How about "Core"? Surely, these are graphic layout trademarks and they don't intend to sue anyone who would say their box has a CPU Core Inside it. Say it ain't so, that the world is just dumb enough to let companies threaten people for the use of "Word", "Lindows", "Killustrator" and others obvious names regardless of the way they are drawn.
I think the problem is they are trying to store the records on 8-tracks.
They are. Quoting the article is such fun:
for now, at least, the Archives uses electronic storing methods similar to those adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, transferring data onto magnetic tapes because that is the only format the archivists know will work indefinitely.
I hope they are using GNU tar to hold that mess togher.
The bigger problem is translating proprietary formats for the ages while maintaining the original format as required by law and making them available to people without having to mail order a big tape.
The Archives recently awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a $308 million, six-year contract to work on creating a system for saving and accessing electronic data over time. Lockheed officials have recommended using a handful of widely accepted formats such as the popular Internet software language HTML to save information and using digital adaptors to translate that into a new language when it becomes obsolete.
Better them than me. Hopefully it won't just like to Word Docs and their "open" XML containers, Euck.
let's be generous and say that the average email is 8192 bytes in size (8KB)
Let's be honest and admit they use M$ junk. You know they are slinging around 70MB power point files, word docs, ad nauseum. Getting that all put into something legible is hard to do. Try opening your Excel 4 files, for example. Did you remember to install the right fonts and equation editor? If all non text were pumped to pdf or html, things would be a little easier but still larger. The challenge is automating the conversion given an administration that's cluelessly in love with all things M$.
Now that we've thought for two seconds, let's visit the article:
the Archives is struggling to devise a system for storing the enormous amount of digital information in a format that will allow it to be accessed 20, 75, even 200 years from now by historians, students and average Americans looking for a first-hand accounts of the federal government's activities.
Sounds a lot like that Mass. mess. Reading on...
For example, when the electronic records of the Sept. 11 presidential commission arrived at the Archives a year ago, "it was the equivalent of all the fully processed electronic records we had received in 30 years," or about one terabyte of data, says Robert Chadduck, computer engineer overseeing the Archives' search for a solution.
Oh my, better get a bigger drive than 800GB.
Part of the impetus for wanting to come up with a comprehensive strategy for digesting electronic records is the desire to make them accessible via the Internet, rather than requiring people visit one of the Archives facilities, request a tape and then wait for a copy be mailed to them.
Suckage.
federal law requires that government documents be kept in their original formats to verify authenticity -- particularly documents that may be used in court.
Oh shit, they are going to become a Digital Williamsburg. I suggest they start learning Bochs, because it's unlikely they will be able to keep some dinky P1 running (with it's "original" CD) to read Bill Clinton's love letters to Paula Jones, much less connect it to a network. Preserving the original format is a good idea, but documents must also be converted to some reasonable publication format before the ability and interest in such conversions goes away.
your work needs to implement a software control policy.
Aw, you're just jealous that your work does not hand out Ubuntu CDs. You can't be too angry about his company not having a use for a 64bit version of an OS that does not work stuffed deep in a drawer, can you?
He makes a jab at the iPod by talking about how larger capacity players add video capability, while ignoring fidelity by not offering lossless.
The article is full of hype driven and M$ friendly contradictions. He claims to use FLAC and says that nothing else will do for him. Me wonders where he gets better than CD quality Audio. Two pages later he recommends formats for the hoy-palloy:
To be fair, Microsoft's WMA standard has a lot going for it. The audio quality of WMA files is generally pretty good, and the DRM can be pretty flexible.
Sure. Windoze is good enough for you, so suck it and that DRM up. Like that's advice I want.
You will both have to excuse me while I avoid all of that BS by running Debian from ARM to 64bit and beyond. OGG too can be lossless, but I can't tell the difference and don't bother. Apple is beautiful and works, but my freedom is more important to me.
Yeah, the usual. They won't say. This one is high profile, so they will move quickly. That won't save you from the other exploits that have been around for years. This one reaches back to Windoze 98, eight years of exploits!
Don't mislead yourselves into thinking Dell is going to shift away from the OS that has over 90% market share.
They will do it on a dime and everyone will follow. When Michael Dell thinks he can make more money without M$, he will without hesitation. He will pull more than Dell's 17% of the world market with him too. Microsoft performance is so poor, the tipping point is here. It's been coming for years but it will happen so fast it Steve Ballmer's chair won't have time to hit the ground.
You can buy a pretty ripping machine from Dell or Gateway or emachines (I mean Gateway) at a very, very good price. These prices are possible because of the huge volume these makers sell, and that volume is possible because everyone knows, no matter how much it may or may not suck, when they get the machine home it will be "familiar" to them and they can go to the gazillion warez and spyware repositories and install whatever crap floats their boat.
Volume makes low hardware prices, regardless of how much or little the software costs. Do you really think Dell's main customers, big dumb companies, put warez and other "crap" on their desktops? No, they usually pay the M$ tax twice because they can not use the "bundled" software provided "for free" to home and small office users. The minute Michael Dell thinks he can make more money selling computers with Mepis instead of M$ licensing headaches, he will and the people supplying him parts will be happy to keep supplying him parts at exactly the same price.
Until there are third party OEMs like Norton and Adobe offering well recognized linux tools that will help sell even more machines, Dell would make LESS on each system by NOT including windows. Twice the support costs (now they have to field both linux and windows calls) but LESS PROFIT. They would have to charge MORE FOR LESS, which is exactly what you see now.
Well recognized like DEC, Wang, OS/2? Brand name means nothing. Companies that rely on closed source sink like stones and are quickly forgoten about. Free software will outlive such nonsense. Performance and demand are everything. The performance gap between free and non free software is so tremendous the demand will only grow. We are close to the tipping point for M$. When Vista flops, and it will, it's all over for them and they can join the non free companies they so happily sank.
I'm going to be happy when the true cost of software is reflected in Dells pricing. A bare box will be cheaper than one with M$ crap on it or your favorite distro. Free software will be cheaper, because you don't have to pay licensing fees for the software, the drivers or any other part of it as you copy it.
I'll also dare to say that free software support costs will be much lower for them, due to free software's reliability. The cost of the clueless will never go away, but modern distributions are much easier to use than Windoze ever was. There will never be the cost of Melissa and all that badness.
It seems that Google Desktop creates an index of the metadata of all images too, and it issues an API call to the vulnerable Windows component SHIMGVW.DLL to extract this info. This is enough to invoke the exploit and infect the machine. This all happens in realtime as Google Desktop contains a file system filter and will index new files in realtime.
I imagine the M$ equivalent will call the same sucky M$ code and explode the same way. No telling though, you might have to drum your fingers waiting for it to explode because they did not bother to make an index on the fly. No telling, but you can't win for losing.
We can be sure that Google will have a fix before M$ does. We can also be sure no other program on any other platform viewing the same information will have the same kind of problem.
Remember, the shills will tell us, it's all the user's fault.
If a company's checking incoming email attachments for viruses and trojans, then it only makes sense to do as much for IM.
Yes, if you are doing dumb things, it's only right to be consistently stupid. You would not want to ban cellphones with cameras while allowing ordinary cameras would you? Pass it by the Homeland Security Office if you have to think about it long. If IM is what you consider your new IP threat, you proably need to reconsider what's important to your company and why.
Such shenanigans only make sense when you believe in intellectual property and treat the creators of such property like criminals. If your entire business relies of a few secrets that could sneak out the door, you have a sorry business. If you do have secrets you need to keep but employees you can't trust to keep them, there is something wrong with the way you hire and treat your employees. The idea of network "security" through port blocking is so laughable the company in question must be using a M$ desktop. If your company has such sorry software, you probably flunk the other tests of dumb company and your life is miserable.
I imagine a device that can carry 70 lbs can pull considerably more on separate wheels. If you can't imagine an airlift, imagine a handtruck with a 55 gal fuel drum to get you where you need to be before you pull the plug. Fuel is just another logistics problem.
It's kind of like the language they use about Trusted Computing. It's designed to confuse in a way that's advantageous to them. Quoted from the FSF:
When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets"--but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this somewhat of an absurdity in the context of palladium.
The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack", "malicious code", "spoofing", as well as "trusted". None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling palladium. And so on.
Every feature added to Windows has Microsoft control as it's ultimate aim. Every word Microsoft uses has the same goal. The purpose of that control is to keep your money flowing to them to fund yet more restrive controls.
If you think of Windoze IE as security hole now, just wait till they finish bolting on RSS and mixing it with Active X, Browser Help Objects and all that. Let's imagine the perfect M$ implementation:
I can imagine them setting up a clearing house site, much like Apple's, which hides the actual address.
IE will automatically add all your favorite porn sites to your feeds and send copies to M$, the CIA and your boss, how helpful. The porn site will then send your new IE RSS client, which is "integrated" into the OS, an 0wnership invitation it can't refuse. The same kinds of people will polute M$'s feed lists.
The ability to "join" your friends to RSS by email or IM.
I could go on, but you get the idea. All the usual M$ flaws and spyware friendly technology will be added to anything M$ embraces and extends. That's how they give everything a bad name which ultimately extinguishes everything.
He's not really doing himself a favour in resigning.
Like M$ does not have the resources to buy more bullshit?
I think he needs to spend some time on revenge. Microsoft should be punished for this and hopefully will be. There's a clear path between the "story" and it's source and very clear malicious intent. It's called slander and whoever did it should pay. When it hit a paper, it became libel and he will be tarred with it forever.
He should just take some leave, then come back recharged and ready to weather the bulls!th from the media.
No, he's getting away because the tarring stuck. He thinks that people's false perception of his wrongdoing is creating an impediment to his policy and effectiveness in general. We have to trust the man on the spot for that call.
For all we know, he's got a really good follow up who won't be afraid of kicking M$ off every state owned desktop. Now that would be some good IT policy.
Overall, the ISP restricting access to its network to people who aren't infected and are secure, is only a good thing -- on every possible front.
That depends entirely on how you can tell. If the method is your silly Cisco router which checks for this or that piece of Windoze shit, it sucks. If the method is detecting obvious spam and worm broadcasting signatures, great. Detecting spammbots is getting tricker all the time because the spammers are smart enough to not want damage the user's performance enough for the user to want to fix the computer. ISPs have been turning off blatantly broken computers for a while and it is a very good thing.
Windows updates generally are denied to people using pirate copies, it will reduce software piracy rates as well.
How do you equate the two without advocating some really stupid and lazy method of punishing people for not having whatever Bill Gates wants you to have right now? A check which provides that kind of solution will outlaw all the software that's actually secure.
the K-menu in the box I'm using are listed by function first. For example: Web Browser (Firefox) and Advanced Text Editor (Kate). That eliminates pretty much all the confusion there, doesn't it?
Yes but there's much more that can and is done. Most of it is automated, so you never have to fool with it but all of it is easily changed. That's what happens when you write software for customers and users instead of products for consumers. You don't know how good you have it till you try to go back and do something with a newer Windoze box.
Two important things that KDE gets right is sub categorization and mime type. The default debian Kmenu categorizes programs by function, editors, office, graphics, multimedia. Konqueror has excellent mime type recognition so a right mouse click pulls up "open with" two or three appropriate applications and an "actions" menu that's also full of choices appropriate for any known file type. Debian automatically updates those types when you install new programs and the "open with" item lets you override that choice and use any program you have installed. Of course good documentation is also very important, so the user can know what they are looking at. Debian has man pages, info pages and both gnome and kde help centers for starters, and even more in/usr/share/docs.
Microsoft compares poorly in all of the above due to the nature of non free software. In the non free software world, users are considered resources to be exploited rather than friends to be helped. Applications greedily advertise their publisher in their crappy start menu and seize default mime types without asking. It's downright creepy the way things work there. When I want to manipulate an image on a windoze box, I might double click on it with their file browser. It will simply view the image. If I've been a good boy, I might have modified my "open with" menu item. If not, I have to crawl through "accessories", and various weird names like Adobe, Correl or Jass before I even come close. The first two or three programs I try will be frustrating. A good one won't be in the Office sub menu and image manipulators don't get much crappier than Paint. In the free software world, I get a menu item called "Graphics" that has two or three image manipulators, three or four image viewers as well as several specialty applications for formats like SVG.
All window managers have reasonable menu devisions, but that's just the beginning. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts and each part is just another piece of free softwar goodness.
one who has no idea what he's asking for, and why nobody else would ask for it.
Actually, he knows what he wants and has asked for exactly what the EU anti-trust commission wants. The want M$ to publish useful documentation for interacting with their garbage. If they won't, fine they will pay millions of dollars a day. All this commentator wants is for his Mac to be able to work. For some reason, he thinks M$ will help him and others make that happen.
M$ is going to sink in their greedy shit. More people are understanding that a "standard" that changes all the time and does not interoperate, even with older versions of itself, is no standard worth having. There are alternatives and people are using them.
don't download tv shows, run a web server from their closet, and download large ISOs of operating systems.... Huh, maybe you shouldn't ask this question on Slashdot.
150 years ago, most people did not have running water. If you wanted to know all the benefits of running water would you ask people without or with it?
If all you want is email and browsing you can get by with a modem. All you have to do is turn off Flash and other crappy plugins and get a half decent browser that let's you block images from ad servers. I've done it and shared the line with my wife and the "normal" use worked just fine. Getting pdfs and other large files sucked life, but you could do that at night with a good download program.
GNU/Linux, with user driven development, is cutting edge and giving people exactly what they want from their computers. People want to share their pictures and dreams with family, friends and others interested. Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to do that, but it's not much harder to do your own when a Mepis CD will auto install Apache with most of the extras. It's actually much easier to make an html photo album on your spare computer than it is to carefully select and upload them to some place that will load them with adverts and go away in a few years. Getting your software off the network via ISOs or automated update tools are exactly what users want as well. Automated downloads from Debian, unlike some updating "services", are unobtrusive and can be trusted to keep your computer working well. Amazingly enough, people also want their Dick Tracy video phone.
Contrary to all of the above, the FCC is happy granting monopolies to greedy morons. By some twisted logic, they think that a cable monopoly competing with a telco monopoly will provide "enough" competition for people to get what they want and the providers to profit "enough" to provide new services. The greedy morons have been proving them wrong for five years or so. I can compare At Home and my choice of DSL to today and it's not favorable at all. Services have dried up with choice and the extra money is being put into an "intigent" network that will make competition in the future even more difficult.
Five years ago, things were much better. For less money that I currently pay for cable, I had better bandwith and fewer restrictions. Today, I have a cable modem with port blocks and a 60KB/s upload crimp. At Home provided the same without restrictions at all and the service was reliable. It was also much easier to get a DSL line, that did not suck, from someone other than the local telco. Today, we have the local telco and the cable company working to penalize each other's packets and the technology, of course, will slow everything up.
Greed, in this case, has been very bad. It's eliminated the companies that provided services people want and rewarded the assholes.
Coming up with examples like RedHat, Apple, and Sun evoke a huge DUH. Name a major corporation that isn't in the OS business. While you will find that the majority of large businesses run major systems (such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc.) on Sun, HP or IBM hardware and OS's, the desktops are Windows.
You mean companies like Lowes, General Motors and others sued by SCO at M$'s request? Lowes, as you can see for yourself by visiting, has eliminated M$ from their desktop. You can even use one of their public terminals to apply for a job. I promise you it won't crash and waste your time. In any case, there are many big companies that have moved away from M$ crap and M$ has tried to punish them with an insane lawsuit.
The SCO case proves both that it's possible to live without M$ crap and that M$ is an anti-competitive monopoly business. Their hold is breaking, but they still have the ability to punish computer hardware makers, vendors and even users.
Oh, by the way Rob, dumping (aka competing on price) is most certainly a monopoly practice. Ask Netscape and Correl. You can also ask Correl what it's like to be on M$'s bad side as a software company.
We should also separate what we are talking about. It's not wrong to be a monopoly if you got there and stay there without use of anti-competitive laws or practices. People don't hate M$ because they are big, they hate them because M$ is evil. You can be small and evil too.
Microsoft's inability to dominate all aspects of publishing and telco does not make them any less anti-competitive any more than the Jack the Ripper's inability to kill people in all major cities made him less of a murderer. M$, through the BSA, still threatens public school systems with lawsuits and that's about as evil as you can get, short of murder.
the music companies want this investigation, because they in fact want to sell music for more money
If they get together, say so, agree on a price structure and then find ways to exclude competitors, they have committed a crime. This is what price fixing and anti-competitive practices are all about. Everyone pays so a select few can profit. Artists and others who would make a living in the industry pay more than anyone else.
It's obvious that such a crime has been and continues to be committed. The cost of an electronic copy of costs more than the same with delivered by physical media. In a free market music can be had for a song. Those that would compete are locked out of traditional broadcast and physical distribution. They are also harassed at every point possible by lawsuits and bogus laws which make operations difficult and expensive. The world's three big music publishers seek to impose all the restrictions of physical media and 100 year old broadcast technology law onto the internet because they won't exist without them. The ultimate crime are laws seeking to "close the analog hole". It's nice to see some of the smaller crimes looked into, but a review of "price fixing" misses the big picture.
Would you do something like this? Would you make such a daring move [to the desert] for you children's sake?
Give me a break. Why not just fill the closet with sand and lock the kid up? Call it closet schooling.
You don't have to live in the desert to live wisely. You can turn off your gadgets if they don't do anything useful for you.
Most people like their cell phone because they can pick it up and call anyone in their family anytime they want at little or no cost.
Most people like their internet because they can use it to share information better than any previous communication method short of moving into the same house with all of your letters, photos, music, projects and everything for a good chat. I don't want to begin to remember how crappy to get all my news from TV and printed news papers.
Leaving all of that because one or two people you know are silly about gadgets is counter productive and self defeating.
The way the IE team has been killing themselves lately developing IE7, I'd be pretty surprised if MS turned around and bought Opera.
Hard work and self sacrifice begets more of the same.
Get the work done but don't kill yourself. If your boss wants to kill you, find another job. It might take a year or two, but it's better to do that than to work to death.
I see nothing in that stupid patent that isn't nebulous and pathetic.
Most software patents are like that. It's what you get when you try to call an abstraction and invention. I'd be much happier if Bill Gates spent his billions eliminating software patents, rather than supporting them and abusing them when it suits him.
Pray, tell, what exactly did Microsoft steal? Did they steal your problem space? Because patents don't cover problems. They cover solutions.
What an amazingly empty statement. I imagine the market leader in device agnostic virtual desktop synchronization has a few solutions. That's why people buy their product and why M$ wants into the space. Lord knows, you won't get anything like that from M$. Those clowns have problems syncing a pocket PC at the end of a USB cable.
It's funny how you quote the first AC poster in the blog thread. Did you spam them too or did you simply cut and paste the comment? Next time say or steal something that makes sense.
Microsoft doesn't want a very nice UI for the web unless they control it. If the standards supported a nice neat replacement for your typical win32 gui then Microsoft is pretty much out of business as they currently stand
As any old yahoo can download Knoppix or Mepis and boot into and install a standards compliant browser on a platform that does not suck, Microsoft is already out of business. It's been obvious for years, they just don't know it yet.
Microsoft has been good enough at everything but delivering software. Game over.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Wintel Rags. Oh wait, the ZDNet story was a little different. They pointed to AOL, Yahoo, MSN and IMLogic but failed to provide anything to help with the problem created by Microsoft's pathetic security model.
It's a story worth reading for all of the similar worms that go unreported. The article mentions worms that display Santa and Star Wars clips as if they came from your friends on IM networks and infect your Microsoft (TM) encumbered computer. How many other WMV, you know that silly video format with an exe bite, worms are there that have not been reported as well?
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How about "Core"? Surely, these are graphic layout trademarks and they don't intend to sue anyone who would say their box has a CPU Core Inside it. Say it ain't so, that the world is just dumb enough to let companies threaten people for the use of "Word", "Lindows", "Killustrator" and others obvious names regardless of the way they are drawn.
They are. Quoting the article is such fun:
for now, at least, the Archives uses electronic storing methods similar to those adopted in the 1960s and 1970s, transferring data onto magnetic tapes because that is the only format the archivists know will work indefinitely.
I hope they are using GNU tar to hold that mess togher.
The bigger problem is translating proprietary formats for the ages while maintaining the original format as required by law and making them available to people without having to mail order a big tape.
The Archives recently awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a $308 million, six-year contract to work on creating a system for saving and accessing electronic data over time. Lockheed officials have recommended using a handful of widely accepted formats such as the popular Internet software language HTML to save information and using digital adaptors to translate that into a new language when it becomes obsolete.
Better them than me. Hopefully it won't just like to Word Docs and their "open" XML containers, Euck.
Let's be honest and admit they use M$ junk. You know they are slinging around 70MB power point files, word docs, ad nauseum. Getting that all put into something legible is hard to do. Try opening your Excel 4 files, for example. Did you remember to install the right fonts and equation editor? If all non text were pumped to pdf or html, things would be a little easier but still larger. The challenge is automating the conversion given an administration that's cluelessly in love with all things M$.
Now that we've thought for two seconds, let's visit the article:
the Archives is struggling to devise a system for storing the enormous amount of digital information in a format that will allow it to be accessed 20, 75, even 200 years from now by historians, students and average Americans looking for a first-hand accounts of the federal government's activities.
Sounds a lot like that Mass. mess. Reading on ...
For example, when the electronic records of the Sept. 11 presidential commission arrived at the Archives a year ago, "it was the equivalent of all the fully processed electronic records we had received in 30 years," or about one terabyte of data, says Robert Chadduck, computer engineer overseeing the Archives' search for a solution.
Oh my, better get a bigger drive than 800GB.
Part of the impetus for wanting to come up with a comprehensive strategy for digesting electronic records is the desire to make them accessible via the Internet, rather than requiring people visit one of the Archives facilities, request a tape and then wait for a copy be mailed to them.
Suckage.
federal law requires that government documents be kept in their original formats to verify authenticity -- particularly documents that may be used in court.
Oh shit, they are going to become a Digital Williamsburg. I suggest they start learning Bochs, because it's unlikely they will be able to keep some dinky P1 running (with it's "original" CD) to read Bill Clinton's love letters to Paula Jones, much less connect it to a network. Preserving the original format is a good idea, but documents must also be converted to some reasonable publication format before the ability and interest in such conversions goes away.
Aw, you're just jealous that your work does not hand out Ubuntu CDs. You can't be too angry about his company not having a use for a 64bit version of an OS that does not work stuffed deep in a drawer, can you?
The article is full of hype driven and M$ friendly contradictions. He claims to use FLAC and says that nothing else will do for him. Me wonders where he gets better than CD quality Audio. Two pages later he recommends formats for the hoy-palloy:
To be fair, Microsoft's WMA standard has a lot going for it. The audio quality of WMA files is generally pretty good, and the DRM can be pretty flexible.
Sure. Windoze is good enough for you, so suck it and that DRM up. Like that's advice I want.
You will both have to excuse me while I avoid all of that BS by running Debian from ARM to 64bit and beyond. OGG too can be lossless, but I can't tell the difference and don't bother. Apple is beautiful and works, but my freedom is more important to me.
Yeah, the usual. They won't say. This one is high profile, so they will move quickly. That won't save you from the other exploits that have been around for years. This one reaches back to Windoze 98, eight years of exploits!
They will do it on a dime and everyone will follow. When Michael Dell thinks he can make more money without M$, he will without hesitation. He will pull more than Dell's 17% of the world market with him too. Microsoft performance is so poor, the tipping point is here. It's been coming for years but it will happen so fast it Steve Ballmer's chair won't have time to hit the ground.
Volume makes low hardware prices, regardless of how much or little the software costs. Do you really think Dell's main customers, big dumb companies, put warez and other "crap" on their desktops? No, they usually pay the M$ tax twice because they can not use the "bundled" software provided "for free" to home and small office users. The minute Michael Dell thinks he can make more money selling computers with Mepis instead of M$ licensing headaches, he will and the people supplying him parts will be happy to keep supplying him parts at exactly the same price.
Until there are third party OEMs like Norton and Adobe offering well recognized linux tools that will help sell even more machines, Dell would make LESS on each system by NOT including windows. Twice the support costs (now they have to field both linux and windows calls) but LESS PROFIT. They would have to charge MORE FOR LESS, which is exactly what you see now.
Well recognized like DEC, Wang, OS/2? Brand name means nothing. Companies that rely on closed source sink like stones and are quickly forgoten about. Free software will outlive such nonsense. Performance and demand are everything. The performance gap between free and non free software is so tremendous the demand will only grow. We are close to the tipping point for M$. When Vista flops, and it will, it's all over for them and they can join the non free companies they so happily sank.
I'm going to be happy when the true cost of software is reflected in Dells pricing. A bare box will be cheaper than one with M$ crap on it or your favorite distro. Free software will be cheaper, because you don't have to pay licensing fees for the software, the drivers or any other part of it as you copy it.
I'll also dare to say that free software support costs will be much lower for them, due to free software's reliability. The cost of the clueless will never go away, but modern distributions are much easier to use than Windoze ever was. There will never be the cost of Melissa and all that badness.
I imagine the M$ equivalent will call the same sucky M$ code and explode the same way. No telling though, you might have to drum your fingers waiting for it to explode because they did not bother to make an index on the fly. No telling, but you can't win for losing.
We can be sure that Google will have a fix before M$ does. We can also be sure no other program on any other platform viewing the same information will have the same kind of problem.
Remember, the shills will tell us, it's all the user's fault.
Yes, if you are doing dumb things, it's only right to be consistently stupid. You would not want to ban cellphones with cameras while allowing ordinary cameras would you? Pass it by the Homeland Security Office if you have to think about it long. If IM is what you consider your new IP threat, you proably need to reconsider what's important to your company and why.
Such shenanigans only make sense when you believe in intellectual property and treat the creators of such property like criminals. If your entire business relies of a few secrets that could sneak out the door, you have a sorry business. If you do have secrets you need to keep but employees you can't trust to keep them, there is something wrong with the way you hire and treat your employees. The idea of network "security" through port blocking is so laughable the company in question must be using a M$ desktop. If your company has such sorry software, you probably flunk the other tests of dumb company and your life is miserable.
Stupidity is self punishing.
It's an attempt to confuse users about Live CDs. "Live" sounds good and other people have made enough buzz that Joe Sixpacks is starting to hear. At this point M$ swoops down with six alternate jargon terms to confuse everyone and slow down trial and adoption of alternate desktops that blow M$'s expensive shit out of the water for ease of use and functionality.
It's kind of like the language they use about Trusted Computing. It's designed to confuse in a way that's advantageous to them. Quoted from the FSF:
When Microsoft speaks of "security" in connection with palladium, they do not mean what we normally mean by that word: protecting your machine from things you do not want. They mean protecting your copies of data on your machine from access by you in ways others do not want. A slide in the presentation listed several types of secrets palladium could be used to keep, including "third party secrets" and "user secrets"--but it put "user secrets" in quotation marks, recognizing that this somewhat of an absurdity in the context of palladium.
The presentation made frequent use of other terms that we frequently associate with the context of security, such as "attack", "malicious code", "spoofing", as well as "trusted". None of them means what it normally means. "Attack" doesn't mean someone trying to hurt you, it means you trying to copy music. "Malicious code" means code installed by you to do what someone else doesn't want your machine to do. "Spoofing" doesn't mean someone fooling you, it means you fooling palladium. And so on.
Every feature added to Windows has Microsoft control as it's ultimate aim. Every word Microsoft uses has the same goal. The purpose of that control is to keep your money flowing to them to fund yet more restrive controls.
I could go on, but you get the idea. All the usual M$ flaws and spyware friendly technology will be added to anything M$ embraces and extends. That's how they give everything a bad name which ultimately extinguishes everything.
Like M$ does not have the resources to buy more bullshit?
I think he needs to spend some time on revenge. Microsoft should be punished for this and hopefully will be. There's a clear path between the "story" and it's source and very clear malicious intent. It's called slander and whoever did it should pay. When it hit a paper, it became libel and he will be tarred with it forever.
He should just take some leave, then come back recharged and ready to weather the bulls!th from the media.
No, he's getting away because the tarring stuck. He thinks that people's false perception of his wrongdoing is creating an impediment to his policy and effectiveness in general. We have to trust the man on the spot for that call.
For all we know, he's got a really good follow up who won't be afraid of kicking M$ off every state owned desktop. Now that would be some good IT policy.
That depends entirely on how you can tell. If the method is your silly Cisco router which checks for this or that piece of Windoze shit, it sucks. If the method is detecting obvious spam and worm broadcasting signatures, great. Detecting spammbots is getting tricker all the time because the spammers are smart enough to not want damage the user's performance enough for the user to want to fix the computer. ISPs have been turning off blatantly broken computers for a while and it is a very good thing.
Windows updates generally are denied to people using pirate copies, it will reduce software piracy rates as well.
How do you equate the two without advocating some really stupid and lazy method of punishing people for not having whatever Bill Gates wants you to have right now? A check which provides that kind of solution will outlaw all the software that's actually secure.
Yes but there's much more that can and is done. Most of it is automated, so you never have to fool with it but all of it is easily changed. That's what happens when you write software for customers and users instead of products for consumers. You don't know how good you have it till you try to go back and do something with a newer Windoze box.
Two important things that KDE gets right is sub categorization and mime type. The default debian Kmenu categorizes programs by function, editors, office, graphics, multimedia. Konqueror has excellent mime type recognition so a right mouse click pulls up "open with" two or three appropriate applications and an "actions" menu that's also full of choices appropriate for any known file type. Debian automatically updates those types when you install new programs and the "open with" item lets you override that choice and use any program you have installed. Of course good documentation is also very important, so the user can know what they are looking at. Debian has man pages, info pages and both gnome and kde help centers for starters, and even more in /usr/share/docs.
Microsoft compares poorly in all of the above due to the nature of non free software. In the non free software world, users are considered resources to be exploited rather than friends to be helped. Applications greedily advertise their publisher in their crappy start menu and seize default mime types without asking. It's downright creepy the way things work there. When I want to manipulate an image on a windoze box, I might double click on it with their file browser. It will simply view the image. If I've been a good boy, I might have modified my "open with" menu item. If not, I have to crawl through "accessories", and various weird names like Adobe, Correl or Jass before I even come close. The first two or three programs I try will be frustrating. A good one won't be in the Office sub menu and image manipulators don't get much crappier than Paint. In the free software world, I get a menu item called "Graphics" that has two or three image manipulators, three or four image viewers as well as several specialty applications for formats like SVG.
All window managers have reasonable menu devisions, but that's just the beginning. The whole is much greater than the sum of the parts and each part is just another piece of free softwar goodness.
Actually, he knows what he wants and has asked for exactly what the EU anti-trust commission wants. The want M$ to publish useful documentation for interacting with their garbage. If they won't, fine they will pay millions of dollars a day. All this commentator wants is for his Mac to be able to work. For some reason, he thinks M$ will help him and others make that happen.
M$ is going to sink in their greedy shit. More people are understanding that a "standard" that changes all the time and does not interoperate, even with older versions of itself, is no standard worth having. There are alternatives and people are using them.
150 years ago, most people did not have running water. If you wanted to know all the benefits of running water would you ask people without or with it?
If all you want is email and browsing you can get by with a modem. All you have to do is turn off Flash and other crappy plugins and get a half decent browser that let's you block images from ad servers. I've done it and shared the line with my wife and the "normal" use worked just fine. Getting pdfs and other large files sucked life, but you could do that at night with a good download program.
GNU/Linux, with user driven development, is cutting edge and giving people exactly what they want from their computers. People want to share their pictures and dreams with family, friends and others interested. Blogging is now one of the easiest ways to do that, but it's not much harder to do your own when a Mepis CD will auto install Apache with most of the extras. It's actually much easier to make an html photo album on your spare computer than it is to carefully select and upload them to some place that will load them with adverts and go away in a few years. Getting your software off the network via ISOs or automated update tools are exactly what users want as well. Automated downloads from Debian, unlike some updating "services", are unobtrusive and can be trusted to keep your computer working well. Amazingly enough, people also want their Dick Tracy video phone.
Contrary to all of the above, the FCC is happy granting monopolies to greedy morons. By some twisted logic, they think that a cable monopoly competing with a telco monopoly will provide "enough" competition for people to get what they want and the providers to profit "enough" to provide new services. The greedy morons have been proving them wrong for five years or so. I can compare At Home and my choice of DSL to today and it's not favorable at all. Services have dried up with choice and the extra money is being put into an "intigent" network that will make competition in the future even more difficult.
Five years ago, things were much better. For less money that I currently pay for cable, I had better bandwith and fewer restrictions. Today, I have a cable modem with port blocks and a 60KB/s upload crimp. At Home provided the same without restrictions at all and the service was reliable. It was also much easier to get a DSL line, that did not suck, from someone other than the local telco. Today, we have the local telco and the cable company working to penalize each other's packets and the technology, of course, will slow everything up.
Greed, in this case, has been very bad. It's eliminated the companies that provided services people want and rewarded the assholes.
You mean companies like Lowes, General Motors and others sued by SCO at M$'s request? Lowes, as you can see for yourself by visiting, has eliminated M$ from their desktop. You can even use one of their public terminals to apply for a job. I promise you it won't crash and waste your time. In any case, there are many big companies that have moved away from M$ crap and M$ has tried to punish them with an insane lawsuit.
The SCO case proves both that it's possible to live without M$ crap and that M$ is an anti-competitive monopoly business. Their hold is breaking, but they still have the ability to punish computer hardware makers, vendors and even users.
Oh, by the way Rob, dumping (aka competing on price) is most certainly a monopoly practice. Ask Netscape and Correl. You can also ask Correl what it's like to be on M$'s bad side as a software company.
We should also separate what we are talking about. It's not wrong to be a monopoly if you got there and stay there without use of anti-competitive laws or practices. People don't hate M$ because they are big, they hate them because M$ is evil. You can be small and evil too.
Microsoft's inability to dominate all aspects of publishing and telco does not make them any less anti-competitive any more than the Jack the Ripper's inability to kill people in all major cities made him less of a murderer. M$, through the BSA, still threatens public school systems with lawsuits and that's about as evil as you can get, short of murder.
If they get together, say so, agree on a price structure and then find ways to exclude competitors, they have committed a crime. This is what price fixing and anti-competitive practices are all about. Everyone pays so a select few can profit. Artists and others who would make a living in the industry pay more than anyone else.
It's obvious that such a crime has been and continues to be committed. The cost of an electronic copy of costs more than the same with delivered by physical media. In a free market music can be had for a song. Those that would compete are locked out of traditional broadcast and physical distribution. They are also harassed at every point possible by lawsuits and bogus laws which make operations difficult and expensive. The world's three big music publishers seek to impose all the restrictions of physical media and 100 year old broadcast technology law onto the internet because they won't exist without them. The ultimate crime are laws seeking to "close the analog hole". It's nice to see some of the smaller crimes looked into, but a review of "price fixing" misses the big picture.
Spitzer might be working for them this time.
That depends on how deep he goes.
Give me a break. Why not just fill the closet with sand and lock the kid up? Call it closet schooling.
You don't have to live in the desert to live wisely. You can turn off your gadgets if they don't do anything useful for you.
Most people like their cell phone because they can pick it up and call anyone in their family anytime they want at little or no cost.
Most people like their internet because they can use it to share information better than any previous communication method short of moving into the same house with all of your letters, photos, music, projects and everything for a good chat. I don't want to begin to remember how crappy to get all my news from TV and printed news papers.
Leaving all of that because one or two people you know are silly about gadgets is counter productive and self defeating.
Hard work and self sacrifice begets more of the same.
Get the work done but don't kill yourself. If your boss wants to kill you, find another job. It might take a year or two, but it's better to do that than to work to death.
Most software patents are like that. It's what you get when you try to call an abstraction and invention. I'd be much happier if Bill Gates spent his billions eliminating software patents, rather than supporting them and abusing them when it suits him.
Pray, tell, what exactly did Microsoft steal? Did they steal your problem space? Because patents don't cover problems. They cover solutions.
What an amazingly empty statement. I imagine the market leader in device agnostic virtual desktop synchronization has a few solutions. That's why people buy their product and why M$ wants into the space. Lord knows, you won't get anything like that from M$. Those clowns have problems syncing a pocket PC at the end of a USB cable.
It's funny how you quote the first AC poster in the blog thread. Did you spam them too or did you simply cut and paste the comment? Next time say or steal something that makes sense.
As any old yahoo can download Knoppix or Mepis and boot into and install a standards compliant browser on a platform that does not suck, Microsoft is already out of business. It's been obvious for years, they just don't know it yet.
Microsoft has been good enough at everything but delivering software. Game over.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Wintel Rags. Oh wait, the ZDNet story was a little different. They pointed to AOL, Yahoo, MSN and IMLogic but failed to provide anything to help with the problem created by Microsoft's pathetic security model.
It's a story worth reading for all of the similar worms that go unreported. The article mentions worms that display Santa and Star Wars clips as if they came from your friends on IM networks and infect your Microsoft (TM) encumbered computer. How many other WMV, you know that silly video format with an exe bite, worms are there that have not been reported as well?
Ho, Ho, Ho, Merry Christmas to all!