Good article from Dan Gilmor on the Microsoft Antitrust verdict.

"This is a day for satisfaction, not joy. Those who chortle over a bully's comeuppance shouldn't forget that this particular bully has done many things right and that most of the people at Microsoft are honest and diligent. And given that many Silicon Valley executives would mimic Bill Gates' worst acts if they had the chance, their glee isn't all that attractive."

Also, "For its part, Microsoft is now relying on an appeals-court victory or ultimate triumph in the Supreme Court. The stakes are the same as they've been all along. If Microsoft wins this case on appeal, the effect will be to invalidate antitrust in the Digital Age."

This is a very important point, and I've heard it before. If Microsoft isn't a monopoly now and didn't engage in anticompetetive practices, etc. then it'd be a bad day in the future when we finally had a company who was and did.

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I have to add a section for important specifications to my programming page. SMTP, POP3, maybe FTP, XML, HTML, Cookies, etc. Annoyingly I don't think the specs for C and C++ are online. Also, the Java specs are old, since Sun owns the language they haven't bothered to update them, although they have a new version coming out, I've heard.

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edited: 2001-08-21 10:29 (utc-4)

 

This is a really good article, so far. It reminded me of I, Robot.

"Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

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