Slashdot Mirror

Microsoft and Intuit

you don't need to defrag ext2. it doesn't get fragmented

There is a very interesting and amusing writeup about why this is the case here

Keep in mind that it's from 1998 but it still applies.

http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com/content/whatsbad.shtm l
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
http://www.novell.com/linux/truth/no_mention.html
http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html
http://www.endgame.org/microsoft.html

FAT is such a technical piece of crap that I would have thought nobody would want to patent it, out of pure
embarrassment.

For non-technical people who don't grok filesystems, there's a good story about FAT here: CyberSnare.

Well, Bell bought a significant part of my local telco, and in that same month, my truly unlimited long distance plan went up in price, and down to 1200 minutes max. Service is downhills, and there's been several strikes since then.

The price hike itself was enough for more to make me switch to VoIP. The base + LD (no caller ID, no voicemail or anything like that) was like 70$. So there is that mass exodus around here. Everybody's getting phone with the cable company for a LOT cheaper. I decided to be a cheap mofo and went with comwave for under 15$ a month with tax, plus actual LD usage @ 1.9 cents/min flat (not one of those pay for 800 minutes no matter if you use them or not or any of those things).

My brother has DSL with Bell (and they force you to have a landline with them as well - so no VoIP for you!), and he's paying a bit more before tax than I'm paying after tax, and I have about 3x that speed (not just claimed speed - it's actually 3x the speed).

They also have a bunch of annoying stupid ads that say things like "constant bandwidth!' -- like having a consistently slower connection than with any other ISP is a good deal. We teh suck more than every other ISP 24/7!

I also used to have a cell phone with them a few years ago, and that was ridiculously expensive. That's one of the purchases I've regretted the most.

For more information about Bell, check this link out, it's worth a read.

To Bell: a royal Fuck You, you can shove that wifi up somewhere really deep, there isn't a chance in hell you'll see any money from me.

And bill bought all these

How The Bells Stole America's Digital Future: Part I

And I'm just going to give a token mention to the miles and miles of unlit (dark) fiber lying around unused because it's "owned" by the phone company. And by owned I mean the state practically gave it to them through tax breaks.

Funny you should mention fiber to the home... Why didn't you mention 500 channels? Tele-medicine? Regulation exemptions in exchange for promises of profits?

How about this fine story: "How the Bells Stole America's Digital Future"

If you ask me, it seems like the same story again and again... Make huge promises, get government money, then quietly fail to deliver while raking it in.

This goes straight to what Microsoft is famous for, "Embrace[ing] and Extend[ing]". It finds itself behind in a market and uses any means necessary to become the leader...

Apple - steals code from Quicktime. Apple settles by selling 50% of non-controllable stock to MS

IBM - develops OS/2 and then takes most of it's core to develop NT.

Sun - develops a standalone JVM implementation that "extends" Java's function... Extended to the point that code written for it only works on Windows. MS finally loses ensuing lawsuit, then strands developers by removing MS Java completely from XP and it's website.

Dr-DOS - adds code that causes a beta copy of Win3.11 to bomb when used under DRDOS. This code doesn't appear in the final release, but this and their anti-competitive actions against DRDOS in Germany, are enough to kill DR-DOS completely. Caldera later wins several lawsuits against MS. Currently, it is alleged that MS has agreements with Caldera to cast Linux in a bad light.

... The list goes on and on, with lots of other smaller companies losing their technologies to MS. MS is a company that cannot be trusted either as a business partner, or as a competitor.

What you say is true, although some of it was originally developed with military uses in mind besides just public good. The problem is that as the commercial software market grew bigger and bigger during the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the government slowly withdrew financial support and left more and more software development in the hands of private companies. What I think the original poster is calling for is a reversal of this trend, which I tend to agree with in many cases.

A really good page which deals partially with the history of this process can be found here.

Here is another good page, also worth a read, which makes a case for government support of open source software.

Two sites to check out are egovos.org and this one at netaction.org. There's also the other side.

You can read about many of the other scams the teleco's are in at TeleTruth. Some quotes from their front page:

"Teletruth estimates that customers paid Verizon Pennsylvania $785 per household for a fiber-optic service they will never receive."

"50% of All Small Business phonebills have mistakes. ---And that's why we have announced our "Send Us Your Phone Bill" campaign in the Verizon territory to help business and residential customers recover overcharges on their Verizon telephone bills."

Also if you have a lot more time than I do you can read "The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells" and How The Bells Stole America's Digital Future. Excerpt from the latter:

"New Networks Institute (NNI) estimates that consumers have already paid over $45 billion in extra telephone charges, and continue to pay over $8 billion annually. As monopoly providers of local phone service, the Bells are still subject to some regulation, yet they are among the most profitable companies in America today. Bell profit margins are more than double that of the major competitive long distance companies and other regulated utilities and literally 167% above the profit margins of some of America's best-known companies. Much of this excess profit is a result of the financial incentives that were supposed to build the infrastructure for America's digital future."

The guy behind all this is Bruce Kushnick. I've yet to find any one claiming he's anything but on the level. If you have please email me.

My blog post about this

The telecos have been making promises to get all of the US on higher bandwidth connections. They made these promises to the FCC. FCC said great, raise your prices for basic services so that you can build these new service.

So prices raised, telecos earn $48 Billion, with $8 Billion more coming in every year, customers get nothing. Do you understand why we must protest to congress?

Read all about it here

Still trying to figure out the best way to fight this problem.

He-he, Visio is owned by Microsoft, and Intuit is still in business only because the US government stopped MS from buying it.

Albert hoffman, the man that discovered LSD was not in berkeley, but in Basel, Swizerland.
source: http://www.stainblue.com/ah.html

Unix was created in the 1960's by bell labs, and only improved upon by students and staff at berkeley in the 70's.
Source: http://www.netaction.org/opensrc/future/unix.html

In the M$ Monitor's goodbye message, the author alluded to other news/coordination resources that were duplicating the M$ Monitor's function. What are these resources?

I miss the M$ Monitor. Of course, if I have to choose between having the Monitor back and having an effective penalty against Microsoft, I'll choose the latter. :)

Frankly, I don't care why MS is going after the GPL, it's enough for me to know that they are. GPL is probably the best thing to happen to Intellectual property in a long time. (Obligatory link to article promoting open source) If Microsoft can make enough public statements against open source that congress feels it should not act to promote it, then we all lose.

If Microsoft is going to take extreme and unjustifiable positions, then some of us need to take equally extreme and unjustifiable positions on the other side. I suggest;

Because of it's abuse of Monopoly power, the government should use it's power of eminent domain to seize Windows, and release it under a GPL.

Weakness doesn't make right either.

How the Bells stole America's Digital Future

and

The Bell's Broadband Failures

Its far too simplistic to blame the CLECs, since the only thing that the old Bell companies have done since the deregulation act of '96 is consolidate in the hopes to buy back their old monopolies.

Also, for clarification, the RBOCs didn't buy those facilities. We, the customer and CAPTIVE ratepayers bought those facilities lock, stock and barrel. The RBOCs haven't spent dime one on those facilities for ages. Did we have a CHOICE when we bought our phone lines or T1s? No, we didn't. If you ask me, I think it'd be damn funny to make the ILECs and the RBOCs pay for those facilities now.

True, open source isn't the same as free, but this is an interesting read.

-----------------------------------------

Here's a good writeup of a world without free software.