Click on the IE icon. Hit the delete button. Click yes. Empty the trash. IE = gone.
Oh, you want to delete the shared library too? Go to windows\system32, find mshtml.dll. Delete it.
I just hope you don't expect explorer (not ie, the desktop) to work, or any help files to work, or anything else which uses that particular shared library to render html...
Honestly, do you really think it was stupid idea to take a whole bunch of applications which render html and create a single shared library that they all use?
Yeah, because instead they should just tell the admins "There's a problem with some software on your box, but we aren't going to tell you where it is. This way, you won't know how urgently you need to apply this patch."
At which point Bill would raise his pinky to his mouth and laugh maniacly...
The problem is that a person who buys a new computer expects that they can double click on that mp3 file, that zip file, that mpeg file, or whatever else file is on their computer and be able to do something with it.
If you don't care which player you're using, having to go and spend time finding software is an annoyance.
The only way MS can make people like you happy is to never put a new feature into any of their products. Because I guarantee you, someone out there somewhere sells something that does that feature.
Now imagine you purchase the car, got the free tv, and now suddenly your VCR doesn't work, you need a Microsoft VCR.
Or you need a non Microsoft TV. Which you would have had to get in the first place if you didn't get a free tv with your car anyway.
Ah, but you say "but nobody makes those tv's anymore, because everyone uses the free one with a microsoft vcr." At which point I would suggest that there isn't enough demand for tv's that don't require microsoft vcrs.
The problem isn't that you have you get a microsoft vcr, the problem is that nobody else cares.
Re:MS will win, of course, they are running the te
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Security FUD On Linux
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Find an unbiased third party to do the study. What, they want money to do the study? If it comes from MS, they've got an MS bias. If it comes from Redhat, they've got a Redhat bias. If it comes from IBM, it's got an IBM bias. What, you found someone to do a study for free? Then they must have a hidden bias, because they picked a winner and had to have done it for some reason because they weren't getting paid for it (you can think they don't, but you aren't going to convince the people wearing the tinfoil hats otherwise).
You aren't going to get study done that everyone considered unbiased.
The only thing you can do is read the study when it comes out with a giant black marker, and anytime it's obvious that a particular result was due to testing bias, black it out.
The stuff that isn't blacked out when you're done reading the report is stuff you need to fix.
The distance between the earth and the moon is roughly 384,000km. A 1,000km change would be on the order of a 0.3% change.
That assumes that the change is constant and linear over time. It is actually believed that the orbital distance between the moon & the earth oscillates (ie: gets closer, moves away, gets closer, moves away...).
1) The link you posted doesn't work. 2) I don't see what this small quote has to do with any of my coments. 3) Just because an offer is being made doesn't mean the employee has to accept it. 4) An offer has not been made, so it is hard to determine if it's a good or bad offer at this point.
Win98 SE was Win98 with updated hardware support, IE5 instead of IE4, and DirectX. If you already had Win98 up and running, you didn't need the updated hardware support. And you could get IE5 and DirectX as a free download.
They strain this one out like a concrete turd. It's obvious that they want to make everyone aware that the FIX for the FAULTY OS is FREE, this time, versus the alterative plan, which is to CHARGE YOU for the FIX for the FAULTY OS.
The language says that it's free so that people know that it's free. Updates and service packs for Windows have always been free. They have never once charged for them.
The markup most retail stores put on non-game software products is rediculous -- A non-upgrade XP Home edition can also be had for about $90 if you know where to look online.
And straight out of the box it's broken. Then they expect you to buy updates, patches, and other repairs to it for more money??
What, you DON'T want people who break into houses to get caught?
Maybe the reward will be a deterrant, maybe not. I really don't care. I do care that people who commit a crime get caught. If sticking a bounty on their head helps, so be it.
You are claiming that it's impossible to write a secure OS, such that a naive user cannot (or at least is very unlikely to) have his system compromised?...when the naive user is using admin/root privlidges at all times, yes.
My mp3 player does pretty good for me... I generally only have to charge the batteries once per week (I use it when walking to/from work daily, plus whenever work gets too noisy to concentrate) -- though I use the fm tuner as much as the mp3 player.
When I take a trip, the batteries last long enough to not need replacing/recharging. My last trip involved one 20 hour day in the airport plus another 8 hour day on my way back, so that's about the extent of what I'd ever expect to need from an mp3 player.
To be fair, Microsoft isn't the only company to "take advantage" of those accounting loopholes. Just about every corporation that gives out stock options does the same. To single them out and demonize them alone just makes you yet another person looking for any excuse to rag on Microsoft.
Regarding the expensing of options -- I would agree that you should expense the cost of exersized options, however I'm uncertain how you would expense options that are 1) not vested and 2) not cashed in.
Even given that, your "deeply unprofitable" claim is greatly exaggerated: the article's author attempts to measure all unclaimed options as an expense (ie: what would happen if every outstanding option was cashed in at the same time). If everyone cashed in on those options all at once, MS would have been unprofitable. But that didn't happen. Additionally, options vest over a period of time -- the article fails to differentiate between vested and unvested options. And on top of that, you don't know what the author valued the options at (I can't imagine that the strike price for all of the options dispersed was the same for every employee), nor if any consideration for underwater options was given. You don't know if the author factored in the fact that options can and do expire (options must be exercised within a certain time period after vesting, or if an employee quits generally they lose their options [though you are generally allowed to cash in your vested options at that time]).
Even if you do want to argue that such behavior is naughty, you can't claim that it is SOP for Microsoft today -- a few months ago Microsoft changed it's accounting practices to expense stock options and grants. They even went back and restarted earnings over the last 2 years to reflect that change.
It currently is one of the few companies that do so today.
Regarding the value of MS stock -- when MSFT was over $100/share (presplit), it was overvalued. You know it, I know it, even my grandma knew it. Microsoft was never worth $700B, nor did their earnings or profit growth ever justify it. Yet people still bought it at $100/share. All technology stocks were inflated way over value. The bottom fell out of EVERY technology based stock, not just Microsoft's. The blame falls primarily on poor investment stratedgy and decisions, not accounting practices. Microsoft's stock is STILL overvalued (a look at their P/E ratio tells you that right away), even at value of 50% of what it was in 2000.
2) I don't think having an expectation of more than 6 hours of playtime is unreasonable. Take any long trip and your batteries will be dead before you reach your destination.
My cd based mp3 player for example lasts 10 hours on pair of 1400mah NiMH batteries (flat AA style). It lasts over 24 hours when an additional 2 AA batteries are added via an external power pack.
As some people pointed out, they do run their own stuff internally. They refer to it as "dogfooding". If you've ever seen a Balmer quote about Microsoft eating it's own dogfood, that's what he is referring to.
You're confusing an API with the functions used to implement an API. An API is just an interface -- a standard way of calling things. The functions the API calls are not. When you write a class, you make the interesting operations public, while everything else is protected/private. You do this because you are interested in having a consistent interface that doesn't change, while not pinning you down to a specific implementation.
Publishing/providing details about the internal os equivilents isn't subject to change with the next release of the OS --> it is subject to change with the next hotfix.
And if you're in the business of trying to maintain compatibility with all products in the market in your future products, the instant that you start publishing "internal APIs" you have to support them in future products. You're stuck with them. You think that MS makes buggy products NOW? Wait until they can't fix any of those bugs because doing so would be a breaking change? "Tough luck to those that get broken" you say? I'm sure the companies making products that were broken will have LOTS of fun in front of a judge saying how they're the victim of MS's anti-competitive practices...
You don't publish an API for something because it's there. You publish it because you intend it to be a uniform way to do things well into the future, regardless of how things work under the hood. You don't change them or drop support for them on a whim.
That's like taking an 4 hour lunch every day and then saying "being fired for eating lunch is fucked."
The dude took pictures of a nonpublic area (violating company policy) showing high dollar value items, demonstrating the lack of physical security, posted them to the internet, stated where the picture was taken at, identified himself and that he worked at microsoft, and then proceeded to rag on his employer.
If that isn't asking for a problem with your employer I don't know what is.
Did Microsoft expect to recoup and profit on the investment they made to to create IE, and on the ongoing expense of developing IE and the cost of the website for downloading IE? Yep. Were did they expect this money to come from? People who paid for the OS....or maybe they expected to profit in the same way their competitors were expecting to pull in money: corporate sales & "portal" sites (you remember those pieces of crap, don't you?). If MS had to pay a liscense fee for every copy of IE distributed, I'd agree with you, but they didn't. It was a fixed cost.
You talk about using IE for rendering icons and all sorts of stuff. If you want to do that then there's no reason you couldn't substitute Netscape or some other engine,
Side note: IE isn't just rendering the icons 'n stuff, it's actually rendering HTML which describes the placement of icons 'n stuff...
Believe it or not, the acclaimed "meeting" between the Office developers @ MS and Netscape was about them wanting to have some sort of html rendering engine to use for help files. The IE guys found out about this, and that's where all of the "Netscape must die" emails came from. Netscape said they weren't interested in writing a component that anyone could use (seeing how they were on ther whole "web platform" kick). At least, that's the story as told by a few Office developers I know.
(In case you hadn't noticed, Office seems to "pioneer" features that are later sucked into Windows itself).
There is also nothing stoping anyone else from making a proper pluggable html rendering engine for Windows. The only thing that comes close is the Mozilla engine, but using it isn't nearly as simple as including an active x control on your dialog.
They are NOT doing it for valid programming reasons. I am a programmer, and I can tell you that it is harder and more complicated for Microsoft to take the route they have taken.
I am a programmer as well, I can tell you that I would NOT implement a different html rendering engine for every piece of code I wrote -- especially if I'd already had one available; I would alter that piece of code so that it was usable from some sort of shared library. I wouldn't rewrite it from scratch.
As I said, it is legally indisputable fact that Micorosoft has a Monopoly and has illegally abused that monopoly. It is absurd to argue that it has had no effect on the market price.
So, what SHOULD the price of Windows be set at? I look around, and I see distributions of something FREE selling for $45 (the last time I saw Redhat). Last time I saw BeOS on a store shelf, it was going for $80. I see WinXP going for $90. And I see MacOS going for $130. Server OSs go for much MUCH more. You can say that there isn't any way that it couldn't have effected the price, but I look at what else is out there and it's a pretty hard claim to prove.
I'm guessing you're refefring to Mac OSX? (1) The anti-trust case defined the relevant market to be OS's for Intel-compatible PC's. The only signifigant alternative is Linux which is available for free. (2) I don't know anything about the pricing of Mac OSX, and even assuming it does cost more it has no bearing on the question of whether Microsoft has inflated the "fair market price" of windows. For one thing there is a vastly larger market for intel-compatible hardare (and OS) than for Mac-compatible hardware (and OS), and software has a marginal cost of near zero. That has a huge impact on the true market price.
If anyone cared about 1, why hasn't Apple been taken to court yet? Their actions have been far worse in many respects than Microsoft. Apple IS competing with Microsoft, weather you admit it or not. 2, Mac OSX costs $130; WinXP Home Edition costs $90 if you shop around for it.
Additionally, the "fair market price" == "what people will pay." The amount of hardware available for Apple platforms vs PC platforms doesn't enter the equation. You ca
Slashdot Mirror
Do you not understand the concept of a shared library?
You expect anything that dynamically links to Gecko as an HTML rendering engine to still work after you delete it?
Click on the IE icon. Hit the delete button. Click yes. Empty the trash. IE = gone.
Oh, you want to delete the shared library too? Go to windows\system32, find mshtml.dll. Delete it.
I just hope you don't expect explorer (not ie, the desktop) to work, or any help files to work, or anything else which uses that particular shared library to render html...
Honestly, do you really think it was stupid idea to take a whole bunch of applications which render html and create a single shared library that they all use?
The straw man arguement is that once you have a monopoly, anything new you do becomes an abuse of monopoly power.
Add anything new to your OS that wasn't in there before, and someone's going to shout "They're trying to squish us out of existance! Unfair!".
The question is becoming "Does someone else already do this? Ha! Off limits! Do it and we'll sue!".
The question should be "Does a buyer of this product expect it to do this out of the box?"
Yeah, because instead they should just tell the admins "There's a problem with some software on your box, but we aren't going to tell you where it is. This way, you won't know how urgently you need to apply this patch."
At which point Bill would raise his pinky to his mouth and laugh maniacly...
The problem is that a person who buys a new computer expects that they can double click on that mp3 file, that zip file, that mpeg file, or whatever else file is on their computer and be able to do something with it.
If you don't care which player you're using, having to go and spend time finding software is an annoyance.
The only way MS can make people like you happy is to never put a new feature into any of their products. Because I guarantee you, someone out there somewhere sells something that does that feature.
Now imagine you purchase the car, got the free tv, and now suddenly your VCR doesn't work, you need a Microsoft VCR.
Or you need a non Microsoft TV. Which you would have had to get in the first place if you didn't get a free tv with your car anyway.
Ah, but you say "but nobody makes those tv's anymore, because everyone uses the free one with a microsoft vcr." At which point I would suggest that there isn't enough demand for tv's that don't require microsoft vcrs.
The problem isn't that you have you get a microsoft vcr, the problem is that nobody else cares.
Find an unbiased third party to do the study. What, they want money to do the study? If it comes from MS, they've got an MS bias. If it comes from Redhat, they've got a Redhat bias. If it comes from IBM, it's got an IBM bias. What, you found someone to do a study for free? Then they must have a hidden bias, because they picked a winner and had to have done it for some reason because they weren't getting paid for it (you can think they don't, but you aren't going to convince the people wearing the tinfoil hats otherwise).
You aren't going to get study done that everyone considered unbiased.
The only thing you can do is read the study when it comes out with a giant black marker, and anytime it's obvious that a particular result was due to testing bias, black it out.
The stuff that isn't blacked out when you're done reading the report is stuff you need to fix.
End of story.
Where "force" in this case was a "developer" from Microsoft sending them an email saying "you know there's a patent on that, right?"
The distance between the earth and the moon is roughly 384,000km. A 1,000km change would be on the order of a 0.3% change.
...).
That assumes that the change is constant and linear over time. It is actually believed that the orbital distance between the moon & the earth oscillates (ie: gets closer, moves away, gets closer, moves away
1) The link you posted doesn't work.
2) I don't see what this small quote has to do with any of my coments.
3) Just because an offer is being made doesn't mean the employee has to accept it.
4) An offer has not been made, so it is hard to determine if it's a good or bad offer at this point.
Linux may not be intended purely for server use, but right now that's the only area it's really good at.
Win98 SE was Win98 with updated hardware support, IE5 instead of IE4, and DirectX. If you already had Win98 up and running, you didn't need the updated hardware support. And you could get IE5 and DirectX as a free download.
Try again.
They strain this one out like a concrete turd. It's obvious that they want to make everyone aware that the FIX for the FAULTY OS is FREE, this time, versus the alterative plan, which is to CHARGE YOU for the FIX for the FAULTY OS.
The language says that it's free so that people know that it's free. Updates and service packs for Windows have always been free. They have never once charged for them.
The markup most retail stores put on non-game software products is rediculous -- A non-upgrade XP Home edition can also be had for about $90 if you know where to look online.
And straight out of the box it's broken. Then they expect you to buy updates, patches, and other repairs to it for more money??
Now you're just trolling.
With $50B in the bank, do you honestly think that they can't do both at the same time?
The only thing this is going to do is make devious hackers more aware that they need to try harder to cover their tracks.
The devious hackers already do cover their tracks. They also make a point to not be noticed -- unlike the idiots who made MSBlaster for example.
What, you DON'T want people who break into houses to get caught?
Maybe the reward will be a deterrant, maybe not. I really don't care. I do care that people who commit a crime get caught. If sticking a bounty on their head helps, so be it.
You are claiming that it's impossible to write a secure OS, such that a naive user cannot (or at least is very unlikely to) have his system compromised? ...when the naive user is using admin/root privlidges at all times, yes.
That's pretty impressive. :)
... I generally only have to charge the batteries once per week (I use it when walking to/from work daily, plus whenever work gets too noisy to concentrate) -- though I use the fm tuner as much as the mp3 player.
My mp3 player does pretty good for me
When I take a trip, the batteries last long enough to not need replacing/recharging. My last trip involved one 20 hour day in the airport plus another 8 hour day on my way back, so that's about the extent of what I'd ever expect to need from an mp3 player.
To be fair, Microsoft isn't the only company to "take advantage" of those accounting loopholes. Just about every corporation that gives out stock options does the same. To single them out and demonize them alone just makes you yet another person looking for any excuse to rag on Microsoft.
Regarding the expensing of options -- I would agree that you should expense the cost of exersized options, however I'm uncertain how you would expense options that are 1) not vested and 2) not cashed in.
Even given that, your "deeply unprofitable" claim is greatly exaggerated: the article's author attempts to measure all unclaimed options as an expense (ie: what would happen if every outstanding option was cashed in at the same time). If everyone cashed in on those options all at once, MS would have been unprofitable. But that didn't happen. Additionally, options vest over a period of time -- the article fails to differentiate between vested and unvested options. And on top of that, you don't know what the author valued the options at (I can't imagine that the strike price for all of the options dispersed was the same for every employee), nor if any consideration for underwater options was given. You don't know if the author factored in the fact that options can and do expire (options must be exercised within a certain time period after vesting, or if an employee quits generally they lose their options [though you are generally allowed to cash in your vested options at that time]).
Even if you do want to argue that such behavior is naughty, you can't claim that it is SOP for Microsoft today -- a few months ago Microsoft changed it's accounting practices to expense stock options and grants. They even went back and restarted earnings over the last 2 years to reflect that change.
It currently is one of the few companies that do so today.
Regarding the value of MS stock -- when MSFT was over $100/share (presplit), it was overvalued. You know it, I know it, even my grandma knew it. Microsoft was never worth $700B, nor did their earnings or profit growth ever justify it. Yet people still bought it at $100/share. All technology stocks were inflated way over value. The bottom fell out of EVERY technology based stock, not just Microsoft's. The blame falls primarily on poor investment stratedgy and decisions, not accounting practices. Microsoft's stock is STILL overvalued (a look at their P/E ratio tells you that right away), even at value of 50% of what it was in 2000.
I think this is definitely NOT a case where the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
:)).
That depends on your perspective.
If your enemy is Microsoft, and their enemy is EOLAS, then the enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
However, if your enemy is EOLAS and their enemy is Microsoft, then the enemy of their enemy IS your friend (in this patent case anyway
2) I don't think having an expectation of more than 6 hours of playtime is unreasonable. Take any long trip and your batteries will be dead before you reach your destination.
My cd based mp3 player for example lasts 10 hours on pair of 1400mah NiMH batteries (flat AA style). It lasts over 24 hours when an additional 2 AA batteries are added via an external power pack.
As some people pointed out, they do run their own stuff internally. They refer to it as "dogfooding". If you've ever seen a Balmer quote about Microsoft eating it's own dogfood, that's what he is referring to.
You're confusing an API with the functions used to implement an API. An API is just an interface -- a standard way of calling things. The functions the API calls are not. When you write a class, you make the interesting operations public, while everything else is protected/private. You do this because you are interested in having a consistent interface that doesn't change, while not pinning you down to a specific implementation.
...
Publishing/providing details about the internal os equivilents isn't subject to change with the next release of the OS --> it is subject to change with the next hotfix.
And if you're in the business of trying to maintain compatibility with all products in the market in your future products, the instant that you start publishing "internal APIs" you have to support them in future products. You're stuck with them. You think that MS makes buggy products NOW? Wait until they can't fix any of those bugs because doing so would be a breaking change? "Tough luck to those that get broken" you say? I'm sure the companies making products that were broken will have LOTS of fun in front of a judge saying how they're the victim of MS's anti-competitive practices
You don't publish an API for something because it's there. You publish it because you intend it to be a uniform way to do things well into the future, regardless of how things work under the hood. You don't change them or drop support for them on a whim.
I don't think he'd be saying Dooooood at the end ... more like "Dooo00000000d" :)
Of course ... why else don't you see windmills generating power all over the place? :)
That's like taking an 4 hour lunch every day and then saying "being fired for eating lunch is fucked."
The dude took pictures of a nonpublic area (violating company policy) showing high dollar value items, demonstrating the lack of physical security, posted them to the internet, stated where the picture was taken at, identified himself and that he worked at microsoft, and then proceeded to rag on his employer.
If that isn't asking for a problem with your employer I don't know what is.
Did Microsoft expect to recoup and profit on the investment they made to to create IE, and on the ongoing expense of developing IE and the cost of the website for downloading IE? Yep. Were did they expect this money to come from? People who paid for the OS. ...or maybe they expected to profit in the same way their competitors were expecting to pull in money: corporate sales & "portal" sites (you remember those pieces of crap, don't you?). If MS had to pay a liscense fee for every copy of IE distributed, I'd agree with you, but they didn't. It was a fixed cost.
You talk about using IE for rendering icons and all sorts of stuff. If you want to do that then there's no reason you couldn't substitute Netscape or some other engine,
Side note: IE isn't just rendering the icons 'n stuff, it's actually rendering HTML which describes the placement of icons 'n stuff...
Believe it or not, the acclaimed "meeting" between the Office developers @ MS and Netscape was about them wanting to have some sort of html rendering engine to use for help files. The IE guys found out about this, and that's where all of the "Netscape must die" emails came from. Netscape said they weren't interested in writing a component that anyone could use (seeing how they were on ther whole "web platform" kick). At least, that's the story as told by a few Office developers I know.
(In case you hadn't noticed, Office seems to "pioneer" features that are later sucked into Windows itself).
There is also nothing stoping anyone else from making a proper pluggable html rendering engine for Windows. The only thing that comes close is the Mozilla engine, but using it isn't nearly as simple as including an active x control on your dialog.
They are NOT doing it for valid programming reasons. I am a programmer, and I can tell you that it is harder and more complicated for Microsoft to take the route they have taken.
I am a programmer as well, I can tell you that I would NOT implement a different html rendering engine for every piece of code I wrote -- especially if I'd already had one available; I would alter that piece of code so that it was usable from some sort of shared library. I wouldn't rewrite it from scratch.
As I said, it is legally indisputable fact that Micorosoft has a Monopoly and has illegally abused that monopoly. It is absurd to argue that it has had no effect on the market price.
So, what SHOULD the price of Windows be set at? I look around, and I see distributions of something FREE selling for $45 (the last time I saw Redhat). Last time I saw BeOS on a store shelf, it was going for $80. I see WinXP going for $90. And I see MacOS going for $130. Server OSs go for much MUCH more. You can say that there isn't any way that it couldn't have effected the price, but I look at what else is out there and it's a pretty hard claim to prove.
I'm guessing you're refefring to Mac OSX? (1) The anti-trust case defined the relevant market to be OS's for Intel-compatible PC's. The only signifigant alternative is Linux which is available for free. (2) I don't know anything about the pricing of Mac OSX, and even assuming it does cost more it has no bearing on the question of whether Microsoft has inflated the "fair market price" of windows. For one thing there is a vastly larger market for intel-compatible hardare (and OS) than for Mac-compatible hardware (and OS), and software has a marginal cost of near zero. That has a huge impact on the true market price.
If anyone cared about 1, why hasn't Apple been taken to court yet? Their actions have been far worse in many respects than Microsoft. Apple IS competing with Microsoft, weather you admit it or not. 2, Mac OSX costs $130; WinXP Home Edition costs $90 if you shop around for it.
Additionally, the "fair market price" == "what people will pay." The amount of hardware available for Apple platforms vs PC platforms doesn't enter the equation. You ca