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Microsoft Calls Today Global Anti-Piracy Day
arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.
I'm declaring today "Anti Microsoft Day." There. We're even.
...invest heavily in warships to help protect our shipping lanes. Nothing could be a better use of their money than helping stop the violence inherent in piracy on the high-seas. Already, many American warships are in stand-off confrontations with merchies taken over by pirates. I--
Sorry, what? This is about software? How Microsoft is concerned about companies who are missing one or two licenses out of 5,000 or 12 year old kids bragging that they got XP off of I13|<p1R4Cy.com? Pfff. In that case, screw 'em.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Know my favorite part of Anti-Piracy Days? The parades. I mean, the parties are nice, and seeing the kids put out the Anti-Piracy decorations, but the parades are what are really great.
Prevent Windows piracy: Use Linux instead!
Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
I find it funny that Microsoft feel they have to educate people about piracy. I'm already well aware of the many benefits thank you, Microsoft.
...that I will not pirate Vista. Ever.
Why not? You can do that, too. Just stroll around and tell everybody you meet that today's...
- "Think of the children"-day,
- "Bad car analogy"-day,
- "Robotic overlord"-day,
- "Natalie Portman"-day,
- "In Soviet russia"-day,
- "Insensitive clod"-day,
- "Goatse"-day,
etc...
The fact that nobody'll listen to you will just make you feel like MS today. But if they don't care - why should you?
> raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy.
Which fades into insignificance when compared to the damage to software innovation caused by Microsoft !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Putting "Bill Gates" in the name field here returns "Smugglin' Hubert Cutler" as the result, appropriately enough... :) Even better, though, "Steve Ballmer" becomes "Sea Monkey Baird"!
;)
Sea Monkey! lol
Hey! Is that a flying chai.. OOF...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
The jokes/reality just write themselves when it comes to M$:
Their newest product line is so sucky that no one wants to pirate it.
Now that's an innovative strategy!
You know you have problems when even pirates don't want your software!
I pledge to pirate 3 times as much, to make up for you slackers.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
If you knew who he was, he wouldn't be much of a ninja.
http://crummysocks.com
2007 isn't that bad. The effing "x" formats are a P.I.T.A but as per usual, the next Office version is a decent incremental upgrade, which will, in due course, be adopted by the business community at large.
If they followed the same sort of incremental, professional design philosophy with Windows, they wouldn't spend so much time having their user base frothing in hatred and rage.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That's true. It feels strange to say this sort of things about Microsoft, especially on Slashdot, but Office 2007 is pretty decent software, and the ribbon is -dare I say it?- a clever and even innovative UI approach. (bye bye karma...)
(Unless you are utterly stupid) Office 2007 is much easyer and you can learn it in less than 5 minutes (I teached it myself).
Oh, the irony.
My major problems with office 2007 are found within outlook 2007. Firstly they took the IE HTML engine out, and replaced it with the Word HTML rendering engine, which means the HTML support is now extremely crippled. Also, when you want to print an email, the only way to bring up the print dialog is with CTRL+P. Which is fine, once you figure it out, but completely annoying before you do. The only other way to print, is to find the ultra-tiny drop down arrow where the print button is hidden, but that only prints immediately to the default printer, and doesn't let you configure any other options.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Would this be a good place to mention that it took me at least ten minutes to figure out what they did with the File menu so that I could convert an OOXML document someone sent me into a different file format?
I find it funny that Microsoft feel they have to educate people about piracy. I'm already well aware of the many benefits thank you, Microsoft.
Maybe this Microsoft's way of fighting global warming? By educating more pirates, we insure a healthy planet for our children's children.
Bearded Dragon
It took me a few minutes to get used to a mouse back in the 80s, too; now that I know how to use one, it's intuitive.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The problem with the ribbon is that it assumes that menus and toolbars are not a quick and easy way of finding what you want.
Well, hopefully they are going to replace Paint with Paint.Net. That alone would be a huge step in the right direction.
I'm not sure who modded you funny, or why, because you make a very good point. Actually, in the absence of piracy, Windows would have a substantially smaller market share, especially in emerging economies. Microsoft has actually admitted this in the past, and made a pathetic attempt at releasing a shareware version of Windows that could run 3 processes at a time in order to compete with the pirates. Microsoft has to tread very carefully when they try to combat piracy, because the fewer pirated copies of Windows and Office people use, the more copies of Linux/BSD and OpenOffice.org/Google Docs people will use. On the other hand, if Microsoft does not make sufficient efforts to protect its trademarks (and to some degree, copyrights), it could lose them, and that would spell trouble for them too.
Palm trees and 8