Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Expert Witness Stumbles
parking_god writes "MIT prof Stuart Madnick, testifying on MS's behalf, was caught out twice when a government attorney asked him to name an OS (other than one made by Microsoft) where the browser couldn't be removed.
Madnick also faltered on several other questions." Basically he doesn't
understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all
holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense ;)
...the Microsoft witness could have tried to accuse Apple of "bundling" CyberDog/OpenDoc technology into the Mac OS...
Oh, that's right, MS bullied Apple into using Explorer, didn't they?
Those who complain about affect & effect on
The abstraction of an "operating system" is merely a convenience to developers and users. Microsoft has every right to define what their "operating system" consists of--and no one can tell them different. To define what an "operating system" consists of for them and to force them to adhere to this government produced definition is no less than Microsoft being tried and found guilty of thoughtcrime.
See TUNES to expand your definition of what an "operating system" could be.
Microsoft domination? Patents? HA! What scares me is when the government is actually considering telling an organization what to think or produce. Will Linux/BSD/etc. operating systems be forced to adhere to what the government defines as an "operating system?" If not, then that seems a little bit of a double standard (and in this case the government has turned from pro-competition to plain anti-Microsoft). This isn't just about bundling a stupid interface to the standardized web. That issue is about as moot as bundling a steering wheel with a car. This is about the government defining what a car consists of to General Motors, and forcing them to adhere to that definition.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that too many people define an "operating system" as what Microsoft considers an "operating system." And the tragedy continues on Slashdot and the Linux/BSD community. Where people bicker about marketing nonsense words such as "innovation" and have a vision of an "operating system" as this esoteric *ix/desktop metaphor hotchpotch. If anyone thinks changing Microsoft's definition of an "operating system" will have any effect in bringing Linux/etc. to the "masses" then they are seriously wrong. If anyone actually thinks Linux/BSD are better for Microsoft's user base than Windows, they would be seriously mistaken.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
i posted as thrid and was moderated redundant :-) samrt guy this moderator. me, i'm not so smart, since i'll prolly lose another point on this ot post
hehe
Windows is an OS and a GUI intricately laced together. Linux is not a fair comparison.
... it's "the GNU system, with Linux as one of its kernels."
Let's time warp back to 1992. The web is young, and a man named Gates has an interface called "Windows 3.1." Now, let's say that IE was bundled/integrated with Win 3.1 --- which is NOT an operating system, and could be removed and replaced with an alternate desktop manager. Would this attorney's case hold water then? Just to give you an example of how volatile the subject of "so what, Konqueror is integrated into KDE" is, my sig mentioned that for about the last month or so. I received more replies to my sig than I did to my legitimate posts. Kind of a social experiment of mine. That means that all the MS-haters on here just show that they are after technicalities just as much as Microsoft, and are using the "uh, it's a desktop -- not an OS!" Well if you're after technicalities, just ask RMS, who thinks that Linux isn't an OS
Who cares if Windows comes with IE as long as one can install Mozilla?
About 95% of the world. Non-geek folks don't know/don't care/won't ever care about Mozilla. They want to plug in their computer, double click that "E" icon, and pull up Yahoo! Makes you wonder why the iMac was so damn successful.
Windows and Microsoft shouldn't go out of its way to make it more difficult for non-MS apps to work well.
They don't, that's just anti-MS FUD.
If it comes with IE, great, but Dell, should be able include Mozilla/Netscape if they'd like to.
Thing is, they don't want to. The world would revolt if they did. Mozilla is still beta software, complete with the "Debug" menu. Netscape 6 is keerap, Mozilla is so much better. But Moz can be broken, and it crashes often (IE 6 has yet to crash on me). Before Moz can be a commercial competitor (and I must say that the browser wars are over...), it must be less crash-prone than IE. I can't stand the people that bitch about standards, because how many people do you know that develop web pages to "standard" -- I'll tell you Slashdot isn't one of them. Just because IE has its own features and doesn't support stupid tags (I had some anti-MS troll once give me an example of some super-obscure tag, <link> I think) doesn't mean it's a bad browser.