Category:
Category:
The admission may bolster the litigating states’ claim that Microsoft could deliver a version of its flagship Windows operating system stripped of so-called middleware such as browsers and media players.”
Category:
“IBM’s Linux strategy is very strong in most key areas studied. Indeed,
IBM has been instrumental in enabling and driving the Linux market to
its present success,” said Pierre Fricke, executive vice president, D.H.
Brown Associates, Inc.
The report analyzes IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP, and Sun in the key areas of
vendor positioning, product line breadth, system pricing, value added,
services and support, applications focus and Linux community
involvement.
IBM received the highest ranking of differentiation and leadership in
most of these key areas, with the D.H. Brown report noting IBM’s
comprehensive Linux offerings. “IBM has developed a comprehensive Linux
strategy including all elements from hardware and software through
services and partner programs,” said Fricke.
“In the three years since IBM has embraced Linux, we have worked with
our customers and the open source community to meet the evolving needs
of our customers and the industry,” said Steve Solazzo, vice president,
Linux, IBM. “IBM is in the unique position to offer our customers a
total solution on Linux through our hardware, software and services.”
DH Brown gave IBM the highest rating of leadership in the following
areas:
About IBM
IBM is the world’s number one server company and information technology
provider, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate.
IBM helps customers, business partners and developers in a wide range of
industries that leverage the power of the Internet for e-business. For
more information, visit http://www.ibm.com
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines
Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel is
a registered trademark of Intel Corporation.
Category:
This is what got me to try Mozilla 0.9.8 instead of the mediocre-but-predictable Netscape I had been using as my primary browser, and I only did it because co-worker Timothy Lord (“timothy” on Slashdot) raved so long and hard about the Mozilla implementation of this feature, which Opera has had in a slightly different form for some time, that I decided to take the plunge.
I now use a combination of tabs within one window, and multiple windows, to sort sites by function and linkage. I usually work on a number of writing and editing projects at once, and it’s very nice to assign a browser window to each project, then open related sites as tabs within that window. So far I have not noticed a limit on the number of tabs or windows I can keep open at the same time. The most I’ve counted at any one time was six windows running a total of 22 tabs, but I’ve had many more than that going at times when I was too busy to stop and count them.
Tabbed browsing is one of those features you don’t know you need until you have it. Once you have it and get used to it, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.
Text zoom
Many sites (including Linux.com and NewsForge) use fonts that are too small to read on some monitors. MSIE has a “text size” feature that’ll change most font sizes, but won’t override all font-size settings on every site. Mozilla’s Text Zoom will. Opera has a similar utility, but I like the behavior of Mozilla’s better. Netscape commercial browsers have it, same as Mozilla (as near as I can tell) but the stability I’m getting from Mozilla 0.9.8 is so much better than anything I’ve seen from the commercial Netscapes that you might as well write off the Netscapes and switch to Mozilla anyway.
Say goodbye to irritating ads
If you are using MSIE you need to get third-party, add-on software to kill annoying popup ads. If you use Opera you need to pay $35 to make Opera itself ad-free. But Mozilla has a preference setting (Advanced -> Scripts and Windows) you can use to eliminate popup (and popunder) ads built right in, no charge. You can also shut off the annoying habit some sites have of grabbing your browser controls and opening full-screen windows. You can also control “cookies” completely so that you only get them from the site you are visiting, thereby turning off any from third-party adservers like those owned by the ubiquitous DoubleClick. Or you can turn off all cookies, although many sites use them to maintain logins and for other non-nefarious purposes. It’s up to you.
Mozilla can also limit or turn off animation in animated GIFs. I love this. There are sites I like to look at now and then, including MSNBC.com and WashingtonPost.com, that are often rendered nearly unreadable by popups and animated banner ads. Take away these annoyances, and these sites (and almost all other ad-supported sites) suddenly become a pleasure to view.
I’m not alone in liking Mozilla
After I wrote the above words, a friend pointed me to some Mozilla praise at Time.com. I used to know Lev Grossman, who wrote the Time.com story, and he is a very mainstream guy, not an Open Source zealot (as I have been accused of being). Interesting. I think we’re going to see a lot more positive reviews of Mozilla before long — and not just in leading-edge tech media, either.
Remember, Mozilla is not quite at 1.0 status, so you may still see bugs. I am sticking to 0.9.8 for the moment, myself, because it is stable (on Linux, which is what I run, of course), and does everything I need for the moment — and because it is the version included with the download edition of Mandrake 8.2. Adventurous souls can find newer versions at mozilla.org.
Category:
Category:
“SOT, the publisher of Best Linux, has announced both a change of name for its Linux distribution and a release of the new version of the distro, now
known again as SOT Linux.
The company is returning the distribution to its former name, SOT Linux, last used 4 years ago in 1998.”
Category:
Last week, I suggested a lack of inspiration had caused the states
to put on an appallingly bad case, featuring bad research, an inept
strategy and poorly prepped witnesses. Instead of focusing on the impact of a
series of proposed penalties governing Microsoft behavior, they handed the
company a second chance to retry the original case, two years after the
facts were established, and the company’s guilt was confirmed. The state’s presentation was so hard to follow that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found herself agreeing to most of the objections made by Microsoft’s lawyers. I suggested that it was hard to imagine a more poorly presented case.
This week, Microsoft’s team nearly returned the favor. The company’s witness
list was full of clients, “researchers” funded by Microsoft, ex-employees
with a bag full of stock options or clueless executives who needed a
favor from Redmond. The low point was hit early on when Jerry Sanders,
AMD’s sometimes erratic chairman, stood up to testify. It was clear from
the outset that he was unfamiliar
with the facts of the case and that he took the witness stand only
because he needed support from Microsoft. (And
he got it!)
The only witness who stood out from this sorry crowd was William
Gates III himself. Unlike his testimony in the earlier antitrust trial where
he chose to be too busy to attend in person and almost perjured himself
on the witness stand, this new, PR-prepped and properly dressed Gates
gave some of the only credible testimony anyone had heard over the last two
weeks. While reporters for The Register dismissed it as nothing more
than
“a long
tedious advertisement for Microsoft,” it is just possible that Gates saved
his company.
Several experienced Microsoft haters, including Mathew Ingram
of Toronto’s Globe and Mail and
The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray came away fairly impressed. Compared to almost everyone else that testified, Gates
made some credible points. At various points in his oral and written testimony (or at least the testimony prepped for him by his lawyers
and PR people), Gates basically conceded that the Microsoft code base was bloated, complex and under-documented. It should come as no revelation to learn that
Windows is not so much an OS as it is a patchwork of operating platform
elements connected together to provide some level of backwards compatibility. He
suggested, quite correctly, that the only firm likely to be able to
clean up that code, and modularize it, was Microsoft itself. By that logic,
if the court wanted Microsoft to make changes in the code, it would
have to depend on Microsoft to make them. How could that possibly work?
Further, Gates and Microsoft maintain that they might not be able to
comply, unless they radically simplified the code, effectively
abandoning millions of legacy users and marooning thousands of small applications
developers in the process. Its an infuriating suggestion, and it’s
probably true.
Gates suggested that many of the distinctions being made between
applications and the operating platform are artificial. Code is code. There really
is no logic that mandates specific boundaries between applications and the
operating platform. As he said, “There is no clear dividing line
between where a particular [application] block ends and the operating system
begins.” Developers of older, proprietary computing systems frequently combined
elements of what is now considered the operating system with
application elements. If Microsoft does the same thing on occasion, how does that
make it different than developers who have gone before it? And he asked
a fairly obvious question: Is the court going to successfully define
what constitutes the proper boundaries of an operating platform or
judge where APIs should be made available?
The alternative might be to open up the entire code base. Gates
suggests, quite plausibly, that the result might be hard to interpret, and the
most interested parties would come from the Open Source community. He
suggested that the result would likely be relatively little in the way of
commercial software and lots of Open Source freeware of varying quality. He argued
that Linux platform developers would almost certainly
emulate Windows APIs. Gates claimed that Microsoft would then be competing
against freeware. He suggested that this would quickly kill the Windows
operating platform as a commercially viable product for the company. This
suggestion has infuriated many Microsoft haters, but it is quite possibly true.
Gates claimed that whatever flaws there were in Microsoft’s past
practices, it had been much more supportive of open platforms than its
competitors. He pointed out that, unlike Apple, Microsoft did license its code to
OEM equipment makers. He pointed out that he had urged Apple to do so as
far back as 1985. He suggested that Apple’s unwillingness to do so led to
it being marginalized, rather than anything Microsoft did. He went on to
argue that Sun Microsystems could have positioned either the Sun OS or
Solaris as an alternate OS platform for Intel hardware, but chose not to do so.
He suggested that both companies had tried to set up closed
hardware/software/application environments in ways that Microsoft had never considered. He suggested that today Sun is facing a threat similar to the one Apple had faced, now that lower-priced servers running on Windows 2000 or Linux are
coming onto the market. He suggested that the blame for this situation hardly
lays with Microsoft. This is probably true as well.
To be sure, Gates made a number of fairly absurd claims as
well. He claimed that Microsoft “doesn’t track development costs.” If that was true, no wonder his COO resigned. Gates also claimed that the
proposed settlement would allow developers to make use of the Windows
trademark even if there was little or no Microsoft products on a PC or other
system, and that they, rather than Microsoft, could judge for
themselves if a product was Windows-compatible.
One claim woven throughout Gates’ testimony could be called the
monopolist defense. Throughout his testimony, Gates returned again and again to an
argument made by monopolists and
their defenders since the days of John Pierpont Morgan and
John D. Rockefeller. Gates suggested that most of his company’s actions were
aimed at providing consistency and rationality to the software
marketplace. In their time, both Morgan and Rockefeller claimed to be “rationalizing”
the oil, steel and banking markets. Rockefeller never denied
being a monopolist — he simply stated that whatever he was doing, that the
price of kerosene was a lot lower and had more predictable quality than it
did before he put his competitors out of business.
In and out of court, Gates and his allies make similar claims. They
have suggested that software is a “natural ” monopoly. Gates’ testimony is
full of references to the need to make sure all code elements work together.
Outside of court Microsoft defenders point to the many incompatible
flavors of Unix and the meager financial statements of most commercial Linux
companies as evidence of what happens without such rationalization. And. like
Rockefeller, Gates claims that the cost of a fully loaded desktop PC costs less,
does more and works better than would be the case if Microsoft had not used
its dominance to dictate standards and rationalize the market.
If that is all that Microsoft’s monopoly has done, where is the
harm? And what should the penalty be?
Microsoft and the Justice Department have recently suggested that
the harm isn’t necessarily all that great. This is one reason that their
suggested penalty is relatively minor.
Outside the United States, regulators have often believed that such
“rationalization” is a good thing. In the past, European and Asian governments used to
turn a blind eye to monopoly behavior, and permitted the formation of
cartels that “rationalized” markets in products and services in everything from
chemicals to banking. Monopolists and cartels don’t lay people off and
they don’t go bankrupt. Only recently have these governments noticed
the cost of monopoly is stagnation, as they realized that their
“rational” economies were falling behind that of the United States.
Outside the United States, government agencies are re-examining other “natural”
monopolies in the telecoms and electric power markets. In Europe, especially, cartels and would-be monopolists have been subject to dawn raids, and heavy
fines, typically 10%
of the companies’ gross receipts. In Microsoft’s case, such an
approach would have cost the company $2.5 billion dollars for every
infraction of antitrust laws. That wouldn’t put Microsoft out of business, but it
would certainly get its attention.
And it would have been a lot easier to manage and adjudicate than
any of the proposed “structural remedies” being discussed in and out of
court over the last couple of years.
