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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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June 12th, 2009

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Friday, June 12th, 2009 12:27 pm

C|Net reports that Opera, the chief plaintiff against Microsoft in the European browser-monopoly case, “says that the move to strip Internet Explorer out of Windows 7 in Europe is an insufficient step that won’t lead to better competition in the browser market.”

I think that’s missing the point, and Ina Fried at C|Net apparently thinks so too.  I believe Microsoft is deliberately offering a solution that at best is unworkable, and at worst will lock users even more tightly into Internet Explorer.  If Microsoft offers MSIE only separately from Windows 7 installs, that appears to mean that new Windows 7 installs in Europe will not have a browser installed at all.  And that means that users who don’t already have another working machine with a web browser — any web browser — installed will be unable to go and download a browser to install, because the vast majority of them won’t know how to do so without a web browser.  And that, in turn, means they’ll have to go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy an off-the-shelf packaged web browser.

And guess what’s going to be the only one there.

Sure, they could buy MSIE, take it home, install it, use it to download Firefox or Opera, then throw it away.  But realistically, how many consumers are going to do that after they just went to the store and paid additional money for it?

To compete, Opera and Mozilla are going to have to have boxed product there on the shelf beside Internet Explorer.  And neither of them can afford to do that for free.

This is a cunning and completely mendacious move on Microsoft’s part.  It’s fairly clearly been thought out to adhere to the letter of the EU ruling while totally violating its intent.

Of course, we’ve never seen Microsoft do that before.  And I have this really excellent historic bridge that I can let you have, cheap...

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unixronin: Rodin's Thinker (Thinker)
Friday, June 12th, 2009 09:10 pm

This story is all over the ‘net today.  It claims a 14-year-old German kid was hit in the hand by a “pea-sized” meteorite, later found to be strongly magnetic (ergo, nickel-iron), claimed to be going 30,000mph, and that it bounced off his hand and hit the road, where it left a crater a foot across.  Kid claims the impact knocked him flying.

I don’t buy it.  I’m willing to believe that that’s what the kid THINKS happened.  But that’s not what happened.  Because the kid still has his hand.

And I’m sorry, but if a pea-size chunk of nickel-iron going 8.3 MILES A SECOND hits a 14-year-old kid in the hand, and the kid’s father is NOT named Kal-El, that meteorite is not going to “bounce off” his hand.  It’s going to turn his hand into pink mist and then continue on its way as though he wasn’t even there.

You want to tell me the kid was standing near where it hit, and a piece of flying ejecta hit his hand and the blast knocked him on his ass?  Sure, I’ll buy that.  I’d even buy that it missed him by millimeters and the plasma trail burned his hand as it went by, then the impast blast knocked him on his ass.  But an 8.3-miles-per-second meteorite hit him and knocked him flying, and left only a little tiny three-inch scar on his hand?

Bullshit.

But the story sounds sooooooo much more dramatic that way....

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s still an amazing story.  But it didn’t need any embellishment, and whoever just wrote down the kid’s version as is, without question, with all its logical inconsistencies intact, displays a severe lack of critical-thinking skills.

Update:  This MSNBC article is much less breathless and credulous, and is actually asking the right questions.