CaptainRon

pen drive speed is meassured in MBs not Kbs. Else even a floppy drive will have faster access than a pen drive. Pen drives usually read at 8mbps and rite at 6mbps.Anyway, I guess all it will do is maybe use it as swap partition. Or who knows??? may be it actually turns it into a RAM? It will definitely perform better than a HD coz an HD is busy with loads of other work too which makes it act slow even with swap file. But Pen drive can be used for direct memory access.There is not much report about all this on the popular sites either... so not much info.

qwijibow, you kill the point here.

 

UNIX is by far the master piece of a human brain in designing an operating system. Every person who is into computer science will know it and admire it just like I do.

 

There are lots of things in this world that are superb, yet they fail. This were the difference between a tech guy and a business man lies. OK probably I would like to end this discussion by quoting an interview of Ken Thompson (designer of UNIX, co-creator) on Linux.

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

"I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft -- a backlash against Microsoft, no more, no less," he said. "I don't think it will be very successful in the long run."

And that is exactly what I have been trying to prove! Considering present pace of Open Source, it will not withstand the MS pressure.

Those who have migrated from Windows to Linux will soon migrate back to Vista and wudn't even look back! Hell they don't care about some quirky chroot() or POSIX standards!

 

"My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up.

When the mastermind says that, I simply don't feel like arguing against it. Whatever advantages of Linux are quoted, is all due to UNIX in the first place.

 

A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically

...Linux needs standardization

 

qwijibow, what your friend described about sounds much rather like the disk image tool. back up the hard disk when it is in good state as an image. whenever u see ur system crashing, simply restore the image in a matter of few minutes.

 

I don't know exactly but yes in Linux maybe I could do it with the dd command

Here we go again.

 

See I will lay down a few common sense facts:

 

Is MS evil with its Monopoly?

 

In short, yes it is.

 

How should, we the users, react to it?

 

We should be thankful that we have one OS on which we can be assured to depend peacefully on. Yes that goes for Windows.

I know many would make a fuss with the term 'depend' and quote all kinda MS evil deeds, but let me make a point clear. What is dependence in my and our terms?

I buy CS Source for Windows, one step install, and within the next minute I am playing it. Time taken 15-20 minutes flat.

I get the same for Linux to set up a LAN Server, and I face all sort of inhuman problems on getting it running on my Mandrake 10.1

Then somehow i get to run the stuff and then I realise that the Linux CS Server is performing even worse than Windows 98!!! Reason? Oh damn I forgot to keep a swap partition for my Linux! (OK my fault, but anyone can make this common mistake!) I re-install the stuff with a nice share of swap partition and then again go thru the Mandrake incompatibility issue and finally get to run the game. Time taken? 4 hours.

 

Even games designed to run on Linux don't always perform the best. Now if one application is designed to run on Red Hat (fedora) why can't it be equally compatible with other distros??? There are practically 100s of Distros and not even a single of them provides complete satisfaction.

 

OK that was an end user view. Now I come down to programming view. My client wants a s/w written to run on both Windows and Linux. I initially think of using Java but Java simply refused to provide me core OS features of Linux and Windows. So I used Qt instead, which I was sure to be perfect on both the OSes. Fine, I deliver an RPM which I tested on Fedora 3,4. Now he comes back complaining that my RPM wudn't install on Suse9 and Mandrake 9.1 (which most of his clients were using on Laptop). Of course not every end user understands how to satisfy 'dependencies'. Fine I give all the packages I used hence satisfying dependencies that wud ever occur. Now I get another complaint that one of the dependencies crashed the whole OS on one of the client's computer! Basically it uninstalled another package in order for itself to run and that in turn being not backward compatible destabilized KDE.

Finally giving up, I end up delivering the package that I compiled on Windows along with 'Wine' with a pretty Installer

No complaints ever till now, rather I got to hear, "why didnt you do that in the first place?!"

 

If Xisto forum ever monitors that which user uses which OS while browsing, I suppose it will turn out that I come here using Windows 50% times and Linux 50% times. I am a fair user of both the OSes and love trying out the latest stuff in Linux.

No doubt that Linux is superb and probably the most wonderful OS ever built. The problem is of standardization.

THERE ARE NO FIXED STANDARDS

Hundreds of Distros with not even a single one of them being perfect. Not all s/w behave well on every other Distro.

 

But yes I must say one thing, Linux is the way to go. And WE ALL KNOW THAT LINUX IS BENEFICIAL FOR US!!!

 

So instead of ARGUING ABOUT WHICH IS BETTER, we must accept that Linux is as of yet way inferior on the Desktop Market (and will even loose on the server market if the things go at this pace).

 

What we must do collaboratively is to make Linux even more perfect. And as of now the only area were Linux lacks is standardization. I use Mandriva 2006, but I don't get all the support needed for it. Fedora has a lot of support for sure. But then features that of Mandriva aren't there on Fedora! The day this Distro Hell ends, is the day we win.

 

My conclusion: Linux needs standardization, until then, it will receive a harsher defeat by Vista. I know people who are dying to get Vista as if it was the Harry Potter 7 release.

hahaha thanx m^e...

hey guys try to discover some by hit and trial urself! let's get some original Xisto discoveries.... what say?

'Blunder' implies something is wrong with this result...

yeah that was to console fellow bush fans...

Well its FREE only for 15 days...

 

so what to do after that?

 

Why don't people start using .NET???

 

Try C#.NET and VB.NET they beat most languages hands down. On top of that MS provides Express Integrated Development environments TRULY FREE.

 

Goto .NET website and start coding with the latest and one of the most powerful languages (C#) that provides ease of VB along with power of C++.

 

Also check out http://www.icsharpcode.net/ . Its an open source IDE for C#, VB. Anyhow considering MS has already put the world's most advanced IDE (and it truly is) out for free, there is no need to band your head here and there.

Oops randomdood I forgot that you are new to prog.See in Visual Basic, use a File List Box (simply drag and drop it onto the form), set it's path to the folder you want to pic photos from. sayFile1.Path = "C:\Images"Now after that done, your list box will be populated with all the available files (images in this case).To get the name of each file (in order to run a slide show), do the following:1) Write a Dim statement in the general section of code.Dim ptr as Integer2) Now drag a Timer control from the tool box into your form. Double click the timer, the code section will appear. Also, set the timer's Interval property (see the property box) to whatever time gap you want between each picture (for slideshow). This can also be done thru code like:Timer1.Interval = 100001000 means 1 second. 10000 means 10 seconds.Set the enabled property of the Timer to false (so that it doesnt start from beginning).3) Write this code:if ptr <= List1.ListCount - 1 then Image1.Picture = LoadPicture(List1.Path & "\" & List1.List(ptr))else Timer1.Enabled = Falseend ifWe take a variable called ptr. Initially its 0. We start to increment it to work our way down the list of images. We check to see if it has crossed the total number of images in the folder, if not then show the current image, if yes then stop the timer.4) Now to execute the code through a command button do this add a push/command button to your form from the tool box. Double click it to open the source view.Private Sub Command1_click() wMedia.Open "C:\Music\MyMusic.mp3" Timer1.Enabled = TrueEnd SubFirst line opens the music file and starts playing it using the windows media player component.Second line simply enables the timer we coded earlier. That means the images will start to slide every 10 secs.In any case just pick up a good book on Visual Basic, and you will love programming. I don't know how many people know the fact that Windows got the maximum (80%) number of programs contributed to it via Visual Basic developers. Visual basic is the world's most popular language as of today, and will remain so due to its sheer ease and definite power in desktop application development.

Ok its pretty straightGoto https://www.google.comtype/ ´Failure' in search and press I´m feeling lucky :-)Enjoy!

ah... yeah i have the latest nightly build and its codenamed MineField (Firefox 3.0). It has a cool icon. Maybe its the same for all Beta/Alpha releases.Also yes it does crash at certain points and I do send the crash report to mozilla.Anyhow itś stupid to have gone till the development of version 3.0 when the only stable thing you have is FireFox 1.5And I don´t see any version 3 qualities either (except the inline spell checker, but that could come as an add-on too). Uh.. I mean they arent fixing possible future bugs but creating way for it. Anyhow FireFox is at a stage where it doesn require much of further rigourous development. All that the users will be interested in next will be more Add-ons.Also what I believe is that some of the very required add-ons should be made an integral part of the whole suite. A good download manager and a few top rated skins for instance. Itś a bare necessity which isnt fulfilled yet within the official release.

two thingseither there is a war between religions (ahh now i guess it will be 1 vs 4.... you all know which one)or we will have advanced to nano technological miracles and would be buying stuff at dirt cheap prices.I suppose the first case will definitely happen and if we survive that we might think of accompolishing the second case.

connectpal wrote on May 23 2005, 08:11 AM

kalyan replies on May 17 2006, 10:47 AM

 

You are asking him to be clear after 1 year?

Hey Kalyan, anyway how deep did u dig to get to this super old post????

As if anyone care's of cross-platform compatibility with a multimedia application.

Java is not very suitable for developing desktop applications. I think the only legitimate options are Visual C++ or Visual Basic.

Visual Basic offers power with simplicity. Whoever knows advanced coding hacks can make it do anything that VC++ does, yet cutting the development time to 1/5th.

Anyway getting back to the topic, I suppose the best thing would be to use Visual Basic. It compiles native exe and can be ported to any Windows platform. For playing a music file you can use the Media Player component. For displaying images, its very simple with VB, use a Image control from Tools and use the LoadPicture statement to load a picture from the specified path.

wMedia.Open "C:\Music\MyMP3.mp3"Image1.Picture = LoadPicture("C:\Images\MyImage.jpg")

hah! thats it! these two statements will do what you are describing :-)

wow now that is something that i needed!it would really help me do stuff at places where my editing tools are not available (and it happens many times )...

Well incase you want to implement on your website, i think that's quite straight with PHP provided that the structure of both MS Access and MySQL databases are same (or equivalent).In any case all you need to do is make two simultaneous connections, run retrieval SQL on one and insertion SQL on the other.

Hah... MS is desparate to hold its market share.It's legalization of the existing MS OS is just a base to make sure that the people don't move to Open source systems following the MS anti-piracy crackdown.Plus most of indonesian govt employees must be comfortable only with MS Windows so now they(MS) have kinda assured that their Windows Vista will make them bucks thru Indo Govt when they stop support of 98 and then at a later point of time XP.

I dont know how many have tried LeechFTP but its very good.

here is the download link:

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

Sometimes its really much easier and favourable to use IE ftp browser, specially when need to do quick uploads.

 

For Linux, nothing comes close to KBear. Simply the best.

I can see why IE fans would like this "light" browser. The actual IE is becoming just as bloated as the rest of Microsoft's products, so finding an alternative with at least a few of the GOOD things in common (i.e. appearance) seems like a good bet for a lot of people.

Well firstly, if you havent noticed, IE 7 starts up lightining fast. In around 2 seconds after click its up and running in contrast to FireFox, which takes around 10 secs to load on my comp. Yes ofcourse I have figured out the trick MS uses. It's the same as that of Media Player. "Show the GUI as soon as possible, rest we will keep doing later...". If you notice, although Media Player starts up super fast but shows a "Connecting...." status even for Local files. That's the time it setting up its COM interface to the Media player core component, and initializing the codecs interface. Same is with IE7. But see thats how MS is innovative! in fooling customers and that too legitimately. But anyhow, must admire the MS skills in that

As for the good features etc, MS had the vision to leave it to the developers to make cool tools based on the IE component. So most people have the impression that MS didnt have the technology... common Sarah... these tiny features like tabbed browsing, skinning etc are a day's work in all... that too by a single programmer. The major part of any damn browser is the rendering engine. IE was always a potent web browser platform, with its initial mosaic background. Neither is FireFox coded from scratch. It's built on top of the Gecko engine as we all know.

Wow now that sure looks a wonderful IE based browser. It has all the important features ever needed.

 

It is an extension of the good old MyIE which was Open Source IE based browser. Now I find something called GreenBrowser search which is the default search engine of the browser. (gb-search.com). That's a nice way to promote your search engine.

 

And I see a great feature that I needed! I can turn images on or off with one click! That means I can do image less browsing with one click, and restore it incase i need to. This will really help me save my bandwidth.

 

Now is there a FF extension or setting available that does this??? I will need that too.

Tell people that there is a tool called Writely which allows you to Word Process online, and people go ooh... and aah...Tell them that MS has made a similar or better product (they do rule word processing), and people respod saying "i dont see any use".Well, i think thats the best rendering of a Remote desktop I have seen yet! It's miles ahead of Writely or AjaxWrite.One more thing, this is not a Online Edition or something, its basically meant to demonstrate the MS products, without people having to download it. Since MS knows that if people download evaluations, it will get cracked within no time.Last time when I was checking Frontpage 2003 eval version, I had landed up on this page instead.Hope this gets converted to a free platform on the internet, but I know that's not to happen any time soon.

ah... i was already using FireFox and for IE specific browsing, MyIE2, but just wanted to check out the latest IE Beta 2 release....its pretty unstable, and the windows validation sucks!!!half the world uses pirated windows...back to FF. :-)

I got the latest build from MS website and installed (by the Validation bypass hack) and when i restarted the comp after installing it, i could see no sign of tabs toolbar. I tried every possibility. Although when i press ctrl+t, it says new tab opened, and when i close my browser it says multiple tabs open, but howsoever i can see no tab at all!I have tried evry setting i could, and finally came to the conclusion that its too early to start trusting Betas by MS. After searching the net i realised that there are a few other people too who have had this problem, but not every one.anyone here who has encountered this problem and rectified???

or else you could search for a list of free proxy servers from google, and then in FireFox preferences>Proxy settings, make an entry of it.I used to use this method when i used to make DNS changes with my domain and wanted to test whether it was working ok or not (since my ISP wud cache an old IP).

For those who believe IE preloads during startup...Well, speaking factually, IE code does not load during startup.Firstly you must be clear about the COM+ application principles, and since IE module is a COM+ app, it loads seperately for different client apps. Windows Explorer uses an instance of it, not a preloaded code. COM+ apps have different modes of execution, when compiled as EXE, they can serve in distributed environments. Hence, if the IE module was ever a EXE, then I wouldn't have challenged your claim. But IE module is basically a COM+ DLL, and there is no way that a DLL runs independantly without being in shared mode. The DLL loads in the memory space of the corresponding calling EXE application. In case of Windows Explorer, it loads in the mem space of explorer.exeIn case of IE webbrowser, it gets onto the mem space of iexplore.exe .There are some sites which claim that MS deliberately uses Hidden API's, and its on that popular belief that this theory propagates. It may be true but as of now it isn't proved to be so. If at all there are hidden API's then I suppose the finders must have decompiled the application and got the raw API call. And incase they did get the raw API call, why dont they make it public so that everyone can use the so called hidden API's?Also if at all preloading on startup is beneficial, why doesn't FireFox has a preload on startup option? I mean, Windows doesn't stop anyone from placing startup applications... Even OpenOffice.org has a common startup component placed inthe registry for quick startup.Well the answer is, the Web Browser architecture isn't at all worthy of having a common startup. Going by Object Oriented principles, every instance of the web browser (be it new tab or a new window) are new instances of the Webbrowser class.Although yes, opening tabs is faster than opening new windows (but that was not the point here).So what FireFox can do is, start a single instance of the FireFox.exe in the memory, and never terminate it, just put it on invisible mode when some one closes it. There had been a debate on this strategy by the FireFox developers themselves, and they came to the conclusion that this shall not be done. Since only one instance of FireFox.exe means that you cannot start a fresh copy of it. So incase of a error/bug (which firefox had loads of initially), the user would continue to face the bug throughout the session of windows (until he restarts) and come under impression that FireFox is buggy, and switch back to IE.May be the next versions of FF will have this option. Believe me FF would appear to load and run extremely fast with that done.The best part about FF is that its OpenSource. The best part about the whole of Open source is that its legit to view/modify their source code.Hence I vote for FF until IE becomes OpenSource. :-)

My point will be utterly clear if you read this article. It tackles the accusations of the above anti-MS article:

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (requires free signup, so i will quote below):

 

IS MICROSOFT BAD?

 

Is Microsoft a monopoly? In the loose sense of the word, yes. Is Microsoft bad for consumers and entrepreneurs? No: Microsoft's market dominance is good for us. And the U.S. Justice Department should limit its oversight of Microsoft to enforcing existing antitrust law. In the following pages we explain why and air the two most strident voices in the debate about Microsoft's influence: Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati lawyer Gary Reback.

February 1, 1998

 

Microsoft has a monopoly in personal computing operating systems (over 90 percent of all desktop PCs run Windows, and its share of server systems is still growing)--a monopoly achieved through its early, momentous decision to license rather than sell DOS to IBM as well as the desire of software developers and users for a common software platform. Given the "increasing returns" that accrue to a standard technology like DOS (discussed below), Microsoft's OS monopoly may have been unstoppable.

 

But the Justice Department and many of Microsoft's competitors believe that Microsoft uses its monopoly in operating systems to beat better, competing products in other markets like browsers or desktop applications. In an industry defined by persistent progress, they think a single, dominant company is intolerable and want the government to do something about it. They're wrong.

 

The monopoly

Microsoft's decision to license the OS to IBM for its new "home computer" may have been the most foresightful decision in the history of American business. It left Microsoft free to license the standard to other computer manufacturers. Soon most software developers wrote only for DOS--and consumers wanted the operating system that ran the most software. In time, Microsoft would use DOS to create a new market for its graphical operating system, Windows. Not many people think Microsoft's OS monopoly is itself wrong; these days most information technologies are dominated by a single company. Sun has eliminated most of the Unix vendors; Oracle owns databases; Cisco, networking; IBM, mainframe software and systems; Intel, microprocessors. Consumers, and the industry, seem to like it that way.

 

Nor could Microsoft's OS monopoly be considered illegal by any reading of U.S. antitrust law. Section 2 of the Sherman Act states that "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize . . . any part of trade or commerce among the several States . . . shall be deemed guilty of a felony."

 

Courts have never found monopolies that were acquired through the development of a better product, superior business practices, or luck to be in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act: the law bans the act of monopolizing, not monopolies. But the Sherman Act does explicitly prohibit the use of one monopoly to create another. In 1995 the Justice Department forced Microsoft to sign a consent decree, wherein Microsoft agreed that it would not require computer manufacturers to buy other Microsoft products in order to license Windows. The evolution of personal computers into communications devices made Microsoft's OS monopoly a matter of renewed concern to the technology industry. When Microsoft began to tie its Web browser, Internet Explorer, into Windows and--according to Netscape--strong-armed manufacturers into including Explorer with new systems as the price of licensing Windows at competitive rates, competitors cried foul. Last October the Department of Justice took notice: Attorney General Janet Reno took the unusual step of calling Microsoft an illegal monopolist and slapped the company with a fine of $1 million a day until it complied with the 1995 consent decree.

 

Even though Microsoft probably could dig up $1 million a day from under office couch cushions, company officials in Redmond were vexed. They'd been bundling features like utilities, storage, games, and spreadsheets into the OS for years; that, they said, was the platforms business. During the launch of Windows 95, the Justice Department had questioned the legality of bundling the Microsoft Network, Microsoft's online service, with the new OS--and the case had been thrown out of federal court. How was folding the browser into Windows any different? Microsoft was rolling out new products with reasonable consistency and at reasonable prices. As Microsoft chief operating officer Bob Herbold wrote in an open letter to customers last November, if the price of automobiles had dropped as quickly as that of personal computers, the average car would cost $2 and go 600 miles on a thimbleful of gas.

 

If a monopoly is defined by the tendency to increase prices, how was Microsoft a monopoly?

 

The point of many returns

The Feds and Microsoft's competitors have an answer: Microsoft is a new kind of monopoly, they say, and U.S. antitrust law--developed to fight railroad and steel monopolies at the end of the last century--needs to be rewritten. To support this argument, they call upon an economic theory called "increasing returns," an idea advanced by the economists Paul Romer of Stanford University and W. Brian Arthur, among others.

 

The theory of increasing returns holds that the company that is ahead gets farther ahead, and companies that are behind disappear altogether. Its fundamental insight can be summed up as "the more you get, the more you get." The theory consciously reverses classical economics, which says that a monopoly will increase prices as it sees its returns diminish. With increasing returns, companies don't have to raise prices to make a profit: they make a profit by selling more stuff at less cost. Increasing returns is supposedly characterized by "path dependence," or the tendency of consumers to keep using the same technology standard, even if there are better alternatives.

 

Sound familiar? Increasing returns says that, in high technology, a handful of monopolies are inevitable as companies hit upon a hot idea that, for whatever reason, becomes the standard. Latecomers don't have a chance.

 

The implication is that technology monopolies smother innovation. Too often, the theory goes, the little startup with the great idea is either absorbed or squashed by a company like Microsoft once the titan decides it wants that market. This belief is not uncommon in the technology industry. Andrew Schulman, a senior technical editor at the consultancy O'Reilly & Associates, former software developer, and longtime critic of Microsoft, says there's no mystery anymore to what it takes to succeed in high tech. "A new software business finds a niche that it can build up so that Microsoft will have to pay to take over what the company is doing instead of simply bypassing it," he says. "That's the business plan for independent software developers today."

 

With the theory of increasing returns as its philosophical justification, and the alleged violation of the consent decree as its excuse, the Justice Department has begun a major investigation of Microsoft. At our press time, the government was looking into whether Microsoft threatened to withdraw Compaq Computer's Windows 95 license when it heard that Compaq planned to place the Netscape Navigator icon instead of the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop of its Presario PCs. In December a federal court was sufficiently convinced by the Justice Department's preliminary findings that it barred Microsoft from requiring computer manufacturers that license Windows to buy the company's Web browser with it; the case will be decided in May.

 

But the Justice Department's investigation goes far beyond the company's browser business. The government is asking whether Microsoft is trying to become a monopolistic "gatekeeper" of Internet content by cutting deals with companies like Walt Disney, Paramount, and Time Warner to make some of their content available only on Internet Explorer­enabled sites; whether Microsoft forced the Santa Cruz Operation to include code with its Unix operating system that made it incompatible with Windows; whether Microsoft engineered incompatibilities into its version of Java so that it wouldn't work with non-Windows applications; and whether Microsoft is plotting to seek a "vig," or cut, on all electronic commerce transactions.

 

Borrowed times

Does the theory have legs? Is Microsoft bad for innovation? Many, many people say yes.

 

Microsoft has never been known for creating superior technology. DOS, Windows, and Internet Explorer were all adopted from other companies or organizations. And while Microsoft has always improved its offerings (consider the rave reviews of Internet Explorer 4.0), the common perception is that it lacks the vision to develop anything really new. "They put a lot of money into R&D that doesn't lead to anything revolutionary," says developer Rick Ross, president of the Java Lobby.

 

Has Microsoft ever used its monopoly in operating systems to stamp out innovative competing technologies? Andrew Block, Sun Microsystems' manager of competitive analysis, can offer interested parties a lengthy list of great technologies--including the DR DOS operating system, the OpenDoc component architecture, the Objective-C programming language, X.500 network directories--that he claims were eliminated by Microsoft's predatory practices.

 

"These technologies had advantages over Microsoft's corresponding technologies, and you can argue that they failed because of their companies' inability to promote and execute upon them," Mr. Block says. "But in many of the cases, Microsoft announced its competing products years in advance, froze out the competitors from the market, and left people waiting for their products. By the time Microsoft delivered--or sometimes didn't deliver--the products, most of the competing companies had abandoned them."

 

A common complaint among software developers is that Microsoft's tools do more for Microsoft than they do for developers--and, ultimately, consumers, who end up with programs made from second-rate parts. For instance, ActiveX, Microsoft's component architecture, is hard to use, but it's even harder to write to Microsoft's Win32 APIs and not use ActiveX. And many developers feel that ActiveX may not be the best possible architecture with which to build distributed applications. Dennis Van Dusen, a vice president at the systems integration company Planmatics, likens the process to being forced to buy an entire stereo system from one manufacturer instead of being able to pick and choose components: "Microsoft restricts developers to working within its platform at all times, and when you work within that you nearly always have to use the tools developed for it." Mr. Schulman of O'Reilly is more acerbic: "Microsoft supports third-party developers the way a rope supports someone about to be hanged."

 

The executioner's song and dance

So what? What if all these allegations are true? Should Microsoft be penalized, or broken up like AT&T? Probably not.

 

While the central insight of increasing returns--that companies that own a standard will go from strength to strength because a standard grows more valuable to everybody as it becomes more common--is demonstrably true, the implicit prescription--that such monopolies must be regulated out of existence because they lock consumers into buying possibly inferior products forever--is nonsense.

 

Instead of looking to a new economic theory, the Justice Department should accept a simpler explanation for Microsoft's success: Microsoft has succeeded by selling people what they want. To argue that its OSs have been inferior but have succeeded because of "path dependence" is to argue that technical excellence is the sole criterion by which people choose products.

 

But both users and developers wanted a common platform more than anything else. Users wanted to know that their applications and operating systems would work well together. Users who cared more about other things--like an elegant interface or swift I/O--could buy other products, like Sun Solaris or the Macintosh. Software developers wanted to sell to the largest possible market, and they wanted the economy of a single platform. Windows developer Mike Sax, president of Sax Software, says, "Because of Windows' single standard, you can test your products more easily; in Java and Unix you have to test on 25 different platforms. Having one dominant standard makes it easier to concentrate on being innovative, instead of concentrating your resources on cross-platform testing."

 

If Microsoft has succeeded in markets other than operating systems, it is not because consumers are "forced" to use products like Microsoft Office or Explorer. If people like Microsoft's products because they work well with Windows, that is because working well with Windows is overwhelmingly important to consumers. Nevertheless, when a product--like Microsoft Money--has failed to meet consumers' expectations, Microsoft's OS monopoly has been no help at all.

 

Nor does this monopoly free Microsoft from the pressure to innovate: it's not as though we're still using DOS 1.0. In technology, change is rapid and unpredictable, and increasing returns don't last forever: a monopoly must innovate to keep its market share. IBM's monopoly in mainframes did not guarantee success in personal computers, nor did Novell's early success in LANs mean that it would control wide area networks. As yet, we don't know whether users really want a monolithic, bundled operating system and browser: Microsoft's strategy may be too closed and proprietary for the Internet.

 

The U.S. government doesn't know either. Every attempt by the Justice Department to regulate the technology industry for the benefit of consumers has been comically misguided. In the '60s, after Justice decided that IBM should not make both mainframes and punch cards, minicomputers and new programming languages made mainframes and punch cards less important. In 1995, when Justice tried to regulate MSN, the Internet was making MSN irrelevant. Government should generally leave consumer choices to consumers (see Jason Pontin's column "The Limits of Government").

 

Even Mr. Arthur, the father of the theory of increasing returns, questions the utility of regulating Microsoft. While he welcomes scrutiny of the company, he worries that government intervention will stifle innovation. "What keeps the lights burning in Silicon Valley at 3 a.m. is the possibility of locking one of these markets," he says. "I would hope the government doesn't get too restrictive."

 

The Department of Justice should limit its investigation of Microsoft to asking whether Microsoft violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Microsoft should not have threatened to withdraw Compaq's Windows 95 license, and the federal court was right to bar Microsoft from bullying manufacturers: the company is depriving consumers of free choice. But the government should not tell Microsoft what features it may include in its operating system. Justice must remember that there is no precedent for punishing a monopoly that was honestly won through good business. If anything can be learned from the theory of increasing returns, it is this: monopolies happen naturally in technology because people want standards. And since none of the evils associated with classical monopolies--high prices, bad products, diminished entrepreneurialism--accompany the honestly won technology monopoly, the government should relax and let people have what they want. By and large, Microsoft is good for us.

I would like to requote a para from above (since I am a developer, this is what makes me stick to MS):

 

But both users and developers wanted a common platform more than anything else. Users wanted to know that their applications and operating systems would work well together. Users who cared more about other things--like an elegant interface or swift I/O--could buy other products, like Sun Solaris or the Macintosh. Software developers wanted to sell to the largest possible market, and they wanted the economy of a single platform. Windows developer Mike Sax, president of Sax Software, says, "Because of Windows' single standard, you can test your products more easily; in Java and Unix you have to test on 25 different platforms. Having one dominant standard makes it easier to concentrate on being innovative, instead of concentrating your resources on cross-platform testing."

uh fellas...

 

The "Why MS is Bad" article was quite good and an eye opener about Microsoft. But I found a few logical flaws in some of the accusations.

 

Lest you think otherwise, Word should not crash when it is simply being used, IE should not crash when it is simply being used, and Windows should never crash just because a program it is running has performed an "illegal operation".

This happens in every other so called "Alternatives" i have used. I use Mandrake 10.1 jsut as much I use Windows XP. At certain times in Mandrake, certain casual actions of mine makes Linux do infinite Disk I/O's with no useful output on the screen. Once, just opening the configuration window in parallel to FireFox stalled my computer with excessive hard disk i/o and jerky mouse movement. I would prefer a Illegal Operation message instead of that awkward behaviour!

Opera fails to render Orkut.com properly (fixed in just the recent release), still doesn't support Gmail flexibly.

Linux has Hardware compatiblity and non-standardization problems...

Open source is an absolute mess for the developers migrating from Windows (unstandardized API's, Kernel versions, Windowing systems, a modular architecture that develops migration problems)

I still can't import tables from a webpage into OOo Calc 2.0 (Through FireFox, Opera, IE wahtever...)

A report at ComputerWorld.com has clearly outlined that the common belief that there is an alternative to every MS product in OpenSource is flawed. Products in OpenSource still have a long way to go.

 

Frankly speaking, from my own experience, the GUI usage of both the OSes would make anyone feel that XP is far more stable. In XP, the mouse interrupts are on very high priority, and they never(90% times) do the jerky motion like in Linux. So that keeps me patient while I open the task manager and terminate the problematic exe.

 

This was not a one time thing, but a recurring habit of reaping the rewards for other peoples' work which started way back in the beginning when Bill Gates bought DOS (no, Microsoft didn't even create the product that was the seed for their entire monopoly).

Wright Brothers didn't invent wheels, they didn't invent canvas, they didn't invent woodcutting... yet by piecing it altogether with a tactic of having a framed canvas sheet wing on top of otherwise casual wooden car, and giving the wheels certain dimensions so as to make an angle, they made the greatest invention of the century!

Yes, MS didn't invent the technology but moulded it into a true money generator. Their "Wings" was the concept of having an OS for the Desktop PC. They foresaw that the next big thing would be people like me and you sitting at home and computing (unimaginable at those times).

 

 

In the end, Yes MS tactics were evil. The way they dominated the market was surely not the right way. But they demonstrate aggressive business tactics, which turns business into a battlefield. Isn't that the basis of capatilism? Survival of the fittest!? Oh... or we should give equal rights to everyone and play by fair means. We should become Socialists???

 

Well guys, just wait and watch while the neoMicrosoft aka Google is in making. They already show traits of future MS like Monopoly...

 

uh by the way... i am not a MS employee if that article gets you that way... i am just a engg student as of now.

Well it seems that AppForge is the tool you are looking for. It allows you to develop in VB and compiles to S60.
Then again I do not know how good it is... I've programmed very little with Visual Basic (mainly because I didn't like it) and let alone tried this IDE plugin. I've done Symbian C++ developing and I know it is really nicely done platform: the memory handling is done absolutely foolproof.

Certainly, if you learned C++ you'd be able to do much more and more efficiently, but if VB is your thing and you don't plan on doing anything huge then I'd try that AppForge.

uh just to remind you that VB is the World's Most Popular programming language.
Also, it is extremely powerful for Windows development. Read the book Advanced Visual Basic, and you will know why the Visual C++ developers revolted against that book's writer (he made VB codes run just as fast and efficient as VC, and obviously cut the development time to 1/10th).

Windows has such a huge software base owing to Visual Basic. Till 1991, there weren't a lot of Windows applications, but with VB 1.0 released in 1991, apps started flooding in.

Don't mind, I am a die hard VB coder.