Now how about enforcing that on every homeowner in your city?
Enforcing $28 per month high speed internet access? The horror! Especially in Utah, where the flood of pr0n combined with our repressed nature will cause severe social problems!
Seriously: the $1100 and additional $1400 figure are infrastructure investment numbers. Operation costs will still be involved, but if the infrastructure is done right, there could be more than enough left over to repay investment and eventually turn it into an income center.
Meanwhile -- and I think this is the thing to get really excited about -- Utah will have built a platform for telecom/data utilities that they could have companies in that space truly compete to deliver service. I don't know if this model exists anywhere, but that's always been the problem with public utilities: either you end up with a single government behemoth, or you end up with a private monopoly, because those are the kinds of entities that have the ability to sustain the outlay for the infrastructure. What it *should* be is: a public infrastructure on which anyone can compete. And this could be one of the first times this happens.
Face it, the same crowd of unwashed FSF geeks who are crying over patent abuse is producing a few people who are taking advantage of the U.S. Patents Office inability to award patents based on merit.
Care to back that assertion up with, say, some specific cases involving software patent abuse and Free Software fans?
I still own all the code for it and been wondering whether I should GPL it.
I'd be interested to see something like what you had -- which was apparently quite well developed, by the way -- released/active again, despite the fact the wheel is obviously being reinvented. Probably more to your lasting fame and credit to release it rather than keep it... or perhaps at least find someone willing to donate bandwidth. Unless of course you've got a smart business plan hidden up your sleeve, to jump to step three (Profit!):)
Someone else was doing this circa 1998/1999 IIRC... myhand.com? Invible Hand? They had exactly this kind of market, but with funny money. There were bets on the outcome of Madonna's upcoming release, whether who would win the GOP and DNC 2000 Presidential nominations, and bets on tech stuff too... anyone else recall this?
I've often been suprised that many people blame the current administration for the downturn in the economy when to signifigantly change the path of the economy takes at least 3 years of work, in my opinion this is just the initial effects of the current economy plan coming in to action.
While I agree with the several year lag time theory, it actually works against the idea that recent positive developments have anything to do with the current administration's policies. Bush et all will have been setting policy for three years starting in January, and it's arguable that the first of their changes didn't hit the books until six months after that, and the lions share of them much later, even into this year.
And it's probably time to add another category to the list of things easily used to explain the mainstream record industry's drop in sales. In addition to (1) the recession and (2) the smaller # of releases by record companies themselves and (3) increase in indie company sales, we'll have to have (4) legitimate online sales.
What's more, #4 has to be magnified: if done right, digital sales should be far more pure revenue than conventional distribution, given physical production and retailer take.
that music blips and skips A LOT when running on iTunes whenever you do ANYTHING else, even if it's just like opening Explorer or moving windows?
If I can open and use Adobe Illustrator while listening succesfully to iTunes, I'd expect that most applications short of intense compiling, 3-D rendering, or digital signal processing could coexist with iTunes on a 1+ Ghz workstation....
My experience is on a 1.5Ghz P4 running Win XP (window dressing turned off).
Actually, it could be tremendous opportunity......he now has amunition for lawsuits against both his former employer and the federal government... having said all of that, I believe the feds should hang their heads in shame for being overzealous and making the mistake in the first place
What about the opportunity for payback for overzealous prosecutors?
Sometimes after reading about cases like this, I wonder if there shouldn't be a law which says that if prosecutors over reach -- and especially if there's any evidence that they knowingly overstated their case, or presented any evidence or supporting testimony that wasn't factual -- they can be sent to prison.
Actually, it seems like there should be laws about this already, but IANAL. Anyone know if wrongfully convicted citizens can file criminal suit against prosecutors?
This doesn't help ppl switch because if they use IE it looks like a poorly designed page and thus they make think similar things about the browser.
I agree... I've made this very mistake with clients in the past. When things don't look good under IE 5.5 or sometimes even 5.0, they don't look at you as a cutting edge developer who they want to support, they look at you as someone too stupid to use conventional, reliable web coding techniques that work across browsers.
Still, even if you tend to the idea that the standards that matter most from a practical standpoint are de facto standards -- something which is certainly true when it comes to going to bat for your client -- the current state of things is *still* a problem. CSS wasn't just invented as a religion (though it's been adopted as such among some people) -- it was invented as a good solution to some practical problems. There are layout/design tasks made orders of magnitude easier by CSS (and a few that are impossible without it) -- and they'd be easier still if IE played to the standards. But they don't, and in that sense, Microsoft's refusal to invest the resources it would take to make this possible is a robbery of time and therefore money from web developers and their clients.
why do you imply that only Microsoft has the resources to make it?
I don't. In fact, what I'm implying is nearly the reverse: despite the fact that Microsoft has nearly unparalleled resources for a software company, their products are generally inferior. Much smaller organizations turn out some competetive, sometimes superior products.
If it is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it yet?
It has, hundreds of times. Sometimes the perpetrators get crushed or bought out by other means. Sometimes they survive marginally. Sometimes they even beat MS.
Quicken. Mozilla. And as for Word -- I'd argue in a minute that Claris Works version 3 (released in 1995) is a better word processor.
maybe Word is already pretty damn effective as it is, but no, you would rather rant about people mis-using well written software
If Word were well-written, that would be possible in this case. But it's not, and what you have to go through in Word to, say, set up stationary for anything that doesn't fall into the standard header/footer form, is a rigamarole. It shows that MS hasn't thought seriously about the feature; they just added it in an ad hoc fasion, like most of the other things about Word. It's not an inherent weakness in their file format -- it could be done -- it's a UI/toolset problem.
This is a central question that I've been asking in every "What makes you think MS is evil?" discussion I've had lately:
Why is Microsoft, the player in the browser market with the most resources by an insane margin, have the piece of software that's the most egregious offender in terms of standards compliance?
You can come up with a lot of answers, but I've come to believe that it's because they understand something:
(1) The lock in principles that we're all familiar with
(2) You more easily make money by letting others waste their time making things work than by wasting your own resources
(3) It's possible the IE 6 codebase really is hard to polish and move forward at this point.
Focus on #2 for a moment. They steal time from every single developer who has to use their products to deliver a product -- and that's everyone who's delivering a web application, at least. How do they steal it? Just recently I lost hours of my time (and possibly business) because of some bug that makes images that display all right and proper in every browser -- except IE. You just had to know that in certain situations involving nested, CSS positioned divs, unless you set the most immediately containing div to position: relative, the images would not render. Anyone here who's ever tried CSS positioning and the accompanying loosely semantic markup knows what I'm talking about. This happens in a hundred small ways.
It's not just IE, either. I have to use MS Word XP at work to occasionally do *page layout*. Nevermind that it's the wrong tool for the job, we know that, it's just that sometimes our customers demand stuff in that format. The gyrations necessary to do things in those programs are ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. I've used two other word processors who make it an order of magnitude easier -- hell, sometimes I'd rather do page layout in the same bug-ridden CSS/XHTML combo I mentioned above. Again, who is the player with the most resources? Who does not have the easiest or most powerful toolset?
Seriously, someday I think people will wake up and realize that Bill has been wasting several GDPs worth of people's time, and that's how he's amased his wealth -- Microsoft would much rather let customers and developers waste their time than spend their own dimes creating truly effective software.
It's not just the precedent. If/When Eolas comes racketeering for the other browsers, they've got a problem: no $420 million to pony up. Since this sort of functionality is essential to modern browsers, what Eolas has essentially done is raise a barrier to entry to the browser market that only rich, established companies can hurdle. Microsoft actually *wins* on this one, because (a) they look like a victim while (b) they get one of their favorite things, a non-technical barrier to entry against competitors.
the California legislature is cranking out as many liberal laws as possible.
"Liberal" law? The kind passed by the sorts of liberals our friendly neighborhood right-wing pundits imagine they're combatting?
Seems far more likely to me this law is actually passed by at best a market competition conservative (and at worst a capital-crony cheap labor conservative) who wants to make sure no young, technically superior, feature-richer telecom company is going to have a leg up on the traditional telecom behemoths.
I don't have any particular beef with the fees because even though I'd rather see services like vonnage tear out of the gateway, yes, I can see the logic that it's all telecom and needs to meet certain service standarads that are funded by fees, and I have faith that Vonnage is going to win out anyway, fee-level playing field or no. But the idea that this is a liberal taxation plot is just ridiculous.
I'll bet some folks think that recent raise on vehicle taxes is a Gray Davis liberal taxation plot as well, when, in reality, that is a consequence of laws passed in 1998 specifying what would happen on budget deficit.
a 'best performing stock' with +800% -- is run by nice Mormons, IBM is the evil Goliath
This is probably a good time to recycle a small rant I wrote a few weeks ago -- short version is that any Mormon with a half an ounce of sense of their own history would recognize there are shared values between the open source community and their own cultural/spiritual history.
Let the market control how shitty TV programs are and stop bringing government into every damn thing.
Because the market is doing such a great job of controling the quality of television programming here, especially compared to places where the programming quality is clearly inferior, like those socialist English folks and their BBC.
That's not even really the point, of course. What's being suggested is that product placement needs to be monitored for the sorts of suggestions that made truth in advertising laws necessary.
But if they had gone ahead with the imaging, and the photos showed no damage and the shuttle had landed safely with no (or insignificant) damage to the wing, their reputation would have suffered.
And maybe that's the real problem.
I understand that it's discouraging to be the one who checks things out carefully and finds them good 99% of the time. But that doesn't mean it's not important to be checking.
I thought we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
Yes. Whatever standards compliance POSIX brings to various operating systems, it doesn't necessarily mean you have commen API/system calls, and definitely doesn't guarantee binary compatibility across systems. You've probably noticed that apps don't always make/compile across *NIX systems (let alone other POSIX compliant systems like WinNT) -- hence the need for autoconf and its ilk.
It sounds like their initial goal was to open up the UNIX stuff they got from SCO, building a better Linux in the process. When they found they couldn't do that without IP encumbrance, they changed their goal: to create a UNIX product which had whatever edges they thought they'd inherited but would also run Linux apps on IA32/64, no problem.
And when their plans with IBM went awry -- and it sounds like Love thinks IBM wasn't ethical -- they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.
the number one guy gets picked on the most, and exploited the most
I think that's arguably not true in the web server market, in which Apache pretty clearly dominates. I've been curious for a while to see if anyone would do a study between Apache and IIS comparing rates of security hole discovery, average time to patch/update release, and average time between release and install. My suspicion is that despite being the clear market leader, Apache's stats in this regard are competetive with IIS.
I think Microsoft's spin "we're picked on because we're number one, it's a terrible burden to carry but we do it" is brilliant, but there are few mass markets in which to test that theory. The Apache vs IIS comparison is a great one.
Anyone who can understand that there's a difference between deciding a KB is 1000 bytes vs 1024 bytes should also know better than to make this into a lawsuit. I'll bet the motivation isn't even so much to screw consumers as to avoid confusing them. Once your average american on the street groks the metric system, explaining that we're working with multiples of 2^10 instead of 10^3 isn't going play well.
If you're really in a tizzy about this, just invent the distinction "binary GB|MB|KB" and "decimal GB|MB|KB" and stick with that.
And if your boss decides he's going to use your salary on expensive call girls and very smooth gin instead of depositing it in your bank account, technically you haven't lost anything. You just haven't gained.
Not the same (though close) because there's an important distinction here. Mr. Card doesn't sell his time -- he sells a product. When that product is distributed digitally or lent physically, he doesn't lose the ability to sell his product.
Selling your time -- essentially what you do when you accept a salary -- is different, because once time is given to something, it can't be recalled or sold to someone else.
Interesting that Card makes that distinction about how he works from a personal/legal standpoint to -- he licenses, but never gives up his copyright as a work for hire.
Ideals aside -- and I believe in supporting the right thing even for questionable characters/companies -- it's pragmatic on every level to hope for a microsoft victory in this case.
You see, if they lose, they can actually turn this to their advantage. As others have observed, Microsoft can afford to pay licensing fees. Most developers of other browsers can't. Thus, if Microsoft were to lose or "settle," they'd simply be creating another barrier to entry in the browser market. Which is remarkably good for them in a time when their current browser is at a developmental dead end.
Slashdot Mirror
Now how about enforcing that on every homeowner in your city?
Enforcing $28 per month high speed internet access? The horror! Especially in Utah, where the flood of pr0n combined with our repressed nature will cause severe social problems!
Seriously: the $1100 and additional $1400 figure are infrastructure investment numbers. Operation costs will still be involved, but if the infrastructure is done right, there could be more than enough left over to repay investment and eventually turn it into an income center.
Meanwhile -- and I think this is the thing to get really excited about -- Utah will have built a platform for telecom/data utilities that they could have companies in that space truly compete to deliver service. I don't know if this model exists anywhere, but that's always been the problem with public utilities: either you end up with a single government behemoth, or you end up with a private monopoly, because those are the kinds of entities that have the ability to sustain the outlay for the infrastructure. What it *should* be is: a public infrastructure on which anyone can compete. And this could be one of the first times this happens.
Jerry Fenn, the president of the Utah division of Qwest...said.. "Why provide a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do?"
Mr. Fenn: can we make that your corporate tagline? "Why provide a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do?"
I know, it's not strictly accurate. But at least it wouldn't point out that this service would essentially be a Rolls-Royce at Chevy prices.
Face it, the same crowd of unwashed FSF geeks who are crying over patent abuse is producing a few people who are taking advantage of the U.S. Patents Office inability to award patents based on merit.
Care to back that assertion up with, say, some specific cases involving software patent abuse and Free Software fans?
I still own all the code for it and been wondering whether I should GPL it.
... or perhaps at least find someone willing to donate bandwidth. Unless of course you've got a smart business plan hidden up your sleeve, to jump to step three (Profit!) :)
I'd be interested to see something like what you had -- which was apparently quite well developed, by the way -- released/active again, despite the fact the wheel is obviously being reinvented. Probably more to your lasting fame and credit to release it rather than keep it
Feel free to email me about it!
Someone else was doing this circa 1998/1999 IIRC... myhand.com? Invible Hand? They had exactly this kind of market, but with funny money. There were bets on the outcome of Madonna's upcoming release, whether who would win the GOP and DNC 2000 Presidential nominations, and bets on tech stuff too... anyone else recall this?
I've often been suprised that many people blame the current administration for the downturn in the economy when to signifigantly change the path of the economy takes at least 3 years of work, in my opinion this is just the initial effects of the current economy plan coming in to action.
While I agree with the several year lag time theory, it actually works against the idea that recent positive developments have anything to do with the current administration's policies. Bush et all will have been setting policy for three years starting in January, and it's arguable that the first of their changes didn't hit the books until six months after that, and the lions share of them much later, even into this year.
And it's probably time to add another category to the list of things easily used to explain the mainstream record industry's drop in sales. In addition to (1) the recession and (2) the smaller # of releases by record companies themselves and (3) increase in indie company sales, we'll have to have (4) legitimate online sales.
What's more, #4 has to be magnified: if done right, digital sales should be far more pure revenue than conventional distribution, given physical production and retailer take.
that music blips and skips A LOT when running on iTunes whenever you do ANYTHING else, even if it's just like opening Explorer or moving windows?
If I can open and use Adobe Illustrator while listening succesfully to iTunes, I'd expect that most applications short of intense compiling, 3-D rendering, or digital signal processing could coexist with iTunes on a 1+ Ghz workstation....
My experience is on a 1.5Ghz P4 running Win XP (window dressing turned off).
Actually, it could be tremendous opportunity... ...he now has amunition for lawsuits against both his former employer and the federal government... having said all of that, I believe the feds should hang their heads in shame for being overzealous and making the mistake in the first place
What about the opportunity for payback for overzealous prosecutors?
Sometimes after reading about cases like this, I wonder if there shouldn't be a law which says that if prosecutors over reach -- and especially if there's any evidence that they knowingly overstated their case, or presented any evidence or supporting testimony that wasn't factual -- they can be sent to prison.
Actually, it seems like there should be laws about this already, but IANAL. Anyone know if wrongfully convicted citizens can file criminal suit against prosecutors?
This doesn't help ppl switch because if they use IE it looks like a poorly designed page and thus they make think similar things about the browser.
I agree... I've made this very mistake with clients in the past. When things don't look good under IE 5.5 or sometimes even 5.0, they don't look at you as a cutting edge developer who they want to support, they look at you as someone too stupid to use conventional, reliable web coding techniques that work across browsers.
Still, even if you tend to the idea that the standards that matter most from a practical standpoint are de facto standards -- something which is certainly true when it comes to going to bat for your client -- the current state of things is *still* a problem. CSS wasn't just invented as a religion (though it's been adopted as such among some people) -- it was invented as a good solution to some practical problems. There are layout/design tasks made orders of magnitude easier by CSS (and a few that are impossible without it) -- and they'd be easier still if IE played to the standards. But they don't, and in that sense, Microsoft's refusal to invest the resources it would take to make this possible is a robbery of time and therefore money from web developers and their clients.
why do you imply that only Microsoft has the resources to make it?
I don't. In fact, what I'm implying is nearly the reverse: despite the fact that Microsoft has nearly unparalleled resources for a software company, their products are generally inferior. Much smaller organizations turn out some competetive, sometimes superior products.
If it is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it yet?
It has, hundreds of times. Sometimes the perpetrators get crushed or bought out by other means. Sometimes they survive marginally. Sometimes they even beat MS.
Quicken. Mozilla. And as for Word -- I'd argue in a minute that Claris Works version 3 (released in 1995) is a better word processor.
maybe Word is already pretty damn effective as it is, but no, you would rather rant about people mis-using well written software
If Word were well-written, that would be possible in this case. But it's not, and what you have to go through in Word to, say, set up stationary for anything that doesn't fall into the standard header/footer form, is a rigamarole. It shows that MS hasn't thought seriously about the feature; they just added it in an ad hoc fasion, like most of the other things about Word. It's not an inherent weakness in their file format -- it could be done -- it's a UI/toolset problem.
This is a central question that I've been asking in every "What makes you think MS is evil?" discussion I've had lately:
Why is Microsoft, the player in the browser market with the most resources by an insane margin, have the piece of software that's the most egregious offender in terms of standards compliance?
You can come up with a lot of answers, but I've come to believe that it's because they understand something:
(1) The lock in principles that we're all familiar with
(2) You more easily make money by letting others waste their time making things work than by wasting your own resources
(3) It's possible the IE 6 codebase really is hard to polish and move forward at this point.
Focus on #2 for a moment. They steal time from every single developer who has to use their products to deliver a product -- and that's everyone who's delivering a web application, at least. How do they steal it? Just recently I lost hours of my time (and possibly business) because of some bug that makes images that display all right and proper in every browser -- except IE. You just had to know that in certain situations involving nested, CSS positioned divs, unless you set the most immediately containing div to position: relative, the images would not render. Anyone here who's ever tried CSS positioning and the accompanying loosely semantic markup knows what I'm talking about. This happens in a hundred small ways.
It's not just IE, either. I have to use MS Word XP at work to occasionally do *page layout*. Nevermind that it's the wrong tool for the job, we know that, it's just that sometimes our customers demand stuff in that format. The gyrations necessary to do things in those programs are ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. I've used two other word processors who make it an order of magnitude easier -- hell, sometimes I'd rather do page layout in the same bug-ridden CSS/XHTML combo I mentioned above. Again, who is the player with the most resources? Who does not have the easiest or most powerful toolset?
Seriously, someday I think people will wake up and realize that Bill has been wasting several GDPs worth of people's time, and that's how he's amased his wealth -- Microsoft would much rather let customers and developers waste their time than spend their own dimes creating truly effective software.
All I've got left is a cell phone. No land line.
Of course! Cell phones are illegal to call! Now, if only there were some way to get land lines that were also illegal to call....
It's not just the precedent. If/When Eolas comes racketeering for the other browsers, they've got a problem: no $420 million to pony up. Since this sort of functionality is essential to modern browsers, what Eolas has essentially done is raise a barrier to entry to the browser market that only rich, established companies can hurdle. Microsoft actually *wins* on this one, because (a) they look like a victim while (b) they get one of their favorite things, a non-technical barrier to entry against competitors.
Cool can be manufactured.
Diamonds, too....
the California legislature is cranking out as many liberal laws as possible.
"Liberal" law? The kind passed by the sorts of liberals our friendly neighborhood right-wing pundits imagine they're combatting?
Seems far more likely to me this law is actually passed by at best a market competition conservative (and at worst a capital-crony cheap labor conservative) who wants to make sure no young, technically superior, feature-richer telecom company is going to have a leg up on the traditional telecom behemoths.
I don't have any particular beef with the fees because even though I'd rather see services like vonnage tear out of the gateway, yes, I can see the logic that it's all telecom and needs to meet certain service standarads that are funded by fees, and I have faith that Vonnage is going to win out anyway, fee-level playing field or no. But the idea that this is a liberal taxation plot is just ridiculous.
I'll bet some folks think that recent raise on vehicle taxes is a Gray Davis liberal taxation plot as well, when, in reality, that is a consequence of laws passed in 1998 specifying what would happen on budget deficit.
a 'best performing stock' with +800% -- is run by nice Mormons, IBM is the evil Goliath
This is probably a good time to recycle a small rant I wrote a few weeks ago -- short version is that any Mormon with a half an ounce of sense of their own history would recognize there are shared values between the open source community and their own cultural/spiritual history.
Let the market control how shitty TV programs are and stop bringing government into every damn thing.
Because the market is doing such a great job of controling the quality of television programming here, especially compared to places where the programming quality is clearly inferior, like those socialist English folks and their BBC.
That's not even really the point, of course. What's being suggested is that product placement needs to be monitored for the sorts of suggestions that made truth in advertising laws necessary.
But if they had gone ahead with the imaging, and the photos showed no damage and the shuttle had landed safely with no (or insignificant) damage to the wing, their reputation would have suffered.
And maybe that's the real problem.
I understand that it's discouraging to be the one who checks things out carefully and finds them good 99% of the time. But that doesn't mean it's not important to be checking.
I thought we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
Yes. Whatever standards compliance POSIX brings to various operating systems, it doesn't necessarily mean you have commen API/system calls, and definitely doesn't guarantee binary compatibility across systems. You've probably noticed that apps don't always make/compile across *NIX systems (let alone other POSIX compliant systems like WinNT) -- hence the need for autoconf and its ilk.
It sounds like their initial goal was to open up the UNIX stuff they got from SCO, building a better Linux in the process. When they found they couldn't do that without IP encumbrance, they changed their goal: to create a UNIX product which had whatever edges they thought they'd inherited but would also run Linux apps on IA32/64, no problem.
And when their plans with IBM went awry -- and it sounds like Love thinks IBM wasn't ethical -- they stopped, and the current folks decided to pick legal fights with IBM and the open source community.
the number one guy gets picked on the most, and exploited the most
I think that's arguably not true in the web server market, in which Apache pretty clearly dominates. I've been curious for a while to see if anyone would do a study between Apache and IIS comparing rates of security hole discovery, average time to patch/update release, and average time between release and install. My suspicion is that despite being the clear market leader, Apache's stats in this regard are competetive with IIS.
I think Microsoft's spin "we're picked on because we're number one, it's a terrible burden to carry but we do it" is brilliant, but there are few mass markets in which to test that theory. The Apache vs IIS comparison is a great one.
Acorn in the UK developed its own RISC processor
<merkin parody>
Where is this UK of which you speak? Is it one of them Canadian provinces?
</merkin parody>
Anyone who can understand that there's a difference between deciding a KB is 1000 bytes vs 1024 bytes should also know better than to make this into a lawsuit. I'll bet the motivation isn't even so much to screw consumers as to avoid confusing them. Once your average american on the street groks the metric system, explaining that we're working with multiples of 2^10 instead of 10^3 isn't going play well.
If you're really in a tizzy about this, just invent the distinction "binary GB|MB|KB" and "decimal GB|MB|KB" and stick with that.
And if your boss decides he's going to use your salary on expensive call girls and very smooth gin instead of depositing it in your bank account, technically you haven't lost anything. You just haven't gained.
Not the same (though close) because there's an important distinction here. Mr. Card doesn't sell his time -- he sells a product. When that product is distributed digitally or lent physically, he doesn't lose the ability to sell his product.
Selling your time -- essentially what you do when you accept a salary -- is different, because once time is given to something, it can't be recalled or sold to someone else.
Interesting that Card makes that distinction about how he works from a personal/legal standpoint to -- he licenses, but never gives up his copyright as a work for hire.
Ideals aside -- and I believe in supporting the right thing even for questionable characters/companies -- it's pragmatic on every level to hope for a microsoft victory in this case.
You see, if they lose, they can actually turn this to their advantage. As others have observed, Microsoft can afford to pay licensing fees. Most developers of other browsers can't. Thus, if Microsoft were to lose or "settle," they'd simply be creating another barrier to entry in the browser market. Which is remarkably good for them in a time when their current browser is at a developmental dead end.