It's even more slimy than that. Read the question and the answer in their entirety from Microsoft's page:
Why isn't there a patch available for this issue?
The person who discovered this vulnerability has chosen to handle it irresponsibly, and has deliberately made this issue public only a few days after reporting it to Microsoft. It is simply not possible to build, test and release a patch within this timeframe and still meet reasonable quality standards.
What does the first sentence of the answer even have to do with the question?
Why did Microsoft feel it was necessary to bash the person who discovered the vulnerability? They even admit they had 'a few days' between the time the bug was reported to them and the time it went public. Who knows if maybe someone else already found the vulnerability first, and has been stealing data from cookies for weeks now without either notifying Microsoft or notifying the public?
Moreover, Microsoft's response here implies that the 'responsible' way to deal with vulnerabilities is to notify Microsoft and no one else, and to give Microsoft all the time it needs to release a patch. How many other 'high severity rating' security holes have been reported to Microsoft but not to the public? How long have they gone without being fixed? Meanwhile, are they being exploited?
I used to be a Lisp fanatic, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for the language.:-)
To me, Lisp is wonderful for three reasons:
(1) It's highly abstract. It makes working with fuzzy concepts (such as natural language) so much easier; you very rarely (if ever) have to get into the nitty-gritty of worrying about how your code actually interfaces with the hardware it's running on. Lisp is one of the highest-level languages I've ever used. Compared to Lisp, C++ is just horribly ugly.
(2) Lisp code can be self-modifying -- it's easy to write a program which puts together a new function and adds it to itself. This makes it great for artificial intelligence, in which self-modifying programs are good things. Compared with this, Perl's 'eval' function is woefully inadequate.
(3) One of the most important things to learn about Lisp is that good code flows from the fingertips, while bad code snarls up and is hard to write. If you're having a hard time getting a piece of Lisp code to work, then you're probably going about solving a problem the wrong way. When thoughts and code are in harmony, it's a very Zen form of beauty.
Lisp code is just *fun* to write.:-) Even more so than Perl code!
It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.
If that same rule holds true for the iPaq, it might become one of the best gaming systems ever conceived.:-)
What do you mean, 'CS isn't fun any more?' Do you just mean that your classes aren't fun any more? That's natural -- I love CS, but Discrete Math was almost the end of me. (I couldn't STAND the smug Knuth 'Concrete Mathematics' book.)
CS isn't just about writing code and pushing bits. You could do any of these things in the CS field:
work on free software, anything from Linux to Gnome or beyond
get into 3D modelling, for anything from the next Quake to the next Shrek
become a system administrator or a system architect, and create a company's secure network
get into management, and lead a team of software developers on a project
And these are just a few ideas. Saying that you don't like CS is silly -- CS is a means, not an end. You can pick any end you want with the skills a CS education gives you.
Interesting commentary from macfixit.com on Microsoft's aggressiveness ever since the breakup remedy was thrown out:
In recent weeks, we have seen Microsoft remove its support for Netscape extensions, forcing Apple to scramble to revise its QuickTime plug-in so that it would work with the Windows version of Explorer (and making us wonder if this also had something to do with Microsoft's desire to push its own Media Player format). At the same time, it omitted Java support from Window's Explorer [see previous item]. Then there is XP's reduced support for the MP3 format (again in favor of Microsoft's own alternative), plus the countless ways XP coerces you to MS-approved web sites [see this item]. Add to all of this the recent controversy over MS blocking access to MSN by web browsers other than Explorer (see next item). We could go on. But you get the point. Yes, it certainly appears that Microsoft has been humbled by this lawsuit.
My take on the court case all along...
Microsoft's defense: "No, Your Honor, we're not responsible for murdering the victim! We only pointed the gun towards him and pulled the trigger -- it was his fault that he wasn't strong enough to deal with that! Besides, he was someday eventually going to die anyway! And there's no point in punishing us now, since he's already dead."
DOJ: "Yes, you're right, we're sorry. We're going to punish you by telling you never to do it again! Here's your gun back."
Not if the fine is large enough. How much do you think Microsoft's illegal activities have hurt its competitors? Can you put a dollar value on that? I'll bet its competitors can, and I'll bet it won't be trivial.
Keep in mind that the settlement between Microsoft and the DOJ does not involve any punitive actions. Microsoft is free to profit from its illegal gains. I think a heavy fine isn't only useful, but necessary -- especially if the fine is paid to the companies who were hurt, and they use it to compete against Microsoft.
I enjoyed the movie most of the way through, but the climax really kinda spoiled it for me. Not because of the effects or the characterization, but for a line it crossed.
What had up until that point been a lighthearted movie suddenly introduced the idea of kidnapping children and forcing screams out of them.
Was I the only person who found this completely inappropriate?
A 'consumer level loss of interest?' As in, people migrating off Microsoft software? Yeah. Sure.
Mark my words: within five years, Microsoft will already have ignored and broken the terms of today's settlement. They'll already be hard at work tying products together and locking customers into Microsoft-only solutions, leveraging Windows and IE and the MSN messager off each other to make sure no customers leave the fold.
Yes, the government will quickly get wise to this new illegal activity -- and it'll result in a new court case, which will take another four years to reach a settlement, which will give Microsoft a completely new set of restrictions to ignore.
I wonder if Bill Gates's hand is red from being slapped by the government so often.
There's a long history of companies crushed by Microsoft's outrageously illegal practices, from Digital Research (the FUD campaign against DR-DOS in the early 1980's) to Stack (outright stealing of their compression code in the early 1990's) to Netscape ('cutting off their air supply' by cloning every Netscape product and giving them away for free). In the courtroom, they've falsified evidence (the famous videotape with the disappearing icons) and even destroyed evidence (deleted incriminating email in a case against Caldera) and they've always gotten away with it. With today's settlement, I wonder who Microsoft's next victim will be.
What's the use of trying to bring an innovative new product to market any more, knowing that Microsoft will just steal it from you after you R&D it and create its user base?
(1) Microsoft insists up and down that it is not a monopoly. They claim that competition in the marketplace is strong and healthy; they point to Mac and Linux and Palm alternatives as evidence of this.
If you were to try to drag Microsoft into court to prove they're a monopoly, they would bog down the legal proceedings in a tarpit of red tape and appeals as they've done so many times before, and you'd be completely unable to actually accomplish anything.
(2) There's nothing wrong with BEING a monopoly; all the problems lie in ABUSING that monopoly. If you refuse patent and copyright protection to companies simply because they're monopolies, you go against the very nature of capitalism and you discourage companies from wanting to be #1 in a given market, and that would play havoc with the free market.
If you want to drag Microsoft into court to prove they've abused their monopoly -- well, then, they bring the legal system to a halt while they continue doing what they were doing, and you're back at square one.
It's a very slippery slope, and they're a very slippery snake.
You're all overlooking something very important, something absolutely critical to the game:
Microsoft is not interested in playing nice.Everything they do is geared towards locking in more customers to gain more control and thereby more money. They pay lip service to standards and open-ness when it doesn't hurt them, but they have absolutely no hesitations about violating standards, breaking the law, or otherwise Not Being Nice when it suits them to be.
The sole and entire purpose of Windows XP is to lock people into using the msn.com web site for all their needs, and to force them into using Windows Media Player for video and audio files. Their goal is divisiveness and incompatibility from anything that's not Microsoft-made. They want to leverage the Windows market share to make their standards and their services so necessary that people will have to be able to access the msn.com web site, and so therefore it'll just be too much trouble to bother using any browser other than IE, or any media player other than WMP. MP3's will be too much of a hassle because Windows XP doesn't support them nearly as nicely as it supports WMA files. (XP's media player has crippled MP3 features, including limiting the bit rate at which the MP3 codecs can record music.)
Stop trying to make sense of Microsoft's actions in terms of what's best for competition or for the web. Microsoft doesn't care. They will play nice when it benefits them; they'll play dirty when it suits them; and there's nothing anybody can do about it, because they've shown they're capable of tying court cases in knots for years until long after they've won the battles in question and crushed their opponents into oblivion.
Notice, by the way, that they're doing their best to make absolutely certain that they own all the file formats they're using; they only push for open formats when they don't own the market in question. You can bet it'll be a cold day in hell before Linux users ever get to use Windows audio and video file formats without getting sued by Microsoft, and the formats which Linux supports will continue to be deprecated in Windows -- thereby relegating Linux to become an 'incompatible' operating system which even fewer users will have an incentive to use.
Microsoft's actions are extremely bad for the industry and for the future of computing. They have far too much power and there's no clear way to stop them.
Nope. Netscape never forced everyone to use their browser to see netscape.com. Had Netscape done this, it would have backfired -- instead of people flocking to install Netscape so they could get to Netscape's web site, people would have abandoned Netscape's web site in droves. The lost ad revenues were enough to convince Netscape not to implement any restriction like this.
Problem is, Mac OS 10.1 breaks MacMAME. It still runs, but most of the settings tabs are now inaccessible, and full-screen OpenGL smoothed video has stopped working for lots of people. This is supposedly due to bugs in 10.1 which will most likely be fixed in 10.1.1.
The interesting thing is that the word 'Mozilla' is trademarked by Netscape (and that trademark is now owned by AOL).
Microsoft isn't legally allowed to use the word 'Mozilla' in their software. Their tactic of having MSIE represent itself as 'Mozilla' in the user-agent string is on shaky legal ground at best.
Unless you're knowledgeable enough to build a PC on your own from parts, generally any pre-built PC you buy from any name-brand PC company is required to have Windows bundled in with it. You can't buy a PC from Compaq, Dell, or Gateway without Windows included in the price.
How many people would then pay *more* to purchase another operating system with fewer applications, just because they want to thumb their nose at Microsoft?
The complaint isn't that a user must have an original license for every computer -- the complaint is that the user must purchase a *new* license for every computer. What if you're upgrading to a new PC, you won't be using the old one any more, and you want to use your old copy of Windows 98 on the new PC; why should you be required to purchase Windows XP bundled with the new PC? What if you do get this new PC with Windows XP on it, why aren't you then allowed to give your copy of Windows 98 to someone else?
Let me get this straight. It's basically not possible any more to purchase a new PC without a copy of Windows bundled in (and included in the price), and you're not legally allowed to sell or even give this copy of Windows to anyone else?
So, even if you're upgrading from an old PC to a new PC and you want to use your copy of Windows 98 on this new PC, you're still required to pay for a copy of Windows XP that you can't get rid of? And if someone wants to get some new life out of an old PC, he's not allowed to have a copy of Windows 95 unless Microsoft lets him buy it from them (yeah right), even if you have an extra legal copy you're not using?
And what's more, Microsoft appears to be strong-arming the issue to get even more leeway. The article says that Ron Faul was selling two copies of Windows 95 and that Microsoft had eBay shut down the auctions; it doesn't say that these were preinstalled copies. I especially like this quote: "The preponderance of history is against them in this case, but light bends when it gets near Microsoft."
Years and years and years of court cases against Microsoft, from their killing DR-DOS back in the early 1980's by spreading Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt all the way up to their killing Netscape in the late 1990's by 'cutting off their air supply,' and they're still powerful enough to pull trash like this -- Bill Gates is probably laughing his head off at the all-bark-no-bite of the American legal system.
I wonder whether Jay Leno will leave the Twin Towers on the skyline backdrop to his set.
I hope so. I hope he makes a statement about how he's leaving them there because the real things will be rebuilt someday soon.
In the face of this tragedy, I'm glad to see world leaders speaking out in support of the United States. Perhaps this will end up being a sobering moment across the globe, and perhaps it'll end up bringing people together more than driving them apart.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of the Daft Punk music videos here. The recent ones are from their latest album 'Discovery.' The videos are animated by Leiji Matsumoto, otherwise famous for anime such as Space Cruiser Yamato (aka Star Blazers), Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock, and Queen Emereldas... it's great stuff! Especially since Matsumoto himself is more than seventy years old now!
I had originally heard that only the first four tracks from the album would be animated, but the fourth video (which I saw on Cartoon Network's 'Toonami' the other night) doesn't resolve anything. Has anyone heard for certain how much of the album will be animated?
The first three videos are available in RealVideo format from 'http://www.animedream.org/movies/matsumoto/'. The third video is my favorite.:-) A Quicktime file of the first video is available in three sizes from 'http://the-raft.com/pieces/daftpunk/movies/one_mo re_time_m.html'.
I'd love to see QuickTime or MPEG versions of all four videos; anyone know if such is available?
This sounds a lot like the ill-fated Divx DVD format of two years ago. With Divx, you could buy a DVD and 'unlock' it for any 48-hour period for a few dollars.
Divx failed because it just wasn't convenient enough for the price ($100 more for a compatible DVD player, and you still had to go to a store for the discs), but this rent-a-book concept doesn't suffer the same problem if the books can simply be downloaded.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. If the rent-a-book concept succeeds, that means that renting bits (CD's? software?) might catch on again; if it fails, then don't expect to see anything else become rentable on your computer in the next few years.
I've got a collection of old Apple hardware -- prototypes of the Mac Plus and Mac II, an Apple II+ with Apple Computer Inc. asset tags on it, some Newtons, various Quadras, Macs with asset tags on them from Kaleida and Netscape (all obtained legally), et cetera. Most of what I have was donated for free by people who wanted to clear out garage space. I've cleaned it up, restored it to like-new condition, and put the operating system it shipped with back onto its hard disk.
If anyone out there is in the Orlando, Florida area, and you've got any old Mac stuff to get rid of or if you know of anyplace that's getting rid of old Apple equipment for cheap or free, please drop me a line! (The BEST place I've found for this sort of collecting is Weird Stuff, www.weirdstuff.com, but that's in Sunnyvale California.)
The ruling to split up Microsoft was overturned because the Appeals Court decided that Judge Jackson was biased, broke codes of conduct, and "motivated by a desire to punish the company."
I briefly read through the Appeals Court decision, and I found very little in it actually defending Microsoft's market practices.
Microsoft won because they knew how to play the game. This isn't about right or wrong, it's about Lawyer Vs. Lawyer. Microsoft only had to do three things:
Drag the court case on as long as they could, and postpone any verdict as long as they could.
Never EVER admit to even the slightest wrongdoing. Vehemently protest even the merest suggestion that anything they did was at all improper.
Flaunt the judge at every opportunity. Remember Bill Gates not being able to remember business decisions he made, not knowing the meaning of simple words, and trying to say that Netscape wasn't a competitor? Remember the faked videotape?
The first two tactics worked well for a long time. (Note that even Bill Clinton used these tactics to some success.) But it's the third tactic which cinched the win for them: by basically giving Judge Jackson the finger in court, ANY reaction Judge Jackson had as a result could be blamed on him being biased against Microsoft.
This will have a devastating effect on the software industry, since it's been proven that Microsoft has the money and the resources to buy any market they want to own, and the political power to get away with it. Even if you had the Next Big Idea and a million dollars to start with, how could you even hope to compete with Microsoft once they got wind of your idea and copied it?
We're only now seeing Microsoft begin to notice the free software industry. I don't think it will be long before they find a way to 'embrace and extend,' lock customers into Microsoft-only solutions, and make free software become irrelevant. Nobody thought it could happen to Apple, nobody thought it could happen to Netscape, nobody thinks it'll happen to Linux...
After trying various complicated ways of screening out spam before it hit my inbox, I now simply use a procmail filter which puts any email containing any of the following phrases into a 'spam' mailbox:
"remove" in subject line
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
removal instructions
remove in subject line
remove in the subject
to be permanently removed
to be removed
to be taken off
to get off the list
to get off this list
to get removed
to remove yourself
In a month of using this filter, it's reduced the spam I get by 2/3 (it caught 300 of the 450 spams I received in the past four weeks), and it hasn't yet accidentally marked even a single non-spam as spam. I add new phrases as I see new spam slip through the filter. (Next up: I need to add "S.1618" and "S. 1618" to the list.)
Each one of these is wrapped in a simple procmail recipe, as such:
:0
* B ?? to be removed
/home/brian/spambox
It's not the most efficient thing in the world, but it's simple and it works. I hope this idea is of use to others.:-)
It's not like a EULA has any teeth, anyway. Remember about two years ago when many PC's were only sold with Windows, and people who used Linux instead tried to return their Windows CD's to Microsoft, as the EULA told them to? "If you do not agree to the terms of this software license," it said (and they didn't agree to the terms), "then return this Software Product to Microsoft for a full refund." They tried to get a $90 refund on the CD's, but Microsoft refused to oblige to the terms of the EULA.
If people violate the EULA and continue to use open-source software in conjunction with Microsoft software, and if Microsoft fights back legally, just take a page from their book and make sure the court case is drawn out long and slowly, until it doesn't really matter any more.
But when has this ever happened? When has any open source software "created obligations" for the maker of a proprietary piece of software, or "granted to any third party any rights to or immunities under" the original maker's intellectual property rights?
An example of this would be if you marketed and sold proprietary software, and one day someone knocked on your door and said, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but someone has just made your software part of the Emacs distribution. Because Emacs is licensed under the GPL, that means you must provide us with the source to your proprietary software right now, or we'll sue."
This is nonsense, of course -- it's completely backwards from the way things work. A public license may preclude the use of restricted-license software in public-licensed work, but it won't try to force a restricted license to be treated as public. I really don't understand what Microsoft is trying to protect itself from. The only way that a public license would obligate Microsoft in any way would be if Microsoft were to try to use a public-license software program in one of their products.
Actually, no, I know exactly what Microsoft is doing: trying to drive a wedge between Microsoft products and open-source projects. Microsoft is hoping to corral corporate America into going exclusively with Microsoft software, and to require them to keep away from open source.
I hate the term 'Viral Software' as applied to open-source licenses, by the way.
Slashdot Mirror
What does the first sentence of the answer even have to do with the question?
Why did Microsoft feel it was necessary to bash the person who discovered the vulnerability? They even admit they had 'a few days' between the time the bug was reported to them and the time it went public. Who knows if maybe someone else already found the vulnerability first, and has been stealing data from cookies for weeks now without either notifying Microsoft or notifying the public?
Moreover, Microsoft's response here implies that the 'responsible' way to deal with vulnerabilities is to notify Microsoft and no one else, and to give Microsoft all the time it needs to release a patch. How many other 'high severity rating' security holes have been reported to Microsoft but not to the public? How long have they gone without being fixed? Meanwhile, are they being exploited?
I used to be a Lisp fanatic, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for the language. :-)
:-) Even more so than Perl code!
To me, Lisp is wonderful for three reasons:
(1) It's highly abstract. It makes working with fuzzy concepts (such as natural language) so much easier; you very rarely (if ever) have to get into the nitty-gritty of worrying about how your code actually interfaces with the hardware it's running on. Lisp is one of the highest-level languages I've ever used. Compared to Lisp, C++ is just horribly ugly.
(2) Lisp code can be self-modifying -- it's easy to write a program which puts together a new function and adds it to itself. This makes it great for artificial intelligence, in which self-modifying programs are good things. Compared with this, Perl's 'eval' function is woefully inadequate.
(3) One of the most important things to learn about Lisp is that good code flows from the fingertips, while bad code snarls up and is hard to write. If you're having a hard time getting a piece of Lisp code to work, then you're probably going about solving a problem the wrong way. When thoughts and code are in harmony, it's a very Zen form of beauty.
Lisp code is just *fun* to write.
It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.
:-)
If that same rule holds true for the iPaq, it might become one of the best gaming systems ever conceived.
What do you mean, 'CS isn't fun any more?' Do you just mean that your classes aren't fun any more? That's natural -- I love CS, but Discrete Math was almost the end of me. (I couldn't STAND the smug Knuth 'Concrete Mathematics' book.)
CS isn't just about writing code and pushing bits. You could do any of these things in the CS field:
And these are just a few ideas. Saying that you don't like CS is silly -- CS is a means, not an end. You can pick any end you want with the skills a CS education gives you.
Interesting commentary from macfixit.com on Microsoft's aggressiveness ever since the breakup remedy was thrown out:
In recent weeks, we have seen Microsoft remove its support for Netscape extensions, forcing Apple to scramble to revise its QuickTime plug-in so that it would work with the Windows version of Explorer (and making us wonder if this also had something to do with Microsoft's desire to push its own Media Player format). At the same time, it omitted Java support from Window's Explorer [see previous item]. Then there is XP's reduced support for the MP3 format (again in favor of Microsoft's own alternative), plus the countless ways XP coerces you to MS-approved web sites [see this item]. Add to all of this the recent controversy over MS blocking access to MSN by web browsers other than Explorer (see next item). We could go on. But you get the point. Yes, it certainly appears that Microsoft has been humbled by this lawsuit.
My take on the court case all along...
Microsoft's defense: "No, Your Honor, we're not responsible for murdering the victim! We only pointed the gun towards him and pulled the trigger -- it was his fault that he wasn't strong enough to deal with that! Besides, he was someday eventually going to die anyway! And there's no point in punishing us now, since he's already dead."
DOJ: "Yes, you're right, we're sorry. We're going to punish you by telling you never to do it again! Here's your gun back."
A fine is useless.
Not if the fine is large enough. How much do you think Microsoft's illegal activities have hurt its competitors? Can you put a dollar value on that? I'll bet its competitors can, and I'll bet it won't be trivial.
Keep in mind that the settlement between Microsoft and the DOJ does not involve any punitive actions. Microsoft is free to profit from its illegal gains. I think a heavy fine isn't only useful, but necessary -- especially if the fine is paid to the companies who were hurt, and they use it to compete against Microsoft.
I enjoyed the movie most of the way through, but the climax really kinda spoiled it for me. Not because of the effects or the characterization, but for a line it crossed.
What had up until that point been a lighthearted movie suddenly introduced the idea of kidnapping children and forcing screams out of them.
Was I the only person who found this completely inappropriate?
A 'consumer level loss of interest?' As in, people migrating off Microsoft software? Yeah. Sure.
Mark my words: within five years, Microsoft will already have ignored and broken the terms of today's settlement. They'll already be hard at work tying products together and locking customers into Microsoft-only solutions, leveraging Windows and IE and the MSN messager off each other to make sure no customers leave the fold.
Yes, the government will quickly get wise to this new illegal activity -- and it'll result in a new court case, which will take another four years to reach a settlement, which will give Microsoft a completely new set of restrictions to ignore.
I wonder if Bill Gates's hand is red from being slapped by the government so often.
There's a long history of companies crushed by Microsoft's outrageously illegal practices, from Digital Research (the FUD campaign against DR-DOS in the early 1980's) to Stack (outright stealing of their compression code in the early 1990's) to Netscape ('cutting off their air supply' by cloning every Netscape product and giving them away for free). In the courtroom, they've falsified evidence (the famous videotape with the disappearing icons) and even destroyed evidence (deleted incriminating email in a case against Caldera) and they've always gotten away with it. With today's settlement, I wonder who Microsoft's next victim will be.
What's the use of trying to bring an innovative new product to market any more, knowing that Microsoft will just steal it from you after you R&D it and create its user base?
There are two problems with this approach.
(1) Microsoft insists up and down that it is not a monopoly. They claim that competition in the marketplace is strong and healthy; they point to Mac and Linux and Palm alternatives as evidence of this.
If you were to try to drag Microsoft into court to prove they're a monopoly, they would bog down the legal proceedings in a tarpit of red tape and appeals as they've done so many times before, and you'd be completely unable to actually accomplish anything.
(2) There's nothing wrong with BEING a monopoly; all the problems lie in ABUSING that monopoly. If you refuse patent and copyright protection to companies simply because they're monopolies, you go against the very nature of capitalism and you discourage companies from wanting to be #1 in a given market, and that would play havoc with the free market.
If you want to drag Microsoft into court to prove they've abused their monopoly -- well, then, they bring the legal system to a halt while they continue doing what they were doing, and you're back at square one.
It's a very slippery slope, and they're a very slippery snake.
You're all overlooking something very important, something absolutely critical to the game:
Microsoft is not interested in playing nice. Everything they do is geared towards locking in more customers to gain more control and thereby more money. They pay lip service to standards and open-ness when it doesn't hurt them, but they have absolutely no hesitations about violating standards, breaking the law, or otherwise Not Being Nice when it suits them to be.
The sole and entire purpose of Windows XP is to lock people into using the msn.com web site for all their needs, and to force them into using Windows Media Player for video and audio files. Their goal is divisiveness and incompatibility from anything that's not Microsoft-made. They want to leverage the Windows market share to make their standards and their services so necessary that people will have to be able to access the msn.com web site, and so therefore it'll just be too much trouble to bother using any browser other than IE, or any media player other than WMP. MP3's will be too much of a hassle because Windows XP doesn't support them nearly as nicely as it supports WMA files. (XP's media player has crippled MP3 features, including limiting the bit rate at which the MP3 codecs can record music.)
Stop trying to make sense of Microsoft's actions in terms of what's best for competition or for the web. Microsoft doesn't care. They will play nice when it benefits them; they'll play dirty when it suits them; and there's nothing anybody can do about it, because they've shown they're capable of tying court cases in knots for years until long after they've won the battles in question and crushed their opponents into oblivion.
Notice, by the way, that they're doing their best to make absolutely certain that they own all the file formats they're using; they only push for open formats when they don't own the market in question. You can bet it'll be a cold day in hell before Linux users ever get to use Windows audio and video file formats without getting sued by Microsoft, and the formats which Linux supports will continue to be deprecated in Windows -- thereby relegating Linux to become an 'incompatible' operating system which even fewer users will have an incentive to use.
Microsoft's actions are extremely bad for the industry and for the future of computing. They have far too much power and there's no clear way to stop them.
Nope. Netscape never forced everyone to use their browser to see netscape.com. Had Netscape done this, it would have backfired -- instead of people flocking to install Netscape so they could get to Netscape's web site, people would have abandoned Netscape's web site in droves. The lost ad revenues were enough to convince Netscape not to implement any restriction like this.
Problem is, Mac OS 10.1 breaks MacMAME. It still runs, but most of the settings tabs are now inaccessible, and full-screen OpenGL smoothed video has stopped working for lots of people. This is supposedly due to bugs in 10.1 which will most likely be fixed in 10.1.1.
The interesting thing is that the word 'Mozilla' is trademarked by Netscape (and that trademark is now owned by AOL).
Microsoft isn't legally allowed to use the word 'Mozilla' in their software. Their tactic of having MSIE represent itself as 'Mozilla' in the user-agent string is on shaky legal ground at best.
Unless you're knowledgeable enough to build a PC on your own from parts, generally any pre-built PC you buy from any name-brand PC company is required to have Windows bundled in with it. You can't buy a PC from Compaq, Dell, or Gateway without Windows included in the price.
How many people would then pay *more* to purchase another operating system with fewer applications, just because they want to thumb their nose at Microsoft?
The complaint isn't that a user must have an original license for every computer -- the complaint is that the user must purchase a *new* license for every computer. What if you're upgrading to a new PC, you won't be using the old one any more, and you want to use your old copy of Windows 98 on the new PC; why should you be required to purchase Windows XP bundled with the new PC? What if you do get this new PC with Windows XP on it, why aren't you then allowed to give your copy of Windows 98 to someone else?
Let me get this straight. It's basically not possible any more to purchase a new PC without a copy of Windows bundled in (and included in the price), and you're not legally allowed to sell or even give this copy of Windows to anyone else?
So, even if you're upgrading from an old PC to a new PC and you want to use your copy of Windows 98 on this new PC, you're still required to pay for a copy of Windows XP that you can't get rid of? And if someone wants to get some new life out of an old PC, he's not allowed to have a copy of Windows 95 unless Microsoft lets him buy it from them (yeah right), even if you have an extra legal copy you're not using?
And what's more, Microsoft appears to be strong-arming the issue to get even more leeway. The article says that Ron Faul was selling two copies of Windows 95 and that Microsoft had eBay shut down the auctions; it doesn't say that these were preinstalled copies. I especially like this quote: "The preponderance of history is against them in this case, but light bends when it gets near Microsoft."
Years and years and years of court cases against Microsoft, from their killing DR-DOS back in the early 1980's by spreading Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt all the way up to their killing Netscape in the late 1990's by 'cutting off their air supply,' and they're still powerful enough to pull trash like this -- Bill Gates is probably laughing his head off at the all-bark-no-bite of the American legal system.
I wonder whether Jay Leno will leave the Twin Towers on the skyline backdrop to his set.
I hope so. I hope he makes a statement about how he's leaving them there because the real things will be rebuilt someday soon.
In the face of this tragedy, I'm glad to see world leaders speaking out in support of the United States. Perhaps this will end up being a sobering moment across the globe, and perhaps it'll end up bringing people together more than driving them apart.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of the Daft Punk music videos here. The recent ones are from their latest album 'Discovery.' The videos are animated by Leiji Matsumoto, otherwise famous for anime such as Space Cruiser Yamato (aka Star Blazers), Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock, and Queen Emereldas... it's great stuff! Especially since Matsumoto himself is more than seventy years old now!
:-) A Quicktime file of the first video is available in three sizes from 'http://the-raft.com/pieces/daftpunk/movies/one_mo re_time_m.html'.
I had originally heard that only the first four tracks from the album would be animated, but the fourth video (which I saw on Cartoon Network's 'Toonami' the other night) doesn't resolve anything. Has anyone heard for certain how much of the album will be animated?
The first three videos are available in RealVideo format from 'http://www.animedream.org/movies/matsumoto/'. The third video is my favorite.
I'd love to see QuickTime or MPEG versions of all four videos; anyone know if such is available?
This sounds a lot like the ill-fated Divx DVD format of two years ago. With Divx, you could buy a DVD and 'unlock' it for any 48-hour period for a few dollars.
Divx failed because it just wasn't convenient enough for the price ($100 more for a compatible DVD player, and you still had to go to a store for the discs), but this rent-a-book concept doesn't suffer the same problem if the books can simply be downloaded.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. If the rent-a-book concept succeeds, that means that renting bits (CD's? software?) might catch on again; if it fails, then don't expect to see anything else become rentable on your computer in the next few years.
If anyone out there is in the Orlando, Florida area, and you've got any old Mac stuff to get rid of or if you know of anyplace that's getting rid of old Apple equipment for cheap or free, please drop me a line! (The BEST place I've found for this sort of collecting is Weird Stuff, www.weirdstuff.com, but that's in Sunnyvale California.)
There was a wonderful coffee-table book published a few years ago titled 'AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group' which goes great with my collection; it really shows off the design talent behind these old computers.
yes, master? ~
I briefly read through the Appeals Court decision, and I found very little in it actually defending Microsoft's market practices.
Microsoft won because they knew how to play the game. This isn't about right or wrong, it's about Lawyer Vs. Lawyer. Microsoft only had to do three things:
- Drag the court case on as long as they could, and postpone any verdict as long as they could.
- Never EVER admit to even the slightest wrongdoing. Vehemently protest even the merest suggestion that anything they did was at all improper.
- Flaunt the judge at every opportunity. Remember Bill Gates not being able to remember business decisions he made, not knowing the meaning of simple words, and trying to say that Netscape wasn't a competitor? Remember the faked videotape?
The first two tactics worked well for a long time. (Note that even Bill Clinton used these tactics to some success.) But it's the third tactic which cinched the win for them: by basically giving Judge Jackson the finger in court, ANY reaction Judge Jackson had as a result could be blamed on him being biased against Microsoft.This will have a devastating effect on the software industry, since it's been proven that Microsoft has the money and the resources to buy any market they want to own, and the political power to get away with it. Even if you had the Next Big Idea and a million dollars to start with, how could you even hope to compete with Microsoft once they got wind of your idea and copied it?
We're only now seeing Microsoft begin to notice the free software industry. I don't think it will be long before they find a way to 'embrace and extend,' lock customers into Microsoft-only solutions, and make free software become irrelevant. Nobody thought it could happen to Apple, nobody thought it could happen to Netscape, nobody thinks it'll happen to Linux...
After trying various complicated ways of screening out spam before it hit my inbox, I now simply use a procmail filter which puts any email containing any of the following phrases into a 'spam' mailbox:
:-)
"remove" in subject line
"remove" in the subject
'remove' in the subject
removal instructions
remove in subject line
remove in the subject
to be permanently removed
to be removed
to be taken off
to get off the list
to get off this list
to get removed
to remove yourself
In a month of using this filter, it's reduced the spam I get by 2/3 (it caught 300 of the 450 spams I received in the past four weeks), and it hasn't yet accidentally marked even a single non-spam as spam. I add new phrases as I see new spam slip through the filter. (Next up: I need to add "S.1618" and "S. 1618" to the list.)
Each one of these is wrapped in a simple procmail recipe, as such:
:0
* B ?? to be removed
/home/brian/spambox
It's not the most efficient thing in the world, but it's simple and it works. I hope this idea is of use to others.
It's not like a EULA has any teeth, anyway. Remember about two years ago when many PC's were only sold with Windows, and people who used Linux instead tried to return their Windows CD's to Microsoft, as the EULA told them to? "If you do not agree to the terms of this software license," it said (and they didn't agree to the terms), "then return this Software Product to Microsoft for a full refund." They tried to get a $90 refund on the CD's, but Microsoft refused to oblige to the terms of the EULA.
If people violate the EULA and continue to use open-source software in conjunction with Microsoft software, and if Microsoft fights back legally, just take a page from their book and make sure the court case is drawn out long and slowly, until it doesn't really matter any more.
But when has this ever happened? When has any open source software "created obligations" for the maker of a proprietary piece of software, or "granted to any third party any rights to or immunities under" the original maker's intellectual property rights?
An example of this would be if you marketed and sold proprietary software, and one day someone knocked on your door and said, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but someone has just made your software part of the Emacs distribution. Because Emacs is licensed under the GPL, that means you must provide us with the source to your proprietary software right now, or we'll sue."
This is nonsense, of course -- it's completely backwards from the way things work. A public license may preclude the use of restricted-license software in public-licensed work, but it won't try to force a restricted license to be treated as public. I really don't understand what Microsoft is trying to protect itself from. The only way that a public license would obligate Microsoft in any way would be if Microsoft were to try to use a public-license software program in one of their products.
Actually, no, I know exactly what Microsoft is doing: trying to drive a wedge between Microsoft products and open-source projects. Microsoft is hoping to corral corporate America into going exclusively with Microsoft software, and to require them to keep away from open source.
I hate the term 'Viral Software' as applied to open-source licenses, by the way.