Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
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DISCUSSION

FW: <hopper-ex> Re: IE for the Mac no longer under development


The below is from another discussion of the thread 'IE for the Mac no longer under development',
on the hopper-ex Director list. We skip the opening of the thread and proceed into the relation
between the NASDAQ crash and MSFT stock crash and the DOJ action and decision.

t.whid and my correspondant below both believe the bushies will not kick the MSFT bush. probably
the prognostication is correct. but should Microsoft be allowed now to proceed against the
decision concerning OS integrated browsers being unfair competition? slippery slippery.

ja

-----Original Message-----
From: hopper-ex@moshplant.com [mailto:hopper-ex@moshplant.com]On Behalf
Of Jim Andrews
Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 11:26 PM
To: Multiple recipients of hopper-ex
Subject: <hopper-ex> Re: IE for the Mac no longer under development

> > Beginning of MSFT crash: JANUARY 2000
> > Beginning of NASDAQ crash: MARCH 2000
> > DOJ Decision: JUNE 2000
> > USA Election date: NOVEMBER 7, 2000
>
> > NASDAQ in five year view: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^IXIC&d=c&t=5y&l=on&z=b&q=l
> >
> > The NASDAQ fall begins around March 2000 and ain't even down to the bottom by
> > the time of the election
> > in November.
>
> Well! I sit corrected. Thanks for the link and the lesson in
> self-revised history. Sucks to have it shown so clearly that I suffer
> from selective recollection and/or wholesale remanufacturing of the
> past to suit a present emotional sense. (Because I like to think better
> of myself, not because you've been proved right.) Sigh. I guess I need
> to go back to Vulcan for a while to get some brush-up courses!

What the above graph shows is that NASDAQ peaks in March
2000 and a sharp descent occurs--the first one for a long time after a strong rise over several
years. Check out the 25 year view of NASDAQ at
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^IXIC&d=c&kA&a=v&p=s&t=my&l=on&z=m&q=l .

The DOJ decision came after the fall by at least two months. You recall, though, how in March
came the first realizations that Microsoft might well lose and in a big way. There was talk at
that point of breaking Microsoft up like AT&T was split up. It was not a large probability, but
it did loom among the possibilities rather newsworthy and was widely speculated.

Why did the stocks crash? Part of the problem was the valuation of companies like Yahoo with
General Motors. But another part was the realization that Microsoft's fortunes were critical to
many another company's fortune if only because of how MSFT stock prices had been steady Eddy up
and up. No company was more solid in its stock in IT since, oh, big blue IBM before it, say.
Microsoft claimed the DOJ was stifling innovation; the DOJ
claimed that they were, instead, regulating monopoly. The hope of the DOJ had been that the
economy would thrive via breakup of such important monopoly as that of the desktop in a world
where the Net and the desktop become intermingled, intertwined. Instead, the drop in the
Microsoft stock price (check out the five year view of Microsoft at
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=MSFT&d=c&t=5y&l=on&z=b&q=l drops sharply in March and April--and
even before that, in January 2000), is typical of what followed for many other companies.
Compare the two graphs in their five year views. The Microsoft fall slightly predates the NASDAQ
fall and has more
valiant recoveries and dramatic declines. They were among the first to suffer in a big way in
their stock price.

Microsoft was shown not to be as solid as a rock in the stock market and to be feuding
unproductively with even the judge (who later blundered irrecoverably and exposed real bias).

Also, 'the five year thing' caught up with ecommerce companies. And this is independent of the
DOJ situation, for the most part, a bad coincidence of timing. If the DOJ action had been close
to the time IE 4 came out in 97, perhaps the market would have weathered the storm in a more
resilient manner. Look at this cnet.com article/poll--at
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-203897.html?legacy=cnet --that discusses the issue of Microsoft
OS-browser integration from *1997* when IE 4 came out. People did not favor it then in its first
incarnation, IE 4. If it had been dealt with in 97, dot.com wouldn't have been at the end of its
five year speculation period. But presumably that could not have happened easily at that time.

Generally, in business, you get
five years to make it or break it. A salable, financially profitable line of products has to be
in place and making money by that time, often, or the company is deemed to be toast by investors
who can no longer justify their investment that, originally, had been future-looking over
basically a five year plan. Sometimes longer. Sometimes shorter. But profitability of the
business must be in the cards unless it is a non-profit organization and, even then, some sort
of sustainable economy of production has to be in place. From 1995 till 2000 was the five year
dot.com speculation period.

The art one has been poorer and longer and somewhat more abstract, less dependent on venture
capital and even relating to the institutions and their often fair-weather support of net.art.

Who got the goods baby?

The artists do.

Back to the past though: many ecommerce businesses were burning capital with no good products or
services in sight when the new millenium dawned, yawned and sneered at dot.commery.

And I'm sure there were other factors. In any case, I suspect we agree that these factors were
more decisive in the NASDAQ crash than the mere fact of the DOJ MSFT action--that had been
ongoing for some time--and in fact the
beginnings of the MSFT and then the NASDAQ fall happened before the DOJ decision--in response
not only to federal heat but also in reaction to the generally precarious position of the net
economy and its exorbitant capital valuations.

Microsoft should not be immune to monopoly laws. Nor should Apple. Or Linux. Microsoft will
argue that this is the proper competition concerning browser competition: competition among
operating systems, not among non-OS companies. Because the OS that is isolated to the desktop is
the OS that does not invite the Net into the desktop and is, therefore, not the computing and
information source the desktop could be.

Or they will argue that desktop access to the net can have private significance also via the
Active Desktop, the startup tray, and so on.

> > > BTW, Jim, what's the URL for your site again? A question came up a
> > > while back on another list about beautiful Shockwave sites and I
> > > thought of yours,

> > http://vispo.com
>
> Very good. I'll pass it along. The question came up on Dirgames-L, BTW.

Thanks. I'm currently working on Windows for Shockwave 4.0. I've finished an article
about 3.0 for DOUG, in the DOUG queue somewhere. It's an overview of WFS 3.0 with a last section
about 4.0.

I've been forsaking the art for the dev work into WFS 4.0. But I want 4.0 for my art. 4.0 will
support dynamic creation/destruction of sprites and multi-sprites at run-time. Via a channel
manager that doles out channels free among the last channels in which dragndrop sprites never
reside. Writing managers of this sort is a relatively easy manager to write. It's the sprite and
multi-sprite creation/destruction handlers and the dynamic behavior attachers/detachers that
will be new in 4.0.

In authoring tools/languages such as C++, Delphi, Visual Basic, etc, there is no Score
(timeline) and development proceeds basically window-by-window, or menu-by-menu. The resulting
applications are, conceptually, one-frame movies in which objects are dynamically created and
destroyed. WFS 3.0 supports the "window-by-window" and/or "menu-by-menu" part of the above. WFS
4.0 will support the "dynamically created and destroyed" part.

In a new piece I will continue working on after WFS 4.0, there will be some featureful
interactive audio interfaces via dynamic windowing of multi-sprites. That is where I am going
with WFS.

this is at the 'application level', not really the 'desktop level'. Like Sound Forge etc., only
online via Shockwave.

but it's a long way to the shop if you want a software sausage roll.

Not at the desktop level but toward a different kind of integration: art and windowed, dyamic
applications.

I am against the forces of dullness and monopoly. But I am way for mind-blowing features that
transform the mind and experience, transform the desktop into strong net integration. but in
certain ways. not necessarily as microsoft would have it. more open. the feds can't just back
off. they need to be concerned about this recent development where Microsoft and Apple attempt
together to turn the browser into an OS-specific application. Not necessarily putting the kibosh
on it, but keeping the possibility of other browsers--perhaps not OS-integrated, perhaps
OS-integrated, as a possibility. That'd be their job to figure out what serves the societies of
the world best, not Microsoft and Apple. I think as long as they continue to support various
protocols that *are* supportable in other browsers, they will get their deeper browser-OS
integration.

or, as you say, the bushies may just walk away.

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: Mac IE is dead part 2


> i thought that IE 5/Mac was compliant with the standard DOM. it was ns4
> which had it all f'd up with the friggin' layer property.
>
> no?

only one of my dhtml works (the first one) works on any mac browsers. one of the articles you
provided mentions problems with the DOM in IE for the Mac.

> > but it runs shockwave ok.
> >
> > which is one of the reasons i switched from creating dhtml work to
> > shockwave work.
>
> them plugins certainly make it easier to do sites that net artists
> would like to do, meaning more control over the final product which
> many times is more interested in interesting visuals than in standards
> compliance, machine readability, etc.
>
> >
> > "Ho says that the decision has been made to make way for Apple's own
> > Safari browser. 'Some of
> > the key customer requests for web browsing on the Mac require close
> > development between the
> > browser and the OS, something to which only Apple has access,' she
> > explained."
>
> on some other forums regarding this issue some folks pointed out that
> this is an admission of guilt by MS. If they can't compete with the
> developer of the OS than how can anyone compete with them on their OS?

possibly. or you could read it this way: microsoft and apple agree that some browsers need to
support features that can only be supported via integration with the OS.

now what are those features? perhaps you're right and it's an empy argument designed to squash
competition, nothing else. but we haven't heard the argument, or at least i haven't. so it's
hard to judge.

would such browsers be superior to the competition to the point where they kill the competition?

if they are significantly superior in terms of the features they support, then that means that
the features achievable via OS integration *are* significant.

if OS-integrated browsers are not, in theory, significantly superior in terms of the features
they support, then that means they are (more or less) just a means of squashing competition, as
you say.

> their arg during the browser war was that Netscape had a fair playing
> field on which to compete against MS's own browser. now we see them,
> thru Ho, admitting that it's impossible to compete when someone
> controls the playing field and you don't. of course the Bushies aren't
> gonna do a damn thing about it.

no, they won't want to rock the economic boat like it rocked last time. mind you, the stock
market was ready for that blasted 'adjustment' (crash!).

ja

> >> this editorial on zeldman.com covers the pertinent points regarding
> >> this development and what it may mean for people producing things for
> >> the web:
> >>
> >> http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0603a.shtml#rip
> >
> > http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/
> > news_story.php?idC191

.

DISCUSSION

Re: Mac IE is dead part 2


thanks, t.whid.

'I don

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: fresh air & real soul...


that's well said, t.whid.

when i viewed Jess's piece, i got quite a few chuckles out of it. it is an amusing piece. and
jess knows this, to judge from her intro. and it is fresh and has soul. that this is somewhat
unusual is unfortunate. and it might earn an interesting place in discussions of the
presence/absence of the hand in digital art for the Web.

to be more ambitious is itself becoming a little bit preposterous. but then art is
preposterously improbable. what makes art so improbable in a particular place or environment is
part of the edge of what makes it possible, in going beyond the impediments to it.

>why has it been that ever since 9/11 I've felt like I've been living in a bad dystopian sci-fi
novel?

hang in there, t.whid. if it's bad enough, it'll have a happy ending.

you might bring back bill and monica or something.

art dystopia is when nothing but sunday painting is possible and joy, emotion and pain are
simply technologically unreachable or merely inappropriate.

one of your country's dudes, walt whitman, said that "great poetry demands a great audience."
that they arise together, can't exist without one another. a great audience not necessarily
being one that claps loud, but one for whom there is something important at stake in the art. an
audience that won't live without it, demands it, must have it, settles for nothing less. and
gets it.

so i'd say the discussion is healthy.

what do you think, jess?

ja

DISCUSSION

spam spew and spies


spam spew and spies:
(OS)ama cgi-bin laden

ja