I was going to focus on Japanese internment during WWII, but forget that.
All of those bad things that you mention, I'll acknowledge, but with one difference. We look on all of them as shameful events in our past. Mistakes we made, and hope we don't make again.
We're making them now.
That we made those mistakes in the past doesn't make them right now. In fact, it makes them worse now, because we made them in the past, and acknowledged that they were mistakes. We deliberately and knowingly re-committed them.
I find it interesting that the Beatles, or at least the royalties on their music, may well be one of the driving forces for copyright extension/abomination in the UK.
"Can You imagine what Black Sabbath would have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward would have formed the band in the 14th century? Would "War Pigs" or "The Wizard" have been as powerful if played on medieval instruments like lute, fiddle and harp?"
It's actually pretty decent stuff. I took the CD in for Yoga class one evening, if you can imagine a Yoga class to music by Black Sabbath. (It worked well.)
The difference here is in WHO benefits and WHO is hurt.
Remember that this whole thing is being done by some small startup. Presumably they have only a venture capital budget, and no lobbyist presence, as of yet. Then remember that they're preparing to litigate against the likes of Microsoft, Sun, and IBM, all of who have real budgets and real lobbyist presences.
Whether the patent reform this engenders is the kind we'd like to see is a different question. But I'm sure this effort won't get off the starting blocks.
That is, unless there are players behind the scenes with both budgets and lobbyists, acting on their behalf.
>No party is going to get lockstepped behind him the way the Republicans did Bush, or partly the way the Dems did behind Clinton >before the Republican uprising.
And the nature of the Republican uprising is one of the sadder things that has happened during that time. To be perfectly honest,I don't know much about "Hillary's Health Plan" that instigated the uprising, nor do I even care. What's bad is that we had the opportunity for a national debate on health care, and we squandered it. We did worse than merely squander the chance, as a nation we stuck our fingers in our ears and shouted, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, I'm NOT listening!!!" We didn't even take the time to decide that health care was just fine and didn't need fixing, we just shut the discussion off and focused on something much MORE important - a fishing expedition behind Bill's zipper.
During the 90's and 00's American jobs kept moving overseas, and one of the reasons that kept popping up was health care costs. So regardless of the nature of any health care proposals, to have completely shut down the debate was BAD for us as a nation.
My *next* letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy will have 3 focal points... 1: I like the work he's currently doing on Judiciary with the investigations. This stuff is IMPORTANT! 2: As far as copyright law goes, these days it's not really "all about the artists," as he has told me in letters in the past. If he really believes that, he's being sold a bill of goods by the mafiAA, and I need to dig up substantiation for his.
And the point germane to this thread... 3: Passing ever-more-draconian copyright/DRM legislation is HURTING our media industry. We will NEVER get a regimen this tough forced around the world, no matter how hard we try, and no matter that there are some early exceptions. NONE of this stuff has done spit to stop widespread violation in China and it never will.
Like it or not, the world is changing, and the mafiAA had darned well better learn to cope with it. The current legislative path in the US is coddling them, and allowing them to not cope with a changing world, and at some point they will be completely incapable of playing on the world stage. (figuratively and literally) For an analogy, a favorite on Slashdot is how the movie industry grew up in California, in order to get around the protective laws the stage industry had in New York. If the mafiAA doesn't learn to adapt, world entertainment WILL move elsewhere, it's just a matter of time.
Which is a harder problem - cracking the Chinese copyright violation problem, or teaching Bollywood to make good movies?
SELinux introduces the "role". Sure in most environments you're both "user" and "admin". But when you're acting like a "user" you're generally not doing "admin" things, and vice-versa. In fact, keeping the 2 types of actions well separated is probably a good idea, no matter what the platform. I hear about some dialog that Vista annoys people with, and that's probably not the right model to be using, because of the "auto-OK" effect. The "switch-to-admin role" mechanism IS the responsiblity of Vista. (or Linux, for that matter.)
But no matter how good the cryptography, the best attacks tend to be "human engineering." That's what rjh has really described, a human-engineering attack against the encrypted volume of TrueCrypt. Even if justice is eventually done, the wheels grind slowly, and you're the one getting ground during the whole process until you're exonerated.
Another opportunity to bring up my favorite old, "New York State Thruway" analogy.
Back in the days of uniform 55MpH, that was the speed limit on the New York State Thruway, as well. But the mean speed on the road was somewhere between 65 and 70Mph, so in essence, everyone was breaking the law. Had you obeyed the law and driven 55MpH, everyone would need to change lanes to the bottleneck to traffic you'd become. In this environment the police could stop pretty much *anyone* and know that they were at least speeding. With nearly everyone potentially a lawbreaker, they could institute whatever criteria they chose for stopping someone.
I have no indication that this ever happened, or that there was ever any "selective law enforcement."
But the situation was ripe for abuse.
Now apply the situation to "hacker tools", leaving the definition sufficiently nebulous. They potentially have the tools to haul almost any sophisticated computer user into court, at will. Remember, Al Capone was put behind bars for income tax evasion, not bootlegging, mob hits, or anything like that. Crack any DVDs lately? Used libdvdcss to watch a DVD under Linux? If you're also running Linux, how many of those "standards" could also be taken as "hacking tools?"
I guess this answers my question... What happened to Rose, because TFA referred to her as "ex star".
But then SciFi network is still stuck on the second season, and the available Canadian stations quit carrying Dr. Who. But then again, I've only seen "The Christmas Invasion" so far out of the second season, the rest of the episodes are chewing up space on my Myth box.
You assemble on "The Commons." That's where you put your soap box, stand on it, and start rallying your crowd. I don't think you disagree with that point.
The ***ENTIRE*** question of the moment is whether the Internet is a Commons.
The ***ENTIRE*** problem of the moment is a conflict of answers to that question.
There appears to be enough of a "paper trail" to know that if the original implementors didn't think if the Internet as a Commons to start with, the notion came rather quickly after, even if it wasn't phrased as such. (Though it certainly has been considered a Common for quite a while, now.) One notion that is certainly well known, and conceptually deeply buried in the Internet is "end-to-end", and I don't think that is under any significant dispute. The definition of end-to-end is quite consistent with a Commons, even if they lie in different terminology spaces. (edit: I use "utility" later, so it's appropriate to use it here.) Another term used with respect to the Internet is "Utility." The ISP transports packets, and can bill you for packets transported, just like water, phone, or electricity.
Now for a different perspective. I know I'm putting words in the ISPs mouths, and perhaps they haven't even admitted this to themselves, but... In the long term, I believe the ISPs would like to turn the Internet into a content delivery system with an easy-to-use back-channel for communications. In other words, "Cable TV done right," over whatever convenient physical/logical link. I say "Cable TV done right," because Cable TV doesn't really have the on-demand request capability built in very well. But that's the key, primarily content delivery, content which can be contract-negotiated and revenue-maximized. Oh yeah, maybe we can let some of those "classic Internet" things happen, either as a premium service, or for base charge, as long as they're not a significant revenue issue. (Either by consuming resource, or by being a potential revenue source.)
Now ask the key question... For the moment forget Free Market economics, there really are things more important than the Free Market. Ask this question:
Are the Nation and the People better served by a Commons via a Utility, or by the economic opportunities of Cable TV done right?
Took a while to find any reference to JCL, and there were only 3 in the 330 posts when I scanned. How can you possibly talk about dead or dying IT skills without at least a passing reference to JCL?
I used to do JCL, and was almost decent at it, even had a few procs up in the shared space. JCL was kind of nice, in that nothing happened until Submit. At that point, it's too late. Whatever was going to happen, probably already has. None of this "If I hurry and kill the script maybe I can save the side-effects of that typo" crap.
The moment the term "average user" is put into the sentence, you may as well stop discussion.
To the "average user" the computer is an overly complex appliance. He/she brought it home, plugged in way too many cables, or got a kid to do it for them, turned it on, and it came to life. Then the annoying stuff about Internet setup, again perhaps with the help of a kid, and the computer was ready to use. Of course the business user presumably has IT people to substitute for the kid, but it's the same thing.
Once that's done, well it's a computer, and what the computer does is the way computers are. Every now and then, computers get a virus, or have a BSOD and have to reboot. With time, computers tend to get slower, but that's just because the hardware is static and progress makes it obsolete. (Spyware, what's that?) When the computer gets to be too slow, it's time to get a new one. Those annoying confirmation popups are annoying, because you just click 'OK', but that's the way computers work, even if it is sometimes annoying.
Windows? Well that's just part of a computer, isn't it? Who's annoyed with Windows? I'm annoyed with the computer.
It's perhaps impolite/politically incorrect to refer to oneselves elite, but the Slashdot audience compared to the "average user" really is elite, even though one fraction thinks that the other fraction really isn't.
I can't give you a link, but I believe the biggest fuss was over the early Vista drivers for the nVidia 8xxx series. Oops, google is your friend: "NVIDIA responds to complaints about state of Vista drivers" http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8784 .html
There has been enough fuss recently over "Vista-Certified" graphics drivers that didn't really work well with Vista. So all you need is a driver certification plan that pretty much can't possibly be met in every detail. Then go ahead and be relaxed about the certification - most of the time. When you come across a recalcitrant hardware vendor who provides drivers and/or documentation to Linux, it's time to insist on dotting all I's and crossing all T's.
I've suggested a similar possibility in the old 55MpH days on the New York State Thruway. The official speed limit was 55MpH, but the average speed on the road was somewhere above 65MpH. Nearly everyone on the road was a lawbreaker. So at that point, you can use whatever other criteria you wish, and know that whoever you choose to pull over is breaking at least the speed limit. I have no suspicion or evidence that this "selective law enforcement" was actually happening, but never liked the mere possibility.
My original thought was that Lessig (or someone else) is now equipped to say, "YouTube kept this video around for XXX days with not takedown notice from Disney, and we know that they are aware of its existence. (This latter point may be a tough one, even if someone sends a link to "Disney", it's got to go to a knowledgeable/responsible party.) Therefore Disney has tacitly approved of its existence.
I get the impression from others on this thread that it is perfectly permissible to "selectively enforce" copyright. That sounds a little off to me, because it could also be construed to be discriminatory, which doesn't generally fly too well in court.
Oh, I dunno. Let's say a link to the YouTube video was posted for instance, here: http://www.lessig.org/blog/
At that point I'm not sure that it isn't a legal precedent, because it's knowingly in the hands of someone with the capability to recognize it as such.
When Lessig (or someone else in similar station) knows it, and Disney knows that Lessig knows it, it's a precedent.
>"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
You guys are all making the mistake of interpreting Bill Gates' remark in a technical sense, then playing semantic games about OS/2, NT, etc.
Instead look at this statement politically, and you'll see that Gates was *exactly* correct. OS/2 was the point where, thanks to a shifty business-doublecross, Microsoft cut itself from the apron strings from IBM and emerged as the next 800lb gorilla. They didn't simply come out with a new product that took over the market, they got IBM committed to and preoccupied with a joint development, then brought out their own product and sabotaged the joint development effort. Had OS/2 not existed at the time, Windows would have merely been introduced and grown in the market, like DOS before it. By reframing Windows as a battle with OS/2, already having all of the necessary preload contracts in it's back pocket to make the win, Microsoft was able to be seen as the victor over IBM. Add to Microsoft's preload contracts the fact that at the time the industry was ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see IBM take a fall, and the result was foregone.
So OS/2 and it's link to IBM led to the sea change with Microsoft's dominance.
Was Gates clever enough to have planned it all this way? I don't think so.
Now of course Microsoft is where IBM was back then. The industry is ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see Microsoft take a fall. That doesn't mean they want Microsoft to be gone, just like IBM isn't. But we're about sick of Microsoft's tenure as the 800lb gorilla.
Disney MUST get the video taken down. They have a history of requiring strict compliance with copyright law, perhaps defining it even more strictly than Congress. If they allow this to pass, it sets a precedent. Maintaining copyrights and trademarks requires due diligence, and getting this taken down is part of that due diligence.
No doubt somewhere in the Halls of Disney, lawyers are examining this video very carefully. If they think they can win, they will send the takedown notice, because if they don't it sets a precedent too. Of course in their eyes the worst case is to send a takedown and lose in court. But leaving it stand is second-worst.
I'd like to see what happened to IBM happen to them.
I'd like to see them have to document all of their "public" interfaces and file formats, make that documentation freely (I'd have no objections if they charged for dead-tree, but NO fishy licenses.) and readily available, and either stick by those public interfaces themselves, or publish the changes in a timely manner.
Oh, and this one goes for Intel, too. I'd like to see an end to any sort of "loyalty discounts." The courts took away Microsoft's per-cpu licensing, but Microsoft managed to get the same effect with other terms.
Level playing field. Let them compete on features, security, and quality. Screw this crap about lock-in, exclusive distribution contracts, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to focus on Japanese internment during WWII, but forget that.
All of those bad things that you mention, I'll acknowledge, but with one difference. We look on all of them as shameful events in our past. Mistakes we made, and hope we don't make again.
We're making them now.
That we made those mistakes in the past doesn't make them right now. In fact, it makes them worse now, because we made them in the past, and acknowledged that they were mistakes. We deliberately and knowingly re-committed them.
>Total IBM shop, only the best and most expensive.
IBM isn't an IBM shop, any more.
Hate to disillusion you.
Or one could view "Taxman": http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=101
I find it interesting that the Beatles, or at least the royalties on their music, may well be one of the driving forces for copyright extension/abomination in the UK.
Sabbatum by Rondellus
"Can You imagine what Black Sabbath would have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward would have formed the band in the 14th century? Would "War Pigs" or "The Wizard" have been as powerful if played on medieval instruments like lute, fiddle and harp?"
http://cdbaby.com/cd/rondellus
It's actually pretty decent stuff. I took the CD in for Yoga class one evening, if you can imagine a Yoga class to music by Black Sabbath. (It worked well.)
The difference here is in WHO benefits and WHO is hurt.
Remember that this whole thing is being done by some small startup. Presumably they have only a venture capital budget, and no lobbyist presence, as of yet. Then remember that they're preparing to litigate against the likes of Microsoft, Sun, and IBM, all of who have real budgets and real lobbyist presences.
Whether the patent reform this engenders is the kind we'd like to see is a different question. But I'm sure this effort won't get off the starting blocks.
That is, unless there are players behind the scenes with both budgets and lobbyists, acting on their behalf.
>nVidia won't fix the open source driver or give anyone else the information to do so, so a reverse-engineering effort is necessary.
Then it's not really open source. Perhaps it meets the letter, but clearly not the spirit.
And here I thought the /DNF Easter Egg was an embedded game of Duke Nukem Forever...
Whooooooooosshh
>No party is going to get lockstepped behind him the way the Republicans did Bush, or partly the way the Dems did behind Clinton
>before the Republican uprising.
And the nature of the Republican uprising is one of the sadder things that has happened during that time. To be perfectly honest,I don't know much about "Hillary's Health Plan" that instigated the uprising, nor do I even care. What's bad is that we had the opportunity for a national debate on health care, and we squandered it. We did worse than merely squander the chance, as a nation we stuck our fingers in our ears and shouted, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, I'm NOT listening!!!" We didn't even take the time to decide that health care was just fine and didn't need fixing, we just shut the discussion off and focused on something much MORE important - a fishing expedition behind Bill's zipper.
During the 90's and 00's American jobs kept moving overseas, and one of the reasons that kept popping up was health care costs. So regardless of the nature of any health care proposals, to have completely shut down the debate was BAD for us as a nation.
Given the responses I've gotten from Sen. Leahy, and some of the noises I've heard from him in Washington, I really expected him to be on this list.
He's not.
Makes my *next* letter more urgent to write. Maybe he's merely misguided, and really does think "it's all about the artists."
My *next* letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy will have 3 focal points...
1: I like the work he's currently doing on Judiciary with the investigations. This stuff is IMPORTANT!
2: As far as copyright law goes, these days it's not really "all about the artists," as he has told me in letters in the past. If he really believes that, he's being sold a bill of goods by the mafiAA, and I need to dig up substantiation for his.
And the point germane to this thread...
3: Passing ever-more-draconian copyright/DRM legislation is HURTING our media industry. We will NEVER get a regimen this tough forced around the world, no matter how hard we try, and no matter that there are some early exceptions. NONE of this stuff has done spit to stop widespread violation in China and it never will.
Like it or not, the world is changing, and the mafiAA had darned well better learn to cope with it. The current legislative path in the US is coddling them, and allowing them to not cope with a changing world, and at some point they will be completely incapable of playing on the world stage. (figuratively and literally) For an analogy, a favorite on Slashdot is how the movie industry grew up in California, in order to get around the protective laws the stage industry had in New York. If the mafiAA doesn't learn to adapt, world entertainment WILL move elsewhere, it's just a matter of time.
Which is a harder problem - cracking the Chinese copyright violation problem, or teaching Bollywood to make good movies?
SELinux introduces the "role". Sure in most environments you're both "user" and "admin". But when you're acting like a "user" you're generally not doing "admin" things, and vice-versa. In fact, keeping the 2 types of actions well separated is probably a good idea, no matter what the platform. I hear about some dialog that Vista annoys people with, and that's probably not the right model to be using, because of the "auto-OK" effect. The "switch-to-admin role" mechanism IS the responsiblity of Vista. (or Linux, for that matter.)
But no matter how good the cryptography, the best attacks tend to be "human engineering." That's what rjh has really described, a human-engineering attack against the encrypted volume of TrueCrypt. Even if justice is eventually done, the wheels grind slowly, and you're the one getting ground during the whole process until you're exonerated.
I have no personal knowledge or hearsay about that type of thing happening on the NYST. I was merely pointing out the possibility for it.
Another opportunity to bring up my favorite old, "New York State Thruway" analogy.
Back in the days of uniform 55MpH, that was the speed limit on the New York State Thruway, as well. But the mean speed on the road was somewhere between 65 and 70Mph, so in essence, everyone was breaking the law. Had you obeyed the law and driven 55MpH, everyone would need to change lanes to the bottleneck to traffic you'd become. In this environment the police could stop pretty much *anyone* and know that they were at least speeding. With nearly everyone potentially a lawbreaker, they could institute whatever criteria they chose for stopping someone.
I have no indication that this ever happened, or that there was ever any "selective law enforcement."
But the situation was ripe for abuse.
Now apply the situation to "hacker tools", leaving the definition sufficiently nebulous. They potentially have the tools to haul almost any sophisticated computer user into court, at will. Remember, Al Capone was put behind bars for income tax evasion, not bootlegging, mob hits, or anything like that. Crack any DVDs lately? Used libdvdcss to watch a DVD under Linux? If you're also running Linux, how many of those "standards" could also be taken as "hacking tools?"
I guess this answers my question... What happened to Rose, because TFA referred to her as "ex star".
But then SciFi network is still stuck on the second season, and the available Canadian stations quit carrying Dr. Who. But then again, I've only seen "The Christmas Invasion" so far out of the second season, the rest of the episodes are chewing up space on my Myth box.
You assemble on "The Commons." That's where you put your soap box, stand on it, and start rallying your crowd. I don't think you disagree with that point.
The ***ENTIRE*** question of the moment is whether the Internet is a Commons.
The ***ENTIRE*** problem of the moment is a conflict of answers to that question.
There appears to be enough of a "paper trail" to know that if the original implementors didn't think if the Internet as a Commons to start with, the notion came rather quickly after, even if it wasn't phrased as such. (Though it certainly has been considered a Common for quite a while, now.) One notion that is certainly well known, and conceptually deeply buried in the Internet is "end-to-end", and I don't think that is under any significant dispute. The definition of end-to-end is quite consistent with a Commons, even if they lie in different terminology spaces. (edit: I use "utility" later, so it's appropriate to use it here.) Another term used with respect to the Internet is "Utility." The ISP transports packets, and can bill you for packets transported, just like water, phone, or electricity.
Now for a different perspective. I know I'm putting words in the ISPs mouths, and perhaps they haven't even admitted this to themselves, but... In the long term, I believe the ISPs would like to turn the Internet into a content delivery system with an easy-to-use back-channel for communications. In other words, "Cable TV done right," over whatever convenient physical/logical link. I say "Cable TV done right," because Cable TV doesn't really have the on-demand request capability built in very well. But that's the key, primarily content delivery, content which can be contract-negotiated and revenue-maximized. Oh yeah, maybe we can let some of those "classic Internet" things happen, either as a premium service, or for base charge, as long as they're not a significant revenue issue. (Either by consuming resource, or by being a potential revenue source.)
Now ask the key question... For the moment forget Free Market economics, there really are things more important than the Free Market. Ask this question:
Are the Nation and the People better served by a Commons via a Utility, or by the economic opportunities of Cable TV done right?
Took a while to find any reference to JCL, and there were only 3 in the 330 posts when I scanned. How can you possibly talk about dead or dying IT skills without at least a passing reference to JCL?
I used to do JCL, and was almost decent at it, even had a few procs up in the shared space. JCL was kind of nice, in that nothing happened until Submit. At that point, it's too late. Whatever was going to happen, probably already has. None of this "If I hurry and kill the script maybe I can save the side-effects of that typo" crap.
The moment the term "average user" is put into the sentence, you may as well stop discussion.
To the "average user" the computer is an overly complex appliance. He/she brought it home, plugged in way too many cables, or got a kid to do it for them, turned it on, and it came to life. Then the annoying stuff about Internet setup, again perhaps with the help of a kid, and the computer was ready to use. Of course the business user presumably has IT people to substitute for the kid, but it's the same thing.
Once that's done, well it's a computer, and what the computer does is the way computers are. Every now and then, computers get a virus, or have a BSOD and have to reboot. With time, computers tend to get slower, but that's just because the hardware is static and progress makes it obsolete. (Spyware, what's that?) When the computer gets to be too slow, it's time to get a new one. Those annoying confirmation popups are annoying, because you just click 'OK', but that's the way computers work, even if it is sometimes annoying.
Windows? Well that's just part of a computer, isn't it? Who's annoyed with Windows? I'm annoyed with the computer.
It's perhaps impolite/politically incorrect to refer to oneselves elite, but the Slashdot audience compared to the "average user" really is elite, even though one fraction thinks that the other fraction really isn't.
I can't give you a link, but I believe the biggest fuss was over the early Vista drivers for the nVidia 8xxx series. Oops, google is your friend: "NVIDIA responds to complaints about state of Vista drivers" http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070206-8784 .html
Let's rephrase this...
There has been enough fuss recently over "Vista-Certified" graphics drivers that didn't really work well with Vista. So all you need is a driver certification plan that pretty much can't possibly be met in every detail. Then go ahead and be relaxed about the certification - most of the time. When you come across a recalcitrant hardware vendor who provides drivers and/or documentation to Linux, it's time to insist on dotting all I's and crossing all T's.
I've suggested a similar possibility in the old 55MpH days on the New York State Thruway. The official speed limit was 55MpH, but the average speed on the road was somewhere above 65MpH. Nearly everyone on the road was a lawbreaker. So at that point, you can use whatever other criteria you wish, and know that whoever you choose to pull over is breaking at least the speed limit. I have no suspicion or evidence that this "selective law enforcement" was actually happening, but never liked the mere possibility.
My original thought was that Lessig (or someone else) is now equipped to say, "YouTube kept this video around for XXX days with not takedown notice from Disney, and we know that they are aware of its existence. (This latter point may be a tough one, even if someone sends a link to "Disney", it's got to go to a knowledgeable/responsible party.) Therefore Disney has tacitly approved of its existence.
I get the impression from others on this thread that it is perfectly permissible to "selectively enforce" copyright. That sounds a little off to me, because it could also be construed to be discriminatory, which doesn't generally fly too well in court.
Oh, I dunno. Let's say a link to the YouTube video was posted for instance, here: http://www.lessig.org/blog/
At that point I'm not sure that it isn't a legal precedent, because it's knowingly in the hands of someone with the capability to recognize it as such.
When Lessig (or someone else in similar station) knows it, and Disney knows that Lessig knows it, it's a precedent.
>"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
You guys are all making the mistake of interpreting Bill Gates' remark in a technical sense, then playing semantic games about OS/2, NT, etc.
Instead look at this statement politically, and you'll see that Gates was *exactly* correct. OS/2 was the point where, thanks to a shifty business-doublecross, Microsoft cut itself from the apron strings from IBM and emerged as the next 800lb gorilla. They didn't simply come out with a new product that took over the market, they got IBM committed to and preoccupied with a joint development, then brought out their own product and sabotaged the joint development effort. Had OS/2 not existed at the time, Windows would have merely been introduced and grown in the market, like DOS before it. By reframing Windows as a battle with OS/2, already having all of the necessary preload contracts in it's back pocket to make the win, Microsoft was able to be seen as the victor over IBM. Add to Microsoft's preload contracts the fact that at the time the industry was ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see IBM take a fall, and the result was foregone.
So OS/2 and it's link to IBM led to the sea change with Microsoft's dominance.
Was Gates clever enough to have planned it all this way? I don't think so.
Now of course Microsoft is where IBM was back then. The industry is ready/willing/wanting/hoping to see Microsoft take a fall. That doesn't mean they want Microsoft to be gone, just like IBM isn't. But we're about sick of Microsoft's tenure as the 800lb gorilla.
Disney MUST get the video taken down. They have a history of requiring strict compliance with copyright law, perhaps defining it even more strictly than Congress. If they allow this to pass, it sets a precedent. Maintaining copyrights and trademarks requires due diligence, and getting this taken down is part of that due diligence.
No doubt somewhere in the Halls of Disney, lawyers are examining this video very carefully. If they think they can win, they will send the takedown notice, because if they don't it sets a precedent too. Of course in their eyes the worst case is to send a takedown and lose in court. But leaving it stand is second-worst.
I'd like to see what happened to IBM happen to them.
I'd like to see them have to document all of their "public" interfaces and file formats, make that documentation freely (I'd have no objections if they charged for dead-tree, but NO fishy licenses.) and readily available, and either stick by those public interfaces themselves, or publish the changes in a timely manner.
Oh, and this one goes for Intel, too. I'd like to see an end to any sort of "loyalty discounts." The courts took away Microsoft's per-cpu licensing, but Microsoft managed to get the same effect with other terms.
Level playing field. Let them compete on features, security, and quality. Screw this crap about lock-in, exclusive distribution contracts, etc.