Slashdot Mirror

I think he still missed the point though. I think people are unhappy that a handfull of companies control music, movies, video games, television and news. And these companies are determined to provide the least usefull solutions and the least value to their customers.

How many times have you bought a DVD only to have several special edition versions issued later? Why not pirate the dvd now, and wait for the special edition? I have several DVD's which have died of "dvd rot". What is the Warner Brothers solution to this problem? Go buy another one!

The XBOX modding situation -- Emulation and XBOX Media Player on the xbox are *killer apps*. Yet people are *GOING TO JAIL* for selling chips which let you do this? Why doesn't Nintendo sell all their NES games on a cd with an emulator for 60$? What a killer app that would be!

Bush gutted the Microsoft settlement, and the issue of their massive financial fraud is still unaddressed.

Lastly, price fixing and payola, by the music industry is legendary, and what was the remedy? A 15$ rebate for people who were affected?

Piracy is an expression of peoples disatisfaction with the current state of affairs. But instead of fixing the *cause of the problem* these companies have convinced everyone that the nasty pirates are the problem, when they aer infact the symptoms of a broken system.

well, it's not like you did so no, I think you are lieing. They make money on the office trap I'm sure. I'd have to see proof they make money on anything else. There is excellent proof that they don't really make any profit at all.

Stock price is justified by the profit potential of a share. For instance, if you expect a share to yield 6 cents of profit per year, and current interest rates is 3%, you'd be ready to spend $2 for that share (3% of $2 is 6 cents). (This simplistic calculation needs of course need to be adjusted for risk: you expect your shares to pay higher interest rates than your savings account, because they carry higher risk ==> so you'd probably put a price less than $2 on the share..)

For a non-growing share, all profit you can expect from a share is dividend. Thus higher dividend means better share price.

For a growth stock, profit is not only the dividend, but also the price increase of the share itself. In a way, the share price feeds itself... until the bubble bursts. That's why until recently, MS didn't pay any dividend at all: its exponential growth was justification enough for its "value". However, since 1999, MSFT's share price has been more or less flat (or even, falling), thus growth can no longer justify what little value remains. MSFT has to pay a dividend to stop the downfall.

Of course, smart economists may realize why MSFT is paying these huge dividends (because the stock would suck otherwise), and the move might have just the opposite effect...

Bill Parish has an interesting writeup about this. The report is quite old (November 1999), so many of those things that have already come to pass are still predictions...

A more up to date press list can be found here (not all references articles are about MSFT, but most are...)

Stock price is justified by the profit potential of a share. For instance, if you expect a share to yield 6 cents of profit per year, and current interest rates is 3%, you'd be ready to spend $2 for that share (3% of $2 is 6 cents). (This simplistic calculation needs of course need to be adjusted for risk: you expect your shares to pay higher interest rates than your savings account, because they carry higher risk ==> so you'd probably put a price less than $2 on the share..)

For a non-growing share, all profit you can expect from a share is dividend. Thus higher dividend means better share price.

For a growth stock, profit is not only the dividend, but also the price increase of the share itself. In a way, the share price feeds itself... until the bubble bursts. That's why until recently, MS didn't pay any dividend at all: its exponential growth was justification enough for its "value". However, since 1999, MSFT's share price has been more or less flat (or even, falling), thus growth can no longer justify what little value remains. MSFT has to pay a dividend to stop the downfall.

Of course, smart economists may realize why MSFT is paying these huge dividends (because the stock would suck otherwise), and the move might have just the opposite effect...

Bill Parish has an interesting writeup about this. The report is quite old (November 1999), so many of those things that have already come to pass are still predictions...

A more up to date press list can be found here (not all references articles are about MSFT, but most are...)

Microsoft may be the ones to trigger it, too.

they have enough cash in the bank to pay every one of their 40,000 employees for the next five years.

This is a common misconception which originates in the flawed accounting laws that helped allow Enron and Worldcom to fleece the world for so long.

The current accounting laws allows companies to include employee stock options as "income." Microsoft is able to include the valuation of these stock options as income, so as long as the stock price goes up, Microsoft gets to count that as income, even though there is no actual money exchanging hands. In fact, Microsoft gets to "print" its own money by handing out more stocks to its employees.

This is important, because if Microsoft's stock starts to fail, the amount of "cash" they have on-hand will dwindle also, very rapidly.

Microsoft is not as golden as you might expect, given the business hype that surrounds the company.

(SEE Bill Parish's website for more details.)

That's the way Linux works. The overlap's not perfect, but at least there's less backstabbing, graft and general politics than in a purely greed-powered system. And things get done with unprecedented quickness.

Does anyone have more pointers to this Grant, and knows if he has information on IBM comparable to what Bill Parish has on Microsoft?

Does anyone have more pointers to this Grant, and knows if he has information on IBM comparable to what Bill Parish has on Microsoft?

"Donated property may generally be deducted at the fair market value of the property at the time of the contribution."

This generally means how much the donated property can be sold for. The source of the info

This means that Microsoft can deduct from their taxes the full retail price of any software donated, up to 10% of their total taxable income. Which was 3.2 billion dollars in 1999. But the whole tax point is kind of moot because if this guy is right they didn't pay any taxes before the current software donations began.

Despite the fraud 'n' stuff, I think now is probably optimax selling time for Steve anyway. Even if Microsoft still exists and prospers in 10 years (doubt it), he's planning to retire, and on top of that Microsoft pretty much seems to have stonewalled in terms of the radical new market expasion which has kept it fed and happy since birth. Like any huge animal, it may not realise that it's dead yet, but the wave it rode to power has definitely splashed up on the beach and is receding.

Keep an eye out for an article entitled The Late Great Planet Microsoft.

But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.

Don't look now, but they're doing it already.

Bill's desktop may be pretty, and officially possessed of useability, but if that were what really counted then Apple would long ago have won the desktop wars, wouldn't they?

A lot of things go into making a desktop corporately acceptable, and many businesses are waking up to the fact that if they run Windows, Microsoft to some extent runs their business - and Microsoft is working very hard to drive their claws deeper into every business they can reach. Anyone who thinks that's a safe move from the individual business's perspective is invited to continue headbutting the walls of their cell.

Meanwhile, businesses are also discovering that if they want their desktops to be within cooee of stable, they have to spend time and/or effort locking them down. Locking down KDE or GNOME (or for that matter Ice, FluxBox etc) is relatively trivial, especially en masse, and can be done without the one-idle-change-in-Tahoe-wrecks-systems-in-Boston- and-Vancouver risks of Active Directory.

Without our complex Amerian taxation system, companies like Microsoft would actually have to give money to the government every year.

Yah, and Microsoft is going away as well. Right?

Maybe. If so, AD users will find themselves standing on thin air over a cesspit at the time. Either way, sooner ot later AD will be a dead end. Trust me on this one, Microsoft will obselete it one day, and force users into The Next Great White Hope<*>, whatevere that turns out to be.

Reality is that the ONLY LDAP directory out there that really is useful for Windows OS is ... Active Directory.

He doesn't say that they're an all-Borg shop, or that they need to continue to be if they are.

Using OpenLDAP (any decent LDAP, really), he could be both an OU and a child domain at the same time, no worries, no major management hassles as long as no dweeb dicks with the LDAP directory by hand.

<*> read `Hope' as `Elephant' and there you have it. Microsoft sell a lot of Stone Soup.

There was a guy who made big deal (and even made the Economist) a few years ago about MS being a net money loser if it was forced to account for the massive stock options it gave to bolster its otherwise weak salaries as an expense. This has become a more popular topic (if not practice in some cases) in the post-WCOM era as it can distort profitability and valuation.

The counter argument, if I remember the Economist story, was that shareholders, employees and the corporation were able to get away with cranking up the stock printing press because in spite of the dilution of owership and value that printing stock normally would have, MS stock valuations continued to climb stratospherically, and that made everyone happy and ignore what might otherwise be fundamental problems with their management.

I'm not informed/smart enough to know if the Parrish site is right or not about Microsoft, but the financial shenanigans surrounding stock options as pay have certainly become public knowledge and a number of businesses have collapsed, if not due to this specifically, due to these kinds of accounting tricks masking their true value.

The question I have, though, is if you can keep making this trick work year in and year out for at least a decade, are you still a fraud or just talented? I don't know the answer to that and I suspect that as long as MS has a ton of cash, employees that feel well compensated, and shareholders that the answer doesn't matter. I also think that we'll never know the answer, either, since MS is too huge to just collapse quickly and its technology assets (slashdot critiques notwithstanding) would cause it to morph before it disintegrated.

Unfortunately, the real world is not such a utopia. The real world is what you get when the market economy actually works, as opposed to the computer industry, where it's been warped and twisted into a smoking pile of slag.

Open source and free software are about sharing the (intellectual) wealth around, making it available to anybody, not concentrating it in one place. It's a people thing.

This article is the modern day equivalent of stories of how rich and opulent the Kings palaces are, how his staff and manservants live in stunning surroundings and how much they love the King for it. Interesting reading, and it certainly sounds like a cool place to work, but not sadly reflective of anything that can be really recreated while we use our current economic system.

Oh BTW, I might as well remind you that some say it's all built on a house of cards. Is it true? I don't know. Make up your own mind.

McEntire doesn't get it.

Most of the Linux distro revenue comes from professional servers and technical workstation users who want paid support. These users couldn't care if MS gave away their products. They would consider switching to, say, IBM's AIX or Sun's Solaris if the price was right and the apps available. But not to Windows.

The fact that this guy is not aware of this simple market reality and yet manages a stock portfolio is really scary. Keep away from his Marketocracy Technology Plus Fund.

Now, on another hand, your argument about Linux on the desktop makes much more sense:

I especially see this coming as the other divisions of Microsoft, such as MSN and the XBox, while still losing money, are not losing as much money as they used to, and thus Microsoft would no longer have to rely on Windows and Office as their cash cows so much as they have done in the past.

Now that's a valid argument. It would not hurt the server sales but it would certainly hurt the Linux desktop numbers.

However, keep in mind that Microsoft depends on the value of its stock in order to retain employees with stock options. Now take a look at MS'S SEC filing, especially Note 9, "Segment information". Their operating systems and applications account for more than 86% of their sales income (financial activities excluded). The other divisions, entertainment and consumer electronics, are barely showing up on the radar screen. Even if they were profitable, they really couldn't scale up to the Office+Windows income. A sustained price cut on Windows and Office would hurt MS's income very badly, send their stock price down, and bring down their option-based financial Ponzi scheme. So they just cannot afford to do it.

See Bill Parish's report for an overview of MS's financial pyramid. Recommended reading to understand what makes the Redmond Beat tick.

-- SysKoll

> Microsoft owning the OEM channel and therefore maintaining profits because nobody else could sell their products directly into the channel. Profits keep flowing to Redmond

MS has not had a real profit since 1.995, as Bill Parish has shown.

> Microsoft owning the OEM channel and therefore maintaining profits because nobody else could sell their products directly into the channel. Profits keep flowing to Redmond

MS has not had a real profit since 1.995, as Bill Parish has shown.

> Microsoft is a profitable company

It is not!.

Anyway, MS is in the proprietary customer lock-in, and MandrakeSoft is not. Better to compare to Red Hat, LibraNet and others. And do not guide yourself by the Linux name only: even SuSE is also in the proprietary lock-in game, even if a much milder version of it than MS.

If you think that Microsoft's $40 Billion is an impressive number calculate what Bill Gates would lose personally if Microsoft's stock lost half of its value.

His fortune is less tied to MS than you might think. Gates has diversified his holdings over the past several years and as of Sept. 9th of this year only held 11.6% of the company's stock. I believe his current net holdings are worth $43 billion. MSFT has 5,346,449,872 shares as of Sept. 30th, and it closed on that day at $43.74. On that day, MS stock was worth $223 billion, and he held only $27 billion in MS stock. If he lost half that, he'd go from $43 billion to $29.5 billion (ignoring the fact that an MS crash would take down the whole market). Boo hoo. He'd still have over 100 times what he was worth back in 1986.

Of course, this in no way invalidates your argument which is 100% correct. MS is a very stock price-obsessed company, and a lot of mutual funds invest so much money into it because it's preceived as a stable growth company. A major Enron-like shake-up like Bill Parish has been hoping for would devistate the market as badly as Enron's did. MS's business personnel are wholy obsessed with keeping this growth stable, and it's been well documented that MS uses tricky accounting to smooth losses from one quarter to the next by storing up money from good quarters and counting it as "earnings" later.

Incidentally, the Bill Gates Net Worth Page is an amusing collection of statistics and extrapolations about his wealth, though its data is a little out of date. It shows things like how long he could buy off every major official in the government (if he stopped earning money), how fast you'd have to go picking up dollar bills from end to end to earn money as fast as he has since MS went public (35+ MPH), and how if he can maintain his current rate of growth per year (over 35%!), he'll be a trillionaire by 2014.

From the article: PHP runs seamlessly under Windows, as do MySQL and Apache. WAMP anyone?

IMO this is what makes *AMP. Consistency between platforms. I use Apache, MySQL, and PHP religiously, and no matter what kind of machine I'm running everything on it is seamless.
I'm not saying this isn't true with other scripting languages, but being able to code on anything with a few tools no matter where I am is EXCEPTIONALLY nice.
PHP's use on large web application projects has been uncertain. Yahoo doesn't feel this way. Neither does Earthlink (WebMail)

But I suppose perception needs to change--you don't have to have a billion dollars [Article, still reading it. . .] in the bank to make a great web language. (*cough* M$ *cough*) Neither do you need a couple thousand to deploy a website with dynamic content.

Well, last time I checked it appeared that they were not paying taxes at all. Outrageous. I wonder what their current situation is ...

Microsoft's capitalization is such a big part of the stock market that economic anxiety probably had a lot to do with this plutocrats-whores Administration deciding to back off on the Antitrust case.

See the following analysis of Microsoft's financial pyramid for enlightenment:

Microsoft Fraud Facts

> Microsoft is possibley the most profitable company at this time

According to Bill Parish, CPA, it isn't and hasn't been for quite some time now.

> Microsoft is possibley the most profitable company at this time

According to Bill Parish, CPA, it isn't and hasn't been for quite some time now.

> Open source rules, and is an inherently better way to develop software

As long as you keep thinking about OpenSource and "a [...] better way to develop" you will miss the freedom point. It is sure worthwhile to sacrifice some convenience for freedom, specially when all functionality is actually available, even if perhaps not quite as conveniently.

Also, your "dialog-propaganda-as-reasoning" is flawed, because a you fail to mention any real functionality that you suppose to be missing, and because it ignores the point that, for all licensing fees one has to pay, he would probably get all the convenience he wants plus more functionality than proprietary software offers, not to mention standards-compliance -- and thus the actual ownership and control over one's own data -- and freedom, which is a convenience in itself.

I see many reasons why some people don't see the problems of proprietary software. They don't pay for the software they daily use and thus ignore its real price and cost, they don't abide by the license terms they are supposed to; they don't really understand the security, reliability, privacy and data accessibility issues; they don't realise the biggest proprietary software company isn't profitable and consequently hasn't yet proved its practical viability.

Like taxes?

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?

Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme

Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron

Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions

Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse

http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.ht ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested

Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock

Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing

"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"

Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated

How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income ...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...

> if you don't, you wind up doing nothing at all.

Thanks for providing me a reason to keep trying to educate. It may be pathetic and pitiful, but not everyone can hope to be great.

> by shoving document after document of propaganda, doctrine and philosiphy

What is wrong with that? You can't dismiss arguments by classifying them as propaganda or doctrine. One has to read, understand, and then prove them wrong. Your failure to do that can be interpreted in many ways: reading incompetence, unwillingness to face intellectual challenge are some of them.

> you are an extremist

I read from Paul Krugman that it isfunny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself?. Also from him, sometimes you have to be extremist to be truthful. Because being at some extreme or at the middle has nothing to do with being right or wrong, but with not agreeing with the current climate of opinion. Where extremism is unseemingly is when the extreme is pursued as an end in itself: that's what I call "opositionism", or opposing something just because it's unfashionable to be in accordance.

> The extremes to which you would want to go with free software is unatainable at best, and at worst, absolute insanity.

Please prove them so.

> I have not experienced this evilness of corporate which does not allow me to get my work done.

I don't know what's your field, but in the database industry is bad enough that people are bashing the only fundamentally sound approach to the field because they don't realise it was never attempted, instead Big Corp pushes SQL which is brain-damaged. If you don't have database education I won't ever be able to tell you how bad this is, neither in bad faith nor in consequences.

But even outside of IT, haven't you heard about the railroad tycoons, or the military industrial complex, or Enron, or the California energy crisis, or Microsoft? I can't provide you with every piece of reading that's good for your education, but for a starter you could read some Paul Krugman or some Bill Parish. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, much more can be said at the deeper cultural, even philosophical level. Then you will have to do deeper reading, from Plato & St Augustine to Francis A Schaeffer & Rookmaaker, along with their contradictors.

> philosophy means nothing without fact and proof

Well, show me where my own philosophy is lacking. I don't doubt it has lackings, as I am young enough and even elders aren't perfect, being human. But you never cared to disprove it.

> I have yet to come across a person who uses only free software and who's life has dramaticaly improved because of it.

That's show you are missing the whole point. Free software isn't pragmatical in the first place, even if we hope it will be eventually. It's idealistic. It's building a new future, with all the sacrifices that entails.

> it is a rare enough instance just to come across someone who uses all free software period.

Yes, and I've given you the reasons: unreasonable forking (because there is such a thing as reasonable forking too) and time wasted reverse engineering file formats, protocols & APIs which should be documented in the first place.

Anyway, free software is not about being popular -- not yet. We do know it's not yet fit for general consumption, and therefore we are far enough from World Domination(TM).

> When you show me the proof of corporate evil and rule. When you show me the proof of GNU Nirvana, then I will consider your position. But sending me link after link of propaganda is nothing more than that. Propaganda.

Now spare me the junk. These last phrases in your comment are just that, junk. If you can't do your reading and understand your own time and its signs, even yet don't ever go around calling names and putting words in other people's mouths.

http://www.billparish.com/20000418spotmsft.html

See here. Basically, MS are scum. Quite why they're not being done for accounting fraud like enron and AOL is beyond me...

Bill Parish says:
"One has to wonder how hard working tax paying voters in these Senators' and Representatives' Districts would feel if they knew this amazing fact. Perhaps Bill Clinton himself does not realize that Microsoft now pays no federal income tax. Of course the company has never paid a dividend to shareholders either. That is tough to do when you have 6 billion shares outstanding, including 800 million still owed to employees."

taken from here.

THATS evil. If its a lie, then its pretty stupid. Either way, something smells foul.

This company pays only 1.8% in federal taxes

No they don't. M$ pays **NO** federal taxes (and no, I am not making this up).

IE has had more than it's share of security problems, but who says Mozilla won't?

You'll get flamed because you deserve it.

You ASSUME that Mozilla will have a lot of security problems and say that it doesn't deserve a chance.

That's what I hate most about you MSFT-lovers:

You will go through lots of pain (risking changing EULAs by updating, downloading Crazybrowser (sic) extensions, working around bugs, installing virus scanners, accepting WPA, accepting Palladium, etc.) to run a Microsoft product but if some product doesn't have the golden "Microsoft" sticker on it, even the smallest inconvenience or even some FUD (like "who says Mozilla won't", you know... exactly this kind of FUD) will be enough to not even give it a try.

Sorry, but I just get the feeling that you have either a substancial investment in MSFT stock or are completely brainwashed by marketing.

If you don't deserve to be flamed, nobody does.

Microsoft has a lot of branches that make losses and their stubbornness concerning XBox (it's so clear that it won't topple PS2, yet they keep pumping money in it without the remote chance of getting it back) will cost them fortunes.

Also, the community has ported Linux and the BSDs to tens (hundreds?) of hardware platforms, while Windows failed on everytime they tried something other than x86 (PPC, Mips, Alpha and IA64 in a few years, you will see it)

Microsoft is in a strong position because they control the OEMs. However they charge a bigger percentage every year, it's really just a matter of time until the Microsoft-tax becomes unbearable and OEMs start jumping ship - wait, Walmart already sells Windows-less PCs.

In addition to that, only 35% of their money come from product sales, the rest is gathered through financial tricks and tax deductions with gullible investment money being Microsoft's single most important source of money.

As soon as investors start asking questions (we just had Worldcom, remember? And Enron of course) this whole scheme might topple over and Microsoft will lose most of it's income and WILL START MAKING LOSSES. Also most employees will be pissed because THEIR income (which consists mostly of stock options) will only be a fraction of what it used to be. Microsoft is a house of cards and if XBox or Worldcom doesn't crush it, something else will. It's just a matter of time, it won't work much longer.

See Bill Parish' page for more details.

Microsoft has a lot of branches that make losses and their stubbornness concerning XBox (it's so clear that it won't topple PS2, yet they keep pumping money in it without the remote chance of getting it back) will cost them fortunes.

Also, the community has ported Linux and the BSDs to tens (hundreds?) of hardware platforms, while Windows failed on everytime they tried something other than x86 (PPC, Mips, Alpha and IA64 in a few years, you will see it)

Microsoft is in a strong position because they control the OEMs. However they charge a bigger percentage every year, it's really just a matter of time until the Microsoft-tax becomes unbearable and OEMs start jumping ship - wait, Walmart already sells Windows-less PCs.

In addition to that, only 35% of their money come from product sales, the rest is gathered through financial tricks and tax deductions with gullible investment money being Microsoft's single most important source of money.

As soon as investors start asking questions (we just had Worldcom, remember? And Enron of course) this whole scheme might topple over and Microsoft will lose most of it's income and WILL START MAKING LOSSES. Also most employees will be pissed because THEIR income (which consists mostly of stock options) will only be a fraction of what it used to be. Microsoft is a house of cards and if XBox or Worldcom doesn't crush it, something else will. It's just a matter of time, it won't work much longer.

See Bill Parish' page for more details.

This might be the site you're thinking of. It contains quite detailed consideration of the structure of MSFT's finances.

and this has lots of details, and some specific, recent commentaries on MS share price fraud...

There are a people out there saying just that. this has some details...

VB is right because i386 is wrong. Or is it because VB displayed the number incorrectly to begin with? When you slip into the confused and closed world of M$ BS, 2+2 might be 3, 4 or 5.

When the Microsoft accounting scandal breaks, as it will eventually, there'll hopefully be very little more of this crap.

I just hope you're all in money market funds in your 401K. DOW to 5000, Nasdaq to 700, that's my guess.

That's what Bill Gates projected that the losses would be back in 1999. In other words, that's pulling numbers out of the clear blue sky. The article stated that Microsoft lost $750 million this fiscal year and is expected to lose $1.1 billion next fiscal year.

In other words, if Microsoft expected to lose $3.3 billion over 8 years, then they are well on their way to doing far worse than they expected.

As for the stock options, that's a completely different scandal. However, according to Bill Parish if Microsoft had to count stock options as expenses then they would actually be losing money. In other words that $40 billion that Microsoft has in the bank is money that it skimmed off the stock market, not money it made selling software.