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| Microsoft, Then and Now - Searching for Video of the US Antitrust Trial |
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Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:01 AM EST
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The New York Times' Steve Lohr and John Markoff have an interesting take on Microsoft's decision to delay Vista: Back in 1998, the U.S. government declared that its landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft was not merely a matter of law enforcement, but a defense of innovation. The concern was that the company's strategy of bundling more and more features into Microsoft Windows was thwarting competition and stifling innovation.
Eight years later, long after Microsoft lost and then settled the antitrust case, it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation: at Microsoft.
The problem, they say, is the decision to make everything backward compatible. I don't agree that the company has always done that, but maybe you need to be a secretary or a paralegal to know about those struggles. But let's posit that the company does have that goal now. They have said so, citing that as their reason for not supporting ODF and offering their own XML standard instead. My brain just can't accept that having more than one standard is useful. Imagine if firemen arrived at a fire, and their hoses couldn't fit on the hydrant. Don't laugh. It happened in 1904, when reinforcements arrived from out-of-state to help fight a huge fire in Baltimore, and the disaster -- the fire destroyed approximately 2,500 buildings and burned for more than 30 hours, while all those out-of-state firemen watched helplessly -- led to standards on firehose couplings. Prior to that, each municipality had its own. I think computers have similarly reached a point where too many people depend on them to let there be competing and incompatible standards. Think Katrina. Yes, people's lives do depend on computers sometimes. Reorganizing the executives at Microsoft won't solve the real problem, according to the New York Times article, which is that the code is too large and too complex. They also think that it was worries about antitrust issues that contributed to the decision to delay, because Microsoft has promised not to treat OEM's preferentially, and unlike Dell, HP sells through retailers, which means stocking shelves, and that takes time: Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.
Maybe, if that is the issue, Microsoft should just support ODF and give up on the old, tangled pile of spaghetti. It doesn't seem to be working out for them. Anyone thinking of adopting their XML instead of ODF needs to consider what has just happened too. If the legacy code is too complicated and just too hard to support, are there troubles ahead for you? Reading about their antitrust concerns made me start looking around for some video of David Boies, so you could see him in action.
It used to be that you could find video of the US antitrust trial everywhere. CourtTV had it, and so did ZDNET. Didn't the Department of Justice website have it too? It seems to be all gone. All of it. Even Wayback, which shows the prior existence of some of the files once on ZDNET, no longer will play them. If you download them, RealPlayer says it can't find the server to play them and if you try to just open them, you get the old CNET page, but no video. At least that is what happened to me. In other cases, there is a robots.txt file
blocking. Such a complete cleansing of history is seriously weird. Here's Harvard's Cyberlaw's collection of transcripts of the trial, Trial: The Microsoft Case, which is the next best thing. I contacted them to see if they had the video, but they said they couldn't archive the ZDNET or CourtTV's materials, for copyright reasons. Copyright strikes again. I next tried Harvard Law School, because as a library, they'd be allowed to archive copyrighted materials. They have the deposition from 1998 of Bill Gates, but you have to go there to view it on 11 video cassettes. Research libraries don't let you take things like that home, generally speaking. And rightly so, because if you lose it or your dog eats it, then there is no copy left anywhere. I'm a little nervous about telling you it exists, for fear it will disappear too. And even Harvard Law School doesn't have all the depositions, just that one. They got their copy from the Government Printing Office. But I contacted the Library of Congress and they don't have it any more. Here's what Harvard has: Gates, Bill, 1955-
Deposition : Bill Gates [videorecording] : case :
U.S.A. v. Microsoft Corp.
[Washington, D.C. : U.S. G.P.O., 1998]
11 videocassettes (ca. 1040 min.) : sd., col., 1/2 in.
U.S.A. v. Microsoft Corp.
United States of America v. Microsoft Corp.
Deposition of Bill Gates in the United States of
America v. Microsoft Corp. case, U.S. District Court,
District of Columbia. Deposition held and filmed at
Microsoft in Redmond, WA.
Deposition was taken over three days: 8/27/1998,
8/28/1998, and 9/2/1998.
United States. District Court (District of Columbia)
Microsoft Corporation.
008671575# The fact that Harvard has this means that a research library near you may have it too. (The University of Chicago has it too.) If you'd like to read a transcript of Boies in action instead of going through all the hassle to view the video, try his opening statement (warning: they are doc files that download on to your computer if you click on the link), or read the cross examination of James Allchin, which includes the famous altered video, which you can read about here. Boies did that cross. The Register also has a massive collection of coverage of the trial that they did, which is a treasure trove, and they have an article about that video too.
This transcript is interesting, where Boies plays some depositions of Bill Gates, even though it isn't Boies doing all of the deposition. The attorney discusses with him an email in which apparently Gates and his boys discussed getting Apple to do a deal with Microsoft, which it eventually did, regarding IE, Microsoft's goal, according to the email, being to harm Sun and Netscape. It seems there were discussions of threatening Apple with a cancellation of MacOffice as a bargaining chip, in discussions with Apple over a patent cross license, to get Apple to do what Microsoft wanted. It seems that there is more utility to patents than just using them to sue people. I must say what popped into my head as I read this transcript was wondering just why Apple decided to support Microsoft's XML, instead of ODF. You can see a short snip of Bill Gates being deposed in September of 1998 here, and the voice of the attorney asking him questions sounds like David Boies to me. It's too short to be satisfying as to Boies' performance. But it's revelatory about Mr. Gates. To be fair, here's Gates' reaction to the depositions. The guy who posted the brief video clip claims to have a 12 DVD set of the deposition for sale. You can also read this interview with Ken Auletta about the trial. And here's the District Court's site and here's the page of orders by Judge Jackson. No video. So we'll have to step outside of the antitrust trial to see Boies at work in video.
Here's a lecture he gave [RealPlayer needed] at Yale Law Schoool, his alma mater, in 2003, "Fashioning the Legal Constitution: Culture, Courts and the Law." More recently, here's one he gave in November [RealPlayer needed] -- "Judicial Independence and the Rule of Law" at Wisconsin University Law School. He gave the same lecture elsewhere, at New York Law School, where he said that the justice system should be made "more fair". There's a link to the video on that page (scroll down until you see his picture).
If you prefer, you can just read quotes from the lecture.
The Department of Justice website has voluminous transcripts, exhibits and documents -- but no videos -- here. Excerpts of transcripts of depositions are here, including one by Bryan Sparks [PDF], I notice, then with Caldera. A lot of it is whited out (I believe Microsoft was able to exclude materials from depositions regarding the Caldera v. Microsoft litigation, which was a Sparks production, at least according to this contemporaneous article in The Register. But isn't it interesting that Boies wanted that material entered into the case? And later, as we know, Canopy asked the court to destroy a lot of those documents from the litigation. So much history being wiped away.) Sparks is asked about OpenLinux and on page 11 of the transcript, he indicates that they were having trouble getting OEMs to offer it, he thought because of fears of retaliation by Microsoft: Sparks: ... I'm not sure how to elaborate on that, but it is difficult to break in. We also have the -- at least perceived -- I don't have direct knowledge of real, but the perceived notion -- or ai can't comment on the real -- where there's the notion that it would be difficult for the OEM's to take a risk on anything other than Microsoft for retaliatory reasons.
Q: What attempts has Caldera actually made to distribute OpenLinux through OEM's?
Sparks: We've tried. We've talked to some of the larger OEM's, made efforts -- came where we thought was pretty close on one or two of those. Just haven't been successful. We made presentations, we've negotiated price, we've talked about market segments, we've talked about cooperative marketing and sales rollouts, and just haven't been successful in doing that. He relates that one prospective deal with Compaq went "down the road quite a ways and then, you know, stopped. So I don't know why." That puts the Caldera story in a new light. Darl McBride said they couldn't make money on Linux. Well, if Sparks' story is correct, and it was Microsoft pressuring OEM's not to offer OpenLinux, that would be a different root cause for Caldera's problem. Clearly the GPL wasn't the problem in such a scenario. Sparks says he tried at Dell too, but he couldn't get very far, because, he says, "They're a very outspoken Microsoft shop at Dell, and so, you know, we didn't make much headway there, apparently." You can see how press clippings can be used in litigation beginning on page 19, by the way. You can see Boies in action before the Supreme Court in the Gore election case by going to this
CBS News collection and looking for his name. Oyez has one audio clip here, with accompanying transcript, in .smil format, but my RealPlayer won't play it, claiming it is an unsupported type. Sigh. So, ZDNET, how about it? Could you look around and see if you have those videos lying around somewhere? CourtTV? Is there any way you guys could make those videos available, if you find them? Please? Pretty please? You may say it's just data rot. However, if a guy in Florida is selling DVDs of the deposition of Bill Gates dating from 1998, and Harvard Law has video cassettes, how can that be the entire explanation? Can it really be the case that absolutely no one thought to preserve these videos for posterity? I called Lexis to see if I could buy them. No. They don't have them either. So much for the promise of the internet. If anyone has any news of a sighting of any of that deposition video, I'd surely like to hear about it. And just so you know, the Court of Appeals in the case already ruled that the depositions had to be made public, something Microsoft tried to prevent. Our thanks go to the New York Times for making that happen, and to Tom Harney for finding that article. So, history has been disappearing. And now you know what Groklaw is for.
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| Authored by: feldegast on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:08 AM EST |
So PJ can find them
---
IANAL
The above post is (C)Copyright 2006 and released under the Creative Commons
License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: feldegast on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:10 AM EST |
Please make links clickable
---
IANAL
The above post is (C)Copyright 2006 and released under the Creative Commons
License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:20 AM EST |
The problem, they say, is the decision to make everything backward
compatible. I don't agree that the company has always done that, but maybe you
need to be a secretary or a paralegal to know about those struggles. But let's
posit that the company does have that goal now.
You've only have to take
one look at the cruft in the Win32 API to see that backwards compatibility has
always been a goal within Microsoft. Their applications may not always achieve
that goal, but at lower levels they certainly do. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:24 AM EST |
Our illustrious host wrote;
Imagine if firemen arrived at a fire, and their hoses couldn't fit on the
hydrant.
During the Oakland (CA) Hills Fire in 1991, that happened.
Even today in San Francisco, it would happen. SF has standardized on a larger
fitting size than everyone because they have a special high pressure water
system for the fire department and they want the maximum volume they can get.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:31 AM EST |
Normally a library search is by author, title, or subject. I wouldn't know what
to enter for any of those for a deposition.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: GuyllFyre on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:33 AM EST |
Seems in these same court interactions, Mircosoft claimed that too many Windows
versions woul dmake for a codebase too difficult to support and that they would
never do it.
Now we've got no less than six versions of MS Vista on the way, currently two
versions of XP, and three of Server 2003...
Statement of fact...
Microsoft representatives are liars.
Bill Gates himself committed perjury on the stand in a federal court and did not
receive any sort of reprimand.
I hope someone gets wise to this some time soon, I'm getting sick of liars going
unpunished.
-S[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: RomeoBravo on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:40 AM EST |
Apologies -- I'm a long-time anonymous reader, but first time poster.
There appear to be multiple copies of the VHS tapes of Gates' deposition at
various libraries of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Is there any virtue in getting these into electronic format? Any legal reason
it should not be done? (Publisher appears to be the "Administrative Office
of the U.S. Courts.")
One example:
Call number: JU 10.2:M 58/3/09-02-98/TAPE 1-3
Author: United States.
Title: Deposition, Bill Gates [videorecording] : case, U.S.A. v. Microsoft
Corp.
Publication info: [Washington, D.C. : Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts,
1998?]
Description: 11 videocassettes (17 hrs., 21 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in.
Note: Title from cassette label.
Note: "Released pursuant to 15 U.S.C. sec. 30."
Note: Shipping list no.: 2001-0009-E.
Summary: Videotape deposition of Bill Gates in the Microsoft offices in
Redmond, Washington.
Technical details: VHS.
Ron Bentley[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: joef on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:47 AM EST |
I seem to recall that a university in TN was building an archive of the
material that appeared on broadcast TV, This was at least 10 years ago, 'cause
I remember it was before I moved to NC. Of course, they may not have been able
to keep up with the dozens, now hundreds, of sources on cable, so the project
may no longer exist.
The reason I remember it is that there was a lawsuit involved, trying to enjoin
them from maintaining the archive based on copyright claims. The details of the
project and the legal case are quite vague to me now.[ Reply to This | # ]
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- Archive in TN? - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 01:18 PM EST
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| Authored by: Carlo Graziani on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 11:59 AM EST |
The problem, they say, is the decision to make everything
backward
compatible. I don't agree that the company has always done that, but
maybe
you need to be a secretary or a paralegal to know about those
struggles.
There was a very interesting perspective on Windows and
back-compatibility
in a
Joel on
Software blog entry from 2004.
Joel Spolsky claims that
Microsoft used to be fanatic (almost to the point
of mental illness) about
making sure that old applications would continue
to run in new versions of
Windows. He cites the example of a version of
Sim City, which contained a bad
memory bug which caused it to crash under
W95, despite the fact that it worked
under DOS. MS dealt with the problem
not by demanding that the game developers
fix their code, but by actually
putting code in W95 to detect whether Sim City
was running, and if so to
activate an older memory-management system under which
the buggy behavior
was legal!
Spolsky claims that sometime in 2003
(roughly), the camp among Windows
developers that championed this kind of
developer-friendly coding was
defeated in a bureaucratic battle by a camp that
wanted to give developers
all kinds of API bells and whistles that would be cool
to program with, but
which would reduce application portability between windows
versions to
essentially zero.
It's a fun read.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 01:09 PM EST |
Such a complete cleansing of history is seriously
weird.
Not to me. It sounds more like a cleansing of large
video files that use lots of storage and bandwidth. If those same sites still
have similar videos of other court proceedings of similar vintage, then I'd
start to wonder.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: pogson on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 01:34 PM EST |
| Can it really be the case that absolutely no one thought to preserve these
videos for posterity? With the persistence of MSFT and SCOG to their
plans, I have confidence there will be another opportunity to have video
coverage and to preserve it. The cost of storage is rapidly falling, too. There
have been some memorable moments in SCOG v IBM. It would have been neat to have
seen snippets of dozing, stumbling verbally, and moments of frank honesty in the
courtroom on CNN...
---
http://www.skyweb.ca/~alicia/ , my homepage,
an eclectic survey of topics: berries, mushrooms, teaching in N. Canada, Linux,
firearms and hunting... [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Stefan Berglund on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 02:01 PM EST |
I don't believe microsoft has any interest in backward compatibility. I have
been a software developer for ~33 years - the last ten using microsoft products.
I have a commercial app written in VB6 that is my bread and butter app. If
microsoft were honestly committed to backward compatibility do you think it
would be reasonable for me to find myself in a position where I must completely
rewrite this app in another language? microsoft has effectively left all VBers
with no migration path forward other than a complete rewrite.
This is outrageous conduct and I've lost all trust that may have existed
previously. Never in my career has this happened. I agree that hardware
changes and old programs get migrated to that new hardware but to declare a
language dead and leave millions of developers with no code assets at all is
despicable behavior.
Fortunately I've discovered Linux and PostgreSQL and have just successfully
converted an ASP/SQL Server web site to PHP/PostgreSQL. I'll be working on
converting the app and it's web site for the next two years and I won't be using
microsoft tools any longer. :-)[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 02:01 PM EST |
Actually PJ, I disagree with you on the "several standards" issue.
Personally I think it is good to have more than one standard, or even no
standard at all, even if sometimes fires can't be put out. :^)
Japan has a different gauge for its railways than the US, but there is a
perfectly good reason for it, the country is so mountainous that the trains need
to take sharper turns than what the "standard" gauge allows. So they
use a narrower gauge. Note that their fast trains use the standard gauge but the
fast train tracks don't not have sharp bends. So in the same country they use
two gauges for trains, one that is narrow, and one (the standard gauge) that can
be traced back to the width of an ancient Roman chariot 2000+ years ago.
Personally, I find standards restricting. It keeps designs to a safe known way
of doing things, but stifles innovation. If there had been a
"transportation" standard in the US when the Wright brothers were
alive, the plane would never have been invented.
So, while I don't like Microsoft, I don't mind if they wish to invent their own
"standard" so long as they publish what it is to let others use it.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: jws on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 02:38 PM EST |
quote:
Don't laugh. It happened in 1904, when reinforcements arrived from out-of-state
to help fight a huge fire in Baltimore, and the disaster -- the fire destroyed
approximately 2,500 buildings and burned for more than 30 hours, while all those
out-of-state firemen watched helplessly -- led to standards on firehose
couplings. Prior to that, each municipality had its own.
This is still the case. I am a member of the National Railway Historical
Society, St. Louis. A group of people in the St. Louis area used to operate the
Frisco engine 1522, which is a steam locomotive.
The reason that I comment is that they had one of the most extensive collections
of brass in their service car that they pulled, which was all forms of fire hose
adapters. They never knew which town they'd pull into and have to water the
engine from.
they also had fuel adapters, but that is less of a problem than having to hook a
hose up to a fire hydrant and water an engine. You can't let them go dry, while
they are steamed up, so this is a very important thing to be able to do. I know
on new routes that the scouts would take a special trip as they would prepare
for a run to note all fire hydrants and contact all local fire departments.
I know of at least one time that UP contacted them while passing thru, because
they had adapters for water systems that UP didn't have nor did the fire or
water departments where they were going to water the UP engine, 3985.
I know there must be some standards, but I suspect that they have still got
problems, judging by the 1522 SLSTA experiences.
BTW, they operated 1522 from the gulf coast to northern Montana, just from
memory, this is not just a St. Louis area
observation.
Jim[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 03:47 PM EST |
| Gates' deposition was
recently for sale on Ebay. Perhaps whoever bought it would be willing to
make copies available.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 03:48 PM EST |
How practical would it be for IBM's lawyers to delve into past anti-competitive
acts by Microsoft against Caldera's business? Is it too late to go down that
road? It would make Microsoft less glad they helped to fund this litigation.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: neilplatform1 on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 03:59 PM EST |
This seems to be a clip from Gates' deposition of 2/9/1998 'thought to be
scrubbed off the internet' which may whet your appetite for more.
http://video
.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1960403143809172490
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| Authored by: cmc on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 04:27 PM EST |
I agree with PJ that in certain situations (such as fire hose fittings) there
should be only one standard. However, computers are different. Computers serve
multiple roles. One standard will not support everything. It's ridiculous to
suggest that it would.
In this case, PJ suggests that people should opt to use ODF instead of
Microsoft's XML format. I agree. But I do not agree that ODF should be the
only standard in use. If you want only one standard, choose text files. They
can be opened on every computer.
What will happen when someone sees a feature or function that ODF cannot or does
not offer? Will a new version of ODF pop up? And if so, does that mean that
all files in existence should be upgraded to that new format? What about files
on backup media or in archives? The point is, you will never have just one
standard. Think of text files, ODF, and PDF. They are each standards, and they
each have their uses. To stop using two of them and choose to only use one of
them would be crazy.
cmc
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| Authored by: sschlimgen on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 04:28 PM EST |
PJ -
It's interesting you should use Baltimore 1904 fire as an example
of the danger of multiple incompatible standards. I can provide a more recent
example.
In October of 1991, my brother-in-law was a volunteer fireman
in Twain Harte, a small town in the California Gold Country, about 140 miles
from the San Francisco Bay Area. They were called out to help during the Oakland
Hills Fire:
Wikipedia
article
They got there to find that all their trucks' equipment -
hoses, pumping capacity, etc. - were useless, because they didn't match the
Oakland hydrants. The best they could do was farm out the firemen to relieve
exhausted Oakland crews.
---
Meandering through life like a drunk
on a unicycle. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 27 2006 @ 06:42 PM EST |
Clifford Stoll made some remarks in "Silicon Snake Oil" that now sound
surprisingly prescient.
Why did the Sovient Union not publish phone books? Because they couldn't
be redacted when someone is declared an "unperson".
If we ever become completely dependant upon information that isn't
mutable-- i.e. "rented from the net but not retained", for instance--
then
revising history and making people "disappear" becomes a LOT easier.
It also
makes erasing/sealing records of past wrong-doings of elected officials
painless.
"If you can't make a copy of it, it isn't *yours*" -- and, with RIAA
and MPAA
and the DMCA, this is becoming more and more true. We don't *own* a DVD,
for instance, we're merely licensing the ability to play back the content.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: davidf on Tuesday, March 28 2006 @ 04:18 AM EST |
PJ's closing line seems a good segue into this tidbit.
Back before Microsoft was charged with Antitrust violations, there was a major
news story about an FBI investigation at Microsoft where FBI agents had stumbled
upon the source code for Apple's QuickTime Media layer.
I remember this as a major news story, because it was the FBI who had found the
evidence, and it was thus incontrivertable. I was not surprised that there was
industrial espionage but definitely surprised that the FBI had found it while
*one another investigation*. I always wanted to know what that *other*
investigation was. Now I realise it was likely the antitrust violations.
Apple quickly sued Microsoft for multi-billions of dollars. The news stories on
PBS/NPR were if the amount Apple had sued for was granted, if it would push
Microsoft into insolvency.
Remember also at this time Apple was *strapped for cash*. They weren't broke,
just cash poor at the time and the situation for them was quite serious.
A month or so after this happened the technology sharing agreement with
Microsoft and Apple was signed and Microsoft got shares in the deal while Apple
got guarantees that Microsoft would develop applications for Mac OS that really
worked. Office 98 for Mac was the end result as well as Internet Explorer. Media
Player also began working on the Mac. The deal also included $250 million in
Cash for Apple AND also ended all their outstanding legal copyright and patent
issues.
My guess is that the QuickTime copyright infringement was buried in this deal
and there is a gag order around it. No one from either side has said boo about
it since. I also cannot find any press reports anywhere on the Internet about
it. No, I have not been smoking anything! I remember this clearly! Microsoft
caught red handed!
When the so called "Technology Sharing Agreement" was announced,
months later, the press had somehow forgotten about the QuickTime lawsuit,
because (after all) this agreement ended all of Apple and Microsoft's
outstanding legal and copyright disputes. The pundit's talk was all about how
Microsoft had bailed out Apple (even though Apple was not bankrupt ... just cash
poor at the time). Personally I think Apple had Microsoft by the throat and got
what it needed from Microsoft in return for very little else.
Sure enough, Microsoft's work on Office for Mac and Internet Explorer and the
Entrouage email client was stunning. Some of the best from Microsoft. As well,
they did not develop Access for Macintosh leaing Apple's File Maker Pro Database
without competition on the Macintosh platform.
I had expected that this story would turn up on Groklaw but it has not. I've
looked high and low on the Internet and cannot find anything. Does anyone else
remember this story? Can Groklaw document this? I truly hate when parts of
history are conveniently left out or loast altogether. This is one that has
bothered me for quite some time.
I've been wanting to bring it up but have not found the opportune moment. Now,
it seems that moment has arrived.
Yes, I do remember this despite the fact that it is never mentioned. Funny how
history can just vanish if no one is there to talk about it.
Cheers,
David Fedoruk[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 28 2006 @ 06:47 AM EST |
| disappeared pages
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| Authored by: BassSinger on Tuesday, March 28 2006 @ 03:14 PM EST |
PJ,
A slight correction. You wrote:
>>Maybe, if that is the issue, Microsoft should just support ODF and give
up on the old, tangled pile of spaghetti. It doesn't seem to be working out for
them. Anyone thinking of adopting their XML instead of ODF needs to consider
what has just happened too. If the legacy code is too complicated and just too
hard to support, are there troubles ahead for you?<<
Let's be clear about a distinction that Microsoft has been endeavoring to blur
for years.
Vista is an Operating System. It doesn't support document standards. It does
support communication standards (TCP/IP comes to mind, but I believe they do
that with a FreeBSD stack).
Office (whatever version) is an Application Suite. It has several applications
that may or may not (in their case they do) link and connect and *do* support
document standards, like RTF (but not ODF).
It is Office that we would like to have support ODF. It is Windows that we
would like to be delivered independent of all applications (like Internet
Explorer, MediaPlayer and a host of others). It is the backward compatibility
to things like the Registry and Windows specific hardware that are causing
troubles now, as well as the interlink between windows and IE.
It is the blurring of these lines of division that are causing the tangled
nightmare that is slowing their development of the next version. When a small
change to IE propagates through hundreds of locations of code in Windows,
updating things is horrendously complicated. Especially since most of the
people who designed (if I may use the term so loosely) the tangles no longer
work there.
If each part was neatly compartmentalized you could select the pieces that you
want, install alternate apps (like Firefox), and update the pieces independently
- thus making the upgrade job easier, but allowing users to throw out your bad
products and only keep you good products.
Just so we aren't talking apples and oranges here. ;-})
---
In A Chord,
Tom
Proud Member of the Kitsap Chordsmen
Registered Linux User # 154358[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tz on Wednesday, March 29 2006 @ 11:12 AM EST |
Most things are opensource in the first place, so recompiling them (and only one
person has to generate the binary or install package) makes them available.
Changes in X normally don't affect kernel drivers. You could probably compile
firefox for a linux 1.0 and the original mozilla release for 2.6.
Yet there are still the compatibility modules like support for a.out binaries
and other pre-elf stuff. Of course a lot of things are more flexible because
Linux is cross-platform, so has to be to a large extent agnostic with regards to
endianness, integer size, and even with uClinux, mmus.
In this sense it becomes more compatible. You can run old stuff on new hardware
only supported in 2.6.
Microsoft could have built a better browser and kept it isolated from the OS
(whether they ported it to Linux like they did for Mac or not). Or it could
have built some kind of generic, w3c compliant HTML rendering library between so
everything would still be separate. But no, the idea was not quality or
security, it was lock-in. Superglue on the steering wheel. For that, you want
a Gordian knot, but it is the opposite of quality.
For lock-in, you want a tangle of things scattered between the kernel,
oil-and-water DLLs, and applications (ah, but where is the bug?). You want
quirks (if you own the market), as everyone will code for your quirks instead of
doing it right.
And as anyone who has written software for any length of time knows, it is
easier to avoid writing tangled code rather than untangling it later - since you
usually will need to untangle things at some point. And it is almost harder to
untangle one thread (think security patch).
But since their tangles are policy, Vista will have to be a hairball even if it
doesn't want to be.
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| Authored by: tz on Wednesday, March 29 2006 @ 05:04 PM EST |
The other common anti-trust practice that is only occasionally commented on is
the scorched earth announcement.
"We'll have XYZ 2.0 early next year with all these neat features",
then competitor's sales drop as people wait expectantly and hopefully for the
Microsoft version. Then it is put off. Then longer. Some things are
occasionally cancelled (I forget the specific instances).
Won't IE7 fix everything? It seems to be getting harder to condense the
vaporware.
Note how Vista and now Office are due sometime in 2007. Weren't they supposed
to be out last year? Oh, don't switch to Linux and OO today, Microsoft will be
out with all the fixes and features tomorrow... How many more FOSS users would
there be today if Microsoft was accurate (or honest if you are of a
conspiratorial mind) about the delivery date?
Will they break things or keep compatibility? Will they actually be secure out
of the box (the half-life of a malware infection will be an order of magnitude
greater than the time to patch)? Will it run on most existing hardware? No one
knows yet.
Meanwhile the dusty old x86 box just keeps running Linux (or bsd). I started
with a 486, and would keep moving the disks to a new box with new motherboard,
then replacing the disks after copying the entire filesystem several times and
it would always work. A rolling upgrade. I could probably attach them to one
of the new Macs, or an AMD 64 bit system and it wouldn't hiccup. I never have
to upgrade but it is rarely painful when I do.
The Hare is asleep dreaming about crossing the finish line, whereas the Tortise
just keeps doing step after step. One of these times the Hare won't make it to
the finish line before the tortise crosses.
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| Authored by: Superbowl H5N1 on Wednesday, March 29 2006 @ 09:40 PM EST |
| MS and Gates make heavy use of PR firms. Gates in particular seems to be
drawing back from the public and press. At the same time online shills and puff
piece articles are used to try soften the image he has earned as an impatient,
self-centered, arrogant, and condescending geek.
These videos are very
contradictory of Gates' new image which is being groomed in the press.
A
lot of material gets lost through web rot or whatever you want to call it, but
material related to Gates' image and to the illegal aspects of MS' business
methods seem to be getting particularly scarce these days. In a related
example, the "Halloween Papers" were completely unavailable more or less
everywhere for an extended period of time last year until the issue was brought
up and pressed repeatedly. [ Reply to This | # ]
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