Of the four most available solutions to the end the reign of terror conducted by the gangsters from Redmond, a break-up seems most sensible.
Let's review them.
1) Disband the company and sentence all its employes with stock options to life sentences of cleaning public bathrooms with their tongues.
2) Hurl Gates and Co. from a helicopter over Pugeot Sound.
3) Order Gates and Co. to appear at the desk of anyone whose computer has frozen or BSODed and offer, first, to debug the OS and then beg to be slapped for producing such egregious crap.
4) Divide MSFT into a number of companies that might compete rather than collude.
The first three options have their charms - (3) is my favorite but (4) might give us a fighting chance to see, yes, COMPETING OSes in PCs, like 1985, when you could go to the computer store and chose from CP/M, AppleDOS, Amiga, MS-DOS, etc.
For God's sake, someone please channel Gary Kildall. He'd know what to make of this opportunity!
The disparaging remarks about the gluttonous IPO mongers are well taken . . . but for god's sake can't we figure out how to take advantage of the moment and leave virtue to the saints? We can join them in their righteous now - or beg forgiveness for our sins from the deck of our party barge somewhere off the coast of New Caledonia, the wine chilling in the hold, the harem toasting on the deck, the resident symphony warming up for their performance of Mahler 5. Serious questions: Should the/. crowd agitate for a cut of the stock in trade for its influencial participation in the technology culture that is propelling palm computing today? What would be an equitable division of shares of a block of stock reserved for Slashdot?
C, I've had to travel a lot on business trips and ended up using UUNET POPs. My ISP has a deal with UUNET to allow their users to access those POPs for a surcharge. I doubt this ISP has negotiated a sui generis deal. Here's the blurb from my ISP about the service and the search routine for local POPs. Welcome to The World's MSN/UUNET Database The World is available from 898 MSN/UUNET local dial-ups A $2/hour surcharge applies when calling via MSN/UUNET To access World via MSN, dial the number with your modem and login to the prompt with UU/world, use the password world Enter the city, state or area code you are interested in: AT&T would be a good option but they might ask you for a credit card to bill you. And that might be a pain to suspend and cancel once you finish your trip. Another option is NetZero - actually the outfit I use for Web access. They lease POPs from everybody. It's a totally free ISP like FreeServe. You can sign up at www.netzero.net. When you get the software, you can check out lists of states and local POPs. PFC
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the releases but no price list - can you give us the price data?
Peter
Let's review them.
1) Disband the company and sentence all its employes with stock options to life sentences of cleaning public bathrooms with their tongues.
2) Hurl Gates and Co. from a helicopter over Pugeot Sound.
3) Order Gates and Co. to appear at the desk of anyone whose computer has frozen or BSODed and offer, first, to debug the OS and then beg to be slapped for producing such egregious crap.
4) Divide MSFT into a number of companies that might compete rather than collude.
The first three options have their charms - (3) is my favorite but (4) might give us a fighting chance to see, yes, COMPETING OSes in PCs, like 1985, when you could go to the computer store and chose from CP/M, AppleDOS, Amiga, MS-DOS, etc.
For God's sake, someone please channel Gary Kildall. He'd know what to make of this opportunity!
PFC
The disparaging remarks about the gluttonous IPO mongers are well taken . . . but for god's sake can't we figure out how to take advantage of the moment and leave virtue to the saints? We can join them in their righteous now - or beg forgiveness for our sins from the deck of our party barge somewhere off the coast of New Caledonia, the wine chilling in the hold, the harem toasting on the deck, the resident symphony warming up for their performance of Mahler 5. Serious questions: Should the /. crowd agitate for a cut of the stock in trade for its influencial participation in the technology culture that is propelling palm computing today? What would be an equitable division of shares of a block of stock reserved for Slashdot?
C, I've had to travel a lot on business trips and ended up using UUNET POPs. My ISP has a deal with UUNET to allow their users to access those POPs for a surcharge. I doubt this ISP has negotiated a sui generis deal. Here's the blurb from my ISP about the service and the search routine for local POPs. Welcome to The World's MSN/UUNET Database The World is available from 898 MSN/UUNET local dial-ups A $2/hour surcharge applies when calling via MSN/UUNET To access World via MSN, dial the number with your modem and login to the prompt with UU/world, use the password world Enter the city, state or area code you are interested in: AT&T would be a good option but they might ask you for a credit card to bill you. And that might be a pain to suspend and cancel once you finish your trip. Another option is NetZero - actually the outfit I use for Web access. They lease POPs from everybody. It's a totally free ISP like FreeServe. You can sign up at www.netzero.net. When you get the software, you can check out lists of states and local POPs. PFC