Allegations of deliberate Microsoft bias against Apache or any other competitor are not supported by the historical record and merely reflect the anti-Microsoft paranoia endemic to Slashdot.
Microsoft has long been cognizant of its corporate obligations to society and has treated competitors ethically as it sought to bring value to consumers through innovation, interoperability, and choice. At every turn Microsoft has sought to maximize consumer satisfaction by encouraging rational decision making in a fair and efficient marketplace - to the point of sometimes subordinating its own short term corporate interests.
Consider in the following cases how Microsoft has gone more than "half way":
1 With Lotus (123) and Quarterdeck in extending memory management in DOS in the late 80s.
2 With Digital Research to bring the benefits of Windows 3.x to users of DR-DOS.
3 With Stac Electronics to bring bring on-the-fly disk compression to the masses.
4 With IBM to preserve the purity of the a strong 32 bit pre-emptive operating system by repeatedly moving Win32s beyond the reach of OS/2.
5 With WordPerfect, Lotus (Word Pro) and, more recently, Open Office to document and standardize file formats for maximum user convenience.
6 With various business partners to enhance the web experience of users of first Netscape and later Opera as they visited various optimized corporate websites (Disney circa 1997).
7 With various OEM partners to enhance users' internet experience by keeping Netscape off their default desktops until it no longer mattered.
8 With the W3C to extend the benefits of open and free communication standards into the future.
9 With virus and spyware writers around the world to keep the "Windows Experience" always exciting and unpredictable.
Microsoft bashers need to realize that their rabid conspiracy theories reveal more about them than anything about Microsoft. Fred "IE is no less secure than Firefox" Langa knows this, why don't the MS bashers clue in?
And remember, DRM and Trusted Computing shall set you free.
Okay, business opportunities shipping TVs to the US aside, does anyone know the answer to the original question: what will be the legal situation in Canada after the Flag becomes law in the US?
Will Canadian regulators care? Or will we become collateral damage? That is, BF free TVs will be legal, but the manufacturers won't differentiate between the Canadian and American markets and ship crippled TVs to us too. Last fall I asked a number of TV sales types in the Vancouver area about the Flag and, big surprise, none of them had even heard about it! It's always a treat to deal with informed professionals.
I know there's lots of Canadians on SlashDot: what's going to happen up here?
Yes, a 486, or at least a really good one, could play mp3s. I had, and still have, an AMD 5x486-133 based system which I managed to get to play mp3s on Win95 in 1998. The 5x486-133 was a 486 on steroids: it had 16 KB of L1 cache (not 8 KB) and ran at 133 MHz. But it was/is a 486, both architecturally and socketwise.
The trick was waiting for the right codec to come along. I remember trying and failing (with results as you described) with an early version of WinAmp. But with a later version, set to CPU hogging high priority, it worked. Mind you I doubt it work for any bitrate above 128 kb...
Slashdot Mirror
Only if they are edible.
Only 1600 pages? It needs to be four times longer to be rubber stamped as an ISO standard.
Allegations of deliberate Microsoft bias against Apache or any other competitor are not supported by the historical record and merely reflect the anti-Microsoft paranoia endemic to Slashdot.
Microsoft has long been cognizant of its corporate obligations to society and has treated competitors ethically as it sought to bring value to consumers through innovation, interoperability, and choice. At every turn Microsoft has sought to maximize consumer satisfaction by encouraging rational decision making in a fair and efficient marketplace - to the point of sometimes subordinating its own short term corporate interests.
Consider in the following cases how Microsoft has gone more than "half way":
1 With Lotus (123) and Quarterdeck in extending memory management in DOS in the late 80s.
2 With Digital Research to bring the benefits of Windows 3.x to users of DR-DOS.
3 With Stac Electronics to bring bring on-the-fly disk compression to the masses.
4 With IBM to preserve the purity of the a strong 32 bit pre-emptive operating system by repeatedly moving Win32s beyond the reach of OS/2.
5 With WordPerfect, Lotus (Word Pro) and, more recently, Open Office to document and standardize file formats for maximum user convenience.
6 With various business partners to enhance the web experience of users of first Netscape and later Opera as they visited various optimized corporate websites (Disney circa 1997).
7 With various OEM partners to enhance users' internet experience by keeping Netscape off their default desktops until it no longer mattered.
8 With the W3C to extend the benefits of open and free communication standards into the future.
9 With virus and spyware writers around the world to keep the "Windows Experience" always exciting and unpredictable.
Microsoft bashers need to realize that their rabid conspiracy theories reveal more about them than anything about Microsoft. Fred "IE is no less secure than Firefox" Langa knows this, why don't the MS bashers clue in?
And remember, DRM and Trusted Computing shall set you free.
Okay, business opportunities shipping TVs to the US aside, does anyone know the answer to the original question: what will be the legal situation in Canada after the Flag becomes law in the US?
Will Canadian regulators care? Or will we become collateral damage? That is, BF free TVs will be legal, but the manufacturers won't differentiate between the Canadian and American markets and ship crippled TVs to us too. Last fall I asked a number of TV sales types in the Vancouver area about the Flag and, big surprise, none of them had even heard about it! It's always a treat to deal with informed professionals.
I know there's lots of Canadians on SlashDot: what's going to happen up here?
Yes, a 486, or at least a really good one, could play mp3s. I had, and still have, an AMD 5x486-133 based system which I managed to get to play mp3s on Win95 in 1998. The 5x486-133 was a 486 on steroids: it had 16 KB of L1 cache (not 8 KB) and ran at 133 MHz. But it was/is a 486, both architecturally and socketwise.
...
The trick was waiting for the right codec to come along. I remember trying and failing (with results as you described) with an early version of WinAmp. But with a later version, set to CPU hogging high priority, it worked. Mind you I doubt it work for any bitrate above 128 kb