USian here that took Swedish language classes in college. Since there's no English textbooks, we used a Swedish textbook which was apparently designed for Slavic immigrants to Sweden.
One of the stories was Serbian Guy getting a little sniffle at work. His boss orders him to the doctor, and the doctor orders him go home for a mandatory 2 week sick leave. Even though he's soon healthy, he has to stay home and get nagged by his wife.
Is that for real? Mandatory sick leave? (Note here in the US, people do get fired all the time for being sick, and at the lower end of the wage scale, you're lucky if you get a couple days of paid leave a year.)
The box would have been considered pretty high-end for an office machine: Dell P3-800 or something (might have been i815 if that matters). Still couldn't play Quake III.
I've also played UT on a PII-400 with an unacellerated RagePro (NT4) and it was OK for LAN play, although it had 128MB of RAM. Maybe the choppyness you noticed is swapping.
Have consumers, in net, been harmed by Microsoft's giving the browser away for free, bundled?
You haven't been keeping up with the case. The appeals court ruled that the bundling ("tieing") was not illegal. What was illegal was restrictive contracts and threats in the OEM and ISP markets, which at that time consisted of Netscape's primary distribution channels.
Remember the "Cutting off the air supply" remark made by a MS executive? -- he was talking about using MS's weight to remove Netscape's ability to distribute their product.
I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.
There's also the real problem that game companies are outpacing the market penetration for top end hardware. While you can do wonderful things with a GeForce 4 or whatever, it's a real question if there will be enough GF4 users to profitably sell games to.
Gone are the days when you could slap Doom or Quake on pretty much any old computer in your office and have a network shootemup. Requiring recent 3D hardware eliminates the vast majority of PCs in the real world.
Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example). Half-Life is another game friendly to low-end boxes. Not to mention SimCity, RR Tycoon, Sims, and other big sellers that didn't require much hardware-wise.
Not to mention that the average user probably finds the whole world of 3D card to be a mess of confusing brandnames, limited retail outlets, driver woes, hardware upgrades, and so on. It starts to become real work for something that's supposed to be fun.
I guess I'm being presumptuous in telling game companies how to run their businesses. Just that from what I've heard, it sounds like the PC game sales are in the dumps, and only half the problem is unoriginal game concepts. Maybe they should consider quitting chasing the l33t gamer crowd or techies like myself that find it fun to keep up with the gear, and get back to the broader market of people who just want to blow off some steam after work.
Yes, Netscape made a huge mistake in trying to sell popular software that ran on Windows
Oh please - Netscape's long term goal was to _replace_ Windows, not run on top of it. Andresson even foolishly came out and said so. ("poorly debugged collection of device drivers", I think the line was.)
I'm not saying that MS isn't pure evil or whatever, but there's no reason to play up Po' Wittle Netscape in this mess. They understood exactly what the stakes were (more so than most people here) and they were declaring victory years before the real battle even started.
The real "killed Netscape" culprit isn't Explorer, but Outlook
That's true, but not for the reasons you say.
Netscape never intended for the browser to be a primary revenue stream. They really existed to sell expensive "enterprise" server software to large corporations for exorbitant prices.
One of their plans was to sell a mail/calendar server setup that used Communicator as the client software. Microsoft (and IBM/Lotus) absolutely killed them in that market.
The other product that really stuck a dagger in their revenue stream was Apache.
Right, and making IE superior was not illegal, and neither was bundling it with the OS (appeals court ruling, correct me if that's wrong).
What they did do was go around and pay-off and arm-twist ISPs and OEMs to ship IE instead of Netscape. This was when those were ISPs were the primary channels for browser distribution. Even worse, they started doing this with IE 3.0, which was not superior to Netscape.
When MS plotted to "cut off their air supply", they were talking about destroying Netscape's distribution channels.
Hypothetically, MS could have poured tons of money into IE, out-engineered Netscape, and just sat back and waited for the users to come. That wasn't the course of action they chose, however.
I've just finished a project where we interfaced with the MS-SQL version of GoldMine to get customer records.
From what I can tell, there is a COM API but it's not really stable or fully intended for 3rd party developers. We decided to avoid a maintenance nightmare and not use it, and instead read the data out of the SQL tables.
Even though the thing is on MS-SQL, the database is pure flat file -- it looks exactly like the DBase tables I was looking at for similar sales tools 10 years ago. Given that it uses something called "BDE" (Borland Data Engine?), that's probably exactly what it is.
After that it was read-only access was straight forward -- just figure out the user-defined field mappings and you are there. Really the biggest problem was escaping out their phony primary key which uses every code-unfriendly character you can think of. And the fact that there is no clustered index so lookups are sloow. I haven't needed to add or update records yet - that might be more complex due to the fact that uses another goofy field called RECNO (?) as replication sequence. For that you might need to go to the API or their stored procs.
I don't think that Microsoft ever rewrote their browser completely from scratch after version 2.0 (which was Mosaic). Every version of IE since has been somewhat bug-compatible with previous versions.
Netscape literally started over from a blank emacs window when that wasn't necessary at all. Yeah, their layout engine was fucked. That didn't mean that they needed to rewrite their UI in javascript/XUL or rewrite the mailer (which still isn't feature equivalent to Messenger 4 after 4 years)
Why sell a $500 computer containing a $100 operating system, when you can sell a $400 computer with a free one?
Because in the real world, nothing comes for free.
You make a fundemental mistake. The support costs of a system far outweigh the operating system costs. If you reduce the MS OEM rate from $50 to $0 for Linux, but you double your support costs, you are now losing money!
The PC business is brutal to the margins, and if these guys could save money with Linux, they'd be all over it. The fact is they can't.
In fact one could argue that as long as Linux is a Unix-like expert user system, it will never be competitive with Windows in terms of support costs, except in large scale installations. That leaves MS in the catbird seat.
BTW, perhaps this culling of the herd in the mainstream PC market will have a positive effect on PC quality.
That's very optimistic. What we've seen over the last few years is that once rock-solid vendors like HP and Compaq have been reduced to producing low quality mystery crap. The fact is that there's little or no market for a 'quality' PC so cost-cutting reigns supreme and people buy disposible hardware and are consigned to bitching about system crashes and machines that aren't fundementally faster for the user than they were 10 years ago.
The nightmare situation is that you'll only have two PC choices in a couple years - Dell and a mystery meat white box. There's just no way a company with real engineering overhead can compete.
BTW, the PC industry brought this upon themselves. They set up a pathetic situation where they were only selling Megahertz and nothing else of value. So it shouldn't be a suprise that Intel and AMD are the only ones (along with Microsoft) who make any real profit off a computer.
The only real solution is to get back to the point where the market sees PCs as a real capital investment and not just a disposable bit of office suppply. That means 5-8 year purchasing cycles instead of 18-36 months. Maybe if they convince themselves that nobody really needs more than 2Ghz/512MB/a fast disk, this will come to pass, but I doubt it.
The GPL *needs* IP law in order to force people to release their source. Without that, it would just be a polite request.
Until sometime in the early 80s, when the law was amended, it was an open legal question if computer machine code was covered by the copyright law. Stallman and others in the FSF opposed that change in the law, and the GPL was devised afterward as a away to turn the intentions of the law against itself.
You are correct that the GPL relies on IP law, but it's inventors would prefer that would not be the case.
In addition, note that 99% of commercial software is not distributed under the terms of copyright law, but instead try to rely on a seperate contract (a click-thru or signed agreement). In the absense of copyright law, the GPL could easily be altered slightly be become a 'click-thru' licence (and you could argue that it alread sort of is a End User Licence Agreement, because it imposes some minor requirements on the end user as soon as they modify the software, irregardless of distribution.)
Custom software is a very small market when compared to commercial development.
Hmm. Maybe that's true in terms of revenue. But my understanding was that 80% of programmers were employed doing custom or vertical market stuff.
Don't forget that an enormous amount of custom software gets counted as "services" revenue for mainstream computer companies, Big5 firms, etc.
I don't know of any company that will budget to pay for custom programming of that type of software.
I don't know of any real world business or charity that runs using completely off-the-shelf software either. And the custom work usually costs an order of magintude more than the shrinkwrap. Think everything from SAP implementations to your typical crappy Access tracking app.
Excellent point! We see lots of people knee-jerking at the fact that Word is the de facto standard, but the fact is there is no dejure standard to replace it.
This is highlighted by the silly solution suggested by several slashdotters of adopting the Microsoft RTF format as a standard for interoperability. Not often you'll get a bunch of died-in-the-wool MS haters to promote a Microsoft format!
In fact, the only thing that comes close an open standard in this market is a bunch of CSS3 drafts over at the W3C, and I haven't heard about anyone who's promised to implement these, including open source projects.
The thing is, if you did have a Big Name Standards Body Word Processing Spec, there would be more than a snowball's chance in hell that the US Government would adopt it as a requirement. And the US Governement is Microsoft's biggest customer.
Since some people can read ROT-13 without machine assistance*, it probably does not qualify as "effective" as defined by the DMCA. The Skylarov (sp) thing was a little more complicated, involving a hardware device, but since they dropped charges, we'll never know for sure.
But you are absolutely correct that the DMCA's "effective" does not mean technically effective. Only that it's impossible to access the unprotected content through the normal operation of the device (there's no off switch).
* I met a former sigint guy that could solve the newspaper cryptoquip puzzle in about 30 seconds, and that's more complex than ROT-13. Someone like that would have been killer for Skylarov's defense.
I think that this is a great idea, but I don't see how it would be managed? Would the thrusted authorities sign the certificates for free or for a charge?
Such a system is hardly imaginary. Major browsers and mailers/newsreaders have supported X509 certificates for 5+ years now. Thwate gives out free certs (in your e-mail address only, not your real name), and Verisign charges $20 or so for individuals last I checked.
Problem is the "trusted authority" model (SMIME) is incompatible both techincally and philsophically with the PGP/GPG model (which relys on a 'web of trust' rather than a certificate authority.)
A few years ago I blew away Mandrake something and installed Solaris 7 x86 on an old machines I had around (that was on Sun's HCL).
The CDE install was certainly more responsive than the KDE v1 Mandrake had. The screen display was much crisper, and the graphics redrew faster with the Sun X server. And best of all -- Netscape was actually reasonably stable -- well, comparable to the Windows version at least.
It was a little unusual of a box (SCSI, Matrox Millenium, supported by Sun), but at the time Solaris was a much more reponsive and "better" desktop OS than Linux. Maybe "Slowaris" couldn't fork Apache processes as fast, but you won't know it as an end user.
The big problem with the product is that it caught no end of FUD -- from both the Linux crowd (who hated the [better] competition? and primarily have IDE and unsupported graphics like Nvidia) and from the Sun crowd (Sparc bigots, all of them, or well most of them).
" But what possible benefit could there be in letting it leak? "
What possible harm? Nearly all of the target customers won't see this thing until after the announcement, or until it shows up on the cover of Time a couple days later.
Dogging fanboys is not the only thing they worry about over at Apple. Nobody fucked up -- it's a well-executed PR blitz in action. (Plus, Jobs hasn't been on the cover of Time since NeXT launched.)
Besides, the fact they let this leak probably indicates that Jobs has bigger things up his sleeve (G5?).
Factual problems -- Microsoft did not "win", in fact they settled for $20M (link), which is a pretty good price if you consider that Mosaic was technologically obsolete by the time MS started using it (didn't support popular Netscapisms like tables and frames), and had less than a 10% marketshare at the time.
On top of that $20M, they spent many millions of dollars and a couple years developing IE into something that was actually competitive with Netscape, and for the most part no longer resembled Mosaic.
I do agree that they probably _tried_ to steal Mosaic, but they didn't get away with it, and nor was the deal essential to IE's eventual market dominiation. It's also sad that a company with $4B/year revenue would try to dick over some doomed-to-failure pipsqueaks like Spyglass.
Re:delightful.....yes, it is(?)
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1
Wasn't Motorola spending 100M$ to retrofit a factory to make Mac clones?
Motorola's _original_ plan with the PowerPC was to compete with Intel in the business desktop market by selling PPC workstations running Windows NT. This was hatched before Apple even signed up for PPC.
Their Mac clone licence came rather late, after businesses showed no interest in moving from Intel. (Primarily because the PPro came out, and to everyone's suprise, kicked ass.) So, you can't blame Apple entirely for Moto's very poor business decisions.
Yes, of course Congress would never misname a bill, or sully the laws of the "Digital Millenium" with stinky old analog requirements. Try googling, and verify that you are incorrect.
(It's also illegal to sell a device specifically to bypass Macrovision. GoVideo pretty much had to remove their dual VHS deck units from the market because they became unsable for commercial content, and the $20 'video enhancer' boxes have disappeared from radio shack. Of course, common solutions still exist.)
Re:So what ASCII value will the Euro be?
on
The Euro
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· Score: 1
Interesting, the 8851-1 chart I have has nothing for 128. The generic currency sign, is at 164 (¤). I wonder if core10k is using an old version of Win95 or something.
(You might need to enlarge your font to see it properly -- a circle with spokes sticking out.)
Slashdot Mirror
USian here that took Swedish language classes in college. Since there's no English textbooks, we used a Swedish textbook which was apparently designed for Slavic immigrants to Sweden.
One of the stories was Serbian Guy getting a little sniffle at work. His boss orders him to the doctor, and the doctor orders him go home for a mandatory 2 week sick leave. Even though he's soon healthy, he has to stay home and get nagged by his wife.
Is that for real? Mandatory sick leave? (Note here in the US, people do get fired all the time for being sick, and at the lower end of the wage scale, you're lucky if you get a couple days of paid leave a year.)
The box would have been considered pretty high-end for an office machine: Dell P3-800 or something (might have been i815 if that matters). Still couldn't play Quake III.
I've also played UT on a PII-400 with an unacellerated RagePro (NT4) and it was OK for LAN play, although it had 128MB of RAM. Maybe the choppyness you noticed is swapping.
Have consumers, in net, been harmed by Microsoft's giving the browser away for free, bundled?
You haven't been keeping up with the case. The appeals court ruled that the bundling ("tieing") was not illegal. What was illegal was restrictive contracts and threats in the OEM and ISP markets, which at that time consisted of Netscape's primary distribution channels.
Remember the "Cutting off the air supply" remark made by a MS executive? -- he was talking about using MS's weight to remove Netscape's ability to distribute their product.
I'm hoping that we hit a plateau in the graphics card ability, as once that is hit, then the game makers will turn back to the game since they can no longer optimize the pretty-ness of the game itself.
There's also the real problem that game companies are outpacing the market penetration for top end hardware. While you can do wonderful things with a GeForce 4 or whatever, it's a real question if there will be enough GF4 users to profitably sell games to.
Gone are the days when you could slap Doom or Quake on pretty much any old computer in your office and have a network shootemup. Requiring recent 3D hardware eliminates the vast majority of PCs in the real world.
Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example). Half-Life is another game friendly to low-end boxes. Not to mention SimCity, RR Tycoon, Sims, and other big sellers that didn't require much hardware-wise.
Not to mention that the average user probably finds the whole world of 3D card to be a mess of confusing brandnames, limited retail outlets, driver woes, hardware upgrades, and so on. It starts to become real work for something that's supposed to be fun.
I guess I'm being presumptuous in telling game companies how to run their businesses. Just that from what I've heard, it sounds like the PC game sales are in the dumps, and only half the problem is unoriginal game concepts. Maybe they should consider quitting chasing the l33t gamer crowd or techies like myself that find it fun to keep up with the gear, and get back to the broader market of people who just want to blow off some steam after work.
NetBEUI -- it it wasn't being killed at the moment, it would be the perfect protocol for auto-configuring peripherals over Ethernet.
Surely you know the difference between a year ago and 1994 to 96.
All the court documents are online, feel free to read them.
Yes, Netscape made a huge mistake in trying to sell popular software that ran on Windows
Oh please - Netscape's long term goal was to _replace_ Windows, not run on top of it. Andresson even foolishly came out and said so. ("poorly debugged collection of device drivers", I think the line was.)
I'm not saying that MS isn't pure evil or whatever, but there's no reason to play up Po' Wittle Netscape in this mess. They understood exactly what the stakes were (more so than most people here) and they were declaring victory years before the real battle even started.
The real "killed Netscape" culprit isn't Explorer, but Outlook
That's true, but not for the reasons you say.
Netscape never intended for the browser to be a primary revenue stream. They really existed to sell expensive "enterprise" server software to large corporations for exorbitant prices.
One of their plans was to sell a mail/calendar server setup that used Communicator as the client software. Microsoft (and IBM/Lotus) absolutely killed them in that market.
The other product that really stuck a dagger in their revenue stream was Apache.
Right, and making IE superior was not illegal, and neither was bundling it with the OS (appeals court ruling, correct me if that's wrong).
What they did do was go around and pay-off and arm-twist ISPs and OEMs to ship IE instead of Netscape. This was when those were ISPs were the primary channels for browser distribution. Even worse, they started doing this with IE 3.0, which was not superior to Netscape.
When MS plotted to "cut off their air supply", they were talking about destroying Netscape's distribution channels.
Hypothetically, MS could have poured tons of money into IE, out-engineered Netscape, and just sat back and waited for the users to come. That wasn't the course of action they chose, however.
I've just finished a project where we interfaced with the MS-SQL version of GoldMine to get customer records.
From what I can tell, there is a COM API but it's not really stable or fully intended for 3rd party developers. We decided to avoid a maintenance nightmare and not use it, and instead read the data out of the SQL tables.
Even though the thing is on MS-SQL, the database is pure flat file -- it looks exactly like the DBase tables I was looking at for similar sales tools 10 years ago. Given that it uses something called "BDE" (Borland Data Engine?), that's probably exactly what it is.
After that it was read-only access was straight forward -- just figure out the user-defined field mappings and you are there. Really the biggest problem was escaping out their phony primary key which uses every code-unfriendly character you can think of. And the fact that there is no clustered index so lookups are sloow. I haven't needed to add or update records yet - that might be more complex due to the fact that uses another goofy field called RECNO (?) as replication sequence. For that you might need to go to the API or their stored procs.
I don't think that Microsoft ever rewrote their browser completely from scratch after version 2.0 (which was Mosaic). Every version of IE since has been somewhat bug-compatible with previous versions.
Netscape literally started over from a blank emacs window when that wasn't necessary at all. Yeah, their layout engine was fucked. That didn't mean that they needed to rewrite their UI in javascript/XUL or rewrite the mailer (which still isn't feature equivalent to Messenger 4 after 4 years)
Good point about the component profits.
Why sell a $500 computer containing a $100 operating system, when you can sell a $400 computer with a free one?
Because in the real world, nothing comes for free.
You make a fundemental mistake. The support costs of a system far outweigh the operating system costs. If you reduce the MS OEM rate from $50 to $0 for Linux, but you double your support costs, you are now losing money!
The PC business is brutal to the margins, and if these guys could save money with Linux, they'd be all over it. The fact is they can't.
In fact one could argue that as long as Linux is a Unix-like expert user system, it will never be competitive with Windows in terms of support costs, except in large scale installations. That leaves MS in the catbird seat.
BTW, perhaps this culling of the herd in the mainstream PC market will have a positive effect on PC quality.
That's very optimistic. What we've seen over the last few years is that once rock-solid vendors like HP and Compaq have been reduced to producing low quality mystery crap. The fact is that there's little or no market for a 'quality' PC so cost-cutting reigns supreme and people buy disposible hardware and are consigned to bitching about system crashes and machines that aren't fundementally faster for the user than they were 10 years ago.
The nightmare situation is that you'll only have two PC choices in a couple years - Dell and a mystery meat white box. There's just no way a company with real engineering overhead can compete.
BTW, the PC industry brought this upon themselves. They set up a pathetic situation where they were only selling Megahertz and nothing else of value. So it shouldn't be a suprise that Intel and AMD are the only ones (along with Microsoft) who make any real profit off a computer.
The only real solution is to get back to the point where the market sees PCs as a real capital investment and not just a disposable bit of office suppply. That means 5-8 year purchasing cycles instead of 18-36 months. Maybe if they convince themselves that nobody really needs more than 2Ghz/512MB/a fast disk, this will come to pass, but I doubt it.
The GPL *needs* IP law in order to force people to release their source. Without that, it would just be a polite request.
Until sometime in the early 80s, when the law was amended, it was an open legal question if computer machine code was covered by the copyright law. Stallman and others in the FSF opposed that change in the law, and the GPL was devised afterward as a away to turn the intentions of the law against itself.
You are correct that the GPL relies on IP law, but it's inventors would prefer that would not be the case.
In addition, note that 99% of commercial software is not distributed under the terms of copyright law, but instead try to rely on a seperate contract (a click-thru or signed agreement). In the absense of copyright law, the GPL could easily be altered slightly be become a 'click-thru' licence (and you could argue that it alread sort of is a End User Licence Agreement, because it imposes some minor requirements on the end user as soon as they modify the software, irregardless of distribution.)
Custom software is a very small market when compared to commercial development.
Hmm. Maybe that's true in terms of revenue. But my understanding was that 80% of programmers were employed doing custom or vertical market stuff.
Don't forget that an enormous amount of custom software gets counted as "services" revenue for mainstream computer companies, Big5 firms, etc.
I don't know of any company that will budget to pay for custom programming of that type of software.
I don't know of any real world business or charity that runs using completely off-the-shelf software either. And the custom work usually costs an order of magintude more than the shrinkwrap. Think everything from SAP implementations to your typical crappy Access tracking app.
Excellent point! We see lots of people knee-jerking at the fact that Word is the de facto standard, but the fact is there is no dejure standard to replace it.
This is highlighted by the silly solution suggested by several slashdotters of adopting the Microsoft RTF format as a standard for interoperability. Not often you'll get a bunch of died-in-the-wool MS haters to promote a Microsoft format!
In fact, the only thing that comes close an open standard in this market is a bunch of CSS3 drafts over at the W3C, and I haven't heard about anyone who's promised to implement these, including open source projects.
The thing is, if you did have a Big Name Standards Body Word Processing Spec, there would be more than a snowball's chance in hell that the US Government would adopt it as a requirement. And the US Governement is Microsoft's biggest customer.
Since some people can read ROT-13 without machine assistance*, it probably does not qualify as "effective" as defined by the DMCA. The Skylarov (sp) thing was a little more complicated, involving a hardware device, but since they dropped charges, we'll never know for sure.
But you are absolutely correct that the DMCA's "effective" does not mean technically effective. Only that it's impossible to access the unprotected content through the normal operation of the device (there's no off switch).
* I met a former sigint guy that could solve the newspaper cryptoquip puzzle in about 30 seconds, and that's more complex than ROT-13. Someone like that would have been killer for Skylarov's defense.
I think that this is a great idea, but I don't see how it would be managed? Would the thrusted authorities sign the certificates for free or for a charge?
Such a system is hardly imaginary. Major browsers and mailers/newsreaders have supported X509 certificates for 5+ years now. Thwate gives out free certs (in your e-mail address only, not your real name), and Verisign charges $20 or so for individuals last I checked.
Problem is the "trusted authority" model (SMIME) is incompatible both techincally and philsophically with the PGP/GPG model (which relys on a 'web of trust' rather than a certificate authority.)
My brief experience with Solaris x86:
A few years ago I blew away Mandrake something and installed Solaris 7 x86 on an old machines I had around (that was on Sun's HCL).
The CDE install was certainly more responsive than the KDE v1 Mandrake had. The screen display was much crisper, and the graphics redrew faster with the Sun X server. And best of all -- Netscape was actually reasonably stable -- well, comparable to the Windows version at least.
It was a little unusual of a box (SCSI, Matrox Millenium, supported by Sun), but at the time Solaris was a much more reponsive and "better" desktop OS than Linux. Maybe "Slowaris" couldn't fork Apache processes as fast, but you won't know it as an end user.
The big problem with the product is that it caught no end of FUD -- from both the Linux crowd (who hated the [better] competition? and primarily have IDE and unsupported graphics like Nvidia) and from the Sun crowd (Sparc bigots, all of them, or well most of them).
" But what possible benefit could there be in letting it leak? "
What possible harm? Nearly all of the target customers won't see this thing until after the announcement, or until it shows up on the cover of Time a couple days later.
Dogging fanboys is not the only thing they worry about over at Apple. Nobody fucked up -- it's a well-executed PR blitz in action. (Plus, Jobs hasn't been on the cover of Time since NeXT launched.)
Besides, the fact they let this leak probably indicates that Jobs has bigger things up his sleeve (G5?).
Factual problems -- Microsoft did not "win", in fact they settled for $20M (link), which is a pretty good price if you consider that Mosaic was technologically obsolete by the time MS started using it (didn't support popular Netscapisms like tables and frames), and had less than a 10% marketshare at the time.
On top of that $20M, they spent many millions of dollars and a couple years developing IE into something that was actually competitive with Netscape, and for the most part no longer resembled Mosaic.
I do agree that they probably _tried_ to steal Mosaic, but they didn't get away with it, and nor was the deal essential to IE's eventual market dominiation. It's also sad that a company with $4B/year revenue would try to dick over some doomed-to-failure pipsqueaks like Spyglass.
Wasn't Motorola spending 100M$ to retrofit a factory to make Mac clones?
Motorola's _original_ plan with the PowerPC was to compete with Intel in the business desktop market by selling PPC workstations running Windows NT. This was hatched before Apple even signed up for PPC.
Their Mac clone licence came rather late, after businesses showed no interest in moving from Intel. (Primarily because the PPro came out, and to everyone's suprise, kicked ass.) So, you can't blame Apple entirely for Moto's very poor business decisions.
Yes, of course Congress would never misname a bill, or sully the laws of the "Digital Millenium" with stinky old analog requirements. Try googling, and verify that you are incorrect.
(It's also illegal to sell a device specifically to bypass Macrovision. GoVideo pretty much had to remove their dual VHS deck units from the market because they became unsable for commercial content, and the $20 'video enhancer' boxes have disappeared from radio shack. Of course, common solutions still exist.)
CNet says they did
Interesting, the 8851-1 chart I have has nothing for 128. The generic currency sign, is at 164 (¤). I wonder if core10k is using an old version of Win95 or something.
(You might need to enlarge your font to see it properly -- a circle with spokes sticking out.)