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MS and the DOJ Return to the Ring
Johan Jonasson writes "ZDNet reports that the opening round in the appeals phase of the Microsoft case gets under way Monday, when the company is scheduled to fire the next salvos in its battle to prevent a breakup. In a 150-page document, the company will try to convince an appeals court to overturn a lower court ruling that would split the software giant into two parts."
... the M$ antitrust lawsuit or the election?
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
It says that part of their argument will be based on the fact that including IE with windows gave users "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser." And what pray tell would these features be?
Kiss me, I'm blueberry-flavored!
Someone please moderate the above post as Troll, because only a moron would think that the AT&T breakup was a bad thing. The only thing that has died was an illegal monopoly that overcharged for everything and didn't offer any new services.
Here are some of the new technologies and products that have come out since the break up:
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And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
With the embarassing Presidential struggle under way, I think the Microsoft case is going to go largely unnoticed now.
Is David Boies still involved with the appeals process regarding Microsoft? If so, I believe his roll will greatly diminish with so called "contests" being readied in Florida.
My take...Microsoft comes out of the Court of Appeals just as they would like, and there is a President Bush Part 2.
Jeff -- skibum, among other things
You're in luck!
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
Here are some things that AT&T did:
1)Built fucking loads of Telephone lines.
2)Created Unix
Created much of our modern telephone structure in the 70's
3)Built some of the first computers.
The things you mention were mostly pioneered in Europe, especially mobile phones. The frontier in the telecommunications industry now lies outwith America, in Europe and Japan.
I bet if AT&T had never been broken up, America would still have the lead.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
If it was a Linux antitrust case, we could have got twice as much argument in our favour in 35 pages. We have benchmarks to prove it.
From the Realdoll FAQ: Question: What if I don't fit with RealDoll's sex parts?
REALDOLL's vaginal and anal cavities are made snug to accommodate any
insertion. The silicone flesh is soft, slippery, and very elastic. Any
petroleum or water-based lubricants can be applied to ease entry.
REALDOLL's oral cavity contains soft silicone tongue and teeth. The
oral cavity is as snug as the doll's other entries. All of REALDOLL's
cavities allow deep insertions.
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
Troll? You don't have to be an anti-Microsoft zealot to realize that Microsoft only became a significant player long *after* home computers were common. Really, DOS/Windows machines weren't popular in the home until the early '90s, although they certainly were popular in offices earlier. Apple and Commodore were much more significant in establishing the home computer market.
That's it.I'm moving to Alaska.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
By my count, it should be at least five parts: Operating Systems, Office Applications, Internet Applications, Hardware, and misc.
True, no one will really know whether these products and/or low prices would be available today if AT&T were never broken up, but I seriously doubt they would be - especially the prices.
And for that matter, what's wrong with Unix? It is the OS that powers the Internet, you know!
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And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Microsoft's effects on innovation have largely been exaggerated by both Microsoft and by the main stream press. Windows 3.1 was a major innovation; Windows 95 was a major innovation in the interface. However, Windows 98 shows that their innovation has largely petered out. Windows 2000 is NT 5.0 repackaged with again minor changes and improvements. Look at ME and you will find exactly the same thing. Microsoft's response to innovation has usually been to buy up the competition.
.net for example.
Linux, BEOS, Free BSD, even OS And the other up and coming operating systems have done more to foster innovation by forcing Microsoft to adapt and break the fossilization that in the end takes large companies and stops the innovation which made them so successful take
The linux window managers and the linux app programmers need to standardize the interface so that most if not all linux programs have a semi consistent look and feel. This is the one area Microsoft has been stomping linux. We can win the individual battles but without doing this we will loose the war in the end.
The next area Linux OS's needs to head is new protocols and new methods of accessing net services. This will insure that Linux maintains the edge that draws power users to it in droves.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Its called lynx. Damn fast and rock solid. Admittedly if you want support for new fangled rubbish like tables and images then I'll grudgingly conced that IE and Netscape have the edge.
he was pointing out the _good_ things at&t did.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
I can't wait until Kylix comes out, then there will be real development tools for linux.
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
The full Windows API to Deleveloper. Yes even the infamous undocumented API and make it easier for 3rd party deleveloper to create a apps that take advantage of the FULL capality of windows. This would be a worse punishment for Microsoft than a break up in my opinion.
Innovation did not die. Look at what we have now. It got better.
MS is not *responsible* for the acceptance of computers into the home.. that would have happened *anyway*, as technology progressed. MS just leveraged it so they would appear to be the sole player.
And this is *not* about the 'Linux' community, it is about antitrust law.
And this will stand as an example to all corporations who think they are above the law.
You seem to be counting innovation as "changes relative to earlier MS OS products".
Some of us seem to recall there being a consumer OS that provided a GUI interface having been available from a company other than MS since, oh, 1984.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Much of the new tech took place outside the US During the eighties when we were obsessed with buying other companies, not improving our technology. the Japanese and Euros were building new machines and technologies during that time.
We put ourselves deep in debt during this feeding frenzy, sapping the R&D departments. Instead of putting money into pure research, Reagan put money into tax breaks for the wealthiest, and for weapons systems that the military didn't want or need.
The Break up of AT&T gave a lot of people a chance to enter the market.
Look at what has happened because of the DOJ. Do you think that MS would have allowed Linux, or the Mac exist if there was no case. Do you think there would still be a BeOS if the case had not been brought.
It appears that Bush will be president. This means the case will probably be dropped. Bush's campaign advisor was Ralph Reed, lobbyist for MS. Gates gave over 3.5 million to the Bush campaign.
photosMy Photostream
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has set up a web page for No. 00-5212, United States v. Microsoft, and No. 00-5213, New York, et al. v. Microsoft. The page includes a schedule and court documents.
In addition, you can join an official mailing list to be notified of submission of new pleadings or court orders.
According to James Grimaldi of The Washington Post, Microsoft intends to target District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in its 150-page appeal Monday. Others predict it is a distraction to demand recusal for Jackson's comments to news media, released after his decision.
As I mentioned in discussing another /. topic, the D.C. Circuit Court judges are exceptionally savvy about technology, and are equipped with Apple Powerbooks. Unfortunately, however, it appears that some of the judges on the panel will have to recuse themselves because they were Justice Department employees before becoming judges--and those judges had considerable antitrust experience, in contrast to the remaining judges.
Let's hope that the current popularity among some "pundits" to bash the judiciary does not carry over to politicizing and weakening the verdict all of us need in this case in order to carry out business in this new era.
If M$ is not split, things will remain as they are. If M$ is split, then all the stock should split as well. Anyone holding a share of M$FT will receive a share of stock in the companies that form as a result of the split. Gates does own stock in his company, and thus will become even more rich after the split.
(BTW, what's "outwith"? I know "outwit"...)
Not at all, I was speaking of what the average end user sees as innovation. I use my linux and love it to death. However, the IT professionals can love linux all you want however without gains in the desktop OS market you will find that linux will eventually be swept to the side more than it is now. The desktop is the battlefield where the OS war will be won and linux has a long march ahead of it before we can come close to victory.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Actually, it's a common myth that AT&T built our telephone structure. If you look back at the early history of telephones in America, you'll see that there were literally hundreds of different companies that built the infrastructure and offered services to various parts of the country. All AT&T did was leverage their dominance to swallow up these smaller competitors until they owned nearly the entire national telephone grid (note: a few of the early AT&T competitors resisted and still exist as small regional telecom operations today). At the same time they were buying out, or crushing, their competitors, they also got some effective legal protections in place to secure their monopoly (like having municipalities pass ordinances specifying that only one telephone line could be strung on municipal poles, and AT&T maintaining an iron grip on those lines).
I'd also like to point out that the Internet probably wouldn't exist in its current form if AT&T had remained whole. Much of the modern Internets resilience comes from the fact that packet traffic is routed through multiple fiber backbones from multiple providers. Those providers simply wouldn't exist if AT&T had retained its monopoly. And do you think AT&T, a single profit driven corporation, would have installed multiple backbones to keep the network running well? Heck no, they would have gone with the cheapest option available. It's also likely that AT&T would have tried to exploit the Internet boom by instituting fees and rates to increase their profits. Higher Internet access costs would have muffled the growth of the Internet, and would have likely dampened our long economic growth period.
And you think breaking them up was a bad thing?
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
The problem with Microsoft's brand of "innovation" up until now is that it's been too centered on desktop applications to really have an effect on the mindshare of the actual community that supports innovation itself. The are trying to make up for that with their new .NET approach, trying to incentivize distributed applications in order to aggregate back-end e-tailers and architect visionary technologies, but it might indeed be too late. Some of the top technology in the world, in the near future, will be made up for cross-platform and internet technology-based products such as Python language, Java language, Amiga Tao Elate Virtual Processor, etc. The only thing Microsoft has really done well is realize that they needed to target visionary partnerships early on, partnering with IBM and Intel early on, and overtaking them later. But that was then, this is now - it's a whole new ballgame. Now, they must either change their focus and start trying to e-enable enterprise e-commerce and iterate cutting-edge applications, or they will surely not be able to redistribute their current mindshare effectively or even grow their enterprise marketshare beyond a percentage of their competitors fractional increases.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
No ... but I think there is a Cue:Cat one...
Yeah this Christmas at a cinema near you "The Fellowship of the Ring"
Starring:
Bill Gates as Sauron
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson as Gandalf
Association for Competitive Technology as misc Orcs and Wargs.
AOL as Saruman
I see. And what innovations 'died'?
The Microsoft Internet Explorer is the only browser that shows the full range of the Microsoft Standard Code for Information Interchange characters. Other browsers either show the smart quotes as ? or not at all.
A consistant interface keeps comming up as an issue. It IS NOT so big an issue as people keep pointing out. So buttons between motif, gtk and kde apps dont look EXACTLY the same; buttons are buttons. I can see the difficulty in using TOTALLY different metaphores, and especially in using slightly different ones, as the subtle differences would be hard to pick up all of the time. It's a little bit of an inconvenience to apply themes to kde and gnome seperately, etc, but, it's not THAT bad, and there are tools to do it for you.
The problem is more with overwhelming users - most users have to install from scratch (linux isnt shipped with many boxes) and are presented with more information than they think they need during installation and setup. This greater amount of information makes linux LOOK harder.
First off, one thing to remember about appellate judges. They're extremely busy people, with very little time to waste. If you want to score points with an appellate judge, the way you do it is to keep your arguments clear, concise, and realistic. If there were three "real errors" in your trial and another twelve "didn't affect the outcome, but still wrong", ignore the twelve and focus on the three.
If you put all fifteen in your brief and force the judges to figure out, on their own, that three of the issues were worthwhile and the other twelve was just attorney ego-stroking, don't be surprised if Los Federales take a very dim view of you.
Microsoft lost in trial court, but they wouldn't have lost as badly if they hadn't committed the cardinal sin of pissing off the judge. You can get past any legal hurdle in any courtroom except that one.
With a 150-page legal brief, which the appellate judges will have to examine point-by-point in their opinion, Microsoft is guaranteeing to make a lot of judges on the appellate bench unhappy, too.
Were I Microsoft, I'd have focused on only a handful of issues (and maybe made a token attempt at discrediting James Allchin, since he turned out to be Boies' best witness). I sure as hell wouldn't go about writing a 150-page monster which is guaranteed to make me enemies of the judges before I ever set foot in their courtroom for oral arguments.
that the court's web page is running IIS
Bush will be president and he is in the pocket of Microsoft.
The case will be dropped, the Justice department will not enforce anti trust laws. This is the GOP style.
Judging from this question on a Harris poll I took last week, MS is charging full speed ahead.
"If Microsoft developed and released a new Windows operating system next year for personal computers (including Apple), what is the likelihood that
you would want to buy it, either as a new installation or an upgrade?"
I would think that this is why they bought into Corel, and why Corel is considering selling its Linux department.
photosMy Photostream
First, you aren't allowed to introduce new evidence at the appellate level (except in extremely unusual circumstances). There's no new testimony allowed, there's no new evidence allowed. All you're allowed to argue on is the court record.
Microsoft had plenty of opportunity to show "features unavailable to them in a non-Microsoft browser". The reality of it is, not only did they not show this, their own witness discredited this claim.
James Allchin's direct testimony (submitted in written form) claimed that customers benefitted from the integration of browser and OS in ways which were not possible with the products being separate. He had seventeen or eighteen points which he hammered on.
When Boies cross-examined Allchin, Boies went step-by-step through Allchin's direct testimony and asked him if those exact same benefits couldn't be obtained by downloading IE 4.0 as a separate product and installing it on Win95/B.
On every single claim, Allchin was forced to admit that "correct, the integration offers no advantage in this case".
Boies' cross of Allchin ought to do in the Litigants' Hall of Fame. Allchin was bloodily eviscerated on the witness stand, and Microsoft's strongest witness turned out to be the strongest witness, all right... strongest PLAINTIFF'S witness.
They might argue that IE/Win is beneficial to the users, but the court record shows MS's own witness admitting, seventeen times, that the integration conferred no benefit.
In other words, they're just putting that argument in there to look good. I'd expect the appellate judges to come down pretty harshly on them for it.
Another thing to keep in mind--the last time the appellate bench overruled Jackson, they said that tying products together was lawful as long as it conferred a benefit to the consumer. Most people don't remember that; all they remember is "they said the `integration' was okay". Microsoft is apparently depending on the appellate court to say that integration is always okay.
But if the appellate court holds to their earlier opinion, Microsoft is in a hell of a lot of hot water.
AT&T *WON* their antitrust suit. They broke up voluntarily.
Please get your facts straight.
When one has to choose between pine, mutt, and so many other options, and, in the end, uses Netscape as the mail and news client, installation looks much harder than it really is.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
No points for second place, please play again
I think this applies to Win2K as well, but in ME, you right click on the desktop, go to 'Active Desktop' and then 'Show Web Content'
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CitizenC
My name is not 'nospam,' but 'citizenc'.
Did you buy it on EBay??
I'd agree that Win98, Win98SE and WinME are not exactly stellar
advances on Win95, but you're being unfair about Win2k: it offers a
lot of important improvements over NT4 (eg. long uptimes, improved
scripting and remote administration, much improved security features
in the registry, rebootless device changes). Win2k is a plausible
server OS, a claim I don't think was true of NT4.
Despite the so-called de-regulation (and the BT fan club known as Oftel) BT still have that vital control over the local loop and are fighting tooth and nail not to let anyone else get access to it.
The cheapest ISDN rental I can get works out at over 40USD per month - and don't forget there are NO free/unmetered calls with BT. This is changing in areas where you are lucky enough to have a one of the cable companies that is any good.
The ISDN prices are high to protect leased line revenue, and ADSL is being rolled out as slowly as possible to protect ISDN revenue. I don't know that this is BT policy, but it is a reasonable conclussion.
I may eventually get ADSL for about 65USD per month - 512/256k if I'm lucky - but there is no SLA so I will be expected to pay even when there is no service - right, I should think so.
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
That cassette tape used to really piss me off, just when I had memorized the tracking number (whatever you call the odometer like thing that would track where on the tape you where), that little bastard brother of mine would reset it. NUTS!!!!
I would like to see the Linux community achieve victory on a fair and square basis, not by legal trickery.
Uh, I don't think the "Linux bunch" is behind the trial here. You could make a very tenuous point that this suit was brought against M$ by Netscape, AOL or Sun, but the fact is, the US Gov't had been eyeing M$ for some time and those companies just fueled their fire.Pooty tweet
How likely do folks think that this will go to the Supreme Court? The
case will only be heard if the Supreme Court decides to hear it, and
they decided not to hear it earlier. My guess is that if the appeal
court largely agrees with Jackson's legal judgement, then they will
not examine the case, in which case we can expect the case to be
finished by summer next year. Opinions?
I think Microsoft should look on the good side of all this.
:-)
Look at previous split-up companies in the US. AT&T ("Ma Bell" herself) was a lumbering hulk before it was split - since then it has (or rather its various children have) gone from strength to strength.
IBM almost underwent the same process in the early 1980s, and perhaps the split HAD taken place they would have avoided such spectacular failure in the early 1990s. Only in the last 5 years have they really turned things around again, ironically employing the same compartmentalisation techniques that a DOJ-enforced split would have imposed.
Now, Microsoft are a hugely successful company. But they're getting very big, and they are at just the stage where management and red tape begin to take their toll on good business sense and keen research and development. Indeed, according to inside reports they themselves are beginning to realise their own fallibility (especially after a couple of high-profile squibs in the last few years).
Perhaps therefore the DOJ split would do Microsoft a power of good, in a business sense. Whether or not this is good news for Slashdot readers remains to be seen.
arnald
Go away Pip, no one likes you
As a Microsoft admin and dabbler of Linux (MD7.2), why is it all linux sites look the same? I mean it's like whatever program being used only has three themes to apply to the pages?
The reason Europe and Japan have the lead in mobile phones is that the area to cover is FAR smaller than the U.S. You cover more population with less investment.
Go read up on how BT is doing. That's the UK's monopoly telephone service. Guess what, they're just starting to put out DSL. Why? Not as much profit as ISDN. Oh, don't forget the "no free local calls" bit. My first phone bill over there was 600$, 90% local calls!
Duh, of COURSE AT&T built most of the modern telephone structre in the 70's. Who else do you think would do it? Dunkin Dounuts?
Later
ErikZ
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
In all these M$ v/s DOJ, we seem to forget who is the real winner here by including a browser with the OS. Solaris does it with their HotJava browser. Linux does it with Netscape. Irix does it with Netscape. So why is it strange that when Microsoft try to ship their own browser with their OS everybody jumps 50 feet high? The truth is, may be most of the /. users would rather use Netscape. Good choice. But we seem to forget that 90% of Windows users out there (think about the +40 age group or the not-so-computer-savy user out there) would rather simply switch on their computer and surf the net, without having to do anything. It's already terrifying for them to even switch on the damn box, let alone removing IE and installing NS.
That's what I always do anyway. I want a browser independent of the OS. But that's my choice. Most people just want a browser that works.
Now what is disturbing is the fact that whenever you buy a PC you get M$ Windows automatically with it. Hopefully things are starting to change and we are today seeing the major PC manufacturers offering Linux as a viable alternative OS.
So what's the point? M$ stand a good chance of walking away a clear winner. Consider the # of browsers currently available for Linux. Now that OSS is clearly being made more public, more and more people are aware of better alternative out there. Besides, the software landscape 5 years ago (whenever the initial suit was established) has changeg so much that will the case still stand on its 2 feet?
Oracle software is run on the major intnernet sites, and Sun hardware obviously own the market on the hardware side. Shall we break Oracle too? What about Sun?
Today M$ stand against much more competition that ever. Linux is growing leaps and bounds every single day. Star Office is turning out to be a wonderful replacement for M$ Office. Netscape will always be the browser of choice for Linux/Unix users alike.
Do we still think that M$ still holds a monopoly and is worth breaking up? AOL should definitely be on the list.
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Or is the whole town assembly composed of unix aldermen?
Yeah, my dad was a gear head too. If you want to see some pics, shoot me an email and I will send you the URL.
Let me guess, you live in the south
(See you in hell, I'll be the one kicking your bitch ass)
Besides, the summers are more fun anyway, I can ride wheelies between traffic
What advice could be better than this? I once saw a '65 Shelby Cobra 427 parked in the street in front of my building. I stood there watching it, until the owner came out and wondered if I was gay. Nothing beats the deep bass rumble of a 60's generation "7 liter" muscle car...
...the Mission Statement Generator on the Dilbert webpage. I haven't seen that many buzzwords together in one place in I don't know how long.
I thought they stole it from Apple
There are still plenty of issues outstanding, though:
Cheers,
The courts are spending so much time deciding on this case. The whole time, M$ is just taking more money from businesses' pockets. I'm afraid the government isn't going to do anything for us. We are going to have to take this one into our own hands and woop MS ourselves. Power to the Linux Community! Get out there and code.
Once a Linux User, Always a Linux User
Gates will be forced to _choose_ a company with which to have is stock in, so he could either have stock in the OS company, or he could have stock in the applications company. This would be a difficult choice, as I see it, the apps company would make more money, but Gates not going with his roots on the OS side could be interpreted as a vote of non-confidence in the flagship product.
Going to be interesting to see what happens. Personally, I think cokehea^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, Bush will overthrow the decision, or interfere at the least. All those campeign contributions gotta count for something (although, last time I checked, microsoft gave money to both campeigns, more to Bush, I believe, though).
..don't panic
Programs to browse the Web have always been free. You can see from them if net browsing is a tempting to go and buy a browser. Mosaic is free. Many are based on mosaic.
Netscape made a market for a 'browser plus' application. That is, Mosaic that could do other things as well. They created a profitable product for their innovations, that took 80% of the market, even though you paid for it.
Other vendors made 'browser plus' programs, and sold them according to what they thought people would pay for the 'plus' bit. Microsoft saw this, and wheeled out their 'browser plus'. But their 'browser plus' wasn't capturing the market share that they hoped for.
In order to capture the market, Microsoft had to do something different, and that is what they did. They bundled it with Windows, first as a separate application, then bound it into Windows so hard that you need to use their browser.
Windows 98 works without a browser. Check out http://www.98lite.com/ where a program to remove IE might be found.
The real reason that nobody wins is because the solution proposed kills innovation. No Windows, No Net. Simple enough.
OS/2's Web Explorer
This is Mosaic for OS/2. It fits on a single floppy, uncompressed. It is advertised as an onramp to the internet. But it's only an onramp, not the highway. If you want speed or class or whatever, go get something else.
Netscape
This is only free because Microsoft killed the market. Why pay $50 when you can get the same for free? Netscape were forced into a situation where they could not compete, and so had to give the stuff away to stay afloat. For whatever they did right or wrong, they simply were bankrolled by the Windows juggernaut.
Java
Java was a genuine attempt to allow people to write web applets for the internet. Microsoft had their way with this as well (J++, C#, VirusBasic, ...).
Net Innovation
Of course you can further innovate. The OS/2 install program "WarpIn" uses a html-like script for installation. look at http://projects.netlabs.org/
Active Desktop
You don't need a browser to make the active desktop. Not even close here. Even if the active desktop and the browser share the same code, it should be possible to install both Active Desktop and Netscape. I mean, it's just DLL calls.
Why do we loose
You give a fish a feed, it wins. You reel in the line, it looses. Inverted J curve - nothing less, nothing more.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
No, I am a different FamousRapperIceCube.
---
Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
There would have been other big cross counrty fiber/copper providers to run IP over in the last decade or so because there was lots of cross country copper providers back before Bell was broken up.
You know who SPRINT was? They werent a invented company, out to sell long distance, they were a railroad company: Southern Pacific. SP, as all RR's have one of the underlying requirements to run cable, that is physcal right of ways over land. So RRs ran a lot of Telegraph lines. And upgraded those over time.
Sprint anyway, in the '60s started selling bulk long distance, and probably even long haul data connections.
Might we have been, big picture, better off if Bell stade as voice only, and Sprint (and friends) sold data connections, only? Thats a good fucking question.
Besides, the real reason that long distance prices have fallen since the earlt 1980's is because of technological increase in capacity.. Competition has had only a slight total effect.
Were Linux in the dock, you'ld wonder who was holding the knife, because its packaging has been forked. :)
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
GOOoooood Evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to a special Battlebot's presentation of Political Grudge Match Duels to the Death!
...
Tonight we have for you two hot battles: first up we have George Bush and his Team Pachyderm versus Al Gore and the Lock-Box-Rocks-Crue in the slap-down for the presidency of the United States. Our second duel-to-end-all-duels pits Bill Gate's Innovatin'-and-Devestatin' Microsoft against Janet Reno and the Department of Kicking-your-Ass Justice
But first, the Rumble for White House
This match has some baaaad blood between the combatants and they're ready for some metal shredding action tonight. Team Pachyderm's 'Bot is ready for a kill. We go to Donna D'Erico ringside with George Bush jr.:
DE: "Gov Bush, what's your strategy for tonight?"
GB:
DE: "Uhh, sir, please speak into the microphone, not my cleavage..."
GB: "Uhhh, sorry. Donna, we're not going to fall for Gore's fuzzy engineering. Since I'm all about inclusion, my 'Bot is going to reach across to the Democrats, grab hold, and spin them at about 1000 rpm."
DE: "Is it true, that to appease the Christian Coalition, your machine cannot make left turns, it can only go right?"
GB: "Let me make one thing straight. I'm my own man, at least that's what my daddy tells me. But yes, that's true."
DE: "Thanks, Govenor. Back to Battlebot central"
Thanks, Erica. And now for a technical analysis of Lock-Box-Rocks-Crue's "Analator", we turn to Bill Nye
BN: "The Analator has an ingenious design for a weapon. It basically sits there, lulling it's opponent into boredom, then it unleashes a barage of micro-detailed projectiles. It's only weakness is when it's near anyone's wife"
And now we go to the floor to determine the next Leader of the Free World (tm)!
["Red team, are you ready?" flip switch. "Blue team, are you ready?" flip switch]
Buzzzzzzz
And they're off! Bush swerves to the right, trying to flank Gore. Gore turns and stands his ground. Bush misses by a wide margin and slams right into the buzz saws! Gore approaches from behind and prepares to unleash a barage of projectiles. Bush breaks free from the blades, and grabs hold of Gore! The Analator gives a big audible sigh as it tries to break free of Pachyderm's grip. And Bush spins him right up against the spike wall! Unbelievable! Gore is stuck on top of the spikes! He can't move! The side-judge begins the count...
And it's over! Gore loses by Robot TKO!
And now for our next match... Oh wait! President elect Bush's first act is to declare Microsoft the winner!
Well thats all from San Francisco. Good Night!!!
do we need any further proof that Microsoft is just delaying the hand of justice inevitably? The message couldn't be more clear: "go ahead, split us up, but not until we have our cross platform .NET stategy in place"
How we know is more important than what we know.
In the 80s, home computers were not as popular as they are today. It wasn't until the 90s that computers appeared in 50% of homes today. During the 80s, computers were difficult to use (compared to today) and largely incompatible with one another; Commodore owners could not share floppies with PC or Apple or Atari users. Microsoft created a product (Dos) that was largely used in business, and eventually people caught on that bringing work home would be a selling point to having a computer in the home- an extension of the "kids should have the same computer at home as they have in school" idea which drove sales of Apple computers.
join the Young Microsofts
How we know is more important than what we know.
wow.. you really should publish this and have conferences on it and maybe a few court cases for publishing false history. Just because you lived under a rock until the Information Super Hypeway jumped into the limelight and conviced you to part with a few grand doesn't mean you know anything about the "home computer market".
Why don't you tell us all how the television set really wasn't popular until the VCR came about?
How we know is more important than what we know.
I was just wondering when will a busybody make this a Linux vs Microsoft debate?
Just picture this:
Judge: Will the defense lawyer please present their opening statements...
MS Lawyer: I'm sorry your honor, but my Windows 2000 Laptop Crashed last night in my hotel. So I tired to re-install it using the CD I brought, but I forgot the CD-Key back in the Office. So I had the document on a disk. Well when I gave it to my counsol, they had an older version of Word on it so I couldn't open it. (We know how that dang format keeps changing) Then once I retyped it, when I tried to print it I got a Fatal Exception Error and was forced to reboot once again, re-install the printer driver, and finally try to print it out. But then explorer crashed an corupted the video driver Vxd. So what I'm trying to say is that I don't have my opening statement.
I agree with you but not with your reason. You realize that if M$ is split in two, the public gets to pay double. Windows Whistler for example would come out as a base OS, no notepad, no solitaire, no software, cause that's part of the other company. You can probably buy the Whistler Software Pack with the Solitaire, Notepad and the rest for another chunk o change. So you see, M$1 and M$2 work together, and Bill gets richer still. But I spose he'll have more work to do. After all he is probably the one who generates those damned annoying Product-Keys.
Kleedrac
Sure we wang, can.
It also gets brownie points for mentioning Linux before the mainstream media got hold of it :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If Windows and Office become modules within one application / system, Microsoft can't be divided, and they don't have to give up their API's.
Bizar technology?
Right now there's no distribution that limited, because everyone building them likes lots of choices. (For instance, I'd never use a distribution like you describe ... after all, I don't use either KDE or netscape, and I have no problem with having lots of different mail programs to mess around with.) But maybe lots of people would be interested.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Currently, what drew a good number of the Linux users I know was the ability to customize the look and feel of everything.
-RickHunter
Alan Greenspan on Antitrust.
"Besides, the real reason that long distance prices have fallen since the earlt 1980's is because of technological increase in capacity.. Competition has had only a slight total effect."
Yeah, right. And competition between AMD and Intel, 3DFX and Nvidia, etc. hasn't done anything either.
The fact is, if they weren't split up, they could be charging whatever they want, do you really think they'd go as low as 5 cents a minute? From dealing with local telcos that have monopolies in certain areas, I can tell you the answer is no, they'd screw you every which way they could.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Last time I checked there were something like 18 states involved in the case against Microsoft. If the DOJ backs out, look for Boies to begin working for one of the states involved. They will not drop the case.
In the end the Supreme Court will have the final say on Microsoft.
Microsoft also is expected to question Judge Jackson's conduct during the trial.
In past filings, company attorneys have argued that Judge Jackson was biased against Microsoft and that he failed to provide them with an adequate arena to present their case. They've also accused Jackson of mishandling the case and applying antitrust laws too broadly. - from ZDNet story
This is incredible chutzpah. They started with a judge (Penfield) who was a political conservative disposed to be sympathetic, and then MS proceded to lie as lamely as possible and really piss him off. MS had plenty of chances to defend itself, but the facts, as found by Penfield, are that MS comported itself as a monopolist, engaged in restraint of trade, and basically has become a criminal under the antitrust laws.
Of course, it doesn't end there. MS then says that it's willing to discuss a satisfactory solution, in that it would simply agree not to be a bad boy for awhile. Its representatives are taken aback and offended at proposals to break MS up. Doh. If for no other reasons, there should be punitive considerations.
I use MSIE on my Mac, I use OE and the Office suite. The San Francisco MS team's Mac products are good. But MS's actions as a corporation have been found to be illegal, and need to be dealt with. Should they pierce the corporate veil, find the individuals who carried out intimidation and other anticompetitive acts, and punish them? I think that's too radical for the judicial system (it would mean nasty polluting CEOs could go to prison, not good for the DemiPubs)... so MS has to pay the piper. Amazingly, MS simply believes it never did any wrong, even as its attorneys were caught up in lies before much of the world press.
-Dave
Why is it that people totally miss the point here? Certain customers of certain PC vendors wanted Netscape preinstalled. The PC vendors wanted to do it to keep their customers happy. Microsoft, being a monopoly and thus having no need to keep their customers happy, threatened to raise the price of Windows, an unrelated product, to those PC vendors that preinstalled Netscape.
To continue your analogy, it would be as if RedHat told (say) VA Linux that they would have to pay more for their distro if they wanted to include Konqueror as well as Netscape on their boxes. Clearly this is not the same situation, because RedHat is not even a monopoly supplier of its own software.
The clue that most MSFT defenders need to acquire is that nothing MSFT is accused of would be illegal if they hadn't short-sightedly crushed all their competition in the desktop OS market. When you are a monopoly there are things you can't legally do. In the absence of market forces, the government acts as the regulator valve. Not always well, but better than not having any control at all.
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E_NOSIG
Bollocks.
Try New Zealand, a nation with in excess of 90% coverage (and that doesn't include the marine coverage) by cellular networks of both Vodafone (GSM) and Telecom NZ (analogue). This is a country with average population densities of less than 1 person per square kilometre for much of the larger half of the country. Don't give us the sob stories about low population density.
Europe, just like the US, focuses most of the population in major centres. LA, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston... Every single one of those cities has more people in them than NZ, and NZ has a land mass the size of California.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
We are talking serious below-the-belt punching here. The following appears on the last page of Microsoft's brief: Likewise, the district judge's apparent decision to read letters he received from the public during trial, some of which he described as "thoughtful pieces by people who were vitally interested in the case," Sarah Jackson-Han, Father in Law, DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAG., Nov./Dec. 2000, at 44, was a flagrant violation of Canon 3(A)(4) of the Code of Conduct. Sarah Jackson-Han happens to be Judge Jackson's daughter, a journalist with Agence France-Presse (the French Associated Press). Impeaching the judge with his own daughter's article is pretty rough play.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.