Frankly I don't care for the shareholders who put their money into a vile Criminal Monopoly to feed their own greed, any more than I care for those who invest in industries that kill millions, like tobacco, when they lose the lot, as I sincerely hope they will. I could mention Monsanto and GM.....
People with some spare cash to invest should either act responsibly or face the consequences.
BTW I am not a communist, I do in fact own an extremely modest number of shares in two companies that actually make useful things, avionics and data comms.
I agree, but will the fine be a mere slap on the wrist, or will it be a sufficient deterrent that they never behave badly again? Of course, they will appeal anyway, so it will drag on for several more years yet.
The fact is that the law is far too slow, both in the US and Europe, to deal with vile Criminal Monopolies like M$, the damage is done and the opposition (inevitably with better products, which is not hard in the case of M$) crushed, long before the case even gets through the first round of legal proceedings.
There is an urgent case for a system of fast-tracking cases like this so the damage can be stopped promptly, as soon as the illegal actions of the Abusive Monopoly are spotted.
The catholic church do not believe in God. They are a heretical cult. The word believe comes from the greek pisteou, which means to trust in, rely on and adhere to, none of which they do. They have elevated Mary to the stauus of "Mother of God", etc. They have all the identifying signs of the Beast of Rveelation, including the number 666. They disobey His word right, left and centre, as do their offspring, most of the nominally Christian churches, who in fact are no such thing.
Indeed it does! I must confess that I did not have time to read the web site in full, and see the various other strange but chemically correct names. Now, the formula for an alcohol is C(n)H(2n+1)OH, where n is 1 for methanol, which is highly toxic, 2 for ethanol etc. There seems to be nothing preventing n being zero, so can we call it aquanol? The site has been slashdotted so I can't get access to it right now to see if he has already thought of that one.
It matters very much. IANAL, but there is a danger that if laws, contracts, agreements, kicences, etc are not applied, it will become impossible in some countries to enforce them in the future.
In the UK we have public rights of way in the countryside. The law differs between Scotland and England/Wales, but in general if these rights of way are not used by someone within a certain time period, the landowner can claim them as private again. It is a fair system, that which is absolutely never used should not be retained in the public domain. The rights of way are guarded by the Ramblers Associstion, who many years ago (before my time) were branded as communists for a mass protest, a battle which resulted in the fairly sensible arrangements we have now. But, if they had not done that, access to the countryside would now be greatly reduced, and many useful footpaths would be gone for ever.
Now, the FSF, and RMS in particular, are frequently branded as communists by the likes of Ballmer,because they dare to uphold the rights of the FOSS community. If they don't enforce their rights, at least occasionally, these rights may be lost.
I think this sort of thing is a risk in countries which use the "common law" concept, which includes most of the Commonwealth including Australia. Don't know about the US, but not most of Europe. It can be a case of "use it or lose it", and although many rights would take generations to be lost, others may be gone quite quickly, at the discretion of the courts. So, it is very necessary to enforce the GPL fairly regularly.
As to hacking around with the source, maybe no-one would, there is no way of knowing, unlike my example of the footpaths, where those who have on a special occasion exercised a right will document it in case of dispute. But, casual visitors may not be seen.
As to why anyone would fail to make proper or full disclosure of source, and expect to get away with it, I don't know. The Big Boys like IBM play by the rules on this, so why can't lesser people?
No, the cancellation can only be partial and in certain positions. The problem is simply a matter of time delay, the speed of sound is not very high so for practical dimensions there is substantial phase shift. By using a lot of speakers and very complicated processing, you can make it better, but it is still in the form of an interference pattern, and will always show peaks in certain places. You would need to make the summation of the speakers look like the original source, but in antiphase, to everyone around, to get cancellation. The wavelength of sound at 1KHz is about a foot, if you use one speaker you need to get the difference in disatnce between everyone and the speaker very much less than 1 foot so they all see cancellation. The idea is to put the maxima where they do least harm. These systems only work on regular frequencies, you can't predict random noise, and so can't cancel it unless maybe the speakers are all very much nearer people than the original source so there is time to do the computation.
A very greatly hyped and over-rated technology, which in some specific circumstances will provide a useful reduction (10dB?) in low-frequency noise, for example in the Dash8-Q400 aircraft, where propeller blade fundamental frequency noise is at 85Hz in the cruise (6 blades at 850 rpm, which is lower than most), and where people tend to sit in predictable places, it does quite well, although a fair part of the reduction is by trimming the relative phases of the two propellers (which should run in synchronism in steady flight, although this is not a safety-related function and might not always work, as it is not provided with any backup system), how that compares to the contribution from the speakers I don't know. The active noise suppression system can command the propeller controls to adjust the phasing, and indeed select which blades to synchronise, as they might be slightly unequal, of course it has only extremely limited control authority to avoid it becoming safety-critical, so it can only trim the relative angles very slowly. That is basically adjusting two noise sources so they make the least overall noise, inside the aircraft. I always had the suspicion that at certain precise positions outside (as presumaly happens with all twin-engined aircraft), the noise would be doubled, but it passed certification so it must have been acceptable. Probably much quieter than the average jet, Avro 146 excluded, anyway.
At 85Hz, the wavelength is about 12 feet, so the problem is somewhat simpler, but still very complex....
I am not a noise expert, but I can clain very intimate knowledge of the propeller sync system, called "syncrophase" in this case, being one of its main hardware designers. The propellers are synchronised at the desired angle, within about quarter of a degree, which is not bad considering there is no mechanical connection, the engine power is several thousand horsepower, and only a little pulse as each blade passes a sensor gets sent from the master controller to the slave. Oh! sorry, I forgot, can't use these words any more..... Back to the drawing board. Ground the aircraft in the interests of political correctness. Now, did it have any IDE drives on board?
On a jet, by comparison, the fundamental frequency is much greater, and the engines can't be synchronised anyway, so these systems are not worth bothering with.
If I remember my chemistry correctly, dihydrogen monoxide is incorrect because the molecule splits into H+ and OH- ions. It should be hydrogen hydroxide. I made the same mistake in chemistry class in 1964.
Konqueror has not been ruled to be illegally commingled in a court of law, and there is no reason for it to be. It can be freely removed from the OS, or not installed, whatever one chooses.
IE cannot be removed by any method provided by M$. True, you can now, AFAIK, uninstall it, which removes the icon from the desktop, and leaves 20MB or so of bloated, buggy and insecure code still loaded. They have delibarately put various vital system functions into some of the.dlls that belong to IE (very bad programming practice indeed) to ensure that as afr as possible it cannot be removed. That, and the illegal act, under monopoly law, of tying a browser to an OS, is shy it is illegal.
I am glad that you run Opera and like it, I mostly use Mozilla, but do use Opera for testing web pages and the occasional site taht doesn't seem to work properly. The sad fact is that when you are running Opera, or I am running Mozilla, the bloated and buggy IE is still consuming system resources.
Nevertheless what he did say still appears to be entirely untrue. AFAIK no politician anywhere at that time did anything to encourage the development of the internet, it happened to develop in the quite efficient and democratic way that it has because of lack of political involvement. Politicians could not achieve such a thing even within one country, far less internationally. Their ideas, aspirations, imaginations, methods and competencies are totally at odds with anything technical being made to operate on a large scale, efficiently, as is proved regularly.
What politicians do look like achieveing is ending the net as we know it, because they will listen to the wrong advice about how to deal with spam, pornography, hate and violence, etc. What was created by research institutions (OK, government funded but no politician was watching the detail, or would comprehend it, of what they were doing), expanded by businesses large and small, without the participation of the Illegal Monopoly until very late (my first ISP was one of the small category), and used by almost anyone, will be destroyed by supposedly democratically elected governments. Sadly you and I will not be able to comment, because there will be no Slashdot, there may however be a virus-infested and unreliable MSN, which will be said by those who have taken bribes (sorry, campaign funding) from the Monopoly to have solved all the problems.
Would you not also have a virtual BSOD, virtual seurity holes, virtual Outlook (or is that the same thing?), virtual illegally commingled disfunctional web browser, virtual monololy.......
All the more reason to make the move completely to Linux, BSD or whatever, and OOo or Star Office, and dump the buggy and undocumented M$ protocols and file formats.
No sensible organisation sends M$ Office files out by email anyway, due to the extreme risk of macro viruses, so interoperability is really not needed in practice except within the organisation itself, and how long does it take to roll out OOo?
That can be done long before the switch to Linux, to get users familiar with their main applications, then Linux can be brought in at a leisurely pace, knowing that OOo will interoperate with itself on all supported platforms.
All very well, but you US citizens did not vote for that mentally deficient warmonger that you have in the White House now. You do not legally have a president right now. The election was a farce, and it looks set to be an even bigger farce next time round, with voting machines being run by M$ software, and all sorts of other horrors.
Just make sure that the other guy has such a decisive majority this time that the inevitable attempts at election rigging will not succeed.
I think that would make the GPL invalid, and so there would be no way that others could distribute the code, as the only licence for them to do so would be invalid. It gets complicated.....
Of course the copyright holder is entitled to do anything they want, and despite some very careless or stupid remarks by both McBride and Ballmer, nothing forces anyone to apply the GPL anyway. It does not try to take over all your code of its own volition, as they have implied on a number of occasions. But, once you have GPLed the code, you can't take it back, although as the copyright holder, you would be able to make new versions that were not GPL.
If you wanted GPL with some restrictions removed (as is your right as copyright holder), you would really need to write your own licence, or dual-licence under GPL and BSD for example, but if you do this, beware of forking, and others who will make the BSD licenced version proprietary, effectively stealing your hard work.
Another problem occurs when someone using the GPL code fixes a problem, adds a feature, or just changes it in some way. If you have applied the GPL, that work is yours as well as his and everyone else's, to do with as you wish, while complying with the GPL, but if you have allowed exceptions, you may well have no rights to the modified code, based on what you wrote. It is far, far safer for everyone to stick to the GPL in full, or use an entirely different licence such as BSD if you really must.
To clarify, it is safer to dual-licence, the user selecting which licence on offer that he wishes to comply with (one might be commercial), or to write an entirely new licence, rather than trying to graft exceptions on to the GPL, which is purposely designed to prevent these types of exception.
It is of course perfectly permissible for the copyright holder to offer to negotiate other licencing arrangements with anyone who needs something different, but they can then only include their own code, or get specific permission from each and every other person who has contributed to the GPL code, which would at best be difficult.
....because internet protocols are developed, documented and controlled via the RFC system which works very well and is open to anyone who wants to participate.
They are of course fully entitled to invent as many protocols as they need for their own use, and it is probably a good thing, but unless it goes through the RFC process, it will never be accepted for general use by the public.
It means very little except that there is lots of prior art, but the obfuscated language makes it very difficult to see. All they seem to be talking about here is a software emulation, which allows a program written for a large and powerful processor to be run in a degraded manner on a smaller and less powerful processor, by emulation. But people have been doing that for a long time, IIRC "The Mythical Man Month" talks about emulating the latest new IBM hardware on the previous generation, and that was 30 years ago. Techniques of dropping frames due to poor data rate are not new, in fact very well used on internet TV etc, same with showing downgraded images on small devices.
There is nothing new here, nor anything not obvious to a person skilled in the art, or whatever the legal phrase is.
Once again, the patents office has got it very wrong. It would be almost impossible to devise any software that actually contained anything new. It does happen, but very rarely, Unix would have qualified (or maybe Multics), for having all I/O as files, possibly the fork(), and one or two other bits, the first assembler, the first compiler, maybe even the first interpreter, or the first (Xerox?) GUI, the first application of Virtual Memory (don't know who, it definitely pre-dated BSD, most likely one of the mainframe manufacturers, etc. These, and things like them, were truly inventive steps. The Convicted Monopolist apparently holds a patent for using segment registers, since about Windoze 1.0. How stupid! The segment registers are there to be used, if the programmer so wishes, to do anything. They hold segment adresses, that is all they can do.
In 99.99999% of the software patents we seem to be seeing in the US (not yet in the UK fortunately) there is simply no inventive step, lots of prior art and not the slightest reason to award a patent.
Draw your own conclusions about why, and it is not (just?) because I am stupid.
The fact is that I haven't used anything but Mozilla, sometimes Konqueror or Opera, for serious browsing for so long that I have forgotten how useles IE is. Still, it only ever was a tool for an Illegal Monopoly to destroy Netscape, it never needed to be a good browser, never has been, and never will be.
Yes, to be the first person in their Quality Control department, because he clearly can see what is not standards-compliant, unlike Sir Bill. Or maybe Chief Software Architect, because he has demonstrated a lot more ability in that direction than the present incompetent incumbent....
Of course, if Sir Bill were to clean his glasses more often, he might notice a few problems....
But sadly it will not make IE secure, or stable, and the range of features of CSS it supports will forever be limited, to what can be reimplemented in the bit of CSS that does actually work.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, even less from a piece of porcine excrement like IE.
Nevertheless this guy has made a very good attempt.
It shows very little about IE except that as a browser it is an obsolete, insecure and bug-infested piece of illegally commingled code, which is so entwined with the equally insecure and bug-infested OS that it can't be fixed.
It does however show a great degree of skill on the part of the programmer, in the use of the limited and corrupt subset of CSS which actually works on the obsolete browser, and a great deal of patience in finding and working around countless undocumented bugs and features, despite the obstruction and wilful obfuscation caused by the actions of the Criminal Monopolist.
Yes, and we all know why IE has been allowed to stagnate. It has served its illegal purpose of destroying the competition, therefore it is no longer of any interest to Sir Bill and his Convicted Monopoly. In short, there is no money to be made, ar additional Illegal Monopolistic advantage to be gained, in doing any more browser development. Sir Bill thinks he has won, but in a few years it will be recognised that this led directly to the downfall of Microsoft. Just wait and see....
It is such a mess of commingled code that it would be impossible to sort it out properly without a complete redesign of both IE and the bug-infested trash OS of which it has illegally become a part.
Commingling disparate software is one of the worst design practices known, it always results in a perpetual mess. Sir Bill's attempts to create a situation, in utter defiance of the courts, where the browser cannot be removed from the OS, is responsible for this situation.
You need ieradicator. It removes Incompetent Exploder, and/or Lookout. You have to leave a few bits of IE for the Windoze help system IIRC, it can do that too.
I haven't used it for a while, since I started using Linux exclusively for email and browsing, but it certainly worked well last time I tried it. It gave me great pleasure to do something easily that those M$ employees who committed perjury in the monopoly trial said could not be done, and the system was faster and more stable afterwards. The illegally commingled code makes the whole OS a mess, a tidy piece of code would never be structured like that, with assorted functions spread here, there and everywhere for no other reason than to make removal diffciult.
Slashdot Mirror
People with some spare cash to invest should either act responsibly or face the consequences.
BTW I am not a communist, I do in fact own an extremely modest number of shares in two companies that actually make useful things, avionics and data comms.
The fact is that the law is far too slow, both in the US and Europe, to deal with vile Criminal Monopolies like M$, the damage is done and the opposition (inevitably with better products, which is not hard in the case of M$) crushed, long before the case even gets through the first round of legal proceedings.
There is an urgent case for a system of fast-tracking cases like this so the damage can be stopped promptly, as soon as the illegal actions of the Abusive Monopoly are spotted.
Don't confuse man-made cult religion with Truth!
See http://www.trf.org.au
Indeed it does! I must confess that I did not have time to read the web site in full, and see the various other strange but chemically correct names. Now, the formula for an alcohol is C(n)H(2n+1)OH, where n is 1 for methanol, which is highly toxic, 2 for ethanol etc. There seems to be nothing preventing n being zero, so can we call it aquanol? The site has been slashdotted so I can't get access to it right now to see if he has already thought of that one.
In the UK we have public rights of way in the countryside. The law differs between Scotland and England/Wales, but in general if these rights of way are not used by someone within a certain time period, the landowner can claim them as private again. It is a fair system, that which is absolutely never used should not be retained in the public domain. The rights of way are guarded by the Ramblers Associstion, who many years ago (before my time) were branded as communists for a mass protest, a battle which resulted in the fairly sensible arrangements we have now. But, if they had not done that, access to the countryside would now be greatly reduced, and many useful footpaths would be gone for ever.
Now, the FSF, and RMS in particular, are frequently branded as communists by the likes of Ballmer,because they dare to uphold the rights of the FOSS community. If they don't enforce their rights, at least occasionally, these rights may be lost.
I think this sort of thing is a risk in countries which use the "common law" concept, which includes most of the Commonwealth including Australia. Don't know about the US, but not most of Europe. It can be a case of "use it or lose it", and although many rights would take generations to be lost, others may be gone quite quickly, at the discretion of the courts. So, it is very necessary to enforce the GPL fairly regularly.
As to hacking around with the source, maybe no-one would, there is no way of knowing, unlike my example of the footpaths, where those who have on a special occasion exercised a right will document it in case of dispute. But, casual visitors may not be seen.
As to why anyone would fail to make proper or full disclosure of source, and expect to get away with it, I don't know. The Big Boys like IBM play by the rules on this, so why can't lesser people?
A very greatly hyped and over-rated technology, which in some specific circumstances will provide a useful reduction (10dB?) in low-frequency noise, for example in the Dash8-Q400 aircraft, where propeller blade fundamental frequency noise is at 85Hz in the cruise (6 blades at 850 rpm, which is lower than most), and where people tend to sit in predictable places, it does quite well, although a fair part of the reduction is by trimming the relative phases of the two propellers (which should run in synchronism in steady flight, although this is not a safety-related function and might not always work, as it is not provided with any backup system), how that compares to the contribution from the speakers I don't know. The active noise suppression system can command the propeller controls to adjust the phasing, and indeed select which blades to synchronise, as they might be slightly unequal, of course it has only extremely limited control authority to avoid it becoming safety-critical, so it can only trim the relative angles very slowly. That is basically adjusting two noise sources so they make the least overall noise, inside the aircraft. I always had the suspicion that at certain precise positions outside (as presumaly happens with all twin-engined aircraft), the noise would be doubled, but it passed certification so it must have been acceptable. Probably much quieter than the average jet, Avro 146 excluded, anyway.
At 85Hz, the wavelength is about 12 feet, so the problem is somewhat simpler, but still very complex....
I am not a noise expert, but I can clain very intimate knowledge of the propeller sync system, called "syncrophase" in this case, being one of its main hardware designers. The propellers are synchronised at the desired angle, within about quarter of a degree, which is not bad considering there is no mechanical connection, the engine power is several thousand horsepower, and only a little pulse as each blade passes a sensor gets sent from the master controller to the slave. Oh! sorry, I forgot, can't use these words any more..... Back to the drawing board. Ground the aircraft in the interests of political correctness. Now, did it have any IDE drives on board?
On a jet, by comparison, the fundamental frequency is much greater, and the engines can't be synchronised anyway, so these systems are not worth bothering with.
If I remember my chemistry correctly, dihydrogen monoxide is incorrect because the molecule splits into H+ and OH- ions. It should be hydrogen hydroxide. I made the same mistake in chemistry class in 1964.
IE cannot be removed by any method provided by M$. True, you can now, AFAIK, uninstall it, which removes the icon from the desktop, and leaves 20MB or so of bloated, buggy and insecure code still loaded. They have delibarately put various vital system functions into some of the .dlls that belong to IE (very bad programming practice indeed) to ensure that as afr as possible it cannot be removed. That, and the illegal act, under monopoly law, of tying a browser to an OS, is shy it is illegal.
I am glad that you run Opera and like it, I mostly use Mozilla, but do use Opera for testing web pages and the occasional site taht doesn't seem to work properly. The sad fact is that when you are running Opera, or I am running Mozilla, the bloated and buggy IE is still consuming system resources.
Nevertheless what he did say still appears to be entirely untrue. AFAIK no politician anywhere at that time did anything to encourage the development of the internet, it happened to develop in the quite efficient and democratic way that it has because of lack of political involvement. Politicians could not achieve such a thing even within one country, far less internationally. Their ideas, aspirations, imaginations, methods and competencies are totally at odds with anything technical being made to operate on a large scale, efficiently, as is proved regularly.
What politicians do look like achieveing is ending the net as we know it, because they will listen to the wrong advice about how to deal with spam, pornography, hate and violence, etc. What was created by research institutions (OK, government funded but no politician was watching the detail, or would comprehend it, of what they were doing), expanded by businesses large and small, without the participation of the Illegal Monopoly until very late (my first ISP was one of the small category), and used by almost anyone, will be destroyed by supposedly democratically elected governments. Sadly you and I will not be able to comment, because there will be no Slashdot, there may however be a virus-infested and unreliable MSN, which will be said by those who have taken bribes (sorry, campaign funding) from the Monopoly to have solved all the problems.
Would you not also have a virtual BSOD, virtual seurity holes, virtual Outlook (or is that the same thing?), virtual illegally commingled disfunctional web browser, virtual monololy.......
No sensible organisation sends M$ Office files out by email anyway, due to the extreme risk of macro viruses, so interoperability is really not needed in practice except within the organisation itself, and how long does it take to roll out OOo?
That can be done long before the switch to Linux, to get users familiar with their main applications, then Linux can be brought in at a leisurely pace, knowing that OOo will interoperate with itself on all supported platforms.
Just make sure that the other guy has such a decisive majority this time that the inevitable attempts at election rigging will not succeed.
Of course the copyright holder is entitled to do anything they want, and despite some very careless or stupid remarks by both McBride and Ballmer, nothing forces anyone to apply the GPL anyway. It does not try to take over all your code of its own volition, as they have implied on a number of occasions. But, once you have GPLed the code, you can't take it back, although as the copyright holder, you would be able to make new versions that were not GPL.
If you wanted GPL with some restrictions removed (as is your right as copyright holder), you would really need to write your own licence, or dual-licence under GPL and BSD for example, but if you do this, beware of forking, and others who will make the BSD licenced version proprietary, effectively stealing your hard work.
Another problem occurs when someone using the GPL code fixes a problem, adds a feature, or just changes it in some way. If you have applied the GPL, that work is yours as well as his and everyone else's, to do with as you wish, while complying with the GPL, but if you have allowed exceptions, you may well have no rights to the modified code, based on what you wrote. It is far, far safer for everyone to stick to the GPL in full, or use an entirely different licence such as BSD if you really must.
To clarify, it is safer to dual-licence, the user selecting which licence on offer that he wishes to comply with (one might be commercial), or to write an entirely new licence, rather than trying to graft exceptions on to the GPL, which is purposely designed to prevent these types of exception.
It is of course perfectly permissible for the copyright holder to offer to negotiate other licencing arrangements with anyone who needs something different, but they can then only include their own code, or get specific permission from each and every other person who has contributed to the GPL code, which would at best be difficult.
They are of course fully entitled to invent as many protocols as they need for their own use, and it is probably a good thing, but unless it goes through the RFC process, it will never be accepted for general use by the public.
This is really a big non-event.
I think the usual, and provably correct, saying is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
...when he invented the internet?
There is nothing new here, nor anything not obvious to a person skilled in the art, or whatever the legal phrase is.
Once again, the patents office has got it very wrong. It would be almost impossible to devise any software that actually contained anything new. It does happen, but very rarely, Unix would have qualified (or maybe Multics), for having all I/O as files, possibly the fork(), and one or two other bits, the first assembler, the first compiler, maybe even the first interpreter, or the first (Xerox?) GUI, the first application of Virtual Memory (don't know who, it definitely pre-dated BSD, most likely one of the mainframe manufacturers, etc. These, and things like them, were truly inventive steps. The Convicted Monopolist apparently holds a patent for using segment registers, since about Windoze 1.0. How stupid! The segment registers are there to be used, if the programmer so wishes, to do anything. They hold segment adresses, that is all they can do.
In 99.99999% of the software patents we seem to be seeing in the US (not yet in the UK fortunately) there is simply no inventive step, lots of prior art and not the slightest reason to award a patent.
Draw your own conclusions about why, and it is not (just?) because I am stupid.
The fact is that I haven't used anything but Mozilla, sometimes Konqueror or Opera, for serious browsing for so long that I have forgotten how useles IE is. Still, it only ever was a tool for an Illegal Monopoly to destroy Netscape, it never needed to be a good browser, never has been, and never will be.
Of course, if Sir Bill were to clean his glasses more often, he might notice a few problems....
But sadly it will not make IE secure, or stable, and the range of features of CSS it supports will forever be limited, to what can be reimplemented in the bit of CSS that does actually work.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, even less from a piece of porcine excrement like IE.
Nevertheless this guy has made a very good attempt.
It does however show a great degree of skill on the part of the programmer, in the use of the limited and corrupt subset of CSS which actually works on the obsolete browser, and a great deal of patience in finding and working around countless undocumented bugs and features, despite the obstruction and wilful obfuscation caused by the actions of the Criminal Monopolist.
It is such a mess of commingled code that it would be impossible to sort it out properly without a complete redesign of both IE and the bug-infested trash OS of which it has illegally become a part.
Commingling disparate software is one of the worst design practices known, it always results in a perpetual mess. Sir Bill's attempts to create a situation, in utter defiance of the courts, where the browser cannot be removed from the OS, is responsible for this situation.
The sad thing is that the law does not get applied to the biggest criminal of them all, the Convicted Monopolist.
I haven't used it for a while, since I started using Linux exclusively for email and browsing, but it certainly worked well last time I tried it. It gave me great pleasure to do something easily that those M$ employees who committed perjury in the monopoly trial said could not be done, and the system was faster and more stable afterwards. The illegally commingled code makes the whole OS a mess, a tidy piece of code would never be structured like that, with assorted functions spread here, there and everywhere for no other reason than to make removal diffciult.
Or maybe they could borrow it, copy the files, and return the media?