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MS May Be Forced To Sell Stripped-Down OS In EU
An anonymous reader submits "According to this article at Infoworld, Microsoft may be forced to sell a stripped-down version of Windows in the EU as a result of antitrust rulings, unless a settlement is reached during the next month to six weeks." (See this post from last week for more background on the EU's antitrust proceedings.)
If you want to change your XP cd key you can easily do it without a program.
Follow the instuctions here.
YES THAT does mena they play by different rules.
monopolists are subject to much more restrictions.
its reality.
why? because of monopolism or market dominance? not likely. as of november 2003 the ipod was the leader in portable digital music player with... 31%.
less than a third.
oh yeah, i have a source for that number.
2 1337 4 u!
I have read the IE-Netscape case. the problem wasn't just that MS wasn't charging,
The problem was that
- MS contracted with Computer manufactures saying they couldn't install Netscape
- MS told ISP that if they want their software loaded on the machine they couldn't use Netscape
This basically screwed netscape as it had no cost effect means of distributing their product. Sure they could carpet bomb like AOL, but they didn't have that kind of money. So really the only way people could get it is if they went to netscape and downloaded it.
More to the point, you can get Quicktime for Windows but you can't get WMP for Mac.
Yes, you can...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
The word CONVICTED here rings a particular bell. MS has been CONVICTED of ILLEGALLY maintaining a MONOPOLY. This is yet another remedy to restore order by punishing the CONVICTED.
Got Code?
Because if you can't handle a one second shot of a bare nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show then I don't think you're ready for a stripped down anything.
The nipple wasn't bare. She had a little sun around it.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I see.. in europe it's OK to sexually assault someone on TV.
(She didn't expose herself, Justin Timberlake did it for her.)
It was a planned part of their show. When you plan & consent for something to happen, it's not sexual asssault.
The "DirectShow" component of DirectX provides access to the audio and video codecs - and includes full playback functionality.
Applications that play movies (typically games and movie players - although you'll note that even the "copy file" dialog box animation is actually a resource-embedded AVI) need DirectX and DirectShow installed. The "Windows Media Player" GUI is basicly a tiny app that sits in front of all this other stuff that's an essential operating system service.
The Windows Media Player executable is 70k (plus about 1MB of DLL files that include the DRM libraries). All the codecs and the actual decoding engine are part of the system.
Sure, so the Windows Media 9 codecs come with the player, but there's nothing stopping anyone from writing their own codecs that use the same mechanism. See: Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative, plugins that let you play RealVideo and QuickTime movies using the standard playback functions. So if, for example, Apple complains about Windows Media Player not supporting Quicktime - this is only Apple's fault for insisting on only supporting their own player and for not following Windows standards.
A "punter" is someone who punts, a punt being either:
1. A type of lat-bottomed boat pushed along the water by pushing off on the river/canal/sea bed with a long pole; or
2. A bet.
The term "punter" can also refer to a customer, which is derived from the betting usage. Bookmakers (the people that are licenced to take bets) naturally refer to their customers as punters, and the term has spread to become a colloquial term for a customer in general.
Of course, the American Football definitions of punters and punts are derived from sporting usage elsewhere, in this case football (soccer if you must), where a punt is a kick upfield, and the term is normally used when a player kicks a ball with the express intention of just getting it away from the part of the field that he was in.
Basically, it describes a semi-desperate precautionary defensive manouvre, which, I suppose, is not too dissimilar to how a punt works in American Football. However, rarely (if ever) have I heard the term punter used in this context, so it's doubtful that any Englishman that you hear use the word is referring to this meaning.
Hope that helps.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
But MSIE is not free, in either the libre or gratis sense. MS is on record the IE costs them over USD100M per year and the cost of that is built into the cost of the OS. Win XP should be $40 per pc cheaper, and then the user can be be free (libre) to choose whether they want MS media player or not.
It is exposed as a COM object. It's exposed to automation (*cough* VB *cough*) via the FilgraphManager object. In C++ you have things like IFilter, IFilterGraph, IFilterGraph2, IFilterInfo, IGraphBuilder, etc... You compose a filter graph that goes something like: disk->codec->audio device, or disk->codec->disk, or disk->codec->visualization filter->audio device. And if you want to write a codec you end up implementing a bunch of interfaces (your codec is a COM object). It's all buried under DirectShow. There may be some more recent APIs here though that I don't know about. There's certainly the Secure Audio Path (SAP), and I don't think DirectShow has access to that.
And these APIs are the reason why MS doesn't want to remove media support. If you remove it applications will break. Could you remove the WMP chrome and leave all the APIs? Sure, this is the same as removing the IE chrome and leaving the rendering engine. But in the end people don't seem to find this a satisfying solution.
Where did you get this free Internet Explorer, and free Media Player? I have been to www.microsoft.com, but they don't give those products away for free. Reading the end user license agreement, you are not allowed to install them, if you did not already pay for them, which you do when/if you buy a copy of windows. You cannot buy IE or WMP without Windows, and you cannot buy Windows without IE or WMP. That is known as bundling, in some countries even illegal bundling.
Those same guys have, after many moons of hard work, managed to pull the same sort of trick with 2000 and XP.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
1.Remove any references to MSN (so they cant push their MSN internet service or e.g. MSN search .NET binaries etc etc). Ditto for all their "secret" APIs (such as apis in MSHTML.DLL, SHELL32.DLL, SHLWAPI.DLL, SHDOCVW.DLL, SHFOLDER.DLL, WININET.DLL, COMCTL32.DLL, ADVAPI32.DLL, JSCRIPT.DLL, VBSCRIPT.DLL, .NET runtime, .NET libraries, DirectX, Media Player libs and whatever else) .NET to attack mono)
2.Make MSN messenger something that you can choose to install or choose not to install (i.e. if you dont want it, you can choose not to install it and install another messenger or no messenger at all)
3.Completly open up the Windows Media Player codec layer such that anyone can write WMP codecs and anyone can use those codecs in their app (making it so that e.g. games can use the codecs for displaying full-screen video clips or playing game audio would be a nice thing also, I dont know if its already possible or not)
4.Detatch the Windows Media Player UI from windows and from the codecs and make it an optional install.
5.Force microsoft to have one OEM price and one OEM contract. Anyone that wants windows OEM can buy at the same price (as long as they are bundling with a PC, they qualify for OEM price).
6.MS not able to dictate what OEMs can/cant do.
For example, let OEMs install whatever they want alongside windows (i.e. Linux, Mozilla or whatever else)
7.Publish all the communications protocols used by anything that comes on the windows CD under a clear "anyone can use this with no restrictions" licence. Also, publish all of their various data storage formats under the same sort of licence (e.g. NTFS filesystem specs, MS office document formats, MS media files, regular and HTML help document files,
That way, anyone can talk to/use their HTML renderer, internet DLLs and whatever else.
Also, it would (presumably) allow one to write a new HTML renderer (e.g. based on gecko) that could replace the MS one.
8.Force MS to unbundle Outlook Express, publish all the data formats that OE uses to store stuff, etc etc etc. (so that other mail programs can be used instead if you want to)
8.Force MS to completly implement the current W3C standards for HTML, XML and such. This includes complete support for ALL parts of formats like PNG
9.MS not allowed to use patents to protect their monopoly in the OS space (for example, cant use patents on
and 10.MS not allowed to use influence to try and spread products inside EU (e.g. applying pressure to governments/corps who are trying to decide between windows and linux)
These are all important but the most important IMO is point 7 (i.e. the "open all their secrets" thing) since that will level the playingfield as far as competitors go.
For example, Mozilla will be able to talk MS server authentication on all platforms, with no licence conditions or strings attatched.
And things like Linux and ReactOS will have full information to be able to read NTFS file systems.
And so on.
Apple doesn't *have* a monopoly.
As far as I can tell, you have Sculley to thank for that. According to this anecdote from a key Mac developer, Jobs wanted to sell the original Mac for about $1500 (up from his original target of $500, incidentally). It was Sculley who decided to charge the outrageous price of $2500, thus establishing the Mac tradition of paying WAY too much for relatively run-of-the-mill hardware.
And if they're willing to price-rape you while they're still just a single-digit market-share player, I imagine they wouldn't hesitate to stick it to you if they actually had influence to bring to bear.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
"If bundling is MicroSoft's crime, then it's certainly Apple's, too."
No, it certainly isn't. You are misunderstanding anti-trust, and people modding you up seem to be misunderstanding it as well.
Anti-trust legislation deals with using an existing monopoly to increase your market share in other areas. Apple is not a monopoly, and there is no law against vertically integrated solutions. When apple bundles a media player, their media player is not suddenly dominant in the world of media players.
Microsoft on the other hand basically has a monopoly on desktop operating systems (if you want to run a very common range of applications, your only choice is often Microsoft).
It means that when Microsoft decides to bundle an application, this application becomes dominant in it's market unless it really, really stinks (read Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player).
Apples bundling takes their applications to 1-2% of the market. Microsofts take their applications to 90-95% of the market. It is the last problem that antitrust tries to help against (very unsuccesfully if I might add).
A free Linux solution can never be a monopoly because everyone is free to distribute them as they see fit.
Apple can't give you the code or SDK to their DRM, because they do not own it. The DRM used by iTMS is licensed from a third party, who are at liberty to license it to anyone else they may choose.
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Well, this isn't the way history played out. Netscape Navigator was indeed given out free. Netscape changed the way software distribution and evaluation was done. They revolutionized the desktop software industry which expanded also into the realm of server software. Prior to NS, the only s/w you could download was freeware/shareware/nagware.
MS IE was initially not free. You had to buy MS-Plus! to get it. It only became free as the browser war began to heat up...and once MS realized that noone was truly going to purchase a bunch of desktop themes and a browser that was not as rich as a "free" one from NS. They also realized that by giving IE away for free that the royalties owed to Mosaic Corp would equal exactly $0.00.
NS showed that you could let people download fully-functional software for free. But their licensing on those downloads was an evaluation license. For commercial use (or for rebundling), you were required to purchase a proper license. Many (many!) corporations licensed NS.
It was actually quite clever. Let people download the software at home (or rogue users in the corporate environment) and let them learn to use the software (and show it off). When it can be shown to solve certain business problems, then the corporation(s) would have/want to purchase it outright.