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Vista is Watching You
greengrass writes "Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company."
Objectively the reality is Microsoft has not disclosed what they're sending themselves, who receives it, and what they do with it. When you have products such as Microsoft Media Center it's very scary. A roommate bought a new latop with Media Center on it ... the first time he connected it to the LAN in our house it went through every other computer's shared drives and DELETED movies and music without saying a word. The only fingerprints were the Media Center thumbnail databases dribbled all over the place. Several gigabytes of other people's data was deleted with no warning, and we suspect transmitted to Microsoft, and likely The Office of Fatherland Security. It's completely over the top - and Vista has that kind of spyware BUILT-IN. It is utterly naive to think Microsoft is sending themselves data for the good of the customer.
In fact, I'd bet there's MORE applications on Linux that send your private information back to some web server somewhere, just because Linux sockets are easier to write for than their Windows cousins and so Linux has and will always have a lead over networking for developers. A quick look bears this out.. there's my SUSE Yast, KDevelop's help system, the tank game, the time, KTorrent, the music client, and more..
The irony is thus: to keep into GPL culture, all the personal creativity and ingenuity that I apply is not something that is considered valuable, but under Windows, it is. Sounds to me like Linux people here are just trying to take a few shots at MS, which is always a good thing to do, but without thinking it through.
The end game of any open information system is going to be an end to the right to privacy. First it will be open source, then, open financials, and then open everything.
So, you might charaterize things less harshly as follows : Linux tries to let you keep your personal information private but all of your work product is public, and Windows keeps all of your work product private but your personal information is public. I guess if you wanted a system where you could develop in closed source, and not have an evil empire attached to it, you'd probably have to resurrect OS/2 or BeOS. But then, if everyone switched to those, then, whatever institution owned would by default become the evil empire and we'd all miss Microsoft in the same way people miss IBM.
This is my sig.
Actually, you can credibly argue it.
The halo series is not a series FPS game, only for casual users. Gears of war? not even close to the competition you can get in PC gaming.
Counterstrike
Quake Series
Unreal Series
Battlefield Series
You have to admit that the only REAL competition of online gamers is going on in these games. Nobody is competing on the xbox hahahah That would just be plain silly. You can't even aim the damn gun accurately with a little thumb joystick.
Maybe when the wii controllers and wii consol is refined with better and faster hardware, you MIGHT find a good FPS game on the nintendo. But probably never on the xbox or ps2.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.