Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Jul 2012 21:12 UTC
The moment Microsoft announced it would lock other browsers out of being installed on Windows RT, we all knew regulatory bodies the world over were wringing their hands. Today, this has been confirmed: in the wake of an investigation into Microsoft not complying with the existing antitrust rulings regarding browser choice, the EU has also announced it's investigating Windows 8 x86 and Windows 8 RT (ARM).
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RE[2]: How to restore competition
by Alfman on Thu 19th Jul 2012 20:28
in reply to "RE: How to restore competition"
Member since:2011-01-28
ronaldst,
"Let the people fix the competition "problem". The government needs to stay out of people's way. What government needs to do is lower barriers to entry by eliminating/fixing the bogus patent system, decreasing the paperwork and lowering taxes."
Minimal government is nice, but without some kind of regulation you end up with corporations who are willing and able to abuse the lack of corporate oversight to the detriment of everyone else and even competition itself will suffer. The trick is to find the right balance, and not to overshoot.
"Silly things like ballot boxes, sharing APIs, N versions, 'predatory' pricing arguments only exist to waste people's precious time/money, further career politician and grow wasteful bureaucracies."
It may seem silly to you, but the very existence of many small/medium tech companies may ride on things like fair market access and APIs. Large corps are willing and able to lock up the entire industry. They'd strongarm OEMs and hijack standards to control what OEMS may sell. They'd add hardware restrictions to extend their control over end users as well. They'd render competing products ineffective and incompatible. History has shown time and time again that without regulation large corporations become abusive bullies who will use sheer size to dominate the markets rather than innovation or merit.
Capitalism is great, I love it...but it needs to be played on a level playing field.
RE[3]: How to restore competition
by ronaldst on Fri 20th Jul 2012 01:04
in reply to "RE[2]: How to restore competition"
Member since:2005-06-29
Alfman ,
Minimal government is nice, but without some kind of regulation you end up with corporations who are willing and able to abuse the lack of corporate oversight to the detriment of everyone else and even competition itself will suffer. The trick is to find the right balance, and not to overshoot.
Big government is nice, but you end up with corporations who are willing and able to abuse their immense corporate oversight to the detriment of everyone else and even competition itself will suffer. The trick is to leave government out of the selection of winners and losers, and not be tempted to protect people's profit for electoral purposes.
It may seem silly to you, but the very existence of many small/medium tech companies may ride on things like fair market access and APIs. Large corps are willing and able to lock up the entire industry. They'd strongarm OEMs and hijack standards to control what OEMS may sell. They'd add hardware restrictions to extend their control over end users as well. They'd render competing products ineffective and incompatible. History has shown time and time again that without regulation large corporations become abusive bullies who will use sheer size to dominate the markets rather than innovation or merit.
Only where there is government granted special favours (patents, etc...) you'll find monopolies.
Have a little faith in people, you'll be surprised.
Capitalism is great, I love it...but it needs to be played on a level playing field.
And where will you find people, that don't have an agenda, to level the playing field?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"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.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"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.More News »
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Member since:
2005-06-29
Let the people fix the competition "problem". The government needs to stay out of people's way. What government needs to do is lower barriers to entry by eliminating/fixing the bogus patent system, decreasing the paperwork and lowering taxes.
Silly things like ballot boxes, sharing APIs, N versions, "predatory" pricing arguments only exist to waste people's precious time/money, further career politician and grow wasteful bureaucracies.