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I think /. url mangled my link.

http://www.albion.com/netiquet...

Try that link.

If we are going to give a reference, we should at least link to an authoritative source. In this case it would be Miss Manners, to whom I defer in all such things.
http://articles.chicagotribune...

I think /. url mangled my link.

http://www.albion.com/netiquet...

Try that link.

You are aware that it is the height of bad manners on the net to correct people for minor English mistakes. Please read the following link.

http://www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html/

First, Apple is not a convicted monopolist like Microsoft

Neither is Microsoft a 'convicted monopolist' - the case against them was a civil action, you can only be convicted of something in a criminal court. The term 'convicted monopolist' is nothing more than a slashdot marketing term.

Just imagine the outcry if Microsoft banned all other development environments than Visual Studio... But suddenly when it's Apple it's all ok. Why the hell?

First, Apple is not a convicted monopolist like Microsoft, second, I don't think this move is cool either, but it's totally legal.

When one is considering the personalities of those who use browsers; I think of the Over Dressed Smiling Show Offs convicted of Lying, Cheating, and Stealing are a special breed apart.

E-voting backed up by an auditable paper trail can be designed to be trusted. I agree that E-voting with no physical audit trail cannot be trusted at all. Your reference to the compiler backdoor scenario pointed out by Ken Thompson 25 years ago is also correct; thorough review of the source code is not sufficient to guarantee security.

34. Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.

Tim S

Microsoft's Attempt to Dissuade Netscape from Developing Navigator as a Platform: http://www.albion.com/microsoft/findings-21.html

I don't recall the precise wording

Currently there are no products, nor are there likely to be any in the near future, that a significant percentage of consumers world-wide could substitute for Intel-compatible PC operating systems without incurring substantial costs. Furthermore, no firm that does not currently market Intel-compatible PC operating systems could start doing so in a way that would, within a reasonably short period of time, present a significant percentage of consumers with a viable alternative to existing Intel-compatible PC operating systems. It follows that, if one firm controlled the licensing of all Intel-compatible PC operating systems world-wide, it could set the price of a license substantially above that which would be charged in a competitive market and leave the price there for a significant period of time without losing so many customers as to make the action unprofitable. Therefore, in determining the level of Microsoft's market power, the relevant market is the licensing of all Intel-compatible PC operating systems world-wide.

Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?

* Netscape
* Palm
* Symantec and McAfee
* Sendo

Exactly

really one just needs to read a couple of pages of the report by judge penfield jackson to get a proper understanding.

http://www.albion.com/microsoft/
it's all there

only really need to skim through I. V. and VII.

...

33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.

34. Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.

...

Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

The whole ruling of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is here. Please clarify how it is vague...

Sure it is. That's what we Europians do: wait for a company to become successfull and then we drag it through courts so we can get a cut of the money.
[/sarcasm]

And the US DOJ does the exact same thing! They wait for successful business men to emerge and then ambush their success!
[/sarcasm]

Does Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ring any bells?

Listen, liking microsoft or their products is not a bad thing, but there is a whole world out there wanting to make a living on software and microsoft is using their position to make sure that, when they are playing, only they have a chance. This is what the courts in the US, the EU and apparently South Korea have ruled against microsoft. You can paint it anyway you want so it will fit in to your point of view, but the fact that MS violates anti-trust laws has been decided in a court of law more than one time already throughout the world. The fine they are asked to pay can in no way be called extortion. Unless I can call the fine I am asked to pay for speeding extortion, because I disagree with the court's ruling.

Grandparent post knows nothing about how the law works. Details of why microsoft is treated like this can be found searching for "microsoft monopoly" on google. First result:

The landmark ruling by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. This document describes accurately why microsoft is ruled a monopoly, addresses all the straw man arguements often posted of "microsoft not holding 100% market share, therefor is not a monopoly" and so on and so forth... If you have the time, read about it. It beats posting emotion driving posts that leads to flamewars, without posting any facts to back it up...

Do you even know what monopoly means? I doubt it.

What kind of pain are they inflicting and on whom? Same question for damage.


Read up a bit and learn yourself before critisizing others...

please define what monopoly means to you. Everybody seems to be entitled to make up what words mean these days, I just want to be certain.

How about reading up on the landmark ruling by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson:

33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market.

34. Viewed together, three main facts indicate that Microsoft enjoys monopoly power. First, Microsoft's share of the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is extremely large and stable. Second, Microsoft's dominant market share is protected by a high barrier to entry. Third, and largely as a result of that barrier, Microsoft's customers lack a commercially viable alternative to Windows.

However, despite this, I find English to be not too bad for communication, although if I want to think deep and clearly about difficult things, I might adopt Loglan instead, because English can be mirky at times and makes understanding the actual problem even trickier...

Here are my observations on English:

• Most of the time, even if the riting haz por gramar and bad speling u can stil grok wot woz ment. Dis iz becoz inglish iz remarkabli staibl foneticly. So, what's your problem, exactly? This is the stance most Geeks take, I feel, and it comes from a very deep understanding of communication, not from sloppiness. In a way, it's a kind of play...
• When the King James bible came out, "they" elected to "standardise" [note my correct Commonwealth spelling of that word, which is different from the correct American spelling...] all the different spellings of English words (notably, CHURCH, which was variously spelled CHIRCH, KIRK, CIRCH, CHURCH and some others, depending on where in Britain you lived). It explains why English is so inconsistent (a fact remarked by many): a comittee put it together from whatever the locals were doing in the 15th century...
• If you read Victorian period books (or books by people close to that time, like original publications of any Tolkien LOTR, or perhaps some Sherlock Holmes) you'll see words like CONNEXION, which was a legitimate spelling that changed later...
• In "America", a gentleman (can't remember his name, or when exactly but it was in the 19th century) had the, IMHO, very fine idea of developing "simplified spelling", so USA got words like COLOR insteard of COLOUR, JAIL instead of GAOL, etc. However, my personal taste for the INITIALIZE instead of INITIALISE differs from his, although I agree his makes much more sense...

So, "correct" English depends on:

• Where in the world you are
• When in the timestream you are
• Optionally the target in the timespace continuum to which you are writing...

Finally, please observe that it is extremely bad netiquette to complain about English grammar/spelling because the Geek may not have English as a first (or even fluent) written language. Perhaps in Russia it is not considered rude to constantly nit-pick about it, but most of the Commonwealth thinks that it is , and the general netiquite adopted by netizens certainly does think it rude.

Thus, even though "should of" is a pet pieve of mine also, I won't pick someone up for it, assuming they are a non-native who has translitterated (sp? :-) what they have heard...

So to sum up: get over it... :-)

Copyright Durations
...the copyright term began on the date of publication or registration, and originally lasted 28 years...
http://www.bromsun.com/practice/copyrights/copyrig ht_durations.html

bulk.resource.org
Data rescued by media.org.
http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/

Copyright Clearance Center
http://www.copyright.com/

Copyright in Cyberspace
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/0963702513p1 33.html

Copyright Management Center
http://copyright.iupui.edu/

Copyright Website
http://www.benedict.com/

FAIRCOPY
http://www.faircopy.com/

Janis Ian
The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.h tml
FALLOUT - a follow up to The Internet Debacle
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html

Musicians Against Copyrighting Of Samples
http://www.icomm.ca/macos/

Stanford University Libraries
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

What is Copyright Protection
http://www.whatiscopyright.org/

Microsoft is not a monopoly because anyone on Slashdot says so, but because it has been proven to be a monopoly in federal court.

So Google is not a monopoly, but Microsoft is a monopoly. That seems logical to me, given the facts.

As for your assertion that all companies do this (pay for ancilary products with the main product), that's not the case. Many public companies run divisions as separate profit centers, which must sink or swim on their own.

I've tried to put logic into my argument, and hope that it meets with your approval.

...because well-written OSS isn't tied to Windows. That reduces the applications barrier to entry

If the author of TFA has a beef, it should be with lazy OSS authors who don't write their apps in a portable fashion, or who succumb to the siren song of people like Robert Scoble, who was urging Mozilla to tie itself inextricably to Longhorn, thus making Mozilla Windows-only as MS tried to do to Java code with their polluted Java. As long as they don't do that, eventually OSS apps will cover the majority of things people want to do with computers, and eventually they'll ask themselves why they are bothering to pay the MS Tax.

When the user demanding access to the box I support because he's the "IT" person and he's had a unix class so he knows what he's doing and knows nothing about our applications and when supporting him on a different box that isn't ours to support (just to be nice) and he's told to press control-c asks if that is "capital control-c?", he's not getting access.

Now submitter anomaly isn't that confused, but the point for needing external support is that he can't support it himself. Maybe there's reasons the product has to work the way it does. If not, like everyone says, get a different vendor.

Or ... get an open source application and change it to do what you want, that's the beauty of open source!

[Microsoft] is not a monopoly

The United States Justice Department disagrees with you. Here's a simpler roundup of the facts. While the enforcement of Judge Jackson's ruling was overturned (mostly because of his stupid spouting off to the press), his Findings of Fact were not. Microsoft remains a convincted monopolist. Once a company is deemed a monopoly, a different set of business rules apply to them.

Ok I was mostly kidding, but read this if you want some insight into how hard it can be to fully trust a compiler.

Confident? That's a very dangerous assumption if you're that concerned about your privacy. I maintain quite a few corporate e-mail systems, and one of the biggest problems is convincing people to delete anything - even crap. It's not uncommon for the executives to have mailboxes which exceed 1GB.

I have every business email I have sent or received in the last six years. My assumption is that every email I send is more than likely still out there.

Don't want your messages to be readable by the 'wrong' people? Encrypt 'em real good, or don't use email.

"Don't send anything over email that you wouldn't want published on the front page of USA Today."

53. That Microsoft's market share and the applications barrier to entry together endow the company with monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems is directly evidenced by the sustained absence of realistic commercial alternatives to Microsoft's PC operating-system products.

Just because Microsoft is the most distributed OS and has the most applications built around it today doesn't mean that the software market doesn't turn around really fast.

Microsoft is successful because of all the applications built around it. It's an ecosystem. Legally tying Microsoft's hands will actually do more to hurt that ecosystem (most people who use it) than to help it. Since this computing ecosystem has 90+% of all the worlds computers, it is a standard. People gravitate towards the standard, which makes it more of a standard.

People use MS products because there are more products working with MS products than with any other. It's like a big black hole in the center of a galaxy. Most of the other bodies gravitate around it, adding to the mass at the center, until the system of gravity is too strong. Weakening the ability for the center to improve itself might enable some outside forces to balance out that pull, but it's more likely to harm most people depending on the ability of the system to be stable.

What is the next threat to Microsoft? Is it legal? Is it technical? Maybe it's in cheaper devices. I bet that MSR has a few niche technologies that will come out built in to their next OS. Speech and handwriting recognition. Face and voice biometric recognition. They certainly do a LOT of AI and Graphics work. I think that the next threat to Microsoft is competition which doesn't charge and provides the same value. It's hard to measure in $ the amount of time/work put into Linux/OSS, but it isn't hard to understand that it is a threat to Microsoft, even if it doesn't integrate as tightly. Eventually, someone will package it.

Microsoft's advantage is in its ability to integrate its products and provide the whole solution for a cheaper price than it would take people to build it themselves. This is only an advantage while it is true. Certain people today can build you a computer for cheap, and put no OS on it or a free OS on it, but they cost about the same price as a Dell with Windows. Microsoft only charges something like $50 per license on these machines (note that MS doesn't even make the CDs or install them in these cases -- MS just gets $50 for the license - a 0.001 cent piece of paper), and Dell has mastery of mass production.

This is business. It's just as political as it is cut-throat, and the future is never certain. In the software business, the industry can turn on a dime, and a company with 90% market share like Netscape can be an also ran the next day. Microsoft having $50B in the bank doesn't guarantee it will have $10B in revenues next year.

Is not the Macintosh OS X OS a commercially viable alternative to Windows? It seems to be the #2 OS in the consumer space, but even though it is dwarfed by Windows, that doesn't make it irrelevant.

You did read the link I provided, right? Try reading just the first line (#53).

As an avid Linux user who doesn't use any Microsoft products, allow me to play devil's advocate here: Is Microsoft a monopoly?

Since I'm sitting here typing this on my Linux machine, my response is no.

Thus demonstrating your complete inability to understand that a monopoly does not require 100% of the market.

If there is a viable alternative to a product, then how can said product have a monopoly?

Judge Jackson said there "exists no commercially viable alternative [to Windows]". Obviously you know more about the case than he does. Also you clearly know something that was unknown to the appellate court because they did not disagree with Judge Jackson's findings. Maybe you should ring up the DOJ and report a miscarriage of justice, based on your superior understanding of the facts.

Though before making a fool of yourself any further, perhaps you'd like to read this.

I always am amused (and at the same time somewhat disgusted) by this kind of elitist reply that seems to plague Slashdot.

Of course, I understand that we're all busy people with our own busy things to do so people don't have time to make some sort of constructive response. Then one gets to thinking: "If everyone's too busy or important to reply, why do they have time to write a reply that isn't constructive and actually seems to be more of a drag on the 'community' as a whole?"

Not too busy to take the time to point out how superiorior and resourceful they are to the 'n00bs', I guess. :\

People will go out of their ways to berate a perfectly logical question instead of answer 'yes' or 'no' (Which would be a simple reply to the first part of his question.)

Anyhow, I'd best stop for now. I've had my 2 bits and I'm not interested in starting a flame war. (I'm a really 'busy' person too! hehe Also, I'm beginning to think that I'm beginning to look like I'm getting a little hypocritical myself.)

[Last ditch attempt to be constructive]

Here's a link to help kick-start a new 'net you!'

Microsoft has been legally found to be a monopoly. "Fine," say you. "That doesn't make them evil."

If you haven't been paying attention, there are a few other things they've done that put them beyond the category of aggressive competitors. For example:

• They committed perjury by faking video testimony.
• They're still under investigation in the EU for displaying a pattern of illegal monopoly protection.
• They've done quite a few other things that could qualify as nasty.

All companies are not the same.

The monopoly is legal. Of course this is rather obvious from the fact that it still exists. Were Microsoft found to have an illegal monopoly the courts would have broken it up.

In the separate lawsuit filed by the Justice Department (news - web sites) and 18 states, the court had found that Microsoft acted as an illegal monopoly based on its dominance in desktop operating systems.

Thanks for sorting that out... Now nobody will be confused by my typo and think I was talking about commas.

I didn't think anyone was confused. Did I give you that impression? Rather, I simply find it interesting to note the general rule of thumb -- that posts designed to correct grammatical errors tend to have a higher than normal probability of having grammatical errors themselves.

I'm certainly not the first person to note this, see here, here, and here. Nor, unfortunately, will I be the last.

If somehow you got out of my comment that I was looking to make an example specifically of you, or to expose you to ridicule, well, that wasn't the case. Actually, your post was both informative and interesting, and by virtue of the typo, funny to boot.

And I do feel better now, thanks for asking!

1) A remote crash is not a security compromise, its a DoS.

Molly, if you believe that, then you need to go and re-read a security textbook. Availability is by definition a necessary aspect of security.

2) If you have physical access to my wire, all is lost.

Packet injection does not require physical access.

3) If you have physical access to my machine, all is lost.

True, but this is still a significant privilege elevation attack and therefore a security flaw. For example, if you have 95 clients, a worm can use this problem to gain access to a departmental server running NT, potentially a bigger deal.

I'm mildly amused that I'm debating W95's security. :-)

The key issue here, though, is that with closed-source single-vendor systems you are at the vendor's mercy about when, how, and at what price you will upgrade. With open source you have a bit more freedom.

It's not black and white though: the DoD is basically *telling* HPQ to keep maintaining VMS for the next few decades; whereas your average home user will need to upgrade when their RH 6.0 machine goes out of maintenance.

But a largish government department is probably near the breakpoint: in conjunction with a good systems integrator a Linux solution would let them upgrade as and when they wish. This kind of flexibility is a great thing for all those organizations with solid and stable DOS, W95, Novell, or SCO installations.

Plass said the record industry, which fought a legal battle to shutter Napster and has a lawsuit pending against Kazaa, had been "quite hostile" to his initiative.

Record-label executives believe the Netherlands ruling in favor of Kazaa will eventually be reversed and have said they will press ahead with an effort to enforce their rights world-wide.

We need a new moderation: -1 Doesn't Read News

Read The Findings of Fact by a US judge in court. Just because the DOJ got cold feet and decided to let them off with a slap on the wrist doesn't make it less true.

Also go ask random Joe Blow on the street if he knows what Solaris is.

And finally no one is suing the worlds largest zipper company because its not illegal to have a monopoly, its illegal to leverage that monopoly into other markets, You don't see ZippyCo trying to buy out all Velcro and button manufactuerers do you? And its also illegal to price fix based on that monopoly. MS has done both.

Microsoft's actual pricing behavior is consistent with the proposition that the firm enjoys monopoly power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems...Another indication of monopoly power is the fact that Microsoft raised the price that it charged OEMs for Windows 95, with trivial exceptions, to the same level as the price it charged for Windows 98 just prior to releasing the newer product. In a competitive market, one would expect the price of an older operating system to stay the same or decrease upon the release of a newer, more attractive version.

In November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris released the infamous "Internet worm" that corrupted thousands of net-connected machines overnight.

The worm exposed a Pandora's Box of vulnerabilities in UNIX, including bugs in the venerable sendmail and finger programs. It also exploited the concept of "trusted hosts" in UNIX

Beyond it's immediate impact on infected systems, the worm called into question the "open lab" approach to UNIX security, which maximizes resource-sharing and trusting cooperation at the expense of formal security controls.