Microsoft told a European Union court on Monday that regulators had completely misunderstood thriving competition in the software market in issuing a landmark antitrust ruling against the giant U.S. company. But an internal Microsoft memo presented by a coalition of critical companies suggested founder Bill Gates was told that a strategy used to crush the rival Netscape browser could also take down the leader in streaming media, RealNetworks' RealPlayer.
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Member since:2006-04-14
Which part of the word MONOPOLY don't (some of) you understand?
You keep saying that also linux distro makers and Apple should be prosecuted as well since they also bundle some applications with their OS.
They don't have a monopoly, thats why.
Why in god's name should you defend MS? If there was no such thing as the Mozilla foundation, we were all forced to use IE 6.0... Heck, I bet MS would bundle IE 6.0 with Vista. No competition, no innovation.
Imagine IE 6 being a final release 
Edited 2006-04-25 14:18
Member since:2005-07-12
>> Why in god's name should you defend MS?
Why in god's name would you want a world where laws do not apply equally? Means should you ever BECOME rich, you're open for prosecution... Dangerous, DANGEROUS talk here people. Does this mean that if Linux or apple gain dominant market share, you want to shoot them down too? When you prosecute someone for doing something everyone else is allowed to get away with - that's as much of a crime as letting an individual get away with it because they are rich, priviliged or 'know the right people'.
We're basically talking the same type of bull here spouted by feminazi's, 'equal rights' protestors, etc. They don't actually WANT equality, they want dominance.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I also don't have the rabid hatred that makes people auto-vote down anyone who dares say 'wait a minute' and vote up anyone who attacks them, no matter how nonsensical the post.
"Laws must apply equally, or they mean nothing. Laws that unjustly favor one party or the other are exactly that; unjust." - John Adams.
Member since:2005-06-29
As to the EU, why aren't half the linux distributors out there under prosecution for bundling totem or XMMS, or apple up before you for giving away the itunes software for free and bundling it up with their OS? Because they aren't the leading vendor?
Apparently you don't know what "anti-trust" laws are. It's perfectly legal for Apple or $RANDOM_DISTRO to bundle anything and everything because they don't own the market. And, in the Linux case, they aren't even bundling their own player, they're choosing the best one from the community.
Member since:2006-01-04
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-12
>>is that people actually use RealPlayer?
Amazing that isn't it? The only sites that seem to use it are fetish porn (the type of stuff Eric Cartman's mom would be in), but there you go... It's Europe. but then I say the same thing about quicktime so...
You know, MS is a business, to thrive (truly thrive) you have to do a better job than your competitors... As much as people may not want to admit it, IE 5.5 WAS a better product than Netscape 4.x (much less the abortive 5.x/6.x disaster), and until the past two years (well, maybe 3) Mozilla was SO FAR behind IE in functionality and stability we wouldn't even be HAVING this conversation.
Meanwhile you have RealNetworks, who Microsoft could have crushed simply by HAVING a product... which they already did in the form of media player - it's a functionality expansion over the win 3.1 version - little more.
Can't compete by making a good product? Have the government do it for you!
As to the EU, why aren't half the linux distributors out there under prosecution for bundling totem or XMMS, or apple up before you for giving away the itunes software for free and bundling it up with their OS? Because they aren't the leading vendor?
If this was cops on the street we were talking about, it's called 'selective enforcement' - usually goes hand-in-hand with bribes and dirty cops.