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I too am a DirecTV subscriber and will be among the first in line to buy a TiVo that works with DirecTV. It's supposed to happen when the 2 year contract with NDS runs out (see this), but I haven't heard anything since the initial announcement.

I'm hoping that the fact that TiVo is going after Verizon/AT&T and not DirecTV/Cable is an indication that they'll be adding a DirecTV TiVo soon (i.e. they're only suing the companies that don't allow their customers to use TiVos.)

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08/26/free-software-foundation-throwing-a-hissy-fit-over-windows-7/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10318343-16.html
http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/08/fsf-violates-creative-commons/
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-7-Sins-Bad-Vista-6-1-120095.shtml

Yeah, there actually has.

Its not non-compliance when a federal judge has ruled that you cannot be forced to reveal your encryption keys. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

I loaded the movies into a RAM disk and set the hard drive to power down, shut off syslog, and removed the DVD drive completely. Try that on a Windows box!

You mean like using RAMDiskXP to do exactly the same thing?

Twitter has more accepted slashdot stories than anybody I know of. If he finds a thing interesting the odds are the rest of us do too. Like myself he might find life not challenging enough to be interesting. For this space though the point is moot.

Twitter finds us interesting stuff on the Internet. This is a useful service. Twitter posts in articles many interesting things others might not know about because he's got a long memory and an axe to grind. This gives us contrary dialog to the marketdroids who would embrace a product because it's in their financial interest to do so. Twitter finds us astroturf trollbots to ignore. That's a good service too. Yes, his $'isms are a nuisance. Nonetheless he adds more value to slashdot than I do, and that's quite a bit.

Every challenge is an opportunity. I doubt Twitter could be induced to work for Microsoft but Yahoo is doable. For a measly $250k/yr Twitter could move a lot of mindshare. It's just bonus that he couldn't be spending all of his energy poking holes in every marketing effort. Oh FSM how I hate myself for posting that. The guy has every bit as much influence as Matt Asay, or more. We would miss him, but his children would be fat.

Seriously - this is the only firm requirement my employer had - "We have an exchange mail system, and we'll buy you any mobile device you want - so long as it can use ActiveSync." We were poised to use Android OS phones because iPhones were thought of as toys - with the exception of Exchange we're still mostly a *nix shop - but that one caveat changed the purchase of all our mobile devices.

I had high hopes after seeing the HTC Magic demos, but it turns out that was all smoke and mirrors. Trying to explain to my senior management that "it's a google phone but not really but it still has android but I'm not sure it's supported we'll see they bought the license" vs. "yes, the iPhone has ActiveSync capability" - guess who won?

Was just a copy-n-paste from the comments on the source article, so "on your half" doesn't really apply to the anon coward...

And it's actually the Swedish stock exchange and other authorities who brought up the "mmm this look like an internal pump and dump, and that would be insider trading" when they suspended trading in that stock: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10315020-93.html?tag=mncol;txt

But yes, different than Enron.

I guess it depends on Ellison - will his hate of all things MS make him sink millions into OO and make it a true competitor to MSO, or will he head the bean counters and cut it lose?

The geek sees an office suite.

Microsoft sees an office system that scales to a business of any size:

Microsoft, Google, and VMware redefine the OS, Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession

100 million seats for SharePoint.

This is the market in which Ellison must compete - and throwing a few more pennies into OpenOffice.org doesn't yield much of a return.

The head of Oracle and 3rd richest man in the world visited the lowly Java developers conference last month and gave full support for Java inside the new Oracle.

World of Wacrarft already uses bitorrent to handle updates. No ISP would block it outright so long as that's the case.

And yet Comcast did exactly that...

I sorry what I ment to say was no isp would admit to blocking bittorrent.

First of all, why should I have to build a fence around my home because some weird ass US company has decided to do a mass photo shoot abroad?

However, a fence is no solution either.. That's actually part of the problem: the camera's are higher than eye height.

World of Wacrarft already uses bitorrent to handle updates. No ISP would block it outright so long as that's the case.

And yet Comcast did exactly that...

Microsoft is becoming AOL. A crappy, proprietary, expensive, unreliable impediment to getting onto the internet. Their applications have plateaued, and open-source desktop and web-based competitors are improving rapidly. They'll hang on longer, but they've begun their long decline.

The true Slashdot geek can't post about Microsoft without his brain dissolving into mush. Fantasy rules and reality is an intrusion.

Listen to one of your own:

And then there's Microsoft. The company prints billions of dollars worth of profits each quarter from its Windows franchise, yet for years it has been quietly developing its next big operating system. And no, I'm not referring to Windows 7.

Microsoft has created a bridge "between personal productivity and line-of-business applications," one that stitches together Microsoft's "desktop" dominance with its cloud ambitions.

It's called SharePoint, and with over 100 million seats and $1 billion in revenue, the odds are that your company already has it installed.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer long ago declared that "SharePoint is the definitive operating system or platform for the middle tier," and I don't think he's using the term "operating system" lightly.

Increasingly, SharePoint is the center of the Microsoft universe, at least, for enterprise computing. SharePoint serves as the hub for Microsoft's suite of operating systems, applications, and third-party software. It is a content application server, of sorts, one that provides the platform upon which so much of Microsoft's value is now being built.

I've disparaged SharePoint in the past for its tendency to lock customers into its proprietary repository. But let's be clear: a large number of companies seem perfectly happy to make that trade-off and are actively using SharePoint at the heart of their intranets, extranets, and Web sites.

Microsoft, Google, and VMware redefine the OS

Matt Assay is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management.

He was even blunter when speaking to The New York Times:

SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."

Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession

AC learn to read. To make it simple the BSA is just as bad as the RIAA but they don't go after a big business just small businesses. Some of those guys might be here with start-ups and could get hit by them because one person gets fired and cries about it. If they come in on you, you will have to pay 4 to 5 figures whether you are in the right or not. I think the RIAA has to win the case to get their money. The BSA doesn't.

LINK:

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

Ernie Ball is a cool company that quit buying in to the M$ BS.

Do you think your software is so valuable then put a hardware lock on it. Don't send

Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica.

The problem with Wikipedia in academia is not the accuracy per se, it's that references on Wikipedia are not static and therefore are unverifiable. References in the Encyclopedia Brittanica - even a 50 year old edition - are. If you try to verify today what I quoted from Wikipedia last week, it may well have changed since then. If I quote a specific edition of the Brittanica as my reference for a fact, I may be taken to task for using an outdated reference, but at least my research will be reproducible because that edition will always carry the same content.

Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica. This is even taking into account the risk of vandalism. I don't care about the detail; there seem to be ways of counting which make Wikipedia win and ways that make Britannica win; what matters is that this means that statistically, a fact in Wikipedia is much more likely to be true than not. If you wouldn't worry when using a different Encyclopaedia, then you shouldn't worry when using Wikipedia.

Now, if you care about a fact enough that you are worried even in this situation. A; typical example where this might be true is when involved in academic studies; then you need to check the sources of the fact. This is where Wikipedia's citation policy is a killer. Whilst you should still check the fact in multiple sources, knowing the original source tends to make it much easier to be clear when a fact is wrong. Why was it wrong? What is the original source of the misunderstanding etc. etc.

The only thing to be aware of in Wikipedia is that it's more likely that a fact is maliciously and deliberately wrong. In this case, it helps to check the history of the fact and see who added it; again something not possible in Britannica. If that doesn't matter / isn't likely for the fact you are interested in then again you just go back to statistics, which are in your favour.

Apple surprised people by putting the price to upgrade to Snow Leopard at a very attractive $29 for a single license, and $49 for a five-user family pack. But there's a catch: you have to already have Leopard installed to pay those prices. If you're upgrading from a previous version of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you'll have to pay $169, which includes an upgrade to 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard). For a 5-user family pack license, it'll cost $229. And Snow Leopard is only compatible with Macs containing Intel chips. On the OS front, Leopard is the end of the line for PowerPC Mac owners.

Let's not forget the Ernie Ball story.

If this system is run by the US government, will they apply their own censorship?

http://news.cnet.com/2010-1028_3-5204405.html

the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International. But an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov).

But it gets better...

Instead, the list unintentionally reveals its author's views of what's appropriate and inappropriate. The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site. More to the point, the U.S. government could have set a positive example to the world regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians--especially in Iran, which punishes homosexuality with death.

So oppressed homosexuals in Iran found themselves circumventing the Iranian government only to be thwarted by the US government. But that isn't even the best bit.

In an e-mail to the OpenNet Initiative on Monday morning, Berman defended the concept of filtering as a way to preserve bandwidth. "Since the U.S. taxpayers are financing this program...there are legitimate limits that may be imposed," his message said. "These limits are hardly restrictive in finding any and all human rights, pro-democracy, dissident and other sites, as well as intellectual, religious, governmental and commercial sites. The porn filtering is a trade-off we feel is a proper balance and that, as noted in your Web release, frees up bandwidth for other uses and users."

Yes, there are legitimate limits to what taxpayers should cough up for - and I think helping a foreign government keep its gay population from accessing the wider international community most definitely falls into that category!

In 2000, they signed an agreement with Google, and Yahoo's search was powered by Google, in other words -- if you used Yahoo, you were using Google.

Let us not forget Inktomi, I believe they used a few other providers during those years as well.

Microsoft has been cannibalizing their own business for profits. They don't have the ability to innovate and they have been resorting to forcing upgrades on their customers to maintain revenue.
they could have taken over business software

Slashdot and reality are perilously close to a permanent disconnect:

"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping." Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, Slow down, cowboy

With the next version of Office, Microsoft is trying to expand* its desktop hold on the productivity market into one that spans the PC, Web, and phone, and the Nokia deal is seen as a significant move in that last category.
The software maker has already said that, with the next version of Office, it plans to offer browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Those programs will be able to run inside Safari and Firefox in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That means that Office, for the first time, will run on Linux-based machines.
Although Nokia and Microsoft have long been rivals in the phone business, the two have also struck deals at times. Nokia already has a license that allows its phones to connect to Exchange Servers using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. In 2007, Microsoft also struck a deal with Nokia to have Windows Live services run on the Finnish company's phones. Microsoft, Nokia plan mobile Office deal

*-emphasis added.

According to this Link, the claim is that they want to battle Balckberry's RIM.

My understanding is that lib(dvd)css2 is in a legal limbo -- despite a quick search on Google, I can't find a single citation to show that it is expressly forbidden. However, there are warnings about using it and similar technologies all over the net.

So what? If "they" (whoever "they" may be) don't know you are using it, who cares? Well, for instance, what happens when you carry your laptop on an international flight, and as you return to the country, Customs asks to search your laptop?

I might just be paranoid, but it's something to keep in mind.

been there done that

the govt will just get a black bag warrant to put a keylogger on your computer, snag the passphrase, and it is game over

you check the back of your computer every time you use it to see if there's a keylogger attached to the keyboard, right?

you say it like this is some sort of stretch of the imagination, uwe boll making a myspace movie

david fincher of all people, he of fightclub and seven fame, is actually making a movie based on facebook:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10271662-36.html

i cannot believe fincher is doing this. my esteem for the man just went into the toilet. the whole idea seems like such a narcissistic absurdity. just the effort of trying to imagine the kind of person a facebook movie would appeal to fills me with nausea

Because upgrading the upstream pipe from 14.4Kbps to 33.6Kbps would require the Yemenis ISP to take out a small loan at a 'very' high interest rape from the WTO...

But in reality, all ISP's would like to censor traffic as 'Less load + more consumers = Greater Profit'. If ISP's had their way we would all have the old netzero type ad bar on our screens while every mistyped web domain would take you to their sponsors web site all the while making sure you never exceed 1GB a month on your 100Mbit/100Mbit connection.

As far as the 'free market' 'you have a choice' idea goes... We know that just isn't true anymore... Large corporations collude with each other to insure your SOL and they rarely get caught. Even when they do it doesn't drive them out of business.. Flamebait? Damn Dirty Lies? Hey why not check out the quick 30 seconds of research below.

07-14-2009: EU issues charges in global LCD price fixing crackdown
06-16-2009: AT&T and Verizon deny price-fixing accusations
03-10-2009: Hitachi pleads guilty to LCD price fixing
11-12-2008: LG, Sharp, Chunghwa admit to LCD price fixing
03-03-2004: EU probes memory price-fixing charge
09-30-2002: States settle CD price-fixing case

This is why 'fanboys & girls' really need to be 're-educated' and not by their TV's, iPhones or PS3s... ;-|

Because upgrading the upstream pipe from 14.4Kbps to 33.6Kbps would require the Yemenis ISP to take out a small loan at a 'very' high interest rape from the WTO...

But in reality, all ISP's would like to censor traffic as 'Less load + more consumers = Greater Profit'. If ISP's had their way we would all have the old netzero type ad bar on our screens while every mistyped web domain would take you to their sponsors web site all the while making sure you never exceed 1GB a month on your 100Mbit/100Mbit connection.

As far as the 'free market' 'you have a choice' idea goes... We know that just isn't true anymore... Large corporations collude with each other to insure your SOL and they rarely get caught. Even when they do it doesn't drive them out of business.. Flamebait? Damn Dirty Lies? Hey why not check out the quick 30 seconds of research below.

07-14-2009: EU issues charges in global LCD price fixing crackdown
06-16-2009: AT&T and Verizon deny price-fixing accusations
03-10-2009: Hitachi pleads guilty to LCD price fixing
11-12-2008: LG, Sharp, Chunghwa admit to LCD price fixing
03-03-2004: EU probes memory price-fixing charge
09-30-2002: States settle CD price-fixing case

This is why 'fanboys & girls' really need to be 're-educated' and not by their TV's, iPhones or PS3s... ;-|

While Wikipedia is an amazing effort, it will not ever be Britannica, unless you pour a lot of money into it to hire writers and editors. They are both a luxury in the Internet media world, and the lack of them shows in the uneven writing and many factual errors Wikipedia suffers from.

The error rate of Wikipedia versus Britannica is about the same. While it has more errors per article, it has a lot more information per article. I would dare to guess that Wikipedia is much more accurate than newspapers. The experiment is over, and it worked.

The belief that Wikipedia must be less accurate is purely religious zeal; print is not automatically more accurate than electrons, a small group of editors doing it all isn't better than the Wiki model, and paying for encyclopedic information doesn't buy accuracy. The latter thinking - "it costs more, so it must be good" - is also the bane of FOSS.

In fairness, a Cornell study that escapes me at the moment once showed that Wikipedia's vandalism rate was getting marginally worse over time (by hundredths of a percent per month, based on actual page views of damaged pages, and with lots of disclaimers). The last serious, peer-reviewed study of the comparative error rate was in late '95; we're due for a new one.

The industry is stablizing for those that are general programmers.

Oh, is it? I missed that memo.

I have just got a LG BD-390 which plays
- Blu-ray
- MKV, divx rip, either on a USB drive or on a burned disc
- Netflix stream which can be HD depending on your bandwidth and the source material.
- stream from your own server

I'd say it is almost perfect.

"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"

How would you know?

For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.

Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".

http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php

http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html

"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."

And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.

Unfortunately, nothing restricts them from moving your intellectual property overseas. A US Congressman once tried to raise a fuss about this very issue but nothing was ever done about it. See "Your data in a cloud over India": http://techclub.mypctechs.com/?p=364 and this article: http://news.cnet.com/Congressman-raises-offshore-ID-theft-concerns/2100-1028_3-5165248.html

I would not at all be surprised if AT&T has a clause in the agreement that states Apple must be pro-active in protecting the device

Apple makes something like $18 per month for each iPhone with an active AT&T contract. I speculate that they're perfectly happy enforcing lock-in on their own, and that it won't change until someone else offers them a bigger slice of the pie.

A lot of lobbyists are lawyers, a lot of politicians are lawyers, the current system had been made to push every challenge into court with accompanying major court costs. Honestly how likely do you think major patent reform is.

When the patent office complains then I think the chances are higher than you apparently do. Not great mind you, but not abysmal either.

Citation here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10110247-2.html Technical details here (I think): http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions/gleam-api

One word:

malwarebytes

Detecting and removing botnet software is its purpose in life.

http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html?tag=mncol

As I write this the first item on Google News is Could YOU be responsible for the Twitter outage?

The story says if you don't keep your computer clean of viruses you could be partly responsible.

Hopefully, a few of the people with insecure computers will get tired of being pwned and take back their machine. I would call that a plus.
==

Could YOU be responsible for the Twitter outage?
CNET News - Larry Magid - 43 minutes ago
Of course you're not personally responsible for bringing down Twitter, but if your computer isn't equipped with up-to-date anti-malware software and the latest version of your operating system, you could unwittingly be part of the ...
Facebook Confirms Problems, But Is It an Attack? PC Magazine
Twitter Hit By 'Denial-Of-Service' Attack Wall Street Journal
Computerworld - InformationWeek - Los Angeles Times - PC World
all 821 news articles
Email this story
BBC News

Apple has a monopoly on selling supported software for the iPhone. Not all monopolies are anticompetitive; it has yet to be decided if this is one which is. There has certainly been some grumbling, but going after Apple for it would almost certainly mean they'd have to reopen antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. If you haven't noticed, Microsoft got totally let off on the whole antitrust thing by Ashcroft himself; there is certainly some sort of collusion there. It is unimaginable that Bill Gates would have been permitted to simply be in control of those big stacks of money over at the Gates Foundation, though, which are invested for profit in the industries of those same players. Ashcroft claimed the settlement "[...]fully and completely addressed the anti-competitive conduct outlined by the Court of Appeals against Microsoft". That's his job, though; the guy running the process on behalf of the USDOJ was appointed by Bush just months earlier, and "it's certain that Bush and his aides questioned [him] in detail about his future intentions in the Microsoft litigation." The DOJ/Microsoft deal "...breaks a longstanding cooperative relationship that began during the Ford Administration in the mid-1970s" — clearly, the decision to essentially abort antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, which had been caught dead to rights and found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in nearly every market in which they were involved, was not made lightly. It was made deliberately.

Even if Apple has nine illegal monopolies, the DOJ cannot call them on their behavior unless they go back after Microsoft, and that is clearly not on their agenda.

1. Why Windows Vista and Office 2007 are so Expensive  The Firefox ...
2. Is Windows getting more expensive? - CNET News
3. Windows 7 to be âoemore expensiveâ than Vista, XP
4. Writing on the Wall: Why Windows is so expensive
5. Why are vinyl windows so expensive? who provides them cheapest ...
6. Omfg Vista Is So Expensive - Windows Vista and Windows 7

Top 6 results from Bing:

1. Why are Mac's So Expensive? - Yahoo! Answers

2. why so expensive?. - Games for Windows Live

3. Why are vinyl windows so expensive? who provides them cheapest ...

4. Why are windows hosting providers so expensive? - Community Server

5. Why are Macbooks so expensive? - Yahoo! Answers

6. WikiAnswers - Why are Apple Macs so expensive

5 out of the top 6 at Google are directly related to what I actually wanted to know... articles about why Microsoft Windows is too expensive.

3 out of the 6 at Microsoft's Bing search engine return results for why their direct competitor, Apple, has such expensive computers. 1 more out of the remaining three appears to be somewhat related to my search by at least being about windows games, but no... look at the clip telling me why Bing thought this was relevant:

Official Games for Windows Forums ... why are macbooks so expensive i mean i saw a better windows pc laptop for half the price and double the specs and looks so why

Of the remaining 2 top 6 results, one is about vinyl windows just like Google's one stray result, and the other is about internet hosting companies charging more for windows based hosting... this is the only result that even remotely comes close to answering my question. So... 4 out of the top 6 listed look bad for a direct competitor and don't answer my question, 1 is irrelevant noise, and one is marginally relevant, but still noise. Bing sucks, and is certainly biased against anything negative being said about Microsoft.

Your link? Yeah, it's on the first page of the Google results, but it is the second to the last result, and is the only Apple related link, and even that link directly mentions Windows in the comments, and Windows 7 is linked all over the friggin place on this article's page!

is doing it?

The solar on a Prius produces about 215w. I'm not talking about running the entire car folks, I'm just talking about reducing loads on the battery. While searching for the watt/horse power ratio's, I stubmled on this. It says that a company has demonstrated a 29% increase in economy on a modified Prius.

It doesn't have to power the entire unit. It just has to help out when possible.

> Sounds like FUD.

Right. Because there's never been a person who has lost a file when Word crashed and the *.tmp files are entirely reliable and very easy to search through. In fact, it's so reliable, there was never any need to build recover functionality into it. Come on - just because you've lucked out and it's worked " seamlessly and effortlessly" for you doesn't mean a ton of us haven't lost important files because of Word's lack of 100% "uptime."

I thought that the folks at the University of Arizona who had announced (in 2006) a different type of adjustable glasses using an embedded liquid crystal layer and an adjustment varying the electric field applied to it had put their development into fast gear and already were shipping prototypes.

Darn! Past shock, again...

So far that's what I see:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9984384-54.html

Maybe it's 5kW to start and 2kW to run.

The compressor has a cooling performance of 3.4kW, according to: http://www.epa.gov/cppd/Presentations/Matsunaga%20electric%20inverter.pdf

But I can't figure out the power consumption from that document - there are no units in the relevant graphs. And that doesn't include the fans/blowers.

You keep stating that Microsoft is a monopoly over and over so frequently I believe it's a repetition tactic. You know, you repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth for you.

Ten years ago called, and they're tapping you on the head with the receiver: Judge calls Microsoft a "monopoly"

The last serious commercial competitor to Microsoft Windows for the desktop PC that I remember before Apple switched to the same x86 platform capable of running Windows, was IBM with OS/2.

So you claim that the last competitor was OS/2, and now that MS has no competitors, it's still not a monopoly? My friend, if there is no competition, that is the definition of monopoly!

I guess it's convenient to ignore my statements while you attempt to cement your argument. There are current competitors to Microsoft Windows, therefore it's not a monopoly. You epic failed to recognize that OS/2 was simply the last venture that was greeted with mild success, but still failed to dethrone the market leader.

BTW, a judge may call anything anything, but I would have to take a guess and say that unless it was a ruling and it was upheld after appeal, it's just an opinion. IANAL.

Not only that but they can make web tools Live/Bing/Hotmail work best with their browser - influencing users of those tools to almost be forced to to use IE.

They've already been bitten by that one. They blocked all browsers except IE from accessing MSN.com. After two days of people making noise about it they let everyone view MSN again.

Did they learn? No. Less than two years later they served a stylesheet to Opera (and only to Opera, other browsers received a working stylesheet and IE had its own) that deliberately broke the display of the page. They served Opera the IE stylesheet, which displayed fine, after some more complaints.

Was that enough for them? No, they tried again with hotmail. They sent Opera an incomplete javascript file that was missing a required function to empty the junk e-mail. Other browsers were sent a different javascript file.

I don't think they'd dare try again with how closely the EU is monitoring them now.

Ah I see what you mean now. They will still get the Full version as promised.
 
See the last paragraph: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10301299-56.html

You keep stating that Microsoft is a monopoly over and over so frequently I believe it's a repetition tactic. You know, you repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth for you.

Ten years ago called, and they're tapping you on the head with the receiver:

Judge calls Microsoft a "monopoly"

The last serious commercial competitor to Microsoft Windows for the desktop PC that I remember before Apple switched to the same x86 platform capable of running Windows, was IBM with OS/2.

So you claim that the last competitor was OS/2, and now that MS has no competitors, it's still not a monopoly? My friend, if there is no competition, that is the definition of monopoly!

The founders want to buy back Skype since their latest endeavor failed ( http://www.joost.com/ ) to catch on. This was first reported in April ( http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10217611-94.html ) , its possible that negations havnt gone the way the founder want and now pulls this trick.

Didn't we just have this a few years ago... oh no, that was SCO forgetting to actually buy UNIX from Novell. I wonder how many other companies will turn out not to own the software they think they own?

Also, don't forget that RIM were nearly at the point of having to close down Blackberry wireless operations in the US a couple of years go for very similar reasons.