What the crap have they been doing for the last THREE years? Playing Halo?
I had to violate the DMCA and commit several other computer laws to get this patented list off a senior designer's Palm Pilot. Several free electrons died for it:
FUD competition
troll slashdot
integrate browser into BIOS and DRM.
integrate newly aquired java code but don't tell anyone
All of the IE engineers should have a twelve-year-old kid use their computer at night while they're out of the office. Maybe after uninstalling a few thousand pieces of spyware they'll reconsider some of their basic design choices.
They might have time for such a bold experiment if they were not so busy removing spyware. If they used a more productive platform such as KDE, IE might have tabbed browsing by next year.
Let's compare IE to free browsers, shall we? Single window, no tabs, no pop-up blocking, these are a given. For a long time, they were shipping without Java. Now they've had to turn off Active-X, their wanna be Java replacement. CSS support is supposed to be misserable. What's left?
Get the new Debian installer. Sarge will run well on that machine with just 32MB more memory and will probably run fine without it. I did it last week. You get KDE 3.2, which is a better interface than Windoze, and it runs reasonably. You get the excellent Konqueror browser and Kmail both with spell checking. Open Office might be a pain to run, but it installs. Just tell people to send you plain text instead of LEGACY.DOC garbage.
If KDE won't run reasonably in 32MB of RAM, go ahead and install Window Maker or Fluxbox and use packages selected by Feather Linux. The extra RAM is worth purchasing and much cheaper than the kind of hardware you need to run XP.
Microsoft ain't lazy! Hey, at least they write their own stuff. Torvald$ had to steal his code from Minix, I heard. Plus you have the whole thing with IBM taking SCO's intellectual property and mi$appropriating it into the Linux kernel. How are real software companies to survive while lazy open source thieves are stealing the fruits of their labor?
Microsoft went up a minimum 10,000% (and around 50,000% during the dot-com peak) during the 90's. It has been one of the best investments in the last few decades (possibly one of the best of all time). So you are wrong; MS made a ton of money for investors.
You need to be more precise. The ballpark estimate is a clear loser for Microsoft investors.
A tenfold advance in "value" over twenty years is not very good if the actual valuation is about 25% of current market value. Any investment should more than double in ten years given average inflation. Over twenty years, that's a four fold increase. If M$'s current "value" is $27 and that represents a tenfold advance, but the worth is $6 investors have lost their shirts on M$ and would have at least $12 from government bonds. These losses would have been offset, had Microsoft done the honest thing and payed divedens. The assets on hand do not cover the investment people have made. The only people who did well are those who speculated early and sold high.
Precise numbers might prove me wrong but "Best Investment Ever!" rings about as true as "Best Software Ever!" and "Best Place to Work Ever!". It's a bitch how one or two little lies can discount everything you say, isn't it?
The resulting fray ends with a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies. Lawsuit over.
The lawsuit is judicial extortion, given the insane set of laws and practices of the patent office. Microsoft has consistently used the cost of these kinds of suits to intimidate competitors. It's part of the deal you can't refuse when they decide to get into your market.
An excellent example is their buyout of archival software under their platform. I was a fan of Fast-back, which was one of the best and located in my home state.
Bogus patents on long filenames are a good example of how M$ plans to block free software from interacting with their file systems. Their kludges to their inadequate file systems hardly merit the name "invention" and don't rate a patent. Their submarining the issue for a decade is another clue to their ill intent. If I have to "license" the ability to read M$ junk, then I can't share it with my friends and free software won't be able to do this in the future. The DMCA can come to their rescue on this one and make sure that free software is no longer a competitive threat.
If those things are not M$ using copyright and patent powers that they have worked to build for themselves, I don't know what is.
Writing M$ is always a sure sign of maturity. Go back to reading your tentacle porn books, you fucking nerd.
Constructive and polite, what a nice little troll. Why don't you you fix your problems instead of going back to playing with your Windoze and FUDding Mozilla?
I would bet that this is all temporary until things stabilize and then they will give the benefits back in some form or fashion.
The lack of growth is saturation and that's not temporary. M$ has been saying that free software is "temporary" and won't catch of forever. But it's not, the fact is that M$'s core products are being replaced.
OK, that's it you guys. No more talk of how IE is so insecure because of Microsoft's 'monoculture.'
No, IE is insecure because it's a piece of shit. Had you read the article summary, you might have noticed this is a Windoze problem:
Note that this only affects users of Mozilla and Firefox on Windows XP or Windows 2000.
The OS is a piece of shit too and you can't fix it by putting a better browser on it any more than you can make a VW bug into a Porche by upgrading the engine. As the same browser does not exhibit the same problem on other OS, you must conclude the OS is a fault, not the browser.
Apologies to VW for comparing the fine VW bug to M$'s OS.
Pull your pants up now, Captian, no one else is interested.
Just how does Mozilla/FireFox think it's going to keep malware from tricking the users into granting permission when the clueless masses come over from IE?
You can never keep employees from being tricked, but that's a data segregation and HR issue. Only give people information they need and only give sensitive information to people you know you can trust.
Running a free OS like Linux or BSD is a good start. As the current exploit shows, sticking a better browser on top of Windoze does not make it safe from auto exploits. Systems with real user level permissions and a diverse selection of software running are much safer for everyone.
Got any better ideas? Rip your network card out? Go back to IE and it's own plugin systems?
How much is Billy boy paying you to write that trash? I'll be glad when he runs out of money and you can put your greedy little head to something else. In the mean time, keep sucking.
You take something that is completely offtopic and manage to turn it into a dumb flame.
Actually, this is a good example of how M$'s poor quality can reach out and skew public perceptions. M$ has nothing to do with Biotech, I hope, but here's an article quoting people from MIT and Harvard forcasting Biological sabotage and terrorism who point to M$'s hacking record to make their point. It's trivially easy to auto-root M$. It will not be trivially easy to best nature and make diseases that kill 90% of the population, yet this is what people might be lead to believe given the analogy at hand.
So, you are telling me that without this "belt tightening" there will be no profit growth and stock prices will tank and the options pyramid will collapse? I'll bet you are right, except that the admission indicates that it's already happening.
But they take their "fiduciary responsibility" to stockholders very very seriously, and until recently (last year, this year) were among the most consistent growth stocks in business history.
Until last year, they never paid a dividend. The only people who ever made money off M$'s greed were stock market speculators. Now that the "growth" is over, they pay a pathetic little dinkle to all those who had faith. At the same time, they rewarded their executives handsomely, though their treatment of "perma-temps" is infamous. You call that responsible? That's rape all around.
When the stock crashes down to it's worth, about $6 for their assets, "investors" will be left with nothing. Don't you worry, the lawyers will get the cash. I predict that long term investors, such as pension funds and "partner companies", would have been better off with government bonds.
... Atlas Shrugged skewed my thinking, but I typically consider capable, motivated employees to be an investment, as opposed to a financial burden.
That's only true in a free market. Ask Steve Ballmer how motivating bullshit like this is. That pales in comparison to memos about "accountability", which are big dumb company speak for, "we're going to fire people, work harder." When you are using government IP laws to squash your competition and purchases to prop up your bottom line, you might get big headed. The market, however, is much freer than M$ suspects.
On perceptions of Microsoft: "... We must emphasize key positive perceptions of the strong manageability, and developer and information-worker preference, for our platform."
Sorry, that's not a perception issue and it's not one that can be changed internally. It's a quality/cost issue and they are beaten.
On avoiding the trappings of size: "Nothing solves 'big company' ills quite like a strong focus on accountability....
Notice is issued for the first round of layoffs. If firing someone for posting pictures of Apples on the loading dock is any indication of things to come, the layoffs will have nothing to do with the bottom line.
The NYT and Register also are running storries about Ballmer's unusual memo. Stock option discounts will be reduced to 10% from 15%.
Employees can clearly expect no protection from M$'s 56 billion dollars. From the NYT article:
Using some of Microsoft's $56 billion in cash to maintain worker benefits, Mr. Ballmer explained, is not an option. "The cash is the shareholders' money," he wrote, "so we need to either invest in new opportunities or return it to them."
Whack! Who would think that the company that has screwed it's investors, partners and customers would turn around and screw their employees?
Last year's hiring binge is over and the Microsoft game is very close to over. Speculation is that up to $40 billion will be used in a stock buyback to keep the options from tanking. That will leave them with about two or three quarters of operating expenses in the bank. Good riddance, IT will be a much better place without them.
The continuing problems the Internet is experiencing with computer viruses that are released secretly give some indication of the problems that synthesized self-replicating systems pose.
techstar25 echos:
If you think Microsoft is slow to release patches, imagine how long it would take the CDC to immunize everybody from a brand new man-made virus.
This is extremely misleading and alarmist. The Microsoft Monopol has been compared fairly to monoculture virus propagation. 90% of the world's personal computers use M$ and M$'s lazy closed source development model insures that each version mostly contains the same code. Flipping the analogy around is preposterous. Biology is diverse in ways that have no coding or even linguistic analogies.
I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens. Men can harness natural selection through traditional breeding. Each new tool makes breeding more powerful, but it is unlikely that any breeding project can match the scale of ordinary natural selection. Governments may be dangerous, but script kiddies will mainly be a threat to themselves. I'm far more worried about drug resistant strains evolving under the missuse of anti-biotics.
Andromida Strains, Petro-plagues, comet dust and man made viruses are good science fiction but I'm not quaking in my boots about it.
The gimp is slower and it's interface sucks. That's my opinion and don't waste your breath on a flameware.
Why mention it at all, except to infuriate people? You are entitled to your opinion, to spend your money as you wish and to run all the cracked crap you can get your hands on. Great.
I'm happy with GIMP on Linux and most people should be. If all you ever needed was Paint Shop Pro, GIMP is more than you need. GIMP 2 has most of the features people complain are missing and menus that are as easy to use as any complicated program.
Publishers and software makers know that networking is driving them to obsolescence, so don't expect their reasons to make sense. Free software is difficult to use and impossible to develop without networks. Publishers want to remain in control of distribution. The current attack on P2P is not aimed at "piracy", it's designed to change the internet itself and give control to entrenched interests. Legitimate use of networking will be overlooked and "piracy" will be exaggerated or created with astroturf.
It always baffles me why people use VNC or convoluted scripts to copy over the settings when most of the time, remote X would do the job just fine. Possibly because the man pages for X in general and remote X in particular are not meant to be read by Normal People?
I can think of two reasons, Windows and ignorance. Windoze won't do X without lots of effort and then not very well. Everyone else has not learned that ssh -X auto configures everything for you on most distributions.
Sure, I remember dealing with both. X on Windoze is a real pain. Manual X forwarding, while powerful and awesome, is also a pain. Once you find out ssh does all of that forwarding, you only look back if you want to set up multiple X servers.
Intel's effort is aimed at ignorant Windoze users. The whole feature list looks like a bad software page from Tiger Direct. The lack of privacy implied by running my life on other people's computers is really creepy. No thanks, Intel, I have your entire feature set on computers I own with software that has no owners.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to violate the DMCA and commit several other computer laws to get this patented list off a senior designer's Palm Pilot. Several free electrons died for it:
They might have time for such a bold experiment if they were not so busy removing spyware. If they used a more productive platform such as KDE, IE might have tabbed browsing by next year.
IE - java - activeX = Dillo - efficiancy
Good thing they don't charge a lot of money for it! It's "free" with your $300 purchase of an OS that has no spell checker. Ha, ha, ha.
If KDE won't run reasonably in 32MB of RAM, go ahead and install Window Maker or Fluxbox and use packages selected by Feather Linux. The extra RAM is worth purchasing and much cheaper than the kind of hardware you need to run XP.
Is that you Daryl?
You need to be more precise. The ballpark estimate is a clear loser for Microsoft investors.
A tenfold advance in "value" over twenty years is not very good if the actual valuation is about 25% of current market value. Any investment should more than double in ten years given average inflation. Over twenty years, that's a four fold increase. If M$'s current "value" is $27 and that represents a tenfold advance, but the worth is $6 investors have lost their shirts on M$ and would have at least $12 from government bonds. These losses would have been offset, had Microsoft done the honest thing and payed divedens. The assets on hand do not cover the investment people have made. The only people who did well are those who speculated early and sold high.
Precise numbers might prove me wrong but "Best Investment Ever!" rings about as true as "Best Software Ever!" and "Best Place to Work Ever!". It's a bitch how one or two little lies can discount everything you say, isn't it?
The lawsuit is judicial extortion, given the insane set of laws and practices of the patent office. Microsoft has consistently used the cost of these kinds of suits to intimidate competitors. It's part of the deal you can't refuse when they decide to get into your market.
An excellent example is their buyout of archival software under their platform. I was a fan of Fast-back, which was one of the best and located in my home state.
Bogus patents on long filenames are a good example of how M$ plans to block free software from interacting with their file systems. Their kludges to their inadequate file systems hardly merit the name "invention" and don't rate a patent. Their submarining the issue for a decade is another clue to their ill intent. If I have to "license" the ability to read M$ junk, then I can't share it with my friends and free software won't be able to do this in the future. The DMCA can come to their rescue on this one and make sure that free software is no longer a competitive threat.
If those things are not M$ using copyright and patent powers that they have worked to build for themselves, I don't know what is.
yep, thanks.
Constructive and polite, what a nice little troll. Why don't you you fix your problems instead of going back to playing with your Windoze and FUDding Mozilla?
The lack of growth is saturation and that's not temporary. M$ has been saying that free software is "temporary" and won't catch of forever. But it's not, the fact is that M$'s core products are being replaced.
Is such a thing possible on a single user mode OS like Windoze?
Nice of you to blame Mozilla, but that does not hold much water when you consider that the same browser does not have the same hole on other OS.
No, IE is insecure because it's a piece of shit. Had you read the article summary, you might have noticed this is a Windoze problem:
Note that this only affects users of Mozilla and Firefox on Windows XP or Windows 2000.
The OS is a piece of shit too and you can't fix it by putting a better browser on it any more than you can make a VW bug into a Porche by upgrading the engine. As the same browser does not exhibit the same problem on other OS, you must conclude the OS is a fault, not the browser.
Apologies to VW for comparing the fine VW bug to M$'s OS.
Pull your pants up now, Captian, no one else is interested.
You can never keep employees from being tricked, but that's a data segregation and HR issue. Only give people information they need and only give sensitive information to people you know you can trust.
Running a free OS like Linux or BSD is a good start. As the current exploit shows, sticking a better browser on top of Windoze does not make it safe from auto exploits. Systems with real user level permissions and a diverse selection of software running are much safer for everyone.
Got any better ideas? Rip your network card out? Go back to IE and it's own plugin systems?
I doubt they will block Slashdotters.
It's less effort, really it is. We now return you, of your own volition, to Windoze hell.
You take something that is completely offtopic and manage to turn it into a dumb flame.
Actually, this is a good example of how M$'s poor quality can reach out and skew public perceptions. M$ has nothing to do with Biotech, I hope, but here's an article quoting people from MIT and Harvard forcasting Biological sabotage and terrorism who point to M$'s hacking record to make their point. It's trivially easy to auto-root M$. It will not be trivially easy to best nature and make diseases that kill 90% of the population, yet this is what people might be lead to believe given the analogy at hand.
Until last year, they never paid a dividend. The only people who ever made money off M$'s greed were stock market speculators. Now that the "growth" is over, they pay a pathetic little dinkle to all those who had faith. At the same time, they rewarded their executives handsomely, though their treatment of "perma-temps" is infamous. You call that responsible? That's rape all around.
When the stock crashes down to it's worth, about $6 for their assets, "investors" will be left with nothing. Don't you worry, the lawyers will get the cash. I predict that long term investors, such as pension funds and "partner companies", would have been better off with government bonds.
That's only true in a free market. Ask Steve Ballmer how motivating bullshit like this is. That pales in comparison to memos about "accountability", which are big dumb company speak for, "we're going to fire people, work harder." When you are using government IP laws to squash your competition and purchases to prop up your bottom line, you might get big headed. The market, however, is much freer than M$ suspects.
Sorry, that's not a perception issue and it's not one that can be changed internally. It's a quality/cost issue and they are beaten.
On avoiding the trappings of size: "Nothing solves 'big company' ills quite like a strong focus on accountability ....
Notice is issued for the first round of layoffs. If firing someone for posting pictures of Apples on the loading dock is any indication of things to come, the layoffs will have nothing to do with the bottom line.
This whole memo belongs in fucked company.
Go to Munich and see how they have fallen behind. Advertising won't save them.
Employees can clearly expect no protection from M$'s 56 billion dollars. From the NYT article:
Using some of Microsoft's $56 billion in cash to maintain worker benefits, Mr. Ballmer explained, is not an option. "The cash is the shareholders' money," he wrote, "so we need to either invest in new opportunities or return it to them."
Whack! Who would think that the company that has screwed it's investors, partners and customers would turn around and screw their employees?
Last year's hiring binge is over and the Microsoft game is very close to over. Speculation is that up to $40 billion will be used in a stock buyback to keep the options from tanking. That will leave them with about two or three quarters of operating expenses in the bank. Good riddance, IT will be a much better place without them.
The continuing problems the Internet is experiencing with computer viruses that are released secretly give some indication of the problems that synthesized self-replicating systems pose.
techstar25 echos:
If you think Microsoft is slow to release patches, imagine how long it would take the CDC to immunize everybody from a brand new man-made virus.
This is extremely misleading and alarmist. The Microsoft Monopol has been compared fairly to monoculture virus propagation. 90% of the world's personal computers use M$ and M$'s lazy closed source development model insures that each version mostly contains the same code. Flipping the analogy around is preposterous. Biology is diverse in ways that have no coding or even linguistic analogies.
I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens. Men can harness natural selection through traditional breeding. Each new tool makes breeding more powerful, but it is unlikely that any breeding project can match the scale of ordinary natural selection. Governments may be dangerous, but script kiddies will mainly be a threat to themselves. I'm far more worried about drug resistant strains evolving under the missuse of anti-biotics.
Andromida Strains, Petro-plagues, comet dust and man made viruses are good science fiction but I'm not quaking in my boots about it.
Why mention it at all, except to infuriate people? You are entitled to your opinion, to spend your money as you wish and to run all the cracked crap you can get your hands on. Great.
I'm happy with GIMP on Linux and most people should be. If all you ever needed was Paint Shop Pro, GIMP is more than you need. GIMP 2 has most of the features people complain are missing and menus that are as easy to use as any complicated program.
I can think of two reasons, Windows and ignorance. Windoze won't do X without lots of effort and then not very well. Everyone else has not learned that ssh -X auto configures everything for you on most distributions.
Sure, I remember dealing with both. X on Windoze is a real pain. Manual X forwarding, while powerful and awesome, is also a pain. Once you find out ssh does all of that forwarding, you only look back if you want to set up multiple X servers.
Intel's effort is aimed at ignorant Windoze users. The whole feature list looks like a bad software page from Tiger Direct. The lack of privacy implied by running my life on other people's computers is really creepy. No thanks, Intel, I have your entire feature set on computers I own with software that has no owners.