Step 1) By some miracle, weasel a provision into your settlement that forces the other company to pay you some money if your biggest competitor also settles.
If you don't understand the reasons behind this, doesn't mean it's "insanity".
The story is quite logical and sensible if you read more into it.
At the time Microsoft was still beginning its entry into the gaming console market. When Immersion sued them, Microsoft's lawyers analyzed the patent and how this applies to XBox and PlayStation2.
They realized that if Immersion is persistent enough, they'll win out in such a case. But "to be persistent" in the current legal system means you gotta have lots and lots of cache to fund this persistence.
At the same time Immersion was doing quite bad financially and only had a few million dollars profits for the entire year. They needed cash badly.
So Microsoft figured: if they offer enough cash to Immersion in a settlement, Immersion will go after Sony next, which sell a lot more PS2, and hence stand to lose a lot more in such a trial.
But Microsoft has the will, power and money to not do a settlement and protract the case forever, just like they always do. And Immersion knew that as well. Immersion would run out of cash before they could complete the case and end up with empty pockets and a bankrupt company.
So, Microsoft approached them and said "we won't fight, we'll settle with you, and give you the much needed cash to go after Sony. If you fail with Sony, you keep the cash, but if you get them, you return the cash". Since Immersion would end up with a lot more cash (turns out around 120 million dollars) if it won against Sony, they accepted the deal and had fresh 27 million to proceed with their patent trolling.
Now that they got Sony, Microsoft wants its cash back, as per their settlement.
Seems everyone is in the business of making a user-friendly OS. No one has yet understood that we have tons of user-friendly OSes and that the OS is not the problem?
How about you shut up, and go do something, versus tell other people what NOT to do.
I'm a Windows user who runs Linux servers (not very good at the latter, especially without my admin), and when I saw this article advertising shallower learning curve for Windows users, I downloaded it. And I plan to evaluate it and very likely use it.
Don't kill me now - but ZFS looks like something all OS should support. With the great innovations of this file system, it just looks wrong to be confined to any given OS or a set of OS.
Now... NTFS supports some of the stuff (not all) found in ZFS, but it's proprietary, so it doesn't qualify.
Instead, this is Apple trying to create the illusion that it really is the big dangerous new browser on the block, and create the perception of market dominance and leadership. I don't think it will work, and this is likely to make Apple look foolish in the eyes of the non-default to IE market, but that's what Apple is trying to do with these silly charts and pronouncements.
Apple's marketing was always extreme, and that is their style for as long as Jobs is on top.
This achieves few things:
- The core of Mac users become even more devoted to the Apple brand (it's sort of like a cult, it doesn't matter sometimes Jobs says ridiculous things).
- The rest of the world sees Apple as arrogant, sometimes foolish, but always and always interesting nonetheless.
- Which on the other hand makes Apple a great news material, and gains it a huge media coverage.
So the bottomline: they're doing what they have to, to survive. The "reality distortion field" of Jobs isn't a myth - it's very real, and the guy's doing it to get the exact effects he gets.
Apple always tries to create its own bubble where it competes with mythical collective enemies such as "The PC", "Microsoft", "The rest of the Phones", "The rest of the browsers". To support this bubble, you need the extreme kind of marketing Jobs does, otherwise it falls a apart and Apple will have to compete in the real market like any other company.
Jobs uses bubbles in his own company as well. Many people know that he would separate his employees in "buubles" and let them "fight" each other (in their work) to full exhaustion (such was the case with Apple II and Lisa teams). The other team is the enemy, and you gotta do everything humanly possible to support your own bubble.
The title of this article is misleading "Mozilla exec claims Apple is hunting OSS browsers".
First of all, not all non-IE browsers are OSS. Opera for example, isn't.
Second, Safari is kinda OSS itself. WebKit (the Safari core) is OSS and there's a mobile version of it in other phones and Adobe uses it in their application runtime.
Third, it's not Mozilla exec claiming this, said exec just comments on *Jobs claiming it*. I mean look at the charts Jobs have shown at the WWDC. It doesn't take a lot of brains to comprehend what the two charts displayed meant.
--
Are they honestly crying in public because a competitor wants to... compete with them?
Honestly, Lili doesn't believe Safari will overtake Firefox on Windows. No one actually believes that, except Jobs himself (maybe).
I could go into lengthy and boring explanation about the whys and whats of this opinion, but I'll opt for something much simpler: Firefox is eating at Safari on its own platform, the Mac. Why are people using Gecko browsers on Mac if Safari is so perfect? And how on Earth does Mac expect to eliminate Firefox on Windows with Safari (an unapologetically Mac app sure to confuse people on Windows), when it can't eliminate it on the Mac, where Safari is bundled with the OS itself.
On Windows, currently Firefox risks being eliminated only by IE, which if it improves above certain level (and that level is NOT the Firefox level, it's much lower, since it has the benefit of being bundled) will kill Firefox just like it killed Netscape.
Lili however is just insulted by Jobs' arrogance. I love Jobs, I love the Microsoft jokes and I love Macs, but Jobs is definitely one arrogant asshole: let's be honest. And sometimes he crosses the line, and this is one of those times. Lili just uses his right to react, doesn't mean they're shaking in their boots when they see Safari on Windows.
Second you'd need to be patient for quite a few years for the clone to grow up, unless you're into children, you sick pedo.
Apparently you've not watched enough sci-fi movies, so I'll excuse your ignorance. But cloning machines have this little rotary knob on the side "age". It's right between "brains" and "boobs".
Personally, I'd rather make out with my Jessica Alba-bot.
So.. you'll need to be patient for quite a few years for the clone to grow up, unless you're into children, you sick pedo.
All kidding aside... would the FBI (or some other government or law enforcement agency) ever be able to request (wink wink) your DNA from ancestry.com? I doubt there's a 'web site/client' privilege to contend with. Is there any real expectation of privacy if you voluntarily submit it to them?
It's 2007, FBI is irrelevant. Just issue a DMCA takedown notice for your DNA and crime clues to them and they gotta comply.
If they don't, sue their asses. That'll teach them. Amateurs.
The rest is just a matter of a few million mutations scattered throughout the genome. Oh, and the bits of the genome that are proving to be very difficult to sequence.
That's like painting a DELL white and calling it "Macintosh". No candy for you.
You can't upgrade a product that doesn't yet exist. The original announcement was probably deliberately misleading so they could announce an "improvement" just before the product is made available.
The iPhone unit Steve demoed in 2006 had glass on it. In fact I'm surprised people thought iPhone had plastic - apparently from fake spec lists.
The reason could be, he didn't want to hint his competition on some of the design decisions of iPhone. Second reason - generate some more news right before launch.
I can flip through a book in front of the TV. Not so a PDF. Yes, I have a tablet PC.
Oh come on, man! You have a tablet PC, you have a PDF, and you want to read in front of your TV! Think, think!!
People really got lazy these days.
jk;)
BTW did everybody notice how Ruby's magic worn out lately? The thing was very VERY fast and intuitive to develop basic things in, but kinda hard to deploy and very slow? Funny thing, that.
That's why I've always said that in IT you're gotta be learning really fast since technology changes in days. But if you learn TOO fast, you'll learn too much "trendy" technologies that'll never really pickup in a big way, and be forgotten few months later.
Similarly, a lot of Windows users are simply familiar with what they are used to. So they're not so much as fanatical themselves, they're just highly resistant to solid logic that's often used by the Mac community.
Solid logic. I'm not sure why some people assume that if they have in their possession "solid logic" they have a license to annoy the rest of the world until it's converted.
Apple specifically, they don't run a computer business. They run a cult. People don't have anything against Apple's technology, but the reasons why the world isn't running on Macs are purely pragmatical.
Just as pragmatical as Apple's switch from proprietary card slots to PCI, from proprietary graphics card and printers to PC standards. From SCSI to IDE, and recently, from PPC to x86, the PC chip platform.
Fanboys don't see those pragmatical decisions in Windows users, they don't see them in Apple's hardware choices. They see the religion. And for them if OSX has less virus attacks and runs smoother than Windows, that's "solid logic" that the world should run on Apple.
The reasons for the current market shared are a lot more complex though. A lot more complex than a fanboy is willing to acknowledge.
Combine their need to do marketing on behalf of their adopted companies and their products with the passion to make others see things their way, and you have a powerful group of people.
I too am someone who witnessed the sad transformation of a Windows/Linux guy into a Mac fanboy. Now every little problem I have on my computer, be it slow connection, or program hang, or WHATEVER, serves as a reason that I should be constantly reminded "how much I need a Mac".
"Man, you SO need a Mac!"
"Shit, dude, you gotta get a Mac."
"Macs are sooo cool, let's find you a Mac."
Everything on a Mac is godly and I apparently and struggling to survive without that on my Windows system. Even shadows! How the heck can I work without shadows behind my windows?! Impossible.
I'm suspecting that when you sum up the total of positive and negative effects of rabid fanboys defending their limited view on the world, the picture isn't nice. I'm sure there are people who will despise Mac and Linux without ever seen them, just because of the overly zealous fanboys that nagged them incessantly.
So far, one method tried was to post the summons on the message board itself and ask the defendants to step forward.
Wow.. so did it work?
If not, they gotta try to post the Internet summons in the form of a "IT'S NOT A JOKE. YOU WON. CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE" banner. Maybe throw in a "FREE TRIP!!!" next to it.
That's the whole point it's the "you don't want to mess with that guy; he's insane" effect. If someone doesn't seem to care if they get hurt or if they hurt random bystanders or whether any offence is real or imagined, then most people will avoid doing anything that might possibly upset them.
So how does a citizen constitute this "messing with the insane guy" activity? By living in USA? The "don't drink at the same bar where RIAA is standing" kinda doesn't work, they'll subpoena the ISP, get the name written behind the IP and sue you. Just like that.
If you've never encountered this before then you really need to get out more:)
They just want to scare you by suing innocent people. They want you to think "if that innocent guy got sued, maybe I am next". It's a bit like terrorism.
I'd buy that if they sued grown & guilty people (even if the guilt is about mere sharing).
But they're frequently found suing kids, or people who never sat on a computer and don't know what an mp3 is.
If you look at the chain up in RIAA and the organisations like it, you'll see the people carrying out those actions don't always directly have some well thought and sound long term strategy in mind.
They just want to report that they're doing what "is necessary" to their superiors, and save their jobs for another day. It's like a drowning man who just wants another gulp of air *right now*, never mind looking for ships passing by or reaching the shore or whatever.. That's not as emergent as saving the next minute or so.
As a counterclaim of the popular "they want to scare you by making examples" theory, I want to ask you: do you know people die every single day in car accidents? Do you drive a car? "It'll never happen to me", right?
How does the existence of plugins interfere with your desire for a simple browser? If you don't want any plugins or extensions or anything, then don't install any! Really, it is just that easy.
You don't get it: I simply HAVE to click on every "free toolbar with smilies!" ad I lay my eyes on!
As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy). It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows. Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong:)
Well of course Microsoft counts only sold Windows licenses actually leaving their premises (virtually speaking). To verify quickly from an independent source, let's check TheCounter's OS Stats for June 2007. 86% for XP+2000, and 91% if you add NT and 98 in the mix. Sounds as if things match. TheCounter has been fairly reliable metric in for browser usage, that's based on what the browsers report they run on (the huge majority of installed browsers out there don't lie about their OS).
Slashdot Mirror
Legal Insanity 101
Step 1) By some miracle, weasel a provision into your settlement that forces the other company to pay you some money if your biggest competitor also settles.
If you don't understand the reasons behind this, doesn't mean it's "insanity".
The story is quite logical and sensible if you read more into it.
At the time Microsoft was still beginning its entry into the gaming console market. When Immersion sued them, Microsoft's lawyers analyzed the patent and how this applies to XBox and PlayStation2.
They realized that if Immersion is persistent enough, they'll win out in such a case. But "to be persistent" in the current legal system means you gotta have lots and lots of cache to fund this persistence.
At the same time Immersion was doing quite bad financially and only had a few million dollars profits for the entire year. They needed cash badly.
So Microsoft figured: if they offer enough cash to Immersion in a settlement, Immersion will go after Sony next, which sell a lot more PS2, and hence stand to lose a lot more in such a trial.
But Microsoft has the will, power and money to not do a settlement and protract the case forever, just like they always do. And Immersion knew that as well. Immersion would run out of cash before they could complete the case and end up with empty pockets and a bankrupt company.
So, Microsoft approached them and said "we won't fight, we'll settle with you, and give you the much needed cash to go after Sony. If you fail with Sony, you keep the cash, but if you get them, you return the cash". Since Immersion would end up with a lot more cash (turns out around 120 million dollars) if it won against Sony, they accepted the deal and had fresh 27 million to proceed with their patent trolling.
Now that they got Sony, Microsoft wants its cash back, as per their settlement.
That's all that happened.
Seems everyone is in the business of making a user-friendly OS. No one has yet understood that we have tons of user-friendly OSes and that the OS is not the problem?
How about you shut up, and go do something, versus tell other people what NOT to do.
I'm a Windows user who runs Linux servers (not very good at the latter, especially without my admin), and when I saw this article advertising shallower learning curve for Windows users, I downloaded it. And I plan to evaluate it and very likely use it.
Don't kill me now - but ZFS looks like something all OS should support. With the great innovations of this file system, it just looks wrong to be confined to any given OS or a set of OS.
Now... NTFS supports some of the stuff (not all) found in ZFS, but it's proprietary, so it doesn't qualify.
Talking about bizarre presentation of technology, nothing beats a singing ensemble of hard drive parts and bits.
Instead, this is Apple trying to create the illusion that it really is the big dangerous new browser on the block, and create the perception of market dominance and leadership. I don't think it will work, and this is likely to make Apple look foolish in the eyes of the non-default to IE market, but that's what Apple is trying to do with these silly charts and pronouncements.
Apple's marketing was always extreme, and that is their style for as long as Jobs is on top.
This achieves few things:
- The core of Mac users become even more devoted to the Apple brand (it's sort of like a cult, it doesn't matter sometimes Jobs says ridiculous things).
- The rest of the world sees Apple as arrogant, sometimes foolish, but always and always interesting nonetheless.
- Which on the other hand makes Apple a great news material, and gains it a huge media coverage.
So the bottomline: they're doing what they have to, to survive. The "reality distortion field" of Jobs isn't a myth - it's very real, and the guy's doing it to get the exact effects he gets.
Apple always tries to create its own bubble where it competes with mythical collective enemies such as "The PC", "Microsoft", "The rest of the Phones", "The rest of the browsers". To support this bubble, you need the extreme kind of marketing Jobs does, otherwise it falls a apart and Apple will have to compete in the real market like any other company.
Jobs uses bubbles in his own company as well. Many people know that he would separate his employees in "buubles" and let them "fight" each other (in their work) to full exhaustion (such was the case with Apple II and Lisa teams). The other team is the enemy, and you gotta do everything humanly possible to support your own bubble.
The title of this article is misleading "Mozilla exec claims Apple is hunting OSS browsers".
First of all, not all non-IE browsers are OSS. Opera for example, isn't.
Second, Safari is kinda OSS itself. WebKit (the Safari core) is OSS and there's a mobile version of it in other phones and Adobe uses it in their application runtime.
Third, it's not Mozilla exec claiming this, said exec just comments on *Jobs claiming it*. I mean look at the charts Jobs have shown at the WWDC. It doesn't take a lot of brains to comprehend what the two charts displayed meant.
--
Are they honestly crying in public because a competitor wants to... compete with them?
Honestly, Lili doesn't believe Safari will overtake Firefox on Windows. No one actually believes that, except Jobs himself (maybe).
I could go into lengthy and boring explanation about the whys and whats of this opinion, but I'll opt for something much simpler: Firefox is eating at Safari on its own platform, the Mac. Why are people using Gecko browsers on Mac if Safari is so perfect? And how on Earth does Mac expect to eliminate Firefox on Windows with Safari (an unapologetically Mac app sure to confuse people on Windows), when it can't eliminate it on the Mac, where Safari is bundled with the OS itself.
On Windows, currently Firefox risks being eliminated only by IE, which if it improves above certain level (and that level is NOT the Firefox level, it's much lower, since it has the benefit of being bundled) will kill Firefox just like it killed Netscape.
Lili however is just insulted by Jobs' arrogance. I love Jobs, I love the Microsoft jokes and I love Macs, but Jobs is definitely one arrogant asshole: let's be honest. And sometimes he crosses the line, and this is one of those times. Lili just uses his right to react, doesn't mean they're shaking in their boots when they see Safari on Windows.
Second you'd need to be patient for quite a few years for the clone to grow up, unless you're into children, you sick pedo.
Apparently you've not watched enough sci-fi movies, so I'll excuse your ignorance. But cloning machines have this little rotary knob on the side "age". It's right between "brains" and "boobs".
Personally, I'd rather make out with my Jessica Alba-bot.
So.. you'll need to be patient for quite a few years for the clone to grow up, unless you're into children, you sick pedo.
All kidding aside ... would the FBI (or some other government or law enforcement agency) ever be able to request (wink wink) your DNA from ancestry.com? I doubt there's a 'web site/client' privilege to contend with. Is there any real expectation of privacy if you voluntarily submit it to them?
It's 2007, FBI is irrelevant. Just issue a DMCA takedown notice for your DNA and crime clues to them and they gotta comply.
If they don't, sue their asses. That'll teach them. Amateurs.
Here's most of it (you can select other chromosomes for downloading through that interface):a xid=9606&chr=1&from=1&to=247249719
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mapview/seq_reg.cgi?t
The rest is just a matter of a few million mutations scattered throughout the genome. Oh, and the bits of the genome that are proving to be very difficult to sequence.
That's like painting a DELL white and calling it "Macintosh". No candy for you.
For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites.
Excellent, now the last thing left is for someone to invent a practical cloning machine.
For less than $200 of course.
Anyone got a bittorent to Pamela Anderson's DNA?
You can't upgrade a product that doesn't yet exist. The original announcement was probably deliberately misleading so they could announce an "improvement" just before the product is made available.
The iPhone unit Steve demoed in 2006 had glass on it. In fact I'm surprised people thought iPhone had plastic - apparently from fake spec lists.
The reason could be, he didn't want to hint his competition on some of the design decisions of iPhone. Second reason - generate some more news right before launch.
I can't care less how they got reorganized. Where is my new version of The Incredible Machine!
:((
If they called the Maxis division "The Sims", looks like T.I.M. isn't coming any time soon
I can flip through a book in front of the TV. Not so a PDF. Yes, I have a tablet PC.
;)
Oh come on, man! You have a tablet PC, you have a PDF, and you want to read in front of your TV! Think, think!!
People really got lazy these days.
jk
BTW did everybody notice how Ruby's magic worn out lately? The thing was very VERY fast and intuitive to develop basic things in, but kinda hard to deploy and very slow? Funny thing, that.
That's why I've always said that in IT you're gotta be learning really fast since technology changes in days. But if you learn TOO fast, you'll learn too much "trendy" technologies that'll never really pickup in a big way, and be forgotten few months later.
Similarly, a lot of Windows users are simply familiar with what they are used to. So they're not so much as fanatical themselves, they're just highly resistant to solid logic that's often used by the Mac community.
Solid logic. I'm not sure why some people assume that if they have in their possession "solid logic" they have a license to annoy the rest of the world until it's converted.
Apple specifically, they don't run a computer business. They run a cult. People don't have anything against Apple's technology, but the reasons why the world isn't running on Macs are purely pragmatical.
Just as pragmatical as Apple's switch from proprietary card slots to PCI, from proprietary graphics card and printers to PC standards. From SCSI to IDE, and recently, from PPC to x86, the PC chip platform.
Fanboys don't see those pragmatical decisions in Windows users, they don't see them in Apple's hardware choices. They see the religion. And for them if OSX has less virus attacks and runs smoother than Windows, that's "solid logic" that the world should run on Apple.
The reasons for the current market shared are a lot more complex though. A lot more complex than a fanboy is willing to acknowledge.
Combine their need to do marketing on behalf of their adopted companies and their products with the passion to make others see things their way, and you have a powerful group of people.
Right, here's the kind of reactions the marketing of a group of unstoppable fanboys achieve.
I too am someone who witnessed the sad transformation of a Windows/Linux guy into a Mac fanboy. Now every little problem I have on my computer, be it slow connection, or program hang, or WHATEVER, serves as a reason that I should be constantly reminded "how much I need a Mac".
"Man, you SO need a Mac!"
"Shit, dude, you gotta get a Mac."
"Macs are sooo cool, let's find you a Mac."
Everything on a Mac is godly and I apparently and struggling to survive without that on my Windows system. Even shadows! How the heck can I work without shadows behind my windows?! Impossible.
I'm suspecting that when you sum up the total of positive and negative effects of rabid fanboys defending their limited view on the world, the picture isn't nice. I'm sure there are people who will despise Mac and Linux without ever seen them, just because of the overly zealous fanboys that nagged them incessantly.
So far, one method tried was to post the summons on the message board itself and ask the defendants to step forward.
Wow.. so did it work?
If not, they gotta try to post the Internet summons in the form of a "IT'S NOT A JOKE. YOU WON. CLICK HERE TO CLAIM YOUR PRIZE" banner. Maybe throw in a "FREE TRIP!!!" next to it.
That works. Every time.
That's the whole point it's the "you don't want to mess with that guy; he's insane" effect. If someone doesn't seem to care if they get hurt or if they hurt random bystanders or whether any offence is real or imagined, then most people will avoid doing anything that might possibly upset them.
:)
So how does a citizen constitute this "messing with the insane guy" activity? By living in USA? The "don't drink at the same bar where RIAA is standing" kinda doesn't work, they'll subpoena the ISP, get the name written behind the IP and sue you. Just like that.
If you've never encountered this before then you really need to get out more
You don't wanna mess with me, I'm insane.
Everytime someone misuse the word "terrorism", god kills a kitten and the terrorists win.
Damn, god's a terrorist.
They just want to scare you by suing innocent people. They want you to think "if that innocent guy got sued, maybe I am next". It's a bit like terrorism.
I'd buy that if they sued grown & guilty people (even if the guilt is about mere sharing).
But they're frequently found suing kids, or people who never sat on a computer and don't know what an mp3 is.
If you look at the chain up in RIAA and the organisations like it, you'll see the people carrying out those actions don't always directly have some well thought and sound long term strategy in mind.
They just want to report that they're doing what "is necessary" to their superiors, and save their jobs for another day. It's like a drowning man who just wants another gulp of air *right now*, never mind looking for ships passing by or reaching the shore or whatever.. That's not as emergent as saving the next minute or so.
As a counterclaim of the popular "they want to scare you by making examples" theory, I want to ask you: do you know people die every single day in car accidents? Do you drive a car? "It'll never happen to me", right?
Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?
Naah, I feel freemasons must be involved somehow.
physicists at Fermilab have discovered a new heavy particle called the Cascade B.
Splendid! Now all I have to do is feed this into our generators, reverse the polarity of our schields, and our enemies are history. Muahahahah!
Could it be the submitter of this article is simply engaging in random, mindless speculation?
I've been reading Slashdot for years now, this is the first time this happens.
How does the existence of plugins interfere with your desire for a simple browser? If you don't want any plugins or extensions or anything, then don't install any! Really, it is just that easy.
You don't get it: I simply HAVE to click on every "free toolbar with smilies!" ad I lay my eyes on!
Which of these is the fight that Apple can't win?
this one
As someone already pointed out, there is a per-machine fee charged by Microsoft, mainly due to the way licences are sold in volumes to OEMs (per machine, not per copy). :)
It would be very interesting to see the implications of forcing Microsoft to move away from this kind of licensing, and present numbers based on the actual Windows copy installations instead of OEM per-machine licensing numbers. While it won't change the market much and the actual number of copies installed, the updated numbers could very well indicate a market share lower than 85% for Windows.
Just my 2c. I might be horribly wrong
Well of course Microsoft counts only sold Windows licenses actually leaving their premises (virtually speaking). To verify quickly from an independent source, let's check TheCounter's OS Stats for June 2007. 86% for XP+2000, and 91% if you add NT and 98 in the mix. Sounds as if things match. TheCounter has been fairly reliable metric in for browser usage, that's based on what the browsers report they run on (the huge majority of installed browsers out there don't lie about their OS).