Basically I see two major reasons why you don't see companies manufacturing a lot of B&W displays (especially of the size you are describing):
1) Minimal demand
2) Lower per unit profit margins
The first problem is that ultimately most people want to buy color LCD panels. It's not worth it to most LCD manufacturers to bother with the small segment of people who would be happy with large black and white LCD panels.
The other issue is that with Black and White, because it is simpler technology, ultimately their profit margins are going to be lower per unit. That means that they have to sell that many more in order to make a profit. If they charge enough to recoup their investment it wouldn't be that much more for people to shell out for the color display.
To see how these economics work, look at the price of processors in the market. There's a certain optimum point where you get a significant amount of power for a low price. If you reduce the power of the chip, the price doesn't drop much because. So you end up in the bizarre situation that you could pick up a K6-300 for just slightly more (or maybe even less) than an old pentium 60. It's just all economics.
Why is that bad? Katz, you're knee-jerking again. They coming up with new projects and products. That's *wonderful*, not terrible. It adds to the "marketplace of ideas." If we don't like them, we don't have to buy them.
What if we DO have to buy them? Do you own Windows? Why? Because it was the best thing for the job? Or was it because you had no choice? Do you run Office? Why? Because it was the best thing for the job? Or was it because you had no choice?
Personally for my use I've found many alternatives to Microsoft products that work good enough, but yet for many things I must own Microsoft products. Example: if you try to get a job, any recruiter you talk to will want you to e-mail them a resume IN WORD FORMAT. So, to get a job, I have to own a copy of word.
If it was really as simple as choosing not to use things I'd be happy with them. It's not that simple though...
No, I have no objection to them being a successful busines. Read what I said. What I object to is not their success but rather the elimination of choices for me. If their success didn't come at the price of my freedom, I'd be very happy to support them.
Let me give you an example of why this bothers me. When I recently went job hunting, I had to send a copy of my resume to recruiters in Microsoft Word format. I had to own a microsoft product so that I could get a job... Do you see the problem here?
While I agree that as a user I can choose to turn off these features or use a product that doesn't do this, there is a serious problem with this smart tags concept that "tuning out" doesn't solve.
If Microsoft controls the operating system market and the browser market then they ultimately control how people look at information. By controlling how people look at information they can influence the message that an individual receives. For example, they could put in lots of links to good press about Microsoft anytime I browse an anti-microsoft article. Anytime I bring up slashdot, the word Linux might end up pointing to Microsoft's shared source philosophy page. They can, to some extent, control information and can therfor control thought.
You as an individual make a choice to not use these technologies, but if large portions of the general population are using them, then that means Microsoft has an increased degree of influence over their thinking. You are not an island and you'll have to deal with the influence of this technology when you meet these people on the street and when they cast their votes. Just think of the potential for smart tags on:
-Political campaign sites - Visit the gore site and see links to pages that are against gore's positions
-Corporate homepages - wonder what sorts of tags might show up on sun's page through a microsoft browser
-Anti-Microsoft sites
The problem with Microsoft's current position and it's ongoing practices is that it tends to reduce choice in the industry. I will admit that I use windows and many other Microsoft products, sometimes by choice because they are better, sometimes because it's the only option.
As you point out, Office is the best office suite around, bar none. But why? Is it because nobody else has the skill that Microsoft does? Perhaps. But is it possible that nobody else bothers because they can't hope to compete. The risk involved is enormous and the reward is miminal. It's so bad that Corel decided to develop its own flavor of Linux just so it could have a platform where they could sell their word processor (that's not necessarily a fact, but it's my impression).
As for Office competing against Linux equivalents, what features do the Linux equivalents lack that you are concerned about? My biggest problem has simply been incompatibility with the Microsoft document formats. I have to keep a copy of Office around because some work I do requires having Office (otherwise I'd purge it). Is this a good thing that regardless of the quality of Microsoft's product I really have no choice but to have a copy?
If Microsoft's software was the best in all categories, I would still use Linux. Why? Because I like having a choice.
Fresh air airs at different times on each station. Here in Chicago it's at 2:00 pm (which means I just missed most of it). so, check your local NPR station to find out for certain when it is
AOL isn't stupid, they are hedging their bets and doing what they can to put themselves in an effective position to compete. The fact of the matter is that right now Microsoft runs the desktop of most consumers and so AOL is willing to make the sacrifice to go with IE in exchange for favorable positioning up front.
Now, at the same time, they fund the Mozilla effort, which as time goes on, should probably be little drain on their resources due to increasing community involvement. So overall investment there is small and it continues to give them a platform to work with on Embedded devices and non-windows desktops. As the market share of Embedded devices vs. Desktops shifts, AOL will have mozilla there to fill that need.
When you say, "one Windows 'distribution", which one are you referring to: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, or Windows XP?:) Sorry, couldn't resist.
Upgrades are less frequent, but there's two caveats to that:
1) you can only upgrade when microsoft deems it is okay to upgrade. So, if you want to add some new functionality they haven't made official yet, tough luck. Or if some exploit has been found that they don't have a patch for yet, too bad.
2) when the upgrades do come along, they make an effort to break things to force you to upgrade so you can pay them more money.
Frankly, except for the occasional security patch, old versions of Linux work just fine. My server at home runs Redhat 6.1, and it's pretty stock except for security patches. And really it worked fine when I had RedHat 5.2. I upgraded because I wanted some of the new features, but I was by no means obligated to do so.
You become a prositute and then later become a burden on society. You could just as easily become a software developer and then later become a burden on society. What do you see as a social cost associated with this?
And as for your drug comment, you are free to choose that lifestyle or not, just as you are free to do so here in the US. The only difference is that in the US we will try to force you to not be an addict by having criminal laws. Of course this doesn't cure you and just further alienates you by labeling you a criminal.
My impression is that the judge's interpretaion of the california law was slightly overboard, but not as much as I'd like to think. It says tht somebody who knowingly threatens to use a weapon of mass destruction even if the have no intent or capability of using it can be prosecuted.
So my thinking is that the judge saw the context as irrelevant in the case because this law doesn't really make clearance for the "just kidding" defense. Effectively this is being treated similarly to the laws about bomb jokes at the airport. So he forbid entry of that evidence into the record because it would have tainted the jury's perspective.
It seems quite realistic that if you sent an e-mail to somebody and jokingly said, "If you don't come out with us tonight, I'm gonna blow up your house with a cruise missile," you can be prosecuted as a terrorist (assuming they feel compelled to do so). This is a VERY bad law written in the heat of the moment and in desperate need of overturning. So whatever you do in the mean time, if you describe conducting violent acts on anybody in any forum, don't do it in California, and don't use weapons of mass destruction. And ESPECIALLY don't do it to scientologists:)
If you want to maintain a strong sense of Hyperbole, might I recommend instead using non-existent science-fiction weapons? Threaten to use a Death Star or anti-matter weapons. Perhaps you should add a further touch of the comedic by threatening somebody with a 747 full of rabid weasels.
Disclaimer: If you choose to use advice in this posting, you need to put down the crack pipe. Just say no!
Perhaps the major drive for using Linux here is simply not having to re-invent the wheel. With most game consoles, a serious amount of time is invested in making custom hardware and developing a custom operating system. With Linux, they can take a stock kernel and stock PC parts and save themselves a lot of trouble.
Yes, of course to some extent they'll get good press because they use Linux (and certainly they make a point of mentioning it because of this). But ultimately it seems like they just want to do something that will get them in the market fast and you'd be hard pressed to find a better choice in that regard.
How so? I'm not attempting to dispute your claim about these socialist european countries controlling people. But frankly most of the things I've heard about the freedoms granted to people in those countries makes me think very highly of them and increases my dissapointment with this country. So I ask you, in what way do they control them? No society is perfect so I'm sure they have some issues, but what are they?
It isn't that academic research scientists are learning this lesson faster, it is a matter of the economics of their work vs. that of recording musicians. In the recording industry, a musician can be pushed into relative obscurity if the labels don't publish their music. There are many musicians out there and the recording labels have demonstrated a willingness to push lesser quality music and the public has shown a willingness to listen to it. So musicians do not have a lot of leverage to work with.
For scientists, their livelihoods are sponsored by universities, not directly through the act of publishing. Publishing is used as a benchmark of academic reputation, and although academic researchers are expected to publish, universities are much more understanding about this sort of protest than the landlord of a starving young musician. Such a protest serves to further the academic reputations of the scientists involved, by demonstrating their loyalty to the ideals that have driven scientific research to date. Also, if the protest is successful, the universities benefit through greater access to the materials provided by those journals, so why wouldn't they back the protest.
The ACLU has rarely hesitated to defend offensive speach no matter what wing it comes from. They defend KKK members just as readily as they defend the EFF. Why weren't they involved in this? I'm not sure, but I'd be curious to find out.
I think that it would be oh so lovely if we had federal statutes to protect the privacy of such information. If it is given that the addresses, phone numbers, etc, of these doctors was publicly available information, then it seems well within the rights of the publishers to put all of that information together even in that context.
But the question is, should that information have even gotten to them in the first place? Should they be able to publish that private information without authorization from those doctors? I tend to think not.
Um, this isn't a particularly original idea. If you ever played "You Don't Know Jack" on-line, it did the same thing. There were two ad breaks in the middle of it and usually a third break where they had an amusing fake advertisement.
Think about where you get your information from in a given day. Every single bit of it that you didn't experience first hand is filtered. Even what you experience first hand is filtered through your subjective mind, instilling impressions of what happened that may not match reality.
If you get the news from NPR instead of ABC, you get a different perspective. How is the Internet making this any different? The only difference I see is that you get a number of sites that specialize in certain kinds of information within certain types of communities (slashdot for geeks, etc). Is it really somehow better to have your news filtered by some faceless editor in a news corporation, or have it filtered by like-minded community members.
I mean, when I go through my day, the vast majority of the real news I get about the world comes from NPR. I get my geek news from Slashdot and news.com. I go to other sites to discuss what I've read and I share my ideas. I know the type of information that I get and the overall quality of it for each information source. I intentionally seek out news from many sources so that I can get as accurate a perspective on the world as possible. I'm aware of how each outlet filters their news and I take that into account. When I attach validity to the information. Slashdot is notorious for overreacting on stories so I take any news from here of somebody's rights being trampled with a huge grain of salt.
People who wish to remain oblivious to what's going on in the world have been able to do that for a long time without the Internet. Look at the gated communities in the distant suburbs. Do you think these people keep in close touch with the reality of poverty in the inner city? The Internet isn't some huge new threat, it's just another aspect of the same problem that's always been there.
It seems to me that censorware is an excellent business to be in right now. Let's look at how a censorware business works:
1) You begin by building a piece of software that works at blocking a certain set of benchmark sites (and you build the list of benchmarks). The benchmark sites are compiled by a group of college students you pay to surf pr0n all day
2) You hype up the products abilities (based on those benchmarks), and when people find holes you just patch those few holes you can and say you are working on improving it. No need for perfection here because nobody expects it.
3) You get state legislatures and the federal government to mandate addition of censorware to computers. This gives you an automatic federally enforced income.
You get to develop a shoddy product, surf pr0n, and you get the government to pay for the whole damn thing. Wow, I think we've found socialist nirvana!
The problem that this concept runs into is that if I can get the same content for free as what I pay for just give or take the ad banners, I can use software to block the banners. I personally don't block slashdot's ad banners because I actually have an interest in products that get advertised here.
If you want to offer a subscription service you have to add some value to the service to make it worth the extra money other than axing the advertisements. I don't think this would be feasible on Slashdot because of how slashdot works.
I mean fine, I'm willing to believe earthlink here, but your suggestion that it's not long enough to be a GUID seems specious. If you look at the numbers we can clearly see that each number can be at least 0-d which implies that it is probably either an 8 bit character or a 4 bit character (i.e. hexidecimal). So, you say:
Microsoft's GUID had 128 bits; a good hash function might have 160 bits;
Well, if each character in that string was a 4 bit number, then you are talking 4 bits in 48 places which means it is at least a 192 bit number. So, your logic seems somewhat faulty.
You have to give the CIA credit for at least on thing here. They are definitely much better that the FBI at naming their systems in a way that doesn't spook people. CARNIVORE?!? Sheesh, how did you expect people to react?
The RIAA and MPAA have become very good at sneaking by their draconian technologies without anybody noticing. DVD is a prime example of how they can get away with this sort of thing. They offer superior fidelity, multiple audio tracks, digital surround sound, etc to get you to buy it. Once you've adopted the technology you then find out that you accidentally sold your sould.
Market forces already do the work of a boycott. To illustrate this, take a look at Divx's failure. This is really the scheme that the media companies would prefer to use but people found it very unpalatable because it provided no real benefits and had all of the draconian drawbacks.
Just wait, they'll come up with some reason to get people to buy into these new technologies.
In thinking about my own opinions on this subject I tried to resolve the apparent conflict between my realtively libertarian beliefs and my desire to see Microsoft smashed into tiny little bits. Sure, Microsoft should have the right do do what it wants, but I think there has to be a balance when doing what they want comes in conflict with protecting a competitive marketplace that increases the choices available to end users.
The problem as I see it is that Microsoft reduces personal choice for me. I can choose to run MacOS only because Microsoft has chosen to keep Apple around. A few years ago, Microsoft could have just let Apple fall into bankruptcy and today you'd only have Linux and Windows as reasonable choices. Today I use Linux, for many reasons, chief amongst them being that I want to preserve my right to have a choice in the matter. Sometimes doing things under Linux is more of a challenge and sometimes things can't be done at all, but I make that choice because I want to have an alternative to Windows.
So really, my Libertarian side is looking to see Microsoft smashed so that competition is restored and to insure that I will always have a choice about what OS, browser, and office software I use.
After watching this case unfold, I get the sense that the DOJ chose the wrong target. Netscape was certainly trounced by Microsoft, partially because of Microsoft using their dominance, but also partially because Netscape got behind the 8 ball (witness Real Audio's continued existance as evidence that just Microsoft monopolistic power isn't necessarily enough).
What further doesn't make sense about this whole situation is that Jackson seems to be targeting the ties between Office and Windows as the big threat. This is Microsoft's current power base and Jackson realized this, but I think the leap of logic to say that because of the netscape debacle they should break up the office products from the OS is pushing it. The great danger with IE has nothing to do with office, but rather that they can leverage that monopoly to push a monopoly in the server realm (proprietary ties between IE and IIS that push people away from open platforms). In fact, if you look at Microsoft's current models it looks like they want to get rid of the traditional packaging of Office and replace it with pay-per-use on-line software driven by a Microsoft server and browser.
So, I think that the DOJ and Jackson really dropped the ball on this one. I think that Microsoft is a dangerous monopoly, and once this suit falls apart (which I think is an almost certainty), Microsoft will feel free to start using both hands again to strangle competition. Microsoft won't really learn anything (except that it's a good idea to send large checks to politicians) and we'll continue to have a Microsoft dominated industry for the foreseeable future.
It is terribly risky to put your faith in the Supreme Court. This court has had a tendancy to be very activist, and could do something really dangerous with this case. I guarantee that this will go before the Supreme court because neither side can afford to lose, but that doesn't mean 2600 will win it.
I think that 2600 has very valid legal ground and the release of open source players for Linux validates the very useful application of this technology. But the Supreme Court could decide that this laws was within the jurisdicition of congress and that Kaplan's interpretation is accurate. Then where would we be?
We need to find a louder voice in the place where the bad laws get made. We need to have greater control over our destiny than hoping that we get lucky with the Supreme Court. It's too late now for 2600 to take a different approach, but if this goes badly, we need to be ready with a backup plan (besides moving to countries with well written laws).
Slashdot Mirror
1) Minimal demand
2) Lower per unit profit margins
The first problem is that ultimately most people want to buy color LCD panels. It's not worth it to most LCD manufacturers to bother with the small segment of people who would be happy with large black and white LCD panels.
The other issue is that with Black and White, because it is simpler technology, ultimately their profit margins are going to be lower per unit. That means that they have to sell that many more in order to make a profit. If they charge enough to recoup their investment it wouldn't be that much more for people to shell out for the color display.
To see how these economics work, look at the price of processors in the market. There's a certain optimum point where you get a significant amount of power for a low price. If you reduce the power of the chip, the price doesn't drop much because. So you end up in the bizarre situation that you could pick up a K6-300 for just slightly more (or maybe even less) than an old pentium 60. It's just all economics.
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What if we DO have to buy them? Do you own Windows? Why? Because it was the best thing for the job? Or was it because you had no choice? Do you run Office? Why? Because it was the best thing for the job? Or was it because you had no choice?
Personally for my use I've found many alternatives to Microsoft products that work good enough, but yet for many things I must own Microsoft products. Example: if you try to get a job, any recruiter you talk to will want you to e-mail them a resume IN WORD FORMAT. So, to get a job, I have to own a copy of word.
If it was really as simple as choosing not to use things I'd be happy with them. It's not that simple though...
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Let me give you an example of why this bothers me. When I recently went job hunting, I had to send a copy of my resume to recruiters in Microsoft Word format. I had to own a microsoft product so that I could get a job... Do you see the problem here?
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If Microsoft controls the operating system market and the browser market then they ultimately control how people look at information. By controlling how people look at information they can influence the message that an individual receives. For example, they could put in lots of links to good press about Microsoft anytime I browse an anti-microsoft article. Anytime I bring up slashdot, the word Linux might end up pointing to Microsoft's shared source philosophy page. They can, to some extent, control information and can therfor control thought.
You as an individual make a choice to not use these technologies, but if large portions of the general population are using them, then that means Microsoft has an increased degree of influence over their thinking. You are not an island and you'll have to deal with the influence of this technology when you meet these people on the street and when they cast their votes. Just think of the potential for smart tags on:
-Political campaign sites - Visit the gore site and see links to pages that are against gore's positions
-Corporate homepages - wonder what sorts of tags might show up on sun's page through a microsoft browser
-Anti-Microsoft sites
Be afraid... Be very afraid...
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As you point out, Office is the best office suite around, bar none. But why? Is it because nobody else has the skill that Microsoft does? Perhaps. But is it possible that nobody else bothers because they can't hope to compete. The risk involved is enormous and the reward is miminal. It's so bad that Corel decided to develop its own flavor of Linux just so it could have a platform where they could sell their word processor (that's not necessarily a fact, but it's my impression).
As for Office competing against Linux equivalents, what features do the Linux equivalents lack that you are concerned about? My biggest problem has simply been incompatibility with the Microsoft document formats. I have to keep a copy of Office around because some work I do requires having Office (otherwise I'd purge it). Is this a good thing that regardless of the quality of Microsoft's product I really have no choice but to have a copy?
If Microsoft's software was the best in all categories, I would still use Linux. Why? Because I like having a choice.
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Now, at the same time, they fund the Mozilla effort, which as time goes on, should probably be little drain on their resources due to increasing community involvement. So overall investment there is small and it continues to give them a platform to work with on Embedded devices and non-windows desktops. As the market share of Embedded devices vs. Desktops shifts, AOL will have mozilla there to fill that need.
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Upgrades are less frequent, but there's two caveats to that:
1) you can only upgrade when microsoft deems it is okay to upgrade. So, if you want to add some new functionality they haven't made official yet, tough luck. Or if some exploit has been found that they don't have a patch for yet, too bad.
2) when the upgrades do come along, they make an effort to break things to force you to upgrade so you can pay them more money.
Frankly, except for the occasional security patch, old versions of Linux work just fine. My server at home runs Redhat 6.1, and it's pretty stock except for security patches. And really it worked fine when I had RedHat 5.2. I upgraded because I wanted some of the new features, but I was by no means obligated to do so.
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You become a prositute and then later become a burden on society. You could just as easily become a software developer and then later become a burden on society. What do you see as a social cost associated with this?
And as for your drug comment, you are free to choose that lifestyle or not, just as you are free to do so here in the US. The only difference is that in the US we will try to force you to not be an addict by having criminal laws. Of course this doesn't cure you and just further alienates you by labeling you a criminal.
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So my thinking is that the judge saw the context as irrelevant in the case because this law doesn't really make clearance for the "just kidding" defense. Effectively this is being treated similarly to the laws about bomb jokes at the airport. So he forbid entry of that evidence into the record because it would have tainted the jury's perspective.
It seems quite realistic that if you sent an e-mail to somebody and jokingly said, "If you don't come out with us tonight, I'm gonna blow up your house with a cruise missile," you can be prosecuted as a terrorist (assuming they feel compelled to do so). This is a VERY bad law written in the heat of the moment and in desperate need of overturning. So whatever you do in the mean time, if you describe conducting violent acts on anybody in any forum, don't do it in California, and don't use weapons of mass destruction. And ESPECIALLY don't do it to scientologists
If you want to maintain a strong sense of Hyperbole, might I recommend instead using non-existent science-fiction weapons? Threaten to use a Death Star or anti-matter weapons. Perhaps you should add a further touch of the comedic by threatening somebody with a 747 full of rabid weasels.
Disclaimer: If you choose to use advice in this posting, you need to put down the crack pipe. Just say no!
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Yes, of course to some extent they'll get good press because they use Linux (and certainly they make a point of mentioning it because of this). But ultimately it seems like they just want to do something that will get them in the market fast and you'd be hard pressed to find a better choice in that regard.
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For scientists, their livelihoods are sponsored by universities, not directly through the act of publishing. Publishing is used as a benchmark of academic reputation, and although academic researchers are expected to publish, universities are much more understanding about this sort of protest than the landlord of a starving young musician. Such a protest serves to further the academic reputations of the scientists involved, by demonstrating their loyalty to the ideals that have driven scientific research to date. Also, if the protest is successful, the universities benefit through greater access to the materials provided by those journals, so why wouldn't they back the protest.
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But the question is, should that information have even gotten to them in the first place? Should they be able to publish that private information without authorization from those doctors? I tend to think not.
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If you get the news from NPR instead of ABC, you get a different perspective. How is the Internet making this any different? The only difference I see is that you get a number of sites that specialize in certain kinds of information within certain types of communities (slashdot for geeks, etc). Is it really somehow better to have your news filtered by some faceless editor in a news corporation, or have it filtered by like-minded community members.
I mean, when I go through my day, the vast majority of the real news I get about the world comes from NPR. I get my geek news from Slashdot and news.com. I go to other sites to discuss what I've read and I share my ideas. I know the type of information that I get and the overall quality of it for each information source. I intentionally seek out news from many sources so that I can get as accurate a perspective on the world as possible. I'm aware of how each outlet filters their news and I take that into account. When I attach validity to the information. Slashdot is notorious for overreacting on stories so I take any news from here of somebody's rights being trampled with a huge grain of salt.
People who wish to remain oblivious to what's going on in the world have been able to do that for a long time without the Internet. Look at the gated communities in the distant suburbs. Do you think these people keep in close touch with the reality of poverty in the inner city? The Internet isn't some huge new threat, it's just another aspect of the same problem that's always been there.
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1) You begin by building a piece of software that works at blocking a certain set of benchmark sites (and you build the list of benchmarks). The benchmark sites are compiled by a group of college students you pay to surf pr0n all day
2) You hype up the products abilities (based on those benchmarks), and when people find holes you just patch those few holes you can and say you are working on improving it. No need for perfection here because nobody expects it.
3) You get state legislatures and the federal government to mandate addition of censorware to computers. This gives you an automatic federally enforced income.
You get to develop a shoddy product, surf pr0n, and you get the government to pay for the whole damn thing. Wow, I think we've found socialist nirvana!
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If you want to offer a subscription service you have to add some value to the service to make it worth the extra money other than axing the advertisements. I don't think this would be feasible on Slashdot because of how slashdot works.
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I mean fine, I'm willing to believe earthlink here, but your suggestion that it's not long enough to be a GUID seems specious. If you look at the numbers we can clearly see that each number can be at least 0-d which implies that it is probably either an 8 bit character or a 4 bit character (i.e. hexidecimal). So, you say:
Microsoft's GUID had 128 bits; a good hash function might have 160 bits;
Well, if each character in that string was a 4 bit number, then you are talking 4 bits in 48 places which means it is at least a 192 bit number. So, your logic seems somewhat faulty.
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Market forces already do the work of a boycott. To illustrate this, take a look at Divx's failure. This is really the scheme that the media companies would prefer to use but people found it very unpalatable because it provided no real benefits and had all of the draconian drawbacks.
Just wait, they'll come up with some reason to get people to buy into these new technologies.
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The problem as I see it is that Microsoft reduces personal choice for me. I can choose to run MacOS only because Microsoft has chosen to keep Apple around. A few years ago, Microsoft could have just let Apple fall into bankruptcy and today you'd only have Linux and Windows as reasonable choices. Today I use Linux, for many reasons, chief amongst them being that I want to preserve my right to have a choice in the matter. Sometimes doing things under Linux is more of a challenge and sometimes things can't be done at all, but I make that choice because I want to have an alternative to Windows.
So really, my Libertarian side is looking to see Microsoft smashed so that competition is restored and to insure that I will always have a choice about what OS, browser, and office software I use.
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What further doesn't make sense about this whole situation is that Jackson seems to be targeting the ties between Office and Windows as the big threat. This is Microsoft's current power base and Jackson realized this, but I think the leap of logic to say that because of the netscape debacle they should break up the office products from the OS is pushing it. The great danger with IE has nothing to do with office, but rather that they can leverage that monopoly to push a monopoly in the server realm (proprietary ties between IE and IIS that push people away from open platforms). In fact, if you look at Microsoft's current models it looks like they want to get rid of the traditional packaging of Office and replace it with pay-per-use on-line software driven by a Microsoft server and browser.
So, I think that the DOJ and Jackson really dropped the ball on this one. I think that Microsoft is a dangerous monopoly, and once this suit falls apart (which I think is an almost certainty), Microsoft will feel free to start using both hands again to strangle competition. Microsoft won't really learn anything (except that it's a good idea to send large checks to politicians) and we'll continue to have a Microsoft dominated industry for the foreseeable future.
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I think that 2600 has very valid legal ground and the release of open source players for Linux validates the very useful application of this technology. But the Supreme Court could decide that this laws was within the jurisdicition of congress and that Kaplan's interpretation is accurate. Then where would we be?
We need to find a louder voice in the place where the bad laws get made. We need to have greater control over our destiny than hoping that we get lucky with the Supreme Court. It's too late now for 2600 to take a different approach, but if this goes badly, we need to be ready with a backup plan (besides moving to countries with well written laws).
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