Agreed. It's a simplification. FWIW, VAT on Guitars in the UK is 17.5% and the import tariff is 3.7%*. Even assuming that Sweetwater is selling at no margin a GBP 950 guitar becomes GBP 985.15 after duty, and the VAT component on 1700 is 253.19 (base price of 1446.81). So the mark up is only 1446.81 - 985.15 = GBP 461.66 = $904.85.
For moving a bit of wood from one side of the world to the other.
The local distributors often wave their hands about and blame tariffs and tax, but their rake off is higher than simple conversion into a high tax regime.
(BTW, the same guitar in Sweden is $4,723.96, so I suppose I should count myself lucky)
* When you import something personally you pay both tariff and VAT to the customs man
Don't even start me on US products and the currency rate fiddle. The only US-made product worth owning is an electric guitar* (Macs would count if they were *made* in the US).
A Gibson ES-335 Dot from Streetwater in the US is $1900 = GBP 950
A Gibson ES-335 Dot from Soundslive in the UK is GBP 1700 = $3400
A profit to the distributor of $1500 for moving a lump of wood from one place to another
* I might make an exception for Zvex effects pedals and the Moog Little Phatty.
Actually, lentils are dried in sensible countries using the traditional air-drying method. They might freeze-dry them in the US, but the lentils I buy in the UK are dried by passing warm dry air over the wet legumes.
Flour is scarcely empty carbohydrate, given that the bleaching is intended to raise the level of gluten in the flour and gluten is a protein. And which bleaching are you concerned about? The chemical variety (which is bad) or the slower air based process?
Given that I've just pointed out two staple foods that are actually produced by taking a food product and *exposing* it to the air I think your argument is already holed and taking on water. But lets look at some other common foodstuffs:
Most meat is actually prepared by allowing it to hang (in the open air). You'd find unhung beef, for example, too tough to eat. In some cases (such as high quality ham) the meat is hung for so long it desiccates and becomes cured, meaning it can be stored in the open air without refridgeration (NB, the best way to store such cured meat is in a cool place covered in a cloth so that the air can still get to it, but flies can't). The same is true of cheese.
Some foodstuffs require exposure to the air to complete their maturation: notably bananas and apples. You'll also ruin a good camembert by sticking it in a fridge or in a sealed container: that's why the fancy ones come in wooden containers. To keep the bacteria alive. It'll be edible, but it'll just taste like soft plastic.
Some foodstuffs are actively harmed by sealing away from the air: mushrooms stay fresh longer of they are allowed access to the air. Stick a mushroom in a sealed container and it'll liquefy. (The reason that mushrooms sold in supermarket-style plastic wrap don't liquefy is that they are not in contact with the air: the gas in the container is nitrogen).
yes, because this guy is guaranteed to bring their enterprise software strategy to its knees. he's a technological obfuscator and goldbricker of the highest order. websphere is horrible horrible horrible, especially at any layer of its archirtecture where it actually has anything to do with the web, SOA is just a fancy consultant-fee-boosting acronym describing the kind of good practise the rest of us have been doing for years, except now the management consultants can sell us it back at twice the price.
well done microsoft, you have finally provided the evidence that you genuinely know about nothing beyond toy disk operating systems and corporate extortion.
>> A base 4 digit contains two bits of information, not four. 00, 01, 10, 11.
True, true, I was muddling my bases.
>> That's wrong too. You can't just multiply by the count; each one contains a unique set of 3 billion bits which is always a different subset of the same 6 billion bits, chopped up into contiguous chunks. Unless you want to count the same information more than once if it appears in multiple places. But it's not as if each one is from a different guy.
I left that out in the interests of low comedy, along with a number of other considerations such as the fact that the DNA in a single sperm is smaller than the total DNA in a non gamete cell because it's only half the DNA (haploid) and is missing the mitochondrial DNA.
In which case you have an extremely low sperm count. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs which (as it's base 4) comes to about 4*(3*10^9)=12billion bits and there are roughly 280 million tadpoles in each puddle of love so actually your total data output is about 3,360,000,000,000,000,000 bits or 2.9 exabytes of data.
The inspectors were later withdrawn due to non-cooperation, and also because they were at risk from the Desert Fox bombing campaign, which was designed to force Saddam to allow the inspectors into the buildings they had been barred from.
And Saddam did not violate the ceasefire, the terms of the ceasefire simply read 'get out of Kuwait and don't come back, and give us a list of your minefields while you're at it'. The anti-WMD UN resolutions actually predate Desert Storm (see 612), and it's those Saddam violated by refusing to cooperate with UNSCOM.
Unfortunately, Clinton failed to act Except by bombing Baghdad.
and, after that, most people forgot about the implications for kicking the UN inspectors out because people have a short memory.
People do have such memories don't they? They forget the US invaded Iraq in Desert Storm, they forget the UN inspectors were not kicked out, they forget what it was that Hussein was supposed to have done wrong
If Japan had begun building its military back up directly after the end of WWII, should the US have begun bombing Tokyo again?
And sadly there's no real evidence that the Iraqis were building their military up, just failing to get rid of the old one in sufficiently transparent a manner. Why? Possibly because Saddam was stuck trying to convince his very pissed off neighbours to the east and south that he was still a big bad dog.
Straw man, blown down. Don't confuse a lack of democracy and human rights abuses with "behaving like a rogue nation" internationally. The US has democracy and sort of has a human rights framework (suspension of habeas corpus making a big dent in that) but *internationally* it is the biggest rogue of all.
Let's get this straight: Iran and North Korea are "rogue nations" in that they refuse to obey the will of the international community over their weapons programs. The US and the UK are rogue nations in that they invade other countries without a valid pretext and use weapons of mass destruction in pursuit of their aims.
In the 27 years since the Iranian revolution Iran has invaded precisely 0 countries. The US has invaded four, two of which are in a worse state than before the invasion (death toll in Iraq, opium production and return of the warlords in Afghanistan), one (Kosovo) is just about functional and one (Grenada) really doesn't count.
Iran has provided arms and assistance to terrorists in the shape of Hamas and Hezbollah. The US has provided arms and assistance to terrorists in the shape of the Contras, the anti-Castro-ists (the president's brother pardoned a Cuban terrorist who killed 73 people in a plane bombing only the other year) and the anti-Chavez movement.
So please don't come holier than thou on the rest of us.
It all depends on who you regard as "rogue nations running around doing anything they want". From where I'm sat, that description looks more like Bush's USA than Iran.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps the US would do better at R&D if it stopped passing off other people's inventions as its own:
The US developed the first reel-to-reel video recorder but the VCR was a Philips invention (Dutch) building on a cassette recorder developed by Sony (Japan).
As for the computer, the first stored program computer was German and the first commercial computer was British.
Swan did patent the light bulb before Edison. Edison went into partnership with Swan in the UK to avoid a patent battle (which he would have lost). See:
What seems surprising now is that Swan did not exploit his priority in the US. I don't have the facts to hand (I'll actually go and find a book) but I suspect that he simply didn't have time to file a US patent. Which is much the same situation as the original Wheatstone/Morse telegraph patents.
It's amazing that over 100 years later we still haven't solved this fundamental weakness of the patent system: in awarding the victor of a patent race all the spoils it hinders R&D as much as it helps.
(US readers butt out, as you can pass on either side) What are you doing in the righthand lane to begin with? You're supposed to be in the lefthand lane at all times unless overtaking. Bizarrely the only country I've been to that obeys the overtake-then-pull-back-in rule is France. On autoroutes it's almost suspiciously well-mannered. And if you think UK tailgating is bad - try Germany. I have very nearly given up on atheism in the back of German taxis. 10 feet behind the vehicle in front at 150kph, where the vehicle in front is a truck so long its rear axles are still paying tolls in Belgium, is not fun.
Having said that you're actually doing exactly the right thing by slowing down. Slowing down gently to increase the space in front is the correct response to tailgating as it gives you more time to react on behalf of the cretin behind. And then some twunt pulls into your carefully created safety space. On a motorbike being tailgated is much more exciting as I have much less mass to decelerate so can brake harder and quicker than any cage can (excepting porsches, must be some magical property of the red paint).
(Plus which obviously being a biker I have supernatural reactions and the right to use the entire road surface up to and including the tops of cars.)
It takes Milan 892 words to get to his fundamental point: that that Web Browsers are virtual machines, but.Net is better. Most of the 892 words could be described as unnecessary and a sizeable minority are definitely purple, but no matter, at least we've found a point to the article. (The rest of tha rtiocle is 1257 words - a 40% intro! My old editor would have fired him on the spot)
What follows the intro is the creaking sound of an analogy being stretched to catastrophic failure. To save anyone the bother here's the gist:
* HTML and C++ are programming languages and they can run in virtual machines called (respectively) web browsers and.Net. Microsoft more or less owns C++ and Google more or less owns HTML (sic).
* People will install HTML applications (bear with me here, I'm only precis-ing) because you can uninstall them easily and they have a limited impact on the host machine. C++ applications are prone to security holes.
* Microsoft has figured out how to solve the security problem and make better applicatiosn through C++ and their technology is teh krieg.
* But there's another company that's got some Java technology and they're cool, but I'm going to save that tile next week (presumably because I'm being paid by the word).
Now, obviously Mr Milan is a very imaginative man, because even if we are to allow his analogy (there's stuff about weather and railroad tracks as well, but I left those out) his analysis strains credulity. Especially given that he's ignored completely the actual technologies that make his analysis work: in the Web browser's case Javascript and in Microsoft's case C# & the CLI.
Extra executive summary for those that can't bothered to read the read: interesting, but barking.
As a Dane (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=M%C3%B8 lleh%C3%B8j&oldid=46429241) I'm sure Lomborg is aware of the dangers of a rising water level.
If I don't want to use the current WebKit, I can compile another one If I don't want to use the current KHTML implementation I can compile another one If I don't like what GtkHTML does I can install a different RPM If I don't like what MSIE.DLL does I can...er...um...use Firefox!
Most people here understand the software engineering, it's the level of control the user has over the integration thats the issue.
"Microsoft is not a monopoly. A monopoly is, from Oxford Dictionary, a company or group having exclusive control over a commodity or service. Microsoft does not have exclusive control at all. They have very significant control, but anyone can and many have come out with a competing product. Not all that many people are looking for one, but they can and do exist."
The US government does not use the Oxford Dictionary as a basis for law (I presume you mean the concise, the OED contains all the flavours of the word) and the US government says Microsoft is a monopoly. Why they even got a judge to agree with them: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
I refer you to paragraph 33. "Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
I'm fully aware of the joys of shared code. I'm also aware of the gotchas that shared code causes: from failed dependencies to this kind of absurd "well you can't have this version of the app until you buy a new OS license" (or an old version, which is what TFA says).
You seem to have missed the reference to the Microsoft antitrust suit that was doing so well until the chimp came to power. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_S tates_v._Microsoft&oldid=91340321 The US govt wanted Microsoft to unbundle IE *in exactly the way I describe* - there's nothing magical about Internet Explorer the application; there's nothing magical about msie.dll that requires a *whole new OS install* to support a different version.
As to "every other platform (now) has an equivalent to IE" - that's only partly true. "Every" platform, which I presume you mean to be the popular platforms of Mac and Linux desktop managers such as Gnome and KDE, certainly have OS-level HTML renderers, but they're all open source so if I want to build a previous version I can. I can even give my lib/app a different name from the built in one and *run them at the same time on the same machine without incurring an additional license fee* which is the point you seem to have missed. Until Microsoft came up with this generous over you had to pay twice for something that "every other platform" gives for free.
I was making a hyper-oblique reference to the antitrust suit. Which I think is still legit, btw.
There's nothing to stop Microsoft providing a rendering engine for developers' use without tying the browser to the OS. The whole idea that you have to pay for two OS licenses (or had to, given the point of the story) just to use two different web browsers seems upside down.
Would be for the browser in Windows to be self-contained enough to run as an application. Then you could have multiple versions because they wouldn't all be reliant on things like msie.dll in the OS layer.
Microsoft could easily achieve that by unbundling the web browser from the OS.
>>Didn't a Microsoft employee come up with xml from sgml?
You're thinking of Jean Paoli. Not quite. Paoli was made third editor of the XML spec after Tim Bray started working for Netscape (this being the days when these things mattered). Microsoft has always had an active role in W3C working groups (look at the list of names on the CSS spec, for example) but that's not the same as coming up with the ideas in the first place.
>>Microsoft did bring GUIs to PC users
Depends on a> your definition of PC and b> your definition of GUI. GEM was first on Intel machines. Mac OS first on, well Macs (people used to call any computer you could own yourself a PC, not just IBM compatibles (which we used to call...IBM Compatibles)), and both ideas were pinched from Xerox PARC.
>>Then again I wanted a Mac once I got to the store. Instead I got a Packard Bell!
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. It's a simplification. FWIW, VAT on Guitars in the UK is 17.5% and the import tariff is 3.7%*. Even assuming that Sweetwater is selling at no margin a GBP 950 guitar becomes GBP 985.15 after duty, and the VAT component on 1700 is 253.19 (base price of 1446.81). So the mark up is only 1446.81 - 985.15 = GBP 461.66 = $904.85.
For moving a bit of wood from one side of the world to the other.
The local distributors often wave their hands about and blame tariffs and tax, but their rake off is higher than simple conversion into a high tax regime.
(BTW, the same guitar in Sweden is $4,723.96, so I suppose I should count myself lucky)
* When you import something personally you pay both tariff and VAT to the customs man
Don't even start me on US products and the currency rate fiddle. The only US-made product worth owning is an electric guitar* (Macs would count if they were *made* in the US).
A Gibson ES-335 Dot from Streetwater in the US is $1900 = GBP 950
A Gibson ES-335 Dot from Soundslive in the UK is GBP 1700 = $3400
A profit to the distributor of $1500 for moving a lump of wood from one place to another
* I might make an exception for Zvex effects pedals and the Moog Little Phatty.
Actually, lentils are dried in sensible countries using the traditional air-drying method. They might freeze-dry them in the US, but the lentils I buy in the UK are dried by passing warm dry air over the wet legumes.
Flour is scarcely empty carbohydrate, given that the bleaching is intended to raise the level of gluten in the flour and gluten is a protein. And which bleaching are you concerned about? The chemical variety (which is bad) or the slower air based process?
Given that I've just pointed out two staple foods that are actually produced by taking a food product and *exposing* it to the air I think your argument is already holed and taking on water. But lets look at some other common foodstuffs:
Most meat is actually prepared by allowing it to hang (in the open air). You'd find unhung beef, for example, too tough to eat. In some cases (such as high quality ham) the meat is hung for so long it desiccates and becomes cured, meaning it can be stored in the open air without refridgeration (NB, the best way to store such cured meat is in a cool place covered in a cloth so that the air can still get to it, but flies can't). The same is true of cheese.
Some foodstuffs require exposure to the air to complete their maturation: notably bananas and apples. You'll also ruin a good camembert by sticking it in a fridge or in a sealed container: that's why the fancy ones come in wooden containers. To keep the bacteria alive. It'll be edible, but it'll just taste like soft plastic.
Some foodstuffs are actively harmed by sealing away from the air: mushrooms stay fresh longer of they are allowed access to the air. Stick a mushroom in a sealed container and it'll liquefy. (The reason that mushrooms sold in supermarket-style plastic wrap don't liquefy is that they are not in contact with the air: the gas in the container is nitrogen).
Like apples? Carrots? Potatoes? Tomatoes? Would you liek to think that rule of thumb through and then repost?
yes, because this guy is guaranteed to bring their enterprise software strategy to its knees. he's a technological obfuscator and goldbricker of the highest order. websphere is horrible horrible horrible, especially at any layer of its archirtecture where it actually has anything to do with the web, SOA is just a fancy consultant-fee-boosting acronym describing the kind of good practise the rest of us have been doing for years, except now the management consultants can sell us it back at twice the price.
well done microsoft, you have finally provided the evidence that you genuinely know about nothing beyond toy disk operating systems and corporate extortion.
>> A base 4 digit contains two bits of information, not four. 00, 01, 10, 11.
True, true, I was muddling my bases.
>> That's wrong too. You can't just multiply by the count; each one contains a unique set of 3 billion bits which is always a different subset of the same 6 billion bits, chopped up into contiguous chunks. Unless you want to count the same information more than once if it appears in multiple places. But it's not as if each one is from a different guy.
I left that out in the interests of low comedy, along with a number of other considerations such as the fact that the DNA in a single sperm is smaller than the total DNA in a non gamete cell because it's only half the DNA (haploid) and is missing the mitochondrial DNA.
In which case you have an extremely low sperm count. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs which (as it's base 4) comes to about 4*(3*10^9)=12billion bits and there are roughly 280 million tadpoles in each puddle of love so actually your total data output is about 3,360,000,000,000,000,000 bits or 2.9 exabytes of data.
How's your map reading? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4 /Operation_Desert_Storm.jpg
I make US forces about 200 miles into Iraq. You?
The first Gulf War ended with a cease fire (that Hussein never signed but it served as a provisional end to the war);Saddam Hussein didn't attend the ceasefire ceremony, but his military commanders did sign the ceasefire. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/ 02/iraq_events/html/ceasefire.stm
when Hussein kicked the UN inspectors out of the country, he violated the cease fire and therefore aggressions should have resumed.Once again, Saddam did not kick the inspectors out. He tried to kick the US inspectors out (and succeeded for about six weeks in 1997). http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/Chronology/chronolo gyframe.htm
The inspectors were later withdrawn due to non-cooperation, and also because they were at risk from the Desert Fox bombing campaign, which was designed to force Saddam to allow the inspectors into the buildings they had been barred from.
And Saddam did not violate the ceasefire, the terms of the ceasefire simply read 'get out of Kuwait and don't come back, and give us a list of your minefields while you're at it'. The anti-WMD UN resolutions actually predate Desert Storm (see 612), and it's those Saddam violated by refusing to cooperate with UNSCOM.
Unfortunately, Clinton failed to act Except by bombing Baghdad. and, after that, most people forgot about the implications for kicking the UN inspectors out because people have a short memory.People do have such memories don't they? They forget the US invaded Iraq in Desert Storm, they forget the UN inspectors were not kicked out, they forget what it was that Hussein was supposed to have done wrong
If Japan had begun building its military back up directly after the end of WWII, should the US have begun bombing Tokyo again?And sadly there's no real evidence that the Iraqis were building their military up, just failing to get rid of the old one in sufficiently transparent a manner. Why? Possibly because Saddam was stuck trying to convince his very pissed off neighbours to the east and south that he was still a big bad dog.
Straw man, blown down. Don't confuse a lack of democracy and human rights abuses with "behaving like a rogue nation" internationally. The US has democracy and sort of has a human rights framework (suspension of habeas corpus making a big dent in that) but *internationally* it is the biggest rogue of all.
Let's get this straight: Iran and North Korea are "rogue nations" in that they refuse to obey the will of the international community over their weapons programs. The US and the UK are rogue nations in that they invade other countries without a valid pretext and use weapons of mass destruction in pursuit of their aims.
In the 27 years since the Iranian revolution Iran has invaded precisely 0 countries. The US has invaded four, two of which are in a worse state than before the invasion (death toll in Iraq, opium production and return of the warlords in Afghanistan), one (Kosovo) is just about functional and one (Grenada) really doesn't count.
Iran has provided arms and assistance to terrorists in the shape of Hamas and Hezbollah. The US has provided arms and assistance to terrorists in the shape of the Contras, the anti-Castro-ists (the president's brother pardoned a Cuban terrorist who killed 73 people in a plane bombing only the other year) and the anti-Chavez movement.
So please don't come holier than thou on the rest of us.
You haven't.
It all depends on who you regard as "rogue nations running around doing anything they want". From where I'm sat, that description looks more like Bush's USA than Iran.
Perhaps the US would do better at R&D if it stopped passing off other people's inventions as its own:
The US developed the first reel-to-reel video recorder but the VCR was a Philips invention (Dutch) building on a cassette recorder developed by Sony (Japan).
As for the computer, the first stored program computer was German and the first commercial computer was British.
Given that his patent was invalidated by the US Patent Office in 1883, it was indeed a wise decision not to waste money on lawyers.
Swan did patent the light bulb before Edison. Edison went into partnership with Swan in the UK to avoid a patent battle (which he would have lost). See:
h tm
http://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/bios/swan.
What seems surprising now is that Swan did not exploit his priority in the US. I don't have the facts to hand (I'll actually go and find a book) but I suspect that he simply didn't have time to file a US patent. Which is much the same situation as the original Wheatstone/Morse telegraph patents.
It's amazing that over 100 years later we still haven't solved this fundamental weakness of the patent system: in awarding the victor of a patent race all the spoils it hinders R&D as much as it helps.
Didn't you read my post? We're all ex AMA racers with surgically enhanced nervous systems
(US readers butt out, as you can pass on either side) What are you doing in the righthand lane to begin with? You're supposed to be in the lefthand lane at all times unless overtaking. Bizarrely the only country I've been to that obeys the overtake-then-pull-back-in rule is France. On autoroutes it's almost suspiciously well-mannered. And if you think UK tailgating is bad - try Germany. I have very nearly given up on atheism in the back of German taxis. 10 feet behind the vehicle in front at 150kph, where the vehicle in front is a truck so long its rear axles are still paying tolls in Belgium, is not fun.
Having said that you're actually doing exactly the right thing by slowing down. Slowing down gently to increase the space in front is the correct response to tailgating as it gives you more time to react on behalf of the cretin behind. And then some twunt pulls into your carefully created safety space. On a motorbike being tailgated is much more exciting as I have much less mass to decelerate so can brake harder and quicker than any cage can (excepting porsches, must be some magical property of the red paint).
(Plus which obviously being a biker I have supernatural reactions and the right to use the entire road surface up to and including the tops of cars.)
Those entitities really confused the Slash parser: here it is as html: The highest point in Denmark
It takes Milan 892 words to get to his fundamental point: that that Web Browsers are virtual machines, but .Net is better. Most of the 892 words could be described as unnecessary and a sizeable minority are definitely purple, but no matter, at least we've found a point to the article. (The rest of tha rtiocle is 1257 words - a 40% intro! My old editor would have fired him on the spot)
.Net. Microsoft more or less owns C++ and Google more or less owns HTML (sic).
What follows the intro is the creaking sound of an analogy being stretched to catastrophic failure. To save anyone the bother here's the gist:
* HTML and C++ are programming languages and they can run in virtual machines called (respectively) web browsers and
* People will install HTML applications (bear with me here, I'm only precis-ing) because you can uninstall them easily and they have a limited impact on the host machine. C++ applications are prone to security holes.
* Microsoft has figured out how to solve the security problem and make better applicatiosn through C++ and their technology is teh krieg.
* But there's another company that's got some Java technology and they're cool, but I'm going to save that tile next week (presumably because I'm being paid by the word).
Now, obviously Mr Milan is a very imaginative man, because even if we are to allow his analogy (there's stuff about weather and railroad tracks as well, but I left those out) his analysis strains credulity. Especially given that he's ignored completely the actual technologies that make his analysis work: in the Web browser's case Javascript and in Microsoft's case C# & the CLI.
Extra executive summary for those that can't bothered to read the read: interesting, but barking.
As a Dane (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=M%C3%B8 lleh%C3%B8j&oldid=46429241) I'm sure Lomborg is aware of the dangers of a rising water level.
If I don't want to use the current WebKit, I can compile another one
If I don't want to use the current KHTML implementation I can compile another one
If I don't like what GtkHTML does I can install a different RPM
If I don't like what MSIE.DLL does I can...er...um...use Firefox!
Most people here understand the software engineering, it's the level of control the user has over the integration thats the issue.
"Microsoft is not a monopoly. A monopoly is, from Oxford Dictionary, a company or group having exclusive control over a commodity or service. Microsoft does not have exclusive control at all. They have very significant control, but anyone can and many have come out with a competing product. Not all that many people are looking for one, but they can and do exist."
The US government does not use the Oxford Dictionary as a basis for law (I presume you mean the concise, the OED contains all the flavours of the word) and the US government says Microsoft is a monopoly. Why they even got a judge to agree with them: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
I refer you to paragraph 33. "Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
Oh gee, looky here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/02/02 52239
I'm fully aware of the joys of shared code. I'm also aware of the gotchas that shared code causes: from failed dependencies to this kind of absurd "well you can't have this version of the app until you buy a new OS license" (or an old version, which is what TFA says).
S tates_v._Microsoft&oldid=91340321 The US govt wanted Microsoft to unbundle IE *in exactly the way I describe* - there's nothing magical about Internet Explorer the application; there's nothing magical about msie.dll that requires a *whole new OS install* to support a different version.
You seem to have missed the reference to the Microsoft antitrust suit that was doing so well until the chimp came to power. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=United_
As to "every other platform (now) has an equivalent to IE" - that's only partly true. "Every" platform, which I presume you mean to be the popular platforms of Mac and Linux desktop managers such as Gnome and KDE, certainly have OS-level HTML renderers, but they're all open source so if I want to build a previous version I can. I can even give my lib/app a different name from the built in one and *run them at the same time on the same machine without incurring an additional license fee* which is the point you seem to have missed. Until Microsoft came up with this generous over you had to pay twice for something that "every other platform" gives for free.
I was making a hyper-oblique reference to the antitrust suit. Which I think is still legit, btw.
There's nothing to stop Microsoft providing a rendering engine for developers' use without tying the browser to the OS. The whole idea that you have to pay for two OS licenses (or had to, given the point of the story) just to use two different web browsers seems upside down.
Would be for the browser in Windows to be self-contained enough to run as an application. Then you could have multiple versions because they wouldn't all be reliant on things like msie.dll in the OS layer.
Microsoft could easily achieve that by unbundling the web browser from the OS.
What, did I just say something stupid?
>>Didn't a Microsoft employee come up with xml from sgml?
You're thinking of Jean Paoli. Not quite. Paoli was made third editor of the XML spec after Tim Bray started working for Netscape (this being the days when these things mattered). Microsoft has always had an active role in W3C working groups (look at the list of names on the CSS spec, for example) but that's not the same as coming up with the ideas in the first place.
>>Microsoft did bring GUIs to PC users
Depends on a> your definition of PC and b> your definition of GUI. GEM was first on Intel machines. Mac OS first on, well Macs (people used to call any computer you could own yourself a PC, not just IBM compatibles (which we used to call...IBM Compatibles)), and both ideas were pinched from Xerox PARC.
>>Then again I wanted a Mac once I got to the store. Instead I got a Packard Bell!
Then you were doubly cursed.