

Federal antitrust oversight of Microsoft formally ends - endergen
http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110512/tc_digitaltrends/federalantitrustoversightofmicrosoftformallyends_1

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powertower
I remember watching the anti-trust tapes of Bill G's deposition.

The prosecution was absolutely clueless about the technology in question, to
the extreme point of trying to link Windows "shortcuts" to some type of anti-
competitive behavior.

With a large organization such as Microsoft, you will generate a lot of "dots"
(random internal memos/conversation and other other points) that will then be
further connected by "lines" (in the court room), and your guilt will be
obvious.

I'm not saying that Microsoft did not engage in anti-competitive behavior, but
just that the courtroom is the last place you will find the truth.

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Peaker
I thought Microsoft required OEMs to place shortcuts to its pre-installed
software while disallowing them to install shortcuts to competitors' software.

Is this what you're talking about? If it is, don't you think it is indeed an
anti-competitive practice?

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powertower
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLBA1Ldq6M>

It's in one of the 10 parts.

There was a misunderstanding about what a desktop shortcut was.

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1010011010
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's behavior changes. I suspect it
will get worse now that oversight is gone. Ballmer's the kind of guy who would
want to take the lead in shady PR back from Facebook.

Perhaps I will be surprised, though.

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kevin_morrill
Unlikely. The company is still under intense scrutiny from the EU to publish
API documentation.

It's actually kind of sad, because the company burns thousands of man years
writing API docs for things no one actually uses. It's certainly not the only
reason, but it's another factor in why they ship so infrequently.

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rbanffy
It's not ridiculously hard to generate automatic documentation from comments.
A healthy side-effect would be that the quality of the code would increase and
precisely match the quality of the documentation. If the documentation is
lacking, incomplete or wrong, you go and fix the comments in the source code
and regenerate the docs.

If a programmer told you that if skipping documenting the source code would
allow it to be delivered sooner, would you buy it? What's next? Skipping
tests?

In my projects my team routinely generates not only API documentation, but
also unit-tests from comments. This way, if the docs are wrong, the tests
fail.

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kenjackson
API documentation isn't the issue. MS has that covered easy. Rather its
protocols. And the EU standard is a fair bit higher than say the C standard,
because there is no such thing as undefined behavior.

MS must specify what happens in all conditions on all potential configurations
of all their systems. I need to look it up but I think its like 50K plus pages
of non API docs.

