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What's Microsoft Up To?
So, today's one of those days when every bit of news is dominated by Microsoft. To spare you six different stories about the Borg, we'll assimilate them all into this one. You have seen the stupid Passport hole in an earlier story; also the iLoo, although that hasn't stopped you from submitting stories about it, oh no. New news: a report paid for by Microsoft shows that Windows is a better server than Red Hat. A class-action suit has been filed charging that MSN and Best Buy combined to scam customers. The WINHEC conference is ongoing - Steve Ballmer says DRM is an opportunity, not a prison, the Xbox is going to be your home communications center, Wired talks about how hardware will be changed to imprison users, and once you're locked in to Microsoft you get to pay more each year. An article describes why user desktops are locked down. Oh, and here's another on DRM, just because.
So, this is pretty crappy if it's true. I can understand the BB employees putting a free CD in your bag. I can understand them scanning it for inventory purposes. but to then charge a monthly fee? that's ridiculous. someone will be fired for that stunt.
Tablet PCs are alive and well. XP tablet edition is out, and manufacturers are releasing their new products. Just the other day a product rep from Gateway stopped by to show off the new line of Gateway tablets, starting around $2500. On this particular model, the handwriting recognition is nearly FLAWLESS. Made me drool, as much as I hate Gateway. Other units are priced as low as $1300 if you shop around. I believe there's a FiC model floating around for that price.
Tablets are alive and probably replacing a laptop near you.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
For those that haven't read the MSN scam ariticle, let me summarize it. A guy bought some stuff at Best Buy and paid with a debit card. The check out person scanned an MSN CD and dropped it in the bag as well, saying the scanning was for inventory purposes. The debit info is sent to MS who then starts billing the customer's debit card for MSN service. Now that is a shitty deal. That would be like having a car dealer send your credit card or bank account info to a local garage, AAA, OnStar, and the LoJack folks for you and they all start billing you automagically. I hope he wins. This suit certainly has merit IMHO. I hope he doesn't back out on the suit and doesn't settle. Best of luck to him.
Seems that Windows has somewhat more advanced controls here.
And while I'm on it, can someone who is a lawyer tell me if we have a right to fair use or is it merely a thing that we've enjoyed because copyright holders couldn't ever get such a firm grip on it enough to effectively control it?
I am a lawyer. I am not completely sure on this issue, as I have not had a lot of time to research it. It appears as though the issue is split. Some courts refer to fair use as a right, some as a privelege.
Fair use is provided by statute, not the Constitution:
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
The Supreme Court has described it as follows: "Any individual may reproduce a copyrighted work for a 'fair use'; the copyright owner does not possess the exclusive right to such a use." Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 433, 78 L. Ed. 2d 574, 104 S. Ct. 774 (1984).
I don't think the issue has been presented to the courts in this manner (there haven't been many copy protection schemes for thinks like books, e.g., they aren't printed on red paper to stop photcopying). I would say that a court would hodl a content producer can use DRM, but if you hack the DRM, thus allowing you to make copies, you can make copies for various fair uses. However, the hacking itself (i.e, bypassing the DRM) may be illegal under the DMCA. This probably trumps the fair use right (remember, its source is statutory -- not constitutional) in that if you can't make copies legally, you can't exercise your fair use right/privilege.
Alas... the problem is that the various statutes are either out of date (e.g., Copyright Act) or responses to an uncertain environment, goaded by lobbyists (e.g., DMCA).
D'oh -- the stuff that buys me beer! Ray -- the guy who sells me beer!
I hope for your sake you are kidding.
You are talking of two totally different kinds of lockdown features.
Windows lockdown is locking the customer to one perticular vendor (windows in this case), and forcing them to upgrade and pay more and more money every year.
The KDE 3.2 lockdown features are for locking certain aspects of KDE from the users by administrators. Typical application would be kikos where you want multiple users to use the applications but not change the configurations.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
So their stock price is up ~20% over the last five years? Is that supposed to be bad?
Support:
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of moneybr> RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
I think you meant...
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you install Debian, BSD, Gentoo, Mandrake or some other distro that won't charge you out the ass for Eratta support.
$ setfacl -h ... ... ... ...
usage:
setfacl [-r] -f aclfile file
setfacl [-r] -d acl_entries file
setfacl [-r] -m acl_entries file
setfacl [-r] -s acl_entries file
Also available for linux
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
But hey, at least VeriTest was honest enough to put that fact (that the test was paid for my MSFT) right up front, unlike the Mindcraft back in 1999.
... I would be just as sceptical of the result if Red Hat had paid for the study and the result had shown RH parity or superiority to WinServer2k3. Frankly, the only time I think these comparison tests have much credibility is when BOTH the test sponsor AND the testing lab are independent of the vendors of all products tested (as in Mitre's various test studies for various government agencies).
The subtitle ("Test report prepared under contract from Microsoft") definitely makes me think, "Take these results with a very LARGE grain of salt." Don't get me wrong
utter rubbish
We could all switch.
But it does. I can't get any kind of power management support to work. I'm recompiling the kernel right now with another crap-shoot of settings that might make it suspend properly. The userland desktop apps are garbage. Half the hardware on the shelves is either not supported, or half-way supported.
Either deal with the hassles of linux, or deal with the hassles of windows. One will cost you time and features, the other money.
Life's a bitch. Let's get over it, shall we?
BTW, RedHat ain't exactly gods gift to corporate america either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Unfortunately they also left much of the Linux network stack untuned even though they altered all of two settings in samba's config file.
They then proceeded to tune the hell out of the Windows server, altering things like file locking semantics, network timeouts and dormant file limits in order to eke out more speed.
Hope someone else has picked up on this imbalance in the optimisation of the systems....
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
I only skimmed the "benchmark" document, but I immediately saw a couple of fundamental flaws in their methods.
o nb ridge_microsoft.asp
_ 02 -06-27.asp?visitor=X
3 16 1
2 80 1
First, they said they conducted each test twice to ensure the "repeatability" and "accuracy." First of all, running a test only twice in no way gives you enough data to claim accuracy. Second of all, "repeatability" is meaningless in terms of determining statistically significant results. The terms you want to claim are *reliability* and *validity*, not accuracy and repeatability.
Simply averaging the results of two tests is idiotic in terms of sound scientific methods. That's the kind of testing I would expect from a grade school chemistry experiment, not an expensive "commissioned" test of a real-life installed system of this kind of complexity.
The other thing they said, which directly contradicts what they said in the main highlights in the beginning of the report, is that "Our investigation showed that, with some minor tweaks, the default configuration values set for SAMBA generated the best overall performance in our configuration." I'm not sure if this means just their linux configuration, or if they tuned linux and discovered that it was faster and just published the slower non-tweaked numbers.
Here are some interesting URLs that help to reveal the obvious conflict of interest here:
http://www.etestinglabs.com/about/news/press/li
http://www.etestinglabs.com/about/news/press/pr
These two show how LionBridge, the parent company of VeriTest, has a long-standing and EXTREMELY lucrative contract with MicroSoft.
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/137
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/148
Here's some more interesting info:
Fidelity Management and Research Co. is Microsoft's top institutional shareholder, and is LionBridge's 6th largest institutional shareholder.
Barclays Global Investors Int'l is #2 for Microsoft and #9 for LionBridge.
Morgan Stanley Investment Mgmt is #13 for Microsoft and #3 for LionBridge.
State Street is #3 for MicroSoft, #8 for LionBridge.
So, the top 3 institutional shareholders of Microsoft own a very significant chunk of LionBridge, which shows lots of common interest between the two.
I could probably go on, but this should be enough..
Want to see something neat?
Click this. Then click the box next to michael. Then scroll to the bottom and click save. Voila, no michael.
I don't have a problem with michael, but it's sure nice that if I did, I wouldn't have to read his posts. The tools exist, use 'em.
VA Software, Red Hat
You were saying?
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Microsoft disabled last access time through a registry hack, no indication that the EXT3 partition was mounted with the noatime option, this would seriously impare Samba's performance.
This is the one that stands out for me are there any others ?
I had an update today that changed by iTouch quick-key settings. The e-mail button opened Outlook (first time it's ever been run), the search button was remapped to some random search engine (not MS, but not Google either), and the other buttons were likewise messed up.
And this happened after a Media Player (I think it was Media Player) patch.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Ahh, it was customers like you that made me want to tell you to get the hell out of the store, because that computer you just walked out the door without any addons meant me getting hassled by about 3-4 different people. Sometimes, if a customer clearly wasn't interested in service, I would wander away hoping they would leave or that some other employee would get the "bad sale".
That's one reason employees avoid eMachines like the plague - they're tough to sell service plans on. Who wants to pay $99 for a service plan on a $300 computer? Most people buy a $300 computer to be a throw-away anyway.
So next time you're in Best Buy and you say no to the addons and service plan, just remember the employee hates you more than you probably hate him/her.
With EVERY computer, we were REQUIRED and harassed beyond belief if we did not try to sell the following with each computer: Printer, paper, blank CDRs, software from the "discount rack", Norton anti-virus, UPS, $30 USB cable, Service Plans (on the computer, monitor AND printer), extra toner cartridges, MSN, and my personal favorite, "system optimization" for like $30, which included them deleting a few AOL icons off the desktop (Best Buy only offered Earthlink and MSN at the time) and running defragment. woot!
Best Buy lackey: "Did you get service on that?"
Me: "No."
Lackey: "Why not?"
Me: "They weren't interested."
Lackey: "What did you tell them?"
Me: (the usual spiel) "I told them that if the thing died on them they would have to deal with the manufacturer (lie), but with the service plan we would take care of it. I told them how the integrated CD-ROM is often times the first thing to go, which is $100 for eMachines. I told them about our no-lemon policy and how one service call would probably take care of the cost of the plan."
Lackey: "So what did they say."
Me: "They said that if it broke they would just buy a new one and that they don't believe in service plans."
Lackey: "Well, did you get any software out on it?"
Me: "Nope, they said they have all the software they need."
Lackey: "How about a surge supressor or some blank CDR's?"
Me: "Nope, they said the were just interested in the computer and that's it"
Lackey: "Did they at least put it on their Best Buy card?"
Me: "They said their Visa works just as fine."
Now for the best part. Pick your insult:
1. Lackey: "Well, if they didn't want that stuff, you must not have sold it right."
2. Lackey: "If I would have done the sale, I gaurentee they would be walking out of here with at least a battery backup or Norton"
3. Lackey: "You're ruining our numbers for the night! Come on! You gotta get those addons!"
I won't even want to get started on the bitching I would get if the computer didn't go out with an MSN subscription. Most of the time we were suppose to tell them that it was required with the purchase, and if they threatened to leave the store, THEN tell them, "Ok, I guess I can make an acception in your case."
The same is true for RedHat. There are also hundreds of books written for both. I don't think documentation is an issue you can compare. You espessially can't say windows has "none".
Hardly need support for windows? I don't think so. Since the article is talking about it from a server point of view, so will we. Windows servers are a pain, with many flaws and much to learn to make them even work somewhat well. Sure, they HAVE one-click wizards and such, but when do those ever work flawlessly?
As a linux user, I find setting up the simplest things on linux fairly simple. In fact, setting up some very complex things can be fairly simple. When I first started with linux, some things were very difficult. I've paid $0 for support for linux, and know I'm decently knowledgable.
I've bought books for windows, and setup a few networks, and I still can't get everything working the way I want to. I still have mysterious problems on the network, like someone's account will suddenly not be able to run wordperfect on one particular machine without crashing (but it works fine on any other machine, or with any other accounts), and I can find no explaination. And the people that have been using MS products for years have no explanation.
Your last question here is particuarly interesting. There's a trend in the linux - and OSS, in fact - world to create highly configurable software. This means there's lots of options. Which sometimes means that there's a lot to figure out to get it to work the way you want. The difference here is that you - the user - decides how to make the program work the way you want, instead of the program telling you how to work because that's the only thing it can do.
Microsoft DOES in fact release a lot of patches. If you subscribe to HotFix or whatever they call it, you happen to get more of them and a bit faster, but thats a moot point. The big issue is that linux patches will say exactly what they fix, and possibly even more importantly, include source code. Microsoft patches typically are "Security Update - fixes flaw in program XXX that could allow an attacker to take control of your computer". I'd swear every patch says the same thing. :)
Anyways, a lot of admins are reluctant or slow to apply MS patches. And with good reason, it's a well known fact that often patches will break other things, or cause other unpredicable behaviour. I don't know where you work, but applying a fix to prevent someone from doing some strange non-likely hack to your SQL server that also
Speak before you think
Not 404s then, but host not found's. By default you get the nice msn "is this the domain you meant" messages on the msn search page.
There is one obvious hole that I found. /mntpoint"
They turned off the last file access on the Windows servers, but not the Linux servers. Every file hit on Linux got turned into an I-Node update that didn't occur to Windows.
This can be done by "mount -o noatime
This is a boring sig
Microsoft has been adamant that the Xbox is and will remain a gaming platform. Period. The knee-jerk reaction to news of additional capabilities, such as voice and music, is "The Xboxes aren't selling as game consoles, so they're trying other applications in hopes of selling more boxes."
This doesn't make much sense when one considers that Microsoft loses money on every Xbox. The bill of materials is $400-$500, and they retail for $200. That difference can't be made up on volume. This business model is to lose money on the consoles but make it back (and then some) on the games, much like the razor/blade model. Games are high-margin products, especially those created in-house, and I would think that the Xbox business case is dependent upon preserving those margins. So pushing the Xbox as an enabler of low-margin services doesn't make much sense. Let's look at those mentioned...
Voice
Sure, Xbox Live voice quality is pretty good. Since Xbox Live requires broadband, it's not tough to obtain toll quality. But why would they want to? There are many reasons why voice over IP hasn't taken off (customers don't want to be tethered to their PCs, long distance is already cheap -- you'd better not be paying more than $0.05/minute for interstate calls), and to my knowledge Xbox Live doesn't have the billing capabilities required for voice services. The article states that Microsoft would move the chat capability to the Xbox Live dashboard, which implies the requirement of an Xbox Live subscription. It's unlikely that this feature would convince consumers to subscribe to Xbox Live. Microsoft would also need VOIP-PSTN gateways, so their customers can call people who don't use an Xbox. Telephone service is complicated. Maybe Microsoft would partner with a company such as Vonage, but they certainly aren't the easiest to work with.
Music
A neat capability, much like the QCast Tuner for the PlayStation 2. Consumers have shown little willingness to pay for this, however, as they're accustomed to free players. Service like Rhapsody and pressplay would undoubtedly benefit from freedom from the shackles of the PC, but their revenue shares are micenuts compared with Microsoft's costs. Given the current crop of LAN-to-stereo bridges, like the AudioTron and the SimpleFi, the Xbox does stand out, but this advantage may be gone in a few months when the likes of Linksys launch its low-cost device.
Movies
One of the reasons for Movielink's slow start is the simple fact that most consumers prefer to watch movies on their TVs, not their PCs. This problem is defeated with the Xbox in the mix, as it enables high-quality video output to the TV. Perhaps Microsoft plans to download the top 3-4 pay per view movies to the Xbox hard drive each night (Movielink movies are 500-600MB each, so they would easily fit on the 8-9GB Xbox HDD), so when the consumer chooses a popular movie playback begins immediately. The margins on this business are low, too. And Microsoft will compete with existing TV-based PPV and Video on Demand, which is slowly rolling out to cable systems. This makes a tough market even tougher.
Summary
Low margin + low penetration services will not lift the Xbox to profitability. Great games will. Strong Xbox Live games will give customers a reason to pay $9.95 a month for the service. Hopefully the EA/AOL exclusivity deal will end soon, so Xbox can benefit from good sports titles. Until the games improve, Microsoft is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They have the cash to be patient, however.
Disclaimer: I work fo