I'm sure SSH Communications stands to make more money if they can discredit a free, opensource product.
That might work if the free software was not as good as the commercial competitor. As it is, they just made themselves look like morons and I'll never consider anything they have worth the money because of it. OpenBSD is always ahead of commercial software in terms of actual security.
No, it's not the reporter. There's no way you can cover up babbling stupidity about "Enterprise" solutions and dissing OpenBSD.
No hurry, I've got five or ten buried in my back. SCO, Get the Facts, Internet Explorer,.DOC, Windows Media, Paladium, pressure on ISPs to block ports, DMCA, the list goes on and on. All anyone in the free software community has to do to get an axe is reach over their shoulder. Any one of them is good enough to show M$'s intent.
steel door on a house of straw.
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One is good, two is better. Give your users an RFID card, smartcard, RSA SecurID (or similar) or fingerprint reader. Tie in your gift(s) to your authentication scheme.
Hook up your windoze computer to a network and have it owned in 12 minutes anyway. All good practices, when applied to insecure softare, are just an inconvenience to the user. What good are passwords, expensive biometric scanners and all that when your users have Outlook, IE and your "server" runs junk that gets owned all the time? That's just good money after bad.
I hate to break it to the Slashdot zealots... It is not in Microsoft's best interests to restrict development for Windows. It is not in their best interests to break compatibility with older software. Neither of these things will EVER happen at Microsoft
You must have slept through the anti-trust trails. You know, where everyone and anyone in tech testified how M$ constantly fucked with them. As much as you would like to pretend otherwise, M$ is paranoid and breaks software on their platform all the time. They have been doing it since the days of DOS. Here's a short list of dead competitors:
This news has NO implications for FOSS on Windows.... - this just standardizes it and provides centralized downloading and key storage.
You must also not know about Paladium/NGDRM or whatever they are calling "trusted computing" these days. They have already used "security" to break software. Having a central place where M$ decides if you can trust your software means M$ can stop any piece of software from running. That's what DRM is to M$, they are trying to put it in the BIOS, not that flaky BIOS as an anticompetitive trick is new. M$ is freaky and evil. They will use this against free software because they can.
It's been this way since the first time I tried KWord; the letter sizes and spacings are simply uneven compared to the same document/font output from WordPerfect, OpenOffice, MS Word, etc.... Is this just becuase I'm using KOffice RPM packages in Fedora (and before that Red Hat) and the GNU police have compiled something out?
I doubt the "GNU police" have been at work thwarting you. I've been using kword on Debian Sarge to write all of my graduate level papers for the last year or so and have yet to notice your problem. The output is so good that I use the pdf's as demonstrations for Newbies, who have been confused by M$ FUD about not being able to write "complex business documents" without Word.
If you want non free goodies and fonts, try Mepis. They have a live CD with excellent hardware auto configuration as well as non free cruft like swflash, nvidia drivers and all that on top of a solidly configured debian unstable. None of that, however, change much of kword's default behavior.
Micro-cancers may spontaneously occur (and perhaps regress) frequently; no one really knows. However, most cancers presumably started as micro-cancers. I fear this test will pick-up "cancers" of questionable significance.
Then you will know, what's to be afraid of? The incidence will be catalogued and fed back into treatment. So relax, the doctor does not know everything but he does the best with what he's got and has statistics to back it all up. Cancer treatment, where some forms have five year survivals of 10%, obviously needs new tools. This is one of them.
The next step is to turn this diagnostic tool into a treatment tool.
These tests are performed on a drop of blood. They don't enter the body!
I'm glad you understand this but why would you think otherwise? It would be kind of hard to detect conductivity changes of blood through my skin but easy to do it in a device. Oh wait, now I think I see, it's the submission where they quote... the article!
Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires
..patents and DRM will lead to a digital dark age.
Digital technology makes it far easier for me to record, store, copy, transmit and share information. My family has been in this country for more than 250 years. What's left of that is stories, a small library, furniture, a few scrapbooks and the odd film. In all that time it was much more difficult to record thoughts. Paper, the cheapest and easiest, is also a bulky fire hazard that's difficult to search trough. Do you really have room for your own correspondence or the time to sort out what's "important"? How about someone else's? Things get lost because you can't tell what's and old bill and what's a love letter. Now compare that to email in a reasonable format. I've gone from file cabinets to one or two hard drives. I've got every paper and email I've written since 1989, I'm digitizing old photographs, sound recordings, you name it. When Katrina came, I ran with the hard drive. It's much easier than loading up the horse drawn cart. The same thing can be said for businesses, churches and local government. Digital media is a panacea if it's not done is some stupid, commercial way.
Now enter "trusted computing" and DRM in the most distopian way. Boom, some one else thinks they own my computer. Even if the media is preserved in formats me and my friends do know how to work, we can't. Instead of being able to run free software that does everything I want, I have to pay some turd to store, search and share my files. The machine itself won't let me do it and it's owners know just how much they can hit me up for before they erase everything anyway. In this world, I can't afford it and I'm left with a subset more pathetic than the one I've been handed.
How can I avoid this? I can't, without decent laws preventing the nighmare. Judging from my first, still working computer, I can keep DRM free computers going for 20 year or so. But that's the dead end discussed in the story. Only by standing up for our digital rights and avoiding bad hardware will we prevent the next dark age.
The last dark age reduced the entire Greek and Roman library down to a few hundred volumes. You can fit it on one good sized shelf or a few hundred megabytes of text. Archaeologists are currently digging through garbage in Egypt to get more. That is what paper media will do for you. A hundred or so churches, museums and universities hold the physical remains. The remains of our own culture, as described above, are more numerous but infinitely poor next to the digital records free people can pass on.
I wonder how long it'll be before they start getting sued by people and companies when the software misidentifies something legitimate and winds up disabling computers...
Long after many pension plans are stolen in shakedowns of small businesses that do not implement this program, but shortly before a cold day in hell.
It only compiles a list of ALL the media files on your computer, and then compiles a list of all the media file in your "shared" folder. Any deleting has to be done by the user.
I'll bet you delete those files right away when the program calls the RIAA to report your use of file sharing.
This crappy copy of grep will have all of 1 or 2 big dumb company takers. Do they have a torrent for them?
I started by learning Microsoft's DirectShow technology and utilizing the OpenCV library according to the tutorial by R. Laganiere to access the pixels being sent by my web cam. If you try to use the tutorial, you'll have to use the new library paths for DirectX 9 because the ones in the tutorial are a little outdated.
Microsoft, the choice of terrorists everywhere. Born, raised and trained (if you call DirectX familiarization a training) right here in the USA.
Last summer was... last month and M$ has already changed enough for you to need new libraries. Ugh.
Firefox is finally catching up with the market leader! Woo!
Years ago, Microsoft declared security job one. It looks like their Linux labs are finally paying off.
What's that? I think I hear a fanboy saying that M$ is not funding research like that. It must have been a collection of gifted script kiddies with no connection to M$, they say. OK, I'll agree, free software will always run circles around the few people Microsoft can afford to throw at any single problem.
Let the layoffs begin! It's not going to work anyway. If this is a real problem, I'm going to apt-get myself a fix in a day or two. In the mean time, I'm going to simply keep using Konqueror.
And sadly, Linux administrators have been unable to suitably protect their systems in all this time, so it continues to be a pain in the ass, never really going away. I work for a hosting company, and I've dug Linux.RST.b out of too many servers.
Administrators of what? I doubt anyone would have problems like this if they simply pulled their binaries from a trusted source, like Debian.
I think too many Linux admins don't believe there's such a thing as a Linux virus.
No, they just don't believe they have ever seen one. I'm not sure how you think you can convince them their eyes are wrong and you are right.
Tell me how you get this silly thing into a hosting server. Machines like that should have some stable distro on them and never budge unless attacked by malicious users. Give me some infection numbers and a study to back up the "so many" number.
Most of the guy's complaints could come straight from a Dilbert cartoon. Seems to me like someone hasn't worked for a large bureaucratic organization before.
Could it be that M$ is just like a Dilbert cartoon? Except they sue their customers and public school systems. Not even Dilbert's company is that dumb.
This might also be just the "rallying cry" that Gates and Ballmer need to cut loose thousands of employees too.
Loose one of them anyway. Look out MiniM$.
PR: Bob, I want you to write a memo pretending to be a bad guy blogger.
Bob: Sure, I can do that.
time marches on, nothing changes.
PR: Bob? You are fired.
.... did he write his own questions, too?
This wasn't an interview, this was a press release!
That's how it looks when someone knows how to answer questions. If you go back and look at those questions again you will see some real barbs. Allow me to point out some of the more dangerous ones:
For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?
This question came 2/3rds down the article when Linux was mentioned for the first time outside of the site name. The reporter is asking him to justify his product's and free software's existence. That a big question you can lose in daily details. His answer, "Linux is a first step toward organizational independence from single-vendor IT sources," is just what people want to hear.
Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?
This is a follow up to another question that together are tricky. The first question asked him, "What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3..." John avoided the trap by not answering the first question litterally with one or two things and then rejecting the notion Samba is a "niche" product useful only to a few dozen small shops.
Those kinds of questions are classic. His answers are simply up to task. If you don't appreciate it, just let someone like Jan grill you one day. From a distance, behind good cover like John, the words look like honey. When they are in your face and you are trying to get other things done, they can look very hard. She's has been around longer than Linux and knows how to get a story. Bad answers to any of these questions would look bad but good answers are equally good.
Stashing all the entries in a 1.1M archive rather than posting links to the code. No way I'm going to download that just to see what all the fuss is about.
Dell would have made sure that this all works, so pretty soon $YourFavouriteDistro will support everything on these Dell machines.
This will only be true if they free the drivers via gpl, etc. They can, if they are silly, release binary junk and then you are half way back to the windoze world where you need floppies and CDs that only work on one computer with a one particular distribution. Without source code, other distributions can't roll it into their kernels.
In the end, it does not matter. Six months or a year down the road the free community will have drivers that are better than what a single company can provide now.
It would be great if Dell decided that free software was the future and started requiring free drivers from their sub contractors. This would save everyone a lot of time and take a lot of the guesswork out of buying a new computer. As things stand, the safest way to buy a new computer is to try out Knoppix or Mepis on it. Binary drivers can help fill in the time between when you buy the computer and when you can really install your choice of distribution. That's second best and I don't recommend it.
1) Most laptops now have wireless cards. If this is the case, use an encrypted connection to an AP.
All this does is make it difficult to connect alternate OSs to your network. The user still gets owned though email, web or full auto worm. Once owned, the laptop can access anything the user could.
2) Even then, use as many encrypted streams as you can (ssh, https, pop3s/imaps, etc.).
Now you're cooking with gas. Still the holes in the OS defeat the better applications. What good is ssh when a key logger has been installed?
3) Physical security.
Yes, this is a problem but a secondary one. The one or two thieves you are liable to meet in a year's visiting the library are dwarfed by the number of worms, crackers and other baddies 250,000,000 network users will through at you in the same time. Most physical thieves just want the money from selling the laptop. They have no use for data and generally lack the skills required to retrieve it, especially when confronted by an OS they have never seen down at the crack house. The pros can get through anything on the net, but a Windoze set up makes industrial espionage much easier. The top causes of data loss are going to be softare failure caused by worms, spyware and all of that. Loss through physical theft is rare.
Your attempts to lock down the user are pointless in an OS that gets rooted in 12 minutes when connected to a network. The person who cracks the laptop will screw your network regardless of how hard you make things for your users.
The best solution is to dump windows. For applications without a replacement, use wine. The sooner you do this, the less trouble you will have. As M$ branches out, finally, into networking services it will be harder and harder to interoperate.
I agree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising when you are cutting salaries is stupid. They have their reasons, however and you will get your wish. Vista will be promoted as much or more than XP, which was hyped bigger than 98, which was hyped bigger... you get the picture.
Microsoft traditionally spends as much money as needed to keep the Wintel rags running and good press in general. The Wintel rags are where the clueless decide what crappy form or M$ junk to buy next. Occasionally, they branch out into stuff like National Geographic, PBS etc. It keeps them from noticing how crappy a product Microsoft actually has. They spent more than a billion promoting XP. XP is five years old, so you can see that more than 200,000,000 was spent each year floating that crappy software. Oh, did I mention the purchase of NBC?
Microsoft will spend what they think it will take but it's not going to work. People notice and you always have other options.
If the report about the chair is true, then I would suspect that this is where it begins.
Well, yeah, a guy who admitted that he would be working as an insurance saleman if it were not for M$ is not the best man to be running a tech company. Then again, M$ is not much of a tech company as it is a sales and marketing company.
You can see how nuts Balmer is from the article himself. The complaints are that people are not being rewarded by a company that's got poor organization and infighting that interferes with getting things done. His response is ludicrous:
Employees' complaints are rooted in a number of factors. They resent cuts in compensation and benefits as profits soar. They're disappointed with the stock price, which has barely budged for three years, rendering many of their stock options out of the money. They're frustrated with what they see as swelling bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. And they're feeling trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity.
Worse is what he has to say about those problems:
"We have as excited and engaged a team of folks at Microsoft as I can possibly imagine," says Ballmer. "[Employees] love their work....[cites Xbox and MSN as successes and might as well have farted] says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Won the server? He's losing the desktop and what does that have to do with NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHEN YOU ARE BURSTING WITH MONEY or STUPID FUCKING INTERNAL SALES MEETINGS WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PUTTING OUT PRODUCT? Steve, baby, being second rate was good enough for Windoze 3.1 and 95. For all the money your company has you should have something on the desktop 6 times better than KDE, Gnome and all that have, but you don't. You've got a piece of shit that has not fundamentally changed in ten years. That and the bad attitude of thinking he can cram that second rate junk down people's throats is pure lunacy.
It is so over for that company and that's good. At last the closed source nighmare of the 80s can die. The greed heads and control freaks can go back to insurance sales and the business can revert to key banging and hacking among equals.
a lot will depend on how Novell can package desktop management. If it's a slick system that's easy to administer, they might have a chance to take some corporate desktop share from MSFT.
You have obviously never seen a Winblows upgrade at a Fortune 500 company. Novel, actually does have good package management, even for Windoze, with their Zen system. The problem is that the Windoze registry requires most applications to be installed from scratch. The net result is gangs of low grade techs running to and spending about 1 hour on each and every PC in the building. That hour includes time spent on the inevitable 20% of systems that are so virused up that nothing works on them. Grid and cluster computing show that the free software world mastered moving software to hundreds of PCs automatically decades ago. Upgrades away from Windoze will end the package management nightmare forever. Companies that don't move on will continue to suffer high costs and low reliability.
The case has already been proven by companies like Chrysler, Lowes, and on and on that have ended their Windoze nightmare. They are not going back and the rest of the world is running right behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
That might work if the free software was not as good as the commercial competitor. As it is, they just made themselves look like morons and I'll never consider anything they have worth the money because of it. OpenBSD is always ahead of commercial software in terms of actual security.
No, it's not the reporter. There's no way you can cover up babbling stupidity about "Enterprise" solutions and dissing OpenBSD.
No hurry, I've got five or ten buried in my back. SCO, Get the Facts, Internet Explorer, .DOC, Windows Media, Paladium, pressure on ISPs to block ports, DMCA, the list goes on and on. All anyone in the free software community has to do to get an axe is reach over their shoulder. Any one of them is good enough to show M$'s intent.
Hook up your windoze computer to a network and have it owned in 12 minutes anyway. All good practices, when applied to insecure softare, are just an inconvenience to the user. What good are passwords, expensive biometric scanners and all that when your users have Outlook, IE and your "server" runs junk that gets owned all the time? That's just good money after bad.
You must have slept through the anti-trust trails. You know, where everyone and anyone in tech testified how M$ constantly fucked with them. As much as you would like to pretend otherwise, M$ is paranoid and breaks software on their platform all the time. They have been doing it since the days of DOS. Here's a short list of dead competitors:
This news has NO implications for FOSS on Windows. ... - this just standardizes it and provides centralized downloading and key storage.
You must also not know about Paladium/NGDRM or whatever they are calling "trusted computing" these days. They have already used "security" to break software. Having a central place where M$ decides if you can trust your software means M$ can stop any piece of software from running. That's what DRM is to M$, they are trying to put it in the BIOS, not that flaky BIOS as an anticompetitive trick is new. M$ is freaky and evil. They will use this against free software because they can.
I doubt the "GNU police" have been at work thwarting you. I've been using kword on Debian Sarge to write all of my graduate level papers for the last year or so and have yet to notice your problem. The output is so good that I use the pdf's as demonstrations for Newbies, who have been confused by M$ FUD about not being able to write "complex business documents" without Word.
If you want non free goodies and fonts, try Mepis. They have a live CD with excellent hardware auto configuration as well as non free cruft like swflash, nvidia drivers and all that on top of a solidly configured debian unstable. None of that, however, change much of kword's default behavior.
Then you will know, what's to be afraid of? The incidence will be catalogued and fed back into treatment. So relax, the doctor does not know everything but he does the best with what he's got and has statistics to back it all up. Cancer treatment, where some forms have five year survivals of 10%, obviously needs new tools. This is one of them.
The next step is to turn this diagnostic tool into a treatment tool.
I'm glad you understand this but why would you think otherwise? It would be kind of hard to detect conductivity changes of blood through my skin but easy to do it in a device. Oh wait, now I think I see, it's the submission where they quote ... the article!
Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires
I've been trolled again.
Digital technology makes it far easier for me to record, store, copy, transmit and share information. My family has been in this country for more than 250 years. What's left of that is stories, a small library, furniture, a few scrapbooks and the odd film. In all that time it was much more difficult to record thoughts. Paper, the cheapest and easiest, is also a bulky fire hazard that's difficult to search trough. Do you really have room for your own correspondence or the time to sort out what's "important"? How about someone else's? Things get lost because you can't tell what's and old bill and what's a love letter. Now compare that to email in a reasonable format. I've gone from file cabinets to one or two hard drives. I've got every paper and email I've written since 1989, I'm digitizing old photographs, sound recordings, you name it. When Katrina came, I ran with the hard drive. It's much easier than loading up the horse drawn cart. The same thing can be said for businesses, churches and local government. Digital media is a panacea if it's not done is some stupid, commercial way.
Now enter "trusted computing" and DRM in the most distopian way. Boom, some one else thinks they own my computer. Even if the media is preserved in formats me and my friends do know how to work, we can't. Instead of being able to run free software that does everything I want, I have to pay some turd to store, search and share my files. The machine itself won't let me do it and it's owners know just how much they can hit me up for before they erase everything anyway. In this world, I can't afford it and I'm left with a subset more pathetic than the one I've been handed.
How can I avoid this? I can't, without decent laws preventing the nighmare. Judging from my first, still working computer, I can keep DRM free computers going for 20 year or so. But that's the dead end discussed in the story. Only by standing up for our digital rights and avoiding bad hardware will we prevent the next dark age.
The last dark age reduced the entire Greek and Roman library down to a few hundred volumes. You can fit it on one good sized shelf or a few hundred megabytes of text. Archaeologists are currently digging through garbage in Egypt to get more. That is what paper media will do for you. A hundred or so churches, museums and universities hold the physical remains. The remains of our own culture, as described above, are more numerous but infinitely poor next to the digital records free people can pass on.
Long after many pension plans are stolen in shakedowns of small businesses that do not implement this program, but shortly before a cold day in hell.
I'll bet you delete those files right away when the program calls the RIAA to report your use of file sharing.
This crappy copy of grep will have all of 1 or 2 big dumb company takers. Do they have a torrent for them?
I started by learning Microsoft's DirectShow technology and utilizing the OpenCV library according to the tutorial by R. Laganiere to access the pixels being sent by my web cam. If you try to use the tutorial, you'll have to use the new library paths for DirectX 9 because the ones in the tutorial are a little outdated.
Microsoft, the choice of terrorists everywhere. Born, raised and trained (if you call DirectX familiarization a training) right here in the USA.
Last summer was ... last month and M$ has already changed enough for you to need new libraries. Ugh.
Years ago, Microsoft declared security job one. It looks like their Linux labs are finally paying off.
What's that? I think I hear a fanboy saying that M$ is not funding research like that. It must have been a collection of gifted script kiddies with no connection to M$, they say. OK, I'll agree, free software will always run circles around the few people Microsoft can afford to throw at any single problem.
Let the layoffs begin! It's not going to work anyway. If this is a real problem, I'm going to apt-get myself a fix in a day or two. In the mean time, I'm going to simply keep using Konqueror.
Administrators of what? I doubt anyone would have problems like this if they simply pulled their binaries from a trusted source, like Debian.
I think too many Linux admins don't believe there's such a thing as a Linux virus.
No, they just don't believe they have ever seen one. I'm not sure how you think you can convince them their eyes are wrong and you are right.
Tell me how you get this silly thing into a hosting server. Machines like that should have some stable distro on them and never budge unless attacked by malicious users. Give me some infection numbers and a study to back up the "so many" number.
Could it be that M$ is just like a Dilbert cartoon? Except they sue their customers and public school systems. Not even Dilbert's company is that dumb.
Loose one of them anyway. Look out MiniM$.
PR: Bob, I want you to write a memo pretending to be a bad guy blogger.
Bob: Sure, I can do that.
time marches on, nothing changes.
PR: Bob? You are fired.
That's how it looks when someone knows how to answer questions. If you go back and look at those questions again you will see some real barbs. Allow me to point out some of the more dangerous ones:
For businesses, what is adopting Linux the first step toward?
This question came 2/3rds down the article when Linux was mentioned for the first time outside of the site name. The reporter is asking him to justify his product's and free software's existence. That a big question you can lose in daily details. His answer, "Linux is a first step toward organizational independence from single-vendor IT sources," is just what people want to hear.
Could you name a couple of other Samba-3 features that have a niche and are only used in those niches?
This is a follow up to another question that together are tricky. The first question asked him, "What are the primary capabilities of Samba-3 ..." John avoided the trap by not answering the first question litterally with one or two things and then rejecting the notion Samba is a "niche" product useful only to a few dozen small shops.
Those kinds of questions are classic. His answers are simply up to task. If you don't appreciate it, just let someone like Jan grill you one day. From a distance, behind good cover like John, the words look like honey. When they are in your face and you are trying to get other things done, they can look very hard. She's has been around longer than Linux and knows how to get a story. Bad answers to any of these questions would look bad but good answers are equally good.
You visited the site?
This is one I'll pass up, thanks.
-- community will have drivers that are
-- better than what a single company can
-- provide now
- You said the same thing two years ago. With
- the same unflinching bullshit swagger, I
-might add.
It was true then and it's true now. Amazing how that works, isn't it?
This will only be true if they free the drivers via gpl, etc. They can, if they are silly, release binary junk and then you are half way back to the windoze world where you need floppies and CDs that only work on one computer with a one particular distribution. Without source code, other distributions can't roll it into their kernels.
In the end, it does not matter. Six months or a year down the road the free community will have drivers that are better than what a single company can provide now.
It would be great if Dell decided that free software was the future and started requiring free drivers from their sub contractors. This would save everyone a lot of time and take a lot of the guesswork out of buying a new computer. As things stand, the safest way to buy a new computer is to try out Knoppix or Mepis on it. Binary drivers can help fill in the time between when you buy the computer and when you can really install your choice of distribution. That's second best and I don't recommend it.
All this does is make it difficult to connect alternate OSs to your network. The user still gets owned though email, web or full auto worm. Once owned, the laptop can access anything the user could.
2) Even then, use as many encrypted streams as you can (ssh, https, pop3s/imaps, etc.).
Now you're cooking with gas. Still the holes in the OS defeat the better applications. What good is ssh when a key logger has been installed?
3) Physical security.
Yes, this is a problem but a secondary one. The one or two thieves you are liable to meet in a year's visiting the library are dwarfed by the number of worms, crackers and other baddies 250,000,000 network users will through at you in the same time. Most physical thieves just want the money from selling the laptop. They have no use for data and generally lack the skills required to retrieve it, especially when confronted by an OS they have never seen down at the crack house. The pros can get through anything on the net, but a Windoze set up makes industrial espionage much easier. The top causes of data loss are going to be softare failure caused by worms, spyware and all of that. Loss through physical theft is rare.
The best solution is to dump windows. For applications without a replacement, use wine. The sooner you do this, the less trouble you will have. As M$ branches out, finally, into networking services it will be harder and harder to interoperate.
I agree, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising when you are cutting salaries is stupid. They have their reasons, however and you will get your wish. Vista will be promoted as much or more than XP, which was hyped bigger than 98, which was hyped bigger ... you get the picture.
Microsoft traditionally spends as much money as needed to keep the Wintel rags running and good press in general. The Wintel rags are where the clueless decide what crappy form or M$ junk to buy next. Occasionally, they branch out into stuff like National Geographic, PBS etc. It keeps them from noticing how crappy a product Microsoft actually has. They spent more than a billion promoting XP. XP is five years old, so you can see that more than 200,000,000 was spent each year floating that crappy software. Oh, did I mention the purchase of NBC?
Microsoft will spend what they think it will take but it's not going to work. People notice and you always have other options.
Well, yeah, a guy who admitted that he would be working as an insurance saleman if it were not for M$ is not the best man to be running a tech company. Then again, M$ is not much of a tech company as it is a sales and marketing company.
You can see how nuts Balmer is from the article himself. The complaints are that people are not being rewarded by a company that's got poor organization and infighting that interferes with getting things done. His response is ludicrous:
Employees' complaints are rooted in a number of factors. They resent cuts in compensation and benefits as profits soar. They're disappointed with the stock price, which has barely budged for three years, rendering many of their stock options out of the money. They're frustrated with what they see as swelling bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. And they're feeling trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity.
Worse is what he has to say about those problems:
"We have as excited and engaged a team of folks at Microsoft as I can possibly imagine," says Ballmer. "[Employees] love their work. ...[cites Xbox and MSN as successes and might as well have farted] says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Won the server? He's losing the desktop and what does that have to do with NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHEN YOU ARE BURSTING WITH MONEY or STUPID FUCKING INTERNAL SALES MEETINGS WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PUTTING OUT PRODUCT? Steve, baby, being second rate was good enough for Windoze 3.1 and 95. For all the money your company has you should have something on the desktop 6 times better than KDE, Gnome and all that have, but you don't. You've got a piece of shit that has not fundamentally changed in ten years. That and the bad attitude of thinking he can cram that second rate junk down people's throats is pure lunacy.
It is so over for that company and that's good. At last the closed source nighmare of the 80s can die. The greed heads and control freaks can go back to insurance sales and the business can revert to key banging and hacking among equals.
You have obviously never seen a Winblows upgrade at a Fortune 500 company. Novel, actually does have good package management, even for Windoze, with their Zen system. The problem is that the Windoze registry requires most applications to be installed from scratch. The net result is gangs of low grade techs running to and spending about 1 hour on each and every PC in the building. That hour includes time spent on the inevitable 20% of systems that are so virused up that nothing works on them. Grid and cluster computing show that the free software world mastered moving software to hundreds of PCs automatically decades ago. Upgrades away from Windoze will end the package management nightmare forever. Companies that don't move on will continue to suffer high costs and low reliability.
The case has already been proven by companies like Chrysler, Lowes, and on and on that have ended their Windoze nightmare. They are not going back and the rest of the world is running right behind them.
Winblows is finally over.