US Antitrust Judge Examining Windows 7 Documents 225
Anonymous writes "After more than 11 years, the US antitrust case involving Microsoft is still alive, with a federal judge overseeing enforcement of provisions under which the software giant must operate. And now, Judge Kollar-Kotelly says she'll take a close look at new technical documents involving Windows 7. This case began during the Windows 95 era."
Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
We paid a judge and some court staff their salaries for a few years? Oh, and let's not forget the lawyers...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah. Pretty amazing how a website for engineer and computer scientists don't like to pay their own salaries.
Do you remember the 'good ole' days of software. Do you remember how much of it was funded? It was funded by the old telephone monopolies which used their guaranteed monopoly over phone lines to fund such ventures as the invention of C++ at ATT/Bell labs. Wait a minute... do you remember what happened to these great labs once they were forced to breakup from their monopoly? Oh yeah... they sucke
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So on slashdot someone advocating monopolies to drive technological innovation gets modded +4 Insightful?
(Pssst: Competition is the main driver of innovation in a market system, you should be thankful we have _any_ innovation coming from Microsoft instead of cheering for them)
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Who said anything about a "free" market?
Even in regulated markets, monopolies kill innovation and drive prices up. This has absolutely nothing to do with the free market ideology.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market, used that monopoly to gain monopoly position in the browser market (although they have lost that position over the last couple of years) and a dominant position in the office software market.
Let's see what happened in these three markets.
First of all, the OS. It took MS over 6 years to bri
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You keep looking at this from a consumer point of view.
I'm not looking at it that way. I'm looking at it from the view of a worker bee in the industry.
Yes, forcing competition on industry is great for consumers. It is great for consumers that the a day after we release a great product, 20 other competitors have copied us and turn our work into a commodity. Wonderful for you.
It is not so great for those of us who work in the industry.
Yes, us little cogs in the machine that produce all this value.
Every poi
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Microsoft is not a natural monopoly (like cable, electricity, water) where there is only going to be one infrastructure going to your house.
Electricity is not a natural monopoly when it is regulated to separate distribution from generation.
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I don't get it, is this a troll? (Score:3, Insightful)
Until that time, let us people who produce goods that we need to sell in the brutally competitive free market have a few tools to have a steady income. If that means proprietary file formats, exclusive deals with distributors, making funny protocols... so be it. The free market will determine when that is too annoying to bother dealing it and get with the competition.
If all that shit was eliminated, you'd have a level playing field to work on, and be able to compete based on merit.
What are you afraid of?
I'm not living in a world where my neighbor who makes windows break my window every morning, so I have to pay him to fix the window.
I personally have never had a problem with it, but that sounds like WGA to me.
For that matter, it sounds like the Windows update schedule (or OSX, I'm not prejudiced.) Either way, a new OS comes out every so often with new APIs that developers are convinced or cajoled into using so that we have to buy a new operating system. Sometimes it's made sense, because computers h
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Oh, and let's not forget the lawyers...
But what about the children? Why can't anybody think of the Children?
The children lose the most from monopolies.
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There is no car company which can be considered to be a monopoly. Not even close.
You can't use monopoly power to keep others out of the market. You are being deceitful when you leave out the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no car company which can be considered to be a monopoly. Not even close.
It doesn't work that way. Instead, the collective major carmakers of the world collectively wield their might to attempt to prevent new players from entering the market. For example, they manipulated the US government into forcing California to drop our planned emissions standards schedule so that they should sell the cars they wanted to sell here, not the cars that the voters wanted to buy. (The legislation did not prevent the out-of-state purchase and subsequent in-state purchase of automobiles, either; this is not any form of protectionism, at least since the CA DMV was forced to stop raping people over out-of-state registration fees.) Whether this sort of thing is done at the request of the oil industry is of course the big question; I have no evidence either way. I do know that this years' cars don't have much better mileage than last years' and that everyone but the Germans (whose government is currently dominated by their green party) is pushing the boondoggles known as parallel gas hybrids; the German turbodiesels have a lower energy cost in production, get better mileage in almost all real-world driving situations, and have a lower recycling cost. The new ones (e.g. VW CleanTDI) have super-low emissions without urea injection, too. Meanwhile I'm prepping a 1982 MBZ 300SD and a 1992 Ford F250 for B100...
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Diesel also requires less energy to produce than gas(though extra taxes increase at pump costs, and refineries are geared to produce as little diesel, and as much gasoline, as possible suppressing supply).
Honestly, I think a lot of our energy problems could be helped by a nation wide effort to encourage diesel production and use. In the short term, with less taxes and more production, it will help with energy costs. In the long term, bio diesel would be more attractive because of a large fleet of vehicles
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Where have you been? An election is ahead (here::Germany) and the 'Greens' are not participating in the (federal) government since the last one (4 years ago).
CC.
Re:Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh good grief. Yeah, the grandparent was a little exuberant, but your post is so overblown in the opposite direction that the net result is zero.
Microsoft has used unfair business practices to destroy one company after another. They got so blatant about their mission to destroy all potential competition, that the government got involved.
There is ample evidence that Microsoft was trying (sometimes successfully) to use their market penetration and sway over OEMs to their benefit. Examples include not allowing OEMs to bundle certain software. It should go without saying that they wanted to best the competition, that's any corporation's goal. The problem was with some of their anti-competitive techniques crossed the line.
browsers manage to catch the limelight because there are so many, and people notice them.
Except there weren't (this started in 1995 remember) and people don't. The browsers were almost exclusively either IE or Netscape/Mozilla. Maybe the biggest nail in the coffin for Netscape was twofold: Microsoft started bundling IE for free with Windows, and at a certain point IE started to eclipse Netscape in features and stability (shock, I know). Considering there was no real money for MS to make with their browser it made sense to include it with the OS because it meant they could leverage it for other OS-related purposes such as rich help files and things like Windows Update. It also helped them market Windows as an all-inclusive ready out-of-the-box product, pretty much exactly like Apple does now with OS X.
Tell us - why do you suppose that Microsoft has simply refused to make IE standards compliant?
Because Microsoft is a corporation and there was no profit in doing so. Likely a simple cost/benefit analysis. Windows and Office are their bread and butter, why blow development money on a browser?
You don't think it could POSSIBLY be that it helps to break the interweb
Break it? Originally the "interweb" was defined largely by what IE and Netscape implemented.
Why does Microsoft push ActiveX
How do they "push" it?
but won't turn over the source code, or even standards, so that other browser might use it?
Obviously they don't turn over source code because they are a closed-source commercial company. Besides, pretty much all browsers have a plugin/app architecture that serves the same purpose as ActiveX does on IE. While starting to be largely eclipsed by other technology like Flash/Silverlight/AJAX, ActiveX and friends still serve a useful role in providing web applications additional access to the users's computer through a browser when needed.
With or without a browser, Microsoft is going to make billions this year, eclipsing ANY OTHER software company. I say, take away one of Microsoft's toys, if they can't play nicely with the other kids.
We should punish a company just because it makes more money than anyone else? Punish their misdeeds, not their success. Statements like this just come across as envious spite with a weak facade of desiring justice.
Maybe next year, we'll consider taking away Windows media player, if they can't learn to be nice.
Uh, yeah, the brilliant minds at the EU already took a shot at that with forcing Windows XP N Edition. Nobody wanted it.
I think a lot of this "look what they did 15 years ago" stuff is pretty meaningless now. Enough time has passed that we'd be better off remembering the past, but punishing and investigating them for current infractions, and the best place to try and fix potential problems is going to be at the OEM level. Make sure Microsoft can't dictate to Dell what they can or cannot bundle in terms of competitiveness and make sure and keep hardware standards open and documented, but don't restrict what can be included in a retail Windows box. When I buy Windows off the shelf I expect it to come ready-to-use with Microsoft apps like IE, WMP, Wordpad, and Paint. If I want an alternative to one or all of these, I'll go find one.
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Maybe the biggest nail in the coffin for Netscape was twofold: Microsoft started bundling IE for free with Windows, and at a certain point IE started to eclipse Netscape in features and stability (shock, I know).
Those who fail to remember the past [businessweek.com] are doomed to repeat history class. That "certain point" was when AOL announced they would be partnering with Microsoft and their new AOL client would basically be a re-branded version of IE. At the time AOL was wildly popular and it instantly added approximately
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I think GP's point is that the time to worry about skeletons in the closet is *after* the murders have stopped, not before. To drag a metaphor too far.
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Try taking all the webkit libraries out of Mac OSX, and see how much that breaks ?
Try removing libsncurses or whatever it's called from a Linux distro, ditto above ?
In a culture where we it is engrained to "reuse" code, and avoid redundancy, your criticize Microsoft for doing exactly that, while both the other "major" O/S do exactly the same thing to a degree. Every piece of code is going to have SOME dependencies, otherwise everything would be so bloated and no one could use anyone elses code.
Yes, that fun
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We forestalled the compete domination of Microsoft in the computer industry. They behaved like better computer citizens than they otherwise would have. And they should have gone along with the breakup. It would have made for a much more nimble company, with independent units that made the OS, the applications and the hardware.
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They secured the big OEMs the right to sell more than just windows, eventually paving the way for netbooks.
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Re:Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
Briefly, in the 1990's MS was found to have a monopoly in its OS, which is not illegal in and of itself, but that it also illegally used its monopoly OS to create barriers to entry in other competitive areas. Particularly, it illegaly tied its browser to the OS, making other browsers not function as well (e.g., for help file viewing) and more difficult to install. At trial, they were shown to be either liars or, if you are very generous, incompetent.
Detailed findings of fact found illegal anti-competitive behavior in multiple areas, and their punishment was to be broken up into several companies. On appeal, MS successfully got that ruling overturned, on the basis that the judge in the case had made some negative comments about MS prior to issuing his ruling. In the meantime, 15 separate cases against MS brought by state attorneys general were merged, and MS settled with them for something so trivial no one remembers what it was. California, New York, and maybe one or two other states held out and separately obtained billion dollar settlements.
Shortly after the break-up order was rescinded, George W. Bush came into office and all efforts to obtain a reasonable remedy were dropped. MS essentially got off scott-free, in the sense that they illegally transformed their OS monopoly into a browser monopoly, with all the due profit that entailed, and weren't punished at all except for what they had to pay their lawyers and a billion to California.
To summarize and answer your question: Not Much.
don't forget that... (Score:2, Insightful)
And don't forget that this happened right after Microsoft heavily "funded GWB's election campaign".
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And don't forget that this happened right after Microsoft heavily "funded GWB's election campaign".
That's how American politics work these days. We have the best laws, legislators, and governments money can buy.
Re:Summary (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft DID document a number of otherwise undocumented APIs. And they have internal processes to ensure that Microsoft programs like Office, FoxPro, Visual C++ etc dont call anything thats undocumented, see this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/calvin_hsia/archive/2005/01/26/361033.aspx [msdn.com]
They did later document lots of network protocols but that was the EU and not the US that got them to do it.
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Documentation my ass. I read the Wine mailing list a lot and the first thing newbie programmers hear on that list is to take the MSDN documentation with a grain of salt since it is A) not written at the time of programming and B) not written by the programmers itself.
Furthermore; the small, leaked part of the source code for Windows contains comments such as "Changing X seems to fuck up the goddamn C compiler" and "Removing this seems to break Office 98" which implies that not a lot of people at Microsoft s
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Very little, because the DoJ shut down the case before it went to the most recent punitive stage. The findings of fact was useful in that it resulted in many civil suits against Microsoft being won without having to argue the merits of those specific facts.
Instead of actually doing something about the facts of the case, the government decided to turn around and walk away, so that Microsoft ended up in a form of legal limbo where they were guilty of doing something wrong without being punished for it yet, b
Re:Summary (Score:4, Funny)
Can someone summarize exactly what we have achieved in this case?
The outcome was a complete success. Windows 95 no longer dominates the desktop.
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It's not the installer. It's the packages themselves, which do not obey standards for where libraries go, where packages may be installed, how to report and manage library dependencies, and most especially how to manage that database obscenity, the Windows Registry.
Until those issues can begin to be resolved, there is no _point_ to having a nice point and click installer. It's like putting a keyboard on a Lego.
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MS "systems" have lacked and still lack a unified, easy to use package management system such as have been available elsewhere for years.
That's because packaging systems (*especially* on Linux) exist largely to solve a problem Windows doesn't have - massive amounts of intricate and interlinked software dependencies.
OS X lacks a packaging system for much the same reason - there's simply no compelling need for one.
(Of course, it doesn't take much imagination to realise the level of apoplectic outrage that
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.. and if you compile statically, you also don't need a package system, since there are now no external dependencies ...
... but to claim that "a problem Windows doesn't have - massive amounts of intricate and interlinked software dependencies. " is a lie at best, since the whole antitrust case was on the way that IE was supposedly such a core component of the Windows OS, and that so many processes and programs depended on it, or libraries (dlls) that were part of it ...
Remove all the dlls from your system
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Of course, the amount of RAM and hard disk space you're going to waste will be rather large. To say nothing of the maintenance nightmare that any required security patching will produce.
What's the point of this? (Score:2, Informative)
Now, that's interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
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as far as I was aware, there was little movement in 8 years.
If a lot happened quickly, it wouldn't be taking 7 or so years would it, therefore by definition, not a lot of movement is going on.
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Considering that this is the same judge who agreed Microsoft was abiding by the terms of its reward for losing in court, when it clearly wasn't, I don't hold out a lot of hope that anything will change from the last 8 years of U.S. court-endorsed monopoly abuse.
Re:Now, that's interesting. (Score:4, Funny)
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You got modded funny, but I'll bite. Why did it take five and a half years for Microsoft to release Vista, and when they finally got around to it, they released software that was so bizarre that they are not even re-using the name for the subsequent release even though it looks to be only an incremental improvement? It's because they're a monopoly. If the government had forced Microsoft to sto
Red Tape (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's engineering ethics are not bad. (Score:2, Funny)
Name an OS consumers use that is browserless. Fact is, an OS without a browser in this day and age is utterly useless. Less than useless. It's a paperweight.
In general, Microsoft has made great strides to make its OS more transparent and more 'fair' than ever. A lot of people (who are technically aware enough to agree) will probably attribute this to the court, but I think the reason is a lot simpler: good engineering is winning out over corporate greed. Case in point? UAC. A lot of people give Microso
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That's like the frog in the cooking pot saying, "oh good, the water only got one degree warmer, it's not boiling." A user's life might be better, but as someone who knows what decent privilege escalation and user controls actually look like, I would say that UAC is still a joke, but that joke would not be funny. Do yourself a favor and use a different operating system for awhile, it'll open your mind I promise. You may still continue to use Wind
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I have been running linux exclusively at home since 1995.
Think of it this way: can you imagine anyone thinking UAC was going to be a big selling point? They did it because they needed to to.
As far as IE; try setting a different default browser and try to find instances where IE still gets launched. I imagine people do take dependencies on IE's rendering engine, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're going to have a hard time getting rid of ieframe.dll.
BSA ad (Score:2)
Ok why the hell is slashdot running an ad for "report piracy" by the BSA?
And in the YRO section of all places?
The irony...
ob Microsoft Antitrust: Reminds me of why the BSA's power needs to be trimmed in some way.
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Ok why the hell is slashdot running an ad for "report piracy" by the BSA?
slashdot doesn't love you, it just wants your money.
Decline and fall (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, MS isn't going anywhere but their glory days a
Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up? (Score:5, Insightful)
.net, which is so complex that they had to implement autocomplete to make it usable.
Yes, .NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.
As for needing autocomplete to make it usable, personally, I think that autocomplete and the graphical debugger are two of the best things to ever happen in programming. It saves me time, makes my job one heck of a lot easier and allows me to be more productive.
You may learn the value of that sort of thing some day.
I wish that more development environments had usable autocomplete. As much as I love to use Ruby for writing scripts, my main complaint about the IDE I use for it (netbeans) is that it *doesn't* have autocomplete for Ruby unless they've come out with a new version recently that does.
Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up? (Score:5, Funny)
Open Source is pretty good for that, too.
Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up? (Score:5, Insightful)
With open source libraries, you generally have to find the wheel before you can reuse it.
Often people end up reinventing the wheel because they (a.) couldn't find one someone else made, (b.) found one, but it wasn't under licensing terms that they could use with their project, or (c.) found one, but the project lost its way and ended up incomplete with a lead developer who may well have been hit by a bus.
Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.
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With open source libraries, you generally have to find the wheel before you can reuse it.
Often people end up reinventing the wheel because they (a.) couldn't find one someone else made, (b.) found one, but it wasn't under licensing terms that they could use with their project, or (c.) found one, but the project lost its way and ended up incomplete with a lead developer who may well have been hit by a bus.
Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.
Eh, I'm not a zealot and I didn't say anything was a panacea.
It was a tongue-in-cheek type of post, intended to be subtle sarcasm making fun of the exact kind of zealotry you point out. That's alright, bladejester thought it needed a serious explanation too, with lots of emphatic quote marks and patronization and everything. He also mentioned giving me a cookie and assured me that the sky won't fall down. A cookie does sound nice.
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Cookies are always nice unless they're the browser kind or have something in them that you're allergic to. Many problems could be solved with them =]
As for my patronizing manner, having been the editor of an OSS mag, I've seen my fair share of zealot email, comments, etc on both sides of the debate. It burns you out after a while - especially when you're a pragmatic person who sees benefits to both open and closed source solutions in various situations.
You've never had fun until you've been at a conferenc
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At least the wheel is findable and useable, and if it needs fixing, you can at least get it fixed. With closed source, the wheel is patent-pending, heavily encumbered, and if you write something that works just like a wheel, you can get called into court for infringing on said patents. Closed source isn't the end all and be all that you seem to think it is, either. There's advantages to both sides, as well as disadv
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Yes, but at least with closed-source, the wheel is generally wheel-shaped.
OSS tends to be a semi-defined octagon shape, and you have to hack the source to round the edges a bit.
Ouch, these analogies are giving me a headache ... couldn't you have used something involving cars ?
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Not saying closed source libraries are more helpful, plentiful, or accessible, but open source is not the panacea that zealots on Slashdot would like it to be.
I think you must be referring to closed source libraries in general, because Microsoft recently made the source code for the .NET Framework publicly available:
The source code for the .NET framework base class library is available for reference purposes only under the Microsoft Reference License. [39]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net_framework [wikipedia.org]
Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up? (Score:4, Insightful)
The case B you mentioned is exactly why I think open source should be used from the beginning.
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And here was I thinking that they re-invented the wheel because they got sick of driving carts around on wooden wheels, and discovered that it was better to drive around on wheels with pneumatic tyres.
Basically, today's wheel is a lot better than the original wheel. I'm glad somebody re-invented it.
Why does everybody diss re-inventing the wheel? Are wheels beyond all improvement? perfect and totally mature? the best we can possibly ever produce?
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Open Source is pretty good for that, too.
Is this where I give you a cookie?
It is completely possible to write open source programs on Microsoft platforms and with Microsoft technologies. Open source happens on more than just Linux.
What we're talking about here is "complexity" in a group of libraries for a programming language family/common runtime.
The thing is that that "complexity" is optional. You only have to use the parts of it that you want. The rest you can ignore and the sky won't fall down, just
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The thing is that that "complexity" is optional.
Except when it's not. I work on software that can -unfortunately- be nothing *but* complex. (Trust me, my cow-orkers and I wish that the software was *much*, *much* simpler.)
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IMO, the best autocomplete in any IDE I've used would have to be Eclipse. The amount of work it can do for you is ridiculous. NetBeans is pretty good too, but I find it to be a bit clunky at times.
YMMV.
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Two things:
1) Have ever used Eclipse for Java programming?
2) You haven't used KDevelop 4, have you?
When you can get KDev4 to run (as of last month, it was alpha software and was rather crashy), you can see that the autocomplete is light-years ahead of VS.
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And yes, I do 8 hours a day of Java and PL/SQL.
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Yes I have used Eclipse, and continue to occasionally. I usually go back and forth between Eclipse and Netbeans depending on which seems better for what I'm doing at the time. Currently I'm on a Netbeans kick because they have such nice web services support.
I've never used KDevelop, but I'm interested in how it's better. I'll have to check it out. Considering VS2008's autocomplete is pretty close to perfect, it's hard to imagine something "light years" ahead of it, but I'll keep an open mind.
You want sw
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Yes, .NET is complex, or rather it has a hell of a lot of libraries. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. It saves you from having to reinvent the wheel every time you write something.
Instead you spend the time rummaging through your toolbox trying to look for the one wheel that's exactly the right size, with the proper axle connections and everything, and pray that it doesn't fall off when you make a left turn.
(I jest, I jest. But I have found that after a certain point, the effort required to deal with complex libraries properly begins to outweigh the benefit of code reuse.)
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and it's made me realize how much more precisely the Java APIs are defined compared to Microsoft's stuff
Umm.. guh? Windows API's? Buh? Really, what in God's name are you on about? The .NET libraries are no more or less precise than the Java libraries, that doesn't even make any sense.
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My beef with autocomplete is that it encourages a kind of cowboy coding style,
The medicine for this is simple. Fire the cowboys. Autocomplete (whether it's in Visual Studio, Vim, Emacs, or KDevelop 4) is a godsend for those of us who suffer from RSIs, the "too many goddamn projects at once" syndrome, or just plain forgetfulness.
That's no Flamebait! (Score:2)
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Wasn't MFC just a cheap copy of Borland's OWL [wikipedia.org]? So, shouldn't we be blaming Borland for how crufty it is?
The Windows API, on the other hand... *shudder*.
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I thought it looked more modern than slashdot! Try browsing the web with mosaic 1 these days.... :P
Re:What if they had broken Microsoft up? (Score:5, Funny)
Why does every Microsoft Bashing Troll have a homepage that looks like it was designed in 1992?
because those websites were built with frontpage.
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Why does every Microsoft Bashing Troll have a homepage that looks like it was designed in 1992?
Black text on a white background? Possibly it's a demographic that places importance on information rather than aesthetics. If I put up a web page it would probably look like that. Before I got married I had virtually no decoration in my house other than family photos. I still have less in the way of decoration and entertainment than most, but considerably more tools and educational books than most people.
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Black text on a white background? Possibly it's a demographic that places importance on information rather than aesthetics.
You hit the nail square on the head. Most of us geezers grew up reading books; those things made of paper and ink. We're used to black on white, and it's the most readable combination. If your page is gray on black, that tells me that what you've written is so unimportant you don't care if it gets read.
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Second we have the childish one that likes to play these silly things called "games".
Yes because heaven forbid people do something they enjoy with their free time. It would be childish of them to not work like a drone 24/7. Although, I personally do not agree with being an MS apologist just because most PC games are Windows only. That would be similar to defending Walmart's business practices because your favorite brand of shoes is only sold there. (Sorry, I couldn't think of a good car analogy for that)
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I program in C++ and PHP, you insensitive clod!
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I love the h1'd "My brother is getting married" part. Also, this guy's a terrible HTML coder - he vacillates between using quotes and not, doesn't keep a consistent case in his tags, missed the body end tag, etc., etc.
Maybe he used Frontpage?
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Also, for the record, jokes about giving women two black eyes as lessons migh
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7 has serious workflow/productivity improvements for people with multiple monitors. I use 4 monitors in a square configuration and managing more than 30 windows at a time is much easier.
That in itself is worth it to me. As far as home use, I'm considering it to replace my Vista Media Center. The improvements are nice.
Re:Windows 7 is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
The only downside to using Windows is the cost. It takes a reasonably competent user to install a Linux distro, drivers, use WINE to make Crysis work, and so forth. A reasonably competent user can also operate Windows without losing the system to malware and repair any infections that do occur. So a reasonably competent user should be indifferent between Windows and Linux.
I would never purchase Windows for a business enterprise, just because of the cost, and because at work you don't need to run Crysis. It fulfills all of my needs at home, though.
I wish they would sell Direct X as a separate product, though. Using it to try and force Windows upgrades on gamers is a dirty move.
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However those people are the ones getting a bundled OEM copy, which is a far cry from the $100 a retail Home Basic costs. Try around $10.
I've posted before that my gut feel is that the bundled trialware with a box pays in full for the OS. So cost for home users barely matters.
When it gets to enterprise level, well you're going to have 100k of salary running a decent sized network - so the OS cost will be insignificant as well :/
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That cant be right, 2 years old?? I fail to see how a pre-reading, pre-counting>10 child can install an operating system. He'd be more likely to take the CD and smash it with his toy cars.
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Except that installing and configuring Linux is a one-time cost (which can be repeated if desired, when desired). Dealing with malware is a recurring cost and is unpredictable. I could go years on my Linux workstation without doing any administration at all (if I wanted to).
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Ah FUD FUD FUD ...
Like sendmail never needed patching, and openssh never had any flaws, and MySQL never needed upgrading to fix bugs.
NO O/S is a one-time-cost experience. The fact that Linux has no initial payment involved doesn't mean it doesn't still have a financial impact in terms of user's / sysadmin's time.
Or maybe you think all Linux users are geeks with infinite time on their hands, and nothing to do but sit in the basement hacking source ?
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Security updates are about the same on either system. I have only really felt the need to upgrade Firefox and OpenSSH on my workstation for security reasons. I have never "patched" either, apt works fine.
In fact, most people don't really need OpenSSH (and I don't really need it). So, were left with Firefox, and plenty of people run older versions of Firefox without issue -so, yes, I could set up a workstation to be left alone for years without administration. No need to "sit in the basement hacking source"
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It takes a reasonably competent user to install a Linux distro, drivers, use WINE to make Crysis work, and so forth.
Try Mandriva, it doesn't and hasn't for a long time. Windows is only easy for the end-user because it's preinstalled on the PC. I build my own computers, so I wind up installing Windows on them (dual boot) and Windows installation is a long, frustrating ordeal. Installing Mandriva is a piece of cake.
Actually the only reason for Windows is games.
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the only reason for Windows is games
Agreed. However, you're talking to someone who also builds their own computers and installs their own OS. Personally, I don't think the Windows install process is arduous. Long, maybe, but not arduous.
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The only downside to using Windows is the cost.
The lack of basic interface features like virtual desktops and "always on top" is a downside. The lack of a comprehensive package manager is another one. Having to install Cygwin to get essential tools like SSH and GNU Screen is still another downside. As a competent user the dumbed down Windows interface is a downside I experience constantly.
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You are aware of the concept of inertia, aren't you? I don't care if it still sells. That doesn't make it less crappy. People buy crap all the time, even when a perfectly good alternative is right there beside it. Microsoft is a forgettable operation now. We have plenty of good options before us. But here we are with the old "lead a horse to water" routine. I guess some people still prefer swill [jt.org]. Fine by me.
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Probably because it'll hit the OEMs first, and be shipped on every new piece of x86 gear that comes off the line. As for individual sales, it'll be because it's really Vista SP2, and upgrading to it from Vista will make the machine run marginally better. Doesn't mean it'll get the most out of the machines, though...
Re:M$ Should Be Finished (Score:4, Funny)
M$! From hells heart I stab at thee!
*wave finger*
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* Genesis device explodes *
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Parent's excellent monologue, delivered in the style of renowned technology analyst (or analysts!) Twitter, shows solid construction and consistancy throughout. With clever use of symbology - especially with the dollar symbol - this well-reasoned posting is a pleasure to read.
Truly excellent application of delusion and paranoia. Four and a half stars.
Re:Judging technical documents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually seems pretty bright. She saw through many of Microsoft's tricks, and did well in keeping up with technical discussions in court according to at least some case watchers.
Incidentally, she's the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since her tenure began in 2002, the number of warrants that had to be modified before being accepted jumped dramatically. Her term expires in May, at which point she will also no longer be part of the FISC, as judges may not be reappointed.
I generally hold judges in high regard, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly ranks highly overall in my mind. She would, I think, make for a respectable member of the Supreme Court if she were appointed, though I think that's unlikely at this point, as she's around age 65 right now, and I think the trend over the next few administrations is going to be to pick much younger potential justices to fill those positions.
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