I don't think it was the Antitrust trial, I think it was a trial about a year prior to that. Geez, all this happened so long ago now that its difficult to remember.
``Our vision is a robot for every member of the family,'' said Stuart Wallock, director of marketing and business planning for Entertainment Robot America, a unit of Sony Electronics Inc., of Los Angeles.
I thought that in one of the MS trials, the judge had rejected the Govt's case on the basis of the Govt shouldn't be in the business of designing software.
Now it sounds like the Govt wants to create security standards, and all software must be certified to meet this standard.
Civil Disobedience is done in the name of change, and therefore *requires* accountability. Doing this like an anonymous coward, distributing it and not letting yourself be known is lame, and will be seen rightly as an act of cowardice.
Yeah. I'm sure that's how people in other police states (I mean outside the US) see it.
They all realize that if they disobey, say, the Chinese government, that they need to do it in full public view and be accountable. Otherwise, it is pointless.
Don't assemble and meet in secret. Don't exchange information secretly. You need to be accountable.
Heck, FreeNet should be illegal. It destroys the accountability part of civil disobedience. I'll write my congresscritter.
For what it's worth, what RedHat says generally goes.
Really?
I tried RH 5.2 as my first Linux. Hated it. No KDE. Other complaints.
A friend pointed me to SuSE. Boy am I glad. I might never have given Linux a second try.
I've been using SuSE for years now, completely ignoring what RH says. I'll confess I've been using KDE for several years. And ReiserFS for awhile too. But don't tell RH. Or MS.
filesystems should be for named unstructured data.
I agree that the data part of a file should not have any structure known to the filesystem. The structure of the content of a file is unstructured.
But I disagree. You said "named unstructured data". The name is metadata. There seems to be no disagreement that the name is useful. (C'mon, why can't we just all use inode numbers and do away with names?)
The metadata is to make files easier to find, and to store more information about what is in that unstructured data.
We do need to know what format the data is using, so the only additional peice of information that I need that is not in current metadata is the MIME type.
You mentioned filetype. I agree. But I don't think we should stop right there. I think "creator" is another good one. (i.e., which application will launch when I click on this file? e.g. multiple "jpeg" files might launch with different applications, and accordingly display different icons.)
Another good piece of metadata about files is their X,Y location within the window that displays them. Think about this. The Macintosh is the only OS I know of that has a geographic memory of where you put a file. I can remember, "oh, yeah, when I open that folder, I left my business plan in the mid-lower-left corner of the window."
There are other useful metadata as well.
This does not mean that existing apps have to be changed at all. On the Mac you can still write a C program that is totally ignorant of the Mac's extended capabilities. You end up with users saying "why is this program so stupid? why do all it's files have plain white icons?" But the program works. Your C program doesn't have to set the X,Y location of files, the system does that, when the user moves the icon for the file.
On Mac, every file and folder can even be given a custom icon that overrides the icon the file would display based on the combination of it's type/creator. This is another good use of metadata. In fact, it begs the question, if the fielsystem can associate metadata with a file, then why not just make the metadata completely arbitrary? The FS doesn't need to know what attributes KDE or GNOME want to tack onto a file. A window manager could tag a file as having a certian "X" attribute, and certan "Y" attribute. I custom icon attribute. etc.
But you could still type: vim mypict.jpeg, and open a jpeg file using a non-aware application.
Just because the filesystem supports extended attributes doesn't mean you have to use them. Nor do you have to run a GUI that takes advantage of them. Nor do you even have to run the particular filesystem that has extended attributes.
Why does a filesystem need to support arbitrary relational queries? Why make every single app deal with complex access issues that only a few will ever use?
Why would every single app be affected? If you don't want to use a feature don't.
On my Mac, I can search large file systems across multiple hard disks for a file with a certian name or attribute, very fast. For instance, find me all files that end in ".jpeg", are bigger than 3MB, and are in a folder that is locked. I can get results quick.
MS actually ass-rapes you less than Real after you're done buying licenses for the OS and whatever else you need to stream in WM format.
This is how monopolies work. They'll do anything to gain market domination. It doesn't have to make money. It doesn't have to be legal. (You can always pay whatever fines are imposed -- but at least you "own" the entire market.)
Since MS doesn't own the streaming media yet, they'll play nice. Even perhaps give it away, ala Internet Explorer. But you can bet it won't be free forever.
I will make a prediction. (Apply this to WM as you will.) Eventually MS will achieve some major technological advance which will enable them to seperate IE from Windows. Right now you pay a price of $x for Windows. But once they unbundle, you'll hear big news of how this lowers prices and is good for everyone! New windows unbundled(tm) is at the lower price of $y! (where $y < $x) And you can buy IE for only $29.99. But you can bet that $y + $29.99 will be > $x was. And in a couple more years, you'll be able to buy the "new" bundled version of Win + IE for a low discounted cost of $z. ($z < $y + $29.99, but also $z > $x)
How does this apply to WM? WM doesn't own the market yet. So MS will play nice. (Remember all those free copies of J++ ??)
Remember IBM during the 50's, 60's and 70's? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Monopolists follow a pattern. Read the book "Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power".
Cool. Both the "sux" and the "yast2 online_upate" (from parent post). Thanks.
Here is another cool thing I routinely do to a SuSE 7.2 box. Sometimes (at work) I need to X into it from a Win 98 or Win 2000 box. I installed Cygwin on the Windoze box, and also install XFree86 ported to cygwin. Use the latest Test44. It works fantastic! I get a KDM login. I can then remotely run KDE, Gnome, IceWM, and other WM's that SuSE installs. Performance is quite decent. So I may end up running Yast2 in graphical mode to do online updates, instead of text via. ssh.
If the atmosphere is spinning with the "floor", then you might be floating, but you would have a wind in your face. Gradually, the wind would induce enough motion to cause you to fall back to the floor.
Windows 95/2000 have excellent GUI's. I find them more consistant and faster than any Unix ones I've tried
At my office, last spring, we installed a Windows XP beta on a PII 200, 64 MB. Not a *really* bad machine, mine you. And this machine is not uncommon for some people who bought their box just a couple years ago.
We booted up XP. It just sat there thrashing the disk. Just logged in to the desktop. Doing nothing. No applications running. No user input. Just idling. It just kept hitting the hard disk, about once per second. Geez, I can't imagine how well it will run an application.
Recently, when I brought this episode up again, the local Microsoft defenders said that all new OSes require 128 MB of ram as a minimum.
(Of course, I also recently ran Mac OS X on a G3 233, with 128 MB, and it was *dog* slow. And I mean *unusable* slow. Like the 1983 Lisa was.)
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? The chance of IE being unbundled is about the same as Solitare or Notepad being unbundled
Have you ever read the book "Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power?"
This book is an education on monopolies.
Why would IBM unbundle the disk drive from the CPU? They've always been bundled together (that is, since the days when IBM started bundling them to kill the disk drive competition -- just as MS kills browser competition). But in actual fact, there is no *technical* reason to have them bundled together in the first place. So eventually you see that the disk drive and CPU are "unbundled". (i.e. the browser and OS are unbundled) Of course, amid a bunch of marketing bullshit about lower prices, etc. The price of the CPU goes down. The price of disk drive seems reasonable. But the pair together cost even more! You can bet that when MS catches up with IBM's strategy, that Windows will be even cheaper!!!!! And IE will cost only $29.95. But combo will cost even more than you pay now. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
You are right. That is why most vendors favor compatibility.
When you have monopoly power, or let me use the term "market power", you can do whatever the hell you want, with impunity. In fact, when you have monopoly power, it is in your best interest not to be compatible, and to keep your customers locked in against their will.
MS will be slapped down by their ignorance, and the mass of netizens will flock back to Netscape because they can't be without the ability to load web pages!
Not likely. Which browser is the standard browser? It's not Netscape.
Site designers will design for the standard browser, which is IE.
Next: expect MS to introduce new "standards" that site designers use, which exclude other platforms.
I guess it's a good thing you didn't pay a lot of money for MSIE, did you?
The reason IE was free all along was that it always was a tool to help cement Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop.
By giving away a browser on a monopoly platform, you make that browser the standard. Once that browser is the predominant standard, then you begin changing things so that everything else is incompatible, and therefore "non-standard". (i.e. Konqueror wants to use these "non-standard" netscape plugins to view Real Video.)
Once IE is utterly the uncontested king, and there are no other browsers to compete, you can bet it will not remain free. Someday it will be unbundled, amidst a bunch of marketing manure, stating how this provides the best value for customers and other such bullshit.
Monopolies never give away something for free, unless it is to maintain market share. There is always one thing reflected in the actions of any monopoly: they will do anything legal, or illegal, even at a loss, to maintain that all important market share. Nothing is more important than market share. Even if you loose your shirt in the short term. Even if you are found guilty and have to pay fines. Once you have everyone bent over a barrel, you can make it up to them.
Too bad MS probably never really expected the legal route to go so far as a breakup. Even if you are found guilty and pay a stiff fine -- you're still a monopoly!
Netscape plug ins run on three platforms. (Unix, Mac, Windows)
Many of the plug in's are important (Flash, QuickTime, RealOddeeo, etc.)
Some major web sites use these plug ins
By changing these plugins to ActiveX, it increases the possibility that these plugins will stop being supported on non-Windows platforms.
So non-windows platforms end up being second-class (or worse) citizens when it comes to the browser.
Since the only business model MS knows is the leverage and maintenance of monopoly power, it makes sense for MS to do everything they can to make IE the standard, and make it incompatible with everything else. This helps them effectively steal open standards and turn them into proprietary standards by leveraging their monopoly on the desktop. By making other browsers second-class, it helps them maintain their monopoloy on the desktop. Nobody wants to use a desktop with a second class browser.
Both leveraging and maintaining a monopoly is what got them in trouble in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it was the Antitrust trial, I think it was a trial about a year prior to that. Geez, all this happened so long ago now that its difficult to remember.
``Our vision is a robot for every member of the family,'' said Stuart Wallock, director of marketing and business planning for Entertainment Robot America, a unit of Sony Electronics Inc., of Los Angeles.
Hmmmmm.
...there is "enough" sex and violence in media...... ...How much is enough?
Who defines enough?
Some people may be satisfied with the present level of sex and violence, and others may not yet be satisfied. Some people are harder to please.
I thought that in one of the MS trials, the judge had rejected the Govt's case on the basis of the Govt shouldn't be in the business of designing software.
Now it sounds like the Govt wants to create security standards, and all software must be certified to meet this standard.
Civil Disobedience is done in the name of change, and therefore *requires* accountability. Doing this like an anonymous coward, distributing it and not letting yourself be known is lame, and will be seen rightly as an act of cowardice.
Yeah. I'm sure that's how people in other police states (I mean outside the US) see it.
They all realize that if they disobey, say, the Chinese government, that they need to do it in full public view and be accountable. Otherwise, it is pointless.
Don't assemble and meet in secret. Don't exchange information secretly. You need to be accountable.
Heck, FreeNet should be illegal. It destroys the accountability part of civil disobedience. I'll write my congresscritter.
For what it's worth, what RedHat says generally goes.
Really?
I tried RH 5.2 as my first Linux. Hated it. No KDE. Other complaints.
A friend pointed me to SuSE. Boy am I glad. I might never have given Linux a second try.
I've been using SuSE for years now, completely ignoring what RH says. I'll confess I've been using KDE for several years. And ReiserFS for awhile too. But don't tell RH. Or MS.
It's nice to have choice.
filesystems should be for named unstructured data.
I agree that the data part of a file should not have any structure known to the filesystem. The structure of the content of a file is unstructured.
But I disagree. You said "named unstructured data". The name is metadata. There seems to be no disagreement that the name is useful. (C'mon, why can't we just all use inode numbers and do away with names?)
The metadata is to make files easier to find, and to store more information about what is in that unstructured data.
We do need to know what format the data is using, so the only additional peice of information that I need that is not in current metadata is the MIME type.
You mentioned filetype. I agree. But I don't think we should stop right there. I think "creator" is another good one. (i.e., which application will launch when I click on this file? e.g. multiple "jpeg" files might launch with different applications, and accordingly display different icons.)
Another good piece of metadata about files is their X,Y location within the window that displays them. Think about this. The Macintosh is the only OS I know of that has a geographic memory of where you put a file. I can remember, "oh, yeah, when I open that folder, I left my business plan in the mid-lower-left corner of the window."
There are other useful metadata as well.
This does not mean that existing apps have to be changed at all. On the Mac you can still write a C program that is totally ignorant of the Mac's extended capabilities. You end up with users saying "why is this program so stupid? why do all it's files have plain white icons?" But the program works. Your C program doesn't have to set the X,Y location of files, the system does that, when the user moves the icon for the file.
On Mac, every file and folder can even be given a custom icon that overrides the icon the file would display based on the combination of it's type/creator. This is another good use of metadata. In fact, it begs the question, if the fielsystem can associate metadata with a file, then why not just make the metadata completely arbitrary? The FS doesn't need to know what attributes KDE or GNOME want to tack onto a file. A window manager could tag a file as having a certian "X" attribute, and certan "Y" attribute. I custom icon attribute. etc.
But you could still type: vim mypict.jpeg, and open a jpeg file using a non-aware application.
Just because the filesystem supports extended attributes doesn't mean you have to use them. Nor do you have to run a GUI that takes advantage of them. Nor do you even have to run the particular filesystem that has extended attributes.
Some of us want better GUI's.
Why does a filesystem need to support arbitrary relational queries? Why make every single app deal with complex access issues that only a few will ever use?
Why would every single app be affected? If you don't want to use a feature don't.
On my Mac, I can search large file systems across multiple hard disks for a file with a certian name or attribute, very fast. For instance, find me all files that end in ".jpeg", are bigger than 3MB, and are in a folder that is locked. I can get results quick.
Much better than using locate/updatedb or find.
This seems like an advance to me.
MS actually ass-rapes you less than Real after you're done buying licenses for the OS and whatever else you need to stream in WM format.
This is how monopolies work. They'll do anything to gain market domination. It doesn't have to make money. It doesn't have to be legal. (You can always pay whatever fines are imposed -- but at least you "own" the entire market.)
Since MS doesn't own the streaming media yet, they'll play nice. Even perhaps give it away, ala Internet Explorer. But you can bet it won't be free forever.
I will make a prediction. (Apply this to WM as you will.) Eventually MS will achieve some major technological advance which will enable them to seperate IE from Windows. Right now you pay a price of $x for Windows. But once they unbundle, you'll hear big news of how this lowers prices and is good for everyone! New windows unbundled(tm) is at the lower price of $y! (where $y < $x) And you can buy IE for only $29.99. But you can bet that $y + $29.99 will be > $x was. And in a couple more years, you'll be able to buy the "new" bundled version of Win + IE for a low discounted cost of $z. ($z < $y + $29.99, but also $z > $x)
How does this apply to WM? WM doesn't own the market yet. So MS will play nice. (Remember all those free copies of J++ ??)
Remember IBM during the 50's, 60's and 70's? Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Monopolists follow a pattern. Read the book "Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power".
Cool. Both the "sux" and the "yast2 online_upate" (from parent post). Thanks.
Here is another cool thing I routinely do to a SuSE 7.2 box. Sometimes (at work) I need to X into it from a Win 98 or Win 2000 box. I installed Cygwin on the Windoze box, and also install XFree86 ported to cygwin. Use the latest Test44. It works fantastic! I get a KDM login. I can then remotely run KDE, Gnome, IceWM, and other WM's that SuSE installs. Performance is quite decent. So I may end up running Yast2 in graphical mode to do online updates, instead of text via. ssh.
Did you know that YaST2 runs in TEXT mode?
<BR>
Yes. I routinely ssh into a remote box, and run Yast2 and do online updates -- all in text mode.
If the atmosphere is spinning with the "floor", then you might be floating, but you would have a wind in your face. Gradually, the wind would induce enough motion to cause you to fall back to the floor.
Once all corps finally merge into once, and they confiscate the slashdot servers, what mechanisms could be used to track each of us down?
Slashdot might be keeping our IP addresses. But maybe they are smart enough not to keep this?
The statement
Drug patents make me sick
Might well be a true statement, if you're too poor to aford the drugs which are overpriced due to patents, and you end up sick because of it.
But what about walk ins? The article did say that some people come in person?
They should also sue the ISP, the phone company, and the manufacturers of the dial up modem or cable modem/dsl equipment.
Be sure to sue the people with money. It's a waste of your money to sue poor people.
Windows 95/2000 have excellent GUI's. I find them more consistant and faster than any Unix ones I've tried
At my office, last spring, we installed a Windows XP beta on a PII 200, 64 MB. Not a *really* bad machine, mine you. And this machine is not uncommon for some people who bought their box just a couple years ago.
We booted up XP. It just sat there thrashing the disk. Just logged in to the desktop. Doing nothing. No applications running. No user input. Just idling. It just kept hitting the hard disk, about once per second. Geez, I can't imagine how well it will run an application.
Recently, when I brought this episode up again, the local Microsoft defenders said that all new OSes require 128 MB of ram as a minimum.
(Of course, I also recently ran Mac OS X on a G3 233, with 128 MB, and it was *dog* slow. And I mean *unusable* slow. Like the 1983 Lisa was.)
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? The chance of IE being unbundled is about the same as Solitare or Notepad being unbundled
Have you ever read the book "Big Blue: IBM's use and abuse of power?"
This book is an education on monopolies.
Why would IBM unbundle the disk drive from the CPU? They've always been bundled together (that is, since the days when IBM started bundling them to kill the disk drive competition -- just as MS kills browser competition). But in actual fact, there is no *technical* reason to have them bundled together in the first place. So eventually you see that the disk drive and CPU are "unbundled". (i.e. the browser and OS are unbundled) Of course, amid a bunch of marketing bullshit about lower prices, etc. The price of the CPU goes down. The price of disk drive seems reasonable. But the pair together cost even more! You can bet that when MS catches up with IBM's strategy, that Windows will be even cheaper!!!!! And IE will cost only $29.95. But combo will cost even more than you pay now. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
My point is that monopolies never give away anything of real value -- such as IE.
compatibility is a feature
You are right. That is why most vendors favor compatibility.
When you have monopoly power, or let me use the term "market power", you can do whatever the hell you want, with impunity. In fact, when you have monopoly power, it is in your best interest not to be compatible, and to keep your customers locked in against their will.
Hopefully this bit of history will replay itself.
Hopefully, MS, in trying to monopolize the Internet, will loose. Everybody will "just say no", like they did to the PS/2 and Microchannel.
MS will be slapped down by their ignorance, and the mass of netizens will flock back to Netscape because they can't be without the ability to load web pages!
Not likely. Which browser is the standard browser? It's not Netscape.
Site designers will design for the standard browser, which is IE.
Next: expect MS to introduce new "standards" that site designers use, which exclude other platforms.
I guess it's a good thing you didn't pay a lot of money for MSIE, did you?
The reason IE was free all along was that it always was a tool to help cement Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop.
By giving away a browser on a monopoly platform, you make that browser the standard. Once that browser is the predominant standard, then you begin changing things so that everything else is incompatible, and therefore "non-standard". (i.e. Konqueror wants to use these "non-standard" netscape plugins to view Real Video.)
Once IE is utterly the uncontested king, and there are no other browsers to compete, you can bet it will not remain free. Someday it will be unbundled, amidst a bunch of marketing manure, stating how this provides the best value for customers and other such bullshit.
Monopolies never give away something for free, unless it is to maintain market share. There is always one thing reflected in the actions of any monopoly: they will do anything legal, or illegal, even at a loss, to maintain that all important market share. Nothing is more important than market share. Even if you loose your shirt in the short term. Even if you are found guilty and have to pay fines. Once you have everyone bent over a barrel, you can make it up to them.
Too bad MS probably never really expected the legal route to go so far as a breakup. Even if you are found guilty and pay a stiff fine -- you're still a monopoly!
- Netscape plug ins run on three platforms. (Unix, Mac, Windows)
- Many of the plug in's are important (Flash, QuickTime, RealOddeeo, etc.)
- Some major web sites use these plug ins
By changing these plugins to ActiveX, it increases the possibility that these plugins will stop being supported on non-Windows platforms.So non-windows platforms end up being second-class (or worse) citizens when it comes to the browser.
Since the only business model MS knows is the leverage and maintenance of monopoly power, it makes sense for MS to do everything they can to make IE the standard, and make it incompatible with everything else. This helps them effectively steal open standards and turn them into proprietary standards by leveraging their monopoly on the desktop. By making other browsers second-class, it helps them maintain their monopoloy on the desktop. Nobody wants to use a desktop with a second class browser.
Both leveraging and maintaining a monopoly is what got them in trouble in the first place.
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
Not likely to happen, as most people are heterosexual.