A rule of thumb: If you're not sure whether to move on to grad school or to go into the computer industry, go the industry route. Get a job, earn some money, learn how the office world works. In a few years you'll have some good practical experience (and some savings) under your belt, and then you'll be in a much better position to decide whether you'd like to return to academia to work towards a degree or stay in the corporate world and work up the job ladder.
If you have dreams of changing the world, if you want to revolutionize the way that computer science is being taught, there are plenty of ways you can go about this in the hours you're not at work. Help out at a local school or university, or tutor people in computer skills in the evenings. If you stick with it long enough, you can eventually make a name for yourself, build up contacts, and find you have the freedom to take this in any direction you want to go with it, and the experience to know where to take it.
All too often people fall into the trap of not knowing what they want to do with their life, so they slip into grad school, slave away a few more years of their life, and emerge with another degree but no better idea of what to do from there. You can prove your skills without needing that piece of paper. In the computer world, more than any other world I think, experience (and proven ability) counts far, far more than college education.
I think that Zork had a tremendous influence in its day... but, sadly, that entire lineage is now dead.
Zork spawned games like 'Wizard and the Princess' and 'King's Quest', games which added graphics to the text. All of these were more like interactive novels than video games; they were stories which unfolded around you if you were clever enough to find your way through them. They weren't quite role-playing games in the traditional sense, since they didn't involve hit points or levelling up. These works of interactive fiction were a distinct genre of their own.
Unfortunately, aside from work being done by fans to keep the genre alive, I don't think there have been any interactive fiction games of this sort released in the past several years. Myst and Riven pale by comparison; next to Zork's clever parser, those two games are mere slideshows.
I think modern gamers just don't like having to type -- or maybe kids these days just can't spell.;-)
Check out Glow Bug, "http://www.glow-bug.com/". They stock all kinds of cool LED flashlights, the coolest being the Eternalight. I have that one, as well as their Photon (keychain) and NightStar (no batteries) flashlights. Very cool stuff.
That's because TiVo is a closed system in a closed box which runs a single application and only ever has to connect to a single modem service.
The people who support TiVo only have to know how the application works. The questions they get are all of the "how do I tell it to tape Friends?' variety. They don't have to worry about what hardware or software you have in your system or on your network and how it all interacts.
If a TiVo box starts behaving strangely under warranty, you just return it for a new one. If it misbehaves out of warranty, well, that's why warranties have limitations.
It's simply nonsense to compare supporting a TiVo with supporting a Windows NT computer on the Internet. This is like saying that people who fix tricycles are a whole lot friendlier than people who fix automobiles.
This story is heartwrenchingly true. I've lived it -- I used to do tech support for Netscape, and you can imagine how bad *that* was, back in the days when adding new features was more important than making sure the existing features worked. (Are we still in those days?)
Earlier this year, however, I got a chance to turn the tables and be on the customer side of the support phonecall. I had purchased an Apple Cinema Display, one of those sexy 1600x1024 models... and it wouldn't play widescreen DVD's full-screen as advertised. When I tried to play any DVD movie, the DVD player software would limit the movie's width to 1280, and then it would letterbox a widescreen movie inside that width, so 16x9 movies were played at 1280x720 (or, under some circumstances, stretched to 1600x720) rather than at 1600x900. The software simply didn't know how to understand a monitor that wasn't 4x3.
So, seeing as how this was a clear-cut problem and a high-end product, and also seeing as how I found a whole bunch of other unresolved reports of this problem on various bulletin boards, I called Apple to make sure this issue was in their bug database so it might one day be fixed.
Thus began several weeks of tech support tango. I had support reps tell me that a computer monitor isn't capable of displaying a 16x9 image, or that 1600x900 isn't a 16x9 ratio, or that a 16x9 movie can't physically be played any larger than 12 inches wide, or that computer monitors always need to letterbox everything on all four sides because they don't overscan. I had support reps commit to calling me back at specific dates and times, then I never heard from them again. I had support reps tell me "I don't have the equipment here to try to reproduce your problem, but I really don't think it would work that way, so I'm going to close your call." I repeatedly asked to speak to supervisors and managers and was told "no." No one would just say the magic words "we've logged this as a bug."
It turned into something of an obsession for me, I'll admit, because I *never* would have been allowed to treat a customer like any one of these people had treated me. Never once did I raise my voice or become angry, despite getting yelled at and hung up on by a tech support rep for 'wasting his time' because nobody else out there has a Cinema Display. The longer the issue dragged on, the more appalled I became... until finally I just decided to give up, which is exactly what they wanted me to do. A manager was scheduled to call me back sometime in late April, and he never did, and that was the end of that.
The lesson I took away from this is that if you know more than the support reps do -- and this is easy to determine in one phonecall -- then it's useless to bother them with a question. Give me a FAQ and a web search engine, give me a company's knowledge base, give me a way to submit bugs directly to a company's developers, and I'll never need to call any company's Tech Support again.
Oh, and not that it matters because I don't watch DVD's on my computer monitor anyway, but... the bug wasn't ever fixed.
I've often wished that the home modelling programs out there would use the Quake engine (or some other good 3D shooter engine).
I'm having a house built right now... and the best consumer-level home designer program I've found has been Broderbund's "3D Home DesignSuite." It does offer 3-D peeks into the house plan... but it doesn't do texture-mapping, nor lighting, nor does it let you roam around the model in real-time, nor does it let you angle your view up or down. All it does is crude polygonal views.
Couple the modeller in "3D Home DesignSuite" with the renderer in Quake III, and you'd have a dream come true! Broderbund, are you listening?
The NASA web site on the Pioneer projects is fascinating. 'http://spac epr ojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat. html' explains how Pioneer is now sailing through a better vacuum than any which can be created on Earth, and how the spacecraft is expected to outlive Earth itself, when our sun will become a red giant in five billion years: "Pioneer 10 and any etched metal message aboard it are likely to survive for much longer periods than any of the works of Man on Earth." I hope that, five billion years from now, Earth is only one of thousands of planets colonized by humans...
The 'Dark Side Developer Kit' ('http://guide.lugnet.com/set/9754') has been out for a few months now. The central component of the kit is the LEGO Micro Scout, which is the same component used in the R2-D2 'Droid Development Kit' ('http://guide.lugnet.com/set/9748'). The Micro Scout isn't nearly as customizable as the LEGO Mindstorms RCX unit, but it's still fun.
If you've got deep pockets, get the Mindstorms base kit and add 'Vision Command' ('http://guide.lugnet.com/set/9731') to it. Vision Command comes with a small USB video camera which can be programmed to watch for movement in various 'zones' of its field of vision; what it sees is sent to your computer via USB, and then your computer can send that information back to the Mindstorms RCX unit via infrared. The result is that you can make a robot which turns its head to watch you as you walk in front of it (as in, make it turn its head to the right if it sees motion to the right of center), or which can orient its gaze on anything it sees of a specific color. Very cool!
If you're interested in LEGO at all, check out the Lego Users Group Network at 'http://www.lugnet.com/'. They have discussion groups for everything from robotics to train sets, they link to set instructions and CAD programs and information on programming the Mindstorms RCX in Java. Also, there have been two books published (one by O'Reilly) about building robotics with Mindstorms.
Re:Spam is the worst kind of free speech.
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MAPS Sued Again
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· Score: 5
Here are some links you might find useful in your fight against spam:
http://www.ecst.csuchico. edu/~atman/spam/adblock.shtml: This site provides you with a hosts file which maps dozens of web ad banner graphic sites to 127.0.0.1. The net affect is that many banner ads won't load at all, and instead will show up in your browser as broken images. This really speeds up the loading of web pages, especially if you're on a modem connection.
http://spamcop.net/: SpamCop is a great site! For free, it lets you paste a spam email into its form, and then it analyzes the spam, decides who the appropriate ISP's are to complain to, and sends those people a detailed complaint with all the info they need to find and shut down whoever violated their terms-of-service. It also keeps stats on the worst spam offenders, and makes this information available to ORBS. I swear by it, and it's immensely gratifying when I (frequently!) get email from an ISP thanking me for my help and letting me know that the offending account has been terminated.
http://www.spambouncer.org/: I haven't used SpamBouncer myself yet, but it's a procmail-based way to screen spam out of your mailbox. I've heard it's good.
Another recommendation: If your email client loads images automatically in HTML email, turn that option off! Some spam will put your email address in the URL's of the images it loads, so that just by opening the message (and viewing the images) the spammer will know you saw their message.
(I got one spam recently that actually ha a return receipt attached; it was a pyramid scheme and Eudora beeped and told me 'The sender has requested notification that you read this email.' What gall!)
The United States government likes big business. The Federal Trade Commission is not in the business of shooing away eight-hundred-pound gorillas. This is capitalism at work, and America doesn't want to stifle it and give foreign corporations the opportunity to swoop in and take the glory.
The AOL/TW deal will go through. The only question is how many concessions will be made by AOL/TW in the process of getting the deal through. That's the only purpose of this elaborate dance going on right now.
I think that hackers, as a general rule, tend to dislike seeing any one entity gain dominance in an area. Whenever a company gets too big, true geeks get worried. The American legal system works differently, however; the idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' still permeates the system. The proposed merger of AOL/TW can't be blocked based on the problems they could cause. Instead, all that can be done is to take all the necessary legal precautions, have all the right people sign all the right promises, then set the behemoth free... and then if it gets out of line, the task begins to rein it in.
I believe that AOL/TW won't quickly or intentionally start to test its legal limits -- it sees what's going on with Microsoft, and the last thing it wants to have happen would be for any legal precedent set in the Microsoft case to be applied in turn to AOL/TW.
I have a Kodak DC280 camera. Will the DOOM and MAME ports run on my DC280, or is there some technical difference between the 280 and the 290 that will prevent them from working on my camera?
The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special.
Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we
are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!
Susan Williams
Consumer Services
Re:Mac Mozilla M17 tries hard to reinvent the whee
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Mozilla M17 Is Out
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· Score: 2
That approach makes some sense... but it gets back to the age-old debate of just how cross-platform to make a cross-platform application. In this case, Mozilla has gone for the lowest-common-denominator approach, resulting in the fact that it doesn't take advantage of any particular operating system's features and that it doesn't look/feel like any other application on that OS. I can see why it's beneficial if you want web pages to look completely identical on every operating system, but it comes at a huge cost in having to duplicate basic OS-builtin GUI features, having to make sure they work reliably, and having to add support to Mozilla for any GUI-relevant feature that's added to any OS it supports.
In hindsight, I think a much better use of the Mozilla development team's time would have been to have Mozilla rely on each operating system's GUI calls, but meanwhile to spin off the effort to come up with a consistent cross-platform GUI into another project altogether, so that it could be more easily shared across other applications as well.
Mac Mozilla M17 tries hard to reinvent the wheel
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Mozilla M17 Is Out
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· Score: 2
I've been playing with the Mac version of Mozilla for about an hour so far, and it's really disappointing.
The best I can say about it is that this is the FIRST milestone of Mozilla on the Mac that doesn't trash my maching in interesting ways. All versions of Mozilla I've tried before this have done strange and wonderful things like rendering web pages outside the app window (including in the menu bar), hosing networking until a reboot, or causing the operating system to stop noticing my mouse clicks.
But that's damning with faint praise, so let me be a little more direct with my condemnations. Mozilla M17 goes to enormous lengths to reinvent the wheel, and ends up doing a half-baked job of it. Rather than using Mac OS Toolbox calls to draw lists (as in the 'Manage Bookmarks' window), it draws its own lists which work almost, but not quite as quickly or as flexibly as, lists in the native GUI (Mozilla's columns can't be resized or rearranged). Rather than using the standard GUI's scrollbars in the main browser window, it draws its own scrollbars, which don't work with a wheel mouse yet. Rather than relying on the operating system to render menus for it, it draws its own menu when I right-click in a window or click on a pulldown, and sometimes little fragments of this menu don't get drawn in quite the right places. Curiously, however, it implements clippings just fine (select a range of text from a web page then drag that text to the desktop). Overall, Mozilla appears to go to great lengths to look like it's trying hard not to be a standard Mac application; its interface elements just look (and sometimes work) different for no obvious good reason.
I admire the Mozilla developers for the immense amout of work they've put into this project, but I wonder why they decided to reimplement many GUI elements which the operating system could have easily handled for them if they'd abstracted their GUI calls a bit more. As a result, over the history of the Mozilla project, it seems like the developers have had a lot more trouble making Mozilla a well-behaved Mac application than making it a good web browser.
A highly useful service available to individuals in the fight against spam is SpamCop (http://spamcop.net/). I'm not affiliated with that service in any way except as a happy customer.. They offer two useful services:
One is free: paste any spam email you receive into a form on their site, and it will analyze the spam's headers to find out who's responsible for that spam getting to you, then it will automatically email a complaint to the relevant postmasters and system administrators, and also pass information about open relay abuse to ORBS. I've been using SpamCop this way for a few months, and I've already received several dozen responses from ISP's that the offending email accounts have been shut down due to terms-of-service violations. It gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that I'm doing some small part to help stop spam.
The other service comes for a paltry fee: you can get a 'spamcop.net' email address which filters out email for you. I believe that it will still let you see spam if you want to, and I think you can customize it to make absolutely sure it doesn't block legitimate email, so this might satisfy the people here who want more control over the way their mail is filtered.
As several comments have already pointed out, the 'trap' that sites like Home Depot's put you in is (most likely) not intentional. It's simply the result of a zero-second refresh page to redirect you to another page, and the easiest way around that is to bypass the page by holding down your 'Back' button or by using the 'Go' menu in your browser.
The real problem, of course, are the porn and scam sites which actively and aggressively prevent you from leaving their web pages. They use JavaScript to sense when you leave their page or close your browser window, and then they bring up another window on their web site -- or, worse, several other porn and scam sites.
The porn site 'http://www.gamefaq.com/' (not to be confused with 'www.gamefaqS.com') used to do this, and it was a great example of how dangerous the web can be for kids: mistype a URL, and not only might you have pictures of women having sex with donkeys dumped onto your screen, but you might not be able to get them off your screen without quitting completely out of your browser, either. Fortunately, 'gamefaqs' bought the 'gamefaq' domain name to stop this from happening (if you can call extortion 'fortunate'), but it still happens with countless other web sites...
Titan AE changes drastically halfway through
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Review: 'Titan A.E.'
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· Score: 2
I've seen 'Titan AE' twice -- once on opening night, again on Sunday. The first time through I complained about some of the plot holes, but I went back to enjoy it as pure eye candy, and it works really well as that.
But it struck me that the movie's plot isn't all bad; it just suddenly and markedly gets dumbed down at one specific point.
For about an hour, the movie's going along great, covering some interesting issues: Cale's way of dealing with abandonment, humanity's demotion to third-rate species in the universe, Akima's zeal to collect those last few trinkets by which to remember Earth's lost culture... it puts our heroes into fascinating new environments, and it shows that aliens (specifically, the bats) can be shown as humanoid and wise without having to make them speak.
Then, suddenly comes the betrayal scene (which itself is handled very clumsily), and everything from there on out becomes standard formula. Pretty, but uninspired. All of the subplots which had been developed up to that point are suddenly dropped.
Throw away the rest of the film at that point, rewrite the ending to keep the evil aliens mysterious and impersonal, bring about the climax by having Cale abandon the commander then later come around after having dealt with his own personal demons, and you'd have a much deeper, more solid movie, I think.
All things considered, I really liked the character of Stith, the bowlegged kangaroo/griffin creature. She was a female sidekick but she wasn't portrayed as weak or stupid, she had a temper but she was an effective warrior -- come to think of it, she was probably this movie's Chewbacca. A lot of people have complained about her crazy leg design, but I enjoyed it as another example of Don Bluth coming up with unconventional characters.
You've got to give them credit -- Microsoft just doesn't give up. Notice that throughout their entire history of legal battles, Microsoft has never *once* even hinted that they may have knowingly broken the law; all along they've played this as if they're innocent martyrs of a corrupt legal system. They're not stupid, and they're not naive. They're doing this because to admit even one iota of guilt makes it that much easier for their legal foes to build a case against them. The longer they play innocent, misrepresent the issues to a gullible public, and keep digging potholes in the path of the legal proceedings, the longer they can continue to do business as usual. They're manipulating United States law as if it were the rules of a game, devoid of moral responsibility, free to be stretched or broken at will as long as Microsoft knows they can cope with the consequences.
My concern, though, is that the two-company split ordered by the court won't do any good. So one company is still in charge of the destiny of Windows, and still has enormous power in the marketplace -- how long will it be before they begin to test the limits imposed on them and find loopholes to worm through, knowing that if they step over the line, the worst they might face is another long, drawn-out court battle until they're reined in again? And the applications company, do you really think they'll bother porting to the tiny Linux market? More likely, Microsoft Office will still have an unassailable dominant position on Windows, Windows will still have an unassailable position in the PC OS market, the Windows OS company will find a way to continue to rule the computer industry through intimidation, and nothing will have changed.
I still believe the right solution would have been to have multiple vendors (fragments of Microsoft, existing companies, or new companies) developing and marketing their own versions of Windows. Only then would Windows be subject to real competition and be forced to become leaner, cheaper, and better, and only then would customers have real choice over what operating system to run on their computer. (Remember that in the business world, Macintosh is still widely looked as as a home computer and a toy, and a lot of people still don't even know what Linux is.)
If junk email offered useful services with legitimate terms, I wouldn't mind it so much.
I throw out most of my junk postal email, but every now and then I get good coupons for pizza or free samples of interesting stuff, and the rest of my junk postal email is relatively innocent and irrelevant to me, so I don't have much of a problem with the amount of junk postal email I get. (I'll make an exception for the junk mail that tries to look more important than it really is, such as magazine subscription ads that look like invoices, or credit-card applications that try to look like they've annotated by hand or that come with faux newspaper clippings. And every time my bank sends me a letter stamped 'Important: Account Information Enclosed,' I know to ignore it.)
But I have two serious problems with junk email:
(1) I have NEVER received junk email that's even remotely useful to me; moreover, I don't think I've ever gotten any junk email that even looks legitimate. All of it looks like too-good-to-be-true deals by fly-by-night companies that will be all to glad to take your money and skip town overnight with it. The services themselves are even shady -- the majority of my junk email is for things like "get your neighbor's credit history!" or "buy now and get a list of free XXX web site passwords!" or "buy this list of email addresses for advertising; it's been pre-screened!" or "I tried this pyramid scheme, and it REALLY WORKS!"
(2) What's worse, the spammers lie blatantly about the nature of their spam. For example:
"Hey Dave, here's more info about that great real-estate program I was telling you about last night! Say hi to Margaret for me!" (Making it look like I'm the accidental beneficiary of some choice information.)
"This email is NOT SPAM. You are receiving this email because you have contacted us or one of our subsidiary companies in the past." (I get this sort of spam sent to the email address in my InterNIC domain record, which I've never actually used to send anything.)
"You are on our OPT-IN marketing list. If you would like to be removed, please opt into the removal process by sending your email address to..." (They hope that the magic word 'opt-in' will get me off their backs.)
"Make money fast! This is NOT a pyramid scheme!" (That's the best tipoff that it is.)
"A prime-time television special tried our multi-level marketing scheme, and not only did it bring them sixty thousand dollars in two days, but they also discovered that there are absolutely no laws against it!" (Note that they never mention what TV show they're talking about.)
All in all, it's not the amount of spam that bothers me so much (although I would like to get rid of it entirely, and I support CAUCE). It's the shady, thieving nature of the stuff that really irks me. For every million spam emails that these crooks send out, they're going to find at least a few dozen people who really believe that they can earn $50,000 a month by stuffing envelopes at home, and these people will gladly kiss $70 from their own pockets goodbye.
'Melissa' and 'ILOVEYOU' are proof that because America is so dependent on Microsoft Windows, we absolutely can not let one single company be the sole source of the Windows operating system. This would be like all of the farmers in America growing only one specific strain of corn; the lack of diversity could easily let a single virus wipe out everything, and the same is true of Windows.
I believe the only true solution to Microsoft's abusive monopoly is to have at least three independent companies each offering their own compatible version of Windows. Each company could choose its own priorities -- adding features, fixing bugs, improving security -- and the market would decide which version of Windows suited its needs best, instead of the current arrangement where the market is forced to accept whatever Microsoft chooses to release. Have a look at some of the Windows 2000 features listed at "http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/professional/ features/default.asp"; wouldn't you readily give up some of those new features in return for not having to worry about the next macro virus trashing your company's computers again?
Skeptics claim this would overly complicate the market, but I don't think it would confuse matters any more than having so many different versions of Windows already out there. They also say that this would result in many incompatible versions of Windows running around, but to that I say that any company releasing a version of Windows with compatibility problems would suffer in the market, so they have an incentive to strive for simplicity and compatibility... and, besides, how many compatibility issues are there between Windows 95/98/NT/2000 already?
Meanwhile, Microsoft is making noise about trying to appease the government by offering a version of Windows which merely 'hides' browser access, thereby demonstrating that they have no interest in legally recognizing their illegal tie of two products. They've shown that they have no qualms about breaking the law as long as they can defer or escape punishment (by tying it up in drawn-out courtroom cases); it should be obvious by now that any further legal restrictions on the company would be pointless, and that any 'solution' which results in a single company still being responsible for the operating system isn't a solution at all.
Grrrr!! And they don't post this limitation anywhere else, so there's no way to find out that their Shockwave games are Windows-only until you actually try to play one of them. I hate seeing a cross-platform standard misused and made dependent on a specific operating system.
I guess Macromedia is admitting that their Shockwave engine isn't truly cross-platform, and that additional development work is needed to port Shockwave apps from Windows to Mac.
I'd love to have a Playstation CD with MAME and a bunch of ROMs on it.:) Yeah, yeah, the ROMs aren't commercially distributable... but if I could press my own CD with my own ROMs, that'd be fine by me!
Is it possible for a normal CD burner to produce a CD which will boot and run on a Playstation, or is there some sort of copy protection which needs to be in place?
Babylon 5 succeeded in spite of its bad acting and sometimes-cheesy plots. Why? Because it was a serial; it was telling a story from beginning to end. Unlike any of the Trek series, where all of the characters have to end an episode in the same way they began it, Babylon 5 was free to introduce new regular characters, kill off important ones, and change the universe in some really drastic ways. Unlike Voyager, where no one cares what the crew goes through from week to week because the Big Red Reset Button keeps being hit, B5 viewers enthusiastically tuned in every week so that they wouldn't miss anything, and one of the most fun pasttimes was to analyze previous episodes to figure out what would happen in future ones.
The time period of an Excelsior series is rampant with possibilities. Space is being explored, but there's still a lot unknown out there; the Klingons are now our allies, but it's an uneasy truce at best; a lot of new technology is being developed, but it doesn't always work quite right. There's a lot of room for political intrigue, commando squads, tense standoffs, heroic bravery... the very sorts of things Hollywood loves these days. Throw in some marauders causing tensions between Starfleet and Klingon, add in some more of those high-ranking officials from Star Trek VI who believed the whole thing was doomed to fail, and there's your writers' bible for you.
The problem with a 'Birth of the Federation' series is that it's going to annoy fans when they inevitably get the details wrong... and who cares about the big clunky starships which had pea-shooter-power phasers, anyway? At the other end of the scale you've got Voyager-era Trek, where people fiddle with time and reality on a regular basis so that nothing's sacred any more. The Excelsior era comes at an exciting time in Trek history, and there's not a lot canon about it yet; I really feel Paramount's making a grave mistake by not listening to its fans here.
Actually, I do believe that Microsoft and its people know exactly the implications of what they're doing. I don't think any of them are too dumb to realize that they're not 'playing fair.'
I think what's happening is that they're trying to transcend the law in rather interesting ways, and what's most interesting is that, so far, they've been succeeding.
Nowhere in United States law does it say 'you must play fair.' Instead, the law delineates very specific behaviors and intents which are illegal, because vague altruistic laws aren't enforceable -- but the flip side of it is that the more specific a law is, the greater the possibility to find a loophole of some sort. And that's what Microsoft has been doing, redefining terms and feigning confusion just enough to worm its way around the letter of the law, and crying holy indignities whenever anyone dare try to mention the spirit of the law, because Microsoft asserts that its own belief that it's playing nice is just as strong as anyone else's belief that it's not.
So the first thing Microsoft has done is to treat the law as a list of rules devoid of any moral obligation whatsoever. It's kind of like in _The Matrix_, where Morpheus tells Neo that he can gain unbelievable powers simply by realizing that the world around him is governed by rules which can be bent or broken, and that the only thing limiting him is his own set of preconceptions.
And therefore, the second clever thing Microsoft has done has been to realize that laws *can* be broken, and that breaking them doesn't immediately cause the big foot from Monty Python to come down and smoosh them. They are obviously not out to keep their nose clean; they've done a lot of highly questionable things in several different cases, all the way down to destroying incriminating documents in the Caldera case. (I'm referring to the recent incident where a woman employed by Microsoft in Germany, I believe it was, admitted to having deleted a lot of subpoena'ed email at her manager's directive.) What Microsoft is depending on -- and what has so far held up for them -- is that court cases can drag on for years, well beyond any relevancy they once had in the Internet marketplace. Why behave legally today if you can escape punishment for another five to ten years or more, long after the companies which brought suit against you have gone out of business? And who knows, maybe by that time your founder will have donated so many millions of dollars to charities and political parties that no one (and least of all a Republican president) would ever consider continuing a lawsuit against your company? Or maybe the industry will have changed so much that any punishment against you will be irrelevant?
Much as I absolutely despise Microsoft's tactics in its court battles, I really have a lot of respect for their brazen ability to keep using the law to their own advantage. They have *never* admitted one iota of guilt for anything (which is amazing in itself), they've successfully managed to misrepresent the issue to the average American so that it looks like a simple matter of 'freedom to innovate' versus 'heavy-handed government intervention' rather than a straightforward tying issue, and they've managed to snarl up every court case they've been through and drag it on *much* longer than necessary, even while committing barefaced perjury, such as faking a videotape and using it as a 'smoking gun' until they were caught. They've been trying hard to get the judge or the prosecution ticked off enough to make a mistake so that Microsoft can declare it a mistrial and make everyone start all over again. They know, and everybody else knows, that Microsoft doesn't have a legal leg to stand on here; it's truly incredible that they've managed to drag the anti-trust case itself out for an entire year and a half already, where initially people expected it to last no longer than six weeks.
Microsoft is a shining example of modern capitalism, and of the ability of a United States corporation to do anything in its power to enture a good return for its shareholders. Unfortunately, it's showing the bad sides of this as well as the good.
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A rule of thumb: If you're not sure whether to move on to grad school or to go into the computer industry, go the industry route. Get a job, earn some money, learn how the office world works. In a few years you'll have some good practical experience (and some savings) under your belt, and then you'll be in a much better position to decide whether you'd like to return to academia to work towards a degree or stay in the corporate world and work up the job ladder.
If you have dreams of changing the world, if you want to revolutionize the way that computer science is being taught, there are plenty of ways you can go about this in the hours you're not at work. Help out at a local school or university, or tutor people in computer skills in the evenings. If you stick with it long enough, you can eventually make a name for yourself, build up contacts, and find you have the freedom to take this in any direction you want to go with it, and the experience to know where to take it.
All too often people fall into the trap of not knowing what they want to do with their life, so they slip into grad school, slave away a few more years of their life, and emerge with another degree but no better idea of what to do from there. You can prove your skills without needing that piece of paper. In the computer world, more than any other world I think, experience (and proven ability) counts far, far more than college education.
I think that Zork had a tremendous influence in its day... but, sadly, that entire lineage is now dead.
;-)
Zork spawned games like 'Wizard and the Princess' and 'King's Quest', games which added graphics to the text. All of these were more like interactive novels than video games; they were stories which unfolded around you if you were clever enough to find your way through them. They weren't quite role-playing games in the traditional sense, since they didn't involve hit points or levelling up. These works of interactive fiction were a distinct genre of their own.
Unfortunately, aside from work being done by fans to keep the genre alive, I don't think there have been any interactive fiction games of this sort released in the past several years. Myst and Riven pale by comparison; next to Zork's clever parser, those two games are mere slideshows.
I think modern gamers just don't like having to type -- or maybe kids these days just can't spell.
<picardmaneuver> Actually, they just need to say 'Make it so.' </picardmaneuver>
That's because TiVo is a closed system in a closed box which runs a single application and only ever has to connect to a single modem service.
The people who support TiVo only have to know how the application works. The questions they get are all of the "how do I tell it to tape Friends?' variety. They don't have to worry about what hardware or software you have in your system or on your network and how it all interacts.
If a TiVo box starts behaving strangely under warranty, you just return it for a new one. If it misbehaves out of warranty, well, that's why warranties have limitations.
It's simply nonsense to compare supporting a TiVo with supporting a Windows NT computer on the Internet. This is like saying that people who fix tricycles are a whole lot friendlier than people who fix automobiles.
This story is heartwrenchingly true. I've lived it -- I used to do tech support for Netscape, and you can imagine how bad *that* was, back in the days when adding new features was more important than making sure the existing features worked. (Are we still in those days?)
Earlier this year, however, I got a chance to turn the tables and be on the customer side of the support phonecall. I had purchased an Apple Cinema Display, one of those sexy 1600x1024 models... and it wouldn't play widescreen DVD's full-screen as advertised. When I tried to play any DVD movie, the DVD player software would limit the movie's width to 1280, and then it would letterbox a widescreen movie inside that width, so 16x9 movies were played at 1280x720 (or, under some circumstances, stretched to 1600x720) rather than at 1600x900. The software simply didn't know how to understand a monitor that wasn't 4x3.
So, seeing as how this was a clear-cut problem and a high-end product, and also seeing as how I found a whole bunch of other unresolved reports of this problem on various bulletin boards, I called Apple to make sure this issue was in their bug database so it might one day be fixed.
Thus began several weeks of tech support tango. I had support reps tell me that a computer monitor isn't capable of displaying a 16x9 image, or that 1600x900 isn't a 16x9 ratio, or that a 16x9 movie can't physically be played any larger than 12 inches wide, or that computer monitors always need to letterbox everything on all four sides because they don't overscan. I had support reps commit to calling me back at specific dates and times, then I never heard from them again. I had support reps tell me "I don't have the equipment here to try to reproduce your problem, but I really don't think it would work that way, so I'm going to close your call." I repeatedly asked to speak to supervisors and managers and was told "no." No one would just say the magic words "we've logged this as a bug."
It turned into something of an obsession for me, I'll admit, because I *never* would have been allowed to treat a customer like any one of these people had treated me. Never once did I raise my voice or become angry, despite getting yelled at and hung up on by a tech support rep for 'wasting his time' because nobody else out there has a Cinema Display. The longer the issue dragged on, the more appalled I became... until finally I just decided to give up, which is exactly what they wanted me to do. A manager was scheduled to call me back sometime in late April, and he never did, and that was the end of that.
The lesson I took away from this is that if you know more than the support reps do -- and this is easy to determine in one phonecall -- then it's useless to bother them with a question. Give me a FAQ and a web search engine, give me a company's knowledge base, give me a way to submit bugs directly to a company's developers, and I'll never need to call any company's Tech Support again.
Oh, and not that it matters because I don't watch DVD's on my computer monitor anyway, but... the bug wasn't ever fixed.
I've often wished that the home modelling programs out there would use the Quake engine (or some other good 3D shooter engine).
I'm having a house built right now... and the best consumer-level home designer program I've found has been Broderbund's "3D Home DesignSuite." It does offer 3-D peeks into the house plan... but it doesn't do texture-mapping, nor lighting, nor does it let you roam around the model in real-time, nor does it let you angle your view up or down. All it does is crude polygonal views.
Couple the modeller in "3D Home DesignSuite" with the renderer in Quake III, and you'd have a dream come true! Broderbund, are you listening?
The NASA web site on the Pioneer projects is fascinating. 'http://spac epr ojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat
Also interesting is an image of the plaque on-board Pioneer, 'http:
If you've got deep pockets, get the Mindstorms base kit and add 'Vision Command' ('http://guide.lugnet.com/set/9731') to it. Vision Command comes with a small USB video camera which can be programmed to watch for movement in various 'zones' of its field of vision; what it sees is sent to your computer via USB, and then your computer can send that information back to the Mindstorms RCX unit via infrared. The result is that you can make a robot which turns its head to watch you as you walk in front of it (as in, make it turn its head to the right if it sees motion to the right of center), or which can orient its gaze on anything it sees of a specific color. Very cool!
If you're interested in LEGO at all, check out the Lego Users Group Network at 'http://www.lugnet.com/'. They have discussion groups for everything from robotics to train sets, they link to set instructions and CAD programs and information on programming the Mindstorms RCX in Java. Also, there have been two books published (one by O'Reilly) about building robotics with Mindstorms.
- http://www.ecst.csuchico. edu
/~atman/spam/adblock.shtml: This site provides you with a hosts file which maps dozens of web ad banner graphic sites to 127.0.0.1. The net affect is that many banner ads won't load at all, and instead will show up in your browser as broken images. This really speeds up the loading of web pages, especially if you're on a modem connection.
- http://spamcop.net/: SpamCop is a great site! For free, it lets you paste a spam email into its form, and then it analyzes the spam, decides who the appropriate ISP's are to complain to, and sends those people a detailed complaint with all the info they need to find and shut down whoever violated their terms-of-service. It also keeps stats on the worst spam offenders, and makes this information available to ORBS. I swear by it, and it's immensely gratifying when I (frequently!) get email from an ISP thanking me for my help and letting me know that the offending account has been terminated.
- http://www.spambouncer.org/: I haven't used SpamBouncer myself yet, but it's a procmail-based way to screen spam out of your mailbox. I've heard it's good.
Another recommendation: If your email client loads images automatically in HTML email, turn that option off! Some spam will put your email address in the URL's of the images it loads, so that just by opening the message (and viewing the images) the spammer will know you saw their message.(I got one spam recently that actually ha a return receipt attached; it was a pyramid scheme and Eudora beeped and told me 'The sender has requested notification that you read this email.' What gall!)
The AOL/TW deal will go through. The only question is how many concessions will be made by AOL/TW in the process of getting the deal through. That's the only purpose of this elaborate dance going on right now.
I think that hackers, as a general rule, tend to dislike seeing any one entity gain dominance in an area. Whenever a company gets too big, true geeks get worried. The American legal system works differently, however; the idea of 'innocent until proven guilty' still permeates the system. The proposed merger of AOL/TW can't be blocked based on the problems they could cause. Instead, all that can be done is to take all the necessary legal precautions, have all the right people sign all the right promises, then set the behemoth free... and then if it gets out of line, the task begins to rein it in.
I believe that AOL/TW won't quickly or intentionally start to test its legal limits -- it sees what's going on with Microsoft, and the last thing it wants to have happen would be for any legal precedent set in the Microsoft case to be applied in turn to AOL/TW.
I have a Kodak DC280 camera. Will the DOOM and MAME ports run on my DC280, or is there some technical difference between the 280 and the 290 that will prevent them from working on my camera?
That approach makes some sense... but it gets back to the age-old debate of just how cross-platform to make a cross-platform application. In this case, Mozilla has gone for the lowest-common-denominator approach, resulting in the fact that it doesn't take advantage of any particular operating system's features and that it doesn't look/feel like any other application on that OS. I can see why it's beneficial if you want web pages to look completely identical on every operating system, but it comes at a huge cost in having to duplicate basic OS-builtin GUI features, having to make sure they work reliably, and having to add support to Mozilla for any GUI-relevant feature that's added to any OS it supports.
In hindsight, I think a much better use of the Mozilla development team's time would have been to have Mozilla rely on each operating system's GUI calls, but meanwhile to spin off the effort to come up with a consistent cross-platform GUI into another project altogether, so that it could be more easily shared across other applications as well.
I've been playing with the Mac version of Mozilla for about an hour so far, and it's really disappointing.
The best I can say about it is that this is the FIRST milestone of Mozilla on the Mac that doesn't trash my maching in interesting ways. All versions of Mozilla I've tried before this have done strange and wonderful things like rendering web pages outside the app window (including in the menu bar), hosing networking until a reboot, or causing the operating system to stop noticing my mouse clicks.
But that's damning with faint praise, so let me be a little more direct with my condemnations. Mozilla M17 goes to enormous lengths to reinvent the wheel, and ends up doing a half-baked job of it. Rather than using Mac OS Toolbox calls to draw lists (as in the 'Manage Bookmarks' window), it draws its own lists which work almost, but not quite as quickly or as flexibly as, lists in the native GUI (Mozilla's columns can't be resized or rearranged). Rather than using the standard GUI's scrollbars in the main browser window, it draws its own scrollbars, which don't work with a wheel mouse yet. Rather than relying on the operating system to render menus for it, it draws its own menu when I right-click in a window or click on a pulldown, and sometimes little fragments of this menu don't get drawn in quite the right places. Curiously, however, it implements clippings just fine (select a range of text from a web page then drag that text to the desktop). Overall, Mozilla appears to go to great lengths to look like it's trying hard not to be a standard Mac application; its interface elements just look (and sometimes work) different for no obvious good reason.
I admire the Mozilla developers for the immense amout of work they've put into this project, but I wonder why they decided to reimplement many GUI elements which the operating system could have easily handled for them if they'd abstracted their GUI calls a bit more. As a result, over the history of the Mozilla project, it seems like the developers have had a lot more trouble making Mozilla a well-behaved Mac application than making it a good web browser.
One is free: paste any spam email you receive into a form on their site, and it will analyze the spam's headers to find out who's responsible for that spam getting to you, then it will automatically email a complaint to the relevant postmasters and system administrators, and also pass information about open relay abuse to ORBS. I've been using SpamCop this way for a few months, and I've already received several dozen responses from ISP's that the offending email accounts have been shut down due to terms-of-service violations. It gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that I'm doing some small part to help stop spam.
The other service comes for a paltry fee: you can get a 'spamcop.net' email address which filters out email for you. I believe that it will still let you see spam if you want to, and I think you can customize it to make absolutely sure it doesn't block legitimate email, so this might satisfy the people here who want more control over the way their mail is filtered.
As several comments have already pointed out, the 'trap' that sites like Home Depot's put you in is (most likely) not intentional. It's simply the result of a zero-second refresh page to redirect you to another page, and the easiest way around that is to bypass the page by holding down your 'Back' button or by using the 'Go' menu in your browser.
The real problem, of course, are the porn and scam sites which actively and aggressively prevent you from leaving their web pages. They use JavaScript to sense when you leave their page or close your browser window, and then they bring up another window on their web site -- or, worse, several other porn and scam sites.
The porn site 'http://www.gamefaq.com/' (not to be confused with 'www.gamefaqS.com') used to do this, and it was a great example of how dangerous the web can be for kids: mistype a URL, and not only might you have pictures of women having sex with donkeys dumped onto your screen, but you might not be able to get them off your screen without quitting completely out of your browser, either. Fortunately, 'gamefaqs' bought the 'gamefaq' domain name to stop this from happening (if you can call extortion 'fortunate'), but it still happens with countless other web sites...
I've seen 'Titan AE' twice -- once on opening night, again on Sunday. The first time through I complained about some of the plot holes, but I went back to enjoy it as pure eye candy, and it works really well as that.
But it struck me that the movie's plot isn't all bad; it just suddenly and markedly gets dumbed down at one specific point.
For about an hour, the movie's going along great, covering some interesting issues: Cale's way of dealing with abandonment, humanity's demotion to third-rate species in the universe, Akima's zeal to collect those last few trinkets by which to remember Earth's lost culture... it puts our heroes into fascinating new environments, and it shows that aliens (specifically, the bats) can be shown as humanoid and wise without having to make them speak.
Then, suddenly comes the betrayal scene (which itself is handled very clumsily), and everything from there on out becomes standard formula. Pretty, but uninspired. All of the subplots which had been developed up to that point are suddenly dropped.
Throw away the rest of the film at that point, rewrite the ending to keep the evil aliens mysterious and impersonal, bring about the climax by having Cale abandon the commander then later come around after having dealt with his own personal demons, and you'd have a much deeper, more solid movie, I think.
All things considered, I really liked the character of Stith, the bowlegged kangaroo/griffin creature. She was a female sidekick but she wasn't portrayed as weak or stupid, she had a temper but she was an effective warrior -- come to think of it, she was probably this movie's Chewbacca. A lot of people have complained about her crazy leg design, but I enjoyed it as another example of Don Bluth coming up with unconventional characters.
You've got to give them credit -- Microsoft just doesn't give up. Notice that throughout their entire history of legal battles, Microsoft has never *once* even hinted that they may have knowingly broken the law; all along they've played this as if they're innocent martyrs of a corrupt legal system. They're not stupid, and they're not naive. They're doing this because to admit even one iota of guilt makes it that much easier for their legal foes to build a case against them. The longer they play innocent, misrepresent the issues to a gullible public, and keep digging potholes in the path of the legal proceedings, the longer they can continue to do business as usual. They're manipulating United States law as if it were the rules of a game, devoid of moral responsibility, free to be stretched or broken at will as long as Microsoft knows they can cope with the consequences.
My concern, though, is that the two-company split ordered by the court won't do any good. So one company is still in charge of the destiny of Windows, and still has enormous power in the marketplace -- how long will it be before they begin to test the limits imposed on them and find loopholes to worm through, knowing that if they step over the line, the worst they might face is another long, drawn-out court battle until they're reined in again? And the applications company, do you really think they'll bother porting to the tiny Linux market? More likely, Microsoft Office will still have an unassailable dominant position on Windows, Windows will still have an unassailable position in the PC OS market, the Windows OS company will find a way to continue to rule the computer industry through intimidation, and nothing will have changed.
I still believe the right solution would have been to have multiple vendors (fragments of Microsoft, existing companies, or new companies) developing and marketing their own versions of Windows. Only then would Windows be subject to real competition and be forced to become leaner, cheaper, and better, and only then would customers have real choice over what operating system to run on their computer. (Remember that in the business world, Macintosh is still widely looked as as a home computer and a toy, and a lot of people still don't even know what Linux is.)
If junk email offered useful services with legitimate terms, I wouldn't mind it so much.
..." (They hope that the magic word 'opt-in' will get me off their backs.)
I throw out most of my junk postal email, but every now and then I get good coupons for pizza or free samples of interesting stuff, and the rest of my junk postal email is relatively innocent and irrelevant to me, so I don't have much of a problem with the amount of junk postal email I get. (I'll make an exception for the junk mail that tries to look more important than it really is, such as magazine subscription ads that look like invoices, or credit-card applications that try to look like they've annotated by hand or that come with faux newspaper clippings. And every time my bank sends me a letter stamped 'Important: Account Information Enclosed,' I know to ignore it.)
But I have two serious problems with junk email:
(1) I have NEVER received junk email that's even remotely useful to me; moreover, I don't think I've ever gotten any junk email that even looks legitimate. All of it looks like too-good-to-be-true deals by fly-by-night companies that will be all to glad to take your money and skip town overnight with it. The services themselves are even shady -- the majority of my junk email is for things like "get your neighbor's credit history!" or "buy now and get a list of free XXX web site passwords!" or "buy this list of email addresses for advertising; it's been pre-screened!" or "I tried this pyramid scheme, and it REALLY WORKS!"
(2) What's worse, the spammers lie blatantly about the nature of their spam. For example:
"Hey Dave, here's more info about that great real-estate program I was telling you about last night! Say hi to Margaret for me!" (Making it look like I'm the accidental beneficiary of some choice information.)
"This email is NOT SPAM. You are receiving this email because you have contacted us or one of our subsidiary companies in the past." (I get this sort of spam sent to the email address in my InterNIC domain record, which I've never actually used to send anything.)
"You are on our OPT-IN marketing list. If you would like to be removed, please opt into the removal process by sending your email address to
"Make money fast! This is NOT a pyramid scheme!" (That's the best tipoff that it is.)
"A prime-time television special tried our multi-level marketing scheme, and not only did it bring them sixty thousand dollars in two days, but they also discovered that there are absolutely no laws against it!" (Note that they never mention what TV show they're talking about.)
All in all, it's not the amount of spam that bothers me so much (although I would like to get rid of it entirely, and I support CAUCE). It's the shady, thieving nature of the stuff that really irks me. For every million spam emails that these crooks send out, they're going to find at least a few dozen people who really believe that they can earn $50,000 a month by stuffing envelopes at home, and these people will gladly kiss $70 from their own pockets goodbye.
I believe the only true solution to Microsoft's abusive monopoly is to have at least three independent companies each offering their own compatible version of Windows. Each company could choose its own priorities -- adding features, fixing bugs, improving security -- and the market would decide which version of Windows suited its needs best, instead of the current arrangement where the market is forced to accept whatever Microsoft chooses to release. Have a look at some of the Windows 2000 features listed at "http:/ /www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/professional/ features/default.asp"; wouldn't you readily give up some of those new features in return for not having to worry about the next macro virus trashing your company's computers again?
Skeptics claim this would overly complicate the market, but I don't think it would confuse matters any more than having so many different versions of Windows already out there. They also say that this would result in many incompatible versions of Windows running around, but to that I say that any company releasing a version of Windows with compatibility problems would suffer in the market, so they have an incentive to strive for simplicity and compatibility... and, besides, how many compatibility issues are there between Windows 95/98/NT/2000 already?
Meanwhile, Microsoft is making noise about trying to appease the government by offering a version of Windows which merely 'hides' browser access, thereby demonstrating that they have no interest in legally recognizing their illegal tie of two products. They've shown that they have no qualms about breaking the law as long as they can defer or escape punishment (by tying it up in drawn-out courtroom cases); it should be obvious by now that any further legal restrictions on the company would be pointless, and that any 'solution' which results in a single company still being responsible for the operating system isn't a solution at all.
Grrrr!! And they don't post this limitation anywhere else, so there's no way to find out that their Shockwave games are Windows-only until you actually try to play one of them. I hate seeing a cross-platform standard misused and made dependent on a specific operating system.
I guess Macromedia is admitting that their Shockwave engine isn't truly cross-platform, and that additional development work is needed to port Shockwave apps from Windows to Mac.
I'd love to have a Playstation CD with MAME and a bunch of ROMs on it. :) Yeah, yeah, the ROMs aren't commercially distributable... but if I could press my own CD with my own ROMs, that'd be fine by me!
Is it possible for a normal CD burner to produce a CD which will boot and run on a Playstation, or is there some sort of copy protection which needs to be in place?
Babylon 5 succeeded in spite of its bad acting and sometimes-cheesy plots. Why? Because it was a serial; it was telling a story from beginning to end. Unlike any of the Trek series, where all of the characters have to end an episode in the same way they began it, Babylon 5 was free to introduce new regular characters, kill off important ones, and change the universe in some really drastic ways. Unlike Voyager, where no one cares what the crew goes through from week to week because the Big Red Reset Button keeps being hit, B5 viewers enthusiastically tuned in every week so that they wouldn't miss anything, and one of the most fun pasttimes was to analyze previous episodes to figure out what would happen in future ones.
The time period of an Excelsior series is rampant with possibilities. Space is being explored, but there's still a lot unknown out there; the Klingons are now our allies, but it's an uneasy truce at best; a lot of new technology is being developed, but it doesn't always work quite right. There's a lot of room for political intrigue, commando squads, tense standoffs, heroic bravery... the very sorts of things Hollywood loves these days. Throw in some marauders causing tensions between Starfleet and Klingon, add in some more of those high-ranking officials from Star Trek VI who believed the whole thing was doomed to fail, and there's your writers' bible for you.
The problem with a 'Birth of the Federation' series is that it's going to annoy fans when they inevitably get the details wrong... and who cares about the big clunky starships which had pea-shooter-power phasers, anyway? At the other end of the scale you've got Voyager-era Trek, where people fiddle with time and reality on a regular basis so that nothing's sacred any more. The Excelsior era comes at an exciting time in Trek history, and there's not a lot canon about it yet; I really feel Paramount's making a grave mistake by not listening to its fans here.
Actually, I do believe that Microsoft and its people know exactly the implications of what they're doing. I don't think any of them are too dumb to realize that they're not 'playing fair.'
I think what's happening is that they're trying to transcend the law in rather interesting ways, and what's most interesting is that, so far, they've been succeeding.
Nowhere in United States law does it say 'you must play fair.' Instead, the law delineates very specific behaviors and intents which are illegal, because vague altruistic laws aren't enforceable -- but the flip side of it is that the more specific a law is, the greater the possibility to find a loophole of some sort. And that's what Microsoft has been doing, redefining terms and feigning confusion just enough to worm its way around the letter of the law, and crying holy indignities whenever anyone dare try to mention the spirit of the law, because Microsoft asserts that its own belief that it's playing nice is just as strong as anyone else's belief that it's not.
So the first thing Microsoft has done is to treat the law as a list of rules devoid of any moral obligation whatsoever. It's kind of like in _The Matrix_, where Morpheus tells Neo that he can gain unbelievable powers simply by realizing that the world around him is governed by rules which can be bent or broken, and that the only thing limiting him is his own set of preconceptions.
And therefore, the second clever thing Microsoft has done has been to realize that laws *can* be broken, and that breaking them doesn't immediately cause the big foot from Monty Python to come down and smoosh them. They are obviously not out to keep their nose clean; they've done a lot of highly questionable things in several different cases, all the way down to destroying incriminating documents in the Caldera case. (I'm referring to the recent incident where a woman employed by Microsoft in Germany, I believe it was, admitted to having deleted a lot of subpoena'ed email at her manager's directive.) What Microsoft is depending on -- and what has so far held up for them -- is that court cases can drag on for years, well beyond any relevancy they once had in the Internet marketplace. Why behave legally today if you can escape punishment for another five to ten years or more, long after the companies which brought suit against you have gone out of business? And who knows, maybe by that time your founder will have donated so many millions of dollars to charities and political parties that no one (and least of all a Republican president) would ever consider continuing a lawsuit against your company? Or maybe the industry will have changed so much that any punishment against you will be irrelevant?
Much as I absolutely despise Microsoft's tactics in its court battles, I really have a lot of respect for their brazen ability to keep using the law to their own advantage. They have *never* admitted one iota of guilt for anything (which is amazing in itself), they've successfully managed to misrepresent the issue to the average American so that it looks like a simple matter of 'freedom to innovate' versus 'heavy-handed government intervention' rather than a straightforward tying issue, and they've managed to snarl up every court case they've been through and drag it on *much* longer than necessary, even while committing barefaced perjury, such as faking a videotape and using it as a 'smoking gun' until they were caught. They've been trying hard to get the judge or the prosecution ticked off enough to make a mistake so that Microsoft can declare it a mistrial and make everyone start all over again. They know, and everybody else knows, that Microsoft doesn't have a legal leg to stand on here; it's truly incredible that they've managed to drag the anti-trust case itself out for an entire year and a half already, where initially people expected it to last no longer than six weeks.
Microsoft is a shining example of modern capitalism, and of the ability of a United States corporation to do anything in its power to enture a good return for its shareholders. Unfortunately, it's showing the bad sides of this as well as the good.