All a test banning agreement means is that the US will try it's damnedest not to get caught testing "Star Wars" weapons. They will still develop them as best they can and some will be tested even if only in simulation. If they ever have to _use_ such devices it will be in war and probably against another signatory to the deal.
And as some genius once said "All's fair in love and war."
I understand enough about British Government to know your bosses won't be telling you to drop Linux. ( Even if they care ). But what about people from outside ? Has anyone said "Switch to our system and we will ___" or "drop Linux or we will ___". Has someone even asked nicely ?
I used to work at a couple of companies that do white box noname clones. At those shops they have a hard time keeping up with the big name vendors in terms of value for money. I.e. Dell can put MSOffice, Encarta, Gulf and some other stuff on a $1,000. For the little goy that's $600 worth of software before you even build the system.
The way out is to bundle free/low cost crap and whatever comes with the hardware. This is why name brand machine might ship with Macafee Anti virus while Mr. noname gets "Dr.Solomaon" ( He has the same bundling deal ).
This means that A serious number of Noname PCs from small time vendors are shipping to users with Corel Linux installed and running.
To make matters worse, I am willing to bet that all parts of said board will make it onto the "A" list by the time these ship. For those who don't know it means that the VIA.GRA ( real name honest) boards will come with "LinModems" and that Corel Linux will detect and configure the sound and video automatically and push your monitor to it's limit.
In short; "This is a good thing" (TM). Even if 90% of them will be dual boot. It will be dual booting with a minimal Windows that only has Corel Office 8.
Do a search for Tom Adelstein on Linux Today and you will find his 9 or 10 part series on consultative selling. Basically he goes into the gory details of how to make money peddling Linux.
Things like how to do meetings with potential customers and how you should find out what they need before you even think about what to provide. Basic stuff that very few of us really know.
It's supported by Walnut Creak CDRom. They don't make money off the server directly but most of the stuff on it is available from them on CD-ROM at sane but not dirt cheap prices.
They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else":).
They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.
It's supported by Walnut Creak CDRom. They don't make money off the server directly but most of the stuff on it is available from them on CD-ROM at sane but not dirt cheap prices.
They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else":).
They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.
Just supporting Linux means responding to the hippie in a "sensible" way, Supporting Linux, FreeBSD and your own Unix flavors in this way means giving the customers choice. It's the equivalent of saying "I don't care what OS or software you run as long as you do so on OUR hardware".
3 chars to Compaq for finally catching the internet wave and realizing that FreeBSD is probably the #3 or #4 OS platform on the net, and taking steps to prove that it runs on Compaq machines.
Silicon valley is in the same state as Hollywood. This is why Stallone is a bigger star than Harison Ford. It's also why Miguel wasn't dragged kicking and screaming into a high paying job a year or more ago.
The only people who wouldn't want this kid are those who have committed to KDE all the way or no GUI at all. That means Caldera and E-Smith.
PS : Harison Ford films have made more money at the box office than those with any other actor.
I live in a country with a huge and obvious gap between rich and pore ( Jamaica ). The evidence I see around me is that the more money you have the fewer kids you have. I.e. My parents are a Carpenter and a low level civil servant. I have 6 older siblings. Now we are all grown up and doing much better than our parents did financially ( They are retired now living more comfortably than when they had "jobs" ).
Of course with all those siblings I have only 6 Nephews/nieces ( included one adopted ) and no children of my own ( I'm 25 ). That means 1 child per couple. Meanwhile the people I see having large numbers of children now are even worse off than my mom ever was. I.e. Single mothers working part time for minimum wage. My customers ( I do a lot of support for home users ) almost never have more than 2 children.
Now that I have established the existence of the divide, where dose it come from ?
Well Rich people also tend to acquire more formal education ( anything beyond high school is enough ). At that level your biology classes tell how well a woman's body recovers from childbirth. You hang with people who simply don't have the time to deal with child care and as a result use contraceptives.
You also learn from people who will tell you that Condoms and Pills are smart. Rather than "I nahh throw out my seed ina plastic bag". Finally there is the financial aspect. Having lots of money up front saves you more in the long run. Ask any girl who is now a mother because she couldn't find the cash to demand the quarterly injection.
The OS architects have said for a long time that moving an OS from 16 -> 32 -> 64 bits is significantly more difficult than moving it between 2 CPUs at the same bandwidth. In other words porting Solaris from Spark to IA64 should be fairly simple and this announcement pretty much proves that.
Linux ( how could I leave it out ? ) has been tested on IA64 and that too was not surprising since Linux has run as a 64 bit CPU on Spark and Alpha machines for some time.
PS : Yes you read correctly. The Linux port started from the Alpha branch of the Kernel source rather than the i386 branch.
2 : Make it OSS and get a few thousand people to help out.
3 : Form a company and pay top dollar to some 1st rate programers.
Linus wasn't a rich man ( and won't be until Transmeta goes public ) so he couldn't have bought talent.
Linus has claimed about %5 of the Kernel as his own coding and the rest is just packing in other people's code. He couldn't have done it all by himself.
Therefore OSS was his only option and frankly if Linux had a BSD/X11 stile license it wouldn't have caught up to freeBSD in the area of contributing developers. Back when Linux was the new OS on the block ( 1992-3 ) it had no technical advantages over BSD at all. Only the GPL ( which was adopted in under a year of development to replace the draconian "Share this source and make no money" license Linus had used at 1st.
Even now the technical advantages over FreeBSD are relatively minor and come with tradeoffs. I.e. More drivers for lower network performance.
All Capone ran his empire from prison for some years. If Copeland was sent to prison ( worst case scenario ) then he could do the same. As things stand right now that is the best bet for keeping the company afloat.
However that seams to be changing so lets embrace and extend in our own way. I.e. Embrace some really cool video cards and extend ATI's bottom line. This is a "good thing" (TM).
Don't bother to say how ATI is just doing this to keep from loosing market share to some other card maker. They are but it doesn't matter.
"Good thing" is a trade mark of RMS -: All rights reserved.
It's closed. It's endorsed by MS ( Indirectly ) and it will probably work properly since the easiest way to emulate a monster like Win32 is to look at the source.
SoftPC for the mack was also built by an NT source code licensee.
Look at some of the portraials of someone amasing a fortune in these movies.
There is absolutly nothing in the "action" efects or odd camera angles that wold look familer to what the wealthy people around experinced.
They do it because it's how you "dramatize" or show something that's longand tedius in a much shorter timespan while letting eaven those movie goers with little/no knowlage of that area understand what goes on.
More disturbing is when they have computers and hackers perform the imposible. I.e. Indipendence day when they uploaded a Virus to the Alien ship that disabled it's shilds. Just as how a Mac or Linux Virus ( They exist. just not very eficent ) will have little efect on a Windows machine. When did these people get a chance to figure out what OS/Software the Alien ship was running ?
Sun's stated goal is to challenge MSOffice on the desktop now and to remove Windows latter. ( Star Portal ). However with the cards stacked as they are ( MSOffice on the vast majority of desktops and most users thinking *.doc is a standard file format ) no single Office suite can ever hope to put a serious dent in that position.
They way to make an impact is to put the Import/Export filters under a BSD stile license and hope that a community grows around them. In other words reduce *.doc and *.xls to mear commodities ( Like *.html and *.txt ).
Too bad they are as big on control as MS is and as such can never gain the foothold MS has now. Think back to 198x. Do you think IBM could have pushed it's PCs all over Commodore, Apple and everybody else without help from Compaq and the rest of cloners ?
If Sun simply wanted to sell big servers to run Star Portal on while reducing any proprietary advantage MSOffice has then it would have put at least the filters of Star Office under a BSD license.
Yes I love the GPL as much as the rest of you but if the point is to have everyone able to read/write MSOffice files without paying Bill then the best filters around should be included in every other app. They also need an army of developers to keep them working ( Ask Mr. Allison how many times SMB has changed and how much of his work is just making SaMBa run with the many versions. )
The only reason Sun is holding SO under the SCSL is so that they can make money licensing it to people and also take it off the market if that suites it's purposes.
It won't work. I know this. Sun doesn't. Life sucks.
The only ways to knock a dominant "standard" product off it's pedestal are to match it byte for byte or to produce a new standard that everybody but the existing leader is using.
That's why the IBM compatible PC whipped the far superior Mac.
That's why USB is far more popular than Firewire.
That's why Windows is the #1 OS in market share.
It's also why Linux will beet both Sun and MS.
The quality of Sun products will only serve to delay it's decline. The SCSL is a boon to all network admins who already depend on Solaris to run the business. Source code that you can patch for performance/bug fixing on a per server basis is better than no source at all. This doesn't compare to what you get with Linux or *BSD but it's a hell of a lot better than Aix or Irix.
/* While I'm sure it's ruined quite a few peoples lives, it no longer poses a significant threat to most of the population. I don't see why geneticaly enginering out genetic diseases would cause problems. */
People with Sickle Cell Anemia are immune to Malaria.
On the surface it seams like a strange coincidence but in fact it's natures way of protecting us. Every now and then a new disease comes along and only some of us are prepared for it.
If it were simply a case where new diseases killed the weak and the stupid then fine. However sometimes it's the "weak" who survive.
Fully 1/3 of europe fell to the black plague. There is now evidence to suggest that the descendants of those who were infected and survived are now immune to aids. ( some people are. just the reason is cloudy. )
I consider it pure arrogance to think we can engineer into all humans immunity to all diseases. Unless we can do just that wide scale genetic engineering would lead to a planet of 3 Billion Shaquel Oneals with 210 IQs. All of whom would die of the next "new" virus to hit, thus leaving the 3 Billion Wendy Fitz-Williamses to clone new boyfriends/Husbands/Sons.:(
The whole idea of _forcing_ teachers to instruct on anything that has not been conclusively proven is in and of itself very disturbing. Neither Creation nor Evolution can claim to be proven and both sides depend on faith in the overall theory to fill in the gaps in the evidence.
You need to teach how life works and what makes up organisms the food chain etc... Extinct creatures are a part of this. Students should be left to conclude for themselves weather T-Rex and Bronto turned into birds, were splattered by an Asteroid or just missed the Ark.
There is evidence and reasoning to support each conclusion. Nobody has conclusive proof.
Evolutionist : "So you think 'god' had a reason to make Mosquitoes and aquatic slugs ?"
Creationist : "You really think these animals exhibited better abilities to survive than all those things that went extinct ?"
Evolutionist : "Look how all the slow and clumsy Dinosaurs died out while the agile and quick mammals survived"
Creationist : "And what exactly dose a Crocodile have over a Raptor that would make the latter extinct ?"
Because everyboy had to rush to the ftp site 1st. All hoping that the lack of a direct link wold delay some of us.
This is how Linux is developed.
on
Managing Geeks
·
· Score: 1
We separate extremely large projects into what we call "Virtual CDs." Think of each project as creating a CD-ROM of software that you can ship. It's an easy concept: Each team has to ship a CD of software in final form to someone else -- perhaps to another team, perhaps to an end user.
This is how all the successful OSS projects are run. Even Linus generally gets chunks of "separate" projects to integrate ( I.e. "SCSI" doesn't really care what "USB" is up to and neither looks at Memory management except as a finished platform to build on.
He just explained how to scale large projects and you had all better listen.
PS : It may be old but some things are worth repeating every time the number of Slashdoters doubles because we all need to read them and 2X the crowd means >50% are new ( some people leave too:)
I wold regulate them and the regulations wold be simple and enforceable.
1 : Don't use any undocumented system calls. If any MS app is found to be talking to the OS in a way not known to other developers they need merely tell the FCC and MS must produce full documentation within a specified time ( 25 days is good ) or release the source code for the app in question.
2 : Volume pricing only. You don't tell them how to price any item ( except for #3 below ) but all prices must be based only on volume. This means that if MS negotiates a deal with some small 10,000 box per year PC OEM for Windows and Office at $50, then $50 becomes the cap for Dell and IBM and they can only negotiate to go down to $40 or whatever.
3 : each item must have it's own price if it ever has it's own price. This means that if OEM A buys Office and Windows while OEM B buys Office, Windows and Encarta then the deference in price must be attributable to the cost of Encarta ( Assuming both OEMs have similar volumes ). Negative prices are not allowed and anyone who goes above the volume of the guy who got it for free is entitled to free licenses too.
While #1 could increase the workload on the technical staff ( More jobs for neards is always good;), 2 and 3 wold reduce the work for MS since it wold be in there interest to draw up price charts and stick to them. All those hundreds of negotiators wold be out of work.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that Penguins live in Antarctica right ?
All a test banning agreement means is that the US will try it's damnedest not to get caught testing "Star Wars" weapons. They will still develop them as best they can and some will be tested even if only in simulation. If they ever have to _use_ such devices it will be in war and probably against another signatory to the deal.
And as some genius once said "All's fair in love and war."
I understand enough about British Government to know your bosses won't be telling you to drop Linux. ( Even if they care ). But what about people from outside ? Has anyone said "Switch to our system and we will ___" or "drop Linux or we will ___". Has someone even asked nicely ?
I used to work at a couple of companies that do white box noname clones. At those shops they have a hard time keeping up with the big name vendors in terms of value for money. I.e. Dell can put MSOffice, Encarta, Gulf and some other stuff on a $1,000. For the little goy that's $600 worth of software before you even build the system.
The way out is to bundle free/low cost crap and whatever comes with the hardware. This is why name brand machine might ship with Macafee Anti virus while Mr. noname gets "Dr.Solomaon" ( He has the same bundling deal ).
This means that A serious number of Noname PCs from small time vendors are shipping to users with Corel Linux installed and running.
To make matters worse, I am willing to bet that all parts of said board will make it onto the "A" list by the time these ship. For those who don't know it means that the VIA.GRA ( real name honest) boards will come with "LinModems" and that Corel Linux will detect and configure the sound and video automatically and push your monitor to it's limit.
In short; "This is a good thing" (TM). Even if 90% of them will be dual boot. It will be dual booting with a minimal Windows that only has Corel Office 8.
I'm Agent Manhine and my Supervisor ( Agent Black ) Was able to confirm that this is indead ligit.
That 1 year jail term is realy a cover so we can recrute the best of those contacteas and "reeducate" the rest.
Do a search for Tom Adelstein on Linux Today and you will find his 9 or 10 part series on consultative selling. Basically he goes into the gory details of how to make money peddling Linux.
Things like how to do meetings with potential customers and how you should find out what they need before you even think about what to provide. Basic stuff that very few of us really know.
They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else" :).
They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.
They run FreeBSD and will happily tell you they couldn't maintain the current performance while switching to anything else without dubbleing the Hardware cost. ( Linux and Open BSD don't count as "something else"
They had 3 T3s at one stage but are at something like 200MBPs now. The server is practically on the Internet Backbone and the ISP doesn't actually charge them for the bandwidth it sucks. ( Somebody estimated $750.000 per year.
Just supporting Linux means responding to the hippie in a "sensible" way, Supporting Linux, FreeBSD and your own Unix flavors in this way means giving the customers choice. It's the equivalent of saying "I don't care what OS or software you run as long as you do so on OUR hardware".
3 chars to Compaq for finally catching the internet wave and realizing that FreeBSD is probably the #3 or #4 OS platform on the net, and taking steps to prove that it runs on Compaq machines.
Silicon valley is in the same state as Hollywood. This is why Stallone is a bigger star than Harison Ford. It's also why Miguel wasn't dragged kicking and screaming into a high paying job a year or more ago.
The only people who wouldn't want this kid are those who have committed to KDE all the way or no GUI at all. That means Caldera and E-Smith.
PS : Harison Ford films have made more money at the box office than those with any other actor.
I live in a country with a huge and obvious gap between rich and pore ( Jamaica ). The evidence I see around me is that the more money you have the fewer kids you have. I.e. My parents are a Carpenter and a low level civil servant. I have 6 older siblings. Now we are all grown up and doing much better than our parents did financially ( They are retired now living more comfortably than when they had "jobs" ).
Of course with all those siblings I have only 6 Nephews/nieces ( included one adopted ) and no children of my own ( I'm 25 ). That means 1 child per couple. Meanwhile the people I see having large numbers of children now are even worse off than my mom ever was. I.e. Single mothers working part time for minimum wage. My customers ( I do a lot of support for home users ) almost never have more than 2 children.
Now that I have established the existence of the divide, where dose it come from ?
Well Rich people also tend to acquire more formal education ( anything beyond high school is enough ). At that level your biology classes tell how well a woman's body recovers from childbirth. You hang with people who simply don't have the time to deal with child care and as a result use contraceptives.
You also learn from people who will tell you that Condoms and Pills are smart. Rather than "I nahh throw out my seed ina plastic bag". Finally there is the financial aspect. Having lots of money up front saves you more in the long run. Ask any girl who is now a mother because she couldn't find the cash to demand the quarterly injection.
The OS architects have said for a long time that moving an OS from 16 -> 32 -> 64 bits is significantly more difficult than moving it between 2 CPUs at the same bandwidth. In other words porting Solaris from Spark to IA64 should be fairly simple and this announcement pretty much proves that.
Linux ( how could I leave it out ? ) has been tested on IA64 and that too was not surprising since Linux has run as a 64 bit CPU on Spark and Alpha machines for some time.
PS : Yes you read correctly. The Linux port started from the Alpha branch of the Kernel source rather than the i386 branch.
There are 3 known ways to write an OS.
1 : Do it all yourself.
2 : Make it OSS and get a few thousand people to help out.
3 : Form a company and pay top dollar to some 1st rate programers.
Linus wasn't a rich man ( and won't be until Transmeta goes public ) so he couldn't have bought talent.
Linus has claimed about %5 of the Kernel as his own coding and the rest is just packing in other people's code. He couldn't have done it all by himself.
Therefore OSS was his only option and frankly if Linux had a BSD/X11 stile license it wouldn't have caught up to freeBSD in the area of contributing developers. Back when Linux was the new OS on the block ( 1992-3 ) it had no technical advantages over BSD at all. Only the GPL ( which was adopted in under a year of development to replace the draconian "Share this source and make no money" license Linus had used at 1st.
Even now the technical advantages over FreeBSD are relatively minor and come with tradeoffs. I.e. More drivers for lower network performance.
All Capone ran his empire from prison for some years. If Copeland was sent to prison ( worst case scenario ) then he could do the same. As things stand right now that is the best bet for keeping the company afloat.
They didn't always release specs.
However that seams to be changing so lets embrace and extend in our own way. I.e. Embrace some really cool video cards and extend ATI's bottom line. This is a "good thing" (TM).
Don't bother to say how ATI is just doing this to keep from loosing market share to some other card maker. They are but it doesn't matter.
"Good thing" is a trade mark of RMS -: All rights reserved.
It's closed. It's endorsed by MS ( Indirectly ) and it will probably work properly since the easiest way to emulate a monster like Win32 is to look at the source.
SoftPC for the mack was also built by an NT source code licensee.
Look at some of the portraials of someone amasing a fortune in these movies.
There is absolutly nothing in the "action" efects or odd camera angles that wold look familer to what the wealthy people around experinced.
They do it because it's how you "dramatize" or show something that's longand tedius in a much shorter timespan while letting eaven those movie goers with little/no knowlage of that area understand what goes on.
More disturbing is when they have computers and hackers perform the imposible. I.e. Indipendence day when they uploaded a Virus to the Alien ship that disabled it's shilds. Just as how a Mac or Linux Virus ( They exist. just not very eficent ) will have little efect on a Windows machine. When did these people get a chance to figure out what OS/Software the Alien ship was running ?
Sun's stated goal is to challenge MSOffice on the desktop now and to remove Windows latter. ( Star Portal ). However with the cards stacked as they are ( MSOffice on the vast majority of desktops and most users thinking *.doc is a standard file format ) no single Office suite can ever hope to put a serious dent in that position.
They way to make an impact is to put the Import/Export filters under a BSD stile license and hope that a community grows around them. In other words reduce *.doc and *.xls to mear commodities ( Like *.html and *.txt ).
Too bad they are as big on control as MS is and as such can never gain the foothold MS has now. Think back to 198x. Do you think IBM could have pushed it's PCs all over Commodore, Apple and everybody else without help from Compaq and the rest of cloners ?
If Sun simply wanted to sell big servers to run Star Portal on while reducing any proprietary advantage MSOffice has then it would have put at least the filters of Star Office under a BSD license.
Yes I love the GPL as much as the rest of you but if the point is to have everyone able to read/write MSOffice files without paying Bill then the best filters around should be included in every other app. They also need an army of developers to keep them working ( Ask Mr. Allison how many times SMB has changed and how much of his work is just making SaMBa run with the
many versions. )
The only reason Sun is holding SO under the SCSL is so that they can make money licensing it to people and also take it off the market if that suites it's purposes.
It won't work. I know this. Sun doesn't. Life sucks.
The only ways to knock a dominant "standard" product off it's pedestal are to match it byte for byte or to produce a new standard that everybody but the existing leader is using.
That's why the IBM compatible PC whipped the far superior Mac.
That's why USB is far more popular than Firewire.
That's why Windows is the #1 OS in market share.
It's also why Linux will beet both Sun and MS.
The quality of Sun products will only serve to delay it's decline. The SCSL is a boon to all network admins who already depend on Solaris to run the business. Source code that you can patch for performance/bug fixing on a per server basis is better than no source at all. This doesn't compare to what you get with Linux or *BSD but it's a hell of a lot better than Aix or Irix.
/* While I'm sure it's ruined quite a few peoples lives, it no longer poses a significant threat to most of the population. I don't see why geneticaly enginering out genetic diseases would cause problems.
:(
*/
People with Sickle Cell Anemia are immune to Malaria.
On the surface it seams like a strange coincidence but in fact it's natures way of protecting us. Every now and then a new disease comes along and only some of us are prepared for it.
If it were simply a case where new diseases killed the weak and the stupid then fine. However sometimes it's the "weak" who survive.
Fully 1/3 of europe fell to the black plague. There is now evidence to suggest that the descendants of those who were infected and survived are now immune to aids. ( some people are. just the reason is cloudy. )
I consider it pure arrogance to think we can engineer into all humans immunity to all diseases. Unless we can do just that wide scale genetic engineering would lead to a planet of 3 Billion Shaquel Oneals with 210 IQs. All of whom would die of the next "new" virus to hit, thus leaving the 3 Billion Wendy Fitz-Williamses to clone new boyfriends/Husbands/Sons.
The whole idea of _forcing_ teachers to instruct on anything that has not been conclusively proven is in and of itself very disturbing. Neither Creation nor Evolution can claim to be proven and both sides depend on faith in the overall theory to fill in the gaps in the evidence.
You need to teach how life works and what makes up organisms the food chain etc... Extinct creatures are a part of this. Students should be left to conclude for themselves weather T-Rex and Bronto turned into birds, were splattered by an Asteroid or just missed the Ark.
There is evidence and reasoning to support each conclusion. Nobody has conclusive proof.
Evolutionist : "So you think 'god' had a reason to make Mosquitoes and aquatic slugs ?"
Creationist : "You really think these animals exhibited better abilities to survive than all those things that went extinct ?"
Evolutionist : "Look how all the slow and clumsy Dinosaurs died out while the agile and quick mammals survived"
Creationist : "And what exactly dose a Crocodile have over a Raptor that would make the latter extinct ?"
Because everyboy had to rush to the ftp
site 1st. All hoping that the lack of a
direct link wold delay some of us.
This is how all the successful OSS projects are run. Even Linus generally gets chunks of "separate" projects to integrate ( I.e. "SCSI" doesn't really care what "USB" is up to and neither looks at Memory management except as a finished platform to build on.
He just explained how to scale large projects and you had all better listen.
PS : It may be old but some things are worth repeating every time the number of Slashdoters doubles because we all need to read them and 2X the crowd means >50% are new ( some people leave too :)
I wold regulate them and the regulations wold be simple and enforceable.
;), 2 and 3 wold reduce the work for MS
1 : Don't use any undocumented system calls. If any MS app is found
to be talking to the OS in a way not known to other developers they
need merely tell the FCC and MS must produce full documentation within
a specified time ( 25 days is good ) or release the source code for
the app in question.
2 : Volume pricing only. You don't tell them how to price any item
( except for #3 below ) but all prices must be based only on volume.
This means that if MS negotiates a deal with some small 10,000 box
per year PC OEM for Windows and Office at $50, then $50 becomes the
cap for Dell and IBM and they can only negotiate to go down to $40
or whatever.
3 : each item must have it's own price if it ever has it's own price.
This means that if OEM A buys Office and Windows while OEM B buys
Office, Windows and Encarta then the deference in price must be
attributable to the cost of Encarta ( Assuming both OEMs have similar
volumes ). Negative prices are not allowed and anyone who goes above
the volume of the guy who got it for free is entitled to free licenses
too.
While #1 could increase the workload on the technical staff ( More jobs
for neards is always good
since it wold be in there interest to draw up price charts and stick
to them. All those hundreds of negotiators wold be out of work.
I don't know how or why this bug came up but if you run Netscape from a Simlink the spell checker dosn't work.
You shuld be able to figure out how to make it start from the actual executeble or a script that points where the simlink did.