On what basis could Apple be regulated? There are a multitude of alternatives available. The idea is ridiculous - nobody has to use Apple if they don't like it.
True. So here's how it works. Basically, MS's competitors rile up their local officials to try to get some kind of business advantage out of it. This happens in the US and in the EU. If you look in the US at the states that have tried to go after MS, it's easy enough to "follow the money" to figure out why they're doing it. It's even easier in the EU - MS is a US company, they want to help their companies compete and get a nice chunk of change in he process.
In my arguments, though, I was mostly referring to the typical slashdweeb IANAL moron who tries to pretend he's an antitrust expert and a free market champion and gives the same old tired arguments. In the end, it's all bullshit - they just hate Microsoft because what they see as a superior OS is an also-ran due to the market's desire for a consistent, single OS.
Exactly. Here are key points when arguing with some imbecile pretending the US govt needs to "protect" us from MS.
1. There are alternatives. Countless, many of which are free.
2. The mythical "John Q" being an idiot isn't a reason to regulate a "monopoly".
3. The idea of a demand-based monopoly in the face of countless alternatives is laughable.
4. The idea of a monopoly over a piece of intellectual property is more than laughable. Monopolies are all cool and whatnot for real, limited resources e.g. oil, food, water, etc... but not something you can pull out of the air or imagine up.
5. A monopoly would imply pricing power. Microsoft has no pricing power. Linux is free, it's hard to have pricing power in the face of a free alternative. Apples prices don't change based on MS's whims, either.
Really, they have an untenable position in claiming MS should be regulated. It's all based on emotion and poor arguments. But seeing the same tired old arguments from these people about the "convicted monopolist" (a meaningless phrase they use over and over) really gets too boring to bother replying.
You're exactly right, most of these dweebs are just so into their little OS and so bitter about mainstream use of MS OS's that they are more than a little insane about the whole issue. There are, provably, alternatives to Windows. Free ones, commercial ones, all sorts. The purpose of antitrust and monopoly laws is to prevent a single provider from cornering, on the supply side, an item. What we have with Windows is a _demand_ side "monopoly" where people choose Windows in the face of a multitude of alternatives. It's nonsensical and logically inconsistent to claim Microsoft should be regulated as a monopoly.
If you look through the facile postings by the anti-MS folks who try so hard to sound rational, their argument always backs up to the fact that people _want_ Windows. They don't need it. If you _want_ something, you can't call that something a monopoly. No amount of posturing about 10 year old issues MS had with OEMs and exclusivity deals or make-believe shit about supposedly hidden APIs (note, an API is not a protocol - if I were MS I wouldn't give out protocol details either, you can't change them once some asshole starts depending on them), etc... will change the fact that if you don't want to purchase MS products there is nothing preventing you from using any of multitude alternatives.
I'll put it more bluntly here than I did in my other reply to someone who made the same point. Astrology - ancient. Western school dates based on age and birth month - not so ancient. It's a load of crap no matter how much you try to chop it up to fit down the toilet pipe.
Bigoted? If someone is stupid, they're stupid. They may be a fine person otherwise, but that doesn't change the fact that if you belive in astrology or any of various other ridiculous mythologies or kooky belief systems you are an idiot. I'm not saying we should lock them up or throw rotten fruit at them.
Interesting point, but let me ask you a feq question. How old is astrology? And how old are western standards of when a person starts the school year based on age? Seems to be a rather large disconnect there.
Define your market. How much money are all these ARM cpu's bringing in to their respective manufacturers? Compare that with money going to Intel and AMD, and you'll have your answer.
Oooh, yeah. SlashDot so pro-Microsoft now. It's sheer craziness, I tells ya! Where in God's name will all those ridiculous MS-haters go to rant and rave about MS now that SlashDot is effectively owned by MS now, according to Cyclops.
Give me a fucking break, dude. And I'm not sure why you bolded fake Open Source operating system. Because CmdrTaco used a bad article title, you seem to be making some retarded implication that Microsoft is "pulling one over" on you and not really releasing something as open source when in fact they never claimed it was open source.
yet it all comes together, and every prophecy has come true.... No, it doesn't and no, they haven't. Nostradamus has prophecies people claim have come true, for some value of "true" and "prophecies". I will make a prediction right now, and it will absolutely come true. Am I god?
There will come, from the east, a leader who shall upend the order of things and bring about a great change on the world's stage. This leader shall be a purveyor of lies but will lead his faithful to true power and his enemies the world over shall plot his death. This leader will die with the sky in his eyes and God shall smite his seeds from the Earth near his passing.
Now, let's come back in 100 years. I promise you I would, were I alive, be able to finagle this into some real world historical event. In 500 years, without a doubt. Really, prophecies are only there for stupid people.
Oh jesus, not you again. Your rehashed "but everyone _wants_ MS OS's, so they have to sell them, so, umm, MS has a monopoly!" hand-waving chewbacca defense-esque argument is just stupid, I choose to ignore it.
Please stop embarrassing yourself and go buy a book on the basics of economics. Just reading a 10 page summary of antitrust law is enough education to demonstrate how flawed your understanding is. Isn't Econ 101 a requirement for a bachelor's degree anymore? So much for the US educational system... I suppose you'll blame your ignorance on that on the fact that it is a socialist program huh? You've already proven you're a retard of some sort. Please explain how you can rationally define a demand-created monopoly? Also, how exactly can you have a monopoly with no pricing power over alteratives (read: Linux is free). You seem to think you can argue, with a straight face, that one can have a monopoly when there is no supply-side limitation to the supposedly monopolized commodity. I would argue that that's fucking stupid.
I'm all for stopping cartels or monopolies over important commodities which are limited in supply in a single-supplier arrangement. Hurrah. Go after OPEC. Whoohoo. Oil. Power. Water. Food. If you are the only supplier of one of these, then you have a monopoly. Having a "monopoly" when the consumer has literally hundreds of alternatives is a ridiculous concept.
What monopoly? I'm confused, why can't I go install Linux or use Firefox or Opera on Windows. Oh, wait. I can. You seem to have a misunderstanding of what "unfair" means. Consumers are the goal. Depriving them of functionality just so John Widget Vendor can sell his crappy alternative doesn't help anyone. Then again, the EU is largely a socialist's utopia so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
The unescapable fact you people willfully ignore is that there is no monopoly in the desktop OS market. This is provably so. Now, you can narrowly enough define something so that Microsoft has what you can make-believe define as a "monopoly", but that doesn't make it rational.
Ahahaha. How dare you contradict SlashDweeb Group"Think". Instead of allowing a different opinion be heard, they use the moderation system to make sure nobody contradicts their idiotic view of the EU as the knight in white armor riding to the rescue of the billions, nay TRILLIONS, of people who are dying every day because of the Evil Microsoft "Monopoly".
Since when "Unbundle WMP from Windows" is so much unreasonable? Because Microsoft develops the product and should be able to include whatever they think adds value to the customer. The customers want it. Nobody will buy the "cripped" windows. That's why it's unreasonable.
? A think the EU requires ALL operating system manufacturers to stop bundling different products into their OS. - Oh, wait... WHAT other operating system manufacturers are we talking about? There is only Microsoft on the scene. Looks like monopoly to me... Hmm... What other operating systems? Let's see, Apple, a few dozen major variants of Linux, a few hundred minor variants, OpenSolaris, QNX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Plan9, Hurd, the list truly goes on and on and on.
Now, I know you'll whine that those aren't "mainstream", then you'll go on to cry that if you want to run Windows Application XYZ poor Joe Schmoe needs Windows. The fact is that if you try hard enough to artificially narrow a market you can define any company as a "monopoly". Seriously, do you know how ridiculous this sounds?
"Microsoft has a monopoly on x86 operating systems which are called Windows Vista and Windows XP and Windows Server and which can run binaries which utilize the Microsoft APIs and which also have no equivelents on other operating systems". Slightly...narrow definition, I'd say. What a fucking joke, people who claim MS has a monopoly are disingenuous or retarded.
It's obvious he's retarded is what it is. If an application launches a new instance of IE when Firefox is configured as the browser, that application is broken. If an application launches an embedded IE instance to render HTML, it's because that's the way it's done. The API is well know, you always know IE is installed and how to embed it and what it will look like. That's why you can't remove IE from the OS.
Your argument is stupid. IE is used as a "standard" browser and as a componentized browser all through the OS because it is a known constant. Any application that needs to render a page in a browser inside a shell window the application owns knows it can use IE, knows the exact API to do so, and knows what it will look like. This is why IE is there and can't be uninstalled.
If you don't like IE, don't use it. Why do you think you should be able to install it, from some facile academic CS definition of an "OS"? I can't remove NTFS. I can't remove the OSX filesystem. I can't remove the font rendering engine. Oh no! Call the EU!
You can run firefox or opera on Windows to your heart's content. If an application pops up a full blown IE window when you click on a link, that application is broken if you have configured firefox to be your default browser.
I'm not clear whether you're trolling, or are just plum stupid. Pricewatch doesn't list the Phenom 9700 CPU, and it lists the Phenom 9600 CPU at $249.
Were you making some ridiculous joke about ancient ATI 9x00 series video cards?
Re:I inadvertently switched to Intel...
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
So you're flat out saying you're a fanboy and will buy based on the company and not the quality of the product at any given time? That's cool, but I don't know why anyone would care about your opinion in this case.
Me, I bought an AMD 3800+ for an HTPC CPU simply because Intel couldn't compete in terms of noise/cooling and it worked well enough. But when it came time to upgrade Intel's CPUs were far and away the better choice in pretty much all dimensions.
Why do you insist on lying, and why did people mod you "informative"?
First, the 9700 is not $200. In fact, if you can find it it's more like $300. Yes, more than the Q6600. If you look around, even the 9600 is like $240.
Personally, I think he did it and that they appear to have sufficient evidence to prove he did it. That said, you all do know that they don't _need_ evidence, right? You can be convicted in this country of murder with _no_ evidence simply for having an apparent motive.
I don't want to live in your world. Apparently in your world all you have to do in order to get away with murder is (1) destroy the body, (2), destroy the murder weapon, (3), make sure no one is literally watching when you commit the murder. Now, (4) is the rub but of course you're simply wrong. They found blood evidence in his car. They found blood evidence in the house. They have peculiar behavior (like missing seats in a car, a soaked car as if cleaned, books, etc...) that is directly linked to the case in question. Oh, and his house being the last place she was seen alive sure doesn't help him.
Now, I agree with you in theory. Some poor woman just got convicted with no evidence whatsoever, far less than Reiser. Apparently she got a boob job with her dead husband's life insurance and partied it up in Mexico or something like that "too soon" after he died and a jury of morons found her guilty. In this case, however, his behavior and the circumstantial evidence all adds up.
Unfortunately for your point, laser wavelength isn't the only factor. A rather large factor is this thing called "layers". Kind of how a DVD has, you know, two layers?
Slashdot Mirror
On what basis could Apple be regulated? There are a multitude of alternatives available. The idea is ridiculous - nobody has to use Apple if they don't like it.
In my arguments, though, I was mostly referring to the typical slashdweeb IANAL moron who tries to pretend he's an antitrust expert and a free market champion and gives the same old tired arguments. In the end, it's all bullshit - they just hate Microsoft because what they see as a superior OS is an also-ran due to the market's desire for a consistent, single OS.
1. There are alternatives. Countless, many of which are free.
2. The mythical "John Q" being an idiot isn't a reason to regulate a "monopoly".
3. The idea of a demand-based monopoly in the face of countless alternatives is laughable.
4. The idea of a monopoly over a piece of intellectual property is more than laughable. Monopolies are all cool and whatnot for real, limited resources e.g. oil, food, water, etc... but not something you can pull out of the air or imagine up.
5. A monopoly would imply pricing power. Microsoft has no pricing power. Linux is free, it's hard to have pricing power in the face of a free alternative. Apples prices don't change based on MS's whims, either.
Really, they have an untenable position in claiming MS should be regulated. It's all based on emotion and poor arguments. But seeing the same tired old arguments from these people about the "convicted monopolist" (a meaningless phrase they use over and over) really gets too boring to bother replying.
If you look through the facile postings by the anti-MS folks who try so hard to sound rational, their argument always backs up to the fact that people _want_ Windows. They don't need it. If you _want_ something, you can't call that something a monopoly. No amount of posturing about 10 year old issues MS had with OEMs and exclusivity deals or make-believe shit about supposedly hidden APIs (note, an API is not a protocol - if I were MS I wouldn't give out protocol details either, you can't change them once some asshole starts depending on them), etc... will change the fact that if you don't want to purchase MS products there is nothing preventing you from using any of multitude alternatives.
I'll put it more bluntly here than I did in my other reply to someone who made the same point. Astrology - ancient. Western school dates based on age and birth month - not so ancient. It's a load of crap no matter how much you try to chop it up to fit down the toilet pipe.
Bigoted? If someone is stupid, they're stupid. They may be a fine person otherwise, but that doesn't change the fact that if you belive in astrology or any of various other ridiculous mythologies or kooky belief systems you are an idiot. I'm not saying we should lock them up or throw rotten fruit at them.
Interesting point, but let me ask you a feq question. How old is astrology? And how old are western standards of when a person starts the school year based on age? Seems to be a rather large disconnect there.
Define your market. How much money are all these ARM cpu's bringing in to their respective manufacturers? Compare that with money going to Intel and AMD, and you'll have your answer.
I'm not sure if you know this, but .NET isn't a "bandwagon" any more than Java, Linux, or Perl are "bandwagons". .NET isn't going _anywhere_.
Give me a fucking break, dude. And I'm not sure why you bolded fake Open Source operating system. Because CmdrTaco used a bad article title, you seem to be making some retarded implication that Microsoft is "pulling one over" on you and not really releasing something as open source when in fact they never claimed it was open source.
There will come, from the east, a leader who shall upend the order of things and bring about a great change on the world's stage. This leader shall be a purveyor of lies but will lead his faithful to true power and his enemies the world over shall plot his death. This leader will die with the sky in his eyes and God shall smite his seeds from the Earth near his passing.
Now, let's come back in 100 years. I promise you I would, were I alive, be able to finagle this into some real world historical event. In 500 years, without a doubt. Really, prophecies are only there for stupid people.
You don't really know what "vapor-ware" is, do you? Hint - it's not "any software which is currently under development and not available". Crikey.
I'm all for stopping cartels or monopolies over important commodities which are limited in supply in a single-supplier arrangement. Hurrah. Go after OPEC. Whoohoo. Oil. Power. Water. Food. If you are the only supplier of one of these, then you have a monopoly. Having a "monopoly" when the consumer has literally hundreds of alternatives is a ridiculous concept.
The unescapable fact you people willfully ignore is that there is no monopoly in the desktop OS market. This is provably so. Now, you can narrowly enough define something so that Microsoft has what you can make-believe define as a "monopoly", but that doesn't make it rational.
Ahahaha. How dare you contradict SlashDweeb Group"Think". Instead of allowing a different opinion be heard, they use the moderation system to make sure nobody contradicts their idiotic view of the EU as the knight in white armor riding to the rescue of the billions, nay TRILLIONS, of people who are dying every day because of the Evil Microsoft "Monopoly".
Now, I know you'll whine that those aren't "mainstream", then you'll go on to cry that if you want to run Windows Application XYZ poor Joe Schmoe needs Windows. The fact is that if you try hard enough to artificially narrow a market you can define any company as a "monopoly". Seriously, do you know how ridiculous this sounds?
"Microsoft has a monopoly on x86 operating systems which are called Windows Vista and Windows XP and Windows Server and which can run binaries which utilize the Microsoft APIs and which also have no equivelents on other operating systems". Slightly...narrow definition, I'd say. What a fucking joke, people who claim MS has a monopoly are disingenuous or retarded.
It's obvious he's retarded is what it is. If an application launches a new instance of IE when Firefox is configured as the browser, that application is broken. If an application launches an embedded IE instance to render HTML, it's because that's the way it's done. The API is well know, you always know IE is installed and how to embed it and what it will look like. That's why you can't remove IE from the OS.
If you don't like IE, don't use it. Why do you think you should be able to install it, from some facile academic CS definition of an "OS"? I can't remove NTFS. I can't remove the OSX filesystem. I can't remove the font rendering engine. Oh no! Call the EU!
You can run firefox or opera on Windows to your heart's content. If an application pops up a full blown IE window when you click on a link, that application is broken if you have configured firefox to be your default browser.
Were you making some ridiculous joke about ancient ATI 9x00 series video cards?
Me, I bought an AMD 3800+ for an HTPC CPU simply because Intel couldn't compete in terms of noise/cooling and it worked well enough. But when it came time to upgrade Intel's CPUs were far and away the better choice in pretty much all dimensions.
First, the 9700 is not $200. In fact, if you can find it it's more like $300. Yes, more than the Q6600. If you look around, even the 9600 is like $240.
Well, the thing is they're absolutely not inventors. They haven't invented _anything_.
For proof, do a google search on Cynthia Sommers.
Now, I agree with you in theory. Some poor woman just got convicted with no evidence whatsoever, far less than Reiser. Apparently she got a boob job with her dead husband's life insurance and partied it up in Mexico or something like that "too soon" after he died and a jury of morons found her guilty. In this case, however, his behavior and the circumstantial evidence all adds up.
Unfortunately for your point, laser wavelength isn't the only factor. A rather large factor is this thing called "layers". Kind of how a DVD has, you know, two layers?