The new order says agreed upon expert [makes the copy] and I agree, it does actually sound pretty reasonable.
What's reasonable about being threatened with the loss everything and your reputation at random? All to protect some big rich music publishers. Bin Laden is loving it.
Even if you can defend the witch hunt, this detail is still abusive. They are only interested in specific files and should be able to make a tool that extracts them transparently. Just imagine making a list of all the files that you want to delete.
1. Who pays for the neutral expert?
2. Who makes the deletion of the privileged files?
3. How are the privileged files going to be deleted?
If media files are all the RIAA trolls are interested in, it would be easy enough to make a script to extract them. Standard tools like find and tar do exactly that and do it well. Fancier tools could be made to look for id tags if the RIAA is paranoid about people changing filenames. It is this list of files that should be agreed on and only that should be coppied for examination beyond the "neutral" party.
Asking for more is just abusive but that's what this is all about, isn't it? "A few dollars a song is all we ask," they tell us, "isn't everything we can take away worth more than that?" Muggers use similar logic when they brandish their weapons.
While the change from "The RIAA gets everything it wants, so shut up." in these tiny details is nice, there's a long way to go before anything like justice is served and these searches start to look reasonable or lawful. Everyone in my house has a computer or two. The burden of identifying each and every file that might be embarrassing or abused is well beyond the average user. Even if you can do that, the details of the deletion are still troubling. I'd say that the RIAA system that makes the original mirror is something that can't be trusted to begin with and all bets are off from the first step.
Unreasonable searches are disruptive and dangerous. The easiest way to see what a powerful weapon this can be is to imagine if MLK were alive today. The kinds of people who tapped his phones and told him to commit suicide would be demanding his computers. Those who want to avoid harassment must give up many modern conveniences and efficiencies. The threat of revocation make the tools useless anyway. All it takes to end up on the list is an ISP.
The only thing less reasonable than the "evidence" or motivation for these trials are the harsh penalties provided by law. Everyone of us faces the complete loss of property and livelyhoods at random, all to protect an industry from obvious technical obsolescence.
I was skeptical about the proclaimed end of the Cold War, because that issue will never go away, and no country will willingly accept the loss of status that Russia did. It's hardly surprising that they would want back in the game.
If you accept the notion that to be "great" you must "do as I say," the communists have won your mind. We are hearing from a lot of the same kinds of people in Washington these days. They talk about sacrifice, struggle, security and other unAmerican nonsense.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. - Eisenhower
Two bit tyrants pushing around their broadcasters are anything but great and their country will be anything but respected. Feared and avoided, perhaps, but never respected.
At least the people of Boston have a chance to throw the bums out in the next election. If you're encountering censorship by a cable company given a legal monopoly to "serve" a certain region, you have virtually no recourse
It's funny how cable companies originally got their monopolies from local public service commissions and municipalities. By now the locals no longer matter, but monopoly service and bad government go hand in hand.
I wish they'd been more explicit as to what 'relaxing the rules' meant. But maybe that would've spoiled the story.
They allowed user activity, aka he browsed to a site he created for the purpose. It seems this is not a full auto worm type exploit of the kind common in the Windoze world. See here. It's hard to say if the problem was javascript of something like Flash called by it.
All the M$ tools are going to be underlining their popularity arguments and slinging mud at all the more secure OS. Even the Register indulged in a little of that kind of flamage.
You may safely assume that a business server is administrated by someone who has at least half a clue and uses security features, no matter how lenient, so the consumer is the core target group for botnetters.
Having worked for a fortune 100 company and later done Windoze upgrades for another, I can say that assumption is anything but safe. It had nothing to do with the users and everything to do with OS choice. The admins worked hard but it was all a waste of time regardless of the amount of money they spent. Smaller companies might be expected to fare better due to their freedom, independence and brain power, but they don't. Windows and all closed source "security" is just so much voodoo. If you don't want to take my word for it, you can read about some recent big dumb company exploits here.
the corruption wasn't with the govt. but with other companies. The other companies received money from Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle, among others for preferential treatment when it came to govt contracts.
The claims are that discounts and rebates are offered to the contractor - Accenture (slime warning), so that they would recommend Dell, M$ and all that as just what the government needs. The rebates would not be passed onto the government, so they are simply bribes.
When you talk about bribes, everyone wants a piece of the acction, so don't be surprised if administration hands are dirty. Single source contracts are everywhere right now and those are a good sign of bad behavior on the part of government officials. No one is really dumb enough to think those kinds of contracts will actually save their office money or result in better service.
Yes, back in 1940 you could see the thickness of lead in the linotype output, which was indeed a volume. That sounds good, but it might not be right because I just made it up. I do, however have a jar of old lead letters about that old for fun and props. No linotype blocks though.
If you want to get really hoary, I'll bust out my old IBM typewriter, hook it up to WP 4.x and show you proportional fonts that are all about areas instead of volumes. Then we can party like it's 1989.
Vista may be top heavy, I don't think you do any thing any good by making it out to be worse then it is. There are plenty of good reasons not to jump on Vista, that just doesn't happen to be one of them.
Performance is not a good reason to chose an OS? That one is new. Both XP and gnu/Linux run the same hardware better and gnu/Linux offers the user a greater choice of much better software. M$ can't win for losing this.
... we may be ready for Linux everywhere, but a LOT of people wouldn't be. You think Vista is giving people reason to complain? Try being thrust onto Linux unwittingly.
People are indeed ready for free software. Vendors like Dell need to promote what works best and that's been GNU/Linux for about five years now. With vendor promotion and hardware maker support for free software, M$ would not stand a chance. The only missing piece is accelerated graphics drivers but CPUs are fast enough to just about negate that last non free advantage and only gamers can tell the differnce.
Dell's decision to back off sends a very strong message: Vista is not ready.
Customers asked for gnu/linux. They got XP because Michael Dell is still afraid of M$. M$'s plan is to eliminate XP by the end of the year, so this move by Dell is little more than a nice talking point: Vista does not meet customer's demands and expectations and was not selling. A stronger violation of M$ will, but something good for customers, would be to discontinue the sales of Vista because it's defective and promote gnu/linux as superior to XP.
By centralizing the negotiation and licensing, Microsoft greatly reduces the total transaction costs. That said, I'm sure a lot of these patents are absurd software patents that Microsoft decided it was cheaper or easier to license than defeat in court.
Ah, the magic of cross-licensing raises it's ugly head again. It's funny how those costs would go to zero if it were not for the insane software patents that M$ bullied and bribed into law. It's not like they have any respect for those laws either. M$ is famous for using what they want, fighting tooth and nail in court and being slapped with huge fines when they inevitably lose. The ferocious attitude is required to intimidate all but the largest players, so effectively they are above the laws they have forced on the rest of us.
All of us pay the M$ tax. Patents are a small but critical part of those costs. Without them, and other unjustified government protection, we might all escape the coercive and abusive M$ monopoly.
Vista is a pure cost with no revenue upside. That's $5bn of Vista development costs straight out of shareholders pockets. That's perhaps 50c per share or so, approx 2% of the share value.
Isn't it even mildly disturbing to you that patent costs are equivalent to what they paid to make something of value? A share is only worth future earnings, we shall see what Vista, Zune, and other second rate offerings take out of that share price. Bu-Bye, M$. When they are gone and unable to push bad "IP" legislation, these kinds of costs will be lower for everyone.
Is Windows XP the only thing Microsoft sold from 2001 to 2004?
It's the most popular thing they sold and a fair normalizing factor. You can try to smear it out to "products" of secondary importance but that only shifts a small fraction of the costs onto business users who pass them back to you and me anyway. XP and Office were the big money makers, so that's where they money actually came from. You can't run Office without XP (or Wine but that can be neglected here), so you might as well divide it that way as an average. If you put the costs onto the small fraction of people who bought office, you will dramatically increase their share but it won't do much for the rest of us. It's a crime, but All of us pay the M$ tax.
Casino logic won't work here, the money comes from you and me.
Secondly, this is BS. It ignores the fact that MS sold more products in that period that just WinXP than just an OS, things like Office.
First, don't call me a "consumer". At best, I'm your customer. The term "consumer" is insulting and inaccurate. The dollars I pay, unfortunately, don't make Windoze go away.
Second, the 4.3 billion dollars M$ spent on patents don't magically disappear because you can't figure out which M$ customers actually paid the price up front. Everyone who buys anything has paid their share of the M$ tax because everyone who buys M$ passes the costs on to their customers. When I buy something from a company that does not use M$, my cost may be lower because they saved themselves the primary inefficiency of Windoze use. That company still has to buy suppliers and so on and so forth, until you get the entire M$ annual revenue. Because M$ is a convicted coercive monopolist, it's hard to avoid paying their tax because they make it difficult for anyone to by anything else. Even the lower cost of avoiding M$ are a part of the M$ burden.
[market for lemons] explains why Vista is selling.
It would if Vista was selling. I have not seen any evidence of that so far, other than channel stuffing. The word from local stores is that people who make the mistake of installing Vista hate it enough to buy XP and pay someone to put it on. They have to buy another copy of XP because Vista upgrades won't give back their license to run XP or they had no choice about OS when they bought a new computer. I'd say Vista was failing badly and it's hurting computer sales.
The only sad part about this is that most people are still afraid of GNU/Linux. The failure of Vista and success of projects like GIMP and Firefox is changing that quickly.
Marketing and persuasion always wins out in the end.
Only if the marketers can suppress truth, but that's very expensive and fails eventually. If you look at Microsoft's quarterly statements you will see that they spend about a billion dollars a month on marketing. Some good examples of their failures are webTV, IE, Zune, Plays for Sure, Bob, ME and now Vista. Not only did M$ blow a much of money shouting about these things, they have done a lot to sabotage their competitors efforts. Yet all of these things failed to dominate the market because people knew better. All that marketing is doing is adding to their costs. All the sabotage does is add complexity that drags down the performance of their own systems. Every market for lemons is built on ignorance. In the internet age, ignorance can only be maintained by flooding every information channel with noise but their are as many channels as there are customers.
One small one: no one wants Vista. Even fewer want it when they run it and find out how buggy it is, or at least that's what I've heard from the local shops that are doing a nice little business putting XP on machines that came with Vista.
You said "wrong" 11 times but you can't shine and sell the Vista turd.
Only if new PCs can only be purchased with Vista. While Vista's half life may exceed the 12 minutes it takes to 0wn XP on any network, it's still short enough that only a fraction of those new PCs will have Vista in two weeks time. As for "pirates" and legitimate buyers, the supposed upgrade won't install and play the ten dollar DVDs the would be user purchased, so they never really become users.
The problem is that Nokia considers GNU/Linux tablets to be unsupported abandonware only 1.5 years after introduction. The tablets are loaded with proprietary and binary-only drivers and software, which means once official support goes away, you're left with a very expensive paperweight.
This is true for all the devices in it's class and is not special to GNU/Linux tablets. It's true that an all free device like the One Laptop per Child is better, but that single device is the only one I'm aware of. Everything else has to be reverse engineered and all other makers consider their PDA's, tablets, laptops and deskops to be abandonware by the LWN definition, "the End-User Software Agreement is still valid and Nokia 770 customers can make use of all their rights, same as before the N800 and the IT OS [2007] were launched."
You failed to read the rest of the article. THE FINDING WAS OVERTURNED ON APPEAL. In the eyes of the law, it never existed. If you are found guilty of a crime, appeal and are found not guilty, are you still 'found guilty'?
Funny, but the word "OVERTURNED" does not appear in the DoJ document referenced. Care to point out where any of the findings of fact, such as violations of law, are documented? M$ has engaged in the same kind of behavior in other "markets" since and continues to thumb their nose at the world's governments and people.
He did not say Ubunto was not ready for the desktop, he said the market was not ready for Ubunto!:
I certainly would not push the large IT companies to put Linux on consumer PCs, because I understand that in their business, the cost of a user accidentally getting Linux, thinking that they get cheap Windows would be a problem for the companies selling the computers. So I don't think it is really ready yet for mass consumer sales of Linux on desktop.
This is not a quality or ease of use issue, it's one of familiarity. Here's what he thinks of the "ready" issue:
So there are lots of places where Ubuntu is relevant for ordinary users. But not everywhere, I absolutely would agree to that. But it's certainly good enough for me and I'm a pretty demanding user.
In other words, it's ready. There's a big difference between "eating your own dog food" and using something that's good enough for your own demands. It should be obvious where Mark sits.
There were lots of nice material in this interview and it's too bad the submitter had to focus on the bogus issue above. That Google uses Ubunto for all of their developer desktops is news to me. Other traction, like airline pilots using Ubunto for security reasons is great to hear about. Mark's goals, particularly his desire to promote free software are also news to me because I have not paid attention. This is all good news.
cite, just one cite, of how the "rights ascribed to a corporation" (public company has screw all to do with it) are revoked upon a finding of monopoly.
A coercive monopoly does not even have the right to exist under US anti-trust law. A famous example is Standard Oil, which was not as bad as M$ has proven themselves but was broken into three competing companies. Another famous example is ATT. The successors to these abusive companies still enjoy many forms of government protection that real free market advocates should frown on. M$'s slap on the wrist punishment, it's dependence on government purchases and bogus "IP" laws are a national disgrace.
Slashdot Mirror
The new order says agreed upon expert [makes the copy] and I agree, it does actually sound pretty reasonable.
What's reasonable about being threatened with the loss everything and your reputation at random? All to protect some big rich music publishers. Bin Laden is loving it.
Even if you can defend the witch hunt, this detail is still abusive. They are only interested in specific files and should be able to make a tool that extracts them transparently. Just imagine making a list of all the files that you want to delete.
1. Who pays for the neutral expert? 2. Who makes the deletion of the privileged files? 3. How are the privileged files going to be deleted?
If media files are all the RIAA trolls are interested in, it would be easy enough to make a script to extract them. Standard tools like find and tar do exactly that and do it well. Fancier tools could be made to look for id tags if the RIAA is paranoid about people changing filenames. It is this list of files that should be agreed on and only that should be coppied for examination beyond the "neutral" party.
Asking for more is just abusive but that's what this is all about, isn't it? "A few dollars a song is all we ask," they tell us, "isn't everything we can take away worth more than that?" Muggers use similar logic when they brandish their weapons.
While the change from "The RIAA gets everything it wants, so shut up." in these tiny details is nice, there's a long way to go before anything like justice is served and these searches start to look reasonable or lawful. Everyone in my house has a computer or two. The burden of identifying each and every file that might be embarrassing or abused is well beyond the average user. Even if you can do that, the details of the deletion are still troubling. I'd say that the RIAA system that makes the original mirror is something that can't be trusted to begin with and all bets are off from the first step.
Unreasonable searches are disruptive and dangerous. The easiest way to see what a powerful weapon this can be is to imagine if MLK were alive today. The kinds of people who tapped his phones and told him to commit suicide would be demanding his computers. Those who want to avoid harassment must give up many modern conveniences and efficiencies. The threat of revocation make the tools useless anyway. All it takes to end up on the list is an ISP.
The only thing less reasonable than the "evidence" or motivation for these trials are the harsh penalties provided by law. Everyone of us faces the complete loss of property and livelyhoods at random, all to protect an industry from obvious technical obsolescence.
I was skeptical about the proclaimed end of the Cold War, because that issue will never go away, and no country will willingly accept the loss of status that Russia did. It's hardly surprising that they would want back in the game.
If you accept the notion that to be "great" you must "do as I say," the communists have won your mind. We are hearing from a lot of the same kinds of people in Washington these days. They talk about sacrifice, struggle, security and other unAmerican nonsense.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. - Eisenhower
Two bit tyrants pushing around their broadcasters are anything but great and their country will be anything but respected. Feared and avoided, perhaps, but never respected.
At least the people of Boston have a chance to throw the bums out in the next election. If you're encountering censorship by a cable company given a legal monopoly to "serve" a certain region, you have virtually no recourse
It's funny how cable companies originally got their monopolies from local public service commissions and municipalities. By now the locals no longer matter, but monopoly service and bad government go hand in hand.
I wish they'd been more explicit as to what 'relaxing the rules' meant. But maybe that would've spoiled the story.
They allowed user activity, aka he browsed to a site he created for the purpose. It seems this is not a full auto worm type exploit of the kind common in the Windoze world. See here. It's hard to say if the problem was javascript of something like Flash called by it.
All the M$ tools are going to be underlining their popularity arguments and slinging mud at all the more secure OS. Even the Register indulged in a little of that kind of flamage.
You may safely assume that a business server is administrated by someone who has at least half a clue and uses security features, no matter how lenient, so the consumer is the core target group for botnetters.
Having worked for a fortune 100 company and later done Windoze upgrades for another, I can say that assumption is anything but safe. It had nothing to do with the users and everything to do with OS choice. The admins worked hard but it was all a waste of time regardless of the amount of money they spent. Smaller companies might be expected to fare better due to their freedom, independence and brain power, but they don't. Windows and all closed source "security" is just so much voodoo. If you don't want to take my word for it, you can read about some recent big dumb company exploits here.
and it has nothing to do with what users do other than use Windoze.
the corruption wasn't with the govt. but with other companies. The other companies received money from Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle, among others for preferential treatment when it came to govt contracts.
The claims are that discounts and rebates are offered to the contractor - Accenture (slime warning), so that they would recommend Dell, M$ and all that as just what the government needs. The rebates would not be passed onto the government, so they are simply bribes.
When you talk about bribes, everyone wants a piece of the acction, so don't be surprised if administration hands are dirty. Single source contracts are everywhere right now and those are a good sign of bad behavior on the part of government officials. No one is really dumb enough to think those kinds of contracts will actually save their office money or result in better service.
It looked better in print.
Yes, back in 1940 you could see the thickness of lead in the linotype output, which was indeed a volume. That sounds good, but it might not be right because I just made it up. I do, however have a jar of old lead letters about that old for fun and props. No linotype blocks though.
If you want to get really hoary, I'll bust out my old IBM typewriter, hook it up to WP 4.x and show you proportional fonts that are all about areas instead of volumes. Then we can party like it's 1989.
Dude, the market is speaking.
Vista may be top heavy, I don't think you do any thing any good by making it out to be worse then it is. There are plenty of good reasons not to jump on Vista, that just doesn't happen to be one of them.
Performance is not a good reason to chose an OS? That one is new. Both XP and gnu/Linux run the same hardware better and gnu/Linux offers the user a greater choice of much better software. M$ can't win for losing this.
People are indeed ready for free software. Vendors like Dell need to promote what works best and that's been GNU/Linux for about five years now. With vendor promotion and hardware maker support for free software, M$ would not stand a chance. The only missing piece is accelerated graphics drivers but CPUs are fast enough to just about negate that last non free advantage and only gamers can tell the differnce.
Dell's decision to back off sends a very strong message: Vista is not ready.
Customers asked for gnu/linux. They got XP because Michael Dell is still afraid of M$. M$'s plan is to eliminate XP by the end of the year, so this move by Dell is little more than a nice talking point: Vista does not meet customer's demands and expectations and was not selling. A stronger violation of M$ will, but something good for customers, would be to discontinue the sales of Vista because it's defective and promote gnu/linux as superior to XP.
By centralizing the negotiation and licensing, Microsoft greatly reduces the total transaction costs. That said, I'm sure a lot of these patents are absurd software patents that Microsoft decided it was cheaper or easier to license than defeat in court.
Ah, the magic of cross-licensing raises it's ugly head again. It's funny how those costs would go to zero if it were not for the insane software patents that M$ bullied and bribed into law. It's not like they have any respect for those laws either. M$ is famous for using what they want, fighting tooth and nail in court and being slapped with huge fines when they inevitably lose. The ferocious attitude is required to intimidate all but the largest players, so effectively they are above the laws they have forced on the rest of us.
All of us pay the M$ tax. Patents are a small but critical part of those costs. Without them, and other unjustified government protection, we might all escape the coercive and abusive M$ monopoly.
Vista is a pure cost with no revenue upside. That's $5bn of Vista development costs straight out of shareholders pockets. That's perhaps 50c per share or so, approx 2% of the share value.
Isn't it even mildly disturbing to you that patent costs are equivalent to what they paid to make something of value? A share is only worth future earnings, we shall see what Vista, Zune, and other second rate offerings take out of that share price. Bu-Bye, M$. When they are gone and unable to push bad "IP" legislation, these kinds of costs will be lower for everyone.
Is Windows XP the only thing Microsoft sold from 2001 to 2004?
It's the most popular thing they sold and a fair normalizing factor. You can try to smear it out to "products" of secondary importance but that only shifts a small fraction of the costs onto business users who pass them back to you and me anyway. XP and Office were the big money makers, so that's where they money actually came from. You can't run Office without XP (or Wine but that can be neglected here), so you might as well divide it that way as an average. If you put the costs onto the small fraction of people who bought office, you will dramatically increase their share but it won't do much for the rest of us. It's a crime, but All of us pay the M$ tax.
Casino logic won't work here, the money comes from you and me.
Secondly, this is BS. It ignores the fact that MS sold more products in that period that just WinXP than just an OS, things like Office.
First, don't call me a "consumer". At best, I'm your customer. The term "consumer" is insulting and inaccurate. The dollars I pay, unfortunately, don't make Windoze go away.
Second, the 4.3 billion dollars M$ spent on patents don't magically disappear because you can't figure out which M$ customers actually paid the price up front. Everyone who buys anything has paid their share of the M$ tax because everyone who buys M$ passes the costs on to their customers. When I buy something from a company that does not use M$, my cost may be lower because they saved themselves the primary inefficiency of Windoze use. That company still has to buy suppliers and so on and so forth, until you get the entire M$ annual revenue. Because M$ is a convicted coercive monopolist, it's hard to avoid paying their tax because they make it difficult for anyone to by anything else. Even the lower cost of avoiding M$ are a part of the M$ burden.
[market for lemons] explains why Vista is selling.
It would if Vista was selling. I have not seen any evidence of that so far, other than channel stuffing. The word from local stores is that people who make the mistake of installing Vista hate it enough to buy XP and pay someone to put it on. They have to buy another copy of XP because Vista upgrades won't give back their license to run XP or they had no choice about OS when they bought a new computer. I'd say Vista was failing badly and it's hurting computer sales.
The only sad part about this is that most people are still afraid of GNU/Linux. The failure of Vista and success of projects like GIMP and Firefox is changing that quickly.
Marketing and persuasion always wins out in the end.
Only if the marketers can suppress truth, but that's very expensive and fails eventually. If you look at Microsoft's quarterly statements you will see that they spend about a billion dollars a month on marketing. Some good examples of their failures are webTV, IE, Zune, Plays for Sure, Bob, ME and now Vista. Not only did M$ blow a much of money shouting about these things, they have done a lot to sabotage their competitors efforts. Yet all of these things failed to dominate the market because people knew better. All that marketing is doing is adding to their costs. All the sabotage does is add complexity that drags down the performance of their own systems. Every market for lemons is built on ignorance. In the internet age, ignorance can only be maintained by flooding every information channel with noise but their are as many channels as there are customers.
got a single fact to back any of that shit up?
One small one: no one wants Vista. Even fewer want it when they run it and find out how buggy it is, or at least that's what I've heard from the local shops that are doing a nice little business putting XP on machines that came with Vista.
You said "wrong" 11 times but you can't shine and sell the Vista turd.
I mean really do you guys just put stuff on the frontpage to incite flamewars?
I don't know, there might be a reason for requiring IE. Sometimes you can take a question for what it's worth. Chances are, there's no real reason.
Hey look! a flying pig that's viewing a website that could only work with IE. Amazing.
There are 8,576,336 users already.
Only if new PCs can only be purchased with Vista. While Vista's half life may exceed the 12 minutes it takes to 0wn XP on any network, it's still short enough that only a fraction of those new PCs will have Vista in two weeks time. As for "pirates" and legitimate buyers, the supposed upgrade won't install and play the ten dollar DVDs the would be user purchased, so they never really become users.
Vista's going the ME route.
The problem is that Nokia considers GNU/Linux tablets to be unsupported abandonware only 1.5 years after introduction. The tablets are loaded with proprietary and binary-only drivers and software, which means once official support goes away, you're left with a very expensive paperweight.
This is true for all the devices in it's class and is not special to GNU/Linux tablets. It's true that an all free device like the One Laptop per Child is better, but that single device is the only one I'm aware of. Everything else has to be reverse engineered and all other makers consider their PDA's, tablets, laptops and deskops to be abandonware by the LWN definition, "the End-User Software Agreement is still valid and Nokia 770 customers can make use of all their rights, same as before the N800 and the IT OS [2007] were launched."
The article is Slashdotted. Does it do Xstroke?
You failed to read the rest of the article. THE FINDING WAS OVERTURNED ON APPEAL. In the eyes of the law, it never existed. If you are found guilty of a crime, appeal and are found not guilty, are you still 'found guilty'?
Funny, but the word "OVERTURNED" does not appear in the DoJ document referenced. Care to point out where any of the findings of fact, such as violations of law, are documented? M$ has engaged in the same kind of behavior in other "markets" since and continues to thumb their nose at the world's governments and people.
He did not say Ubunto was not ready for the desktop, he said the market was not ready for Ubunto!:
I certainly would not push the large IT companies to put Linux on consumer PCs, because I understand that in their business, the cost of a user accidentally getting Linux, thinking that they get cheap Windows would be a problem for the companies selling the computers. So I don't think it is really ready yet for mass consumer sales of Linux on desktop.
This is not a quality or ease of use issue, it's one of familiarity. Here's what he thinks of the "ready" issue:
So there are lots of places where Ubuntu is relevant for ordinary users. But not everywhere, I absolutely would agree to that. But it's certainly good enough for me and I'm a pretty demanding user.
In other words, it's ready. There's a big difference between "eating your own dog food" and using something that's good enough for your own demands. It should be obvious where Mark sits.
There were lots of nice material in this interview and it's too bad the submitter had to focus on the bogus issue above. That Google uses Ubunto for all of their developer desktops is news to me. Other traction, like airline pilots using Ubunto for security reasons is great to hear about. Mark's goals, particularly his desire to promote free software are also news to me because I have not paid attention. This is all good news.
cite, just one cite, of how the "rights ascribed to a corporation" (public company has screw all to do with it) are revoked upon a finding of monopoly.
A coercive monopoly does not even have the right to exist under US anti-trust law. A famous example is Standard Oil, which was not as bad as M$ has proven themselves but was broken into three competing companies. Another famous example is ATT. The successors to these abusive companies still enjoy many forms of government protection that real free market advocates should frown on. M$'s slap on the wrist punishment, it's dependence on government purchases and bogus "IP" laws are a national disgrace.