Isn't it strange how Slashdot's outsourcing stories are always about India and China?
That might be because that's where the programming jobs are going, no?
They're never talking about shocking evidence of contracts with e.g. Canadian or Irish technology vendors.
Why don't you submit a story then?
Not that I'm suggesting that this is barely veiled racism.
Yes you did. It's a little less shocking when a US firm outsources to a place where most people speak English. Most people don't expect their English language word processor would come out well if it were coded by someone who writes Kanji. They might have some cultural differences and make assumptions that don't translate very well. India has a large English speaking population due to it's long colonial history. Even so, the cultural differences make for significant missunderstandings.
An any case, can you tell me why M$ wants to hide the shift? Shame?
M$ has to do this because there's no one left to make software for their platform they can swindle. Gone are the days when they could swoop in and offer a start up a deal they can't refuse. People got smart and left the business when they watched giants like Corel, IBM and others get creamed by M$'s dirty tricks. M$ code has suffered without all that third party work and there costs are going to continue to climb no mater how cheap their paid coders are.
Also note that M$ is hiding the practice. They are ashamed of it as it blows their "made in USA" FUD.
Free software has none of these problems and it's where real programming talent is these days. It's more American in spirit than M$'s control freak and swindle attitude was to begin with. Free press, market and competition are where the winners always go. M$ and it's armies of slaves are doomed to mediocrity and market place failure.
The key to not getting bumped as a tech wage slave by outsourced labor is to not just learn a TECHNOLOGY, but learn a BUSINESS alongside it. Then your value will lie in the combination of business knowledge and tech know-how that you have.
That sounds great in principle. Care to give me a few examples?
Can you tell me how to run any kind of business, regardless of your know-how, when you are forbin to compete? What combination of technical and business knowledge can I have to make ink replacements when big dumb companies and the DMCA will prevent me from selling them? What kind of killer software can I write and service when M$ DRM gimps BIOS so that nothing but their junk will run on affordable hardware? Would my knowing some business school jazz like help me out when the law is keeping me form doing what other people would pay me to do?
You like to run Windoze and troll Slashdot. Those are your problems, until your box gets rooted and spews spam and malice. Then your ISP should turn you off till you can fix your nasty little boxes. You may have other problems, but I could care less.
Gotta love the hypocrisy of/.. Apple threatens to invoke the DMCA against Real, and there's applause and cheers.
I'd say 100% of the people cheering DMCA are astroturfers from the Linux Jihad or some other such stupid organization. This story has more 400 comments and it's only two hours old.
The lowest recorded voltage for electrocution is 17 VDC. 12V won't kill you, but you should be careful around anything that could be in contact with anything higher. As an agg professor once told me:
Him: It was plugged in, right?
Me: Yes
Him: You saw a snake crawl down that hole and now you are going to stick your hand in it?
Me: Thinks, hmmm, he's right. Never work on anything plugged it and be careful anyway because capacitors can store enough zap to get you. Short those bitches with a screwdriver. A few seconds of caution can add years to your life.
I did a similar thing with a regular PC BIOS EPROM. I'd flashed it to the wrong version and made a box that would not boot. I just happened to have another one, just like it, so I borrowed the EPROM from it to boot and ran the flash program again. This time, I used the saved BIOS and put the dead EPROM back in before the actual flash. It worked fine and I did not flash a BIOS again again for five years when ACPI forced my hand.
"He can't say nuclear, that really scares me.
Sometimes a brain is really handy."
"He got that Botox"
There are plenty of other goodies and great images that roll by that had me laughing and laughing.
They need to make another one about the RIAA and the Girl Scouts singing "America the Beautiful". If culture can't be used for fun, what good is it? If this constitutes a republication or public performance of someone else's work, I'm going to burn all my Puff Daddy CDs in protest.
It doesn't matter if he was watching a DVD or picking his nose. If he killed someone, he killed someone.
The driver says he was not watching it, but he's been charged with negligence by people who say he must have been. That's kind of like saying that you, penguinboy, must have been compiling a kernel when you had that wreck because your laptop was on the seat. That people might actually listen to music on a DVD does not enter most people's wooden heads yet.
National headlines have presumed this man guilty of grossly negligent behavior and idiots all around the world want to hang him for murder. Watch out!
Music on DVDs will increase driving safety. Hey, brain dead, did you even read the blurb? DVD players also do music. 4.7GB of music is most of my ogg collection. Having one of those puppies burned and in my dash will keep me, and about 100,000,000 other drivers from having to fumble with CDs, tapes and radio dials. The screens also can be used like a Jedi mind trick on young children. If you think "road trip" is distracting, try taking a real road trip with a two year old. The average 2.5 child family is better off with a DVD player.
Next time, try to think of something better to piss people off with. Ignorance of technology and it's uses are bothersome, but easy to cure.
PS - The Department of Homeland Security (TM) will not allow you to interfere with the normally scheduled Hollywood Brainwash (TM).
Who really wants to pay $750 for Longhorn, and then pay another few hundred for an Office suite?
No one does. Because they can get better performance for less money they will.
Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to die. They can jump on Linux and die later or ignore the next big thing and die sooner. Their favorite option three is to finish their DRM legal work and nationalize software.
Your link points to what is (I think) the original version, which arrives as an EXE, I believe. Other variants arrive as a password-protected ZIP file with an executable inside. Regardless, the EXE will not just run itself. Hopefully this will clear things up a bit for you, because you sure as heck don't know what you're talking about. I'm surprised you can even work up the nerve to shower us with your insightful prose given you don't know squat.
Look, ass, I've seen the environment I'm talking about first hand. Yes, I've also seen Outlook auto rooted, with no action on my part. The stupid exchange "admin" did not believe what I said and had to do it for herself. After seeing it, she still did not understand the magnitude of what she had witnessed, saying "I get those all the time, it's part of normal advertising." Yep, she had remote access to everyone in the company's desktop and had her own machine rooted out already. The only thing dumber than Outlook was the person who recommended and oversaw it. I don't have those problems.
Last I looked (and I use Evolution really) KMail lets me save attached files just fine, regardless of what they contain. And then I can open them by double-clicking on them in Nautilus.
But they are not executables and they won't run. You might have an exploit for a particular program, but there's no such thing as MyDumb for Linux.
You don't have to be an idiot to get viruses on Windoze, you have to be a fucking genius to avoid them.
Here's a post with a little thought in it. It's not the user, it's M$'s crappy software. The long and complicated steps you talk about are not found in fsecure's description, so I have no idea what user intervention you are talking about. I'm also used to the variants boing full auto more than I'm used to them depending on some poor hapless user pulling ROT13.
So enlighten us. How would you have handled this in your hypothetical email client that engineers user stupidity away. I'll even let you pick the OS you'll be running it on so you don't have to be saddled by the deficiencies of "Windoze".
Users trained to click things all day are not stupid, their software is. Kmail on any OS only hands files to clients for viewing. The long chain of exploits are missing there and you don't know what client my users have for a given file type. Files are never saved with executable permission turned on. There is no system wide registry for you to hide in. The list of dumb stuff M$ did to make this possible goes on. The most important thing is that my users are not conditioned to click things without reading them. Free software users don't see many "I submit" buttons and stupid workarounds to Windoze's core inability to easily share work.
Hows that for a ray of sunshine? You need to get out more.
Admin, heal thyself. It would be much easier to fix your software than your users. How many years do you have to wait before your realize that M$ is not going to fix it's problems? Pull your head out of Bill Gates' little propaganda bubble, please, and breath the free air.
Witness the marvel of the Windoze desktop. First, there's the plethora of technical BS admins try to cram into their user's heads via... popup messages that must be clicked "OK" for the user to do even simple tasks. The average corporate user also suffers a veritable flood of "communist propaganda" to their inboxes, which must be read for fear of missing something important, much of it attachments. The company and M$ has trained them to click without reading, so you are surprised how? Then there's double extensions, extension hiding and all the dozens of "executable" extensions to keep up with! Even users with a clue have a hard time. Between that environment and the stupid way Outlook runs as root and can write to system folders, you get MyDoom internet storms. You don't have to be an idiot to get viruses on Windoze, you have to be a fucking genius to avoid them.
Fsecure is still up and has a reasonable description of how this M$ carried dissease gets around. It's a little dated and for this one menace there dozens of versions that have gone full auto by taking advantage of other holes, like download.ject did. Oh well.
The real idiots are administrators who still recommend the same platform for their place of work that's caused them all of these problems. How many times are YOU going to be fooled? It's not convincing your users.
That's the way a lot of M$ users are going to be thinking of email. Thanks to the billion dollar FUD machine in Redmond, few users are thinking about alternate software and are likely to give up on email. I'd noticed the web was a little slow, now I'm pissed at those morons at M$ for making it possible, AGAIN.
Yeah, I've already gotten one of these messages from GEmail, claiming I'm a Penske user. Spam bombardment is also up dramatically. I'm sure I'll get plenty more. This kind of robot generated crap flood is just not funny.
Hello, Neil, I'm one of the kinds of people who perpetuate your "myths". You should spend more time on a Linux desktop or reading about free software. A nice little KDE 3.2 desktop will take some of the scales out of your eyes. Reading a few pages at the free software foundation, will show you that you are treading very old ground. In the mean time, I'll be happy to take on your list one, one by one.
"Don't complain." Sure, complaining is not criticism or bug report filing. People should not complain about free software any more than they should look any other gift horse in the mouth. Bug reports and constructive email rock. People should not be encouraged to "complain"
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems." God, but that's old FUD. Sure, the "average user" won't go coding. That does not make the software less free or that freedom any less of a blessing. He might as well take the next step and claim that free software will never make a friendly interface / GUI / usable kernel etc. Oh wait, he does.
"All software should be free" Uses a false analogy to argue that no software should be free. Software can be coppied without cost. The choice between free and non free software that do the same thing should be obvious to anyone. Because of this all software should be free and what is not will be sooner or later. "all code can somehow be developed for "free", without there being a price to be paid somewhere" Nope, there's no price to be paid with free software because there's no force involved. If free software does something you want, you are free to use it, modify it and share it. Generally, using free software as a base for your own projects saves time and money. Giving back your modifications costs little or nothing.
"Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software" I can say that free is better. I can also say that free software, despite Neil's FUD, develops quicker and becomes technically superior in time. KDE and GNome both kick Winblows ass, despite M$'s laser sharp attention to... their bottom line. I'm not sure what you are using Neil, but newer stuff is better.
"Scratching the personal itch" - Yawn, I'm getting tired of this guy saying that there are no free user friendly tools. A good example of itch scratching working is gphoto2 and digikam. Digikam is KDE's digital camera front end and album keeper. It gets it's power from hundreds of camera drivers found in libgphoto2, which in turn was made possible by thousands of people scratching very personal itches, sometimes over $40 cameras. There's nothing like it in the commercial world and I expect it to continue to get better. When software is released GPL, everyone wins and it goes all the way back to the average user's desktop.
"More choice is always better" He acts like preselection of reasonable options does not exist. Neil, go get a copy of Knoppix of Mepis and see that a distribution can be made on a single CD that does EVERYTHING even the power user such as yourself could want. Amazing how all that "bloated", "designed by committee" software can do what no laser focused commercial software maker can, isn't it?
"Conclusion: It's Not So Simple". My conclusion is that Neil needs to check out some more free software. Anyone who still thinks that Windows has better interfaces is missinformed. Also, no one really thinks that "Sometimes restricting the choices might not be a bad idea." when it comes to themselves. Neil might be afraid of a free software desktop, but I'm sure he's glad he can have one if he changes his mind.
I've heard most of this stuff for years. Some of the user interface issues were once true, but they are no longer. Gnome back in 1998 was about as good and in many ways better than Windows 98. The people in Redmond would love for free software users to read this kind of tripe and n
Lindows endorsement? Sun endorsement? Free Software endorsement? Monoculture slam? I don't think so. Let me pick apart each one for you and "Open your eyes" if I might. What you see on M$NBC is FUD and more FUD.
Sun endorsement, not. The author calls Sun's straight forward description bragging, "With that type of bragging I couldn?t resist." Says, "the SuSE installation process is nearly perfect," as if you have to install on a computer bought at Walmart and as if Windoze installs are "perfect". Then this slam, "The laptop installation was another story. It seems the version of SuSE that was used is old ? and getting older all the time.... Nothing worked. " And, of course, the best is yet to come, " The next versions of JDS could be extremely interesting." That's hardly a ringing endorsement. If the author had written as candidly about an XP install, he'd have been fired.
Lindows endorsement, no, more FUD. I don't even want to read an article that's titled "Getting Better". It goes on to complain about "room for improvement", that it was slow, blah blah blah. The author goes on to complain that it can't do VPN and a host of other things that's just plain bullshit as free software's networking capability blows Windoze away. This article rings more like another ringing endorsement of Winblows to me. Of course, the right distro to try Linux with is a live CD such as Knoppix or Mepis. Both of them are available as free downloads and neither touch your computer till you tell them too. To recommend Linsows over such things is incompetence or malice.
The "Open Source" on the server article is SCO style FUD at it's finest, "The communal aspects of open source can lead to thorny legal questions, particularly when a company claims its proprietary code has seeped into a project. Because developers typically don't offer warranties, end users could be held liable for infringements." Blah, blah, clueless bullshit that at no point recommends free software over M$ cruft, especially on the desktop.
Your final article, about how "biodiversity analogy has it's limits", is a defense of M$'s pathetic security record. It attempts to blame all the problems M$ is having on it's popularity instead of on poor design. While you might consider this to be unflattering to M$ because it admits to problems, it's highly deferential in the way it explains and denigrates the extent of those problems. An honest reporter would note that the same kinds of exploits have been happening across all versions of M$ since people were silly enough to connect that junk to the internet.
The titles of those articles are provocative, but the contents are M$ party line, FUD and nonsense. The truth of the matter is that free software installs easier, runs better, is easier to use and costs less than M$ crap. MSNBC is oblivious to these facts or you can't find the articles. Try again please.
What you have passed is black, but it does not caw. Check the dates on those articles. The Slate article was published June 30th. Your MSNBC article was posted July 7th, two days after the Slashdot attention to the Slate article and probably after Uncle Sam was recommending the same. It's possible that all of them picked up on the Slate suggestion and took it as a M$ endorsement.
That one article is not much to crow about. Can you find me something else? They still don't admit that a user can do without M$ and recommends that people keep their IE handy. I'm getting tired of M$ humble pie, surely you trolls and apologists can do better than that.
I'm sure Microsoft's desire to unload the online rag has less to do w/Slate's recommending Firefox than it does with a predetermined "build-it-to-flip-it" strategy.
Like all those other profitable things they have sold off? I can't think of one, can you? It might be nice if they sold off Office or their OS, the only things they have that make money. It might also be nice if they decided that they were an obsolete hindrance and disbanded giving all their shareholders the $6/share that $54 billion dollars represented.
Yeah, because they dumpbed MSNBC a long time ago for writing less than flattering articles about their products and sdervices.
Show me one MSNBC article that recommends anything but M$ garbage. Everything I read about computers from them looks like it got scrubbed by M$'s PR people if it was not written by them in the first place. It's hard for them to not report on multi-billion dollar M$ vectors rolling around, but they never come out and blame M$ for the problems and never recommend that anyone use anything else. Heck, I don't think I've seen so much as a M$NBC Mac hardware review.
How much is Slate costing them? How about NBC then? In a company as big as M$, a magazine like Slate only grabs someone's attention when they do something really good or really bad.
Recommending an alternate browser would be the equivalent of posting pictures of Macs on your blog or walking around campus with a Mac. You might recall unpleasant stories about people who made those mistakes.
I can imagine the conversation was like this:
Assistant: Mr. Gates, someone at Slate wrote an article recommending people use Mozilla.
Bill Gates: That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Fire the asshole! His editor too. What kind of idiots do we have over there? Shit, just sell the whole thing.
Ass: I'll talk to the lawyers.
Their priority is to pave the way for "legitimate" unsolicited commercial email and control of the that definition. They have argued at length that their spam is legitimate but others are not. That would be part of the exclusion that RMS is talking about and it's ultimate goal, control and the fees you can collect with that control.
I would not attribute good faith to a company that has so often demonstrated such bad faith.
Save your MS bashing for a relevant topic would you? It gets annoying.
I tried to run bash on a windoze box, but it could not find the command.
Microsoft is an embarrassment and nothing can be more annoying than using it on a daily basis except having to babysit people who forced to use it. It's a losing game that makes you a liar.
As for medicine, law, and banking, maybe you just haven't been out in the real world much. Plenty of doctors, bankers, and lawyers are royal pains and too annoying to deal with.
I don't have a problem like that nor do most people. The only consistent element of all your unsatisfying relationships is you.
Just because you don't know how to do anything with Windows doesn't mean no one else does.
Oh, was it that easy, hacking the Windoze registry via some dinkypoo remote desktop? How many times do you have to reboot and pray it comes back up? Why don't people actually do this instead of walking down to the user's desk. If what you say is true, fortune 500 companies would not waste money walking techs around.
Then again, they are running windoze, so they must be stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be because that's where the programming jobs are going, no?
They're never talking about shocking evidence of contracts with e.g. Canadian or Irish technology vendors.
Why don't you submit a story then?
Not that I'm suggesting that this is barely veiled racism.
Yes you did. It's a little less shocking when a US firm outsources to a place where most people speak English. Most people don't expect their English language word processor would come out well if it were coded by someone who writes Kanji. They might have some cultural differences and make assumptions that don't translate very well. India has a large English speaking population due to it's long colonial history. Even so, the cultural differences make for significant missunderstandings.
An any case, can you tell me why M$ wants to hide the shift? Shame?
Also note that M$ is hiding the practice. They are ashamed of it as it blows their "made in USA" FUD.
Free software has none of these problems and it's where real programming talent is these days. It's more American in spirit than M$'s control freak and swindle attitude was to begin with. Free press, market and competition are where the winners always go. M$ and it's armies of slaves are doomed to mediocrity and market place failure.
That sounds great in principle. Care to give me a few examples?
Can you tell me how to run any kind of business, regardless of your know-how, when you are forbin to compete? What combination of technical and business knowledge can I have to make ink replacements when big dumb companies and the DMCA will prevent me from selling them? What kind of killer software can I write and service when M$ DRM gimps BIOS so that nothing but their junk will run on affordable hardware? Would my knowing some business school jazz like help me out when the law is keeping me form doing what other people would pay me to do?
I'd say 100% of the people cheering DMCA are astroturfers from the Linux Jihad or some other such stupid organization. This story has more 400 comments and it's only two hours old.
Don't forget that you can plug it in to windoze too. Wonderful.
$300 for DRM blighted music player
$200 for buggy DRM, spyware, malware blighted OS.
Real, a no cost download. What a bargain.
Just running Linux on your desktop and handhelds instead, priceless.
Him: It was plugged in, right?
Me: Yes
Him: You saw a snake crawl down that hole and now you are going to stick your hand in it?
Me: Thinks, hmmm, he's right. Never work on anything plugged it and be careful anyway because capacitors can store enough zap to get you. Short those bitches with a screwdriver. A few seconds of caution can add years to your life.
"He can't say nuclear, that really scares me.
Sometimes a brain is really handy."
"He got that Botox"
There are plenty of other goodies and great images that roll by that had me laughing and laughing.
They need to make another one about the RIAA and the Girl Scouts singing "America the Beautiful". If culture can't be used for fun, what good is it? If this constitutes a republication or public performance of someone else's work, I'm going to burn all my Puff Daddy CDs in protest.
The driver says he was not watching it, but he's been charged with negligence by people who say he must have been. That's kind of like saying that you, penguinboy, must have been compiling a kernel when you had that wreck because your laptop was on the seat. That people might actually listen to music on a DVD does not enter most people's wooden heads yet.
National headlines have presumed this man guilty of grossly negligent behavior and idiots all around the world want to hang him for murder. Watch out!
Next time, try to think of something better to piss people off with. Ignorance of technology and it's uses are bothersome, but easy to cure.
PS - The Department of Homeland Security (TM) will not allow you to interfere with the normally scheduled Hollywood Brainwash (TM).
No one does. Because they can get better performance for less money they will.
Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to die. They can jump on Linux and die later or ignore the next big thing and die sooner. Their favorite option three is to finish their DRM legal work and nationalize software.
Look, ass, I've seen the environment I'm talking about first hand. Yes, I've also seen Outlook auto rooted, with no action on my part. The stupid exchange "admin" did not believe what I said and had to do it for herself. After seeing it, she still did not understand the magnitude of what she had witnessed, saying "I get those all the time, it's part of normal advertising." Yep, she had remote access to everyone in the company's desktop and had her own machine rooted out already. The only thing dumber than Outlook was the person who recommended and oversaw it. I don't have those problems.
Last I looked (and I use Evolution really) KMail lets me save attached files just fine, regardless of what they contain. And then I can open them by double-clicking on them in Nautilus.
But they are not executables and they won't run. You might have an exploit for a particular program, but there's no such thing as MyDumb for Linux.
Here's a post with a little thought in it. It's not the user, it's M$'s crappy software. The long and complicated steps you talk about are not found in fsecure's description, so I have no idea what user intervention you are talking about. I'm also used to the variants boing full auto more than I'm used to them depending on some poor hapless user pulling ROT13.
So enlighten us. How would you have handled this in your hypothetical email client that engineers user stupidity away. I'll even let you pick the OS you'll be running it on so you don't have to be saddled by the deficiencies of "Windoze".
Users trained to click things all day are not stupid, their software is. Kmail on any OS only hands files to clients for viewing. The long chain of exploits are missing there and you don't know what client my users have for a given file type. Files are never saved with executable permission turned on. There is no system wide registry for you to hide in. The list of dumb stuff M$ did to make this possible goes on. The most important thing is that my users are not conditioned to click things without reading them. Free software users don't see many "I submit" buttons and stupid workarounds to Windoze's core inability to easily share work.
Hows that for a ray of sunshine? You need to get out more.
Witness the marvel of the Windoze desktop. First, there's the plethora of technical BS admins try to cram into their user's heads via ... popup messages that must be clicked "OK" for the user to do even simple tasks. The average corporate user also suffers a veritable flood of "communist propaganda" to their inboxes, which must be read for fear of missing something important, much of it attachments. The company and M$ has trained them to click without reading, so you are surprised how? Then there's double extensions, extension hiding and all the dozens of "executable" extensions to keep up with! Even users with a clue have a hard time. Between that environment and the stupid way Outlook runs as root and can write to system folders, you get MyDoom internet storms. You don't have to be an idiot to get viruses on Windoze, you have to be a fucking genius to avoid them.
Fsecure is still up and has a reasonable description of how this M$ carried dissease gets around. It's a little dated and for this one menace there dozens of versions that have gone full auto by taking advantage of other holes, like download.ject did. Oh well.
The real idiots are administrators who still recommend the same platform for their place of work that's caused them all of these problems. How many times are YOU going to be fooled? It's not convincing your users.
Yeah, I've already gotten one of these messages from GEmail, claiming I'm a Penske user. Spam bombardment is also up dramatically. I'm sure I'll get plenty more. This kind of robot generated crap flood is just not funny.
I've heard most of this stuff for years. Some of the user interface issues were once true, but they are no longer. Gnome back in 1998 was about as good and in many ways better than Windows 98. The people in Redmond would love for free software users to read this kind of tripe and n
Sun endorsement, not. The author calls Sun's straight forward description bragging, "With that type of bragging I couldn?t resist." Says, "the SuSE installation process is nearly perfect," as if you have to install on a computer bought at Walmart and as if Windoze installs are "perfect". Then this slam, "The laptop installation was another story. It seems the version of SuSE that was used is old ? and getting older all the time. ... Nothing worked. " And, of course, the best is yet to come, " The next versions of JDS could be extremely interesting." That's hardly a ringing endorsement. If the author had written as candidly about an XP install, he'd have been fired.
Lindows endorsement, no, more FUD. I don't even want to read an article that's titled "Getting Better". It goes on to complain about "room for improvement", that it was slow, blah blah blah. The author goes on to complain that it can't do VPN and a host of other things that's just plain bullshit as free software's networking capability blows Windoze away. This article rings more like another ringing endorsement of Winblows to me. Of course, the right distro to try Linux with is a live CD such as Knoppix or Mepis. Both of them are available as free downloads and neither touch your computer till you tell them too. To recommend Linsows over such things is incompetence or malice.
The "Open Source" on the server article is SCO style FUD at it's finest, "The communal aspects of open source can lead to thorny legal questions, particularly when a company claims its proprietary code has seeped into a project. Because developers typically don't offer warranties, end users could be held liable for infringements." Blah, blah, clueless bullshit that at no point recommends free software over M$ cruft, especially on the desktop.
Your final article, about how "biodiversity analogy has it's limits", is a defense of M$'s pathetic security record. It attempts to blame all the problems M$ is having on it's popularity instead of on poor design. While you might consider this to be unflattering to M$ because it admits to problems, it's highly deferential in the way it explains and denigrates the extent of those problems. An honest reporter would note that the same kinds of exploits have been happening across all versions of M$ since people were silly enough to connect that junk to the internet.
The titles of those articles are provocative, but the contents are M$ party line, FUD and nonsense. The truth of the matter is that free software installs easier, runs better, is easier to use and costs less than M$ crap. MSNBC is oblivious to these facts or you can't find the articles. Try again please.
What you have passed is black, but it does not caw. Check the dates on those articles. The Slate article was published June 30th. Your MSNBC article was posted July 7th, two days after the Slashdot attention to the Slate article and probably after Uncle Sam was recommending the same. It's possible that all of them picked up on the Slate suggestion and took it as a M$ endorsement.
That one article is not much to crow about. Can you find me something else? They still don't admit that a user can do without M$ and recommends that people keep their IE handy. I'm getting tired of M$ humble pie, surely you trolls and apologists can do better than that.
Like all those other profitable things they have sold off? I can't think of one, can you? It might be nice if they sold off Office or their OS, the only things they have that make money. It might also be nice if they decided that they were an obsolete hindrance and disbanded giving all their shareholders the $6/share that $54 billion dollars represented.
Show me one MSNBC article that recommends anything but M$ garbage. Everything I read about computers from them looks like it got scrubbed by M$'s PR people if it was not written by them in the first place. It's hard for them to not report on multi-billion dollar M$ vectors rolling around, but they never come out and blame M$ for the problems and never recommend that anyone use anything else. Heck, I don't think I've seen so much as a M$NBC Mac hardware review.
Recommending an alternate browser would be the equivalent of posting pictures of Macs on your blog or walking around campus with a Mac. You might recall unpleasant stories about people who made those mistakes.
I can imagine the conversation was like this:
Assistant: Mr. Gates, someone at Slate wrote an article recommending people use Mozilla.
Bill Gates: That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Fire the asshole! His editor too. What kind of idiots do we have over there? Shit, just sell the whole thing.
Ass: I'll talk to the lawyers.
The first mistake, of course, is working for M$.
Their priority is to pave the way for "legitimate" unsolicited commercial email and control of the that definition. They have argued at length that their spam is legitimate but others are not. That would be part of the exclusion that RMS is talking about and it's ultimate goal, control and the fees you can collect with that control.
I would not attribute good faith to a company that has so often demonstrated such bad faith.
I tried to run bash on a windoze box, but it could not find the command.
Microsoft is an embarrassment and nothing can be more annoying than using it on a daily basis except having to babysit people who forced to use it. It's a losing game that makes you a liar.
As for medicine, law, and banking, maybe you just haven't been out in the real world much. Plenty of doctors, bankers, and lawyers are royal pains and too annoying to deal with.
I don't have a problem like that nor do most people. The only consistent element of all your unsatisfying relationships is you.
Oh, was it that easy, hacking the Windoze registry via some dinkypoo remote desktop? How many times do you have to reboot and pray it comes back up? Why don't people actually do this instead of walking down to the user's desk. If what you say is true, fortune 500 companies would not waste money walking techs around.
Then again, they are running windoze, so they must be stupid.