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Article by Hakon Lie of Opera Software. Also note that acdcording to the European Commission, "As for the tying of separate software products, in its Microsoft judgment of 17 September 2007, the Court of First Instance confirmed the principles that must be respected by dominant companies. In a complaint by Opera, a competing browser vendor, Microsoft is alleged to have engaged in illegal tying of its Internet Explorer product to its dominant Windows operating system. The complaint alleges that there is ongoing competitive harm from Microsoft's practices, in particular in view of new proprietary technologies that Microsoft has allegedly introduced in its browser that would reduce compatibility with open internet standards, and therefore hinder competition. In addition, allegations of tying of other separate software products by Microsoft, including desktop search and Windows Live have been brought to the Commission's attention. The Commission's investigation will therefore focus on allegations that a range of products have been unlawfully tied to sales of Microsoft's dominant operating system." http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/08/19&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

The story of Javascript and the browser as a RiA competitor continues to unfold. This lengthy summation from roughlydrafed is perhaps the best discussion 'i've ever seen of technologies that will drive the Future of the Open Web. Roughly believes that Apple and Google are fighting for an Open Web Future, with Adobe and Microsoft RiA jousting for a broken web where they dominate the application development. For usre the web is moving to become an application platform. The question is one of who will own the dominant API, and be in position to impose a global platform tax. This is a great summary demanding a careful read. It also confirms my belief that the WebKit layout and document model is the way forward. It's by far and away the best (X)HTML-CSS-DOM-JavaScript model out there. The W3C alternatives do not include JavaScript, and that pretty much seals their fate. And while there are many JavaScript libraries and frameworks to chose from, i would pay close attention to three initiatives: WebKit SproutCore, Gecko jQuery, and Google GWT. ~ge~

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"In addition, the Commission opened a second antitrust investigation into Amazon's business practices that might artificially favour its own retail offers and offers of marketplace sellers that use Amazon's logistics and delivery services (the so-called "fulfilment by Amazon or FBA sellers"). In particular, the Commission will investigate whether the criteria that Amazon sets to select the winner of the "Buy Box" and to enable sellers to offer products to Prime users, under Amazon's Prime loyalty programme, lead to preferential treatment of Amazon's retail business or of the sellers that use Amazon's logistics and delivery services. The "Buy Box" is displayed prominently on Amazon's websites and allows customers to add items from a specific retailer directly into their shopping carts. Winning the "Buy Box" (i.e. being chosen as the offer that features in this box) is crucial to marketplace sellers as the Buy Box prominently shows the offer of one single seller for a chosen product on Amazon's marketplaces, and generates the vast majority of all sales. The other aspect of the investigation focusses on the possibility for marketplace sellers to effectively reach Prime users. Reaching these consumers is important to sellers because the number of Prime users is continuously growing and because they tend to generate more sales on Amazon's marketplaces than non-Prime users. If proven, the practice under investigation may breach Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) that prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position. The Commission will now carry out its in-depth investigation as a matter of priority"

On the filed charges, the violation seems to be fairly clear-cut and straightforward to prove. (DG Competition has really outstanding lawyers.) I suspect the real fight here will be over the remedy.

"With streaming services asserting their market dominance, the music industry must now try to convince an entire generation raised on free to start paying up-without scaring them off."

"With streaming services asserting their market dominance, the music industry must now try to convince an entire generation raised on free to start paying up-without scaring them off."

"The European Commission on Wednesday charged that Google breached EU antitrust rules by seeking to maintain and expand the dominance of its Android operating system."

"The European Commission on Wednesday charged that Google breached EU antitrust rules by seeking to maintain and expand the dominance of its Android operating system."

It's official, hot off the presses (wasn't there a few minutes ago). We're now into a process where DG Competition will revisit its previous order requiring Microsoft to market two versions of Windows, one with Media Player and one without. DG Competition staff were considerably outraged that Microsoft took advantage of a bit of under-specification in the previous order and sold the two versions at the same price. That detail will not be neglected this time around. Moreover, given the ineffectiveness of the previous order in restoring competition among media players, don't be surprised if this results in an outright ban on bundling MSIE with Windows.

The computer desktop - as was the case with newspapers before there was radio and radio before there was television - has become the high ground from which empires are built. While dominance of the desktop has been maintained for the last decade or more by Microsoft, which at one point represented 95% of the desktops used by all consumers, the future is less certain.it will not be a single operating system that prevails. In the end it will be desktop runtimes that become the most important platforms A desktop runtime is a platform that provides a consistent runtime environment regardless of the underlying operating system. Desktop runtimes are already extending beyond their primary target platform, the desktop, to the Fourth Screen - smart phones.

the obvious conflict of interest between the standards-based web and proprietary platforms advanced by Microsoft, and the rationales for keeping the web's client-side programming language small while the proprietary platforms rapidly evolve support for large languages, does not help maintain the fiction that only clashing high-level philosophies are involved here. Readers may not know that Ecma has no provision for "minor releases" of its standards, so any ES3.1 that was approved by TG1 would inevitably be given a whole edition number, presumably becoming the 4th Edition of ECMAScript. This is obviously contentious given all the years that the majority of TG1, sometimes even apparently including Microsoft representatives, has worked on ES4, and the developer expectations set by this long-standing effort. A history of Microsoft's post-ES3 involvement in the ECMAScript standard group, leading up to the overt split in TG1 in March, is summarized here. The history of ECMAScript since its beginnings in November 1996 shows that when Microsoft was behind in the market (against Netscape in 1996-1997), it moved aggressively in the standards body to evolve standards starting with ES1 through ES3. Once Microsoft dominated the market, the last edition of the standard was left to rot -- ES3 was finished in 1999 -- and even easy-to-fix standards conformance bugs in IE JScript went unfixed for eight years (so three years to go from Edition 1 to 3, then over eight to approach Edition 4). Now that the proposed 4th edition looks like a competitive threat, the world suddenly hears in detail about all those bugs, spun as differences afflicting "JavaScript" that should inform a new standard.

[In 2014, as the hype and newness die down, social media is increasingly something we take for granted in our daily lives. There's a big battle going on to keep our social attention: which of these two companies will prove dominant and win? ...]

[In 2014, as the hype and newness die down, social media is increasingly something we take for granted in our daily lives. There's a big battle going on to keep our social attention: which of these two companies will prove dominant and win? ...]

" Ernesto on February 21, 2016 C: 24 News New research suggests that software piracy has a detrimental effect on the adoption of Linux desktop operating systems. Piracy is one of the reasons why Windows has been able to maintain its dominant market position, making open source alternatives "forgotten victims" of copyright infringement."

" Ernesto on February 21, 2016 C: 24 News New research suggests that software piracy has a detrimental effect on the adoption of Linux desktop operating systems. Piracy is one of the reasons why Windows has been able to maintain its dominant market position, making open source alternatives "forgotten victims" of copyright infringement."

"The ultimate code breakers" If you know anything about encryption, you probably also realize that quantum computers are the secret KEY to unlocking all encrypted files. As I wrote about last year here on Natural News, once quantum computers go into widespread use by the NSA, the CIA, Google, etc., there will be no more secrets kept from the government. All your files - even encrypted files - will be easily opened and read. Until now, most people believed this day was far away. Quantum computing is an "impractical pipe dream," we've been told by scowling scientists and "flat Earth" computer engineers. "It's not possible to build a 512-qubit quantum computer that actually works," they insisted. Don't tell that to Eric Ladizinsky, co-founder and chief scientist of a company called D-Wave. Because Ladizinsky's team has already built a 512-qubit quantum computer. And they're already selling them to wealthy corporations, too. DARPA, Northrup Grumman and Goldman Sachs In case you're wondering where Ladizinsky came from, he's a former employee of Northrup Grumman Space Technology (yes, a weapons manufacturer) where he ran a multi-million-dollar quantum computing research project for none other than DARPA - the same group working on AI-driven armed assault vehicles and battlefield robots to replace human soldiers. .... When groundbreaking new technology is developed by smart people, it almost immediately gets turned into a weapon. Quantum computing will be no different. This technology grants God-like powers to police state governments that seek to dominate and oppress the People.  ..... Google acquires "Skynet" quantum computers from D-Wave According to an article published in Scientific American, Google and NASA have now teamed up to purchase a 512-qubit quantum computer from D-Wave. The computer is called "D-Wave Two" because it's the second generation of the system. The first system was a 128-qubit computer. Gen two

Normally, I'd be suspicious of anything published by Infowars because its editors are willing to publish really over the top stuff, but: [i] this is subject matter I've maintained an interest in over the years and I was aware that working quantum computers were imminent; and [ii] the pedigree on this particular information does not trace to Scientific American, as stated in the article. I've known Scientific American to publish at least one soothing and lengthy article on the subject of chlorinated dioxin hazard -- my specialty as a lawyer was litigating against chemical companies that generated dioxin pollution -- that was generated by known closet chemical industry advocates long since discredited and was totally lacking in scientific validity and contrary to established scientific knowledge. So publication in Scientific American doesn't pack a lot of weight with me. But checking the Scientific American linked article, notes that it was reprinted by permission from Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal and news organization that I trust much more. That said, the InfoWars version is a rewrite that contains lots of information not in the Nature/Scientific American version of a sensationalist nature, so heightened caution is still in order. Check the reprinted Nature version before getting too excited: "The D-Wave computer is not a 'universal' computer that can be programmed to tackle any kind of problem. But scientists have found they can usefully frame questions in machine-learning research as optimisation problems. "D-Wave has battled to prove that its computer really operates on a quantum level, and that it is better or faster than a conventional computer. Before striking the latest deal, the prospective customers set a series of tests for the quantum computer. D-Wave hired an outside expert in algorithm-racing, who concluded that the speed of the D-Wave Two was above average overall, and that it was 3,600 times faster than a leading conventional comput

"October 14, 2016 Sean LeRoy 2 Comments Opinion The prowess and power of Open Source is undeniable. From servers, to the desktop, mobile, to the underpinnings of the so-called "Internet of Things", Open Source spans sectors and continents, public and private. One profession, however, that has traditionally been dominated by closed, proprietary software solutions - and usually very expensive ones at that! - is the field of design. In this article, we'll take a look at some free and open source options"

"1998 Sun complains to the EC on Microsoft's dominant position as a supplier of operating systems for personal computers. 02/2000 EC launches investigation on Microsoft's anti-competitive conduct ("Case No. COMP/C-3/37.792"). Two main issues are under investigation: (1) lack of interoperability information, and (2) incorporation of Windows Media Player with the Windows operating system."

EC v. Microsoft was a landmark advance in the law governing software interoperability. In the preceding case in the U.S., the courts refused to set a standard for the degree of "compatibility" that Microsoft would have to provide competitors. Forewarned, the DG Competition prosecutors had done their homework. Commission v. Microsoft, No. T-167/08, European Community Court of First Instance (Grand Chamber Judgment of 17 September, 2007), para. 230, 374, 421, http://preview.tinyurl.com/chsdb4w (rejecting Microsoft's argument that "interoperability" has a 1-way rather than 2-way meaning; information technology specifications must be disclosed with sufficient specificity to place competitors on an "equal footing" with Mictrosoft's own software in regard to interoperability; "the 12th recital to Directive 91/250 defines interoperability as 'the ability to exchange information and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged'").

[Ownership Chart: The Big Six The U.S. media landscape is dominated by massive corporations that, through a history of mergers and acquisitions, have concentrated their control over what we see, hear and read. In many cases, these giant companies are vertically integrated, controlling everything from initial production to final distribution. In the interactive charts below we reveal who owns what. Click here to learn more about our campaign to stop big media and to support local ownership, diverse voices, and truly competitive media markets that serve the public interest. Select a chart: The Big Six Cable TV Print Telecom Radio ...]

"Today Android and iOS dominate the smartphone market, combining to provide the operating systems for more than 95 percent of smartphones. Still, not everyone is a fan of the Apple-Google mobile universe. If you're wary of Android's security shortcomings, tired of iOS's overly aggressive auto-correct, or interested in tapping out of the Apple vs. Google mobile war, however, you'll be pleased to know that a number of new open-source mobile OSs are slated to debut in the next year or so. From Canonical's Ubuntu to Firefox to Samsung, several big-name corporations and organizations will release their own open-source smartphone platforms this year. So grab your Tux the Linux Penguin gear and read on. "

Awesome article describing the history of Microsoft as seen through the lives of it's three CEO's: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella

"The noted scholar offers his thoughts on the current media landscape in the era of the World Wide Web and Edward Snowden. By Seung-yoon Lee , Noam Chomsky / Byline.com"