(snicker)OK, troll. Calm down. 'findings of law'? where did you get that term? The fact is that the appeals court upheld Jackson's finding of 'facts', and just sent the sentencing back to the lower court for reconsideration. Try to get out and read a newpaper occasionally, dipshit.
From Jackson himself, his opinions were titled 'Findings of Fact' and 'Findings of Law'. It is curious that you choose to go to newspapers (the National Enquirer apparently) for your information. I read the court briefs.
The appeals court found that Jackson's conduct required the whole sentencing part of the case to be thrown out because of apparent and real bias. The Appeals court also noted that Jackson appeared to be attempting to put issues beyond review by the appelate court by labeling opinions as 'Findings of Fact'.
While Sun might attempt to use the appelate decision in their case it is unlikely to be very useful because most of it is trashing Jackson. The only fact that comes out of the appeals decision that would help Sun is the statement that Microsoft is a monopoly which Sun's lawyers probably would not anticipate much difficulty with. I don't recall any off the other findings by the appeals court being relevant to Sun.
The settlement between the DoJ and Microsoft explicitly states that other parties may not use the findings as binding evidence in other cases. The findings are in any case subject to further appeal as the case of the nine remaining states continues. In theory Microsoft could still take the case to the Supreme court and argue against the somewhat peculiar appeals court decision that Jackson was impartial up to the end of the evidence phase and biased in the penalty phase. The attempt to appeal was denied on the narrow grounds that the process in the lower courts was continuing.
Given the mauling that the apeals court gave to Jackson and his 'finding of fact' I don't think that they are likely to play a major role in the Sun case. I doubt that the new court is going to decide that there is no need for an evidentiary hearing as a result of the Jackson opinions. If Sun attempts to introduce the Jackson opinion as evidence, Microsoft will introduce the Appeals court finding that Jackson was guilty of willfull misconduct.
Netscape/AOL will probably find the Appeals court decision rather more useful because the issue of the browser tie was specifically examined. I doubt that Sun will find much of usef because of Jackson's misconduct and the fact that Jackson did not hear very much evidence that related to Java.
The reason that Microsoft got off is first Jackson is a fool and second the DoJ fought the wrong case. The browser case was very weak, Netscape themselves used zero pricing to kill Spyglass. There were much better issues to beat Microsoft up over, in particular the restrictive OEM contracts the appeals court appear to have mainly considered.
Re:I overreact as much as the next guy...
on
Netscape 6 is Spyware?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The commment about the ip address was misleading as well. Any time that information is sent to my computer, I can log the IP address. It doesn't mean that I am going to be doing anything with it.
Netscape should know that logging of IP addresses has severe privacy issues, they were a major source of controversy in the early days of the Web.
This could easily be abused for corporate espionage. It is very easy to correlate addresses with companies - particularly if they have a NAT box and reverse DNS.
This is also introducing a single point of interception for law enforcement, including in police states. People in China trying to access Google to find out about "Tiannamen Square Massacre" could be redirected to the communist party search engine by simply redirecting a single DNS record.
Really once aol took over is this any real surprise?
I hope so because that is what any privacy suit would turn on. Does the user expect AOL to intercept searches and log the results?
The Windows XP 'powertool' has a very useful feature that allows you to enter a shortcut for a search engine. So if I type 'g privacy' it sends off a search to Google for 'privacy'.
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft. As it is I suspect the response will be a bit like the response in Congress to administration stonewalling or the like. Outrage at the actions if it is the other party, appologism if it is their own party, or even outrage that people would even complain.
Netscape has never been pro-privacy. They invented cookies so that advertisers could track readers and now they are tracking them directly themselves.
Could they stop MS shipping C# on the grounds that it is a java rip off, and it is bundled with windows , and only run on windows (as of yet).
Then could AT&T stop Sun shipping Java because it is a C/C++ ripoff, or along the chain to BCPL, CPL, Algol 68, Algol 60?
My complaint about Sun and Java from the start has been that they have been entirely closed about the design and development of Java. Now it appears that they are trying to argue that Java somehow gives them a monopoly on the future development of all Algol like programming languages. That might be news to Tony Hoare who now works for Microsoft and was one of the main inventors of the original Algol.
Java is simply not that novel to allow such a claim. Most of the changes in Java simply fixed longstanding errors in the design of C that had been documented decades before. The main innovation in Java was to partially fix the broken inheritance scheme of C++.
Unfortunately Gosling and co did not go further and take advantage of any of the advances in CS that occurred since the mid 80s. No functional types, no concurrency model and no formal model.
C# is not.NET, it is only one of the programing languages supported by the.NET framework. In fact there are some 20 odd languages supported including languages like Perl and Rexx which were not even designed for compilation. Microsoft is also encouraging universities etc. who are designing languages to use the.NET framework. so people who are designing the next Eifel or Python don't need to spend their time writing code libraries, they can share the existing code. You get a development environment, debugger and the compiler back end for free.
As another sign of desperation, Sun recently announced that it, too, will sell Intel-based servers running Linux. To understand the level of desperation, we note that Sun has been touting itself as the SPARC-only shop for the last 15 years. Sun claimed that it would never resort to selling Intel-based servers.
Which is the real joke here. Sun is crashing because of the competition from Linux, Microsoft is practically irrelevant to its market.
Sun grew fat during the Internet dotcom craze because there were lots of VCs out there throwing obscene amounts of money arround. The VCs would typically demand that their companies applied the latest, sexiest technologies - regardless of whether there was a point. Some friends of mine had to recode their system from Lisp to Java just to please their VC.
A lot of the startups were buying high end Sun gear because it pleased the VCs for whom Sun meant Java, meant 'sexy', meant a red hot IPO.
Today their are two factors that are causing trade to shift from Solaris to Linux. First Linux is now sexier than Java. If your VC demands buzword compliance then Linux is fine. Second companies no longer have unlimited amounts to spend on unnecessary hardware. A company like Google that uses low cost Linux/Intel boxes is thought of much better than one that blows money on Sun gear that costs much more.
Propietary UNIX is doomed. But Microsoft is not the reason, Linux is.
The only proprietary UNIX vendor I would put much faith in long term is Apple. They do have a major base of desktop software and they are the only folk in UNIXland who appear to understand what a user interface is. But even Apple may well end up having to jetison the quasi-proprietary kernel and moving to an open source core some day.
Sun's problems are not going to be solved even if they do force Microsoft to distribute Java. At this point.NET is rapidly becoming the hot issue for enterprise customers. While.NET has lots of hype features, the core advantage of.NET is it provides the means by which the WinTel market can transition from 32 bit x86 architecture to 64 bit Itanium.
A company can transition to using the.NET CLI with a simple re-compilation. The Java VM requires them to rewrite their application, it is a non-starter as an Itanium migration strategy.
Not true. Netscape started shipping non-standard extensions to HTML and HTTP in their very first browser. Netscape did not 'retaliate', it instigated the non-standard extensions fight before Microsoft shipped their first browser.
Netscape set out from the start to become the standards setter for the Web. The current W3C rules about submitting standards were written expressly to curtail Netscape's practice of launching a product and announcing that the new proprietary extensions they included would be proposed to the W3C for 'standardization'.
Microsoft soon realised that they did not need to play the same game. They could get what they wanted by simply bothering to show up at W3C meetings (which Netscape often failed to do).
Preliminary injunctions prior to trial requiring Microsoft to:
Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer.
Stop the unlicensed distribution of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine through separate web downloads, instead of incorporating within Windows XP and Internet Explorer, in accordance with Jan. 23, 2000 settlement agreement.
In other words seeks to undo in this Microsoft suit what it 'won' in its other Microsoft suit.
Last I heard there was no law that said that Sun could decide what Microsoft distributes with their O/S.
Essentially what Sun are demanding that the court do is to tie the distribution of Windows XP to a proprietary Sun product. Sun has consistently refused to allow other companies to extend Java in any way that Sun does not sanction. Meanwhile Sun are demanding that Microsoft be prevented from distributing their.NET CLI which competes against JVM.
Jackson's rulling is not going to be as much use to sun in the suit as many here think. Sun can bring it up at the trial, great, but Microsoft can also bring up the fact that Jackson was dismissed from the case and his 'findings of law' thrown out by the appeals court for gross procedural violations, apparent and actual bias. They can also quote from the Appeals court judges statement that the fact that Jackson describes something as a finding of fact does not make it a finding of fact.
All told I don't think that any sensible lawyer for the Plaintif would want to rely very heavily on the Jackson opinions. They are unlikely to have much weight with the judge and would be very likely to backfire in front of a jury. The appeals court rulings are much narrower.
Well, I'm definitally not a Stalinist, but I would argue that socialism under Stalin was largely effective, if not steadily antilibertarian. However, the class shall note that Stalin did to a number of things to further democratize the Soviet Union, such as ammend the constitution to have elections by anonymous ballot.
You are deluded. Stalin wrote a really great constitution, he also had practically all the members of the Supreme Soviet that enacted it murdered. Stalin's 'secret ballots' consisted of an option to go behind a curtain to mark your ballot rather than just place it in the box and have it count automatically for the party candidate. In Stalin's time most of the people who went behind the curtain were murdered.
Stalin's state had little to do with any political creed other than opportunism and the persuit of power. There is even evidence that Stalin originally joined the communist party as a Tsarist mole.
As for Stalin's effect on the economy, it can only be considered positive compared to the stagnation under the Tsars. Most of the progress took place under Lenin in any case, Stalin was too busy massacring Kulacks by the million and issuing edicts that twenty plants be built when there was material for three with the result that none were completed.
The only positive effect the communists had was they diverted the massive flows of capital that the Tsars had squandered on themselves and poured it into industrial developments, but that did not require a police state.
However, that said, it is quite hilarious that the response of US side folk to the thought that China might surpass them scientifically is to dredge up cold war rhetoric. China has not been a Stalinist state since Mao died and the gang of four were liquidated. Today it is merely an under-developed kleptocracy. If China was not a rival to US power and did not call itself communist the GOP hawks would have no trouble at all supporting them no matter how many people the regime kills.
If you have a billion people and a part way modernised economy you canout perform a country of a quarter your size in a few selected areas of science. There is little reason to believe that the Chinese version of communism will be any more long lasting than the Soviet one. The only difference is that in China the impetus for change is comming from economic success rather than stagnation. Nobody believes in Chinese communism, the issue for Chinas leaders is not whether they adopt a democracy but how they get from where they are to where they want to be.
If China succeeds in a peaceful democratic transition they will inevitably outstrip US power in the same way and for the same reason that the US suceeded the UK, population size.
China is planning to become a biotech super-power. That is not the immediate threat to the US however since it is unlikely many US scientists would move to China. Many will move and are moving to the UK and Canada however.
I'm one of the few conservatives here, yet I hate none of these groups
Read the sentence carefully, I said that those waging the cultural war were conservative. That does not mean that all those who are conservative wage cultural wars.
I just can't believe that someone would compare the hatred of Jews or Blacks to the hatred of video games!
The common thread being fear of anything they don't understand.
This is a country with 8,000 Internet users, 110 hosts, 82 domain names, 4 ISPs and a 2,048bps connection to the outside world. They don't have much going on
The UN does not find it necessary to spend as much time globe trotting, in fact they do most of their work out of their NYC and Geneva hubs.
Most people in the third world would probably prefer to have meetings at places that are near to first tier air connections. Cairo is much more accessible than Ghana if you are going to have a meeting in Africa.
It doesn't have to be ICANN, they could give out the contract to run the TLD to a couple different registrars who would actually do the policing.
The mind boggles.
It appears that you would have the.xxx registrars carefully check the sites in their domain to make sure that they all had sufficiently pornographic content. While I could see that VeriSign could probably find a willing army of applicants eager to perform that task at minimum wage I cannot see what purpose would be served that could not be served by a quality control association such as the Germans set up in response to complaints of insufficiently hard core porn.
What I suspect you mean is that companies in the dotcom domain should be scanned to see if they have porno content up. That is a considerably harder prospect and you would not find registrars willing to do it without a substantial increase in the registration fee.
Maybe we could simply move all the porn sites presently in.com into.xxx space. Something like that will have to happen if.com is going to return to any semblance of organization.
Why on earth does there have to be any semblance of organization in dotcom? There is no technical reason for having the namespace partitioned at the toplevel. The DNS could be run perfectly well if registrations were offered into the root directly. It would require considerably more resources than it does at present but it is certainly feasible from an operational point of view. There would still be hierarchy but that would happen below the name you registered. So slashdot could use www.slashdot as their web address if they chose, or they could use just slashdot and a NAPTR record.
Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.
There are actually two distinct overlapping issues here. The first is do the pornographers want a.xxx domain, hell yes they do! It is a great advertising mechanism.
The other issue is, will pornographers allow themselves to be confined to.xxx? Here the answer is absolutely not. They are not going to agree to any mechanism that supports censorship as long as there are politicians out there trying to outlaw their business entirely.
Ponography is on balance a force for good. Look at what western society was like when the censoship gang were in charge, women had no rights over their bodies, not even the right to use contraception. As Simmone de Beuvoir pointed out, conservatives put women on a pedestal to control her, not to worship her.
If we are going to effect change in the brutal regimes of the muslim world pornography is the best tool we have. The dictators of Saudi Arabia are rightly fearful of the effect of sack loads of Western porn comming through the Internet.
I found it somewhat interesting that when the California 'American Taleban' is being discussed the right leap to the conclusion that his liberal upbringing must be at fault.
But when a good ol' southern boy flies into an office block with a Cesna attempting to duplicate 9/11 the problem cannot be his conservative upbringing, its his acne medication that is to blame.
When Timothy McVeigh murdered 350+ in the Oaklahoma bombing it was clear that Reno and Clinton were to blame.
Fact is that very often there is nobody to blame. Mental illness happens. People who have personality disorders can appear completely normal outside the locus of their disorder.
What the conservatives will never allow to be blamed for Columbine or anything is the gun ownership they and the NRA do all in their power to protect. This even extends to protecting the gun registration information of Al Qaeda suspects. The people who made the guns used by the Columbine killers had a far more direct connection to the killing than the Video game manufacturers, but they can't be to blame because they are on 'our side'.
The videogame suit is really just another episode of the cultural war that conservatives have been waging since the 70s. They hate homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, Blacks, equal treatment of women and especially the permissive society. They want to wage a war against it but they have been so utterly defeated that they can only voice their true views in private (has anyone asked Kisinger what he thinks of the Nixon/Billy Graham anti semitism tape?) or in coded references to 'states rights', 'unfair treatment' or the old favorite 'liberal media'
Oh yes and watch out because round two will be the geeks.
Given that the upshot of the SSSCA is the outlawing of Free operating systems, why isn't there someone from RedHat testifying at these hearings? Why isn't there someone from the Debian project there explaining that this bill is asking for nothing less than outlawing general purpose computers?
Appearances at hearings are dependent on campaign contributions. To appear at that type of hearing you would have to donate approx $50K to the members of the committee.
And no, I am not being sarcastic, I am not making it up, that is the way your Congress people behave. If you don't like it write them a letter asking them why Red Hat etc. were not invited and ask directly if campaign contributions are the reason.
The response you receive will of course make an outright denial. However the probability that Red Hat and the Linux crowd will be allowed into the hearings will increase substantially. With Cheney in hot water for selling access to Enron and his oil company friends the hint that you might fight them on the contributions front would be very frightening.
As they say in Washington, money only buys you acces, it does not buy legislation. Well the crooks who charge for access should be considered no less a crook than the ones who sell legislation.
So next time there is a hearing, go down to Washington with a nice bunch of signs saying something like 'We don't like the SSSCA, but Hollings won't hear from us because we won't pay'. Then go to his office and leave them with his staff.
Whatever you do, don't listen to the fools who tell you to play the DC game, they will walk all over you if they think you will be quiet.
Chances are that this will turn out to be a dud. However the real tragedy of the F&P affair is that it poisoned the field for other researchers who were working in good faith and did not consider the NYT a suitable place for the first publication of their results.
Plenty of science papers turn out to be junk. It is a good thing if Science makes the effort to actually acknowledge that small scale fusion does not have to be equated with junk science.
After all the response to Harrison's chronometers by Newton and co was pretty negative. They could not imagine that any timepiece smaller than the solar system could be accurate. Today I have a mechanical contraption on my wrist that is more accurate than most quartz watches and certainly gives a better longitude fix than any observer of the moons of jupiter.
However, it was impossible to use the address space of the 286 because it required the chip to go into protected mode, and MS-DOS made assumptions that made this impossible. While DOS 1.0 certainly couldn't have predicted this, MS had early access to the 286 specs, but they never made the appropriate changes.
According to the Delamater history of IBM's anti-trust years Microsoft thought the 286 to be to broken to build an O/S that supported protected memory. IBM insisted that they had to ship OS/2 to support the IBM PC AT as they had promised it would support the new O/S.
This was the main issue that led to IBM and Microsoft parting ways, IBM insisted on supporting the 286, Microsoft wanted to skip it and move straight to the 386.
Pfff.. MY first computer [kdef.com] (~20 years ago) had only 5k of RAM, 176x184 resolution (22 columns), and a cassette tape drive.. and to get it I had to walk 10 miles, uphill both ways. It did have 16 colors though, so you've got me there.
My first computer I owned had 1Kb of memory which was shared between the video display and the program memory. The processor was a Z80. I assembled it with a soldering iron and it still runs today [ZX81].
Thats nothing, my first computer had 256 bytes of memory and was programed using a hex pad and displayed results on a one line LED display. [Kim1]
You were lucky, we had to refine sand to make our own silicon for the circuits and had to load the bootstrap program by wiring up magnetic beads ont' ferrite core memory - and you tell the kids of today that and they don't believe you
Does anyone really believe that he had input on the hardware design of the IBM PC? That's what he's suggesting. I was under the impression that the architecture was already set by the time Microsoft was called. Would IBM really ask DR and MS for an OS for a machine that wasn't even specced out yet?
Read the email, Bill says that he had more input into the design of the Sirius than the PC. It is pretty obvious that Chuck Peddle would consult Bill over the design of the Sirius at an early stage as Microsoft Basic was the killer app of the PC world.
From all accounts the IBM PC was essentially designed and manufactured in just over a year. Microsoft was brought in at least a year before the launch because writing the code would take time, so yes Microsoft was in a position to make comments about the PC design at an early stage. As Bill himself states, they were not listened to.
It is also pretty obvious that someone in Bill's position would be pushing for the 68K since everyone arround at the time knew that the 68K was the better chip. IBM actually went for the Intel chip because they could reuse work from a previous failed wordprocessor project.
Those of us who had used PDP and VAX knew that a 32 bit address space was the most desirable improvement in going to the 16 bit processors. Even if you did not anticipate being able to have that much RAM any time soon VAX had demonstrated that virtual memory could work.
The SSSCA requires every digital device to have copy protection measures in it, referred to as Digital Rights Management. Guess who now holds a patent on a Digital Rights Management Operating System? Microsoft.
That is actually the least problematic of the patents. There are hundreds of DRM patents. Intertrust has one (of many) that is over 100 pages long with a thousand odd claims. I doubt anyone has ever read all the claims, certainly I find it hard to believe the examiner would have.
The real problem is that there is no way for the SSSCA requirements to be met without trusted hardware that will only load a trusted O/S. Trusted in this context means 'RIAA approved'. There is no way that Linux could meet that criteria.
I am much less bothered about the SSSCA than most. We in the computer industry can buy more politicians than the RIAA and MPAA put together. The only reason why Hollings is holding hearing is massive campaign contribribetions.
Furthermore folk should be raising issues about the stupider aspects of the Bill. The computing industry is given 12 months to deploy a technology that does not exist and whose sole purpose is to protect profits. The car industry was allowed decades to deploy safety features such as seat belts and air bags that were designed to save lives. The auto industry execs should probably ask themselves if they want a 12 month precedent to be set.
Even if passed the SSSCA would likely have no effect since there is not prospect of the 12 month schedule being set so the decision would fall to the dept of commerce which would then be besiged with lawsuits and various patent holders trying to peddle their snake oil. They certainly won't come to a decision in 2003, 2004 is an election year.
Given that the RIAA and MPAA people were doing their best in 2000 to get Gore elected and are almost certain to be doing their best in 2005 to make sure their is an administration change in 2005 it is most unlikely that govenor Bush will be signing anything into law to favor their interests (unless they come up with a couple of million in hard money contribribetions).
What he's implying is that he thinks that its silly that there should be an alternative to passport (ie, he thinks anyone doing what passport is doing should join efforts with MS.)
Actually the story provides so little information it is not really possible to interpret what he said.
What he is most likely to have said is that Sun could have asked about federating with Passport before they introduced an alternative technical specification. There is general agreement in the IT industry that duplicating standards is a bad thing.
What Sun would retort is that Microsoft only talked about federation after they launched Liberty. Which Microsoft would dispute, although the fact is that they realy gave no details about what they are up to until very recently.
There are also a bunch of problematic aspect of the Passport specification Kerberos style symmetric key authentication is a poor match to the federated authentication problem Passport addresses. Public key based approaches offer much more direct solutions with a much greater degree of robustness.
What Microsoft are right on is that a company should have a better reason for developing a product like Liberty than just stopping a competitor launch. After all Microsoft developed Passport for the purpose of opening up the AOL instant messenger monopoly. Sun and Microsoft both have the same objective, preventing any one party having a monopoly control.
I don't think the First Amendment voids the libel provisions of English common law.
That is true but only because historically the colonies had already held the English libel laws to be void before the revolution. They have always been rejected as a part of colonial and US jurisprudence.
The problem with the English Libel laws is not in the laws themselves but the rules of evidence that surround them. Essentially these are grossly biased towards the plaintif. Although truth is a defense in English libel law, introducing evidence for a defense of justification is very hard.
In the Xybernaught case the most likely outcome is going to be that the defendant goes to court to get the judgement set aside. If the facts are as claimed it should be a walkover. At that point there is zero point in Xybernaught persuing the suit since it is likely to cost them at least a million bucks to contest.
Regardless, I don't do business with folk who behave like that, and I don;t think many others in their target customer base will either.
The address I got this E-mail on is NOT shown on the site and is ONLY listed on the whois, I've managed to keep this account spam free for over a year till now.
Under ICANN rules all registrars are obliged to make their customer names available to SPAMers. This provision was insisted upon by the new registrars who wanted to be able to SPAM Network Solutions customers with offers to switch.
Off course once they had their own customer databases a lot of the registrars have decided to take their customer databases offline. As a result it is quite likely that the mandatory listing rule will get dropped.
Some of the slimier SPAMers make the start of their mail appear to be a Network Solutions renewal notice.
Meanwhile lots of privacy minded folk have registered their domain names under false names and addresses which is fine, until they wonder why they have difficulty renewing.
... and the story said around goes like this: "@Home had some problems with their network and AT&T offered help. Since AT&T had lots of interest (investments) in the company, they accepted the offer. 12 AT&T technicians went to @Home and mapped the whole network and made a complete analyse of it and plans for themselves to find out the problem
Sounds like the rumour that some of the bondholders are desperately trying to spread.
I really have no sympathy for the bond holders. AT&T offered a fair price for the network, there were no other bids. The bond holders went to court to force the reciever to reject the AT&T offer in the hope they could force AT&T to pay more. AT&T walked away and built their own.
The idea that AT&T don't know how to build an IP network, or don't even know who to hire to build one is just wierd. AT&T owns the fibre over which most IP gets sent in the US. They always had the ability to walk away. The bondholders were just too greedy to realise it.
Equally much of the @Home network would have be co-loced at the cable TV service heads. The idea that AT&T would need to engage in espionage is plain silly. It would be their own facilities.
IP was designed to allow the military to lash networks together quickly and cheaply while under fire. If you have unlimited bandwidth a company like AT&T should be able to deploy with a couple of months planning and a large cheque book.
As for why @Home went down, any capital intensive company that buys another loss making capital intensive company is destined for bankrupcy.
Is buying a different 20$ sound card such a big problem?
Since ESR's premise is that the cost of XP at approx $35 will kill the deal we have to assume that $20 is a big deal.
Cheap parts can easily be replaced by other cheap parts. There are drivers too.
Checking a hardware compatibility database at your vendor's site, is that such a big thing?
Hah! do you think that cheapie machines have vendor web sites?
Good luck trying to work out which obscure variant of the S3 command set the embedded video chip implements. If it is an S3 that is, it might be something else entirely.
It would be easier to find Lord Lucan than documentation on many of these machines. So write your own is not likely to be a cost effective approach.
Having had bought cheapie PCs for the sole purpose of running linux I would recommend anyone wanting a linux box to pay a bit more for a custom build and select decent parts from vendors who actually support Linux. Not only will it save grief, you are more likely to have the machine last more than 18 months.
While ESR seems to be very zealous and into the (GNU)/Linux scene, he's it's worst enemy. While Microsoft may spread FUD, people look at this guy and "wtf is this idiot doing? what's he talking about?" if i didn't know better, i'd avoid linux for the sole reason i wouldn't want to be associated with that nut.
Interestingly enough the thread does not have any pro-ESR comments at this point. I think it is pretty obvious that the Linux community can interpret nuts as damage and route arround them.
In the early days of Linux the single biggest advantage Linux had was Linus who is a pretty reasonable guy.
ESR appears to be way over the edge on this one. First off he does not appear to know that OEMs already get Windows at deep discounts over the retail price. Microsoft does not have to provide packaging, retail discount, activation or first level support for those customers so the cost is probably more like $35 for XP Home.
ESR also appears to overlook that Microsoft has aggressively sold its own sub $350 PC, it is called an XBox and they sell them at Toys-R-Us. Equally Microsoft has not let price bar it from the Pocket PC market.
The other reason that ESR is wrong is that the lowest price PCs are typically sold as starter PCs for first time buyers. This is a market that requires the ability to run genuine Microsoft Word. Tomb Raider and AOL. Linux users buying this type of machine are typically buying a second, third or fourth machine to use as a cheap server.
Finally, anyone who has tried to get Linux up on a cheapie PC will know that it is far from simple. The parts used by cheapie PCs are often sourced from obscure vendors and finding a Linux driver often means writing your own. The people who make such machines are typically doing so on a shoestring and cannot afford the cost of development or the delay incurred. In many cases the whole profit on the low cost PC is made by buying parts on 90 days credit, making the machine in 15 days, charging the wholesalers on delivery and making the profit on 75 days worth of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
From Jackson himself, his opinions were titled 'Findings of Fact' and 'Findings of Law'. It is curious that you choose to go to newspapers (the National Enquirer apparently) for your information. I read the court briefs.
The appeals court found that Jackson's conduct required the whole sentencing part of the case to be thrown out because of apparent and real bias. The Appeals court also noted that Jackson appeared to be attempting to put issues beyond review by the appelate court by labeling opinions as 'Findings of Fact'.
While Sun might attempt to use the appelate decision in their case it is unlikely to be very useful because most of it is trashing Jackson. The only fact that comes out of the appeals decision that would help Sun is the statement that Microsoft is a monopoly which Sun's lawyers probably would not anticipate much difficulty with. I don't recall any off the other findings by the appeals court being relevant to Sun.
The settlement between the DoJ and Microsoft explicitly states that other parties may not use the findings as binding evidence in other cases. The findings are in any case subject to further appeal as the case of the nine remaining states continues. In theory Microsoft could still take the case to the Supreme court and argue against the somewhat peculiar appeals court decision that Jackson was impartial up to the end of the evidence phase and biased in the penalty phase. The attempt to appeal was denied on the narrow grounds that the process in the lower courts was continuing.
Given the mauling that the apeals court gave to Jackson and his 'finding of fact' I don't think that they are likely to play a major role in the Sun case. I doubt that the new court is going to decide that there is no need for an evidentiary hearing as a result of the Jackson opinions. If Sun attempts to introduce the Jackson opinion as evidence, Microsoft will introduce the Appeals court finding that Jackson was guilty of willfull misconduct.
Netscape/AOL will probably find the Appeals court decision rather more useful because the issue of the browser tie was specifically examined. I doubt that Sun will find much of usef because of Jackson's misconduct and the fact that Jackson did not hear very much evidence that related to Java.
The reason that Microsoft got off is first Jackson is a fool and second the DoJ fought the wrong case. The browser case was very weak, Netscape themselves used zero pricing to kill Spyglass. There were much better issues to beat Microsoft up over, in particular the restrictive OEM contracts the appeals court appear to have mainly considered.
Netscape should know that logging of IP addresses has severe privacy issues, they were a major source of controversy in the early days of the Web.
This could easily be abused for corporate espionage. It is very easy to correlate addresses with companies - particularly if they have a NAT box and reverse DNS.
This is also introducing a single point of interception for law enforcement, including in police states. People in China trying to access Google to find out about "Tiannamen Square Massacre" could be redirected to the communist party search engine by simply redirecting a single DNS record.
I hope so because that is what any privacy suit would turn on. Does the user expect AOL to intercept searches and log the results?
The Windows XP 'powertool' has a very useful feature that allows you to enter a shortcut for a search engine. So if I type 'g privacy' it sends off a search to Google for 'privacy'.
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft. As it is I suspect the response will be a bit like the response in Congress to administration stonewalling or the like. Outrage at the actions if it is the other party, appologism if it is their own party, or even outrage that people would even complain.
Netscape has never been pro-privacy. They invented cookies so that advertisers could track readers and now they are tracking them directly themselves.
Then could AT&T stop Sun shipping Java because it is a C/C++ ripoff, or along the chain to BCPL, CPL, Algol 68, Algol 60?
My complaint about Sun and Java from the start has been that they have been entirely closed about the design and development of Java. Now it appears that they are trying to argue that Java somehow gives them a monopoly on the future development of all Algol like programming languages. That might be news to Tony Hoare who now works for Microsoft and was one of the main inventors of the original Algol.
Java is simply not that novel to allow such a claim. Most of the changes in Java simply fixed longstanding errors in the design of C that had been documented decades before. The main innovation in Java was to partially fix the broken inheritance scheme of C++.
Unfortunately Gosling and co did not go further and take advantage of any of the advances in CS that occurred since the mid 80s. No functional types, no concurrency model and no formal model.
C# is not .NET, it is only one of the programing languages supported by the .NET framework. In fact there are some 20 odd languages supported including languages like Perl and Rexx which were not even designed for compilation. Microsoft is also encouraging universities etc. who are designing languages to use the .NET framework. so people who are designing the next Eifel or Python don't need to spend their time writing code libraries, they can share the existing code. You get a development environment, debugger and the compiler back end for free.
Which is the real joke here. Sun is crashing because of the competition from Linux, Microsoft is practically irrelevant to its market.
Sun grew fat during the Internet dotcom craze because there were lots of VCs out there throwing obscene amounts of money arround. The VCs would typically demand that their companies applied the latest, sexiest technologies - regardless of whether there was a point. Some friends of mine had to recode their system from Lisp to Java just to please their VC.
A lot of the startups were buying high end Sun gear because it pleased the VCs for whom Sun meant Java, meant 'sexy', meant a red hot IPO.
Today their are two factors that are causing trade to shift from Solaris to Linux. First Linux is now sexier than Java. If your VC demands buzword compliance then Linux is fine. Second companies no longer have unlimited amounts to spend on unnecessary hardware. A company like Google that uses low cost Linux/Intel boxes is thought of much better than one that blows money on Sun gear that costs much more.
Propietary UNIX is doomed. But Microsoft is not the reason, Linux is.
The only proprietary UNIX vendor I would put much faith in long term is Apple. They do have a major base of desktop software and they are the only folk in UNIXland who appear to understand what a user interface is. But even Apple may well end up having to jetison the quasi-proprietary kernel and moving to an open source core some day.
Sun's problems are not going to be solved even if they do force Microsoft to distribute Java. At this point .NET is rapidly becoming the hot issue for enterprise customers. While .NET has lots of hype features, the core advantage of .NET is it provides the means by which the WinTel market can transition from 32 bit x86 architecture to 64 bit Itanium.
A company can transition to using the .NET CLI with a simple re-compilation. The Java VM requires them to rewrite their application, it is a non-starter as an Itanium migration strategy.
Not true. Netscape started shipping non-standard extensions to HTML and HTTP in their very first browser. Netscape did not 'retaliate', it instigated the non-standard extensions fight before Microsoft shipped their first browser.
Netscape set out from the start to become the standards setter for the Web. The current W3C rules about submitting standards were written expressly to curtail Netscape's practice of launching a product and announcing that the new proprietary extensions they included would be proposed to the W3C for 'standardization'.
Microsoft soon realised that they did not need to play the same game. They could get what they wanted by simply bothering to show up at W3C meetings (which Netscape often failed to do).
Distribute Sun's current, binary implementation of Java Plug-in as part of Windows XP and Internet Explorer.
Stop the unlicensed distribution of Microsoft's Java Virtual Machine through separate web downloads, instead of incorporating within Windows XP and Internet Explorer, in accordance with Jan. 23, 2000 settlement agreement.
In other words seeks to undo in this Microsoft suit what it 'won' in its other Microsoft suit.
Last I heard there was no law that said that Sun could decide what Microsoft distributes with their O/S.
Essentially what Sun are demanding that the court do is to tie the distribution of Windows XP to a proprietary Sun product. Sun has consistently refused to allow other companies to extend Java in any way that Sun does not sanction. Meanwhile Sun are demanding that Microsoft be prevented from distributing their .NET CLI which competes against JVM.
Jackson's rulling is not going to be as much use to sun in the suit as many here think. Sun can bring it up at the trial, great, but Microsoft can also bring up the fact that Jackson was dismissed from the case and his 'findings of law' thrown out by the appeals court for gross procedural violations, apparent and actual bias. They can also quote from the Appeals court judges statement that the fact that Jackson describes something as a finding of fact does not make it a finding of fact.
All told I don't think that any sensible lawyer for the Plaintif would want to rely very heavily on the Jackson opinions. They are unlikely to have much weight with the judge and would be very likely to backfire in front of a jury. The appeals court rulings are much narrower.
You are deluded. Stalin wrote a really great constitution, he also had practically all the members of the Supreme Soviet that enacted it murdered. Stalin's 'secret ballots' consisted of an option to go behind a curtain to mark your ballot rather than just place it in the box and have it count automatically for the party candidate. In Stalin's time most of the people who went behind the curtain were murdered.
Stalin's state had little to do with any political creed other than opportunism and the persuit of power. There is even evidence that Stalin originally joined the communist party as a Tsarist mole.
As for Stalin's effect on the economy, it can only be considered positive compared to the stagnation under the Tsars. Most of the progress took place under Lenin in any case, Stalin was too busy massacring Kulacks by the million and issuing edicts that twenty plants be built when there was material for three with the result that none were completed.
The only positive effect the communists had was they diverted the massive flows of capital that the Tsars had squandered on themselves and poured it into industrial developments, but that did not require a police state.
However, that said, it is quite hilarious that the response of US side folk to the thought that China might surpass them scientifically is to dredge up cold war rhetoric. China has not been a Stalinist state since Mao died and the gang of four were liquidated. Today it is merely an under-developed kleptocracy. If China was not a rival to US power and did not call itself communist the GOP hawks would have no trouble at all supporting them no matter how many people the regime kills.
If you have a billion people and a part way modernised economy you canout perform a country of a quarter your size in a few selected areas of science. There is little reason to believe that the Chinese version of communism will be any more long lasting than the Soviet one. The only difference is that in China the impetus for change is comming from economic success rather than stagnation. Nobody believes in Chinese communism, the issue for Chinas leaders is not whether they adopt a democracy but how they get from where they are to where they want to be.
If China succeeds in a peaceful democratic transition they will inevitably outstrip US power in the same way and for the same reason that the US suceeded the UK, population size.
China is planning to become a biotech super-power. That is not the immediate threat to the US however since it is unlikely many US scientists would move to China. Many will move and are moving to the UK and Canada however.
Read the sentence carefully, I said that those waging the cultural war were conservative. That does not mean that all those who are conservative wage cultural wars.
I just can't believe that someone would compare the hatred of Jews or Blacks to the hatred of video games!
The common thread being fear of anything they don't understand.
The UN does not find it necessary to spend as much time globe trotting, in fact they do most of their work out of their NYC and Geneva hubs.
Most people in the third world would probably prefer to have meetings at places that are near to first tier air connections. Cairo is much more accessible than Ghana if you are going to have a meeting in Africa.
The mind boggles.
It appears that you would have the .xxx registrars carefully check the sites in their domain to make sure that they all had sufficiently pornographic content. While I could see that VeriSign could probably find a willing army of applicants eager to perform that task at minimum wage I cannot see what purpose would be served that could not be served by a quality control association such as the Germans set up in response to complaints of insufficiently hard core porn.
What I suspect you mean is that companies in the dotcom domain should be scanned to see if they have porno content up. That is a considerably harder prospect and you would not find registrars willing to do it without a substantial increase in the registration fee.
Maybe we could simply move all the porn sites presently in .com into .xxx space. Something like that will have to happen if .com is going to return to any semblance of organization.
Why on earth does there have to be any semblance of organization in dotcom? There is no technical reason for having the namespace partitioned at the toplevel. The DNS could be run perfectly well if registrations were offered into the root directly. It would require considerably more resources than it does at present but it is certainly feasible from an operational point of view. There would still be hierarchy but that would happen below the name you registered. So slashdot could use www.slashdot as their web address if they chose, or they could use just slashdot and a NAPTR record.
There are actually two distinct overlapping issues here. The first is do the pornographers want a .xxx domain, hell yes they do! It is a great advertising mechanism.
The other issue is, will pornographers allow themselves to be confined to .xxx? Here the answer is absolutely not. They are not going to agree to any mechanism that supports censorship as long as there are politicians out there trying to outlaw their business entirely.
Ponography is on balance a force for good. Look at what western society was like when the censoship gang were in charge, women had no rights over their bodies, not even the right to use contraception. As Simmone de Beuvoir pointed out, conservatives put women on a pedestal to control her, not to worship her.
If we are going to effect change in the brutal regimes of the muslim world pornography is the best tool we have. The dictators of Saudi Arabia are rightly fearful of the effect of sack loads of Western porn comming through the Internet.
I found it somewhat interesting that when the California 'American Taleban' is being discussed the right leap to the conclusion that his liberal upbringing must be at fault.
But when a good ol' southern boy flies into an office block with a Cesna attempting to duplicate 9/11 the problem cannot be his conservative upbringing, its his acne medication that is to blame.
When Timothy McVeigh murdered 350+ in the Oaklahoma bombing it was clear that Reno and Clinton were to blame.
Fact is that very often there is nobody to blame. Mental illness happens. People who have personality disorders can appear completely normal outside the locus of their disorder.
What the conservatives will never allow to be blamed for Columbine or anything is the gun ownership they and the NRA do all in their power to protect. This even extends to protecting the gun registration information of Al Qaeda suspects. The people who made the guns used by the Columbine killers had a far more direct connection to the killing than the Video game manufacturers, but they can't be to blame because they are on 'our side'.
The videogame suit is really just another episode of the cultural war that conservatives have been waging since the 70s. They hate homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, Blacks, equal treatment of women and especially the permissive society. They want to wage a war against it but they have been so utterly defeated that they can only voice their true views in private (has anyone asked Kisinger what he thinks of the Nixon/Billy Graham anti semitism tape?) or in coded references to 'states rights', 'unfair treatment' or the old favorite 'liberal media'
Oh yes and watch out because round two will be the geeks.
Appearances at hearings are dependent on campaign contributions. To appear at that type of hearing you would have to donate approx $50K to the members of the committee.
And no, I am not being sarcastic, I am not making it up, that is the way your Congress people behave. If you don't like it write them a letter asking them why Red Hat etc. were not invited and ask directly if campaign contributions are the reason.
The response you receive will of course make an outright denial. However the probability that Red Hat and the Linux crowd will be allowed into the hearings will increase substantially. With Cheney in hot water for selling access to Enron and his oil company friends the hint that you might fight them on the contributions front would be very frightening.
As they say in Washington, money only buys you acces, it does not buy legislation. Well the crooks who charge for access should be considered no less a crook than the ones who sell legislation.
So next time there is a hearing, go down to Washington with a nice bunch of signs saying something like 'We don't like the SSSCA, but Hollings won't hear from us because we won't pay'. Then go to his office and leave them with his staff.
Whatever you do, don't listen to the fools who tell you to play the DC game, they will walk all over you if they think you will be quiet.
Chances are that this will turn out to be a dud. However the real tragedy of the F&P affair is that it poisoned the field for other researchers who were working in good faith and did not consider the NYT a suitable place for the first publication of their results.
Plenty of science papers turn out to be junk. It is a good thing if Science makes the effort to actually acknowledge that small scale fusion does not have to be equated with junk science.
After all the response to Harrison's chronometers by Newton and co was pretty negative. They could not imagine that any timepiece smaller than the solar system could be accurate. Today I have a mechanical contraption on my wrist that is more accurate than most quartz watches and certainly gives a better longitude fix than any observer of the moons of jupiter.
According to the Delamater history of IBM's anti-trust years Microsoft thought the 286 to be to broken to build an O/S that supported protected memory. IBM insisted that they had to ship OS/2 to support the IBM PC AT as they had promised it would support the new O/S.
This was the main issue that led to IBM and Microsoft parting ways, IBM insisted on supporting the 286, Microsoft wanted to skip it and move straight to the 386.
My first computer I owned had 1Kb of memory which was shared between the video display and the program memory. The processor was a Z80. I assembled it with a soldering iron and it still runs today [ZX81].
Thats nothing, my first computer had 256 bytes of memory and was programed using a hex pad and displayed results on a one line LED display. [Kim1]
You were lucky, we had to refine sand to make our own silicon for the circuits and had to load the bootstrap program by wiring up magnetic beads ont' ferrite core memory - and you tell the kids of today that and they don't believe you
Read the email, Bill says that he had more input into the design of the Sirius than the PC. It is pretty obvious that Chuck Peddle would consult Bill over the design of the Sirius at an early stage as Microsoft Basic was the killer app of the PC world.
From all accounts the IBM PC was essentially designed and manufactured in just over a year. Microsoft was brought in at least a year before the launch because writing the code would take time, so yes Microsoft was in a position to make comments about the PC design at an early stage. As Bill himself states, they were not listened to.
It is also pretty obvious that someone in Bill's position would be pushing for the 68K since everyone arround at the time knew that the 68K was the better chip. IBM actually went for the Intel chip because they could reuse work from a previous failed wordprocessor project.
Those of us who had used PDP and VAX knew that a 32 bit address space was the most desirable improvement in going to the 16 bit processors. Even if you did not anticipate being able to have that much RAM any time soon VAX had demonstrated that virtual memory could work.
That is actually the least problematic of the patents. There are hundreds of DRM patents. Intertrust has one (of many) that is over 100 pages long with a thousand odd claims. I doubt anyone has ever read all the claims, certainly I find it hard to believe the examiner would have.
The real problem is that there is no way for the SSSCA requirements to be met without trusted hardware that will only load a trusted O/S. Trusted in this context means 'RIAA approved'. There is no way that Linux could meet that criteria.
I am much less bothered about the SSSCA than most. We in the computer industry can buy more politicians than the RIAA and MPAA put together. The only reason why Hollings is holding hearing is massive campaign contribribetions.
Furthermore folk should be raising issues about the stupider aspects of the Bill. The computing industry is given 12 months to deploy a technology that does not exist and whose sole purpose is to protect profits. The car industry was allowed decades to deploy safety features such as seat belts and air bags that were designed to save lives. The auto industry execs should probably ask themselves if they want a 12 month precedent to be set.
Even if passed the SSSCA would likely have no effect since there is not prospect of the 12 month schedule being set so the decision would fall to the dept of commerce which would then be besiged with lawsuits and various patent holders trying to peddle their snake oil. They certainly won't come to a decision in 2003, 2004 is an election year.
Given that the RIAA and MPAA people were doing their best in 2000 to get Gore elected and are almost certain to be doing their best in 2005 to make sure their is an administration change in 2005 it is most unlikely that govenor Bush will be signing anything into law to favor their interests (unless they come up with a couple of million in hard money contribribetions).
Actually the story provides so little information it is not really possible to interpret what he said.
What he is most likely to have said is that Sun could have asked about federating with Passport before they introduced an alternative technical specification. There is general agreement in the IT industry that duplicating standards is a bad thing.
What Sun would retort is that Microsoft only talked about federation after they launched Liberty. Which Microsoft would dispute, although the fact is that they realy gave no details about what they are up to until very recently.
There are also a bunch of problematic aspect of the Passport specification Kerberos style symmetric key authentication is a poor match to the federated authentication problem Passport addresses. Public key based approaches offer much more direct solutions with a much greater degree of robustness.
What Microsoft are right on is that a company should have a better reason for developing a product like Liberty than just stopping a competitor launch. After all Microsoft developed Passport for the purpose of opening up the AOL instant messenger monopoly. Sun and Microsoft both have the same objective, preventing any one party having a monopoly control.
That is true but only because historically the colonies had already held the English libel laws to be void before the revolution. They have always been rejected as a part of colonial and US jurisprudence.
The problem with the English Libel laws is not in the laws themselves but the rules of evidence that surround them. Essentially these are grossly biased towards the plaintif. Although truth is a defense in English libel law, introducing evidence for a defense of justification is very hard.
In the Xybernaught case the most likely outcome is going to be that the defendant goes to court to get the judgement set aside. If the facts are as claimed it should be a walkover. At that point there is zero point in Xybernaught persuing the suit since it is likely to cost them at least a million bucks to contest.
Regardless, I don't do business with folk who behave like that, and I don;t think many others in their target customer base will either.
Under ICANN rules all registrars are obliged to make their customer names available to SPAMers. This provision was insisted upon by the new registrars who wanted to be able to SPAM Network Solutions customers with offers to switch.
Off course once they had their own customer databases a lot of the registrars have decided to take their customer databases offline. As a result it is quite likely that the mandatory listing rule will get dropped.
Some of the slimier SPAMers make the start of their mail appear to be a Network Solutions renewal notice.
Meanwhile lots of privacy minded folk have registered their domain names under false names and addresses which is fine, until they wonder why they have difficulty renewing.
Sounds like the rumour that some of the bondholders are desperately trying to spread.
I really have no sympathy for the bond holders. AT&T offered a fair price for the network, there were no other bids. The bond holders went to court to force the reciever to reject the AT&T offer in the hope they could force AT&T to pay more. AT&T walked away and built their own.
The idea that AT&T don't know how to build an IP network, or don't even know who to hire to build one is just wierd. AT&T owns the fibre over which most IP gets sent in the US. They always had the ability to walk away. The bondholders were just too greedy to realise it.
Equally much of the @Home network would have be co-loced at the cable TV service heads. The idea that AT&T would need to engage in espionage is plain silly. It would be their own facilities.
IP was designed to allow the military to lash networks together quickly and cheaply while under fire. If you have unlimited bandwidth a company like AT&T should be able to deploy with a couple of months planning and a large cheque book.
As for why @Home went down, any capital intensive company that buys another loss making capital intensive company is destined for bankrupcy.
Since ESR's premise is that the cost of XP at approx $35 will kill the deal we have to assume that $20 is a big deal.
Cheap parts can easily be replaced by other cheap parts. There are drivers too. Checking a hardware compatibility database at your vendor's site, is that such a big thing?
Hah! do you think that cheapie machines have vendor web sites?
Good luck trying to work out which obscure variant of the S3 command set the embedded video chip implements. If it is an S3 that is, it might be something else entirely.
It would be easier to find Lord Lucan than documentation on many of these machines. So write your own is not likely to be a cost effective approach.
Having had bought cheapie PCs for the sole purpose of running linux I would recommend anyone wanting a linux box to pay a bit more for a custom build and select decent parts from vendors who actually support Linux. Not only will it save grief, you are more likely to have the machine last more than 18 months.
Interestingly enough the thread does not have any pro-ESR comments at this point. I think it is pretty obvious that the Linux community can interpret nuts as damage and route arround them.
In the early days of Linux the single biggest advantage Linux had was Linus who is a pretty reasonable guy.
ESR appears to be way over the edge on this one. First off he does not appear to know that OEMs already get Windows at deep discounts over the retail price. Microsoft does not have to provide packaging, retail discount, activation or first level support for those customers so the cost is probably more like $35 for XP Home.
ESR also appears to overlook that Microsoft has aggressively sold its own sub $350 PC, it is called an XBox and they sell them at Toys-R-Us. Equally Microsoft has not let price bar it from the Pocket PC market.
The other reason that ESR is wrong is that the lowest price PCs are typically sold as starter PCs for first time buyers. This is a market that requires the ability to run genuine Microsoft Word. Tomb Raider and AOL. Linux users buying this type of machine are typically buying a second, third or fourth machine to use as a cheap server.
Finally, anyone who has tried to get Linux up on a cheapie PC will know that it is far from simple. The parts used by cheapie PCs are often sourced from obscure vendors and finding a Linux driver often means writing your own. The people who make such machines are typically doing so on a shoestring and cannot afford the cost of development or the delay incurred. In many cases the whole profit on the low cost PC is made by buying parts on 90 days credit, making the machine in 15 days, charging the wholesalers on delivery and making the profit on 75 days worth of interest.