most interestingly he missed the invention of mobile phones and so pay phones make an appearance in the book.
It's true that he doesn't have any mobile phones and seems to prefer implants, but he had a lot of those that do similar functions to a phone. E.g., Molly has some sort of implant that gives the time, and radio functions and then Case monitors her position through his cyberspace rig (more than just her position, her whole sensory apparatus), of which a video conferencing phone might be considered a clumsy version. Also, throughout the book, one sees people who insert some sort of chip called a "microsoft" into a jack behind their ear that give them some extra knowledge, or some enhancement. When those Bluetooth headsets became popular and people just started wearing them around like they were an item of clothing, it reminded me precisely of those "microsofts" in Neuromancer, or whatever they were called.
That's probably the easiest way, but you don't need that plugin. The site that is used as the search string is written as plain text in the Safari executable. The instructions are here.
They might be coasting to the other side of the carpark or leaving it altogether , in which case if this slows them down too much they'll hit the throttle before they brake again.
They "might be"? Sure, they might walk or bike to the store too, which is pretty damn energy efficient... but most don't. If a substantial portion of the population were coasting, they would not need speed bumps to begin with. The fact that the speed bumps ARE necessary means most people don't coast and there is a net gain of energy efficiency here assuming the kinetic plate liberates more energy than it consumes during its creation, installation and maintenance. Granted, the gain in efficiency is that the store is using some of the energy the cars needlessly generated, but people do lots of stupid things they shouldn't while driving their cars. Think of it as trying to salvage an inherently flawed system to make it more efficient.
The GP is right, slashdot is full of contrarians sometimes.
You mean if i'm using an 8 year old operating system and a 7 year old browser I may have some issues upgrading
You know, this argument would hold up a lot better if XP weren't the newest OS from MS for 2001-2006. That's 5 years. Right, the OS is ancient by computing standards but MS basically sat on its hands for that time while conspicuously not releasing any new OSes for an eternity. Points of comparison: from the time XP was released to the time Vista was release, Apple released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, & 10.4. The linux kernel went from 2.4.0 to 2.4.33 and from 2.6.0 to 2.6.18 (BTW, linux still is releasing patches for the 2.4 series kernel that was released in 2001, same as XP). Redhat released Fedora core 1 in 2003, and it was followed by cores 1-6 in that time, and even Debian released woody and sarge.
The point is that when you talk about how old XP is, what you are really doing is pointing out how slow MS's development cycle was, and still would be if Vista weren't such a failure. I'll give you that the service packs were big increases in functionality, but companies like apple increase functionality in their service packs as well, in addition to releasing new OSes.
Incidentally, I've been using debian for about five years now and this behavior the last year or so to increase the number of packages included in "gnome" or "kde" meta-packages is a little annoying. The reason is that I might want gnome or kde, but I don't want all a full-blown desktop environment because it's bloated and has a whole bunch of stuff I don't need. I don't even know what tomboy or mono is, let alone use them, why would I want to install them by default? I wish they'd differentiate between a package that just installs gnome and then have another meta-package that includes all this other stuff that is no doubt helpful for some people, but not wanted in my case.
As it is, with a new install I have to install a default, bare-bones installation and then install everything else by hand. So for kde, I install kde-base, kde-libs, kde-multimedia, etc. It's not that it's impossible to deal with this way, but for a user like me, when I think of "gnome" I think of gnome itself and not gnome + tomboy + mono + lots of other apps and utilities, etc. but I guess I'm in the minority.
I wonder if Google isn't pleased with Microsoft's entry into the search market because maybe they can use this to help them while they are being investigated for anti-trust measures. If there's a healthy, vibrant competition, or at least they can claim there is some competition in the market place, I would think that would be a mitigating factor in their favor.
Most of the movies in my collection were never filmed in high definition
I thought about this too, but I realized something: movies shot with analog film have a much better resolution than the DVDs they were later transferred to. Unfortunately I can't find a nice link right now for it, but ultimately the resolution of an analog film is determined by the size of the light sensitive crystals used on the film roll when it was shot. Regardless of what that is, it's much better than the 720×480 (for NTSC) that DVDs are. A blu-ray is getting closer to the resolution of the original film that was lost with the DVD that followed television standards. E.g., when I watched full metal jacket on blu-ray on a big monitor, you could actually see the graininess of the film. I don't remember seeing the last time I watched the movie on DVD. Maybe it's because they needed to do a restoration and re-master before they cut the blu-ray, but I was impressed.
Blu-Ray has been aroung long enough that it should be a stable technology. They're selling shit for big prices trying to convince people it's better, but it's worse than DVD (and dvds and players are cheap). There's no reason to upgrade. Even if the picture is nicer, I don't care. P.S. I'm returning my last Blu-Ray and not buying a new one.
Good plan. You were lucky. If AACS thinks that stopping an analogue hole is going to help anything at all they are seriously stupid, people are breaking copy protection on blu-rays all the time just to watch their discs:
I recently built a new computer and decided that while I was upgrading hardware I would buy a blu-ray drive and see the latest and greatest. So I went to Target and first was completely shocked at the prices of new blu-ray. That's okay, even since the winter holidays the blu-ray discs have been on sale fairly often (e.g. buy two get the third free) so that at least brings the price down to DVD levels. I bought a few movies I thought would look good in Blu-ray like the newest version of Bladerunner and pop it into my drive and VLC won't run the blu-ray movies because of the DRM. No problem, I boot windows and start up the powerdvd that came with the drive and low and behold, I get a helpful message that my widescreen monitor is not HDCP compliant so I can't watch the movie in high resolution. So I head over to doom9 and download dumpHD, but no dice, my drive has had its firmware updated and that blocked the access key dumpHD was using. Okay, well, I thought, I'll get anyDVD and strip that copy protection right out. So I do that and now the movie plays at full resolution, except that the powerDVD that came with my drive is a crippled copy and won't play surround sound, only stereo. No problem, I go back to vlc which now helpfully plays the un-DRMed m2ts files and play the individual movie files (just not the virtual machine). Only problem is now I have surround sound, except if the disc has DTS, the channels are mixed up so the center channel is the surround and the surround left is the center and the surround right has nothing. What I'm left with is having to boot into windows to run AnyDVD, then run eac3to.exe to strip the DTS sound file to an AC3, then run tsmuxer to remux the sound and video files, and then watch that using VLC (not to mention the amount of hard drive space I need for these movies is huge).
All of this crap just to watch my legally purchased blu-ray movies on my legally purchased blu-ray player on my legally purchased computer. What a load of horse shit, I hope Sony goes completely completely out of business and blu-ray goes extinct.
Well what I usually do when I want to install firefox is type "sudo apt-get install firefox" and it automagically installs firefox as long as my internet connection works. If I want something special that isn't available with my default package manager I'll type in "sudo apt-get install lynx" and then "lynx" then followed by "g" and then "http://www.google.com" and then search for what I need. It's pretty easy, but I guess us free software geeks are a little spoiled with our package managers and 18,200 different software packages to choose from.
first they announce that the recession is over in the UK (yeh right!)
Actually, by one measure, it is over in Britain. Diffusion indexes show that the British economy expanded slightly recently. You Brits should probably not vote that Labor party out quite yet...
There was something similar in Atlanta awhile back. A guy was walking home from his job at a local bar at 3 or 4 in the morning or so. A bunch of teenagers get out of a cadillac with a shotgun and a pistol they confront him and he runs for it. They follow and trapped him in an alleyway. He kicked the shotgun out of the one guy's hands and the pistol misfired. While he was running he managed to get a knife out of his backpack and when cornered managed to cut a couple of the teenagers. They ran off, and took their wounded friends to the hospital. The hospital then promptly called the police who had already been talking to the guy who was attacked. The moral is don't go to the hospital if you are wounded doing illegal activity and don't want to get caught (and to this day I always carry a knife in my backpack unless I'm going to the airport).
The more unfortunate thing about this story was that, despite his pleas for not to do that, the guy had his name and face plastered all over the local news as a hero, so the other gang members found out where he lived and camped out by his house. As far as I know he had to move away, the police did manage to get some of the ones who were stalking him though.
I just recently watched all the episodes straight through, I agree that there were some great episodes in the later half, but there were also a couple of episodes that I watched later on that were just really, really tedious. Usually the ones with the kids in it, e.g. "The Route of All Evil" was possibly the most irritating thing I have watched in recent memory. It's not outside the realm of probability that that particular episode was created through interference by Fox to create a show that appealed more to children though. I'm willing to forgive and forget though, especially since some of the later episodes were really good.
Refusing the tech altogether because there are certain evil ways of using it is not the answer.
That's right. The answer is that, don't worry, if you have the source code, you have the power to remove the DRM. Freedom, yeah, baby. The only problem with this is if companies like NVIDIA who use binary blobs to interact with the kernel force us to use it, it will be annoying, or perhaps some companies with proprietary software start requiring its use (but then, if one has the source, couldn't one just fake it?). More reason to go with a completely open source solution perhaps.
Thank you, I really appreciate your comment. It's true that I wrote that comment a lot more aggressively that I should have, but when I wrote it I was a little annoyed that here Apple had what seemed like a nice hardware refresh, an update to their mobile OS, and some important updates to their computer OS to make sure it stays current and all the slashdot people can think of, or what gets modded up, is what they did wrong or what they didn't include. It's a little weird.
you should have known better than to buy something just before WWDC
He purchased the phone in February! That's 4-5 months ago. He didn't get "screwed" out of a better phone, he's just bitching that his phone is now last years model. But hey, unreasonable bitching never stopped slashdotters, so while we're wishing for an upgrade discount, why stop at 4-5 months, why not more? Shit, I bought my mac desktop 5 years ago and they've upgraded it since then 3-4 times including changing processors AND operating systems on me, why shouldn't I get an upgrade discount on that? By the GP's logic, Apple should never update their products because people keep buying their existing products. Sorry dude, welcome to the world of electronics, they get upgraded on a yearly or bi-yearly basis and the very minute you buy your product, there is a finite probability you will wake up tomorrow and it will be out of date.
10:21 am Rewrote Finder in Cocoa, which results in lots of extra features.
Whoa. Did they finally FTFF? Wow, cool, I hope Apple posts a video of the keynote or the changes in the finder on their site. For those who don't use OS X, having the Finder rewritten in Cocoa is potentially huge because it gives them a chance to address a number of long-standing issues as well take advantage of a lot of cocoa built-in stuff, but it also may also give the user a lot of customizability because the interface becomes customizable. E.g., I've edited safari to remove the brushed metal look, I've added shortcuts to some menu options, and removed others all together, etc.
At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something
The only reason I even knew bing existed was from reading slashdot. I'm a bit of a luddite so I don't catch onto the latest fads (e.g. I had texting is banned from my cell phone) but I think that it's right that the only people who know about bing are the ones who were looking for it, or are interested in computing in general. Therein lies the problem for MS. They could pour billions into advertising but I think most people tune out commercials nowadays, don't they?
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better (better at what? finding restaurants? searching for back pain? wtf?).
Excellent points. Also there's the fact that software doesn't age. It might look dated, but the 1s and 0s on a new XP CD are just as useful as the original ones. Cars fall apart with use and age. They have a limited lifetime, even if you don't use them they will eventually oxidize and fall apart. Software is good until there doesn't exist any hardware left that is capable to run it. It doesn't matter how old the OS is, what is the determining factor is the number of people still using it, which is something about 60% usage share for XP. You absolutely right that MS weren't a monopoly, then Microsoft would be in no position to cut off supply of XP or they'd be left with the 24% usage share that Vista currently enjoys because everyone else would buy an alternative OS.
Nobody relied on solely Ninja Turtle cereal to obtain their living. One could argue that XP is a vital component for a lot of businesses and that by artificially restricting it as MS is doing, you are forcing them to incur an unnecessary cost. This is essentially saying that MS is a utility service and their actions are analogous to the phone company forcing all land line users to purchase new land lines just because they are old (and not necessarily in need of replacement). I don't necessarily view this as correct, but MS doesn't have too much sympathy from me because they're ditching an OS that people want to buy and somewhat arbitrarily forcing people to buy a new one that isn't as fast.
I remind that having a monopoly on a particular product is not illegal. What is illegal is "abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position" (link). What you are saying is that gaming companies are just developing for the platform that holds 88% o the market. What I am suggesting is that there is a strong possibility that MS is doing more than just making a good platform to design games, they could be colluding with video card developers or game producers to keep it that way so that no other platform could get games, which in turn reinforces their monopoly on the OS. How do you know that MS doesn't offer an unfair advantage to developing on the directX? Are you a developer? Do you know what kinds of deals MS does with e.g., id software? I don't, that's why I'm asking.
As for consoles, can you really not see that MS is trying to use its monopoly on desktops and PC games to leverage itself into the console market? Really?
As for the Mac, don't be ridiculous, the Mac might get some of the more popular titles, but I argue that it's nowhere near the percentage of people using macs at home, AND they get them late if they do get them.
You're pretty much completely missing my point. Let me re-iterate: based on my experience with their past behavior (browsers), it is not outside the realm of possibility that MS is doing something to entice game developers and/or video card makers to solely develop for directX. It could very well be that directX is a better platform to design games for, and that's why most gaming companies use it, but my thought was that *gasp* maybe MS is reenforcing it's monopoly on desktops through anti-competitive behavior. Gee, that'd be a real shocker, wouldn't it? I bet you'd never expect MS to try something like that, or that they might try and use their desktop monopoly to build games for the xbox 360.
Doesn't it make much more sense to go after MS rather then companies which are definitely not monopolies and not abusive ones at that?
I agree. The browser war is pretty much old news, but I'm really sick to death of how video games for PCs are usually only available for Windows. If it weren't for that, I could close down my windows partition on my home PC permanently. Obviously I have no proof of infringing behavior, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that MS is engaging in some anti-competitive practices in this area to shut out competing platforms from the PC gaming market. If it were me looking at this, I'd look for deals between MS and the video card manufacturers.
...I don't care if the neighbors are evolving into birds, we're not doing it. If they were evolving to jump off a cliff, would you do it too? And for the last time, that giant bright spot in the sky the last few days is not an asteroid that will kill us all. I swear, kids these days and their wacky imaginations.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that he doesn't have any mobile phones and seems to prefer implants, but he had a lot of those that do similar functions to a phone. E.g., Molly has some sort of implant that gives the time, and radio functions and then Case monitors her position through his cyberspace rig (more than just her position, her whole sensory apparatus), of which a video conferencing phone might be considered a clumsy version. Also, throughout the book, one sees people who insert some sort of chip called a "microsoft" into a jack behind their ear that give them some extra knowledge, or some enhancement. When those Bluetooth headsets became popular and people just started wearing them around like they were an item of clothing, it reminded me precisely of those "microsofts" in Neuromancer, or whatever they were called.
That's probably the easiest way, but you don't need that plugin. The site that is used as the search string is written as plain text in the Safari executable. The instructions are here.
They "might be"? Sure, they might walk or bike to the store too, which is pretty damn energy efficient... but most don't. If a substantial portion of the population were coasting, they would not need speed bumps to begin with. The fact that the speed bumps ARE necessary means most people don't coast and there is a net gain of energy efficiency here assuming the kinetic plate liberates more energy than it consumes during its creation, installation and maintenance. Granted, the gain in efficiency is that the store is using some of the energy the cars needlessly generated, but people do lots of stupid things they shouldn't while driving their cars. Think of it as trying to salvage an inherently flawed system to make it more efficient.
The GP is right, slashdot is full of contrarians sometimes.
You know, this argument would hold up a lot better if XP weren't the newest OS from MS for 2001-2006. That's 5 years. Right, the OS is ancient by computing standards but MS basically sat on its hands for that time while conspicuously not releasing any new OSes for an eternity. Points of comparison: from the time XP was released to the time Vista was release, Apple released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, & 10.4. The linux kernel went from 2.4.0 to 2.4.33 and from 2.6.0 to 2.6.18 (BTW, linux still is releasing patches for the 2.4 series kernel that was released in 2001, same as XP). Redhat released Fedora core 1 in 2003, and it was followed by cores 1-6 in that time, and even Debian released woody and sarge.
The point is that when you talk about how old XP is, what you are really doing is pointing out how slow MS's development cycle was, and still would be if Vista weren't such a failure. I'll give you that the service packs were big increases in functionality, but companies like apple increase functionality in their service packs as well, in addition to releasing new OSes.
Nice. Thanks for the update, I hadn't looked for awhile and having these core packages will be useful next time I install on a new machine.
Incidentally, I've been using debian for about five years now and this behavior the last year or so to increase the number of packages included in "gnome" or "kde" meta-packages is a little annoying. The reason is that I might want gnome or kde, but I don't want all a full-blown desktop environment because it's bloated and has a whole bunch of stuff I don't need. I don't even know what tomboy or mono is, let alone use them, why would I want to install them by default? I wish they'd differentiate between a package that just installs gnome and then have another meta-package that includes all this other stuff that is no doubt helpful for some people, but not wanted in my case.
As it is, with a new install I have to install a default, bare-bones installation and then install everything else by hand. So for kde, I install kde-base, kde-libs, kde-multimedia, etc. It's not that it's impossible to deal with this way, but for a user like me, when I think of "gnome" I think of gnome itself and not gnome + tomboy + mono + lots of other apps and utilities, etc. but I guess I'm in the minority.
I wonder if Google isn't pleased with Microsoft's entry into the search market because maybe they can use this to help them while they are being investigated for anti-trust measures. If there's a healthy, vibrant competition, or at least they can claim there is some competition in the market place, I would think that would be a mitigating factor in their favor.
I thought about this too, but I realized something: movies shot with analog film have a much better resolution than the DVDs they were later transferred to. Unfortunately I can't find a nice link right now for it, but ultimately the resolution of an analog film is determined by the size of the light sensitive crystals used on the film roll when it was shot. Regardless of what that is, it's much better than the 720×480 (for NTSC) that DVDs are. A blu-ray is getting closer to the resolution of the original film that was lost with the DVD that followed television standards. E.g., when I watched full metal jacket on blu-ray on a big monitor, you could actually see the graininess of the film. I don't remember seeing the last time I watched the movie on DVD. Maybe it's because they needed to do a restoration and re-master before they cut the blu-ray, but I was impressed.
Good plan. You were lucky. If AACS thinks that stopping an analogue hole is going to help anything at all they are seriously stupid, people are breaking copy protection on blu-rays all the time just to watch their discs:
I recently built a new computer and decided that while I was upgrading hardware I would buy a blu-ray drive and see the latest and greatest. So I went to Target and first was completely shocked at the prices of new blu-ray. That's okay, even since the winter holidays the blu-ray discs have been on sale fairly often (e.g. buy two get the third free) so that at least brings the price down to DVD levels. I bought a few movies I thought would look good in Blu-ray like the newest version of Bladerunner and pop it into my drive and VLC won't run the blu-ray movies because of the DRM. No problem, I boot windows and start up the powerdvd that came with the drive and low and behold, I get a helpful message that my widescreen monitor is not HDCP compliant so I can't watch the movie in high resolution. So I head over to doom9 and download dumpHD, but no dice, my drive has had its firmware updated and that blocked the access key dumpHD was using. Okay, well, I thought, I'll get anyDVD and strip that copy protection right out. So I do that and now the movie plays at full resolution, except that the powerDVD that came with my drive is a crippled copy and won't play surround sound, only stereo. No problem, I go back to vlc which now helpfully plays the un-DRMed m2ts files and play the individual movie files (just not the virtual machine). Only problem is now I have surround sound, except if the disc has DTS, the channels are mixed up so the center channel is the surround and the surround left is the center and the surround right has nothing. What I'm left with is having to boot into windows to run AnyDVD, then run eac3to.exe to strip the DTS sound file to an AC3, then run tsmuxer to remux the sound and video files, and then watch that using VLC (not to mention the amount of hard drive space I need for these movies is huge).
All of this crap just to watch my legally purchased blu-ray movies on my legally purchased blu-ray player on my legally purchased computer. What a load of horse shit, I hope Sony goes completely completely out of business and blu-ray goes extinct.
Well what I usually do when I want to install firefox is type "sudo apt-get install firefox" and it automagically installs firefox as long as my internet connection works. If I want something special that isn't available with my default package manager I'll type in "sudo apt-get install lynx" and then "lynx" then followed by "g" and then "http://www.google.com" and then search for what I need. It's pretty easy, but I guess us free software geeks are a little spoiled with our package managers and 18,200 different software packages to choose from.
Erm, I just noticed my link is wrong. Here is the right one.
Actually, by one measure, it is over in Britain. Diffusion indexes show that the British economy expanded slightly recently. You Brits should probably not vote that Labor party out quite yet...
There was something similar in Atlanta awhile back. A guy was walking home from his job at a local bar at 3 or 4 in the morning or so. A bunch of teenagers get out of a cadillac with a shotgun and a pistol they confront him and he runs for it. They follow and trapped him in an alleyway. He kicked the shotgun out of the one guy's hands and the pistol misfired. While he was running he managed to get a knife out of his backpack and when cornered managed to cut a couple of the teenagers. They ran off, and took their wounded friends to the hospital. The hospital then promptly called the police who had already been talking to the guy who was attacked. The moral is don't go to the hospital if you are wounded doing illegal activity and don't want to get caught (and to this day I always carry a knife in my backpack unless I'm going to the airport).
The more unfortunate thing about this story was that, despite his pleas for not to do that, the guy had his name and face plastered all over the local news as a hero, so the other gang members found out where he lived and camped out by his house. As far as I know he had to move away, the police did manage to get some of the ones who were stalking him though.
I just recently watched all the episodes straight through, I agree that there were some great episodes in the later half, but there were also a couple of episodes that I watched later on that were just really, really tedious. Usually the ones with the kids in it, e.g. "The Route of All Evil" was possibly the most irritating thing I have watched in recent memory. It's not outside the realm of probability that that particular episode was created through interference by Fox to create a show that appealed more to children though. I'm willing to forgive and forget though, especially since some of the later episodes were really good.
That's right. The answer is that, don't worry, if you have the source code, you have the power to remove the DRM. Freedom, yeah, baby. The only problem with this is if companies like NVIDIA who use binary blobs to interact with the kernel force us to use it, it will be annoying, or perhaps some companies with proprietary software start requiring its use (but then, if one has the source, couldn't one just fake it?). More reason to go with a completely open source solution perhaps.
Thank you, I really appreciate your comment. It's true that I wrote that comment a lot more aggressively that I should have, but when I wrote it I was a little annoyed that here Apple had what seemed like a nice hardware refresh, an update to their mobile OS, and some important updates to their computer OS to make sure it stays current and all the slashdot people can think of, or what gets modded up, is what they did wrong or what they didn't include. It's a little weird.
He purchased the phone in February! That's 4-5 months ago. He didn't get "screwed" out of a better phone, he's just bitching that his phone is now last years model. But hey, unreasonable bitching never stopped slashdotters, so while we're wishing for an upgrade discount, why stop at 4-5 months, why not more? Shit, I bought my mac desktop 5 years ago and they've upgraded it since then 3-4 times including changing processors AND operating systems on me, why shouldn't I get an upgrade discount on that? By the GP's logic, Apple should never update their products because people keep buying their existing products. Sorry dude, welcome to the world of electronics, they get upgraded on a yearly or bi-yearly basis and the very minute you buy your product, there is a finite probability you will wake up tomorrow and it will be out of date.
Whoa. Did they finally FTFF? Wow, cool, I hope Apple posts a video of the keynote or the changes in the finder on their site. For those who don't use OS X, having the Finder rewritten in Cocoa is potentially huge because it gives them a chance to address a number of long-standing issues as well take advantage of a lot of cocoa built-in stuff, but it also may also give the user a lot of customizability because the interface becomes customizable. E.g., I've edited safari to remove the brushed metal look, I've added shortcuts to some menu options, and removed others all together, etc.
The only reason I even knew bing existed was from reading slashdot. I'm a bit of a luddite so I don't catch onto the latest fads (e.g. I had texting is banned from my cell phone) but I think that it's right that the only people who know about bing are the ones who were looking for it, or are interested in computing in general. Therein lies the problem for MS. They could pour billions into advertising but I think most people tune out commercials nowadays, don't they?
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better (better at what? finding restaurants? searching for back pain? wtf?).
Excellent points. Also there's the fact that software doesn't age. It might look dated, but the 1s and 0s on a new XP CD are just as useful as the original ones. Cars fall apart with use and age. They have a limited lifetime, even if you don't use them they will eventually oxidize and fall apart. Software is good until there doesn't exist any hardware left that is capable to run it. It doesn't matter how old the OS is, what is the determining factor is the number of people still using it, which is something about 60% usage share for XP. You absolutely right that MS weren't a monopoly, then Microsoft would be in no position to cut off supply of XP or they'd be left with the 24% usage share that Vista currently enjoys because everyone else would buy an alternative OS.
Nobody relied on solely Ninja Turtle cereal to obtain their living. One could argue that XP is a vital component for a lot of businesses and that by artificially restricting it as MS is doing, you are forcing them to incur an unnecessary cost. This is essentially saying that MS is a utility service and their actions are analogous to the phone company forcing all land line users to purchase new land lines just because they are old (and not necessarily in need of replacement). I don't necessarily view this as correct, but MS doesn't have too much sympathy from me because they're ditching an OS that people want to buy and somewhat arbitrarily forcing people to buy a new one that isn't as fast.
I remind that having a monopoly on a particular product is not illegal. What is illegal is "abusive behaviour by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position" (link). What you are saying is that gaming companies are just developing for the platform that holds 88% o the market. What I am suggesting is that there is a strong possibility that MS is doing more than just making a good platform to design games, they could be colluding with video card developers or game producers to keep it that way so that no other platform could get games, which in turn reinforces their monopoly on the OS. How do you know that MS doesn't offer an unfair advantage to developing on the directX? Are you a developer? Do you know what kinds of deals MS does with e.g., id software? I don't, that's why I'm asking.
As for consoles, can you really not see that MS is trying to use its monopoly on desktops and PC games to leverage itself into the console market? Really?
As for the Mac, don't be ridiculous, the Mac might get some of the more popular titles, but I argue that it's nowhere near the percentage of people using macs at home, AND they get them late if they do get them.
You're pretty much completely missing my point. Let me re-iterate: based on my experience with their past behavior (browsers), it is not outside the realm of possibility that MS is doing something to entice game developers and/or video card makers to solely develop for directX. It could very well be that directX is a better platform to design games for, and that's why most gaming companies use it, but my thought was that *gasp* maybe MS is reenforcing it's monopoly on desktops through anti-competitive behavior. Gee, that'd be a real shocker, wouldn't it? I bet you'd never expect MS to try something like that, or that they might try and use their desktop monopoly to build games for the xbox 360.
I agree. The browser war is pretty much old news, but I'm really sick to death of how video games for PCs are usually only available for Windows. If it weren't for that, I could close down my windows partition on my home PC permanently. Obviously I have no proof of infringing behavior, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that MS is engaging in some anti-competitive practices in this area to shut out competing platforms from the PC gaming market. If it were me looking at this, I'd look for deals between MS and the video card manufacturers.
...I don't care if the neighbors are evolving into birds, we're not doing it. If they were evolving to jump off a cliff, would you do it too? And for the last time, that giant bright spot in the sky the last few days is not an asteroid that will kill us all. I swear, kids these days and their wacky imaginations.