Hmm... was this the guy who once told Elaine that she was going to Hell? The same actor who plays the traffic cop on the Cadillac "stabilitrac" commercial?
The issue did not seem to be whether or not lucid/xemacs was "better". Rather, the battle seemed to be over who was harder to work with.
I seem to remember all sorts of technical issues too, including design, usability, appearance and even key bindings. But the issue of getting the two camps to work together was always present. It's worth noting that eventually the two did reconcile somewhat and produced a merged set of elisp code that would work in either Emacs.
The point about one Emacs being better than the other is purely a personal observation, but it's important because a lot of people felt the same way. Enough people to continue to make XEmacs viable as a separate code base. Forking the code isn't always bad; if it provides enough benefit to enough people, then it not only should happen, it must happen.
But I'm not trying to pour new fuel on old flames. I didn't get into the flaming then, and I won't now. Just a few observations from the nostalgia department.
Does there exist a good, non-judgmental (I should be so lucky) article about what really happened, focussing on the operational differences between emacs & Xemacs?
I doubt if you can find an unbiased account of what happened back in those days; anyone who remembers those events clearly is probably a resident of one camp or another. I liked the other poster's suggestion of "read the accounts and decide for yourself." Unfortunately, I tried following the link and got an authorization failure.
My camp was the Lucid/XEmacs camp. I had been using the vanilla "FSF Emacs 18", but when I discovered Lucid Emacs 19 I found I liked it much better for many reasons.
Just one example was "font-lock": its ability to display a file using different typefaces -- like bold for keywords, italics for comments, etc. I seem to remember that this feature was in the works for FSF Emacs 19, but that Lucid Emacs 19 came out first.
Stallman's version of Emacs 19 eventually caught up with XEmacs and added the font-lock ability, but the underlying mechanism for how to describe when and where the typeface changed was very different. JWZ had done it (correctly, in my opinion) so that typeface was an attribute of the text, so when you cut and pasted a region of text, the font attributes went with it. RMS had a different implementation, so that the text attributes were a feature of the buffer, and didn't get cut and pasted with the text.
Or maybe it was the other way around, but the point is that the two implementations had different APIs, which made it difficult for any code written on the one Emacs to work on the other. I know, because at the time, I was working on a piece of code called ps-print that would take a fontified buffer and spit out PostScript code so I could pretty-print my code and the printout would look pretty much like it did in Emacs. I eventually worked out a means of supporting both Emacsen and ps-print is now a standard elisp package delivered with each.
Would life have been a little easier if JWZ and RMS had been able to agree? Undoubtedly. Would I have JWZ back down, given that RMS was never going to agree with him? No way. What Jamie and the Lucid/XEmacs minions produced was simply better for my purposes, and I'd hate to have been without it all these years. Note that I'm not alone in this opinion, at least judging by the fact that XEmacs still has a significant following. Check it out at xemacs.org.
I finally got jacked in, and what I'm hearing doesn't sound at all like it's leading to a Linus interview. The jock is whispering about whether the music played at Hillary Clinton fund-raisers encourages children to masturbate, and whether George W. Bush's favorite drug is cocaine or potassium chloride. He's now playing an old Billy Joel tune. It's at least good to hear that the Pacifica station in NY is as wacky as KPFT here in Houston. Rock on, dudes. I'm hanging in there for Linus.
I'm going to e-mail and see if they will take a $100 donation pledge. I can't make it in person, but would like to be there in spirit. (Yeah, I know I could just send the $100 direct to EFF. I joined last year in support of their work in the DVD case.)
But to get to the subject: I would like to suggest that some of the deep-pockets companies like Red Hat or VA Linux make a challenge. For every dollar that us working stiffs donate, they'll donate a dollar or two. Like the pledge drives at your local NPR radio station. Instead of giving out mugs or tote bags, the sponsor can give out the right to put an "I donated" badge on their personal web site, with a link back to the donor's challenge page.
Time for the inevitable list of comparisons to science fiction. I'll start.
Frederick Pohl used this idea as a minor plot element in his Gateway series. In Gateway, The Old Ones were humans who had been captured and "converted" to a computer form. But because they had been poorly converted, their digital forms were rambling, incoherent, and barely sane. (This brings up an important question: who's going to want their immortal mind to run on Microsoft Brain 1.0?)
In the third book of the series, Heechee Rendezvous, the narrator and hero of the series has been converted to digital form -- he calls it being "vastened".
The Gateway series is a fascinating science fiction tale about a race, the HeeChee, who once lived in our galaxy, but disappeared and left behind tantalizing clues about themselves. Probably not the best sci-fi from a critical point of view, but definitely a lot of fun to read.
Is anyone out there set up to do astrophotography with a tracking scope and a digital camera like the Kodak DC-2xx series? With a big enough memory card (a 64MB CF would do) you could take full-res photos spaced about 2 minutes apart for the full duration of the eclipse, or 1 minute apart through totality. Would make a cool animation!
From Lewis Carroll's Alice Through The Looking Glass, Chapter IV, Tweedledum and Tweedledee:
`It's only the Red King snoring,' said Tweedledee.
`Come and look at him!' the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice's hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.
`Isn't he a LOVELY sight?" said Tweedledum.
Alice couldn't say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, and snoring loud -- `fit to snore his head off!' as Tweedledum remarked.
`I'm afraid he'll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,' said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.
`He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee: `and what do you think he's dreaming about?'
Alice said `Nobody can guess that.'
`Why, about YOU!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. `And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'
`Where I am now, of course,' said Alice.
`Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. `You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'
`If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, `you'd go out -- bang! -- just like a candle!'
`I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly. `Besides, if I'M only a sort of thing in his dream, what are YOU, I should like to know?'
`Ditto' said Tweedledum.
`Ditto, ditto' cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, `Hush!
You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.'
`Well, it no use YOUR talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, `when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.'
`I AM real!' said Alice and began to cry.
`You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked: `there's nothing to cry about.' `If I wasn't real,' Alice said -- half-laughing though her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous -- `I shouldn't be able to cry.'
`I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
The use of this device to display the first-down line is the best innovation in TV coverage of football since the instant replay. Forget reverse-angle views. Forget goalcam and helmetcam and all those other cameras. Forget all those other gimicks and gadgets. The virtual first-down line is something that adds real value and enjoyment to watching football.
But its use to alter news coverage is fraud. It's misleading for CBS to think they alter Times Square just because they want it to be their "studio".
Without having looked at it, let me ask... how does it deal with codecs? Does it come with a set bundled, or do you have to add codecs like with xanim? What codecs are included?
My brand-new Inspiron 3700 doesn't have any Linux patches listed, thank you Dell.
The I3700 is very similar component-wise to the I7500, so the linux stuff posted there might work for your I3700. I plan to at least try the sound driver.
For more information on configuring linux for the I3700, see my page Linux on the Dell Inspiron 3700. Much of this information was gleaned from pages about the I7500: Jim Frost's page Linux on the Inspiron 7500 and Steve Hsieh's page Linux on a Dell Inspiron 7000/7500 Laptop. (I see on checking Steve Hsieh's page that he's now added "3700" to the title, so he may have additional information about the I3700.)
Uri Geller has a long history of filing lawsuits against anyone who criticize him, debunk him, or even just incorrectly describe his past. Witness, for example, his various suits against James "Amazing" Randi, who published The Truth About Uri Geller. I don't recall all the details of Geller's suits against Randi, but you can probably find more info at randi.org. Fortunately, Randi is a bulldog who doesn't let Geller intimidate him. The long and the short of it is that Geller is a fraud and will sue anyone who dares to say so.
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Yeah, I noticed that too. Kind of like those TV ads that show an HDTV picture... they don't look too impressive on my ordinary TV set.
My guess is that they used GIF so they could control the color palette and make the presented images appear to approximate the image appearance. In other words, it's a demo.
Experimenters, tinkerers, inventors, pioneers, and fine exemplars of the geek spirit -- they made the machines that led us into flight and into spaceflight.
Excellent article, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive.
Personally, I don't think the keyboard matters as much as the working environment, and how well it and the programmer are attuned to each other. This is probably why people are so religiously bound to their choices of development tools, in particular their editors. People who can find that zone do so because they work well with their tools, because they know the tools well enough that the tools themselves fade into the background, and the code and programmer come to the fore. Having a bad keyboard will certainly get in the way of this experience, but having to use bad tools will get in the way more.
For the programmer to be able to adapt to the tool can be as effective as the tool being able to adapt to the programmer. This is why people are able to reach the zone with editors like vi that aren't as programmable and as extensible as editors like emacs. That's not a judgment of either editor, just an observation that the highly touted customizibility of emacs doesn't necessarily help its users reach the zone, nor does the lack of a built-in programming language prevent vi users from reaching the zone. It simply means that the choice of editor as a matter of taste.
It probably also means that programmers who use detestable IDEs such as Visual C++ can probably also reach the zone.
I thought the problem with ActiveX was that it was a security hazard for the browser -- the person doing the surfing -- and the browsing system. Ditto JavaScript. Can someone please explain to me how these tools are a threat to the servers and their hosting systems?
Or is this just the case of some non-tech-savvy DoD security wonk overreacting to something he's read and misunderstood about the security issues? It happened at NASA. You wouldn't believe the trouble we had getting Java code into mission control at JSC, because some misinformed security expert decided that Java == security threat. *sigh*
Sounds to me like the Metaverse in the making. Snow Crash, here we come. I know that other attempts are underway to make Metaverse-like worlds, but I would give Carmack the highest likelihood of creating something that I would actually want to use. If that's the kind of thing he's talking about.
And accessing web pages isn't closely related to text-editiong activities (eg. hacking)?
Only if you're editing your own HTML (which, I remind you, isn't browsing). I use XEmacs to edit my HTML. But when I want to see it rendered, I view it in both Netscape and IE, because those are the browsers that 99% of the people who visit my site are going to use.
Nescape is good when all you need to do is to masturbate to pretty tables and nice pictures.
Several people in this thread have said that a good reason to write W3 is "because you can". This begs the question of who's really doing the masturbating.
So, an editor that acts as a mail reader and a debugger is fine, but it acting as a web browser is way over the edge? Sounds like a pretty arbitrary line to me.
No. Reading e-mail and debugging code are two activities that are closely related to text-editing activities: namely, replying to e-mail and editing code. Both these activities benefit greatly from having a tightly integrated editor.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the e-mail readers for emacs came about because someone was composing a message in emacs, and thought "wouldn't be great if I could send this straight from emacs, and then read the reply straight into emacs?" The point being that it's the desire to use a good editor that drove the need to extend that editor into the e-mail business.
Furthermore, both e-mail and coding are text-intensive tasks, something that emacs excels at. Laying out and presenting web pages has become an incredibly graphics-intensive process, and graphics is not something that emacs is well-suited for. Yeah, emacs has some capability to handle embedded images, but that's not it's strong suit.
What I'd much rather see than an embedded browser is integration with a real browser, be it Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, or any of the others. Let me edit my HTML in emacs, type control-meta-cokebottle, and see my edited HTML displayed on the external browser. For my money, this makes much more sense than trying to add still more bloat to an already bloated tool.
I love emacs, but it's not the right tool for every job.
I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said that every application seeks to expand until it can read e-mail. I would add the corollary that the really bloated applications expand until they can browse HTML.
For example: there is Emacs/W3, which just released version 4.0. To quote the Freshmeat entry: Emacs/W3 is a full-featured web browser, written entirely in Emacs-Lisp, that supports all the bells and whistles you will find in use on the web today, including frames, tables, stylesheets, and much more. Emacs/W3
Now, I happen to use XEmacs. It's my favorite editor. I couldn't code without it, debug without it, or even read e-mail without it. But I can browse the web without it, and I think building an emacs-based browser is just way over the edge.
As the wise man said, though, Your Mileage May Vary.
Since the first ruling has come out, some in the press have been saying that findings of fact cannot be appealed. Others say that the findings can be appealed, but that the chances for success in such an appeal are unlikely.
Please set the record straight for us -- can findings of fact be appealed, in general, and what are the criteria for overturning these findings? In the Microsoft case in particular, please speculate for us: is it likely that Microsoft will choose to appeal the findings of fact? If they do appeal, what attack are they likely to pursue, and what do you feel their chances of success are?
Slashdot Mirror
Reality, what a concept" - Geo. Carlin.
Ummm, this was the title of Robin William's first comedy album.
"I wonder what chairs think about all day" oop, here comes another asshole!
--jim
Hmm... was this the guy who once told Elaine that she was going to Hell? The same actor who plays the traffic cop on the Cadillac "stabilitrac" commercial?
--Jim
The issue did not seem to be whether or not lucid/xemacs was "better". Rather, the battle seemed to be over who was harder to work with.
I seem to remember all sorts of technical issues too, including design, usability, appearance and even key bindings. But the issue of getting the two camps to work together was always present. It's worth noting that eventually the two did reconcile somewhat and produced a merged set of elisp code that would work in either Emacs.
The point about one Emacs being better than the other is purely a personal observation, but it's important because a lot of people felt the same way. Enough people to continue to make XEmacs viable as a separate code base. Forking the code isn't always bad; if it provides enough benefit to enough people, then it not only should happen, it must happen.
But I'm not trying to pour new fuel on old flames. I didn't get into the flaming then, and I won't now. Just a few observations from the nostalgia department.
C-g
--Jim
Does there exist a good, non-judgmental (I should be so lucky) article about what really happened, focussing on the operational differences between emacs & Xemacs?
I doubt if you can find an unbiased account of what happened back in those days; anyone who remembers those events clearly is probably a resident of one camp or another. I liked the other poster's suggestion of "read the accounts and decide for yourself." Unfortunately, I tried following the link and got an authorization failure.
My camp was the Lucid/XEmacs camp. I had been using the vanilla "FSF Emacs 18", but when I discovered Lucid Emacs 19 I found I liked it much better for many reasons.
Just one example was "font-lock": its ability to display a file using different typefaces -- like bold for keywords, italics for comments, etc. I seem to remember that this feature was in the works for FSF Emacs 19, but that Lucid Emacs 19 came out first.
Stallman's version of Emacs 19 eventually caught up with XEmacs and added the font-lock ability, but the underlying mechanism for how to describe when and where the typeface changed was very different. JWZ had done it (correctly, in my opinion) so that typeface was an attribute of the text, so when you cut and pasted a region of text, the font attributes went with it. RMS had a different implementation, so that the text attributes were a feature of the buffer, and didn't get cut and pasted with the text.
Or maybe it was the other way around, but the point is that the two implementations had different APIs, which made it difficult for any code written on the one Emacs to work on the other. I know, because at the time, I was working on a piece of code called ps-print that would take a fontified buffer and spit out PostScript code so I could pretty-print my code and the printout would look pretty much like it did in Emacs. I eventually worked out a means of supporting both Emacsen and ps-print is now a standard elisp package delivered with each.
Would life have been a little easier if JWZ and RMS had been able to agree? Undoubtedly. Would I have JWZ back down, given that RMS was never going to agree with him? No way. What Jamie and the Lucid/XEmacs minions produced was simply better for my purposes, and I'd hate to have been without it all these years. Note that I'm not alone in this opinion, at least judging by the fact that XEmacs still has a significant following. Check it out at xemacs.org.
--Jim
I finally got jacked in, and what I'm hearing doesn't sound at all like it's leading to a Linus interview. The jock is whispering about whether the music played at Hillary Clinton fund-raisers encourages children to masturbate, and whether George W. Bush's favorite drug is cocaine or potassium chloride. He's now playing an old Billy Joel tune. It's at least good to hear that the Pacifica station in NY is as wacky as KPFT here in Houston. Rock on, dudes. I'm hanging in there for Linus.
--Jim
I'm going to e-mail and see if they will take a $100 donation pledge. I can't make it in person, but would like to be there in spirit. (Yeah, I know I could just send the $100 direct to EFF. I joined last year in support of their work in the DVD case.)
But to get to the subject: I would like to suggest that some of the deep-pockets companies like Red Hat or VA Linux make a challenge. For every dollar that us working stiffs donate, they'll donate a dollar or two. Like the pledge drives at your local NPR radio station. Instead of giving out mugs or tote bags, the sponsor can give out the right to put an "I donated" badge on their personal web site, with a link back to the donor's challenge page.
--Jim
Frederick Pohl used this idea as a minor plot element in his Gateway series. In Gateway, The Old Ones were humans who had been captured and "converted" to a computer form. But because they had been poorly converted, their digital forms were rambling, incoherent, and barely sane. (This brings up an important question: who's going to want their immortal mind to run on Microsoft Brain 1.0?)
In the third book of the series, Heechee Rendezvous, the narrator and hero of the series has been converted to digital form -- he calls it being "vastened".
The Gateway series is a fascinating science fiction tale about a race, the HeeChee, who once lived in our galaxy, but disappeared and left behind tantalizing clues about themselves. Probably not the best sci-fi from a critical point of view, but definitely a lot of fun to read.
--Jim
Is anyone out there set up to do astrophotography with a tracking scope and a digital camera like the Kodak DC-2xx series? With a big enough memory card (a 64MB CF would do) you could take full-res photos spaced about 2 minutes apart for the full duration of the eclipse, or 1 minute apart through totality. Would make a cool animation!
--Jim
...this disc will self-destruct in five seconds...
hiss-ss-ss-ss
The use of this device to display the first-down line is the best innovation in TV coverage of football since the instant replay. Forget reverse-angle views. Forget goalcam and helmetcam and all those other cameras. Forget all those other gimicks and gadgets. The virtual first-down line is something that adds real value and enjoyment to watching football.
But its use to alter news coverage is fraud. It's misleading for CBS to think they alter Times Square just because they want it to be their "studio".
--Jim
Without having looked at it, let me ask... how does it deal with codecs? Does it come with a set bundled, or do you have to add codecs like with xanim? What codecs are included?
--JT
My brand-new Inspiron 3700 doesn't have any Linux patches listed, thank you Dell.
The I3700 is very similar component-wise to the I7500, so the linux stuff posted there might work for your I3700. I plan to at least try the sound driver.
For more information on configuring linux for the I3700, see my page Linux on the Dell Inspiron 3700. Much of this information was gleaned from pages about the I7500: Jim Frost's page Linux on the Inspiron 7500 and Steve Hsieh's page Linux on a Dell Inspiron 7000/7500 Laptop . (I see on checking Steve Hsieh's page that he's now added "3700" to the title, so he may have additional information about the I3700.)
--Jim
Uri Geller has a long history of filing lawsuits against anyone who criticize him, debunk him, or even just incorrectly describe his past. Witness, for example, his various suits against James "Amazing" Randi, who published The Truth About Uri Geller . I don't recall all the details of Geller's suits against Randi, but you can probably find more info at randi.org. Fortunately, Randi is a bulldog who doesn't let Geller intimidate him. The long and the short of it is that Geller is a fraud and will sue anyone who dares to say so.
--Jim
--Jim
Hang on, isn't that a 256 color GIF they used for the comparison?
Yeah, I noticed that too. Kind of like those TV ads that show an HDTV picture... they don't look too impressive on my ordinary TV set.
My guess is that they used GIF so they could control the color palette and make the presented images appear to approximate the image appearance. In other words, it's a demo.
--JT
Experimenters, tinkerers, inventors, pioneers, and fine exemplars of the geek spirit -- they made the machines that led us into flight and into spaceflight.
--Jim
Did anybody else think this was cool:
S3 was first shown publicly when it served as the ring-bearer at my wedding on June 19th 1999
I bet that caused quite a stir! To hell with doves at the wedding, robot snakes are just so much more fun.
--JT
Excellent article, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive, though it's a bit repetitive.
Personally, I don't think the keyboard matters as much as the working environment, and how well it and the programmer are attuned to each other. This is probably why people are so religiously bound to their choices of development tools, in particular their editors. People who can find that zone do so because they work well with their tools, because they know the tools well enough that the tools themselves fade into the background, and the code and programmer come to the fore. Having a bad keyboard will certainly get in the way of this experience, but having to use bad tools will get in the way more.
For the programmer to be able to adapt to the tool can be as effective as the tool being able to adapt to the programmer. This is why people are able to reach the zone with editors like vi that aren't as programmable and as extensible as editors like emacs. That's not a judgment of either editor, just an observation that the highly touted customizibility of emacs doesn't necessarily help its users reach the zone, nor does the lack of a built-in programming language prevent vi users from reaching the zone. It simply means that the choice of editor as a matter of taste.
It probably also means that programmers who use detestable IDEs such as Visual C++ can probably also reach the zone.
--JT
I thought the problem with ActiveX was that it was a security hazard for the browser -- the person doing the surfing -- and the browsing system. Ditto JavaScript. Can someone please explain to me how these tools are a threat to the servers and their hosting systems?
Or is this just the case of some non-tech-savvy DoD security wonk overreacting to something he's read and misunderstood about the security issues? It happened at NASA. You wouldn't believe the trouble we had getting Java code into mission control at JSC, because some misinformed security expert decided that Java == security threat. *sigh*
--JT
Sounds to me like the Metaverse in the making. Snow Crash, here we come. I know that other attempts are underway to make Metaverse-like worlds, but I would give Carmack the highest likelihood of creating something that I would actually want to use. If that's the kind of thing he's talking about.
--JT
And accessing web pages isn't closely related to text-editiong activities (eg. hacking)?
Only if you're editing your own HTML (which, I remind you, isn't browsing). I use XEmacs to edit my HTML. But when I want to see it rendered, I view it in both Netscape and IE, because those are the browsers that 99% of the people who visit my site are going to use.
Nescape is good when all you need to do is to masturbate to pretty tables and nice pictures.
Several people in this thread have said that a good reason to write W3 is "because you can". This begs the question of who's really doing the masturbating.
--JT
So, an editor that acts as a mail reader and a debugger is fine, but it acting as a web browser is way over the edge? Sounds like a pretty arbitrary line to me.
No. Reading e-mail and debugging code are two activities that are closely related to text-editing activities: namely, replying to e-mail and editing code. Both these activities benefit greatly from having a tightly integrated editor.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the e-mail readers for emacs came about because someone was composing a message in emacs, and thought "wouldn't be great if I could send this straight from emacs, and then read the reply straight into emacs?" The point being that it's the desire to use a good editor that drove the need to extend that editor into the e-mail business.
Furthermore, both e-mail and coding are text-intensive tasks, something that emacs excels at. Laying out and presenting web pages has become an incredibly graphics-intensive process, and graphics is not something that emacs is well-suited for. Yeah, emacs has some capability to handle embedded images, but that's not it's strong suit.
What I'd much rather see than an embedded browser is integration with a real browser, be it Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, or any of the others. Let me edit my HTML in emacs, type control-meta-cokebottle, and see my edited HTML displayed on the external browser. For my money, this makes much more sense than trying to add still more bloat to an already bloated tool.
I love emacs, but it's not the right tool for every job.
--JT
I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said that every application seeks to expand until it can read e-mail. I would add the corollary that the really bloated applications expand until they can browse HTML.
For example: there is Emacs/W3, which just released version 4.0. To quote the Freshmeat entry: Emacs/W3 is a full-featured web browser, written entirely in Emacs-Lisp, that supports all the bells and whistles you will find in use on the web today, including frames, tables, stylesheets, and much more. Emacs/W3
Now, I happen to use XEmacs. It's my favorite editor. I couldn't code without it, debug without it, or even read e-mail without it. But I can browse the web without it, and I think building an emacs-based browser is just way over the edge.
As the wise man said, though, Your Mileage May Vary.
--JT
Since the first ruling has come out, some in the press have been saying that findings of fact cannot be appealed. Others say that the findings can be appealed, but that the chances for success in such an appeal are unlikely.
Please set the record straight for us -- can findings of fact be appealed, in general, and what are the criteria for overturning these findings? In the Microsoft case in particular, please speculate for us: is it likely that Microsoft will choose to appeal the findings of fact? If they do appeal, what attack are they likely to pursue, and what do you feel their chances of success are?
--JT