You'd have to be a fool to use something like this for anything other than data that you have absolutely no problem with becoming completely public.... I don't care how good they claim their "safeguards" are... They do only that which is in their best interests, not yours
You can say that about "real" M$ products as well as their vapor ware!
Are you saying that the next time I run out of paper towels I should just buy a bunch of maxi pads? Actually, it would be fun to see the looks I'd get when someone saw a pack of maxi pads on top of my fridge. *laugh*
Try in the garage for oil spills.
For a laugh, put them in the tissue box. "Here, blow your nose on this." It's expensive, but jokes are not really practical.
I thought it was already well-known that snakes originated on land.
Sure, Genisis has God taking away their legs.
All that was lacking was the proof. It's no coincidence the proof is the Sacrum now is it? Dummm, deee dummb dumb!
a lot of those local software companies also base their products on Microsoft's infrastructure... blarg, so complex!
Don't worry, the with it companies are following the Munich example.
The downward spiral is clear. Third rate product and abusive practices are reducing their sales already. Add further Vista delays and dissapointment and the looming recession from increased oil prices and their revenues will drop off the chart. That and $2.4 million a day will finally trigger a shareholder revolt which destroys the value of their stock and their ability to pay their employees. No employees, no product, no revenue, no employees. It's taken long enough to happen.
Investors obviously wouldn't like it, but according to that link, microsoft makes 10 million in profit (40 million in revenue) every single day.
So, every million bucks in fines takes 10% of their profit. The fines are potentially $2.4/day, so about the EU will take 1/4 of M$'s profits for themselves. Their stock price would drop the same amount, and then some.
before you start saying this guy is a shill, did you ever stop to think that this just MIGHT be a real article? And there just MIGHT be people who enjoy working at Microsoft? Is it really that hard to believe?
I'm not going to bother to read the article. It's real, in the sense that it has words that make sentences. Other than that, who knows. Microsoft has squandered any trust they may have once had. Even if the opinion was genuine, it's irrelevant.
Microsoft has invented people before. The Apple Switcher is a good example of that. They took stock photos and wrote up a story of how Apple sucks and Microsoft rocks. Is this blog any less fake? You don't know unless you know the person you can't tell. Because you can't tell, reading is a waste of time.
Reading is also a waste of time because the thing described is irrelevant. I've read enough articles describing the process of begging Bill Gates to know that no employee can ever make a difference. Even if they could, M$ has a long way to go before they are anything but third rate. Bill has screwed his partners, customers and his investors to create this stuff I could care less about. How he treats his slaves is something even less important to me than the software itself.
The same losers who post flamebait here, have invaded other mailing lists. They were dumb enough to admit it on our list with this declaration of war:
We shall continue to disseminate these pearls of wisdom... No matter how many fake email address, no
matter how many open proxies - we shall prevail!
The goal is to make the lists look as described, unfriendly and rude. They do this with their own rude posts and heckling.
They also aim at self censorship. By calling people rude all day long, they hope to keep people from unfavorably describing their crap. Describing Windoze as second rate is not rude, it's an overwhelming statement of fact and it's easy to present in a way that does not insult the user.
These efforts are co-ordinated and they have been from the very beginning. Microsoft knows the power of word of mouth and seeks to influence it:
Bullshit floated on those lists is usually echoed by shills in the Wintel press. Their "ambassador" program at universities is another extension of this program. Given their technical inferiority to most competition, hype, deception and insults are all M$ has to work with. They are losing traction.
It does not work on the local lists, of course, because free software is all about sharing and they still don't have enough resources. Rude people are ignored, technical questions are still answered and newbies are directed to anwsers. The LUG has two newbie efforts, it's own list and volunteers at the local computer club where classes are offered once a month. Those classes are filled and growing.
The end result for Microsoft is a loser in any case because lying does not work. Everytime they get caught doing it, they undermine their reputation further. This is why they have one of the worst reputations in world. Everyone knows they are a bunch of dishonest bullies with second and third rate software.
MS is indeed with its back to the wall. They simply CANNOT produce those docs. They most likely don't exist. Hell, the people who COULD write the docs most likely don't exist anymore there. Not even with "more time" they could give the essential information required. So they're playing the game of stalling, appealing, calling for aid to whoever is available and tries to grasp for straws.
Most modern IDEs, including Kdevelop, will automatically create documentation for you. I don't know and don't care if M$ has such tools but it's wrong to say they can't.
If all Oracle wanted was a Linux O/S distribution then what would stop them from simply going to a particular distribution's website and downloading it?
The GPL and Larry's big head. If he really understood how free softare worked, he would be trying to stop defections to postgress and mysql by acting more like IBM.
[the first reason he's not buying any Linux company is because the companies are too expensive] If an open source product gets good enough, well simply take it, he said. We can do that, IBM can do that, HP can do that anyone with a large support organisation is free to take that intellectual property and embed it in their own products...."I believe JBoss is a $16m company breaking even, MySQL is a $30m company breaking even, said Mr Ellison.
You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just cant charge a lot for it. Theres brand value theres real brand theres people, and thats it.
The second reason for not buying a Linux company, according to Mr Ellison, is the risk that other big technology companies would abandon it. I dont see how we could possibly buy Red Hat IBM would just say, Larry, congratulations, were going our own way, he said.
I'd hate to be working for someone who thought and said things like that. It's true that a free software company is mostly it's people. His low valuation of that asset is what's troubling.
His second reason is more correct and shows how wrong the first point is. No one would trust his distro. Talent, trust and freedom are more valuable commodities than he imagines.
Seriously, why even bother posting such an article?
I'd like to ignore such crap myself, but I know I'll be hearing it over and over again. The upgrade train is building up steam again. Because so many people have been burnt before, M$ is having to crank up the volume more than usual. The article is a sorry apology for M$'s glacial six year OS pace and inability to do anything innovative. Just the same, we are going to hear more of the same. M$ might be deadly, but they are never silent because hype and anti-competitive tactics are all they have. People speculate they are dead because that's how you describe a listless company with mediocre product in a competitive market.
It's nice to see the typical, loud M$ build up to their next release. I can remember the idiots who bought and echoed all the XP hype without ever having run it. "It's based on NT Technology so it's like solid," I overheard some marketdroid in a supermarket. That's the level of penetration M$ achieves with billions of dollars worth of advert budget. Similar stupid things could be heard a year before the release 2000, 98, "the end of DOS, USB support", 95, "the 32 bit computing and the end of DOS, a real multitasking GUI.." Some people still believe these things.
DRM only effects me if I want to make a backup or play a disk I bought with Linux. Now if I buy a disk in Europe and want to play it in Canada it is not doable, officially. Unofficially I have to get a DVD player with a backdoor, or a PC DVD player with the Firmware hacked or rip the DVD - all this for a DVD I bought legitimately!?
If you were in Europe, you could also have bought a DVD player. They cost, what, $40 now?
Meanwhile, the Navigator code base was becoming a mess, partly because of the focus on adding more and more proprietary NSHTML and JavaScript hacks.... They also took the kitchen sink approach of insisting that everyone who wanted a Netscape browser also wanted a Netscape mail reader, news reader, IRC client, and so on. That might have made sense on Linux, but on the Mac there were much better alternatives... so nobody wanted the bloat of Netscape.
What bloat? Navigator fit onto a single floppy for a long time and the whole communicator was about a 10MB deb. For all this supposed bloat, my wife and I were able to run NS 4.7 on a 90MHz Pentium I with 48MB of RAM. It was not as nice as browsers are today, but the experience was much better than that typical of IE on Windows 95/98 on better hardware. I have no idea of how all that translated to Mac.
I'm gobsmacked by this: corrupting the
resolver is little short of an intentional dns poisoning attack. It's as if internet explorer had special code in it to see if you were doing an
internet search for 'microsoft products' and then altered the results to only return favourable reviews that microsoft wanted you to see.
Actually, it's exactly like that. Special cases, which can be added or subtracted on Windoze update, can effectively censor the internet for you. Imagine they intermittently broke connections to sites they did not like. The user would never know, the site would be blamed and abandoned. That nasty and it's exactly what M$ likes to do to their perceived competition.
"Safeguarding" your hosts file against tampering is pointless.
No one is defending that excuse.
The greatest potential problem is from M$ themselves. If they have a mechanism that defeats DNS and host files, they can direct your traffic where ever and whenever they want to. Used carefully, this power is undetectable and easily explained by the overall sorry Microsoft browsing experience. M$ can intermittently DoS sites and make life difficult for those they don't like.
You don't see what the bid deal is about a second M$ imposed DNS system is? If they can bypass your hosts files, they can bypass anything and thereby censor anything they wanted for you.
Let's say M$ decided to censor Slashdot, for example. You type http://slashdot.org/ but get the Microsoft mirror instead, all cleaned up. It might take you a while to catch on. A more diabolical approach would be to make connections to this site or that unreliable. This would transparently censor selected sites and frustrated users would simply abandon them. They could FUD those sites with Astroturf like, "That site sure is slow." etc.
This is the ultimate price of non free software - you never know what it is really doing.
For a guy who has some great moral opposition to patents, he didn't seem to mind taking a 20k payoff to help a company exploit a patent to extort millions from RIM. Doesn't that seem a bit hypocritical to anyone else?
It looks hypocritical but it should be a lesson to all of us. First, they flattered him by remembering who he was. Then they just wanted to talk to him to learn more of that history. Then came the "standard" NDA. The alarm bells should have sounded, but he was too close to the picture to even imagine what he knew was hard to find out. You can only imagine what kind of threats they could have leveled at him after he signed. The lesson here is that NDAs are always anti-social and have the potential for greater harm than you might realize. I can only hope that this backfires bigtime on the lawyers. In the meantime, beware and seek independent legal help when things don't seem right. Hiding evidence sure sounds like a crime.
RIM will not comment on the situation because they too are restrained. As the fine article has it:
"The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M."
They had the basis and they extracted the payment and fear of an injunction is going to keep them quit, forever:
Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service.
Half of the burn you smell is provided by NDAs. Non disclosure is an enemy of the truth and that's where abuse happens.
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies, frames (in version 2.0), and JavaScript (in version 3.0).,
and further that IE 5 was the first version with some technical advantages over Netscape 4. It can easily be argued that most of the problems Netscape had on Windoze were M$ induced, as such problems did not exist on alternate platforms. You can see for yourself by loading an old computer with Debian Potato, which contained Navigator 4.7. It can also be argued that IE 4, which came with Active Desktop, was a security nightmare which Microsoft has yet to recover from. Whatever technical advantages IE might have had are completely obliterated today with such obvious problems as lack of transparency, SVG, tabs, buggy CSS and so on. The few toys available for fancy content on the development side are also eclipsed by other free projects.
Microsoft's failure to compete is a very good thing. LAMP is the way most serious content providers chose to serve their content. The Microsoft way is as stagnant and dreadful as IE. If they had managed to make a economically and technically competitive offering, life would be much harder for users of non M$ software. that One or two outrageous examples (taxes too!) are more than enough. IE7's mild enhancements, most of which are available through "shell" programs already, will not be good enough to halt IE's loss of marketshare to other browsers and ultimately to better platforms.
The paper is flawed from the beginning by a specific omission:
Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
The above debate is poorly framed because the anticompetitive tactics are wrong. The tactic was to forbid the vendor from installing Netscape and to make it very difficult to have a default other than IE. The difficulty tactic persists to this day in the form of endless beg screens and "updates" which change preferences and break competitor's code. Sooner or later, the hapless user pushes the wrong button and ends up with the wrong preference. If that does not work, Bill helps them along or their computer mysteriously stops working.
"Researchers" indeed. I can't imagine anyone thinking that a browser that still lacks tags had any technological edge. Only a bigot who never used the other browser, except long enough to be frustrated because the shortcuts were different, could possibly think that way.
Shit dude, hook me up with some of that mojo -[mindless insults]
It's not funny. See here for a start:
Hu was responsible for a political crackdown in early 1989 that lead to the deaths of several Tibetan activists. He also worked towards some liberalisation of cultural activities. Hu's harsh stance towards in Tibet led him to be reputed as a leader of conviction, and further attracted attention from the Central Government in Beijing.
Slashdot Mirror
You can say that about "real" M$ products as well as their vapor ware!
Try in the garage for oil spills.
For a laugh, put them in the tissue box. "Here, blow your nose on this." It's expensive, but jokes are not really practical.
How about finding a snake that's evolving a pelvis? If fish can do it, can't snakes?
Sure, Genisis has God taking away their legs. All that was lacking was the proof. It's no coincidence the proof is the Sacrum now is it? Dummm, deee dummb dumb!
You can also prove the Sun is smaller than a quarter by holding the quarter up in the sky and blocking your view of the Sun entirely! This trick should be good for the quarter of US citizens who think the Sun revolves around the Earth. Ironically, things are worse in Japan, but the Catholic Church is on the case! The two fifths of US citizens who have no curiosity are probably beyond redemption.
The world is weird but consistent. People are more so because they are not but they do not know it and do not care.
I don't know anything about ancient Egyptian recipes, and, believe it or not, I could care less.
You don't care about beer? Well, OK, you are probably better off for that.
I'm also not interested in football.
Me neither, but going to games is fun. Never going to a big SEC game is your loss.
Feminine hygiene products?
Once again, your loss. Maxi pads are cheap ways to clean up a big mess.
An engineer is someone who can do for a penny what any fool can do for a dollar. You have it or you don't.
Don't worry, the with it companies are following the Munich example.
The downward spiral is clear. Third rate product and abusive practices are reducing their sales already. Add further Vista delays and dissapointment and the looming recession from increased oil prices and their revenues will drop off the chart. That and $2.4 million a day will finally trigger a shareholder revolt which destroys the value of their stock and their ability to pay their employees. No employees, no product, no revenue, no employees. It's taken long enough to happen.
So, every million bucks in fines takes 10% of their profit. The fines are potentially $2.4/day, so about the EU will take 1/4 of M$'s profits for themselves. Their stock price would drop the same amount, and then some.
I'm not going to bother to read the article. It's real, in the sense that it has words that make sentences. Other than that, who knows. Microsoft has squandered any trust they may have once had. Even if the opinion was genuine, it's irrelevant.
Microsoft has invented people before. The Apple Switcher is a good example of that. They took stock photos and wrote up a story of how Apple sucks and Microsoft rocks. Is this blog any less fake? You don't know unless you know the person you can't tell. Because you can't tell, reading is a waste of time.
Reading is also a waste of time because the thing described is irrelevant. I've read enough articles describing the process of begging Bill Gates to know that no employee can ever make a difference. Even if they could, M$ has a long way to go before they are anything but third rate. Bill has screwed his partners, customers and his investors to create this stuff I could care less about. How he treats his slaves is something even less important to me than the software itself.
We shall continue to disseminate these pearls of wisdom ... No matter how many fake email address, no
matter how many open proxies - we shall prevail!
The goal is to make the lists look as described, unfriendly and rude. They do this with their own rude posts and heckling.
They also aim at self censorship. By calling people rude all day long, they hope to keep people from unfavorably describing their crap. Describing Windoze as second rate is not rude, it's an overwhelming statement of fact and it's easy to present in a way that does not insult the user.
These efforts are co-ordinated and they have been from the very beginning. Microsoft knows the power of word of mouth and seeks to influence it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050313031916/http:/ /www.kickassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.htm
Bullshit floated on those lists is usually echoed by shills in the Wintel press. Their "ambassador" program at universities is another extension of this program. Given their technical inferiority to most competition, hype, deception and insults are all M$ has to work with. They are losing traction.
It does not work on the local lists, of course, because free software is all about sharing and they still don't have enough resources. Rude people are ignored, technical questions are still answered and newbies are directed to anwsers. The LUG has two newbie efforts, it's own list and volunteers at the local computer club where classes are offered once a month. Those classes are filled and growing.
The end result for Microsoft is a loser in any case because lying does not work. Everytime they get caught doing it, they undermine their reputation further. This is why they have one of the worst reputations in world. Everyone knows they are a bunch of dishonest bullies with second and third rate software.
Most modern IDEs, including Kdevelop, will automatically create documentation for you. I don't know and don't care if M$ has such tools but it's wrong to say they can't.
The GPL and Larry's big head. If he really understood how free softare worked, he would be trying to stop defections to postgress and mysql by acting more like IBM.
[the first reason he's not buying any Linux company is because the companies are too expensive] If an open source product gets good enough, well simply take it, he said. We can do that, IBM can do that, HP can do that anyone with a large support organisation is free to take that intellectual property and embed it in their own products. ..."I believe JBoss is a $16m company breaking even, MySQL is a $30m company breaking even, said Mr Ellison.
You can build a sustainable business [in open source], you just cant charge a lot for it. Theres brand value theres real brand theres people, and thats it.
The second reason for not buying a Linux company, according to Mr Ellison, is the risk that other big technology companies would abandon it. I dont see how we could possibly buy Red Hat IBM would just say, Larry, congratulations, were going our own way, he said.
I'd hate to be working for someone who thought and said things like that. It's true that a free software company is mostly it's people. His low valuation of that asset is what's troubling.
His second reason is more correct and shows how wrong the first point is. No one would trust his distro. Talent, trust and freedom are more valuable commodities than he imagines.
He's so close to understanding, yet so very far.
I'd like to ignore such crap myself, but I know I'll be hearing it over and over again. The upgrade train is building up steam again. Because so many people have been burnt before, M$ is having to crank up the volume more than usual. The article is a sorry apology for M$'s glacial six year OS pace and inability to do anything innovative. Just the same, we are going to hear more of the same. M$ might be deadly, but they are never silent because hype and anti-competitive tactics are all they have. People speculate they are dead because that's how you describe a listless company with mediocre product in a competitive market.
It's nice to see the typical, loud M$ build up to their next release. I can remember the idiots who bought and echoed all the XP hype without ever having run it. "It's based on NT Technology so it's like solid," I overheard some marketdroid in a supermarket. That's the level of penetration M$ achieves with billions of dollars worth of advert budget. Similar stupid things could be heard a year before the release 2000, 98, "the end of DOS, USB support", 95, "the 32 bit computing and the end of DOS, a real multitasking GUI.." Some people still believe these things.
If you were in Europe, you could also have bought a DVD player. They cost, what, $40 now?
It would probably be easier to rip the CD.
What bloat? Navigator fit onto a single floppy for a long time and the whole communicator was about a 10MB deb. For all this supposed bloat, my wife and I were able to run NS 4.7 on a 90MHz Pentium I with 48MB of RAM. It was not as nice as browsers are today, but the experience was much better than that typical of IE on Windows 95/98 on better hardware. I have no idea of how all that translated to Mac.
I'm gobsmacked by this: corrupting the resolver is little short of an intentional dns poisoning attack. It's as if internet explorer had special code in it to see if you were doing an internet search for 'microsoft products' and then altered the results to only return favourable reviews that microsoft wanted you to see.
Actually, it's exactly like that. Special cases, which can be added or subtracted on Windoze update, can effectively censor the internet for you. Imagine they intermittently broke connections to sites they did not like. The user would never know, the site would be blamed and abandoned. That nasty and it's exactly what M$ likes to do to their perceived competition.
No one is defending that excuse.
The greatest potential problem is from M$ themselves. If they have a mechanism that defeats DNS and host files, they can direct your traffic where ever and whenever they want to. Used carefully, this power is undetectable and easily explained by the overall sorry Microsoft browsing experience. M$ can intermittently DoS sites and make life difficult for those they don't like.
You don't see what the bid deal is about a second M$ imposed DNS system is? If they can bypass your hosts files, they can bypass anything and thereby censor anything they wanted for you.
Let's say M$ decided to censor Slashdot, for example. You type http://slashdot.org/ but get the Microsoft mirror instead, all cleaned up. It might take you a while to catch on. A more diabolical approach would be to make connections to this site or that unreliable. This would transparently censor selected sites and frustrated users would simply abandon them. They could FUD those sites with Astroturf like, "That site sure is slow." etc.
This is the ultimate price of non free software - you never know what it is really doing.
This is only possible when you have no place else to go. In the US, telco mergers are bringing back Ma Bell and pay per minute/distance nonsense.
It looks hypocritical but it should be a lesson to all of us. First, they flattered him by remembering who he was. Then they just wanted to talk to him to learn more of that history. Then came the "standard" NDA. The alarm bells should have sounded, but he was too close to the picture to even imagine what he knew was hard to find out. You can only imagine what kind of threats they could have leveled at him after he signed. The lesson here is that NDAs are always anti-social and have the potential for greater harm than you might realize. I can only hope that this backfires bigtime on the lawyers. In the meantime, beware and seek independent legal help when things don't seem right. Hiding evidence sure sounds like a crime.
RIM will not comment on the situation because they too are restrained. As the fine article has it:
"The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused," said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990's. "If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M."
They had the basis and they extracted the payment and fear of an injunction is going to keep them quit, forever:
Although the NTP patents have been tentatively invalidated by the United States Patent Office, a jury upheld NTP's infringement suit in 2002, and R.I.M. chose to settle the legal fight for fear of a federal court injunction against its popular service.
Half of the burn you smell is provided by NDAs. Non disclosure is an enemy of the truth and that's where abuse happens.
It is generally believed that:
Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. Important new features included cookies, frames (in version 2.0), and JavaScript (in version 3.0).,
and further that IE 5 was the first version with some technical advantages over Netscape 4. It can easily be argued that most of the problems Netscape had on Windoze were M$ induced, as such problems did not exist on alternate platforms. You can see for yourself by loading an old computer with Debian Potato, which contained Navigator 4.7. It can also be argued that IE 4, which came with Active Desktop, was a security nightmare which Microsoft has yet to recover from. Whatever technical advantages IE might have had are completely obliterated today with such obvious problems as lack of transparency, SVG, tabs, buggy CSS and so on. The few toys available for fancy content on the development side are also eclipsed by other free projects.
Microsoft's failure to compete is a very good thing. LAMP is the way most serious content providers chose to serve their content. The Microsoft way is as stagnant and dreadful as IE. If they had managed to make a economically and technically competitive offering, life would be much harder for users of non M$ software. that One or two outrageous examples (taxes too!) are more than enough. IE7's mild enhancements, most of which are available through "shell" programs already, will not be good enough to halt IE's loss of marketshare to other browsers and ultimately to better platforms.
Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
The above debate is poorly framed because the anticompetitive tactics are wrong. The tactic was to forbid the vendor from installing Netscape and to make it very difficult to have a default other than IE. The difficulty tactic persists to this day in the form of endless beg screens and "updates" which change preferences and break competitor's code. Sooner or later, the hapless user pushes the wrong button and ends up with the wrong preference. If that does not work, Bill helps them along or their computer mysteriously stops working.
"Researchers" indeed. I can't imagine anyone thinking that a browser that still lacks tags had any technological edge. Only a bigot who never used the other browser, except long enough to be frustrated because the shortcuts were different, could possibly think that way.
So now you speak for the Dalai Lama?
No, he's complained on his own.
Shit dude, hook me up with some of that mojo -[mindless insults]
It's not funny. See here for a start: Hu was responsible for a political crackdown in early 1989 that lead to the deaths of several Tibetan activists. He also worked towards some liberalisation of cultural activities. Hu's harsh stance towards in Tibet led him to be reputed as a leader of conviction, and further attracted attention from the Central Government in Beijing.