Microsquishie

So, Microsoft and the DOJ finally reached a settlement, which does nothing. So far as I can tell, this is no more than the Consent Decree which Microsoft agreed to in 1994 and violated numerous times over the subsequent years.

Now, the new settlement says that MS will stop doing bad things, and the Department of Justice will keep an eye on them for five years. After five years, if the DOJ determines that MS is still a naughty monopolist, they'll extend the monitoring another two years.

You will play well with others, or we will taunt you a third time!

Your tax dollars at work (well, except you Canucks).

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Update: Apparently the state prosecutors are not willing to give Microsoft the leeway that the federal government is. According to this article, the settlement is unpalatable to the states, which are showing a lot more sense than the DoJ, in my opinion. Why trust MS now, when they have broken decrees in the past with such impunity?

Hmmm

Although I rarely read my friends' pages directly, relying on the wonder of the Friends Page instead, I notice some things when I peruse new potential "friends" on LJ.

Here's one: if you go to peppergurl's journal using Netscape or MSIE, it looks just fine. If you go there with Opera, you get black text on a dark blue background, rendering the text invisible. My quest: discover the source of this discrepency. And, thanks to the wonder of the CSS Validator over at the WWW Consortium, I have. Apparently, the wonderful Klee has mistyped a color in her setup, rendering "C02768" as "CO2768" instead. While this is an illegal color, I'm amazed at the ability of the two mainstream browsers to actually display the desired (amazingly bright) pink shade without error. Things that make you go hmmm...