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Bush Administration Stops Microsoft Breakup
The U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had been instructed by the Bush Administration to cease its drive to break up Microsoft, which has already been found guilty of violating U.S. anti-trust law in a complaint filed by the Federal Government and 19 states. See the BBC or CNN for more. It isn't clear what wristslap, errr, remedy the Justice Department will seek instead. Update: 09/06 15:21 PM GMT by M : Declan McCullagh of Wired notes: "The text of the DOJ announcement is here. Wired News has an article. Also, the DOJ says a 'Senior Antitrust Division Official' will brief reporters at the department's DC headquarters at 11:30 am ET, so look for some followup stories from that."
HAHHAAHHAHAHAHAA
stupid lameness filter
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
How did this get rated "funny"?
Let's face it: We're in for 3+ more years of Bush Jr. doing bad things because he can get away with it in our climate of general apathy and disillusionment. Now, I'm all for being disillusioned, but watching this idiot get away with things that should have us on the White House lawn with torches and pitchforks is getting old.
Let's name a few: -Allowing religion to limit science.
-Irresponsibly cutting taxes and using it to blatently curry favor with the Nascar sect of American society.
- Environmental destruction in favor of short-term corporate gains (Alaska, Kyoto).
- Doing his best to restart the good 'ol cold war (ABM treaty breaking, trying to isolate China).
Let's face it: This guy's the worst example yet of how bad things are getting, and unless people start to notice they might as well just start allowing only Fortune 500 companies to vote in the general election (hey, you said you wanted to get rid of the electoral college, right?).
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
There were 13 comments on this story ("Bush [Administration] Stops Microsoft Breakup") and 1 on another story that we suspect may have had their metadata mixed up somehow. I believe some of them were actually (intended to be?) posted to other stories and they wound up here instead. They were definitely replies to other comments and we had to make them at the "root level." But I believe the rest of their metadata was correct: user id, subject, points, etc.
If anyone who posted one of these comments or otherwise knows for a fact that our metadata is wrong -- at worst we might show them posted by the wrong user, that would be bad -- please email me and I will correct things as best I can.
Sorry about this, but our first reaction is to try to save comments when at all possible in the case of DB corruption, and we all figured it would be better to leave them up, possibly with wrong metadata, than to delete them.
These are the 14 comments: 2259183 2259165 2259166 2259170 2259171 2259174 2259175 2259178 2259181 2259182 2259185 2259186 2259188 2259191
(Please note, discussion of Slashdot downtime is pretty clearly offtopic, so don't be surprised if you reply to this and get modded down as such. Feel free to mod me down. Hm, maybe we need a user-created discussion about our downtime so there's someplace it won't be offtopic...)
Hm, maybe we need a user-created discussion about our downtime so there's someplace it won't be offtopic...
Maybe you need a real database that backs out transactions when they fuck up, instead of just hosing everything.
Oh, and a "sorry, database problem" banner to throw up instead of letting the site come half-ass up when it's being recovered.
Instead of a "user-created discussion", how about posting an article under the Slashdot topic, so that discussion of such WILL be on topic?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So I guess when Janet Reno decided not to appoint an independent counsel to look into probable illegal activity (by Al Gore wasn't it?) that even the head of the FBI found warranted serious investigation -- it was because Bill Clinton had decided the issue.
:P
Oh, I see how that logic works.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
As a separate, off topic post, I would like to refute your TCO claims.
The IDC and Netcraft have both commented on an important trend where many large and small companies are moving from proprietary Unix and, to a lesser extent, Netware to Linux and NT/2000 based solutions. As such, Microsoft's marketshare has risen slightly and Linux's market share has exploded. The basic reason is that most versions of UNIX are proprietary and tied to a hardware market, and for this reason, sales are low. Sales are also comparitively low for Netware and that OS cannot share the developer load with a workstation market. Because the software industry is captive to a very steep economy of scale. (Don't believe me? Price out one of those RS-6000 workstations!) At the same time, Microsoft and Linux are both able to distribute the cost of development more, and as such, able to deliver a better value.
The industry is not driven by the question of "Is it good?" Particularly in hard times, it is driven by the question of "Is it good enough?" If a piece of software is good enough and is a better value, it wins out in the long run (see DOS vs MacOS vs Amiga OS). Microsoft became very successful by inventing the idea of distributing the cost of development by sellign to multiple vendors, and this idea is further "embraced and extended" in the open source movement which distributes this cost by distributing the development itself. In this way, an open source operating system will never be tied to hardware sales even the way Windows is today, so it will, forever remain affordable.
My personal experience has been that NT and 2000 have been more trouble to impliment, support, and secure than Linux or FreeBSD. They often run on otherwise obsolete hardware (a market where Microsoft, for business reasons, chooses not to compete), providing useful network services, such as DNS, SMTP, and POP3. It is easier to learn to administrate well (rather than merely competently), and it is easier to properly and securely automate.
Another factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Over the last year, I have seen 4 crashes of my Linux servers which were not resolved by a reboot(I administrate 6 Linux servers, several of which are also workstations) and as many crashes on the two non-dedicated NT and 2000 servers I have worked with. The average time to fix the Linux crashes was 15 minutes, and almost every crash was caused by human error in the installation or upgrade of new software, such as Tomcat on Apache, etc. OTOH, the NT and 2000 machines not only had to be rebooted twice as often buteach fix that this did not resolve required much more troubleshooting. On one occasion, the reinstallation of network services caused registry corruption and the entire system had to be restored! How is that for lack of maintenance?
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
What, exactly does this have to do with Linux and Microsoft? Yes, I too have noticed that Linux is slightly less stable than other Unices, but it is FAR more stable than anything Microsoft has released (including Windows 2000). If you are only concerned with stability go with FreeBSD which currently accoutns for most of the servers with the longest uptime according to Netcraft. But FreeBSD is not without its own problems-- it has less hardware support and no framebuffer device so that not all Linux games run in it... But who needs a framebuffer or that new video card on a web server?
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
Only when someone who doesn't know what they are doing tries to run e2fsck with the drive mounted... And to Linux's credit, the program displays a wonderfully dire warning message if you try this.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I won't say what comes to mind here. NT-based OSs are extremely hard to learn well, IMO. OTOH, My parents, who were lost when trying to use Windows 95 are using Red Hat 6.1 with Ximian Gnome and love it! That is a learning curve for you!
I won't feed this troll anymore, so if you are sincere and wish to debate this subject with me, please email me.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This was displayed in response to an article on the MS breakup; an anonymous coward somehow went from 0 to -1 with 3 offtopic mods? In an message that the "code" attached to the wrong article?
This is mis-threaded, too. Again 4, offtopic mods pulled it down to -1; even posting at 2, could someone explain to me how this is even possible?
Between this and seeing the "code" here inexplicably bleed 20+ karma points out of my UID without any of my posts actually being modded.... fuggit.
So I'm looking forward to finally releasing the security bug I discovered in Slashcode this weekend (RFPolicy and all that) and then never coming back here to see that they didn't report on flaws in their own system.
Enough of this Alfred E. Neumann "What? Me journalist?" tripe.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
But denegrating Slashdot is always on topic. Hahahahahah! I'll bet that's the last time you'll keep database servers on a comet in the middle of this solar system. Or was it a solar flare this time? Hmmm?
Go ahead MOD ME DOWN! I CAN TAKE IT! HAHAHAHAHA!
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.