Well, I got an email from eBay Marketing today, whom I honestly believe are the ones at the heart of this bonehead maneuver. What I found profoundly disingenuous was that I was told I had opted to receive their junk mail.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In simple fact, I was never given the opportunity to opt out in the first place. Finding the preferences was less than a pleasant affair. And I know that any response from me to any offer to turn spam back on will be routed through my lawyer, not my mail server.
This is highly unethical business behavior, and I'm honestly surprised that eBay is doing it. My hope is that someone in eBay upper management will pink-slip the Pointy-Haired Marketer who approved this bit of lunacy and take a high-ground position about commercial mail. eBay has a big enough name to make that meaningful, or at least to make it noticed.
And yes, I too will go elsewhere should they decide to change my selections for me. eBay is just a place to find neat $#!+. But there are still garage sales and flea markets at which I can find neat $#!+, and they don't email me to tell me about other stuff that I don't want.
Joe Average doesn't give a dingo's kidney about Linux unless he can run the software he already has on it. Reliability comes second to familiarity to him. Keep in mind that this isn't Joe's fault, it's just that MS has done an exceptional job of making it look like there are no alternatives, therefore Joe Average knows MS and that's all.
Joe Average probably has, because of Microsoft's relentless crushing of its competition over the last 15 or so years, more than one true MS application on his computer.
Therefore, Joe Average wants to be able to run Microsoft software on a Linux box before he will seriously consider running Linux instead of MS.
Therefore, Wine is key to getting people to give Linux a shot in two ways:
Joe Average can have his buddy the geek from down the street set him up so he can see what all this "lie-nucks" stuff is about, after which:
Joe Average gets comfortable enough on the system to get curious about what else is out there and promptly discovers a whole new BillG-free world.
I might also add another advantage not specifically related to Joe: A company's systems people can slip a few Linux boxes (configured with fvwm95, Wine and Office) on a few desks, and no one notices the difference until they realize the system hasn't crashed for no damn reason at all for a while:)
So now, Joe Average is willing to consider and possibly even uses Linux, although he may still be running Office on it just because he knows how to use it.
So far, so good. The first side of the sword slices at Redmond nicely.
Now for the other side of the sword.
Unless there is a consistent effort on development of native Linux applications, all that's going to be accomplished here is that MS will gain a foothold in the Linux world and can make our lives miserable.
I know, I know. Development's going on right now, even as we speak. But how many of us look the other way at the limitations of StarOffice or WordPerfect just because we get a warm fuzzy from the fact that it's all MS-free?
If Linux's acceptance comes to hinge on Microsoft software (an oxymoron if ever I heard one, but if the above holds true, not impossible at all), that gives MS an unacceptable wedge over the future path of Linux development -- after all, if we fail to address the needs of MS application users (as defined by the programmers at MS), they can take their apps back to a Windows box.
In my more paranoid moments, I think that this is the reason that Wine hasn't had an encounter with Microsoft's legal division - Wine does, not by design but by result - extend the potential embrace of Microsoft.
What to do, then? Wine is necessary in order to wean current MS users from their digital crack, but at the same time, opens up a whole new playground for MS to lurk in.
I'm not going to propose an answer here, because I don't know what it is. But it's not often that I'm both heartened and chilled by the same piece of news.
Okay. Akira is the default setting for 'Anime Everyone Should See At Least Once'. Whether you love it or hate it, I can guarantee you've never seen anything like it.
My own tastes run to the absurdist, generally. Dr Slump is great, and that show had talking poo years before South Park did.
It's also hard to top Bastard!! in the sick and twisted category, too... having all the magic spells named after heavy metal bands provides just that last little twist of high weirdness.
Tenchi Muyo and Irresponsible Captain Taylor are both loads of fun; I think I'll give the edge to Tenchi here on the basis of a more consistent plot.
I never cared much for giant-robot anime, so I have nothing to add here.
Dragonball Z has it's moments, but those moments are dragged out in excruciating detail over dozens of episodes (the final battle, repeatedy referred to as only having five minutes to complete, took some eight or ten half-hour episodes).
Some of the old sentai anime are fun, too -- I've always rather liked
Saint Seiya
. Gatchaman is some great early-70s fun if you can first find a proper translation of it, and then put the two agonizingly bad mistranslations ('Battle of the Planets' and 'G-Force') completely and entirely out of your mind.
(Slightly off-topic aside: anyone know if Sandy Frank is still around?)
Hey, Badgerman - what's the name of that one we were watching? I spaced on it, but that was real good, too... good storyline, not at all predictable.
And every now and then, grab one of those one-shot titles at Mediaplay or somewhere equivalent, something that doesn't have several hundred episodes, only one or two. Almost no one's heard of them, but they can be kinda cool. Don't be afraid to just rent something for the hell of it, either.
ikaros, who took that advice hisself yesterday and found a cool little one-shot called 'Raven Tengu'.
Obligatory Disclaimer: I do work for IBM, and I am not representing the company or any part of it... just speaking my own mind. Sheesh.:)
You might be surprised.
IBM announced some time ago that Linux compatibility was going to be added to AIX. While this may seem kinda backwards - I think it would be better to just make AIX fully Linux compatible, or scrap it entirely and run with Linux, period - it's an important signal of general acceptance of what's been called 'a college project gone horribly right'.
Don't forget, IBM's been in the computer business longer than pretty much anyone else (if someone's older, I'd like to know who), and nobody learned a lesson the way they did about trying to dictate market terms -- remember Microchannel, or the PCjr? Sometimes the best lead can be taken by following along a while and seeing what happens.
What I think we have here is not that there's an expectation that companies will ditch MVS in favor of running Linux on their S/390s, it's that companies that had no use for Big Iron with a cryptic and user-hostile OS may have use for Big Iron with a widely-distributed, widely-supported and widely-understood OS on it. After all, it's better to sell a nude S/390 than to not sell a fully loaded one.
ikaros, who, being a lowly field tech, does not have access to top secret marketing plans, but this sounds rational to me.
In the early/mid 80s, SSL put out "President Elect", a DOS-based election sim that actually forecast fairly accurate results, in aggregate. I ran about 100 Bush v Dukakis '88 sims and averaged them together and the result was within a few percent of the actual election results.
My favorite thing about PE was the way it handled presidential debates: when posed a question, you were not given a support/oppose option, you were given options on how you spent your speaking time (attack opponent, compare/contrast views, dodge, tell amusing anecdote, etc.) since your views on subjects was defined in your setup. However, how you split that time raised or lowered your chance of committing a gaffe of epic proportions -- one does not tell amusing anecdotes about pro-choice/pro-life questions...
Another election sim that was a bit more detailed was released in the early 90s or thereabouts... I forget the name, but it was a Doonesbury production. Awful cool, but godawful slow.
The Doonesbury sim did have a dirty tricks option, with appropriate levels of risk/reward. It also had a better media handler -- take the high road, or sling mudballs? -- and forced you to do a lot of fundraising, too. Probably more realistic for that.
Any others anyone can remember?
ikaros, who takes pride in running as a liberal Dem and beating Reagan in the 1980 scenario...:)
The question is really, "Which open-standard text formatting system should replace the MS DOC format?"
Full document sharing requirements necessarily preclude proprietary formats. They have to - otherwise, as we're seeing with.DOC, you find yourself locked into a format that's not stable even across revisions of the native software - and given MS's legendary lack of reliability, sometimes not even stable between two machines running the same rev.
It also requires that the document is freely editable, so that knocks out the otherwise quite useful Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
PostScript, XML, and RTF remain viable (although I'm not certain of RTF's parentage - is it an MS format primarily?). I can't think of any reason TeX shouldn't be a contender - of course, my familiarity with TeX/LaTeX is limited, so there may be reasons it shouldn't be considered a standard.
The point is that XML is certainly an option for a fully-portable document format, but it's not the only option.
What are the primary open-standard document formats, anyway? I'm sure I'm missing a lot of them.
ikaros, who's a moderately obsessive WordPerfect partisan:)
Just to add an air of surreality to the whole thing, the URL provided by the US DOJ on their website is wrong. The Proposed Final Judgment is actually here, and requires Adobe Acrobat.
For my money, the most interesting part is 5.A.i.(1) -- Microsoft will be required to provide on demand (during business hours):
...copies of all books, ledgers, accounts, correspondence, memoranda, source code, and other records and documents in the possession or under the control of Microsoft (which may have counsel present), relating to the matters contained in this Final Judgment...
(Emphasis added by me and is not in the original)
This I hadn't expected, although perhaps I should have in retrospect. We all know how MS feels about their Secret Sauce... I wonder how they're going to react to this, even though 5.a.iii prohibits release of any information gathered from MS, "except in the course of legal proceedings to which the Plaintiff is a party (including grand jury proceedings), or for the purpose of securing compliance with this Final Judgment, or as otherwise required by law."
Myself, I hope the DoJ periodically pulls the source and compiles it themselves to see if it behaves exactly like the publicly available version(s) of Windows.
ikaros, who wonders just how long the compile time is...
The DOJ is on the right track going for a structural remedy to the Microsoft problem.
However, the OS/Apps split doesn't address the monopoly position itself -- there will now be two companies holding monopolies instead of just one, and there will still be the risk of illegal maintenance of one monopoly or the other.
All the MS Apps company would have to do is simply not port their software to OSes other than Windows. They can't be forced to port; they can (and I think will) justify a Windows-only decision as targeting the biggest market and not 'wasting time' on smaller chunks. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Office for Mac disappear after the breakup, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Office for Linux. Of course, I wouldn't use it either -- it's been years since I've seen a virus that wasn't carried by an Office component. But that's another issue.:)
Nothing in this redresses the question of damage already done to the software and OS markets -- it's far more than just Netscape being slaughtered on the altar of Bill: it's WordPerfect, it's Lotus, it's DR-DOS, it's a hundred different companies you never heard of because they never had a fair chance to be heard in the first place.
A better solution would have been not to split Microsoft into OS and Apps divisions, but into two or three baby Microsofts in toto. Give each Baby Bill Windows and Office, and make Microsoft compete against the meanest, nastiest competitor there is: Microsoft.
The upside of that would be that most unthinkable thing: a stable release of Windows. Baby Bills under this formula would each be out to prove themselves the true Microsoft, and would finally be forced to look to product rather than marketing to make their sales for them.
As much as I think MS deserves to have Windows forcibly open-sourced, I'm afraid that would be unsupportable legally -- in that instance, there is a legitimate claim of copyright. The DoJ can't force them to reveal the secret formula -- but by splitting MS into MS1, MS2, and maybe an MS3, they can reap the following benefits:
No more malicious coding against competitors: the winning Windows is the most intercompatible one, not the least.
Cleaner, faster Windows: the winning Windows is the one that runs fastest and crashes least.
Adherence to true standards: the winning Windows is the one that plays nicest with its neighbors, not tries to force a corrupted and proprietary 'standard' on everyone else.
Incentive to play by the rules: at the very least, there would now be the fear of being ratted out to the DoJ by your own previous partner. More importantly is the fact that a competitor can threaten one Baby Bill with taking their business elsewhere now.
So, yes, break them up, but break them up meaningfully.
>But the Glass Steagal Act has been >repealed and there is no longer a legal >requirement in the US that prohibits banks >from carrying out all types of financial >transactions.
True enough - but as far as I know, most financial institutions haven't bothered with changing their parent corporation names to 'Bank'. First, customers are already accustomed to the difference and changing back would probably be confusing. Second, I should imagine the federal and state paperwork (not to mention the behind the scenes work changing signs, ads and stationery at the least) would make it just not worth the effort.
There'd be a certain internal confusion, as well - at the very least due to the Pointy Haired Boss factor.
ikaros, who's boss lacks pointy hair, but then, she was a tech first and a manager later.
.banc should actually be the preferred TLD for financial institutions... there's a legal hairsplitting between 'bank' and 'banc' that dates back to the Depression and post-Crash laws that separated banks from "non-banking" financial transactions. "Bank" is used for... er, well, banks. "Banc" is used for the non-banking financial services arm of a bank (insurance, financial consulting, equities, that sort of thing). By going with.banc, both arms of the financial institutions are covered.
As a general rule, the parent corporation of a bank is a 'Banc'. So while you bank at Bank One, for example, the parent company is Banc One Corporation.
ikaros, oh, the things you learn geeking for a financial institution...:)
There's one especially fascinating pair of paragraphs in this report. And I quote:
The Century Strategies statement said the company was hired by Microsoft in the fall of 1998 "to encourage consumers and grass roots citizens to make their views known to public opinion leaders, the media, and political leaders of both parties."
Brief note here: if there's a true grass roots support movement for them, why do they need to hire someone to get that word out?
Dan Leach, a Microsoft spokesman, said Century was one of several companies hired to "defend ourselves from our competitors' lobbying attacks."
Amazing difference in description for two groups doing exactly the same thing.
My translation is: Microsoft hasn't learned a thing; they are in total denial of even the remotest possibility that Judge Jackson ruled against them. Anyone who speaks out against Microsoft is, in their view, an idiot or a paid character assassin -- an opponent's opinion cannot possibly represent a rationally held view by a normal person. Anyone they pay to speak for them is a true representative of the grass roots of the computer community.
Where's Dr. Kubler-Ross when you need her? These folks need a lot of help getting past the denial stage...
I wandered through the WAVE site, and perused their 'warning signs' for a while.
Having been an outcast geek (in a school that was supposed to have been the top academic environment in the area), I was a little startled to see "Has excessive feelings of isolation and/or rejection" listed as a sign of danger.
The only conclusion I can reach is that the people who designed this list were in their schools' "ruling clique". Isolation and rejection comes from external sources more often than not, and not internal. Isolation and rejection are thrust upon the different student by their peers -- they do not feel isolated and rejected, they are isolated and rejected by those around them.
It's an unhealthy sort of blaming the victim: a trait forced upon a kid who is different is now going to be used against him. Jon, please remind the Pinkerton's people about that... I suspect they (like me) are many years removed from their high school years, but some of us remember that time a little clearer, apparently.
Now, the observation:
It never ceases to amaze me how fast adults are to blame kids for so-called "youth problems"... and how fast adults forget what they were like when they were that age.
Parents of America, your children are not stupid. In fact, they are in the main very observant. They have access to news, information and data that you never would have dreamed possible. And they watch you. Very closely.
Your kids are smart enough to read a road sign that says 'Speed Limit 55' and see that you're going 65... and maybe they learn from you that laws can be treated as optional.
Your kids hear you crack an insensitive joke about the latest world tragedy or celebrity death or some such... and maybe they learn that other people's feelings are irrelevant or worse, objects of ridicule.
Your kids hear you rant mindlessly about "that idiot (fill in any politician or commentator here)... and maybe they decide anyone who doesn't agree with them is an idiot and not worthy of any respect, or maybe they just lose interest in the process altogether.
Parents, your kids are watching you... are you PBS, or are you Fox?
ikaros, who believes the root cause is an unwillingness to just take some damned responsibility for one's behavior.
This raises the far more important question: are they doing science or doing business? If they're just cataloging the DNA sequence with the sole intention of selling access to it, then these are not scientists in the pure sense.
Science dictates the need to open up the data. Without free and unfettered peer review, it's sterile: a mindless calling of the roll. That reason alone should be enough to sound the bells and whistles.
Celera's intentions don't sound like a simple matter of wishing to protect rights to their intellectual property - I read it more as an attempt to privatize the public Human Genome Project for their own gain. If their true interest was in providing the genetic map to researchers, then just do it. Don't try to co-opt a competitor, especially not at the expense of the rest of us, our tax dollars, and our future health benefits from this project.
They could take a lesson from Open Source -- the human genome being the ultimate open source project: anyone, within their capabilities, is capable of contributing to the gene pool, and can in a sense be judged by not the quantity but the quality of that contribution (in this case: how good a parent are they as opposed to how good a programmer).
Celera, frankly, should be ashamed of themselves for trying to make the code we already have, proprietary.
And I'm surprised that it took so long to happen in a formal way -- the appearance of 'free' etexts developed online in a public environment subjected to realtime critique.
Granted, you probably can't contribute to the body of text as one might add code to the Linux kernel, but there appear to be public comment sections available for discussion of this work, which is close enough, I suppose.
The next logical step would be GNU-copylefted manuals available freely online (are you listening, O'Reilly?) or available at cost. Imagine the life of one of these documents, kept live and up to date by an international cadre of users adding how-tos, updated fixes and the like... well, we can always hope.
ikaros, who'd be perfectly happy to download and print.
>Hey, this leads me into a REAL "name-the" competition. >What should above-average tech folk be called? If all the >older terms are either dead as a doornail, sexist, >or both, what would be a great, collective way to describe >such people?
I believe that would be 'underpaid' and/or 'overworked'.:)
ikaros, a little of both.
Let it be smart AND stupid ... just not mediocre.
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The only solution to the concern about the 'dumbing down' of Linux is to let projects like this, that are geared towards the "less experienced" user, go ahead full-steam.
In the long run, they'll probably learn enough of the system to be comfortable with making their own choices and can choose to move to KDE or GNOME or fvwm2 (my choice) or whatever. If not, well, hell, they're still on a Linux system and safely weaned off Redmond's digital crack.
The advantage to Linux -- and more importantly, the advantage of OS projects in general -- is that they can follow tracks that serve the advanced and the beginning user simultaneously.
The only real danger is in allowing the 'dumbed-down' version to become the standard as opposed to only one option of many. An affiliated danger is in not reaching out to the newcomers and trying to help them reach the point where they can decide for themselves whether they want the 'dumbed-down' version.
So I agree here -- full speed ahead on the 'two-bit' interface. We'll worry about bringing the newbies up to the full dollar after bringing them on board in the first place.
ikaros, who has been trying to convince his folks that he could make them a Linux box they could use
Dead on right, nullspace. I make a point of referencing a SuSE preference only when asked about which distribution to use, and even then I prefer not to say what I perceive is 'wrong' with other distros but what's right with my choice.
I think the only right response to the question of Linux vs. Windows is Linux without having to qualify it further. Distributions are for simplifying installations, and should be treated as siblings, not rivals. If the Linux community fragments into RH vs SuSE vs Corel vs Debian vs FreeBSD vs Slack vs whatever, Gates wins.
ikaros, off to learn the esoterica of maintaining one's own domain.
I've been a SuSE user for about two years now, off and on, and only lately more on than off. I became committed to SuSE's distro when it configured X for me (6.1, maybe? Kernel 2.2.5 is all I recall for sure) and I didn't have to go through the migraine of getting it configured and running myself.
If anything, 6.3 may be too easy to install... I prefer a commandline prompt, and wasn't given the option to boot to ASCII during the much-too-simple-to-screw-up graphical install.
Yes, this is a mighty step forward in getting Linux to the masses; installation was quick and painless, with minimal intervention required. And while I'll continue to fret about the dumbing-down of software to the lowest common user, the fact is that Linux installs have to be simplified if it's going to take over the desktop.
My first Linux install was an old Yggdrasil system, kernel 1.0.something, on a 20MHz 386SX with a whopping 4Mb RAM. Sure, it was a pain (don't even ask how long it took to recompile the kernel on that thing), and it was something that I honestly have to admit that the average user wouldn't have the patience to do.
The patience factor has now been taken out of the equation. All anyone has to do now is answer a few simple queries, swap out some CDs, and they've got a system that boots straight to X. The most complicated thing an end user is now expected to know is how to get into BIOS to make the system boot from CD.
And still... I worry. I don't want to see Linux get dumbed down strictly for the purpose of competing with Microsoft -- if that happens, Microsoft wins anyway.
I see the results of lowest-common-denominator coding every day -- I wouldn't have a job in tech support if Microsoft wrote code that encouraged users to think about what they were doing as opposed to making them helpless the first time their mouse conks out. Point and click is convenient, but it's also mindless.
The long and short of it is - huzzah for SuSE, who IMO deserves the best distribution recognition; it's the most reliable release I've used, a straight up config is easy, and all the tools are there for the more complex configurations... just make sure they stay there.
ikaros, anyone who says ignorance is bliss has not seen our call center stats.
I don't want this to sound like flamebait, but if you don't see immediately the possibilities beyond just having a waycool Linux-based PDA, then I hope you're not working in the technology field.
Remember, if the Crusoe can emulate the x86 family, then emulating the PPC, the Alpha and the Motorolas -- or anything else, for that matter -- is just a matter of software.
This has the potential to be the first true multiplatform system. This is what gives it the potential to be both an Intel-killer and a Microsoft killer. The user can run whatever they feel like -- most importantly, x86 compatible apps without having to have an x86.
It's this lack of total portability that's prevented me from completely escaping the evil clutches of Redmond -- I still can't run Poser 4 and Jack Nicklaus 6 on Linux. Wine is a valiant effort, but it's not stable enough for that yet (unless some major breakthrough has been made since the last time I checked in). The Crusoe looks like it's offering me a possible way out.
I'm also stunned by the prices -- a Crusoe-based box is actually within my reach. These guys are serious... I have to wonder if Paul Allen has any idea the danger he's put his MS holdings into by backing this project.
ikaros, who will almost definitely get one of these systems
I have ordered a new cable provider, and will cancel my Time Warner cable as soon as Americast is in place. It ain't a solution, but it's an acceptable "think globally, act locally" patch.
For a brief period, I was willing to cut AOL some slack because they left ICQ the hell alone (okay, I will grant that I run ICQ 0.95 or something like that, because I refused to upgrade after AOL bought ICQ). After what happened the last time I upgraded Netscape (force-installing AOL IM on my machine and neither asking my permission nor providing a graceful uninstall), though, AOL promptly returned to its natural position as emergency backup Antichrist of the digital world. I went out and bought Opera that night (IE was never an option, of course).
A media behemoth the size of AOL scares the biologically processed waste matter out of me. TW was already too damn big, and the compression of controlling entities over media should rightfully scare any civil libertarian. There are too few companies controlling too many information flows -- this is not the hallmark of a healthy democracy. Remember CBS's spiking of the tobacco story: it's not unreasonable to think that AOL may try to wield that kind of power over CNN. And consider this: how long will AOL users have before the Time Warner part of the new company demands expunging of all MP3s from their websites?
The only thing about this news that's remotely amusing is watching Microsoft scream "Look! It's a competitor!" Yeah, right, Bill. Talk to me when Steve Case brings out an OS.
> The conventional wisdom is that the value of the separated entities will rise higher than > the value of the original entity, as happened with the Standard Oil breakup. This is just false. > What will happen is the bottom will fall out of the stock price - faced with competition > from free software, and no longer having the means of forcibly maintaining the existing > monopoly, the Baby Bills revenue can go nowhere but down.
This is an exceptional point that I can't believe I missed in the talks my friends and I have had on this topic. And it's more than just competing on a fair playing field with Linux, BeOS, etc.
One of the rumored proposals for breakup is into one applications company and two OS companies -- which means that MS faces not only fair competition at long last, but also the meanest, nastiest, hairiest competitor in the industry: themselves.
Both OS houses will naturally try to position themselves as the One True Windows Company. I wouldn't be too shocked to see them go after each other with the same, ah, enthusiasm that MS has always used on competitors.
You know, the more I think about that scenario, the more I like it:)
Meanwhile, BillG, having seen which way the wind was blowing, has himself ready to be CEO/Chairman/President/God-Emperor of MS Applications Corp., which will survive breakup much more easily than the OS side. We can fairly assume (and it has been reported elsewhere in this article thread) that Bill stepping aside has been in the works for some time; either BillG saw the breakup as inevitable a long time ago, or the timing is fortuitous. In either case, it's not a response to the breakup rumors.
I think that the geek buried deep inside him knows that shoddily-coded Windows is hosed as soon as consumers have a fair choice to make, and he wanted to be with what will be the biggest (most profitable, most successful) Baby Bill -- the applications division.
In the main, end users know squat about the OSes and NOSes they use on a minute-by-minute basis. What they care about is how to change the font on the first line of a word-processing document, how to tot up a column in a spreadsheet, how to put a cool background onto a presentation graphics slide.
Take an end user who's accustomed to WordPerfect 8 on Win95. Stick him on a Linux box running fvwm95 (or whatever it's called, I don't use it) as the x manager, running WP8 for Linux. He won't notice a blessed thing different until he goes to open a file and sees a somewhat different directory structure -- IF he even notices that.
A good OS is quiet to the end-user; it should be seen only on power-up and shutdown, and inbetween when config changes are needed. When the system is up, the end-user is focused on the task at hand, which requires officeware, not OS diagnostic tools.
Better than anyone else, BillG knows that Windows is not quiet -- it is a prolonged wail. He's positioned himself to be "on the user's side" so to speak. I know as a support tech, the only thing he and Microsoft have ever done for me is provide me with a lot of opportunities to provide support -- server-side and support-side, Gates isn't there and I don't think he wants to be there.
Long-term, what it looks like to me is that Gates will continue raking in hundreds of times the money that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes for putting out second-rate software that will have a huge following through momentum... and he will be free to port it to any OS when he no longer has to worry about supporting the monopoly. Microsoft OS Corp (singular or plural) will take the hit a lot harder than MS Applications Corp will, and Ballmer will have a lot more sleepless nights than Gates.
ikaros, who will be quite interested when MS Applications Corp decides to create a Linux port of something...:)
I think the reason Gates did this is the following: On some deep level, he's admitted to himself that the breakup of Microsoft is inevitable, and he's positioning himself to be in charge of the Baby Bill that gets applications.
Two reasons for this:
The applications playing field is naturally wider than the OS field
He knows perfectly well that if forced to compete head to head, Windows can only survive on momentum and market share and is clearly inferior to the alternatives.
Remember, one killer desktop app, and Linux leaps from being currently just a desktop curiosity (let's be honest, that's unfortunately all it is right now, market-wise -- server-side is separate and largely invisible to John Q. Public) to a significant minority or better. Visicalc is what made DOS (and Microsoft, by extension), and all Linux needs is a Visicalc of its own, now that MS is behaving itself for the duration of the trial.
If Gates were to stay with the OS company (or companies) left over after the breakup, he'd be limiting himself to, well, just the OS market. On the applications side, he gets to meddle with the markets for office productivity, games, educational software... everything but the OS itself, basically.
Hmmm... when the company's broken up, will IE go to the OS or the application company? Obviously, to hear MS tell the story, it's an 'integral part of the operating system'... if it goes to the applications company, is there a possibility for further legal action on the basis of perjury? Eeenteresting...:)
In any case, this is Microsoft -- and Bill -- positioning for the post-breakup world. MS has a long history of ignoring and circumventing paper limits; a breakup is the only way to prevent them from reverting to past behavior.
I for one don't understand why Gates is so resistant to the idea. It was the breakup of Standard Oil that made Rockefeller the first billionaire; in later years, Rockefeller was heard to say that the breakup was the best thing to ever happen to him. A breakup of Microsoft would make Gates wealthy beyond even his dreams.
ikaros, hopping off the soapbox so someone else can use it.
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My initial, gut-most reaction is: when (not if) the MS part of the chair crashes, will the recliner part go haywire and fold you into a pretzel?
Well, I got an email from eBay Marketing today, whom I honestly believe are the ones at the heart of this bonehead maneuver. What I found profoundly disingenuous was that I was told I had opted to receive their junk mail.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In simple fact, I was never given the opportunity to opt out in the first place. Finding the preferences was less than a pleasant affair. And I know that any response from me to any offer to turn spam back on will be routed through my lawyer, not my mail server.
This is highly unethical business behavior, and I'm honestly surprised that eBay is doing it. My hope is that someone in eBay upper management will pink-slip the Pointy-Haired Marketer who approved this bit of lunacy and take a high-ground position about commercial mail. eBay has a big enough name to make that meaningful, or at least to make it noticed.
And yes, I too will go elsewhere should they decide to change my selections for me. eBay is just a place to find neat $#!+. But there are still garage sales and flea markets at which I can find neat $#!+, and they don't email me to tell me about other stuff that I don't want.
Okay. Let's posit the following:
Keep in mind that this isn't Joe's fault, it's just that MS has done an exceptional job of making it look like there are no alternatives, therefore Joe Average knows MS and that's all.
Therefore, Wine is key to getting people to give Linux a shot in two ways:
I might also add another advantage not specifically related to Joe: A company's systems people can slip a few Linux boxes (configured with fvwm95, Wine and Office) on a few desks, and no one notices the difference until they realize the system hasn't crashed for no damn reason at all for a while :)
So now, Joe Average is willing to consider and possibly even uses Linux, although he may still be running Office on it just because he knows how to use it.
So far, so good. The first side of the sword slices at Redmond nicely.
Now for the other side of the sword.
Unless there is a consistent effort on development of native Linux applications, all that's going to be accomplished here is that MS will gain a foothold in the Linux world and can make our lives miserable.
I know, I know. Development's going on right now, even as we speak. But how many of us look the other way at the limitations of StarOffice or WordPerfect just because we get a warm fuzzy from the fact that it's all MS-free?
If Linux's acceptance comes to hinge on Microsoft software (an oxymoron if ever I heard one, but if the above holds true, not impossible at all), that gives MS an unacceptable wedge over the future path of Linux development -- after all, if we fail to address the needs of MS application users (as defined by the programmers at MS), they can take their apps back to a Windows box.
In my more paranoid moments, I think that this is the reason that Wine hasn't had an encounter with Microsoft's legal division - Wine does, not by design but by result - extend the potential embrace of Microsoft.
What to do, then? Wine is necessary in order to wean current MS users from their digital crack, but at the same time, opens up a whole new playground for MS to lurk in.
I'm not going to propose an answer here, because I don't know what it is. But it's not often that I'm both heartened and chilled by the same piece of news.
Okay. Akira is the default setting for 'Anime Everyone Should See At Least Once'. Whether you love it or hate it, I can guarantee you've never seen anything like it.
My own tastes run to the absurdist, generally. Dr Slump is great, and that show had talking poo years before South Park did.
It's also hard to top Bastard!! in the sick and twisted category, too ... having all the magic spells named after heavy metal bands provides just that last little twist of high weirdness.
Tenchi Muyo and Irresponsible Captain Taylor are both loads of fun; I think I'll give the edge to Tenchi here on the basis of a more consistent plot.
I never cared much for giant-robot anime, so I have nothing to add here.
Dragonball Z has it's moments, but those moments are dragged out in excruciating detail over dozens of episodes (the final battle, repeatedy referred to as only having five minutes to complete, took some eight or ten half-hour episodes).
Some of the old sentai anime are fun, too -- I've always rather liked
Saint Seiya
. Gatchaman is some great early-70s fun if you can first find a proper translation of it, and then put the two agonizingly bad mistranslations ('Battle of the Planets' and 'G-Force') completely and entirely out of your mind.(Slightly off-topic aside: anyone know if Sandy Frank is still around?)
Hey, Badgerman - what's the name of that one we were watching? I spaced on it, but that was real good, too ... good storyline, not at all predictable.
And every now and then, grab one of those one-shot titles at Mediaplay or somewhere equivalent, something that doesn't have several hundred episodes, only one or two. Almost no one's heard of them, but they can be kinda cool. Don't be afraid to just rent something for the hell of it, either.
ikaros, who took that advice hisself yesterday and found a cool little one-shot called 'Raven Tengu'.
Obligatory Disclaimer: I do work for IBM, and I am not representing the company or any part of it ... just speaking my own mind. Sheesh. :)
You might be surprised.
IBM announced some time ago that Linux compatibility was going to be added to AIX. While this may seem kinda backwards - I think it would be better to just make AIX fully Linux compatible, or scrap it entirely and run with Linux, period - it's an important signal of general acceptance of what's been called 'a college project gone horribly right'.
Don't forget, IBM's been in the computer business longer than pretty much anyone else (if someone's older, I'd like to know who), and nobody learned a lesson the way they did about trying to dictate market terms -- remember Microchannel, or the PCjr? Sometimes the best lead can be taken by following along a while and seeing what happens.
What I think we have here is not that there's an expectation that companies will ditch MVS in favor of running Linux on their S/390s, it's that companies that had no use for Big Iron with a cryptic and user-hostile OS may have use for Big Iron with a widely-distributed, widely-supported and widely-understood OS on it. After all, it's better to sell a nude S/390 than to not sell a fully loaded one.
ikaros, who, being a lowly field tech, does not have access to top secret marketing plans, but this sounds rational to me.
Congrats, everyone -- the improvement is immediately noticeable and greatly appreciated!
Imagine the frustration (and I'm sure you can) of sitting on a T1 connection and having to stick /. in the background while it loads ... eventually.
I suppose we can safely assume it's not running IIS on an NT4 box ... :)
ikaros, who has really got to get off his bum and get his own server set up
In the early/mid 80s, SSL put out "President Elect", a DOS-based election sim that actually forecast fairly accurate results, in aggregate. I ran about 100 Bush v Dukakis '88 sims and averaged them together and the result was within a few percent of the actual election results.
My favorite thing about PE was the way it handled presidential debates: when posed a question, you were not given a support/oppose option, you were given options on how you spent your speaking time (attack opponent, compare/contrast views, dodge, tell amusing anecdote, etc.) since your views on subjects was defined in your setup. However, how you split that time raised or lowered your chance of committing a gaffe of epic proportions -- one does not tell amusing anecdotes about pro-choice/pro-life questions...
Another election sim that was a bit more detailed was released in the early 90s or thereabouts ... I forget the name, but it was a Doonesbury production. Awful cool, but godawful slow.
The Doonesbury sim did have a dirty tricks option, with appropriate levels of risk/reward. It also had a better media handler -- take the high road, or sling mudballs? -- and forced you to do a lot of fundraising, too. Probably more realistic for that.
Any others anyone can remember?
ikaros, who takes pride in running as a liberal Dem and beating Reagan in the 1980 scenario
The question is really, "Which open-standard text formatting system should replace the MS DOC format?"
Full document sharing requirements necessarily preclude proprietary formats. They have to - otherwise, as we're seeing with .DOC, you find yourself locked into a format that's not stable even across revisions of the native software - and given MS's legendary lack of reliability, sometimes not even stable between two machines running the same rev.
It also requires that the document is freely editable, so that knocks out the otherwise quite useful Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
PostScript, XML, and RTF remain viable (although I'm not certain of RTF's parentage - is it an MS format primarily?). I can't think of any reason TeX shouldn't be a contender - of course, my familiarity with TeX/LaTeX is limited, so there may be reasons it shouldn't be considered a standard.
The point is that XML is certainly an option for a fully-portable document format, but it's not the only option.
What are the primary open-standard document formats, anyway? I'm sure I'm missing a lot of them.
ikaros, who's a moderately obsessive WordPerfect partisan
Just to add an air of surreality to the whole thing, the URL provided by the US DOJ on their website is wrong. The Proposed Final Judgment is actually here, and requires Adobe Acrobat.
For my money, the most interesting part is 5.A.i.(1) -- Microsoft will be required to provide on demand (during business hours):
(Emphasis added by me and is not in the original)
This I hadn't expected, although perhaps I should have in retrospect. We all know how MS feels about their Secret Sauce ... I wonder how they're going to react to this, even though 5.a.iii prohibits release of any information gathered from MS, "except in the course of legal proceedings to which the Plaintiff is a party (including grand jury proceedings), or for the purpose of securing compliance with this Final Judgment, or as otherwise required by law."
Myself, I hope the DoJ periodically pulls the source and compiles it themselves to see if it behaves exactly like the publicly available version(s) of Windows.
ikaros, who wonders just how long the compile time is...
The DOJ is on the right track going for a structural remedy to the Microsoft problem.
However, the OS/Apps split doesn't address the monopoly position itself -- there will now be two companies holding monopolies instead of just one, and there will still be the risk of illegal maintenance of one monopoly or the other.
All the MS Apps company would have to do is simply not port their software to OSes other than Windows. They can't be forced to port; they can (and I think will) justify a Windows-only decision as targeting the biggest market and not 'wasting time' on smaller chunks. I wouldn't be too surprised to see Office for Mac disappear after the breakup, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Office for Linux. Of course, I wouldn't use it either -- it's been years since I've seen a virus that wasn't carried by an Office component. But that's another issue. :)
Nothing in this redresses the question of damage already done to the software and OS markets -- it's far more than just Netscape being slaughtered on the altar of Bill: it's WordPerfect, it's Lotus, it's DR-DOS, it's a hundred different companies you never heard of because they never had a fair chance to be heard in the first place.
A better solution would have been not to split Microsoft into OS and Apps divisions, but into two or three baby Microsofts in toto. Give each Baby Bill Windows and Office, and make Microsoft compete against the meanest, nastiest competitor there is: Microsoft.
The upside of that would be that most unthinkable thing: a stable release of Windows. Baby Bills under this formula would each be out to prove themselves the true Microsoft, and would finally be forced to look to product rather than marketing to make their sales for them.
As much as I think MS deserves to have Windows forcibly open-sourced, I'm afraid that would be unsupportable legally -- in that instance, there is a legitimate claim of copyright. The DoJ can't force them to reveal the secret formula -- but by splitting MS into MS1, MS2, and maybe an MS3, they can reap the following benefits:
So, yes, break them up, but break them up meaningfully.
ikaros, not one for half-measures
>repealed and there is no longer a legal
>requirement in the US that prohibits banks
>from carrying out all types of financial
>transactions.
True enough - but as far as I know, most financial institutions haven't bothered with changing their parent corporation names to 'Bank'. First, customers are already accustomed to the difference and changing back would probably be confusing. Second, I should imagine the federal and state paperwork (not to mention the behind the scenes work changing signs, ads and stationery at the least) would make it just not worth the effort.
There'd be a certain internal confusion, as well - at the very least due to the Pointy Haired Boss factor.
ikaros, who's boss lacks pointy hair, but then, she was a tech first and a manager later.
As a general rule, the parent corporation of a bank is a 'Banc'. So while you bank at Bank One, for example, the parent company is Banc One Corporation.
ikaros, oh, the things you learn geeking for a financial institution ... :)
There's one especially fascinating pair of paragraphs in this report. And I quote:
Amazing difference in description for two groups doing exactly the same thing.
My translation is: Microsoft hasn't learned a thing; they are in total denial of even the remotest possibility that Judge Jackson ruled against them. Anyone who speaks out against Microsoft is, in their view, an idiot or a paid character assassin -- an opponent's opinion cannot possibly represent a rationally held view by a normal person. Anyone they pay to speak for them is a true representative of the grass roots of the computer community.
Where's Dr. Kubler-Ross when you need her? These folks need a lot of help getting past the denial stage ...
ikaros, looking forward to the wake.
First, the point:
I wandered through the WAVE site, and perused their 'warning signs' for a while.
Having been an outcast geek (in a school that was supposed to have been the top academic environment in the area), I was a little startled to see "Has excessive feelings of isolation and/or rejection" listed as a sign of danger.
The only conclusion I can reach is that the people who designed this list were in their schools' "ruling clique". Isolation and rejection comes from external sources more often than not, and not internal. Isolation and rejection are thrust upon the different student by their peers -- they do not feel isolated and rejected, they are isolated and rejected by those around them.
It's an unhealthy sort of blaming the victim: a trait forced upon a kid who is different is now going to be used against him. Jon, please remind the Pinkerton's people about that ... I suspect they (like me) are many years removed from their high school years, but some of us remember that time a little clearer, apparently.
Now, the observation:
It never ceases to amaze me how fast adults are to blame kids for so-called "youth problems" ... and how fast adults forget what they were like when they were that age.
Parents of America, your children are not stupid. In fact, they are in the main very observant. They have access to news, information and data that you never would have dreamed possible. And they watch you. Very closely.
Your kids are smart enough to read a road sign that says 'Speed Limit 55' and see that you're going 65 ... and maybe they learn from you that laws can be treated as optional.
Your kids hear you crack an insensitive joke about the latest world tragedy or celebrity death or some such ... and maybe they learn that other people's feelings are irrelevant or worse, objects of ridicule.
Your kids hear you rant mindlessly about "that idiot (fill in any politician or commentator here) ... and maybe they decide anyone who doesn't agree with them is an idiot and not worthy of any respect, or maybe they just lose interest in the process altogether.
Parents, your kids are watching you ... are you PBS, or are you Fox?
ikaros, who believes the root cause is an unwillingness to just take some damned responsibility for one's behavior.
This raises the far more important question: are they doing science or doing business? If they're just cataloging the DNA sequence with the sole intention of selling access to it, then these are not scientists in the pure sense.
Science dictates the need to open up the data. Without free and unfettered peer review, it's sterile: a mindless calling of the roll. That reason alone should be enough to sound the bells and whistles.
Celera's intentions don't sound like a simple matter of wishing to protect rights to their intellectual property - I read it more as an attempt to privatize the public Human Genome Project for their own gain. If their true interest was in providing the genetic map to researchers, then just do it. Don't try to co-opt a competitor, especially not at the expense of the rest of us, our tax dollars, and our future health benefits from this project.
They could take a lesson from Open Source -- the human genome being the ultimate open source project: anyone, within their capabilities, is capable of contributing to the gene pool, and can in a sense be judged by not the quantity but the quality of that contribution (in this case: how good a parent are they as opposed to how good a programmer).
Celera, frankly, should be ashamed of themselves for trying to make the code we already have, proprietary.
ikaros
And I'm surprised that it took so long to happen in a formal way -- the appearance of 'free' etexts developed online in a public environment subjected to realtime critique.
Granted, you probably can't contribute to the body of text as one might add code to the Linux kernel, but there appear to be public comment sections available for discussion of this work, which is close enough, I suppose.
The next logical step would be GNU-copylefted manuals available freely online (are you listening, O'Reilly?) or available at cost. Imagine the life of one of these documents, kept live and up to date by an international cadre of users adding how-tos, updated fixes and the like ... well, we can always hope.
ikaros, who'd be perfectly happy to download and print.
>What should above-average tech folk be called? If all the
>older terms are either dead as a doornail, sexist,
>or both, what would be a great, collective way to describe
>such people?
I believe that would be 'underpaid' and/or 'overworked'. :)
ikaros, a little of both.
The only solution to the concern about the 'dumbing down' of Linux is to let projects like this, that are geared towards the "less experienced" user, go ahead full-steam.
In the long run, they'll probably learn enough of the system to be comfortable with making their own choices and can choose to move to KDE or GNOME or fvwm2 (my choice) or whatever. If not, well, hell, they're still on a Linux system and safely weaned off Redmond's digital crack.
The advantage to Linux -- and more importantly, the advantage of OS projects in general -- is that they can follow tracks that serve the advanced and the beginning user simultaneously.
The only real danger is in allowing the 'dumbed-down' version to become the standard as opposed to only one option of many. An affiliated danger is in not reaching out to the newcomers and trying to help them reach the point where they can decide for themselves whether they want the 'dumbed-down' version.
So I agree here -- full speed ahead on the 'two-bit' interface. We'll worry about bringing the newbies up to the full dollar after bringing them on board in the first place.
ikaros, who has been trying to convince his folks that he could make them a Linux box they could use
I think the only right response to the question of Linux vs. Windows is Linux without having to qualify it further. Distributions are for simplifying installations, and should be treated as siblings, not rivals. If the Linux community fragments into RH vs SuSE vs Corel vs Debian vs FreeBSD vs Slack vs whatever, Gates wins.
ikaros, off to learn the esoterica of maintaining one's own domain.
I've been a SuSE user for about two years now, off and on, and only lately more on than off. I became committed to SuSE's distro when it configured X for me (6.1, maybe? Kernel 2.2.5 is all I recall for sure) and I didn't have to go through the migraine of getting it configured and running myself.
If anything, 6.3 may be too easy to install ... I prefer a commandline prompt, and wasn't given the option to boot to ASCII during the much-too-simple-to-screw-up graphical install.
Yes, this is a mighty step forward in getting Linux to the masses; installation was quick and painless, with minimal intervention required. And while I'll continue to fret about the dumbing-down of software to the lowest common user, the fact is that Linux installs have to be simplified if it's going to take over the desktop.
My first Linux install was an old Yggdrasil system, kernel 1.0.something, on a 20MHz 386SX with a whopping 4Mb RAM. Sure, it was a pain (don't even ask how long it took to recompile the kernel on that thing), and it was something that I honestly have to admit that the average user wouldn't have the patience to do.
The patience factor has now been taken out of the equation. All anyone has to do now is answer a few simple queries, swap out some CDs, and they've got a system that boots straight to X. The most complicated thing an end user is now expected to know is how to get into BIOS to make the system boot from CD.
And still ... I worry. I don't want to see Linux get dumbed down strictly for the purpose of competing with Microsoft -- if that happens, Microsoft wins anyway.
I see the results of lowest-common-denominator coding every day -- I wouldn't have a job in tech support if Microsoft wrote code that encouraged users to think about what they were doing as opposed to making them helpless the first time their mouse conks out. Point and click is convenient, but it's also mindless.
The long and short of it is - huzzah for SuSE, who IMO deserves the best distribution recognition; it's the most reliable release I've used, a straight up config is easy, and all the tools are there for the more complex configurations ... just make sure they stay there.
ikaros, anyone who says ignorance is bliss has not seen our call center stats.
I don't want this to sound like flamebait, but if you don't see immediately the possibilities beyond just having a waycool Linux-based PDA, then I hope you're not working in the technology field.
Remember, if the Crusoe can emulate the x86 family, then emulating the PPC, the Alpha and the Motorolas -- or anything else, for that matter -- is just a matter of software.
This has the potential to be the first true multiplatform system. This is what gives it the potential to be both an Intel-killer and a Microsoft killer. The user can run whatever they feel like -- most importantly, x86 compatible apps without having to have an x86.
It's this lack of total portability that's prevented me from completely escaping the evil clutches of Redmond -- I still can't run Poser 4 and Jack Nicklaus 6 on Linux. Wine is a valiant effort, but it's not stable enough for that yet (unless some major breakthrough has been made since the last time I checked in). The Crusoe looks like it's offering me a possible way out.
I'm also stunned by the prices -- a Crusoe-based box is actually within my reach. These guys are serious ... I have to wonder if Paul Allen has any idea the danger he's put his MS holdings into by backing this project.
ikaros, who will almost definitely get one of these systems
That would be Prohias (whose first name eludes me). Spy vs Spy [vs Spy] always were among my faves in the old Mads ... :)
I have ordered a new cable provider, and will cancel my Time Warner cable as soon as Americast is in place. It ain't a solution, but it's an acceptable "think globally, act locally" patch.
For a brief period, I was willing to cut AOL some slack because they left ICQ the hell alone (okay, I will grant that I run ICQ 0.95 or something like that, because I refused to upgrade after AOL bought ICQ). After what happened the last time I upgraded Netscape (force-installing AOL IM on my machine and neither asking my permission nor providing a graceful uninstall), though, AOL promptly returned to its natural position as emergency backup Antichrist of the digital world. I went out and bought Opera that night (IE was never an option, of course).
A media behemoth the size of AOL scares the biologically processed waste matter out of me. TW was already too damn big, and the compression of controlling entities over media should rightfully scare any civil libertarian. There are too few companies controlling too many information flows -- this is not the hallmark of a healthy democracy. Remember CBS's spiking of the tobacco story: it's not unreasonable to think that AOL may try to wield that kind of power over CNN. And consider this: how long will AOL users have before the Time Warner part of the new company demands expunging of all MP3s from their websites?
The only thing about this news that's remotely amusing is watching Microsoft scream "Look! It's a competitor!" Yeah, right, Bill. Talk to me when Steve Case brings out an OS.
ikaros, definitely worried.
> the value of the original entity, as happened with the Standard Oil breakup. This is just false.
> What will happen is the bottom will fall out of the stock price - faced with competition
> from free software, and no longer having the means of forcibly maintaining the existing
> monopoly, the Baby Bills revenue can go nowhere but down.
This is an exceptional point that I can't believe I missed in the talks my friends and I have had on this topic. And it's more than just competing on a fair playing field with Linux, BeOS, etc.
One of the rumored proposals for breakup is into one applications company and two OS companies -- which means that MS faces not only fair competition at long last, but also the meanest, nastiest, hairiest competitor in the industry: themselves.
Both OS houses will naturally try to position themselves as the One True Windows Company. I wouldn't be too shocked to see them go after each other with the same, ah, enthusiasm that MS has always used on competitors.
You know, the more I think about that scenario, the more I like it :)
Meanwhile, BillG, having seen which way the wind was blowing, has himself ready to be CEO/Chairman/President/God-Emperor of MS Applications Corp., which will survive breakup much more easily than the OS side. We can fairly assume (and it has been reported elsewhere in this article thread) that Bill stepping aside has been in the works for some time; either BillG saw the breakup as inevitable a long time ago, or the timing is fortuitous. In either case, it's not a response to the breakup rumors.
I think that the geek buried deep inside him knows that shoddily-coded Windows is hosed as soon as consumers have a fair choice to make, and he wanted to be with what will be the biggest (most profitable, most successful) Baby Bill -- the applications division.
In the main, end users know squat about the OSes and NOSes they use on a minute-by-minute basis. What they care about is how to change the font on the first line of a word-processing document, how to tot up a column in a spreadsheet, how to put a cool background onto a presentation graphics slide.
Take an end user who's accustomed to WordPerfect 8 on Win95. Stick him on a Linux box running fvwm95 (or whatever it's called, I don't use it) as the x manager, running WP8 for Linux. He won't notice a blessed thing different until he goes to open a file and sees a somewhat different directory structure -- IF he even notices that.
A good OS is quiet to the end-user; it should be seen only on power-up and shutdown, and inbetween when config changes are needed. When the system is up, the end-user is focused on the task at hand, which requires officeware, not OS diagnostic tools.
Better than anyone else, BillG knows that Windows is not quiet -- it is a prolonged wail. He's positioned himself to be "on the user's side" so to speak. I know as a support tech, the only thing he and Microsoft have ever done for me is provide me with a lot of opportunities to provide support -- server-side and support-side, Gates isn't there and I don't think he wants to be there.
Long-term, what it looks like to me is that Gates will continue raking in hundreds of times the money that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes for putting out second-rate software that will have a huge following through momentum ... and he will be free to port it to any OS when he no longer has to worry about supporting the monopoly. Microsoft OS Corp (singular or plural) will take the hit a lot harder than MS Applications Corp will, and Ballmer will have a lot more sleepless nights than Gates.
ikaros, who will be quite interested when MS Applications Corp decides to create a Linux port of something ... :)
I think the reason Gates did this is the following: On some deep level, he's admitted to himself that the breakup of Microsoft is inevitable, and he's positioning himself to be in charge of the Baby Bill that gets applications.
Two reasons for this:
Remember, one killer desktop app, and Linux leaps from being currently just a desktop curiosity (let's be honest, that's unfortunately all it is right now, market-wise -- server-side is separate and largely invisible to John Q. Public) to a significant minority or better. Visicalc is what made DOS (and Microsoft, by extension), and all Linux needs is a Visicalc of its own, now that MS is behaving itself for the duration of the trial.
If Gates were to stay with the OS company (or companies) left over after the breakup, he'd be limiting himself to, well, just the OS market. On the applications side, he gets to meddle with the markets for office productivity, games, educational software ... everything but the OS itself, basically.
Hmmm ... when the company's broken up, will IE go to the OS or the application company? Obviously, to hear MS tell the story, it's an 'integral part of the operating system' ... if it goes to the applications company, is there a possibility for further legal action on the basis of perjury? Eeenteresting ... :)
In any case, this is Microsoft -- and Bill -- positioning for the post-breakup world. MS has a long history of ignoring and circumventing paper limits; a breakup is the only way to prevent them from reverting to past behavior.
I for one don't understand why Gates is so resistant to the idea. It was the breakup of Standard Oil that made Rockefeller the first billionaire; in later years, Rockefeller was heard to say that the breakup was the best thing to ever happen to him. A breakup of Microsoft would make Gates wealthy beyond even his dreams.
ikaros, hopping off the soapbox so someone else can use it.