Microsoft does not want to end spam, they want to control it and be the only spammer. Honeynet would eventually point back to lots of big dumb companies who are busy spamming their competitors.
How's that for a short list of inflammatory shit? This guy has a long history of flamebait. Forbes, you suck.
This "lynch mob" baloney and the smear response has been floating around the M$ moronosphere for a while now, and it's being taken up by other big dumb companies. Everytime someone makes a reasonable complaint, M$ has paid these nutcases to scream "extremism, liars, lynch mob!" Yes, I mean you Laura DidioIt's amazing how big dumb companies can dish out the insults like that but have a hard time when someone's little blog complains, rightly, about a billing dispute or some other notorious practice. Cry me a river Dan, your corporate task masters are having another "best year ever" screwing their customers. They are not going to take it quietly and trying to smear your customers is not going to win you new ones.
Oh yeah, I know how the "expert" knows that 50% of blogs are written by competitors. He or someone he knows is being paid to robot post bullshit. That's the one thing missing from the sidebar learned from the RIAA: pollute the space. It's not going to work.
... shitty customer, I'm gonna ban you from my store" play seems perfectly reasonable to me."
Do you work for the Microsoft Marketing Department? You've got all the marks, poor reasoning ability, abrasive attitude, arrogance toward the customer and common language.
Insulting your customers is bad business.
Demanding other countries change their laws to meet your whims is insane. It's not a matter of them just not selling Windoze in South Korea, it's a matter of them 'withdrawing' from the market. When you are talking about something you don't own but only have permission to use, withdrawal means a forfit of legal use. The is the full flexure of Microsoft's means. It's a stupid bluff, for no other reason than it may be called without much loss.
Now, add to the above the full PR effect. They are really out of their minds. Microsoft can just about kiss government sales outside the US goodbye after this one.
The statement is just part of the usual grandstanding that always goes on with this sort of thing.
What a great apology that is, "My lawyers are all liars, so don't believe a word I say."
The Microsoft ship has gone down. What you hear now is bursting bulkheads. Microsoft is so vast that many inside do not realize they are underwater. The executives, who are quitting in droves, know.
Switching to a GNU/Linux distribution because you're anti-Microsoft is not a long-term reason to switch.
That depends on why you are anti-Microsoft, but morals are a much longer term answer than others.
Morality is a solid reason to avoid Microsoft and Linux is the moral opposite, and that's a good reason to switch. There are many people that would rather not give their money to a company that sues public school systems and supports an anti-social software development model. Those kinds of people will never go back because they see suing public school systems as a logical extension of the closed source way.
Performance issues, also a direct consequence of those flawed morals, are a more practical but short term reason. If you hate Microsoft because their software is crap an costs you lots of time, you can go back if they ever get their act together. You might even pick up a Mac. That would also make you a contributor to the BSA as well as put you under Apple's DRM thumb. Comfort is not the best reason to use free software though ultimately freedom maximizes your comfort and currently the Linux desktop is better than any other.
Troll posts have really gone downhill here. It would be better for you to direct your name calling at a real post rather than a strawman. Can't you at least use a sock puppet account to create the strawman? Now, let's get down to technical issues, shall we?
It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
What egg? Gnumeric and Kword run circles around both OO and M$ Office. As a free software fan, I have my choice of applications. Unlike 20 years ago, that's not the case on Microsoft platforms. The primary reason to run OO is to open Microsoft's horrid and bloated file formats with an editor that has good html and pdf export. When I want to write a paper or manipulate data the free software world has more choices that work better than Bill Gate's best wet dream. The problem is solved because it never existed.
I call bullshit on ZDNet. That Wintel rag never gets free software stories right and often gets them wrong deliberately. It's not worth reading and I could care less what gets published there. OO may be big and bloated next to other software but Microsoft is the prize hog and always will be.
In this case, it goes against personal experience. I can and do run OO on systems with resources Microsoft's latest, the now five year old XP, won't even install on. When I need a slide show, I pop open OO presenter on... a Pentium 2 with less than 256MB of RAM. Try that with M$ crap-ola. Sure, you might be able to create an 80MB monster piece with software that Microsoft has abandon support for. Good luck getting it off that machine on a network, ha ha. Will your new copy of Office render it correctly?
An extreme example of fat new software on skinny old hardware was posted onto my LUG recently. Check out OO running on a 133MHz Pentium laptop with 70MB of RAM:
Holy Shit! That's crazy. But far from 200MB for OO alone, the combined six or seven big applications took 120MB of swap. The nutcase ran OO, Abiword, Kword, Kontact, Konqueror, GIMP and other software at the same time on separate virtual desktops. XP would be a fragging, blue screened disaster if someone tried to run M$ Office, Outlook, Photoshop and IE all at the same time, say nothing of trying to load up a few other extras.
When someone does that with XP or Vista and M$ Office, I'll believe that they are no less bloated than OO and Linux. Right now, I believe, XP won't install on less than a P3.
a marketing campaign known as "easy start," would have affected portable music devices that compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod. It would have precluded makers of those devices from distributing to consumers music software other than Microsoft's own Windows Media Player...
Just take that last sentence and add whatever you want:
"precluded makers of whatever_you_want from distributing software other than Microsoft's own whatever_M$_wants."
Some typical pairs:
computer devices, Windoze drivers
computers, Windows
computers, IE
computers, M$ Office
PDAs, Windows
Music Players, Works for Sure
Nothing has changed, they are unrivaled hardware and software bullies. Microsoft still pressures everyone with anything to do with computing into "supporting" them and only them. From the stupid M$ approval sticker and it's FUD ability to Windoze updater with it's ability to push broken drivers to replace newer ones that work. They are pushing it into phones, music players and want to own every electronic device you have all to protect their crummy OS market share.
speed up the search for genes that promote common illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes
The potential misuses of this are obvious, immediate and must be legislated against now:
Denial of insurance based on heredity.
Abortion and culling based on heredity.
Genetic "improvement" with unintentional consequences.
That's a short list and others can think of more, I'm sure.
The first two are obviously evil, but the third is perhaps the most terrifying. It would be very tempting to have a magic wand to change your child's DNA in such a way that they would not have high blood pressure. But what else would that do? Scientist are just beginning to understand how RNA and proteins magnify DNA differences and no one understands the relationship to thought patterns or behavior. Informed consent, under such circumstances, is impossible and experiments are not ethical.
Formulating laws to deal with problems without halting reasonable research is difficult but must be persued.
They allow and perhaps encourage, but they don't force anything...
You don't have to read far into the article to see what he's talking about, so I suggest you do that instead of jerking your knee like that. There's real force here by the very nature of closed source. The whole way the code base is acquired and maintained leads to this. The inner ugliness of greed, selfishness and paranoia is manifesting itself in a horrid tool that you will have to use if you want to play their game.
The author notes that Microsoft's API now includes some 60,000 methods and properties, an impossible number to get your head around without an aid. The aid is IntelliSense. I'll let him take it from here:
And yet, IntelliSense is also dictating the way we program.
For example, for many years programmers have debated whether its best to code in a top-down manner, where you basically start with the overall structure of the program and then eventually code the more detailed routines at the bottom; or, alternatively, the bottom-up approach, where you start with the low-level functions and then proceed upwards. Some languages, such as classical Pascal, basically impose a bottom-up approach, but other languages do not.
Well, the debate is now over. In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If thats not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what youre typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.
... To get IntelliSense to work right, not only must you code in a bottom-up structure, but within each method or property, you must also write you code linearly from beginning to end just as if you were using that old DOS line editor, EDLIN. You must define all variables before you use them. No more skipping around in your code.
Sure, you can program without Microsoft's new autowrong tool. I can hardly stand typing text in an editor that changes things for me, and I know such a tool would drive me nuts
But then where are you? There's not a man page and a book, the author points out, would be 1,000 pages long. The Cathedral is Byzantine indeed, and you might as well abandon Microsoft all together as soon as you abandon their tools. This mess is undoubtedly pathologically redundant, full of bugs and represents the zenith of non-free programming. People who are not free to share their work duplicate it all day long and Microsoft has amassed it all by purchase into a giant Frankenstine. Yet, in typical Microsoft style, it's "Do as I say and be grateful." The control freak that Bill Gates is made manifest.
Like you, I have to dissagree with him about the inevitability of this kind of hen pecking. The purpose of higher languages and code reuse is to allow abstraction. A proper tool will give us hints based on natural language questions about what we want to accomplish, much the way a experienced human mentor does today. You give it a flow chart, it comes up with answers. Instead of locking us into an insane framework, it will offer us rational choices of methods that work and let us zoom into and modify details as we see fit.
You won't find a tool like that coming from Redmond, ever. They do not want you to understand or modify their code. They simply want you to use it. Anyone who can understand their mess is looked on as competition, to be purchased or ruthlessly exterminated.
All of this is consistent with the Microsoft way and the result is what you see, a network overrun with spam and botnets, friendly only to those who think they own it.
LOL, you really do so desperately need Windows to be the cause of all problems, don't you?LOL, you really do so desperately need Windows to be the cause of all problems, don't you?
No, I don't need that it just happens to be true most of the time.
"Both the server and desktop"? What the hell does the desktop have to do with anything? "Both the server and desktop"? What the hell does the desktop have to do with anything?
According to the story, a virus in "Windows Hell" was the root cause of their network outage. That virus pulled down the dumb little windoze box running checkpoint. As you claim checkpoint works on Solaris and have never had this problem, we can conclude that Microsoft was the wrong software on both the desktop and the server.
you're nothing more than a dumb zealot. Especially if you think I'm 'astroturfing' for Microsoft. Get a grip.you're nothing more than a dumb zealot. Especially if you think I'm 'astroturfing' for Microsoft. Get a grip.
Foul language and insults, you sound like someone from Microsoft. I'm going to get a grip now and ignore you.
Oh, wow. Looks like the zealots are out in force today.
I never sleep. It helps me to keep up with the 24 hour astroturfing Bill Gates pays to put here.
I work for a Fortune 500 subsidiary, with 120M+ revenue last FY. We've run Checkpoint ('chokepoint', that's funny!) on Solaris for the past six years with nary a hiccup. None. Sure, it's expensive, but it's also fully supported 27/7/365 uptime software. We keep our Windows (application, domain controller, etc) servers and a few Linux ones (Bugzilla, Wordpress, CVS) safely behind the single SPARC box. Never had a problem. Do you think the guy saved '7 salary years' because he dumped Windows?
Yes I do think he saved lots of money getting rid of Windoze. If what you say about Checkpoint working on Solaris is true, it shows the problem that caused the DoS was Windows on both the server and the desktop. As I mentioned above, the real cost of things not working right is the cost of your employees sitting on their ass all day as deadlines pass and customers move on. The bottom line is that free software does the job that choked non free stuff.
Of course, you are an AC and one that called me an ignorant zealot too, so you are probably full of shit. You silly ACs are like that.
Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. "So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said.
If you read carefully, you would have noticed that Checkpoint was not eradicated in the first place because of office politics of the kind M$ types typically use:
"Microsoft just happens to be one of our clients and Checkpoint is our standard firewall," Uemura said. "Checkpoint on Windows was unmanageable but after a few months of using OpenBSD we were told to put Checkpoint back."
When Chokepoint failed, it was kept in place, safely behind OpenBSD, where it would not choke or make it's advocates look too bad. A fanboy can say, "Checkpoint provides some vital protection OpenBSD does not have yet," and he'd be right. Of course, needing Checkpoint because you have Windoze on the desktop is a good reason to dump windoze on the desktop. The duh factor was all forced from above.
This guy managed to get the job done after repeated Windoze failures and cost overruns. That's something that's sure to embarrass the fanboys, but it's something that has to get done sooner or later. You might be awake when it happens, but by the time that happens in big dumb companies like PW, it will have been done everywhere.
The end result was the man on the spot managed to save 7 salary years worth of downtime and heartache and got himself a raise.
Three cheers and good luck! Microsoft is sure to get him fired over this, but they were probably looking to get rid of him for doing his job so well. Just check out the bullshit here, like this and this. No big deal, the bottom line talks and he'll soon have job offers from many fed up companies that do NOT have microsoft as a client where there's much less DUH going on.
Even if the software is free it seems to me that the most expensive thing is always the developers, training, implementation, etc
Buggy software that affects your entire company will cost you much more in downtime, missed due dates, frustration, hatred of IT and quality of life. From the article:
Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. "So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."
There's nothing respectable about that [10% market share for firefox].
First, in a free world, you would expect Firefox to get about 33%. Why? Because there's at least two other good browsers out there, and most run on Windoze. If users were informed and were able to chose a browser that they actually liked, you would expect them to move to one or the other of these based on the quirks of each and personal preference. As Microsoft dies and user choice improves the net will move towards a mix of standards based browsers and none will gain more than 33%.
Second, do realize the enormous effort required to break out of the Microsoft vendor lock in? BBC is a work safe site, so it's statistics are dominated by corporate desktop browsing. Big dumb companies buy from other big dumb companies, like Dell. Microsoft makes sure that companies will pay through the nose to have any non M$ approved software on those computers. So, the 80% market share IE shows here is a major step towards user choice. Each one of those browsers is a determined punch in M$'s face.
Actually, the BBC numbers show that IE has LESS than 85% of the market. The author was unable to identify or otherwise did not count 5% of the strings, non of which is IE. So IE has 85% or 95% of the visits to BBC, which is 80.75%. I'm waiting for it to dip lower than 80% on such a huge site.
It looks like the business world is learning. The BBC is a work safe site, so statistics should be dominated by corporate desktop visiting where the user has no choice of software. That's good news for everyone.
These statistics can be skewed by the botnet. The kinds of people who use botnets would be very sad if the world dumped windows, so you can be sure that DDoS attacks use a standard IE string when they are not busy taking sites down. Microsoft, judged by their record of dirty tricks, might even pay them to do that.
When "Internet Protocol" becomes anyone's SECOND definition of IP, they're no longer a nerd.
Thanks for the insult, I'll return the favor.
If it comes from the mouth of a businessman, you can be sure "IP" has nothing to do with protocols. Not understanding that does not make you a nerd, it makes you ignorant.
I liked them better in 1851, when they thought patents were a bad idea.
If you believe in "Intellectual property" and debate policies about IP, you are chasing something that does not exist. Patents, copyright and trademarks are radically different concepts and should never be lumped together. The term IP is designed to confuse the real issues and muddy the publics' concept of what should and should not have state protection. Blather about software cross-licensing is equally foolish and anchored in disproved development models of the early 1980s. Only the largest of incumbent businesses benefit from this kind of confusion. They use it to drive everyone else out of the market and pass the cost of complexity back to you and me.
A balanced business perspective would be closer to the informed opinion found in the vast majority of technical employers. Most people do not work for big dumb companies and have much to lose when patents cover business methods, copyright laws are used to prevent reverse engineering for compatibility, and trade mark laws are used to prevent advertising of compatibility or exchangeability. The median informed opinion is vastly different from the propaganda put out by giants like Microsoft. To present the two views together as equals is more an averaging of noise than it is a balance.
It scares me that so much of the US net worth is wrapped up in excluding others from doing things. I have little faith in the value of such things and see a rude awakening on the horizon when the rest of the world decides to give us the finger.
The government's "excessive preference" for the open-source Linux platform is harming the domestic software industry and Linux's business model is flawed as the low, or no, charge is thwarting the profitability of Linux developers, the CSIA said in the report.
Yeah, we all know that the best way for China to make more money is to spend gobs of cash on Microsoft. Don't tell Bill that China is robbing him blind that way, he'll have Steve throw a chair at you.
Bill Gates and software giant Microsoft and the Queen have signed to become first "Founding Partner" of the new England, in a five-year deal worth at least £50m.
Microsoft technology will be used in all official functions, and the firm will get use of the soil for 90 minutes a year.
'Iconic'
"We are tremendously proud to be the first (founding partner)," said Nick Barley, business and marketing officer of Microsoft UK.
"You won't see our name on consumers' shirts but there is something about England - it's an icon, it's a legend, it's part of British culture and life. The word Microsoft will appear on every one of their biometric ID cards, which will be renamed to Passport and we're working on a deal to transcribe it into consumers genes and have obtained a patent for that."
The original England opened in 1066 and eventually became the British Empire. The Empire won its last match against Germany in the century and recently defeated Argentina.
Regeneration programme
English executives say over two million visitors will visit the England each year, and that the project will generate approximately 5,000 new jobs.
The deal is at the heart of a regeneration programme called Vision 2020, creating new homes, offices and community sport and leisure facilities as well as improved public transport links.
However its construction has not been entirely smooth, with delays and cost overruns, with Australian builders Multiplex saying it will not make a profit on the contract. Bill Gates dissmissed the builder's assertions saying the new facts will get TCO straight.
"The union of Microsoft and the new state-of-the-art kingdom is fantastic news and will help resurrect the Empire as the world's leading sports and entertainment venue," said a representative.
Business Aims
"We won't have any of that Open Business going on here," Bill smiled as he toured a Castle, "I got so sick of hearing people slipping out of my grip in Munich, Mass and all that. We're going to enjoy a good market here and everywhere we are able to purchase customers."
Disney and Warner executives were stung by the deal. A collective "I can't believe we let that tin horn beat us to it!" was heard in board meetings in both companies.
Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-Ray is very anti-consumer... it won't work well on PCs.
I'm glad Mr. Gates has finally come around to my way of thinking. For years, I've been bothered by my inability of his anti-consumer media formats that take months or years to be decoded so that I can use them and my favorite toys under free software. Now if only he'd view free software like he does trivial things like movie formats, I'd be very happy.
Mr. Gates will come to understand fully how rotten M$ is. It will happen when he's no longer calling the shots.
Unless you sprung for extra storage, the space on your PDA is measured in tens of megabytes. On an iPod, it's measured in tens of gigabytes.
Not exactly. My three year old Zaurus 5500 takes SD and those are getting into the gigabytes now and you can use it and a CF wifi at the same time. Sure it's not tens of GB, but it's more than most "Plays for Sure" dedicated players have and you could use the same CF hard drive in a PDA's CF slot. So what's really going on?
"Where is the convergence device?" you ask. The tech is there, obviously, and it's been there for years. Why is it that your PDA, which is more powerful than your five year old laptop, won't play music, movies or tie in to phone service?
The future, for now, is lost in big dumb company greed. Look at the abuse Apple puts up with from the RIAA. Cell phones? Don't get me started at how stupid and greedy the incumbent phone companies are and how much pure bullshit phone makers have to put up with so that you have to pay hundreds of dollars for a $30 device that will never leave your current carrier. The only worse offender is Microsoft which wants it's fingers in everyone else's pie and routinly breaks your toys by both malice and incompetence. These asinine companies will never agree on anything and they will make it impossible to make and market a general purpose device that does everything at a reasonable price. Outside of free software you will are still stuck with half a dozen devices that won't talk to each other and sometimes won't even talk to themselves.
Wish the australian government would do the same, so that don't have to wake up stupidly early to make conference calls to the US East coast.
Awesome idea, mate! Just imagine not having to wake up early because you are already awake. By getting on US Eastern time you can live that cool all nighter life style. Siderial, smiderial, who needs sunlight?
...it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer."
I resemble that comment, sort of. I'm not new, because I've been using PCs since 1987, Microsoft crap even. Less qualified? I'm wondering what qualifications it takes to dig through the M$ GUI. I don't know but that's probably because I don't have any M$ certs, but I'd hate to call myself a less qualified observer when I'm a proficient coder and administrator and master of six or seven free GUIs. Can I use a M$ computer? Yes, but it's painful and sucks life.
It might be that all those large organizations use anything but M$ because M$ simply sucks. In that case, the writers are not biased, they are knowlegable.
Wait... a 233 MHz Pentium II? And it's a laptop, so I'd wager you can roughly cram no more than 128MB in there, correct? And you're doing all this... with that kind of hardware? I'm sorry, but even given that you're running E and even the most aggresive optimization of Linux resources I very much doubt you could do all that concurrently..[user has problems with vim on PIII]..I have to call bullshit on this. I'm not contending you can do all that or the fact that E has these cool features, I just think you're making all this up so you can get your 'M$' argument in.
No, I've got 196MB, which is a few more than the 128 needed to run Mepis, a big hog.
I run Debian Sarge, stock packages, no real tricks other than selection and configuration. E runs very well, as fast or faster than Window Maker or XFCE. Yes, I can run two or three projects worth of work using gnumeric, kate, xterms, konsole and konqueror. Kword is my perferred editor but I can run OO if needed. Gqview works nicely and Gimp is more than usable. Noatun, xine, sox and other programs work at the same time, if I feel like it, though there is some skipping when I change desktops. I only have to turn it off when I run out of battery power or need to plug it into an external monitor and the bios switching tool is not working.
Amazing, eh? It can be a little slow at times, but it's much easier than fooling with the upgrade train, popups and all that crap that plagues my classmates. My computer works, theirs sucks.
I'm glad you can keep all that crap organized in your head.
I can't, that's why I lay it out on different desktops. It's like having a big physical desktop.
So most of the time, run a query, copy contents, paste into Excel, create graph, drag graph across screen to the the second into Powerpoint and drop it in (the ever famous "drag and drop"). In this case it works, and was much more intuitive than switching from one screen to the next on the same monitor.
I'm not sure what's more intuitive about that than pressing a window on a pager or dragging one desktop over. By the way, you would be amazed at how much better cut and paste is on X than it is on Windoze. Under X, I can cut and paste from all of my computers by X forwarding under ssh. Unlike proprietary applications such as Mathematica and Word, cut and paste works between Gnome, KDE and most free software. You would also be amazed at how good gnumeric is at importing text and other formats. Why bother to cut and paste when you could just write to a file that you can suck up with one double click operation?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft does not want to end spam, they want to control it and be the only spammer. Honeynet would eventually point back to lots of big dumb companies who are busy spamming their competitors.
How's that for a short list of inflammatory shit? This guy has a long history of flamebait. Forbes, you suck.
This "lynch mob" baloney and the smear response has been floating around the M$ moronosphere for a while now, and it's being taken up by other big dumb companies. Everytime someone makes a reasonable complaint, M$ has paid these nutcases to scream "extremism, liars, lynch mob!" Yes, I mean you Laura DidioIt's amazing how big dumb companies can dish out the insults like that but have a hard time when someone's little blog complains, rightly, about a billing dispute or some other notorious practice. Cry me a river Dan, your corporate task masters are having another "best year ever" screwing their customers. They are not going to take it quietly and trying to smear your customers is not going to win you new ones.
Oh yeah, I know how the "expert" knows that 50% of blogs are written by competitors. He or someone he knows is being paid to robot post bullshit. That's the one thing missing from the sidebar learned from the RIAA: pollute the space. It's not going to work.
Do you work for the Microsoft Marketing Department? You've got all the marks, poor reasoning ability, abrasive attitude, arrogance toward the customer and common language.
Insulting your customers is bad business.
Demanding other countries change their laws to meet your whims is insane. It's not a matter of them just not selling Windoze in South Korea, it's a matter of them 'withdrawing' from the market. When you are talking about something you don't own but only have permission to use, withdrawal means a forfit of legal use. The is the full flexure of Microsoft's means. It's a stupid bluff, for no other reason than it may be called without much loss.
Now, add to the above the full PR effect. They are really out of their minds. Microsoft can just about kiss government sales outside the US goodbye after this one.
What a great apology that is, "My lawyers are all liars, so don't believe a word I say."
The Microsoft ship has gone down. What you hear now is bursting bulkheads. Microsoft is so vast that many inside do not realize they are underwater. The executives, who are quitting in droves, know.
That depends on why you are anti-Microsoft, but morals are a much longer term answer than others.
Morality is a solid reason to avoid Microsoft and Linux is the moral opposite, and that's a good reason to switch. There are many people that would rather not give their money to a company that sues public school systems and supports an anti-social software development model. Those kinds of people will never go back because they see suing public school systems as a logical extension of the closed source way.
Performance issues, also a direct consequence of those flawed morals, are a more practical but short term reason. If you hate Microsoft because their software is crap an costs you lots of time, you can go back if they ever get their act together. You might even pick up a Mac. That would also make you a contributor to the BSA as well as put you under Apple's DRM thumb. Comfort is not the best reason to use free software though ultimately freedom maximizes your comfort and currently the Linux desktop is better than any other.
It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
What egg? Gnumeric and Kword run circles around both OO and M$ Office. As a free software fan, I have my choice of applications. Unlike 20 years ago, that's not the case on Microsoft platforms. The primary reason to run OO is to open Microsoft's horrid and bloated file formats with an editor that has good html and pdf export. When I want to write a paper or manipulate data the free software world has more choices that work better than Bill Gate's best wet dream. The problem is solved because it never existed.
I call bullshit on ZDNet. That Wintel rag never gets free software stories right and often gets them wrong deliberately. It's not worth reading and I could care less what gets published there. OO may be big and bloated next to other software but Microsoft is the prize hog and always will be.
In this case, it goes against personal experience. I can and do run OO on systems with resources Microsoft's latest, the now five year old XP, won't even install on. When I need a slide show, I pop open OO presenter on ... a Pentium 2 with less than 256MB of RAM. Try that with M$ crap-ola. Sure, you might be able to create an 80MB monster piece with software that Microsoft has abandon support for. Good luck getting it off that machine on a network, ha ha. Will your new copy of Office render it correctly?
An extreme example of fat new software on skinny old hardware was posted onto my LUG recently. Check out OO running on a 133MHz Pentium laptop with 70MB of RAM:
Holy Shit! That's crazy. But far from 200MB for OO alone, the combined six or seven big applications took 120MB of swap. The nutcase ran OO, Abiword, Kword, Kontact, Konqueror, GIMP and other software at the same time on separate virtual desktops. XP would be a fragging, blue screened disaster if someone tried to run M$ Office, Outlook, Photoshop and IE all at the same time, say nothing of trying to load up a few other extras.
When someone does that with XP or Vista and M$ Office, I'll believe that they are no less bloated than OO and Linux. Right now, I believe, XP won't install on less than a P3.
a marketing campaign known as "easy start," would have affected portable music devices that compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod. It would have precluded makers of those devices from distributing to consumers music software other than Microsoft's own Windows Media Player ...
Just take that last sentence and add whatever you want:
"precluded makers of whatever_you_want from distributing software other than Microsoft's own whatever_M$_wants."
Some typical pairs:
Nothing has changed, they are unrivaled hardware and software bullies. Microsoft still pressures everyone with anything to do with computing into "supporting" them and only them. From the stupid M$ approval sticker and it's FUD ability to Windoze updater with it's ability to push broken drivers to replace newer ones that work. They are pushing it into phones, music players and want to own every electronic device you have all to protect their crummy OS market share.
The judge is asleep.
The potential misuses of this are obvious, immediate and must be legislated against now:
That's a short list and others can think of more, I'm sure.
The first two are obviously evil, but the third is perhaps the most terrifying. It would be very tempting to have a magic wand to change your child's DNA in such a way that they would not have high blood pressure. But what else would that do? Scientist are just beginning to understand how RNA and proteins magnify DNA differences and no one understands the relationship to thought patterns or behavior. Informed consent, under such circumstances, is impossible and experiments are not ethical.
Formulating laws to deal with problems without halting reasonable research is difficult but must be persued.
You don't have to read far into the article to see what he's talking about, so I suggest you do that instead of jerking your knee like that. There's real force here by the very nature of closed source. The whole way the code base is acquired and maintained leads to this. The inner ugliness of greed, selfishness and paranoia is manifesting itself in a horrid tool that you will have to use if you want to play their game.
The author notes that Microsoft's API now includes some 60,000 methods and properties, an impossible number to get your head around without an aid. The aid is IntelliSense. I'll let him take it from here:
And yet, IntelliSense is also dictating the way we program.
For example, for many years programmers have debated whether its best to code in a top-down manner, where you basically start with the overall structure of the program and then eventually code the more detailed routines at the bottom; or, alternatively, the bottom-up approach, where you start with the low-level functions and then proceed upwards. Some languages, such as classical Pascal, basically impose a bottom-up approach, but other languages do not.
Well, the debate is now over. In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If thats not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what youre typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.
Sure, you can program without Microsoft's new autowrong tool. I can hardly stand typing text in an editor that changes things for me, and I know such a tool would drive me nuts
But then where are you? There's not a man page and a book, the author points out, would be 1,000 pages long. The Cathedral is Byzantine indeed, and you might as well abandon Microsoft all together as soon as you abandon their tools. This mess is undoubtedly pathologically redundant, full of bugs and represents the zenith of non-free programming. People who are not free to share their work duplicate it all day long and Microsoft has amassed it all by purchase into a giant Frankenstine. Yet, in typical Microsoft style, it's "Do as I say and be grateful." The control freak that Bill Gates is made manifest.
Like you, I have to dissagree with him about the inevitability of this kind of hen pecking. The purpose of higher languages and code reuse is to allow abstraction. A proper tool will give us hints based on natural language questions about what we want to accomplish, much the way a experienced human mentor does today. You give it a flow chart, it comes up with answers. Instead of locking us into an insane framework, it will offer us rational choices of methods that work and let us zoom into and modify details as we see fit.
You won't find a tool like that coming from Redmond, ever. They do not want you to understand or modify their code. They simply want you to use it. Anyone who can understand their mess is looked on as competition, to be purchased or ruthlessly exterminated.
All of this is consistent with the Microsoft way and the result is what you see, a network overrun with spam and botnets, friendly only to those who think they own it.
No, I don't need that it just happens to be true most of the time.
"Both the server and desktop"? What the hell does the desktop have to do with anything? "Both the server and desktop"? What the hell does the desktop have to do with anything?
According to the story, a virus in "Windows Hell" was the root cause of their network outage. That virus pulled down the dumb little windoze box running checkpoint. As you claim checkpoint works on Solaris and have never had this problem, we can conclude that Microsoft was the wrong software on both the desktop and the server.
you're nothing more than a dumb zealot. Especially if you think I'm 'astroturfing' for Microsoft. Get a grip.you're nothing more than a dumb zealot. Especially if you think I'm 'astroturfing' for Microsoft. Get a grip.
Foul language and insults, you sound like someone from Microsoft. I'm going to get a grip now and ignore you.
I never sleep. It helps me to keep up with the 24 hour astroturfing Bill Gates pays to put here.
I work for a Fortune 500 subsidiary, with 120M+ revenue last FY. We've run Checkpoint ('chokepoint', that's funny!) on Solaris for the past six years with nary a hiccup. None. Sure, it's expensive, but it's also fully supported 27/7/365 uptime software. We keep our Windows (application, domain controller, etc) servers and a few Linux ones (Bugzilla, Wordpress, CVS) safely behind the single SPARC box. Never had a problem. Do you think the guy saved '7 salary years' because he dumped Windows?
Yes I do think he saved lots of money getting rid of Windoze. If what you say about Checkpoint working on Solaris is true, it shows the problem that caused the DoS was Windows on both the server and the desktop. As I mentioned above, the real cost of things not working right is the cost of your employees sitting on their ass all day as deadlines pass and customers move on. The bottom line is that free software does the job that choked non free stuff.
Of course, you are an AC and one that called me an ignorant zealot too, so you are probably full of shit. You silly ACs are like that.
If you read carefully, you would have noticed that Checkpoint was not eradicated in the first place because of office politics of the kind M$ types typically use:
"Microsoft just happens to be one of our clients and Checkpoint is our standard firewall," Uemura said. "Checkpoint on Windows was unmanageable but after a few months of using OpenBSD we were told to put Checkpoint back."
When Chokepoint failed, it was kept in place, safely behind OpenBSD, where it would not choke or make it's advocates look too bad. A fanboy can say, "Checkpoint provides some vital protection OpenBSD does not have yet," and he'd be right. Of course, needing Checkpoint because you have Windoze on the desktop is a good reason to dump windoze on the desktop. The duh factor was all forced from above.
This guy managed to get the job done after repeated Windoze failures and cost overruns. That's something that's sure to embarrass the fanboys, but it's something that has to get done sooner or later. You might be awake when it happens, but by the time that happens in big dumb companies like PW, it will have been done everywhere.
The end result was the man on the spot managed to save 7 salary years worth of downtime and heartache and got himself a raise.
Three cheers and good luck! Microsoft is sure to get him fired over this, but they were probably looking to get rid of him for doing his job so well. Just check out the bullshit here, like this and this. No big deal, the bottom line talks and he'll soon have job offers from many fed up companies that do NOT have microsoft as a client where there's much less DUH going on.
Buggy software that affects your entire company will cost you much more in downtime, missed due dates, frustration, hatred of IT and quality of life. From the article:
Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. "So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager. And because of the savings we get more productivity out of old hardware."
TCO fact, baby.
First, in a free world, you would expect Firefox to get about 33%. Why? Because there's at least two other good browsers out there, and most run on Windoze. If users were informed and were able to chose a browser that they actually liked, you would expect them to move to one or the other of these based on the quirks of each and personal preference. As Microsoft dies and user choice improves the net will move towards a mix of standards based browsers and none will gain more than 33%.
Second, do realize the enormous effort required to break out of the Microsoft vendor lock in? BBC is a work safe site, so it's statistics are dominated by corporate desktop browsing. Big dumb companies buy from other big dumb companies, like Dell. Microsoft makes sure that companies will pay through the nose to have any non M$ approved software on those computers. So, the 80% market share IE shows here is a major step towards user choice. Each one of those browsers is a determined punch in M$'s face.
It looks like the business world is learning. The BBC is a work safe site, so statistics should be dominated by corporate desktop visiting where the user has no choice of software. That's good news for everyone.
These statistics can be skewed by the botnet. The kinds of people who use botnets would be very sad if the world dumped windows, so you can be sure that DDoS attacks use a standard IE string when they are not busy taking sites down. Microsoft, judged by their record of dirty tricks, might even pay them to do that.
Thanks for the insult, I'll return the favor.
If it comes from the mouth of a businessman, you can be sure "IP" has nothing to do with protocols. Not understanding that does not make you a nerd, it makes you ignorant.
If you believe in "Intellectual property" and debate policies about IP, you are chasing something that does not exist. Patents, copyright and trademarks are radically different concepts and should never be lumped together. The term IP is designed to confuse the real issues and muddy the publics' concept of what should and should not have state protection. Blather about software cross-licensing is equally foolish and anchored in disproved development models of the early 1980s. Only the largest of incumbent businesses benefit from this kind of confusion. They use it to drive everyone else out of the market and pass the cost of complexity back to you and me.
A balanced business perspective would be closer to the informed opinion found in the vast majority of technical employers. Most people do not work for big dumb companies and have much to lose when patents cover business methods, copyright laws are used to prevent reverse engineering for compatibility, and trade mark laws are used to prevent advertising of compatibility or exchangeability. The median informed opinion is vastly different from the propaganda put out by giants like Microsoft. To present the two views together as equals is more an averaging of noise than it is a balance.
It scares me that so much of the US net worth is wrapped up in excluding others from doing things. I have little faith in the value of such things and see a rude awakening on the horizon when the rest of the world decides to give us the finger.
Yeah, we all know that the best way for China to make more money is to spend gobs of cash on Microsoft. Don't tell Bill that China is robbing him blind that way, he'll have Steve throw a chair at you.
Microsoft signs as England backer
Bill Gates and software giant Microsoft and the Queen have signed to become first "Founding Partner" of the new England, in a five-year deal worth at least £50m.
Microsoft technology will be used in all official functions, and the firm will get use of the soil for 90 minutes a year.
'Iconic'
"We are tremendously proud to be the first (founding partner)," said Nick Barley, business and marketing officer of Microsoft UK.
"You won't see our name on consumers' shirts but there is something about England - it's an icon, it's a legend, it's part of British culture and life. The word Microsoft will appear on every one of their biometric ID cards, which will be renamed to Passport and we're working on a deal to transcribe it into consumers genes and have obtained a patent for that."
The original England opened in 1066 and eventually became the British Empire. The Empire won its last match against Germany in the century and recently defeated Argentina.
Regeneration programme
English executives say over two million visitors will visit the England each year, and that the project will generate approximately 5,000 new jobs.
The deal is at the heart of a regeneration programme called Vision 2020, creating new homes, offices and community sport and leisure facilities as well as improved public transport links.
However its construction has not been entirely smooth, with delays and cost overruns, with Australian builders Multiplex saying it will not make a profit on the contract. Bill Gates dissmissed the builder's assertions saying the new facts will get TCO straight.
"The union of Microsoft and the new state-of-the-art kingdom is fantastic news and will help resurrect the Empire as the world's leading sports and entertainment venue," said a representative.
Business Aims
"We won't have any of that Open Business going on here," Bill smiled as he toured a Castle, "I got so sick of hearing people slipping out of my grip in Munich, Mass and all that. We're going to enjoy a good market here and everywhere we are able to purchase customers."
Disney and Warner executives were stung by the deal. A collective "I can't believe we let that tin horn beat us to it!" was heard in board meetings in both companies.
I'm glad Mr. Gates has finally come around to my way of thinking. For years, I've been bothered by my inability of his anti-consumer media formats that take months or years to be decoded so that I can use them and my favorite toys under free software. Now if only he'd view free software like he does trivial things like movie formats, I'd be very happy.
Mr. Gates will come to understand fully how rotten M$ is. It will happen when he's no longer calling the shots.
Not exactly. My three year old Zaurus 5500 takes SD and those are getting into the gigabytes now and you can use it and a CF wifi at the same time. Sure it's not tens of GB, but it's more than most "Plays for Sure" dedicated players have and you could use the same CF hard drive in a PDA's CF slot. So what's really going on?
"Where is the convergence device?" you ask. The tech is there, obviously, and it's been there for years. Why is it that your PDA, which is more powerful than your five year old laptop, won't play music, movies or tie in to phone service?
The future, for now, is lost in big dumb company greed. Look at the abuse Apple puts up with from the RIAA. Cell phones? Don't get me started at how stupid and greedy the incumbent phone companies are and how much pure bullshit phone makers have to put up with so that you have to pay hundreds of dollars for a $30 device that will never leave your current carrier. The only worse offender is Microsoft which wants it's fingers in everyone else's pie and routinly breaks your toys by both malice and incompetence. These asinine companies will never agree on anything and they will make it impossible to make and market a general purpose device that does everything at a reasonable price. Outside of free software you will are still stuck with half a dozen devices that won't talk to each other and sometimes won't even talk to themselves.
Awesome idea, mate! Just imagine not having to wake up early because you are already awake. By getting on US Eastern time you can live that cool all nighter life style. Siderial, smiderial, who needs sunlight?
I resemble that comment, sort of. I'm not new, because I've been using PCs since 1987, Microsoft crap even. Less qualified? I'm wondering what qualifications it takes to dig through the M$ GUI. I don't know but that's probably because I don't have any M$ certs, but I'd hate to call myself a less qualified observer when I'm a proficient coder and administrator and master of six or seven free GUIs. Can I use a M$ computer? Yes, but it's painful and sucks life.
It might be that all those large organizations use anything but M$ because M$ simply sucks. In that case, the writers are not biased, they are knowlegable.
No, I've got 196MB, which is a few more than the 128 needed to run Mepis, a big hog.
I run Debian Sarge, stock packages, no real tricks other than selection and configuration. E runs very well, as fast or faster than Window Maker or XFCE. Yes, I can run two or three projects worth of work using gnumeric, kate, xterms, konsole and konqueror. Kword is my perferred editor but I can run OO if needed. Gqview works nicely and Gimp is more than usable. Noatun, xine, sox and other programs work at the same time, if I feel like it, though there is some skipping when I change desktops. I only have to turn it off when I run out of battery power or need to plug it into an external monitor and the bios switching tool is not working.
Amazing, eh? It can be a little slow at times, but it's much easier than fooling with the upgrade train, popups and all that crap that plagues my classmates. My computer works, theirs sucks.
Why would I make that kind of stuff up?
I can't, that's why I lay it out on different desktops. It's like having a big physical desktop.
So most of the time, run a query, copy contents, paste into Excel, create graph, drag graph across screen to the the second into Powerpoint and drop it in (the ever famous "drag and drop"). In this case it works, and was much more intuitive than switching from one screen to the next on the same monitor.
I'm not sure what's more intuitive about that than pressing a window on a pager or dragging one desktop over. By the way, you would be amazed at how much better cut and paste is on X than it is on Windoze. Under X, I can cut and paste from all of my computers by X forwarding under ssh. Unlike proprietary applications such as Mathematica and Word, cut and paste works between Gnome, KDE and most free software. You would also be amazed at how good gnumeric is at importing text and other formats. Why bother to cut and paste when you could just write to a file that you can suck up with one double click operation?