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Comment Re:It really looks like the prosecution will fail (Score 1) 347

If the prosecution fails the next step will be even heavier lobbying against politicians, "look what they are doing and they are getting away with it".

There are a few legal changes related to IP law and the operators resposibilities coming up for discussion in the swedish parliament soon. A failed prosecution would likely be used to point out how unfair the content owners are being treated in Sweden compared to other countries.

Comment Re:PDF isn't a proprietary format (Score 1) 198

It is open. The reason why Adobe threatened to sue Microsoft seems to be that they would use their monopoly situation to force a certain Adobe product line out of business by offering the "save as PDF" in Office.

Believe it or not, but a lot of companies actually pay money for propriety software used only to convert their documents to PDF format. The lawsuit threat proves it.

The monopoly situation is what allows them to sue. If everyone was using OpenOffice I suppose they could sue Sun(?) for making Adobes business idea irrelevant unless Sun removed the PDF conversion.

So Microsoft actually wanted to do something good and implement an open standard, even if it was probably not out of love for open standards in general. They were stopped by anti-monopoly laws that should be a good idea since monopolies are bad, but which in this case is used to sustain Adobes sales of the same function a few more years just because the customers they would otherwise loose doesn't realize they could get the same thing for free. Their terms for letting Microsoft include the function was that they should charge extra for it and let Adobe in on the revenue. Adobe is just after the money whether it comes from their own products or from getting a piece of the monopoly.

You may consider it good or bad, but the fact is that monopoly regulations doesn't let the market leader compete on even terms featurewise with other products when it comes to functionality that can be seen as a separate business niche.

Now I am sure that Adobes package does a lot more than just convert other documents to PDF and some customers actually need that extra functionality, but Adobe still considers the conversion alone important enough for their business model to go to court over so that alone is the important feature here.

Comment Re:Eh, kinda (Score 1) 308

The geeks have already installed Firefox on their grandmoms computers and giving the geeks another non-IE option to install would not really help decrease the IE marketshare. So it would make sense for Google to primarily try and reach the remaining IE users by other means than the geek install squad.

Making it the default browser with OEM sales would really be the killing blow. I am not sure what it takes to do that, but can imagine Google having both the means and the motivation.

Comment Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score 1) 672

Great from a windows standpoint yes, I am still amazed that one of the most widely used server OS:s in the world need to reboot because it installed updates to it's web browser and similar idiotic things.

A client I was working for once had a mysterious problem that their servers sometimes rebooted for no apparent reason, after some looking around I noticed that automatic windows update was enabled.

And why have things like a media player, sound recorder, paint program and fscking outlook express in a server release by default? If you scratch a bit under the surface you could almost believe it was just a quick paintjob on some cheap home desktop OS to make it passable as a server OS.

Comment Re:Sorry... (Score 1) 664

IMHO this is a damn sight better than SOME of the DRM employed by other companies which even lock out other operating systems (Windows MediaSlayer I'm looking at you)

Do you think Apple would hesitate a second if they had the same market share as Microsoft?

Operating Systems

MoBo Manufacturer Foxconn Refuses To Support Linux 696

Noodlenose notes a thread up on the Ubuntu forums, where a user is questioning the practices of hardware manufacturer Foxconn. The user describes how his new Foxconn motherboard caused his Linux install to freeze and fire off weird kernel errors. He disassembles the BIOS and concludes that a faulty DSDT table is responsible for the errors. Even though the user makes Foxconn aware of the problem, they refuse to correct it, as 'it doesn't support Linux' and is only 'Microsoft certified.' The user speculates darkly on Foxconn's motives. Read the forum, read the code, and come to your own conclusions. "I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here, I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windows XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX. The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation.' The worst part is Foxconn's insistence that the product is ACPI compliant because their tables passed to Windows work, and that Microsoft gave the the magic WHQL certification."

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