Typical class-action style case (I don't know if this was officially class-action, but it has the same characterstics), where the lawyers get rich and those in the "class" get next-to-nothing. These types of cases are a waste of time.
The results of the settlement are bullshit too. "Individual consumers pocket very little: they can file for $16 for each copy of Windows or MS-DOS purchased over a 12-year period, and $29 for Office."
Why should anyone get a partial refund for MS-DOS? Is there ANY evidence that Microsoft overcharged for MS-DOS? They weren't declared a "monopoly" until 2000, long after they were selling MS-DOS, and the product that was ruled to have monopoly status was the desktop version of Windows, not MS-DOS (nor Office or any other product). Nobody has made a credible argument that Microsoft had a monopoly in the MS-DOS days. This entire case was ridiculous now that I look at this.
No it hasn't. OSX 10.4 is slower on my ~2002 PowerBook than OSX 10.3.
Besides that, Vista is the first release of a new OS, and it's common for such OS releases to be slower on similar hardware than their predecessors. OSX 10.0 was dog-slow compared to Mac OS 9. In fact OSX was much much slower relative to its predecessor than Vista is relative to XP. OSX got faster with each release (until 10.4), and Vista may get faster too with each SP.
Libertarians believe in small government, particularly keeping government out of the operations of the marketplace; limited-to-zero regulation. I don't know what the submitter thinks of as "nerds" but slashdotters definitely are NOT Libertarians. They believe in big government regulation of the software industry, government-sanctioned file formats, government-regulation of what features an OS can have, picking and choosing of winners in the marketplace. Some here have even suggested that all software be "free", paid for by taxes going to a commission that would issue grants of software projects it chooses to support. Government-approved software.
It's not a surprise that slashdot only references the anti-Microsoft articles on this issue, but for the readers sake, I post Microsoft's side of the story regarding Sweden. This was posted by Microsoft's Jason Matusow yesterday: Matusow's Blog: Open XML - The Vote in Sweden
The latest chapter in the Open XML standardization story is focused on Sweden. There are accusations flying, emails floating around, and no shortage of theories about what has been happening there. As you can image I have been following up with a number of people and here are the issues and what I have found out so far.
Microsoft encouraged partners to participate in Sweden:
An employee in Sweden sent an email to 2 partners that was inconsistent with company policy. When he realized what he had done, he did the right thing by immediately reaching out to the two partners to address the situation. He contacted them by phone and email letting them know that they should disregard the mail. Here is what I know about this situation so far:
* 2 partners were sent an email making a request to participate in the Swedish process, telling them that they would be responsible for paying the membership fee if they did, but also making a related reference to marketing activities and extra support.
* Within hours both partners were contacted by the same MS employee who initiated the mail to notify them that the information in the email was incorrect and that they should disregard it.
* When the Microsoft Sweden management team became aware of the situation they proactively notified SIS, the national standards body, of this situation and shared the communications with them. There was no impact on the vote due to this situation.
* It is important to note that instructions from corporate to our regional teams around the world throughout this process have been to completely adhere to the rules of the national standards bodies, and that any party wishing to take part in the national standards body is directly responsible for paying any related fees. This means partners must decide whether to participate and vote based on their own determination as to the importance of this standard to their business. To say it more directly, offers to pay standards participation fees are totally inconsistent with our internal policy.
Organizations joining the committee late in the process:
Yes, many organizations joined the committee very late in the process. There were parties both for and against the vote that joined late. The local team did reach out to partners and encouraged them to join the process. Many of the partners had been called by IBM as well, encouraging them to join the process and to vote against the proposed standard. Many of these companies are business partners for both IBM and Microsoft and have business interests related to office automation technologies - thus, they were contacted by both firms. It is critical to note that the addition of voting members at that time was completely within the rules of the national standards body. While there are many arguments to be had over the relative merits of this rule...it is a rule nonetheless. If you are looking for other situations to think about - look at the late addition of Red Hat (and many others...I know) to Committee V1 in the United States. Their presence was simply to vote no - not based on deep technical review - but because it is in their business interests have Open XML fail to achieve ISO/IEC standardization. Google joining the SIS late is the same thing. So - for both sides, seeking to have participation of organizations with interests is within the boundaries of the rules.
The issue with the email is extremely unfortunate as it casts a pall over the hard work of so many, and the process as a whole. The S
There's a big difference between not "owning" a software product (i.e. you're licensing it under the conditions of the EULA) and not "owning" your own data. According to the summary (I've not bothered to read the article, as I don't really care, I just came here to see people's reactions to the summary), Google is claiming ownership of your data itself. If that's true, it's way worse than your run-of-the-mill software EULA.
BTW, why the hell did you bring up Microsoft in the first place? This is a Google story. Seems that Google defenders always want to change the subject to Microsoft.
Can someone explain how MS would be bound by GPL3? They make no GPL software. The Novell deal was made prior to GPL3. How does GPL3 relate to MS at all?
ISO didn't seem too concerned with credibility when it rubberstamped the ODF spec that OASIS gave them, warts and all. One can't even implement a basic spreadsheet using ISO ODF 1.0, yet IBM was running around the globe trying to get governments to mandate exclusive use of ISO ODF 1.0. The very thorough examination that ISO is making OOXML go through should also have been done regarding ODF, but it was not. That's why OASIS folk are working hard to create ODF 1.1, to patch over the woeful deficiencies of ISO ODF 1.0.
ISO failed to do due diligence when rubberstamping ODF, and no slashdotter complained, in fact, they cheered. Now you're pissed that OOXML is being run through the mill (that ODF wasn't put through) and is surviving. Hypocrisy at its finest.
"Or is this just something to put in marketing materials?"
BINGO ODF advocates want ODF to be the sole ISO standard so they can use that status as ammo when lobbying governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. They want to deny any competing format from achieving the same status, lest their talking point disappears.
Any Swedish company can become a member of SIS buy paying somewhere around $300-$500 per year. To be allowed to vote in this particular issue an extra 15 000 Sek ($2500) was needed. So yeah, it is open for anyone with cash (but they had to be members of SIS since before.
So there is no problem here. These companies were already members of SIS, and they exercised their right to vote in that organization.
I assume that HP voted YES because they voted YES in the recent US vote that took place on 08/24/2007, the results of which were YES 12, NO 3, ABSTAIN 1, which was enough to approve OOXML. You can see how each party voted here: US OOXML VOTE 08/24/2007
Notable YES votes include MS, HP, APPLE, INTEL, SONY. Notable NO votes were IBM.
It's amusing that slashdot carried hugh headlines for the NO vote, but hasn't covered the YES vote at all (unless I just missed it).
BTW, the US YES vote is a reversal of the 08/10/2007 US vote that was YES 8, NO 7, ABSTAIN 1, which was not enough for approval (which led to premature celebration by IBM's allies): US OOXML VOTE 08/10/2007
You can check the two links to see which parties flipped from NO to YES. The most notable is the DoD.
It's amusing that/. carried a story trumpeting the previous "NO" vote, but hasn't done a story on the more recent YES vote.
OS/2 World??? LOLOL Didn't know there were still sites pimping for an OS that's been obsolete for 10 years now. Anyway, clearly a site advocating OS/2 would have an axe to grind against Microsoft. That's fine, but I'm sure there's an opposing side to this story (not that I expect/. to cover the other side).
And so what if Microsoft partners showed up to vote YES? Obviously those partners intend to use OOXML an want it to be an ISO standard. The stranger thing is that those that are opposed to OOXML being an ISO standard have no intent to use OOXML so why do they care? Obviously, the reason the care is that they want to use ISO status as a differentiator between ODF and OOXML in lobbying efforts to convince governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. We all know that this is about politics, not technical merit, and those that deny that are just being disingenuous.
Moron, how does some users's empirical evidence of 90% decrease contradict Microsoft's statement, "Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address." ?
Microsoft acknowledges the problem, you silly buffoon.
"Having said that, Vista needs a lot of work, there's no denying it could be much better than it is (much like XP when it was first released, much like NT4.0 was when it was first released, much like Windows 3.0 when it was first released....)"
And that's not just a Windows phenomenon. I recall the state of Mac OS X 10.0, which was dog poo. It didn't become great until 10.3. I recall Mac OS 7.0 having lots of problems that 7.1 solved (then 7.5.3 broke, but whatever).
Also, OO.o adds things to its files that are outside of the ODF spec. If MSO's files aren't true OOXML files, then OO.o's files aren't true ODF files either.
Same situation as many other standard formats, such as HTML. Different apps handle formats differently, and often not 100% faithful to the spec.
So what? Sony paid Target and Best Buy to only carry BR players where consumers can actually see them. They stick Toshiba's HD-DVD players in the corner with old 8-track players.
Sony HQ has ordered Sony Pictures to not release any content on HD-DVD, not for 18 months, but *ever*.
Sony paid Disney to keep its content off of HD-DVD. They caved into Fox by adding draconian BD+ DRM to BR discs to convince Fox to only release its content on BR.
This HD-DVD Paramount deal is simply the other side finally waking up and fighting back in a likewise manner.
The NYTimes reporter was sloppy with his language and didn't realize how cryptic it reads. But I frequent http://avsforum.com/ where Amir frequently posts. From reading his posts there, here is what the NYT article meant:
"Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment made by parties unbeknown to Microsoft but said Microsoft, themselves wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group."
At least one of the listed projects, IronPython, runs with no problems on Mono. I assume the same can be said for much of the other.NET targetted projects.
BTW, mose projects on SourceForge run on Linux ONLY. I guess the reason is to lock people into Linux, according to your dufus logic.
Please stop repeating Groklaw FUD. A couple weeks ago, Groklaw decided to FUD Microsoft's submission of their licenses to OSI by talking of licenses that Microsoft has not even submitted to OSI, namely the Ms-LPL and Ms-LCL. Those are "L"imited versions of Ms-PL and Ms-CL that tie the source to Windows. Microsoft has not submitted those, rather, they have submitted Ms-PL and Ms-CL, which most certainly are platform independent, as IronPython proves (its code released under Ms-PL and runs on.NET and Mono).
I know slashdotters loath Ms-PL, but not all of the projects use Ms-PL anyway. If you had bothered to check the license of the listed projects you'd see that some of them use GPL or LGPL (the only licenses that slashdotters appear to respect).
For example, the PHPExcel, which allows PHP code to read/write Excel 2007 files, uses LGPL. Still other projects use custom licenses, like the GoTraxxx project.
Microsoft's own projects use MS licenses like Ms-PL and Ms-CL (both pending OSI-certification) but non-MS projects can use any license the devs choose to use.
" It is already clear (from other/. stories) that the OOXML architecture seems rather shoddy and looks like something that was quickly put together. MSFT is trying to force it through iso rather thanb let OOXML succeed through its own merit... that alone draws suspicion to the quality of OOXML."
Oh please. Rather than relying on FUD spread by/. and Rob Weird, why don't you read the spec yourself, or just go to http://openxmldeveloper.org/ and read some sample code and articles, and then decide if it's a "shoddy" architecture. And it wasn't quickly put together, it was put together over a number of years, and the ECMA process itself took over a year.
Um, the three of the five licenses that you refer to are NOT on the table for OSI approval. MS has only submitted the two licenses that most agree are open source licenses, i.e. the MS-PL and MS-CL (not the MS-LPL, MS-LCL, and MS-RL). Groklaw was spreading FUD by talking about licenses that are not even being submitted to OSI.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical class-action style case (I don't know if this was officially class-action, but it has the same characterstics), where the lawyers get rich and those in the "class" get next-to-nothing. These types of cases are a waste of time.
The results of the settlement are bullshit too.
"Individual consumers pocket very little: they can file for $16 for each copy of Windows or MS-DOS purchased over a 12-year period, and $29 for Office."
Why should anyone get a partial refund for MS-DOS? Is there ANY evidence that Microsoft overcharged for MS-DOS? They weren't declared a "monopoly" until 2000, long after they were selling MS-DOS, and the product that was ruled to have monopoly status was the desktop version of Windows, not MS-DOS (nor Office or any other product). Nobody has made a credible argument that Microsoft had a monopoly in the MS-DOS days. This entire case was ridiculous now that I look at this.
No it hasn't. OSX 10.4 is slower on my ~2002 PowerBook than OSX 10.3.
Besides that, Vista is the first release of a new OS, and it's common for such OS releases to be slower on similar hardware than their predecessors. OSX 10.0 was dog-slow compared to Mac OS 9. In fact OSX was much much slower relative to its predecessor than Vista is relative to XP. OSX got faster with each release (until 10.4), and Vista may get faster too with each SP.
HA!
So this story is bullshit after all. Should've known, after all, the sources were twitter and theEnquirer.net.
Libertarians believe in small government, particularly keeping government out of the operations of the marketplace; limited-to-zero regulation. I don't know what the submitter thinks of as "nerds" but slashdotters definitely are NOT Libertarians. They believe in big government regulation of the software industry, government-sanctioned file formats, government-regulation of what features an OS can have, picking and choosing of winners in the marketplace. Some here have even suggested that all software be "free", paid for by taxes going to a commission that would issue grants of software projects it chooses to support. Government-approved software.
No, slashdotters are anything BUT Libertarians.
This was posted by Microsoft's Jason Matusow yesterday:
Matusow's Blog: Open XML - The Vote in Sweden
There's a big difference between not "owning" a software product (i.e. you're licensing it under the conditions of the EULA) and not "owning" your own data. According to the summary (I've not bothered to read the article, as I don't really care, I just came here to see people's reactions to the summary), Google is claiming ownership of your data itself. If that's true, it's way worse than your run-of-the-mill software EULA.
BTW, why the hell did you bring up Microsoft in the first place? This is a Google story. Seems that Google defenders always want to change the subject to Microsoft.
Can someone explain how MS would be bound by GPL3? They make no GPL software.
The Novell deal was made prior to GPL3.
How does GPL3 relate to MS at all?
ISO didn't seem too concerned with credibility when it rubberstamped the ODF spec that OASIS gave them, warts and all. One can't even implement a basic spreadsheet using ISO ODF 1.0, yet IBM was running around the globe trying to get governments to mandate exclusive use of ISO ODF 1.0. The very thorough examination that ISO is making OOXML go through should also have been done regarding ODF, but it was not. That's why OASIS folk are working hard to create ODF 1.1, to patch over the woeful deficiencies of ISO ODF 1.0.
ISO failed to do due diligence when rubberstamping ODF, and no slashdotter complained, in fact, they cheered. Now you're pissed that OOXML is being run through the mill (that ODF wasn't put through) and is surviving. Hypocrisy at its finest.
"Or is this just something to put in marketing materials?"
BINGO
ODF advocates want ODF to be the sole ISO standard so they can use that status as ammo when lobbying governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. They want to deny any competing format from achieving the same status, lest their talking point disappears.
Quoting the referred slashdot post by Hoppelainen:
So there is no problem here. These companies were already members of SIS, and they exercised their right to vote in that organization.
I assume that HP voted YES because they voted YES in the recent US vote that took place on 08/24/2007, the results of which were YES 12, NO 3, ABSTAIN 1, which was enough to approve OOXML.
/. carried a story trumpeting the previous "NO" vote, but hasn't done a story on the more recent YES vote.
You can see how each party voted here:
US OOXML VOTE 08/24/2007
Notable YES votes include MS, HP, APPLE, INTEL, SONY.
Notable NO votes were IBM.
It's amusing that slashdot carried hugh headlines for the NO vote, but hasn't covered the YES vote at all (unless I just missed it).
BTW, the US YES vote is a reversal of the 08/10/2007 US vote that was YES 8, NO 7, ABSTAIN 1, which was not enough for approval (which led to premature celebration by IBM's allies):
US OOXML VOTE 08/10/2007
You can check the two links to see which parties flipped from NO to YES. The most notable is the DoD.
It's amusing that
OS/2 World??? LOLOL /. to cover the other side).
Didn't know there were still sites pimping for an OS that's been obsolete for 10 years now.
Anyway, clearly a site advocating OS/2 would have an axe to grind against Microsoft. That's fine, but I'm sure there's an opposing side to this story (not that I expect
And so what if Microsoft partners showed up to vote YES? Obviously those partners intend to use OOXML an want it to be an ISO standard. The stranger thing is that those that are opposed to OOXML being an ISO standard have no intent to use OOXML so why do they care?
Obviously, the reason the care is that they want to use ISO status as a differentiator between ODF and OOXML in lobbying efforts to convince governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. We all know that this is about politics, not technical merit, and those that deny that are just being disingenuous.
Moron, how does some users's empirical evidence of 90% decrease contradict Microsoft's statement, "Of course some users, especially ones on Gigabit based networks, are seeing a much greater decrease than is expected and that is clearly a problem that we need to address." ?
Microsoft acknowledges the problem, you silly buffoon.
"Having said that, Vista needs a lot of work, there's no denying it could be much better than it is (much like XP when it was first released, much like NT4.0 was when it was first released, much like Windows 3.0 when it was first released....)"
And that's not just a Windows phenomenon. I recall the state of Mac OS X 10.0, which was dog poo. It didn't become great until 10.3. I recall Mac OS 7.0 having lots of problems that 7.1 solved (then 7.5.3 broke, but whatever).
This shows that neither OO.o nor K-Office handle ODF faithfully, nor are they compatible with each other.t e/summary.html
http://develop.opendocumentfellowship.org/testsui
Also, OO.o adds things to its files that are outside of the ODF spec. If MSO's files aren't true OOXML files, then OO.o's files aren't true ODF files either.
Same situation as many other standard formats, such as HTML. Different apps handle formats differently, and often not 100% faithful to the spec.
OO.o also support OLE.
Also, Mac Office supports OLE as well, so it's not "Windows-only".
And you claime that OLE is "newly discovered"? It's been around for over 13 years, and was present in the very first OOXML specs.
I don't know about SSPI, but given that your OLE knowledge is so woeful, I feel safe in assuming that your SSPI complaint is FUD as well.
So what?
Sony paid Target and Best Buy to only carry BR players where consumers can actually see them. They stick Toshiba's HD-DVD players in the corner with old 8-track players.
Sony HQ has ordered Sony Pictures to not release any content on HD-DVD, not for 18 months, but *ever*.
Sony paid Disney to keep its content off of HD-DVD. They caved into Fox by adding draconian BD+ DRM to BR discs to convince Fox to only release its content on BR.
This HD-DVD Paramount deal is simply the other side finally waking up and fighting back in a likewise manner.
The NYTimes reporter was sloppy with his language and didn't realize how cryptic it reads.
But I frequent http://avsforum.com/ where Amir frequently posts. From reading his posts there, here is what the NYT article meant:
"Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment made by parties unbeknown to Microsoft but said Microsoft, themselves wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group."
At least one of the listed projects, IronPython, runs with no problems on Mono. .NET targetted projects.
I assume the same can be said for much of the other
BTW, mose projects on SourceForge run on Linux ONLY. I guess the reason is to lock people into Linux, according to your dufus logic.
Please stop repeating Groklaw FUD. .NET and Mono).
A couple weeks ago, Groklaw decided to FUD Microsoft's submission of their licenses to OSI by talking of licenses that Microsoft has not even submitted to OSI, namely the Ms-LPL and Ms-LCL. Those are "L"imited versions of Ms-PL and Ms-CL that tie the source to Windows. Microsoft has not submitted those, rather, they have submitted Ms-PL and Ms-CL, which most certainly are platform independent, as IronPython proves (its code released under Ms-PL and runs on
I know slashdotters loath Ms-PL, but not all of the projects use Ms-PL anyway.
If you had bothered to check the license of the listed projects you'd see that some of them use GPL or LGPL (the only licenses that slashdotters appear to respect).
For example, the PHPExcel, which allows PHP code to read/write Excel 2007 files, uses LGPL.
Still other projects use custom licenses, like the GoTraxxx project.
Microsoft's own projects use MS licenses like Ms-PL and Ms-CL (both pending OSI-certification) but non-MS projects can use any license the devs choose to use.
BluRay is bundled with PS3; that's the only reason that the market "chose" it.
"I have done very well without using any MS products for the past 7 years."
Who gives a shit?
I've done very well without using Linux for the past 20 years. So the hell what? Stick to the issues at hand.
" It is already clear (from other /. stories) that the OOXML architecture seems rather shoddy and looks like something that was quickly put together. MSFT is trying to force it through iso rather thanb let OOXML succeed through its own merit... that alone draws suspicion to the quality of OOXML."
/. and Rob Weird, why don't you read the spec yourself, or just go to http://openxmldeveloper.org/ and read some sample code and articles, and then decide if it's a "shoddy" architecture. And it wasn't quickly put together, it was put together over a number of years, and the ECMA process itself took over a year.
Oh please.
Rather than relying on FUD spread by
Um, the three of the five licenses that you refer to are NOT on the table for OSI approval. MS has only submitted the two licenses that most agree are open source licenses, i.e. the MS-PL and MS-CL (not the MS-LPL, MS-LCL, and MS-RL). Groklaw was spreading FUD by talking about licenses that are not even being submitted to OSI.