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Slashback: Books, Spooks, Violence, Recovery
Library of Congress will have online items o'plenty. franimal wrote in reaction to the report that the Library of Congress does not plan to digitize its collection. "Even though reading online may be 'mindless,' 'isolating,' 'lonely' and 'arrogant' the Library of Congress plans to have 5 million 'items' posted by the end of the year."
Twice as close to the middle of nowhere. HerringFlavoredFowl pointed out that "Ikonos 1 has just raised the bar on Area 51 images. As we all remember, terraserver just released a set of two meter images taken in 1998. Space Imaging snapped this set on April 4th, 2000. The Federation of American Scientists [has posted] a wonderful side by side interpretation of these images. Thank you John Pike for clueing me in on the FAS update. Space.com also has some color images and an the steps Mr. Pike went through to obtain these images. "
One lump or two? Or three? Scott Marks and hordes of fellow travelers let us know that "The US DOJ U.S. v. Microsoft web site has all the gory legal details on the Proposed Final Judgment as well as a number of other interesting tidbits. Not the least is the ability to comment on the trial directly: 'If you would like to send the Antitrust Division your comments on this case, please direct your correspondence to Microsoft.atr@usdoj.gov .'"
What kind of power is that? After the latest brouhaha both on Slashdot and in the rest of the world about the link between violence and video games, Jer Davis wrote: "The Tech Report has an article up written by Andy Brown dissecting some of the psychological studies that have been released recently regarding correlations between real-life violence and violent video games. ... This is a very important issue, and Andy does an excellent job at dissecting the very suspect results these studies have claimed."
And speaking of violence ... Deadli contributed the news that the secretary of education opposes mechanical profiling programs according to this Washington Post article. Perhaps he's been reading the reaction to Jon Katz' article on WAVE.
Once in a while, some good news slips through. In this case, it's from TheGreek, who wrote, "Jason Haas is out of the hospital and well on his way to recovering." Congratulations, Jason.
Damn straight! Followup stories like this make news better... They're not not 'deja vu' news like the constant Jon Benet Ramsey, or Columbine, or OJ Simpson, etc etc stories, but they tell me MORE than what I knew, and actually keep me updated. It's sorta like, "Sequel Quickies"
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
This is a dashed good point--I'd never quite thought of it like that.
An OS is just a device which manages resources; everything else an application. That includes things such as file browsers, graphics systems, window managers and the rest.
The problem is that a computer sold with just an OS is not very useful; it cannot do anything useful to most users. So the question arises: what is the minimal amount of software needed for a `complete' system? Unfortunately, opinions will differ on this one. I would argue that the following things are needed:
This can be anything from cat/more/rm/mv/ls to a full-fledged Finder, Explorer or Midnight Commands environment. But this is vital to the use of the computer; the user can do nothing without it.
This can be anything from a simple command-line to curses to QuickDraw, the Windows graphics API or X+window manager. But it is obviously important that the user be able to deal with the computer.
This list is probably not complete, but these are the bits I can think of right now.
I do not believe that Internet applications are properly within the realm of the OS distribution. They are and should be add-ons; users should have a choice. OTOH it is appropriate for the distribution to provide hooks in the OS or file browser for Internet awareness: NFS, FTP or HTTP filesystems (take a look at anarchie for what an HTTP filesystem might look like).
Bundling third-party software is fine, but there is a problem with bundling one's own software: users are much less likely to replace an OS-branded component than a third party one, and there is a strong temptation to use hidden protocols to get things done. I do not believe that it is possible to integrate any third-party browser into a Windows machine as tightly as IE is, even if one were to write it from scratch. I may be wrong on that, though.
The goal should be something like what we have on Unix boxes. Distributions provide all sorts of tools (or don't: e.g. cc...), but they are all compatible, follow standards and can be replaced easily. This is one of my problems with Gnome/KDE: they are not drop-in replacements for each other, and they tend to break the older way of doing things. For good reasons, no doubt, but still I dislike them for it.
The Mac used to be something like this. In the old days there were Minifinders and Microfinders which offered some of the Finder's functionality with less overhead. The Mac is still light-years ahead of Windows, which is a dank cesspit of folly.
I think you are mixing up a couple things.
(1) Without an application line-up, there will be no reason for Windows Inc to have an undocumented or obscured API. They should be more than happy to provide complete documentation. With a breakup, that problem will solve itself.
(2) The Apps company will still have no incentive to provide open file formats. The MSOffice document problem is not going to go away, as much as you might like it to. (The Govt. case did not directly address Office, and no evidence was presented about the document lock-in as far as I know.) Hell, Unix office suite vendors haven't even standardized on open formats with their fractional marketshare - why should MSApps do it with a 90% monopoly.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel, though -- The Office formats are documented on MSDN, as some might know. The big problem is that they rely on some OLE Stream on-disk format that isn't documented, and might require a port of COM to achieve. The Windows company would own COM, and might document this disk format enough that it could be reverse engineered.
Of course, there is also a big problem that I alluded to. XML file formats are the future, and pretty soon corporations and the government are going to require them from vendors. However, right now the DOJ plan has all of the XML stuff being owned by the Apps company, which means that they will have the incentive to twist the standards to support their Office monopoly. Internet Explorer, HTML, DOM, XML, and so on are really an API, and should be controlled by the Windows company, which will have an interest to keep these specs open and in conformance. Politically, that ain't going to happen, though.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Not to be an apologist, because much of what Microsoft has done to remain "competetive" is excreble and at the expense of true innovation, but I still get a queasy feeling about this. Bill feels that he has an absolute right to run his company any way he wants so long as he doesn't violate anyone else's rights. Now, I will agree that the company has stolen from its competitors, and I think it should have been prosecuted for that. "Oh, you stole this company's code and ran them out of business? That'll be half your cash on hand, please." On the other hand, I have admire Bill for sticking to his libertarian principle, despite the fact that it is in service, as I said, to an anti-innovation company.
The non-insider shareholders own very little of the company. Microsoft still has gone from a split-adjusted US$.21 (?) at IPO to US$69.75 today, so quit your whining. If all you wanted to do was make money, you still did fine. Bill may be gambling that the gov't will not want to tank the economy as well as the pension funds of all those voters, and thus will let him off easy. For him, this gamble is a better solution than compromising his right to run his company any way he wants.
Walt
It'll be interesting to see if it becomes a campain issue...
btw, Al Gore supports the current case, so vote for him!
>In fact, any rational person would expect these peoples' correlational study to turn out as it
;). I agree with much of what he was getting at, but he draws no real conclusion other than "think carefully over the implications of research results". What some readers may be missing is that this is a basic credo in interpreting *any* sort of research in the social sciences (not that they can be blamed for that - the mass media sure doesn't get it). Of course correlation doesn't imply causation, but it certainly doesn't argue against it. Even the tired old ice cream example is flawed; how do you know that summertime sugar rushes don't combine with heat to induce aggression? You can't say it doesn't any more than you can say it does.
>did...not because video games cause violence but because violent personalities are probably more
>inclined to play violent video games. Which would take all responsibility for this violence off of
>the video games' shoulders.
I think you've misinterpreted both the original results and the critique. The initial aggressiveness of the subjects was controlled for in the experiment; basically, everyone got a go. I do believe there were confounding factors in the noise-blast portion of the experiment (which the critique gets close to discovering - for instance I'd be more concerned about the fact that Wolf 3D is more adrenalising than Myst (even though it bores the heck out of me), and thus likely to make people less sensitive to any kind of critical choice, noise-blast-duration or anything else). Between-subject difference wasn't one of them, however; this is one of the most basic elements of research design, and no psych journal would publish a study that was so easily confounded in that manner.
Like the author of the critique, I'm a tech type with a lot of video game experience and a psych degree (convincingly named a B.S.S.
Common sense is often the best tool we have in this sort of area. Does playing a little Quake or Marathon turn you into a monster? Nope, but playing a hell of a lot of it really will tune you out of reality and skew your idea of what's reasonable to do IRL. Been there, done that (but it was MUDs and not 3D shooters, coincidentally while I was supposedly taking that psych degree). The real danger of twitch games isn't as much the violent content as the addictiveness; the violence just isn't a great ingredient in the kind of mild dissociation that results from doing anything out of balance. Any kind of science requires a healthy amount of agnosticism, and the thing you have to be most agnostic about is the value of Science itself.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
I saw a thing on the History Channel about the development of the F117 stealth fighter. Almost all of the actual development took place at Lockheed's facility in Burbank, California. If the DOD has the capability to develop a top secret aircaft a few miles from the movie studios, they probably wouldn't need to store alien corpses in the one "secret" base that every person in America knows about.
-B
It would be a significant undertaking, but I think it would really improve the quality of Slashdot if stories on the mainpage could somehow be ordered in a thread form. News stories discuss the real world, and the real world is a chain of events. Slashdot, as a news site, should reflect this natural organization. It would allow people to better control what they want to read about. If someone is interested in the Microsoft trial, they could follow the entire thread. If someone is sick of hearing about Mitnick, they could drop his thread.
Cool...I didn't know anything about this until today (don't keep tabs on LinuxPPC developers, I guess), but I just read through all the updates that his wife did. That's some awesome storytelling. I greatly enjoyed reading it.
:)
Anyone know what happened between April 14th and now? He's obviously gotten better now. Did he ever ask for that laptop in the hospital?
--GnrcMan--
A few years ago, I heard the editor of the "Weekly World News" speak on C-SPAN. (For those that don't know, the WWN is a supermarket tabloid that prints stories about UFOs and Hitler being alive.) Apparently the WWN staff is pretty educated, all having gone to Harvard and the like.
Their point was that the Weekly World News uses the same journalistic "standards" as any other media outlet -- repeating the same stories that have been reported elsewhere as fact. Your local paper or the TV news happens to be mindlessly repeating AP stories or whatever, while the WWN is mindlessly repeating UFO and Flat Earth stories printed in South American or Eastern European newspapers.
Slashdot gets flack because an unsubstantiated rumor story will get 250 comments from people treating it as fact. Is that really any different from other journalistic outlets? Look at cable stations like MSNBC -- during their "crisis in the white house" period, they would have 2-3 hours of panel discussions and phone calls per day, often based on completely unsubstantiated rumors. And this is a matter of gross national importance, unlike some story about the Amiga or whatever. AM Talk Radio also does the same thing every day, breeding a political culture where flames are shooting out of people's eyes.
Slashdot is really just a part of the new interactive news/entertainment genre, leaving the real 'journalism' to someone else. (And hopefully the NYT and AP and ZDNet and IDG will stay in business providing this base content.) The net result is far more political that fact oriented, but that's what the viewers want...
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well it looks like even if the DOJ gets its way George W. Bush if elected will make do his best to make sure MSFT is not harmed. You can find information about this on Reuters.
Minifinders only were developed for the Mac because in the early days people were limited to 400K floppy disks. With a minifinder, you might be able to have the System + file launcher + an applicaiton on one disk, and thus avoid the "Mac Floppy Tango".
MiniFinders died out pretty much once hard disk became common. Why? Because nobody really wants to spend their time reinventing this base level stuff when the built-in one is good enough. 3rd Party Windows File Managers have been assigned to the same dustbin of history. (Anyone remember TabWorks?)
Unix filemanagers are different story, if only because nobody's invented a really good one yet that fits everyone's licence/widget/API political agenda. There's something about Unix culture that demands that the same wheels get reinvented time and time again, rather than just extending someone elses work like people in the Mac and Win communities do. I don't know if the user base really wants 10 different XTerm programs or file managers or window managers. You seem to be trying to impose the defacto Unix confusion onto the general user base. What they would really like is one really good set of tools that can be extended...
Maybe once KDE and/or Gnome 'finish', people can move onto more productive work, like cloning MS Office. However that's probably wishful thinking on my part.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
That's the idea - to make this a weekly thing, with its own icon and section. We get a *lot* of follow-ups to stories we've already run that are too important to be buried in the comments on the original story or get attached (as updates) to stories that have scrolled off the main page (which means that hardly anyone would see them), but that don't quite deserve a main page story of their own.
Hence Slashback (trial name only; suggestions happily accepted).
Tim is in charge of this. If you have ideas on how to make it better, send e-mail directly to timothy@slashdot.org.
- Robin
As long as we're talking about followups, what ever happened to that guy who was putting a stupid disclaimer on his site "by downloading my GPL code, you agree not to ask for the source"? I was kind of wondering about that the other day, there was a big uproar when that story was first posted, and then nothing more ever came of it (that I know of).
Communication is only possible between equals
I often wish I had a degree in psychology, then I could go around saying, "I'm a psychologist, obey me" like these types do.
I wonder how long it will be before I see them on Sally Jesse Raphael (is that still on TV, I remember they used to have the anti-D&D fanatics on there during the 80's), touting there new book, Columbine: Why video games were the cause..
I'm always happy when someone who knows about video or computer games can attack the integrity of the anti-gamer people by pointing out that the anti-gamer people never bother to do any investigation into the subject they are studying, video and computer games, before making their sweeping condemnations.
I'm just surprised these two psychologists didn't try to set up a competitive Myst deathmatch...All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
The OS doesn't make a difference. 'cd ..' is a bash command as well.
--
No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Like any marketplace, /. rewards some parties for being good providers, and encourages ownership of comments by 1) allowing anonymous posting and 2) saying anonymous posts (no branding) need to be exceptional to be given the same initial status as owned (branded) comments.
As for anonymous moderation, well, that's the market at work. Select members are asked to pass judgement on the state of the market. Generally speaking, quality is recognized, crap is treated as such and items are average quality are left alone. Seems a better random system than having a /. editorial board.
Finally, about calling people cowards... It's a joke. Get over it.
--Humpty Dumpty was pushed!
Hopefully we can see more followups on stories that slashdot posts in the future. This is an excelllent example of resposible journalism.
This is something that I would /love/ to see more of. It shows some continuity and flow to the stories and proves that you are following up. With the follow up with Be over their BeOS being dropped and I see some very positive signs that Slashdot perhaps has no place else to go but up.
Thank you.
The first company would be the Operating System Business, which does Windows.
The second company would be the Applications Business, which does IE, Office, SQL Server, MSNBC, Hotmail, etc.
The third company is called the "Remaining Business" and keeps the Microsoft name. As far as I can tell, all it will be making is keyboards, joysticks and mice, i.e. the hardware. As I understand, it also keeps Bill Gates. :)
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How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
man...we had violence in video games when i was growing up. I remember when i was playing the oregon trail on the apple II e at school one day, and the fucking ox got stuck in the mud, and then i went into the bushes to go exploring and fucking Sarah got scarlet fever and it took us FOREVER to get across idaho and i just wanted to kick that fucking box and i hit the kid that was playing with me cause he wanted to ford the river and i said let's float the wagons and then we forded it but all our shit tipped over and i just wanted to kill someone!!!!!!!!!!!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
btw, personally, I would like to see the current directors (and other high-level types) fired, and outsiders brought in... After all, it's mostly those guys who broke the law.
Actuallying assuming 'mechanical profiling' means 'mechanical' then that wouldn't have much to do with WAVE at all. He says he doesn't think it's right to just put behaviors in a formula to pick out the 'dangerous' people.
He's more talking about profiling software, not profiling in general.
The fact that Slashdot has the balls to post a retraction/correction is excellent. Good job Timothy!!!
;) should have something like a Mr. Yuk.
I hope to see this far far more often.
The only thing I might suggest is that the errors/retractions have its own icon. The quickies have a vaccuum, the errors (stickies?
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Though I bet there could be an automated search-engine function which scanned for other posts mentioning a certain story, updating /all/ stories which deserve it would really be an order of magnitude more difficult -- because really, *every* story usually deserves more than a quick paragraph, but that's (hopefully) what the comments are usually for :) This was an attempt to collate a few of the ones which drew some really interesting / informative new info that readers might not get by skimming the page the first time ...
In the case of information that is misleading or could be damaging, you'll certainly continue to see corrections right in the story if it's still on the page (try /that/ with your copy of the morning paper!) but for more follow-up stories (like these), I think the time spent is hard to justify ... also, I don't want to try to update stories that are already far off the front page, like the one to which the above mention of Jason Haas was a happy update.
I know it's not perfect, but until I can work out the deal with the millions of monkeys on the roof ... ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Although some are saying GPL software is exempt from the new MD law, others are saying companies like RedHat are not.
There's a pretty long tradition in technology disclaiming things like "Merchantability", "Fitness", "Liability". Go Read a HP license on one of their instruments, for example.
I remain concerned about the integrity of the GPL and other licenses in the face of UCITA.
And what of Sun, Microsoft, et. al? Their licenses have the traditional disclaimers as well.
Comments?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Congratulations. This sort of thing will help give Slashdot back its cred.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
> MS is only a monopoly if you believe that the general public is too stupid to use any other OS
Well, they usually *have* to pay for Windows, even if they want something else. MS has also made it difficult to network its computers with non-MS machines. Note that SAMBA was reverse-engineered, just as Star Office and evertyhing else. And Win2K has Win-Kerberos. There are WinModems that only work with MS. And MS also paid web developers to target for special IE-only features (or at least offer IE enhanced pages). There's not Windows Media Player for Linux or BSDs.
MS was able to gain a large market share because they already had a large share of the market. They forced OEMs to not install competing products; they "integrated" their software into their OS for the sole purpose of making it worthless to add Netscape. They *paid* AOL to use IE (specifically, they paid off AOL's contract with Netscape). Part of the AOL deal also included sacraficing MSN (by putting AOL in the On-Line folder).
MicroSoft does not compete fairly. From DR-DOS to Java, they have used their position as the dominant player to thrwart competition rather than competing on the merits.
Look at the Halloween documents. No where do they suggest competing with Linux by actually producing a better product (which, in fact, the author suggests MS is incapable of doing).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I don't think updates on old stories pointing to later, separate updates are necessary; a search of Slashdot will show the update alongside the original story.
Don't forget, there's a search form at the bottom of every Slashdot page.
- Robin
I was a little puzzled when I first heard of the two company breakup plan. Like a lot of other people, I was sure that there was going to be at least three companies, although some really blood thirsty people wanted 10 or 32 companies all destined to go out of business.
But upon some further reflection, the basic plan makes sense -- The only two significant profit centers they have are Windows and Office, and there's quite a bit of cross-subsidies going on between product lines. In the early days, Office subsided Windows (remember when Windows came free with Excel?), but now days the both stand on their own with billions of dollars of revenue, supporting the rest of the product lineup. There is not a third company (like "Internet") that could reasonably be as successful by itself.
Without OEM 'bundling' contracts, the Apps side would be unlikely to make all of those cheesy multimedia and game titles, for example. Without a 'content' business, the OS side wouldn't be making investments in cable tv systems, etc etc. The division can get murky -- to what extent does SQL Server and Exchange subside Windows 2000 or visa versa? Without the OS business, will Apps even bother taking on Oracle and IBM? Without the Apps business, will OS worry about scalability on server hardware? The price lists are going to be up in the air if a breakup happens, although both companies will still make plenty of money in the short term.
However, in the long run the Windows company faces several very unfair provisions. The big one is that Dev Tools is going to the Applications side, not the Windows side. Every other OS provider (including 'GNU') seems to feel that development tools are essential to OS development, but now the Windows corporation is going to have to figure out how to expand the API without good dev tools support. Like or not, things like MFC and COM would not have happened if VisualStudio wasn't part of the OS business. My guess is that Windows Inc. goes and buys Borland or someone or starts building their own (gcc-based?) development environment first thing if this goes through.
And while I want to see MS broken up as much as any persecuted nerd, I have to agree that in the long run Netscape and Microsoft were right. Web APIs are the platform of the future, and Win32 will eventually be a stagnant, commodity product much like POSIX. The Windows company should really be able to keep IIS and IE -- the future of the platform (DCOM, SOAP, XML) depends on it; although with the pretexts of the case that solution is impossible. Without a web application framework, Windows Inc. will be gone soon enough, maybe replaced by a Linux solution where Apache and Mozilla are seen as intregal parts of the total solution.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
My opposition to the IE integration wasn't that Microsoft included a browser with their operating system. IBM did that with OS/2, almost every Linux distro I know of does, and I believe BeOS and MacOS (or whatever its called now!) do too. My problem is that they integrated it. Made many functions of Windows dependant on the web browser, including loading bits of it at startup so it would load faster than other browsers. They also, if memory serves, used their monopoly to prevent computer system distributors from including other browsers with their systems.
-RickHunter
> Microsoft still has gone from a split-adjusted
> US$.21 (?) at IPO to US$69.75 today, so quit
> your whining. If all you wanted to do was make
> money, you still did fine.
I own no MSHAFT stock, and never have. In fact, at least one conservative investment institution has never bought MSHAFT since they viewed the company as "not well managed".
> Bill may be gambling that the gov't will not
> want to tank the economy as well as the pension
> funds of all those voters, and thus will let him
> off easy.
Bill's been making that gamble all along -- with a lot of other people's money.
The money does not go "poof". It either gets invested elsewhere, or liquidated -- provided people weren't stupid enough to continue holding their stock while the price plummeted. There are no guarantees in the stock market.
For the most part, it's still money. It's just no longer invested in MSHAFT.
As the case approaches the point where it is in the hands of the judical, the legislative and executive branches (and thus the voters) will have little to say about the case either way. A widespread election of conservatives might get some states to drop their suit, but California (as one example) won't drop it. Orrin Hatch, a strong conservative, despises MSHAFT -- his state (Utah) has Novell and Caldera, I believe.
If the loss of a single corporation can "tank" the economy, it's in much worse shape than anyone imagines. Besides, the government is actually *adding* a corporation (sorry).
If anyones pension fund is invested solely in MSHAFT stock, they need to get a lawyer. That would be one of the most egregious mishandlings of fund I have ever heard of. Perhaps you mean MSHAFT employees losing value in their matched assets? As I said earlier, they should have spoken up when the lawsuit approached.
> For him, this gamble is a better solution than
> compromising his right to run his company any
> way he wants.
He does not have a right to run his company anyway he wants. His heavy-handed poor judgement appears to have cost some employees and some unfortunates a lot of money. They should be angry at BG, not me, Linux, DOJ, Sherman, Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Slashdot or whatever. Bill is the problem.
laissez faire and libertarianism are interesting political ideals, but like communism and capitalism (and all extreme/simple political ideas), they tend to fall apart in practice.
A strong free market, on the other hand, is a good thing(tm). Sometimes our government has to step in. Around the turn of the last century, an incredibly small number of Americans controlled the majority of the wealth. Like it or not, Sherman came to being (more or less) to redistribute some of that wealth. The rich became less rich, and a lot of poor became middle class. Those middle class people bought a lot of goods and services, while the rich just held the wealth and watched it grow.
In the Depression, a lot of public programs came into being to help the destitute. Like it or not, Roosevelt did far more to restore a sane economy *by acting* rather than watching the "Hoovervilles" grow.
At this time, the USA is once again facing a crisis of wealth. Less than 5% of the population control more than 40% of the wealth. If the trend continues as it has since the early 1980's, you can expect another round of liberal government intervention -- like it or not. The constitution says they serve *the people*, not *a corporation*, and the people tend to vote their pocketbook.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Many thanks. Please stick to this format--maybe make a new story category for it, with a nifty icon.
Actually, here's an idea: Make a new category and start a contest for the best icon. I promise to make lots of contributions. :)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
According to everything I've heard, Area 51 has been abandoned. You still can't actually get inside the thing, but you can get as far as the doors; even the guards are gone.
Do did they ever have anything interesting there? Probably. Do they now? I doubt it; simply too much publicity.
If any of you are wondering who Jason Haas is, go to the original slashdot story here...also, if youre interested in other stuff about him, go here. It has a bunch of links that tell you about what happened to him
Go back and read again. Specifically:
"In the case of such Intellectual Property that is related to the Internet browser, the license shall not grant the Operating System Business any right to develop, license, or distribute modified or derivative versions of the Internet browser."
As for Bill talking to Bill:
"After Implementation of the Plan, and throughout the term of this Final Judgment, neither the Operating Systems Business nor the Applications Business, nor any member of their respective Boards of Directors, shall acquire any securities or assets of the other Business;"
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I would very much like to see this type of thing becoming a weekly feature. Just a brief followup on stories that have been posted. This is one place where Slashdot can leap ahead of many of it's more mainstream counterparts. Updates on other news sites tend to be few and far between.
Additionally, it'd be nice if it had it's own icon/group so that I could browse the updates when I'm pressed for time.
-Jer
First off, I agree that this story is a good idea, and I hope we see more like it in the future.
Now. Area 51, home of UFOs, Little Green (or is it Grey?) Men, Top Sekrit Projects, and possibly Will Smith. Has it occurred to anyone that the government may not have anything interesting down there?
Think about it. The Groom Lake facility is probably one of the most famous testing grounds. Everything going on is surrounded by serious security. Naturally, this means that we all think something big is going on and we spend a lot of time and money trying to get a peek. ("We" probably includes various national governments.) What if the whole thing is just bait? What if Area 51 is a big hoax with DoD-class special effects to keep us mesmerized while the real secret research is going on somewhere totally different?
Hell, if I wanted to keep nosy UFO nuts away from my captured alien specimens and anti-gravity drives, it's what I might do.
Personally, I agree that breaking up microsoft is not the right action at all. They did some pretty messed-up stuff, but I think that that's in the past and breaking them up now would just be retaliatory. Breaking them up now will not do much in my opionion except hurt a lot of people and a lot of other tech companies. Instead I propose baby-sitters for Microsoft. Someone needs to make sure that Microsoft isn't doing anything illegal. Besides that, I don't think that there is any need to break them up. I see other OS's becoming more popular. I see OSX becoming very popular for mac users and that same insurgence in the Mac industry will see it's way into the pc industry. People will like the idea of more compatibilty with macs and new linux companies will start creating distros meant for the home user. Look at the corel distro for instance. I see companies making home distros as a big thing in the future. The average home user does not need running httpd, ftpd, and other similar services after installation. The average user wants a computer that connects easily to the internet, has an easy-to-use browser and mail program, and has an installer that is easy to use so that the user can install any program they want. That's what made Microsoft so popular(besides some of their monopolistic practices). The end user does not want to learn how to create a great system, they want a pre-made, seamlessly integrated system. Only that way will any OS beat microsoft.
The Department of Justice has tried to plug all the holes Microsoft might slip through. I suggest reading the DOJ filing to see if they missed anything. I especially like the "Knowing Interference with Performance" section.
If Judge Jackson signs off on this, it's going to happen. Nobody else gets a say.
But I'm not sure if the proposed split up will be effective enough. I think MS should be split up into three companies at least, and Bill Gates should be forced to give up all of his share in all but one of these companies. There should also be a stipulation that they have to charge royalties when dealing with the other former pieces of Microsoft.
On top of that, MS as it is now should have to pay fines totalling up into the billions.
Now, I know some of you will see this post as being rediculous and typical of a Slashdotter who simply dislikes Microsoft. However, only some really, really, really steep penalties will likey immediately hurt MS enough to restore a decent amount of competition to the Desktop OS market.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The Sherman Antitrust Act is pretty specific. AOL and and Cisco are monopolies, but AFAIK/IANAL have not committed the various acts necessary to be held accountable under Sherman.
Microsoft, on the other hand, violated a consent decree with the DOJ, has something like a 5% hidden API that gives it's own "clone" applications an advantage over anything their competitor's innovate, and then there's the gory history of settling out of court for:
stealing stacker code;
brain draining borland;
novell networking code distributed with win3.x;
code stolen from ibm;
modifying sun's java api;
apple look and feel.
since they settled these cases, none can be used against them in court. but clearly, they have broken a variety of laws to obtain a monopoly, and have continued to do so to maintain it. that behavior is *deep in sherman territory*.
if anyone is to blame for the drop in Microsoft's share price, there is one man : Bill Gates. he rubber stamped all the illegal behavior, and refused to back off even when faced with devastating lawsuits.
another group to blame are the Microsoft employees and shareholders who refused to stand up and say "Why the hell is this company doing these things?" For that, all of them deserve to lose their ass(ets).
I worked for a $40B company, and they were tightly regulated due to the nature of their business. When executives crossed the line, they were forced to retire or fired. Even without tangible proof. Why? because the company's image was at stake, and that company had an obligation to it's shareholders to follow the law.
Your problem is Bill Gates. He screwed Microsoft investors, other companies, the DOJ, the consumer and cost us all a lot of money in a huge lawsuit.
The myth about consumer benefit is ludicrous. Several years ago I could buy a copy of DR-DOS and Borland C++ for about $150 or so. Now, it's about $360 for Win2K and VC++ Pro.
Go write Gates an email, if you lost money of Microsoft. He's the guy who caused all this.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
"In the case of such Intellectual Property that is related to the Internet browser, the license shall not grant the Operating System Business any right to develop, license, or distribute modified or derivative versions of the Internet browser."
Bureaucracies tend / need to see all situations as fitting into their way of looking at the world. Discussions here on slashdot about "what *exactly* is an operating system" have drawn out the fact that there is no commonly accepted definition -- but there is a large gang of ones that are claimed to be universally accepted;)
Often it's tossed out as assertion that an operating system and a Web browser are inherently separate / separable things, which is why MS including IE integrated with their OS was seen as such a conniving move.
But ride with me down this slippery slope for a second ...
Can a /file/ browser be part of an OS? That is not to say whether it's vital to the IO functions, but say in the way that most Linux distros come with quite a few file browsers ... I think most people would say that a file browser is a legitimate / important part of a useable OS.
Given that, I don't see why a Web browswer oughtn't be a legitimate OS componenent -- just look at KDE, where nearly any window can be a Web browser, it seems:)
I'm not saying that a modern OS should of necessity have a Web browser, only that the DOJ isn't allowing enough room for ambiguity by defining OS and Web browser as irreconcilably different, when I don't think they have to be -- in fact, look at all the ways that people are planning to use / already using Mozilla. Definitions shift, tools get used differently, the impossible becomes the ordinary ... I think allowing oversight and market division by the government just sets some dangerous precedent.
I'm saying all this with a sense of wonderment rather than zealotry; I'd just rather seem companies succeed or fail on their merits and faults ... MS certainly would have plenty to worry about without masked men at the gate with guns -- no, wrong story;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5