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Big Brother Lifetime Award Goes To Microsoft
D4C5CE writes "Microsoft's ceaseless "success" in bringing instability, insecurity and
breaches of privacy as well as a deplorable lack of open standards to
almost Every Desktop on Earth has now earned them an "Oscar" for Data
Leeches, the Lifetime Award for
"outstanding mis-achievement" from the BigBrotherAwards 2002
in Germany. Microsoft's
Data Protection Officer actually attended the ceremony to collect the
prize (probably delighted that unlike the "laureates"
of last year's event in Austria, at least he would not receive live
cockroaches), and this unlucky winner took the opportunity to make some critical
remarks on the company's communications regarding the Windows
Media Player and Digital Restrictions (or, euphemistically, in his words: Rights) Management technologies which he deemed crucial for modern
business models, rather than acknowledging that it's in fact not just the advertising but the approach itself which is fundamentally flawed."
I love it... another article that's a troll: "instability". By checking out the links, it doesn't look like they have anything at all to do with stability. On top of that, anyone's who's been awake in the past 2-3 years knows that W2K is incredibly stable.
Bad articles are one things, but blatant trolls are another. Who keeps approving these things?
what a balanced and fair summary
l uation/compare/advantage.asp e r/evaluation/whyupgrade/default.asp
You mean like the documents Microsoft produces?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Embedded/sak/eva
http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/advancedserv
Why read a lousy Google/Altavista translation, when the site has an English version?
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
It has always seemed to me that it's the outdated business models that DRM is meant to protect.
ROTFLMAO
Leave it to a translation software to translate the English word brother used in a German text as bread ago.
It makes sense. They probably thought it was Brot her. Which could be translated as bread (=Brot) ago (=her), but just as well as gimmi (=her) bread.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Windows is getting more stable all the time. However, an improvement from 0.01 acceptable to 0.5 acceptable isn't going to impress anyone, even if it's a 50-fold improvement.
You conveniently chose to ignore the other two points, namely:
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
They did the same thing when slashdot and others tried the Refund trick a few years ago as documented in the fine film 'Revolution OS'. They had a table with free coffee and a banner that read 'Microsoft welcomes the Open Source community' (or some such thing). The Theory is very sound, if you duck an issue you get pissed off people, if you at least greet a attack with some grace it defuses the force of the argument. It's social aikido. You just can't punch out someone who offers you coffee....
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I think Windows is largely a desktop OS, regardless of any "Professional" labels MS choose to put on them. Remember that a "profesional" user is far too often someone who knows how to use MS Office and Outlook with zero security awareness.
:-)
And for a desktop OS, Windows XP is sure stable and secure enough for me. Sometimes I have to wonder if an easy-to-use OS makes people lazy and don't care about firewalls, anti-virus software and other obvious security software that are necessary today, especially if you're going to use an Operating System that's by far the most common on the market. Microsoft's responsibility isn't to provide security to prevent us from spreading trojans. Only education can do that.
But don't get me wrong -- I blame MS if they don't have a patch ready before a virus/trojan/whatever is released. But, to use Bugbear as an example, if a patch is released a year ago and someone didn't care to download it, is it then Microsoft's responisiblity to foresee the problem and have a fix when Windows 2000 went retail or the user's responsibility to keep up to date with security patches?
I guess it all boils down to the fact that we're all human... Since Microsoft has a hard time to keep up with exploits from a huge amount of potential hackers due to the OS' wide-spread use and the end users for not keeping up with security software and patches. Perhaps Windows would be much better of as Open Source since it would help with a larger programmer base, but that's of course impossible as long as Bill Gates has something to say.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
However I have never seen a linux kernel panic before and do not even know what they look like. I have used linux for 3 years now. I am aware the recent 2.4x series is not as stable as earlier version or other unixies but I use linux as a workstation and not a server.
Now before we state that ms is finally getitng it, I would like to mention how many years it took for ms to make a good industrial OS. Take a wild guess? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years ? 15 years?
Microsoft began NT work with os/2 back in 1985. They invented the early win32api's in windows386 which was later supposed to be added to os/2. IT wasn't untill 1988 when they hired David Cutley that they officially began what is now NT. This is after ms decided to dump os/2. It took 11 years to make it server ready! Thats right! 1988-1999 when w2k came out! Lets see where linux came in 11 years or how long it took Bell labs to make Unix ready for the mini market? The 2.0 kernel was the first server ready kernel. I admit the smp sucked and some of the features might of been lacking but it was stable, 24x7 ready, and fully posix compliant for server use back in 1996. It took linux 5 years. It probably would of been quicker if Linus decided to make seperate stable and development branches earlier. Now lets look at unix. I believe the first commercial versions came out in the mid 1970's if I am correct. 6-7 years before it became 24x7 ready.
My point is that it took ms a decade with full working win32 as well as os/2 code to base work on! I only imagine how long it would take if they had to write NT from scratch without any os/2 code. An admin told me once that the first version of NT would display os/2 errors whenever a problem errupted. Where as in the other projects, all the code was written from scratch. Linus I believe decided to dump all minux code for the first version of linux even though it was used to write it. w2k still needs some work and that is a bad track record. Reward is deserved indeed regardless of how good w2k is currently.
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, Microsoft and other DRM advocates will assure you that they have thought of these things, and they have taken steps to insure they won't happen. But to paraphrase Murphy's Law, if anything can be abused, it will be. In the end it comes down to this: how much is control over your own computer worth to you? Would you give it up just for the chance to pay to watch some movies on line?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The winners of the austrian BBAs were announced today. For those who care: Microsoft did not win a single one, although they were nominated in two categories. All the awards went to companies and public institutions that invaded the privacy of austrian citizens in a much more direct way than Microsoft is able to.
I do think that giving the award to Microsoft was more of a publicity stunt pulled by the organizers of the german event than anything else. Giving them a "lifetime achievement" for things they will likely do in the future does seem a bit out of place.
The BigBrotherAwards are not totally useless. But at the moment they should mainly operate on a national level and raise awareness of existing intrusions into privacy. I don't know if there is an international version of these awards. If such a thing exists, then two years down the line Microsoft might deserve to be honored, but right now it just is a cheap attempt to get some publicity.
In completely unrelated and off-topic news: I just found out that Richard Harris, among a lot of other achievments known as the actor who played Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, died today at the age of 72. Bummer.
Hank! White!
BoP is MS's middle name? Would that make them MBoPS? Wasn't that an old Hanson song a few years ago...?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.