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They're not in any hurry it seems. The CNET article that opened with "Microsoft did an about-face Thursday by opening the redesigned MSN.com Web site to some third-party browsers" was rather presumptuous.

Microsoft are binging on evil this month.

there's already 20 MEGS (honest to goodness MEGS) of patches out for WinXP!! http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7661667.html

... that maybe the fact that part of the opposition to this bill comes from other big business might have been a factor? It's a mistake to assume that "big business" is one entity all of whom have the same agenda.

There are two factors here:
1. It will cost hardware and software makers to implement it.
2. Even if a small percentage of hardware/OSs are bought by people who use it for "bad things" then, particularly in hardware (where margins are thin), a small percentage makes a big difference to the bottom line.

More like one set of corps winning a victory over another set. Some seem to think that MS should have been in favour of this as it would "outlaw Linux". Not true - it just might outlaw running Linux without the SSSCA code. Anyone with some skills and a sense of adventure would be able to identify and remove the code from Windoze - hardware access aint hard to spot. Maybe a bit more work if you don't have the source, but still practical.

Microsoft apparently had a change of stance after the backlash surrounding the blocking.

On cnet.com they quote
"All of our development work for the new MSN.com is...W3C standard," said Bob Visse, the director of MSN marketing, referring to the World Wide Web Consortium, which is developing industry standards for Web technologies. "For browsers that we know don't support those standards or that we can't insure will get a great experience for the customer, we do serve up a page that suggests that they upgrade to an IE browser that does support the" standards.

On the other, if you go to the w3c validator you get 4 errors for www.msn.com and msn.com.

well, in the cnet articlehere MS says that they're only blocking "browser[s that don't] support the latest XHTML standard". Yay.

Microsoft is boldly saying "We want to run the Internet. Standards mean nothing except when its our standard."

I think all CS and IT people should strongly oppose this company both from the standpoint of the quality of it's engineering, and it's abysmal ethics and vision. Unix represents the best way (including Linux, *BSD and MacOS X) to fight back, and there are excellent rationales for doing so.

This is probably the best chance alternatives will ever have...let's hope they make the most of it. The reviews of RH 7.2 are an encouraging start at least!

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

Check out the news.com article here

I don't use Ms-Win. I haven't heard anybody I know who does use Ms-Win mention any intention to "upgrade" to XP. And I know for a fact that my company has no plans to do so.

The device does not use a digital-rights management scheme.

When it auto-syncs to iTunes, the iPod can only connect to one copy of the software on one Mac. But a manual mode allows the device to share songs between any number of Macs.

However, Jobs said Apple does not condone stealing music. In fact, he said, the company spent $50,000 on CDs to go along with review copies of the unit so that Apple would not be promoting piracy.

The iPod does come wrapped in plastic with a warning in English, French, German and Japanese that states, "Don't steal music."

"Piracy is not a technological issue. It's a behavior issue," Jobs said, adding that all the encryption schemes that have been developed can also be broken.

He added that Apple tried to go out of its way to show its concern for artists' copyrights, despite the relatively open nature of its hardware.

"We own a lot of intellectual property ourselves. We're one of the few companies in the industry that does," he said.

Everyone loves to rag on Apple, especially over the PowerBook 5300 with defective batteries and other problems. Nobody seems to remember that less than five of these units were in customer hands when the battery problems surfaced, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of affected units in customer hands when Dell and Compaq have done recent battery recalls.

And everyone is so quick to condemn Apple for the 5300, but nobody praises them when they do make things right. Like the 5300/190 Repair Extension Program, which fixed specific defects in the 5300 and 190 series PowerBooks, for free, for a period 7 years after they were discontinued-- I do believe it is still in effect.

And let's not forget the numerous times in the last 18 months or so that Apple offered people who still owned those machines trade-in deals to get much, much better PowerBook G3 units at reduced cost.

~Philly

...so they'll pay less income tax.

How about NO income tax?

Moreover, I think this is an incentive to drive out freeware and open-source developers. Who's going to spend $250/$1500 on something that's not going to make them a penny in return? The big benefit to this for MS is that fw/o-s often provides functionality that they would rather not let you have, or that they would rather charge you for (my fav. current example is Virtual Network Computing 3.3.3r7, which -- for free -- does everything that PCAnywhere does).

Yah know what though? It's going to KILL them in the web market. They think I'm going to include the web-based version of .Net calendar on my little site? Think again. JSP is still free, and ColdFusion ain't so much. I don't care how many dorks still use FrontPage, they're going to drop it like a hot potato when they realize they have to cough up for using widget X.

"Microsoft will "lose $125 on every Xbox console"." from CNET

Looks like MS will try to buy it's way into the gaming market.

I submitted this as an article as well, but I must have been slightly behind the other guy.

I have two major problems with this. First of all, yeah, it's tiny (the length of a credit card and less than an inch thick.) However, what happens when it gets dropped on the floor? For now, hard-drive based players are bulky for a reason -- tiny laptop drives are FRAGILE and need to be protected! The spindles won't hold up to much abuse, and MP3 players are subjected to a large amount of abuses on a daily basis, from being shoved in a backpack to being put in a pocket while the person is running. How well does the Apple player stack up?

Secondly, the Apple player is competing with many others on the market. Steve Jobs makes it sound like Apple is the only player in the arena, but in reality, there are several. Sure, Apple is the only one doing Firewire, and Firewire offers a faster transfer rate. But that's all for moot if my player pukes once I throw it in my bag.

If you're interested in finding a really tiny player, check out the Flash-memory based ones. Flash memory is getting a lot cheaper. MyDivaPlayer.com is offering a 128MB player that also accepts Flash memory for $135 after discount. Plus, these things are about half the size of the iPod. Flash memory players can be neat as well -- infinitely expandable storage, rewriteablity, and most players automatically plug-n-play as removable drives on Windows systems. Plus, you can do voice recording and cart around lots of other files as well, so the players double as mini Zip disks. :) Sure, hard-drive based players do this as well, and they have a much higher storage capacity -- but they are much more bulky and require careful care and feeding.

If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing.

As someone already mentioned, comparing a kiosk that runs the early version of the console 24/7 in a poorly ventilated environment is different from comparing the final consumer product being used in regular conditions. As for Playstation II's not crashing, you must have a very short memory. I seem to remember headlines like PS2 glitches likely to drag down Sony's earnings , Sony finds glitches in three PS2 games and more when they first came out and look how successful PS2 is now.

I say, the jury is out until the holiday season is over before we can tell if X-Box will be a success or failure.

If early generation games crash, Microsoft will have a perception problem regardless of who is at fault. The bar is set higher for entry machines these days. PlayStation and PlayStation II were not prone to crashing.

As someone already mentioned, comparing a kiosk that runs the early version of the console 24/7 in a poorly ventilated environment is different from comparing the final consumer product being used in regular conditions. As for Playstation II's not crashing, you must have a very short memory. I seem to remember headlines like PS2 glitches likely to drag down Sony's earnings , Sony finds glitches in three PS2 games and more when they first came out and look how successful PS2 is now.

I say, the jury is out until the holiday season is over before we can tell if X-Box will be a success or failure.

Sony to expand Linux for PlayStation 2

Now I know which console I'll be getting this holiday season! :-)

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

I got the urge to see this Disney film a few pages below your post. I checked a couple out (eDonkey2000 couldn't connect, nor could BearShare) and decided to download Limewire . You mentioned the Doobie Brothers -- check out the ad from the download page!

MP3 Fans: Get Your Gear Here
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Get started here:
Compare Leading MP3 Players
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Top 5 CD-RW Burners
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Note: Go ahead and check out CNET's services; your download will continue uninterrupted in the background.

I guess the CNET producers saw the episode. ;-)

Tech giants pan anti-piracy mandate!

It's good to see this, after all the press the evil big-media giants have been getting lately! :-)

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

You should talk to Jim Allchin, he has some non-biased views on open source and he's an industry leader.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4833927.html

Kidding aside, it's probably relevant to your assignment.

On the hardware front, they were the first to use an easy to open case with easily accessible parts and pieces. I could be wrong on this one, but they were the first company to say that it was ok to open the case while the computer was still on. And yeah, it looks good. They were also the first to use trackpads, titanium, an extremely small form factor while keeping weight extremely low on their laptops. The ibook is very small but fully-featured. The imac itself was pure innovation, the proof is in the people who tried to copy it and failed. There was some imac look-alike on the Home Shopping Network, but it was $2000 and it looked worse. Apple includes a DVD-R with its midrange and highend towers. Apple was the first to embrace wireless. Apple's flatpanels are innovation with only one cable, and the best looking picture.

On the software front, MacOS X. The power of unix with the simplicity of the MacOS. That's major innovation right there. It's not perfect yet, but it should be sometime around March 24th, 2002. iTunes is great stuff, and so is iMovie supposedly. iDVD looks so simple that your average blowjoe computer user can use it without a problem. A couple independant studies showed that imovie and iDVD were easier than faster than the competiton. Another innovation that comes from not being a monopoly is burning CDs within the Finder.

As for iTools, I've never had it crash on me. My only complaints are that it's slow and that it's a bit hard to use if you're custom making your own webpage. All in all, I was fairly impressed with it.

"Apple doesn't innovate" doesn't hold water. Apple's always been on the bleeding edge of hardware and software innovation. If you want to see the newest and coolest things to hit the market, go with Apple.

I always have to go off on a tangent and be a conspiracy theorist. Have you guys noticed how Apple hasn't said anything negative toward Microsoft and Intel? Now back in the day of 1997, you might remember those commercials of a slug carrying a Pentium chip on its back, and the fireman cooling off one of those sleek guys in a cool costumes that were in Intel's commercials before the Blue Man Group. Those commercials kicked ass, I tell you! There's plenty of things Apple could have done since then, like this.

Sometime Apple is going to need to compete directly with Microsoft and Intel if they are to win more market share. Right now, they aren't ready. MacOS X 10.2 and the G5s need to come out, as well as some REALLY snazzy commercials. It's not too hard to see Microsoft pulling Office and Internet Explorer from the mac, so Apple would need alternatives for those. They need more retail stores also. As soon as all of the pieces are together, they should definately get the message out.

Quick, someone call Bill Gates. These people need to be threatened with legal action as soon as possible. They are obviously not using properly licensed software from Microsoft, and as such are obviously thieving b*stards.

My God, when will people ever learn? I hope Microsoft doesn't let these scum get away easily, like they did with the PCs for Kids project in East Timor.

it's available at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7589931.html? tag=mn_hd.

Have you noticed that the hearing will happen the same day miGrosoft will launch its billionesque marketed XP noperating system ? Is this a coincidence ? Probably, but I feel it ironic.

What could be worse than that kind of legislation that aim to control the way you use information ? Are you supposed a criminal before having done anything or before having been in court ?

...the Dot.Station, a countertop Internet appliance, will fade out. The company shipped 250,000 of the devices to AOL Avant, an America Online joint venture in Spain, but there are no plans to manufacture more.

In a recent article on CNet:

This week, Linus Torvalds, manager for Linux's security response center, published an essay on the company's site decrying the information and example code released by some companies and independent security consultants as "information anarchy."

"It's high time the security community stopped providing the blueprints for building these weapons," Linus wrote in the essay. "And it's high time that computer users insisted that the security community live up to its obligation to protect them."

"The state of affairs today allows even relative novices to build highly destructive (malicious software)," he wrote in the essay. "It's simply indefensible for the security community to continue arming cyber criminals. We can at least raise the bar."

"(We) don't purport to have the answer to the problem," he said in a Wednesday interview. "But we believe that these practices are harmful."

Sprint promised delivery over three years ago. I'm not sure I would characterize it as a "ray of light", maybe a "burst of steam". This article was written in 1999:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-341445.html

From this bit -

Mission: Domination of the Internet

In the second through sixth attempts to connect to the Net, Windows XP will implore consumers to sign up for something called Passport--an identification technology that, in many ways, is a key to Microsoft's future.

Maybe that shows how reluctant people will be to sign up as is not compelling enough for them to sign up at the 1st opportunity.

If Microsoft is successful, Windows XP will eventually resemble an online service like America Online, which runs on top of Windows and other operating systems. That would allow consumers to bypass AOL and other rivals altogether, essentially turning Windows into a one-stop destination that combines AOL-like services with easy access to Microsoft desktop products such as Word and Excel.

I can't ever see M$ ever running anything on a platform other than Windows. As for combining with AOL like services, well AOL has been doing that for many many years, M$ is far behind in the game, and remember AOL has ~30million users against a total Net population of >600million, having a 5% global market share is not what I would call stunning.

Through HailStorm, recently renamed .Net My Services, Microsoft envisions offering consumers and businesses a consistent set of information and services to any devices, whether they be personal computers, handheld devices or cellular phones--often at a cost to the receiver, the provider or both.

Anyone remember "Windows everywhere"? Or the cliams that COM would be running on a large number of platorms? They failed and this will too, as I said above M$ will only do this on Windows, it might licence someone to do a half asses port like with COM and use that to claim cross platform capability.

Many people would welcome the convenience of a reasonably secure mechanism that would instantly find whomever and whatever they were looking for online while allowing them to use various sites and services with a single password entered only once.

Oh yes, I and millions of others really want to hand over my credit card and other details to a reasonably secure system, just like I want to be running ISS and get hit with CR or Nimda. Of course Passport will store more than just CC details so expect there to be cases of identity theft, can you imagine tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people having to cope with having their identities stolen and used in fraudulent activities? How much might this cost the economies of the world? More than the WTC bombing? Ten times more?

In an interview with CNET News.com this summer, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates adamantly defended his company's right to evolve Windows with new features to meet market demand. "Our customers do want us to make Windows richer and more reliable," he said. "So Microsoft's commitment is to add features that customers want. If we can't add any features, then what is Windows?"

Gates questioned why AOL has not received as much criticism as Microsoft for bundling products and services. "Has AOL ever added any new features to their products?" he asked rhetorically. "They have dominant market share of all their stuff. They actually added features? Unbelievable! Who are these people adding features? What's going on here? Well, what's going on is that the PC industry is the most competitive industry that has ever been in terms of software availability and advances."

As above, AOL only has a small proportion of all Net users ~5% whereas Windows runs on ~90% of all computers, nice straw man there Bill.

Other Windows XP testers complained that the operating system's graphical appearance, which resembles that of MSN Explorer, looked like a cartoon.

Elmer FUD or Mr. Magoo?

Yet this kind of apparent contradiction is nothing new to Microsoft, which has long operated on the Darwinian assumption that the fittest of products will survive--as long as they are part of the Windows family.

Dinosaur fails to predict meteor strike / extinction, News at 11.

"It reminds me of the old story about how to boil a frog," he said. "If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of warm water and slowly raise the temperature until the water boils, you have frog soup.

"Consumers aren't going to be thrown into a kettle of boiling water from the get-go, but rather enticed into an inviting, lukewarm bath, and then the temperature will be slowly raised over several release cycles."

I doubt the same tactic will work with Penguins though.

-

Since c|net started this on Oct. 17th, the 2nd installment is available also.

You can read it here: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-7502765-0.htm l

"Microsoft and AOL are considered to be among the few online leaders capable of providing the security and technology necessary to handle payment systems on an Internet-wide scale"

Joe Wilcox
You have got to be kidding me!

Read This! Far much more important than a watch that takes crappy low resolution pictures.

Work-around for failure to startup from a FireWire drive Dik Gregory found that, after updating to Mac OS X 10.1, his external FireWire hard drive with Mac OS 9.1.1 installed, appeared in the Startup Disk System Preference. In Mac OS X 10.0.x, it did not. "However, selecting it had no effect. My system still booted from the OS X 10.1 system on my Cube's internal drive. To actually boot from the FireWire drive, I needed to first boot from 9.2.1 on my internal drive and then select the FireWire drive from the Startup Disk control panel."

There are some other problems with 10.1 but for the most part I'd say the upgrade is well worth it.

CNET also has a review of OS 10.1. There's some contraversy surrounding The "Free" OS X 10.1 Update that costs you $20. TechTV (formerlly ZDTV) also has a review of Mac OS X 10.1. I'd recommend anyone interested in Mac OS X 10.1 read all these reviews to get full coverage, and unbiased opinions.

Here is CNET's review, which gives a quicker summary of the bottom line. Probably the most important piece is the improved feature set for working on a Windows network, which will make the Mac much more friendly in a corporate MS-owned environment.

Proprietary software requires that one company absorb all the R&D costs and then distribute that cost on to their customers.


Actualy, for Microsoft, the biggest cost is Marketing. You want to read this article and learn about the cost of launching WindowsXP ($1 billion!!!!!!).

Have in mind that WindowsXp has no real new features. Just some outrageous theme ontop of Windows2000 core and then some code merginf from the WindowsME tree. Really.

From C|NET:

The new strategy would take advantage of file-swapping networks' own weaknesses, amplifying them to the point where download services appear even more clogged and slow to function than they are today. Because most peer-to-peer services are unregulated, the quality of connections and speed of downloads already varies wildly based on time of day and geographic location.

The software technology, according to industry sources, would essentially act as a downloader, repeatedly requesting the same file and downloading it very slowly, essentially preventing others from accessing the file. While stopping short of a full denial-of-service attack, the method could substantially clog the target computer's Internet connection.

Besides clogging the user's internet conenction, do you suppose the RIAA considered what this might imply for bandwidth usage on the Internet in general? We don't need the RIAA purposefully sucking up bandwidth on tens of thousands of machines because they are too lazy or don't have evidence to prosecute offenders legally.

Java held great promise, but MS has succeeded in killing desktop Java.

Sun deserves a lot of credit. If you're going to introduce a Revolutionary New Approach to Programming, you shouldn't do it with inefficient, buggy VMs, or quickie compilers that don't properly exploit garbage collection. Thos mistakes gave Java a reputation for flakiness and inefficiency it still hasn't fully dispelled.

And if you want everybody to start using Java to develop desktop apps, you don't suddenly shut down your own application development efforts before they've had a chance to bring their product to market. But of course IBM, Oracle, and all the other biggies were doing that too. Coinciding with the downfall of the Network Computer.

And that's what really went wrong with desktop Java. Platform independence was never enough by itself to make Java widely adopted on the desktop. You had to give people a reason to abandon their investment in Windows-based solutions. That reason, was the Java-based NC, which was supposed to lower the Cost of Ownership for big corporate computer buyers. (And, not incidentally, give these same buyers a reason to buy proprietary Sun and IBM hardware instead of commodity PCs.) Unfortunately, nobody bought the NC idea, and the main market for Java desktop apps disappeared.

Some, but not all, of this history is repeating itself with Qt and KDE. Being technically superior to Windows wasn't enough for Java, and it won't be enough for the Linux desktop.

The move completes a change in strategy started in July, when the Indianapolis-based company decided it would focus more of its efforts on services and away from developing its own version of the Linux distribution known as Debian.

"We were burning too much cash doing development," said CEO Steve Schafer. "Now we are cash-positive."

Well this is a dilemma, i already have too many damn palms laying around (a VII, IIIc and a Handspring Visor Deluxe I got as a gift) and i had intended to pick up an ipaq, but i'll be damned if it doesn't look like this is a much better solution.

except for:
why so damn tiny? who asked for something that is only slightly larger then a WAP enabled cell phone display.

the iPaq (which my spellchecker wants to call Iraq) has a cell phone module pending, and it will also do GPS. And if you are married to the PalmOS and want color today you can get the color Handspring Visor Prism and add the Cell Phone module for free (with activation) only with neither of these you don't get the spiffy keyboard... (heh) also the prism isn't as quick as the the Treo, though it does have a bigger 16-bit color display today .

oh hell i just talked myself out of the Treo, and another palm... because well... even though i have heard that the cell phone springboard module actually rocks, the PalmOS development seems to be stagnating while the iPaq not only does every goddamn thing in the world and with a better diplay, you can also jack linux into it when you get sick of WinCE.

man... as a long time Apple guy (easy angry kiddys, i have been building x86 boxes since before you were born and EISA was a hot new bus archetecture) i really hate to see what was once the innovator and hands down best hand held solution (PalmOS) get trumped by another microsoft branded product... i'd help them if i can but i already have three...

Umm, hate to mess with your "sorry, reality bites" attempts, but AFAIK Sun does use StarOffice internally (and has used it before they even bought Star Division, see here). I don't think they have ever used MS Office, so calculating how much they have saved might be a bit difficult.

I just checked out news.com - Guess what one of the headlines are?

Anthrax found in Microsoft office

Can the DOJ show that MS does harm consumers now?

Do not forget the AIM Linux port.
It thought some time ago, it was mentioned that AOL wanted Linux as OS for Internet access device.
(That's where the big market comes in)
A quick search revealed a story on CNET two years ago:"AOL considering Linux device, sources say".
Maybe this development is part of a long term strategy. On the other hand, all those companies seem to have acted more or less independently from AOL.

>The whole player thing is getting a bit weird. [...]
Now all we need is Xmms on OSX :)

Yup, lasers. Though i have no idea how harsh atlantic weather would effect transmission.

here is some more on laser broadband, and here and here.

There's an interesting interview at NEWS.COM with Jim Bell, director of standards and industry initiatives at Hewlett-Packard, titled "Why the W3C needs to be royalty free".

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/review-audiotron.ht ml

http://www.homepna.com/HPNA-AudiotronReview.html

http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-6342420-1305-470 4127.html

I read one that said it looked like there was spot inside for a hard drive. Perhaps a guess about their next system?

Anyone who's not getting excited about this has no imagination. Don't think of it as a PDA -- think of it as the first fully programmable watch! How many of you have seen the Casio filmwatches with little animations on them? As an animator I've always wanted to be able to program my own. Add bluetooth to the equation -- a hobbyist's dream. And a 1 GB Microdrive? ... It sounds wonderful.

Yes it will be cumbersome to wear. But this is a step in the right direction for a toy that is long overdue in my opinion. Now it needs a motion sensor and digital camera...

People looking for serious tools like PDAs should look elsewhere.... in the meantime, I'll be writing the code for an animated avatar who tells me the time, waves at me when I have an email, and gets jostled when I move my wrist quickly (to be implemented when that motion sensor gets included). Insert Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song... here.

Buy From Independant Labels

Buy used CDs (I love my local used CD shop :D)

Write a letter to 'the industry'???
Does anyone know of other avenues to these goals? Is there some sort of organization that people like myself can support to help remedy the situation?

Please if you know anything...let us know!

I also love some of thier business practices, and believe business students will be studing these for years to come in universities all over the USA.

Which ones are you referring to?

• Embrace and Extend
• "Lobby" to get the politicians who support you elected
• Leverage one market with your monopoly in another
• Censorship
• If you can't beat them buy them

From John Ashcroft:
"Sorry, we've been pretty busy lately locking up arabs and then holding them as political prisoners without charging them or providing them legal counsel. We've got almost 600 already! Wait, did I say 'political prisoners?' I meant 'detainees.' What, there's a case against MicroSoft? I'll call Clarence right away and see if we can't get that taken care of *wink* *wink*."