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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.
Anyone see this new Microsoft robot crawling their websites? It's apparently legitimate, or at least acknowledged by Microsoft. Competition for Google?
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
From another CNN article released yesterday, Gates says this of DRM:
"Consumers shouldn't be worried that Microsoft Corp.'s new security technology will wrest control of their PCs and give it to media companies, Bill Gates said this week. They can always choose not to use it, he said."
Holy poopy-poop, that's misleading. People are going to read this and think "they" means "them." As in "the consumer can always choose not to use it." It, of course, doesn't. It means the creators of the content. And there goes fair use. 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?
But anyway, back to the issue. In the same article further down, we see:
"Gates said the format of digital content is up to their creators, and Microsoft is only providing a platform on which record labels and movie studios -- as well as others -- can build."
This is a fairly reasonable argument, not so different from the people who run Kazaa saying "hey, we're just an indexer, blame the end-user." Perhaps Microsoft isn't culpable here, either. What they're creating here is a valid tool, one that can allow people a strong form of encryption. The blame for the abuse of that tool, I think, does not rightfull belong in Microsoft's lap.
You might correctly argue that MS is doing this knowing full well that abuse is going to occur and stands to profit from it. Again, Napster et al. We cannot play both sides of the fence here.
My
Limekiller
A friend of mine asked me to check out the tablet for her so she can gift it to someone. I found out I can type 300 words faster than I can write. same with the navigation. and I hated to clean up the palm/fist prints on the screen. They need to do something about that (call me clumsy). It was kinda neat that I could sit in a hammock and work with it as they show in the ad, but then again, when I am in the hammock, I am someplace else.. ;)
It is creating inroads into commercial applications though (like a warehouse) where the stockers/retirevers are using ruggedized tablet/pocketpc variants to keep track of the inventory. Its kinda sketchy but I have seen it at work and the reception to it has been definitely positive!
Now I'll be the first to note that the man should have paid closer attention to his receipt, but this is definitely not uncommon at many Best Buys.
The Best Buy corporation likes to make a marketting bullet point about how their salespeople are not paid commissions and therefore aren't going to pressure you into sales you don't need. However, they conveniently forget to mention that the sales records of these employees are carefully tracked and while they don't get the positive re-enforcement of a commission income, they get plenty of negative re-enforcement for failing to push MSN, Netflix, service plans or anything else the corporate HQ wants customers to buy into.
Besides seeing such happen as a customer, I worked myself at a Best Buy for an entire eight hours in their computer department a year back and watched one the saleskids first try to push the MSN subscription on a customer who refused it the eight times it was asked, and then had it put on his credit card by the worker anyways.
When I asked the sales manager about the legality of this he merely muttered something about it being the customer's responsibility to keep track of their receipt and that he rewarded such agressive tactics.
I quit that job right then and there.
More horror stories for those look for an entertaining, though depressing read.
Okay, so it is rather redundant to say, but any benchmarking / testing paid for by a party is pretty much guaranteed to be biased in favor of that party.
Anyway, what is up with all the (ONLY 3?) testing systems being PIII Xeons? Where are the AMD chips for comparison? Sounds like Microsoft made sure the systems and benchmarks were very thoroughly optimized in their favor.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Mod away, Michael, mod away. It does not exist if you cannot see it!
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Yes, we all know that it's true.
And they're certain to want to rope off pieces of pie for themselves.
Despite all this, though, I think the general idea of a PC with the functionality of "Athena" is a good idea. If MS uses it's big cudgel to bring down the PC decibel level (you can hear `em whining already - "but we gotta cool our 4 GHz chips!"), increase the reliability (go ahead and use cheap capacitors - we won't let you put a quad-color sticker on the outside), and standardize hardware interfaces for telephony, then that would be a largely positive move.
Of course, as Linux user, I'd like to see all these new standards published openly and available for free to anyone who thinks they could implement them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You left out this interview with Steve Ballmer. I demand satisfaction!
OLPC Australia
NOt at there current cost, but there is a lot of places they would be used.
Replace charts in hospitals, the ability to pull up 3d image of an architect design while walking around a site, warehouse so you can compare inventory lists to actual product, at home so you could carry into the kitchen for recipes, stream some music to it, lok up something about your favorite tv show. I can see many ses for them, but the cost is just too high. If the could gut the cost to less then 400 bucks with color and a decent spec, they wuld start appearing everywhere.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They disabled last access time updating under windows. They didn't under Linux. This is enough to account for these differences, I suspect.
I must say, it was pretty hot. I took it into class, I loaded up the journal program and took notes with it, I had the day's reading (which had been distributed via electronic reserve) loaded into acrobat reader, and it worked well. The best was, of course, the wireless internet, and as we were discussing the latest nigerian elections I was able to pull up nyt.com and report on the latest news from the region.
On the other hand, I found the handwriting recognition horrible (it's supposed to learn your handwriting as you use it, which is why it always works so well for the demo people). The process of converting my three pages of notes from the journal program to ascii text took about a half hour - it would have been faster to retype them. Battery was almost dead after a 2 hour class, and I couldn't have used it in more than one class. Taking notes is fine, cause you can clean it up later, but basic input is very difficult (entering nyt.com via handwriting took about 60 seconds, and then I had to enter my username and password - and since the password was **** starred out, I didn't really know whether it had correctly interpereted my handwriting until I got the big error screen from the times.
My conclusion: TabletPCs are the future for academic environments, but not for three or four generations of the products, and not until apple makes one :-p.
I like
- posting
- reading articles
- reading posts
- thinking about posts
But there is too much here in this article that covers a lot of different ground. I think I'll give this topic a break and read a book today during my break.(It's like last couple of
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
That's so... 1996. This is one of the tactics Novell tried to use to keep corporations from replacing NetWare with NT. What Novell found out is that no one cared about file server performance. As long as the performance was "good enough" and Windows had more gizmos, they were screwed.
Of course, this is just one part of Microsoft's strategy against Linux and OSS. But I'm pretty sure that this salvo will fall on deaf ears.
the no
FK's main point is absolutely valid and correct, IMO. Michael is truely a cancer on this site. Just think, if a reader writes what he did as a comment, he would be modded to -1 in no time. But time and time again, he is allowed to get away with trolling, baiting, distorting, lying to push his little platform of his.
I also find it amusing the editors sooo hate Microsoft, but have no problem taking ad money to fund them. Got hypocrisy?
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
I saw this comment on LWN yesterday, pointing out that they were comparing the PEAK throughput. Windows 2003 may have a higher number for this, but it's the overall throughput that really matters.
Does Bill Gates use a Tablet PC? No, he uses a yellow pad of paper. ( Jon Udell's blob, Ron Howard's blog)
Now having said all this, I'm not surprised, I've been reading performance comparisons for 25 years and strangely enough, the sponsoring company's hardware/software/operating systems always seem to come out on top. This started with comparing the 8086 to the 68000 and has continued on to the present day.
The important/best thing about the review is that it states very clearly at the top that the test was sponsored by Microsoft.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
They also set up the servers with one NIC for each CPU. The uniprocessor box had one ethernet card, while the 8-way box had eight ethernet cards. If I remember, this is similar to the Mindcraft tests, where they tested file and web serving performance on systems having four ethernet adapters. I wouldn't call this a normal real-world configuration.
Maybe there are some cases where a fileserver is connected to several separate ethernet networks, but in my mind, that's an unusual configuration. I wonder if it's a contrived test, designed to exploit a difference between the Linux and Windows kernel, especially in handling multi-cpu / multi-NIC machines.
Perhaps Windows gets a larger boost than Linux from CPU affinity, especially on the chosen hardware (e.g. the IRQs from each ethernet card are dedicated to a specific CPU). There may be some room for improvement. It might even be that Linux doesn't fully support the chipset or APIC on that particular server, and therefore can't make the same optimization.
Of course, they don't run Linux
Why the hell would that be so important? The key aspect of the tablet is MS's snazzy handwriting recognition software... without that, it's just a laptop with the keyboard missing!
Too bad we can't mark stories as flamebait/trolling. This would be a prime example. Bye bye michael-submitted stories.
I'd like to see a comparison between Windows and Linux for video encoding. Recently I've been getting over 30 fps encoding MPEG4 with transcode on Linux. I was getting just over 20 fps on Windows. But that wasn't anything close to a comparison, just an observation.
I'd like to see how these performance features they've added to Win2k3 makes it faster than Linux at performing disk I/O with a loaded CPU or two.
One test I performed last night was kinda cool. Linux can stream 4 720x480 MPEG4/ogg ogm videos over a 100mbps net at the same time with xine. Watching 4 episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation at the same time can be a most humorous experience.
Anyway, check out this for a description of my efforts.
The nurses will lose the damn pens, and I'm not sure but I don't think that replacing them will be on the scale of replacing a bic, the pen on a Compaq tablet has a battery.
The nurses will lose, drop, or spill something over the devices. When we first rolled out pagers to nurses many came back broken and still do, a fairly large number ended up in toilets (poorly designed clips were the problem there). The point is that most health care workers have physically demanding, mobile jobs.
Most importantly the battery life of this generation of tablets is nowhere near the length neccessary. Most of our nurses work 12 hour shifts, they are not going to want to have to charge or swap batteries every day.
If anyone out there works in a hospital and have tested or rolled out these devices I would love to hear about your experiences.
Here's a simple guidline: If it's not human readable and it does not alow "fair use" as described by US code, then it does not desrve US Government copyright protection. Why should the government protect things which will never enlarge the public domain and take such a toll on the useful arts? If a company wants to make money by by publications that don't conform to the intent or purpose of copyright laws, they should go it alone and rely on their repulsive technology. What's not copyrightable should not be protected by DMCA so all's fair.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What is this, the week of micheal? I'm tired of seeing his non-stop articles day after day and his little side editorials he likes to slip in.
I guess I just don't agree with the man on a moral level...see my sig. But it seems he likes to start shit and then play victim. I've noticed that since the first Longhorn article, which spawned wild discussions, they're trying to keep up the page hits with continuous Microsoft coverage because it baits the Slashbots who love to jump on any opportunity to post Microsoft conspiracies and type dollar signs in the company's name. It's trite. As someone posted elsewhere, Windows reports less annual bugs than Linux, but reading Slashdot's front page, you would get a completely opposite impression. That's why you have all these Slashbots who act as if it is proven fact that Linux is more secure and has few bugs, simply because their worldview is taken from the front pages of Slashdot. It creates an anti-Microsoft bias in everyone which isn't based in fact, but instead is based on Slashdot headlines!
I feel there is a clear agenda at work to post Microsoft flamebait and get page hits.
"Sufferin' succotash."
"Second of all, "repeatability" is meaningless in terms of determining statistically significant results."
I believe you are confusing social science with physical science. Benchmarking a computer system is a physical science, the system should behave in a deterministic fashion provided you have properly identified all inputs.
It's like measuring the length of a 2x4. You do so twice, solely to verify your results. You don't need to sample the lengths of many 2x4's to understand the pattern of behavior which applies to the length of a 2x4.
"I could probably go on, but this should be enough.."
Since the methodology used to conduct the benchmark has been published, the only legitimate complaint you can make is to reproduce the benchmark and show exactly how they misconfigured the system.
What I see in your post is idle speculation. The attempt to claim conflict of interest may have relevance only if there has been a history of conflict of interest influencing test results in the past. Unfortunately for the sake of your argument that has not been the case.
This brings up another very good question about the testing techniques: why was only Red Hat compared? Is that the "most common" distro used on servers? Or just the one most likely to look bad when file transfer times are compared?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
..initial impression of the article as a "joe consumer" is, that with this new machine/OS hybrid, "stuff" I would normally be doing is going to be a lot more expensive. Third party apps will have to be microsoft approved to even run on your machine, or the machine won't run correctly or at all if you insist on trying, probably phone home and report on you as well. Massive and expensive catch 22 there. I am assuming that validation will cost app developers serious folding scratch, so there won't be as many freebies or shareware being developed. Media and content providers will be forced to choose, basically from cost, "do we code for this new stuff, or abandon the market, or code for both styles of internet and try to pass the costs on, or what?". There will be MANY conversations along those lines.
I could EASILY see that joe average, in addition to his internet account costs, could rack up 100 clams a month or more in various fees just to "do stuff" with his computer, almost a pay as you use a byte concept, and not be able to do what they are accustomed to doing now. the spooky part is, how much will this be tied into new laws? It could get way out of hand, and quickly.
And I'm sure this won't be classified as a monopoly by most pro MS marketing people or enthusiasts, and government will have a committee study it, forever.
Uhh, we need internet version 2, and yesterday, or the net is just going to be another cable TV monopoly deal. I sorta thought that would happen anyway, to be honest, I figured eventually you would just get one whopper bill a month, and "the net" would be more along "somebody's net you pay access to", sort of like telephony is now, package deals, the rest off limites unless you pay "more". An "AOL with a license to print laws and money" type of deal.
Hey! Still kinda nice to be enjoying the wild, wild west days of the internet, yes?
handwriting recognition is predictive (ie: it differentiates between a captial I, lowercase L, and numerial 1 by the characters that came before or after). In random sequences (read: good passwords), this fails miserably.
What did you expect? This is the same thing the human brain does to an extent, that is why can look at the following:
Oklahoma City
Okahoma Ciyy
Your mind makes out the difference, and knows the intent. You probably know Oklahoma City exists. Your mind spells out the first word phonetically, even with the missing letter it still sounds like "Oak ah home ah", so you make the connection. Plus, your mind immediately looks for other options for the second word's prefix, like 'Cit', 'Cin', or 'Cig', because it is very unlikely to be 'Ciy'.
Same thing happens if you are presented with a messy writing style, your brain uses the associated content and fleshes out any words, syllables or letters you cannot read.
If the human brain depends on phonetics, sentence structure AND cultural literacy to fill in the blanks, how the hell do you expect the mind, let alone a computer, to deal with non-phonetic, non-structured entries?
What you need there is a simpler password system, where you enter the letters not as flowing speech, but one letter at a time like graffiti. Still, it will never be easy...without the tactile feedback of pressing a key, you can never know what you really input.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This same thing happened to me when I bought my mother a desktop and myself a laptop April 2002. They charged a penny to my best buy bill, too, for a 6-month trial experience - which as far as I remember, I did not give/sign for anything saying I'll pay for MSN after the time (6 months is over). When I asked why they said, "Inventory Tracking purposes." Just like the plantiff in the original story.
I, absentmindedly, said, "Oh. OK." and shrug it off. A month later, I say, "Hey what's this MSN experience like and throw in the disk." Know that I already had cable interent via COX.
Not being able to connect to MSN through cable, I called their customer support hot-line and spoke to a rep who informed me that MSN is not available through cable internet. Then, she suggests that I purchase a DSL line through MSN.
A) I haven't used a land line since Y2K.
B) Why would I want to have two sources of internet hooked up in my place? I wouldn't.
C) Too costly!
Land Line ($45/month)
Cable Internet ($39.99/month)
DSL Subsciber ($39.99/month)
MSN Account ($22.95/month)
OUCH!
So I tell her no thanks and hang up, feeling rather refreshed for having gotten off the phone with MSN - butterfly or no.
Well, five months later I get a charge on my charge card for MSN Service. WTF!?
I called and called and called. It took almost two weeks to get in contact with the correct person to remove the charges. When they did remove the charges, it took them two months to do so!
Math Class!
Let's see:
My bill
22.95 @ 12 %interest = x
Microsoft's bill (Hrm)
22.95 times (like) 8000 customers who don't know their being billed ($22.95) + the interest earned on those 8K peeps + MSNs delay time of two months = one helluva chunk of ka-ching via interest alone EVEN IF THOSE SAME PEEPS WERE SEEKING TO STOP MSNs "service."
To make matters worse, they did the same to my mother. If I hadn't mentioned it to her, she might still be paying that bill.
Curse Microsoft!
After a quick read of the study, I have the following question(s):
Isn't this more of a test of Samba on RedHat, than RedHat itself? When you talk filesharing on a Windows network, that's pretty much what you're limited to, isn't it?
I mean, if you want a good comparison test, why don't you see how Windows Server 2003 does as an NFS file server? (I know, NFS isn't the best, but I think you get my drift).
Never mind the fact that Microsoft doesn't exactly share their network file sharing protocol with the Samba guys who, if I recall correctly, have mostly reverse engineered things. What's to stop Microsoft from tweaking the protocol to their advantage in a new release, then quickly testing it against a version of Samba uses an older non-optimal protocol?
...to something that's been going on since there have been "tinkerers" and "the public."
There have always been, and always will be, Those who Know (how to tinker) and Those who Do Not Know (and, in many cases, don't seem to want to know) how to work with computer innards, or solder, or build electronic kits, or even design their own stuff. It's all different levels of the same bar.
An example; Joe and Jane Consumer are thrilled to death about being able to send E-mail with pictures of the kids to granny, but they don't have Clue One about the processes involved, nor do they want one. They're under the belief that any such details are far too messy or complex for their comprehension, even though Joe may have a Ph.d in Astrophysics and Jane in Mathematics.
Belief is a very powerful thing. Far more so than people realize. If you truly believe, in mind and spirit, that something is too tough or too complex for you to learn or do, you will not be able to learn or do it, no matter how hard you try, until you completely shed the belief that is holding you back. That's not easy to do either, because a belief that takes root is just as hard to get rid of as a bad infestation of weeds.
As another example, there are those who have at least a basic understanding of computers and networks (I'm talking the SysAdmins and network techs of the world), but that don't have Clue One about the most basic electrical or electronic principles, or how the very hardware they maintain is put together. Mention Ohm's Law to such people, and you would likely get as blank a stare as if you'd said "The Internet uses TCP/IP protocols" to Joe and Jane. These same admins and techs are just as likely to burn themselves with a soldering iron as they would be to use it right.
There's another tier. Those who take electronics seriously enough to really learn how to work with it, or that know enough about construction practices to be able to design and build a useful circuit, or modify something else to suit their purposes. And there are tiers above that, for those that are (or were, in times past) pioneers in the sciences (Tesla, Marconi, Bell, etc.)
My point is simple; It all boils down to how much you choose to teach yourself about the world we share, and the tools we use in it. The more you choose to learn, the easier a time you'll have working with those same tools. A high IQ, a dexterous touch, or other physical and mental gifts can help, but you never know what you're truly capable of until you push your OWN limits -- hard!
If you want to be led around by the nose, and don't mind paying for the privilege, then anything Microsoft puts out, hardware or software, will be a good match.
If you would rather be doing the leading, of yourself or others, then you need to learn enough about the hardware and/or software you're working with to do something more sophisticated than click a mouse. Period. Learning may not be easy, or fun (most of the time), but the rewards are usually well worth the effort.
It's all the same dance, folks. It's just a question of whether you want to be a dancer or a musician (or somewhere in between).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
/. readers are smart enough to figure out that MS is trying to do is to make computers inobtrusive and pervasive within the home and office.
MS should be thanked for pushing the usability envelope as far as it has since most competetors (including open source) are striving for a MS like interface/functionality in their software packages.
1. The CPU/Motherboard/video/network should be in a non-upgradable box.
2. The OS/application programs should be on a CD-R or download on demand Java applets. This includes a build manager which lets you add/remove packages to the base installation, burn it on CD-R, and then boot up with that OS on a user machine.
3. Data storage should be on an external USB enclosure type hard disk or flash card
This greatly lowers the total IT cost by:
1. Swap out a CPU unit to upgrade a machine/fix a broken one without having to recreate the data
2. OS upgrades are easy as booting off a new CD-R
3. The total cost of such a box would be very low
4. The IT orginization could include any extra software packages required on the CD-R or on the network drive
5. The cost of software would be much lower than a MS OS and MS Office license
Knoppix and a CD-ROM bootable Linux from Scratch will be the ancestors of this.
If you can read German, look here
Or, summarised in English:
1st No updates of RedHat Advanced Server.
2nd No new Samba version.
3rd No new kswapd (should especially speed up performance under high load).
4th Original Samba version got difficulties, used even older ones, but did not ask RedHat for any help.
5th Tuning of Windows using Registry-Key "Disablelastaccess", but did not use corresponding mount-Option "noatime" for the used ext3 file system.
6th ext3 uses a much more sophisticated journaling of the file system, but they did not set the mount option "data=writeback" to have similar conditions.
7th Very old LinUX kernel (over one year old, with known limits of this kernel for high load environments - do you remember all these 2.4.xy problems because of the virtual memory!?).
8th Redhat provides solutions to the most of the described problems, but they did not use these updates or that help.
9th They did not really try to tune Samba and used mostly the default settings.
I could testify in that court case, should the plaintiff see fit to contact me.
I was set up with a paper trail, and terminated from Best Buy, after refusing to sign up people for MSN without their knowledge.
I worked there during high school.
I worked in computers, and then appliances. I refused to stuff an MSN cd in some old man's bag who didn't even have a PC. It's just wrong.
Boycott Best Buy. There are dozens of other *HORRIBLE* things that they do that they call "Best Practices", because they're not part of the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) they're not "company policy", thus they just deny it.
These "Best Practices" are store/department written, so they'll never get caught.
I have pushed carts to pay my insurance in high school, I would much rather do something like that, than provide a mechanism for things so morally wrong.
Mod this up so maybe slashdot choosing to use another retailer can make a difference!
A class-action suit has been filed charging that MSN and Best Buy combined to scam customers.
/. Damn I wish I had held out for that GF3.
When I think of best buy and MSN, I think back to 1998 when MSN accidentally left a legal loophole in their marketing plan.
I can't find the story now, but MSN and BB had a promotion going where if you signed up for the MSN service, you got $400 store credit. This was legal in every state EXCEPT california. The San Jose Mercury ran a big story about it, which basically explained the law was created to stop car lots from forcing people to use a certain insurance carrier in exchange for a few dollars knocked off the sticker price.
Well, me and my co-workers took a long lunch that day, headed down to best buy and got our free $400 dollars. Everyone but me bought stuff on the spot, I was smart enough to turn my store credit into gift checks.
Those gift checks sat in my wallet for some time, I was waiting for the latest greatest nvidia card. My wife knew they were in there, and her constant nagging broke down all my defenses until I caved in and let her use them for our new TV.
Unfortunately I spend most of my time in front of this sun monitor tapping away at
When Kim asked why the compact disc had been scanned, the employee allegedly said it was to keep track of inventory. But Best Buy apparently sent Kim's debit card information to Microsoft, which activated an MSN service account in his name without telling him, the lawsuit said.
I can tell you right now that Best Buy's Point of Sale system isn't that slick. In order for an MSN Chargeable Account to be created, a 'Scrip' must be processed during the transaction, which is essentially filling out an electronic form. At the end of the Scrip process, the customer's credit card must be swiped, and the customer is told on a miniature LCD screen (a few times actually) that they are signing up for an MSN account. A few of these screens include choosing a screen name, confirming an address, and signing the MSN EULA after the credit card has been run through the LCD device. This is BEFORE the transaction is copmleted. Once the Scrip has been processed, the customer pays for what they are purchasing and the order is completed.
To sum all this up, it would be very diffucult for Best Buy or MSN to create a scam like this, becuase the system was created to let customers know many times that they are signing up for an MSN account and unless a username, credit card, and customer information is entered in during the Scrip process, an account is not created (I mean, come on, MSN isn't going to create accounts without getting a credit card number and a billing address first).
So, I could see two possibilities from which came this outcome. Either the register people were highly trained to decieve customers, convincing them they need to swipe their credit card twice and give out a billable address (comming from someone who works in retail, this is easier said than done. Also, if Best Buy found out their employees were following this deceptive practice, they'd fire everyone involved immediately). Or, the customer who sparked this lawsuit knew at least vaguely what he was getting himself into and decided that this was a good opportunity to make a little money through legal ventures.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see MSN get sued over something, as they've decieved people before (like advertising fast and reliable connectivity when in truth they could give two craps about the quality of connectivity, especially back in the days of those $400/4 Year Contract agreements), but this is one lawsuit that won't go anywhere.
ACLs on Unix (Linux, anyway) are all very well, but the permissions themselves are still only Read, Write, Execute. The extra things like Modify and Full Control are lacking.
I speak from experience - it's the reason why we were ultimately unable to replace an existing W2k fileserver with Debian (on ext3).
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins