U.S. Faults Microsoft Licensing Compliance

An anonymous reader writes "In a written report card on how well Microsoft is complying with its 2001 antitrust deal with state and federal prosecutors, Justice Department lawyers said they might need the court to force Microsoft to act more quickly." The DOJ's court filing is online if you want to wade through it.

Comments

Microsoft.. Microsoft..

[DaLiNKz]

always in the news, never for anything good. Truth is I don't even see Microsoft as the threat it was, maybe thats because I have sort of lost any real caring about Microsoft.. good or bad. Linux is taking over the server market.. Windows does workstations fine. Maybe Microsoft should learn how to be a bit more friendly in the developmental departments with other groups then to try to attack them all..

But of course.. one day.. Welcome to Microsoft Linux 1.0 (Interactive Mode)

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is mostly following through with its settlement with the federal government. They've elected to withhold TWO APIs, and they're moving the "Set Program Access and Defaults" desktop icon to a permanent location in the start menu.

Of course you would know all this if you had READ THE DOJ'S PAPER

Re:RTFA

[Trepalium]

Microsoft in their INFINITE WISDOM added a feature to Windows XP. Certain types, particularly those that play with Windows Media Player, or are viewable by Internet Explorer have a REG_SZ value on the association named LegacyDisable. If it exists, XP decides that it's smarter than the application that decided to take over the file type association, and silently ignores it. Only if the application is designed to use the XP method of associating with files will it be allowed to change them (or if it deletes those registry values).

I have no idea why Microsoft did this, but it effectively makes it so that certain programs seem to cease operating when you upgrade to XP. For the AVI files you mentioned, the value to delete would be HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AVIFile\shell\open\LegacyDisable
This really pissed me off the first time I used XP, and tried to reassociate the files with mplayer2.exe instead of wmplayer.exe, and the associations just wouldn't take. Didn't matter if I did it manually, or used mplayer2.exe to do it, it just didn't work, until I found that value hiding in those types...

Judges

[FuzzyDaddy]

Judges, yes. Prosecutors, no. The department of justice is responsible for pressing the enforcement of the law. The judge decides between the two sides.

The judges in these cases have been impartial, but the DOJ seriously backed off when the administration changed.

Re:Reminds Me of the English Bobby Joke

[Space cowboy]

I invite you to (any time you like) get on the wrong side of a "bobby".

Their job is only to stop/catch unarmed (or at least, without ranged-weapons) criminals anyway. A policeman with one of the standard-issue batons is significantly better armed than joe crook with a knife...

Any time there is a gun-toting idiot (briefly) around, the police just call in the armed-response unit (ARU). Much better-trained snipers who don't seem to care where they hit, so long as the bad-guy gets it. Similar to SWAT teams, I suppose.

Gun crime isn't much of an issue in the UK anyway. There's a pretty-persistent rumour of a shoot-to-kill policy amongst the armed police. Perhaps that's a contributory factor :-) I think I heard of someone being shot earlier in the year around where I live (NE London). The shooter was shot dead by the police ARU. There was some criticism over the fact that he was hit by more than five bullets, which seemed overkill...

[Note that I'm not at all opposed to the bad-guy being shot. If you play the game, you play by ALL the rules...]

Simon.

Insightful???

[Pave Low]

Why does this garbage always get modded up on slashdot?

If you look it up yourself, Microsoft's contributions doesn't rank anywhere near the top compared to other donors. In fact, they contribute fairly evenly to both parties.

More mindless drivel on slashdot.