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Gary Edwards

Is Microsoft slow to the punch on SOA, or just waiting for the right moment? | Joe McKe... - 0 views

talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10536-0.html

mesh ooxml soa webkit xaml

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 08 - Cached
  • I agree with DonnieBoy. Microsoft will try to leverage their MSOffice monopoly to dominate the newly emerging marketplace of Web-Stack and Cloud Computing solutions. I also believe that for Microsoft, the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place on March 29th, 2008 with ISO approval of the MSOffice-OOXML document format.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 08
     
    Extesnive reply to Joe McKendrik's article about Microsoft and SOA.
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Paul Merrell

Will Language Overload Force Open Enterprises? - 0 views

www.internetnews.com/...oad+Force+Open+Enterprises.htm

rest tim bray xml

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 08 - Cached
  • "XML doesn't have the monopoly it used to have," Bray said. "It used to be that if you wanted to send messages back and forth across the wire, XML was the only game in town." "Clearly, there is going to more heterogeneity for wire formats, too," he added. "Increasingly, given that the future will have more than two programming languages, there will be a lot more messages being passed around."
  • Bray comes to the issue from a unique perspective. As a co-author of the original XML specifications, he helped create a language that at one point had been intended to become the lingua franca for all Web communications. He now admits that he wasn't entirely accurate in his original vision of where XML would end up.
  • "I was so completely wrong on everything," Bray admitted. "We thought we were going to replace HTML and that turned out to be a silly idea. It turned out be used for syndication feeds and purchase orders and a million other things, and that's fine. Things find their own level." However, in today's world of language proliferation, Bray has another favorite approach for exchanging information. "I am a strong partisan of the REST (define) approach, which provides a Web-based approach for integration of anything to anything," Bray said. "REST isn't tied to XML or JSON but it makes it easy to use either."
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Paul Merrell

W3C Standards Make Mobile Web Experience More Inviting - 0 views

www.w3.org/...mwbp-pressrelease

accessibility convergence devices mobile web profiles w3c xhtml basic

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 08 - Cached
  • W3C today announced new standards that will make it easier for people to browse the Web on mobile devices. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, published as a W3C Recommendation, condenses the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into practical advice on creating mobile-friendly content.
  • Until today, content developers faced an additional challenge: a variety of mobile markup languages to choose from. With the publication of the XHTML Basic 1.1 Recommendation today, the preferred format specification of the Best Practices, there is now a full convergence in mobile markup languages, including those developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). The W3C mobileOK checker (beta), when used with the familiar W3C validator, helps developers test mobile-friendly Web content.
  • W3C is also developing resources to help authors understand how to create content that is both mobile-friendly and accessible to people with disabilities. A draft of Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is jointly published by the The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group and WAI's Education & Outreach Working Group (EOWG).
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Gary Edwards

Flash Wars: The Many Enemies and Obstacles of Flash [Part 2 of 3] - AppleInsider Comments - 0 views

forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php

apple flash javascript ria sproutcore webkit

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Jun 08 - Cached
  • Throughout 2007, Apple stripped nearly every vestige of Flash from its corporate site and other products, and began recommending that developers use open standards instead. As noted in Gone in a Flash: More on Apple’s iPhone Web Plans, last summer Apple published a document titled "Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone," which not only listed Flash as the single bullet point item under a listing of "unsupported technologies," but went on to explicitly encourage developers to "stick with standards," and use CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax instead.
  • Microsoft has already begun leveraging its Windows and Office monopolies to distribute Silverlight as a Flash-killer on both the Windows PC desktop and on the Mac. When Microsoft releases a Mac product, it can only mean one thing: it's working hard to kill a cross platform threat to Windows.
  • the new Cocoa iPhone/iPod Touch SDK not only offers Adobe insufficient means to develop a Flash plugin, but also clearly forbids the development of runtimes designed to advance competing platforms on top of the native Cocoa environment, whether Flash, Silverlight, or Java.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Apple is fighting for control of media distribution with open standards! What is it you do not get about Mpeg4, AAC, MP3 and H.264?
  • Silverlight will just not play H264 content : as usual, microsoft has adopted a look alike, incompatible video format : VC1. About why Quicktime is better that Flash when it comes to serious H264 usage, you may want to have a look at the following note/demonstration of a quicktime+javascript player : http://blog.vrarchitect.net/post/200...ter-than-Flash In short : Quicktime can reach any frame of a video. Flash just reach the I-Frames. So if you have a GOP/keyframing of 250 for instance, you can see only one frame every 10s of video (to be honest, most classical gop implies a frame every one or two seconds)
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Jun 08
     
    Excellent comment focused on the clash between Flash and Apple. Apple promotes JavaScript, CSS and AJAX: the WebKit- SproutCore recipe
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Paul Merrell

Japan's Underground Datacenter - System News - 0 views

sun.systemnews.com/...20176

data center container locations sun-msft cloud

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jul 08 - Cached
  • 00 meters under the ground in Japan, Sun along with ten other IT firms are building a datacenter. The datacenter is located at such a low depth to take advantage of the cooler air as a means of bringing the 40% of energy usage, for cooling, down a few notches. The datacenter will also be reluctant to Japan’s earthquake potential by being built on the solid bedrock floor of the crater hollowed out for the project.
  • In the underground pictures it is clear that the Sun Modular Datacenter 20 is going to be a successful format for the datacenter because it is self contained and there is an abundant resource of ground water in the cave for a cooling system. The data center will be used by government agencies, it will serve as a service center for IT clients, and it will be used by businesses.
  • The Sun MD 20 Sun is included the design of this datacenter. In the earthquake analysis, the prototype was placed on a large shake table in California, and put through a simulation of the Northridge earthquake of 1993. The results were very conclusive. The location of Japan’s underground datacenter is still undisclosed. More Information
Gary Edwards

When You're a WebKit Hammer, Everything Looks Like an Open Web Nail ... As it should! - 0 views

weblog.infoworld.com/...taking_ajax_lit.html

webkit web-applications web-design Safari Chrome Tom-yager Ajax JavaScript

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09 - Cached
  • You’re still waiting for me to explain what I meant when I referred to JavaScript as a last resort. I hinted at it in the preceding paragraph. Not the part on JavaScript debugging, but my reference to CSS and HTML. These do a lot more than paint screens. They are a browser's client-side framework. Everything they do is handled as native code. In other words, they're fast. CSS3 and HTML5 are too inconsistently implemented (if at all) across browsers to design to unless you're specifically targeting Safari, iPhone, or other WebKit-based browsers.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09
       
      Tom makes the point that the use of AJAX JavaScript breaks Web interoperability. He further points out that HTML is a static layout language, where CSS is dynamic and adaptive. (Use HTML5/DOM for document structure, and CSS4 for presentation - layout, formatting and visual interface).

      It is the consistency of the WebKit document model across all WebKit browsers that makes for an interoperable Open Web future. I would not however discount the importance of Firefox and Opera embracing the WebKit document model (HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JavaScript, DOM2). That's our guarantee that the future of the Open Web will actually be open.

      Tom goes on to suggest that instead of "AJAX", developers would be better off thinking in terms of "ACHJAX": Asynchronous CSS4 - HTML5 - JavaScript and XML ..... with the focus on getting as much done in CSS4 as possible.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 09
     
    InfoWorld's Tom Yager makes the case for the WebKit visual document model over AJAX. The problem with AJAX as he sees it is that it's JavaScript heavy. And that breaks precious Web interoperability. He makes the point that if something can be done in CSS, it should. He also argues that WebKit is the best tool because the document model is that of advanced HTML5 and CSS3.

    "... These [WebKit] browsers also share a stellar accelerated JavaScript interpreter that makes the edit/run/debug cycle go faster. They are also the only browsers that deliver on CSS4 and HTML5 standards (with some elements that are proposed to the W3C standards body). Sites that are visually rich may start sprouting "best viewed with Safari" banners until other browsers catch up. The banner would also let users know that your site is optimized for iPhone....."

    Humm. Did you catch that? CSS4!!! I guess he's referring to the WebKit penchant for putting advanced graphical transitions and animations into CSS instead of relying on a device specific or OS specific API.

    Placing the visual interface instructions in the documents presentation layer (CSS4) is a revolutionary idea. The WebKit model will go a long way towards creating a global interoperability layer that rides above lower device, OS, browser and application specifics. So yes, by all means let's go with CSS4 :)

Paul Merrell

GooSoft shapes super White Space database * The Register - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...white_spaces_database

broadcast spectrum White Space Database web politics

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 09 - Cached
  • The world's largest software and search companies Wednesday announced the formation of the White Spaces Database Group with PC and broadcasting hardware and services specialists Dell, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, Comsearch, and NeuStar.
  • The White Spaces Database Group comes after months of concerted lobbying of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by Microsoft, Google, and the other companies to make unused TV frequencies - white spaces - available for internet access by PCs and other devices.
  • The FCC last November ruled against broadcasters and said it would open up white spaces, but in a concession to their concerns, it stipulated the need for an online database that devices accessing the spectrum must read in order to find out what channels they are allowed to use. The database should be built and run by a third party and will be selected through a "public process."
Paul Merrell

Tectonic » Southern nations frown on ISO - 0 views

www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2905

1 appeals iso_iec jtc odf ooxml standards

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Sep 08 - Cached
  • State IT organisation representatives from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay have signed a declaration expressing their dissatisfaction with the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The countries signed the declaration at the CONSEGI conference in Brazil over the weekend in response to news that the ISO/IEC had rejected the appeals from South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela and India to the ISO process to adopt Microsoft’s OOXML format as an international standard.
Paul Merrell

Cover Pages: Open Web Foundation Formed to Support Community Specification Development. - 0 views

xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-09-22-a.html

community-driven standards open web foundation

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Sep 08 - Cached
  • The formation of the Open Web Foundation (OWF) was announced on July 24, 2008 at the OSCON 2008 Conference. OWF is "applying the open source model of seeing a common pain point and trying to patch the system by creating an 'organizational library' that makes it easier to go through a collaborative specification process and come out of it with clean IPR, leading to faster implementation and adoption.
  • According to the OWF web site: "The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. It is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification. The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts... The Open Web Foundation is made up of individuals who believe that the open web is built on technologies that are created in the open by a diversity of contributors, and which free to be used and improved upon without restriction."
Paul Merrell

tecosystems » What's a Document? - 0 views

redmonk.com/...whats-a-document

Redmonk terminology

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 08 - Cached
  • To be sure, we should not - must not - try to reframe the traditional definition of a document. For those mainstream folks that will make up the bulk of the user population for the foreseeable future, their definition of what a document is is set, and it would be folly to try and change this. But neither should we let that definition carry forward, tainting more capable formats with the legacy of its limited capabilities. No, we need a new definition or term, I believe. Something more accurately descriptive, and yet non-threatening. Database? Too intimidating, too misleading. Web page? Likewise. Container? I don’t love it.
Paul Merrell

Google Research Publication: BigTable - 0 views

labs.google.com/...bigtable.html

google bigtable database distributed storage

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Abstract Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.
Paul Merrell

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Not Turtles, AtomPub All the Way Down - 0 views

www.25hoursaday.com/...rtlesAtomPubAllTheWayDown.aspx

atom atompub livemesh livesync sql server

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 08 - Cached
  • I don't think the Atom publishing protocol can be considered the universal protocol for talking to remote databases given that cloud storage vendors like Amazon and database vendors like Oracle don't support it yet. That said, this is definitely a positive trend. Back in the RSS vs. Atom days I used to get frustrated that people were spending so much time reinventing the wheel with an RSS clone when the real gaping hole in the infrastructure was a standard editing protocol. It took a little longer than I expected (Sam Ruby started talking about in 2003) but the effort has succeeded way beyond my wildest dreams. All I wanted was a standard editing protocol for blogs and content management systems and we've gotten so much more.
  • Microsoft is using AtomPub as the interface to a wide breadth of services and products as George Moore points out in his post A Unified Standards-Based Protocols and Tooling Platform for Storage from Microsoft 
  • And a few weeks after George's post even more was revealed in posts such as this one about  FeedSync and Live Mesh where we find out Congratulations to the Live Mesh team, who announced their Live Mesh Technology Preview release earlier this evening! Amit Mital gives a detailed overview in this post on http://dev.live.com. You can read all about it in the usual places...so why do I mention it here? FeedSync is one of the core parts of the Live Mesh platform. One of the key values of Live Mesh is that your data flows to all of your devices. And rather than being hidden away in a single service, any properly authenticated user has full bidirectional sync capability. As I discussed in the Introduction to FeedSync, this really makes "your stuff yours". Okay, FeedSync isn't really AtomPub but it does use the Atom syndication format so I count that as a win for Atom+APP as well. As time goes on, I hope we'll see even more products and services that support Atom and AtomPub from Microsoft. Standardization at the protocol layer means we can move innovation up the stack.
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Matteo Spreafico

Advocacy Group Asks DOJ To Probe Google Search Results - 2 views

www.neurosoftware.ro/...christine-varney

google antitrust searchengine

shared by Matteo Spreafico on 25 Feb 10 - Cached
  • The nonprofit advocacy group said it sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, after news that the European Commission had received three complaints against Google alleging the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way.
  • "As part of your continued antitrust investigation we call on you to shine a light on Google’s black box, and require it to explain what’s behind search results," Simpson wrote.
  • "If, as it appears, Google is tweaking results to further its narrow agenda, this anticompetitive behavior must be stopped."
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Feb 10
     
    If the evidence supports the allegations, this is a plausible antitrust theory, a company with a dominant market position leveraging that position into new markets via integration. In essence this is the same theory as that applied against Microsoft's bundling and integration of Windows, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player.  
Paul Merrell

Official Google Docs Blog: Upload and store your files in the cloud with Google Docs - 2 views

googledocs.blogspot.com/...store-your-files-in-cloud.html

Google Google Docs online file storage

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Jan 10
     
    We're happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you'll be able to upload and access your files from any computer -- all you need is an Internet connection. Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email. Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs.
Paul Merrell

Firefox, YouTube and WebM ✩ Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog - 1 views

hacks.mozilla.org/...firefox-youtube-and-webm

Mozilla Firefox VP8 WebM youtube codecs H.264

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 10 - Cached
  • 1. Google will be releasing VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. VP8 is a high-quality video codec that Google acquired when they purchased the company On2. The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. 2. The VP8 codec will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container format to build a new standard for Open Video on the web called WebM. You can find out more about the project at its new site: http://www.webmproject.org/. 3. We will include support for WebM in Firefox. You can get super-early WebM builds of Firefox 4 pre-alpha today. WebM will also be included in Google Chrome and Opera. 4. Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting everything. 5. This is something that is supported by many partners, not just Google and others. Content providers like Brightcove have signed up to support WebM as part of a full HTML5 video solution. Hardware companies, encoding providers and other parts of the video stack are all part of the list of companies backing WebM. Even Adobe will be supporting WebM in Flash. Firefox, with its market share and principled leadership and YouTube, with its video reach are the most important partners in this solution, but we are only a small part of the larger ecosystem of video.
Paul Merrell

Antitrust Week Continues: EU Slams Intel With $1.45b Fine - Law Blog - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...-eu-slams-intel-with-145b-fine

intel antitrust DG Competition

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • Most likely, we grant you, it was coincidence. But we couldn’t help notice the timing: Two days after the DOJ’s new antitrust head, Christine Varney, publicly repudiates her predecessors by pledging to ramp up enforcement on so-called “single-firm” monopolistic behavior, the European Union takes a sledgehammer to Intel Corp., fining it $1.45 billion for alleged monopolistic activity. The fine is the largest ever assessed for monopoly abuse. Click here for the WSJ story, from Charles Forelle; here for the NYT story; here for the NYT story; here for the FT story; here for the Commission’s statement; here for Intel’s response.
    • Paul Merrell
      Paul Merrell on 13 May 09
       
      See my earlier Diigo bookmark quoting the DG Competition statement that it had coordinated with the U.S. Justice Dept. in its simultaneous and ongoing investigation of INtel.
  • John Pheasant, an antitrust practitioner at Hogan & Hartson in London and Brussels, told the Law Blog that some of the evidence does “not look very good for Intel,” adding that “if the facts are there, this type of conduct is more likely to be regarded as abusive if practiced by a dominant company. . . .”
  • On Varney’s statement from earlier this week, Kroes said the Justice Department’s stance gave her a “huge positive feeling. The more competition authorities joining us in our competition philosophy, the better it is.”
Paul Merrell

Rapid - Press Releases - EUROPA - 0 views

europa.eu/...pressReleasesAction.do

intel antitrust DG Competition

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • Did the Commission co-operate with the United States on this case? The Commission and the United States Federal Trade Commission have kept each other regularly and closely informed on the state of play of their respective Intel investigations. These discussions have been held in a co-operative and friendly atmosphere, and have been substantively fruitful in terms of sharing experiences on issues of common interest.
  • Where does the money go? Once final judgment has been delivered in any appeals before the Court of First Instance (CFI) and the Court of Justice, the money goes into the EU’s central budget, thus reducing the contributions that Member States pay to the EU. Does Intel have to pay the fine if it appeals to the European Court of First Instance (CFI)? Yes. In case of appeals to the CFI, it is normal practice that the fine is paid into a blocked bank account pending the final outcome of the appeals process. Any fine that is provisionally paid will produce interest based on the interest rate applied by the European Central Bank to its main refinancing operations. In exceptional circumstances, companies may be allowed to cover the amount of the fine by a bank guarantee at a higher interest rate. What percentage of Intel's turnover does the fine represent? The fine represents 4.15 % of Intel's turnover in 2008. This is less than half the allowable maximum, which is 10% of a company's annual turnover.
  • How long is the Decision? The Decision is 542 pages long. When is the Decision going to be published? The Decision in English (the official language version of the Decision) will be made available as soon as possible on DG Competition’s website (once relevant business secrets have been taken out). French and German translations will also be made available on DG Competition’s website in due course. A summary of the Decision will be published in the EU's Official Journal L series in all languages (once the translations are available).
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 09
Paul Merrell

Rapid - Press Releases - EUROPA - 0 views

europa.eu/...pressReleasesAction.do

Intel antitrust DG Competion

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • The Commission found that Intel engaged in two specific forms of illegal practice. First, Intel gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 CPUs from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it stock only computers with Intel x86 CPUs. Such rebates and payments effectively prevented customers - and ultimately consumers - from choosing alternative products. Second, Intel made direct payments to computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of specific products containing competitors’ x86 CPUs and to limit the sales channels available to these products.
  • Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel: Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer A from December 2002 to December 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing exclusively Intel CPUs Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer B from November 2002 to May 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing no less than 95% of its CPU needs for its business desktop computers from Intel (the remaining 5% that computer manufacturer B could purchase from rival chip maker AMD was then subject to further restrictive conditions set out below) Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer C from October 2002 to November 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing no less than 80% of its CPU needs for its desktop and notebook computers from Intel Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer D in 2007 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing its CPU needs for its notebook computers exclusively from Intel.
  • Furthermore, Intel made payments to major retailer Media Saturn Holding from October 2002 to December 2007 on condition that it exclusively sold Intel-based PCs in all countries in which Media Saturn Holding is active.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In its decision, the Commission does not object to rebates in themselves but to the conditions Intel attached to those rebates.
  • Intel structured its pricing policy to ensure that a computer manufacturer which opted to buy AMD CPUs for that part of its needs that was open to competition would consequently lose the rebate (or a large part of it) that Intel provided for the much greater part of its needs for which the computer manufacturer had no choice but to buy from Intel. The computer manufacturer would therefore have to pay Intel a higher price for each of the units supplied for which the computer manufacturer had no alternative but to buy from Intel. In other words, should a computer manufacturer fail to purchase virtually all its x86 CPU requirements from Intel, it would forego the possibility of obtaining a significant rebate on any of its very high volumes of Intel purchases. Moreover, in order to be able to compete with the Intel rebates, for the part of the computer manufacturers' supplies that was up for grabs, a competitor that was just as efficient as Intel would have had to offer a price for its CPUs lower than its costs of producing those CPUs, even if the average price of its CPUs was lower than that of Intel.
  • For example, rival chip manufacturer AMD offered one million free CPUs to one particular computer manufacturer. If the computer manufacturer had accepted all of these, it would have lost Intel's rebate on its many millions of remaining CPU purchases, and would have been worse off overall simply for having accepted this highly competitive offer. In the end, the computer manufacturer took only 160,000 CPUs for free.
  • Intel also interfered directly in the relations between computer manufacturers and AMD. Intel awarded computer manufacturers payments - unrelated to any particular purchases from Intel - on condition that these computer manufacturers postponed or cancelled the launch of specific AMD-based products and/or put restrictions on the distribution of specific AMD-based products. The Commission found that these payments had the potential effect of preventing products for which there was a consumer demand from coming to the market. The Commission found the following specific cases: For the 5% of computer manufacturer B’s business that was not subject to the conditional rebate outlined above, Intel made further payments to computer manufacturer B provided that this manufacturer : sold AMD-based business desktops only to small and medium enterprises sold AMD-based business desktops only via direct distribution channels (as opposed to through distributors) and postponed the launch of its first AMD-based business desktop in Europe by 6 months. Intel made payments to computer manufacturer E provided that this manufacturer postponed the launch of an AMD-based notebook from September 2003 to January 2004. Before the conditional rebate to computer manufacturer D outlined above, Intel made payments to this manufacturer provided that it postponed the launch of AMD-based notebooks from September 2006 to the end of 2006.
  • The Commission obtained proof of the existence of many of the conditions found to be illegal in the antitrust decision even though they were not made explicit in Intel’s contracts. Such proof is based on a broad range of contemporaneous evidence such as e-mails obtained inter alia from unannounced on-site inspections, in responses to formal requests for information and in a number of formal statements made to the Commission by the other companies concerned. In addition, there is evidence that Intel had sought to conceal the conditions associated with its payments.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 09
     
    This is an uncharacteristically strong press release from DG Competition. I still must read the order, but the description of the evidence is incredible, particularly the finding of concealment of its rebate conditions by Intel.
Paul Merrell

Rapid - Press Releases - EUROPA - 0 views

europa.eu/...pressReleasesAction.do

Intel antitrust dg competition

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • The Commission has found that Intel excluded its competitor in two ways: through illegal loyalty rebates by paying manufacturers and retailers to restrict the commercialisation of competitors' products.These illegal actions were designed to preserve Intel's market share at a time when their only significant rival - AMD - was a growing threat to Intel's position. This threat was widely recognised by both computer manufacturers and in Intel's own internal documents seen by the Commission. The computer manufacturers involved are Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC. The retailer involved is Media Saturn Holdings, the parent company of Media Markt.
  • Naturally, the Commission favours strong, vigorous price competition, including by dominant firms. However, Intel went beyond normal price competition by giving rebates to computer manufacturers on the condition that they bought all, or almost all, of their CPUs from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer – Media Markt - on the condition that it stocked only computers with Intel CPUs.
  • Just to give you one example: in one case, a computer manufacturer took up only a small part of an offer by AMD of free CPUs because acceptance of all the free CPUs offered would have led that computer manufacturer to breach the conditions of its agreement with Intel and to lose rebates on all its much more numerous Intel purchases.
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  • Intel made direct payments to computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of products using their rival's chips, and to limit their distribution once available. The Commission has specific, documented examples, of Intel paying other manufacturers to, for example, delay the launch of an AMD-based PC by six months, and to restrict the sales of AMD-based products to certain customers.
  • The Commission Decision contains evidence that Intel went to great lengths to cover-up many of its anti-competitive actions. Many of the conditions mentioned above were not to be found in Intel’s official contracts. However, the Commission was able to gather a broad range of evidence demonstrating Intel's illegal conduct through statements from companies, on-site inspections, and formal requests for information.
  • Finally, I would like to draw your attention to Intel's latest global advertising campaign which proposes Intel as the "Sponsors of Tomorrow." Their website invites visitors to add their 'vision of tomorrow'. Well, I can give my vision of tomorrow for Intel here and now: "obey the law".
Paul Merrell

Microsoft offers free repository for agency data -- Government Computer News - 0 views

gcn.com/...ft-public-data-repository.aspx

Microsoft Amazon cloud computing marketing

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 09 - Cached
  • Microsoft has set up a repository in which government agencies may upload and store their public-facing datasets so that they can be reused by other parties. Agency developers can upload their data to this repository, called the Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), through Microsoft's Azure, the company's cloud-computing offering.
  • Since taking the role of federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra has urged agencies to make more of their data open to the public in easy-to-use formats. To this end, the General Services Administration, on behalf of Kundra, is setting up a repository of government feeds, to be called Data.gov. Data.gov will both serve as a repository for data and as an index for government data located elsewhere, Kundra told GCN. OGDI came about as a way to introduce Azure to the federal information technology community, said Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal chief technology officer. "The government wants to store all this data, what with Kundra talking about Data.gov. We asked if you were to use Azure as data source, [what would you need to do]?"
  • In addition to Microsoft's effort, at least one other company has volunteered to rehost government data for wider use. Amazon is offering to store public-domain datasets for users of its Elastic Compute Cloud service.
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