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I'm using a Microsoft Trackball Explorer 1.0 PS2/USB optical trackball right now. The big red marble pops out of the frame and you can throw it around the office.
The coolest thing about it is when I turn the lights in my office off - The ring around the ball glows, making the transparent red shell of the ball glow slightly - looks like I have the eye of sauron on my desk.

go here for a review of the thing, with pics and all. I love mine. Keeps the shoulder from burining after a long day of waving a mouse around (bad shoulder, motorcycle accident)

Actual quotes by Windows advocates:

"Its quite refreshing to know that the USA saved Europe all by itself....history is a wonderful thing ;)"

My favorite MS fanzine Activewin.com
has another debate about the same issue here

Besides which, would it even be possible to attack a hub, assuming it was as you say basically a passive bit of hardware; your average hub, i believe, is just a transparent component in most networks. Can they even be assigned IP addresses? I don't know how they are addressed but they would have to be in some way to be able to participate as a unit in the network i think.

Wow. I must've stumbled onto Activewin by mistake. Must be that damn DNS attack....

BTW, an unmanaged hub is nothing more than an electrical device. It propagates electrical signals (packets) to the various ports. A managed hub (which are usually switches-similar to hubs, but not quite the same.) does indeed get an IP address, though it doesn't need one to act as a dumb hub (or switch).

It's usually instructive in situations like this to consider the historical context of the issues. Here's the original 'Open Letter' from Bill Gates to the hobbyist community

The background here is that a lot of people pirated Bill's Altair BASIC program, and Bill wanted to know where good software was going to come from if people didn't get paid for it.

It may not have been legal or ethical for hobbyists to pirate Altair BASIC back in 1976, but very soon thereafter, Free Software gave us an answer and an alternative: share the source, and the software grows even in the absence of monetary incentive. It is immune to the type of 'theft' that Bill was whining about. 26 years later, we have seen that Free Software isn't just surviving, it's thriving.

Now, along comes GotDotNet, which looks suspiciously like an emulation of Open Source practices... except that the AUP includes a few serious distinctions. One is the assignment of certain important rights to Microsoft that basically let them do whatever the hell they please with the sweat of your brow. Here's a quote of (what looks like) the original license from the discussion at Activewin.com: (Link to the full thread)

By posting Your Stuff, You grant to Microsoft, under all of Your intellectual property and proprietary rights the following worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, fully paid up rights: (1) to make, use, copy, modify and create derivative works of Your Stuff; (2) to publicly perform or display, import, broadcast, transmit, distribute, license, offer to sell, and sell, rent, lease, and lend copies of Your Stuff (and derivative works thereof); (3) to sublicense to third parties, including the right to sublicense to further third parties; and (ii) You agree You won't commence any legal action against Microsoft or any Participant or Visitor for exercising any of these rights.

Second, You also agree that You will not use the Workspace for any commercial purposes whatsoever. And last but not least, You agree that Microsoft may remove at any time, without notice, the Workspace or any posting to it.

Note the specific lack of compensation for the original programmer (unless you consider the use of GDN itself to be sufficient recompense, but I'm pretty damn sure that GDN isn't going to be buying your groceries and paying the rent). One must ask - if nobody pays the users of GDN, where will the good software come from? Nothing about GDN sounds like hiring programmers to 'flood the hobby market with good software'. It sounds ripping off the community to serve MS's shareholders (eg, Bill).

So what's the point?

I propose that the fundamental corporate culture of Microsoft embodies Gate's attitude as reflected in the 1976 'Open Letter'. This culture is allergic to piracy, because a consumerist revenue cycle is necessary to improve the software.

The Free Software movement has thoroughly refuted Gate's thesis, by making itself independant of the revenue cycle (and therefore is not harmed by 'piracy' as it is usually understood).

Microsoft's obsolete culture cannot change to adopt Free Software practices - the assumptions that Free Software threaten are the very core of their business. If the company were rebuilt from the ground up on Free principles, the entire culture would have to change - essentially resulting in a totally different company that happens to have the same name.

Since Microsoft cannot adopt free software practices, Microsoft can only regard Free Software as a competing producer of software, taking market share away from them, and therefore, a deadly threat.

Since Microsoft itself regards Free Software as a threat, it seems to follow that nobody else who depends on revenue streams to survive, would ever want to use a system that resembles a Free Software ecology (like GDN), as they would deprive the producer of that stream.

Producers of free software should similarly be suspicious of a system governed by a legal agreement written by someone who considers them to be a deadly enemy.

Therefore, Microsoft's own pseudo-Free intiatives (such as GotDotNet, the Shared Source license, and the Software Choice initiative) are probably (a) Shams that will perpetuate Microsoft's revenue stream at the expense of the rights of members of the community, and/or (b) exceedingly stupid mistakes on Microsoft's part.

In the absence of further evidence (especially since GDN is slashdotted and I can't read the text of the new license), it is impossible to tell to which degree GDN (or any other pseudo-Free effort by Microsoft) will be (a) or (b). In either case, it seems imprudent for users or programmers - whether they produce in open or closed software - to place their trust in these intiatives.

I wonder, as an aside, if Bill himself ever paid anything to the original inventors of BASIC, a pair of researchers at Dartmouth University. So I wonder if Bill's logic reflexively implies that he stole BASIC from Kemeny and Kurtz. Gee. Where will the good ideas come from? Oh, wait academia has been going as a not-for-profit institution for centuries. You may have heard of some of their other 'products' - the theory of universal gravitation, electricty, the rabies vaccine...

Wow is this old news day, or what?

This controversy erupted nearly a month ago.

A number of us in the Windows community balked at the initial licensing. The lead developer of the GotDotNet workspaces actually joined into the conversation trying to defend the team's lawyers. It appears that the initial licensing was written with a heavy emphasis on CYA, without much thought to whether or not people would agree to it.

Microsoft listened to our arguments, and adjusted the licensing to be friendlier within a day or two. I still think it's rather ridiculous language but it is similar to that found at sourceforge.net and even such places as yahoo, etc. Why lawyers feel they need permission to redistribute stuff that you obviously uploaded with the intent of redistributing is beyond my ability to rationalize.

Anyway, I'm surprised it's taken this long for this to hit /., usually anti-MS news is posted quickly, and the good stuff, like the release of Visual Studio .NET, is ignored.

#2 By sodatwit (6 Posts) at 9/25/2002 5:29:18 AM
This comment has been removed due to a violation of the Active Network Terms of Use.

When their editors mod you down, they mod you all the way down.

Even closer than you think:

From ActiveWin.com:
-------------
#24 By cschweda
I installed Linux for a friend last week and Slashdot posted it as a headline.

Then a bunch of 14 year old zealots posted 345 comments about how (a) Windows sucked, (b) linux didn't, (c) CmdrTaco misspelled a word in the headline, (d) JonKatz sucked, (e) no he doesn't, you suck, (f) Natalie Portman is one hunka svelt flesh, (g) a beowulf cluster would be cool a thing to do, (h) Slashdot isn't like how it was in the old days, (i) yes, it is, STFU.
--------------

Kinds of says it all doesn't it?

Sorry for the slower site last night, we got a little over-run because we managed to get a lot of Xbox screenshots before any other sites last night and thus about ten big name sites were linking too us. (emphasis mine)

Amazing! They even make grammatical errors in the editorials, just like Slashdot!

Try: ActiveWin.com

Vote for Windows in this poll!!!

Vote for Windows in this poll!

Why wouldn't Microsoft just write an XBOX->DX8 wrapper?

No need, the graphics API on the XBox is DirectX.

See

• http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0003/14.xbox.s html
• http://www.digit-life.com/articles/xbox/
• http://www.activewin.com/faq/x-box.shtml

As an added bonus the networking APIs are the same DirectPlay APIs on the PC.

you still don't understand that by embedding links
in my content and making them indistinguishable from the links i placed there
myself, this feature alters the context of my piece of work and therefore
violates my copyright. the only way they'll get away with this is that - people
have to choose to turn it on, or be duped into turning it on.

They are not "indistinguishable". They look VERY different from a normal
link. A normal link you click on and it takes you somewhere. A Smart
Tag pops a "Info" tooltip above the word when you hover over it, which you have
to click on to access a menu of things that the current set of enabled filters
provided about that word. Check out a
screen shot.

let's look at this objectively. a holocaust webpage where ever occurence of
"Hitler" turns into a Smart Tag link to purchase Mein Kampf?

If a user installs a Nazi smart tag filter then that's exactly what they
get. Let's also see that a web page run by Nazis can also have links to
factual data about the holocaust. The classic cry of an oppressive
censorship regime is the removal of offensive material. Are you suggesting
that the web should be censored so that searching for 'holocaust' would also
return only "appropriate" things?

a web page about child abuse or molestation where specific words turn into
Smart Tag links to adult content?

If the user has enabled a XXX Smart Tag Filter, sure. Again you are
advocating censorship over individual rights. Who are you to suggest a
user cannot install a Smart Tag Filter that does exactly this? You are
starting to sound like a pro-censorship nut.

the problem here is, they're assuming the context of an individual word and
acting upon it - in a way that fools the reader into thinking that's what the
author meant.

No. The user is enabling a set of filters that simply look through text
and provide links to things on that text (in a way that is completely different
to web site provided links). The simple fact is you are saying that a user
has no right to annotate a web page. Perhaps you also believe that if
someone buys a copy of Schindler's List that they don't have the right to scrawl
Nazi slogan all through it for their own private use? Should people
be allowed to annotate Mein Kampf with factual data that shows it's political
flaws? You seem to think not. I believe a person has the right to do
what they like with published data for their own private use, including
requesting a 3rd party to annotate it for them.

whether you realize it or not, this is diabolical. Smart Tags in office are
very very different- my desktop is a controlled environment, and if my company
wants every occurence of the word "payroll" and "vacation time" to link to the
HR site, _THAT_ is useful.

Exactly. A company can set policies to only permit their computers to have
these tags. Arguing that a technology has potential for misuse and
therefore should be banned is one of the most narrow minded viewpoints that can
be taken. Potential for misuse is not a crime - after all, shouldn't we
ban search engines because they too can link "holocaust" to Nazi propoganda, and
"rape" to perverted stories encouraging it. Censorship is not the answer,
and never was.

embedding Smart Tags in outside-the-box content is a severe violation of the
rights of writers & publishers.

Wrong. Copyright law has no influence on what the end user is
permitted to do with a work as long as they don't republish the material to
someone else. You are permitted through copyright law to request a
3rd party's opinion on a work, and this is exactly what Smart Tags are.
The user installs and enables the specific filters they want and hence
those filters are authorized by the user to annotate any works the user views.
As the tags are specific to the filter, any work sent on by the user will not
contain those tags. There is no violation of publisher's rights
because the publisher has no control over an individual's private actions.
They day they do is the day they change the US Constitution.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

what's www.activewin.com

MS just released SR-1 for MS Office 2000. Here's a list of the 329 bug fixes included in the service pack.

Oh, don't forget that you get a FREE copy of IE 5.01 thrown in.

The patch file, depending on your system and prior patches applied, is between 24 and 40 Mb.

Here are some photos from the launch

If the final product looks something like the picture with the caption "X-Box", it almost makes the PS2 look boring. :)

The page it links to,

http://www.activewin.com/cponline/inde x.html

was the one I was referring to. Sorry for the confusion.

-Julius X

Filipe Fortes http://fortes.com