Did I miss something, or is the poster asking how to *reduce* code size ("run out of code space") - using inline will make your code bigger by duplicating the source. Are you actually running out of stack (data) space?
What compiler is being used? The inline keyword is not supported by ANSI C - it is a C++ feature. However many C compilers support a proprietary inline declaration. Examples:
Green Hills: __inline
Diab: __inline__
Others use: #pragma inline
So, RTFM. Also, check the docs for inlining optimizations.
This deserves some more explanation, since everyone here seems to have missed this point.
A Real Time system is one where the ouptut isn't correct unless it arrives on time. Real Time systems are deterministic - not necessarily fast. The key is to use bounded-time algorithims so that you can predict the worst case execution time at compile time. RTOS's aren't designed to be fast, they are designed to have deterministic schedulers and kernel services.
Of course, faster processors make it easier to meet real time deadlines, but as processors get faster I'm seeing engineers ignore the real time analysis and design because the code passed the last test they ran. Then they are surprised when it fails in the field...
It isn't clear from the article how this company does it, but in my experience with safety certification, you get charged the hourly rate for the certification process regardless if you pass or fail. Just like having your car inspected...
This removes the conflict of interest, and in fact reverses it: the certifying authority *wants* to find problems so they can bill more hours, and the developers but their butts to keep the cost of the certification down.
...for your resume: Human Resources dorks. They look at two degrees and say, "Wow, that's more than one so he must be really smart" Always remember that you ususally need to get past HR before you get to the folks with a clue...
Helpdesks.com is an excellent website that reviews a wide variety of help desk software solutions, from the dinky open source variety to the uber expensive hosted solutions. Go nuts! Jeff
You agreed to the license, and thus relinquished your rights.
The parent is making two points that you overlook:
- He questions the legality of click through or shrink wrap licensing: can a contract be binding without a legally binding signature form? The key problem here is that there is no way to verify *who* agreed to the license.
- US law prevents you from being bound to illegal clauses in an otherwise valid contract. Even if you had a contract with Bioware (see previous), can they force you to assign the rights to your intellectual to them?
Interestingly enough, it would only take a change in a few words for this to be remarkably like the GPL. What if the FSF *required* the copyright of a derivative work to be assigned to the FSF?
Spend enough time a coaster parks and you will soon see that there is no shortage of stupid people - the don't read the signs, cut in line, don't fasten their seatbelts, try to stand up...
Two weeks ago I was at Six Flags America in Maryland and gaped in disbelief as two parents watched their child crawl underneath the platform for a large spinning ride (Music Express type). I'm sure if the kid got hurt they would sue the park.
Maybe we should be handing out Darwin awards instead of legislating the fun out of these places.
TiVo Inc. has made it clear that they would release some unknown (not yet public) backdoors that would allow you to set the time on TiVo and continue to use it as a digital VCR. In spite of that, TiVo made changes in the 2.5 software which made it easier to use the box without service. Beyond the call of duty, if you ask me.
Check out the post by TiVoPony in this thread that confirms this policy is still intact.
I wish people would do some research instead of guessing.
Jeff
Very Simple:
1) Less competition, higher prices (duh)
2) Companies were charging below cost to get market share. (see: Dot-com boom, venture capital)
3) Those companies are now out of business, or are raising their prices to stay in business (see: dot-com bust, burn rate)
4) goto 1
The phone companies of course have other sources of revenue, so they can still try to price the IELC's out of the game (see: Microsoft, monopoly, anti-trust).
Jeff
Antivirus firm Symantec said that over three quarters of Mac users are under the illusion that they are not a target for virus writers and hackers.
Well, in that case I should rush out and buy some Antivirus soft...hey...waitaminit..
Jeff
Ok, it hasn't been commercialized but it isn't as whimpy - check this out"Vision is hard," Gross said. "Nobody has succeeded in making it work in real time."
One word: Aibo
Oh, and give CMU some credit
Jeff
Cygwin is a great way for those bound to the evil empire to have access to some powerful developer tools.
For those not familiar with Cygwin, it is the inverse of Wine: a complete Unix environment that runs in Windows. Just about any Linux app can be ported to it, and many already have.
- gcc
- gdb/Insight
- Python
- Perl
- PostgreSQL
- Apache
- XFree86
- KDE
- Gnome...plus all the shell lovin' you could ever want.
Jeff
Has anyone tried playing WarCraft II, Battle.Net edition using IPX on Windows 2000 machines? You can create a game and see it on another computer, but you cannot connect. Battle.Net works, but you can't use Battle.Net from two computers behind a firewall.
Fire up bnetd on the lan and away we go - switch from network troubleshooting to good'ole hack & slash.
BTW, I will not buy WC3 or any other Blizzard product unless bnetd.org wins this lawsuit. Next they'll try to make Kali Illegal...yes, their FAQ claims that it is against the license agreement to tunnel IPX in TCP...
The TiVo DVR collects certain types of information from its users, including Anonymous Viewing Information, Diagnostic Information, Commerce Information, and Service Information.
TiVo has no way to access any of your Personally Identifiable Viewing Information from your DVR without your prior consent. Absent your consent, the TiVo service has no way of knowing what shows you-as an individual or household- have watched, recorded, or rated with "Thumbs Up" or "Thumbs Down."
TiVo does collect Anonymous Viewing Information; that is, information about viewing choices made while using your DVR, but that does not identify you as an individual or household. In other words, there is no personally identifiable information associated with the viewing information that could identify the viewing information as coming from you or your household. TiVo also collects Diagnostic Information from a small number of randomly sampled DVRs for quality control purposes. If you don't want even your Anonymous Viewing Information or Diagnostic Information used in any way, simply tell us by calling our toll free number (1-877-367-8486).
If you affirmatively elect to engage in a commercial transaction using the TiVo service, such as by responding to an advertisement on the TiVo service, TiVo will collect and disclose your Commerce Information to the commerce partner fulfilling the transaction.
TiVo intends to make available new services in the future. These services will be governed by the privacy policies of the respective service providers.
Note that the hackers in the underground have verified what information is sent to TiVo, and that the opt-out really does stop that information transfer.
Stop the FUD - you know you can. Anonymous, opt-out, what's the problem?
Actually, all MS products used the same authentication scheme up until Win98. The rule is that the second set of digits must add up to a multiple of 7.
Of course, this will probably get me slapped with DMCA lawsuit...
You are wrong on both points:
1) Microsoft has monstrous discounts for educational users
2) What service can a Windows based server supply that a Linux server can't? Some schools have more NFS servers than SMB servers...
Here's why: They offer their own @Work based VPN service. They want to charge per-user access for VPN.
http://work.home.net/remote.html
Their @Work service is all DSL, this is the first I've seen them use cable modems for access.
This is funny...really...its a joke...right?
on
Microsoft Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Found this in my e-mail yesterday...
NewsMax: James Davidson "While Joel Klein and his Justice Department were publicly and distastefully celebrating Judge Jackson's decision, the market capitalization of Microsoft was dropping by more than $100 billion. That's not some theoretical figure. It is a loss in real wealth - in many cases, in retirement savings - of more than two million direct shareholders of Microsoft and of tens of millions more who have substantial holdings of Microsoft in their mutual funds and annuities.... The Nasdaq carnage has been wide-ranging. And why not? The Internet intervention of government, often in league with trial lawyers, threatens every high-tech firm in America." - James R. Glassman, Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2000.
Microsoft is fined $100 billion
For many years, Silicon Valley was Death Valley as far as politicians were concerned. Candidates trolling for dollars and lobbyists seeking to squeeze rents from successful companies usually came away empty-handed in dealings with New Economy companies. High tech entrepreneurs were getting rich without help from government. Even worse, as far as the politicians were concerned, the new entrepreneurs were insufficiently motivated to pay the kind of protection money that has flowed in torrents from Old Economy companies and corporate executives accustomed to the normal perils and blandishments of government intervention. Many of the big boys of the New Economy, most prominently Bill Gates, the world's richest man, paid less tribute to politicians than a junior vice president at General Motors.
It did not go unnoted. Under prodding from some of Microsoft's politically active competitors, like Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, and America Online, owner of Netscape, the Clinton [In]Justice Department brought an antitrust action against Microsoft. As everyone knows, the judge in the case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, appears to have totally swallowed the competitors' view of Microsoft, including the strange notion that Microsoft abused consumers by giving them free Internet software.
I am not a Microsoft shareholder, but like most owners of PCs, I am a Microsoft customer. While not without fault, the company has indisputably helped make personal computing much cheaper and more practical than it would have been otherwise. Indeed, it is the very usefulness of Microsoft and its products that make its example informative. Judge Jackson's unfavorable ruling on Monday, April 3, touched off a steeper high tech sell-off than even five Fed interest rate hikes could engineer.
In theory, the government clobbered Microsoft for violating some almost metaphysical points of antitrust law. But don't waste your time reading law books. The $100 billion loss to Microsoft shareholders, as well as the one trillion dollars lost from the value of other high tech companies, disappeared for an altogether different reason. Microsoft paid the price because the company and its executives failed to contribute enough money to the Democratic Party.
You can bet your last nickel that if Bill Gates had been paying gaudy sums to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom or sponsoring illegal fund raisers in Buddhist temples, he would never have been targeted by Janet Reno's brigade. Had Gates contributed as avidly to the Clinton re-election as the People's Liberation Army, Microsoft would not only have its near-term future intact, it would probably be running the Panama Canal to boot. If Gates had contributed to politicians instead of to education, the Antitrust division of the Justice Department would have spent the last two years filling crates with useless documents about the courtship between Exxon and Mobil.
Why did the Clinton administration go after Gates but leave Exxon alone? Because there was no need for the politicians to pound the oil industry over the head. Oil executives have known that their industry was in thrall to politicians since even before an antitrust ruling broke John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil into 30 pieces at the beginning of the 20th century. By its end, the Clinton administration was perfectly content to let two of the bigger of those pieces merge back together.
Make no mistake. The government attack on Microsoft is not a genuine, if misbegotten, attempt to make markets work better, as some infatuated A-Level students of antitrust theory suppose. It is something less exalted and far more primitive: a power play. Politicians act like jealous dogs. They want to establish their dominion over any new sphere of wealth that technology and economic development bring to the fore. Once upon a time, they fretted that John D. Rockefeller was becoming too powerful. So they sliced and diced his company. The politicians want to be the big dogs in the road. To that end, they are content to impose ruinous costs on anyone who threatens to escape from their thrall.
If chopping $25 billion out of Gates' net worth knocks $20,000 off the value of your portfolio or undermines the retirement savings of millions, clipping the value of 969 mutual funds that own Microsoft, so much the better as far as the politicians are concerned. That will make you all the more grateful to them when they "save Social Security" or fetch up some prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients.
The interests of politicians are not best served when you achieve financial independence and success for your family. They would prefer to see an interlude of prosperity which creates wealth that can be taxed and otherwise redistributed away. The system requires that only a few persons in a thousand become rich enough to bear the costs of all the promises that politicians extend to the underachievers. If you doubt it, just calculate the lifetime tax rate for top earners in the United States. Depending on personal circumstances, it ranges from 73 percent to above 90 percent.
The whole force of the United States government is directed to seeing that in two generations your descendants will never see more than pennies of the dollars you earn. That is the blunt arithmetic of the income and estate tax laws. As I indicated in a recent analysis, the "subversive lure of wealth" is one of the engines driving and accelerating "creative destruction." As government is one of the main incarnations of the old ways of doing things, and thus one of the fattest targets for destruction by revolutionary new technology, no one should be stunned that one of the most powerful officials in Washington, Alan Greenspan, openly frets that too much wealth is being created too quickly, and that incomes are rising too fast.
This recent sell-off in high tech stocks was wanton wealth destruction, engineered directly and indirectly by the U.S. government. In addition to the Microsoft ruling, James Glassman lists half a dozen contributing factors to the widespread decline in New Economy stocks during the week of April 3. (See "Is Government Strangling the New Economy?")
His argument underscores a point I have been warning about for years, namely that investors have naively overestimated the degree to which the United States protects them with a genuinely free and open legal system. In fact, anyone with wealth is well-advised to put as much as possible beyond the reach of the corrupt U.S. legal system. Ironically, in the early days of the Strategic Investment Web site someone impersonating Bill Gates wrote a post ridiculing the themes of the Sovereign Individual and pointing to Gates' success as evidence that nobody in the United States needed to protect his wealth from government. That wasn't Gates really writing, but, in any event, recent experience has disproven the point.
Contrary to pretenses, the U.S. government is not a true friend of property rights. As I have painstakingly detailed on many occasions, the U.S. legal system has been perverted to conjure up novel liabilities, which never before existed in the history of the world. Threats of confiscation and destruction through regulation that are not posed directly by the government itself are eagerly taken up by the predatory pack of trial lawyers that politicians have encouraged to form on every corner in the United States.
I think you miss the point - the break-up isn't about killing Windows, Office, or IE. It isn't even about breaking Microsoft's monopoly. The law MS got charged with breaking prevents anticompetitive behavior by a monopoly. The break up is about giving other companies the opportunity to make competing products on a level playing field.
Under the break-up, the Office group will not have access to any API's or OS features that are not accesable to other applications developers. There will be no benefit for an OEM to bundle Office with Windows than another company's product. And on the OS front, fully open and documented API's allow for better interoperability layers, such as Samba and Wine.
Is this going to be the end of Microsoft? Hell no. Does it give companies like Red Hat, Be Inc., and Corel a fighting chance? I think so.
IDcide - the tracking network jammer - has detected the following tracking networks on sites I visit:
ngadclient.hearme.com, servedby.advertising.com, advertising.com, tucows.com, ads.link4ads.com, ugo.eu-adcenter.net, hitbox.com, mediaplex.com, imgis.com, avenua.com, oh yeah...doubleclick.net, and so on and so on....
Just a clarification: It may be difficult to *require* that improvements be sent back to you, but most open source licences are designed to ensure that you can have source access to derivative works.
As to the hows, whys, dos & don'ts: Read ESR's stuff
Slashdot Mirror
What compiler is being used? The inline keyword is not supported by ANSI C - it is a C++ feature. However many C compilers support a proprietary inline declaration. Examples:
Green Hills: __inline
Diab: __inline__
Others use: #pragma inline
So, RTFM. Also, check the docs for inlining optimizations.
Jeff
This deserves some more explanation, since everyone here seems to have missed this point.
A Real Time system is one where the ouptut isn't correct unless it arrives on time. Real Time systems are deterministic - not necessarily fast. The key is to use bounded-time algorithims so that you can predict the worst case execution time at compile time. RTOS's aren't designed to be fast, they are designed to have deterministic schedulers and kernel services.
Of course, faster processors make it easier to meet real time deadlines, but as processors get faster I'm seeing engineers ignore the real time analysis and design because the code passed the last test they ran. Then they are surprised when it fails in the field...
Jeff
This removes the conflict of interest, and in fact reverses it: the certifying authority *wants* to find problems so they can bill more hours, and the developers but their butts to keep the cost of the certification down.
Jeff
It worked for me anyway :)
Jeff
Helpdesks.com is an excellent website that reviews a wide variety of help desk software solutions, from the dinky open source variety to the uber expensive hosted solutions. Go nuts! Jeff
You agreed to the license, and thus relinquished your rights. The parent is making two points that you overlook: - He questions the legality of click through or shrink wrap licensing: can a contract be binding without a legally binding signature form? The key problem here is that there is no way to verify *who* agreed to the license. - US law prevents you from being bound to illegal clauses in an otherwise valid contract. Even if you had a contract with Bioware (see previous), can they force you to assign the rights to your intellectual to them? Interestingly enough, it would only take a change in a few words for this to be remarkably like the GPL. What if the FSF *required* the copyright of a derivative work to be assigned to the FSF?
Maybe we should be handing out Darwin awards instead of legislating the fun out of these places.
j;TiVo Inc. has made it clear that they would release some unknown (not yet public) backdoors that would allow you to set the time on TiVo and continue to use it as a digital VCR. In spite of that, TiVo made changes in the 2.5 software which made it easier to use the box without service. Beyond the call of duty, if you ask me. Check out the post by TiVoPony in this thread that confirms this policy is still intact. I wish people would do some research instead of guessing. Jeff
Very Simple: 1) Less competition, higher prices (duh) 2) Companies were charging below cost to get market share. (see: Dot-com boom, venture capital) 3) Those companies are now out of business, or are raising their prices to stay in business (see: dot-com bust, burn rate) 4) goto 1 The phone companies of course have other sources of revenue, so they can still try to price the IELC's out of the game (see: Microsoft, monopoly, anti-trust). Jeff
Antivirus firm Symantec said that over three quarters of Mac users are under the illusion that they are not a target for virus writers and hackers. Well, in that case I should rush out and buy some Antivirus soft...hey...waitaminit.. Jeff
Ok, it hasn't been commercialized but it isn't as whimpy - check this out "Vision is hard," Gross said. "Nobody has succeeded in making it work in real time." One word: Aibo Oh, and give CMU some credit Jeff
First step rats, the next step Congressman!
You mean Disney hasn't already done this?
Cygwin is a great way for those bound to the evil empire to have access to some powerful developer tools. For those not familiar with Cygwin, it is the inverse of Wine: a complete Unix environment that runs in Windows. Just about any Linux app can be ported to it, and many already have. - gcc - gdb/Insight - Python - Perl - PostgreSQL - Apache - XFree86 - KDE - Gnome ...plus all the shell lovin' you could ever want.
Jeff
Fire up bnetd on the lan and away we go - switch from network troubleshooting to good'ole hack & slash.
BTW, I will not buy WC3 or any other Blizzard product unless bnetd.org wins this lawsuit. Next they'll try to make Kali Illegal...yes, their FAQ claims that it is against the license agreement to tunnel IPX in TCP...
Jeff
This is not DSL, it is wireless broadband - probably not unlike the Nokia Rooftop system that Cringely mentioned not too long ago...
Jeff
Stop the FUD - you know you can. Anonymous, opt-out, what's the problem?
Jeff
Jeff
Actually, all MS products used the same authentication scheme up until Win98. The rule is that the second set of digits must add up to a multiple of 7.
Of course, this will probably get me slapped with DMCA lawsuit...
You are wrong on both points: 1) Microsoft has monstrous discounts for educational users 2) What service can a Windows based server supply that a Linux server can't? Some schools have more NFS servers than SMB servers...
Bzzzt - thanks for playing.
What you discribe is known as vaporware - promising features/products that do not exist, to one-up the competition.
FUD is used by a market share leader to discredit a competing product:
Fear: Who will support all those Linux Boxen? There is no company to take responsibility!
Uncertainty: Are you *really* sure that cheap AMD processors are 100% compatible with Intel processors?
Doubt: How can a company that gives away its product for free stay in business?
FUD is designed to make the market share leader sound like the "safe" choice. The famous "Nobody ever got fired for purchasing X" fallacy.
Here's why: They offer their own @Work based VPN service. They want to charge per-user access for VPN.
http://work.home.net/remote.html
Their @Work service is all DSL, this is the first I've seen them use cable modems for access.
Found this in my e-mail yesterday...
... The Nasdaq carnage has been wide-ranging. And why not? The Internet intervention of government, often in league with trial lawyers, threatens every high-tech firm in America." - James R. Glassman, Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2000.
NewsMax: James Davidson
"While Joel Klein and his Justice Department were publicly and distastefully celebrating Judge Jackson's decision, the market capitalization of Microsoft was dropping by more than $100 billion. That's not some theoretical figure. It is a loss in real wealth - in many cases, in retirement savings - of more than two million direct shareholders of Microsoft and of tens of millions more who have substantial holdings of Microsoft in their mutual funds and annuities.
Microsoft is fined $100 billion
For many years, Silicon Valley was Death Valley as far as politicians were concerned. Candidates trolling for dollars and lobbyists seeking to squeeze rents from successful companies usually came away empty-handed in dealings with New Economy companies. High tech entrepreneurs were getting rich without help from government.
Even worse, as far as the politicians were concerned, the new entrepreneurs were insufficiently motivated to pay the kind of protection money that has flowed in torrents from Old Economy companies and corporate executives accustomed to the normal perils and blandishments of government intervention. Many of the big boys of the New Economy, most prominently Bill Gates, the world's richest man, paid less tribute to politicians than a junior vice president at General Motors.
It did not go unnoted. Under prodding from some of Microsoft's politically active competitors, like Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, and America Online, owner of Netscape, the Clinton [In]Justice Department brought an antitrust action against Microsoft. As everyone knows, the judge in the case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, appears to have totally swallowed the competitors' view of Microsoft, including the strange notion that Microsoft abused consumers by giving them free Internet software.
I am not a Microsoft shareholder, but like most owners of PCs, I am a Microsoft customer. While not without fault, the company has indisputably helped make personal computing much cheaper and more practical than it would have been otherwise. Indeed, it is the very usefulness of Microsoft and its products that make its example informative. Judge Jackson's unfavorable ruling on Monday, April 3, touched off a steeper high tech sell-off than even five Fed interest rate hikes could engineer.
In theory, the government clobbered Microsoft for violating some almost metaphysical points of antitrust law. But don't waste your time reading law books. The $100 billion loss to Microsoft shareholders, as well as the one trillion dollars lost from the value of other high tech companies, disappeared for an altogether different reason. Microsoft paid the price because the company and its executives failed to contribute enough money to the Democratic Party.
You can bet your last nickel that if Bill Gates had been paying gaudy sums to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom or sponsoring illegal fund raisers in Buddhist temples, he would never have been targeted by Janet Reno's brigade. Had Gates contributed as avidly to the Clinton re-election as the People's Liberation Army, Microsoft would not only have its near-term future intact, it would probably be running the Panama Canal to boot. If Gates had contributed to politicians instead of to education, the Antitrust division of the Justice Department would have spent the last two years filling crates with useless documents about the courtship between Exxon and Mobil.
Why did the Clinton administration go after Gates but leave Exxon alone? Because there was no need for the politicians to pound the oil industry over the head. Oil executives have known that their industry was in thrall to politicians since even before an antitrust ruling broke John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil into 30 pieces at the beginning of the 20th century. By its end, the Clinton administration was perfectly content to let two of the bigger of those pieces merge back together.
Make no mistake. The government attack on Microsoft is not a genuine, if misbegotten, attempt to make markets work better, as some infatuated A-Level students of antitrust theory suppose. It is something less exalted and far more primitive: a power play. Politicians act like jealous dogs. They want to establish their dominion over any new sphere of wealth that technology and economic development bring to the fore. Once upon a time, they fretted that John D. Rockefeller was becoming too powerful. So they sliced and diced his company.
The politicians want to be the big dogs in the road. To that end, they are content to impose ruinous costs on anyone who threatens to escape from their thrall.
If chopping $25 billion out of Gates' net worth knocks $20,000 off the value of your portfolio or undermines the retirement savings of millions, clipping the value of 969 mutual funds that own Microsoft, so much the better as far as the politicians are concerned. That will make you all the more grateful to them when they "save Social Security" or fetch up some prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients.
The interests of politicians are not best served when you achieve financial independence and success for your family. They would prefer to see an interlude of prosperity which creates wealth that can be taxed and otherwise redistributed away. The system requires that only a few persons in a thousand become rich enough to bear the costs of all the promises that politicians extend to the underachievers. If you doubt it, just calculate the lifetime tax rate for top earners in the United States. Depending on personal circumstances, it ranges from 73 percent to above 90 percent.
The whole force of the United States government is directed to seeing that in two generations your descendants will never see more than pennies of the dollars you earn. That is the blunt arithmetic of the income and estate tax laws.
As I indicated in a recent analysis, the "subversive lure of wealth" is one of the engines driving and accelerating "creative destruction." As government is one of the main incarnations of the old ways of doing things, and thus one of the fattest targets for destruction by revolutionary new technology, no one should be stunned that one of the most powerful officials in Washington, Alan Greenspan, openly frets that too much wealth is being created too quickly, and that incomes are rising too fast.
This recent sell-off in high tech stocks was wanton wealth destruction, engineered directly and indirectly by the U.S. government. In addition to the Microsoft ruling, James Glassman lists half a dozen contributing factors to the widespread decline in New Economy stocks during the week of April 3. (See "Is Government Strangling the New Economy?")
His argument underscores a point I have been warning about for years, namely that investors have naively overestimated the degree to which the United States protects them with a genuinely free and open legal system. In fact, anyone with wealth is well-advised to put as much as possible beyond the reach of the corrupt U.S. legal system. Ironically, in the early days of the Strategic Investment Web site someone impersonating Bill Gates wrote a post ridiculing the themes of the Sovereign Individual and pointing to Gates' success as evidence that nobody in the United States needed to protect his wealth from government. That wasn't Gates really writing, but, in any event, recent experience has disproven the point.
Contrary to pretenses, the U.S. government is not a true friend of property rights. As I have painstakingly detailed on many occasions, the U.S. legal system has been perverted to conjure up novel liabilities, which never before existed in the history of the world. Threats of confiscation and destruction through regulation that are not posed directly by the government itself are eagerly taken up by the predatory pack of trial lawyers that politicians have encouraged to form on every corner in the United States.
Under the break-up, the Office group will not have access to any API's or OS features that are not accesable to other applications developers. There will be no benefit for an OEM to bundle Office with Windows than another company's product. And on the OS front, fully open and documented API's allow for better interoperability layers, such as Samba and Wine.
Is this going to be the end of Microsoft? Hell no. Does it give companies like Red Hat, Be Inc., and Corel a fighting chance? I think so.
j;
ngadclient.hearme.com, servedby.advertising.com, advertising.com, tucows.com, ads.link4ads.com, ugo.eu-adcenter.net, hitbox.com, mediaplex.com, imgis.com, avenua.com, oh yeah...doubleclick.net, and so on and so on....
Now the IDcide filter can contain just one entry!
Just a clarification: It may be difficult to *require* that improvements be sent back to you, but most open source licences are designed to ensure that you can have source access to derivative works.
As to the hows, whys, dos & don'ts: Read ESR's stuff
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writ ings/cathedral-bazaar/
Jeff