News: Did the states make a fatal flub?
On Thursday, lawyers representing the nine litigating states and the District of Columbia canceled a May 15 XP Embedded demonstration after being reprimanded by the judge. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly--under pressure to resolve the case on schedule--said the states' legal team had failed to give the court proper notice about the scope of the demonstration and the amount of information Microsoft would have to sift through to respond to it.

The demonstration could have resolved two issues for Kollar-Kotelly: whether Microsoft could develop a "modular" version of the operating system without so-called middleware, such as the software giant's Internet Explorer browser and Windows Media Player, and whether Windows XP Embedded could be used as the basis for a custom version of XP that would run without any serious loss of performance.

But even without the demonstration, "the judge has plenty of testimony on all sides of the debate," said Rich Gray, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based lawyer closely following the trial. "She has the cake already. The demo would have been the icing on it.

"She really wanted to see Windows XP Embedded, and she really wanted it in the record," Gray continued. "But she's trying to keep a clean record, and she's clearly ticked off at the states for putting her in a position where it's difficult to do that."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-912212.html