Could it be that you simply need to have a largish organization to provide the checks and redundancy to catch the flaws that are always going to crop up in a complex system?
I think you have something. But I think there are two answers to your observation. Either you provide the checks and redundancy as you suggest, or you simplify the system.
Maybe when the country is headed full-force into a recession, it's not time for a 5-week vacation when there are laws to be passed. It's time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. The United States isn't ok right now. It's fragile and crumbling. Those elected officials want to spend their August kicking up their shoes when unemployment is at an all-time high?
You think Congress passing laws will help the economy? Maybe for the lawyers and lobbyists. It would be better for the rest of us if they would just freeze the Federal Budget at current levels for 5 years and adjourn until 2013. Then we might finally balance the budget just in time for Social Security to start going into the red.
And we would save on electricity and heating for the capital.
Actually, I wish Congress would keep the lights off for 11 out of 12 months instead of the other way around. If Congresscritters had to live in the real world instead of living in their disneyish Capital Hill, complete with tram rides in the basement, then maybe they would cut the shit and start passing simple laws that they and everyone else could actually read and understand and budgets that we can actually pay for.
Well, if you look at taxation as a percentage of GDP, then it is kinda a lie since the US GDP is being propped up by huge government borrowing and trade deficits.
Still, I think the difference is that in those other countries that wealth is being taxed and redistributed efficiently to make most people happy at the expense of a little freedom. But in the US the wealth is being concentrated and controlled through taxation in a corrupting way that reduces freedom without much benefit of wealth redistribution.
The whole point of "science" in the first place was that it only becomes science when observations are related and published in enough detail to allow for reproducible observations and experiments. Otherwise it doesn't matter. This is a natural progression of science using new technology, not some radical shift.
Except in so far as science is always in danger of drifting backwards towards alchemy and superstition and needs constant vigilance to keep it from becoming the domain of wizards and charlatans again.
There are legitimate business reasons to lock down computers, but the decision should not be an IT department decision. The fundamental equation is that locking down PCs makes the IT department jobs easier, but often at the expense of innovation and productivity of the rest of the company. So, to an IT department measured on uptime and ability to resolve complaints quickly there is only one answer. Don't let the users do anything. But a business trying to maximize its investments versus mitigating risk has other priorities which may override the concerns of the IT department's convenience.
Well, given that most people wouldn't mind having their vote bought [foxnews.com], it's not so insulting to most people as you might imagine. I think the point is that people don't like other people's votes getting bought and then getting stuck with the tax bill that results. Remember "Taxation without representation"? But if the government is going to stop taxing me and give me a boatload of money, then they can do whatever the hell they want as long as that arrangement continues.
As long as it is 'we the taxpayers', then it better also be "We the People".
I've seen people buy Office. I've also certainly been aware of large companies buying it. How do you think MS make money from it if it's not bought? If they didn't care about the home market there wouldn't be home specific versions. Yes, some people do actually make the decision to buy Office. But I think the overall point is a good one. 'Most people' are probably not choosing to buy office for themselves because of its features or "innovation" but rather because of vendor lock-in by all those other people that simply get MS Word already installed and the greatest number of installations are probably corporate installations where OPM (Other People's Money) attitudes prevail. And there is a home version simply because they want to upsell corporate (OPM) buyers.
There is basically nothing compelling about Microsoft Office except that most people are still using Word and Excel. There might have been some compelling feature when there was a healthy competitive market for Formatted Text and Spreadsheet editors which precipitated a switch, I don't remember. But I think that the current dominance was more a result of Microsoft's blatant bundle and lock-in strategy.
Pity to see things heat up between the 'good guys'. There is a difference between healthy competition and trying to drive your competition into the ground in order to squeeze every last penny from the market.
Competition should not be confused with the anticompetitive mafia like behavior that we all too often see from some other big business. For example, if Google acted like Microsoft (or the old AT&T and IBM) they would use their market position and simply require websites to exclude other search engines from indexing their web pages or else be excluded from Google's results.
Competing on quality of product or service is a good thing and helps consumers by giving them better choices. Ethical companies can compete without destroying the market or hurting their customers.
Just look at Google itself.. it was a late comer to the search engine market, but it was able to supplant Yahoo by providing a better search service, but Yahoo is still around and was able to adapt and improve the quality of its service. And ask.com was able to remake itself into a worthwhile alternative by improving its own service with some good features... healthy competition benefits people.
Why do we even need "code"? My aunt works at the town hall of a small town of about 600 people, when election time comes around they fill out a piece of paper and it goes into a wooden box. When the voting is over, an official counts the ballots by hand. I'm pretty sure we've been voting since before we had computers, but I did go to public schools I could be wrong... why not check out what we did 30-50 years ago and.. well, do that? I suspect most people reading what you wrote will say to themselves 'How quaint, only 600 people' and then move on, but they may lose the point that maybe the government shouldn't be trying to scale the polling places to handle more than a relatively small number of people at the precinct level. If States simply capped the size of a polling place to handle a few thousand registered voters, then a lot of these problems go away and you just need to worry about finding volunteers to staff the polling places (which could be made an obligation like jury service). How many more elections do we have to see where large population centers are effectively disenfranchised by hours long waits at polling places which try to "serve" tens of thousands of voters on election day. My polling place serves under 4000 registered voters (with much fewer that actually vote) with optical scan paper ballots. With a realistically manageable number of people there are never serious waits to vote and people are in and out in a few minutes.
Cap the number of registered voters allowed per precinct per election worker and per actual polling station and eliminate the inequalities and bullshit. Eliminate the publicly paid for partisan primaries if you want to save money.
Seems like a simple management principle to me, don't manufacture efficiencies of scale at the expense of the quality of what you are trying to do. In other words, treat people like people and not like just another cog in the wheel.
Flash is plugin based too. I agree with you that JavaScript+SVG support would be ideal. Too bad Microsoft will never support it. Microsoft doesn't want to see Adobe controlling the Web platform where Microsoft failed with ActiveX. It might not be Microsoft's first choice, but given that nobody is going to help them create yet another Microsoft monopoly, supporting SVG might be a good way to limit Adobe's dominance of the rich internet application market.
So let's say that each of the files were individually encrypted (instead of the whole drive, as is the case in the article). They could ask for each of the individual files they knew about but you wouldn't have to give them the "keys" to decode the documents. They have to figure that out on their own. Are defendants required to hand over keys to a safe? If so, then I think the analogy of encryption key (passwords) is a dangerous one to make.
When really it is, as you say, that what they are trying to coerce is knowledge from the person as to how to make sense of the files. Which is prohibited by the constitution.
The javascript way of animations is more akin to an animated gif, it can be made to work for some things, but svg is supposed to have built in animation support which is more like flash. Firefox doesn't yet support the animation module.
JavaScript+Canvas Last time I checked Canvas wasn't supported in IE and HTML 5 (which it is included as a part of) isn't out yet as a released standard. Might be a good stopgap before svg full is supported, but is it really that much easier to implement than SVG or do you give up something?
JavaScript+SVG This would be ideal, but animations aren't yet supported, so you would have to download new svgs with AJAX for interactivity. That seems like an unfortunate hack to me. Better to have the svgs be able to dynamically update more discrete elements.
Java Sure there is java. But Java is being blocked by a lot of corporate firewalls, just like activex is (which you didn't mention). And it is also plugin based. I guess I won't count Java out, but it has been available for quite some time with mixed market adoption.
I didn't miss the point. I agree that this has nothing to do with http protocol, but the point I think the submitter was trying to make was close enough to being in the right ballpark that I thought it was worth pointing that out. Flash/Flex is not just a content format, it is its own proprietary client platform for writing rich internet applications... It is basically its own web browser within a web browser which, if it gains any more wider adoption, it is going to subvert the open standards nature of the Web. Which is what the W3C is trying to prevent by releasing and supporting open formats. So, the fact that he used the wrong acronym is annoying, but if you replace http with the correct acronyms then his point was correct.
The summary is a jumble mess, but the fact that Flex/Flash is still mostly closed source, but fills an important gap that isn't addressed by currently implemented standards, is problematic.
Take a look at this google finance page You simply can't do the type of interactive charting that they do there without Flash and Flex. Any AJAX implementation of that would be just a hack.
It could be done with AJAX techniques and SVG, which is the open standard for flash like animations, but neither major browser implements the full spec yet.
So, the larger point about needing an open standard that is actually implemented is a valid one. But I don't think the fault lies in the W3C, it is just that it is taking some time for volunteer programmers to implement the standards that they came out with in Firefox.
Very picky points, but in this case I actually think the judge may be right within very narrow confines. I think this decision if it is being reported correctly is problematic. Imagine the equivalent paper situation. You write all your papers in some sort of cipher which makes them unreadable unless you crack the code. Those papers are then seized by the police for some reason... Can you then be compelled through threat of jail time to decipher the text for the police? Even if the papers are exactly the ones that the police want? Maybe the papers are labeled in some way and specified in the warrant.
Of course, I suppose that is what the judge is saying... that you can never know if it is exactly the right paper unless you know the contents. Similarly you can never really justify torture because of the ticking bomb defense, because you can never know that the person really knows how to defuse the bomb or if it is even possible to defuse it, or if the person was the one who actually set it or just happened to come along and fiddled with it just as the police arrived so to make it look like they saw the person planting the bomb.
Seems that threatening someone with additional jail time if he doesn't answer some question is a line you do not cross. I think we have crossed that line already in a variety of areas, and in effect this is happening with "reduced sentences" for people that cooperate with the police.
Judges really need to hold the line on some of these fundamental principles, compelling people to speak against themselves is a pretty fundamental right and loosening that restriction is a slippery slope.
Erm, not at $1 and ounce, no. But at some multiple. If it has to be $2,800 per ounce then people will not both exchanging dollars for gold with the government, because they can get gold cheaper elsewhere. But the effect of tying the dollar to *something* will be just as strong. At least if we stick with it, it won't be $3,100 next year and $3,300 the year after that. Just because a return to the gold standard can't undo the last 90+ years of inflation is no reason not to do it. I am a Ron Paul supporter because he has held the line on balancing the budget, personal liberties and promotes a responsible foreign policy. But I dislike the emphasis on the "Gold" standard. Seems to me that people can exchange their cash for something else at whatever it is valued that day and therefore "lock in" the value against Gold, Silver or some other commodity, stock or any material good of their own choosing. So, just knowing that the dollar is not an appropriate store of long term value means that it can safely be used for short term transactions and that people can make informed decisions about what is an appropriate way to save and invest.
For example, I wouldn't sign a contract to sell you my house for its current dollar value in 50 years, but Inflation will probably mean that its dollar worth in 50 years will be several times its current worth all else being equal. But there is so much variability over that length of time that I probably wouldn't sign any contract at all because of excessive risk. Of course if a currency can't hold its value in the short term, then that means short term contracts can't be made with any certainty either and that can cause real economic problems.
But even the problem with long term contracts can be addressed with "either or" types of contracts which can specify the exchange of something other than dollars. There was a real world example of this type of thing in the news some number of years ago. I do not remember the specifics, but a company made a very long term lease arrangement for a large office building (perhaps on the order of 80 to 90 years.) The terms of the lease called for a payment at the end of the lease, to be paid in either dollars or gold at the discretion of the landlord. It turned out that the gold was worth a lot more than the dollars were worth and it had to be settled in court.
And fixing the value of the dollar to an arbitrary amount of some precious metal, doesn't mean that the value measured against other things will always be fixed. In other words, a Gold Standard doesn't fix inflation altogether. Because gold itself has a value based upon its desirability or usefulness. Gold has specific uses in electronics and other applications which become more or less important to people as technology and tastes change.
Say for instance you fixed the dollar to a certain amount of aluminum instead of gold, then someone goes and creates a cheaper method for mining the metal and suddenly there is a glut of aluminum on the market. That would equally cause inflation to rise precipitously. Gold is actually much more scarce in nature than aluminum, but there would be a similar effect on the demand side if gold jewelry was no longer in fashion and something better started being used for electronics.
I agree that using a medium of value that has no intrinsic value itself does have a certain risk, but the financial system should be flexible enough to mitigate that risk without having to return to what is essentially a glorified form of barter exchange which causes central banks to horde a useful metal.
Tell me, really, what is the difference between voting Republican and voting Democrat. I believe South Park had it about right, the difference usually comes down to the choice between a "giant douche" or a "turd sandwich."
Any candidate that doesn't fit into the mold of Rich person's shill candidate is going to be labeled a nut job and a "fringe" candidate. Even if they happen to have been elected to Federal Office.
That is exactly why I like Ron Paul, because he votes against the party he happens to be affiliated with. And he learned the hard way that third parties and independents are excluded from the election system by design.
The option of turning AMS into a free-flyer has been explored and it is prohibitively expensive. Right now it is a precise, sophisticated instrument designed to merge with the ISS infrastructure. Adding propulsion systems, independent power generation, etc. could be done, but is not at all economical. Beyond that, it is probably best that this complicated device be accessible if some unforeseen problem arises. It is not economical to put things in space. Period. The question isn't whether it is prohibitively expensive, because every launch is prohibitively expensive, yet we still keep launching things. The question is how much it costs and whether it is worth doing.
Give our soldiers in Iraq the week off and you save enough to put 5 of these in orbit. The money is there.
I think this is the problem, or at least related. But assuming this is a javascript problem... or maybe more specifically a javascript XMLHttpRequest problem, then it is up to the firefox team to make sure the browser can handle the condition without hanging the whole browser. It is also up to google to fix their code.
Huh? IBM used Microsoft DOS from the first PC because they saw operating systems as commodities and didn't see the need to implement their own (they were going to license CP/M originally, but settled for a cheap clone for reasons that are well documented). They allowed third parties to license DOS from Microsoft because they didn't want to pay extra for exclusive rights to something they saw as a commodity (why pay for exclusive rights to MS DOS when your competitor can just buy CP/M, QDOS, and so on?). That is part of the story, yes. But the full story is that unbundling of software from the hardware was directly related to the U.S. v. IBM antitrust lawsuit. This led to Microsoft being able to write software for IBM hardware in the first place. I am not disputing that Microsoft was or was not the best choice at the time. But the choice was made by IBM, and was directly influenced by antitrust considerations and was an attempt to look less anticompetitive.
Just as Microsoft's actions are now influenced by the antitrust scrutiny it is under both in the US and Europe. Might not be the only factor, and it was certainly spinned in order to make it look like it would benefit IBM, but I don't think IBM was under any delusions that it was better for the company to give up control over its monopoly.
Note, this doesn't mean I think Microsoft's monopoly is good. It's very bad for the industry. Just pointing out that when you break up a monopoly (and I believe market forces broke up IBMs) then you do have a chance for improvement. market forces? Only if you count the US Federal Government as a "market force". They are, but not in the way you meant. IBM's PC hardware monopoly was broken when the Federal government intervened to break up their monopoly, the direct result of which was that they were forced to license a third party OS which other hardware manufacturers could also license. The result of which was that IBM chose Microsoft DOS.
The equivalent today would be to make Microsoft open source its programming api and libraries, so that any OS could be made to run MS Windows applications seamlessly. Until this is done, there will likely not be effective competition in the PC Operating System market. Even with the Windows Vista debacle, they still retain dominant monopoly market share.
Their is nothing natural about how Microsoft keeps its monopoly. Microsoft uses intellectual property laws meant to foster innovation in order to suppress innovation and lock-in their customers. And what is really the worst thing about this situation is that by locking in their customers and controlling the market, they are unnaturally restraining innovation of one of the greatest general purpose creative tools that mankind has ever created.
Bill Gates and Microsoft deserve our thanks, or at least our recognition, for stepping in when the PC market was made competitive. Microsoft DOS played an important role in allowing the PC market to be competitive at the hardware level and thus making computers more affordable for millions of people. Now we need the OS and office file format market to become competitive also.
Open source and open standards doesn't mean you can't charge for your software, it means you can't milk your customers for money long past your product's usefulness.
Big surprise that Microsoft is pushing proprietary languages over expanding existing open standards.
Why are Microsoft employees even allowed in the room anymore? Oh yea... a large part of the market is already locked into their proprietary os and software api monopoly.
I think Microsoft has a long way to go in order to show they can be play nice with others and actually contribute something. Till then all their employees come with a scarlet M... with the combined weight of years of proprietary vendor lock-in, using their monopoly to extend their monopoly, threatening business practices, etc etc.
It is one thing to sell products that people find useful and innovative and another to sell products that are useful and innovative and which make sure you will lose all your work if ever want to use another product that is useful and innovative.
Actually though, I think adobe is the bigger player in rich web based applications. Their proprietary flash with the mostly proprietary flex (for communication between the server and the flash application) are a big proprietary nut to crack for open standards and open implementations. A combination of javascript and full SVG animation support looks promising, but we are still waiting to see a full firefox implementation.
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Could it be that you simply need to have a largish organization to provide the checks and redundancy to catch the flaws that are always going to crop up in a complex system?
I think you have something. But I think there are two answers to your observation. Either you provide the checks and redundancy as you suggest, or you simplify the system.
Maybe when the country is headed full-force into a recession, it's not time for a 5-week vacation when there are laws to be passed. It's time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. The United States isn't ok right now. It's fragile and crumbling. Those elected officials want to spend their August kicking up their shoes when unemployment is at an all-time high?
You think Congress passing laws will help the economy? Maybe for the lawyers and lobbyists. It would be better for the rest of us if they would just freeze the Federal Budget at current levels for 5 years and adjourn until 2013. Then we might finally balance the budget just in time for Social Security to start going into the red.
And we would save on electricity and heating for the capital.
Actually, I wish Congress would keep the lights off for 11 out of 12 months instead of the other way around. If Congresscritters had to live in the real world instead of living in their disneyish Capital Hill, complete with tram rides in the basement, then maybe they would cut the shit and start passing simple laws that they and everyone else could actually read and understand and budgets that we can actually pay for.
Well, if you look at taxation as a percentage of GDP, then it is kinda a lie since the US GDP is being propped up by huge government borrowing and trade deficits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Still, I think the difference is that in those other countries that wealth is being taxed and redistributed efficiently to make most people happy at the expense of a little freedom. But in the US the wealth is being concentrated and controlled through taxation in a corrupting way that reduces freedom without much benefit of wealth redistribution.
The whole point of "science" in the first place was that it only becomes science when observations are related and published in enough detail to allow for reproducible observations and experiments. Otherwise it doesn't matter. This is a natural progression of science using new technology, not some radical shift.
Except in so far as science is always in danger of drifting backwards towards alchemy and superstition and needs constant vigilance to keep it from becoming the domain of wizards and charlatans again.
There are legitimate business reasons to lock down computers, but the decision should not be an IT department decision. The fundamental equation is that locking down PCs makes the IT department jobs easier, but often at the expense of innovation and productivity of the rest of the company. So, to an IT department measured on uptime and ability to resolve complaints quickly there is only one answer. Don't let the users do anything. But a business trying to maximize its investments versus mitigating risk has other priorities which may override the concerns of the IT department's convenience.
As long as it is 'we the taxpayers', then it better also be "We the People".
There is basically nothing compelling about Microsoft Office except that most people are still using Word and Excel. There might have been some compelling feature when there was a healthy competitive market for Formatted Text and Spreadsheet editors which precipitated a switch, I don't remember. But I think that the current dominance was more a result of Microsoft's blatant bundle and lock-in strategy.
Competition should not be confused with the anticompetitive mafia like behavior that we all too often see from some other big business. For example, if Google acted like Microsoft (or the old AT&T and IBM) they would use their market position and simply require websites to exclude other search engines from indexing their web pages or else be excluded from Google's results.
Competing on quality of product or service is a good thing and helps consumers by giving them better choices. Ethical companies can compete without destroying the market or hurting their customers.
Just look at Google itself.. it was a late comer to the search engine market, but it was able to supplant Yahoo by providing a better search service, but Yahoo is still around and was able to adapt and improve the quality of its service. And ask.com was able to remake itself into a worthwhile alternative by improving its own service with some good features... healthy competition benefits people.
Cap the number of registered voters allowed per precinct per election worker and per actual polling station and eliminate the inequalities and bullshit. Eliminate the publicly paid for partisan primaries if you want to save money.
Seems like a simple management principle to me, don't manufacture efficiencies of scale at the expense of the quality of what you are trying to do. In other words, treat people like people and not like just another cog in the wheel.
When really it is, as you say, that what they are trying to coerce is knowledge from the person as to how to make sense of the files. Which is prohibited by the constitution.
The javascript way of animations is more akin to an animated gif, it can be made to work for some things, but svg is supposed to have built in animation support which is more like flash. Firefox doesn't yet support the animation module.
I didn't miss the point. I agree that this has nothing to do with http protocol, but the point I think the submitter was trying to make was close enough to being in the right ballpark that I thought it was worth pointing that out. Flash/Flex is not just a content format, it is its own proprietary client platform for writing rich internet applications... It is basically its own web browser within a web browser which, if it gains any more wider adoption, it is going to subvert the open standards nature of the Web. Which is what the W3C is trying to prevent by releasing and supporting open formats. So, the fact that he used the wrong acronym is annoying, but if you replace http with the correct acronyms then his point was correct.
The summary is a jumble mess, but the fact that Flex/Flash is still mostly closed source, but fills an important gap that isn't addressed by currently implemented standards, is problematic.
Take a look at this google finance page You simply can't do the type of interactive charting that they do there without Flash and Flex. Any AJAX implementation of that would be just a hack.
It could be done with AJAX techniques and SVG, which is the open standard for flash like animations, but neither major browser implements the full spec yet.
So, the larger point about needing an open standard that is actually implemented is a valid one. But I don't think the fault lies in the W3C, it is just that it is taking some time for volunteer programmers to implement the standards that they came out with in Firefox.
Of course, I suppose that is what the judge is saying... that you can never know if it is exactly the right paper unless you know the contents. Similarly you can never really justify torture because of the ticking bomb defense, because you can never know that the person really knows how to defuse the bomb or if it is even possible to defuse it, or if the person was the one who actually set it or just happened to come along and fiddled with it just as the police arrived so to make it look like they saw the person planting the bomb.
Seems that threatening someone with additional jail time if he doesn't answer some question is a line you do not cross. I think we have crossed that line already in a variety of areas, and in effect this is happening with "reduced sentences" for people that cooperate with the police.
Judges really need to hold the line on some of these fundamental principles, compelling people to speak against themselves is a pretty fundamental right and loosening that restriction is a slippery slope.
For example, I wouldn't sign a contract to sell you my house for its current dollar value in 50 years, but Inflation will probably mean that its dollar worth in 50 years will be several times its current worth all else being equal. But there is so much variability over that length of time that I probably wouldn't sign any contract at all because of excessive risk. Of course if a currency can't hold its value in the short term, then that means short term contracts can't be made with any certainty either and that can cause real economic problems.
But even the problem with long term contracts can be addressed with "either or" types of contracts which can specify the exchange of something other than dollars. There was a real world example of this type of thing in the news some number of years ago. I do not remember the specifics, but a company made a very long term lease arrangement for a large office building (perhaps on the order of 80 to 90 years.) The terms of the lease called for a payment at the end of the lease, to be paid in either dollars or gold at the discretion of the landlord. It turned out that the gold was worth a lot more than the dollars were worth and it had to be settled in court.
And fixing the value of the dollar to an arbitrary amount of some precious metal, doesn't mean that the value measured against other things will always be fixed. In other words, a Gold Standard doesn't fix inflation altogether. Because gold itself has a value based upon its desirability or usefulness. Gold has specific uses in electronics and other applications which become more or less important to people as technology and tastes change.
Say for instance you fixed the dollar to a certain amount of aluminum instead of gold, then someone goes and creates a cheaper method for mining the metal and suddenly there is a glut of aluminum on the market. That would equally cause inflation to rise precipitously. Gold is actually much more scarce in nature than aluminum, but there would be a similar effect on the demand side if gold jewelry was no longer in fashion and something better started being used for electronics.
I agree that using a medium of value that has no intrinsic value itself does have a certain risk, but the financial system should be flexible enough to mitigate that risk without having to return to what is essentially a glorified form of barter exchange which causes central banks to horde a useful metal.
Any candidate that doesn't fit into the mold of Rich person's shill candidate is going to be labeled a nut job and a "fringe" candidate. Even if they happen to have been elected to Federal Office.
That is exactly why I like Ron Paul, because he votes against the party he happens to be affiliated with. And he learned the hard way that third parties and independents are excluded from the election system by design.
Give our soldiers in Iraq the week off and you save enough to put 5 of these in orbit. The money is there.
I think this is the problem, or at least related. But assuming this is a javascript problem... or maybe more specifically a javascript XMLHttpRequest problem, then it is up to the firefox team to make sure the browser can handle the condition without hanging the whole browser. It is also up to google to fix their code.
Just as Microsoft's actions are now influenced by the antitrust scrutiny it is under both in the US and Europe. Might not be the only factor, and it was certainly spinned in order to make it look like it would benefit IBM, but I don't think IBM was under any delusions that it was better for the company to give up control over its monopoly.
The equivalent today would be to make Microsoft open source its programming api and libraries, so that any OS could be made to run MS Windows applications seamlessly. Until this is done, there will likely not be effective competition in the PC Operating System market. Even with the Windows Vista debacle, they still retain dominant monopoly market share.
Their is nothing natural about how Microsoft keeps its monopoly. Microsoft uses intellectual property laws meant to foster innovation in order to suppress innovation and lock-in their customers. And what is really the worst thing about this situation is that by locking in their customers and controlling the market, they are unnaturally restraining innovation of one of the greatest general purpose creative tools that mankind has ever created.
Bill Gates and Microsoft deserve our thanks, or at least our recognition, for stepping in when the PC market was made competitive. Microsoft DOS played an important role in allowing the PC market to be competitive at the hardware level and thus making computers more affordable for millions of people. Now we need the OS and office file format market to become competitive also.
Open source and open standards doesn't mean you can't charge for your software, it means you can't milk your customers for money long past your product's usefulness.
Big surprise that Microsoft is pushing proprietary languages over expanding existing open standards.
Why are Microsoft employees even allowed in the room anymore? Oh yea... a large part of the market is already locked into their proprietary os and software api monopoly.
I think Microsoft has a long way to go in order to show they can be play nice with others and actually contribute something. Till then all their employees come with a scarlet M... with the combined weight of years of proprietary vendor lock-in, using their monopoly to extend their monopoly, threatening business practices, etc etc.
It is one thing to sell products that people find useful and innovative and another to sell products that are useful and innovative and which make sure you will lose all your work if ever want to use another product that is useful and innovative.
Actually though, I think adobe is the bigger player in rich web based applications. Their proprietary flash with the mostly proprietary flex (for communication between the server and the flash application) are a big proprietary nut to crack for open standards and open implementations. A combination of javascript and full SVG animation support looks promising, but we are still waiting to see a full firefox implementation.