About one year ago, federal juries in San Diego made Microsoft pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing on two MP3 audio patents with its Windows Media Player, this being the largest patent ruling in history. Now, the European Comission broke the European record, slapping Microsoft with another huge antitrust fine...


Back in March 2004, the European Comission ruled that Microsoft must hand server information to its competitors, because they were extending their monopoly in the workgroup server market by not giving away information to allow rivals to offer product integration. The fine Microsoft got today came as a consequence of this fact - according to the Comission, they were still charging unreasonable amounts to grant access to the server information, until October 2007.

According to Neelie Kroes, competition comissioner "Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision. I hope that today's decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft's record of non-compliance."

Did I forget to mention something? Oh, the amount... Here you go - 899 million euros, or simply $1.3 billion. Even considering Microsoft's huge revenue, I guess this isn't quite easy to handle, but I am sure they'll survive, as they always do...

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IBM's "System z10" mainframe computer offers a solid performance improvement over previous models, while reducing power, space and cooling costs. As an example, it's enough to say that a single such system can go head to head with almost 1,500 distributed servers, while being 85 percent smaller and using 85 percent less energy, thus lowering running costs. OK, so this is the hardware part, but what about the software for this monster?


Today, IBM announced software products for turning Cobol programs into Web services, as well as enabling access to mainframe application through mobile devices, and the new software package serves as an extension to the "Mainframe Simplification" investment, dating back in 2006.

The new IBM Rational Business Developer allows shorter development cycles, as developers don't have to be used with the middleware of technologies lying below the platform they're using, and comes with a lot of companions, such as IBM Rational Transformation Workbench, IBM Enterprise Cobol for z/OS 4.1, IBM Enterprise PL/I for z/OS v3.7, and Software Configuration and Library Manager Advanced Edition for z/OS V1.2.

Other than the above, you can also grab System z Sandbox or System z Starter Packs, which include training, workshops, as well as a 90-day trial period.

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Online advertising is an industry that keeps growing with each year, but there are a lot of things that can be done better, and one of the most important of them is measuring the impact an online ad has on those that view it, apart from other things. The alternative, of course, is to simply count hop many times a unit is displayed, and how many clicks it generates. But...how did Microsoft got here?


"Microsoft Corp. today announced Engagement Mapping, a new approach to managing and measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns that goes beyond the current “last ad clicked” standard. For the last decade, virtually all ad campaign reporting methodologies associate sales, leads and Web traffic simply to the last click or ad exposure. Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale."

The above is what Microsoft's press release says, but it should be noted that everything started back in May 2007, when aQuantive was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion. What's the link between that event and Microsoft's Engagement ROI, the new online campaign reporting and optimization solution?

Well, it's all about Atlas, a smaller company owned by aQuantive, because they were developing the Media Console software, now a part of the Engagement ROI!

Because we'll talk about this subject a lot in the future, I'll leave other details for a later time, because the beta starts officially with the 2008 Spring, on March 1st, and results are expected to pop up before the end of the first half of the year.

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Today, we arrive to the final destination of our web compliance mini-series, and the topic is Firefox, or Mozilla's Gecko engine, to be more accurate. Since Mozilla or Firefox don't need any additional presentation, let's get right into battle, so we can draw the conclusions at the end, shall we?


As you can see above, Firefox failed the old Acid2 test, to my amazement. On this field, it seems Opera is the leader, being the only browser in my little test to pass this old HTML/CSS compliance test!

Just as a side note, be aware that Safari 2.02 also managed to pass this test, being also the first one to do that, back on the 31st of October, 2005. I didn't include the Windows version in my tests, simply because its market share is tiny at this time, and I didn't have a Mac at my disposal to try the one built for Mac OS X...


Next, in the Acid3 test, Mozilla's Gecko engine got a slightly better result than Opera, reaching 50/100. Anyway, there's still a looong way until full compliance is reached...

Testing with other browsers that use the Gecko engine, such as Flock or K-Ninja, didn't bring any surprises, because the results were exactly the same as those in Firefox, so let's move on and draw the conclusions, shall we?

When talking about the older Acid2 test, only Opera managed to display the correct image. Internet Explorer 7 and browsers that use its rendering engine displayed simply a mess, while Firefox 2 got almost there, but didn't manage to pull it off and display an accurate test image.

At last, the Acid3 test was a very tough one for all three main rendering engines that rule the browsers market, the final score being 12(Trident/Internet Explorer) - 46(Presto/Opera) - 50(Gecko/Firefox), and since Trident is only compatible with Windows, at this time, while Presto and Gecko are working well on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD and Unix, Internet Explorer may just go down the drain, if Microsoft doesn't do something about it!

Finally, just remember to subscribe to our RSS feed, because we'll have such series in the future too, so best way to find out about them in time is to receive our news in your email. Of course, you can be sure we won't give away your address to any third parties, or send you any spam messages!

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Opera is a very capable browser, despite its small market share. Probably the fact that, for a pretty long time, it was a commercial product, contributed to this, but I don't care about the market share this browser has. All I am interested in is the fact that it uses its own rendering engine, and the fact that some sites have problems displaying on this is not because Opera doesn't comply with standards, but because those sites were "built for IE". Now, let's see how well does Opera comply with the standards...


As you can see above, the score in Acid3 is pretty high, when looking back at Internet Explorer. It seems Opera 9.50 Beta has a score that's even better, but I won't get into it now. I didn't try that version yet, because I really want to be shocked by how good is going to be the next Opera version, without going through any Beta until the final version is released!


At last, it should be noted that Opera has been passing the Acid2 test since version 9.0, released on the 20th of June, 2006. Above, you can see the Acid2 page as displayed by my Opera 9.25 browser...

These being said, prepare to face Mozilla's rendering engine tomorrow, in the last episode of this short article series about the main layout engines and their compatibility with existing Web standards...

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