Slashdot Mirror

Nowadays everybody wanna talk like they got something to say
But nothin comes out when they move they lips
Just a buncha gibberish
And muthafuckas act like they forgot about Vista

It is just me or is slashdot in the habit of pretending sites like Groklaw doesn't exist? Groklaw had the scoop a full day before the Computer Business Review article (which probably used Groklaw as its primary source anyway). I don't think this is some corporate conspiracy against Groklaw; I just wonder if Slashdot is having a hard time coping with the fact that specialized blogs, rss feeds, and aggregators like Thunderbird are doing a much better job of providing what Slashdot provided in the past... So the editors don't post articles that directly link to the 'competition'.

US government has already tried it, and the FCC is on our side. For now. But when South Dakota makes abortion virtually illegal, do you really trust our government to do what's in our best interests? They'll do anythign they can to get their paws on it somehow. They (the illusive "man/men for proper conjugation") are trying to get us to pay for email, for fuck's sake! It's up to us and how much BS we're willing to deal with. Sony's DRM didn't last long, now did it? The market will even itself out, or that's the going theory...

SenderID is an attempt by Microsoft to hijack a working open standard called SPF. At this point it is effectively dead because of Microsoft's cynical manipulation of Meng Wong's altruistic attempt to help everyone.

You will note I'm not normally a MS-basher, but in this case it's well deserved. SPF was ramping up into a system that would make email forgery impractical for spammers and virii, but Microsoft (with help from Yahoo and AOL, I guess) muddied the waters to the point where the anti-forgery community couldn't get a clear message out. Now SPF is still going, but very slowly, which is a shame since it is a practical thing you can do today that makes a real difference. If comcast (for one example) took the five freakin' minutes that would be required to publish SPF in their DNS, the world would be a better place for it.

Implement SPF. Laugh at the rotting corpse of SenderID.

"It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari," Microsoft said.

IE will not be a problem for Apple users because most of them have applied different browsers on their computers.

And with this change, every mac on the internet will become even more secure than their Windows based counterparts.

More on Indoneia's open source efforts could be found here
http://www.asiaosc.org/enwiki/page/Indonesia.html
They are one of the most active in ASIA but they usually do it on their own while others like Japan, Korea and China are workng together on nice things like Asianux

On the other hand, what manufacturers seem to be doing is clearly somewhat abusive, and even though they're not cooperating with each other, most EULAs will probably contain abusive language, so consumers aren't likely to have a choice about which contract they enter into.

On the other hand, quotes like this give me a little hope that more and more people are seeing the value in openness:

For instance, DiBona pointed out that if Google used Windows, or any other non-open source software program, to make changes to that system he would be required to essentially ask permission from that vendor. "Why should we hand over the control of our software support to another company?"

Something smelled fishy with the details.

While the initial story lacked a date, I found another story, with basically the same info on Novell (same status, same projected dates, etc.), dated back to March 10th of this year.

Basically, this is not news.

Something smelled fishy with the details.

While the initial story lacked a date, I found another story, with basically the same info on Novell (same status, same projected dates, etc.), dated back to March 10th of this year.

Basically, this is not news.

IBM has a lock on the next-generation game consoles. "Computer Business Review" reports that Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (MNS) are collaborating with IBM to build the next-generation processors for game consoles. "PC World" reports that MNS will incorporate IBM processors in their next-generation game consoles.

The hidden sub-text is that the future IBM processors will be excellent for pornographic games, providing life-like flesh tones and smooth-motion "thrusting", "quivering", and "wiggling". Pornography has traditionally be a significant driver of video-processing technology.

If the shortage appears, IBM can just hire some of the 13,000 they http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=29C F3CCF-B6F4-4CEF-BEAD-66F544590BC8just sacked.

You might have missed the CC, but Darl McBride had a little meltdown where he blamed Groklaw and PJ for the sorry state of his company.

See for instance cbronline

I'll let Elcorton speak, because he can speak for many:

Instead of unsupported innuendo against Pamela Jones, why didn't you talk about the fact that both the judge in the IBM case and YOUR OWN COUNSEL have publicly called you a liar for your fraudulent claims of copyright infringement in Linux? You trotted out that miserable little slug Stowell to announce that you wouldn't talk about specifics of pending litigation, which you then proceeded to do when it served your purpose. But you didn't mention that Judge Kimball, who has seen all the sealed filings that you always said proved your case, was "astonished" to find NO COMPETENT EVIDENCE supporting your public pronouncements of all this misappropriated material in Linux. NONE. So tell us again what was in all those sealed filings that the judge overlooked.

Neither did you mention that your own lawyer Robert Silver said in open court that the AutoZone case has NOTHING TO DO WITH LINUX, after you told your shareholders exactly the opposite in a previous conference call. Is that what you mean be "transparency," Darl?

And who do you think gives a fuck who Pamela Jones "really" is? Was it Groklaw that found a "vast disparity" between your public pronouncements and actual evidence? No, Darl, that was a United States District Judge. Too bad none of the callers today brought that up.

Why doesn't your "transparent" web site, the one that has only facts and no spin, mention the fact that your case against Daimler-Chrysler was DISMISSED as to all but one trivial claim, and that your appeal of the dismissal was DENIED months ago? Is all that set in a transparent font?

You're a better liar but a worse human being than any of the contemptible shills who haunt this board. If you really had anything on Jones you would have used it by now. Who's going to be the next victim of a "heart attack" that later turns out to be a bullet in the head with "no possibility of murder?" Anybody who stands up to that has courage. You disgust me, you cowardly little crooked prick.

As the cbronline author notes:

"So who is Pamela Jones? McBride would not say. "We're still digging to the bottom of this. I think once we have all of the facts complete we'll be glad to do [share] that," he said. Perhaps the bigger question might be why SCO, a company McBride claimed is "steadfastly focused on winning in both the court room and in the market place" is so concerned with what a small community web site thinks about its claims."

Indeed.

Some think this Groklaw attack was just redirection to get eyes off the bad numbers. I think it's much more than that. This is another sign of utter DESPERATION from the SCOXE crew. They're fucked, they know it... and now it's time to blame someone else.

No, it was inspired by and has grown vastly beyond Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix.

Even if NAC does not currently use Trusted Computing:
Cisco Systems and Broadcom are already developing switches that will use the TPM for authentication and more

recent move by members of the Trusted Computing Group to create an open standards NAC alternative

and While Cisco presents NAC as an industry-standard approach, at this point, it's a Cisco approach, which apparently Cisco is hoping will become a de facto standard. Elsewhere, there's the Trusted Network Connect standard that's being put together under the auspices of the TCG (Trusted Computing Group), which is intended to accomplish the same thing.

So one way or another the Trusted network admission system *is* a genuine project and genuine threat. Plus the governent call for ordinary ISPs to impose exactly this sort of system on the public as part of their Terms of service. That government plan used to be documented at this BSA address, unfortunately they have taken the PDF down and I cannot find another copy anywhere. I did save some quotes from the President's Cyber Security Advisor's keynote speech:

I think we need to decide that from now on IT security functionality will be built in to what we do, to the products that we bring to market.
-
TCPA, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, is an example of bringing hardware and software manufacturers together. But TCPA is not enough.
-
It is not beyond the wit of this industry to figure out a way of forcing down patches.
-
ISPs and carriers can insist that when cable modems and DSL hookups are made, firewalls are installed. It is not enough for an ISP or carrier to say, oh, and by the way, you might want to think about a firewall.

-

Even if NAC does not currently use Trusted Computing:
Cisco Systems and Broadcom are already developing switches that will use the TPM for authentication and more

recent move by members of the Trusted Computing Group to create an open standards NAC alternative

and While Cisco presents NAC as an industry-standard approach, at this point, it's a Cisco approach, which apparently Cisco is hoping will become a de facto standard. Elsewhere, there's the Trusted Network Connect standard that's being put together under the auspices of the TCG (Trusted Computing Group), which is intended to accomplish the same thing.

So one way or another the Trusted network admission system *is* a genuine project and genuine threat. Plus the governent call for ordinary ISPs to impose exactly this sort of system on the public as part of their Terms of service. That government plan used to be documented at this BSA address, unfortunately they have taken the PDF down and I cannot find another copy anywhere.

-

you, as most of people posting here thus far, have missed the thesis of my blog entirely.

the issue is creating long term viability for Open Source desktop software,

this has nothing to do with it being a closed source platform (after all, what's Solaris or AIX?)

to understand why that is the case, you may have to actually read the article ;-)

While I think it's great that yet another "identity thief" (sort of) has been busted, this does little to stem the flow of spam. What we truly need are more cases that are strictly based on the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mail. We've got some great and not so great legislation out there to protect us... why aren't we using it? Because it costs too much?

And yes, I know that there have been a few landmark cases recently, but a few big falls aren't going to convince spammers as a whole to stop spamming. An concerted effort to shut them down via thousands of small lawsuits from you and I would be much more likely to have an effect, in my humble opinion.

Not really, it's just more "Shared Source", but probably a bone tossed in apeasement in connection with the anti-trust settlement. Interesting reading.

What version of Mandrake didi he use? What are the exact models of the hardware it didn't detect? USB mice have been supported for ages for example. If you havnet tried Mandrake 9.2 or 10.0 then try again. Windows 95 would probably wouldnt work either, but does that mean that Windows 95 IS TOO HARD?

You may like to also try another distribution. Such as Knoppix. Knoppix has top class hardware support and doesnt need installing.

Windows XP dosent support my hardware, it BSODs when I plug my AGFA easypix camera into my computer, Mandrake pops up a disk on my desktop, and so does all the other Linux distros. My 52 year old mother can't figure out Windows XP, but she loves linux, and she uses it to play her games and online banking!

You may also like to report the non-detected hardware to Mandrake QA.

Here are some more links to back up my claim!

So try and get your Neighbour to try Linux again, tell him that its improving all the time!

You're way off, on several accounts. It's always fun to try and blame everything on corporate greed, but sometimes the facts just don't support it. Other posters have pointed out how Sun plans to use similar technology and how IBM plans to implement it. Do you think that they are just copying Intel blindly? They are all attacking the same problem: increasing throughput for fast CPUs. As you yourself pointed out, memory speed cannot come close to keeping up with modern CPUs. Increasing cache size is one way to combat this, but it is a very brute force way to do it. You increase the size, cost, and power consumption of the CPU when doing this. SMT and multi-core SMP systems allow for work to get done while waiting for memory to catch up. HT is just the tip of the iceberg, the stuff that Sun and IBM are working on is pretty amazing.

As for your knowledge of Intel, it is humorous at best. The Itanium was never meant to be the CPU of the future. It was never meant to be in home systems. It was designed to give Intel a way to compete with 64-bit servers that were all the rage in the late 90's. That's why Intel was willing to completely break with x86 instruction sets. If they were planning on trying to transition from PentiumXYZ to Itanium, then they would have never done that. Plus, for all its initial problems, the modern Itanium has put up some impressive numbers.

IBM will have SMT in the Power5. Their approach looks even better than Intel's, but part of that is the Power architecture and part of that is IBM learning from what Intel did. SMT is really the best way to get past the limiting reagents of modern processors : bandwidth.

That is what one gets when one keeps crying wolf!

Unfortunately, the number of words in that sentence did not exhaust the immense volume of even the big lies told by SCO.

I hope the wolf is IBM.

Dear Darl McBride

About "Linux Migration Incentives Planned by SCO" -

A proprietary Operating System? Of course, I've always had a hankering for Big Iron.

Yes, now you come to think of it, Linux really isn't all that good - not when you consider the alternatives.

I think a cluster of Z990s with z/VM with a source code license, with source code licensed z/OS and VSE/ESA running as guests, would be fine, just fine.

And of course, I was forgetting, a 32-cpu Alpha running OpenVMS for the terminal.

I mean, I have to have a serious games machine, don't I? Everybody'll laugh at me if I don't. And that takes serious IO , to control all the remote control aircraft and spacecraft and robots that one needs to b>play DOOM in a totally satisfactory and convincing manner ; and once again, thanks for offering.

Linux'd never fit the bill, would it?

And once again, thanks for the offer, and I take it that once having declared my intentions to take up your offer in good faith, you cannot now refuse to carry it out. And I gave my full postal address when I applied for the Free Unix Licenses, so you don't have any excuses, do you now?

I've never owned a mainframe before - and I owe it all to SCO!

The ICANN Information page on Verisign's Wildcard Service" elicits comments from Members of the Internet community. Emails are to be copied to wildcard-comments@icann.org A selection of comments is viewable here.
I'd suggest making your comments now.
Regarding the Verisign survey...more information about it is in this article. Excerpts:
The survey, a telephone poll of 1,000 internet users who could recall seeing Site Finder, was conducted by Markitecture and Harris Interactive and commissioned by VeriSign. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 5%

On the opposing side, Tucows Inc, a domain name registrar that competes with VeriSign, said a poll of its resellers (generally ISPs and web hosting companies) indicated that 90% of respondents wanted Site Finder turned off.

... are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?

I guess I should have included news sources in my links, because there sure are a lot of them.

All sarcasm aside, your point is well taken. I like the article on the Sun site because it explains more about how the technology works than any of the news sites, but it seems that Slashdot editors are much more likely to accept a story if the link points to an "impartial" news source rather than a press release. Thanks for the tip.

The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more.

Actually, neither one of those products have shipped:

From Via's press release:

The VIA Eden-N processor is sampling now and is expected to start appearing in secure networking, entertainment and communication devices in Q1, 2004.

From Transmeta's press release:

... the Efficeon processor family will be competitive with, or outperform competing microprocessors operating within critical thermal limits such as the 7W limit for typical fanless notebook designs. Systems based on the processor are expected to begin shipping in the fourth quarter.

YES, they did give some advance notice.

In fact, Slashdot had coverage 4 days before it went into effect.

The actual news coverage was at Computer Business Review 6 days before Verisign went live with SiteFinder on Sept 15.

Perhaps it was known before then, but there was certainly more than 3 days. That doesn't make Verisign any less slimey for doing this. But to say they did it without even a few days warning would clearly contradict the news coverage of their intentions at Computer Business Review and here at Slashdot (if you can stomache calling slashdot "news").

Inventor Says Search Service Won't Break DNS

VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos

VeriSign Mulls Way to Make Money from Typos

Inventor Says Search Service Won't Break DNS

VeriSign Looks At Earning Money on Domain Typos

VeriSign Mulls Way to Make Money from Typos

I wrote the following letter to ICANN when it first cropped up:

Hello,

We already have the example of WLS in Verisign abusing its monopoly (and ICANN not stopping this abuse -- see www.stopwls.com).

Planning to monetize all typos by rewriting DNS error codes to instead point to itself (i.e. instead of returning error codes, it will no longer return errors, but instead bring the surfer to Verisign money-making pages) is yet another example of an abusive monopolist. See here:

"Some organizations have shown a propensity to make technical changes happen and then ask for permission later," Afilias's Mohan said. "Given the economics of it, I think that's what will happen here."

Given the huge technical standards that Verisign would be violating, as well as the Intellectual Property and economic issues (e.g. a typo of one letter of your domain name could send a client to a search engine listing your competitor as #1, or worse; John Zuccarini is in JAIL for his typo-squatting!), can someone in the Names Council, or the ICANN Board that has a spinal column please pre-empt this Verisign move by forbidding unilateral action of such a nature by means of a vote of some kind, through the introduction of a motion?

From the comments at ICANNWatch when this abuse last came up, perhaps the way to frame the motion is "gTLD Registry operators WILL return NXDOMAIN for ALL DNS queries for which where there is not a REGISTERED domain name." Period.

Once you start tampering with things at the DNS level, as Verisign is intending to do, you threaten the security and stability of the internet, as I think Vint Cerf properly recognizes (being right at least half of the time; bad call on WLS, but the courts and the US governmet will take care of that one eventually). For a company whose slogan is "The Value of Trust", Verisign makes a mockery of the caretaker role it has been given as guardian of the com/net registries. I trust them as much as I trust John Zuccarini.

If the US government had a problem with Microsoft embedding the Internet Explorer browser into its operating system, what will they think given Verisign has an even greater monopoly when it comes to DNS resolution? The power should belong to the users, who should have the choice (through their own software) how to resolve errors. That's why we have technical standards. Making that decision for them, by BREAKING technical standards and the applications that rely on those standards, as Verisign plans to do, and making loads of $$$$ while doing it, smacks of an abusive father-knows-best monopolist. Verisign is the father you wish you never had! Calling it a "service" adds insult to injury, as they did with WLS, especially when it's a MONOPOLY service, for which one has no choice. When you make a typo for a telephone call, does the 1-800 operator (AT&T, MCI, Neustar?) start playing paid jingles for your competitors, instead of telling you that you misdialled via a message?

Ultimately, folks know Verisign wants to milk every last penny out of its monopolies, and doesn't care who they have to step on to do so. Take a look at Games.TV which shows:

games.tv is available and can be registered immediately for $100,000.00/year

to understand what Verisign's goals are (Verisign runs .tv). Do you think you really own your .com domains? What price would Verisign like to charge you for your domains?? Once they wipe out some registrars through WLS, and other monopoly abuses, who will be left to stop them?

If Verisign is permitted to g

Since at least August, SCO have been floating the idea of sending invoices to Linux users. It's even been reported, seemingly incorrectly, back in August, that SCO was beginning to send invoices. The invoice story has been taken up with a vengence in the last few days, for example, here, here and here.

SCO Australia says the invoicing plan doesn't "ring true" and contradicts very recent strategy discussions. Unfortunately, SCO USA's Blake Stowell, doesn't seem to have yet responded to SCO Australia's request for clarification. SCO Australia also says that they're unsure about the question of invoices being sent in the US even though there are reports on the web [examples: here, here and here] about just such a thing being planned.

Since at least August, SCO have been floating the idea of sending invoices to Linux users. It's even been reported, seemingly incorrectly, back in August, that SCO was beginning to send invoices. The invoice story has been taken up with a vengence in the last few days, for example, here, here and here.

SCO Australia says the invoicing plan doesn't "ring true" and contradicts very recent strategy discussions. Unfortunately, SCO USA's Blake Stowell, doesn't seem to have yet responded to SCO Australia's request for clarification. SCO Australia also says that they're unsure about the question of invoices being sent in the US even though there are reports on the web [examples: here, here and here] about just such a thing being planned.

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald "The SCO Group said today it had never planned to sue any Linux companies, had no concrete plans to sue anyone and also no current plans to take a commercial Linux customer to court."

At GROKLAW there is speculation that this is the start of an attempted defense to the Red Hat suit.

It's certainly an odd move, as only days ago, SCO said "We are in the process of contacting them about coming into compliance and taking a UnixWare license from us. If they refuse to do so, we will sue them directly and see them in court", and apparently claimed to have three groups working on identifying and approaching Linux users, plus were preparing to take a Linux user to court.

As this really does seem like the beginning of an attempted defense to Red Hat's law suit. It would seem like a good idea for the community to collect as many examples of SCO's legal threats as possible - especially to Linux companies and Red Hat in particular - and post them - as well as make Red Hat aware of SCO's latest PR spin, and all the contradictory evidence in their prior actions.

DATE: 20/08/2003 SCO Preparing Legal Action Against Customer By Matthew Aslett

SCO Group Inc is preparing to take a Linux user to court to speed up the legal process in its claim Unix code has been illegally copied into Linux, and also encourage Linux users to take out a license for its intellectual property.

Unbelieveable... SCO is now backtracking on the whole Linux user lawsuit thing... SCO's PR people in Australia are now claiming that there was never any serious plans to sue Linux companies or commercial Linux companies! This in spite of Darl's statement quite to the contrary just a week ago!

Are they really so stupid as to think that nobody will remember what they've actually said up to this point?

HP has what, HP/UX and Tru64-UNIX? No wonder they "have a skinny RISC/Unix workstation business."

You mean they don't match them to this article about SCO threats to sue Linux end-users?

The direction Microsoft took Corel when they bought 25% of them and shut down their Linux work was obviously and disaserously wrong. Corel has continued to lose market share, even in government work where it once ruled.

Why did Microsoft throw all that money at Corel? OK, the official reason, to subsidize Corel's .NET efforts, isn't very plausible. But neither is the idea that they thought WordPerfect was any threat to them. Especially not Linux WordPerfect. My own guess is that this was a quid pro quo for Corel settling its patent lawsuits against Microsoft. By paying Corel off with an "investment", Microsoft avoids some taxes on the money. They did precisely the same thing with Borland -- before Borland started work on its Linux IDE!

(links gleaned from Google News) I'd submit these into the story submission but my submissions have 99% rejection rate.

SCO's proof bogus, Linux advocate says The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, said he was not surprised by Perens analysis. "It sure as hell looks like its BSD-licensed and has been around forever," Linus said. "This was what we claimed was the likely source of any common code in the first place: BSD code and various vendor stuff." ...

...and, hold onto your seat because...

SCO Preparing Legal Action Against Customer Talking to ComputerWire, McBride added SCO is identifying Linux users for possible litigation. He said SCO had for the last month gathered information on Linux users, and identified about 10% of the total Linux servers sold last year. McBride added that he expected that figure to rise to 40% over the coming weeks before SCO would take action. ...

It's not stupidity, it's a great way to make some quick money. I mean, it's underhanded, and ultimately futile, but you can't deny that the execs and shareholders are making a quick buck.

In the end, what SCO is doing isn't illegal, and it won't get any of them in hotwater unless somebody can proove that they filed the suit only to get the stock up, knowing full well it was a baseless lawsuit. Their claims hold just enough water to keep them safe even if they won't stand up in court.

This is a great demonstration of what is wrong with the focus on creating short term profits in corporate america. The SCO execs are not only sniking the future of their company, but potentially the future of other companies. They are doing so, blindly, for the quick buck.

Good news is SCOX closed down 14% today.

Submitted the story but got rejected, Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the word jail-time so often. ;-)

I wish something like this would have happened a couple years ago... before I started running 5 Linux servers at work that I now can't do without.

As reported on The Register, which was really a repost of an article from Compuwire, AOL has announced that in its next upgrade to their AOL client for Apple's OS X, it will use Netscape by default. (And just for those who want another link, Spider-Man is cool).

Most people (well, me) assume this means that AOL is using the Macintosh crowd as a testing base, then will make the same move on the Windows side of things by changing their PC client's default from IE to Netscape. The move won't really hurt Microsoft - it will still own 80% of the browser market, and since both Netscape and Internet Explorer are free, neither company will start having shifts of money.

But this isn't so much about money, as it is about control. AOL knows that their are two reasons Microsoft pushes Internet Explorer. Control of standards, and control of eyeballs. With every Windows computer that ships, it has Internet Explorer on it. And it's home page is MSN, Microsoft's media system.

Control the Eyeballs!

Netscape, by comparison, points to Netscape.com - which contains the collective linked knowledge to all things AOL/Time Warner. Links to news articles on CNN, Cartoon Network, and all else.

It's about the eyeballs. AOL wants you to see Time/Warner stuff, Microsoft wants those eyeballs to check out MSN. Both companies have a lot to gain by keeping your attention. AOL/Time Warner wants you to know all about their movies (like the upcoming Power Puff Girls movie, or their cable channels, or their electronic entertainment partnerships, or, just as important, keeping you signed up with AOL.

MSN has its wants, with its line of cable shows, plus all of the other Microsoft goodies, like Gamezone, Hotmail, Expedia and other services - which keep you plugged into the Microsoft system, and keeps those dollars coming in.

Control the browser, control the world

Just as important as the eyeballs is the technology that drives what they see. At last year's E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), AOl and Sony demonstrated using AOL on the Playstation 2 system, at the same time that Sony talked about running Linux on the Playstation 2. Now, almost a year later, Sony is getting ready to start shipping their hard drive/Ethernet/modem combo unit for $150. And AOL sees a large market place - one where there are more TV's than computers, and a $200 Playstation 2 in plenty of homes.

Odds are, Microsoft isn't going to make Internet Explorer for the Playstation system (not with their own Xbox on the market) - let alone for Linux. But since AOL has been sponsoring the creation of Mozilla, the Open Source browser Netscape is based on. Mozilla has been ported to nearly every operating system in existence - Linux, Macintosh, Solaris, and, of course, Windows. And across all operating systems, it provides the same look and feel - so now it doesn't matter what operating system you're using to surf the web/check your mail/chat with your friends on - Netscape looks the same. And you can bet it will be easy enough to develop and port to the Playstation 2 as well.

The implications could drive a shift of development. Suppose you're a web developer at this second, and you want to make sure people visiting your web page see all the whiz bang stuff. Right now, you spend most of your time making sure that Internet Explorer sees the page perfectly - then concentrate on the other browsers out there. Microsoft is happy, because to make sure IE looks the best, odds are you'll use Microsoft technology, which means you're spending Microsoft money (note: not Microsoft Money - different thing).

Netscape, being built on Mozilla, is HTML 4.0 standards compliant. That means that anything written for Netscape is certain to work with every other browser out there - including Internet Explorer (as long as Microsoft codes IE to be fully HTML compliant).

So now the web developer, in a post AOL-switching-to-Netscape time, has a new choice. Program your web site for IE, then for all the others - or make your web site HTML 4.0 standards compliant, and know that all browsers will render it correct the first time. There will still be questions about plug-ins (like those who like to use Flash enabled web sites, but by changing that over to Java, which runs on as many operating systems as Mozilla, developers can code around that hurdle. HTML 4.0 standards mean that anyone's tools can be used - Open Source, proprietary, or otherwise. Which means less money to Microsoft, and more power everyone else.

Maybe the move to Netscape won't change the world overnight, or drive subscribers to AOL. But it keeps the competition between the two companies alive.

And for most of us, competition is a good thing.

As always, I'm John "Dark Paladin" Hummel. And that's my opinion.