Microsoft may be giving away its handheld devices along with MS Reader with the purchase of any new PC with Windows 2k preinstalled, or so I hear. These new devices can only transfer data to and from Win 2k. I hear that it will even be possible to rent books from your local library (which will be running a Win 2k network) in the MS Reader format, and that the books will automatically stop loading when the due date is reached, so that delinquent users will have an incentive to check them back in! (The library pays a fee per 2 week checkout period to MS for this service, with the book's author getting an royalty from EACH reader!) See, MS is not restricting, but enhancing, the flow of information, while also rewarding authors who have been poorly compensated by traditinal publishers in the past and improving our community infrastructure! So, now all libraries are going to have to pay Bill Gates a royalty for every ebook they check out. Libraries have historically been free, but now Bill Gates is going to collect a royalty from everyone who reads a book. That is the sleaziest thing I have ever heard of. This is just one more indication of the insatiable greed of Bill Gates, and it proves what a cacodemon he is. But this ugly black cloud may have a silver lining, after all, because I cannot imagine anyone in the intelligent world supporting such greed. Ebooks will die as soon as they bloom-- killed by Microsoft. And that is as it should be. If the world is lucky, this ploy will be another nail in Microsoft's coffin, as well! While the rest stand still, MS continues to innovate
new ways to steal money from everyone, whether they like it or not.
MS has encouraged rapid growth of the Internet with its IE Browser giveaway - remember when browsers used to cost $30 or more? MS has given the world more free software than all of so called "open source" combined!
The only free software from Microsoft is the stuff that is pirated, and you should hear Bill Gates' whining complaints when he discovers it and sics his oily lawyers on the pirates. It has truly democratized the Internet for millions of average people everwhere,
Do you really believe that the world would not have embraced the internet as much as it has if Microsoft had not "discovered" it long after UNIX, IBM, Apple, had been on it for several years? Give us a break!
so it is not just a thing for geeks to use to send cryptic messages in plain text back and forth to each other. It has bothered Microsoft from their late beginning on the internet (after everyone else had been using it for years) that they were not making any money from it-- that still bothers them, because they still have not managed to corral it for their own greed. But they are making a desperate attempt to proprietize the entire internet so Bill Gates can make even more money than he has now. What an obscenity! MS will never be heavily penalized by the US government! Unfortunately, you may be right about that-- Microsoft has shown the world that it believes it is more powerful than the entire United States Government. Even after a strongly worded judgement against them, they show no remorse, or any recognition at all that they have acted illegally since their earliest days and apparently have no intention of changing their dirty ways of doing business. That alone is enough reason to strongly bring them to heel, and it should be considered a patriotic duty by each and every U.S. citizen to boycott all Microsoft products at whatever cost to themselves personally and to throw out of office all politicians who would allow Bill Gates to continue on his diabolical path of controlling the dessimination of all information in the world through his evil empire. At the very least, the entire U.S. Government should immediately stop using any of Microsoft's software. After last week's stock market scare, people all over are realizing that this was due to just one thing - a finding of guilt against MS. Boy, you are chock full of disinformation and outright bullshit! I suppose that the stock market scare had nothing at all to do with the fact that the price of virtually all internet and computer-related tech stocks were horribly inflated, way beyond anything sensible, and these levels were driven by the immense hoards of wildcat daytraders who drove them up in their mad feeding frenzy. Get a clue: The internet stock bubble has burst, and its bursting has blown a lot of greedy people out of the water. Like everything else in Microsoft's history, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time for their justified stock slump to coincidentally occur at the same time as the bursting bubble, and they were carried along with the tide of madness and the resulting panic when all the wildcat traders realized they were holding a lot of empty paper. Investors feared that innovation would be stifled and that economic growth would stop if MS is handicapped by any kind of legal penalty for things that happened years ago, and rightly so! If that is true, then it proves that Microsoft is not only more powerful than the U.S. Government, but it is also more powerful than the Federal Reserve, and ipso facto must be stopped at all costs, including even the loss of billions of dollars by holders of Microsoft stock. Bill Clinton and others got the message, and that gets passed along. The American public properly understands and appreciates the source of its prosperity, innovation deriving form Miscosoft. What an arrogant, wrongheaded, downright insolent statement! I can just see the smug smirk on your face as you wrote those idiotic words. I bet you work for Microsoft. Let this be a lesson to all who doubt! What are you going to do, march all of us who don't buy your incredible crap up to a mass grave and mow us down with machine guns? You are a dispicable little worm. Let this be a lesson indeed! Microsoft is finished, and the world is going to be a much better place for it.
Nah, he's just saying that having 98% in a prog course is not equal to the ability to read cod.
But it may give you the ability to read herring. I know someone who reads albacore just for the halibut. But then, he has a degree from Baitball, which is the largest School of Tuna. And while most of us can only work with hexidecimal notation, he has the ability to follow eight threads at once in octopus. I must admit, though, that his credentials are somewhat fishy. I guess it's time for me to clam up.
You've read thousands of books? Real books? Okay, maybe you are what.. at the oldest 35? (I see in another post you claim to have gone rollerblading and most people who do that are young.) But i'll give you the benefit of the doubt and call you 40. If you began at the ripe age of 5, that's 35 years of reading. Even if you read one a week nonstop, a very very unlikely thing if your books are at all substantial, that's only 1750 books. Hardly "thousands".I have a feeling the actual number is "hundreds", but got inflated by your incredible conceit.
Maybe you're including comic books?
Aha! Do I detect in your lines a tinge of jealousy?
Just for the record, I am over sixty.
I have been rollerblading.
And as I write this, I am sitting in my private library-- a very large room in my home filled with bookshelves lining all of the walls, plus seven tables that contain two computers, with the rest of the space taken up with stacks of books and magazines. The bookshelves are crammed with library-binding volumes with other books piled flat on top of the vertically placed books. The tops of the six-foot high bookshelves are filled with more books, in stacks that are piled all the way up to the nine-foot ceiling. All of the tables in the room are likewise filled with stacks of books, though admittedly not all the way to the ceiling. And there are stacks of books on the floor in every part of the room.
Until last year, I also subscribed to 34 quality magazines-- and I read every one of them-- most from cover to cover. I let their subscriptions lapse as they came due, because I was preparing to repatriate to the United States, to an address I did not know (hadn't bought a house yet) and anyway, I had recently discovered the internet with its treasure trove of current reading.
Because I recently changed my abode, due to an international relocation, I happen to know that my present library contains in excess of fifteen hundred volumes, because I personally packed and inventoried each box before shipment. I gave away at least that many books before I packed-- most of them hardcover novels that were once best or near-best sellers, that I had accumulated-- and read-- over the years. And I gave away at least the same amount of books when I left the United States more than twenty years ago to move abroad.
And now, hear this: I can easily read an entire average-sized (200-250 page) book in one day, and have been doing almost just that for the past forty-odd years since I was in college. I should not be stretching the truth to say that I have averaged at least three or four books a week over that time. That works out to be more than 6,500 books over my life. I still read volumes of material every week. I had probably already read nearly a thousand books by the time I was 21, having started as a young teen. By the time I was 35, I had probably read well over 2,000 books.
It takes me about seven hours to read a 250-page book. In addition, until last year, I subscribed to 34 weekly, monthly, and quarterly quality magazines (The New Yorker, Verbatim, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Granta, etc)-- I let their subscriptions lapse as they came due, because I was preparing to repatriate to an unknown address in the U.S. (I hadn't bought a house yet) and anyway, I had recently discovered the internet with its treasure trove of current reading. And by the way, I can read and write in two languages, and have written poetry in both of them, and I can get passably along in a third.
What's the point of all this? Don't be too hasty to judge another's claims to readership. Some of us are compulsive speed readers.
You Brits just can't fucking spell, face it. You and your goddamn "colour" -- what the fuck is that?! Come on! "Torpour"? "Land Rovour"? If I evour again see you fuckers spell eithour of thouse fucking wourds wroung a-fucking-gain I'm gounna snap and start fucking SHOOTING.
I believe you made a typo-- didn't you mean to type "shouting" instead of "shooting"? But don't be too hard on the Brits-- they don't even know the proper day to celebrate Thanksgiving-- one of them told me that they celebrate it on the 4th of July in Merrie England.
What if Microsoft became the "acknowledged, certified, and regulated information public utility in the United States?"
What if it became a federal crime in the United States to use any software that was not produced by Microsoft?
Do these thoughts chill you to the very bone marrow? They certainly do me.
If you do not think in your wildest dreams that such a nightmare could become possible, then read the article Ma Bell, Meet Ma Bill which you can find at this site. It gives a sane, compelling reason why Microsoft must be stopped dead in its tracks-- there can be no compromise!
Microsoft has demonstrated over and over again that they will not give up one inch of the power they have, and this power is very nearly absolute.
I shouldn't be surprised to learn that Bill Gates, coming as he does from a powerful law firm family, already sees the vision of the future as described in the article. Nothing would make him richer or even more powerful than he already is than to have the predictions made in this article come true for Microsoft. And, as far as I am concerned, nothing could be more horrific.
I certainly hope that the DOJ is not going to let Microsoft dilute the terms of this settlement like they did to the antitrust settlement they made with the DOJ in 1994. It will be a tragedy for the entire computer industry if they get away with such nefarious trickery again. Bill Gates has already demonstrated that he is ready to do it again, by his adamant insistance to have four words removed from the end of one of the conditions of settlement-- four words which would come back to haunt the DOJ again in the future-- four words which would yank all the teeth from the document, allowing Microsoft to blithely continue with their unfettered power over the industry.
The American public has to be educated about this-- everyone has to be made to see that even if they can live with the shoddy software produced by Microsoft, they had better think twice before they give absolute power over the total control and dissemination of the exchange of all information and all e-business in the world to a company as greedy and, yes, evil as Microsoft!
And with Active Directory Services, and NT2000 Microsoft have silenced their critics on the issue of innovation.
Another example of Microsoft's "innovation"-- the effective use of Active Directory excludes all other software that Microsoft does not market. The user can't benefit from it unless he has a 100% Microsoft shop from top to bottom. It sounds great for Microsoft, but it is horrible for the consumer.
No, wait-- It is probably going to be really bad for Microsoft, too-- because it is going to open them up for another DOJ antitrust suit!
Proof that the USA becomes more and more Socialist, and more and more jealous of success as every day goes by. I just hope Bill does the decent thing and takes his whole operation offshore, where he can innovate great software free from the meddlesome interference of big govenrment.
And when he goes offshore, I hope he takes all of you knee-jerk Microsoft apologists with him. You can all go to China, where the right to choose is a crime.
In the Register article, it says that Microsoft wants to be freed of having to admit that it is guilty of antitrust violations. The DOJ has backed off of demanding that Microsoft be broken up, and that's a good thing I think, because to break it up would be like cutting off the head of a monster that then grows two in its place-- who needs a whole slew of Microsofts all over the landscape, like great globs of chickenshit all over the barnyard. But to allow Microsoft to be convicted of antitrust violations, and then make a settlement which allows them to walk away from the legal consequences of such a conviction, is an insult to the justice system and the American public. It would be giving Jeffry Dahmer a slap on the wrist for his cannibal crimes and telling him he should become a vegetarian.
It's a great shame that Judge Jackson has decided against Microsoft's offer of a settlement...
It wasn't Judge Jackson, it was the DOJ.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for the computing industry as a whole, making it so that computers have moved from being the domain of long-haired hippies at geek enclaves like MIT to being available for everyone.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for Bill Gates, by stealing what those long-haired hippies at geek enclaves like MIT developed for free and then turning around and forcing the public to pay big bucks for their stolen goods, even if they didn't want it!
...without Microsoft the computer industry would most likely have been only a fraction of its current size, and many of the jobs which/.ers have would never have existed.
Spoken like a true Microsoft employee. Boy, Gates really has you serfs brainwashed, doesn't he? What an audacious, atrociously self-serving statement! To say that the personal computer would have gone nowhere in the past twenty-odd years without Microsoft, is to demonstrate that you have an arrogant, belittling attitude toward the entire industry, and all of the real software innovators out there. Bill Gates was, and is a snake oil salesman, who had the incredible luck to be in the right place at the right time at the beginning of a technology that could only mushroom into the most pervasive industry of the end of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, he is also the, greediest, most unethical, paranoid, megalomaniacal individual in that industry, and for those reasons no one can know what the computer industry would be like without Microsoft today, because Microsoft has held the entire industry in its death grip for the past ten years. With Bill Gates on the scene, there has been no true innovation that has not been strangled, or prostituted to Microsoft's lame system. If you want another opinion, and one which takes into account ALL the facts, and not just what Bill Gates wants you to know, I believe that the computer industry would be years ahead of where it is today if Microsoft had not been around. It would be all open source instead of closed and obscure and proprietary, and one would not have to pay for bug fixes that are released every three years under the guise of an upgrade.
By forcing Microsoft to limit their practices you are forcing the ordinary consumer who wants to own and use a PC to accept something which is second-best in terms of easy use - it is far easier for a normal user to have their browser as part of the OS than it is to have it as a separate application.
This is pure hogwash that Microsoft has tried to force down everyone's throats, but it is brainwashing drivel from Redmond that the intelligent observer, and the court, I might add, has seen fit to reject out of hand. Only a blooming idiot who doesn't know how to click on an icon would want his browser as part of the OS everytime he boots up, and such a moron probably would have no clue how to use a browser anyway. The only person who wants the browser to be integrated with the OS is Bill Gates, because he wanted it to be impossible for people to have a choice and use Netscape instead of IE. This has been proved in the court.
Anything which aims to make computing easier for the masses, like AOL have done, seems to attract rabid flamebait rather than honest praise.
Anything which aims to make computing easier for the masses has not been adopted by Microsoft-- Bill Gates has seen to it that everything that goes into Windows is not cross platform, and excludes non-Microsoft software. Macintosh is far easier to use than anything Microsoft has created and is far more cross platform than Windows is. Microsoft is not AOL, either, so don't try to ride on their coattails. What attracts flames, and justifiably, I think, are comments like yours, which ignore the facts and try to promulgate the fictitious bullshit that originates and continues to flood out of Redmond like bovine diarrhea. You can bullshit all of the people some of the time, and you can bullshit some of the people all of the time, but you can't bullshit all of the people all of the time and not get caught. That is something Bill Gates and company has not learned, and I think they never will learn it. Once a snake oil sales company always a snake oil sales company.
Since $lashdot/andover hasn't seen it worth mentioning any of these it seems important to mention them here.
Three of the four sources you list are quotes from Microsoft officials. Who can believe them anymore? They have proved they will do anything, including lie to promote Microsoft.
The other source says that China will not ban Microsoft. So What? That means nothing.
Maybe dat's so, bro But Linux gwine ter makes Ev'ry Microsoft ho Eat plenty o' CRAP, along w' Gates. It's jes' a mattah o' time B'fo all you luzers be cry'in An' wishin' dat yo'all Could dribble dat open source ball.
Win2k runs Wells Fargo, does it not?:) I'm sure most banks run Windows - and there haven't been any problems yet. In fact, when I walk into my credit union, they're not even running WinNT - they just use a suckie Visual Basic proggie under Win95 or 98. When I look in the newspaper help wanted ads, I see LOTS of job openings at Kaiser Permanente for IT Pros with experience w/ NT. Let's face it - Everywhere you turn, Windows is running it. (I dont want to hear about air traffic control:P)
Bzzt! Wrong!
Wellsfargo.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.0 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX, and its ATMs run on OS/2. If you don't believe me, check out http://www.netcraft.com/whats/
It is a commonly known fact that MOST of the ATMs in the western world run OS/2. Microsoft's lack of security is too dangerous for this kind of application.
This is the same thing everyone said with Win95 and NT 4.0. At the time Windows 3.11 was the typical business OS, and everyone said they were going to wait for Win95 to mature for a year or so before they upgraded. Same thing with NT 4 on the server side. IS departments running NT 3.51 were for the most part happy to wait for things to mature a bit.
This happens every time MS releases an OS. People get on their soapboxes and say it's a failure. Slow addoption, althoug I wouldn't call 1 million coppies in a month slow, hasn't killed MS yet.
There is one fatal flaw in your reasoning: At the time Win3.1 was released, Linux did not yet exist. When Win95 and NT4.0 were released, Linux was still in its fledging years, and not yet ready for use by anyone but serious hackers.
But, Aha! Linux had already reached mainstream when Win2000 hit the shelves, so now there existed an alternative to Microsoft. And it is a serious alternative, that has already started to eat Microsoft's lunch, in big chomps. That is why Win2000 sales have performed so under par-- so seriously under par for Microsoft's history-- in the first month.
Furthermore, though it has already been said before in this forum, Win2000 sales figures have very likely been cooked by Microsoft, and probably do not reflect actual sales to consumers, but copies shipped to OEMs. If the one-million figure were actual sales into the hands of consumers, I would expect the hardware market to have jumped comparably during the past month, because it is highly unlikely that Win2000 would be installable on any but the latest, biggest hardware. Has it?
Next to "Bob", I think Win2000 is going to go down in history as Microsoft's biggest failure. It will be a bigger failure than "Bob" because Microsoft has too much riding on its success-- and there isn't going to be any significant success for Win2000-- at least not significant in the way Microsoft has become accustomed in the past.
Win2000, in my opinion, represents Microsoft's Waterloo-- Microsofts winter invasion of Russia-- Microsoft's invasion of Kuwait.
The handwriting is on the wall-- and it says, "For a good time, call Linux."
Your school needs to learn what a lease is. If they can't afford to replace their computers at least every two years I would hate to see what their computer science curriculum looks like. Two years is a long long life for a computer system.
In the Microsoft world, four years is a long life for a computer system, not two, because it takes Microsoft four years to come out with any new technology-- and their bloated, ponderous, snail-like design absolutely needs the biggest and fastest just to keep up with Linux's benchmarks.
I'll bet the school in the parent post your comment is trying to answer is doing as much work and doing it faster than the latest release of Win2000 would be capable of doing, running on brand new latest technology machines. That's the way Microsoft does business: "Hey, we've just released our latest bug collection-- so throw out all your hardware and replace it with the latest and most expensive Intel PC stuff you can find, just so you can get it installed, after you have paid us a prince's ransome for the privilege of opening the shrinkwrap it is packaged in."
I am running S.u.S.E. 6.2 Linux on a 486DX2/66 with only 32 Mb RAM and a 3.1 Gb SCSI hard drive, and it runs fast enough to get significant work done. That machine was purchased in 1992, and everything in it dates from that time except the hard drive, which is the third one installed since 1992 because the others wore out.
Try getting Win2000 installed on such a machine-- yeah, right. What the heck, try running Win98 on it... Good luck!
Get a clue. Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars, in case you forgot.
So what? He stole 89 billion of it. And I think it is pathetic that so many of you Anonymous Cowards worship the little con man only because he has more money than you do. You obviously don't believe in your hearts what you are posting here with such frequency, because you haven't even the conviction of your beliefs to log in.
The only reason they even leaked this is to get a little public feel for the possibilities, and this is enough to soften the DOJ.
Soften the DOJ? I think not. The world is on to Microsoft's bullshit, and so is the DOJ. Microsoft is doomed. They will keep lumbering on for a few more years, only because of their obscene number of users (or is that, their number of obscene users?), but believe me, honest people who are informed already know what Microsoft represents, and are fed up with them. Microsoft are the pimps of the PC world; they are the ransom-demanding kidnappers of the technology revolution; they are the protection-racketteering Mafiosos of true innovation.
Having actually seen WindowsCE code I can say its *HAS* to be a much cleaner API than the One used in Win98 and Win2K.
Okay its not THE greatest but I did not die laughing or anything. Take this with a grain of salt since I have no qualifications really to say if WindowsCE code is higher quality than Linux code or vice versa however there did not seem to be all that much kludge and stupid stuff going on. The API is a bit cleaner than the regular windows API.:-o
I had to do a small thing for CE once and I found the source on our MSDN disks:-).
So what! WinCE being made Open Source a la Microsoft means nothing to the real world. Nobody will embrace it because Microsoft is crooked, dishonest, greedy, and devious, and the world has already awakened up to that fact. Can you imagine a Nazi opening a Jewish community center?
Microsoft is incapable of writing good code, so why should the Open Source community do it for them. WinCE is properly named. There are no honest open source coders out here who will sell their souls to Microsoft to promote their crapola idea of "open source" WinCE.
It is not that Microsoft "doesn't get it" about what Open Source really is-- They don't want to get it-- they just want the world to think they are joining the human race. Fat chance! As one human with voting rights, I do not intend to let them in! Fsck Bill Gates. Fsck Microsoft.
Microsoft is dying. Linux isn't killing it. Their own greed and stupidity is.
I hope the DOJ wins the antitrust case, and all of the appeals that Microsoft makes fail. But I also hope that nothing is done to break them up. They deserve to be destroyed as the whole entity of evil that they are. And they will be-- by their own inept, stupidly greedy, Machiavellian deviousness. The world already knows what they are-- just let them sink into their own quagmire of putrifaction and feces.
Remember what Ford did? He patented ideas so that others couldn't patent them and abuse the patents. He then allowed everyone to use his ideas for free.
At the risk of being redundant, I must say that I completely support the position expressed by the italicized quote above, and would like to clarify my own thoughts on the matter.
As someone who has spent literally thousands of dollars buying books and music CDs from Amazon over the past couple of years, I was saddened to see that Bezos seemed to be taking Amazon on the route of the monstrously greedy, snatch-everything-for-their-own, closed and propietary corporations. But before I could willingly respond to the appeal posted by Richard Stallman and others on various Linux sites-- to boycott Amazon until Bezos "came to his senses"-- I felt compelled to give it a lot of thought beforehand-- I like Amazon, and the "cut of their jib," and it behooved me to be absolutely certain that Amazon deserved to be boycotted for filing these patents.
In mulling it over, the thought occurred to me that if Amazon had not filed the 1-click patent, or the Associates patent, then the Great Devil of Redmond or one of its tightly bound business incubi might have filed the patent, and then we all know what would have happened: the patents would positively have been used against all of their competition, to make bigger strides toward proprietizing the internet for their own oppresively selfish gains.
In the light of that thinking, I cannot fault Jeff Bezos for filing for these patents-- provided his motive was just for the reason of keeping them out of the grasp of the evil forces, and Amazon does not intend to use them to try to proprietize doing e-business on the web.
And, if I am wrong in this post, and Amazon starts to use these patents to emulate the Evil Forces present in the e-business industry, then I shall cease doing any more business with Amazon. And that is a promise.
If anyone at Amazon wishes to track my previous purchases with Amazon, they can start with my latest, which Amazon identified with Order ID 102-4824324-8143250 on their invoice dated January 16, 2000.
Humor? The ad is absolutely geared to the way a lot of Linux enthusiasts think ("Down with Microsoft! I'd let Satan have his way with me if it'd cause MS' stock price to drop!") and it truly is pathetic.
I don't think it's pathetic. And BTW, Microsoft's stock is dropping these days-- or haven't you noticed?
Yes, I'm sure we all revel in your wishful idealism, but putting Linux on every PC is not a practical solution.
Despite the fact that it may seem perfect to you, many people need drivers that it lacks. And no, they're not going to write them themselves. And why pay for someone to do it, when you already have a working solution? Sorry, it's not a practical move.
Who wants to bet me that this is not one of those infiltrating Microsoft-employed or deadly bound posters I was talking about in my previous post?
Man the moderators are getting to be REALLY stupid.
In the past couple of weeks I have noticed that there seems to be an increase in the presence of irrationally pro-Microsoft posters on Slashdot-- at least there seems to be more of them than there have been in the past.
Some of them have actually logged in-- that is, they have not posted as Anonymous Cowards-- probably so they will have the chance of becoming moderators. There are several of those that have logged in who have posted many (more than twenty) times in the past couple of weeks. If you look at their User Info, it is not hard to discern which of them have hard and set bindings to Microsoft, from clues they reveal on their personal websites. I shouldn't wonder that they gain moderator status occasionally.
Can't you just picture Master Gates, or one of his wranglers, ordering the masses of Microsoft minions to "infiltrate" Slashdot and make posts to "defend Microsoft's honor" if they want to keep collecting their paychecks?
All of the evidence seems to indicate that Microsoft is approaching a state of panic these days.
All the 'good' articles on Microsoft/Bill (like bill donating billions, launch of windows 2000 etc) are quietly ignored. Noone everyone here thinks Microsoft EVIL EVIL EVIL. That's all they hear. If Bill Gate$ doesn't give away his money, he will never be able to spend it all. If he spent $1,000,000 per day on Porches, garish monstrosity houses, and outrageously overpriced Seattle call girls, he would need 274 years 10 months and 25 days to spend his personal (on-paper) fortune, and even at the end of that time, the accrued interest on the balance of his bank account would have earned him-- or his heirs-- approximately $685,000,000,000 more! So how the devil is a story about Bill giving away billions a "good" story? He is giving it away because there is no other way in hell for him to dispose of it!
I mean I dislike Microsofts software as much as the next man, but suggesting they orchestrated this is just plain paranoid.
Paranoid... Oh yeah... I see.
Well, how about this: Bill Gates INVENTED paranoia, and injected it into every part of Microsoft. I am certainly not the first one to have pointed this out. Microsoft's psychotic level of paranoia is just the sort of thing that might cause them to perpetrate something as bizarre as the DDoS attack against Yahoo! et al, in an attempt to discredit Linux/Unix. Such behavior would be right in line with the other things they have done through the years to reach and keep the status of their ill-gotten monopoly. I suppose you don't remember the Astro Turf scandal that was exposed by the LA Times.
The entire world knows by now that Microsoft cannot stomach fair play in business dealings.
Once upon a time they could get away with their psychotic behavior, but now the sunrays of public exposure are falling on the Vampires of Redmond, and they are desperately clutching at anything that comes to their sick minds to try to turn away the unstoppable tsunami of public disgrace that they have earned.
Can't you see that Microsoft is running for its life, and losing the race?
It is not whether or not Microsoft has "finally" produced a stable operating system-- though I seriously doubt that. The fact is, I just do not trust anything Bill Gates or any company he is connected with (read Microsoft, et al). Starting way back in the late seventies:
1. Bill Gates, was stopped for speeding, and was given a ticket. He tried to get the cop who wrote the ticket fired. The attempt failed. This was behavior characteristic of an elitist who thinks he is above the law. That behavior would persist in Bill Gates' actions right up to the present time.
2. "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." [In-house Microsoft mantra about the time that Bill Gates was trying to get a toehold with Excel in the marketplace.]
3. The much recently exposed and discussed Microsoft foul play with DR-DOS.
4. The endless round of Microsoft buying up any company with a technology better than they could themselves invent, or "innovate", and then either making the aquired technology non-compatible with anything but Windows or killing it outright.
5. Microsoft's endless manipulation of the computer press to assure that their products received reviews that were biased-in-favor-of-Microsoft and the competitions' products got supposedly independent reviews that were biased-in-favor-of-Microsoft. Hear, hear, Ziff Davis. I always felt that a majority of Ziff-Davis' writers were bought and paid for by Microsoft. There were a few who held onto their integrity, though, like Dvorak.
6. Microsoft's exclusive OEM agreements that prevented anyone from getting any system but DOS/Windows installed on any computer sold, even if the consumer asked for something else. The DOJ nailed them once for that evil practice, but Microsoft, in their inimitably crooked manner chose to ignore terms of the the decree resulting from that first antitrust trial.
7. Microsoft's endless and on-going attempts to buy legislation that will favor Microsoft and its all-but-disfunctional products against the consumer. Latest effort: UCITA.
8. Microsoft's endless and on-going practice of "embrace and extend" with the effect of proprietizing something as universal and platform-independent as Java, and the internet and the WWW.
9. The obviously dishonest tactics and behavior of Bill Gates and his minions in the DOJ trial.
10. Bill Gates' elitest attitude that made him think he could buy enough influence in Washington to get the DOJ's operating funds reduced, because the trial was going against Microsoft.
11. Microsoft's stingy, exploitative treatment of their "temp" employees, who are anything but temporary. This from a company with a capitalization of five hundred billion dollars in stock, and with nine billion dollars in cash and one who's largest stockholder is the richest man in the world. Tell me, Bill: When will you have enough money?
12. Microsoft's total lack of concern for the consumer, in spite of all the blathering from their new CEO (Ballmer) to the contrary. Consider Microsoft's EULAs and their dodgy tech help, for starters. I'm sure I'm leaving out something here.
13. Microsoft's persistent and unending use of FUD and vaporware to exclude competition with a better product.
14. Microsoft's lame attempt at astro-turf, as exposed by the LA Times.
15. Microsoft's sorry attempt to subvert higher education by buying professors' promotion of their products in the classroom.
16. Bill Gates promise to put proprietary technology in the form of Microsoft products on every computer in the world, to the exclusion of everything else.
I could go on and on, and continue this list much further, but I think you get the point. Microsoft is a dishonest company that I will never, ever trust. Their people, from Bill Gates on down, are bunco snake-oil salesmen.
The threat that Microsoft wants to eventually take over the complete control of the dissemination of all information in the age of the computer by any and every means possible is frightening.
So, you see, whether or not Windows2000 is "stable" or "scalable" or "secure" is really not the issue. Microsoft should really be put down because they are too greedy and power-hungry.
I hope the EU cuts off Microsoft's tail-- and head!
Bill Gates is a dessicated mummy wrapped in dusty, rotting bindings called Microsoft. He will never be resurrected. Furthermore, the bindings now are being stripped from the mummy in broken pieces by the OSS movement, and they disintegrating as they come off. It will not be long now before the mummy will fall apart and its parts will be scattered until they are dust.
Slashdot Mirror
new ways to steal money from everyone, whether they like it or not.
MS has encouraged rapid growth of the Internet with its IE Browser giveaway - remember when browsers used to cost $30 or more? MS has given the world more free software than all of so called "open source" combined!
The only free software from Microsoft is the stuff that is pirated, and you should hear Bill Gates' whining complaints when he discovers it and sics his oily lawyers on the pirates. It has truly democratized the Internet for millions of average people everwhere,
Do you really believe that the world would not have embraced the internet as much as it has if Microsoft had not "discovered" it long after UNIX, IBM, Apple, had been on it for several years? Give us a break!
so it is not just a thing for geeks to use to send cryptic messages in plain text back and forth to each other. It has bothered Microsoft from their late beginning on the internet (after everyone else had been using it for years) that they were not making any money from it-- that still bothers them, because they still have not managed to corral it for their own greed. But they are making a desperate attempt to proprietize the entire internet so Bill Gates can make even more money than he has now. What an obscenity! MS will never be heavily penalized by the US government! Unfortunately, you may be right about that-- Microsoft has shown the world that it believes it is more powerful than the entire United States Government. Even after a strongly worded judgement against them, they show no remorse, or any recognition at all that they have acted illegally since their earliest days and apparently have no intention of changing their dirty ways of doing business. That alone is enough reason to strongly bring them to heel, and it should be considered a patriotic duty by each and every U.S. citizen to boycott all Microsoft products at whatever cost to themselves personally and to throw out of office all politicians who would allow Bill Gates to continue on his diabolical path of controlling the dessimination of all information in the world through his evil empire. At the very least, the entire U.S. Government should immediately stop using any of Microsoft's software. After last week's stock market scare, people all over are realizing that this was due to just one thing - a finding of guilt against MS. Boy, you are chock full of disinformation and outright bullshit! I suppose that the stock market scare had nothing at all to do with the fact that the price of virtually all internet and computer-related tech stocks were horribly inflated, way beyond anything sensible, and these levels were driven by the immense hoards of wildcat daytraders who drove them up in their mad feeding frenzy. Get a clue: The internet stock bubble has burst, and its bursting has blown a lot of greedy people out of the water. Like everything else in Microsoft's history, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time for their justified stock slump to coincidentally occur at the same time as the bursting bubble, and they were carried along with the tide of madness and the resulting panic when all the wildcat traders realized they were holding a lot of empty paper. Investors feared that innovation would be stifled and that economic growth would stop if MS is handicapped by any kind of legal penalty for things that happened years ago, and rightly so! If that is true, then it proves that Microsoft is not only more powerful than the U.S. Government, but it is also more powerful than the Federal Reserve, and ipso facto must be stopped at all costs, including even the loss of billions of dollars by holders of Microsoft stock. Bill Clinton and others got the message, and that gets passed along. The American public properly understands and appreciates the source of its prosperity, innovation deriving form Miscosoft. What an arrogant, wrongheaded, downright insolent statement! I can just see the smug smirk on your face as you wrote those idiotic words. I bet you work for Microsoft. Let this be a lesson to all who doubt! What are you going to do, march all of us who don't buy your incredible crap up to a mass grave and mow us down with machine guns? You are a dispicable little worm. Let this be a lesson indeed! Microsoft is finished, and the world is going to be a much better place for it.
But it may give you the ability to read herring. I know someone who reads albacore just for the halibut. But then, he has a degree from Baitball, which is the largest School of Tuna. And while most of us can only work with hexidecimal notation, he has the ability to follow eight threads at once in octopus. I must admit, though, that his credentials are somewhat fishy. I guess it's time for me to clam up.
Maybe you're including comic books?
Aha! Do I detect in your lines a tinge of jealousy?
Just for the record, I am over sixty.
I have been rollerblading.
And as I write this, I am sitting in my private library-- a very large room in my home filled with bookshelves lining all of the walls, plus seven tables that contain two computers, with the rest of the space taken up with stacks of books and magazines. The bookshelves are crammed with library-binding volumes with other books piled flat on top of the vertically placed books. The tops of the six-foot high bookshelves are filled with more books, in stacks that are piled all the way up to the nine-foot ceiling. All of the tables in the room are likewise filled with stacks of books, though admittedly not all the way to the ceiling. And there are stacks of books on the floor in every part of the room.
Until last year, I also subscribed to 34 quality magazines-- and I read every one of them-- most from cover to cover. I let their subscriptions lapse as they came due, because I was preparing to repatriate to the United States, to an address I did not know (hadn't bought a house yet) and anyway, I had recently discovered the internet with its treasure trove of current reading.
Because I recently changed my abode, due to an international relocation, I happen to know that my present library contains in excess of fifteen hundred volumes, because I personally packed and inventoried each box before shipment. I gave away at least that many books before I packed-- most of them hardcover novels that were once best or near-best sellers, that I had accumulated-- and read-- over the years. And I gave away at least the same amount of books when I left the United States more than twenty years ago to move abroad.
And now, hear this: I can easily read an entire average-sized (200-250 page) book in one day, and have been doing almost just that for the past forty-odd years since I was in college. I should not be stretching the truth to say that I have averaged at least three or four books a week over that time. That works out to be more than 6,500 books over my life. I still read volumes of material every week. I had probably already read nearly a thousand books by the time I was 21, having started as a young teen. By the time I was 35, I had probably read well over 2,000 books.
It takes me about seven hours to read a 250-page book. In addition, until last year, I subscribed to 34 weekly, monthly, and quarterly quality magazines (The New Yorker, Verbatim, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Granta, etc)-- I let their subscriptions lapse as they came due, because I was preparing to repatriate to an unknown address in the U.S. (I hadn't bought a house yet) and anyway, I had recently discovered the internet with its treasure trove of current reading. And by the way, I can read and write in two languages, and have written poetry in both of them, and I can get passably along in a third.
What's the point of all this? Don't be too hasty to judge another's claims to readership. Some of us are compulsive speed readers.
I believe you made a typo-- didn't you mean to type "shouting" instead of "shooting"? But don't be too hard on the Brits-- they don't even know the proper day to celebrate Thanksgiving-- one of them told me that they celebrate it on the 4th of July in Merrie England.
What if it became a federal crime in the United States to use any software that was not produced by Microsoft?
Do these thoughts chill you to the very bone marrow? They certainly do me.
If you do not think in your wildest dreams that such a nightmare could become possible, then read the article Ma Bell, Meet Ma Bill which you can find at this site . It gives a sane, compelling reason why Microsoft must be stopped dead in its tracks-- there can be no compromise!
Microsoft has demonstrated over and over again that they will not give up one inch of the power they have, and this power is very nearly absolute.
I shouldn't be surprised to learn that Bill Gates, coming as he does from a powerful law firm family, already sees the vision of the future as described in the article . Nothing would make him richer or even more powerful than he already is than to have the predictions made in this article come true for Microsoft. And, as far as I am concerned, nothing could be more horrific.
I certainly hope that the DOJ is not going to let Microsoft dilute the terms of this settlement like they did to the antitrust settlement they made with the DOJ in 1994. It will be a tragedy for the entire computer industry if they get away with such nefarious trickery again. Bill Gates has already demonstrated that he is ready to do it again, by his adamant insistance to have four words removed from the end of one of the conditions of settlement-- four words which would come back to haunt the DOJ again in the future-- four words which would yank all the teeth from the document, allowing Microsoft to blithely continue with their unfettered power over the industry.
The American public has to be educated about this-- everyone has to be made to see that even if they can live with the shoddy software produced by Microsoft, they had better think twice before they give absolute power over the total control and dissemination of the exchange of all information and all e-business in the world to a company as greedy and, yes, evil as Microsoft!
Another example of Microsoft's "innovation"-- the effective use of Active Directory excludes all other software that Microsoft does not market. The user can't benefit from it unless he has a 100% Microsoft shop from top to bottom. It sounds great for Microsoft, but it is horrible for the consumer.
No, wait-- It is probably going to be really bad for Microsoft, too-- because it is going to open them up for another DOJ antitrust suit!
Boy, you Microsoft people never learn, do you.
And when he goes offshore, I hope he takes all of you knee-jerk Microsoft apologists with him. You can all go to China, where the right to choose is a crime.
In the Register article, it says that Microsoft wants to be freed of having to admit that it is guilty of antitrust violations. The DOJ has backed off of demanding that Microsoft be broken up, and that's a good thing I think, because to break it up would be like cutting off the head of a monster that then grows two in its place-- who needs a whole slew of Microsofts all over the landscape, like great globs of chickenshit all over the barnyard. But to allow Microsoft to be convicted of antitrust violations, and then make a settlement which allows them to walk away from the legal consequences of such a conviction, is an insult to the justice system and the American public. It would be giving Jeffry Dahmer a slap on the wrist for his cannibal crimes and telling him he should become a vegetarian.
It wasn't Judge Jackson, it was the DOJ.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for the computing industry as a whole, making it so that computers have moved from being the domain of long-haired hippies at geek enclaves like MIT to being available for everyone.
Microsoft has done a lot of good for Bill Gates, by stealing what those long-haired hippies at geek enclaves like MIT developed for free and then turning around and forcing the public to pay big bucks for their stolen goods, even if they didn't want it!
Spoken like a true Microsoft employee. Boy, Gates really has you serfs brainwashed, doesn't he? What an audacious, atrociously self-serving statement! To say that the personal computer would have gone nowhere in the past twenty-odd years without Microsoft, is to demonstrate that you have an arrogant, belittling attitude toward the entire industry, and all of the real software innovators out there. Bill Gates was, and is a snake oil salesman, who had the incredible luck to be in the right place at the right time at the beginning of a technology that could only mushroom into the most pervasive industry of the end of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, he is also the, greediest, most unethical, paranoid, megalomaniacal individual in that industry, and for those reasons no one can know what the computer industry would be like without Microsoft today, because Microsoft has held the entire industry in its death grip for the past ten years. With Bill Gates on the scene, there has been no true innovation that has not been strangled, or prostituted to Microsoft's lame system. If you want another opinion, and one which takes into account ALL the facts, and not just what Bill Gates wants you to know, I believe that the computer industry would be years ahead of where it is today if Microsoft had not been around. It would be all open source instead of closed and obscure and proprietary, and one would not have to pay for bug fixes that are released every three years under the guise of an upgrade.
By forcing Microsoft to limit their practices you are forcing the ordinary consumer who wants to own and use a PC to accept something which is second-best in terms of easy use - it is far easier for a normal user to have their browser as part of the OS than it is to have it as a separate application.
This is pure hogwash that Microsoft has tried to force down everyone's throats, but it is brainwashing drivel from Redmond that the intelligent observer, and the court, I might add, has seen fit to reject out of hand. Only a blooming idiot who doesn't know how to click on an icon would want his browser as part of the OS everytime he boots up, and such a moron probably would have no clue how to use a browser anyway. The only person who wants the browser to be integrated with the OS is Bill Gates, because he wanted it to be impossible for people to have a choice and use Netscape instead of IE. This has been proved in the court.
Anything which aims to make computing easier for the masses, like AOL have done, seems to attract rabid flamebait rather than honest praise.
Anything which aims to make computing easier for the masses has not been adopted by Microsoft-- Bill Gates has seen to it that everything that goes into Windows is not cross platform, and excludes non-Microsoft software. Macintosh is far easier to use than anything Microsoft has created and is far more cross platform than Windows is. Microsoft is not AOL, either, so don't try to ride on their coattails. What attracts flames, and justifiably, I think, are comments like yours, which ignore the facts and try to promulgate the fictitious bullshit that originates and continues to flood out of Redmond like bovine diarrhea. You can bullshit all of the people some of the time, and you can bullshit some of the people all of the time, but you can't bullshit all of the people all of the time and not get caught. That is something Bill Gates and company has not learned, and I think they never will learn it. Once a snake oil sales company always a snake oil sales company.
Three of the four sources you list are quotes from Microsoft officials. Who can believe them anymore? They have proved they will do anything, including lie to promote Microsoft.
The other source says that China will not ban Microsoft. So What? That means nothing.
Maybe dat's so, bro But Linux gwine ter makes Ev'ry Microsoft ho Eat plenty o' CRAP, along w' Gates. It's jes' a mattah o' time B'fo all you luzers be cry'in An' wishin' dat yo'all Could dribble dat open source ball.
Bzzt! Wrong!
Wellsfargo.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/4.0 on Compaq Tru64 UNIX, and its ATMs run on OS/2. If you don't believe me, check out http://www.netcraft.com/whats/
It is a commonly known fact that MOST of the ATMs in the western world run OS/2. Microsoft's lack of security is too dangerous for this kind of application.
This happens every time MS releases an OS. People get on their soapboxes and say it's a failure. Slow addoption, althoug I wouldn't call 1 million coppies in a month slow, hasn't killed MS yet.
There is one fatal flaw in your reasoning: At the time Win3.1 was released, Linux did not yet exist. When Win95 and NT4.0 were released, Linux was still in its fledging years, and not yet ready for use by anyone but serious hackers.
But, Aha! Linux had already reached mainstream when Win2000 hit the shelves, so now there existed an alternative to Microsoft. And it is a serious alternative, that has already started to eat Microsoft's lunch, in big chomps. That is why Win2000 sales have performed so under par-- so seriously under par for Microsoft's history-- in the first month.
Furthermore, though it has already been said before in this forum, Win2000 sales figures have very likely been cooked by Microsoft, and probably do not reflect actual sales to consumers, but copies shipped to OEMs. If the one-million figure were actual sales into the hands of consumers, I would expect the hardware market to have jumped comparably during the past month, because it is highly unlikely that Win2000 would be installable on any but the latest, biggest hardware. Has it?
Next to "Bob", I think Win2000 is going to go down in history as Microsoft's biggest failure. It will be a bigger failure than "Bob" because Microsoft has too much riding on its success-- and there isn't going to be any significant success for Win2000-- at least not significant in the way Microsoft has become accustomed in the past.
Win2000, in my opinion, represents Microsoft's Waterloo-- Microsofts winter invasion of Russia-- Microsoft's invasion of Kuwait.
The handwriting is on the wall-- and it says, "For a good time, call Linux."
In the Microsoft world, four years is a long life for a computer system, not two, because it takes Microsoft four years to come out with any new technology-- and their bloated, ponderous, snail-like design absolutely needs the biggest and fastest just to keep up with Linux's benchmarks.
I'll bet the school in the parent post your comment is trying to answer is doing as much work and doing it faster than the latest release of Win2000 would be capable of doing, running on brand new latest technology machines. That's the way Microsoft does business: "Hey, we've just released our latest bug collection-- so throw out all your hardware and replace it with the latest and most expensive Intel PC stuff you can find, just so you can get it installed, after you have paid us a prince's ransome for the privilege of opening the shrinkwrap it is packaged in."
I am running S.u.S.E. 6.2 Linux on a 486DX2/66 with only 32 Mb RAM and a 3.1 Gb SCSI hard drive, and it runs fast enough to get significant work done. That machine was purchased in 1992, and everything in it dates from that time except the hard drive, which is the third one installed since 1992 because the others wore out.
Try getting Win2000 installed on such a machine-- yeah, right. What the heck, try running Win98 on it... Good luck!
So what? He stole 89 billion of it. And I think it is pathetic that so many of you Anonymous Cowards worship the little con man only because he has more money than you do. You obviously don't believe in your hearts what you are posting here with such frequency, because you haven't even the conviction of your beliefs to log in.
Soften the DOJ? I think not. The world is on to Microsoft's bullshit, and so is the DOJ. Microsoft is doomed. They will keep lumbering on for a few more years, only because of their obscene number of users (or is that, their number of obscene users?), but believe me, honest people who are informed already know what Microsoft represents, and are fed up with them. Microsoft are the pimps of the PC world; they are the ransom-demanding kidnappers of the technology revolution; they are the protection-racketteering Mafiosos of true innovation.
Okay its not THE greatest but I did not die laughing or anything. Take this with a grain of salt since I have no qualifications really to say if WindowsCE code is higher quality than Linux code or vice versa however there did not seem to be all that much kludge and stupid stuff going on. The API is a bit cleaner than the regular windows API. :-o
I had to do a small thing for CE once and I found the source on our MSDN disks :-).
So what! WinCE being made Open Source a la Microsoft means nothing to the real world. Nobody will embrace it because Microsoft is crooked, dishonest, greedy, and devious, and the world has already awakened up to that fact. Can you imagine a Nazi opening a Jewish community center?
Microsoft is incapable of writing good code, so why should the Open Source community do it for them. WinCE is properly named. There are no honest open source coders out here who will sell their souls to Microsoft to promote their crapola idea of "open source" WinCE.
It is not that Microsoft "doesn't get it" about what Open Source really is-- They don't want to get it-- they just want the world to think they are joining the human race. Fat chance! As one human with voting rights, I do not intend to let them in! Fsck Bill Gates. Fsck Microsoft.
Microsoft is dying. Linux isn't killing it. Their own greed and stupidity is.
I hope the DOJ wins the antitrust case, and all of the appeals that Microsoft makes fail. But I also hope that nothing is done to break them up. They deserve to be destroyed as the whole entity of evil that they are. And they will be-- by their own inept, stupidly greedy, Machiavellian deviousness. The world already knows what they are-- just let them sink into their own quagmire of putrifaction and feces.
At the risk of being redundant, I must say that I completely support the position expressed by the italicized quote above, and would like to clarify my own thoughts on the matter.
As someone who has spent literally thousands of dollars buying books and music CDs from Amazon over the past couple of years, I was saddened to see that Bezos seemed to be taking Amazon on the route of the monstrously greedy, snatch-everything-for-their-own, closed and propietary corporations. But before I could willingly respond to the appeal posted by Richard Stallman and others on various Linux sites-- to boycott Amazon until Bezos "came to his senses"-- I felt compelled to give it a lot of thought beforehand-- I like Amazon, and the "cut of their jib," and it behooved me to be absolutely certain that Amazon deserved to be boycotted for filing these patents.
In mulling it over, the thought occurred to me that if Amazon had not filed the 1-click patent, or the Associates patent, then the Great Devil of Redmond or one of its tightly bound business incubi might have filed the patent, and then we all know what would have happened: the patents would positively have been used against all of their competition, to make bigger strides toward proprietizing the internet for their own oppresively selfish gains.
In the light of that thinking, I cannot fault Jeff Bezos for filing for these patents-- provided his motive was just for the reason of keeping them out of the grasp of the evil forces, and Amazon does not intend to use them to try to proprietize doing e-business on the web.
And, if I am wrong in this post, and Amazon starts to use these patents to emulate the Evil Forces present in the e-business industry, then I shall cease doing any more business with Amazon. And that is a promise.
If anyone at Amazon wishes to track my previous purchases with Amazon, they can start with my latest, which Amazon identified with Order ID 102-4824324-8143250 on their invoice dated January 16, 2000.
I don't think it's pathetic. And BTW, Microsoft's stock is dropping these days-- or haven't you noticed?
Hallelujah! There is a god, after all!
Despite the fact that it may seem perfect to you, many people need drivers that it lacks. And no, they're not going to write them themselves. And why pay for someone to do it, when you already have a working solution? Sorry, it's not a practical move.
Who wants to bet me that this is not one of those infiltrating Microsoft-employed or deadly bound posters I was talking about in my previous post?
In the past couple of weeks I have noticed that there seems to be an increase in the presence of irrationally pro-Microsoft posters on Slashdot-- at least there seems to be more of them than there have been in the past.
Some of them have actually logged in-- that is, they have not posted as Anonymous Cowards-- probably so they will have the chance of becoming moderators. There are several of those that have logged in who have posted many (more than twenty) times in the past couple of weeks. If you look at their User Info, it is not hard to discern which of them have hard and set bindings to Microsoft, from clues they reveal on their personal websites. I shouldn't wonder that they gain moderator status occasionally.
Can't you just picture Master Gates, or one of his wranglers, ordering the masses of Microsoft minions to "infiltrate" Slashdot and make posts to "defend Microsoft's honor" if they want to keep collecting their paychecks?
All of the evidence seems to indicate that Microsoft is approaching a state of panic these days.
All the 'good' articles on Microsoft/Bill (like bill donating billions, launch of windows 2000 etc) are quietly ignored. Noone everyone here thinks Microsoft EVIL EVIL EVIL. That's all they hear. If Bill Gate$ doesn't give away his money, he will never be able to spend it all. If he spent $1,000,000 per day on Porches, garish monstrosity houses, and outrageously overpriced Seattle call girls, he would need 274 years 10 months and 25 days to spend his personal (on-paper) fortune, and even at the end of that time, the accrued interest on the balance of his bank account would have earned him-- or his heirs-- approximately $685,000,000,000 more! So how the devil is a story about Bill giving away billions a "good" story? He is giving it away because there is no other way in hell for him to dispose of it!
Paranoid... Oh yeah... I see.
Well, how about this: Bill Gates INVENTED paranoia, and injected it into every part of Microsoft. I am certainly not the first one to have pointed this out. Microsoft's psychotic level of paranoia is just the sort of thing that might cause them to perpetrate something as bizarre as the DDoS attack against Yahoo! et al, in an attempt to discredit Linux/Unix. Such behavior would be right in line with the other things they have done through the years to reach and keep the status of their ill-gotten monopoly. I suppose you don't remember the Astro Turf scandal that was exposed by the LA Times.
The entire world knows by now that Microsoft cannot stomach fair play in business dealings.
Once upon a time they could get away with their psychotic behavior, but now the sunrays of public exposure are falling on the Vampires of Redmond, and they are desperately clutching at anything that comes to their sick minds to try to turn away the unstoppable tsunami of public disgrace that they have earned.
Can't you see that Microsoft is running for its life, and losing the race?
It is not whether or not Microsoft has "finally" produced a stable operating system-- though I seriously doubt that. The fact is, I just do not trust anything Bill Gates or any company he is connected with (read Microsoft, et al). Starting way back in the late seventies:
1. Bill Gates, was stopped for speeding, and was given a ticket. He tried to get the cop who wrote the ticket fired. The attempt failed. This was behavior characteristic of an elitist who thinks he is above the law. That behavior would persist in Bill Gates' actions right up to the present time.
2. "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." [In-house Microsoft mantra about the time that Bill Gates was trying to get a toehold with Excel in the marketplace.]
3. The much recently exposed and discussed Microsoft foul play with DR-DOS.
4. The endless round of Microsoft buying up any company with a technology better than they could themselves invent, or "innovate", and then either making the aquired technology non-compatible with anything but Windows or killing it outright.
5. Microsoft's endless manipulation of the computer press to assure that their products received reviews that were biased-in-favor-of-Microsoft and the competitions' products got supposedly independent reviews that were biased-in-favor-of-Microsoft. Hear, hear, Ziff Davis. I always felt that a majority of Ziff-Davis' writers were bought and paid for by Microsoft. There were a few who held onto their integrity, though, like Dvorak.
6. Microsoft's exclusive OEM agreements that prevented anyone from getting any system but DOS/Windows installed on any computer sold, even if the consumer asked for something else. The DOJ nailed them once for that evil practice, but Microsoft, in their inimitably crooked manner chose to ignore terms of the the decree resulting from that first antitrust trial.
7. Microsoft's endless and on-going attempts to buy legislation that will favor Microsoft and its all-but-disfunctional products against the consumer. Latest effort: UCITA.
8. Microsoft's endless and on-going practice of "embrace and extend" with the effect of proprietizing something as universal and platform-independent as Java, and the internet and the WWW.
9. The obviously dishonest tactics and behavior of Bill Gates and his minions in the DOJ trial.
10. Bill Gates' elitest attitude that made him think he could buy enough influence in Washington to get the DOJ's operating funds reduced, because the trial was going against Microsoft.
11. Microsoft's stingy, exploitative treatment of their "temp" employees, who are anything but temporary. This from a company with a capitalization of five hundred billion dollars in stock, and with nine billion dollars in cash and one who's largest stockholder is the richest man in the world. Tell me, Bill: When will you have enough money?
12. Microsoft's total lack of concern for the consumer, in spite of all the blathering from their new CEO (Ballmer) to the contrary. Consider Microsoft's EULAs and their dodgy tech help, for starters. I'm sure I'm leaving out something here.
13. Microsoft's persistent and unending use of FUD and vaporware to exclude competition with a better product.
14. Microsoft's lame attempt at astro-turf, as exposed by the LA Times.
15. Microsoft's sorry attempt to subvert higher education by buying professors' promotion of their products in the classroom.
16. Bill Gates promise to put proprietary technology in the form of Microsoft products on every computer in the world, to the exclusion of everything else.
I could go on and on, and continue this list much further, but I think you get the point. Microsoft is a dishonest company that I will never, ever trust. Their people, from Bill Gates on down, are bunco snake-oil salesmen.
The threat that Microsoft wants to eventually take over the complete control of the dissemination of all information in the age of the computer by any and every means possible is frightening.
So, you see, whether or not Windows2000 is "stable" or "scalable" or "secure" is really not the issue. Microsoft should really be put down because they are too greedy and power-hungry.
I hope the EU cuts off Microsoft's tail-- and head!
Bill Gates is a dessicated mummy wrapped in dusty, rotting bindings called Microsoft. He will never be resurrected. Furthermore, the bindings now are being stripped from the mummy in broken pieces by the OSS movement, and they disintegrating as they come off. It will not be long now before the mummy will fall apart and its parts will be scattered until they are dust.