It seems to me that MS are trying to fill a hole that's already been covered...
Otherwise known as their business strategy. Every one of the markets they've entered into was already covered by usually superior products. Once they formed a monopoly with Windows, they've used it to stretch their arms into every market available slowly but surely.
Netscape was fine as a browser, IE came in sporting a default Windows install and blew it out of the water competition wise.
MS didn't even really have a modern day media player until a few years ago. Now pretty much everyone that knows little-to-nothing about computers just runs media player and nothing else.
MS didn't have a line of PDAs until Palmpilots became big.
MS didn't touch on a lot of markets and nobody seemed to notice.
What happens is this: MS waits for a market to show worth and expand. Then it comes into the market with a pretty much sub-standard service/product that always contains more compatibility with Windows or more integration because they control Windows. Everyone buys the new versions of Windows and doesn't even know the service exists, until MS puts it in their face with the OS.
I'm just surprised MSN hasn't taken all of the IM market (and kind of glad, but AIM is kind of a POS too).
So just the fact that they enter a market late is meaningless. They can squash the competition with their monopoly. And in this case, they are teaming up with MTV who has a monopoly over most of the youth as far as TV programming. Unless there's something else I'm not seeing, this is a battle MS can easily win.
Yes, it does matter. First, because websites are crap compared to what they could be if the state of the art was not frozen, through this anti-competative behavior. Second, because their is no way to compete with a monopoly many companies don't bother to try, which further retards progress. Finally, there is plenty of other fallout from a massive user based trapped on a single, insecure product. The majority of automated worm traffic that clogs up the internet and slows everything down is the result of automatically propagating worms exploiting Windows, IE, and Outlook.
As someone who designed webpages before, I know that the state of the art isn't in fact frozen. The truth is that you could design a website to easily scale back based on what the user is using. And if (and it is) more featureful (is that a word?) to use an alternative browser, you could include a link like "download firefox to get the most out of this site" the same way MTV tries to force you to download IE (as if you don't already have it). Web site designers are simply too lazy to implement this kind of thing. It's a bit frustrating, I'll admit, but it's fair from impossible.
As far as the Windows monopoly is, let's face it, there is no alternative product for quite a few reasons. Apple has okay mainstream OS's but you have to be an Apple style individual, Apple has basically packaged their OS with their hardware and their mentality. It takes a unique individual to buy into all three at the same time and most companies that don't have an explicit need to do so aren't going to, it's simply not viable.
Linux could be an alternative, it has everything going for it, it's free, it's open source and it's pretty secure. But you have to remember that in order to get things done, things must work. The Linux community is too divided between different distributions or even different GUIs to provide a united front like MS does with Windows or even Apple does to a better extent with their line. If there existed a Windows style GUI without all the bugs, I'm sure people would flock to it. But *nix has problems with support, and Apple simply has problems with its strategies. The average consumer is therefore not presented with a viable alternative. Windows is a monopoly because you haven't introduced a proper product yet. And if some company/development team finally does come up with such a product I'm sure the market will break wide open. The OS always dictates what kind of applications a person runs, can we face that fact? If you are an Apple user, chances are you are using a certain suite of apps, if you are a Windows user, chances are you are using Microsoft crap. If you really have a problem with Microsoft's monopoly, then you should unite to form a reasonable OS that does what Windows does, and then maybe you will stand a chance on everything else, and people will complain about what you bundle with your OS.
Maybe you're right that features and innovation won't always result in overall market share, but it's a market for a freeware item. So if people decide they will use an inferior product despite no difference in price, let them whine to someone else when a purple monkey popped up on their desktop out of nowhere. Saying that MS is being anti-competitional by not allowing Windows unless IE was exclusively installed is just another step in the equation. Who cares if MS decides what software is the best for the end user or if Dell does? Neither one has the end user in mind anyway. Like Dell or Gateway or HP ever packaged superior products with their PCs, they haven't. They package the most dumbed down, easy to use pieces of junk for every element of their computers to avoid tech support phone calls. Things with annoying interfaces like smiling dogs in wizards asking you what kind of CD you would like to burn with a big smiley.
Besides, I bet people like Dell would prefer MS anyway, because then they can offer anti-spyware packages and upgrades when people only got spyware because their browser sucked to begin with. There is nothing more fun to a computer vendor than to sell a computer novice superfluous crap.
People have the ability to decide for themselves what they want to use on the computer, the fact that they aren't aware of this ability just shows how disgustingly uneducated the populace is, and further illustrates that if you aren't going to educate yourself about technology then you probably deserve what you get.
I also don't understand why people, outside perhaps the tech support industry, get irritated by MS at all. Nowadays they have plenty of competition for the aware user. I use firefox almost exclusively and does it really matter how many other people use my same browser? Other than a couple pages might be messed up when you visit em? Not really.
Firefox and other companies also stink at ad campaigns and making people aware of their superior product. I think when we start to see Firefox commercials, particularly funny ones talking about maybe spyware and such, we'll start to see a shift in numbers.
It is when MS bundles products which take over markets based not on their own merits, but upon that bundling that other software producers and consumers are damaged.
This is the argument I'm talking about. I'm saying that they are at least partially of their own merits. IE always came bundled with Windows, but Netscape came installed too. When IE surpassed Netscape (which I believe it did before the advent of spyware and the exposure of all of its security holes), Netscape no longer needed to be packaged. Which makes sense not only from a monopolistic point of view, but also because it costed the makers of such computers to put out less money. Netscape was a purchase product and MSIE simply came with Windows.
And besides that point there's this one: If users who don't know anything about computers manage to download and install all kinds of other garbage, you'd think that if they wanted to, they would be able to download competing products. Are you saying that on a standard MS windows install you should have no browser? That is hardly an alternative. No media player? MS applications to me at least allow a gateway with which I can get the alternatives.
And here's another point, if the user doesn't even know what program they are using then does it really matter to them which program it is anyway? The target audience for software these days I believe should incorporate the average user but target the high end user. Because as people get more and more tech savvy it will no longer go on what program was packaged with their Gateway, but what program is the most useful.
The fact that IE retains 90% of the market despite being vastly inferior for half a decade belies your belief. Companies should not have to be better than MS, just to compete with them. If another product is just as good as one MS produces and at the same price than each should grab about 50% of the market. That is what is known a fair market.
Not true. Let's face it, generic soda is just as good as Coke or Pepsi, but people buy Coke and Pepsi in mass amounts compared to these products. Some of MS's advantage is its name recognition. People outside of the software community know who MS is, and for whatever reason, they trust it as a decent name in software. Or at least "the accepted" name in software. A lot of people don't move to firefox (my dad for example) simply because they don't want some other bizarre browser they haven't heard of. I think this irritates people like you because usefulness and innovation doesn't necessarily breed popularity in the software world. People like me, however, are used to this sad trend. Music, movies, and even videogames all follow this same trend. Why should software be any different? The "good enough" mentality doesn't just pertain to software, it's everywhere and it's a function of the general populace being uninformed and loyal to brands.
My point is that nobody cares that MS bundles some things, but yet gets out of joint about others. As long as the MS product is so inferior it doesn't capture any percentage of the market, nobody notices or cares. Then as soon as the bundled application gets a bit better and takes off, everyone gets irritated.
MS's downfall is that they've become such a huge organization with so many tentacles that they cannot keep up with all the changes in their product lines. Therefore there are security holes, lack of features, etc. But as people get more and more irritated with these things, they will move to other companies. My sister got spyware so often from simply browsing that she was convinced to switch to firefox. All it takes is for the market to change, and for MS not to keep up with it and they'll go under. The people made MS what it is, only the people can stop it from chewing up every possible market.
You're mistaken. IE is crummy and people complain very vocally about it. You're also confusing consumer complaints with legal action. For legal action there needs to be demonstrable damage (losing market share). No one sued over the calculator program because there was no calculator program market (defined by dollars exchanged). There was a media player market, an browser market, and a chat market, most of which was ad supported.
There's plenty of calculator programs on the market, MS's calculator simply doesn't compete with the high-end functionality of something like say, Mathematica. There is a media player market now, but years before nobody was concerned when media player was a little piece of software that didn't include skins and such. IE was almost always bundled with Windows, IE didn't become a problem until it had most of the features that Netscape did. I think a lot of times people are just afraid that people will use the MS product because there's not much difference between that and the competition to the average user. If instead, people innovated and created products that address concerns that MS's products do not, and consistently did so, then they wouldn't have so much to whine and take legal action on.
And I'm not confusing legal action with whining, because I believe they are extensions of the same thing. MS has provided a platform in which you can easily download a different browser, a different media player, etc. The fact that most people don't is simply telling the competition that the average user sees no advantage over running your software instead of the stuff that they have already without expending any effort. If there was a big enough difference, people would go out of their way to provide business to the better product. The increasing popularity of firefox is a testament to this statement.
But no one complains as long as the product is crummy. When the product is a real competitor, then they complain.
Nobody complains about calculator being bundled with windows, or notepad, or word. But technically these things are unfairly competing too.
This is where this argument has always fallen on its face for me. People only get out of joint at things that are decent products, or at least viewed as decent products.
For example, Microsoft Windows 95 came with an early version of IE bundled with it that was a piece of junk. Then when they made IE3 and IE4 and those came bundled, everyone was all upset about it.
Nobody cared when media player came bundled until it became like every other media player and packed in stupid skins and such. Now since it's basically the same as the rest of the media players, it's a problem that it's bundled. I don't understand why it's okay for Microsoft to bundle an inferior product, but not okay for them to bundle one that is just like the competition in the marketplace.
I think most of the problem with the propagation of viruses is the way windows works. I mean, yes, windows gives you little "this could be a virus if you open it" lectures all the time, but most people ignore them because these things pop up whether the file is a jpeg or an exe anyway. Microsoft needs to put something in Windows that will warn you before executing a new executable. Since they are already tracking your commonly used programs, I don't think it would be too much of a jump to warn before running a new one. Or put the warning on all executables. And stop with the default extension hiding. This stuff doesn't work with me because.jpg.exe doesn't look like.jpg cuz I turn the extensions on.
I thought college is supposed to be composed of free-thinkers. That's quite a nice way to teach your students, have a class on freedom of speech and then proceed to take it away from the student body. I don't know why a school would go after such widespread bad press, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to go to this school because they crack down on bloggers. "Just what I always wanted in college, ma, less freedom!"
Legally they can do what they want I'm sure, but seems like a dumb stance to take from any angle, especially once the media gets involved.
Cross platform as long as it's Windows or *nix. How about zSeries, iSeries, HP NonStop, etc.
They are all ignored because anyone dumb enough to use an OS that only ten people ever bothered installing shouldn't expect to be able to run the new version of...well pretty much anything I guess.
If so that was a stupid decision, because the overall drive of the marketplace is to cram more and more features into portable phones and having a cell phone with Apple's ITunes on it becoming popular would've done nothing except help the company's interests. I hardly believe that they would pull a producers with the cell phone industry.
Many people are against combo devices and I know why. It's simply because often combo devices are less than the sum of their parts. They usually are badly constructed and designed and have less features than the devices they are replacing. However, with the right device I think a phone with everything on it could be a great idea.
I mean, we all have our cell phones on us nearly all the time. However, I seldom remember to bring my camera even for a somewhat big event to take pictures. Sometimes I try to do a photo with my camera phone but I don't often bother because the camera is poor quality and there's no real way to transfer the pictures into any useable format. But does that mean camera phones are a bad idea? No, it simply means that they haven't made the right camera phone yet. Also, often I'll be out of the house and realize that I'm suddenly in a situation where I really could've used my mp3 player, but I forgot to take it with me. Now if my cell phone also could sub out as a decent mp3 player (meaning, something better than the ROKR, this would be enough for me given those situations. Since you already have your cell phone on you anyway, why not? I think if a company came along and was to actually integrate all of these components together in a way that was superior to the competition, they'd watch their stock explode. The market is there, but the products are poorly designed.
I understand your position about Microsoft taking over the PDF market, because Microsoft takes over everything before turning it into a long forgotten cause (feeling superior over the market they conquered they then fail to provide any further innovation). However, in the same token, I believe it's quite obvious that something does, in fact, need to be done about the PDF format. Quite frankly, as someone who deals with PDFs on a regular basis I find them quite irritating on a number of levels:
Their viewer application is irritatingly slow and strange to use. It lacks anything resembling features because Adobe wants you to invest a couple hundred into their company. While I'm sure you can buy another viewer for PDFs, who wants to waste money on that?
PDFs rarely are editable at all and most times the PDF is just a giant image like a multi-page TIFF that someone scanned in for you to stare at, versus what I would think would be something of a more digital format. Giant scanned pages of text aren't doing us much good.
Adobe Acrobat itself provides no real needed features and is very rare to find. Nobody buys Adobe Acrobat for the most part. Every company I've ever been at has a version of Office lying around, but the fact that you can't really edit PDFs at most places becomes so frustrating that the format itself is irritating.
Why doesn't Adobe work on providing OCR in its format? How much better would PDFs be if there was a simple way to convert them into a much better, indexable, text form instead of relying on giant images most of the time.
Now I must admit that some of these flaws are being taken care of. As digital document creation gets more popular, many files are starting to have digital origins and contain real, selectable text. However, the fact remains that there is a large volume of scanned media being put into PDFs with no transition whatsoever, resulting in giant, unsearchable images floating around under the name of "document" like it has any form of digital foundation. OCR has taken leaps forward in recent years and I think that if Adobe wanted to, they could actually incorporate this type of thing into Acrobat, making it easier to go from crusty pages to beautiful digital documents. However, Adobe seems as Microsoft is to be very sparse on innovation due to lack of competition. I personally would welcome anyone to take on PDF as a file format, as I feel it's been due for a makeover for a long time.
This is the type of new-age thought that keeps 3rd world countries in the back of the class. Do they seriously think that the first thing a poor country with a starving populace and AIDs epidemic needs: a 100-dollar, 3rd rate, wind-up toy computer?
I agree for the most part. I thought that perhaps the purpose of the tool was to find something you had based on a line that was in a word document for example, but I could be wrong. Look, people, if you seriously can't find your own crap you definitely need a better organizational system on your computer. Your own desktop shouldn't be as scattered as the Internet is and therefore the need to search is minimal IMO.
The cat is out of the bag and they hate it. DRMs are crackable, anything digital is pretty much breakable into a free format that can be easily distributed and I don't understand why they waste their time trying to battle hackers many of which are smarter, more resourceful and have more time and dedication towards their goal. Someone cracked region encoding with one line of Perl code, which begs the question, why have region encoding to begin with? Why present the already righteous feeling hackers with a sense of purpose or need? I say every CD should come with a copy of the CD in high-quality MP3 format on the disc. I don't understand why corporations want us to keep using an outdated technology (CDs for audio) when an already far superior technique exists. Do what ITunes did and charge stupid...
Just needs some *advertising*. FF proved that it is possible to go from relatively obscurity "to the masses" to a quite respectable showing in a short period of time.
Switching from IE to firefox is simple and almost transparent. Most users you could probably install firefox on their computers and they wouldn't notice much save an icon change. Switching from Windows to Linux is a lot less transparent. It's that fact that makes Linux forever the underdog. It's too different from what the average user is used to. Too big of a learning curve and hardware isn't supported how it should be.
The answer is simple, try to get as much support for hardware as Windows has. I would consider myself at least a "power user" and I have yet to even touch Linux because I don't wanna have to look through a checklist everytime I buy hardware. I went through that crap years ago with windows 95 and I'm not about to go back when I can, alternatively, simply plug in my device on WinXP and it will work flawelessly after I install some drivers from a disk usually included with the device. If the Open Source community wants to get serious about open source OSes, they need to evaluate their relationship with hardware manufacturers.
I find that if I am in the mood to work hard on something that bodily impulses irritate me in general and I try as hard as possible to ignore them. I don't go to sleep until way too late, I barely eat anything unless I'm stumped and sometimes I'll try to push back taking a leak because I think I finally found the solution to a problem. Programming inspires me a little too much though, your mileage may vary.
Re:Regulate Sales As Well As Content Creation
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The ESRB Bites Back
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· Score: 0
Part of the problem seems to be that sales are pretty much unregulated, so any kid can go into a shop and buy anything.
Yeah but the polar extreme of that is that it becomes that you can't go into a shop as a young looking adult and buy ANYTHING without a photo ID. At 22-years-old I can potentially be carded for buying a carton of eggs, a can of spraypaint, a lighter, matches, a DVD, a CD with curses, a movie ticket, and countless other crap. These people need to keep better track of their kids, stop offering a 12-year-old the freedom to cruise around the mall with your credit cards and his shopping buddies. This is how bureacracy gets created. First you make a law that everyone has to card for something, then nobody does it anyway because they are lazy employees and frankly don't give a crap. So then you have to set up a governmental agency in order to make sure they are enforcing this law and now you have an army full of idiots whose job it is to make sure they get carded for a pack of cigarettes. And the fact remains that kids still find eggs, in the fridge... Spray paint in the garage... The DVDs from their mom's blockbuster bag, the CDs from the Internet, sneak into an R-rated while paying for a PG-13, and etc. So all you are doing is alienating the paying customers you have who just wanted an omelette and has what society would judge as a young looking face. It's getting to the point where I am on the verge of pulling out photo ID for every transaction and I'm about sick of it.
When it really comes down to it, what the hell are we really arguing over here? GTA: San Andreas and the "Hot Coffee" right? Well, you know what, changing a game's rating from Mature to Adult Only might have detered a few sales, sure. But does anyone on earth think there is such a big difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old. It makes no sense to me at all. First of all, you are talking about one year of age difference and only a very subtle change in content difference. Say we had made San Andreas adult-only, okay, what the hell difference in society would that have made at all? Doesn't matter how old these kids are the parents will usually buy them the games and let them play them anyway. So why don't you just get at the real target? As far as Columbine goes, both people involved were old enough to buy Doom, a very unrealistic game about killing demons that is no more graphic than any PG-13 "let's kill all the aliens" movie. I'm tired of weak arguments always coming to the forefront of the media.
The point remains, however, that the setting of user-privileges shouldn't have anything to do in particular with your machine's security. Everyone's saying Sony is the big bad wolf in this, which they are, but the fact remains that the OS should alert you before allowing certain actions to take place without your consent or knowledge. Everyone should be able to run as an administrator on their own computer. They are the administrator, it's their computer. I just think the sting is that much worse knowing first of all, which we pretty much already knew that our OS is that easily compromised without our knowledge, and secondly that this type of backdoor operation is coming from a more reputable source than in the past. I'd expect this from some third rate software development company that's developing some weird version of gnutella, but to get it from a Sony music CD is just all that more frightening. Overall, however, the OS should prevent stuff like this from happening (and yes, from default). You shouldn't have to tinker around in settings for hours in order to figure out how to make your OS not behave like a retarded schoolchild being lured into a van for candy. Just another reason not to buy stuff, IMO.
Whatever happened to innovation in this country?
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Reining in Google
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· Score: 0
The thing that doesn't make sense to me is why there is all this talk about property rights all the time, and no talk about usefulness. Let's face it, the days of old for book publishing are or should be nearing their end in the same way the days of old for the music industry are. I personally find an indexed text of books more useful than having to search through books by hand or using blanket descriptions, many of which are misleading. Nobody ever looks at the evolution of technology for the evolution's sake. Instead they worry about making money before the chance for profit even exists. This is innovation people and in the end the money always works itself out. Google should probably pay a per-book fee in order to offer something in return, but it still remains that a digital catalog of the old paper books is a goal worth achieving. Instead of working against Google's idea, which in my opinion should be a common goal, they should get down to the brass tacks of what they need to make this work for all parties involved.
Why does this information need logging? I'm getting quickly tired of that "consumer research" line as an excuse to spy on users. If you want research and statistics from your consumers, try asking them for christ's sake...
Slashdot Mirror
Digital is great because of a few of its attributes:
Now what else does this list encompass... Oh that's right, the exact opposite of what you want from voting results!
Otherwise known as their business strategy. Every one of the markets they've entered into was already covered by usually superior products. Once they formed a monopoly with Windows, they've used it to stretch their arms into every market available slowly but surely.
Netscape was fine as a browser, IE came in sporting a default Windows install and blew it out of the water competition wise.
MS didn't even really have a modern day media player until a few years ago. Now pretty much everyone that knows little-to-nothing about computers just runs media player and nothing else.
MS didn't have a line of PDAs until Palmpilots became big.
MS didn't touch on a lot of markets and nobody seemed to notice.
What happens is this: MS waits for a market to show worth and expand. Then it comes into the market with a pretty much sub-standard service/product that always contains more compatibility with Windows or more integration because they control Windows. Everyone buys the new versions of Windows and doesn't even know the service exists, until MS puts it in their face with the OS.
I'm just surprised MSN hasn't taken all of the IM market (and kind of glad, but AIM is kind of a POS too).
So just the fact that they enter a market late is meaningless. They can squash the competition with their monopoly. And in this case, they are teaming up with MTV who has a monopoly over most of the youth as far as TV programming. Unless there's something else I'm not seeing, this is a battle MS can easily win.
As someone who designed webpages before, I know that the state of the art isn't in fact frozen. The truth is that you could design a website to easily scale back based on what the user is using. And if (and it is) more featureful (is that a word?) to use an alternative browser, you could include a link like "download firefox to get the most out of this site" the same way MTV tries to force you to download IE (as if you don't already have it). Web site designers are simply too lazy to implement this kind of thing. It's a bit frustrating, I'll admit, but it's fair from impossible.
As far as the Windows monopoly is, let's face it, there is no alternative product for quite a few reasons. Apple has okay mainstream OS's but you have to be an Apple style individual, Apple has basically packaged their OS with their hardware and their mentality. It takes a unique individual to buy into all three at the same time and most companies that don't have an explicit need to do so aren't going to, it's simply not viable.
Linux could be an alternative, it has everything going for it, it's free, it's open source and it's pretty secure. But you have to remember that in order to get things done, things must work. The Linux community is too divided between different distributions or even different GUIs to provide a united front like MS does with Windows or even Apple does to a better extent with their line. If there existed a Windows style GUI without all the bugs, I'm sure people would flock to it. But *nix has problems with support, and Apple simply has problems with its strategies. The average consumer is therefore not presented with a viable alternative. Windows is a monopoly because you haven't introduced a proper product yet. And if some company/development team finally does come up with such a product I'm sure the market will break wide open. The OS always dictates what kind of applications a person runs, can we face that fact? If you are an Apple user, chances are you are using a certain suite of apps, if you are a Windows user, chances are you are using Microsoft crap. If you really have a problem with Microsoft's monopoly, then you should unite to form a reasonable OS that does what Windows does, and then maybe you will stand a chance on everything else, and people will complain about what you bundle with your OS.
Besides, I bet people like Dell would prefer MS anyway, because then they can offer anti-spyware packages and upgrades when people only got spyware because their browser sucked to begin with. There is nothing more fun to a computer vendor than to sell a computer novice superfluous crap.
People have the ability to decide for themselves what they want to use on the computer, the fact that they aren't aware of this ability just shows how disgustingly uneducated the populace is, and further illustrates that if you aren't going to educate yourself about technology then you probably deserve what you get.
I also don't understand why people, outside perhaps the tech support industry, get irritated by MS at all. Nowadays they have plenty of competition for the aware user. I use firefox almost exclusively and does it really matter how many other people use my same browser? Other than a couple pages might be messed up when you visit em? Not really.
Firefox and other companies also stink at ad campaigns and making people aware of their superior product. I think when we start to see Firefox commercials, particularly funny ones talking about maybe spyware and such, we'll start to see a shift in numbers.
For a fat lady it could write out: How do you even wipe your ass? Can you even locate your asshole?
This is the argument I'm talking about. I'm saying that they are at least partially of their own merits. IE always came bundled with Windows, but Netscape came installed too. When IE surpassed Netscape (which I believe it did before the advent of spyware and the exposure of all of its security holes), Netscape no longer needed to be packaged. Which makes sense not only from a monopolistic point of view, but also because it costed the makers of such computers to put out less money. Netscape was a purchase product and MSIE simply came with Windows.
And besides that point there's this one: If users who don't know anything about computers manage to download and install all kinds of other garbage, you'd think that if they wanted to, they would be able to download competing products. Are you saying that on a standard MS windows install you should have no browser? That is hardly an alternative. No media player? MS applications to me at least allow a gateway with which I can get the alternatives.
And here's another point, if the user doesn't even know what program they are using then does it really matter to them which program it is anyway? The target audience for software these days I believe should incorporate the average user but target the high end user. Because as people get more and more tech savvy it will no longer go on what program was packaged with their Gateway, but what program is the most useful.
Not true. Let's face it, generic soda is just as good as Coke or Pepsi, but people buy Coke and Pepsi in mass amounts compared to these products. Some of MS's advantage is its name recognition. People outside of the software community know who MS is, and for whatever reason, they trust it as a decent name in software. Or at least "the accepted" name in software. A lot of people don't move to firefox (my dad for example) simply because they don't want some other bizarre browser they haven't heard of. I think this irritates people like you because usefulness and innovation doesn't necessarily breed popularity in the software world. People like me, however, are used to this sad trend. Music, movies, and even videogames all follow this same trend. Why should software be any different? The "good enough" mentality doesn't just pertain to software, it's everywhere and it's a function of the general populace being uninformed and loyal to brands.
My point is that nobody cares that MS bundles some things, but yet gets out of joint about others. As long as the MS product is so inferior it doesn't capture any percentage of the market, nobody notices or cares. Then as soon as the bundled application gets a bit better and takes off, everyone gets irritated.
MS's downfall is that they've become such a huge organization with so many tentacles that they cannot keep up with all the changes in their product lines. Therefore there are security holes, lack of features, etc. But as people get more and more irritated with these things, they will move to other companies. My sister got spyware so often from simply browsing that she was convinced to switch to firefox. All it takes is for the market to change, and for MS not to keep up with it and they'll go under. The people made MS what it is, only the people can stop it from chewing up every possible market.
There's plenty of calculator programs on the market, MS's calculator simply doesn't compete with the high-end functionality of something like say, Mathematica. There is a media player market now, but years before nobody was concerned when media player was a little piece of software that didn't include skins and such. IE was almost always bundled with Windows, IE didn't become a problem until it had most of the features that Netscape did. I think a lot of times people are just afraid that people will use the MS product because there's not much difference between that and the competition to the average user. If instead, people innovated and created products that address concerns that MS's products do not, and consistently did so, then they wouldn't have so much to whine and take legal action on.
And I'm not confusing legal action with whining, because I believe they are extensions of the same thing. MS has provided a platform in which you can easily download a different browser, a different media player, etc. The fact that most people don't is simply telling the competition that the average user sees no advantage over running your software instead of the stuff that they have already without expending any effort. If there was a big enough difference, people would go out of their way to provide business to the better product. The increasing popularity of firefox is a testament to this statement.
But no one complains as long as the product is crummy. When the product is a real competitor, then they complain.
Nobody complains about calculator being bundled with windows, or notepad, or word. But technically these things are unfairly competing too.
This is where this argument has always fallen on its face for me. People only get out of joint at things that are decent products, or at least viewed as decent products.
For example, Microsoft Windows 95 came with an early version of IE bundled with it that was a piece of junk. Then when they made IE3 and IE4 and those came bundled, everyone was all upset about it.
Nobody cared when media player came bundled until it became like every other media player and packed in stupid skins and such. Now since it's basically the same as the rest of the media players, it's a problem that it's bundled. I don't understand why it's okay for Microsoft to bundle an inferior product, but not okay for them to bundle one that is just like the competition in the marketplace.
I think most of the problem with the propagation of viruses is the way windows works. I mean, yes, windows gives you little "this could be a virus if you open it" lectures all the time, but most people ignore them because these things pop up whether the file is a jpeg or an exe anyway. Microsoft needs to put something in Windows that will warn you before executing a new executable. Since they are already tracking your commonly used programs, I don't think it would be too much of a jump to warn before running a new one. Or put the warning on all executables. And stop with the default extension hiding. This stuff doesn't work with me because .jpg.exe doesn't look like .jpg cuz I turn the extensions on.
I thought college is supposed to be composed of free-thinkers. That's quite a nice way to teach your students, have a class on freedom of speech and then proceed to take it away from the student body. I don't know why a school would go after such widespread bad press, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to go to this school because they crack down on bloggers. "Just what I always wanted in college, ma, less freedom!" Legally they can do what they want I'm sure, but seems like a dumb stance to take from any angle, especially once the media gets involved.
If so that was a stupid decision, because the overall drive of the marketplace is to cram more and more features into portable phones and having a cell phone with Apple's ITunes on it becoming popular would've done nothing except help the company's interests. I hardly believe that they would pull a producers with the cell phone industry. Many people are against combo devices and I know why. It's simply because often combo devices are less than the sum of their parts. They usually are badly constructed and designed and have less features than the devices they are replacing. However, with the right device I think a phone with everything on it could be a great idea. I mean, we all have our cell phones on us nearly all the time. However, I seldom remember to bring my camera even for a somewhat big event to take pictures. Sometimes I try to do a photo with my camera phone but I don't often bother because the camera is poor quality and there's no real way to transfer the pictures into any useable format. But does that mean camera phones are a bad idea? No, it simply means that they haven't made the right camera phone yet. Also, often I'll be out of the house and realize that I'm suddenly in a situation where I really could've used my mp3 player, but I forgot to take it with me. Now if my cell phone also could sub out as a decent mp3 player (meaning, something better than the ROKR, this would be enough for me given those situations. Since you already have your cell phone on you anyway, why not? I think if a company came along and was to actually integrate all of these components together in a way that was superior to the competition, they'd watch their stock explode. The market is there, but the products are poorly designed.
Why doesn't Adobe work on providing OCR in its format? How much better would PDFs be if there was a simple way to convert them into a much better, indexable, text form instead of relying on giant images most of the time. Now I must admit that some of these flaws are being taken care of. As digital document creation gets more popular, many files are starting to have digital origins and contain real, selectable text. However, the fact remains that there is a large volume of scanned media being put into PDFs with no transition whatsoever, resulting in giant, unsearchable images floating around under the name of "document" like it has any form of digital foundation. OCR has taken leaps forward in recent years and I think that if Adobe wanted to, they could actually incorporate this type of thing into Acrobat, making it easier to go from crusty pages to beautiful digital documents. However, Adobe seems as Microsoft is to be very sparse on innovation due to lack of competition. I personally would welcome anyone to take on PDF as a file format, as I feel it's been due for a makeover for a long time.
This is the type of new-age thought that keeps 3rd world countries in the back of the class. Do they seriously think that the first thing a poor country with a starving populace and AIDs epidemic needs: a 100-dollar, 3rd rate, wind-up toy computer?
I agree for the most part. I thought that perhaps the purpose of the tool was to find something you had based on a line that was in a word document for example, but I could be wrong. Look, people, if you seriously can't find your own crap you definitely need a better organizational system on your computer. Your own desktop shouldn't be as scattered as the Internet is and therefore the need to search is minimal IMO.
The cat is out of the bag and they hate it. DRMs are crackable, anything digital is pretty much breakable into a free format that can be easily distributed and I don't understand why they waste their time trying to battle hackers many of which are smarter, more resourceful and have more time and dedication towards their goal. Someone cracked region encoding with one line of Perl code, which begs the question, why have region encoding to begin with? Why present the already righteous feeling hackers with a sense of purpose or need? I say every CD should come with a copy of the CD in high-quality MP3 format on the disc. I don't understand why corporations want us to keep using an outdated technology (CDs for audio) when an already far superior technique exists. Do what ITunes did and charge stupid...
The answer is simple, try to get as much support for hardware as Windows has. I would consider myself at least a "power user" and I have yet to even touch Linux because I don't wanna have to look through a checklist everytime I buy hardware. I went through that crap years ago with windows 95 and I'm not about to go back when I can, alternatively, simply plug in my device on WinXP and it will work flawelessly after I install some drivers from a disk usually included with the device. If the Open Source community wants to get serious about open source OSes, they need to evaluate their relationship with hardware manufacturers.
I find that if I am in the mood to work hard on something that bodily impulses irritate me in general and I try as hard as possible to ignore them. I don't go to sleep until way too late, I barely eat anything unless I'm stumped and sometimes I'll try to push back taking a leak because I think I finally found the solution to a problem. Programming inspires me a little too much though, your mileage may vary.
When it really comes down to it, what the hell are we really arguing over here? GTA: San Andreas and the "Hot Coffee" right? Well, you know what, changing a game's rating from Mature to Adult Only might have detered a few sales, sure. But does anyone on earth think there is such a big difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old. It makes no sense to me at all. First of all, you are talking about one year of age difference and only a very subtle change in content difference. Say we had made San Andreas adult-only, okay, what the hell difference in society would that have made at all? Doesn't matter how old these kids are the parents will usually buy them the games and let them play them anyway. So why don't you just get at the real target? As far as Columbine goes, both people involved were old enough to buy Doom, a very unrealistic game about killing demons that is no more graphic than any PG-13 "let's kill all the aliens" movie. I'm tired of weak arguments always coming to the forefront of the media.
The point remains, however, that the setting of user-privileges shouldn't have anything to do in particular with your machine's security. Everyone's saying Sony is the big bad wolf in this, which they are, but the fact remains that the OS should alert you before allowing certain actions to take place without your consent or knowledge. Everyone should be able to run as an administrator on their own computer. They are the administrator, it's their computer. I just think the sting is that much worse knowing first of all, which we pretty much already knew that our OS is that easily compromised without our knowledge, and secondly that this type of backdoor operation is coming from a more reputable source than in the past. I'd expect this from some third rate software development company that's developing some weird version of gnutella, but to get it from a Sony music CD is just all that more frightening. Overall, however, the OS should prevent stuff like this from happening (and yes, from default). You shouldn't have to tinker around in settings for hours in order to figure out how to make your OS not behave like a retarded schoolchild being lured into a van for candy. Just another reason not to buy stuff, IMO.
The thing that doesn't make sense to me is why there is all this talk about property rights all the time, and no talk about usefulness. Let's face it, the days of old for book publishing are or should be nearing their end in the same way the days of old for the music industry are. I personally find an indexed text of books more useful than having to search through books by hand or using blanket descriptions, many of which are misleading. Nobody ever looks at the evolution of technology for the evolution's sake. Instead they worry about making money before the chance for profit even exists. This is innovation people and in the end the money always works itself out. Google should probably pay a per-book fee in order to offer something in return, but it still remains that a digital catalog of the old paper books is a goal worth achieving. Instead of working against Google's idea, which in my opinion should be a common goal, they should get down to the brass tacks of what they need to make this work for all parties involved.
Why does this information need logging? I'm getting quickly tired of that "consumer research" line as an excuse to spy on users. If you want research and statistics from your consumers, try asking them for christ's sake...