This would be true if Office did not generate any significant revenues, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft actually makes a good bit of money on Office. What will most likely happen is that IE will officially become part of Office. You'll have a "low end suite" that bundles IE, Word, and Outlook Express, and high end suites that bundle "everything". Since SQL Server and Exchange go both with the applications company, Microsoft will probably start building all of their applications to use either SQL Server (hopefully), or Exchange (somebody kill it please). SQL Server will probably wind up running on everything, first, as Office will later on. So, MS will have a totally integrated system at the applications company with a database server as the platform of domination, not the operating system. Within a decade, the Department of Justice will try to break up Microsoft Applications company because Microsoft will have kicked Oracle out of the database business. Here's a nifty scenario: Nothing in the ruling precludes another company from buying Microsoft Windows Company. What if IBM bought the Windows business. Now who would be the titan then?
If you need to break into a sense of the real world for an afternoon, and pinball's just not around anymore, I'd highly recommend taking up shooting. For physical thrills, it's pretty hard to top shooting. You detonate a small bomb in your arms for the express purpose of accelerating a small piece of lead towards a target some 100 yards away. Hitting the target is easier said than done.
To shoot, you need a gun. I'd recommend starting out with a relatively high caliber rifle. You could go assault style but a lot of people prefer bolt action because they are mechanically simpler and are also a lot cheaper. Pistols are ok but this is about sensation, and for sensation its pretty hard to top a high caliber rifle.
What is riflery all about? You pay a few bucks to get into a range. Then, you set up your target at something like 100 yards away. People at the range have a strictly enforced protocol for "clearing" the firing line so this is safe to do. Once your target is set up, everyone checks to make sure no one is beyond the firing line. When it is safe to proceed, you can begin.
Do wear ear and eye protection. Even with ear protection, you'll find that a rifle range is louder than most concerts. And eye protection is just common sense.
You'll load a few cartridges into your rifle, then engage in the seemingly simple but physically difficult act of pressing the rifle against your shoulder, trying to ensure the barrel is parallel in all axises with a track slightly above the bullseye. You will pull the trigger. If you took my advice about the high caliber rifle, the recoil, the noise, the muzzle flash and the gases spewing forth will conspire to kick your body's adrenal glands into overdrive. You will be instinctively afraid of what you have just done. Then, shaking, you'll do it again. If you actually hit the target, you will get an immense sense of satisfaction of mastery over something almost primally powerful - the fire, the explosion, the sulfur and the forces of hell.
Oh yeah, and if you stand next to someone shooting with a high power rifle, the blast wave from the cartridge detonation is often strong enough to knock your hat off even though you may be a few feet away. It's awe inspiring.
Shooting a target may seem to be dumb thing to do, and quite frankly, it's gotta the most boring thing in the world to watch on TV. But that's because TV can't give you the smell, the recoil, the explosion. For a dose of physical reality, it's pretty hard to top standing in the middle of an explosion, and shooting is the safest way to do that.
I mean, sign language is ok, but I would think that typing is simply faster. Perhaps a better use might be to have the computer be able to read facial expresssions in concert with speech recognition. This way you could a real time trek-esque universal translator capable of translating satirical remarks.
It depends. I didn't finish college in order to pursue a video gaming fortune that didn't materialize. Lucky for me I bailed AFTER data structures and assembly. Still, there are things where I need to hit the books and learn something a C/S grad would just know. If I had to do it all over again, I would have graduated and had the knowledge. If I do ever get rich, I'm going back and finishing. Being bright and being educated are not mutually exclusive things.
The traditional justifications for a republic over a pure democracy are as follows:
a. A full democracy is impractical. Getting everyone to vote on something in time of crisis is impossible.
b. Elected representatives tend to be smarter than the constituents.
c. Elected representatives, being people of higher character, will make better decisions than an inflamed populace.
All of these points are no longer valid.
A real democracy is possible because of the Internet.
Elected representatives are not smarter than their consitutients, in any technologically savvy society. Most representatives are lawyers, and, as such, are not even qualified to make decisions about high technology fields such as computers, genetics, or even modern war fighting. You can tell that this is true because of all the stupid laws today's republics are making.
Elected representatives do make impassioned, stupid decisions. The involvement of the United States in Kosovo was arguably one of those.
A republic was a good thing for a country consisting of people with no better than a high school education. But now it is obsolete. The lawyers in Congress are not better qualified to make decisions about the country than an average engineer, and certainly have shown themselves to not have better character.
The best way to reform Congress is to get rid of it. Put the people in charge.
Can't use nuclear weapons. Basically, what's gonna happen is that the Canadian government will offer better deals for US companies to move north. They will, taking US workers with them. In time, millions of Americans overwhelm the local Canadian population, eventually demanding the same sort of system that they left behind. Finally, a few provinces that are overwhelmingly American in population will go for independence and ultimately statehood. What worked with Texas will work with Western provinces.
Or, the alternative scenario is that the north western United States, including Alaska, Oregon, Montana, etc, says screw DC at around the same time BC says screw Ottawa. they form their own country, leaving a smaller United States, a smaller Canada, and a sparsely populated new country with a fairly big amount of land.
In any case, although every American boy's dream is to add western Canada to the United States, the way to do this is not invasion. All that does is fuel Canadian nationalism and thus make it harder for them to be assimilated. Better to just let our numbers work their course... spread the values up north, and let them volunteer.
Even if they were going to move, they'd deny it at this point. The prudent thing to do is leak the plan, then wait a year or two for DOJ to go through, then move based on "some other reason". There are plenty of other reasons for considering a move. If Canada winds up with better immigration laws, puts a "better" anti-trust system on the table, or even has some advantages in trading with Europe that the US might lose in a stupid trade war over genetically doctored food, then Canada will be a better place for doing business. If the actions of the US government piss off the rest of the world, and make it difficult for a company flying the US flag to operate overseas, then Canada will be a better place for US business.
Sure, it might be a stupid rumour, but I wouldn't dismiss the plan with the logic of "it's impossible, or America is inherently better". We made this mistake with manufacturing in the 1970's and 1980's, and we could easily make it with technology.
The issue with taxation is not at all relevant to Microsoft. Microsoft's entire plan rests on leveraging Windows. If Microsoft can move to Canada in an attempt to escape United States interference, they would do so. They would gladly trade a higher tax rate for the right to keep their business model intact. A trend has been started. If the Canadian Government can sell a higher tax rate in exchange for less anti-trust interference, then Microsoft will not be the first American company to even consider jumping ship. What about AOL/Time Warner? We Americans should not be so arrogant to presume that the United States is the best place on the continent to run a software company, or we risk losing them to an aggressive neighbor up north. Hey, as long as the United States fancies itself to be a sort of modern Roman Republic, it risks making the same mistakes.
Actually, Government is exactly like Microsoft software. Every year the politicians here complaints from the people, so they add new features to the government. As a result, government gets larger, bulkier, and more bloated. This in turn introduces new problems, which causes even larger government. Gates and company would fit right in.
One of the few things that Microsoft actually did reasonably well was to build Unicode support into Windows NT. It's possible a program where your char is a unicode char without too much trouble. Unfortunately, such a program will not run on Windows 95/98, which do not offer much in Unicode support.
So...
Once Windows 9x dies, Unicode will become vastly more prevalent, at least on M$ platforms.
The problem with the breakup being done by the courts is that it establishes legal precedence for prohibiting anyone who has a platform from leveraging it to do something else. I imagine every major technology company is going to be sued for billions of dollars by that dangerous and unusual creature that deserves to be shot, not made an officer of the court. At some point, someone will sue Sun, then someone will sue IBM. They will all use the magic word: "precedent", which is really just law made by the courts without a popular vote. Ultimately the entire United States technology will be sued out of existence or forced to relocate to a country where lawyers are not so malignant.
Today's ruling is no different than the slate of government actions that crippled US manufacturing in the 1970's. Just like Akron Ohio is filled with empty buildings that used to make things, so too will be the offices of Silicon Valley.
People seem to think that because Microsoft was dangerous, AOL-Time Warner could not be, or vice versa. Any concentration of power, be it in government or a private institution, is inherently dangerous. The conveniences that come from concentrated power always must be weighed against the abuses of that power.
Replacability is the issue, it requires careful monitoring for network effects. In the case of AOL, all sorts of abuse is possible. First, because AOL now has a pretty huge cable infrastructure, they have the power to subtly stifle non AOL content. If it is bad to link an operating system with applications, then it is doubly bad to link content to the network that hosts it. Microsoft threatened speech for software developers, AOL/Time Warner threatens free speech for everyone.
While the abuse of power may not be present in AOL, it is entire reasonable to view AOL / Time Warner with considerable alarm. The benefits of the merger do not conceivably merit the amount of power they have accrued as a result of it.
This does not say that because AOL / Time Warner is worse than Microsoft's actions are ok. Whether you got shot in the head ten times or one time doesn't change the fact that you will probably die.
Microsoft should be allowed to bundle open APIs but not applications. Should be allowed to add whatever programmatic interface they want to Windows, but not bundle any application with it. If necessary, break the company up along those lines.
But...
The AOL / Time Warner Merger should not have been approved, and in time will prove itself to be even bigger disaster than MS-DOS.
I propose that we remember what civility, and, in particular, the American ideal is supposed to be: don't put down my weird habits, and I won't put down yours. If you like guys having sex with guys, I might think that's sick, but, by all means go ahead, just so long as you don't try and take away my assault rifle. It follows then, if someone is disrupting the weird behavior of one group, then a dangerous ground has been broken. If it is ok to bash one group for its quirky behavior, then it is ok to bash them all. First on the streets, then in the press, then in the politics, group bashing escalates and this can only lead to civil war. Censorship is a tool of this conflict, and so to promote censorship is to promote war.
So... the next time you see a web site that is getting hammered because you think it is disgusting, stand up for that site - making it clear that you expect quid pro quo for your support. Say "I'll defend your right to have your sick lifestyle if you'll defend my right to have mine." Some people are into packing fudge. Some people are into collecting and shooting assault rifles. It's a sick world but it can be all good. We just have to remember that if we don't let anyone dampen someone's freedom, then nobody will dampen our own.
I bought a Dreamcast. I had some fun with it. Then I got a GeForce 256 + SB Live!, and my life was ruined thanks to Unreal Tournament. If you do not have a computer, then consoles are ok. If you have a computer, then a console is a waste.
Let's face it. Global warming is becoming a reality and the United States is going to get baked. Since the Canadians are disarmed, it ought to be pretty easy to send in the army and take the land.
A US Invasion of Canada would have many benefits. If Canada was a part of the United States, it wouldn't matter if Quebec left. If Canada was a part of the United States, it wouldn't matter. Finally, if Canada was a part of the United States, Canadians might be able to afford a halfway decent hockey team.
Microsoft's post-crash market valuation is still larger than Canada's GDP. You guys don't have crime because you don't anything worth stealing. Watcom was cool, but where are they now? I mean, you can't even field a professional team competitive in your own national sport. That's too funny.
flamebait. heh heh. Bet you wish you had that 357 now.
Now, here's the British guy complaining about the US and its traditions, with all of his traditional British stubborn disregard for the facts.
The British guy brings up the Salem Witch Hunts as an example of religious persecution in America. Hmm.. I'd take a few folks bumped off in Salem versus the several hundred years of Catholic oppression at the hands of the Church of England.
If guns were so easy to ban, then don't you think the IRA would have been disbanned by now? How many guns do the IRA have? In America, if someone like the IRA tried to do something, a bar full of citizens would just shoot the guy.
Life under British Leadership can best be summed up with one anecdote. Ireland was NEUTRAL when London was being bombed.
Guns 101
1/2 of all US Gun Deaths are suicides.
90% of the balance of US Gun Deaths are committed by people with prior felony convictions. During the last 8 years, less than 100 people with prior felony convictions were ever prosecuted for attempting to possess a firearm - already illegal in the US.
More people catch AIDS in the US than die from guns. Should we register people with AIDS? How about a database to look up who we might be sleeping with?
It's time for the British to get involved in American politics in the way they were destined to do so. Lose the royals and become a state. Britian as a state might rank right up their with New Hampshire or something.
Oh, and if they do this, what sort of TV do you think Microsoft is going to get via CNN? The moment AOL gets shafted by Microsoft, AOL starts running stories, daily, about "this Microsoft bug, that Microsoft problem... the troubled Microsoft".
While Microsoft was a monopoly from 1995 - 1998, owing to the overwhelming success of Windows 95, the changing state of computers has done more to level the competitive playing field than any consent decree possibly could.
Much has been written about Microsoft's ability to dominate the desktop. Nearly every Microsoft basher worries that Microsoft will be able to leverage its strong desktop position into a powerful server and internet position. They argue that Microsoft will assimilate like the Borg, spread like a virus, but the numbers simply do not bear this out.
IF Microsoft were a classic monopoly, they would try and leverage IE into forcing NT / Win2K sales. IE now dominates the Windows desktop space - it's bundled after all. However, as much as IE has gone up, the use of IIS and WinNT as a web server has remained even at best in terms of share. In fact, IIS is starting to go DOWN against Apache.
You would think that since Microsoft completely owns the client, that they would be able to force Windows NT as a server, or at least provide a compelling reason to use NT over some other server technology. They have not. Windows NT / 2000 market shares are steady, not increasing. Indeed, Linux is the growth player in operating systems. Not Windows.
One might also think that because Microsoft rules the desktop, they ought to be able to leverage an online service. This has been the biggest and most damning failure of the company. MSN has been bundled into Windows 95 since the get go. This alarmed a lot of people, but as it turned out, AOL not only succeeded in the face of this, but triumphed. While MSN goes from being a core part of the operating system to being a web based streaming media thing to a web based thing to possibly up for sale to something else, AOL has become the dominant owner of not only network infrastructure (Cable), but content (Time / CNN / etc). At AOLs level, the choice of browser or even operating system is almost trivial and is certainly non-relevant.
All of the talk about Microsoft dominating the Internet has been just that, talk. That they destroyed Netscape was sad, but in the grand scheme of things the destruction bought them absolutely nothing. They have not dominated the server market. They have not dominated the online services market. They have not even protected their interest in retaining control of the PC - internet appliances are all the rage. Microsoft is about to be slammed by the justice for committing a crime that had no reward. In retrospect, the destruction of Netscape was a phyrric victory, a business decision that achieved none of its objectives for a price that may ultimately threaten the business itself. You may not like the destruction of Netscape because you whine and sob, Cat Stevens like, about the evils of capitalism. But even the most hardcore capitalist at this point has to conclude that the destruction of Netscape was not even very smart.
A straight up Microsoft port of Office would probably be unrealistic. A more realistic Linux strategy would go something like this.
Windows everywhere - Linux for Windows --------------------------------------- First off, get the Windows GUI and Direct X running on top of Linux. It's probably easier to do this than to port MS applications to Linux piecemeal. They would release a Linux distribution with an open source kernal, plus whatever modifications they needed to make, with those modifications needed for open source. I would think MsgWaitForMultipleObjects and its ilk would have to go in the kernal, open source, and the GUI is a binary. If they kept the GUI close source and the kernal open source, they still might be able to protect their driver hegemony and perhaps actually strengthen it. They should probably include an IIS. Few apache users would switch, but it would protect IIS from further Apache inroads.
A Microsoft Linux would immediately weaken Red Hat, SuSE, and other Linux distributions. Only the Microsoft Linux would be compatible with the Windows applications, or at least Microsoft could claim that. If the distribution was available for free download and charged for support, ALA Red Hat, then Microsoft would still make a lot of money, could still claim that they were giving Windows away, without really losing any money on the deal.
Tools for Linux --------------- Right off the bat there is no reason that a next generation version of SQL Server could not run on Linux. This would attack Oracle on a platform that many feel is better than Solaris, and further weaken arch-enemy Sun. Linux may hurt Windows, but it hurts Solaris even more.
A Visual C++ port to Linux would make some things simpler, but no Unix person in his or her right mind would accept MFC. In fact, few Windows people in their right minds accept MFC. Still, Visual C++ is pricey and would do little to detract from those people who are comfortable with GCC, but still, a lot of people like an IDE and while no one can say that Visual C++ is the best everyone can at least admit that the IDE/debugger combination is popular. Still, with Linux Visual C++, Microsoft could then have carte blanche to extend the language in ways that they cannot with Java.
Finally, a VB port to Linux has real potential to be a Java killer. With Windows running "everywhere", the portability argument of Java would be a lot less relevant. If the next version of VB actually delivers on the promises that Microsoft has made, then VB would be a credible cross platform environment and an ideal way for Microsoft to quietly put the long awaited skewer through MFC.
FoxPro is nice, but at this stage irrelevant, and few Windows people actually like InterDev.
Office for Linux. ---------------- With that foundation, MS could then assess whether or not Office for Linux makes sense. The brand differences in Windows proper and Linux proper would probably drive the OS market. If Microsoft gave up Windows 2000 altogether, and stuck to their Linux distribution, they would immediately circumvent the whole DOJ issue from the get go, on paper, while in reality doing little to change the overall situation. At this point, with a pretty good database running on Linux, with their own Linux distribution, the Microsoft Windows monopoly would be enhanced and supplanted by the Microsoft Linux monopoly. If Office found its way to Linux, it would be on Microsoft Linux, and the world would be fundamentally the same except that Windows would have a better shell.
Before you go and rip big menus, consider that one of the things a big menu does is provide immediate, discoverable access into what a program does.
A lot of responses to questions about an application are "Read the f____ manual". Why should anyone have to read a manual? Computers are interactive - a good application should train users on how to use it.
A good computer is one that requires no education or training to begin using it.
A GUI is not about making it graphic or pretty because it will somehow make things easier. A GUI does not assert that clicking a bunch of things with a mouse is even more efficient than simply typing ls |grep something. A GUI does asserts that the biggest productivity problem is figuring out what an application can do! BeOS to some extent and Linux, most definately, miss this point entirely.
On the flipside, we have the Evil Empire. While MS has been uneven in their pursuit of GUI, they've at least been willing to take some pretty big risks with their applications in the pursuit of discoverability. Nobody asked for the stupid dancing paperclip, and, in Office 97, it's more annoying than useful, but the idea of an intelligent application, of an application interacted with as if it is a person, is an idea whose time has come. I hope they stick with it, so in the very least we can learn from their mistakes. The vision is good, even if the implementation is not.
Programmers demand consistency in the tools that they use. There are holy wars about open standards, and indeed, standardization is the hallmark of the Java movement and forms a key part of the Linux movement.
Why is it so unreasonable to think that what benefits the programmer benefits the user? Programmers reject adding special keywords to Java to make it easier to deal with COM objects, and to support some additional languages, or modifying a C++ implementation to support __int64 or __int32, etc, ala Microsoft. If consistency is so important to them, then why cannot they at least respect the user enough to settle on a set of keystrokes for common things... File operations, window moving, minimizing, maximizing, etc, printing, selecting and deselecting are all well defined interfaces and should be standard. I can't stand to use Linux's GUI because it is such a horrible mess. I detest Be's goofy switcharoo on ALT-CTRL and the lack of accelerators on menus.
User interface and consistency of applications designed for idiots is something Microsoft has done reasonably well. The best thing a Linux GUI developer could possibly do would be to write applications based on ideally the Windows 9x design guide, but at least the CUA STANDARD.
Well, it was a troll. I wrote the specific posts somewhat ticked off that some Europeans posted to the effect "Well, the Americans are clueless and need to be educated." The United States is not perfect, but I think that there is room for argument that American society is as good as European society, better in some ways and worse in others. I like Europeans but I loath what seems to be to be a general European presumption of cultural superiority. It is not just the Microsoft case... the other was that when ECHELON busted Airbus for trying to bribe a foreign government for an order, the EU report cried foul for the COMINT as if the bribe was all fair and good. Similarly, I do not like the idea of market intervention, pro, or con. European markets tend to have more of that. American market places have it too, and I do not like that either. As far as immigration goes, I think that that anyone who has half a brain who wants to come to America and be it a citizen should be allowed to, yes, even from Europe.
I also have Linux on the same machine. I'm buying the release on Feb 17, and also will have installed Suse 6.3 (my favorite distro) on the same. My machine is a dual pentium II, 256Mb RAM, Adaptec 2940U2W + Seagate Barracuda. If you want to run some benchmarks on the two versus the two, let me know and I'd be happy to do so. I'm curious to see for myself. I'm writing a simple server to show a Unix friend how IO Completion ports / threads can be used to do fast I/O on Win2K.. I'll post into PD...would like to see how one would do the same kind of task in the fastest possible way under Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be true if Office did not generate any significant revenues, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft actually makes a good bit of money on Office. What will most likely happen is that IE will officially become part of Office. You'll have a "low end suite" that bundles IE, Word, and Outlook Express, and high end suites that bundle "everything". Since SQL Server and Exchange go both with the applications company, Microsoft will probably start building all of their applications to use either SQL Server (hopefully), or Exchange (somebody kill it please). SQL Server will probably wind up running on everything, first, as Office will later on. So, MS will have a totally integrated system at the applications company with a database server as the platform of domination, not the operating system. Within a decade, the Department of Justice will try to break up Microsoft Applications company because Microsoft will have kicked Oracle out of the database business. Here's a nifty scenario: Nothing in the ruling precludes another company from buying Microsoft Windows Company. What if IBM bought the Windows business. Now who would be the titan then?
If you need to break into a sense of the real world for an afternoon, and pinball's just not around anymore, I'd highly recommend taking up shooting. For physical thrills, it's pretty hard to top shooting. You detonate a small bomb in your arms for the express purpose of accelerating a small piece of lead towards a target some 100 yards away. Hitting the target is easier said than done.
To shoot, you need a gun. I'd recommend starting out with a relatively high caliber rifle. You could go assault style but a lot of people prefer bolt action because they are mechanically simpler and are also a lot cheaper. Pistols are ok but this is about sensation, and for sensation its pretty hard to top a high caliber rifle.
What is riflery all about? You pay a few bucks to get into a range. Then, you set up your target at something like 100 yards away. People at the range have a strictly enforced protocol for "clearing" the firing line so this is safe to do. Once your target is set up, everyone checks to make sure no one is beyond the firing line. When it is safe to proceed, you can begin.
Do wear ear and eye protection. Even with ear protection, you'll find that a rifle range is louder than most concerts. And eye protection is just common sense.
You'll load a few cartridges into your rifle, then engage in the seemingly simple but physically difficult act of pressing the rifle against your shoulder, trying to ensure the barrel is parallel in all axises with a track slightly above the bullseye. You will pull the trigger. If you took my advice about the high caliber rifle, the recoil, the noise, the muzzle flash and the gases spewing forth will conspire to kick your body's adrenal glands into overdrive. You will be instinctively afraid of what you have just done. Then, shaking, you'll do it again. If you actually hit the target, you will get an immense sense of satisfaction of mastery over something almost primally powerful - the fire, the explosion, the sulfur and the forces of hell.
Oh yeah, and if you stand next to someone shooting with a high power rifle, the blast wave from the cartridge detonation is often strong enough to knock your hat off even though you may be a few feet away. It's awe inspiring.
Shooting a target may seem to be dumb thing to do, and quite frankly, it's gotta the most boring thing in the world to watch on TV. But that's because TV can't give you the smell, the recoil, the explosion. For a dose of physical reality, it's pretty hard to top standing in the middle of an explosion, and shooting is the safest way to do that.
I mean, sign language is ok, but I would think that typing is simply faster. Perhaps a better use might be to have the computer be able to read facial expresssions in concert with speech recognition. This way you could a real time trek-esque universal translator capable of translating satirical remarks.
Oh, come on, and you've never, ever strummed an air guitar or held an imaginary gun. Ever? Ever? Are you like even human?
It depends. I didn't finish college in order to pursue a video gaming fortune that didn't materialize. Lucky for me I bailed AFTER data structures and assembly. Still, there are things where I need to hit the books and learn something a C/S grad would just know. If I had to do it all over again, I would have graduated and had the knowledge. If I do ever get rich, I'm going back and finishing. Being bright and being educated are not mutually exclusive things.
The traditional justifications for a republic over a pure democracy are as follows:
a. A full democracy is impractical. Getting everyone to vote on something in time of crisis is impossible.
b. Elected representatives tend to be smarter than the constituents.
c. Elected representatives, being people of higher character, will make better decisions than an inflamed populace.
All of these points are no longer valid.
A real democracy is possible because of the Internet.
Elected representatives are not smarter than their consitutients, in any technologically savvy society. Most representatives are lawyers, and, as such, are not even qualified to make decisions about high technology fields such as computers, genetics, or even modern war fighting. You can tell that this is true because of all the stupid laws today's republics are making.
Elected representatives do make impassioned, stupid decisions. The involvement of the United States in Kosovo was arguably one of those.
A republic was a good thing for a country consisting of people with no better than a high school education. But now it is obsolete. The lawyers in Congress are not better qualified to make decisions about the country than an average engineer, and certainly have shown themselves to not have better character.
The best way to reform Congress is to get rid of it. Put the people in charge.
Can't use nuclear weapons. Basically, what's gonna happen is that the Canadian government will offer better deals for US companies to move north. They will, taking US workers with them. In time, millions of Americans overwhelm the local Canadian population, eventually demanding the same sort of system that they left behind. Finally, a few provinces that are overwhelmingly American in population will go for independence and ultimately statehood. What worked with Texas will work with Western provinces.
Or, the alternative scenario is that the north western United States, including Alaska, Oregon, Montana, etc, says screw DC at around the same time BC says screw Ottawa. they form their own country, leaving a smaller United States, a smaller Canada, and a sparsely populated new country with a fairly big amount of land.
In any case, although every American boy's dream is to add western Canada to the United States, the way to do this is not invasion. All that does is fuel Canadian nationalism and thus make it harder for them to be assimilated. Better to just let our numbers work their course... spread the values up north, and let them volunteer.
Even if they were going to move, they'd deny it at this point. The prudent thing to do is leak the plan, then wait a year or two for DOJ to go through, then move based on "some other reason". There are plenty of other reasons for considering a move. If Canada winds up with better immigration laws, puts a "better" anti-trust system on the table, or even has some advantages in trading with Europe that the US might lose in a stupid trade war over genetically doctored food, then Canada will be a better place for doing business. If the actions of the US government piss off the rest of the world, and make it difficult for a company flying the US flag to operate overseas, then Canada will be a better place for US business.
Sure, it might be a stupid rumour, but I wouldn't dismiss the plan with the logic of "it's impossible, or America is inherently better". We made this mistake with manufacturing in the 1970's and 1980's, and we could easily make it with technology.
The issue with taxation is not at all relevant to Microsoft. Microsoft's entire plan rests on leveraging Windows. If Microsoft can move to Canada in an attempt to escape United States interference, they would do so. They would gladly trade a higher tax rate for the right to keep their business model intact. A trend has been started. If the Canadian Government can sell a higher tax rate in exchange for less anti-trust interference, then Microsoft will not be the first American company to even consider jumping ship. What about AOL/Time Warner? We Americans should not be so arrogant to presume that the United States is the best place on the continent to run a software company, or we risk losing them to an aggressive neighbor up north. Hey, as long as the United States fancies itself to be a sort of modern Roman Republic, it risks making the same mistakes.
Actually, Government is exactly like Microsoft software. Every year the politicians here complaints from the people, so they add new features to the government. As a result, government gets larger, bulkier, and more bloated. This in turn introduces new problems, which causes even larger government. Gates and company would fit right in.
The source is strong with you, young Torvalds, but you are not a billionaire yet.
One of the few things that Microsoft actually did reasonably well was to build Unicode support into Windows NT. It's possible a program where your char is a unicode char without too much trouble. Unfortunately, such a program will not run on Windows 95/98, which do not offer much in Unicode support.
So...
Once Windows 9x dies, Unicode will become vastly more prevalent, at least on M$ platforms.
The problem with the breakup being done by the courts is that it establishes legal precedence for prohibiting anyone who has a platform from leveraging it to do something else. I imagine every major technology company is going to be sued for billions of dollars by that dangerous and unusual creature that deserves to be shot, not made an officer of the court. At some point, someone will sue Sun, then someone will sue IBM. They will all use the magic word: "precedent", which is really just law made by the courts without a popular vote. Ultimately the entire United States technology will be sued out of existence or forced to relocate to a country where lawyers are not so malignant.
Today's ruling is no different than the slate of government actions that crippled US manufacturing in the 1970's. Just like Akron Ohio is filled with empty buildings that used to make things, so too will be the offices of Silicon Valley.
People seem to think that because Microsoft was dangerous, AOL-Time Warner could not be, or vice versa. Any concentration of power, be it in government or a private institution, is inherently dangerous. The conveniences that come from concentrated power always must be weighed against the abuses of that power.
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Replacability is the issue, it requires careful monitoring for network effects. In the case of AOL, all sorts of abuse is possible. First, because AOL now has a pretty huge cable infrastructure, they have the power to subtly stifle non AOL content. If it is bad to link an operating system with applications, then it is doubly bad to link content to the network that hosts it. Microsoft threatened speech for software developers, AOL/Time Warner threatens free speech for everyone.
While the abuse of power may not be present in AOL, it is entire reasonable to view AOL / Time Warner with considerable alarm. The benefits of the merger do not conceivably merit the amount of power they have accrued as a result of it.
This does not say that because AOL / Time Warner is worse than Microsoft's actions are ok. Whether you got shot in the head ten times or one time doesn't change the fact that you will probably die.
Microsoft should be allowed to bundle open APIs but not applications. Should be allowed to add whatever programmatic interface they want to Windows, but not bundle any application with it. If necessary, break the company up along those lines.
But
The AOL / Time Warner Merger should not have been approved, and in time will prove itself to be even bigger disaster than MS-DOS.
I propose that we remember what civility, and, in particular, the American ideal is supposed to be: don't put down my weird habits, and I won't put down yours. If you like guys having sex with guys, I might think that's sick, but, by all means go ahead, just so long as you don't try and take away my assault rifle. It follows then, if someone is disrupting the weird behavior of one group, then a dangerous ground has been broken. If it is ok to bash one group for its quirky behavior, then it is ok to bash them all. First on the streets, then in the press, then in the politics, group bashing escalates and this can only lead to civil war. Censorship is a tool of this conflict, and so to promote censorship is to promote war.
So... the next time you see a web site that is getting hammered because you think it is disgusting, stand up for that site - making it clear that you expect quid pro quo for your support. Say "I'll defend your right to have your sick lifestyle if you'll defend my right to have mine." Some people are into packing fudge. Some people are into collecting and shooting assault rifles. It's a sick world but it can be all good. We just have to remember that if we don't let anyone dampen someone's freedom, then nobody will dampen our own.
I bought a Dreamcast. I had some fun with it. Then I got a GeForce 256 + SB Live!, and my life was ruined thanks to Unreal Tournament. If you do not have a computer, then consoles are ok. If you have a computer, then a console is a waste.
Let's face it. Global warming is becoming a reality and the United States is going to get baked. Since the Canadians are disarmed, it ought to be pretty easy to send in the army and take the land.
A US Invasion of Canada would have many benefits. If Canada was a part of the United States, it wouldn't matter if Quebec left. If Canada was a part of the United States, it wouldn't matter. Finally, if Canada was a part of the United States, Canadians might be able to afford a halfway decent hockey team.
Microsoft's post-crash market valuation is still larger than Canada's GDP. You guys don't have crime because you don't anything worth stealing. Watcom was cool, but where are they now? I mean, you can't even field a professional team competitive in your own national sport. That's too funny.
flamebait. heh heh. Bet you wish you had that 357 now.
:-)
Now, here's the British guy complaining about the US and its traditions, with all of his traditional British stubborn disregard for the facts.
The British guy brings up the Salem Witch Hunts as an example of religious persecution in America. Hmm.. I'd take a few folks bumped off in Salem versus the several hundred years of Catholic oppression at the hands of the Church of England.
If guns were so easy to ban, then don't you think the IRA would have been disbanned by now? How many guns do the IRA have? In America, if someone like the IRA tried to do something, a bar full of citizens would just shoot the guy.
Life under British Leadership can best be summed up with one anecdote. Ireland was NEUTRAL when London was being bombed.
Guns 101
1/2 of all US Gun Deaths are suicides.
90% of the balance of US Gun Deaths are committed by people with prior felony convictions. During the last 8 years, less than 100 people with prior felony convictions were ever prosecuted for attempting to possess a firearm - already illegal in the US.
More people catch AIDS in the US than die from guns. Should we register people with AIDS? How about a database to look up who we might be sleeping with?
It's time for the British to get involved in American politics in the way they were destined to do so. Lose the royals and become a state. Britian as a state might rank right up their with New Hampshire or something.
Oh, and if they do this, what sort of TV do you think Microsoft is going to get via CNN? The moment AOL gets shafted by Microsoft, AOL starts running stories, daily, about "this Microsoft bug, that Microsoft problem... the troubled Microsoft".
While Microsoft was a monopoly from 1995 - 1998, owing to the overwhelming success of Windows 95, the changing state of computers has done more to level the competitive playing field than any consent decree possibly could.
Much has been written about Microsoft's ability to dominate the desktop. Nearly every Microsoft basher worries that Microsoft will be able to leverage its strong desktop position into a powerful server and internet position. They argue that Microsoft will assimilate like the Borg, spread like a virus, but the numbers simply do not bear this out.
IF Microsoft were a classic monopoly, they would try and leverage IE into forcing NT / Win2K sales. IE now dominates the Windows desktop space - it's bundled after all. However, as much as IE has gone up, the use of IIS and WinNT as a web server has remained even at best in terms of share. In fact, IIS is starting to go DOWN against Apache.
You would think that since Microsoft completely owns the client, that they would be able to force Windows NT as a server, or at least provide a compelling reason to use NT over some other server technology. They have not. Windows NT / 2000 market shares are steady, not increasing. Indeed, Linux is the growth player in operating systems. Not Windows.
One might also think that because Microsoft rules the desktop, they ought to be able to leverage an online service. This has been the biggest and most damning failure of the company. MSN has been bundled into Windows 95 since the get go. This alarmed a lot of people, but as it turned out, AOL not only succeeded in the face of this, but triumphed. While MSN goes from being a core part of the operating system to being a web based streaming media thing to a web based thing to possibly up for sale to something else, AOL has become the dominant owner of not only network infrastructure (Cable), but content (Time / CNN / etc). At AOLs level, the choice of browser or even operating system is almost trivial and is certainly non-relevant.
All of the talk about Microsoft dominating the Internet has been just that, talk. That they destroyed Netscape was sad, but in the grand scheme of things the destruction bought them absolutely nothing. They have not dominated the server market. They have not dominated the online services market. They have not even protected their interest in retaining control of the PC - internet appliances are all the rage. Microsoft is about to be slammed by the justice for committing a crime that had no reward. In retrospect, the destruction of Netscape was a phyrric victory, a business decision that achieved none of its objectives for a price that may ultimately threaten the business itself. You may not like the destruction of Netscape because you whine and sob, Cat Stevens like, about the evils of capitalism. But even the most hardcore capitalist at this point has to conclude that the destruction of Netscape was not even very smart.
A straight up Microsoft port of Office would probably be unrealistic. A more realistic Linux strategy would go something like this.
Windows everywhere - Linux for Windows
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First off, get the Windows GUI and Direct X running on top of Linux. It's probably easier to do this than to port MS applications to Linux piecemeal. They would release a Linux distribution with an open source kernal, plus whatever modifications they needed to make, with those modifications needed for open source. I would think MsgWaitForMultipleObjects and its ilk would have to go in the kernal, open source, and the GUI is a binary. If they kept the GUI close source and the kernal open source, they still might be able to protect their driver hegemony and perhaps actually strengthen it. They should probably include an IIS. Few apache users would switch, but it would protect IIS from further Apache inroads.
A Microsoft Linux would immediately weaken Red Hat, SuSE, and other Linux distributions. Only the Microsoft Linux would be compatible with the Windows applications, or at least Microsoft could claim that. If the distribution was available for free download and charged for support, ALA Red Hat, then Microsoft would still make a lot of money, could still claim that they were giving Windows away, without really losing any money on the deal.
Tools for Linux
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Right off the bat there is no reason that a next generation version of SQL Server could not run on Linux. This would attack Oracle on a platform that many feel is better than Solaris, and further weaken arch-enemy Sun. Linux may hurt Windows, but it hurts Solaris even more.
A Visual C++ port to Linux would make some things simpler, but no Unix person in his or her right mind would accept MFC. In fact, few Windows people in their right minds accept MFC. Still, Visual C++ is pricey and would do little to detract from those people who are comfortable with GCC, but still, a lot of people like an IDE and while no one can say that Visual C++ is the best everyone can at least admit that the IDE/debugger combination is popular. Still, with Linux Visual C++, Microsoft could then have carte blanche to extend the language in ways that they cannot with Java.
Finally, a VB port to Linux has real potential to be a Java killer. With Windows running "everywhere", the portability argument of Java would be a lot less relevant. If the next version of VB actually delivers on the promises that Microsoft has made, then VB would be a credible cross platform environment and an ideal way for Microsoft to quietly put the long awaited skewer through MFC.
FoxPro is nice, but at this stage irrelevant, and few Windows people actually like InterDev.
Office for Linux.
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With that foundation, MS could then assess whether or not Office for Linux makes sense. The brand differences in Windows proper and Linux proper would probably drive the OS market. If Microsoft gave up Windows 2000 altogether, and stuck to their Linux distribution, they would immediately circumvent the whole DOJ issue from the get go, on paper, while in reality doing little to change the overall situation. At this point, with a pretty good database running on Linux, with their own Linux distribution, the Microsoft Windows monopoly would be enhanced and supplanted by the Microsoft Linux monopoly. If Office found its way to Linux, it would be on Microsoft Linux, and the world would be fundamentally the same except that Windows would have a better shell.
Before you go and rip big menus, consider that one of the things a big menu does is provide immediate, discoverable access into what a program does.
A lot of responses to questions about an application are "Read the f____ manual". Why should anyone have to read a manual? Computers are interactive - a good application should train users on how to use it.
A good computer is one that requires no education or training to begin using it.
A GUI is not about making it graphic or pretty because it will somehow make things easier. A GUI does not assert that clicking a bunch of things with a mouse is even more efficient than simply typing ls |grep something. A GUI does asserts that the biggest productivity problem is figuring out what an application can do! BeOS to some extent and Linux, most definately, miss this point entirely.
On the flipside, we have the Evil Empire. While MS has been uneven in their pursuit of GUI, they've at least been willing to take some pretty big risks with their applications in the pursuit of discoverability. Nobody asked for the stupid dancing paperclip, and, in Office 97, it's more annoying than useful, but the idea of an intelligent application, of an application interacted with as if it is a person, is an idea whose time has come. I hope they stick with it, so in the very least we can learn from their mistakes. The vision is good, even if the implementation is not.
Programmers demand consistency in the tools that they use. There are holy wars about open standards, and indeed, standardization is the hallmark of the Java movement and forms a key part of the Linux movement.
Why is it so unreasonable to think that what benefits the programmer benefits the user? Programmers reject adding special keywords to Java to make it easier to deal with COM objects, and to support some additional languages, or modifying a C++ implementation to support __int64 or __int32, etc, ala Microsoft. If consistency is so important to them, then why cannot they at least respect the user enough to settle on a set of keystrokes for common things... File operations, window moving, minimizing, maximizing, etc, printing, selecting and deselecting are all well defined interfaces and should be standard. I can't stand to use Linux's GUI because it is such a horrible mess. I detest Be's goofy switcharoo on ALT-CTRL and the lack of accelerators on menus.
User interface and consistency of applications designed for idiots is something Microsoft has done reasonably well. The best thing a Linux GUI developer could possibly do would be to write applications based on ideally the Windows 9x design guide, but at least the CUA STANDARD.
Well, it was a troll. I wrote the specific posts somewhat ticked off that some Europeans posted to the effect "Well, the Americans are clueless and need to be educated." The United States is not perfect, but I think that there is room for argument that American society is as good as European society, better in some ways and worse in others. I like Europeans but I loath what seems to be to be a general European presumption of cultural superiority. It is not just the Microsoft case... the other was that when ECHELON busted Airbus for trying to bribe a foreign government for an order, the EU report cried foul for the COMINT as if the bribe was all fair and good. Similarly, I do not like the idea of market intervention, pro, or con. European markets tend to have more of that. American market places have it too, and I do not like that either. As far as immigration goes, I think that that anyone who has half a brain who wants to come to America and be it a citizen should be allowed to, yes, even from Europe.
I also have Linux on the same machine. I'm buying the release on Feb 17, and also will have installed Suse 6.3 (my favorite distro) on the same. My machine is a dual pentium II, 256Mb RAM, Adaptec 2940U2W + Seagate Barracuda. If you want to run some benchmarks on the two versus the two, let me know and I'd be happy to do so. I'm curious to see for myself. I'm writing a simple server to show a Unix friend how IO Completion ports / threads can be used to do fast I/O on Win2K.. I'll post into PD...would like to see how one would do the same kind of task in the fastest possible way under Linux.