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U.S. v. Microsoft Arguments - Streaming Audio
Wendy writes "Oral arguments in the Microsoft Case appeal are scheduled Monday and Tuesday before the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a first, the court is offering live audio streaming through ABC News and C-SPAN. Arguments begin at 9:30 a.m. -- monopoly maintenance and tying Monday; attempted monopolization, relief, and Judge Jackson's conduct of the trial Tuesday. Microsoft is, of course, appealing Jackson's breakup order and final judgment."
How to set up PPP in Linux Mandrake:
Click on Internet Dialer, userid and password. Go to Setup and enter the phone number of your ISP. Return to the main dialer window and click Connect. Wow, what a nightmare. I suppose I'd better return to Windows. Good troll though.
Not forgetting the userid and password, d'oh :-)
Not that I don't appreciate being able to say I listened - hope you had as much luck as I did.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
Good job embedding the "The monopoly line has been bullshit from the start" quote. And the "jealousy" keyword was genius.
For those that don't know what I'm talking about, see my (current) sig.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Hi, I am a MS-defender and I'm here to flame you.
Powerpoint ships with Standard, Professional and Premium.
It does not ship with Small Business edition, but then they ship you Publisher instead which is likely of more use to a small business.
So it appears you are wrong.
On the other hand if Powerpoint was included in every bundle, I would argue that I'm wasting my money because I have no use for it.
It's a zero sum argument, neither side really has a good point that doesn't have an opposite counterpoint equally as good.
Umm, dBase was already dead by the time Access was introduced.
Borland was pushing Paradox.
The dBase III users who were disgruntled by dBase IV(for good reason) moved to FoxPro.
Clipper was extremely popular because it would compile your resulting app into a redistributable executable.
Access's secret to success at the time was that it was relational and it had wonderful report generation facilities.
I still hate it to this day, but admit that it is useful.
Don't all laws have to be tried before a judge sooner or later?
According to your analysis it should be legal for corporations to hire death squads to assinate competitors. If they were simply allowed to kill anybody they wanted they would not worry about the uncertainty of trying to make a profit.
You gotta draw the line somewhere and the society has done exactly that. No matter where you draw the line someone will object and it will end up in front of a judge. This is how our system works.
War is necrophilia.
They are not idiots trust me. MS bought the president they wanted, they got the Attorney General they wanted installed and now the DOJ is going to throw the case for them.
Even if the circuit court sees through this kabuki dance the republican supreme court is going to give Bill Gates what he want's anyway.
At this time this nothing but a waste of our tax dollars.
War is necrophilia.
Strange but when I installed Mandrake it asked me if I wanted to configure my Lucent Winmodem. I didn't at the time because I've got cable, but maybe I should try it just to see what happens.
"
Now help your mom download, apply, configure, compile and install a source code patch!
"
Mum,
can you dial the internet please?
$ ssh mumsbox.herisp.net
$ login :
.....
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
huh?
Yes but the question is why should someone learn
a new interface? For a computer game it makes
sense, but Linux is no faster, no more stable (than
NT/W2K), has less hardware support and less
software. In short the 'sheeple' are perfectly
well aware of what they want in an OS and
Linux isn't it.
> I'm not interested in court proceedings, and
> probably will not watch, but it would be
> interesting to see the courts used yet again as
> a tool to appease jealousy.
It is strange to see how people who have too little interest in the case to actually read the judgement (even though it is easily available and written in plain English), somehow feel able to firmly state that the judges decission is in error.
The Microsoft spin doctors must have done an incredibly good job.
Good God! Is anyone listening to this? The government (prosecution) counsel is being beaten up by the Court on the following argument:
"The Netscape-Java middleware merger would simply replace the Microsoft monopoly and its' application barrier to entry with a new monopoly, the Netscape-Java middleware monopoly with the Netscape-Java application barrier to entry"
Will someone please tell the idiot attorney for the U.S. who is representing us that the difference is OPEN STANDARDS. THE DIFFERENCE IS OPEN STANDARDS. The difference is that anyone can implement the middleware layer because it has an open API, but NO ONE is allowed to create a parallel implementation of the windows API.
Will someone in D.C. please paint THE DIFFERENCE IS OPEN STANDARDS on your naked body and run screaming into the courtroom with your hair on fire!
God these judges are stupid. I can't believe our fate rests with them.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Now talk her through it over the phone with no feeback from her machine but what Mom reads you over the phone - I used to help people configure and link Microport System V/AT kernels over the phone all the time when I worked in their tech support department.
The command line does have its advantages over GUI in purely voice tech support but it's no substitute for just having nothing ever go wrong at all.
While difficult to achieve, complete reliability and ease of use are technical possibilities.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
How does the MSDN subscription thing work into getting developers on board with not only MS OS, but MS development tools, as well as all the other software they produce? I have seen developers recommend MS products in situations where they may or may not have been ideal, simply because they had either warezed versions or already had access via this MSDN thing.
I do not have a signature
--
I'll be in School. Perhaps I could convince my teachers its a "Learning Experience".
Or, does anyone know any programs I would be able to use to record the one tommorow?
Scroll up to the top of the page and read about why I feel cross-platform development is essential to the developer and the public.
Thank you for your attention.
Regards,
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
[/irony]
As much as Microsoft have abused the position they currently occupy in the software market, they do have several points worth considering. Of course, this isn't to say that they shouldn't be broken up, but it's not the black and white issue that it is often presented as in the more Linux friendly media.
Microsoft got to where they are today through two things - a comination of ruthless business tactics and complete incompetance on the part of potential competitors. Without both of these, Microsoft wouldn't have their current near-monopoly and we'd see several competing commercial desktop operating systems being popular.
But would this be a good thing?
For the server market competition is all for the better - servers need to be robust platforms from which to run network services, and the fact that all the important protocols are open means that they can live side by side without problems. We've seen how having Linux and BSD have forced Microsoft to improve their code or be left behind.
But is this true for the desktop? At this end the majority of users aren't technically accomplished and simply want to get things done. If there are half a dozen different types of system, each with their own way of doing things, then people are either going to have to be trained for each one, or lose out on potential employment at offices using an OS they don't know. This all adds to employer's costs, and cuts down on profitability. The effects will be subtle, but in the long-run it'll damage the economy, which has become increasingly reliant on companies utilising technology.
So maybe Microsoft should be split instead into desktop and server divisions. Linux isn't really competing with Microsoft on the desktop anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem. Then Microsoft's server OS can stand or fall on it's own merits, or lack of.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Its funny how analysts complain about potential stock losses from investing in Microsoft...
Perhaps the stock holders should tell the company leadership that violating the law isnt part of their mandate for maximizing profits?
And perhaps investors should think twice about investing in companies known throughout the industry for their blatant disregard for the differences between legal or illegal competetive practices.
The MSDN tries to do what OpenSource does. Make the development platform and tools available to the developers at a minimal cost.
:)
::grin::), learn a bit about cross-platform coding, and brush up on my C/C++ along the way.
The term minimal is relative of course. I only ended up with a nice and legal copy of MSVC++ 6.0 because a friend had accidentally gotten an extra copy, and gifted it to me. Otherwise I would be trying to get GCC and MING running on MS. Heaven forbid I would use an illegal copy of MS's software. Of course if you are doing serious developement work, then MSDN might be nice to subscribe to (free tools/test platforms), but for my minimal effort the coast just doesn't pay.
Now that I have it though, I am using it to produce code that uses OpenSource libraries and tools. My goal is to put out a game or two (in my spare time, hence it being a goal and not a Project Plan or a Buisness Model
Why not just use Linux?
My main machine is dual boot Linux/Windows.
I've found for me, that working on one platform consistently is the easiest thing for developement. Otherwise I spend half my time just re-orienting myself within my environment. For my Perl development, I use Linux... almost exclusively for the major developement. For my C/C++, at least for now, I use windows because some of the people I'm working with are on Windows also, so its easier to swap around files if we all use a consistent platform, and for me to be able to send them Binaries to look at (and they are non-techie graphic people, not programmers, so Linux isn't as much of an option for them... yet).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Why do I get the feeling that if the judgment doesn't go M$'s way, there's only one way we'll REALly hear it...
"Cool case"
The proposed remedy, the one that MS is fighting so furiously with all its legal muscle, is not so structurally damaging to their business model as you might guess based solely on the spectacle of blood and fur that you see in the press.
Real competition would be better served if the company were not simply broken into an OS maker with an effective monopoly and an office product maker with an effective monopoly. Rather, the public's interest would be better served if at least 2 companies of each variety and comparable size were created.
Some might argue with me that the inside pipe between Office and OS is an incredibly lucrative lever the current company possesses - I don't know for sure, given all the arguments that a Chinese Wall separates the two developer teams. Such a wall may only be for show and may not prevent the upper level management from coordinating efforts with a view to both sides of the wall.
However, I don't see consumer choices and the competitive landscape improving much simply by creating MS-OS vendor with 90% of the desktop OS market and an MS-Office vendor with 90% of the desktop productivity suite market.
At least the appeals process takes time. To the extent that such time permits the current situation to prevail, their currently successful business model can thrive.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Funny, even Microsoft isn't fighting that they are a monopoly. They are fighting the punishment of illegally using said postion as monopoly. The Government, the Courts, and even Microsoft knows that the monopoly line is not bullshit, why can't you accept it?
I personally do not believe that Microsoft has done a good job a meeting customer needs. I believe that Microsoft has done a very impressive job of locking in customers through the use of illegal business practices. The numbers over the past couple of years support my belief. Macs came back from 1% of the market up to ~7% of the total market over the past couple of years, Linux is nearly 5% and continues to grow exponentially. Sun continues to beat estimates of growth every year. Palm OS has dominance is the hand helds, and that doesn't seem to be faltering.
Although MS has complete control over the office market, I only know one person who uses the office assistant, and I hear people complain constantly about how big it is and how expensive it is. People ask me all the time if there are alternatives to MS Office that can perfectly convert Office files.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people are happy with a unified user interface. Most of the people that I talk to are not happy with Mircosoft, even the simplist of users, because it seems to get slower and more expensive with each release, and the fact that it is still unreliable.
My experience is that so long as they recongnize the interface they don't care what runs behind it. When I set up user accounts on my Linux partition for people, and configure the account to look similar to the Win95 interface people plod along contently, and are in general happier because the thing doesn't crash on them. The funniest thing that I have found is that when my keyboard goes haywire (hardware issue with my motherboard, don't want to go into it) and stops working people sware at Microsoft, even when they KNOW that they aren't using Microsoft, it has become a habit.
People are NOT happy with Microsoft, it does not meet customer needs, and it is a monopoly. The problem is that they use their position as a monopoly to prevent alternatives from becoming viable options.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Now help your mom download, apply, configure, compile and install a source code patch!
I know people who are blessed with parents who know how to program, but my mom wanted to go back to CompuServe after Dad fixed her up with Earthlink because earthlink gave them netscape on the installation CD to read her email with.
She didn't know, until I came to visit, downloaded and tested every email client available for the Mac OS, and set her up with Sono Software's Musashi that everyone's email wasn't hardwired to their ISP. I tried to explain to her before I visited that she could get a different mail program, but didn't understand - she didn't know she was running Netscape to read her email, she thought she was reading her email in Earthlink.
My dad knows a little programming - FORTRAN IV on an IBM 360 via punchcards.
If something breaks on their little Mac (and they manage to do it somehow), it stays broken until their son the software consultant flies home to visit.
Please contribute articles to the Linux Quality Database on how to write quality software, test it, or send in links to quality information and resources that I can link to from the page or write articles about.
Especially important are articles that are accessible to ordinary users or inexperienced programers on how they can contribute in a meaningful way to QA testing of the Free Software product of their choice. An example is my article (still in progress) Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel.
Planning for the kernel testing database that I have in mind is still in a vaporware phase. If you know about designing database schemas I could really use your help in architecting this thing. I could write the database access code myself but I don't want to plan the schema because I'm sure I'd make a mess of it. I've never designed a real schema before.
I'd like to use Enhydra as the application server - it's pretty good and open source. You can integrate it with Apache or the Netscape server, or it comes with its own Java HTTP server built-in that you can use either for testing or production.
When you use the Enhydra multiserver in development the whole enhydra system can run in one Java VM process. I echoed out the java command line from the startup script to find out what all the parameters were then put the command line into NetComputing's AnyJ debugger (free as in beer for Linux) to run a whole web application in a source debugger. Much nicer and more effective than printing "here I am" to the console.
I believe they have Enhydra running under Kaffe now. It didn't when I tried it but the startup scripts now support it as an option. I reported the problem to the Kaffe folks quite a while ago and I guess they fixed it.
Mike
-- Could you use my software consulting serv