No XP-Smarttags in Europe

nils23 writes "There's a story on heise.de that says that M$ won't include their SmartTags (tm - probably...) in the European release of Windows eXPerimental.. The reason is not, they claim, any privacy or Anti-Trust issues, but the problem of maintaining the content/links to Microsoft. It's in german. Use the fish, Luke." I'd be fine with this if they only did it on pages that included a tag that said the author of the page approved the feature. I for one don't want Microsoft choosing where links on a Slashdot story go. Imagine what links they could choose for words like Linux or the GPL. Think I'm kidding?

Comments

And this is different how?

[Masem]

Clicking on links and not going to where you expect to go? And how is this any different from /. currently...? (starts with g, ends with x)

</joke>

'Smart'

[Ed Avis]

Have you ever noticed that whenever Microsoft calls something 'Smart', it's definitely a feature you want to disable?

Re:'Smart'

[DrCode]

Yes! And when they call something a 'Technology', it's something that others have been doing for at least a decade.

Re:Ya know...

[JabberWokky]

if mozilla did this but linked to everything2, the slashdot crowd would have a field day and claim how "innovative" and "clever" they were...

There are two major differences... first, Everything2 is (more or less) community built. That implies quite a bit, some of which is good, some of which is bad, but certinly means that one entity can't control the content.

The second and harder to understand thing for most people is that Mozilla can be changed - it isn't written for you. It's written for the person who wrote it. And you can change that by writing it yourself, taking any of the existing code out there. Like KDE's Konqueror, which can render with either KHTML or Mozilla's rendering engine - open source is all about infinite choice, and a total potential spectrum of all possibilities. That's why software patents damage Open Source and certainly Free Software.

--
Evan

not a saving grace!

[TotallyUseless]

Erm, why would I want to provide my own smart tag entries? If I wanted something linked, dont you think I would just hyperlink it instead of futzing with making a special tag for it that only IE will see????? I already provided my own smart tag entries. They are called hyperlinks. please leave them alone

Smart Tags = Fair Use

[artificeren]

It's very simple. I downloaded a file from a web server. This file is now MY file on MY hard drive. If I want to view it with notepad, I can. If I want to edit this file to make every single word go to everything2.com, I can. If I want to use services that insert new links into this file on my hard drive which might be of interest to me, I can do that, too.

Many people get in a big stink if other media publishers try to limit what people can do with the content after it has been transfered ( DeCSS, etc ), so why are web publishers in some magic bubble where it's Right that they own the content after the customer has it? If I want to run any arbitrary program on a file on my harddrive, I damn well can.

Oh, sure, I believe their explanation....

[GreyPoopon]

I think it's more probable that folks in Europe aren't "whipped" like those of us in the US, and are less willing to accept M$ as the "emperor of links." Maybe they're just trying to avoid the obvious beating they'll take for trying out their antics in non-US markets.

GreyPoopon
--

Come on.

[Violet Null]

Microsoft, the big ol' international company that markets Visual Studio in about 60 different languages, much less Windows, much less Internet Explorer..._this_ is the Microsoft that's pulling SmartTags in Europe because of language issues?

Excuse me if I don't think that's quite the reason.