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The money is nothing to M$. Losing, thus establishing the pattern of behavior, is everything. As Microsoft loses case after case, for their temerity, they build the antitrust case against them. Megabusinesses (AOL/TW, BofA, etc.) need pay attention to their business manners. Clearly the early days of personal computing and the internet were exciting times, with a lot of inexperienced, aggressive people growing empires. The value of experience is in knowing when you are about to step on someone's toes, so you can avoid or tread no harder than you need to.

Bill Gates isn't the only one who scrambled to the top of the heap with hobnail boots on, crushing tender feet along the way. He's just very visible because of his success. It would be good to take M$ down a few notches, perhaps with a more intelligent breakup than that proposed by US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. It would be bad to destroy M$, because something as bad would probably take their place. (Such a lucrative market!)

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To paraphrase Lewis Carrol - If M$ was unethical, they might be sued; and if M$ were unethical, they would be sued; but as M$ isn't ethical, they can't not be sued. Thats logic.

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The sad part for the updstart Football League was that they filed for damages of $1B, the NFL was found guilty of monopolistic practices as well of colusion with TV networks, yet were awarded something pitiful, like $1. I hope the courts get this right this time.

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WASHINGTON -- A federal judge found that Microsoft Corp. engaged in "wanton, reckless" and deceptive business practices against a Connecticut software maker, in a harsh ruling reminiscent of the court's finding against Microsoft in the government's antitrust suit.

U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall in Bridgeport, Conn., ordered Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to pay punitive damages of $1 million to Bristol Technology Inc., in the highest award ever imposed under the state's fair-trade statute. After a six-week civil trial last year, a federal jury found that Microsoft had violated Connecticut's unfair-trade practices act, but awarded Bristol damages of just $1.

Quoting from an article on The Register back on August 22:

Albert Yu was asked if he could give a rough idea of when a 2GHz Pentium might ship. Although his response was "I have no idea", Barrett intervened to say that he wasn't at liberty to divulge it. However, Barrett added that the demo used no special cooling. The part was air-cooled.

A 450g heatsink requiring a new case isn't special???? What next?

SANTA CLARA (AFU-NEWS) Today silicon circuit behemoth Intel demoed the Pentium 4 CPU clocked at 2.5GHz The presence of an anchor from the Queen Mary bolted to the top of the CPU was described by Albert Yu, Senior Intel VP, as "normal cooling." Versions of the CPU running at lower clock speeds could be cooled by bolting them to anvils, manhole covers and recycled steel plates from the heads of Intel marketing folks. "A special cabinet may be required," he added.

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Ah, but if you have an account with a US bank you can. I've done business with canadians via PayPal.

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How to screw your body up with the byproducts of this sort of do-it-to-yourself chemistry. Aside from getting the body to do useless things like manufacture caffiene (when there's a perfectly good source of it in q-q-quadruple es-s-s-spresso) genetic research on other fronts have been useful in trying to find a cure for Juvenile Diabetes by getting a diabetics body to manufacture it's own insulin.

I'm also not sure our conscious minds are better at regulating compounds in our bloodstreams than bio/analog processes, considering how judgement becomes impared with acclimation to a compound. i.e. becoming chemically dependant rather than just psychologically.

IMHO these are apples and sausages issues, has any warmblooded creature been found which produces the common plant compound of Caffeine?

The original story I heard on this was to breed plants to grow caffeine free tea and coffee. Quite a stretch from this posts interpretations.

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Yet, we seem to be rail away at people who do things "Safe." I.e. Not take the risk of creating new and original games, rather than rehashing the old and tired.

Nice to see a segment of the hacker community will have a future, albeit short and uninteresting.

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If you can do some like this, why not create your own game and forget about duplicating these people's server.

Take the best features, dump the worst, add new things you wish it had.

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News for Nerds. Stuff that is unverified.

You make it sound like a bad thing! ;-)

N00zPH145h:
Sir Alec Guiness' was cloned before he died. The clone, named Skippy, will appear in Ep3 with the shocking revelation that he is [a legal gnome slips in and attempts to serve a C&D, but to his utter embarrassment realizes this isn't an Apple leak and slips back out again] Han Solo's father's cousin's mother's hyperdrive mechanic's valet's kid brother's best friend's lawn bowling partner! Needless to say, this comes as a stunner to everyone, including Natalie Portman Sources close the story claim George Lucas vigorously denied this claim, retorting, "The clone's name is not Skippy, it's Fred!"

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Find out about the feature

Query Help for about an hour to find out how to moderate

Find it shipped enabled and then disable it

Probably my greatest annoyance with M$ products is this type of behavior. It usually costs me hours to find and disable all the annoying "features", particularly because M$ doesn't use the same terminology the rest of the world does, so it's non-obvious. Then the on/off button is deeply buried in a non-obvious location. There's a name for people who design things like this: a$$hole.

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People who read about DeCSS

People who talk about DeCSS

People who listen to people who talk about DeCSS

People who think about DeCSS

People who have ever used the letters c,d,e & s in any way, shape or form

But, hey it's a free contry... right...

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Well, yeah, that's the general idea. Punish them by making them give back a certain amount of revenue. It would also set precident. That done they'd have to review their pricing practices more carefully, lest they get hauled into another Class suit.

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Nope, never a smoker, hated coming home with all that stink on my clothes. Hard to enjoy a good Paulaner Heffeweizen or Pilsner Urquell in a stench of tobacco fumes. I often eat dinner along with a couple brews at a local pub (which offers 99 different kinds of beer, about 40 on tap, people who have been to Santa Cruz will know of this wonderful place)

The original point was that these laws aren't necessarily stupid things to make a tiny population of hippies joyful. As much as law can restrict the power of government it can also make us a more civil society (which is sorely needed in densely populated areas like California has). The Class Action, which isn't even a filing, yet, was merely a judge giving permissiont to pursue this avenue of punishing a business, again, to make this a more civil place to live (cheaper software!)

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Hey, maybe *that's* why their economy is so good. (isn't it in the top ten worldwide?)

6th largest economy in the world. "Feel Good" is about as out of date as the 70's. This is one of the most cutthroat business centers of the world.

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Smoking in bars: When they banned it I spent hundreds more per month in bars. I hated smoke filled bars when I lived in Michigan.

Most restrictive polution laws: And yet you can drive around a smoking pre-73 car and the damn things don't rust out.

Put 35 million people in one legal entity and see what happens.

If people don't stand up to M$ and other corporations then they will get screwed. If anything it should punish a monopolist and encourage the kind of open-source cooperation often discussed on /. I don't feel that M$ makes the worst products, but I think they need more competition to focus them on actually making better products. Competition stimulates the imagination.

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On the contrary, these complaints were simmering before the Federal Antitrust trial got rolling. And when it's your choice being limited and your wallet being hit, I'm sure you'll feel the same.

The California case centers around monopolistic practices elimitating choice of other software, which may have brought prices down. The People of the State of California must demonstrate that costs were higher than would normally be if there were competition. This isn't an easy thing to prove, and still hinges to some degree upon the success of the antitrust trial.

If Microsoft Word were being given away free and drove Word Perfect and Displaywriter from store shelves, then they jacked up the prices, it would be open and shut. Most likely people wanted to settle on some standard for documents, spreadsheets, O/S behavior to simplify training, communication and exchange with other parties. The most damning thing really is lack of some storage standard which all vendors could agree on and then compete to make the best wordprocessor. Too many picked Word and the rest have pretty much faded. Without serious competition Microsoft sets prices where they want.

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Some how I have a problem seeing California being harmed by much of anything, aside from falling in the ocean...

Consider how much the State Govt, alone, would recoup in something like this. Large businesses, schools, etc. The state isn't just some nebulous entity tied to a chunk of land.

BTW, we're waiting for that big one, when all the land to the east of the fault slides off into the Atlantic.

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Read it again, this is a violation of a State law being tested.

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Yes, if they win then Microsoft cuts checks to purchasers in California for a few bucks each. Not a major setback for Bill.

This still has to wait on the Federal Antitrust trial results.

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On the contrary, I think looking for planets is a good start.

Other things searched are meteorites (many of which can easily be found in Antarctica, lying on top of the ice!) for life traces and radiowaves (Is there a Natalie Portman on other worlds and are they doing anything this weekend?)

There are only so many means available until we actually send a craft to one of these extraterrestrial bodies and and look around. As much as Tommy Lee Jones joked about the tabloids being the best place to look for alien sitings, it would seem with all the coverage these things have, SETI should be focusing on trailer parks first. Maybe find some alien sonic screwdriver or sparkplug on the outskirts.

The scope of time is the most daunting. Only for ~100 years have we made enough noise and emitted enough light to be seen from space, nearly doing ourselves in back in 1962. Not even an eyeblink in the history of intelligent life. Odds may be that intelligent life will be found after it's already dead. I think that would be a pretty good wake up --

"SETI reports the sitings of large, bright flashes of light on planet x, followed by total cessation of radio emissions."

Personally, I think it would rock to find a planet ruled by dinosaurs and feed Britney Spears to one 8)

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In theory, your NTSC set should support something like 435 lines (535 with overscan(?)), but most of the cheap $200 color TVs are only capable of half that resolution. (VHS is only about 170 lines anyway) I picked up some Toshiba professional video monitor, with a token tuner, back in 1983 and it still serves as an excellent set for video games, cable, etc. Granted in y'2000 dollars it would cost close to that $2,000 mark. It would probably do the XBox justice, but it is foremost a monitor.

At the 2000 CES I had a chance to look at much of the top of the line monitors and HDTV isn't really going anywhere, not unless you're a videophile with deep pockets. I'm afraid, with the public's acceptance of crappy quality video, where it is, HDTV is probably going be have a very marginal existance, if it doesn't die out.

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I added it up with the Windows calculator ;-)

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66,372 Applications which suck and never should have been marketed by anybody.

1,654 Games.

1,104 Applications which cling to life even as Microsoft threatens their very existence.

795 Microsoft applications which have built in flight simulators which make install take up half of disk.

47 Fun Games.

36 Applications which actually perform some sort of work.

1 Bug Free. (ain't tellin' which, neither! :)

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Hitachi and Toshiba bowed before Rambus because the extortion is negligble compared to legal costs and perceived PR cost.

Intel held/holds stock in Rambus (read: conflict of interest)

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I've been waiting for this one to drop. Now, if it would just squish Rambux then we can all enjoy cheep DDR SDRAM in a few months! ;-)

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Yeah, they got a cool box.
Yeah, they bought up a bunch of companies which have had a run of good games.
Yeah, they have the money to make a push only Disney could rival.

Do *I* think it's going to succeed?

Only a little. Even with a really cool game machine and lots of kewl games, I spend way more time on the computer.

I have the computer for other reasons and fire up games when I feel like it.

I'd have thought WebTV would be teaching Microsoft something, since it's got a small population and growth nothing like AOL, there's no real attraction to playing these high quality graphics games on a low quality monitor (TV) let alone trying to surf the web.

What will it take for it to succeed? At least one truly great game you can't play on anything else. Problem is, you can't force these things, people will like it or pass on it and all the ads and cartoons and cereal box promos and giveaways at McDonald's won't change that.

Best of luck to them, but I'm just not interested. Also, I think they got a lot of these companies after their peak success.

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Maybe we can replace George Lucas with a CGI Director... Just a thought...

Or better, a random number generator!

cat /dev/random > /dev/GeorgeLucas

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What? There's more than one guy in the world with the name Kenny Baker? ;-)

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Probably had his horn in there with him, how'd he fit it all in there? ;-)

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Well, maybe he can get a higher paying job at Lucas Ltd doing the graphics ;-)

I wish him best of luck.

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Dr. Louis Leaky MMDLLXIIV will unearth a fossilized monitor with a web page burned into its phosphors and people will draw conclusions about the late 20th century. History can be so cruel.

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Attorneys at Laww (not to be confused with Law) allow us to represent you ;-)

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I had a rather unhappy experience with (and haven't resolved, yet, just pretty much threw in the towel) RedHat changes from 4.* to 5.*, I believe regarding tio or termio (I forget and don't have it in front of me) which was going toward BSD compliance. I had to pick up a few O'Reilly books which detailed this matter in greater depth. Albeit it's rather late for something of this nature to be published, were there any books published on these differences?

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Spellchecking is for Humanities majors, not CS ;-)

You can have good looking code which crashes or ugly looking code which runs good.

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This Lawsuit brought to you by the number 3* and the letter D**.

* NVIDIA patent No. 5,687,357
** NVIDIA patent No. 5,721,947

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I have it on the best authority that the name of the previous "Unknown Individual" is **%%***}@#***%****}}****)***%*********ause Ellison thought the Apple | Microsoft connetion was too***%*%%***}}}}}****&**}}****}***@*ccording to KGB files, which were foun***}}}***%%#$$}}}@@*****!****.}***exican Mafia was paid off by someone in Arthur C. Cla****%%***ASA/FBI underco*}}}}}}***}}}******001 Space Odessy really! If you don't believe me, look at those picture of Europa ag*******}}}*****$****ven Jobs really is an ali*****%%}}}}******* Cubes will hatch****}}}}***%%%%****%*}}}******laving the entire human race.

There you have it. Now I gotta go get another modem this one's fu*%%}}

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An intelligent company knows enough to use the very best, even if it comes from a competitor. So they're not so dumb after all, eh?

Evil, yes, dumb, not necessarily.

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He's so stoopid he thinks 'Pat Pend' was the world's greatest inventor.

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'When and if Mr. Pool's patent becomes final, lawyers hired by his company, DE Technologies LLC, say anyone conducting computer-to-computer international trades over the Internet without the permission of DE Technology will infringe on the company's intellectual property.'

I have a patent pending on his pending patent to patent this.

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A follow up I found on The Register, so at least ALi and IWill are in the hunt, preview boards out early fall... sigh. Gonna be a long wait until Christmas, I guess.

Maybe I should just tighten the belt and go for the 1040MHz Alpha (w/DDR, AGPx2)

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I've read enough... I'm just waiting for DDR SDRAM mobos to come out! Anyone have any ideas on how soon VIA and ASUS will be bringing something to market?

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I'm not going to get in-depth on this, but the primary issue with Windows is that it usually comes installed in Jack-of-all-Trades manner. For those familiar with the end use of a PC or workstation a custom install can be performed to omit certain features and designate how resources will be used (memory, caching, paging, etc.) The less tasks the OS has to manage, the more efficiently it usually accomplishes each. (My PC at work is usually paging (swapping memory to disk) with only a couple small applications running (but I didn't set this beast up.) Problem is, most users just assume when things get slow that they need more power. Often better drivers become available for controllers or other devices which can reduce memory usage or run faster. The typical end user doesn't know and usually can't be bothered with such details.


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[I'd look this up, but I'm too lazy, atm] the key here is factors like Instructions Per Cycle, speed of Write and Fetch and a few other real measures of CPU horsepower, as well as mating that CPU to a good motherboard architecture. The end user benchmarks are what consumers should pay attention to, and something Apple and publications make available, regarding time to do image operations, spreadsheet calcuations, spell check documents, etc. For gamers, how many frames per second of Quake III or some other game.

The burden for Wintel systems is having to tune the hardware and OS to work the best. Not something a lot of cheap clone makers do well. You may buy a 1Ghz PIII, but if it's thrown together it may run like a well tuned 200MHz PII.

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Agreed. I've read both and a few other articles on Tom's site and he has reminded me how important it is to take all things with a grain of salt. Good, bad or ugly.

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In Tom's original article he utterly trashed Intel and the sample before contacting Intel about the flaky nature of his specimen.

He should have contacted Intel first, before writing his review. It benefits me more, as a potential customer, to know how Intel handles such a situation. That he contacted PR (public relations) doesn't help me much, as I'm sure I wouldn't contact that department with a quality issue.

Through the articles Tom has written concerning Intel, it's not difficult to see him as bearing some sort of grudge. Other companies products may not cut the mustard in his tests, but he rarely trashes them.

IMHO it is good for Intel to have such a critic, but it helps better if he gives them the benefit of doubt before writing their specimen off as typical of their entire offering. I would at the very least assume it may have suffered some damage in shipping and request a replacement. Returning the defective part to them may give up his "evidence", but allows Intel to determine what may have gone wrong.


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I thought I read this two weeks ago... Tom trashed Intel, then contacted Intel to report a possible flaky sample. Inappropriate and hardly objective behavior. It's worth noting that Dell is claiming to offer the 1.13 Ghz systems.

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I just took my Harry Potter: Sorcerer's Stone over to a friends house for him to read to his kids. Um.. It's a gift! Yeah! That's the ticket!

I can see some usefulness of timely books, but reference to previous medical publications is why professionals build libraries. (heck, I still have PL/1 books) I suppose I'll just have to boycott these types of online publications, after all, if nobody buys them then they'll have to change. Publishers *do* know which side of the bread the butter goes on (the down side.)

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More stuff I gotta buy now.

Sucks to be an impulse buyer.

But I sure have a lotta kewl toys! =)

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I've been getting 5-10 spams in Mandarin per day for months. Occasionally I get a german or spanish spam.

However, the last counts and projections I've seen on use of the internet engish speakers are by far the majority, with growth in China expected to be very modest (possibly due to lack of infrastructure or the central govt deciding who to trust or places party faithful in the role of snooping email, content, etc.) I've already conducted business with chinese parties via the net, but all, of course spoke the language of commerce (English)


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