As a consumer, I don't feel that the antitrust case is for me, but rather for the competing companies. I think that the fact that Microsoft are abusing competitors are not so bad in itself, but it's bad because it makes it easier for Microsoft to abuse the consumers, which is their goal. Removing competition is just one of a lot of methods used to force us to buy their products.
Currently, around 90% of the computer users use programs from Microsoft whenever they are available. Microsofts tactic is to separate those from those running other systems, making them unable to communicate. Personally, I can't understand how most people avoids seeing the intention, but they do. And since a large group has more to offer than a small one, the large one (Microsoft-based) stay large, the other stays small.
The primary way they maintain this situation is by secret file formats. The best example is the Word format. I cannot read formatted documents produced by the large group, since Microsoft keeps the Word format a secret. I cannot view ASF movies, because Microsoft keeps the ASF format a secret. I can only barely access Microsoft file servers, because Microsoft keeps the protocol a secret.
All of this limits my options. I can select to either buy the software I want, or to buy everything from Microsoft and become a part of world again. But I don't feel that this limitation is a topic in the trial. It seems as they see the crushing of Netscape as an illegal way of forcing me to choose their web browser. But the case is that Microsoft don't give a shit about what web browser I use. The reason they wanted to crush Netscape was that the large market share would expose their attempts of closing the blockade hole known as the web to too many users. If people stop using Netscape, they can safely make part of the web more and more unavailable to outsiders, thus keeping the separation between the Microsoft world and the outsiders strong.
And now to my questions:
Is it likely that this in itself will become a topic in a case agains Microsoft in near future, or will the Justice Department continue to attack side effects?
Is this practise of freezing out non-users illegal at all?
How likely is it that Microsoft will be forced to release the file formats and protocols to the public?
I guess we can throw away all the other unlimited storage devices from past years now. My 1997 40TB credit card lookalike from Opticom is a little dated (not to mention slow).
</irony>
Until this is in the stores, I'll consider this as yet another fraud.
USB support, dvd, scsi, 3d accelerators. Yep pretty ancient.Seriously, Linux was written in 1991, and has been regularly updated ever since. I wonder how much original code is still in the kernel. I also disagree that MS operating systems are dated. For a desktop system NT, and what i've used of 2000, is a pretty decent platform. Even under moderate usage it is fairly stable.
You totally miss the point. A tape recorder is ancient technology even if the tape format is new and the recorder was produced this year, and it doesn't crash.
It's good enough for most people.
Most users takes whatever is given to them.
As for the PDP11 environement, well if it works why change it. I;ve got plenty of GUI tools that work with the text configuration files. Works fine.
Text configuration files are Good[tm] and is not what I mean by a PDP11 environment. What I mean is that first of all most programs are written in an assembly version for PDP11 which was created because the original assembly was to verbose and thus required to much typing on an teletype. It is a direct translation (had to be, the PDP11 had only ~16K of memory). And being a PDP11 assembler, it lacks support for stuff that the PDP11 did not have, like overflow registers. And the exec exec exec model is, well, very dated. load run run run is more up to date. Keeps information between sessions, reduces running time and makes a lot of other stuff easier to do.
You're right. Linux is ancient technology. Somewhere in the '70s, if I'm not wrong. But unfortunately, that and FreeBSD are the only useable alternatives.
Microsofts operating systems is even more dated. And the user interface is crippled. And they have done everything wrong. Everything in they're operating systems are either missing or they sucks. Personally, I think that for anything other than launching games, Windows do not work.
I don't think Linux' user interface is dated. What is dated are the current "We're still on a PDP11" development environment.
This situation should be no surprise for anyone. Netscape has done everything wrong since they first started.
First, they fucked up the standards. Since Netscape did not follow the standards, IETF released HTML 2.0, which was an attempt for a standard to follow Netscape. But they still managed to screw it up, thus making standard violation acceptable, and "enhancements" hard to detect.
Then they stopped enhancing the hypertext system, and instead started to play the "feature" game. The only game Microsoft knows how to play beside Monopoly. They invented the javascript language, which is so crappy Microsofts incompetent language designers could easily fuck it up without people noticing a quality loss.
They managed to write a browser which could not render pages properly. When web pages started to be IE only, there was no way to tell which browser was most to blame.
The browser source they released was so crappy that most of the pieces had to be replaced.
There's only one way to win this war:
Finish the browser
Hang on to Microsofts "enhancements"
Start to innovate. Don't just add something to the current mess. Change it all to be a little better than before. When noone innovates, people choose Microsoft.
STICK TO THE STANDARDS! If you have to add something non-standard, make the integration standard-compliant and make sure noone fucks up the integration.
Personally, I think doing smart stuff with XML, like writing DTDs with client side graphich layout and making W3C standardize them, is a good start. Just make sure there's no way to use the DTD to affect rendering.
Personally, I think this is the Battle[tm]. If we loose, there will be no access to the web from linux. And who are gonna run linux then? Or any other OS with no IE? Noone. Not even me. And I truly hate Microsoft and thinks a lot of the people working there deserves penalties in the range from large fines to a few years in prison.
Ok, it is a problem that people create problems and solve them, instead of not creating them in the first place. But that is not related to the internet, but rather to the mentality of programmers in general. It's some things that are common between a lots of computer people:
Problems are cool, so why reduce the population?
Why use other people's solutions? self-solved is well-solved.
Difficulty is a value in itself.
If these people designed cars, they would be made of Lego Techno and matches. But the net didn't make them that way. Most of the programmers today would still be programmers if the net wasn't there. They just wouldn't be so exposed to better ways of doing stuff, so they would stay at home writing paper simulators in x86 assembly, instead of writing paper simulators called HTML editors in java. Both are stupid, but the former is even more stupid and less useful than the latter.
When it comes to intelligence and the net, I for one think that you become bright from using it, especially usenet and irc. It's extremely good training. You talk to people just waiting for you to say something stupid so they can flame you to hell. Sooner or later you learn to recognize stupid stuff, and not say it. That make you more intelligent.
If it's one industry we could do without, I would rather pick commercials. Think about how many man-months gone into creating and watching commercials. Millions. For what use? Is it entertaining? Normally not. Is it useful to know that the blue bottle of shampoo is better than the green one since the makers of the blue one could afford to pay more creative people who could invent cooler names of the content? no. It's just a way of paying for entertainment with a giant loss percentage.
BTW: I'm very sleepy while writing this. That's the reason for the lack of continium and the bad language. That and my crappy English teachers.
The problem with Microsoft, and most of the software business, is NOT that it's not open source. The problem is that they use proprietary file formats and protocols. When they release a protocol, that's a Good Thing[tm].
And who needs their crappy code anyway? My RedHat system is unstable enough without Microsoft code in it...
I just consider any language that requires you to type "1.0" instead of "1" when assigning to a float terminally brain-damaged. Strong typing is a good thing (Perl's bitten me a couple of times because of its almost complete lack of typing), but typing _that_ strong is ridiculous.
Do you get tired of writing all those extra.0's, or are you afraid you might get out of disk space?
That is a microscopic detailt. Saying this is near eqivalent to saying "Norway is hell. I just consider any country where milk is sold in cartons terminally brain-damaged. So I stay in Kosovo".
If there were more people using more programming languages we might not have so many occurances of things like buffer overruns and other misc security breaches... IMHO
I agree. That is one of many reasons I have rejected C and startet writing in Ada95. Personally, I would require a lot more than average payment to start writing in C again. I recommend taking a look at Ada. The following resources are pretty interresting:
Oh yes! I really need that. Gee, I wonder what I might need next. Oh, now I know. I need a bottle opener with a shoe on it. And a knife with which I can both cut meat and read my mail. And maybe a skate board keyboard too. Can't live without.
It is actually bad enough to make me wonder why they bothered.
You don't have to be paranoid to realize that the reason they "ported" it and actually released that piece of crap was to demonstrate to the public that Solaris is not a useable OS for running desktop applications.
It just isn't possible to write something that crappy and bloated by accident or incompetence.
I guess the reason there's no IE for Linux yet is that they won't recognize it as an OS. When they do that, they will probably release IE for it, and it will be at least as crappy as the Solaris version.
Well, I have run it for...lets see...6 minutes, and about 20 seconds, and it has only crashed 4 times (one on slashdot), so I guess it's pretty stable. It has some minor flaws, like crashing deterministic on sites like http://www.mp3search.com/ or http://www.pcworld.no/, but 4.5 did that as well.
I guess that's not Netscape's fault. After all, it was not their fault that that everyone startet to ignore all standards while the nice guys at Netscape, who just wanted to follow every standard they could find, just had to stand there and look at it, not beeing able to do anything about it. So, well, I guess it's only fair and square that the nice guys who tried to keep the web clean so that everyone could compete, now prevents me from ever seeing that part of it. When I think of it, I don't really need MP3s. Give me a can of Battery or Red Bull and shiny buttons I can press randomly, and I'll be as happy as I ever will be.
So I stick to Netscape. Not only because they got the perfect browser which has made my life perfect, but because the brand new halo they bought looks so good on them that I just can't resist
Why not in assembly? Or even better, "typing" the "scripts" directly on a floppy with a magnetic needle?
Personally, I can't see a single reason for using C as a scripting language, except "I'm going to commit suicide next week, and need to get in the mood".
I'm writing my own license, but I don't know what to call it. I have not come very far.
It's not going to be a free license. Personally, there's lots of persons and purposes I am not willing to submit source code to.
I'm going to have restrictions, something like the following:
You are not allowed to store the source code or any program built partly or completely from the source code on any computer which contains a version of Microsoft Office or any of the applications mentioned on the Microsoft Office paper box.
You are not allowed to make this source code or any program built partly or completely from the source code directly available from a web page which source violates any W3 Consortium standards, unless the violation is there to make the page available through more browsers than it would if the errors had been connected, and the violation is not a violation of the basic block structure of SGML and the web page does not contain any undefined tags. If, at the time you create the web page, more than half of the world web pages is XML pages, then you are not allowed to distribute this program through a HTML based web page. You may not abuse the tag on (the page).
You are not allowed to use this software for torture or any system aiding the violation of human rights.
You are not allowed to use this source for any purpose connected to the military in any country with forced military service.
You are not allowed to use this software for any violation of any IETF,ISO or ANSI standards, unless everybody contributing to this software agrees.
You are not allowed to do any other really bad stuff.
Install a central documentation database with links to topic on all commands and common utilities in PLAIN TEXT and HTML *only* and with EXAMPLES. Remove all the useless postscrip, sgml Info and Tex documentation from/usr/doc and put it in/opt/usr/geek. Distros should accept NO applications or utilities from ANYONE without documentation in text and HTML.
I disagree. The right thing to do is to standardize on some SGML or XML format, from which the end user can extract exactly the documentation (s)he wants, in the format (s)he wants, without much trouble.
The problem is that:
The traditional standard is man pages. They sucks, and can mostly be replaced by a --help option, but they are standard. Manpages is written in troff. Or was it nroff? Doesn't matter, since groff works fine
The GNU standard is texinfo. You can generate info, dvi and html from texinfo. Unfortunately, texinfo is not compatible with other versions of itself, so therefore each application normally contains a texinfo.tex file for its own documentation. Despite that, a lot of the texinfo information is fucked up. Especially when it comes to generating dvi.
Then you have docbook, a linux documentation SGML doctype. Great, but not common.
Standardizing in one format (like docbook) requires that enough people agree with it. That's a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
As a consumer, I don't feel that the antitrust case is for me, but rather for the competing companies. I think that the fact that Microsoft are abusing competitors are not so bad in itself, but it's bad because it makes it easier for Microsoft to abuse the consumers, which is their goal. Removing competition is just one of a lot of methods used to force us to buy their products.
Currently, around 90% of the computer users use programs from Microsoft whenever they are available. Microsofts tactic is to separate those from those running other systems, making them unable to communicate. Personally, I can't understand how most people avoids seeing the intention, but they do. And since a large group has more to offer than a small one, the large one (Microsoft-based) stay large, the other stays small.
The primary way they maintain this situation is by secret file formats. The best example is the Word format. I cannot read formatted documents produced by the large group, since Microsoft keeps the Word format a secret. I cannot view ASF movies, because Microsoft keeps the ASF format a secret. I can only barely access Microsoft file servers, because Microsoft keeps the protocol a secret.
All of this limits my options. I can select to either buy the software I want, or to buy everything from Microsoft and become a part of world again. But I don't feel that this limitation is a topic in the trial. It seems as they see the crushing of Netscape as an illegal way of forcing me to choose their web browser. But the case is that Microsoft don't give a shit about what web browser I use. The reason they wanted to crush Netscape was that the large market share would expose their attempts of closing the blockade hole known as the web to too many users. If people stop using Netscape, they can safely make part of the web more and more unavailable to outsiders, thus keeping the separation between the Microsoft world and the outsiders strong.
And now to my questions:
I guess we can throw away all the other unlimited storage devices from past years now. My 1997 40TB credit card lookalike from Opticom is a little dated (not to mention slow).
</irony>
Until this is in the stores, I'll consider this as yet another fraud.
And the exec exec exec model is, well, very dated. load run run run is more up to date. Keeps information between sessions, reduces running time and makes a lot of other stuff easier to do.
You're right. Linux is ancient technology. Somewhere in the '70s, if I'm not wrong. But unfortunately, that and FreeBSD are the only useable alternatives.
Microsofts operating systems is even more dated. And the user interface is crippled. And they have done everything wrong. Everything in they're operating systems are either missing or they sucks. Personally, I think that for anything other than launching games, Windows do not work.
I don't think Linux' user interface is dated. What is dated are the current "We're still on a PDP11" development environment.
This situation should be no surprise for anyone. Netscape has done everything wrong since they first started.
First, they fucked up the standards. Since Netscape did not follow the standards, IETF released HTML 2.0, which was an attempt for a standard to follow Netscape. But they still managed to screw it up, thus making standard violation acceptable, and "enhancements" hard to detect.
Then they stopped enhancing the hypertext system, and instead started to play the "feature" game. The only game Microsoft knows how to play beside Monopoly. They invented the javascript language, which is so crappy Microsofts incompetent language designers could easily fuck it up without people noticing a quality loss.
They managed to write a browser which could not render pages properly. When web pages started to be IE only, there was no way to tell which browser was most to blame.
The browser source they released was so crappy that most of the pieces had to be replaced.
There's only one way to win this war:Personally, I think doing smart stuff with XML, like writing DTDs with client side graphich layout and making W3C standardize them, is a good start. Just make sure there's no way to use the DTD to affect rendering.
Personally, I think this is the Battle[tm]. If we loose, there will be no access to the web from linux. And who are gonna run linux then? Or any other OS with no IE? Noone. Not even me. And I truly hate Microsoft and thinks a lot of the people working there deserves penalties in the range from large fines to a few years in prison.
Ok, it is a problem that people create problems and solve them, instead of not creating them in the first place. But that is not related to the internet, but rather to the mentality of programmers in general. It's some things that are common between a lots of computer people:
- Problems are cool, so why reduce the population?
- Why use other people's solutions? self-solved is well-solved.
- Difficulty is a value in itself.
If these people designed cars, they would be made of Lego Techno and matches. But the net didn't make them that way. Most of the programmers today would still be programmers if the net wasn't there. They just wouldn't be so exposed to better ways of doing stuff, so they would stay at home writing paper simulators in x86 assembly, instead of writing paper simulators called HTML editors in java. Both are stupid, but the former is even more stupid and less useful than the latter.When it comes to intelligence and the net, I for one think that you become bright from using it, especially usenet and irc. It's extremely good training. You talk to people just waiting for you to say something stupid so they can flame you to hell. Sooner or later you learn to recognize stupid stuff, and not say it. That make you more intelligent.
If it's one industry we could do without, I would rather pick commercials. Think about how many man-months gone into creating and watching commercials. Millions. For what use? Is it entertaining? Normally not. Is it useful to know that the blue bottle of shampoo is better than the green one since the makers of the blue one could afford to pay more creative people who could invent cooler names of the content? no. It's just a way of paying for entertainment with a giant loss percentage.
BTW: I'm very sleepy while writing this. That's the reason for the lack of continium and the bad language. That and my crappy English teachers.
And who needs their crappy code anyway? My RedHat system is unstable enough without Microsoft code in it...
Why do you give the crackers what they want? There's no news value in this story anyway, everyone have seen cracked sites before.
I have changed my mind, after realizing that this is a joke, not a scam. My new TODO-list is now:
If there is one single thing I regret, it is that I did not buy shares in Opticom a couple of years ago.
That is a microscopic detailt. Saying this is near eqivalent to saying "Norway is hell. I just consider any country where milk is sold in cartons terminally brain-damaged. So I stay in Kosovo".
Oh yes! I really need that. Gee, I wonder what I might need next. Oh, now I know. I need a bottle opener with a shoe on it. And a knife with which I can both cut meat and read my mail. And maybe a skate board keyboard too. Can't live without.
Why do people have to abuse words. It handles only _one_ medium. The correct name is then "X Mono Medium System".
You don't have to be paranoid to realize that the reason they "ported" it and actually released that piece of crap was to demonstrate to the public that Solaris is not a useable OS for running desktop applications.
It just isn't possible to write something that crappy and bloated by accident or incompetence.
I guess the reason there's no IE for Linux yet is that they won't recognize it as an OS. When they do that, they will probably release IE for it, and it will be at least as crappy as the Solaris version.
Do I really have to start skipping a users guide with my comments?
Continue this sequence:
Goldy - silvery - i....
Well, I have run it for...lets see...6 minutes, and about 20 seconds, and it has only crashed 4 times (one on slashdot), so I guess it's pretty stable. It has some minor flaws, like crashing deterministic on sites like http://www.mp3search.com/ or http://www.pcworld.no/, but 4.5 did that as well.
I guess that's not Netscape's fault. After all, it was not their fault that that everyone startet to ignore all standards while the nice guys at Netscape, who just wanted to follow every standard they could find, just had to stand there and look at it, not beeing able to do anything about it. So, well, I guess it's only fair and square that the nice guys who tried to keep the web clean so that everyone could compete, now prevents me from ever seeing that part of it. When I think of it, I don't really need MP3s. Give me a can of Battery or Red Bull and shiny buttons I can press randomly, and I'll be as happy as I ever will be.
So I stick to Netscape. Not only because they got the perfect browser which has made my life perfect, but because the brand new halo they bought looks so good on them that I just can't resist
I prefer to write new layouts in emacs, then write scripts (shell,perl,m4) to generate pages using those layouts later.
Why not in assembly? Or even better, "typing" the "scripts" directly on a floppy with a magnetic needle?
Personally, I can't see a single reason for using C as a scripting language, except "I'm going to commit suicide next week, and need to get in the mood".
I agree. Although I think it is strange that you have not mentioned any lisp dialect here. Guile had been perfect.
And BTW, you don't really mean that you prefer writing AI in C?
fuck, I hate it when I automatically use tab for whitespacing in browser forms and end up pressing a random button.
Just ignore the comment. It was just an incomplete outline, which, when I think about it, I would probably never have conciously submitted.
I don't think you got the point. There's no reason a little language can't be implemented in a high level extension language, like guile.
What is the actual difference between
I'm writing my own license, but I don't know what to call it. I have not come very far.
It's not going to be a free license. Personally, there's lots of persons and purposes I am not willing to submit source code to.
I'm going to have restrictions, something like the following:
I disagree. The right thing to do is to standardize on some SGML or XML format, from which the end user can extract exactly the documentation (s)he wants, in the format (s)he wants, without much trouble.
The problem is that:
Standardizing in one format (like docbook) requires that enough people agree with it. That's a problem.