It's pretty much a given that Mac OS X and Mac OS X -native apps would be pretty straightforward to port to Intel. If Apple started building custom x86 based computers, they would have to build some kind of emulation only for the 'Carbon' and 'Classic' apps, which would mean that there would be much less PowerPC code around than 68k code during the recent transition.
Moreover, as the bulk of the lower-end PowerPC processors from Motorola and IBM are targeted at the embedded market, they cost next to nothing, *including* support circuitry. Apple could just invest $50 per box to have low end but emulation-beating PowerPC hardware in their x86 boxes.
Personally, I don't see Apple going for x86, but it is a possibility they like to play with from time to time to keep Motorola on its toes.
Perhaps unlike anyone else around here, I don't see that the PowerPC instruction set has lost the performance war, just look at the powerpc isa based Power4. (Yes, it really is based on the powerpc isa, unlike the Power3 series)
Apple should switch Motorola for IBM, not for Intel or AMD.
This, I have to say, is a novel concept; paying a middle man when there (technically) isn't one.
If Alice wants to download a Metallica tune from Bob, I don't really see them shelling out the $$$ for Napster. But if Alice would be free to download the same tunes from reliable, comprehensive and fast Napster MP3 archives, the story might be different. Is Napster just dumping the whole P2P concept and beginning the transformation into plain vanilla MP3 distributor?
Alex, it seems like you think Apple was simply shopping for an operating system back in 1997, and made the wrong choice in this process.
However, Apple was on the market for more than that -- it needed a knight in a shining armor to rescue the company. The candidates, Be and NeXT, seem very similar at first look: Both were failed companies led by ex-Apple entrepreneurs working on a doomed-to-obscurity operating system.
By this time, it was becoming clear that Gil Amelio had failed to stage a National Semiconductor -like comeback for Apple. As you no doubt remember, the lack of confidence in Apple had reached an all-time high, and predicting Apple's immediate doom was the favorite pastime of journalists.
The Apple board was wise to realize that what the company really needed was a new story. And the return of the company's original founder would definitely qualify as one.
Steve Jobs obviously knew how to take advantage of the situation. His old enemies at Apple were long gone, and as the original founder, he enjoyed natural authority. In a word, he had the opportunity to transform Apple into whatever he wanted.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that he chose to transform Apple into NeXT. This "reverse takeover" of Apple is in my book one of the weirdest business transactions of the last decade. Really, take a look of Apple's management, current hardware, and future software products. Which company are we talking about, Apple or NeXT?
If Apple had bought Be, it would've been a simple software transaction. It wouldn't have been enough to save Apple in the face of investors, customers and the general public. Perhaps the company wouldn't have died immediately, but I'm quite confident that it would have slowly faded away.
This is an interesting idea especially because the big sites tend to outsource their site's infrastructure to the big players, such as Globalcenter, Exodus, AboveNet, Digital Island, Verio, even Akamai.
Tracking which site uses which provider and THEN tracking their availability and performance should give us some indication on how the big names in the hosting business serve their best known customers. This information should prove to be valuable even to those of us who don't really make the hosting companies' most-important-customers list.
Okay, send me a penny for every grand you make with this, promise?
The Right Way to block offending imagery at the sender is to make an MD5 hash of the image to be sent, and then compare it to every image ever posted to any Usenet erotica/tasteless newsgroups.
Everyone who has worked in a male-dominated office environment knows that 95% of this stuff originates from the Usenet, and that the remaining 5% will eventually end up on Usenet. So, basically this is a fool-proof way of blocking most of the stuff that gets sent, while maintaining an impressive 0% false-positive rate.
"Oh My GOD, it seems Apple has made their latest OS version SIMD-optimized for their AltiVec instruction set! We can't possibly emulate that! Our software will be way too slow to run Mac OS X! Quick, guys, let's figure out a way to save our asses and blame someone for this!"
I mean come on, this guy is bashing Apple for not supporting the 680x0 platforms until end of time, stopping the cloning, charging for beta software, and having this beta software available only for high-end Macs.
Well, the simple truth is that unlike Emulators, Inc, when other companies encounter trouble, they do something about it instead of writing rants. Apple has made upgrading to their current line of computers as desirable as possible. They look better, are a lot faster, and with Mac OS X, operate better than earlier Macs -- and people are lining up to get them.
The alternate history scenario with cloning, Mac OS 8 and beige 604e boxes would have killed Apple in no time (remember when people were counting the days?). But I guess that would've been magnificient for the Mac emulation business!
All in all, dedicated Apache installations seem to be the smallest compromise. Memory is cheap, at least when compared to administration hassles.
Also, reconfiguring and restarting an Apache with one site is a few orders of magnitude less critical an operation than doing the same with an Apache that handles 1000 sites.
On a sidenote, security is always a compromise in shared-server solutions. But a shared HTTP server is, IMHO, one step worse.
Plain name-based virtual hosting is acceptable for "bulk" or low-end hosting, but there's still plenty of situations where you run into trouble without using separate IPs.
For example, the hosting provider I work for sets up dedicated Apache installations for each customer -- and this policy gets hailed as heavenlike by our customers, since they're free to install any extensions they could possibly need (or even completely switch servers). With current technology, it's tricky at best to implement something like this with name-based virtual hosts. We would need to run our private address space internally and then have a HTTP-level metaserver to distribute the HTTP/1.1 name-based queries to the right servers.
Also gone are access lists on the router level. Dedicated ftp/smtp servers listening on the same IP as the site. I could go on forever.
To the credit of both ARIN and RIPE (ARIN's equivalent in Europe), they seem to be on top of this. If a company DOES use a single Apache for a thousand sites, I think it's justified to ask them to use less than a thousand IP numbers. However, this is a grey issue, and the organizations have been understanding in situations where there really is a need for IP-based virtual hosting.
IP numbers are not assigned for administrative ease, and that's ok. But the issue of name-based or IP-based virtual hosting isn't about convenience yet. It's still about functionality.
It will be a public beta, so "leaking" is redundant. Moreover, Mac OS X is by no means "on schedule" -- it has been slipping every quarter since the Rhapsody days (still remember that?)
The latest slip came at MacWorld NY in July, when Steve matter-of-factly mentioned that the OS is "on track for early 2001 delivery". Early 2001 obviously means April -- the deadline before that was January.
Obviously Xbox and the state of the art in PC game hardware will differ more and more as time goes by. But assuming that Microsoft will be successful in the initial Xbox marketing push (and I have no doubt they will), the market will be filled with millions of boxes with this static hardware/software combination.
After that, I believe that the supply of games that require more than what Xbox has to offer (in terms of hardware/software) will dry up for a long, long time.
I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a game industry executive for a second. You are developing a PC gaming title with a fixed development budget. Do you want to include or exclude an installed base of, say, 10 million Xboxes from your target audience? Do you want your title to be compatible or incompatible with the Xbox?
Paul Allen owns Vulcan Ventures privately; its only relation to Microsoft is Paul Allen himself. Claiming Microsoft owned a part of Transmeta would be like claiming Apple owns a part of Pixar.
It's not very surprising that both Paul Allen and Bill Gates are slowly but surely moving their assets away from Microsoft stock. Paul Allen has chosen the venture capital path while Gates has become the biggest philantropist in the US via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I think (but am not certain, as I am not a lawyer) that no one has the obligation to provide the source to your cousin. By providing a source disk to you, I have fulfilled my distribution obligations to you. The GPL (I don't think) could restrict your rights under first sale.
That's what I thought. I sincerely hope that a law expert stops by right now to prove us false. Because if we happened to be right, I could soon be magnifying my CD-swapping side business to a large scale operation.
(The ramifications are that two separate legal entities could possibly conspire to start an outfit for mass distribution of binary-only, GPL-derived software products. And that just wouldn't be nice, now would it?)
You sell me a copy of your awesome Broken Inside Linux 7.0 distribution, which you distribute on two CDs: one is the source CD, and the other one is the binary CD.
Well, because I only bought the package to get a decent source collection on a CD, I'm willing to put the other, binary-only CD to the market, and in fact sell it to my cousin who happens to be a Linux newbie.
Now, what has happened is the following:
- I haven't been involved with making any additional copies of any GPL-ed software. In fact, I sold a CD without knowing anything about its contents -- I never cared to even mount it. In this transaction, I considered the CD I sold to just be a physical object.
- My cousin, the end user, has received a copy of GPL-ed software without a source. That's fine, according to the GPL, but now someone has the obligation to give the source to my cousin for a reasonable cost. Who? Me? Or you, the original seller of Broken Inside Linux?
It seems you are proposing that the actions taken by Big Monopolies such as Microsoft should be ruled illegal by high courts rather than dealed with by antitrust ligitation.
Somehow that line of thought contains the idea that single Microsoft actions have not been unlawful per se. But that's just plain untrue -- Microsoft has been found to be involved in unlawful acts in a US court.
So to sum this up, just having specific methods for leveraging a monopoly ruled illegal doesn't change anything. Most of them, in fact, are already illegal. And Microsoft, for one, doesn't seem to care at all.
Too bad the MPEG-2 encoding and decoding is done in hardware on the TiVo. And the main PowerPC CPU doesn't have nearly enough horsepower for realtime DivX encoding..
Ad companies don't have to host banner GIFs -- thanks to the 302 HTTP result type.
The modus operandi of all modern ad networks is to do all the ad-jugling magic on the control message only and then do a redict to a static URL of an actual banner image. This not only frees the ad company from serving the actual image data, but also helps the Internet as a whole to cope with banner traffic by making efficient caching of banners possible.
I'm quite let down on Slashdot posting this -- it's obvious that there is more than a single truth on the matter and Slashdot is just adding ammunition to an internal id battle on the issue. As JC states, Kevin and Adrian control >50% of id, which means they're effectively in charge of the company. Publishing rants by people as popular as JC about this is really just a way of pressurising them to take a path they are not willing to take.
Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I happen to think that majority stock holders should be able to decide what a company does and doesn't do. id is no exception, no matter how cool a new DOOM sounds like -- after all, we can't be sure what the other development alternatives are.
You don't exactly have to be a trademark lawyer to understand that a trademark, in order to be registrable, doesn't have to be original (in the sense of having never before been uttered, let alone put on paper).
Apogee only has trademark protection against anyone else using the name "Pinball Wizards" in the realm of computer games. I don't see anything questionable in that.
Having many eyes looking at source code almost invariably leads to bugs being found. However, the popular misconception is that any piece of open source software actually IS continuously looked at by alert people.
The reality of the issue is, at least in the few projects I'm involved with, that just distributing software in source format doesn't mean it will be looked at. Not by the end users (this is obvious), but not that much by developers either -- even the core developers usually divide workload by assigning module owners and such, and as a result, code in someone-elses-module rarely gets properly reviewed. Sure, someone might keep an eye on the commit logs but that's hardly a decent way to review evolving code.
So, with regards to security issues, I think things boil down to this: unlike proprietary, binary-distributed software, open source as a distribution mechanism isn't explicitly designed to prevent code review.
If the opportunity for peer review has been left unutilized in a single project, others can use the example to learn. Open source isn't about automatic benefits in software quality -- it's about making work towards better software possible.
The new camcorder uses a new-and-improved type of minidiscs, called MD Data2. They can hold 650 megs of data, or about the same as a CD. The Discam is the first product based on the new format, but it sure offers some interesting prospecs. The audio minidiscs have been (unfairly, IMHO) bashed for their sound quality -- MD Data2 discs would make uncompressed audio minidiscs possible. This would be the first serious contender for DATs.
"The flip side to that is that it will inhibit innovation. Not only is IE faster than Netscape, but having it integrated right into the shell is tremendously convenient. I used to be a die-hard Netscape fan who wouldn't touch IE just on principal - then one day I woke up and smelt the Folgers. IE is faster, and above all, really tightly integrated with the OS. From a philosophical standpoint, this is devious, but pragmatically, it's fscking great. Way, way easier than firing up a new browser everytime I want to peek at some page."
Yes, Yes, Yes. This is the ONE thing Judge Jackson agreed with Microsoft on -- that integrating the web browser with the desktop has been for the benefit of the consumer. And I'm willing to put my money on this prediction: as soon as Mozilla's next-generation layout engine is ready, we *will* see work to bring browser-desktop integration to the Linux desktop as well.
Basically -- this I will get flamed for -- I don't even see a need for competition on the browser market. Ensuring the viability of multiple browser vendors shouldn't be the first priority of the government. Instead, ensuring standards compliancy in browsers should be.
If Microsoft was forced to distribute a fully W3C standards compliant web browser with every Windows sold and have a standard Java implementation to boot, that would immediately erode much of Microsoft's artificial barrier-to-entry on the desktop market. Here are some of the specific consequences for this single act:
Standards compliancy makes cross-platform software development possible. The W3C standards suite and Java is a sufficient middleware platform for basically any type of software development -- its perceived inadequacies stem mainly for incompatible implementations.
Emergence of true cross-platform software diminishes Windows' position as the dominant desktop software platform. This has implications not only on the operating systems market, but on the hardware market as well.
Web/Network based applications bring down the average cost of a desktop workstation by enabling more efficient sharing of computing resources. This and increasing competition forces Microsoft to lower the price of a Windows license, effectively commodizing the desktop operating system.
And if that isn't in the consumers' best interest, I don't know what is.
As we know, Google is storing local copies of most of the pages its spider comes across. I know I'll be flamed to oblivion for saying this, but I think this approach is *very* problematic from a copyright point of view (no, I don't think fair use applies to copying and archiving whole sites).
The Internet content economy as it exists today revolves completely around traffic and advertising/sponsorship revenue generated from that traffic. Search engines that store pages locally are already affecting the number of visitors on a site, eating away the sustainability of free, commercial content on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty much a given that Mac OS X and Mac OS X -native apps would be pretty straightforward to port to Intel. If Apple started building custom x86 based computers, they would have to build some kind of emulation only for the 'Carbon' and 'Classic' apps, which would mean that there would be much less PowerPC code around than 68k code during the recent transition.
Moreover, as the bulk of the lower-end PowerPC processors from Motorola and IBM are targeted at the embedded market, they cost next to nothing, *including* support circuitry. Apple could just invest $50 per box to have low end but emulation-beating PowerPC hardware in their x86 boxes.
Personally, I don't see Apple going for x86, but it is a possibility they like to play with from time to time to keep Motorola on its toes.
Perhaps unlike anyone else around here, I don't see that the PowerPC instruction set has lost the performance war, just look at the powerpc isa based Power4. (Yes, it really is based on the powerpc isa, unlike the Power3 series)
Apple should switch Motorola for IBM, not for Intel or AMD.
This, I have to say, is a novel concept; paying a middle man when there (technically) isn't one.
If Alice wants to download a Metallica tune from Bob, I don't really see them shelling out the $$$ for Napster. But if Alice would be free to download the same tunes from reliable, comprehensive and fast Napster MP3 archives, the story might be different. Is Napster just dumping the whole P2P concept and beginning the transformation into plain vanilla MP3 distributor?
Alex, it seems like you think Apple was simply shopping for an operating system back in 1997, and made the wrong choice in this process.
However, Apple was on the market for more than that -- it needed a knight in a shining armor to rescue the company. The candidates, Be and NeXT, seem very similar at first look: Both were failed companies led by ex-Apple entrepreneurs working on a doomed-to-obscurity operating system.
By this time, it was becoming clear that Gil Amelio had failed to stage a National Semiconductor -like comeback for Apple. As you no doubt remember, the lack of confidence in Apple had reached an all-time high, and predicting Apple's immediate doom was the favorite pastime of journalists.
The Apple board was wise to realize that what the company really needed was a new story. And the return of the company's original founder would definitely qualify as one.
Steve Jobs obviously knew how to take advantage of the situation. His old enemies at Apple were long gone, and as the original founder, he enjoyed natural authority. In a word, he had the opportunity to transform Apple into whatever he wanted.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that he chose to transform Apple into NeXT. This "reverse takeover" of Apple is in my book one of the weirdest business transactions of the last decade. Really, take a look of Apple's management, current hardware, and future software products. Which company are we talking about, Apple or NeXT?
If Apple had bought Be, it would've been a simple software transaction. It wouldn't have been enough to save Apple in the face of investors, customers and the general public. Perhaps the company wouldn't have died immediately, but I'm quite confident that it would have slowly faded away.
I think it's safe to predict that everyone will have a Tivo way before timezones get eliminated.
This is an interesting idea especially because the big sites tend to outsource their site's infrastructure to the big players, such as Globalcenter, Exodus, AboveNet, Digital Island, Verio, even Akamai.
Tracking which site uses which provider and THEN tracking their availability and performance should give us some indication on how the big names in the hosting business serve their best known customers. This information should prove to be valuable even to those of us who don't really make the hosting companies' most-important-customers list.
Okay, send me a penny for every grand you make with this, promise?
The Right Way to block offending imagery at the sender is to make an MD5 hash of the image to be sent, and then compare it to every image ever posted to any Usenet erotica/tasteless newsgroups.
Everyone who has worked in a male-dominated office environment knows that 95% of this stuff originates from the Usenet, and that the remaining 5% will eventually end up on Usenet. So, basically this is a fool-proof way of blocking most of the stuff that gets sent, while maintaining an impressive 0% false-positive rate.
You mean it wouldn't block the gore on the net?
Well, just imagine how the Internet as a whole would work if networks and hosts were connected ONLY by explicit static routes.
That's right, it wouldn't.
"Oh My GOD, it seems Apple has made their latest OS version SIMD-optimized for their AltiVec instruction set! We can't possibly emulate that! Our software will be way too slow to run Mac OS X! Quick, guys, let's figure out a way to save our asses and blame someone for this!"
I mean come on, this guy is bashing Apple for not supporting the 680x0 platforms until end of time, stopping the cloning, charging for beta software, and having this beta software available only for high-end Macs.
Well, the simple truth is that unlike Emulators, Inc, when other companies encounter trouble, they do something about it instead of writing rants. Apple has made upgrading to their current line of computers as desirable as possible. They look better, are a lot faster, and with Mac OS X, operate better than earlier Macs -- and people are lining up to get them.
The alternate history scenario with cloning, Mac OS 8 and beige 604e boxes would have killed Apple in no time (remember when people were counting the days?). But I guess that would've been magnificient for the Mac emulation business!
All in all, dedicated Apache installations seem to be the smallest compromise. Memory is cheap, at least when compared to administration hassles.
Also, reconfiguring and restarting an Apache with one site is a few orders of magnitude less critical an operation than doing the same with an Apache that handles 1000 sites.
On a sidenote, security is always a compromise in shared-server solutions. But a shared HTTP server is, IMHO, one step worse.
Plain name-based virtual hosting is acceptable for "bulk" or low-end hosting, but there's still plenty of situations where you run into trouble without using separate IPs.
For example, the hosting provider I work for sets up dedicated Apache installations for each customer -- and this policy gets hailed as heavenlike by our customers, since they're free to install any extensions they could possibly need (or even completely switch servers). With current technology, it's tricky at best to implement something like this with name-based virtual hosts. We would need to run our private address space internally and then have a HTTP-level metaserver to distribute the HTTP/1.1 name-based queries to the right servers.
Also gone are access lists on the router level. Dedicated ftp/smtp servers listening on the same IP as the site. I could go on forever.
To the credit of both ARIN and RIPE (ARIN's equivalent in Europe), they seem to be on top of this. If a company DOES use a single Apache for a thousand sites, I think it's justified to ask them to use less than a thousand IP numbers. However, this is a grey issue, and the organizations have been understanding in situations where there really is a need for IP-based virtual hosting.
IP numbers are not assigned for administrative ease, and that's ok. But the issue of name-based or IP-based virtual hosting isn't about convenience yet. It's still about functionality.
It will be a public beta, so "leaking" is redundant. Moreover, Mac OS X is by no means "on schedule" -- it has been slipping every quarter since the Rhapsody days (still remember that?)
The latest slip came at MacWorld NY in July, when Steve matter-of-factly mentioned that the OS is "on track for early 2001 delivery". Early 2001 obviously means April -- the deadline before that was January.
Obviously Xbox and the state of the art in PC game hardware will differ more and more as time goes by. But assuming that Microsoft will be successful in the initial Xbox marketing push (and I have no doubt they will), the market will be filled with millions of boxes with this static hardware/software combination.
After that, I believe that the supply of games that require more than what Xbox has to offer (in terms of hardware/software) will dry up for a long, long time.
I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a game industry executive for a second. You are developing a PC gaming title with a fixed development budget. Do you want to include or exclude an installed base of, say, 10 million Xboxes from your target audience? Do you want your title to be compatible or incompatible with the Xbox?
I thought so.
It's not very surprising that both Paul Allen and Bill Gates are slowly but surely moving their assets away from Microsoft stock. Paul Allen has chosen the venture capital path while Gates has become the biggest philantropist in the US via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I think (but am not certain, as I am not a lawyer) that no one has the obligation to provide the source to your cousin. By providing a source disk to you, I have fulfilled my distribution obligations to you. The GPL (I don't think) could restrict your rights under first sale.
That's what I thought. I sincerely hope that a law expert stops by right now to prove us false. Because if we happened to be right, I could soon be magnifying my CD-swapping side business to a large scale operation.
(The ramifications are that two separate legal entities could possibly conspire to start an outfit for mass distribution of binary-only, GPL-derived software products. And that just wouldn't be nice, now would it?)
So, how about this scenario:
You sell me a copy of your awesome Broken Inside Linux 7.0 distribution, which you distribute on two CDs: one is the source CD, and the other one is the binary CD.
Well, because I only bought the package to get a decent source collection on a CD, I'm willing to put the other, binary-only CD to the market, and in fact sell it to my cousin who happens to be a Linux newbie.
Now, what has happened is the following:
- I haven't been involved with making any additional copies of any GPL-ed software. In fact, I sold a CD without knowing anything about its contents -- I never cared to even mount it. In this transaction, I considered the CD I sold to just be a physical object.
- My cousin, the end user, has received a copy of GPL-ed software without a source. That's fine, according to the GPL, but now someone has the obligation to give the source to my cousin for a reasonable cost. Who? Me? Or you, the original seller of Broken Inside Linux?
It seems you are proposing that the actions taken by Big Monopolies such as Microsoft should be ruled illegal by high courts rather than dealed with by antitrust ligitation.
Somehow that line of thought contains the idea that single Microsoft actions have not been unlawful per se. But that's just plain untrue -- Microsoft has been found to be involved in unlawful acts in a US court.
So to sum this up, just having specific methods for leveraging a monopoly ruled illegal doesn't change anything. Most of them, in fact, are already illegal. And Microsoft, for one, doesn't seem to care at all.
Too bad the MPEG-2 encoding and decoding is done in hardware on the TiVo. And the main PowerPC CPU doesn't have nearly enough horsepower for realtime DivX encoding..
:-)
Perhaps that'll be TiVo's version 2.0
Ad companies don't have to host banner GIFs -- thanks to the 302 HTTP result type.
The modus operandi of all modern ad networks is to do all the ad-jugling magic on the control message only and then do a redict to a static URL of an actual banner image. This not only frees the ad company from serving the actual image data, but also helps the Internet as a whole to cope with banner traffic by making efficient caching of banners possible.
Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I happen to think that majority stock holders should be able to decide what a company does and doesn't do. id is no exception, no matter how cool a new DOOM sounds like -- after all, we can't be sure what the other development alternatives are.
Apogee only has trademark protection against anyone else using the name "Pinball Wizards" in the realm of computer games. I don't see anything questionable in that.
The reality of the issue is, at least in the few projects I'm involved with, that just distributing software in source format doesn't mean it will be looked at. Not by the end users (this is obvious), but not that much by developers either -- even the core developers usually divide workload by assigning module owners and such, and as a result, code in someone-elses-module rarely gets properly reviewed. Sure, someone might keep an eye on the commit logs but that's hardly a decent way to review evolving code.
So, with regards to security issues, I think things boil down to this: unlike proprietary, binary-distributed software, open source as a distribution mechanism isn't explicitly designed to prevent code review.
If the opportunity for peer review has been left unutilized in a single project, others can use the example to learn. Open source isn't about automatic benefits in software quality -- it's about making work towards better software possible.
The new camcorder uses a new-and-improved type of minidiscs, called MD Data2. They can hold 650 megs of data, or about the same as a CD. The Discam is the first product based on the new format, but it sure offers some interesting prospecs. The audio minidiscs have been (unfairly, IMHO) bashed for their sound quality -- MD Data2 discs would make uncompressed audio minidiscs possible. This would be the first serious contender for DATs.
Yes, Yes, Yes. This is the ONE thing Judge Jackson agreed with Microsoft on -- that integrating the web browser with the desktop has been for the benefit of the consumer. And I'm willing to put my money on this prediction: as soon as Mozilla's next-generation layout engine is ready, we *will* see work to bring browser-desktop integration to the Linux desktop as well.
Basically -- this I will get flamed for -- I don't even see a need for competition on the browser market. Ensuring the viability of multiple browser vendors shouldn't be the first priority of the government. Instead, ensuring standards compliancy in browsers should be.
If Microsoft was forced to distribute a fully W3C standards compliant web browser with every Windows sold and have a standard Java implementation to boot, that would immediately erode much of Microsoft's artificial barrier-to-entry on the desktop market. Here are some of the specific consequences for this single act:
And if that isn't in the consumers' best interest, I don't know what is.
As we know, Google is storing local copies of most of the pages its spider comes across. I know I'll be flamed to oblivion for saying this, but I think this approach is *very* problematic from a copyright point of view (no, I don't think fair use applies to copying and archiving whole sites).
The Internet content economy as it exists today revolves completely around traffic and advertising/sponsorship revenue generated from that traffic. Search engines that store pages locally are already affecting the number of visitors on a site, eating away the sustainability of free, commercial content on the Internet.