“We have to work on our reputation for security in the marketplace.”

Salon.com Technology | Microsoft says penalty will let hackers run wild

Many Microsoft witnesses, including Chairman Bill Gates, say that Microsoft is unable to make a modular Windows because the different features — like the Internet browser and media player — are dependent on each other.

This is a contrived limitation, as I hope the judge realizes. Analogous comparisons are easy to come up with: one of the big automakers claiming their cars won’t run correctly without their own brand of audio equipment comes to mind.
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elusive spring

The high today is supposed to hit 56: that’s not very spring-like. The temperature in my kitchen window is 70, but I can’t fit in my kitchen window. Brr.

FUD demolished

Congressman Villanueva’s reply letter to Microsoft

It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position, since in innumerable cases they propose as a solution to problems raised by users: “update your software to the new version” (at the user’s expense, naturally); furthermore, it is common to find arbitrary cessation of technical help for products, which, in the provider’s judgment alone, are “old” and so, to receive any kind of technical assistance, the user finds himself forced to migrate to new versions (with non-trivial costs, especially as changes in hardware platform are often involved). And as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays “trapped” in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).
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