"That is, in fact, part of the reason why the case went so poorly. "
Jesus man what planet are you on? The case went great! The govt won!. Ms was found guilty. Then Ms appealed and the case went great again. The lower court decision was upheld unanimously by the district court. The case went great and they won. When the Bush justice dept took over it was too late to throw the case so the only thing they could do was to not punish them very hard. So Bush and Ashcroft decided to let Ms off the hook and reward them for losing the case and being criminals.
Unfortunately in our justice system you only get punished if you are poor. If you are rich you get to drag the trial out till you get your bitches into office and then they give you money for being found guilty.
Man you are one confused motherfucker. How old are you? Think back (if you were alive back then) we are talking about netscape 4.x vs IE 3.x Opera did not exist back then.
BTW the cause of most wars is greed nothing else. Usually though the ruthless and evil will always triumph over the weak and pacifists. In the real world evil always wins. Teach that as a lesson to every kid you know.!
"I have to admit that *some* things brought to bear against Microsoft by our government are unfounded"
First of all this action is not brought on by the govt. It's by another corporation who got shafted by MS and now wants payback. Perfectly OK by me.
As for your point I think you must be kidding. The govt has so far done nothing except kiss MS ass. Their so-called punishment will be a joke and everyone knows it. MS came in and bitchslapped the US govt like an abused wife. The analogy is pretty good considering that their number one bitch is in the white house the number two bitch is the attorney general.
If what you say is true then there is no reason to put postgresql 7.x into the stable distribution. Alas that is not so. Right now you risk things breaking in sid when you do an apt-get upgrade or you use postgres 6.5. Between a rock and a hard place dontcha think?
It's a tough call isn't it? On the one had trying to install from the unstable distro is iffy at best when even common things like slapd, libapache-mod-ssl don't install properly OTOH you don't want to be left behind with an ancient version of some software.
What this tells me is that debian (and perhaps linux itself) is broken in a fundemantal way. If by including the latest version of postgres into stable you risk the stability of your distribution then I'd say something is wrong someplace. Somehow we need to figure out a distribution system where installing individual packages can't break the entire distro.
I believe there are numerous suits pending. Qwest is one of the most unethical businesses around (which explains why it makes a perfect match to MS). My own nightmare is too sad to tell but I'll summarize it like this. "They kept billing me for lines that I had cancelled, they kept billing me despite teh fact that I had proof those lines were cancelled, they kept billing me for a year, they refused to refund all my money". In the end they refunded some money and admitted they were wrong but they kept a good chunk of it and wasted a ton of my time.
They are bastards and in this case the birds of a feather are flocking together.
1) It would not matter if you had the source code. MS has thousands (if not tens of thousands) of DLLs. A keyboard logger could be implanted with the next IE update, Mdac update, service pack, or installed along with some codec by the media player. No country is able to audit every single line of every dll and every service pack. It's best to just not use it at all. Besides if you buy MS software you are taking your tax payers money and giving it to an american company. Why not support the businesses in your own country?
2) The budgets you mention probably don't reflect the "black budget" portion. The intelligence offices have pretty much unlimited money to do whatever they want (especially under republican governments). Also remember that they raise a ton of money with drug smuggling and other activities would be illegal if you and I did them.
By the same token why would you standardise on an operating system or office software that was built by a US firm. It's infinately easier to install "listening devices" into windows or office then to install them in an airplane. Combine this with the fact that every single company and govt office in your country is going to run the thing on every single desktop and you have a disaster ready to happen.
The CIA (or NSA, or FBI, or MS) theoretically would be able to read any document, created by any application, on any desktop. That would be a much more powerful spying tool then a bug in an airplane that gets used infrequently.
"If your VB code has GOTO's all over the place, it's poorly-written"
Look at the code you posted as an example. DO you see the line that says..
"On Error Goto EH"
The third word in your example consists of the letters G, O, T, O. So when I say that every decently written VB program consists of a billion GOTOS do you understand what I mean?
Now will the subroutine you posted have to be re-written to take advantage of try-catch? Of course it will as with every other subroutine you have written.
I think your post just proves my point. VB.NET is more like C#. It had to aquire features in order to run in the VM. Other languages like lisp or eiffel will shed features like multiple inheritance. VM is the equilizer of language features. Since all code runs in the VM it's also a equalizer of speed then the speed differences go away too. Like I said you choose languages on the.net depending on syntactic sugar.
"Anyway, so when I say "not extensive" I mean very little thought/effort looks to be required to upgrade."
every decently written VB app has a billion GOTOs. In every subroutine there is an on error goto statement. Then there is some awkward attempt at guessing what the error was and then a resume next or resume somelabel. Every single subroutine will (should) be re-written to do proper try catch error trapping. I call that extensive and expensive. God only knows why MS did not introduce proper error handling to VB a decade ago but that's another topic alltogether.
No I don't think IP protection is a big incentive. In case you missed the point in my last post I'll say it in a matter you can understand.
People created important works of art, music, literature, philosophy, plays etc before the invention of IP. In fact some people might say that the works of art and literature created in the pre IP era far surpress anything Brittney Spears is likely achieve in her life time.
I have offered evidence that creative works will appear without IP laws by simply pointing at the past surely you can't argue with the evidence. Now give some evidence that without IP no creative work will take place and/or inferior creative work will take place.
For example I say that homers oddyssey is a superlative work of literature which was written without the aid of IP. Not only that but I say it pretty much dwarfs any other literature written in the post IP world. What do you say?
Apparently there was no creative work done before the advent of IP law. Nobody wrote songs, wrote books, told stories, wrote plays or anything before IP was invented. For thousands of years humans scraped by without dancing, singing, telling stories, goin to plays, reading. it was a bleak existance till one day somebody wrote the IP laws of the land and voila we could all dance and sing for the first time ever. When was that by the way? Was it in America? Was it in the early 1900s? or perhaps I got it wrong maybe it was a bit earlier. Please let me know the first time a human being wrote a song I would love to know.
I guess resorting to ad hominem attacks means you were not able to dispute any of my points.
1) Do MS executives lie consistently (or pathalogically).
2) Were you lying when you stated that the java JVM did not enable objects written in one language to be inheritable by another language.
3) Does MS use use "entities" to hide the extent of it's debt.
4) Does MS buy and sell it's own stock to manipulate earnings.
5) Does MS play accounting tricks with stock options.
" Actually these arbitration clauses sometimes exist in a contract to protect the consumer or employee in cases where a lawsuit would be practically impossible for the individual to undertake."
How would a stacked arbitration panel consisting of other business owners in the same field help an employee? If they find for the employee then they encourage the same type of action in their own firms. They are going to rubberstamp a big red NO on everything and find for the corporation no matter how bad the conduct was. It's not like you can appeal or anything.
" Second, 95% is incorrect. It was incorrect then, and no. I would suspect worldwide that the actual number of licensed, legal, Windows users is in the range of %60-%70."
Do you have any numbers to back that up? What operating system the other 30 to 40% desktops running?
" Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly nor would they necessarily be restraining trade."
This is your opinion. It has nothing to do with the facts or the law. Apparently you think the law is wrong but nevertheless it's the law. MS is a monopoly as defined by the law of the united states. Not only does the law say so but so does a federal court an an appeals court. Not only is MS a monopoly but according to two courts they have abused that monopoly and have harmed the consumers. The trial is in the penalty phase right now. Ms will be punished for harming the consumers it remains to be seen weather that punishment is substantial or a slap on the wrist.
Burying your head in the sand and repeating "ms is not a monopoly" will not change the law, the federal court ruling, nor the appeals court ruling. All of the above state that MS is an abusive monopoly and will punish it for being one.
" How can you dare call MS software "monopolistic"?"
IIRC the technical definition of a monopoly is a bit over 70%. I doubt losing a hundred thousand desktops will drop MS share of the desktop market below 70%.
If somebody knows the actual number please post is so that people like danhaskett don't go around thinking that a monopoly is defined as a 100% market share.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be a troll but at least I am a troll for ideas. You on the other hand are a troll for a corporation.
"That is, in fact, part of the reason why the case went so poorly. "
Jesus man what planet are you on? The case went great! The govt won!. Ms was found guilty. Then Ms appealed and the case went great again. The lower court decision was upheld unanimously by the district court. The case went great and they won. When the Bush justice dept took over it was too late to throw the case so the only thing they could do was to not punish them very hard. So Bush and Ashcroft decided to let Ms off the hook and reward them for losing the case and being criminals.
Unfortunately in our justice system you only get punished if you are poor. If you are rich you get to drag the trial out till you get your bitches into office and then they give you money for being found guilty.
Man you are one confused motherfucker. How old are you? Think back (if you were alive back then) we are talking about netscape 4.x vs IE 3.x Opera did not exist back then.
But the case was upheld on appeal. Unanimously!
BTW the cause of most wars is greed nothing else. Usually though the ruthless and evil will always triumph over the weak and pacifists. In the real world evil always wins. Teach that as a lesson to every kid you know.!
What is the difference? Seems like the same thing to me. Besides it's still illegal if a monopoly does it. The rules are different for monopolies.
"I have to admit that *some* things brought to bear against Microsoft by our government are unfounded"
First of all this action is not brought on by the govt. It's by another corporation who got shafted by MS and now wants payback. Perfectly OK by me.
As for your point I think you must be kidding. The govt has so far done nothing except kiss MS ass. Their so-called punishment will be a joke and everyone knows it. MS came in and bitchslapped the US govt like an abused wife. The analogy is pretty good considering that their number one bitch is in the white house the number two bitch is the attorney general.
If MS did not want you to take them they would not have put them there.
If what you say is true then there is no reason to put postgresql 7.x into the stable distribution. Alas that is not so. Right now you risk things breaking in sid when you do an apt-get upgrade or you use postgres 6.5. Between a rock and a hard place dontcha think?
It's a tough call isn't it? On the one had trying to install from the unstable distro is iffy at best when even common things like slapd, libapache-mod-ssl don't install properly OTOH you don't want to be left behind with an ancient version of some software.
What this tells me is that debian (and perhaps linux itself) is broken in a fundemantal way. If by including the latest version of postgres into stable you risk the stability of your distribution then I'd say something is wrong someplace. Somehow we need to figure out a distribution system where installing individual packages can't break the entire distro.
I believe there are numerous suits pending. Qwest is one of the most unethical businesses around (which explains why it makes a perfect match to MS). My own nightmare is too sad to tell but I'll summarize it like this. "They kept billing me for lines that I had cancelled, they kept billing me despite teh fact that I had proof those lines were cancelled, they kept billing me for a year, they refused to refund all my money". In the end they refunded some money and admitted they were wrong but they kept a good chunk of it and wasted a ton of my time.
They are bastards and in this case the birds of a feather are flocking together.
Yea debian rocks (by and large) but stay away from unstable.
Two things.
1) It would not matter if you had the source code. MS has thousands (if not tens of thousands) of DLLs. A keyboard logger could be implanted with the next IE update, Mdac update, service pack, or installed along with some codec by the media player. No country is able to audit every single line of every dll and every service pack. It's best to just not use it at all. Besides if you buy MS software you are taking your tax payers money and giving it to an american company. Why not support the businesses in your own country?
2) The budgets you mention probably don't reflect the "black budget" portion. The intelligence offices have pretty much unlimited money to do whatever they want (especially under republican governments). Also remember that they raise a ton of money with drug smuggling and other activities would be illegal if you and I did them.
By the same token why would you standardise on an operating system or office software that was built by a US firm. It's infinately easier to install "listening devices" into windows or office then to install them in an airplane. Combine this with the fact that every single company and govt office in your country is going to run the thing on every single desktop and you have a disaster ready to happen.
The CIA (or NSA, or FBI, or MS) theoretically would be able to read any document, created by any application, on any desktop. That would be a much more powerful spying tool then a bug in an airplane that gets used infrequently.
REally? A printer driver kills your server? Astonishing!.
How do people put up with this shit.
Both of those can be accomplished with netmeeting on w2k not to mention VNC.
"If your VB code has GOTO's all over the place, it's poorly-written"
Look at the code you posted as an example. DO you see the line that says..
"On Error Goto EH"
The third word in your example consists of the letters G, O, T, O. So when I say that every decently written VB program consists of a billion GOTOS do you understand what I mean?
Now will the subroutine you posted have to be re-written to take advantage of try-catch? Of course it will as with every other subroutine you have written.
I think your post just proves my point. VB.NET is more like C#. It had to aquire features in order to run in the VM. Other languages like lisp or eiffel will shed features like multiple inheritance. VM is the equilizer of language features. Since all code runs in the VM it's also a equalizer of speed then the speed differences go away too. Like I said you choose languages on the .net depending on syntactic sugar.
"Anyway, so when I say "not extensive" I mean very little thought/effort looks to be required to upgrade."
every decently written VB app has a billion GOTOs. In every subroutine there is an on error goto statement. Then there is some awkward attempt at guessing what the error was and then a resume next or resume somelabel. Every single subroutine will (should) be re-written to do proper try catch error trapping. I call that extensive and expensive. God only knows why MS did not introduce proper error handling to VB a decade ago but that's another topic alltogether.
No I don't think IP protection is a big incentive. In case you missed the point in my last post I'll say it in a matter you can understand.
People created important works of art, music, literature, philosophy, plays etc before the invention of IP. In fact some people might say that the works of art and literature created in the pre IP era far surpress anything Brittney Spears is likely achieve in her life time.
I have offered evidence that creative works will appear without IP laws by simply pointing at the past surely you can't argue with the evidence. Now give some evidence that without IP no creative work will take place and/or inferior creative work will take place.
For example I say that homers oddyssey is a superlative work of literature which was written without the aid of IP. Not only that but I say it pretty much dwarfs any other literature written in the post IP world. What do you say?
Apparently there was no creative work done before the advent of IP law. Nobody wrote songs, wrote books, told stories, wrote plays or anything before IP was invented. For thousands of years humans scraped by without dancing, singing, telling stories, goin to plays, reading. it was a bleak existance till one day somebody wrote the IP laws of the land and voila we could all dance and sing for the first time ever. When was that by the way? Was it in America? Was it in the early 1900s? or perhaps I got it wrong maybe it was a bit earlier. Please let me know the first time a human being wrote a song I would love to know.
I guess resorting to ad hominem attacks means you were not able to dispute any of my points.
1) Do MS executives lie consistently (or pathalogically).
2) Were you lying when you stated that the java JVM did not enable objects written in one language to be inheritable by another language.
3) Does MS use use "entities" to hide the extent of it's debt.
4) Does MS buy and sell it's own stock to manipulate earnings.
5) Does MS play accounting tricks with stock options.
"Its very much a question of interpretation. "
And in this case people who know much more about the law and the sherman acts decided that they were a monopoly and an abusive one at that.
"I work for a company that agressively enforces anti-piracy provisions."
I guess some people will do anything for money.
" Actually these arbitration clauses sometimes exist in a contract to protect the consumer or employee in cases where a lawsuit would be practically impossible for the individual to undertake."
How would a stacked arbitration panel consisting of other business owners in the same field help an employee? If they find for the employee then they encourage the same type of action in their own firms. They are going to rubberstamp a big red NO on everything and find for the corporation no matter how bad the conduct was. It's not like you can appeal or anything.
" Second, 95% is incorrect. It was incorrect then, and no. I would suspect worldwide that the actual number of licensed, legal, Windows users is in the range of %60-%70."
Do you have any numbers to back that up? What operating system the other 30 to 40% desktops running?
" Finally, my original statement stands. Even if MS has 100% market share they wouldn't necessarily be a monopoly nor would they necessarily be restraining trade."
This is your opinion. It has nothing to do with the facts or the law. Apparently you think the law is wrong but nevertheless it's the law. MS is a monopoly as defined by the law of the united states. Not only does the law say so but so does a federal court an an appeals court. Not only is MS a monopoly but according to two courts they have abused that monopoly and have harmed the consumers. The trial is in the penalty phase right now. Ms will be punished for harming the consumers it remains to be seen weather that punishment is substantial or a slap on the wrist.
Burying your head in the sand and repeating "ms is not a monopoly" will not change the law, the federal court ruling, nor the appeals court ruling. All of the above state that MS is an abusive monopoly and will punish it for being one.
" How can you dare call MS software "monopolistic"?"
IIRC the technical definition of a monopoly is a bit over 70%. I doubt losing a hundred thousand desktops will drop MS share of the desktop market below 70%.
If somebody knows the actual number please post is so that people like danhaskett don't go around thinking that a monopoly is defined as a 100% market share.