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Evidence Surfaces That MS Violated 2002 Judgement
whoever57 writes "In the Comes Vs. Microsoft case, the plaintiffs believe they have found evidence that Microsoft has failed to fully disclose APIs to competitors. If true, this would mean that Microsoft has violated the 2002 judgement. This information has become available since the plaintiffs have obtained an order allowing them to disclose Microsoft's alleged misbehavior to the DOJ ('appropriate enforcement and compliance authorities')."
So by my reading, they've been given the right to talk to the DoJ about something they have found that may or may not prove that they have broken the law? It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but I'll be waiting for the next story along in this chain before I start jumping to conclusions.
I'm sure someone else here will do that for me.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
A convicted monopolist can't change it's spots overnight, no matter what anyone might think.
Think about it logically, a business that big needs time to change, we are not 10 people sitting in a room here...
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
If the allegations are true, and it turns out that MS might somehow not be the shining beacon of Justice and Honour that we've come to regard it as (okay, I'll cut the sarcasm now), what is the worst that will happen to MS? And are they really concerned...ever?
I'd rather we skip the monetary fines that are becoming meaningless and go for revocation of patents. Can you imagine if MS had it's patents revoked and switched to a free-for-all? That would be nice... Ah, to dream.
I don't know, but I suppose if this is found to be true, then some of the antitrust measures could be "resurfaced". It all depends on how the verdict was formulated.
If this is true, we shall be very angry!
And we shall write a letter, TELLING you how angry we are!
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Any publicity is good publicity in Microsoft's eyes.
What will they get this time.. another fine and more time to correct the wrong? It's not like these fines hurt MS..
In two more years, evidence of this might actually get somewhere with the DoJ. However, please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it still entirely controlled by the exact same administration that let Microsoft off in the first place?
Now, if Congress could somehow manage to get involved, that might make some difference...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
If history is any indication, they won't even get that... they'll just get ANOTHER judgement against them, and the DoJ will say, "This time, really, please don't do it again."
E pluribus unum
Based on a reading of the email offered as 'evidence' of this transgression, it occurred in 1992, 10 years before the settlement! So this is old evidence of a 'transgression' that allegedly occurred before the settlement. It is NOT evidence of a transgression that occurred AFTER the settlement. So it may not be 'new news' by any measure. Nothing to see, just a wookie, keep moving!
Free markets and specilizations work, when large systems are broken into simpler components, the performance metrics and interface details are specified by a neutral standard that do not play favourites. Does the consumer really know the vicosity vs temperature profile of 10W-40 and 5W-40? They dont know, they dont care. The IC engine manufacturers and the lubricant oil manufacturer know it. All the rest only care about the spec name. Free market takes care of the rest and provides us with the cheapest engine oil taking advantage of all economies of scale etc.
If GM could make its cars accept only GM engine oil and keeps the spec secret and the competition out, it will do it. But it is the consumers who would refuse to buy such cars and force GM to disclose the lubricant requirements for its IC engines. If consumers are willing to buy such "closed" cars from GM, could the courts or the govt do anything to change it? The can try. But they will never be able to reach the same level of efficiency the free market does.
So dont just blame MS, blame the consumers too. All the tech columnists who should be educating the public about these things are talking fluff about the latest and greatest gadgets and widgets in trade shows. Blame them too. Slashdotters who know these things better talk to the other consumers as though they are complete idiots, creating a backlash against nerds/geeks etc. People buy MS blindly because they are not fully informed. Not because they are idiots willing to fork over their money to a large corporation without asking questions. Only educated consumers can break the monopoly. It is our duty to educate them without insulting them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
but this time, with a Democrat-controlled Congress, things may be different! .. thank you folks, I'll be here all week!
Actually, if any Slashdot "Editors" read the actual document, you'd see that the document is actually favorable, and says that MS is making good headway with documenting and hand-holding their competitors. The document says that MS has somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 people working to get this documentation done, and that there have been no substantive complaints about MS's compliance.
Read The Fucking Article, Slashdot editors.
I'm not sure what the law in the U.S. is but here in the U.K. you can go to jail for contempt.
According to the Office of Fair Trading http://www.oft.gov.uk/
"The maximum penalty for contempt of a county court order is two years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine"
So a simple way to calculate a fine would be to calculate how much money MS has (including financial assests) and double it, if they don't pay up send the baliffs in.
When they still don't pay up hold them for contempt of that, and then imprison whoever was responsible for a couple of years.
Unfortunaltely the legal system has a problem with coruption. If you have money you are allowed to break laws it would seem.
Still if they laugh at fines, let then laugh at it from inside a prison cell.
I think slashdot agrees with me, the CAPTCHA word is "detain"
Eh? You think that's nothing do you?
You can do all kinds of ethically questionable things within the law. You can delay justice, you can even thwart it. But the one thing you can't do, the stupidest possible thing to try, is to sashay into a court and spit in the judge's eye. They won't stand for it. Nor will they stand for you doing it to to another judge, even another judge they despise and disagree with.
Defying any court is defying the authority of every court. Judicial power is a judge's basic stock in trade. If you willfuly undermine that, you'll find the judge putting judicial restraint up on the shelf and taking down the can of legal whupass. They don't like doing that. If there is a loophole, if it can be argued to be an honest mistake, maybe they'll turn the screw just one or two turns tighter. But once it becomes clear you think you are beyond the power of the court to restrain, the judge will introduce you to a whole new world of legal pain.
Oh please let it be so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Given that if you buy a product, you don't even get to see all the API hooks you can use with the product. Why would they give it to their competitors when they won't even give all the API stuff to customers that paid for it?
stuff |
There are two kinds of contempt in the US, civil and criminal. Yes, for criminal, you can go to jail.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
We all agree one major platform is better than many wildly different platforms right?
I don't
One processor architecture (x86) is better than four completely different
I disagree
and one computer platform (PC) is better than many (even Apple understood that.. and effectively sells shiny PC-s loaded with OSX right now)
I don't agree here either.
You will, if you have to develop software targeting multiple OS/CPU vs one (and I don't mean making a web page in Python or PHP, but actual programming, say C++).
No, having interoperability and standards is better than one major OS in my opinion.
Have you heard of why "design by committee" is bad? It's slow? It's the least common denominator of all benefits? The option that won't "offend" anyone?
Yes, that would be the best course of action - however, the essence of a monopoly is that you have little other choices.
Would this be possible? Yes, the Munich city is moving to something else than Windows (details not so important), and is converting from a couple of years, and the complete conversion will take another couple of years maybe
And I don't care if you mod me down for this. Cry babies.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Four words: revocation of corporate charter.
This is something that needs to start happening a lot if we ever want to reduce the problem of corrupt business damaging society.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Microsoft, being a legal entity can be charged with something, but you cannot jail a corporate entity. The veil of incorporation means that it is unlikely that individuals will be charged either.
Fines seem the most likely course of action, and microsoft can either argue about those till it becomes meaningless, or pay up.
Or the Judge could order severe sanctions, like splitting the company into smaller portions so such mistakes are easier to prevent in the future. IBM did this themselves when they got into loads of trouble, and the result was a vast improvement for them in terms of productivity and public image.
No, having interoperability and standards is better than one major OS in my opinion.
Well, in your Fairy Dream Land, every OS works together and we all hold hands and sing together. The reality is that this has never happened, and if you were around during the birth of PC's in the 80's, you'd remember the nightmare of having several different platforms to develop for.
Lots of software written for Linux is able to be run on OpenBSD - by using the so-called ports. Also, for the same architecture, you could run the so-called "binary emulation" with near native efficiency.
...). The X Windowing system seems a standard in Unix world.
NetBSD (just the operating system) runs on tons of computer architectures. As such, having multiple architectures is certainly possible.
Games are written for all the three major consoles - and there aren't many similarities between each other.
Other things - the AMD connection from microprocessor to chipset is derivated from Alpha architecture. Inside, the Intel processors are about as much RISC as their old competitors (Alpha, MIPS). x86 - however good it is - don't have anything in the very low power arena (even the very low power Via processors can't run without a heat sink).
Having a different server architecture (while running software compatible to Intel microarchitecture) helped AMD from about 0% market share in server processors to some 20% (I think). Having Transmeta Crusoe as a competitor maybe motivated Intel to go for a low power, high performance laptop processor (the Pentium M).
Interoperability and standards... POSIX seem to work some (even Windows NT was marketed as having POSIX compliance). OpenGL works again. Binary compatibility between operating systems works too (Linux compatibility exists in OpenBSD, Sun,
"We all agree one major platform is better than many wildly different platforms right?"
No. For the same reason that one species of banana is bad news. How about potato blight? Oh, biology. Doesn't have anything to do with computers. While in biology, a monoculture is a bad thing and means that a simple virus can drop a culture into famine and poverty, that simply doesn't happen in the world of computing.......oh wait.
Different code bases implementing fully documented standards is the only way we will get through all this. One company should not control everything regardless of how hard they work to make their code secure. In the end the computers will either have to be complete black boxes with no user modifiable features or there will need to be multiple implementations from different sources to avoid a catastrophic single point failure.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Well I'm developing code for a gumstix (400mhz Intel X-scale processor bassed on the ARM architecture, no FPU),
and I can write all my code for my laptop(x86), then just cross compile it and it works exactly the same.
Why is that? ohhhh, yea they are both running Linux. so that covers your multiple CPU problem.
Then we look at the multiple os problem...I mean if you have never heard of Java or QT, then I guess this would sound like a huge problem.
Money is the root of all evil?
You're misunderstanding the reason that MS is considered evil. As much as people may dislike their OS and software, their business tactics are the real problem. The DOJ had them dead to rights during the last trial. MS execs had been caught lying on multiple occasions. They had destroyed evidence. Their expert witnesses often ended up looking like fools. Everything was going great for the DOJ. Then Bush got elected and the DOJ folded and settled with MS. So Microsoft basically got away with years of illegal tactics and abuse. That's why we should come down hard on them anytime they step out of line. Maybe in another year or so we'll have a government willing to do that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I mean if you have never heard of Java or QT
You're claiming Java and QT are generic solution to the multi-OS problem (I wonder: what IF you're the one writing the JRE... but that's another topic)
Oh my god, what is Adobe doing! They spent so much resources to port that port Flash to Linux properly, while they could've just used Java or QT!?
And all their other software! And Mac software, why isn't it all written in Java so we poor Windows users can run it?
Have Billions, Will Travel.
I don't know what your major objection is to interoperability and standards as opposed to one OS, but to me it seems desirable, and while we've got a ways to go yet, it doesn't seem unachievable.
Slashdot readers seem to be generally anti-corporation, and assign them "powers" that simply don't exist, just so they can point to how "unfair" this particular legal construct is.
This is a little more general and less about this particular instance of abuse but... Does anyone here have any confidence that MS will stop breaking the law unless the courts effectively intervene? Does anyone here think that MS's huge contributions to the political campaigns of those corrupt people in charge of enforcing said laws will be able to prevent them from being effectively punished for a given abuse? Does anyone think the courts can act quickly enough so that they stop all the existing players in a market from being destroyed?
The courts are slow as molasses when lots of high priced lawyers get involved. The justice department is directed by corrupt politicians who will do anything they can get away with for money. MS has piles of money. As a result MS can break the law and suffer little or no repercussions. Sure they pay a fine here and settle a lawsuit there, but at nowhere near an expense equalling the amount of money they make from their crimes. They built their business model upon the assumption that breaking the law and then buying their way out of it would be more profitable than obeying the law, and they've been 100% correct.
I don't think it will ever be possible for a bureaucracy like most governments to deal with MS on a micro-managing level. The only way to repair the destroyed markets and make sure MS does not have motivation to commit more crimes is to break their business model for them. The best way I can see to do this is the classic way, destroy their monopoly by breaking them into competing factions. You can't abuse a monopoly if you don't have one.
Here is what I think would work. Assign all intellectual property, copyrights, and patents relating to Windows to two new companies MS-A and MS-B. Split the workforce and financial resources between them. Investors get a stock split. Now you have two companies both of whom can sell Windows and make changes to Windows and both of whom have some of the manpower needed to do that. Forbid the two companies from any non-public communication with one another. Every single MS lock-in is instantly destroyed. Dell can buy Windows from MS-A or MS-B and can take bids from both. Dell can also choose based upon competition on features. Windows A now has improved graphics performance for OpenGL and DirectX and is great for gamers. Windows B, however, concentrated on developing the best anti-virus and security solution possible mitigating almost all malware without the user ever doing a thing. Dell can buy either version or both for different customers, but they have a choice. Both new companies are actually motivated to deliver what they think customers want, instead of anti-features that provide MS with what MS wants and ignores the customers under the assumption that they will have to buy from MS.
Windows fans will get a temporary slowdown in development during the reorganization, then a huge boom in development as the new companies streamline and invest in giving users what they want in order to compete with the other new MS. People who think bundling is critical to innovation can likewise be happy, since both new companies are now free to bundle anything and everything they want, as that does not lock anyone in.
Both new companies are motivated to provide interoperability and play nice with others to a much greater extent since they will be trying to win customers from one another. Application developers will no longer be motivated to write non-portable code and thus applications that run on many platforms will become more common. Java VM applications, for example will get a lot better and a lot more common. All of this will make Linux distributions, OS X, and other OS players more viable and more likely to be adopted. Apple will probably be forced to de-couple their OS and hardware in order to compete and will no longer be assured of destruction from monopoly abuse if they take that action. Users and OEMs will have choices and investment in the OS market will skyrocket with accompanying rapid improvements in the sta
I'd love to believe this. But I don't recall anything of the sort happening when MS showed a deliberately fabricated video (of Win98 crippled by the removal of IE) in court during the antitrust trial.
...other media formats, namely those of Xiph.Org (FLAC, Vorbis, Speex, Theora, etc)? I mean, they have competiting products in the form of WMV and WMA, and their Janus DRM specification explicitely required devices not to support Ogg Vorbis until recently. They aren't going to provide support for any of the free software audio/video formats any time soon, neither in Windows, Media Center, Xbox or Zune. And Apple's pretty much in the same boat with iPod and Mac OS X. I wonder, can an anti-trust case be held against those two companies in either Europe or USA? And if so, how does the average joe turns the attention of (say) DOJ to this issue?
You're claiming Java and QT are generic solution to the multi-OS problem...
Actually Java and QT are examples of possible solutions to easy cross-platform development. Almost all major software development houses maintain portable code because it makes for better code even if you never target another platform. It provides more flexibility for the future and other platforms are profitable right now. The real problem with cross-platform applications is not that the technology is not possible. It is that in many cases there is little motivation to use them and some artificial incentives to not use them. Because of MS's monopoly on desktop OS's and the technological decisions they've made to try to make cross platform programming harder, in some market segments it does not make sense to aim at multiple platforms. That does not mean that if the desktop OS market was not more evenly divided among 3 or more competing platforms, cross-platform programming tools would not be a whole lot better and better supported by those platforms. It would be the default way to work and I don't know of any technical reasons why it would not work just fine.
Basically, I think you're mistaking the effect (cross platform tools are not used as widely as they could be and are not mature and well supported on all OS's) for the cause (there is one dominant OS).
IANAL
1. Wikipedia != reliable reference
2. The corporate veil he was referring to is its existence as a legal entity.
3. A corporation is a legal body, you can not sue portions of that body.
4. You can however sue Bill Gates / Balmer / some other senior exec for a crime THEY have committed (IE: ordering the company to do something illegal).
Example: If you set yourself up to be a one man corporation and then proceed to kill somebody, the corporation has not committed a crime, and therefore will not be punished, you on the other hand will be guilty of murder and will be found guilty unless you use the chewbacca defense.
Sorry but I have written a two applications that are platform independent using Java. They work and are used every day.
The current program I am working on I develop under Linux on the X86 and the cross compile for an ARM.
Take a look at some examples of multi platform applications.
OpenOffice, Firefox, Apache, MySQL, PostgresSQL, GIMP, Google Earth, Thunderbird, and many more.
Programs that run on multiple OSs and ISAs are getting more common.
And frankly Microsoft is scared of that and doing all it can to stop it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In one of scox's hearings, Scox's law team, BSF, openly defied a judge's orders just minutes after the ruling. The judge just ignored. Actually, that has happend a few times during the scox trials.
There is only one important thing to do to make the operating system market competitive - END THE PER-PC LICENSING. Every computer should have the option of having either Windows or another OS - the government should simply make sure that Microsoft doesn't discriminate against companies that offer an alternative. If I were the judge, I would have gone further and forced Microsoft to price Windows as a commodity so they would have to offer the same price to everyone - with stiff penalties for any sort of marketing kickbacks.
The per-model scheme we have now is slightly better than per-processor, but still not adequate.
Ask the Wine developers. I'm sure there's hundreds of examples of issues.
One thing to do would be to compare the msys headers with the wine headers. msys only contains publically documented interfaces, wine contains everything that's actually required.
----- obSig
Well, I haven't seen a whole heck of a lot of cross-platforms apps, even after the Miracle of Java (tm) was created. About the only progress made in the past two decades is that a PC can read a Mac disk and vice versa. All we really have at this point are hacked together kludges (like WINE). I'll believe it when I see it.
The viable reasons for appeal:
- Bias: check - the judge was highly biased in your favor for all of these rulings during discovery.
- Violation of precedent: If you actually read the whole rulings that you were quoting from you wouldn't be an ass.
- Gross Error: Yep, you should never have brought this case in the first place.
and not a valid reason outside SCO's alternate universe:Then Bush got elected and the DOJ folded and settled with MS. So Microsoft basically got away with years of illegal tactics and abuse.
o ft_appeal/
r osoft
I know its popular to blame everything on Bush, but lets not re-write history. An appeals court threw out the guilty verdict after Penfield Jackson ran his mouth off to the press. Had he not done that, there would be two Microsofts right now. Bush choose not to waste tax payer money on a re-trial (Remember there was a recession during this time).
http://money.cnn.com/2001/06/28/technology/micros
And please note, the Clinton DOJ settled first back in 1994. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Mic
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Are you kidding?
c rosoft#Appeal
... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing."
Do you even remember why the original senatance was overturned?
The appeals court ruled that Judge Jackson had an appearance of bias, because of his media statements. In the media, Judge Jackson made a series of statements, that I, personally, loved. Here's a quote for you:
"Following the trial's conclusion last June, Jackson's statements began appearing in news stories and books about the case. His views on Microsoft executives and the metaphors he used to describe the case troubled the appeals judges.
Among the examples, in the Jan. 8 issue of The New Yorker, Jackson said Microsoft founder Bill Gates "has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses." He added that company executives "don't act like grown-ups!"
Also in that book, Auletta writes that Jackson likened Microsoft's "proclamation of innocence to those of four members of the Newton Street Crew convicting in a racketeering, drug-dealing and murder trial he had presided over five years before."
Such sentiments drew the wrath of the appeals judges Tuesday.
"There are lots of things we think and feel about" the parties during a proceeding, said Chief Judge Harry Edwards. "The system would be a sham if all the judges were doing this."
The problem was the he got TOO angry. He basically "flipped out" legally, and Microsoft started to play nice, at least during appeals. If he had just kept his mouth shut, the judgment would have stood. http://news.com.com/2100-1001-253250.html
The appeals court overturned, "Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft on browser tying and attempted monopolization on grounds, that he gave off-the-record, but nevertheless disclosed, interviews to the news media during the case, and that Judge Jackson having opinions about the defendant was improper. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Mi
In that sense, you might say that Microsoft's defense against contempt of court was shooting the moon. And it seemed to have worked out, in the short term. Here's what Jackson had to say, "Judge Jackson's response to this was that Microsoft's conduct itself was the cause of any "perceived bias"; Microsoft executives had "proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false.
Keep in mind that the appeals court did maintain Judge Jackson's findings of fact; that Microsoft did seek to misuse it's monopoly power to drastically damage the market for computer software.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
there's various degrees of this. first off, the tendency here to discount web services, either entirely server-side things like php, ruby and the like or client-side things like ajax is unfounded. the fact that it runs within a particular environment does not diminish the fact that those are cross-platform solutions. those are clearly the most common, and you're blind or ignorant if you're still going to say you've not seen many. beyond that, there's a decent handful of java apps out there that do a good job of being cross-platform. sure, they're less common (for a variety of reasons), but they certainly exist and are certainly options for programmers. finally, things like POSIX and other cross-platform portability standards and libraries have a very real impact as well. sure, they don't provide binary portability, but providing code portability is (in my mind, given the need to test on each supported platform anyway) very nearly as good for commercial or otherwise supported applications. and those have come a very long way since the world of the early/mid-80's.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Antitrust law is a joke unless applied to government granted monopolies or monopolies over scarce physical resources. The idea of applying it to intellectual property is logically inconsistent and is basically communistic. "You came up with this idea we really like, it now belongs to us in that we can dictate what you do with it".
Seeing that Microsoft's 2005 revenues are 39.788 Billion and that their net income is 12.254 Billion, both of those numbers are a significant chunck of the United States's 2005 GDP of 12455.8 Billion. Microsoft's net income for 2005 is .098% of the United States's GDP and its total revenues for 2005 are .319% of the United States's GDP. Think about that for one second: one company. If you add 3M to Microsoft you get total revenues of 60.955 Billion 39.788+21.1670 billion). Now let's add P&G. Suddenly, you've got an additiona, 56.7410 billion to bring three companies total revenues up to 117.696, or damn near 1% of the nation's GDP. Simply put, Microsoft, along with the (relatively) few other gigantic corporations are virtually untouchable because they are too large of a portion of our economy to collapse without significantly harming the economy.
Have you considered the possibilities that your (presumably) Windows desktop PC has (possibly) used a Sun Solaris DNS server to connect to (possibly) an Apache web server running on a BSD server on more than one occasion. But of course, you're not bothered about that because it's all happened pretty much transparently and without you needing to give it a second thought.
Hey, guess what... it's the good old TCP/IP ***OPEN STANDARDS*** that allowed all of this to work nicely for you - lots of different hardware on different operating systems, all working nicely together to deliver the ***experience*** you desire!
Please bear this in mind before you start turning every disagreement with your opinion into a "Linux/FOSS vs Windows" war - it has ***ABSOLUTELY NOTHING*** to do with which OS you run but having open standards that allow each and every one of us to choose whatever OS we want to use.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm sure MS did not forget to pay their yearly Republican Party dues. I can just hear the Attorney General asking his pimp what he should do and Bush saying, "Nothing, of course."
Of course if they tell a judge instead of the AG, I think things may be different since judges aren't Dubya's beetches.
So, Microsoft is very evil. Ok. I've wondered though, if it weren't for Microsoft, would the world be a better place for IT?
Yes
We all agree one major platform is better than many wildly different platforms right?
No. Multiple platforms with compatible or close to compatible ABIs are vastly superior. Especially if the ABIs follow standards bodies, enabling you to implement backwards, forwards, and cross-compatibility. Think commodity.
One processor architecture (x86) is better than four completely different, and one computer platform (PC) is better than many (even Apple understood that.. and effectively sells shiny PC-s loaded with OSX right now).
Nope. x86 blows. Even Intel and AMD know that. But the market momentum has built to such an extent that even the primary x86 supplier cannot change it. This could have changed in a world without Microsoft; Itanium, Power, or any of the other next-gen architectures may have had an opportunity. Apple went Intel because they were the only company buying PowerPC laptop chips, and as such, they could not be produced at the right price point.
Make no mistake; x86 is nobodies choice but Microsoft; even Intel was sledgehammered by Microsoft's refusual to embrace Itanium.
So one major OS is better. But Microsoft sucks, so which one.
You're starting from a misconception. You don't need one major OS; you need published standards, so that software for X can be made to run on Y. We have multiple browsers, and in a world with ISO standard document formats, we'll have multiple office suites. Look at e-mail; SMTP/POP/IMAP work across a multitude of clients. Look at Linux; software can work across may different varieties of kernels, with minor modifications here and there. POSIX software isn't build once, install everywhere; but portability is an entirely different beast than going from WindowsAnything else. And, I might add that if we had a company that was dedicated to standards as the market leader in operating systems we might have better, and more inclusive standards.
I would not be shocked to see an LSB that maintained binary compatibility across multiple distributions, and I would not be shocked to see Unixes that implemented an LSB compatible environment.
This is a much better way to mention OS requirements. Think "LSB 4.0", or "POSIX Plus 2.2" required, rather than "98SE", or "Vista required". Standards, standards, standards. Standards are the keystone of commerce.
I hope it won't be *nix if-I-can-do-it-so-can-my-grandma, or especially Linux its-only-kernel-but-pick-one-of-the-500-distros.
You're misinformed. First of all, you need to be considering the desktop, not the kernel. What matters is user experience, not hardware under the hood. In that sense, you've really got 2 choices. Gnome, and KDE. There are a couple different customizations of each. I like the SuSE version and Ubuntu version, because they are easy to use. Linspire, although no the most secure thing under the sun, is a KDE distribution that is drop dead easy to work with. Easy software installs, the whole nine yards. Vastly simplier than Windows.
Either way, both Gnome and KDE, and Linuxes in general, have a great deal of work to do in terms of application availability, but this is neither a technical concern or an interface concern. This is a market concern, and a direct result of Microsoft monopoly practices, not the nature of computing in general. Personally, I find KDE much easier to work with than Windows, and 5 years of testing now with my entire family setup on SuSE has borne this out.
Given Apple's attitude to keeps things locked and proprietary (and dumbed down), I hope it won't be OSX either (can you imagine being FORCED to buy Apple hardware? No competition for OSX hardware? bad.. bad).
I agree that Apple has a bad attitude. That being said, Apple really provides a superior experience. I do hope that one day Apple develops an OS licensing model that allows it to continue to
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
"One processor architecture (x86) is better than four completely different"
Not at all. If there were lots and lots of CPU architectures, OS's would have to be written to run or be ported easily to another processor architecture. This would open up competition to the "best" processor, rather than the best implementation of the X86 command line.
It probably would have forced OS vendor to be far more innovative in terms of virtualization and other technologies that we can't even dream of.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I'm not so sure he's the reasonable and logical one. No I am not.
unfortunately I'd have to read the article to know for sure.
-pyrrho
no, "better" does not mean "easier"... it's a worse situation over all to have homogenius OS deployment (and highly unlikely, if you just configure something like linux to go on all devices, those version of linux for phones are not going to be just like the workstation install anyway, and you still play OS compatibility games per device)... but my point is it's a worse situation to have a homogenius OS world than it is to do the hard work of making platform independant software.
Further... it's very easy to program in C on any machine, and indeed C++... but the GUI libraries are not standard, and so all the nice ANSI compatibility falls to hell... so add that final layer to the standard C++ universe and you're all set.
-pyrrho
there is just one OS and it runs similarly on every device... and the company owning it doesn't try to screw the world.
Interoperable standards are MUCH MORE LIKELY.
Take screws. Standard thread weights, standard heads... take all contracting, take commodoties.
Humans know how to interoperate, but they don't know how to be good little children when they hold choke points.
-pyrrho
What fantastic logic. So by your rationale, taking into account your home and car and such, you'd have no problem with judges fining individual people such as yourself in the order of 300,000 to 400,000 pounds?
Maybe now judges will be more willing, since neocons can't scream so loudly about activist judges anymore.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Maybe if Microsoft won't comply with the reduced penalty for abusing its monopoly power the original penalty should be carried out.
Bust them up into two or better yet three separate companies.
Honestly, this should have been done a long time ago.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Only if he was the person responsible for preventing payment of the fine. That seems reasonable. Sure, there would be pressure from your workplace to not do it, but you would have to, since your workplace can't require you to break the law. If you were then fired, you could sue your former employer for wrongful termination, and you'd probsably pocket the 300,000 to 400,000 pounds yourself. Even when working from inside an immoral organisation, a moral person is required to take the moral path. Of course, in the case of Microsoft, you probably aren't going to wake up with a stallions head in your bed for disobeying them.
Antitrust abuse involves markets, not formats. MS has been convicted in the EU of illegally tying their media player software and its accompanying format and DRM to the Windows OS. Technically, that means MS should have to stop bundling it and/or provide some other way in which competing players/formats can be promoted in the exact same way. Unfortunately, the courts dropped the ball entirely and imposed useless penalties.
Apple is currently under investigation for tying their media playing software (iTunes) not to their OS, but to their portable players. If convicted, it is anyone's guess what will happen and I don't know who to cheer for. If they impose another useless penalty, then users will have very limited choices in the market. If they stop Apple, they are basically handing the market to MS, since they failed to stop MS's bundling. The only real hope is that they mandate Apple's format/DRM, but as an opened standard thus denying lock-in for the format at least to any company.
And if so, how does the average joe turns the attention of (say) DOJ to this issue?
First donate a few million bucks to the republican party... or create a huge media sensation about the issue so that political figures become concerned about being re-elected. Otherwise, I don't think the DoJ cares, MS already paid their masters.
and, just so i'm clear, you were putting C++ forward as an example of "real" programming before, right? you do, of course, realize that C++ suffers from extensive "design by committee" failures, right?
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Recession has nothing to do with it. The fact that Microsoft started making serious political contributions probably had a lot more to do with it. The cost of another trial is insignificant compared to a thousand other ways the government wastes our money. Putting a stop to a major monopoly would probably save us a lot of money in the medium to long term, and would not only be a better investment, but it's simply the right thing to do when a company of that size is so flagrantly breaking the law. Yes, the judge screwed up. No, that shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook. We retry criminals all the time when a trial gets messed up. They don't usually just walk.
Right, and the fact that they blew off that settlement is part of what got them in trouble again. Not to mention all the more reason the DOJ should have continued to pursue them and taken them down for good. They'd already shown that they couldn't be trusted to abide by a settlement.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Sorry, but I gotta disagree with you. The fact that they are convicted monopolists means that they've broken the law. When you break the law, and get caught and convicted, you are supposed to stop breaking the law right then and there. Not next Tuesday, not when the Q4 results come in, immediately. Your argument sounds good on the surface, but it ignores the imperative that the law is supposed to be. It's supposed to be like a gun to the head.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
"Not at all. If there were lots and lots of CPU architectures, OS's would have to be written to run or be ported easily to another processor architecture. This would open up competition to the "best" processor, rather than the best implementation of the X86 command line."
I said (or attempted to say, but failed to say) the same thing (or at least a related thing), and got modded down. But this is one of my biggest general peeve nowadays in software development. Too many programmers are just building for situational functionality, instead of transferable, scalable, and modifiable, functionality. This is keeping us tied to (granted, arguably) inferior architectures. Unfortunately, write once, run anywhere is appearing harder than it appeared it would be in the nineties. To not write with that philosophy, however, condemns us to perpetual rewrites and safe (read minor) developments in hardware logic.
Oh, and you might want to try to use a few more "M$" deals in your post. They'll make you look mature and relevant.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Stalking me now Twitter? You didn't even respond to my points last time, and yet here you are making arguments that are not only mostly irrelevant, are mostly, once again, the opinions of a lunatic.
Let's pick out the important line:
Plaintiffs in the current Iowa antitrust trial against Microsoft told the court yesterday that it is in possession of certain materials, obtained in part in discovery in that case, that they believe is evidence of Microsoft failing to disclose APIs
How am I in any way arrogant to want to wait until the evidence is actually revealed? Strangely enough, I'm not like you, and I'm not interested in what is basically hearsay, ifs, buts and maybes when I accuse someone of something. I haven't said, anywhere in my post, whether I think MS is guilty or not. Apparently the moderators agree with me.
Back in your box, Twit.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
"A masterpiece of arrogance and misdirection. Let's review Grocklaw's take"
Because, as we all know, Groklaw is a completely unbiased source that has no pro-FOSS, anti-MS agenda, and PJ hasn't ever deleted a single posted opinion that doesn't agree with hers...
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I really love how you link to your own (or your sockpuppet Erris', as you did above) comments as if they're some impartial, infallible font of knowledge.
And then you call everyone else astroturfers and shills.
Just the other day, he annoyed me enough to research his faithful but insulting defense of M$ in all things.
OH NOES HE DEFENDED TEH MICROSOFTS?!!? And what did you do? You wrote one of your famous posts which links to a lot of his comments and talks shit about them all, just as you did with me. And then you dupe posted it, just to get across the message that twitter was stamping his little footsies in anger. Did you not notice that you got modded down to -1 Troll with that comment? Or is this, in your eyes, a failure of the new Microsoft-controlled Slashdot moderation system?
Even funnier, when the posts you've linked to include such disgusting M$ propaganda as "I like the Windows key, as it provides a handy shortcut key for OS-specific functions" and a comment lambasting both IE and Firefox, presumably in favour of Opera or some such. And he doesn't have to resort to petty "M$" style name calling (LOL firefucks lolololol, look I'm as inventive as twitter! Take that, sparsely-related Internet-based open source software development team!) and is far more reasonable and interesting than you, who has recently written a frankly hilarious screed saying that Microsoft are going to hurt the environment. Not in relation to the article, of course, just in general. You took a comment which said that not sending out plastic media might help the environment a bit and responded to it with "BUT VISTA WILL REQUIRE NEW COMPUTARS!!! LINUX ROX!!!". But I digress.
In conclusion: shut up, you prick. (and I'm sure that will be included in one of your delightful little posts with links to all my comments...go ahead, knock yourself out. I don't mind.)
I refer you to the AC who recently posted in reply to one of your shitfests: "Someone who enjoys and contributes to free software thinks you're a retarded jihadist FUD-spewing ignorant, petulant loser that contributes nothing to the community. Does this fracture your view of reality much? I ask because that is reality."
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Genius.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You didn't even read my comment, did you? I made a list of APIs that are cross platform and work wonderfully, and you mention WINE in the same category? Wine is okay for people who need to get Windows software to work on another platform, but it's a complete cop-out for someone who writes software. As a sibling said, there are hundreds of cross platform applications. Before I switched from Windows to Ubuntu, the programs I used were Firefox for web browsing, Gaim for instant messaging, OpenOffice for an office suite, Eclipse for software development, VLC for playing videos, iTunes for managing my music and iPod, and Audacity on the rare occasion I need to edit an audio clip. The only one of those I'm not using on Linux is iTunes. Every other program I just mentioned was written using cross-platform APIs. I use GMail and Google Calendar for my e-mail and scheduling needs, and while those aren't running on my computer, they certainly meet the needs of users on different platforms.