Windows 7 To Be "Thoroughly" Tested For Antitrust Compliance 364
CWmike writes "Technical advisers to the antitrust regulators who monitor Microsoft's compliance with the 2002 antitrust settlement will test Windows 7 'more thoroughly' than earlier versions of the operating system were tested, according to a new status report filed with the federal judge watching over the company. Microsoft is also facing renewed scrutiny from the EU, which two weeks ago filed preliminary charges against the company over bundling IE with Windows, and said more recently that Microsoft 'shields' IE from competition."
Re:Oh yea, we'll test it really hard. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:There is a very easy solution... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I am skeptical (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The EU is just bashing an American company (Score:4, Informative)
Re:But if they don't include IE... (Score:3, Informative)
Windows 95 came with a primitive web browser it was good enough to download Netscape.
For Windows 3.1 if you talented enough to get Winsock working then figuring out FTP was no big deal. Besides most of the stuff on the internet was via, Telnet, FTP and Gopher the Web only had academic papers and some cheesy corporate websites that were nothing more then a bunch of fliers done in HTML.
Re:I user IE exactly once on a new computer (Score:1, Informative)
But if you use any help files at all when using windows, you are using IE. It is used to render them. Also, automatic updates uses IE.
Re:The EU is just bashing an American company (Score:5, Informative)
Because supporting a property in JavaScript that returns the HTML string with in an element isn't going to break anything else. Just because something doesn't come from a standard doesn't mean it's not a good idea to adopt it. It's only when you adopt something that breaks a standard or is in conflict with a standard that it becomes a problem. Supporting extensions on top a standard that break nothing else isn't a problem.
Most of the problems around MSIE in terms of standards compliance have been fixed in IE 8. The other half of the problem, though, is ActiveX, which other browsers cannot implement on platform other than Windows. If ActiveX where implemented aa true open standard, without moving targets, without reliance on the underlying platform, then it would be possible to produce browsers on competing platforms that supported ActiveX.
Since Microsoft has deliberately chosen to keep certain details of ActiveX a complete an utter secret and tie it into Windows, there's no way for anyone to implement on a non-Windows platform.
This deliberate tie-in is an effort by Microsoft to create vendor lock-in. Microsoft can either compete fairly or they can fight dirty. They've consistently chosen to fight dirty and until they stop, they're always going to face criticism for it.
No Microsoft paycheck for you.
Re:But if they don't include IE... (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps because we actually RT 2nd page of the FA [computerworld.com], which suggests obliging MS to ship Windows with other browsers installed and presented to the user in addition to IE?
Wait... I'm on Slashdot, aren't I? Sorry, silly response.
Re:I am skeptical (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft itself still hasn't been able to produce a faithful OOXML implementation that adheres to their ill-gotten standard, and they wrote the format spec!
As it stands, Microsoft Office is on track to support ODF long before it will support the (MS)ISO OOXML spec, if it ever does.
The docx, etc. format currently used in Office 2007 is a proto-OOXML format that may not be completely compatible with the ISO "standard" OOXML.
Re:is this a little one sided? (Score:1, Informative)
The difference between Apple and Microsoft is a monopoly. It is the monopoly which makes bundling illegal, the bundling itself is not illegal.
Re:Oh yea, we'll test it really hard. (Score:5, Informative)
bash? No - Windows 7 comes with PowerShell. In many areas it is much more powerful than bash - and it is certainly a better "fit" for Windows than bash would be (PS is object-oriented and object-based and practically all of Windows API is now exposed as objects either through COM, WMI or .NET). Note, that is not saying that PS would be better for *nix than bash.
Windows is moving towards xml config files - not the line-based delimiter-of-the-day config files of *nix. Xml files are arguably better for describing many more complicated structures. They also are more bloated ;-) . PS has support for reading/writing/manipulating xml files
Incidently, PowerShell treats the registry, certificate store, the PW function list etc. just as a file system. It means that to manipulate the registry you access registry keys/values just like directories/files - using the same commands.
Re:I am skeptical (Score:1, Informative)
Ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
Look it's another antitrust story about Microsoft! Look it's already filled with dozens of comments by people who don't know what antitrust abuse is. Seriously people, you're making Slashdot look as ignorant as other Web forums. Don't people think it might be a good idea to know what they're talking about before telling us what they think about it?
Antitrust abuse is undermining free trade in a market using the large amount of influence a company or group has in a separate market. Antitrust laws were made because trusts discovered they could undermine capitalism by tying markets they controlled to markets they did not and then they did not have to work hard and spend money to make the best product in the second market; they could dominate it with an inferior product that did not cost them to produce. This also resulted in them having little or no motivation to please customers, improve that product, or reduce costs... undermining all the important benefits we were gaining from capitalism in the first place. Without antitrust laws, capitalism collapses into a series of competing monopolists, which is why pretty much every country around the world implemented very similar antitrust laws, which have stabilized economies and prevented the worst abuses.
Example: How to abuse a monopoly. Suppose I gain a monopoly or trust. It doesn't matter how. Say I contract with a city to lay the wires that distribute electricity. Fine, this is a common monopoly scenario in the US. Now suppose I decide I want to move into a new market, like selling bottled water. Legally, antitrust law says because water is a separate pre-existing market, I cannot tie those two markets together. The most common form of illegal tying is bundling. Suppose I start shipping every one of my electrical distribution customers a "free" case of bottled water every month. The vast majority of sellers of bottled water go out of business, because everyone already has bottled water. This is both unfair and destabilizes the market by driving good companies out of business without having a better product. Then, I slowly raise the price of electrical power distribution to cover my expense in purchasing and distributing bottled water. What if my water is not as good and tastes slightly off? What if the bottles are non-recyclable? What if it costs me more than it did previous companies and I'm passing on higher costs to you?
In capitalism all those problems are solved by the market. I'm motivated to solve them because it will make my bottled water more attractive and get me more sales. With monopoly abuse, I have no motivation to solve those problems. If people want electricity in their houses they will buy my bottled water, so who cares if it sucks and is overpriced? What can they do?
I'll tell you what they can do. They can pass criminal laws that make such bundling illegal. If you tie a product in a market where you have a huge amount of influence (either as a company or a cartel) to a separate pre-existing market, you are breaking the law. That law makes a lot of sense and has stabilized our economy an insured competition. A lot of people have proposed solutions other than antitrust law, that would let some currently illegal bundling continue and try to solve the problem in a different way, basically trying to solve a specific case by writing laws to cover that case instead of general laws that cover all cases. I think that is a myopic view and misguided.
So what did MS do? They took a product (Windows) where they had huge influence on the market and bundled numerous other products with it. These are products from separate pre-existing markets. When they did it, they knew it was breaking the law, but they figured they'd make enough money to buy their way out of trouble. They paid off companies with enough money to sue them successfully. They made huge campaign contributions to the people who were supposed to be enforcing the laws. They spent large amounts of money on misinformation campaigns to confuse people about the law and spread mi
Re:Oh yea, we'll test it really hard. (Score:3, Informative)
First thing to realize about awk is that it was really only necessary because bash pipelines are text-only. You need awk, cut etc. to "find" the correct columns and emit something as a result.
Once you move to an object-based pipeline the need for something like awk disappears, at least for combining commands.
Example: The PS ls command is an alias for the Get-ChildItem cmdlet. Executed on a filesystem it will return a sequence of DirectoryInfo and FileInfo objects. Standard formatting rules (the ToString method) of those objects ensures that if they are written to the console they will appear as (somewhat) familar ls lines. But you can also pipe then thorugh another cmdlet, e.g. filtering on size *without* needing to parse the "filesize column":
ls | ?{ $_.Length -gt 30kb }
Re:People don't upgrade from what they're given (Score:3, Informative)
W3Schools lists the stats for their site only. It's not representative of world-wide market share at all.
Re:Oh yea, we'll test it really hard. (Score:2, Informative)
You can download junction.exe (the NTFS version of ln) from Microsoft's Technet [microsoft.com].
Re:is this a little one sided? (Score:3, Informative)
Safari is bundled with OS X, as are a lot of utility programs. However, you can easily download and install another browser and delete the safari.app file from your /Applications folder. Then you can run System Preferences and set your default browser, if the browser itself hasn't already done so.
None of this is important to antitrust abuse.
And anyway, Apple has not been found guilty of violating the Sherman Act. Microsoft has, therefore different rules apply to them.
No, the same laws apply to both companies. The case against MS, however is made simpler because most of the findings of fact are done and because MS is a repeat offender. Apple can bundle anything they want with OS X or Safari because that does not constitute antitrust abuse. You have to be leveraging monopoly influence through bundling, i.e. one of the bundled products has to constitute a monopoly. Neither Safari nor OS X is monopoly in the legal or economic sense.
Re:More EU "justice" (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is not so much bundling, as the impossibility to unbundle e.g. WMP and IE.
Legally speaking, that isn't true.
I do think, even as a Good European, that the EU would not be doing this if MS were French.
They convicted Telfonica of illegal bundling in violation of antitrust laws, and Telfonica is Spanish.
Re:But if they don't include IE... (Score:4, Informative)
I think these lawsuits are just getting over the top.
This isn't a lawsuit. It's a criminal case.
Microsoft in this case is interested in enhancing the user experience by integrating the web browser into the OS. I think that's fine.
The laws around the world disagree. Would it be fine with you if the power distribution monopoly in your area decided to enhance your electricity using experience and ship you a new TV every year and roll the cost into your bill?
And this has somehow given Europe access to suing them for as much money as they like? don't you think that's stupid?
Well, it might be if it was true, but it isn't. Europe is charging them with a crime and working on punishing them for it while forcing them to stop, all without upsetting the US too much, since MS is a huge campaign contributor to both parties.
This is a clear-case of a company being attacked for being successful, this is just extra tax/bribes which is being conjured out of them, at least in asia the politicians call the bribes what it is: a bribe.
You mean like the large contributions MS made just before the US changed their mind about splitting them up for their crimes and instead decided to do nothing at all? This is a fine for a crime. That was a bribe, even if such bribery is stupidly legal in the US. The difference is the people in the EU making the decisions don't benefit, whereas the politicians in the US were re-elected using ads paid for by MS.
The fact they add IE to the OS, I don't find anything wrong with that...
I have no doubt. Of course you probably don't understand what the law was they convicted of abusing or why that law was written either. Maybe you should find out.
It's also a tax/blackmail because other OS-companies don't have this problem. Apple doesn't have this problem, most linux distributions don't have this problem.
Yeah it's funny how only the people who break the laws are convicted of breaking the laws. That's pretty nuts.
Hopefully they will win if they get sued because it's just a bloody stupid lawsuit.
Well, this article is about the US courts investigating MS's criminal acts. The EU thing is the EU looking to convict them for the criminal act, and MS will lose that case because it is open and shut. After reading your post the phrase 'bloody stupid" did come to mind, but that is unfair. You're probably not stupid, just ignorant and loud about it.
Re:More EU "justice" (Score:2, Informative)
>that the EU would not be doing this if MS were French.
Have you been paying attention to how many European companies have got their asses handed to them by Nelli Kroes?
She's the one in charge of all of this. See her most recent speech on this topic:
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/09/1&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
Called "Avoiding the protectionist trap"
So, to answer your question, the EU would go much further if MS were European.
It is actually the fact that it is American, and they can't risk a trade war, that they are this soft on Microsoft compared to how strict european companies are regulated.
Re:I am skeptical (Score:3, Informative)
apt-get is designed to install for the system. it's perfectly possible to run most software (firefox, etc) in your home directory, e.g. local to a user.
Realistically, this isn't an issue. If I download PaintShit Photo Editor v1337 from sexyshareware.com, I'm going to be reeealy suspicious if it needs to run as root. If it runs as a user, then (theoretically) the worst it can do is hose that user. Running programs as a different user (nobody) fixes that, and is still easy.
If I get my PaintShit from my package manager, then it is trusted as much as I trust the distributor (Ubuntu, Fedora) and cryptographically signed so I know they put their stamp on it. Hence, since they have a good track record, I don't mind installing it for everybody.
Still won't run it as root.
The basic idea is you need to go out of your way to affect the whole system, and you can't do it by accident.