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Microsoft Facing European Sanctions
Shakrai writes "CNN and Money Magazine are reporting that a draft decision by the EU committee overseeing the Microsoft investigation appears to recommend fairly severe sanctions against our favorite software company. The article states that the ruling will likely force Microsoft to offer a second version of Windows without 'built-in audiovisual software' (Windows Media Player) for EU customers. While this sounds like a good thing, the article also mentions that Microsoft has an appeals process and will likely get an injunction against enforcement while they pursue said appeal, which may take years."
Yeah, but the idea is that the OEM does the video installation. Says that in the article :)
Semper en excreta sumus solum profundum
Does nobody RTFA?!!
The aim is to free computer makers to sell Windows bundled with rival audiovisual software such as RealNetworks RealPlayer or Apple's Quicktime, the sources said.
IIRC, that's basically what the Commission said - right after RealNetworks demonstrated how to strip WMP from the OS. I'm amazed MS even bothered claiming it - I can only surmise that (a) they have non-geek lawyers or, (b) "we tried that lie with IE, and the dumb judge bought it, so let's try it again and see if we befuddle those dumb Euros".
This is where the serious fun begins.
Nor does WMP. I can still install iTunes, Winamp or whatever else. And iTunes has the same DRM for media that you buy from their store.
Because Windows Media Player is an APPLICATION, not a part of the operating system (or at least shouldn't be).
o mp.os.r esearch).
From Dictionary.com:
operating system
n.
Software designed to control the hardware of a specific data-processing system in order to allow users and application programs to make use of it.
Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
operating system
(OS) The low-level software which handles
the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks,
allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
user when no application program is running.
The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present
and various system programs which use facilities provided by
the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks,
often acting as servers in a client-server relationship.
Some would include a graphical user interface and window
system as part of the OS, others would not. The operating
system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot
time or when installing the operating system would generally
not be considered part of the operating system, though this
distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating
system such as RISC OS.
The facilities an operating system provides and its general
design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on
programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up
around the machines on which it runs.
Example operating systems include 386BSD, AIX, AOS,
Amoeba, Angel, Artemis microkernel, BeOS, Brazil,
COS, CP/M, CTSS, Chorus, DACNOS, DOSEXEC 2,
GCOS, GEORGE 3, GEOS, ITS, KAOS, Linux, LynxOS,
MPV, MS-DOS, MVS, Mach, Macintosh operating system,
Microsoft Windows, MINIX, Multics, Multipop-68,
Novell NetWare, OS-9, OS/2, Pick, Plan 9, QNX,
RISC OS, STING, System V, System/360, TOPS-10,
TOPS-20, TRUSIX, TWENEX, TYMCOM-X, Thoth, Unix,
VM/CMS, VMS, VRTX, VSTa, VxWorks, WAITS.
FAQ
(ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/usenet/news-info/c
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.os.research.
(1999-06-09)
Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, (C) 1993-2003 Denis Howe
Windows Media doesn't control the sound card any more than Word or OpenOffice controls the printer. Device drivers do that.
Internet Explorer and Mozilla don't control the operation of a network card; the device driverdoes that.
THAT is why Media Player shouldn't be integrated with the OS. If I purchase a mass-produced computer ever again (not likely) I would want to choose my OWN applications.
I've seen it written somewhere else and I agree: strip out all the non-OS parts of Windows and sell a versionfor $50. That is a reasonable price point, and let the user/manufacturer decide on the default applications.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
MOZILLA IS NOT SLOWER THAN IE!!!
Mozilla startup takes more time than IE, IF and only if you don't consider the time it takes to start IE at system startup. Other than that, Mozilla, and Firefox especially, literally kick the pants off of IE. There was a wonderful page I found that simply drew images and removed them repeatedly that demonstrated this, IIRC IE took about 10 times as long as Mozilla.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Why on earth wouldn't I want windows to play back videos fresh out of the box.
Nobody would like that.
From the website:
The aim is to free computer makers to sell Windows bundled with rival audiovisual software such as RealNetworks RealPlayer or Apple's Quicktime, the sources said.
It is not so much to open up Windows to competition.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Standard oil was broken up by the government why shouldn't we do the same now to Microsoft?
Try: "We" don't have the jurisdiction. Otherwise I totally agree with you. So does The Economist, which in 1999 wrote:
--------------
[stuff deleted]
The Road Ahead
So what should Mr Klein [the judge in the US Microsoft case] suggest? His starting-point must be that any action should provide consumers with choices they do not have today, and also stimulate innovation that would have otherwise been chilled. One potentially elegant structural solution that stops short of breaking the firm up would be to force it to publish the full specifications of the Windows "application program interfaces" (APIs), the codes that software firms who want their products to run on Windows must follow. IBM spent a fortune in the early 1990s in an attempt to reverse engineer or "clone" these for a rival operating system. But it could not persuade its customers that it had done enough to run a critical mass of Windows's applications; and Microsoft, as the incumbent, was always able to stay one jump ahead. Were such expense and uncertainty to be removed, IBM might be tempted back into the fray.
Going further, Microsoft could be required to license the source code for Windows itself to the highest bidders. If that encouraged the entry of powerful companies such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, a main objective of the Justice Department would have been achieved.
Yet a drawback of both approaches is that they rely on other firms' appetite for risk-taking. So if after a year, say, no new entrant had appeared to challenge Microsoft's monopoly, the break-up option would need to be revived. There is one version of the 'Baby Bills' that would carry less risk of perverse unintended consequences: to divide Microsoft into two or three competing operating-system companies and an applications company. (The firm's expanding investments in web services could simply be sold--the Internet can do very well without Microsoft's attentions.)
If there were two or three Windows companies, they would have no incentive to create different APIs, as they would all have a strong interest in supporting the greatest possible number of Windows applications. They would instead compete on price, ease of use, features and the trade-off between stability and backwards compatibility. The remaining applications firm would, for its part, have an equal interest in ensuring smooth integration with differing versions of Windows; and it would want to make both Office and BackOffice (which includes Microsoft's database product) available on Linux, the fledgling open-source Windows rival, and on every flavour of commercial Unix operating systems. The discipline of real competition would thus trigger innovation and give consumers more choice--but without jeopardising the Holy Grail of interoperability. And without having the government trying to run a technology industry.
("Now bust Microsoft's trust", Nov 11 1999)
---------------------
Amen.
Because PCs are very versatile, your DVD player is disigned to do a total of perhaps three things (and you do have to install "software" each time you put in a disc happily it is very standardized). Your PC can do many many more, and the things you want to do out of the box, may well be very different from the things I want mine to do out of the box. One of us might want to download music the other rips it. One of us might play FPS, the other wants to play bejeweled and browse slashdot. One of us might work in word processors, the other spreadsheets, and another guy might only want to use a text editor and compier. Each of these tasks requires a special addition to our generic tool, and we might not care about being able to do the things that the other tools allow us to potentially do. That's why you have to install software on your computer, the alternative is buying a task specific computer (a developer workstation, gamer's box, office machine, network terminal, but each of these would require that the seller know all the software you plan to use for the life of the computer.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Windows Media is no longer a proprietary format. It's an open, but not free, standard just like MPEG-4. Anyone that pays a fee is free to implement it in any form they like (just like MPEG-4).
r ea te/licensing.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/c
The .torrent problem is a server misconfiguration. The server is sending the data with a MIME type of text/plain, and Mozilla is obeying. The best way to fix this is to email the webmaster--if that's not an option, I hear you can save the data when it finishes loading and everything works, or you can right-click the original link and choose save as. I never use them, because I hardly ever have that problem, but I've recommended it to lots of people before and never had anyone tell me it doesn't work.
I've never seen or heard of your problem with highlighting before (and I spend lots of time on the netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups). It could be a profile issue, but I doubt it... maybe a reflow issue? If you find a way to reproduce it on demand, report it to bugzilla (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org).
Happy surfing! :-)
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
I'm a typical geek who builds custom computers for people preinstalled and preconfigured with their choice of software, and most of my clients opt for Media Player Classic rather than WMP as their default video playback thing, as far as video goes. I'm not an OEM by any means (I've only built about a dozen computers), but I'd love if customisable installs would filter down to the end users.
For those of you who don't know, Media Player Classic is an open source clone of Media Player 6.4 (the default media player shipped with Win2k), and (with the right codec libs installed) will play DVD's, avi's, wmv's, ogm's, Real and QT streams. Very nice clean and easy to use interface, and hooks into standard DirectShow codecs, none of the irritations of WMP/Real/QT, and completely free (thanks Gabest!), although donations are always welcom I imagine.
Being able to completely replace WMP with MPC would be a dream come true for me, and my clients. The only thing that worried me is that MS would take their ball home, and if made to remove Media Player they would probably cripple DirectShow to such an extent that I'd have to install WMP in order to get my codec libraries to work.
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