I mean if Microsoft is evil then they'd do something like this and doing something like this would prove Microsoft is evil - it's a perfect circle!
It's much easier to point out that free software users don't have these kinds of problems and give them a copy of Mepis to solve their problems. Yes, M$ has taken the upgrade train and user extortion to new lows but it's nothing new nor is it the worst part of running non free software. Following every detail of the M$ lie machine is a waste of time.
I've legitimately purchased a license of windows that turns out to be pirated and now I have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get everything straightened out.
Worse than that, you can't possibly tell if it's "pirated" or not. In the end you have to take M$'s word for it and fork over the cash if you want to keep using your computer the same way. M$ has not always told the truth in the past and others have gleefully defended such "sharp business practices." I wonder how gleeful they will be on the receiving end when they foolishly fork over their hard earned cash to their former heroes.
It's better to be running free software. M$ has always been about cheap and easy. Now they are neither cheap nor easy. It's amazing how their "Get the Facts" nonsense touts "legal uncertainty" about free software while they are actively screwing their own user base - again.
If some company would sell me invalid copy (pirated) of software on purpose I would post EVERY DETAIL on that company that I have.
Why all the vindictiveness and personal effort? Are you really that morally outraged that M$ did not get a large portion of your purchase price? The copy fooled you, can't you understand it fooling the person who sold it to you? The retailer got it from a regional wholesaler who got it from an even bigger wholesaler. If you think having a message about "legitimate" software flash on your computer is bad, you should see what they do to the company that sold you that crap. M$, through the BSA, puts mom and pop stores out of business all the time. Why waste your time contributing to that?
You could avoid all of it and have a better outlook on the world by running free software. I just don't understand the moral outrage that copyright warriors are able to muster for minor violations of the "IP" of the world's riches companies. There are real disasters happening right now in the Sudan, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in China and other places. Hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced right here in the US from Andrew, Katrina and Rita. Five hundred thousand people have been robbed of their homes and livelyhoods in Lebanon and those who can't escape over bombed out bridges are about to be "flattened" from the air by people who think they are all terrorist supporters of Hezbolah. Others are far more worthy of your actions and support than M$ and their new "get legitimate" nonsense.
How do I know, when I buy a copy of some content (movie, song, app, OS, whatever) that it's "legitimate"?
You can't. There is no difference between the "legitimate" copy and any other copy and that fact demands a rethink of copyright laws designed to protect dead tree publishing.
Copyright law in the US was formed a devil's bargain from the beginning. The founding fathers understood the purpose of such laws was the promotion of creative arts. They never wanted people to own ideas, which they correctly understood as something other than property. They did not even want people to own their publications forever. The goal was to encourage as much expensive publication as possible so that as many people as possible could be exposed to the country's current thoughts. They liberated their presses in a way the old world refused. The goal was to share. Exclusive franchises were established because that sharing was fiercely expensive.
Today the cost of information is now entirely in it's creation. A worldwide network has been built where it is possible to transfer entire libraries without significant cost. The marginal cost of copies is neglegible. There is no reason anyone should be without any knowledge. Once the knowledge is create, it should spread without bounds. People will continue to solve problems and create knowledge because they must if they want to get things done. Most people want that knowledge spread in their lifetime.
The problem comes not from the creators of knowledge but from those who would own it. Large publishers and others, long used to being gate keepers of information, want to retain that position. Windows is an example. The code was acquired though means both fair and foul. Much of it has been used to suppress rather than express as the death of Word Perfect, OS2, Palm and a host of other superior "competitors." In a few cases, such as Netscape, the code was liberated. In other cases, like Fastback and other backup programs, the code was discarded. Outside the computer industry things can be even worse. For every book you see at the major chain stores, there are hundreds in warehouses and thousands that never saw publication. For every song you hear on the radio, the story is much the same. Music, writing and other arts are part of human nature which preceded and will outlast the growing tyranny of IPA ownership. People are trying very hard to get around these would be owners to share and profit from that sharing. The current owners are not offering any share of those profits and will be routed around eventually. In the mean time, they are encroaching further and further into our basic rights to maintain their position.
Copyright needs a complete rework. Strong protections and exclusive franchises are no longer required to promote the creation and spread of the usefull arts. Strong "IPA" laws are now the largest barrier to the innovation and education they obsessively promote.
I think Microsoft's patch is a step in the right direction. It is simply too easy to spy on the user and hide the driver under the current system.
Well, it would be great if it were not so easy to circumvent. Typical of M$ "security", this change is just another inconvenience to the legitimate user.
Our software doesn't work, we're pissed.... Instead of whining, why don't they engage Microsoft and figure out what exactly they need.... Microsoft will NOT be in a good situation if Vista turns out to be a dud security-wise. They want it to work.
You must have read a different report. The one I read said that Microsoft was broken and they won't let anyone fix it. The M$ security model was easy to circumvent and that circumvention was the only way to get what they need to watch out for all the dirt bags doing the same thing to serve up adds and spam.
Insulting the people who try to fix what's broken on M$ is not a good way to apologize for M$'s broken junk.
I told you already that privacy only exists when you take active measures to ensure it exists.
There are no measures you can take against the treachery of those you trust. You started this tread with a little talk about the friendly grocer of years gone by who knew all about you. Today the grocer not only keeps a database of those things, he's selling you out. His information, combined with that from everyone else who's selling you out can be retrieved effortlessly by complete strangers with power and used against you. The only remedy to such invasion is to massively inconvenience yourself by going cash only, but with RFID chips your cash will tell on you the same way your credit card does. Good luck getting your employer to give you a large portion of your paycheck in cash to get around your bank's big sell out. Because you can not spend anonymously, everything you do and everywhere you go is known. Getting around it is nearly impossible. Because you have a non free sore of value, you are a slave.
That being said, you can do as recommended to try to keep some privacy in your private papers. Encryption of email, community anonymizers and other good practices should be encouraged. The problem is that the vast majority of computer users are in the hands of the sellouts of the computer world, M$ and Apple, which do not provide the tools you need and have proved less than trustworthy if they did.
Routine is trumped by " reasonable" From the decision:
Instead, searches made at the border . . . are reasonable
simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border.
United States v. Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. 149, 152-53
(2004) (quoting United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616
(1977)). Thus, the routine border search of Romms laptop
was reasonable, regardless whether Romm obtained foreign
contraband in Canada or was under official restraint.
Using this as a basis, it looks like customs can do anything they want and call it reasonable to anyone going in or out of the US. You are no longer secure in your private papers when you leave or enter the US.
So the state has granted itself new powers of search based and justifies it by humiliating a wanker. Surely, everyone hates kiddie porn. Even the defendant though he should be punished for such dirty stuff as this:
While staying in his hotel room in Las Vegas, Romm viewed child pornography and masturbated twice, while or shortly after viewing the child pornography; he claimed to have then deleted....
Only twice? Are they sure it was not three times? He could have lied, you know. I can hardly believe I'm reading such crap in an official US publication, but I suppose that's what the weird and wacky world of pornography prosecution is all about. The upshot of it all is that a customs agent is now free to violate each and every one of us.
If Microsoft releases the buggy, hole-ridden mess that so many are afraid of along with functional, cheap, easily obtainable antivirus tools, they're out of a job. If Microsoft were to release an OS as secure as, say, Linux, they're still out of a job.
The second options is impossible for a closed source company.
The first option, less most of the bugs, is what M$ would like you to believe is going to happen.
The usual option is to realease anything they can and then put the others out of business. Price and "free" are only the surface of the attack. The real attack comes from denying the "competitor" needed OS information and outright sabotage. Microsoft's insane complexity and bugs are a legacy of that kind of attack.
No company has a guaranteed right to profit.
M$ is a company too. Vista is the end of the road for them. Their profits and market share will implode soon after they get that buggy junk out the door when no one buys it.
You can't tell me what I am doing is wrong, because you don't know what I am doing.
No, this is not a fishing expedition.
In this case, we know what they are doing and that it's wrong. A credible witness has come forward and told us about wiretapping, which violates the fourth amendment by violating your right to be secure in your home and private papers. What's missing is proof of the extent of the crime. It's not if they were doing something wrong or what that wrong was, GWB has admitted it, it's how much wrong was done.
Shutting down the investigation for "security" is outrageous and disgusting. They might as well tell us, "if we have to get search warrents to violate you, the terrorists will win." There are laws against domestic spying and they are being violated.
The security companies will be better off forming their own knowledge pool and inviting Microsoft representatives to learn from them.
What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours, right? What a flamebait assertion, that M$ should keep the details of how they do things to themselves but that others should go out of their way to share what they manage to claw from the void. Typical.
M$'s behavior and the results are entirely predictable by this point. They want to own the market so they are withholding what others need. As in every case of M$ putting a "competitor" out of business, the Windoze market will be that much poorer when the competitors are all gone. All everyone is left with is the decidedly inferior M$ offering which will subsequently be neglected and suck more and more as time goes by. Windoze security was already a lost cause, so it won't matter that much. The spam and DoS will continue to flow as long as M$ has market share. The only people this really matters to are those about to lose their jobs.
In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.
That's especially true at home, where the average PC has a 32bit PCI slot with a 133 megabyte per second transfer rate. It's nice how the G4 has a 64 bit PCI bus and that the industry is moving to PCI express, finally. Unless you have the controller built into the motherboard or have a real bus, you can't expect anthing better than 80MB/s.
In the mean time, I'm happy with 80MB/s from a $40 used scsi card and equally cheap old scsi drives. Yeah, I wish they stored more, but five to twenty gigs is more than sufficient for normal daily use and everything else can go into not so slow storage on a run of the mill 8MB/s ide drive. Normal drives are more than fast enough for music, movies and all that jazz as you should suspect from having played such on PI and PIIs
I get really tired of the "I've only got two broadband providers available" complaints by US residents.... if you've got DSL, almost anywhere in the US, you've got lots of providers who will sell you service, and they're the ones who set open/closed/AUP policies even though many of them are selling telco-provided connectivity underneath their service.
Tired of reality, eh? The bells have been screwing over "independent" DSL providers for years. They own the "availability" list and can deny service to anyone who won't buy from them, if they even get an open slot because they continue to drag their feet on deployment. The result is that the US is 16th and falling in broadband deployment. We pay more for less and it's getting worse not better. They really have destroyed their competition, aka the "bursting internet bubble." Removing neutrality so they can get back to milking every bit of traffic is what they had in mind all along.
Because government created this mess, they will have to pull us out of it. In the mean time, instead of getting the fiber you were promissed and paid for, you are stuck with copper from a hundred and fifty years ago. Oh yeah, you could get cable... with upload speeds capped to exactly what you can get from a better DSL connection. They will push you back to dial up and counting minutes if they can. That's what you get when you feed a few pet companies instead of letting competition do it's magic. They started out snakes, now they are bigger snakes.
The limit of the trend is a single "engineer" responsible for all aspects of the business, a single person company, owned by millions of shareholders (IP owners) and one or two CEOs who extract all but $60,000/year of value. The BOFH replaced everyone in sales, accounting, customer relations with shell scripts where the functions could not be merged into the engineering position. The BOFH then disappeared in a cloud of keyboard clatters as one of his scripts replaced him. No one was able to tell what the CEO did, so they left him alone.
No one (at the conference) knows the reason yet. Lots of people here at the show were quite confused and suprised at the whole situation. I am sure we will know something by Monday...
Then it's show of force. Only the Feds are supposed to play with the "stovepipes" of Carnivore and when they pay you to do it for them you need to keep your mouth shut.
Can you say "Police State"? I voted for George Bush because he promissed me a smaller and less invasive government. This is what I got.
when I worked at Microsoft, I got a call from someone who's computer had been broken into and child pornographers were using it for a drop box.... if you can't secure a wireless network, what makes you think you can secure Windows?
That's a great example and it shows how stupid mandatory "security" laws are.
Because you can't secure Windoze, securing your wireless is a waste of time. Your lan connects you to the entire internet, with it's hundreds of millions of users, and Windows has a twelve minute half life there. Your wireless connects you to a few dozen people at most. The odds of someone abusing your computer and it's internet connection through the wireless are about a hundred million times less likely than those for someone abusing your wireless. If you are using software that protects your privacy to begin with, you don't have to worry about "securing" your network connection and can share it as you will.
Does this mean they'll spend $6 billion on it and end up capturing 23% of the market? Because this team is really, really good at that.
I doubt anyone will use this shit. The music companies and M$ have been unable to get students to use their crappy DRM music on M$ systems, even after extorting schools to pay fees for it, even though the cost to use the service was zero, even after giving away players, even enjoying greater than 70% OS pentration so it would "work for sure". The chance of getting people to actually pay for a service they don't think is a good deal when "free" are zero.
People don't want what M$ has to offer. The don't want music which requires software that screws up their computer. They don't want music that they can't share, even with themselves and they don't want to constantly pay for what they are used to owning. It's a huge step backward from analog and people are not going that direction. DRM is not going to work out in general and the Microsoft way has already failed spectacularly.
Rockbox, one day, might be able to Purge your Zune.
"Zune is the Aros version of the "Magic User Interface" (or MUI) which was a shareware app on the classic Amiga systems that allowed you to change the entire look of the OS."
The open source alternatives that exist to most of the specialized commercial software I use (e.g. for statistical analysis) are frankly crap, and don't even come close to being viable (and most of us who could improve them don't have the time, since commercial software already meets our needs).
The people who write that software will be happy to move it to an OS that's not crap if they have not already done so. I'm not sure how you can do statistical analysis on a system with such a limited file system and networking. Those limits are well known to anyone who writes software that runs under windoze.
The big deal is them not being able to get an OS out the door in six years, despite promisses and expensive "assurance" plans they sold people. The fact that it's still a buggy piece of junk and might slip yet again is more evidence that M$ has put it's efforts in all the wrong places. Instead of making good software they were busy trying to own digital media, slandering officials in Mass, "Getting the Facts" and other harmful waste.
I just don't buy the whole Microsoft is hurting Linux/Apple/BSD etc. because all of those systems are growing and getting better all the time. Linux is getting better and better, OS X is super cool, and so on.
Microsoft's inability to disrupt free software is not from a lack of trying. See the Halloween Documents for graphic proof of their honesty, attitude and intentions. The attack includes all dependencies and weaknesses perceived eight years ago, discussion groups and standards of all sorts. If anything, those attacks have multiplied and intensified. The reality is that they are so paranoid and crazy that they won't be happy until every compting device on the planet, right down to your music player, runs their software without choice. The other day's "We own corporate search and nobody's takin food off our table," crazy should convince you before October that all is the same in the M$ world. Their inability to "fucking kill _your_favorite_thing_here" does not indicate a lack of effort so much as it indicates common sense elsewhere.
Strangely enough, they have helpers. Apple is insanely supporting them for many issues and the media companies are terminally stupid. The harm done includes:
Difficulty collaborating with M$ users.
Difficulty installing and using new hardware.
DRM'd media and difficulty playing content on anything but licensed systems. Show me a simple music player that does USB file system and plays OGGs here in the US. It's not there, you have to use an old player like IRiver and hack it up with Rockbox.
Crappy wireless "security" network protocols.
All the usual non free upgrade train nonsense their users suffer, which amounts to massive intentional waste.
Free software has managed to float above all that and will prevail. It's as inevitable as Vista is buggy, bloated and sorry improvement on previous offerings.
Microsoft is not your friend. They never have been and never will be.
How precisely do they propose to differentiate between "retaliation against a computer maker" and "business decisions" due to any other little thing the maker may do that they decide they don't like?
What makes you think they mean it? The fact that they have admitted the practice should convince you they can do it again.
As in so many cases in the past, this is just another damage control press release and no one should expect change. In the court prooven case of DRDOS, they planned both the technical and PR attacks in advance. In that case, internal emails show they programmed Win3.1 to error out for anything but their own DOS and planned to astroturf the newsgroups to blame DRDOS. It worked and DRDOS failed. Ditto Netscape, Word Perfect, Correl and all other private "competitors". When a new net nasty takes out every corporate network, they issue statements about how "security is job 1" and hype their patches. Now that they are being tagged by the EU for trying to lock down the world of media and computers in general, they issue this bogus and confusing release. They think they can talk their way out of anything.
They need a good old fashion hanging judge to say, "For getting smart, boy, I'm going to double your daily fine until you comply." The lenient stance of the Bush administration and the EU so far are just short of ludicrous. In the mean time, I'm waiting for sales of Vista to tank and the sun to finally set on M$ and non free junk.
It's funny, that after they call Konqueror "obscure" they go on to complain about this:
But all the themes we found merely changed the interface buttons and perhaps added an image to the top menu area; they don't change the window borders the way you can with WindowBlinds. And beware that most themes haven't yet been updated to work with Firefox 2.
That's such a pathetically windoze centric point of view. In the free world, you have a choice of skinable window managers which you can mix and match as you please. "Extreme Tech, where we dare to leave the Start Menu." Kudos to the for noticing this "Linux" thing an including it on a chart. Brickbacks for hanging onto a six year old interface that sucks.
Embrace, extend, extinguish? At least that is what everyone here is going to say, so I don't even see why the editors bothered to post this story. It's slashdot, we always have the same response to news about microsoft.
When they quit acting the same old way, I'll quit telling you about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean if Microsoft is evil then they'd do something like this and doing something like this would prove Microsoft is evil - it's a perfect circle!
It's much easier to point out that free software users don't have these kinds of problems and give them a copy of Mepis to solve their problems. Yes, M$ has taken the upgrade train and user extortion to new lows but it's nothing new nor is it the worst part of running non free software. Following every detail of the M$ lie machine is a waste of time.
I've legitimately purchased a license of windows that turns out to be pirated and now I have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get everything straightened out.
Worse than that, you can't possibly tell if it's "pirated" or not. In the end you have to take M$'s word for it and fork over the cash if you want to keep using your computer the same way. M$ has not always told the truth in the past and others have gleefully defended such "sharp business practices." I wonder how gleeful they will be on the receiving end when they foolishly fork over their hard earned cash to their former heroes.
It's better to be running free software. M$ has always been about cheap and easy. Now they are neither cheap nor easy. It's amazing how their "Get the Facts" nonsense touts "legal uncertainty" about free software while they are actively screwing their own user base - again.
If some company would sell me invalid copy (pirated) of software on purpose I would post EVERY DETAIL on that company that I have.
Why all the vindictiveness and personal effort? Are you really that morally outraged that M$ did not get a large portion of your purchase price? The copy fooled you, can't you understand it fooling the person who sold it to you? The retailer got it from a regional wholesaler who got it from an even bigger wholesaler. If you think having a message about "legitimate" software flash on your computer is bad, you should see what they do to the company that sold you that crap. M$, through the BSA, puts mom and pop stores out of business all the time. Why waste your time contributing to that?
You could avoid all of it and have a better outlook on the world by running free software. I just don't understand the moral outrage that copyright warriors are able to muster for minor violations of the "IP" of the world's riches companies. There are real disasters happening right now in the Sudan, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in China and other places. Hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced right here in the US from Andrew, Katrina and Rita. Five hundred thousand people have been robbed of their homes and livelyhoods in Lebanon and those who can't escape over bombed out bridges are about to be "flattened" from the air by people who think they are all terrorist supporters of Hezbolah. Others are far more worthy of your actions and support than M$ and their new "get legitimate" nonsense.
How do I know, when I buy a copy of some content (movie, song, app, OS, whatever) that it's "legitimate"?
You can't. There is no difference between the "legitimate" copy and any other copy and that fact demands a rethink of copyright laws designed to protect dead tree publishing.
Copyright law in the US was formed a devil's bargain from the beginning. The founding fathers understood the purpose of such laws was the promotion of creative arts. They never wanted people to own ideas, which they correctly understood as something other than property. They did not even want people to own their publications forever. The goal was to encourage as much expensive publication as possible so that as many people as possible could be exposed to the country's current thoughts. They liberated their presses in a way the old world refused. The goal was to share. Exclusive franchises were established because that sharing was fiercely expensive.
Today the cost of information is now entirely in it's creation. A worldwide network has been built where it is possible to transfer entire libraries without significant cost. The marginal cost of copies is neglegible. There is no reason anyone should be without any knowledge. Once the knowledge is create, it should spread without bounds. People will continue to solve problems and create knowledge because they must if they want to get things done. Most people want that knowledge spread in their lifetime.
The problem comes not from the creators of knowledge but from those who would own it. Large publishers and others, long used to being gate keepers of information, want to retain that position. Windows is an example. The code was acquired though means both fair and foul. Much of it has been used to suppress rather than express as the death of Word Perfect, OS2, Palm and a host of other superior "competitors." In a few cases, such as Netscape, the code was liberated. In other cases, like Fastback and other backup programs, the code was discarded. Outside the computer industry things can be even worse. For every book you see at the major chain stores, there are hundreds in warehouses and thousands that never saw publication. For every song you hear on the radio, the story is much the same. Music, writing and other arts are part of human nature which preceded and will outlast the growing tyranny of IPA ownership. People are trying very hard to get around these would be owners to share and profit from that sharing. The current owners are not offering any share of those profits and will be routed around eventually. In the mean time, they are encroaching further and further into our basic rights to maintain their position.
Copyright needs a complete rework. Strong protections and exclusive franchises are no longer required to promote the creation and spread of the usefull arts. Strong "IPA" laws are now the largest barrier to the innovation and education they obsessively promote.
I think Microsoft's patch is a step in the right direction. It is simply too easy to spy on the user and hide the driver under the current system.
Well, it would be great if it were not so easy to circumvent. Typical of M$ "security", this change is just another inconvenience to the legitimate user.
Our software doesn't work, we're pissed. ... Instead of whining, why don't they engage Microsoft and figure out what exactly they need. ... Microsoft will NOT be in a good situation if Vista turns out to be a dud security-wise. They want it to work.
You must have read a different report. The one I read said that Microsoft was broken and they won't let anyone fix it. The M$ security model was easy to circumvent and that circumvention was the only way to get what they need to watch out for all the dirt bags doing the same thing to serve up adds and spam.
Insulting the people who try to fix what's broken on M$ is not a good way to apologize for M$'s broken junk.
I told you already that privacy only exists when you take active measures to ensure it exists.
There are no measures you can take against the treachery of those you trust. You started this tread with a little talk about the friendly grocer of years gone by who knew all about you. Today the grocer not only keeps a database of those things, he's selling you out. His information, combined with that from everyone else who's selling you out can be retrieved effortlessly by complete strangers with power and used against you. The only remedy to such invasion is to massively inconvenience yourself by going cash only, but with RFID chips your cash will tell on you the same way your credit card does. Good luck getting your employer to give you a large portion of your paycheck in cash to get around your bank's big sell out. Because you can not spend anonymously, everything you do and everywhere you go is known. Getting around it is nearly impossible. Because you have a non free sore of value, you are a slave.
That being said, you can do as recommended to try to keep some privacy in your private papers. Encryption of email, community anonymizers and other good practices should be encouraged. The problem is that the vast majority of computer users are in the hands of the sellouts of the computer world, M$ and Apple, which do not provide the tools you need and have proved less than trustworthy if they did.
Routine is trumped by " reasonable" From the decision:
Instead, searches made at the border . . . are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border. United States v. Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. 149, 152-53 (2004) (quoting United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616 (1977)). Thus, the routine border search of Romms laptop was reasonable, regardless whether Romm obtained foreign contraband in Canada or was under official restraint.
Using this as a basis, it looks like customs can do anything they want and call it reasonable to anyone going in or out of the US. You are no longer secure in your private papers when you leave or enter the US.
So the state has granted itself new powers of search based and justifies it by humiliating a wanker. Surely, everyone hates kiddie porn. Even the defendant though he should be punished for such dirty stuff as this:
While staying in his hotel room in Las Vegas, Romm viewed child pornography and masturbated twice, while or shortly after viewing the child pornography; he claimed to have then deleted ....
Only twice? Are they sure it was not three times? He could have lied, you know. I can hardly believe I'm reading such crap in an official US publication, but I suppose that's what the weird and wacky world of pornography prosecution is all about. The upshot of it all is that a customs agent is now free to violate each and every one of us.
If Microsoft releases the buggy, hole-ridden mess that so many are afraid of along with functional, cheap, easily obtainable antivirus tools, they're out of a job. If Microsoft were to release an OS as secure as, say, Linux, they're still out of a job.
The second options is impossible for a closed source company.
The first option, less most of the bugs, is what M$ would like you to believe is going to happen.
The usual option is to realease anything they can and then put the others out of business. Price and "free" are only the surface of the attack. The real attack comes from denying the "competitor" needed OS information and outright sabotage. Microsoft's insane complexity and bugs are a legacy of that kind of attack.
No company has a guaranteed right to profit.
M$ is a company too. Vista is the end of the road for them. Their profits and market share will implode soon after they get that buggy junk out the door when no one buys it.
You can't tell me what I am doing is wrong, because you don't know what I am doing.
No, this is not a fishing expedition.
In this case, we know what they are doing and that it's wrong. A credible witness has come forward and told us about wiretapping, which violates the fourth amendment by violating your right to be secure in your home and private papers. What's missing is proof of the extent of the crime. It's not if they were doing something wrong or what that wrong was, GWB has admitted it, it's how much wrong was done.
Shutting down the investigation for "security" is outrageous and disgusting. They might as well tell us, "if we have to get search warrents to violate you, the terrorists will win." There are laws against domestic spying and they are being violated.
The security companies will be better off forming their own knowledge pool and inviting Microsoft representatives to learn from them.
What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours, right? What a flamebait assertion, that M$ should keep the details of how they do things to themselves but that others should go out of their way to share what they manage to claw from the void. Typical.
M$'s behavior and the results are entirely predictable by this point. They want to own the market so they are withholding what others need. As in every case of M$ putting a "competitor" out of business, the Windoze market will be that much poorer when the competitors are all gone. All everyone is left with is the decidedly inferior M$ offering which will subsequently be neglected and suck more and more as time goes by. Windoze security was already a lost cause, so it won't matter that much. The spam and DoS will continue to flow as long as M$ has market share. The only people this really matters to are those about to lose their jobs.
In benchmarks the drive achieves 180 Mbytes/sec buffered reads.
That's especially true at home, where the average PC has a 32bit PCI slot with a 133 megabyte per second transfer rate. It's nice how the G4 has a 64 bit PCI bus and that the industry is moving to PCI express, finally. Unless you have the controller built into the motherboard or have a real bus, you can't expect anthing better than 80MB/s.
In the mean time, I'm happy with 80MB/s from a $40 used scsi card and equally cheap old scsi drives. Yeah, I wish they stored more, but five to twenty gigs is more than sufficient for normal daily use and everything else can go into not so slow storage on a run of the mill 8MB/s ide drive. Normal drives are more than fast enough for music, movies and all that jazz as you should suspect from having played such on PI and PIIs
Tired of reality, eh? The bells have been screwing over "independent" DSL providers for years. They own the "availability" list and can deny service to anyone who won't buy from them, if they even get an open slot because they continue to drag their feet on deployment. The result is that the US is 16th and falling in broadband deployment. We pay more for less and it's getting worse not better. They really have destroyed their competition, aka the "bursting internet bubble." Removing neutrality so they can get back to milking every bit of traffic is what they had in mind all along.
Because government created this mess, they will have to pull us out of it. In the mean time, instead of getting the fiber you were promissed and paid for, you are stuck with copper from a hundred and fifty years ago. Oh yeah, you could get cable ... with upload speeds capped to exactly what you can get from a better DSL connection. They will push you back to dial up and counting minutes if they can. That's what you get when you feed a few pet companies instead of letting competition do it's magic. They started out snakes, now they are bigger snakes.
Then it's show of force. Only the Feds are supposed to play with the "stovepipes" of Carnivore and when they pay you to do it for them you need to keep your mouth shut.
Can you say "Police State"? I voted for George Bush because he promissed me a smaller and less invasive government. This is what I got.
when I worked at Microsoft, I got a call from someone who's computer had been broken into and child pornographers were using it for a drop box. ... if you can't secure a wireless network, what makes you think you can secure Windows?
That's a great example and it shows how stupid mandatory "security" laws are.
Because you can't secure Windoze, securing your wireless is a waste of time. Your lan connects you to the entire internet, with it's hundreds of millions of users, and Windows has a twelve minute half life there. Your wireless connects you to a few dozen people at most. The odds of someone abusing your computer and it's internet connection through the wireless are about a hundred million times less likely than those for someone abusing your wireless. If you are using software that protects your privacy to begin with, you don't have to worry about "securing" your network connection and can share it as you will.
I doubt anyone will use this shit. The music companies and M$ have been unable to get students to use their crappy DRM music on M$ systems, even after extorting schools to pay fees for it, even though the cost to use the service was zero, even after giving away players, even enjoying greater than 70% OS pentration so it would "work for sure". The chance of getting people to actually pay for a service they don't think is a good deal when "free" are zero.
People don't want what M$ has to offer. The don't want music which requires software that screws up their computer. They don't want music that they can't share, even with themselves and they don't want to constantly pay for what they are used to owning. It's a huge step backward from analog and people are not going that direction. DRM is not going to work out in general and the Microsoft way has already failed spectacularly.
Rockbox, one day, might be able to Purge your Zune.
Not even Amiga is spared their crap.
The open source alternatives that exist to most of the specialized commercial software I use (e.g. for statistical analysis) are frankly crap, and don't even come close to being viable (and most of us who could improve them don't have the time, since commercial software already meets our needs).
The people who write that software will be happy to move it to an OS that's not crap if they have not already done so. I'm not sure how you can do statistical analysis on a system with such a limited file system and networking. Those limits are well known to anyone who writes software that runs under windoze.
I just don't buy the whole Microsoft is hurting Linux/Apple/BSD etc. because all of those systems are growing and getting better all the time. Linux is getting better and better, OS X is super cool, and so on.
Microsoft's inability to disrupt free software is not from a lack of trying. See the Halloween Documents for graphic proof of their honesty, attitude and intentions. The attack includes all dependencies and weaknesses perceived eight years ago, discussion groups and standards of all sorts. If anything, those attacks have multiplied and intensified. The reality is that they are so paranoid and crazy that they won't be happy until every compting device on the planet, right down to your music player, runs their software without choice. The other day's "We own corporate search and nobody's takin food off our table," crazy should convince you before October that all is the same in the M$ world. Their inability to "fucking kill _your_favorite_thing_here" does not indicate a lack of effort so much as it indicates common sense elsewhere.
Strangely enough, they have helpers. Apple is insanely supporting them for many issues and the media companies are terminally stupid. The harm done includes:
Free software has managed to float above all that and will prevail. It's as inevitable as Vista is buggy, bloated and sorry improvement on previous offerings.
Microsoft is not your friend. They never have been and never will be.
How precisely do they propose to differentiate between "retaliation against a computer maker" and "business decisions" due to any other little thing the maker may do that they decide they don't like?
What makes you think they mean it? The fact that they have admitted the practice should convince you they can do it again.
As in so many cases in the past, this is just another damage control press release and no one should expect change. In the court prooven case of DRDOS, they planned both the technical and PR attacks in advance. In that case, internal emails show they programmed Win3.1 to error out for anything but their own DOS and planned to astroturf the newsgroups to blame DRDOS. It worked and DRDOS failed. Ditto Netscape, Word Perfect, Correl and all other private "competitors". When a new net nasty takes out every corporate network, they issue statements about how "security is job 1" and hype their patches. Now that they are being tagged by the EU for trying to lock down the world of media and computers in general, they issue this bogus and confusing release. They think they can talk their way out of anything.
They need a good old fashion hanging judge to say, "For getting smart, boy, I'm going to double your daily fine until you comply." The lenient stance of the Bush administration and the EU so far are just short of ludicrous. In the mean time, I'm waiting for sales of Vista to tank and the sun to finally set on M$ and non free junk.
But all the themes we found merely changed the interface buttons and perhaps added an image to the top menu area; they don't change the window borders the way you can with WindowBlinds. And beware that most themes haven't yet been updated to work with Firefox 2.
That's such a pathetically windoze centric point of view. In the free world, you have a choice of skinable window managers which you can mix and match as you please. "Extreme Tech, where we dare to leave the Start Menu." Kudos to the for noticing this "Linux" thing an including it on a chart. Brickbacks for hanging onto a six year old interface that sucks.
When they quit acting the same old way, I'll quit telling you about it.
All would be well if he just laughed?