Microsoft loses anti-trust appeal

[grober]

With this new European decision against Microsoft http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6998272.stm

Just how safe a platform will Windows be if the criminal hackers of europe get their hands on the source code?? While not a fan of anti-competitive conduct from big multi-nationals I am a bit wary of any implications for the end user.

 

[Spinal]

Finally someone that sees it from a realistic point of view! To be frank, I'm weary of Microsoft bashers who see Microsoft as an evil daemon to be expunged!

 

[recycled]

are they not?
Any monopoly in any market surely is not good for consumers or end users

 

[recycled]

Say shell now buy all the fuel stations in england and then enter into the car manufacturing business with shell cars 2.0 v6
And they now modify the fuel to only work in shell cars 2.0 v6 .then all merc and toyota owners will be forced to buy shell car 2.0 v6 or face having to drive with coconut oil in their tanks

 

[SEM]

W-Healthy competition..? if i could get my software to work on linux or mac, i'd probably change

 

[grober]

If Cars Were Like Operating Systems

If Cars Were Like Operating Systems
What if cars were designed like XP, OS X, and Linux?
Courtesy of Jeff Adkins from lowendmac.com


If your car was built by a computer company....
If your car is an XP model...

You can put the steering wheel on the roof and the gearshift on the hood if you want, and sooner or later you try it just to see what it's like. You find that it's painful, and no one else will drive your car. Eventually you go back to a normal configuration.

You can buy parts for it at Wal-Mart, but somehow they never fit quite right, or you have to go buy a part that Wal-Mart doesn't carry to make the part you originally bought fit.

Every third time you park it somewhere besides home and work, it will fail to start until you call AAA.

In order to keep it from running out of gas, you buy a bigger tank, but that takes more gas to haul around, so you buy a still bigger tank....

If you give a stranded motorist a jump, both of your cars will cease to work.

If you don't drive it for a month or so, the internal electronics reset and you have to tow it to a dealer to get it to run again.

Your CD player interferes with your left turn signal. Every time you turn left, the CD player switches to track one. It's not a big problem, and you can work around it, but no one knows why it happens. Everything you do to fix it makes it worse.

If you let your buddy borrow your handicapped parking sign, his car will not run with the sign hanging from his rearview mirror. If he throws the sign outside the car, then his car will run again. Furthermore, when he is in possession of your parking sign, your car won't run either.

Every time you go to Mega-Lo Mart, you can't find your car again, because it looks like every other car in the lot.

Touching the door makes it automatically open, with or without a key. It does this at odd and embarrassing times - usually when you are showing it off to other people and bragging on how secure it is.

The warning light panel has 438 different symbols and requires a written manual (which was not included in the purchase) to interpret properly.

The only place you can store your key is in a box on the hood marked "NOTICE: PUT KEY HERE."

Gangs of pre-teenagers will use the hood key to take over your car (whether you're in it or not) and drive around causing random traffic jams. When the jam is good and solid, they get out, but they always leave your car a little worse for the wear. Sometimes they take the engine.

Whenever you consider trying to get another car, a policeman shows up at your door and reminds you that no other kind of car is allowed on the access ramp to the freeway. You're welcome to use alternative cars anywhere else, though.
If your car is an OS X model....

The day after you buy it, an improved model comes out for less than you paid, and the thing which is improved - a turbocharger for the engine - will not function in your car, even if bought separately.

It only comes in one color, although you know people who own older colored ones, and you can customize it only with difficulty. People who customize it complain that it's not customizable enough.

Most of the time it's an automatic, but when you drive places you used to frequent years ago, it turns into a standard. Unfortunately that list includes your house.

It has no gearshift and is fully automatic unless you are driving someplace you've been many times, whereupon a gearshift suddenly appears. When you want to go in reverse, a special lever which is hidden under the dashboard must be flipped. Then the car rotates in place using special hinged axles. The special lever is difficult to find and requires you to stretch just a little more than is comfortable to reach it. Most of the time you avoid parking anywhere you have to back out.

When you go to the showroom to buy one, people give you bottled water and swap stories for hours on end, but no one ever actually asks if you are ready to buy one.

When people see it go by on the street, they say, "Hey, isn't that one of those new..." and the person with them says, "Yeah, they look great, but I wouldn't buy one unless I won the lottery."

They use it to teach Driver's Ed. This is somewhat controversial, as everyone knows the skills used to drive one car are not transferable to another car.

If the engine is not running, you cannot open the hood. If the engine is running, the hood automatically opens whenever an oil change is needed and you are at a gas station.

The engine parts are sealed inside a translucent and quite thick hood. Opening the hood will automatically void your warranty. It will also leave scratches all over your car. If you do manage to open the hood, you discover to your surprise that there is a powerful, fuel efficient, lean engine in there, and you have not been taking full advantage of its power.

The first time you clean it vigorously you will notice that you left tiny scratches all over the finish, just big enough that wax doesn't cover them up. Your wife will not like this.

Sometimes you can't make it fit onto the onramps at freeways. Even though it is illegal for you to drive on the freeway on ramps, you can get by with it if you hang a colored flag on your antenna.

When you and an XP driver and a Linux driver leave from the same place for a restaurant across town, the Linux driver arrives first but is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road. You arrive second having found a shortcut which takes only two turns. The XP driver arrives last but declares that this is not the right restaurant and makes everyone drive to a new place.

It has only one pedal. When you push it down, it accelerates. When you pull it up, it brakes. This feels unnatural to you and prevents you from doing doughnuts in the parking lot, so you go buy another pedal and install it yourself.

Some part, somewhere, will become loose and fall off. This part will not interfere with the operation of the car, but you will constantly have to explain this to people who think your car is defective. The part might be a door to the gas cap, the cover on the dome light, one of the hubcaps, or the plastic cover on the glove compartment's drink holder.

Despite the obvious attention to detail, there will be some fundamental design flaw - and only one - which afflicts all the owners of this type of car. It may be that the rearview mirror is mounted in front of the driver's seat, or that the seat can tilt but not slide forward and back, or one headlight burns out two days after the warranty ceases to cover it, or it may require metric tools to open the drink carriers. It won't be a serious problem; you can work around it, but you hate it when other people notice it.

The car is designed not to require maintenance; there are no maintenance facilities anywhere near where you live; but when the day finally comes when you can't afford to wait any longer, maintenance will no longer be offered for your model.
If your car is a Linux model....

You built it yourself out of discarded scrap from the junkyard, yet it outruns anything on the road. Some part on it somewhere is held in place with a rubber band.

No one else can drive it because it takes too long to explain the procedure on how to make it go.

It has four gear shift levers.

There is always some fundamental part not attached to it, awaiting a vendor to provide it, such as the trunk lid, the back seat, the tachometer, or the radio.

It has no air conditioning. You know of people who have installed air conditioning themselves, but you haven't gotten around to learning how to do that yet.

Your car only runs really really well on the freeway. It can go 120 mph and get 300 mpg while doing it. When going slower than 45 mph in a residential area, it often sputters and dies, refuses to change gears, or won't fit in parking spaces. Many fine restaurants will not allow your car in the parking lot.

Sometimes the gas you buy works well, other times it chokes the engine. You become very conscious of the availability of gas in the exact formulation that works best. You have a notebook with dozens of pages of notes on the subject.

The engine you bought was free and runs great. The steering wheel and gearshift cost you money, though, and they suck. You bought them on credit and haven't paid for them yet.

Even though there is no user's manual, you have cobbled one together from various books. It is 1,200 pages long and some of it is in Dutch.

There are eight places this car is preprogrammed to drive itself. Amazingly, this works reliably, and you use it when you can. Unfortunately only three of them are places you actually want to go - but you go to the other places just because you can.

There is one place where everyone who drives your type of car goes to meet. When there, it is difficult to get a word in edgewise because everyone knows more than you - or at least they think they do. When drivers of other cars wander in by accident, you steal their hubcaps and tell them what fools they are.

You are an expert on XP type cars and often pull over to help one which has suddenly died due to a missed registration key.

In a conversation with XP and OS X car owners, you invariably come off as the one person who actually has a clue about how a car operates.

You live under the misguided concept that everyone will want to build their own car someday.

 

[Spinal]

Say shell now buy all the fuel stations in england and then enter into the car manufacturing business with shell cars 2.0 v6
And they now modify the fuel to only work in shell cars 2.0 v6 .then all merc and toyota owners will be forced to buy shell car 2.0 v6 or face having to drive with coconut oil in their tanks

See, thats the main difference. In the car manufacturing market, the barriers to enty are much higher. In the software market, any geek in a garage with some free time and a good idea can compete with even the largest companies.

Think of Apple - IBM had a practical monopoly on the market, then a couple of random geeks in a garage suddenly manage to compete!

Think of FireFox - I.E. had what, 90+% of the market? FireFox came by and almost overnight its one of the most used browsers.

That brings me to my next point. e-Patents = bad.

Michele

 

[recycled]

agreed. but Microsoft is trying to stifle the garage geeks by making sure the other browsers never work with thier OS .they did it with netscape.
Is that not what the eu is trying to prevent?

 

[glojo]

I am NOT a computer type person, but have always been very envious of Bill Gates achievements. Is this all about one person being clever enough to develop software that the whole World took up and the customer has put Microsoft where it is?

How on earth can anyone figure out just how wealthy this person is?

John

 

[fuzzer]

If anything else was any good im sure we would use it.

Everybody uses microsoft. Its like english.

The world needs it , it sucks sometimes and doesnt make a whole lot of sense but you just go with it cause thats what youve been taught!

 

[Rose Chap]

I wouldn't have a livlihood if it wasn't for Microsoft.

 

[recycled]

neither would i but it is certainly not like english.
english was spread more like by bullying and battering the opposition into submission by conquests threats and deaths.
what you ae implying is that might is always right, which in most cases always work but it is certainly not the right thing to do.
Hence the western world throwing its weight around mere less mortals.

without robbery a lot of people will also lose their livelihood

 

[glojo]

Hence the westerm world throwing its weight around mere less mortals.

We are where we are. The Romans, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, British Empire, and Hitler. We could be speaking anyone of half a dozen languages but we are where we are and good luck to Bill Gates, he has conquered a World market and could easily create havoc.

John

 

[scotth_uk]

Windows has essentially made computing what it is today. If Microsoft didn't invent it, it was created by someone trying to better them.

I respect windows, but I don't enjoy it.

 

[miro]

The source code for Windows is basically PDP-10 source code from DEC-VMS ported across.. all of the security bugs in windows are identical to the ones in the originating OS.

As for the future of computing .... much like the future of F1 .... if you tamper too much with the operations of the best performers, you dont relieve the market of any monopoly. The next biggest player will take the market by the throat and do the same thing - because whatever Microsoft did, everyone else will do the same - it worked for Microsoft.

The other problem with defeating Microsoft at its own business would be to discourage investment in global infrastructure. Microsoft bought the Iridium satellite network on a speculative notion of expanding the worlds communications grid. Then it all went very quiet and no person has mentioned it since.

Either it was a white elephant or society doesnt need to know what is going on because it was sublet to a government. Those initial costs are staggering and smaller companies can not operate with those margins for error.

When the time comes to expand MSN and Skype to the leading phone systems worldwide it will be mandatory to have the sufficient capital to proceed. Obviously Skype has no money at all because the pace of development is absolute zero. They make all of these stupid partner agreements with no effective outcomes in the marketplace.

Microsoft would really love to take over the personal communication market, plus write the OS for the hardware, but that would only put 10 more nails into its coffin, so then it would seem more motivation to keep Iridium hidden.

Instead we have these ineffective synchronisation setups between PDA and PC. This is a reflection of conservative self-protection. If MS had delivered anything as socially significant as global telephony at nominal / trivial prices then it would fall under the same axe which is about to splinter some of the current products.

The global market is failing to deliver new technology and in about 2-3 years if there is not a dramatic improvement in the usability of communication and information devices the market will stall. There is no way to add more buttons to a phone and entice people to buy it. There has to be a new product and a new purpose for phones and the last frontier is certainly for the cost of calls to hit rock bottom.

Without integrated user interfaces I do not anticipate any useful alternatives in less than 5 years.

Look at the best iPhone clone from China, being sold on eBay. It is almost good but without the quality it represents just styling without usability. We already have that now with old products costing 1/2 the price.

You would think that with 2000 programmers you could make anything .... but there is only one Bill Gates and one Steve Jobs. If you tamper with their visions you end up with something less than that, which by all accounts is nothing special, retrograde and not likely to motivate the marketplace.

The last thing I need is Vista spam from a Russian developer.

 

[miro]

We are where we are. The Romans, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, British Empire, and Hitler. We could be speaking anyone of half a dozen languages but we are where we are and good luck to Bill Gates, he has conquered a World market and could easily create havoc.

John

Every language on Earth represents an old Empire. We are in fact losing 300 languages and dialects each year. These will never return.

 

[Spinal]

agreed. but Microsoft is trying to stifle the garage geeks by making sure the other browsers never work with thier OS .they did it with netscape.
Is that not what the eu is trying to prevent?

Actually, Netscape worked with windows... its just that IE was free. Free works well for the consumer as long as it remains free - and if its free, its competitors need to be free. Hence, in a way, IE-"freeness" helped spawn, Camino, FireFox, Mozilla, Opera and all the other free browsers.

When Microsoft made IE free, other browser makers whined that it was "unfair competition". Now that Linux is free, do you see Microsoft whining that Linus Torvald is being "unfair"?

Michele

Oh and on a side note:
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1008.html
Steve Job's first apology; its in reference to his iPhone apologies...

 

[grober]

Accidental Empires

For folks really interested in this kind of thing I would heartily recommend this book----- Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely http://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-...ooks&qid=1190128643&sr=1-1&tag=amazon0e9db-21

Its a bit out of date now ( written in 1996) but gives a very readable personal viewpoint of the early days of the first PCs. Its about the people not the technology for those who are allergic to "geek speak" although it is about the "uber nerds" Steve Jobes, Steve Wozniak, Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates etc.
Should be a required social history text for all kids IMHO since it documents ( in an entertaining fashion) events and people which shape our lives today.

 

[miro]

For folks really interested in this kind of thing I would heartily recommend this book----- Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely http://www.amazon.co.uk/Accidental-...ooks&qid=1190128643&sr=1-1&tag=amazon0e9db-21

Its a bit out of date now ( written in 1996) but gives a very readable personal viewpoint of the early days of the first PCs. Its about the people not the technology for those who are allergic to "geek speak" although it is about the "uber nerds" Steve Jobes, Steve Wozniak, Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates etc.
Should be a required social history text for all kids IMHO since it documents ( in an entertaining fashion) events and people which shape our lives today.

I sat for some classes in Digital Culture and to be honest it was total crap. They had a course called Technocultures, which is where your book would be highly relevant, and all they talked about was the internet. The problem was that another course was already devoted to internet speak.

There are two modalities to global perception, where you manifest change actively with conceptual change and where you whine and fluff about as people do on YouTube. The latter has taken over as the focus of social interaction but the former is still the dominant force in society.

 

[grober]

God your sitting in my chair!

Have you read the book? It certainly is'nt a "text book" and is arguably factually inaccurate in some parts. It fades a bit at the end but the first 2/3 is really an entertaining read. Its from a pre-internet era and is interesting from that point of view alone. In contrast Gillies and Cailliau HOW THE WEB WAS BORN was packed with detailed facts about ARPANET, CERNET and Tim Berners -Lee etc but was frankly unreadable like many books on the history of the internet. So I would certainly agree with you about many similar books or courses on the subject.
The internet is such a dynamic thing that any book that tries to "define it" is almost inevitably out of date by the time its published. The only effectual tool to address the "INTERNET" is probably the internet itself.

Anecdotal evidence exists that Bill ( God-- your sitting in my chair! ) Gates didn't think the internet would catch on in its early days and thought Netscape and the other browsers of the time were a "fringe" interest. There then followed a " Ooh Sh*t " moment and Microsoft's Internet Explorer was hurriedly developed for the masses--some say its still in its gestational stage !
Comforting to know Bill can maybe get it wrong sometimes.