Slashdot Mirror

I think you're right (and some other posters have said this, too.)

Most of MS' patent portfolio is taken out defensively because they're a big fat deep-pocket target.

Recall some version of DOS where MS had infringed upon someone else's compression technology and, among other things, had to re-release their product after legal action that was taken against them.

There's cases where MS has transgressed others technology, and sometimes they've gotten bitten for it, but they've certainly learned to patent everything to protect their butts. (And to keep a sharp lookout for new technology that could be really important to their business and to buy it out, eg, Citrix).

As long as MS owns the technology, it's usually no skin off their nose to rent it out to others. It's not like anyone else has the same kind of marketing leverage that MS does.

Check out all the companies M$ has taken control of, possesion of, or hold a major interest in.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog/

A fellow went and studied an authoritarian church. He found that as people stayed in longer, their personality types changed, all of them converging on one type. This church is also pretty destructive. Read it online here, it's by a guy named Flavil Yeakley about the Boston Church of Christ.

This got modded insightful? MS has done little to no innovation The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation". They got most of their ideas from Mac. Even Mac didn't do all the innovation. You see there is a thing foreign to the world of MS that is called Information Sharing. It is the thing that has driven man kind from the begining. There is very little real innovation in the world. Most of the time it is taking good ideas and making them just a little better. So why do you have a problem if the KDE guys and Gnome guys take good ideas for a desktop environment and make them a little better? How are they playing catch-up with MS or Mac? Sorry, it is just not the case. The only area Linux has been playing catch-up in is in user friendliness since Linux started out as a geek toy, it makes sense that the orginal design of the desktop was not a Fisher Price Point-N-Click gui. Though it is very close now with KDE, Gnome 2.2 and Ximian's XD2. As a programmer I have plenty of problems with the useablity of MS's desktops. They are too stupified for me and often make me less productive because they are designed too general geared for a computer newbie. Maybe the previous generation grew up without a computer, however almost all of the current generation is pretty tech savvy. If MS keeps dumbing down their GUI for grandma and grandpa to be able to send an email, I think more and more people will desire the more powerfull GUI offered by KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.

And how is Lycoris copying ms windows XP? Lycoris uses KDE as the deskotp. It is a completely differnt desktop then the Fisher Price (TM) desktop of ms windows XP. KDE and Gnome both have very good support to make the desktop Look how you want. MS is the one that actaully copies from others and try to pass it off as their own.

or if you end up writing that killer busseinse app. youve allways wanted, it will meen going after the ppl riping you off.

"And, as a fallback plan, they make products people want."

No, They don't. They buy them and resell them, abusing their large amounts of money to do whatever they please.
Microsoft Internet Explorer? Try spyglass (Part of MOSAIC).
MS-DOS? Seattle computer
many many more examples here (including hotmail, webtv, many others.)

Even their best selling game, Halo, was originaly advertised as a macintosh exclusive. I wonder what changed their mind..

Sorry, MS did NOT invent cleartype. It was around apple for a long time.
The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation"
Have you tried Redhat 9? The fonts using XFree86 4.3.x with Xfont look much better on my laptop then they did with MS Windows XP and clear type. Whit cleartype there was too colour fringing.

According to The Microsoft "Hall of Innovation" (Admittedly biased), MS-Bob and Clippy are the only true M$ innovations. Everything else was copied from someone else.

Microsoft has been legally found to be a monopoly. "Fine," say you. "That doesn't make them evil."

If you haven't been paying attention, there are a few other things they've done that put them beyond the category of aggressive competitors. For example:

• They committed perjury by faking video testimony.
• They're still under investigation in the EU for displaying a pattern of illegal monopoly protection.
• They've done quite a few other things that could qualify as nasty.

All companies are not the same.

Here's an interesting review of Microsoft's 'Hall of Innovation'. The only accepted nominations so far appear to be Microsoft Bob and The Talking Paper Clip. How impressive.

Disclaimer: This is a 'Boycott Microsoft' site and I'm not sure when it was last updated. Good reading all the same.

Here's a link to David Ross's page on the subject. Suprisingly, many of the examples listed there do apply to me, and apply to most of the people I know (if only more of my friends and coworkers would use PGP...).

What, you say? All of those examples are still about hiding things? I thought I said I had nothing to hide!

IMHO, there's a huge difference between having "something to hide" from an FBI investigation -- i.e., committing a crime -- and maintaining your privacy. You don't want everyone to know that you pick your nose and eat it, so when you send a letter to your psycologist about your "problem", you should be allowed and able to protect that message with encryption.

And, of course, if you're transmitting other types of secrets, namely trade secrets for your company, you should be able to encrypt that as well.

Now, you may still ask, so what if the government can view those messages, as long as "real people" can't? My answer to that is that the government is made of "real people" too, and I don't want any old FBI agent to know about me picking my nose. Extend that analogy as necessary for different levels of "secrets", as well as different levels of paranoia about how Big Brother will stretch any information about you to fit His purposes.

It would be much more productive if Reed and other "architects of the Internet" spend time finding solutions to EM pollution caused by switching power supplies and digital systems, rather than proposing ways to make problems worse in areas they clearly don't understand.

This comment follows a rant which ironically ignores most modern radio breaktrhoughs: packet routing and frequency hopping on low power devices to create a network with far greater bandwith than a single transmitter per frequency set up that's current. Instead, he focus on ancient details of antenae size and signal propagation. It's amazing that someone could ignore the demonstrated reality of Alohanet and 802.11B meshworks and then call others ignorant.

Then again a simple search pulls up stuff about Tom Rauch. Is this guy a profesional slammer or what?

• Some strange blow up over RF amps in the early 90's
• Another Amplifier blowup.
• Interesting tube rant.

Well, fine, he knows his tubes and amps, IF the first person linked to above is not correct in assesing him as a whore. You have to be suspicious of people who rant so.

All of the other letters on that page supported Lessing's conclusion that the broadcast spectrum is poorly allocated and mostly empty. There was that one bizare and false analogy to a pinhole cameras with no pinhole. I've never seen a pinhole radio, it must be intersting.

You mean like This One?
If enough of us link to it from our personal web pages, We could probably make it come up first on google.
Be sure to use the words "Microsoft Business Partner" in the link!

Late entry into networking. Let Novell capture small business networking for many years.

Late entry into GUI interfaces. Let apple (and others) have a modern GUI interface years before a successfull MS version.

Late entry into IDEs (Integrated development environments). Borland was the first commercial success with Turbo Pascal (and incidentally the first successful TSR app called Sidekick).

Late entry into browsers. I can clearly remember using Mosaic and Netscape two years before I saw a decent MS browser.

Late entry into office suites. Can anyone say 1,2,3 or Wordstar?

Late entry into OSes. Gary Kildall had CPM long before Microsoft bought DOS from Tim Patterson.

Late entry into the ISP business. MSN is still behind.

IMHO, the only thing Gates, Ballmer etc are really good at is leveraging its monopoly position on Windows, and forcing OEMS to use its version of office suite, networking, browser, ISP etc. The rest of its technology is for the most part purchased, or stolen.

A lot of their ideas are actually not that bad

Microsoft hasn't been all that good at innovating. The only real innovations I can think of were Microsoft Bob, and it's bastard child from Hell clippy. Neither score major points with me, though I give them points for being attempts at least to break away from the WIMP metaphor..

At the time, Direct3D was indeed a steaming pile to work with. The most recent versions are vastly easier to use.

That may be so, but he predicted that very fact in his .plan anyway:

I'm sure D3D will suck less with each forthcoming version, but this is an opportunity to just bypass dragging the entire development community through the messy evolution of an ill-birthed API.
and also:
Some of these choices were made so that the API would be able to gracefully expand in the future, but who cares about having an API that can grow if you have forced it to be painful to use now and forever after?
(as quoted from a copy of said .plan (at the bottom))

DirectX was a direct response to OpenGL, which literally is an open standard. Instead of going with what was (maybe) the only all-inclusive open API, they created their own.

Just to further the point you made...

You said:
"Pharmaceutical companies spend vastly more on marketing than they do on R&D."

Very true. Apparently, so does Microsoft...

Surely it can't cost them that much to steal all those ideas. ;)

Legal Bits
Stall Beg I
Gab Sell It
Beats Gill
A Bill Gets

And finally...

All Bis Get

Did I post this twice? You Decide!

Legal Bits
Stall Beg I
Gab Sell It
Beats Gill
A Bill Gets

And finally...

All Bis Get

"Microsoft Creates the Direct3D API
In 1995 and 1996 Microsoft established a new program to support games on PCs running its Windows 95 operating system. The goal was to expand the market for PCs into the area then dominated by game consoles such as those from Nintendo and Sega.

Microsoft chose not to use the OpenGL technology it already provided in Windows NT to handle 3D graphics for games. Instead, Microsoft purchased Rendermorphics, Ltd. and acquired its 3D graphics API known as RealityLab. Microsoft reworked the device driver design for RealityLab and announced the result as a new 3D graphics API called Direct3D Immediate-Mode (Direct3D)."

story here

The main problem is that prior to MS using creative marketing, DirectX had two components DirectX and Direct3d (D3D was later merged with/renamed to DirectX) which everyone seems to like confusing. The DirectX everyone is talking about is actually (meant to be) the Direct3d technology. DirectX was created for games, basically old style DOS like side scrollers, arcade, etc. games. and was a toolkit to use the hardware features in windows, like sound and video. Direct3d was merely a way to render 3d games using hardware support, exactly like OpenGL, neither of the two have sound APIs but when Direct3d merged with DirectX entirely, MS created the idea that it did. In fact to create OpenGL based games on Win32 you need to use DirectX for sound outputting. So, Direct3d was created as a response to OpenGL. You are correct parts of DirectX were created as a response, but as a whole, DirectX was originally meant to be a way for programmers to create windows games.

http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/3d.html

Microsoft succeeds at anything it wants, because it all amounts to the one thing that drives America: Money. As long as Microsoft has money, they will get what they want, because history has shown us that with money, you can buy whatever you want.

Want proof: http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog/This website lists all the companies that Microsoft has either:

1) Bought
2) Stolen technology from
3) Sued into nothingness
4)Bundled software with its OS to drive it out of market.

http://www.kmfms.com/whatsbad.html#deception This site lists all kinds of lovely information about Microsoft's practices.

For a list of proposed Microsoft innovations, you can go to:

http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/innovation.sh tml

The Court rejects Adobe's argument that the EULA gives to purchasers only a license to use the software. The Court finds that SoftMan has not assented to the EULA and therefore cannot be bound by its terms. Therefore, the Court finds that Adobe has not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of its copyright infringement claim.

The decision did acknowledge that the enforceability of a shrinkwrap license isn't as certain as Adobe or Microsoft would have us believe:

These courts have refused to recognize a bargain in shrinkwrap license that is not signed by the party against whom it is enforced. In Step-Saver, the Third Circuit found that the terms of a contract were formed when the parties shipped, received and paid for the product. Therefore, the software shrinkwrap agreement constituted additional terms to the contract, and under Uniform Commercial Code 2-207 (governing commercial counter-offers), these terms were invalid without express assent by the purchasex. In contrast, other courts have determined that the shrinkwrap license is valid and enforceable. ProCD, 86 F.3d at 1453; Harmony, 846 F. Supp. at 212.

> I can produce evidence that he publicly denies saying that infamous quote. You say "He did, in 1981." Where? When?

The History of Computing Foundation was my first source. The fact that Mr. Gates denies having said this carries little weight with me since I can also present definitive proof that he lies when it suits him.

Virg

P.S. I was born in 1968. Oh, and fuck you for the attitude.

Karma backlash caused by senedipity 2?

Wrong.

Apple Computer, Inc.

Personal computer manufacturer.

$150 million equity investment, broad technology sharing agreement.

1997

If you ship UPS from the U.S. into Canada, the person who receives the package will have to cough up an obscene "brokerage fee", which can be anywhere from $20 to $70 or more depending on the value of the package -- it's essentially a package ransom - if you want your package you have to bend over. A brokerage fee is unavoidable, but UPS's brokerage fee is an obvious rip-off : if you ship USPS->CanPost there's a flat $5 brokerage fee. Hit this link for more information. And definitely check out this site.

Not knowing much about these things I found a document from somewhere describing the ADK stuff. The problem seems to be all the necessary trouble while encrypting, which doesn't make it a backdoor really. If you "forgot" to use the ADK feature there wouldn't be a "backdoor" anymore..

So, while this was a good idea, it wouldn't work unless the usage of some second key was somehow built-in into the algorithm itself, unavoidably and unknown to the users. The original question still remains open; what kind of backdoors are technically possible in the real world usage that wouldn't be either found out and defeated by hackers or wouldn't render the method too insecure to be used seriously by anyone (clipper, crippled DES and others, whatever..)?

Of course there has always been some speculation about the NSA knowing certain weaknesses in various algorithms, but even if they did, it wouldn't make wide spread usage of yet-to-be-developed future encryption methods "backdoorable"..

MS wants to replace a consortium-controlled graphices API with an API that it can control alone. Read details at

Microsoft and 3D Graphics: A Case Study in Suppressing Innovation and Competition

He succeeded with OpenGL in a single weekend. With DirectX, however, the API at the time (DirectX 1.0? 2.0?) was crap, or it was poorly documented. So he gave up on it.

3.0, as far as I know... the original story can be found from many places (here, for instance - look at the appendix in the end).

There is a long-running debate about Microsoft innovation among those of us who are active in the anti-Ms community. Check out BMS's Hall of Innovation for the ones we found. There are, not surprisingly, very few listed on the page. And yes, BoB is one of them.

Hopefully X-Box Technologies doesn't make an operating system called QDOS :)

I came across this page which shows some of Microsoft's Investments over the years. Apart from the fact that Microsoft has never had an original idea for itself, one thing stood out... The have funded Transvirtual's Java Virtual Machine, Kaffe. This software is developed under a GPL license... I wonder if Microsoft had a tough time stooping down to our level just to get a bit of leverage on one of their other compeditors... Sun.

First, DR-DOS. I can't argue that this is a matter of a Windows API breaking code, but it is an example of Microsoft deliberately introducing an incompatibility for the sake of defeating competition. This page explains that it was likely that only developers and computer makers saw this message because the routine (which was encrypted to prevent easy discovery) to display it was disabled before Windows 3.1 went to market (it was only in a beta, as you claim, but it still did significant harm to DR-DOS because computer makers saw it). The message was still present in the shipped binary, disproving the Microsoft assertion that this was all an urban legend, and this page has a utility you can grab (in addition to the source code) to find the message in Windows 3.1. The page also mentions that Microsoft QuickC under DR-DOS would emit an ominous message (but would presumably still run). So you can't say that malicious coding has never been on their mind and you can't blame people for being a bit suspicious when things break strangely.

Another example, though one I'm less likely to attribute to malicious incompatibility for the reason I give at the top of this reply, can be found under 'Smothering Freeware' on this site. Equally interesting (and also mentioned on this page) was the breaking of Professor Felten's demonstration in the recent antitrust trial of Microsoft that Internet Explorer did not need to be integrated into the operating system for the operating system to function. Felten had to provide his program to Microsoft as part of discovery and at some point between then and the trial his program no longer functioned properly. There was some speculation that Microsoft deliberately broke the program, though I tend to believe that their updates just didn't take the functioning of this program into account because, by definition, Felten's program was trying to convert Windows 98 into a non-standard state.

Finally, Kerberos in Windows 2000. Though that was broken from the start (i.e., it wasn't a change to break existing software on Windows), one could argue that it was specifically broken to discourage compatibility of a nature Microsoft didn't want between their system and competitors' systems. Or one could argue that Microsoft liked the technology but didn't want to invest any more effort into development than was necessary to meet their goals (compatibility with other Win2k, whatever other compatibility exists is purely a bonus). Discussion here (search for 'Kerberos') suggests that the incompatibility is a benign by-product of innovation. This (search for 'clickwrap') suggests that it wasn't... putting the specification of the Microsoft changes to the protocol under NDA clickwrap forces an incompatibility between standard Kerberos and MS Kerberos. A matter of perspective, to be sure, but a reminder that seamless compatibility is hardly a priority.

---

A list of innovations Microsoft bought is here

When Marc Ewing, co-founder and [former] Chief Technology Officer, lost his grandfather's red Cornell lacrosse cap while a student at Carnegie-Mellon University, he searched everywhere for it. The manual of the beta release of what was to become Red Hat Linux contained a plea asking readers to send him the cap if they found it while in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He [ Mark Ewing] named his venture Red Hat, after the Cornell lacrosse team cap he got from his grandfather. "The real story is that it was red- and white-striped," said Ewing, who wore the cap regularly until he lost it. "But Red- and White-striped Hat didn't sound like a good name for a company."

[...] he [ Mark White, Vice President/General Manager, Asia-Pacific, Red Hat Inc.] had this to say : "Our co-founder Mark Ewing used to be a student at Carnegie Mellon University. Like all students, he took on jobs at the school and one of his trademark outfits includes wearing one of his uncles old lacrosse hat, which happened to be red. Whenever anyone needed help with the computers, people will say, 'look for the guy with the red hat'. He essentially became the 'red hat guy'. Later, he met up with Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat Inc. They wanted a name/logo for the new company they are setting up, it had to be of an emotional color and be an everyday object. Naturally they decided on 'red hat'. "

He [Marc Ewing] spent years of hard work on Red Hat, which he named after a Cornell lacrosse team cap he found in his grandfather's closet.

In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use ... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."

For an example, you can review the OpenGL vs. Direct3D history.

But think about it: how many licenses actually grant license to the wild behavior of the manufacturer?

This could be the advent of a whole new battle, not so easily dismissed in court by those who have signed the EULA but regard the contract as absurd. What happens when Microsoft starts reserving the rights openly for the dirty tricks they used to have to do in secret?

They have a list of MS' spending spree over the years. (look under 'departments')

Please give examples of any actual "Microsoft Innovation" that doesn't involve buying other companies.

Pretty much the Paper Clip (the most irritationg part of MS Office) and Microsoft Bob (that was so successful).

The site is pretty sparse, post articles to them.

Please give examples of any actual "Microsoft Innovation" that doesn't involve buying other companies.

Pretty much the Paper Clip (the most irritationg part of MS Office) and Microsoft Bob (that was so successful).

The site is pretty sparse, post articles to them.

it hasn't been updated in a while i think but, it still has a lot of good info for those who do not realize the depths of bill gates' depravity..

boycott microsoft

...dave

p.s. don't abuse your +1 bonus, some moderators will punish you for it and you will lose karma..
just a hint.

You do realize, of course, that all these same arguments apply to our other favorite whipping boy, the government. This applies to individual parts of the government as well, such as he FBI and NSA. Most of them are just normal people who think they're doing the right thing and protecting their fellow citizens.

Does that mean I trust, or that others should trust, these organization? Hell no! You'd be a fool to look at their track record and still trust them. No matter how noble the intentions of the individual members, the organization culture, and the agenda of its leaders, has always and will always seek to maximize its power to the deteriment of your freedom. I think Venor Vinge describes their attitude best: "Aw, come on, just an inch. We won't fuck you!"

Why do I bring this up? Well, Microsoft has a proven track record of being a bunch of fucking bullying and deceitful pricks. Astro-turf, the Halloween memo, what they did to DR-DOS, Cytrix Winframe, Stack Electronics, etc..

It's the same as the FBI. Just because most Microsoft employees are nice people doensn't make the organization as whole something trustworthy. Remember, the employees don't set the agenda, Bill and his lackeys (like Ballmer) do. Microsoft isn't a democracy; it's power is not derived from the bottom up. It is derived from Bill's fanaticism and the greed of it's shareholders.

Oh, and Mr. Limo, if you think big media is diverse enough that the agenda of its owners won't affect its content, read up a little on Rupert Murdoch and the various newspaper cartels that buy up independant newspapers and impose their editorial agenda on them.

This is having an important effect on the open source community.I've studied it and have come to several conclusions, which are illustrated in the following articles.

1. Forbes Magazine article
2. "Microsoft on the Defensive"
3. "Reflections on the Cathedral and the Bazaar"











>sad`ji3br#Z5ei"d?0-t42()(f.n1i(itrukt=-b%1'_.20cq `h9,'4et\#ecb*(up7#`c_9\j 1o\4"\g:a,og&.?#]p_.)+c^b14\\?'&`65b4k^a-7\.>[k4^? .24'`e<?u1

I'm sure there are. Just from experience, their Proxy Server 2.0 will default to their default to their proprietary WinNT Challenge/Response protocol for authentication. This really sucks for SETI@home, RealPlayer, and all non-MSIE (Netscape) Browsers, because the proxy won't function like a proxy to non-MS products unless you dig into the settings and disable the defaults.

And of course, that doesn't even scratch the surface of email filtering in Outlook Express and WebTV.

I am very impressed with the calm response from Roblimo. I think that this story needs to be released to the world of microsoft users. Perhaps we can each find the email or real mail address of our elected officials and let them see this attempt at censorship. I am duly frightened by this microsoft letter and there is no way that I am going to bait them. BUT I think that all of these censorship letters should be kept on the net somewhere. I think it should be a regular feature. I have new respect for Roblimo.