The government is taking a long look at the upcoming operating system, and wants to make sure that it complies with the antitrust ruling. The desktop version of Longhorn is due in 2006, while the server edition arrives in 2007.
DOJ Takes a Long Look at Longhorn
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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And we all know how well the DOJ upholds antitrust laws…This is all show.
Wow. I didn’t know the DOJ was such an optimistic group of people! My money’s on 2106!
The state should keep their noses out of private enterprise altogether, it’s not as if their nannying does anything good for anyone other than themselves (extorting fines from private companies.)
Right, lets just let cut-throat crooks rule the world. Hands of government, consumers don’t want things like recalls, safety, and fair competition!
umm… it is in the governments, the workers, the consumer’s and the economies best interests (and has been proven time and again) to keep monopolies from getting abusive. there is no law that says a company cannot enjoy being a monopoly in a sector, but the law does say that since a monopoly has certain powers in a market that they must follow set rules or be punished for it.
Well if the DOJ doesn’t do it,the EU will do it again with lawsuites and penalties for MS. EU probably getting ready to look into Longhorn theirselves soon.
Money money money money …….
bored waiting for longhorn ? me too..
looking forward to the beta in February if it comes out.
in the meantime, some screenshots of longhorn versions 4008/4015/4029/4053/4074
http://anyweb.kicks-ass.net/computers/os/windows/longhorn/index.htm…
cheers
anyweb
I’ve heard that Longhorn will have a resolution independant interface. Do you have any screenshots that demonstrate this?
CaptainN said I’ve heard that Longhorn will have a resolution independant interface. Do you have any screenshots that demonstrate this?
can you clarify exactly what you mean there ? i can certaintly check if i know what you referring to
cheers
anyweb
Irony, thy name is Microsoft.
In a sad effort to comply with DoJ regarding its Microsoft Internet Explorer monopoly, Microsoft produces documents that only work in Internet Explorer!
That’s just typical M$ monopoly, Andrew. 😉
> The state should keep their noses out of private enterprise
> altogether, it’s not as if their nannying does anything good
> for anyone other than themselves (extorting fines from
> private companies.)
Fair enough. But since the state is also interfering with the free market by creating limited monopolies like patents, copyrights, trade secret law, and trademarks, and virtual people like “corporations”, it’s only fair that government keep its noses out of private enterprise by abolishing all law that deal with these artificial legal constructs.
Well, honestly, I never really got a firm idea about what that meant either, and I haven’t heard about it in a while.
What I was hoping was that you would be able to change the size of the text and icons (and the rest) in a proportional way. So that if you have a 15″ laptop monitor with a resolution of 1200×1920, you could run the screen at it’s native resolution, and just bump up the size of the elements on the screen. This would have the added effect of making thing smoother, since there would be more pixels to anti-alias text and the like.
Is this even a feature of the new OS?
can you clarify exactly what you mean there ? i can certaintly check if i know what you referring to
He means that as the resolution changes, the GUI automatically resizes UI elements so they remain the same apparent size.
Eg: a button that is 1.5×0.5cm on a 14″ screen at 800×600 will also be 1.5×0.5cm on a 15″ screen at 1600×1200, a 19″ screen at 1280×1024, a 12″ widescreen at 1152×864, etc.
Note that the facilities already exist to do this. The reasons it often doesn’t work are (primarily) developers hard-coding font and UI element sizes in pixels and (less often) display hardware that can’t (or won’t) tell the OS its physical dimensions.
i don’t understand the governement! on two levels:
1. both the UK and USA goverments want to encourage free markets and the want to reward commercial entities that do well. incetivise commercial and hence economic success. but practises like this which disincentivise sccess appear t be anti-freemarket. they seem a little of the old “command economy” .. characteristic of north korea and the such like.
2. some might say “cobblers to all that” .. what’s really happenin is that big business IS the govt… they slap each other on the back because its the same people. well the why do they appear here not to? remember MS was making noises about moving to canada – until bush came along? MS donates how much to bush’s campaign (a lot, top 10 donor). and of course we’ve seen the bectel’s and so on ..
so, if anyone can shed any light on ths – let me know? even here in the UK – while every europan govt is lookin at alternative OSes – the british govt insists on not doing so. n ot consistent? is it a for-show farce?
tech_user, Microsoft didn’t make large political donations until the government attacked them. You could almost say they were blackmailed. Now of course they make huge donations out of self-defense.
According to ComputerWorld, Microsoft was the 19th largest Bush contributor in 2004. Microsoft was also Kerry’s 13th largest contributor. 47% of Microsoft corporate donations were Democrat in 2004, although it was 61% when employee donations are added in.
— http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/sto… —
Anyway, you are right about government and business being in it together, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Democrats or Republicans because politicians of both sides like money. Corporations try to buy both sides in order to hedge their bets.
1) I’m not familiar with the workings of the anti-trust ruling, but I would have thought that the DoJ can’t do anything until the final product ships. If this is the case, and Microsoft is found to be in breach, then the worst that will happen to Microsoft is that the product has to be withheld while the case is appealed. This may well suit Microsoft.
2) I doubt the EU will be of much use. Their recent ruling was quite symbolic, but I don’t see how it would seriously affect Microsoft. The fine was neglible in Microsoft terms, and could be written off by the accountants as a sort of political donation.
Quote: “Yeah, the anti-business fascists in the EU would do something.”
So, according to yourselves, companies/businesses are allowed to be above the law, all in the ability to make money? Correct? Consumers have no rights, can be made to pay extortionate amounts of money for substandard products, with little or no warranty etc. Is this correct, cos that’s what it sounds like. The businesses are ONLY in existance because of consumers/customers. To ignore them is very dangerous.
The EU has some guts to stand up to monopolists like Microsoft, whereas the US DOJ seems to only answer to the highest bidder, or whatever political powers push its buttons. Many Americans don’t like it, cos they believe that Europe is picking on a successfull American company out of jealousy – that is utter bull. Microsoft has long been a monopoly, using its immense market share and buying power to elbow out and destroy competitors, with the sole aim to have 100% of the market and control it anyway it sees fit. Within the US borders, Microsoft may remain so, but outside is a different story and more and more countries are leaving the Microsoft gravy train for better products elsewhere.
Get used to it – cos it’s just gonna keep happening.
Dave
Quote: “2) I doubt the EU will be of much use. Their recent ruling was quite symbolic, but I don’t see how it would seriously affect Microsoft. The fine was neglible in Microsoft terms, and could be written off by the accountants as a sort of political donation. ”
Absolutely correct. Microsoft must be really punished, not play punished. 600 million dollars is nothing – they made more money than that from the market that they stole due to their illegal and monopolistic tactics – so they’re still in the blue financially.
What should have happened is:
1. Fine then 40 Billion dollars.
2. Force them to make their key products such as msn messenger, windows media player and ms office for bsd/linux platforms
Then watch them actually cease their behaviour and compete on merit.
Dave
Agreed, the state should not meddle with the free market in any way. When I can take my case before the state to try and prove that you’re “unjustly” using an idea I claim to “own” you perpetuate the vicious cycle of government-nannying. This only allows the industry of lobbying to thrive and monopolies to be hand-picked by the state.
Thou shalt not steal is the basis of all property rights, w/o it we may as well just bury what’s left of what was once a beautiful country.
Blah…drivel. Proven when? When has government prevented or restrained monopoly, this entirely oxymoronic.
On the contrary, government *creates* monopolies. For the schoolkids, a good current-event example would be government “contractors” (quasi-fasicst, war-profiteering monopolipies) in Iraq. These companies are joined at-the-hip with the state (public/private partnership – a.k.a. fascism) and do not compete for the contracts they are repeatedly rewarded. In other words, the state chooses who wins, bypassing the natural process of free-market competition, thus creating a monopoly. Of course this is where you get rampant corruption on many levels, they have no incentive to do a good job…they will be rewarded regardless. If I felt like pursuing the historal evidence of this I could literally write a book…and I wouldn’t be the first.
Anyhow, just because a company has a large majority of a market share doesn’t automatically make it a “monopoly”…that’s just business success. Consumers are not a dumb herd of sheep zombies buying everything on the shelf because they commanded by “evil corporations”.
Ultimately, the market will decide the fate of Microsoft’s products…this is simply *not* the role government should be playing…no way…no how…never.
This is DOJ speak, drilled into your skull throughout the late 90’s by the state.
I get so damn tired of hearing “monopoly” when someone brings up Microsoft, it’s so outright ignorant it gets under my skin.
Blah blah BLAH. The government doesn’t do a good job at any of these things, however, there are plenty of private consumer groups that do.
Again, another case of public education having numbed your brain with anti-corporate, anti-free-market, socialist thinking.
The state is the boogeyman my friend, not the free-market.
Yeah, that’s the ticket! Let’s extort even more money from a private company that government can burn on killing innocent foreigners (and our own soldiers), creating new pointless, impotent, expensive regulations for which it can’t possibly hope to enforce effectively and honestly. Perhaps they can dump it into Social Security so we all benefit? Is it possible to hear a stone hit the bottom of a bottom-less pit?
You’re right on pal, the more theft of a company which produces a product which people want and find useful, the better.
Let’s get em’! Maybe the nanny-state can finally put these evil bastards out of business! That way we can destroy an entire segement of the IT industry, destroy thousands of jobs, and eliminate billions (that’s with a B) of dollars in philanthropy and other miscellanious contributions!
Now you’re thinking.
Ever notice how every government “attempt” to protect individuals and consumers ends up hurting consumers? Copyright came about so that early presses could not abuse authors. Copyright was never intended to apply to the end user. Patent law was so that individual inventors had incentive to invent, and some rights with their inventions. Trademark existed to not allow one company to impersonate another and dupe consumers.
But the the government allows those laws to be turned against consumers. Fair Use has been virtually removed from copyright. Patents are a stranglehold on small business.
Think about that the next time you want the government to fix a problem. The law you get created may bite you back soon.
MS is a problem. But the government makes it worth. Government money is used to promote MS in Southeast Asia. I took numerous colleges classes that required submissions to be in an MS format. The gov’t took the sting out of a guilty anti-trust verdict.
My favorite part of that case, was when MS suggested that it pay it’s remedy by donating hardware and software to elementary schools. A remedy to an anti-trust case that would 1) take market share from apple and 2) (at least for teh software half) cost them nothing.
I’m suprised the U.S. gov’t didn’t allow that.
-b
It’s refreshing to see some common sense, thank you.
Though I do not agree MS is a “problem” though I do believe that they have some problems. One of them is that they’re producing sub-par quality software. Another is that they can’t get the nanny state off of their backs.
The state is the boogeyman my friend, not the free-market.
Most people (rightfully) consider corporations to be at least as big a boogyman as the government.
You are aware that most corporations aren’t interested in the “free market” either, right ? All they want is to monopolise whatever market they service.
Fantasy Land is where your belong Zambizzi.
Fantasy land, or 1850 a.d.
The industrial revolution was not kind to the workers who supported it. Without the government there would be no OSHA, no FMLA, no minimum wage, no social security, no superfund, no fines against corporations which dump chemicals and kill people (think Union Carbide, India, think Exxon, no tarrifs on much much cheaper foreign goods made by slave labor or children.
I’m not a socialist, infact I will dance in the streets the day Castro dies.
Many people seem to forget the bad old days before government intervention into big business.
NO INTERVENTION IS REDICULOUS. You sound like you’ve JUST READ about invisible hand ecconomics and think Adam Smith is a genious. He was, but Lazise (spelling) Fair business DOES NOT WORK TO ANYONE’S ADVANTAGE, OTHER THAN THE UPPER ECHELON AND INVESTORS OF THE CORPORATION.
Government has been used to promote companies in a disgusting manner such as in the Banana Wars, Opium Wars, Trade wars, all of the times the US Military was brought in to attack striking workers who didn’t want to be treated like scum any more.
The answer is NOT to remove ALL intervention, rather it is to actualy enforce the laws passed, or remove the laws.
Having no intervention will lead to MASSIVE pollution, a MUCH GREATER gap between rich and poor, zero competition, no possible way to start a business, massive US poverty, since ALL JOBS will be shipped overseas (no tariffs.)
The next time you open a bottle of asprin, realize that it took DEATHS to get that childproof / tamper detection seal on it. Recalls are forced due to liability. No company wants to spend money to protect anyone.
Go back to fox news.