Groklaw Putting Comes v. Microsoft Docs Online 159
An anonymous reader writes "PJ of Groklaw is working on putting the documents from Comes v. Microsoft online, to make them searchable and accessible to everyone. If you don't remember their history, the plaintiffs got these documents from Microsoft during discovery after fighting the lawyers tooth and nail. After realizing how embarrassing the documents were to Microsoft, they put them online and later got a very large settlement from Microsoft by agreeing to take their website down. The web being what it is, these documents had already been mirrored and were later (legally) made available on the Pirate Bay. Now Groklaw has put them online and is looking for people to help transcribe them, so that documents like the infamous Evangelism is War presentation will not be forgotten."
Re:Unbiased this will not be. (Score:2, Interesting)
Rest assured that any information that isn't negative to Microsoft will be posted last if at all.
Microsoft already does all they can to trumpet everything that goes to their favour, there's no need to repeat these pieces.
GL/PJ isn't exactly know for being an unbiased source - she will say/do anything to keep the hits/money coming in.
This is a war, and the other side fights hard for themselves. We're not supposed to help them.
Not that bad really (Score:2, Interesting)
Talking to one of those who worked on the case... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had one of the people working on the case come talk to my college class. The documents provided to the law office were on paper. The office had an impressive cluster of computers used to do optical code recognition on all the documents so that they could be indexed and searched. There were tons of documents. It was not easy technically, and they worked a lot of hours.
The person I talked to always hoped someone would take this on. They couldn't give up their work for public domain, but there was a ton of computer history contained in those files.
Groklaw Putting Comes v. Microsoft Docs Online (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why I wish the internet would become a development platform for application (GUI driven in this case). If this was the case the platform wars (to borrow Microsoft terminology) would be over and developers would code for the internet. Google, with chrome os etc, seems to be an ally in this, not that they are benevolent benefactors, just that their business aims and the open source community desires align.
What would it take to code in any number of languages (in the way we can now code in javascript) for the web.
The Colossal Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that right around the same time Microsoft started thinking about using its bulk and business practices to achieve marketing ends, is right around the same time its innovation, risk taking, and other admirable traits about the company slacked off. I mean, yeah, it might have been hurtful to Borland for Microsoft to buy the superior Fox and use it to crush dBase, but at least the market did get a better product. And it might have been wrong to use Windows money to fund the development of Visual Studio to propel it past Turbo C++, but, again, the consumer got a better product. Even IE4 was better than Netscape.
But this email is from 1997, when MS had won the OS wars, the browser wars, and since then, what has happened? MS has lost its focus on computing entirely. Folding the Windows NT core into the Windows 95 shell to get first Windows NT 4.0 and then Windows 2000 were the best things the company did, and since then, we've had really not much to write home about.
Re:Talking to one of those who worked on the case. (Score:5, Interesting)
there was a ton of computer history contained in those files.
Indeed! There're many interesting bits in these emails that explain quite well some of the things we suffer every day.
"One things I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific. It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. Maybe we could define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something related to this" - Bill Gates [tinyurl.com]
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered well by others people browser is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPIETARY IE capabilities" - Bill Gates [tinyurl.com]
Re:B.b.b..but, M$.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine that clearly enough and you'll see why no one who could arrange that is inclined to let it happen.
Said no one who could arrange that being the electorate of your county/state/country?
It may have been a Slashdotter who mirrored it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Submitter here.
Yes, it was mirrored by others (thankfully people had the foresight to mirror this stuff right away). In fact, one person who had all the files asked what to do with them (either here or on Groklaw, I don't recall), and I was the one who suggested it be put on the Pirate Bay. I don't know for sure that he took my advice, but I do know that a Comes collection appeared there shortly thereafter.
Re:The Colossal Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
In Microsoft's defense, they are not alone. Windows 2000 (and it's UI improvement XP) did deliver. They threw a rock-solid OS with acceptable performance out there, and satisfied everyone from businesses to gamers. The famous 20% of work to get 80% of the result were done. Delivering again is hard, because now customers expect to get 160% at the same price. That's how things like Vista and DNF happen. :)
But as I said, they are not alone. Apple had their 2000/XP moments with Puma and Jaguar. They handled their "Vista" better through a series of incremental updates, but outside of Jobs' RDF, few "revolutionary" changes happened. Linux is more difficult to mold into that schematic by its very nature. Different projects that integrate into one distribution release at different times. Limiting the view to single projects, the situation is once again similar: changes, chaos, revolutionary thoughts up to a stable release and a slower trickling of updates thereafter.
At one point in every project, the gorgeously fat fruits dragging their branches down to ideal picking heights have been picked (XP, Jaguar). Getting a ladder and going for the apples becomes a tad more exhaustive (7, Snow Leopard), and finally going for the cherries way up in the tree becomes even more work. In the end, they'll be picked, though, as there's no other way to get to that pretty release with a cherry on top.
Re:Thankful for the Streisand Effect (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not just the Streisand effect. There have been a lot of people involved in Microsoft's dirty tricks campaigns over the years and now that the company's on a downhill slide, many of them are looking at their past roles with a bit of regret. The whole dirty house of cards isn't far from tumbling down.
Even James Plamendon, who created Microsoft's Evangelism program, authored that evangelism presentation and is responsible for much of Microsoft's brutal MSOOXML campaign has recanted. He's stated that he regrets his actions and is writing a book about it.
Time, perspective. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you had enjoyed the benefit of playing with SVR2 through a 30" high def graphical terminal in 1984 as I did, Microsoft's "innovations" in Windows 2000 some 15 years later might seem a bit less amazing. In 1984 we had aerial photos on LaserDisc overlaid with terrain data that we could draw on, and real-time position data in a distributed database with mesh networking for geotracking important operational assets. You could take a bomb to all but one node in the system, and that last node would stay up and have the latest propagated data. Yes, it took three or four seconds to redraw when you shifted scale or moved the map, but it was 1984. We had csh, ksh, X-Windows with widgets that looked better than W2k's. Networking was assumed. It was a multiuser system with an evolved system of managing user security that persists to this day. This was about nine months after Microsoft had invented the remarkable "subdirectory" concept with DOS 2.0, and 14 years before they included an IP stack by default. </sarcasm>.
Back then it took about 12 minutes to draft a professional one page letter using a CPT dedicated word processing station with full-page WYSYWIG and a SCSI daisy wheel printer. Today you can do a Google maps mashup of your own Cell GPS geolocation data in real time, and it takes about 25 minutes to craft a one-page letter. So the advantage of 25 years of progress is that technolgies are cheaper and more common and individuals are less effective.
A default install of SVR2 included development tools - grep, lex, yacc, awk, sed, an assembler, compiler, and cross-compiler for new hardware architectures, the source for the OS and all the tools, an ip stack including email. It was a multiuser environment. The processor performance graph, to give an example, included an animated graph of the pen writing the data on the scrolling log - an unnecessary but artful use of screen space that I miss to this day.
Rock solid? Windows 2000? Give me a break! If you think W2k was rock solid you have low standards [wikipedia.org].
Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever,[15] but it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda.[16] Over nine years after its release, it continues to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month.
Windows 2000 was a remarkable advance in the scope of "Microsoft operating systems". People who know better found nothing special in it. It wasn't as good as eight year old Jolix [wikipedia.org] then, and it still isn't [wikipedia.org].
Re:Agree (Score:2, Interesting)
In my world the prevention of progress is evil. To profit from the prevention of progress is corporate evil. The prevention of interopability through obfuscation of interfaces is the epitome of evil.
Man will move forward or he will not. Any institutional prevention of progress is an effort to prevent the survival of Man, as a species. We have been distracted by the profit motives of this Redmond, WA corporation long enough.
Re:Thankful for the Streisand Effect (Score:1, Interesting)
Good old Streisand effect. I just downloaded a copy of the evangelism presentation (oh noes, did I infringe MS's copyright?) and read through it. For some reason, learning that something is censored makes me take a lot of effort to find it and read through it carefully, much more than if nothing happened to it. It's probably partly "if it gets censored, it must be interesting" and partly sticking it to the man. Doesn't matter, whatever gets uploaded is out there and will be forever out there and there's nothing anyone can do to stop that.
Does this extent to learning new languages? US adaptions of books (would be wrong to call them translations) and movies are generally very censored by the publishers and producers. The original books and movies usually deal with matters that are complitely removed from the US adaption (the main excuse is to make the books/movies simpler to read/view with less diversions, because every American publisher seem to think of their readers/viewers as stupid and easily distracted), usually the main themes of the books and movies are altered too. And to make it even worse, the original movies are generally much better made and with good actors, while the americanised movies use subpar, but famous, US actors and directors.
If the original movie is distributed in US, than large parts of the movie is usually censored. Sometimes for no obvius reason. From resent experience I could give as an example the hilarously funny Swedish movie "Picassos Adventures" were the sketch that make fun of American Gangster movies (and American English, the movie is fully made in fake languages that make fun of the original languages) are removed. Speaking about Swedish made things: large parts of Pippi Longstocking in the Americanised version is censored or rewritten because it would make children behave unruly. Way to go with a book which main theme is about questioning and stand up against unfair authorities.
Re:Thankful for the Streisand Effect (Score:3, Interesting)
It might not have done anything to further their propagation (although the fact that MS paid to have them removed at least indicated that they might have been worth a look), but I still find it very puzzling that in this day and age, someone actually thought "oh noes, our sekret filez are on the intarweb, I'll just pay to have them removed" (duh). Maybe he was from sales, or marketing.
Removing stuff that's on the network works fine for the media publishers after all, so Microsoft shouldn't have any problems doing it.