That's why you have IN PERSON MEETINGS! And no minutes other than tasks and attendees.
Trust me, I know. But don't you agree that it's sad? Truth and honesty are disappearing because of the legal system.
What happened to learning lessons from mistakes? What happened to learning from others' mistakes? If these mistakes aren't ever communicated in a permanent form, thousands of others at these large companies will never learn, and history will simply continue to repeat itself. In-person meetings only go so far as a communication tool.
I find it unsettling that these messages can be used against them in such a way, because it would seem to lead us to a state where marketing BS invades internal technical discussions, creating a sort of double-think / no-privacy situation in the workplace.
I agree 100%, and this is exactly what is happening at major corporations. Legal-driven corporate policy now discourages all open and honest criticism of your own products because emails can be subpoenaed in court. This policy ironically leads to worse products, because the company is afraid to permit open and honest internal communication between engineers. You're only allowed to comment if it's good news. Engineers wither under this kind of restraint.
Nonsense. It's called bundling to an unacceptable level. Cross-subsidizing to get into new markets. Something they've been doing for decades.
This is where I completely disagree with your position. Under most legal standards, to be guilty of anti-competitive "bundling", the "bundled" product must be a clearly distinct product which is not functionally relevant to the market-dominant one.
To use a real-world example, if my company had a near-monopoly on freezers and I tried to bundle a chair with my freezer, that would be considered anti-competitive bundling because the chair does not share any functional relevance to the freezer; there is no "purpose" for them to be bundled other than to increase the market share of the chair. However, if I were to start bundling ice cube trays with my freezer (and this caused competition for the various aftermarket ice cube tray manufacturers), this combination would NOT be considered anti-competitive bundling because ice cube trays could be considered functionally part of the same "product" that makes up the freezer.
What kind of world would we live in if the ice-cube tray manufacturers of the world were "protected" from this type of behavior? Many types of products we now enjoy would be barely functional, and would require "add-ons" purchased from manufacturers whose market is legally protected from entry. For example, a few years ago Palm OS handheld computers had monopolized the handheld PC market. Accessory manufacturers sprung up overnight to supply such add-ons as "screen protectors" and "protective cases". Would Palm be guilty of "bundling" if they started making screens which didn't need protectors, or shipping their product with free protective cases?
What you call "bundling" most businesses routinely call "product improvement." Bundling requires clear functional disparity between products, and in the computer systems market, this line is anything but obvious.
Complete crap. The commission's position is that Microsoft must obey the law. That means no anti-competitive conduct.
"Anti-competitive conduct" is not as easy to recognize as you seem to believe. Your analogy to murder is "insultingly absurd", to use your own phrase. Anti-competitive practices, especially in this case, are not so clear-cut.
The EU regulatory commission is being amazingly pig-headed in this case. The commission doesn't want to be seen as "holding up the release of Vista" because they're scared of what kind of message that might send out to international business community. But at the same time, it can't even answer a basic question about what is or is not acceptable to them, which should be even more scary to the business community.
The central tenet of the rule of law is that laws are clear and defined BEFORE people can be held accountable to them. The fact that the EU cannot define clearly what is or is not acceptable to them before Microsoft releases Vista is absolutely unreasonable. Microsoft clearly feels that what it is doing with Vista is fine. But Adobe and Symantec do not. If the EU can't come out with a clear policy before Microsoft acts, then Microsoft cannot act without exposing itself to unknown legal risks.
Imagine if you were forced to obey a rule outlawing "anti-environmental practices", and that is as clearly as the law were defined. Is driving your car considered an "anti-environmental practice"? What about using too much energy? Running your air conditioner? Buying toothpaste in a plastic tube? The point is, how can you go about your daily life (or business) if you don't know what legal risks you are exposing yourself to?
Microsoft is simply asking here: "Is what I'm about to do acceptable to you? If not, what can I do to make it acceptable?" If this is so difficult to answer, then the EU has major problems with its laws. Regulatory bodies answer questions like these all the time.
Don't forget, this is a court-ordered fine - a punishment - upheld after an appeal.
No, this fine has absolutely NOT been appealed yet. This is a NEW (additional) fine imposed after the Comission declared noncompliance with the 2nd half of the original 2004 ruling. You can bet that Microsoft will absolutely appeal this fine, especially if they really did have 300 full-time employees working on compliance for the past 6 months, and the original "non-compliance" feedback for this documentation was not delivered until September 2005.
Dr. Barrett has actually stated that he is pleased with the documentation he has seen from this task force. His testimony could bolster Microsoft's appeal about compliance regarding this fine. If you aren't happy with a result, you absolutely must give the entity enough time to correct the perceived problem. Microsoft is doing this, to the independent auditor's satisfaction. Fining them now is like telling a criminal to shape up, and just as they start to obey, you throw them in jail anyway.
Fiscal conservative is now democratic property- you know, the guys who balanced the budget in the 90s.
The push in the 1990s for the balanced budget was instigated by the Republicans in 1994 as part of their platform dubbed "Contract with America". Specifically, the Fiscal Responsibility Act was one of the first attempts to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution which would effectively outlaw deficit spending. The House of Representatives passed the amendment under Newt Gingrich, but Democrats in the Senate defeated the amendment by one vote (65-35).
Since Budgets are always created by the House, the new 1994 Republicans who dominated the House of Representatives throughout the latter half of the decade were instrumental in cutting spending dramatically. You can read the Brookings Institution's analysis of the 104th Congress to get an idea of what their intentions were and who they were fighting against.
Clinton refused to sign the 1996 budget over objections to spending cuts. The resulting shutdown of the federal government was somehow blamed on Republicans, despite the fact that no other President in US history had ever vetoed the budget. Regardless, it was clear at that time that Clinton was much more interested in funding social projects than balancing a budget.
The other benefit that helped balance the budget in the 1990s was the Internet Boom, which drove tax revenues through the roof. The combination of record tax revenues and House Republican spending cuts reversed the horrible deficits which occurred under the split-party system of the 1980s (Tip O'Neill vs. Ronald Reagan).
While I agree that the current administration has no idea how to balance a budget, I completely reject your claim that the Democrats are any more fiscally responsible!
Just for clarification before anyone gets on their soapbox about how Microsoft shouldn't have to open their code to competitors, that is not the parts that the EU wants. They want MS to dislose API type information so that competitors can better interface with Windows. i.e. Samba.
No, they want Microsoft to disclose in detail how its client/server protocols operate. See, Microsoft's competitors want to develop server-based tools on Linux and other platforms which compete with Windows Server. To do this, they want to utilize the Microsoft networking client that is built into Windows 2000/XP/etc. If they can achieve this feat, then they don't need to develop their own client software.
That is what really bugs me. Nothing is stopping these companies from developing their own client software to run on Windows desktop operating systems. But they won't do it because they would rather use the protocols built into Windows, which Microsoft had only intended to work with its own products (Windows Server). After all, why develop your own client software when you can utilize your local government to force your competitor to let you use it for free?
Face it, there is nothing stopping these competitors from writing their own client software on Windows using the same TCP/IP stack that the Microsoft client is built on. Novell shipped a Netware client for Windows for years which was popular despite Microsoft including a competing Novell client built-in. But Microsoft's competitors here just don't want to do that work. This isn't about being "interoperable"; it's about money. These competitors want to have an easy way to compete with Microsoft rather than developing their own solution.
It's also about the Samba project, since that project's entire modus operandi is to utilize Microsoft's built-in client stack by fooling it into believing it is actually talking to a real Windows Server. The Samba team could have written its own client software to integrate into Windows, but instead it chose to utilize Microsoft's client so that the user wouldn't have any idea that he wasn't on a true "Windows-based" domain/server environment.
So the "leadership toll" so far is 4 individuals: Gates, Taylor, Hase, and Scoble.
Last I read, Microsoft had something on the order of 100 vice-presidents. What makes you think that 2 of them leaving after the founder of the company announced his retirement makes this some kind of mass exodus?
Taylor and Hase were just Corporate VPs, which is the lowest executive rank at Microsoft from what I understand. Scoble wasn't even an executive; his title was "technical evangelist." I have no clue how many evangelists that Microsoft employs, but my guess is quite a few.
Slashdot's rumors of Microsoft's impending demise have (once again) been greatly exaggerated...
I'd almost guarantee that if you removed the API then.Net would stop working because it's implemented on top of it. It probably is implemented on top of COM as well.
It is, but it was written under the assumption that at some future date, the.NET framework could essentially live in its own NT subsystem and would not be dependent upon the Windows subsystem at all. That would leave out all of the horrible Win32 security and compatibility nightmares that make working on Windows such a headache.
I think you will see a future version of Windows where Win32 is effectively a compatibility layer, similar to "Mac Classic" running on OS X. It will be there for backwards compatibility, but if you're running only native.NET apps it would never even be loaded...
It's a transition that would take years to complete, but Microsoft has shown it is willing to sacrifice some backwards compatibility in order to simplify. For instance, the 16-bit compatibility layer is gone on 64-bit Windows.
Wasn't the whole point of the non-proliferation treaty for non-nuclear states to remain that way, and in exchange the nuclear states would dispose of their nuclear arsenals over time?
pro-lif-er-ate(v. intr.)
To grow or multiply by rapidly producing new tissue, parts, cells, or offspring.
To increase or spread at a rapid rate: fears that nuclear weapons might proliferate.
Nuclear Non-proliferation = no growing or increasing nuclear capabilities. This project is therefore quite compatible with non-proliferation treaties, since it focuses on maintaining or replacing those weapons which are already accounted and accepted under the current strategic policy.
Microsoft really makes no effort at all in providing even generic drivers for hardware.
This is a joke, right? So your NIC (the make/model of which you conveniently neglected to mention) doesn't have an inbox driver in XPSp2, and the conclusion is that Microsoft makes no effort to supply inbox drivers?
There are tons of generic class drivers inbox in Windows. In fact, I challenge you to name one that is missing that is available in, say, OS X. I'll be waiting.
Microsoft does not redistribute vendor drivers inbox for every piece of hardware out there in the world. You should know better than to expect that. Your computer vendor is responsible for providing the necessary install/setup CD to get your system up and running with the appropriate operating system and drivers. Microsoft cannot possibly be expected to cover each and every possible device that OEMs are including. Try as they might, there will always be gaps.
Still... We installed a very fresh version of WinXP last week at the office, with that SP2 preloaded and all, on a 4 years old computer, and it still couldn't get a network connection without us downloading the drivers from another computer and then burning it to a CD (because network drivers these days don't fit on a floppy).
Have you heard of a USB flash key? Your complaints are starting to sound really hollow.
It's time to finish their sleezeball business practises once and for all.
Windows has become such a huge part of European infratructure that we can no longer rely on a shady corporation.
This sentiment is *exactly* why most people on Wall Street and in the business world see this case for what it is: the Europeans trying to assert control over an American company they despise.
This case has nothing to do with legality. It's about taking down a hated foreign company by coming up with a string of witnesses who have axes to grind.
Andrew Tridgell? Give me a break! This guy has based his entire career by reverse-engineering other companies' products and passing them off as his own. He is a leech. And yet *he* is the one who the EU is listening to? That's a telling commentary on what Europe has become today.
Whether the EU system of justice is fair or not, those are the tradeoffs of becoming a multinational corporation.
Wait, so now a fair justice system is a tradeoff and not an expectation we place on any governmental organization?
So why should we Americans give a damm what Microsoft's legal troubles are in the EU system.
For that matter, why should we Americans give a damn about any injustice happening elsewhere in the world? Why don't we just seal up our borders and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?
The Event Viewer has its uses, but IMO it doesn't hold a candle to the various logs automatically generated in Linux in terms of specific and useful information content.
That depends on what you have configured the system to log, and what application developers have choen to log. The security log, for instance, is extremely helpful at diagnosing "access denied" or file sharing failures, because the NT object manager logs all system object access failures (and if requested, all successes) to the Security log. And that is only one example.
Bottom line -- troubleshooting a Windows machine is largely a guessing game. Occassionally you might get lucky and have an easy issue that can be solved within a few guesses. Most of the time, I'm left scratching my head.
Windows is very deterministic and easy to troubleshoot if you take the time to learn. It has distinct startup and shutdown procedures, driver installation, file system behavior, thread and process management, etc. These are all publicly documented, if you care to learn about them. Buy a copy of Windows Internals and you'll be amazed at what you didn't know. There are tools and utilities to automate all kinds of useful activities from the command-line, and if these tools don't exist, the APIs are very well documented on MSDN for how to create them.
Things taken for granted on Linux like verbose debug information, verbose startup/shutdown (w/logging)
Ever heard of that management console snap-in called Event Viewer? You might want to look into that. And as for debugging applications or even kernel-mode device drivers, Windows has some of the best freely available debugging facilities of any platform.
...ability to checksum the installed binaries to verify they haven't been tampered with
Read about Windows System File Protection. Run "sfc.exe/scannow" to validate your system files on XP/2k3. It uses hashes, not checksums.
...ability to view *all* running processes
Task manager? Tlist.exe?
It's pretty clear that you don't know much about Windows, which seems to be a common thread here on Slashdot. You'd rather trash Windows than spend the time to learn about what you don't know. It's easier to write off Windows as "unexplainable" just because you are too lazy to look behind the GUI.
If you don't care about what you are doing and just want to make lots of money, you should be in corporate law. Why bother with something as challenging as science?
This is an asinine and insulting statement. Of course I care about what I do, or I wouldn't be in this field today. But you're living in some kind of a pipe dream if you think that finance doesn't play a part in these decisions.
When I graduated with my B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science, I was about $75k in debt. By the time I obtained my master's degree, loan interest had pushed the principal to about $90k. As much as I love studying and researching the innermost workings of computers, putting my financial future in doubt is simply no way to start life.
If undergraduate education were free, I would probably have continued to finish my PhD. Despite what you think, I was perfectly happy living on a research stipend, and my research advisor definitely wanted me to stay. The research I was doing was interesting, and my fellow researchers were intellectually stimulating.
But nothing is free, and financial realities do not permit one from choosing any path in life. And In my opinion, the poor economic returns offered by advanced engineering degrees help explain the low numbers of US citizens pursuing such an education. You lose 6 years of earning potential in the prime of your life, during which you can hardly support a family and won't have much of a life outside your research. The questionable financial return for this sacrifice makes it that much harder of a choice.
Yes, very true. And, in fact, with a Ph.D. in Comp. Sci., you get to be called "doctor".
Not unless you end up teaching, which only about 20% of Ph.D. students end up doing. I work with many Ph.D.s at my company, and they get no more respect than the next guy. In fact, if they asked others to refer to them as "doctor", they would be looked upon as pretentious snobs.
Face it, MDs get more respect than PhDs in other fields (except of course for professors).
What world do you live in? Do you understand that the average income for an M.D. is about $150k? Do the math. Do you understand that most of us "doctors" don't go around driving high end automobiles or living in mansions?
I'm living in the real world, and I can guarantee you that the average income for a PhD in computer science is no where near that of MDs. Especially compared to practicing physicians. Research MDs are more comparable, I'd agree. But still not the same. There is absolutely a disparity.
In fact, the lack of return on investment is one of the reasons I left graduate school after finishing my master's thesis in electrical engineering. I did the math, and spending 4 more years to get a PhD wasn't worth it while I was racking up interest on my undergrad loans. If they do get hired, they either end up in the same pay scales as others with post-graduate degrees, or they fight for slots in "research" labs, where there are limited opportunities and you're not seen as part of the core business.
After the dotcom bust, enrollment was largely cut back down to those who were genuinely interested in the industry, not just after a quick buck. For that, we should all be grateful.
Here's the rub: there are still tens of thousands of people you describe that entered this industry during the dotcom era, when companies were hiring literally anyone with computer experience (and in some cases, none at all). These people now have seniority or have even entered management positions, and if you eneter the market today, you will be reporting to them or forced to work with them.
Personally, I wish there were more 80s-era geeks left in our industry. At least they actually loved technology. Unfortunately, they all seem to have left after making so much money in the late 90s. They should be today's managers, not the 90s-era kruft that we have today.
We're talking about virtual server software, not virtual workstation software.
VMWare Server beta is available for free download here. The company has stated that there will be a free version of the VMWare Server once it is ready for release.
Microsoft may not have known about Daum Communications specifically, but they absolutely knew about other companies in the instant messenger space. AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, etc.
How many ways do I have to say this? Those companies aren't suing Microsoft, and this lawsuit has nothing to do with AIM or ICQ or Yahoo, just like it has nothing to do with Netscape. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits.
If you can't keep your issues separate, you have only managed to pollute the integrity of a legal system which has jurisdiction over EVERYONE. Just because it's happening to Microsoft now, who you happen to hate, doesn't mean that it won't happen to someone you appreciate tomorrow.
This Korean verdict is outrageous and sets horrible precedent for international commerce law. Personally, if I were running a company and choosing markets to enter, I would look at court decisions like this and think twice before entering the Korean market before others.
They were convicted of breaking the law in America.
Except this lawsuit is in South Korea and doesn't have anything to do with the Netscape vs. IE bundling case. The complaint South Korea has filed relates to including Windows Messenger as part of Windows, which a South Korean firm named "Daum Communications" claims is impeding their ability to compete in the IM market.
The point is, every country on the planet has some little company which makes a product that competes with something inside Windows. So where do these lawsuits end? These types of verdicts are thinly disguised extortion of a hated American company.
So Microsoft broke the law in America, was convicted in a court of law, and no one ever did anything to make them stop breaking the law. So is it that surprising that they're breaking the law in the rest of the world as well?
Your argument seems to be, "Well, they were convicted of competing illegally against Netscape in the U.S., therefore all of their other business practices are probably illegal too." In other words, now they are guilty until proven innocent. It's faulty reasoning. Every situation is different.
If Microsoft would obey the law, they wouldn't have to pay these fines and settlements and whatnot.
You keep using the expressions "break the law" and "obey the law" as though the law is clear-cut in these circumstances. Your view of "the law" is incredibly naive: the law is anything but clear here. What exactly do you want Microsoft to do in the Korean case to "Obey the law"? Please explain what *specifically* they must do to be a "law-abiding" company in your eyes, or rather what they are currently doing that is specifically illegal in your view?
The specifics of this case are *very* weak for the Korean government. It's not even clear that Microsoft knew anything about this little company named Daum Communications when Windows Messenger was added. It is a completely different situation to the IE vs. Netscape situation, where Microsoft clearly aimed its strategy at taking out Netscape as a competitive entity. If you don't even know about a competitor or don't even consider them a competitor, how can you be guilty of conspiring against them?
Try this. Try installing any program that writes to the registry (most if not all windows program does). After you've done this, try resizing windows in various shapes and configurations (this too is stored in registry). Give it about a minute at the most....now yank the power from the PC.
Window sizing policy is entirely application-dependent. Windows itself does not record window size or position information at all. Applications are free to persist this information however they see fit. Personally, if I chose to use a registry value to persist this information, I would only update the value at program exit, and not at every window resize/position event. Anything else would be poor application behavior on my part.
Regardless, this is not a Windows OS problem and could happen on Mac OS X or Linux just the same. Just replace "registry" with "application configuration file" and you have a similar situation. The problem lies with poorly designed window metadata persistence, not OS-level policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, I know. But don't you agree that it's sad? Truth and honesty are disappearing because of the legal system.
What happened to learning lessons from mistakes? What happened to learning from others' mistakes? If these mistakes aren't ever communicated in a permanent form, thousands of others at these large companies will never learn, and history will simply continue to repeat itself. In-person meetings only go so far as a communication tool.
I agree 100%, and this is exactly what is happening at major corporations. Legal-driven corporate policy now discourages all open and honest criticism of your own products because emails can be subpoenaed in court. This policy ironically leads to worse products, because the company is afraid to permit open and honest internal communication between engineers. You're only allowed to comment if it's good news. Engineers wither under this kind of restraint.
This is where I completely disagree with your position. Under most legal standards, to be guilty of anti-competitive "bundling", the "bundled" product must be a clearly distinct product which is not functionally relevant to the market-dominant one.
To use a real-world example, if my company had a near-monopoly on freezers and I tried to bundle a chair with my freezer, that would be considered anti-competitive bundling because the chair does not share any functional relevance to the freezer; there is no "purpose" for them to be bundled other than to increase the market share of the chair. However, if I were to start bundling ice cube trays with my freezer (and this caused competition for the various aftermarket ice cube tray manufacturers), this combination would NOT be considered anti-competitive bundling because ice cube trays could be considered functionally part of the same "product" that makes up the freezer.
What kind of world would we live in if the ice-cube tray manufacturers of the world were "protected" from this type of behavior? Many types of products we now enjoy would be barely functional, and would require "add-ons" purchased from manufacturers whose market is legally protected from entry. For example, a few years ago Palm OS handheld computers had monopolized the handheld PC market. Accessory manufacturers sprung up overnight to supply such add-ons as "screen protectors" and "protective cases". Would Palm be guilty of "bundling" if they started making screens which didn't need protectors, or shipping their product with free protective cases?
What you call "bundling" most businesses routinely call "product improvement." Bundling requires clear functional disparity between products, and in the computer systems market, this line is anything but obvious.
"Anti-competitive conduct" is not as easy to recognize as you seem to believe. Your analogy to murder is "insultingly absurd", to use your own phrase. Anti-competitive practices, especially in this case, are not so clear-cut.
The EU regulatory commission is being amazingly pig-headed in this case. The commission doesn't want to be seen as "holding up the release of Vista" because they're scared of what kind of message that might send out to international business community. But at the same time, it can't even answer a basic question about what is or is not acceptable to them, which should be even more scary to the business community.
The central tenet of the rule of law is that laws are clear and defined BEFORE people can be held accountable to them. The fact that the EU cannot define clearly what is or is not acceptable to them before Microsoft releases Vista is absolutely unreasonable. Microsoft clearly feels that what it is doing with Vista is fine. But Adobe and Symantec do not. If the EU can't come out with a clear policy before Microsoft acts, then Microsoft cannot act without exposing itself to unknown legal risks.
Imagine if you were forced to obey a rule outlawing "anti-environmental practices", and that is as clearly as the law were defined. Is driving your car considered an "anti-environmental practice"? What about using too much energy? Running your air conditioner? Buying toothpaste in a plastic tube? The point is, how can you go about your daily life (or business) if you don't know what legal risks you are exposing yourself to?
Microsoft is simply asking here: "Is what I'm about to do acceptable to you? If not, what can I do to make it acceptable?" If this is so difficult to answer, then the EU has major problems with its laws. Regulatory bodies answer questions like these all the time.
No, this fine has absolutely NOT been appealed yet. This is a NEW (additional) fine imposed after the Comission declared noncompliance with the 2nd half of the original 2004 ruling. You can bet that Microsoft will absolutely appeal this fine, especially if they really did have 300 full-time employees working on compliance for the past 6 months, and the original "non-compliance" feedback for this documentation was not delivered until September 2005.
Dr. Barrett has actually stated that he is pleased with the documentation he has seen from this task force. His testimony could bolster Microsoft's appeal about compliance regarding this fine. If you aren't happy with a result, you absolutely must give the entity enough time to correct the perceived problem. Microsoft is doing this, to the independent auditor's satisfaction. Fining them now is like telling a criminal to shape up, and just as they start to obey, you throw them in jail anyway.
The push in the 1990s for the balanced budget was instigated by the Republicans in 1994 as part of their platform dubbed "Contract with America". Specifically, the Fiscal Responsibility Act was one of the first attempts to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution which would effectively outlaw deficit spending. The House of Representatives passed the amendment under Newt Gingrich, but Democrats in the Senate defeated the amendment by one vote (65-35).
Since Budgets are always created by the House, the new 1994 Republicans who dominated the House of Representatives throughout the latter half of the decade were instrumental in cutting spending dramatically. You can read the Brookings Institution's analysis of the 104th Congress to get an idea of what their intentions were and who they were fighting against.
Clinton refused to sign the 1996 budget over objections to spending cuts. The resulting shutdown of the federal government was somehow blamed on Republicans, despite the fact that no other President in US history had ever vetoed the budget. Regardless, it was clear at that time that Clinton was much more interested in funding social projects than balancing a budget.
The other benefit that helped balance the budget in the 1990s was the Internet Boom, which drove tax revenues through the roof. The combination of record tax revenues and House Republican spending cuts reversed the horrible deficits which occurred under the split-party system of the 1980s (Tip O'Neill vs. Ronald Reagan).
While I agree that the current administration has no idea how to balance a budget, I completely reject your claim that the Democrats are any more fiscally responsible!
No, they want Microsoft to disclose in detail how its client/server protocols operate. See, Microsoft's competitors want to develop server-based tools on Linux and other platforms which compete with Windows Server. To do this, they want to utilize the Microsoft networking client that is built into Windows 2000/XP/etc. If they can achieve this feat, then they don't need to develop their own client software.
That is what really bugs me. Nothing is stopping these companies from developing their own client software to run on Windows desktop operating systems. But they won't do it because they would rather use the protocols built into Windows, which Microsoft had only intended to work with its own products (Windows Server). After all, why develop your own client software when you can utilize your local government to force your competitor to let you use it for free?
Face it, there is nothing stopping these competitors from writing their own client software on Windows using the same TCP/IP stack that the Microsoft client is built on. Novell shipped a Netware client for Windows for years which was popular despite Microsoft including a competing Novell client built-in. But Microsoft's competitors here just don't want to do that work. This isn't about being "interoperable"; it's about money. These competitors want to have an easy way to compete with Microsoft rather than developing their own solution.
It's also about the Samba project, since that project's entire modus operandi is to utilize Microsoft's built-in client stack by fooling it into believing it is actually talking to a real Windows Server. The Samba team could have written its own client software to integrate into Windows, but instead it chose to utilize Microsoft's client so that the user wouldn't have any idea that he wasn't on a true "Windows-based" domain/server environment.
So the "leadership toll" so far is 4 individuals: Gates, Taylor, Hase, and Scoble.
Last I read, Microsoft had something on the order of 100 vice-presidents. What makes you think that 2 of them leaving after the founder of the company announced his retirement makes this some kind of mass exodus?
Taylor and Hase were just Corporate VPs, which is the lowest executive rank at Microsoft from what I understand. Scoble wasn't even an executive; his title was "technical evangelist." I have no clue how many evangelists that Microsoft employs, but my guess is quite a few.
Slashdot's rumors of Microsoft's impending demise have (once again) been greatly exaggerated...
It is, but it was written under the assumption that at some future date, the .NET framework could essentially live in its own NT subsystem and would not be dependent upon the Windows subsystem at all. That would leave out all of the horrible Win32 security and compatibility nightmares that make working on Windows such a headache.
I think you will see a future version of Windows where Win32 is effectively a compatibility layer, similar to "Mac Classic" running on OS X. It will be there for backwards compatibility, but if you're running only native .NET apps it would never even be loaded...
It's a transition that would take years to complete, but Microsoft has shown it is willing to sacrifice some backwards compatibility in order to simplify. For instance, the 16-bit compatibility layer is gone on 64-bit Windows.
LoginIsAllowed = IsPasswordCorrect(userInput);
Nuclear Non-proliferation = no growing or increasing nuclear capabilities. This project is therefore quite compatible with non-proliferation treaties, since it focuses on maintaining or replacing those weapons which are already accounted and accepted under the current strategic policy.
This is a joke, right? So your NIC (the make/model of which you conveniently neglected to mention) doesn't have an inbox driver in XPSp2, and the conclusion is that Microsoft makes no effort to supply inbox drivers?
There are tons of generic class drivers inbox in Windows. In fact, I challenge you to name one that is missing that is available in, say, OS X. I'll be waiting.
Microsoft does not redistribute vendor drivers inbox for every piece of hardware out there in the world. You should know better than to expect that. Your computer vendor is responsible for providing the necessary install/setup CD to get your system up and running with the appropriate operating system and drivers. Microsoft cannot possibly be expected to cover each and every possible device that OEMs are including. Try as they might, there will always be gaps.
Have you heard of a USB flash key? Your complaints are starting to sound really hollow.
Please cite the study linking vacation time to incidence rate of cancer.
This sentiment is *exactly* why most people on Wall Street and in the business world see this case for what it is: the Europeans trying to assert control over an American company they despise.
This case has nothing to do with legality. It's about taking down a hated foreign company by coming up with a string of witnesses who have axes to grind.
Andrew Tridgell? Give me a break! This guy has based his entire career by reverse-engineering other companies' products and passing them off as his own. He is a leech. And yet *he* is the one who the EU is listening to? That's a telling commentary on what Europe has become today.
Wait, so now a fair justice system is a tradeoff and not an expectation we place on any governmental organization?
For that matter, why should we Americans give a damn about any injustice happening elsewhere in the world? Why don't we just seal up our borders and pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist?
That depends on what you have configured the system to log, and what application developers have choen to log. The security log, for instance, is extremely helpful at diagnosing "access denied" or file sharing failures, because the NT object manager logs all system object access failures (and if requested, all successes) to the Security log. And that is only one example.
You can also use Windows Management Instrumentation scripts to monitor tons of system information or performance.
Windows is very deterministic and easy to troubleshoot if you take the time to learn. It has distinct startup and shutdown procedures, driver installation, file system behavior, thread and process management, etc. These are all publicly documented, if you care to learn about them. Buy a copy of Windows Internals and you'll be amazed at what you didn't know. There are tools and utilities to automate all kinds of useful activities from the command-line, and if these tools don't exist, the APIs are very well documented on MSDN for how to create them.
Ever heard of that management console snap-in called Event Viewer? You might want to look into that. And as for debugging applications or even kernel-mode device drivers, Windows has some of the best freely available debugging facilities of any platform.
Read about Windows System File Protection. Run "sfc.exe /scannow" to validate your system files on XP/2k3. It uses hashes, not checksums.
Task manager? Tlist.exe?
It's pretty clear that you don't know much about Windows, which seems to be a common thread here on Slashdot. You'd rather trash Windows than spend the time to learn about what you don't know. It's easier to write off Windows as "unexplainable" just because you are too lazy to look behind the GUI.
This is an asinine and insulting statement. Of course I care about what I do, or I wouldn't be in this field today. But you're living in some kind of a pipe dream if you think that finance doesn't play a part in these decisions.
When I graduated with my B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science, I was about $75k in debt. By the time I obtained my master's degree, loan interest had pushed the principal to about $90k. As much as I love studying and researching the innermost workings of computers, putting my financial future in doubt is simply no way to start life.
If undergraduate education were free, I would probably have continued to finish my PhD. Despite what you think, I was perfectly happy living on a research stipend, and my research advisor definitely wanted me to stay. The research I was doing was interesting, and my fellow researchers were intellectually stimulating.
But nothing is free, and financial realities do not permit one from choosing any path in life. And In my opinion, the poor economic returns offered by advanced engineering degrees help explain the low numbers of US citizens pursuing such an education. You lose 6 years of earning potential in the prime of your life, during which you can hardly support a family and won't have much of a life outside your research. The questionable financial return for this sacrifice makes it that much harder of a choice.
Not unless you end up teaching, which only about 20% of Ph.D. students end up doing. I work with many Ph.D.s at my company, and they get no more respect than the next guy. In fact, if they asked others to refer to them as "doctor", they would be looked upon as pretentious snobs.
Face it, MDs get more respect than PhDs in other fields (except of course for professors).
I'm living in the real world, and I can guarantee you that the average income for a PhD in computer science is no where near that of MDs. Especially compared to practicing physicians. Research MDs are more comparable, I'd agree. But still not the same. There is absolutely a disparity.
In fact, the lack of return on investment is one of the reasons I left graduate school after finishing my master's thesis in electrical engineering. I did the math, and spending 4 more years to get a PhD wasn't worth it while I was racking up interest on my undergrad loans. If they do get hired, they either end up in the same pay scales as others with post-graduate degrees, or they fight for slots in "research" labs, where there are limited opportunities and you're not seen as part of the core business.
Here's the rub: there are still tens of thousands of people you describe that entered this industry during the dotcom era, when companies were hiring literally anyone with computer experience (and in some cases, none at all). These people now have seniority or have even entered management positions, and if you eneter the market today, you will be reporting to them or forced to work with them.
Personally, I wish there were more 80s-era geeks left in our industry. At least they actually loved technology. Unfortunately, they all seem to have left after making so much money in the late 90s. They should be today's managers, not the 90s-era kruft that we have today.
Funny. Whenever I watch the CBC from Vancouver (I live in Seattle), it appears to me to have a left wing bias. Go figure.
We're talking about virtual server software, not virtual workstation software.
VMWare Server beta is available for free download here. The company has stated that there will be a free version of the VMWare Server once it is ready for release.
How many ways do I have to say this? Those companies aren't suing Microsoft, and this lawsuit has nothing to do with AIM or ICQ or Yahoo, just like it has nothing to do with Netscape. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits.
If you can't keep your issues separate, you have only managed to pollute the integrity of a legal system which has jurisdiction over EVERYONE. Just because it's happening to Microsoft now, who you happen to hate, doesn't mean that it won't happen to someone you appreciate tomorrow.
This Korean verdict is outrageous and sets horrible precedent for international commerce law. Personally, if I were running a company and choosing markets to enter, I would look at court decisions like this and think twice before entering the Korean market before others.
Except this lawsuit is in South Korea and doesn't have anything to do with the Netscape vs. IE bundling case. The complaint South Korea has filed relates to including Windows Messenger as part of Windows, which a South Korean firm named "Daum Communications" claims is impeding their ability to compete in the IM market.
The point is, every country on the planet has some little company which makes a product that competes with something inside Windows. So where do these lawsuits end? These types of verdicts are thinly disguised extortion of a hated American company.
Your argument seems to be, "Well, they were convicted of competing illegally against Netscape in the U.S., therefore all of their other business practices are probably illegal too." In other words, now they are guilty until proven innocent. It's faulty reasoning. Every situation is different.
You keep using the expressions "break the law" and "obey the law" as though the law is clear-cut in these circumstances. Your view of "the law" is incredibly naive: the law is anything but clear here. What exactly do you want Microsoft to do in the Korean case to "Obey the law"? Please explain what *specifically* they must do to be a "law-abiding" company in your eyes, or rather what they are currently doing that is specifically illegal in your view?
The specifics of this case are *very* weak for the Korean government. It's not even clear that Microsoft knew anything about this little company named Daum Communications when Windows Messenger was added. It is a completely different situation to the IE vs. Netscape situation, where Microsoft clearly aimed its strategy at taking out Netscape as a competitive entity. If you don't even know about a competitor or don't even consider them a competitor, how can you be guilty of conspiring against them?
Window sizing policy is entirely application-dependent. Windows itself does not record window size or position information at all. Applications are free to persist this information however they see fit. Personally, if I chose to use a registry value to persist this information, I would only update the value at program exit, and not at every window resize/position event. Anything else would be poor application behavior on my part.
Regardless, this is not a Windows OS problem and could happen on Mac OS X or Linux just the same. Just replace "registry" with "application configuration file" and you have a similar situation. The problem lies with poorly designed window metadata persistence, not OS-level policy.