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The War Of The Word
atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."
In a democratic process, liberals could never persuade Americans to vote for their insane ideas - abortion on demand, gay marriage and adoption, handgun confiscation, cross-district busing, abolishing the death penalty and affirmative action quotas. So issues are simply taken out of the voters' hands by the Supreme Court. Vitally important cultural issues are now decided for us by a handful of unelected elites, who, coincidentally, share the ideology of Janeane Garofalo. It's a lot easier to get a majority out of nine votes than it is to get a majority of 280 million votes.
As long as liberals have a majority of Supreme Court justices in their pockets, they never have to persuade their fellow countrymen to support any of their crackpot ideas. They just sit around waiting for the Supreme Court to give them the "nine thumbs up!" sign to abortion on demand.
When Reagan was president, he threatened to appoint justices who would not discover nonexistent "penumbras," which mysteriously read like a People for the American Way press release, and to return these issues to voters. The uneducated bumpkin Reagan's radical notion was that judges don't write laws, they interpret them.
Liberals exploded in righteous anger - an emotion they've never mustered toward Islamic terrorists, I note. Still, all their theatrics would have been for naught and we would already have our democracy back - but for Arlen Specter.
Specter voted against a slew of conservative Reagan appointees, including Jeff Sessions to a federal appellate court (Sessions now sits with Specter on what must be a rather chilly Senate Judiciary Committee) and Brad Reynolds to be associate attorney general. But his epochal vote was against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
Liberals waged a vicious campaign of vilification against Bork, saying he would bring back segregated lunch counters, government censorship and "rogue police" engaging in midnight raids. No one expects more of Teddy Kennedy. But when a senator with an "R" after his name opposed Bork, it was over.
Specter pretended to weigh the attacks on Bork thoughtfully and after careful consideration announced he would vote against Bork. By exploiting the fact that he calls himself a "Republican" - despite voting with John Kerry more often than he voted with Ronald Reagan - Specter gave cover to the left's portrayal of decent, God-fearing Americans who love their country as being about one step away from David Duke. As the first Republican to oppose Bork publicly, Specter ensured that other craven "moderates" would soon follow suit.
The Bork fiasco utterly cauterized the Republicans. After that, Republican administrations were terrified of nominating anyone provably to the right of Susan Sarandon. Instead of legal giants like Judge Robert Bork, we ended up with Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter on the Supreme Court.
Since Bork, Republican presidents have put three justices on the court. Two of the three gaze upon a document that says absolutely nothing about abortion or sodomy and discern a "constitutional" right to both. (But try as they might, they still haven't been able to discern a woman's constitutional right to defend herself from rapists by carrying a pistol in her purse.) Because of the court's miraculous discovery of a right to sodomy last term, gay marriage is now on the agenda in America.
The nation waits with bated breath to see if, this term, the court will strike "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Liberals are so desperate for this to happen that some of them are actually praying for it. The only reason to hope the court might let us keep saying "under God" is that it's an election year. Like Arlen Specter, the Supreme Court often gets religion whenever normal Americans are about to vote.
Luckily for the country, Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court a year before Specter was up for re-election. After supporting Thomas, Specter turned around and started bellyaching that Thoma
Microsoft won because it bundled its apps with Windows... and wrote contracts with the vendors to cut their price for the purchase the Windows license *if* they included Word/Excel etc. Include the software MS wants to build a new monopoly in. which at the time was office apps, and you'll get a great deal on the already-a-monopoly Windows license. This is the reason the "secret price list" was such a big deal during the DOJ trial.
Anyone, especially MS-shills, who claims it has anything to do with the quality of the software or MS giving people what they want is lying, or stupid.
Can someone please submit this article to Slashdot's editors? Its been pending for a day and a half for myself. I've released this text into the public domain so feel free to reword anything in it.
I think its self explanatory but feel free to reply here for clarifications.
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Open Source Application Under Attack by Maker of KaZaA over Reverse Engineering
A story from Zeropaid indicates that maker of KaZaA, Sharman Networks, has sent a Cease and Desist Letter to the maker of GPLed software KCEasy because it interoperates with their FastTrack network. The creator of KCeasy says on the KCEasy website "I feel that inclusion of FastTrack access with KCeasy is not worth a legal battle between Sharman and myself". A similar issue was covered by the Slashdot story Fight On Blizzard Vs. Bnetd Case on the right to reverse engineer to create an interoperable network. Reverse engineering to be another on the list of rights that have fallen by the way side?
"We forgive you. We don't have type 11 errors anymore. You can come back to the Mac any time you want. *opens arms* You sound like you need a hug."
10 years too late, and $1000 too much. Sorry, Macs are for sux0rs.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So I asked my friend, if MS seems to be such a great company--and they really do, from this angle--why are their products so damn bad? His answer was, who says they're bad?
I told him, ``well, I'll admit Windows fills its niche just as well as anything else--if only OS X worked on x86--but c'mon, look at some of their other stuff!'' Like VisualBasic, he said? Sure, you or I wouldn't use it, but we aren't the target market. The guys using it for rapid development in the corporate world aren't coders. They don't care about performance or semantics or control; they care about something they can use and be done with. And (according to my friend--I've barely used it) VisualBasic fits the bill.
What about Windows Server, I asked. I mean, here's a product that simply sucks. Compare it to Linux, FreeBSD, or any number of commercial Unix offerings, and while it might win on usability or TCO, the effort of making it actually work as well as the alternatives is hardly worth it. He said, yeah, or PocketPC, right? I said, absolutely. Hell, I doubt MS even made money on PocketPC.
He agreed with me, but said, well, think about this. They don't want to make a whole new OS--and they could--they want to make a Windows for a server. They're tied to the legacy code. So while it might not be pretty, Windows Server likely truly is the best they can do with that legacy code, just as is PocketPC.
I suppose Microsoft might seem to be the bumbling 300 pound gorilla at times, but I can't argue with results. Can you?