Microsoft Corp. asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to shelve a lower court order that would force it to start incorporating Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language in its Windows operating system.
The world's largest software company filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. seeking a stay of the Java "must-carry" order until the court considers its challenge of the order. In the motion, Microsoft's lawyers asked for an expedited hearing of the lower-court ruling, which they called "extreme and unprecedented."
"The injunction will inflict serious harm on Microsoft and Windows, Microsoft's flagship product, that is distributed to many millions of customers throughout the world," Microsoft told the appeals court.
Microsoft is hoping to overturn an order issued on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore that requires Microsoft to begin putting Sun's Java into Windows within 120 days after the order is entered. Motz said in an opinion issued Dec. 23 that the Java "must-carry" order was needed to remedy Microsoft's past antitrust violations and level the playing field between Java and Microsoft's .NET Web services software.
Motz said there was a "substantial" likelihood that after a full trial he would impose the order permanently, calling it "an elegantly simple remedy" aimed at preventing Microsoft's past wrongs from giving it an advantage in the market battle for Internet-based computing.
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News source: CNN Money
The world's largest software company filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va. seeking a stay of the Java "must-carry" order until the court considers its challenge of the order. In the motion, Microsoft's lawyers asked for an expedited hearing of the lower-court ruling, which they called "extreme and unprecedented."
"The injunction will inflict serious harm on Microsoft and Windows, Microsoft's flagship product, that is distributed to many millions of customers throughout the world," Microsoft told the appeals court.
Microsoft is hoping to overturn an order issued on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore that requires Microsoft to begin putting Sun's Java into Windows within 120 days after the order is entered. Motz said in an opinion issued Dec. 23 that the Java "must-carry" order was needed to remedy Microsoft's past antitrust violations and level the playing field between Java and Microsoft's .NET Web services software.
Motz said there was a "substantial" likelihood that after a full trial he would impose the order permanently, calling it "an elegantly simple remedy" aimed at preventing Microsoft's past wrongs from giving it an advantage in the market battle for Internet-based computing.
View: Full Article News source: CNN Money
Integrated Bluetooth is also a fairly safe bet - after all it shouldn't be too expensive or difficult to implement. FireWire 800 is an entirely different matter, as even Apple themselves decided to leave it out of the new 12" PowerBook. I think that at most we could see it on the very top of the line iMac model - which I still think will retain a 17" screen, for price and balance concerns, as a 19" screen would push the iMac well over $2,000.
The iLamp iMac is 13 months old, and sorely needs a huge revamp of its motherboard, GPU and CPU. It seems that Apple is finally jumping on the DDR wagon, and it'd certainly be nice if they implemented it on the whole consumer desktop lineup - thus leaving only the iBook and the aging 15" PowerBook to still use PC-100 and PC-133 SDRAM memory respectively.
My biggest concerns though are related to the GPUs these machines will use. Except for the 17-inch iMac - which comes with a GeForce 4 MX--they all currently sport very pitiful GeForce 2 MX video cards, all of them are equipped with only 32MB of DDR video memory. My hope is for the new machines to come equipped with 64MB ATI Radeon 9000 chips, but given Apple's recent (bad) choice for the PowerBooks this seems quite unlikely. Hope dies hard though.
To be fair with their customers, Apple should compensate the painfully slow CPU performance with great peripherals, accessories and bundles - like including an Airport Extreme card across the whole lineup, for example - but I'm only dreaming about such a thing.
Given the processor speeds at which the new PowerBooks were introduced I don't see anything dramatically new from Motorola, and if this is true we can expect the models to top out at 1GHz at most. Which is certainly fairly pitiful, but less pitiful than the current configurations.
It'll really be a very long and painful wait until the 64-bit PowerPC 970 arrives...
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