They have a vested interest in controlling the OS. Their anticompetitive nature is affirmed in the illogical behavior you mentioned.
Selling software to all platforms only makes sense from the application side of the Microsoft business not from the operating system side. If they started porting "killer apps" to Linux that would have a big simulative effect on the sale of Linux and they would lose their monopoly in that area. If they don't have a monopoly operating system they lose the ability to tweak that system to give themselves an unfair advantage in the software area of their business.
It's a pretty classic case of abusing monopoly power in order to maintain that monopoly and to extend power into other areas. Quite illegal and quite "ignored / under reacted to" by our judicial branch of government.
"This is clearly, yet again, a story that is more about MSFT bashing than about anything real."
Any time a corporation claims it has the right to license a technology the implication is that they own part or all of that technology.
Microsoft has been at the receiving end of bashing. That doesn't mean that they haven't deserved it. All too often they have shown themselves to be underhanded, self serving corporate slime-balls. It's just a fact.
IANAL but I don't think I could get away with implement a twenty year old protocol in one of my applications and then offer licenses to that protocol as if I actually had rights to the protocol itself.
A license is an agreement between parties. One party giving the other certain rights that almost always come with restrictions. But without the agreement the second party has no use rights at all.
Clearly Microsoft has some reason for doing this. We can only guess what that reason is but if we factor in Microsoft's past behavior we can make an educated guess that its about self promotion. Perhaps easing into a new strategy to stop Open Source software. A new future FUD campaign? Future litigation against financially defenseless Open Source projects?
Who knows? But of one thing I am fairly sure; whatever their reasons, ultimately it will be bad for Linux and other Open Source projects.
"Explaining why the lab sponsored the study, AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams said, "If we don't turn over stones, we don't know if we have missed something."
Why limit spending the taxpayer's money on this alone? The possibilities are limitless if you're going to turn over every stone.
May I suggest a study of the destructive power of orgazmic energy? Just get a whole bunch of guys to form a big circle and think evil thoughts while jerking off...
"It was a war people! The purpose of war is to KILL PEOPLE"
It is not the purpose of a war to kill civilians. And I think the point of the article is that so many have died and for what? We were told to rid Iraq of WMD.
Well from the beginning I spoke out against this immoral preemptive strike. This was and is a blood for votes war and I don't think we should reward a mental midget for doing such an evil thing.
Over 100,000 people are dead and all Bush can say is the world is better off without Saddam. The problem with that is it marginalizes the value of all who died. Including over 1,000 Americans. The world is NOT better off. Over 100,000 dead and for what? To kick some asshole out of his job. He was already contained. Bush can't even admit that he may have made a mistake. A real cowboy's cowboy. These were REAL PEOPLE, not just numbers on a piece of paper.
I don't think we can be sure how it will effect the voting. Some people will say "oh, he put out the tape to influence the election because he wants Kerry to win." Others will say "No, he wants Bush to be re-elected because the Iraq fiasco has been the greatest recruiting tool EVER and this tape will scare people into voting for Bush"
Personally, I think he put the tape own this close to the elections to raise his own stature in the Museum world without much though about our elections.
"In otherwords, Linux can be as cheap as can be, but if it doesn't "integrate" well into Microsoft infrastructure, it will be stuck on the margins forever."
I'm not sure if Linux will need to play Microsoft's game for long. It is just starting to take on a life of its own. If Microsoft continues to play dirty, the day will come when the Open Source world will flip Microsoft the bird and just do its own thing.
Nobody said that. My point is that light travels at 186000 miles per second and at the speed the computers clock at no days the upper limit has amost been reached.
If computers are going to continue to get faster it isn't going to be by increasing clock speed much more. Other ways are going to have to be found and when we run out of other ways...
So, you're a "informed scientist" that doesn't believe in global warming are ya?
Nice Sig by the way...
Do you have ESP? [whohasesp.com]
You don't believe in global warming but you do believe in ESP?? Guess there must be more supporting evidence for ESP than the global warming thing.... but then I'm just one of those "fruitcakes" you well informed scientists are talking about...
The world needs the ability to communicate and transfer information. Currently Microsoft is doing everything possible to ensure that Linux will not be able to do that with Microsoft products. This forces a company to choose between a better product and the ability to share its data. It's what we call "lock in" and Microsoft uses its monopoly weight to artificially keep it's customer's locked into their products.
"Oh, and someone will now say how the competitors remark meant that MS is anticompetitive, using their monopoly to blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda."
And you think this is not true??
The fact that Microsofts OS is being run on over 90% of the home computer's in the world does afford the company some bit of leverage that it DOES ABUSE.
The sad FACT is that hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and IBM still have a hard time selling PCs that do not come with a Microsoft OS. This is not what I or most reasonable people are gripping about. This is not illegal. What is illegal is to use this fact in a way that protects their monopoly by disrupting normal market forces that would allow better products to gain market share.
Example: With the fierce competition, the margin of profit is very low on new PCs. Just a few dollars can make the difference of a vendor succeeding or being driven out of business. In comes Microsoft. It sees a vendor selling hardware and giving their customers a choice of either Windows or Linux.
"A choice!!" Screams Microsoft. "We can't have that!"
So they tell the vendor that unless they stop giving the customer the option of buying their computer's with Linux the company will have to pay Microsoft more for the right to sell the computers with a Microsoft OS. The difference would have to be passed on to the consumer and the difference is enough that the company would no longer be competitive.
Sure, the company has a choice but as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, if they make that choice the will go out of business. So to say that they have a viable choice is truly disingenuous.
So in comes the DOJ to save the day.
"You can't do that! You may add a charge onto the cost of companies offering another OS." They yell at Microsoft.
"Okay, we won't." says Microsoft. And soon afterwards they tell all vendors that the price of the OS has gone up but they'll give discounts to any vendor who only sells Microsoft Oses. Same effect, same anti-competitive practice but now they're not technically adding an extra charge to companies who support Linux.
Oh, and this is just one small example. Microsoft has loads of dirty tricks in its bag. It would take many, many pages to document them all!
Bush and his Administration don't lie, exactly. They just grossly misrepresent the facts in order to get whatever they want. They knew that there was strong evidence that those aluminum tubes were NOT for a nuclear program. But somebody told them that the tubes maybe could be used in a nuclear program and so they put their spin on it. Not a lie, just the next best thing.
They do this with other things as well. They have been trying to tie Iraq to terrorism for a long time. They have to or Bush would be in danger of having to admit a mistake and his cowboy ego won't allow that. The logic goes that the world is better off without Saddam. Hard to argue against that. Or is it? You see, the flaw in that statement is that it only looks at half the equation. It doesn't take into account that in the balance there are people dead. A lot of people dead. There are over 1,000 American families that have been shattered and who knows how many Iraq citizens. 12,000 - 15, 000 I believe. These were real people too. It's easier if we just think of them as statistics or as "the enemy." So when Bush says that the world is better off with out Saddam I have to say really? Is the world better off with over 1,000 American families destroyed and over 15,000 Iraqi families destroyed? Was kicking this admittedly evil dictator who was completely contained out of his job worth the cost in lives and suffering? I have always been against this war. I said it before the war started and I'll say it now: This is a blood for votes war. Bush is an evil little mental midget who is a disgrace to the American Presidency. Even at the first debate he tried to justify going into Iraq by saying that "We were attacked." Again grossly spinning and twisting the truth to justify his agenda! Yes, we were attacked. NO, NO, NO we were not attacked by Iraq and the attack that we suffered was in NO WAY justification to preemptively attack another nation. Get it Mr. Bush? Yeah, you get it. You have got it all along but you don't care. He's as phony as a six dollar bill.
Personally, I like the idea of having a shield that would keep us safe from incoming missiles. However, that statement makes the assumption that the system works. I believe that with enough research and development it could.
There is however a flaw. If I have a system that can knock down 10 missiles that is an incentive for my enemy to produce 11 + missiles. So if we get ourselves into another cold war these systems could result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It might protect us from a terrorist organization launching a missile in the unlikely event that they could get one. The real threat, however, is that a terrorist group might get the materials they need to construct a small nuclear devise and then sneak it into one of our poorly guarded sea ports. They could place it in a cargo ship heading to whichever major port city they wanted to destroy.
So we've got to make some tough decisions. Where would our money better spent?
Well sure, with the new era of preemptive strikes it makes perfect sense. We should blast anything that we think may or may not be tied to terrorism. Hell, I say the next time those Spaceship one bastards lift off we blast them....
They may have weapons of mass destruction or be thinking about getting weapons of mass destruction or know someone who may be thinking about getting weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, even if they don't and aren't the world would obviously be a better place without them.
We wouldn't even have to send more than a thousand American soldiers to there deaths to do it. And even if we did we could just state that the world is a better place without Spaceship one and just not mention the fact that the world is also without all those who gave there lives to destroy this threat to the free corporate world.
Just one tactical nuke and that group of possible terrorist advocates could eradicated from our planet which would either make us safer or not! I say we go for it!
I think it's far too late in the game for what will simply be perceived as more FUD.
I was at the Sybase Tech Wave conference that was held near Orlando Florida in August. The conference was buzzing with Linux talk. A Sybase engineer told me that last year people were just talking about Linux but this year they are switching to it.
I was talking to one employee from Boeing who told me that they had switched a 32 processor box running UNIX with an 8 processor box running Linux. They saved a fortune and the Linux box out performed the older Unix box.
Groklaw's article quotes George Coloney as saying:
"The operating system is not about world peace and the charitable work of the world's great programmers. It's like every other operating system ever created: It's about the foibles, greed, mistakes and engineering prowess (or lack thereof) of one vendor -- in this case, Red Hat."
He clearly does not understand the nature of Linux and off handidy admits that SUN is about "greed."
It's too late for FUD which means we should brace ourselves for more SCO like actions. Let's not forget that the SCO thing got started with the help of Microsoft and now SUN is in the same bed.
So, if I want to distribute documents critical of the government I must give the government my email address making it possible to track me down and hurt me? I smell a constitutional issue.
Slashdot Mirror
"It behaves like a cockroach. It smells like a cockroach. It is accepted by other cockroaches. But it is not a cockroach."
Oh God! I just stomped on my $1,200 Robo-Roach!! Arrrgggghhh!
They have a vested interest in controlling the OS. Their anticompetitive nature is affirmed in the illogical behavior you mentioned.
Selling software to all platforms only makes sense from the application side of the Microsoft business not from the operating system side. If they started porting "killer apps" to Linux that would have a big simulative effect on the sale of Linux and they would lose their monopoly in that area. If they don't have a monopoly operating system they lose the ability to tweak that system to give themselves an unfair advantage in the software area of their business.
It's a pretty classic case of abusing monopoly power in order to maintain that monopoly and to extend power into other areas. Quite illegal and quite "ignored / under reacted to" by our judicial branch of government.
"This is clearly, yet again, a story that is more about MSFT bashing than about anything real."
Any time a corporation claims it has the right to license a technology the implication is that they own part or all of that technology.
Microsoft has been at the receiving end of bashing. That doesn't mean that they haven't deserved it. All too often they have shown themselves to be underhanded, self serving corporate slime-balls. It's just a fact.
IANAL but I don't think I could get away with implement a twenty year old protocol in one of my applications and then offer licenses to that protocol as if I actually had rights to the protocol itself.
A license is an agreement between parties. One party giving the other certain rights that almost always come with restrictions. But without the agreement the second party has no use rights at all.
Clearly Microsoft has some reason for doing this. We can only guess what that reason is but if we factor in Microsoft's past behavior we can make an educated guess that its about self promotion. Perhaps easing into a new strategy to stop Open Source software. A new future FUD campaign? Future litigation against financially defenseless Open Source projects?
Who knows? But of one thing I am fairly sure; whatever their reasons, ultimately it will be bad for Linux and other Open Source projects.
"Explaining why the lab sponsored the study, AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams said, "If we don't turn over stones, we don't know if we have missed something."
Why limit spending the taxpayer's money on this alone? The possibilities are limitless if you're going to turn over every stone.
May I suggest a study of the destructive power of orgazmic energy? Just get a whole bunch of guys to form a big circle and think evil thoughts while jerking off...
" Can you tell me a time in history when it was not the purpose of war to kill civilians?"
Any war since the adoption of the Geneva Convention. But like so many things, it looks nice on paper but doesn't ever seem to pan out in real life.
I do, however, expect that my country will try to do the right thing. Looks good on paper anyway.
"It was a war people! The purpose of war is to KILL PEOPLE"
It is not the purpose of a war to kill civilians. And I think the point of the article is that so many have died and for what? We were told to rid Iraq of WMD.
Well from the beginning I spoke out against this immoral preemptive strike. This was and is a blood for votes war and I don't think we should reward a mental midget for doing such an evil thing.
Over 100,000 people are dead and all Bush can say is the world is better off without Saddam. The problem with that is it marginalizes the value of all who died. Including over 1,000 Americans. The world is NOT better off. Over 100,000 dead and for what? To kick some asshole out of his job. He was already contained. Bush can't even admit that he may have made a mistake. A real cowboy's cowboy. These were REAL PEOPLE, not just numbers on a piece of paper.
I don't think we can be sure how it will effect the voting. Some people will say "oh, he put out the tape to influence the election because he wants Kerry to win." Others will say "No, he wants Bush to be re-elected because the Iraq fiasco has been the greatest recruiting tool EVER and this tape will scare people into voting for Bush"
Personally, I think he put the tape own this close to the elections to raise his own stature in the Museum world without much though about our elections.
"In otherwords, Linux can be as cheap as can be, but if it doesn't "integrate" well into Microsoft infrastructure, it will be stuck on the margins forever."
I'm not sure if Linux will need to play Microsoft's game for long. It is just starting to take on a life of its own. If Microsoft continues to play dirty, the day will come when the Open Source world will flip Microsoft the bird and just do its own thing.
Wow that's more info than I get from a whois lookup...
How the hell do you do that?
The question begging to be asked is why is this site still alive?
/. effect!
heh, maybe it won't be for long with the
You are correct. Gates was a programmer... A mediocre programmer at best however.
It is sad that usually the path to riches is one of exploiting other people's talent.
Nobody said that. My point is that light travels at 186000 miles per second and at the speed the computers clock at no days the upper limit has amost been reached.
If computers are going to continue to get faster it isn't going to be by increasing clock speed much more. Other ways are going to have to be found and when we run out of other ways...
It seems to me that there has got to be maximum rate at which we can push the clock.
I have a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4. How far can light travel in one clock cycle at that speed?
186000 miles / 3.2 billion is about 3.7 inches isn't it?
Come on... This is Oct 12th not April 1st!
"These companies have expressly designed their businesses to avoid all legal liability..."
In other words, they're staying within the law... Oh how dare they...
So, you're a "informed scientist" that doesn't believe in global warming are ya?
Nice Sig by the way...
Do you have ESP? [whohasesp.com]
You don't believe in global warming but you do believe in ESP?? Guess there must be more supporting evidence for ESP than the global warming thing.... but then I'm just one of those "fruitcakes" you well informed scientists are talking about...
It isn't that simple.
The world needs the ability to communicate and transfer information. Currently Microsoft is doing everything possible to ensure that Linux will not be able to do that with Microsoft products. This forces a company to choose between a better product and the ability to share its data. It's what we call "lock in" and Microsoft uses its monopoly weight to artificially keep it's customer's locked into their products.
"Oh, and someone will now say how the competitors remark meant that MS is anticompetitive, using their monopoly to blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda."
And you think this is not true??
The fact that Microsofts OS is being run on over 90% of the home computer's in the world does afford the company some bit of leverage that it DOES ABUSE.
The sad FACT is that hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and IBM still have a hard time selling PCs that do not come with a Microsoft OS. This is not what I or most reasonable people are gripping about. This is not illegal. What is illegal is to use this fact in a way that protects their monopoly by disrupting normal market forces that would allow better products to gain market share.
Example: With the fierce competition, the margin of profit is very low on new PCs. Just a few dollars can make the difference of a vendor succeeding or being driven out of business. In comes Microsoft. It sees a vendor selling hardware and giving their customers a choice of either Windows or Linux.
"A choice!!" Screams Microsoft. "We can't have that!"
So they tell the vendor that unless they stop giving the customer the option of buying their computer's with Linux the company will have to pay Microsoft more for the right to sell the computers with a Microsoft OS. The difference would have to be passed on to the consumer and the difference is enough that the company would no longer be competitive.
Sure, the company has a choice but as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, if they make that choice the will go out of business. So to say that they have a viable choice is truly disingenuous.
So in comes the DOJ to save the day.
"You can't do that! You may add a charge onto the cost of companies offering another OS." They yell at Microsoft.
"Okay, we won't." says Microsoft. And soon afterwards they tell all vendors that the price of the OS has gone up but they'll give discounts to any vendor who only sells Microsoft Oses. Same effect, same anti-competitive practice but now they're not technically adding an extra charge to companies who support Linux.
Oh, and this is just one small example. Microsoft has loads of dirty tricks in its bag. It would take many, many pages to document them all!
Bush and his Administration don't lie, exactly. They just grossly misrepresent the facts in order to get whatever they want. They knew that there was strong evidence that those aluminum tubes were NOT for a nuclear program. But somebody told them that the tubes maybe could be used in a nuclear program and so they put their spin on it. Not a lie, just the next best thing.
They do this with other things as well. They have been trying to tie Iraq to terrorism for a long time. They have to or Bush would be in danger of having to admit a mistake and his cowboy ego won't allow that. The logic goes that the world is better off without Saddam. Hard to argue against that. Or is it? You see, the flaw in that statement is that it only looks at half the equation. It doesn't take into account that in the balance there are people dead. A lot of people dead. There are over 1,000 American families that have been shattered and who knows how many Iraq citizens. 12,000 - 15, 000 I believe. These were real people too. It's easier if we just think of them as statistics or as "the enemy." So when Bush says that the world is better off with out Saddam I have to say really? Is the world better off with over 1,000 American families destroyed and over 15,000 Iraqi families destroyed? Was kicking this admittedly evil dictator who was completely contained out of his job worth the cost in lives and suffering? I have always been against this war. I said it before the war started and I'll say it now: This is a blood for votes war. Bush is an evil little mental midget who is a disgrace to the American Presidency. Even at the first debate he tried to justify going into Iraq by saying that "We were attacked." Again grossly spinning and twisting the truth to justify his agenda! Yes, we were attacked. NO, NO, NO we were not attacked by Iraq and the attack that we suffered was in NO WAY justification to preemptively attack another nation. Get it Mr. Bush? Yeah, you get it. You have got it all along but you don't care. He's as phony as a six dollar bill.
Personally, I like the idea of having a shield that would keep us safe from incoming missiles. However, that statement makes the assumption that the system works. I believe that with enough research and development it could.
There is however a flaw. If I have a system that can knock down 10 missiles that is an incentive for my enemy to produce 11 + missiles. So if we get ourselves into another cold war these systems could result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
It might protect us from a terrorist organization launching a missile in the unlikely event that they could get one. The real threat, however, is that a terrorist group might get the materials they need to construct a small nuclear devise and then sneak it into one of our poorly guarded sea ports. They could place it in a cargo ship heading to whichever major port city they wanted to destroy.
So we've got to make some tough decisions. Where would our money better spent?
Well sure, with the new era of preemptive strikes it makes perfect sense. We should blast anything that we think may or may not be tied to terrorism. Hell, I say the next time those Spaceship one bastards lift off we blast them....
They may have weapons of mass destruction or be thinking about getting weapons of mass destruction or know someone who may be thinking about getting weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, even if they don't and aren't the world would obviously be a better place without them.
We wouldn't even have to send more than a thousand American soldiers to there deaths to do it. And even if we did we could just state that the world is a better place without Spaceship one and just not mention the fact that the world is also without all those who gave there lives to destroy this threat to the free corporate world.
Just one tactical nuke and that group of possible terrorist advocates could eradicated from our planet which would either make us safer or not! I say we go for it!
I think it's far too late in the game for what will simply be perceived as more FUD.
I was at the Sybase Tech Wave conference that was held near Orlando Florida in August. The conference was buzzing with Linux talk. A Sybase engineer told me that last year people were just talking about Linux but this year they are switching to it.
I was talking to one employee from Boeing who told me that they had switched a 32 processor box running UNIX with an 8 processor box running Linux. They saved a fortune and the Linux box out performed the older Unix box.
Groklaw's article quotes George Coloney as saying:
"The operating system is not about world peace and the charitable work of the world's great programmers. It's like every other operating system ever created: It's about the foibles, greed, mistakes and engineering prowess (or lack thereof) of one vendor -- in this case, Red Hat."
He clearly does not understand the nature of Linux and off handidy admits that SUN is about "greed."
It's too late for FUD which means we should brace ourselves for more SCO like actions. Let's not forget that the SCO thing got started with the help of Microsoft and now SUN is in the same bed.
And the level 8 video card of today would be the level 5 of tomorrow...
So, if I want to distribute documents critical of the government I must give the government my email address making it possible to track me down and hurt me? I smell a constitutional issue.
Windows NT has a disclaimer in the license agreement stating that it should not be used in critical job roles like nuclear reactor control, etc.
Maybe they need to update the list. I would suggest everything except their Mine Sweep game.