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EU's Mind 'made up' on Microsoft
Alain Williams writes "The BBC reports that Microsoft could soon be facing multi-billion euro fines and other sanctions for breaking European competition law.
The European Commission has finished drafting its decision in the case it brought against the software giant." Let's just hope that the EU can fine them cash and not accept Microsoft coupons like the US does. Clearly the best solution to an operating system monopoly is to give free copies of windows to school and eliminate the competition as early in the education process as possible.
The EU has some real teeth when it comes to noncompetitive practices. The maximum is something like 10% of annual earnings (could be profit). Ouch.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
So long as a company does business in the European Union, they can fine them. It doesn't matter where your headquarters are based. Microsoft could ignore the ruling, but they would have to stop doing business in the EU altogether.
Rubbish.
The EU isn't afraid of fining European Companies. You just have to look in to Car manufacturers, i.e., BMW, Volkwagan etc.
Plenty of these firms have been fined *heavily* for anti competitive practices and price fixing.
If MS was a European Company, it wouldn't be let off the hook, as it would be seen to be crushing other EU software companies as well...
Ireland is theyre OTG operations support, localization and external customer support.
Why can't we have define fines as a proportion of the defendant's wealth or income or something, so that they hurt everybody just as much regardless of how rich they are?
The EU can fine for an amount of 10% of the earnings within eu countries. Nintendo was once fined $600M for uncompetitive behaviour. How much do you think they can fine microsoft?
Maersk and SAS (the air carrier, not the statistics package or the military unit) was given huge fines by EU for having non-competition agreements. EU is very active on that, in Denmark many age-old trusts have been stopped by the EU.
Airbus is not a monopoly, it is an European attempt to break Boeings monopoly on air planes.
Microsoft is a European company too, having subsidaries in many EU countries. Obviously, it should not be excempt from EU law, just because its headquarter is located elsewhere. Everyone who does business in EU must perform that business according to EU law. I can't see why that could be a surprise to anyone.
And yes, EU based companies has to obey US laws as well, when doing business in the the US. I don't know if anyone of them are dominating enough in the US market to come in conflict with US anti-trust law, but if so, no the EU would not be silly enough to claim that the US does not have the power to enforce US law on US ground. (The US have the power to enforce US law everywhere on the planet and close space, but on US ground, they also have the legal and moral right to do so).
Win4Lin runs a complete copy of Window98 inside a Linux OS. For $60/copy It re-uses the Windows98 licenses the district already paid for. It runs Office, and photoshop, and AutoCad, and all the stuff they ALREADY PAID FOR.
And what's more, it will run exactly the same way it used to run. No compadibility layer. AND it doesn't run DirectX games.
It's a perfect fix for a lab environment. All of what you need to run. Nothing that you don't need.
Win4Lin also runs will in a X-terminal environment. All those old PC's can be re-cycled as terminals. I use it personally on my Gentoo laptop for all the goofy network tools that haven't been ported to Linux yet. It's hilarious to see a WindowsME desktop right next to a KDE menu.
BTW, I'll be happy to be a reference as a place where Linux runs successfully. I am the Senior Network Engineer at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. I switched our network to Linux before Linux was cool.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
No, not even that.
AAC is an audio compression format. No more, no less. It's the audio layer from MPEG-4, in fact, and is just as open as MP3. You can rip/convert to and from AAC with no restrictions. (It's not Apple's format: they didn't create it and don't control it -- anyone can license the format and build it into any player; Apple are just another user.)
In particular, AAC itself is unencrypted. No DRM.
What the iTunes Music Store sells are .m4p files: AAC files that have been wrapped in a FairPlay encryption layer. It's FairPlay that stops you playing on other machines &c.
To summarise:
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
In fact, the fine is capped at 10% of the undertaking's total worldwide turnover in the previous year. So, the fine could be a maximum of $3,500,000,000.
With RedHat, Suse, *BSD you can easily strip the application software and leave the kernel bare if so you wish. You have freedom of choice in how your hardware and software resources should work.
Try to uninstall some of the applications from XP. Good luck.
I hope that explains fully the meaning of "bundling" in this context.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Notethe part: It will also be necessary to take account of the effective economic capacity of offenders to cause significant damage to other operators - in particular consumers - and to set the fine at a level which ensures that it has a sufficiently deterrent effect.
[Please sign here]
idiot, your parent post is soliciting an an estimation of some actual monetary amount, not some dumbass redundant piece of information.
get a clue, or stfu.
How about you get some coffee. While you are at it, you should look up "rhetorical question" and "humour" for good measure! :)
There is a fundamental difference being having a competitive advantage (which is a GOOD thing) and anti-comptetitive behavior. Having a monopoly isn't even illegal. Using an existing monopoly (such as Windows) as leverage to acquite another monoppoly (such as browsers or media players) is however illegal.
The heights of genius are only measurable by the depths of stupidity
It doesn't matter wether or not media player or ie are bundled or not. It has been my experience that the only reason people use these things is because they don't know any better. Absolutely everybody I have shown Firebird has switched. Some even thank me, almost as if I saved their lives. A single ad campaign for Mozilla Firebird will destroy Internet Explorer. People just have to be told it exists. Same for winamp 5. If you show people that it can do more than media player ever could they'll switch because it is better. I really hope that mplayer for windows actually works soon though. That will be the best.
Yeah, the bundling of a media player doesn't matter. There are so many apps that hijack your default preferences that many users end up using an app just because it hijacked the file association.
Hell, Mozilla Firebird (for Windows) keeps hijacking my image preferences! I think this is a bug, though, it usually loses all my bookmarks and settings when it does this as well.
Winamp 5 is excellent. I've been using MPC for video, but may give Winamp 5 a chance as its done well for video the few times I've tried.
At home, I've actually found myself leaving my Windows box turned off and using Linux for multimedia. Here are the apps I use:
RhythmBox - music player and organizer. Works good despite the occasional crash. It needs better playlist support. It's no Winamp 5, but with a few more features it could be just as good for my purposes.
Totem - video player. This here is the WiMP killer. It has worked with every video file I have tried (and also many non-DRM streams). It occasionally crashes, but other than that its pretty much perfect for my purposes.
Xine - I occasionally use this for music when Rhythmbox fails me. I find XMMS (from Debian sid) way too buggy, otherwise I'd use that. XMMS locks up on most of my music files.
Gnome - once you realize you can use drag and drop to do things quick and easy, Gnome becomes really usable. Try dragging a file from Nautilus to a Gnome file dialog. Try dragging a theme into the theme settings window. I think this is based on the Mac approach, but I don't have enough experience with that to compare.
Throw Gaim, Evolution, and Mozilla-Firebird into this mix, and its a great desktop setup. All that needs to be done is get some bugs fixed and add a few small features here and there, and it'll be a nice polished desktop.
Sorry, went way off topic there...
I tried this installing firebird on my parent's PC. They ended up on some sites which were only accessible to internet explorer, so they concluded that Firebird doesn't work. This was enough for them to switch back.
the soon-to-be former prime minister, is a huge Gates fanboy. The knighthood for Gates is undoubtedly one of his nominations.
--
E_NOSIG
Simple; the US didn't enforce anything on MS because MS contributed a lot of money to Bush, and he instructed Ashcroft to ignore MS. See how US politics works now?
hmm, try XPLite from Litepc.com... one of the things I found through tinyapps.org remove IE and many other things from your XP, 2000 or 98 flavoured DOS...
Maybe because everyone seems to use monopoly when they should be saying monopolistic.
Microsoft's practices were ruled monopolistic in the U.S. They used their market dominance to restrain trade and limit competition.
The Microsoft antitrust case in the USA also looked promising at the beginning.
The people of the USA had a real advocate in Thomas Penfield Jackson who also made up his mind that Microsoft was an illegal monopoly and something substantial needed to be done about it.
Microsoft bought some time with appeals and then bought the USDOJ with their secret cash/spyware deal. Note Microsoft has been one of the biggest cash contributors on Capitol Hill since the sweetheart zero-consequences deal they made. It's no surprise, no one in government has shown any interest in doing anything substantive about the Microsoft monopoly. Why give up your Microsoft Money monthly payment?
I would expect that the EU will get some cash and a better data feed from the Microsoft Spy Network.
And then Greedy Bill can get back to stealing IP from others and screwing the world.
Remember Microsoft's new slogan --
"Your ideas. Our profits."
Depending who you believe, it is still not safe to write to a NTFS partition from Linux, funnily enough this sort of thing ONLY happens with Bill's trash. Almost every other OS can read every other OS's files reliably, and that is how it should be. After all, we have interchangeable media (Zip, Jazz, etc) and even interchangeadle hard drives. Some of us need this.
Bill's trash of course has no capability to read foreign file systems, his OS in all its guises is about as backward as they come.
" The idea that kids should not be taught Linux because they're "too stupid" is very offensive to me. "
I thought it was the other way around, don't install Linux because they're too smart. A Linux system is a powerful tool for an inquiring mind. With Windows so much is hidden. But let the kids use Linux and before you know it they'll have hacked your machine with a loadable kernel module exploit.