Caveat's: I am an antitrust lawyer and economist. This is not legal advice. I have not reached a conclusion about the legality of microsoft's behavior, but here assume they lose. I do have an academic paper waiting to be finished on related subjects.
That said, a little competition goes a long way. It is not necessary for the competing windows to gain a laarge market share; just enough that third party projects won't want to overlook it, especially if compliance is easy.
The successful bidders will have a vested interest in *opening* the API, rather than creating interlocking NDA's: give the world enough information to make sure their products run on your version.
Any of the vendors could still make changes, but they would need to reveal them. Or they could come up with new versions collectively. But "hidden" changes to provide clandestine support for other products will be impractical; it cuts off access for that app to part of the market.
If an extension is useful enough, programmers will use it. If not, it dies.
The key thing here is that competition does *not* have to be for the entire market; it is sufficient that the contested portion, as well as that held by new vendors, be large enough to have some value. Almost all interesting economic phenomona occur at the margin; here that is in the contested portion of the market. And a little bit of it goes a long ways . . .
Speaking as an attorney, but this is not legal advice:
A settlement is extremely unlikely at the moment.
The basis of a settlement is finding mutually acceptable ground, or at least a ground that each side sees as preferable to the reisk of what they'll lose.
The problem is that it appears that both sides think they've won. When, after the evidence, there appears a strong probability that one side has one, or that the outcome is in the air, settlement is possible. In the first case, it is on terms close to surrender by the losing side; the winner gives up something for certainty. WHen it's in the air, something in the middle is palatable.
In this case, though, both sides are offering the first type, with themselves as the winner. Neither side has offered anything significantly different from what they receive in a win, and thus neither side has any reason to consider the other's offer.
Before serious motion towards settlemet can occur, the judge is going to have to drop some hints. So far, all of the hints lean against microsoft (laughing at witnesses, for example).
*If* there is a settlement, I expect that the judge will be involved, in the form of dragging counsel from each side into chambers, and strongly "suggesting" something to consider.
I've never heard of him before, either, but I read the "article" on his webpage, and it is consistent with what cranks tend to put out.
His rant is that whoever most recently installed the system could compromised security, particularly by modifying the source for the kernel to change root privilidges or something similar.
He is upset that Slashdot and elsewhere won't "discuss" this "problem" he's found.
But it's far from news. Physical access is an absolute breach of security. Pull the hard drive; anything but an encrypted file system has already been defeated. Boot from floppy (if not disabled). Whatever.
THe "problem" has nothing to do with open source. If the system isn't open source, the same thing can be done, either by a custom program, or even splicing in open source programs, installing a trogan, etc. The "problem" is that someone has root access.
"Evil Empire" was a reference to the Soviet Union, known in its final days as the "U.F.F.R." (Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics), originating in one of Reagan's speeches.
So maybe it's the rump Communist Party in Russia . . .
When Apple introduced the powerbook line, all but the 100 were done by Apple. To build the low-end 100, they handed Sony a Mac Portable and told them to shrink it and build it for them.
OTOH, the portables will probably still be running long after the last 100 and 1xx bit it. My portable has outlasted my 180 by a couple of years now. But it's so heavy, I actually hurt my shoulder (not badly) lugging it through an airport.
I forget the current number; i think it's down from 14 a few years ago, but only by a couple. *all* of our carriers are nuclear, unless they're still using that old one for training.
hawk, who is still upset about scrapping the battleships. Never mind using them, the ability to toss something the weight of a volkswagen for 30 miles is just plain cool:)
>Recall that the Puritans left England because >they wouldn't follow the Church of England (and >the resulting persecution) but rather practice >the Catholic faith (I believe it was Catholic)
err, no, and no.
One of the Great Myths is that the pilgrims, who were puritans, came to the New World to gain religous freedom. Great spin, but . . .
They were called puritans because they wanted to "Purify" the Church of England. They did take over the country for a while, under Cromwell, and executed the king. Among their more notable "accomplishments" was banning Christmas.
Yes, I'm serious, they criminalized the observance of Christmas. They weren't Catholic, but thought there was too much Catholic influence left in the C of E. Which is what led to the smashing of statutes in churches, etc.
Even so, after the Restoration, they were largely tolerated. They were left to themselves, with the only requirement being that they attend Mass at the C of E once a year.
So they fled (Holland?), and it was from there that they crossed the Atlantic.
But it wasn't about freedom of religion, or persecution. Rather, it was because they weren't allowed to impose puritanism on the rest of England.
Having arrived in Massachusetts, they promptly set up a Theocracy, with club-wielding goons set out after anyone who didn't show up for church services, fines for dressing in a "papist" manner, and assorted similar freedoms.
A few years ago, a researcher went over the old records, and found a birth within six months of a majority of their marriages . . .
Using them as a mascot for religious freedom is like holding up Clinton as a model of chastity . . . :)
I doubt a high-end free fortran is in the forseeable future (but hopefully I'm wrong).
In applications for which Fortran is appropriate, performance tends to count. When we bought the dual PII linux box last year, we paid about $10k for the box, and another $1k for absoft fortran (a cray derivative), imsl, and a set of multiprocesor libraries. Had there been a free alternative, we probably still would have bought this over a 10% difference in performance--and it's much more than that. Also, we need F90 features, and could have used F95 (there's places that i have to write several lines of F90 to duplicate F95 features, and I'd kill for true arrays of pointers).
Then again, what we *really* want is Digital Fortran for Linux. It sounds like they're working on it in house, but haven't decided whether to go ahead. Had it been available, we probably wouldn't have even looked at any of the alternatives.
/flamebait{} Open source meant absolutely nothing to us in this decision. We took linux for it's stability (ok, and I probably wouldn't have agreed to work for him if it meant I had to use NT:) Not that I could, anyway; he's across campus from me, and I ssh into his machine from mine).
We needed the most bang for the bucks he'd been budgetted, and on a stable system. The choices came down to linux x86, alpha linux (too risky a year ago), and alpha DU. Given the prices that month, the x86 with linux was the best choice. Though it's a pity we couldn't have waited another month (the money would have gone *poof*), as we had to take 333's since a dual MB for 100mhz wasn't out yet:(
And for the record, we're tickled pink with Absoft. The tech support is spectacular; usually by the next day, and frequently the same day if we write in the morning. I even got a message back from they're tech support after I posted a question (thought it was general F90) in comp.languages.fortran. The real kicker: their tech support gets back to us every time faster than NAG sales ever got back [I've been told since then that NAG tech support is also faster than NAG sales. I have no idea how you stay in business that way.
Or perhaps even (shock) *before* the announcement, since these are issues that he raised with apple? and which apple no doubt bounced off counsel? Who in turn would have explained matters?
But then, that's just a wild from my profesional experience as an attorney . . .
I used the unstable branch of debian from summer of 96 until a few months ago, with only rare problems. Every few months an incompatible or unsychronized problem would render the system unusable. There was also a period when I had to use bo X with hamm. No problem, just hit = on the packages in question.
Maybe it's the particular days I upgraded slink, but this became once or twice a month, and I had to downgrade back to hamm.
Don't get me wrong; debian is wonderful, and as of a year or so ago, easier to install than RH. But slink hasn't been nearly as reliable as preceding unstable variants.
And my bloodpressure's been better since I discovered I could edit/etc/issue and the like to remove that ugly "GNU/" from in front of Linux:)
hawk, who will put FreeBSD utilities on his once he gets a few hours to spare.
what about blinking & animation?
on
Opera for Linux
·
· Score: 1
can it also disable blinking & animation? I wouldn't mind the ads so much if they'd just sit still . . .
I'm still using netscape 3 over having load images in the menu rather than buried in configuration, and for the alt-num sequence to go back several pages at once.
If you purport to register a trademark that infringes on mine, you can bet that I will force you to disgorge it, immediately. You don't get to hang on to the filing until you misuse it.
>Aside from a few booboos (pine falters on FCCing >email, and netscape crashes the machine >occasionally on file save)
Not just X, but the whole machine???
>it works just fine. The netscape thing sounds a >bit severe, but after compiling a lot of stuff >off ext2fs, (where all my cvs trees are) I feel >safe with it. The thing is that FFS+SU is faster, >so perhaps move your home over to FreeBSD?
If it works, I could do that. The fear is losing *everything* if i have to move it back. hmm, i suppose i could copy a tarball to a fat, then boot the other OS to untar it . . .
But I still needto run long enough to be sure i want to make the switch.
>I haven't really tested Linux's latest UFS >driver... the one before the 2.2-pre series >sucked.
It was also read-only . . . and the linux partitions in an extended partition after a bsd partition changed numbers depending upon what you were doing unless your ufs support was just right.
>Currently (thanks to netscape and pine), I just >made a separate home dir in FreeBSD with >a few symlinks for stuff like ".ssh", and one >symlink to the entirety of my home dir.
that could work, too . . .
Thanks
When I have a couple of hours, i'll move around a few partitions & install.
IF you're using it for swap, it becomes a lot more expensive than simply adding the same amount as main memory. Finging motherbaords to adress 1G is no big deal these days
Given that KDE isn't GPL to start with, but quasi-GPL, the patches fall under the same license. To hold that patches come under a different license than the code itself gets back to the legal absurdity problem.
It would take true GPL code from another project, not patches to KDE, to bring up a GPL & linking issue.
Oh, and LyX (and therefore KLyX) aren't GPL, either. Though putatively GPL, they're also quasi-GPL. And at the moment, we're putting together a license clarification (not change) to avoid the KDE-style fiasco.
Unless KDE took GPL source from somewhere else, this just plain isn't true.
The authors released the code which inherently had to link to GPL-incompatible code. That means that KDE is not GPL, no matter how many times anyone calls it GPL--including the authors.
The action of releasing it with that dependency changes the license. This is very basic law; getting it wrong would fail a contract exam in law school or on the bar exam. The law doesn't tolerate absurdity, and holding the authors to violate their own license would be so. Like LyX, KDE is quasi-GPL, not GPL.
But then, it was undisputed for 612 years, 1386-1998, that perjury was not only impeachable, but one of the most serious impeachable offenses, and there's folks that are suddenly claiming it isn't
In the book, as opposed to the movie, that's how it works. There's no game grid, the player (not a criminal) tries to evade actual police capture. He has to send in a postcard each day, and gets a bonus based on the number of police he manages to kill.
In many respects, the book has a darker view than the movies . . .
"We use Internet Explorer. The DNS is a.b.c.d, the newserver is e.f.g.h, and the mailserver is i.j.k.l" is the extent of what many know (OK, someone knows, but not the fools on the phone).
Details like pap, chap, or whatever are beyond them. THe hardware will talk to you, but you're left to configure by trial & error.
Slashdot Mirror
Caveat's: I am an antitrust lawyer and economist. This is not legal advice. I have not reached a conclusion about the legality of microsoft's behavior, but here assume they lose. I do have an academic paper waiting to be finished on related subjects.
That said, a little competition goes a long way. It is not necessary for the competing windows to gain a laarge market share; just enough that third party projects won't want to overlook it, especially if compliance is easy.
The successful bidders will have a vested interest in *opening* the API, rather than creating interlocking NDA's: give the world enough information to make sure their products run on your version.
Any of the vendors could still make changes, but they would need to reveal them. Or they could come up with new versions collectively. But "hidden" changes to provide clandestine support for other products will be impractical; it cuts off access for that app to part of the market.
If an extension is useful enough, programmers will use it. If not, it dies.
The key thing here is that competition does *not* have to be for the entire market; it is sufficient that the contested portion, as well as that held by new vendors, be large enough to have some value. Almost all interesting economic phenomona occur at the margin; here that is in the contested portion of the market. And a little bit of it goes a long ways . . .
Speaking as an attorney, but this is not legal advice:
A settlement is extremely unlikely at the moment.
The basis of a settlement is finding mutually acceptable ground, or at least a ground that each side sees as preferable to the reisk of what they'll lose.
The problem is that it appears that both sides think they've won. When, after the evidence, there appears a strong probability that one side has one, or that the outcome is in the air, settlement is possible. In the first case, it is on terms close to surrender by the losing side; the winner gives up something for certainty. WHen it's in the air, something in the middle is palatable.
In this case, though, both sides are offering the first type, with themselves as the winner. Neither side has offered anything significantly different from what they receive in a win, and thus neither side has any reason to consider the other's offer.
Before serious motion towards settlemet can occur, the judge is going to have to drop some hints. So far, all of the hints lean against microsoft (laughing at witnesses, for example).
*If* there is a settlement, I expect that the judge will be involved, in the form of dragging counsel from each side into chambers, and strongly "suggesting" something to consider.
hawk, esq.
I've never heard of him before, either, but I read the "article" on his webpage, and it is consistent with what cranks tend to put out.
His rant is that whoever most recently installed the system could compromised security, particularly by modifying the source for the kernel to change root privilidges or something similar.
He is upset that Slashdot and elsewhere won't "discuss" this "problem" he's found.
But it's far from news. Physical access is an absolute breach of security. Pull the hard drive; anything but an encrypted file system has already been defeated. Boot from floppy (if not disabled). Whatever.
THe "problem" has nothing to do with open source. If the system isn't open source, the same thing can be done, either by a custom program, or even splicing in open source programs, installing a trogan, etc. The "problem" is that someone has root access.
hawk, esq.
Reagan, maybe, but not lucas.
"Evil Empire" was a reference to the Soviet Union, known in its final days as the "U.F.F.R." (Union of Fewer and Fewer Republics), originating in one of Reagan's speeches.
So maybe it's the rump Communist Party in Russia . . .
:)
When Apple introduced the powerbook line, all but the 100 were done by Apple. To build the low-end 100, they handed Sony a Mac Portable and told them to shrink it and build it for them.
OTOH, the portables will probably still be running long after the last 100 and 1xx bit it. My portable has outlasted my 180 by a couple of years now. But it's so heavy, I actually hurt my shoulder (not badly) lugging it through an airport.
I forget the current number; i think it's down from 14 a few years ago, but only by a couple. *all* of our carriers are nuclear, unless they're still using that old one for training.
:)
hawk, who is still upset about scrapping the battleships. Never mind using them, the ability to toss something the weight of a volkswagen for 30 miles is just plain cool
>Recall that the Puritans left England because
>they wouldn't follow the Church of England (and
>the resulting persecution) but rather practice
>the Catholic faith (I believe it was Catholic)
err, no, and no.
One of the Great Myths is that the pilgrims, who were puritans, came to the New World to gain religous freedom. Great spin, but . . .
They were called puritans because they wanted to "Purify" the Church of England. They did take over the country for a while, under Cromwell, and executed the king. Among their more notable "accomplishments" was banning Christmas.
Yes, I'm serious, they criminalized the observance of Christmas. They weren't Catholic, but thought there was too much Catholic influence left in the C of E. Which is what led to the smashing of statutes in churches, etc.
Even so, after the Restoration, they were largely tolerated. They were left to themselves, with the only requirement being that they attend Mass at the C of E once a year.
So they fled (Holland?), and it was from there that they crossed the Atlantic.
But it wasn't about freedom of religion, or persecution. Rather, it was because they weren't allowed to impose puritanism on the rest of England.
Having arrived in Massachusetts, they promptly set up a Theocracy, with club-wielding goons set out after anyone who didn't show up for church services, fines for dressing in a "papist" manner, and assorted similar freedoms.
A few years ago, a researcher went over the old records, and found a birth within six months of a majority of their marriages . . .
Using them as a mascot for religious freedom is like holding up Clinton as a model of chastity . . .
:)
/end{history lesson}
I doubt a high-end free fortran is in the forseeable future (but hopefully I'm wrong).
:) Not that I could, anyway; he's across campus from me, and I ssh into his machine from mine).
:(
In applications for which Fortran is appropriate, performance tends to count. When we bought the dual PII linux box last year, we paid about $10k for the box, and another $1k for absoft fortran (a cray derivative), imsl, and a set of multiprocesor libraries. Had there been a free alternative, we probably still would have bought this over a 10% difference in performance--and it's much more than that. Also, we need F90 features, and could have used F95 (there's places that i have to write several lines of F90 to duplicate F95 features, and I'd kill for true arrays of pointers).
Then again, what we *really* want is Digital Fortran for Linux. It sounds like they're working on it in house, but haven't decided whether to go ahead. Had it been available, we probably wouldn't have even looked at any of the alternatives.
/flamebait{}
Open source meant absolutely nothing to us in this decision. We took linux for it's stability (ok, and I probably wouldn't have agreed to work for him if it meant I had to use NT
We needed the most bang for the bucks he'd been budgetted, and on a stable system. The choices came down to linux x86, alpha linux (too risky a year ago), and alpha DU. Given the prices that month, the x86 with linux was the best choice. Though it's a pity we couldn't have waited another month (the money would have gone *poof*), as we had to take 333's since a dual MB for 100mhz wasn't out yet
And for the record, we're tickled pink with Absoft. The tech support is spectacular; usually by the next day, and frequently the same day if we write in the morning. I even got a message back from they're tech support after I posted a question (thought it was general F90) in comp.languages.fortran. The real kicker: their tech support gets back to us every time faster than NAG sales ever got back [I've been told since then that NAG tech support is also faster than NAG sales. I have no idea how you stay in business that way.
/end flamebait for "GPL uber alles" crowd
Or perhaps even (shock) *before* the announcement, since these are issues that he raised with apple? and which apple no doubt bounced off counsel? Who in turn would have explained matters?
But then, that's just a wild from my profesional experience as an attorney . . .
I used the unstable branch of debian from summer of 96 until a few months ago, with only rare problems. Every few months an incompatible or unsychronized problem would render the system unusable. There was also a period when I had to use bo X with hamm. No problem, just hit = on the packages in question.
/etc/issue and the like to remove that ugly "GNU/" from in front of Linux :)
Maybe it's the particular days I upgraded slink, but this became once or twice a month, and I had to downgrade back to hamm.
Don't get me wrong; debian is wonderful, and as of a year or so ago, easier to install than RH. But slink hasn't been nearly as reliable as preceding unstable variants.
And my bloodpressure's been better since I discovered I could edit
hawk, who will put FreeBSD utilities on his once he gets a few hours to spare.
can it also disable blinking & animation? I wouldn't mind the ads so much if they'd just sit still . . .
I'm still using netscape 3 over having load images in the menu rather than buried in configuration, and for the alt-num sequence to go back several pages at once.
You sue them under a ficticious name, either the one they posted under, or "Does I-C, inclusive," or the like.
:) Otherwise, the names come out real quick.
You then start hitting ISP's, the owners of sites, etc. with supoenas.
If people start going to jail instead of answering, then we know that at least one of them is Bill Clinton
Hawk, esq.
If you purport to register a trademark that infringes on mine, you can bet that I will force you to disgorge it, immediately. You don't get to hang on to the filing until you misuse it.
hawk, esq.
The WSJ and other mainstream press have reported that IBM will be *shipping* linux on thinkpads later this year.
>Aside from a few booboos (pine falters on FCCing >email, and netscape crashes the machine >occasionally on file save)
Not just X, but the whole machine???
>it works just fine. The netscape thing sounds a
>bit severe, but after compiling a lot of stuff >off ext2fs, (where all my cvs trees are) I feel
>safe with it. The thing is that FFS+SU is faster, >so perhaps move your home over to FreeBSD?
If it works, I could do that. The fear is losing *everything* if i have to move it back. hmm, i suppose i could copy a tarball to a fat, then boot the other OS to untar it . . .
But I still needto run long enough to be sure i want to make the switch.
>I haven't really tested Linux's latest UFS
>driver... the one before the 2.2-pre series
>sucked.
It was also read-only . . . and the linux partitions in an extended partition after a bsd partition changed numbers depending upon what you were doing unless your ufs support was just right.
>Currently (thanks to netscape and pine), I just
>made a separate home dir in FreeBSD with
>a few symlinks for stuff like ".ssh", and one
>symlink to the entirety of my home dir.
that could work, too . . .
Thanks
When I have a couple of hours, i'll move around a few partitions & install.
At the risk of a flameware, I'll ask:
/home with my linux install.
Does the e2fs support work this time?
I tried 3.0 shortly after release, and found out that it did some Bad Things to my e2fs system. Particularly, it inserted random data during writes.
I'd like to give it a longer try, but that's not possible until it can share
IF you're using it for swap, it becomes a lot more expensive than simply adding the same amount as main memory. Finging motherbaords to adress 1G is no big deal these days
>and even supports the old "green screen" mode.
:)
but htat's easy. Does it support the light purple tint & fuzz?
Given that KDE isn't GPL to start with, but quasi-GPL, the patches fall under the same license. To hold that patches come under a different license than the code itself gets back to the legal absurdity problem.
It would take true GPL code from another project, not patches to KDE, to bring up a GPL & linking issue.
Oh, and LyX (and therefore KLyX) aren't GPL, either. Though putatively GPL, they're also quasi-GPL. And at the moment, we're putting together a license clarification (not change) to avoid the KDE-style fiasco.
Unless KDE took GPL source from somewhere else, this just plain isn't true.
The authors released the code which inherently had to link to GPL-incompatible code. That means that KDE is not GPL, no matter how many times anyone calls it GPL--including the authors.
The action of releasing it with that dependency changes the license. This is very basic law; getting it wrong would fail a contract exam in law school or on the bar exam. The law doesn't tolerate absurdity, and holding the authors to violate their own license would be so. Like LyX, KDE is quasi-GPL, not GPL.
But then, it was undisputed for 612 years, 1386-1998, that perjury was not only impeachable, but one of the most serious impeachable offenses, and there's folks that are suddenly claiming it isn't
hawk, esq., who isn't sure why he bothers.
In the book, as opposed to the movie, that's how it works. There's no game grid, the player (not a criminal) tries to evade actual police capture. He has to send in a postcard each day, and gets a bonus based on the number of police he manages to kill.
In many respects, the book has a darker view than the movies . . .
"We use Internet Explorer. The DNS is a.b.c.d, the newserver is e.f.g.h, and the mailserver is i.j.k.l" is the extent of what many know (OK, someone knows, but not the fools on the phone).
Details like pap, chap, or whatever are beyond them. THe hardware will talk to you, but you're left to configure by trial & error.