Actually, they did have an article on Rather being a guest at that fund raiser. The did present Rather's side of the issue which was that he didn't know it was a fund raiser until he got there.
It's an opinion piece, and does do some dem-bashing. I'm just hoping that democratic voters realize that it's well justified bashing. I'm hoping they can look past the tone of the article, and realize that there seems to be a serious problem with some of thier elected officials trading their rights away for campain cash. I don't expect democrats to believe this to be true just because they heard it on FOX News. There's plenty of evidence of the facts out there for those who are willing to look.
Just to state my rather obvious point of view here. I am a registered Republican, though I don't side with Republicans on all issues.
I'm not sure how you think Micorsoft penalized hardware companies that used DR-DOS and IBM-DOS. I'm pretty sure their you must install our OS on all machines you make of a certain type agreements post date these OSes. With DR-DOS, they definatley kept them from having early access to Microsoft's other products, which hurt DR-DOS because it would often need to be patched before some new MS products would work on it. Of course, it's not clear that Microsoft was a monopoly at that time, so it's kind of a mute point anyway.
OS/2 is kind of a different story. It was relatively hard to configure, had a lot of compatibility issues with software from many different vendors, and the advanced features it provided over Windows really didn't mean that much to customers at the time. IBM has a long history of making some great products, but not really knowing how to market them, or when and how to bring them to market. OS/2 pretty much died on it's own because Windows met most user's needs as well if not better, and people were more used to it. NT filled the needs of those that Windows didn't. OS/2 just never really offered people something they were looking for.
You are right that the key to Microsoft's unfair competition has been their licensing. Microsoft should be allowed to add products to their OS/opperating environment. That provides a benefit to customers. It was especially important when few people had broadband. A lot of applications have been built apon the middleware that Microsoft has added to Windows. Without that functionality being integrated into Windows, every vendor would have to create that functionality themselves, or license it from someone else. Even if the middleware is provided for free, there would be conflicting implementations and configuration issues. Consumers wouldn't benefit from this, and it isn't the justice departments job to make life better for Microsoft's competitors at the expense of consumers.
Microsoft's licensing agreements are another story. There's no reason ISP should have been forced to use IE if they wanted to be listed in MS's connection wizard. There's no reason that Microsoft should be able to demand that multi-boot systems not be sold by vendors.
I'm not sure that multi-os systems are really in vendors best interests due to support costs, but it should be the vendor's decision, not Microsoft's.
I'm not sure where you're getting your idea that he's opposed to peaceful protest. He did say something about a mob taking to the streets, but I don't usuall equate the term mob with a peaceful protest.
From what I've seen, the anti-globalization protesters that have been tear gassed by police weren't being very peaceful, or were part of a group that wasn't being peaceful, and wouldn't leave so the immedite area so the police could deal with the non-peaceful protestors.
There are many people who peacefully protest anti-globalization. I fully respect their right to do so. There are also many who have violently protested it, and I don't see that violence as justified.
ACPI is a very complicated standard. It's very possible that both Microsoft and Soyo have compliant implementations that simply don't work together. That type of thing happens much more often than people appear to realize. For Microsoft to certify that hardware works with XP, that hardware must go through a test suite. It looks like the ACPI implementation caused their board to fail these tests. Soyo's solution appears to have been to disable ACPI. There are other Motherboards out there with ACPI enabled that are XP certified. This isn't an issue with XP and ACPI in general, just with this board.
If the test failed because Microsoft didn't implement ACPI correctly, then Microsoft should fix the problem. If Soyo didn't implement it correctly, Soyo should fix the problem. If they both implemented it according to the spec, but there's still an incompatibility, then Microsoft shouldn't certify the board unless Soho makes it work with Microsoft's implementation.
Hardware incompatibilities are nothing new. I get to work with them on a regular basis. They often require vendors to work together to resolve an issue.
As it is now, the best solution is for FreeBSD to be fixed to be able to share interrupts. There's no reason PCI interrupts shouldn't be able to be shared.
People need to ease up on the everything is Microsoft's fault attitude. The link in the story to Microsoft's winlogo site even talks about ACPI support, so it's obvious that MS doesn't require this to be disabled on all motherboards. This is an issue with a single motherboard, and that vendors method of attaining their works with XP logo.
Suppose I write a game like this, and *then* after selling it all over, start charging by the hour for server access. Someone goes out and writes a free alternate server. If the "you cannot write an alternate server" attack becomes a valid attack, then writing a free alternate server would become illegal as well, something that I completely do not agree with.
So your argument is that people should be able to write an emulator, even though it definately opens them up to more software piracy, because they might sometime in the future decided to charge for battlenet. Blizzard has never done anything like that in the past. There may even be legal issues with them doing so. I can see Blizzard making a new game that you pay for on a monthly basis, but I don't see them starting to charge for bnet access after selling a product that says free online play on bnet all over the box.
Many people have to put up with firewalls or have slow or unreliable connections to battle.net. This will let them enjoy their game much more fully.
This is a very small portion of the user base, and it's likely that most of the people having those problems won't benefit from bnetd. If you have a crappy internet connection, moving the server usually means you have a crappy connection to a new server. A lot of the people who have problems with routers either have a poorly configured router, which bnetd isn't going to solve, or are playing in a network where the owners/admins don't want the users accessing bnet. These arguments aren't going to convince a judge that there are significant, legitimate uses. Bnetd will also be a support nightmare for Blizzard. Every time they patch the client and server to fix something, bnetd is going to break. That's going to piss off people who bought the game, and they're going to get flooded with nasty support emails. Saying that they don't support bnetd won't work. They'll still get blamed. Bugs bnetd will also get blamed on Blizzard, and they'll have to waste development time making sure the bug isn't theirs. Bnetd will cost Blizzard money in support costs and lost sales. WHere's that money going to come from? Somebody has to pay the bills. Are you willing to pay more for the games to make up for it? You can suggest that bnetd will bring Blizzard a wider audience, which would increase sales to pay these costs, but I don't think the numbers will add up. There's also the question of who should make that decision. My answer is Blizzard. They invested the money on developing the game. They're taking the risk if things don't work out, and it doesn't make sense to expand their expenses to a larger support staff without a clear benefit.
Blizzard's putting up a front. Legally, they haven't got a leg to stand on.
I think you're very wrong here. I also don't think Blizzard even needs the DMCA to kill bnetd. They can just screw with the client and server code though patches on a regular basis. That would definately get ugly, and I hope it never comes to that.
Blizzard spent a tremendous amout of money developing these games. You get to play them for a low 1 time fee of around $50. That business model only works if they get to have some control over how the software is distributed and used. If you don't like this, try and get an open source game development movement going. There's obviously a lot of skilled people involved in bnetd development. I however, don't think they are willing to dedicate at least 40 hours a week for years to develop a game like Blizzard does for free. Why should people be able to take Blizzard's efforts and do with it whatever they please. If you want to be able to do that expect to be paying hundreds of dollars for your computer games, or getting much lower quality software.
Hm, so by that justification, if I made a game that directly competed with Blizzard's, I'd be justified in ordering them to shut down, because they're depriving me of potential profit that I can use to make additional games?
I'm not sure how you jumped to this from what I wrote. If you can create a game that competes with Blizzards then great. This is a case of taking the game that blizzard created and making it easier for people to steal it. That may not be the intention of many of the developers, but that is the end result.
You can't mak a server emulator that doesn't allow people to to avoid the copy protection. Even if you use some form of authentication, unless it's a central authentication server, you can use the same CD key on multiple servers. Even then, it would be easy to remove the authentication from an open source server.
There's also no good reason for Blizzard to set up and maintain the authentication server. This would be additional cost to them with little or no benefit.
What's the point? I can understan people's desire to have an emulator, but the emulator is going to take a lot of work to create and maintain. Blizzard can also just tweak the client and server from time to time to keep breaking the emulator. Even if they didn't object to the development of the emulator, patches to the clien would probably break the emulator which would irritate as many people as are pissed of now. There's no real upside for Blizzard to let this projet proceed, and I doubt there's really going to be much benefit to developing it without their support or at least their indifference. Even if you host it in a different country, any US citizens or residents that work on the project are risking jail time. People from other countries may be risking the same thing depending on the laws there. Is all this really worth it just because you want to play the game that blizzard developed and hosts on a FREE (as in free beer) server, on a different server? And at the same time you are facilitating people stealing from the people who wrote this awsome game that you want to play so badly. Blizzard invests a fortune paying a team of artists and developers to work for years on the game. Don't you think they deserve some return on that investment. Don't you also think they deserve some respect for the exelent job they've don and the job they continue to do in patching the games to keep them as balanced as they can? If you don't like their rules, don't play the game and don't buy anymore of their software. That's you're choice. Blizzard is giving you what you've paid for, and in my opinion, it's a bargain. Your opinion may vary, but if you're impressed enough with their games that you'd want to go to the trouble of creating an emulator for their server, then I'd think you're pretty impressed with it.
Notice how they cleverly shift the argument from one of "Why did Blizzard (successfully) attempt to shut down this project?" to "Are you saying you support piracy?" This is what we call a strawman [wikipedia.com], boys and girls.
A strawman is arguing against a warker stance than your opponents actually hold. So what is the stronger stance? What's the real argument here? This is an emulator which would allow people to get around Blizzard's copy protection. I haven't palyed on battlenet in years. They may also have some advertising there, so there might be some loss in ad revenue, though I doubt the ad revenue outweighs the server costs.
All they've done is piss off a bunch of people and possibly "prevent" a couple of copies of their games from being the target of copyright violation. Let's see... a couple fewer sales, or the loss of much goodwill?
I doubt we're talking about just a few sales. Blizzard enjoys a relatively low amount of piracy of it's games that are played online. I even know a couple people who bought the game rather than coppied it because they needed the CD key, and I don't know that many people that play those games. I've also got the question the loss of "much goodwill". Are that many people really surprised by this action by Blizzard? The vast majority of Blizzard's customers won't be surprised, or offended by Blizzard's actions. Even among those that get upset, most will continue to buy and play blizzard's games because the games are of high quality, and the relatively low price of the game is outweighed by the many, many hours of enjoyable play time.
Blizzard isn't being unreasonable or vindictive, they're simply protecting their software so thay can pay their employees and continue to make the high quality games they make.
A lot of people copy games from their friends because it's easy and conveinient, and it's nice to try before buying. A lot of those same people will never bother to actually buy the game, even if they play it a lot. Blizzard's copy protection really only has to make it hard enough that those people buy it rather than copy it.
These are real issues for Blizzard. Arguing that it's only a couple sales and that they will lose good will is the strawman.
With proprietary, you may choose the vendor or the vendor.
Exactly. With propriety software you choose which vendor you want to trust. You can also make agreements where you can audit the software itself under NDA, but that's usually not very helpful in reality.
With open source, you can choose an auditor that you trust, but how many people or companies have someone they trust that have the technical abilities to audit SOMEONE ELSE'S software for security. It usually comes back to having to trust the people writing the software.
I'm not sure larger companies are willing to trust hobbiests to take the time and use the rigorous procedures in developing their software that are required to create good secure software. I'm not saying there isn't exelently written, relatively secure, Open Source software. If you're selecting software on which the stability and good name of you billion dollar company relies why would you choose Open Source over closed source? The company using the software isn't expecting their internal people to be finding security bugs. They'll likely audit the software, but they want a solution, not problems. They don't expect to find anything in their audits, and they definately don't expect to be fixing it themselves. When it comes down to it they want someone they feel they can trust. That means a reasonable, proven track record of few security problems, and a quick response on fixing issues. They also look for someone who's going to be around for a long time to support the software. That usually means a large, stable company. Large, stable companies require stable income. They usually get that income from selling both software and services. Selling services alone is a much more risky business plan because it's hard to support someone else's software, especially when response time is critical, and if the source is open, anyone can take it and compete for the support contract. That competition drives down support costs, but often reduces the quality of the support in the process. Open source does have advantages, but I don't think those advantages are going to be the major determining factors in companies choosing security software.
It all comes back to who do you trust. Most people don't trust people who don't have much to lose. Companies are also going to have trouble trusting people who have strong anti-business attitudes. There are some vocal people in open source with those views. That adds to the doubts. A lot of small doubts quickly add up to going with the option from the big company.
Seriously, MS has already been found guilty of being a monopoly.
I'm kind of nitpicking words here, but being a monopoly is not something you're found guilty of. Being a monopoly isn't a crime.
I remember so many PC makers who tried to offer Be on a pc till Microsoft totally went agro on the makers and made them stop.
I did hear something about this, but I didn't thing there were many, or that they were big companies. The reason computer companies would want to offer BeOS on their computers is to differentiate them from the competition. The downside of offering it is support costs. Don't underestimate how much supporting BeOS would cost a big name manufacturer. They contract out their support, and every call cuts into their low profit margins. Training a support staff enough to be useful on BeOS would be an expensive task, and the contractors are going to pass that price on to the computer companies.
BE never had a chance, and the OS from my point of view was incredible.
I never used BeOS, but it would have to be truely incredible to have even a slight chance. Most people with computers want the same OS that everyone else is using. That fact is the true barrier to entry for new OSs. I've heard from some people that BeOS definately shined in some areas, but even if Microsoft just ignored it, I doubt it stood a chance. Microsoft has a monopoly because they won the first round of the PC OS wars, and the nature of the OS business is that it works out easiest for everyone it they're all using the same one. Microsoft also doesn't sit still. They constantly work to make Windows better. They definately don't do that flawlessly, but they have definately done an exellent job on making their user interface easy to use, and they keep working on making it better.
Be may very well have a case. Microsoft may very well abused it's monopoly position out of paranoia. However, it's unlikely that the damages are in the billions if they are guilty. It's more likely that they crushed a niche OS that may have been able to make millions more. If they did that, they should be punished, and the damages trippled acording to law.
In the short run, a lot of economy professors will be making money as expert witnesses, and lawyers will get rich.
You have a very good point, but if the closed source vendor is serious about fixing security bugs you can report the bug to them and they can fix it. The creators also should have a better idea of how the code works, so you have less of a chance of the fix causing other bugs. This becomes more of an issue of the proper resources getting applied to the task, rather than how software is licensed. It also comes down to who do you trust. Do you trust an open source hacker to fix a security exploit without accidently or intentionally adding another exploit? With open source you can always check the code yourself, but most people don't have the skill or time to make sure there isn't an exploit hidden there. If you can't make sure yourself, you have to trust someone to do it right. Who do you trust?
First of all, this bug is not that significant performance wise. Very little software is going to use 4 MB pages. I don't think you even have an option of allocating memory with 4 MB pages in user space. This appears to be an issue with being able to optimise drivers, however, if AMD's processors can't do this, and Intel's can, why don't we see Intel's processors greatly outperforming AMD's in Win2k? This is a minor bug, and it's easily worked around without patching the kernel in both Win2k and Linux.
The processors are basicly all their Athlon and Duron processors. For AMD or any chip maker to replace chips with bugs in them is VERY expensive. They already have a low profit margin. Replacing all "defective" Athlon and Duron processors would simply bankrupt AMD. Realisticly, all complex software or hardware has bugs. Bugs in hardware are much more difficult and expensive to fix. The truely significant hardware bugs are usually found early in testing. Other bugs are fixed in software, usually in the system BIOS, but sometimes in the OS code. This isn't something new. It's pretty much always been this way. Why has it been this way? Because no one wants to pay the outlandish prices that would result from trying to make hardware perfect. It costs a tremendous amount of money to reroll a processor. It's not as simple as making a quick code change and recompiling software. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE BUGS IN PROCESSORS! A truely significant bug like the Pentium floating point bug needs to be fixed in the hardware, and that one was even significant enough to deserve a recall of the processor. This bug is simple to work around, and isn't truely a significant problem.
The question you asked in the subject is "Should AMD do the right thing?" The answer is yes, they should correct their Technology Bulletin to actually say what the processor bug is, rather than just say here's a workaround to a bug that effects Win2k.
I'm really surprsed that someone at NVidia didn't pass this on to Linux kernel developers much sooner, since people at that company seem to have been aware of this for some time.
Solaris for X86 may still be around for existing installations, but I don't think many people will consider it a viable product for new installations.
I'm pretty sure this means our company will be scratching X86 off the list of supported platforms for driver development. Third party hardware support may not be a big issue for a lot of companies, but the idea of Solaris for x86 always seemed to be a reliable OS on cheap hardware. This seems to kill that idea.
If graphics hous wants to use GIMP they have to retrain their employees. I'm not a graphics person, but I tried using gimp about a year ago to do some stuff. It wasn't very easy to learn to use. I ended up downloading Photoshop and figured out with a little effort how to do what I wanted with it. I then discoverd that you couldn't save or print your work in the free version, and had to download a third program which I got to work.
Profesional graphics people will ikely learn this stuff faster than me, but their time is money. It doesn't take much wasted time learning Gimp before Photoshop becomes a better bargain for them. If GIMP wants to take market share from Photoshop, they need to make their product easy for Photoshop users to learn and use. Otherwise, they're just making a product for hobbiests who have the time to learn it.
I should probably just leave this alone, but why do you have to have 4 different passport accounts. The zone let you associate your zone name with an existing pasport account. It seems like you have 4 different accounts because you don't want Microsoft to associate you (through your credit card) with those other accounts. Well that's not the way the system was designed to work. You can do that, they made it possible to do that, but you need different accounts. How is this different than when you had these accounts seperate before. Passport didn't cause you to have more accounts, it just didn't simplify things, because you didn't want them simplified.
I will agree that the Zone screwed up the transition to Passport pretty badly, but they are pretty much on par with other multiplayer games. I played UO for a little while, and their expansions went worse than AC's. AO's launch was a major disaster. DAoC apparently has been better than most, but AC is far from the worst.
Unless Sun/Apple/Sony/Linux Community get their collective acts together, MS will be the only practical solution.
If these companies get their acts together, we'll just have a different version of passport. If you want to have privacy from this kind of data gathering by companies, you're going to need to get legislation passed to prevent it. SInce most consumers just don't care if a company traks what kind of cereal they eat, and what kind of shows they watch, I don't see Congress passing the legislation.
The MSN gaming zone is a microsoft site. I can see why Microsoft wants one universal system like passport to use for their various sites (MSDN switched a while ago). It saves them support costs in the long run. I'm also not sure how AC players lost any privacy through this move. Microsoft already had the credit card info from the previous zone accounts. It would be nice if Microsoft would accept some other form of payment other than credit cards for AC.
I don't see why well written desktop software needs to be tied to a certain platform. Much of the GNU software is used on many different platforms. Is the main purpose of GCC just to have a free software compiler so that you can compile free software? Is the main purpose of EMACS really to provide an editor on GNU platforms? Do the majority of the contributors agree with these goals? It seems like the idea of GNOME's main purpose being to supply a desktop for GNU software is too narrow. I would think that the goal of GNOME is to supply the best desktop software that they can, and make it usable on as many platforms as they can reasonably support. But this is just my opinion, and other people closer to the issue will likely have more insight.
For someone with a username of fanatic, you seem to have actually spent some time comming up possible solutions, rather than just rants. I do have some comments on your solutions, which I've posted below.
1) All terms must be enforced by a non-Microsoft party with full access to all Microsoft resources, including source code. Microsoft cannot be trusted to voluntarily comply with any agreement.
I think this is in the proposed settlement. I saw something about 3 outside auditors. They need to be there, since if you can't verify that the settlement is being implemented, then it isn't an effective solution.
2) All communication protocols used by all microsoft products must be fully documented. Such documents must be made available to any and all parties for any reason. Microsoft is not allowed to change their protocols until 90 days after documentation of such changes are made available to any parties requesting them.
There would need to be provisions for bug and security fixes, so they could be implemented in less than 90 days, but this issue could likely be worked out as long as this can be monitored by a third party for compliance.
3) The previous term must also apply to all Microsoft APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
The trick part with this one will be internal APIs. Windows, like other OSs, uses internal APIs that are not intended to be exported to application or even driver developers. Hiding these APIs allows changes to be made to Windows without breaking outside developers code. These APIs exist so the the internal parts of the OS can communicate in a structured way, and are not meant for use by outside developers. Other people using those APIs would likely result in software breaking everytime Microsoft changed some inner working of Windows. There have already been enough examples of developers using functions that Microsoft did not consider to be part of a public API, and then the developers complaining whe Microsoft changed the API. The real problem will be determining exactly what needs to be public, and what Microsoft has a right to keep private.
4) Microsoft may not keep agreements secret. In particular, the terms of the current OEM agreements, currently protected as "trade secrets" must be disclosed.
I'm not sure the OEMs would like that very much. I think that they should have to share the details of such agreements with independent auditors, but OEMs don't want competitors to know details like what kind of volumes they are buying, or planning to buy from Microsoft. An alternate solution of having Microsoft have a fixed volume pricing schedule for all OEMs might be a more reasonable solution, though it wouldn't really be fair to void the current agreements Microsoft has made with OEMs (fair to the OEMs that is).
5) Microsoft may not use agreements with Computer OEMs to restrict in any way the addition of other software to the computers, along with Microsoft products. In particular, OEMs are not to be prohibited from selling "dual-boot" systems,
where the system can be booted into Windows or into some other operating system, such as Linux or a form of BSD or BeOS.
I agree that OEMs should have the choice of selling "dual-boot" systems. I'm not sure that a lot of them will choose to do so because of increased support costs, but they should have the choice.
The one problem I do see is that OEMs will sometimes bundle crappy software (because it was cheap). Microsoft should have some right to insist that it be obvious to the trained eye that the software isn't part of Windows. Microsoft does have a brand name to protect, and they should only have to suffer for the failures of their software. Otherwise they will have little encouragement to improve the quality of their own software. Their software is in need of some quality improvements, but they have been making some progress, and I would like to see that continue.
6) Microsoft may not use their licensing terms to stop users or developers from using Open Source software or Free Software.
I agree that Microsoft shouldn't be able to disallow the use of software based on it's licensing.
7) Microsoft may not meddle in the the legislative processes of Fderal, State or local governemnts or bodies that make recommendations to them, with their work on UCITA being a prime model of behaviour that is prohibited to them as a monopoly.
This is simply the prohibition of free speech. I can't support this remedy. Microsoft, and especially the people who make up Microsoft, have the right to speek their mind, and lobby for ligislation. Free speech is a constitutional right, and our government shouldn't even attempt to take that right away from anyone as a condition of a settlement in a civil case.
Before you question the searches, make sure you are prepared to answer a simple question. Why do you really need to take your personal items into work. If your employer has real security concerns, then they should be allowd to be able to make reasonable searches. If you're not comfortable with being searched, then you might need to find different employment. In the United States you have a right to be protected from unreasonable searches. This ins't a case where the government or your employer wants to search your home, or spot check you as you are walking down the street in public. You have the option of not working there. You even have an option of not bringing those personal items with you to work.
Actually, Microsoft had a hard time at first getting application developers to write Windows programs because doing so meant they had to rewrite too much of their applications. Microsoft went ahead and developed what became MS Office and ended up with the largest cash cow in the history of the software biz. There were plenty of now Windows apps available and many companies had both Windows and non-Windows versions of their software for years. I was there. I used it. It was buggy, but considering it's features, and the wide variety of software that was written for it, it was the best overall choice.
I tried using Desqview, didn't like it. I use an Amiga some. There wasn't a wide enough variety of software available at reasonable prices for it to be a reasonable solution for me. Part of putting out a good OS/Operating environment is having good development tools so that people can develop for your product. Desqview didn't do that, they disappeared. Amiga never managed to managed to get a reasonable marketshare except in low end video applications, so no one would write software for them.
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
The thing that made Windows 3.0 great for it's time was that it offered so many things in one easy to use package. Microsoft hasn't forgotton that lesson. They could bundle other people's products with Windows, but then they would have to deal with all the licensing hassles, and be responsible for bugs in other companies software. They've bundled stuff in the past, and probably will bundle some stuff in the future. I'll have to wait until I see it myself before I dedide if they are really forcing thier services down my throat or just making services I may find useful available to me without me having to download or purchase something seperately.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily.
Never heard of this one, but this would really piss off business customers, I believe it when I see it.
Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software.
SUN shares a lot of the blame on this one. If the JVM isn't exactly what SUN wants from it Microsoft would spend years in court. When two giants like SUN and Microsoft squabble, the users usually get screwed. Microsoft should make it clear that their extensions to Java are extensions, but SUN wasn't exactly playing fair either.
Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
Unless I misunderstand something the same activation code you used the first time will work when you reinstall. You can even upgrade several pieces of hardware. You just can't install it on a significantly different PC thant the one you first installed it on without proving you own it.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are complaining about Microsoft. Thera always are. A lot of these same people would bitch about Microsoft XP if it were a near perfect product. I've become numb to all the bitching and moaning. CIOs are blaking at the changes to the volume licensing, because it looks like it's going to cost them more. Microsoft appears to be yielding to the pressure, and those plans may be changed to make CIOs happier.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I don't like to spend a lot of time patching my computer, or dealing with compatibility issues. Because of this I buy quality hardware and don't use beta drivers if I can avoid it. I use my home computer mostly for games, and its simply a lot easier for me to keep a windows gaming system running well than a Linux one.
For web servers it seems Linux is the one that requires less patches and is simpler to keep running. Maybe that's why Linux does so well in that market.
It's real simple for me. I value my time at higher that the price the Microsoft software cost me, and Microsoft's software suits my needs better. MacOS might be more appealing if the hardware weren't so expensive, and more games were available on it. After dealing with Linux on a Mac at work, I wouldn't recomend it to anyone who isn't very familiar with Linux. Linux on a PPC is still needs some time before it becomes a mature platform.
The mobile cellron 400a one of the above posters mentioned doesn't need a fan either. There are a lot of embedded chips that won't require a fan, that will give you more performance than your pentium 60. Crusoe will likely do a good job for you, but the system is likely going to be more expensive than other commonly used embedded chips. The real problem I see is that it's hard to make a reasonable decision because Transmeta won't publish a full set of specs. It goes back to what I've posted before. If a company is that reluctant to give you the information to let you make an informed decision. Their product isn't worth considering.
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Actually, they did have an article on Rather being a guest at that fund raiser. The did present Rather's side of the issue which was that he didn't know it was a fund raiser until he got there.
It's an opinion piece, and does do some dem-bashing. I'm just hoping that democratic voters realize that it's well justified bashing. I'm hoping they can look past the tone of the article, and realize that there seems to be a serious problem with some of thier elected officials trading their rights away for campain cash. I don't expect democrats to believe this to be true just because they heard it on FOX News. There's plenty of evidence of the facts out there for those who are willing to look.
Just to state my rather obvious point of view here. I am a registered Republican, though I don't side with Republicans on all issues.
I'm not sure how you think Micorsoft penalized hardware companies that used DR-DOS and IBM-DOS. I'm pretty sure their you must install our OS on all machines you make of a certain type agreements post date these OSes. With DR-DOS, they definatley kept them from having early access to Microsoft's other products, which hurt DR-DOS because it would often need to be patched before some new MS products would work on it. Of course, it's not clear that Microsoft was a monopoly at that time, so it's kind of a mute point anyway.
OS/2 is kind of a different story. It was relatively hard to configure, had a lot of compatibility issues with software from many different vendors, and the advanced features it provided over Windows really didn't mean that much to customers at the time. IBM has a long history of making some great products, but not really knowing how to market them, or when and how to bring them to market. OS/2 pretty much died on it's own because Windows met most user's needs as well if not better, and people were more used to it. NT filled the needs of those that Windows didn't. OS/2 just never really offered people something they were looking for.
You are right that the key to Microsoft's unfair competition has been their licensing. Microsoft should be allowed to add products to their OS/opperating environment. That provides a benefit to customers. It was especially important when few people had broadband. A lot of applications have been built apon the middleware that Microsoft has added to Windows. Without that functionality being integrated into Windows, every vendor would have to create that functionality themselves, or license it from someone else. Even if the middleware is provided for free, there would be conflicting implementations and configuration issues. Consumers wouldn't benefit from this, and it isn't the justice departments job to make life better for Microsoft's competitors at the expense of consumers.
Microsoft's licensing agreements are another story. There's no reason ISP should have been forced to use IE if they wanted to be listed in MS's connection wizard. There's no reason that Microsoft should be able to demand that multi-boot systems not be sold by vendors.
I'm not sure that multi-os systems are really in vendors best interests due to support costs, but it should be the vendor's decision, not Microsoft's.
I'm not sure where you're getting your idea that he's opposed to peaceful protest. He did say something about a mob taking to the streets, but I don't usuall equate the term mob with a peaceful protest.
From what I've seen, the anti-globalization protesters that have been tear gassed by police weren't being very peaceful, or were part of a group that wasn't being peaceful, and wouldn't leave so the immedite area so the police could deal with the non-peaceful protestors.
There are many people who peacefully protest anti-globalization. I fully respect their right to do so. There are also many who have violently protested it, and I don't see that violence as justified.
ACPI is a very complicated standard. It's very possible that both Microsoft and Soyo have compliant implementations that simply don't work together. That type of thing happens much more often than people appear to realize. For Microsoft to certify that hardware works with XP, that hardware must go through a test suite. It looks like the ACPI implementation caused their board to fail these tests. Soyo's solution appears to have been to disable ACPI. There are other Motherboards out there with ACPI enabled that are XP certified. This isn't an issue with XP and ACPI in general, just with this board.
If the test failed because Microsoft didn't implement ACPI correctly, then Microsoft should fix the problem. If Soyo didn't implement it correctly, Soyo should fix the problem. If they both implemented it according to the spec, but there's still an incompatibility, then Microsoft shouldn't certify the board unless Soho makes it work with Microsoft's implementation.
Hardware incompatibilities are nothing new. I get to work with them on a regular basis. They often require vendors to work together to resolve an issue.
As it is now, the best solution is for FreeBSD to be fixed to be able to share interrupts. There's no reason PCI interrupts shouldn't be able to be shared.
People need to ease up on the everything is Microsoft's fault attitude. The link in the story to Microsoft's winlogo site even talks about ACPI support, so it's obvious that MS doesn't require this to be disabled on all motherboards. This is an issue with a single motherboard, and that vendors method of attaining their works with XP logo.
Suppose I write a game like this, and *then* after selling it all over, start charging by the hour for server access. Someone goes out and writes a free alternate server. If the "you cannot write an alternate server" attack becomes a valid attack, then writing a free alternate server would become illegal as well, something that I completely do not agree with.
So your argument is that people should be able to write an emulator, even though it definately opens them up to more software piracy, because they might sometime in the future decided to charge for battlenet. Blizzard has never done anything like that in the past. There may even be legal issues with them doing so. I can see Blizzard making a new game that you pay for on a monthly basis, but I don't see them starting to charge for bnet access after selling a product that says free online play on bnet all over the box.
Many people have to put up with firewalls or have slow or unreliable connections to battle.net. This will let them enjoy their game much more fully.
This is a very small portion of the user base, and it's likely that most of the people having those problems won't benefit from bnetd. If you have a crappy internet connection, moving the server usually means you have a crappy connection to a new server.
A lot of the people who have problems with routers either have a poorly configured router, which bnetd isn't going to solve, or are playing in a network where the owners/admins don't want the users accessing bnet. These arguments aren't going to convince a judge that there are significant, legitimate uses.
Bnetd will also be a support nightmare for Blizzard. Every time they patch the client and server to fix something, bnetd is going to break. That's going to piss off people who bought the game, and they're going to get flooded with nasty support emails. Saying that they don't support bnetd won't work. They'll still get blamed. Bugs bnetd will also get blamed on Blizzard, and they'll have to waste development time making sure the bug isn't theirs. Bnetd will cost Blizzard money in support costs and lost sales. WHere's that money going to come from? Somebody has to pay the bills. Are you willing to pay more for the games to make up for it?
You can suggest that bnetd will bring Blizzard a wider audience, which would increase sales to pay these costs, but I don't think the numbers will add up. There's also the question of who should make that decision. My answer is Blizzard. They invested the money on developing the game. They're taking the risk if things don't work out, and it doesn't make sense to expand their expenses to a larger support staff without a clear benefit.
Blizzard's putting up a front. Legally, they haven't got a leg to stand on.
I think you're very wrong here. I also don't think Blizzard even needs the DMCA to kill bnetd. They can just screw with the client and server code though patches on a regular basis. That would definately get ugly, and I hope it never comes to that.
Blizzard spent a tremendous amout of money developing these games. You get to play them for a low 1 time fee of around $50. That business model only works if they get to have some control over how the software is distributed and used. If you don't like this, try and get an open source game development movement going. There's obviously a lot of skilled people involved in bnetd development. I however, don't think they are willing to dedicate at least 40 hours a week for years to develop a game like Blizzard does for free. Why should people be able to take Blizzard's efforts and do with it whatever they please. If you want to be able to do that expect to be paying hundreds of dollars for your computer games, or getting much lower quality software.
Hm, so by that justification, if I made a game that directly competed with Blizzard's, I'd be justified in ordering them to shut down, because they're depriving me of potential profit that I can use to make additional games?
I'm not sure how you jumped to this from what I wrote. If you can create a game that competes with Blizzards then great. This is a case of taking the game that blizzard created and making it easier for people to steal it. That may not be the intention of many of the developers, but that is the end result.
You can't mak a server emulator that doesn't allow people to to avoid the copy protection. Even if you use some form of authentication, unless it's a central authentication server, you can use the same CD key on multiple servers. Even then, it would be easy to remove the authentication from an open source server.
There's also no good reason for Blizzard to set up and maintain the authentication server. This would be additional cost to them with little or no benefit.
What's the point? I can understan people's desire to have an emulator, but the emulator is going to take a lot of work to create and maintain. Blizzard can also just tweak the client and server from time to time to keep breaking the emulator. Even if they didn't object to the development of the emulator, patches to the clien would probably break the emulator which would irritate as many people as are pissed of now. There's no real upside for Blizzard to let this projet proceed, and I doubt there's really going to be much benefit to developing it without their support or at least their indifference. Even if you host it in a different country, any US citizens or residents that work on the project are risking jail time. People from other countries may be risking the same thing depending on the laws there.
Is all this really worth it just because you want to play the game that blizzard developed and hosts on a FREE (as in free beer) server, on a different server? And at the same time you are facilitating people stealing from the people who wrote this awsome game that you want to play so badly. Blizzard invests a fortune paying a team of artists and developers to work for years on the game. Don't you think they deserve some return on that investment. Don't you also think they deserve some respect for the exelent job they've don and the job they continue to do in patching the games to keep them as balanced as they can?
If you don't like their rules, don't play the game and don't buy anymore of their software. That's you're choice. Blizzard is giving you what you've paid for, and in my opinion, it's a bargain. Your opinion may vary, but if you're impressed enough with their games that you'd want to go to the trouble of creating an emulator for their server, then I'd think you're pretty impressed with it.
Notice how they cleverly shift the argument from one of "Why did Blizzard (successfully) attempt to shut down this project?" to "Are you saying you support piracy?" This is what we call a strawman [wikipedia.com], boys and girls.
A strawman is arguing against a warker stance than your opponents actually hold. So what is the stronger stance? What's the real argument here?
This is an emulator which would allow people to get around Blizzard's copy protection. I haven't palyed on battlenet in years. They may also have some advertising there, so there might be some loss in ad revenue, though I doubt the ad revenue outweighs the server costs.
All they've done is piss off a bunch of people and possibly "prevent" a couple of copies of their games from being the target of copyright violation. Let's see... a couple fewer sales, or the loss of much goodwill?
I doubt we're talking about just a few sales. Blizzard enjoys a relatively low amount of piracy of it's games that are played online. I even know a couple people who bought the game rather than coppied it because they needed the CD key, and I don't know that many people that play those games. I've also got the question the loss of "much goodwill". Are that many people really surprised by this action by Blizzard? The vast majority of Blizzard's customers won't be surprised, or offended by Blizzard's actions. Even among those that get upset, most will continue to buy and play blizzard's games because the games are of high quality, and the relatively low price of the game is outweighed by the many, many hours of enjoyable play time.
Blizzard isn't being unreasonable or vindictive, they're simply protecting their software so thay can pay their employees and continue to make the high quality games they make.
A lot of people copy games from their friends because it's easy and conveinient, and it's nice to try before buying. A lot of those same people will never bother to actually buy the game, even if they play it a lot. Blizzard's copy protection really only has to make it hard enough that those people buy it rather than copy it.
These are real issues for Blizzard. Arguing that it's only a couple sales and that they will lose good will is the strawman.
With proprietary, you may choose the vendor or the vendor.
Exactly. With propriety software you choose which vendor you want to trust. You can also make agreements where you can audit the software itself under NDA, but that's usually not very helpful in reality.
With open source, you can choose an auditor that you trust, but how many people or companies have someone they trust that have the technical abilities to audit SOMEONE ELSE'S software for security. It usually comes back to having to trust the people writing the software.
I'm not sure larger companies are willing to trust hobbiests to take the time and use the rigorous procedures in developing their software that are required to create good secure software. I'm not saying there isn't exelently written, relatively secure, Open Source software. If you're selecting software on which the stability and good name of you billion dollar company relies why would you choose Open Source over closed source? The company using the software isn't expecting their internal people to be finding security bugs. They'll likely audit the software, but they want a solution, not problems. They don't expect to find anything in their audits, and they definately don't expect to be fixing it themselves. When it comes down to it they want someone they feel they can trust. That means a reasonable, proven track record of few security problems, and a quick response on fixing issues. They also look for someone who's going to be around for a long time to support the software. That usually means a large, stable company. Large, stable companies require stable income. They usually get that income from selling both software and services. Selling services alone is a much more risky business plan because it's hard to support someone else's software, especially when response time is critical, and if the source is open, anyone can take it and compete for the support contract. That competition drives down support costs, but often reduces the quality of the support in the process. Open source does have advantages, but I don't think those advantages are going to be the major determining factors in companies choosing security software.
It all comes back to who do you trust. Most people don't trust people who don't have much to lose. Companies are also going to have trouble trusting people who have strong anti-business attitudes. There are some vocal people in open source with those views. That adds to the doubts. A lot of small doubts quickly add up to going with the option from the big company.
Seriously, MS has already been found guilty of being a monopoly.
I'm kind of nitpicking words here, but being a monopoly is not something you're found guilty of. Being a monopoly isn't a crime.
I remember so many PC makers who tried to offer Be on a pc till Microsoft totally went agro on the makers and made them stop.
I did hear something about this, but I didn't thing there were many, or that they were big companies. The reason computer companies would want to offer BeOS on their computers is to differentiate them from the competition. The downside of offering it is support costs. Don't underestimate how much supporting BeOS would cost a big name manufacturer. They contract out their support, and every call cuts into their low profit margins. Training a support staff enough to be useful on BeOS would be an expensive task, and the contractors are going to pass that price on to the computer companies.
BE never had a chance, and the OS from my point of view was incredible.
I never used BeOS, but it would have to be truely incredible to have even a slight chance. Most people with computers want the same OS that everyone else is using. That fact is the true barrier to entry for new OSs. I've heard from some people that BeOS definately shined in some areas, but even if Microsoft just ignored it, I doubt it stood a chance. Microsoft has a monopoly because they won the first round of the PC OS wars, and the nature of the OS business is that it works out easiest for everyone it they're all using the same one. Microsoft also doesn't sit still. They constantly work to make Windows better. They definately don't do that flawlessly, but they have definately done an exellent job on making their user interface easy to use, and they keep working on making it better.
Be may very well have a case. Microsoft may very well abused it's monopoly position out of paranoia. However, it's unlikely that the damages are in the billions if they are guilty. It's more likely that they crushed a niche OS that may have been able to make millions more. If they did that, they should be punished, and the damages trippled acording to law.
In the short run, a lot of economy professors will be making money as expert witnesses, and lawyers will get rich.
You have a very good point, but if the closed source vendor is serious about fixing security bugs you can report the bug to them and they can fix it. The creators also should have a better idea of how the code works, so you have less of a chance of the fix causing other bugs. This becomes more of an issue of the proper resources getting applied to the task, rather than how software is licensed. It also comes down to who do you trust. Do you trust an open source hacker to fix a security exploit without accidently or intentionally adding another exploit? With open source you can always check the code yourself, but most people don't have the skill or time to make sure there isn't an exploit hidden there. If you can't make sure yourself, you have to trust someone to do it right. Who do you trust?
First of all, this bug is not that significant performance wise. Very little software is going to use 4 MB pages. I don't think you even have an option of allocating memory with 4 MB pages in user space. This appears to be an issue with being able to optimise drivers, however, if AMD's processors can't do this, and Intel's can, why don't we see Intel's processors greatly outperforming AMD's in Win2k? This is a minor bug, and it's easily worked around without patching the kernel in both Win2k and Linux.
The processors are basicly all their Athlon and Duron processors. For AMD or any chip maker to replace chips with bugs in them is VERY expensive. They already have a low profit margin. Replacing all "defective" Athlon and Duron processors would simply bankrupt AMD. Realisticly, all complex software or hardware has bugs. Bugs in hardware are much more difficult and expensive to fix. The truely significant hardware bugs are usually found early in testing. Other bugs are fixed in software, usually in the system BIOS, but sometimes in the OS code. This isn't something new. It's pretty much always been this way. Why has it been this way? Because no one wants to pay the outlandish prices that would result from trying to make hardware perfect. It costs a tremendous amount of money to reroll a processor. It's not as simple as making a quick code change and recompiling software. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE BUGS IN PROCESSORS! A truely significant bug like the Pentium floating point bug needs to be fixed in the hardware, and that one was even significant enough to deserve a recall of the processor. This bug is simple to work around, and isn't truely a significant problem.
The question you asked in the subject is "Should AMD do the right thing?" The answer is yes, they should correct their Technology Bulletin to actually say what the processor bug is, rather than just say here's a workaround to a bug that effects Win2k.
I'm really surprsed that someone at NVidia didn't pass this on to Linux kernel developers much sooner, since people at that company seem to have been aware of this for some time.
Solaris for X86 may still be around for existing installations, but I don't think many people will consider it a viable product for new installations.
I'm pretty sure this means our company will be scratching X86 off the list of supported platforms for driver development. Third party hardware support may not be a big issue for a lot of companies, but the idea of Solaris for x86 always seemed to be a reliable OS on cheap hardware. This seems to kill that idea.
Is QNX still out there? And LynxOS is a real time UNIX that's still being developed on X86.
It just looks like UNIX on X86 is becomming even more of a niche market.
If graphics hous wants to use GIMP they have to retrain their employees. I'm not a graphics person, but I tried using gimp about a year ago to do some stuff. It wasn't very easy to learn to use. I ended up downloading Photoshop and figured out with a little effort how to do what I wanted with it. I then discoverd that you couldn't save or print your work in the free version, and had to download a third program which I got to work.
Profesional graphics people will ikely learn this stuff faster than me, but their time is money. It doesn't take much wasted time learning Gimp before Photoshop becomes a better bargain for them. If GIMP wants to take market share from Photoshop, they need to make their product easy for Photoshop users to learn and use. Otherwise, they're just making a product for hobbiests who have the time to learn it.
I should probably just leave this alone, but why do you have to have 4 different passport accounts. The zone let you associate your zone name with an existing pasport account. It seems like you have 4 different accounts because you don't want Microsoft to associate you (through your credit card) with those other accounts. Well that's not the way the system was designed to work. You can do that, they made it possible to do that, but you need different accounts. How is this different than when you had these accounts seperate before. Passport didn't cause you to have more accounts, it just didn't simplify things, because you didn't want them simplified.
I will agree that the Zone screwed up the transition to Passport pretty badly, but they are pretty much on par with other multiplayer games. I played UO for a little while, and their expansions went worse than AC's. AO's launch was a major disaster. DAoC apparently has been better than most, but AC is far from the worst.
Unless Sun/Apple/Sony/Linux Community get their collective acts together, MS will be the only practical solution.
If these companies get their acts together, we'll just have a different version of passport. If you want to have privacy from this kind of data gathering by companies, you're going to need to get legislation passed to prevent it. SInce most consumers just don't care if a company traks what kind of cereal they eat, and what kind of shows they watch, I don't see Congress passing the legislation.
The MSN gaming zone is a microsoft site. I can see why Microsoft wants one universal system like passport to use for their various sites (MSDN switched a while ago). It saves them support costs in the long run. I'm also not sure how AC players lost any privacy through this move. Microsoft already had the credit card info from the previous zone accounts. It would be nice if Microsoft would accept some other form of payment other than credit cards for AC.
I don't see why well written desktop software needs to be tied to a certain platform. Much of the GNU software is used on many different platforms. Is the main purpose of GCC just to have a free software compiler so that you can compile free software? Is the main purpose of EMACS really to provide an editor on GNU platforms? Do the majority of the contributors agree with these goals? It seems like the idea of GNOME's main purpose being to supply a desktop for GNU software is too narrow. I would think that the goal of GNOME is to supply the best desktop software that they can, and make it usable on as many platforms as they can reasonably support. But this is just my opinion, and other people closer to the issue will likely have more insight.
For someone with a username of fanatic, you seem to have actually spent some time comming up possible solutions, rather than just rants. I do have some comments on your solutions, which I've posted below.
1) All terms must be enforced by a non-Microsoft party with full access to all Microsoft resources, including source code. Microsoft cannot be trusted to voluntarily comply with any agreement.
I think this is in the proposed settlement. I saw something about 3 outside auditors. They need to be there, since if you can't verify that the settlement is being implemented, then it isn't an effective solution.
2) All communication protocols used by all microsoft products must be fully documented. Such documents must be made available to any and all parties for any reason. Microsoft is not allowed to change their protocols until 90 days after documentation of such changes are made available to any parties requesting them.
There would need to be provisions for bug and security fixes, so they could be implemented in less than 90 days, but this issue could likely be worked out as long as this can be monitored by a third party for compliance.
3) The previous term must also apply to all Microsoft APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
The trick part with this one will be internal APIs. Windows, like other OSs, uses internal APIs that are not intended to be exported to application or even driver developers. Hiding these APIs allows changes to be made to Windows without breaking outside developers code. These APIs exist so the the internal parts of the OS can communicate in a structured way, and are not meant for use by outside developers. Other people using those APIs would likely result in software breaking everytime Microsoft changed some inner working of Windows. There have already been enough examples of developers using functions that Microsoft did not consider to be part of a public API, and then the developers complaining whe Microsoft changed the API. The real problem will be determining exactly what needs to be public, and what Microsoft has a right to keep private.
4) Microsoft may not keep agreements secret. In particular, the terms of the current OEM agreements, currently protected as "trade secrets" must be disclosed.
I'm not sure the OEMs would like that very much. I think that they should have to share the details of such agreements with independent auditors, but OEMs don't want competitors to know details like what kind of volumes they are buying, or planning to buy from Microsoft. An alternate solution of having Microsoft have a fixed volume pricing schedule for all OEMs might be a more reasonable solution, though it wouldn't really be fair to void the current agreements Microsoft has made with OEMs (fair to the OEMs that is).
5) Microsoft may not use agreements with Computer OEMs to restrict in any way the addition of other software to the computers, along with Microsoft products. In particular, OEMs are not to be prohibited from selling "dual-boot" systems,
where the system can be booted into Windows or into some other operating system, such as Linux or a form of BSD or BeOS.
I agree that OEMs should have the choice of selling "dual-boot" systems. I'm not sure that a lot of them will choose to do so because of increased support costs, but they should have the choice.
The one problem I do see is that OEMs will sometimes bundle crappy software (because it was cheap). Microsoft should have some right to insist that it be obvious to the trained eye that the software isn't part of Windows. Microsoft does have a brand name to protect, and they should only have to suffer for the failures of their software. Otherwise they will have little encouragement to improve the quality of their own software. Their software is in need of some quality improvements, but they have been making some progress, and I would like to see that continue.
6) Microsoft may not use their licensing terms to stop users or developers from using Open Source software or Free Software.
I agree that Microsoft shouldn't be able to disallow the use of software based on it's licensing.
7) Microsoft may not meddle in the the legislative processes of Fderal, State or local governemnts or bodies that make recommendations to them, with their work on UCITA being a prime model of behaviour that is prohibited to them as a monopoly.
This is simply the prohibition of free speech. I can't support this remedy. Microsoft, and especially the people who make up Microsoft, have the right to speek their mind, and lobby for ligislation. Free speech is a constitutional right, and our government shouldn't even attempt to take that right away from anyone as a condition of a settlement in a civil case.
Before you question the searches, make sure you are prepared to answer a simple question. Why do you really need to take your personal items into work. If your employer has real security concerns, then they should be allowd to be able to make reasonable searches. If you're not comfortable with being searched, then you might need to find different employment. In the United States you have a right to be protected from unreasonable searches. This ins't a case where the government or your employer wants to search your home, or spot check you as you are walking down the street in public. You have the option of not working there. You even have an option of not bringing those personal items with you to work.
Actually, Microsoft had a hard time at first getting application developers to write Windows programs because doing so meant they had to rewrite too much of their applications. Microsoft went ahead and developed what became MS Office and ended up with the largest cash cow in the history of the software biz. There were plenty of now Windows apps available and many companies had both Windows and non-Windows versions of their software for years. I was there. I used it. It was buggy, but considering it's features, and the wide variety of software that was written for it, it was the best overall choice.
I tried using Desqview, didn't like it. I use an Amiga some. There wasn't a wide enough variety of software available at reasonable prices for it to be a reasonable solution for me. Part of putting out a good OS/Operating environment is having good development tools so that people can develop for your product. Desqview didn't do that, they disappeared. Amiga never managed to managed to get a reasonable marketshare except in low end video applications, so no one would write software for them.
As Mitchell writes, consumers want "reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users." But in XP these virtues are tangled up with Microsoft's efforts to force its online services down your throat.
The thing that made Windows 3.0 great for it's time was that it offered so many things in one easy to use package. Microsoft hasn't forgotton that lesson. They could bundle other people's products with Windows, but then they would have to deal with all the licensing hassles, and be responsible for bugs in other companies software. They've bundled stuff in the past, and probably will bundle some stuff in the future. I'll have to wait until I see it myself before I dedide if they are really forcing thier services down my throat or just making services I may find useful available to me without me having to download or purchase something seperately.
Redirecting all mailto: links to Hotmail instead of the registered mail editor is an obstacle to communicating easily.
Never heard of this one, but this would really piss off business customers, I believe it when I see it.
Forcing customers to download a Java VM does not enhance access to popular software.
SUN shares a lot of the blame on this one. If the JVM isn't exactly what SUN wants from it Microsoft would spend years in court. When two giants like SUN and Microsoft squabble, the users usually get screwed. Microsoft should make it clear that their extensions to Java are extensions, but SUN wasn't exactly playing fair either.
Forbidding reinstallation of the OS without calling Microsoft and proving that you own it isn't what I'd call simplicity.
Unless I misunderstand something the same activation code you used the first time will work when you reinstall. You can even upgrade several pieces of hardware. You just can't install it on a significantly different PC thant the one you first installed it on without proving you own it.
We all know the full list, and we all know that both consumers and CIOs are balking.
Yes, there are a lot of people who are complaining about Microsoft. Thera always are. A lot of these same people would bitch about Microsoft XP if it were a near perfect product. I've become numb to all the bitching and moaning. CIOs are blaking at the changes to the volume licensing, because it looks like it's going to cost them more. Microsoft appears to be yielding to the pressure, and those plans may be changed to make CIOs happier.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a long way to go to offer a viable alternative for the average luser. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people take a second look at MacOS and Linux after tangling with XP.
I don't like to spend a lot of time patching my computer, or dealing with compatibility issues. Because of this I buy quality hardware and don't use beta drivers if I can avoid it. I use my home computer mostly for games, and its simply a lot easier for me to keep a windows gaming system running well than a Linux one.
For web servers it seems Linux is the one that requires less patches and is simpler to keep running. Maybe that's why Linux does so well in that market.
It's real simple for me. I value my time at higher that the price the Microsoft software cost me, and Microsoft's software suits my needs better. MacOS might be more appealing if the hardware weren't so expensive, and more games were available on it. After dealing with Linux on a Mac at work, I wouldn't recomend it to anyone who isn't very familiar with Linux. Linux on a PPC is still needs some time before it becomes a mature platform.
The mobile cellron 400a one of the above posters mentioned doesn't need a fan either. There are a lot of embedded chips that won't require a fan, that will give you more performance than your pentium 60. Crusoe will likely do a good job for you, but the system is likely going to be more expensive than other commonly used embedded chips. The real problem I see is that it's hard to make a reasonable decision because Transmeta won't publish a full set of specs. It goes back to what I've posted before. If a company is that reluctant to give you the information to let you make an informed decision. Their product isn't worth considering.