DoJ Extends Microsoft Oversight for Two Years

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Department of Justice has extended its anti-trust oversight of Microsoft by two years. This only applies to the requirement that Microsoft make protocol documentation available to competitors, though. All of the other requirements have expired, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not give the states complaining the full five years of oversight they requested. Still, this should prove useful given that one of Microsoft's new tricks is to use OOXML extensions to tie businesses to Sharepoint."

Comments

oblig Ubuntu reference

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*ahem* Ubuntu

quite possibly best OS distro out there, even among the likes of commercial offerings like OSX and WinXP. Sure each has its advantages in certain areas, but as a jack of all trades ubuntu can get it all done without much fuss. What it really comes down to is application support, if you are using software that absolutely requires any one OS in exclusion of all others, then you are screwing yourself for the future (this mostly applies to businesses however)

Re:oblig Ubuntu reference

[CannonballHead]

I've known two computer science majors out of about the ten at my school to have major problems getting Ubuntu (and Fedora for that matter) installed on their laptops. Either sound wasn't working, or wireless card, or the monitor, or in one case it wouldn't format/partition the hard drive correctly.

Frankly, I love Linux. I took Windows XP off my laptop and am doing a VirtualBox OSE virtual machine with XP installed and can even run Sibelius 5.1 on it. No 3D support is detrimental, but I have my desktops for that. But with all that, I can't honestly entirely recommend any Linux distro flat out to everyone. Myself, I've tried SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora, and Ubuntu, and I liked SuSE best and am running 10.3. It actually supports all my hardware well, except for my video card - the ATI linux drivers for the x1400 mobile don't work well, but I got it mostly working eventually.

All this to simply say one thing: when it comes down to application support and to ease of use, Windows has quite a lead on Linux. Yeah, you can talk about wine and virtualization all you want, but I couldn't even get iTunes to work correctly in wine (yes, I can do it virtualized, so I'm happy about that, but are we going to really expect every normal office user to learn to use a virtual machine and all that, too?). I'm NOT anti-linux, nor pro-microsoft, but from a person that likes Linux better, I have to give credit to Microsoft for XP and its Office products being pretty good in terms of usability, functionality, versatility, and compatibility. Compatibility, for me personally, is big: I mean, seriously, my laptop is a year and a half old, and the drivers for the video card (which is older still, to some extent) don't work completely? And a Dell E1505 isn't exactly an uncommon laptop.

I think the parent to this particular thread is right - Microsoft DOES have some really good products, And yes, some really bad ones. Like Vista, IMO.