing framework in Windows.
MS know any attempt to kill mono (or linux) with patents would do too much damage to themselves.
Yes it would... today. Once Silverlight is a well established technology, however, that will likely no longer be the case. It's not like they haven't done this before you know. It's not like we have internal memos and testimony from insiders where they discussed this exact strategy to be used to break compatibility with other Web technologies they were implementing.
IE as an example is ridiculous. It is a HTML renderer, Which BTW was a very simple spec considering the timeline of this.
It is an intentionally incompatible/nonstandard HTML renderer.
There is no advantage in "appearing" cross platform. Business owners don't think like 2 year olds, they want the real thing..
They're still at the "embrace stage". That's where they get buy in, remain cross platform, and do everything to gain market share. It isn't until they have significant market share that they break cross platform compatibility.
. If they do assume, it probably means they are stupid, and if a stupid business dies, hell, that's capitalism.
Monopolies can be leveraged to undermine capitalism.
But anyway considering Linux user base is still negligible it can be safely ignored.
No one implementing new technologies today can ignore Linux. There is no guarantee it will ever have significant market share for a use, but it is a reasonable possibility to plan for as a contingency.
Besides don't you guys all use no script and ad blockers?
Us guys?
For a group of people actively trying to kill the web you sure do make a lot of demands.
The first part is a troll and for the second part, when did it become unreasonable to expect companies to obey antitrust laws that have been enforced for a hundred years now?
Lets make it more clear then, besides paranoid tin foil conspiracies, do you have any other evidence?
Where do you think "embrace, extend, extinguish" came from? It was in testimony and internal memos revealed during MS's US antitrust case. It's more than just evidence it is several sources of evidence, vetted by the courts and submitted under oath.