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No XP-Smarttags in Europe

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the those-lucky-euro-bastards dept.

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?

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. And this is different how? by Masem · · Score: 5
    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>

    --
    "Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
    "I can see my house from here!" - ST:
  2. 'Smart' by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5

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

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    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    1. Re:'Smart' by DrCode · · Score: 5

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

  3. Re:Ya know... by JabberWokky · · Score: 5
    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

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  4. Come on. by Violet+Null · · Score: 5

    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.