ME worked if you got it on a new computer and you will still come across machines running it, despite the fact that few people bought it. My mom used it for five years and only replaced it when she bought a new laptop. Vista is more than a sales dissaster.
Read the polls for yourself, more people think the Earth orbits the Sun than think anyone in IT is honest. The number of people who trust software and hardware makers took a big drop in 2007.
Adblock, or that 80% of Slashdot readers are GNU/Linux users and that even the biggest Vista fanboy here would not install software served in a popup and they trouble themselves with a monthly wipe and reloads for that fresh M$ smell.
It's a non free software problem. Free software users don't have to download software from untrusted third parties. No closed source software can be trusted, so Windoze users who don't get software from Snopes ads should not feel so smug. There is very little difference between M$ and Zango.
surfing outside our informed group here, websites talk about recent fantastic record results and outlooks for Microsoft, among other things fueled by strong Windows growth.... where do they get there information from.
Yes, some news sources take what M$ says at face value. Outside M$NBC and the Wintel press, there's not many of them.
One of the more interesting, but old, trick M$ pulled over the year was to delay $1 billion dollars in revenue. The excuse was the late start of Vista last year. The delay makes it look like they were having a surge of profit (3.6 becomes 4.7) instead of the flat performance of reality. Vista sales were actually falling while M$ proclaimed strength and growth and backed it with phony profit statements. This is par for the M$ PR team but most people would consider it fraud.
Awww, come on AC, you can be my friend. I know you read everything I write and are my biggest fan. What's keeping you from pushing that little button and sharing your true love?
Yet XP has been pushed onto home and business users alike. If XP is the successor to ME, then everyone has been forced to take M$'s very worst. That's the way a monopoly market works isn't it? If you want to see real differences in software aimed at real categories of users you have to look at a really free market. Today's M$ choices are as trivial as branding on US automobiles, exactly the same obsolete engine and body designs with different stickers, paint and price tags. The major new feature of Vista was digital restrictions that no one wanted.
Every M$ change since the mid 90s has been M$ tightening their monopoly grip. The M$ branching of the early 90s was the result of real competition in the non free software world which is now largely extinct. The Win98 register has been followed by WGA and network enabled kill switches. This kind of spy and malware has always been written into M$ EULAs but they now have the technical mechanisms to enforce them. Proof of M$ code recycling can be found in any listing M$ OS remote exploits. Invariably these hit many versions of M$ that the reporting site cares to list because the binaries are largely unchanged i386 junk. They can't afford a rewrite.
M$'s cash has been flowing out at $10 billion a year. At that rate, they have two years to zero. If they had spent that money on code instead of their billion dollar a month marketing blitz, they might have a competitive product. They did not, so they don't. Good riddance.
I'd rather the energy was put into GNU/Linux. Most Windoze users will take years to embrace KDE but the trolls will call GNU/Linux a "second class citizen" as the Ars author did because Windoze and OSX users could run newwer code from easy to install binaries. KDE 4.0 will take time to get into stable distributions. Had the effort been spent on GNU/Linux, KDE 4.0 would all be in Debian testing already. Right now, it requires unstable archives. While that's a better performer than any version of Winblows, it's more effort than I'm willing to go to. I'd rather the effort was taken to shoring up some bugs in KDE 3.5 and getting 4.0 out the door. The more comfortable you make people in their slavery, the longer they will stay there.
First, who cares if Yahoo patents some tiny area? This patent is so specific that few will ever feel the need to violate it. Second, this patent sucks because it's a software patent, not because it's obvious.
We should all care because it wipes out a lot of good software. Context sensitive drag and drop is obvious and Konqueror, for example, makes extensive use of the concept. Menu options change based on file types and associations. Files dropped to players play, dropped to file managers produce a menu about move, copy or link. Even if you buy into the foolish notion of software patents, you should hate this one because it's obvious and there's lots of prior art.
Things stop working. Really, running Firefox won't keep M$ from swapping system files around. Everytime that happens, some non free piece of code that someone considers vital is going to be broken. That's why sysadmins at big companies waste all sorts of time testing out these updates before rolling them out. For home users the situation is more dire. Bit rot is inevitable and sooner or later their computers don't work at all.
Things are much better in the free software world, where things are tested and can easily be fixed before being pushed onto the public. Things are broken from time to time but those are exceptions that prove the rule. Reasonable standards and excellent package management take the dread out of updates and software experimentation. Knowing you can install and rip software out, even kernels, without much harm is one of the great advantages of free software.
Time Warner intends to offer plans priced for up to 5, 10, 20, and 40 gigabytes per month, with middle-tiered plans running roughly the same amount average users currently pay for high-speed connections. (Time Warner offers high-speed plans for $29.95 a month in some areas.)
That means movies downloaded will cost you about $10 each, significantly more than the nearest competition which is movie rental. Think about that, you can only watch five or six hours of good quality video a month via internet.
What this means is that TW and the MAFIAA have effectively countered internet media competition. While places like Japan have laid fiber networks, our ISPs have intentionally held back broadband deployment and spent your money on their profits and performance degrading filtering equipment. There are now 25 countries with better networks than ours. The capacity really is there on US cable networks, but it's all wastefully dedicated to broadcasts that mostly go unwatched. TW and other ISPs are rocketing us back to the bad old days of pay per minute access, all so incumbents can keep their positions. Internet radio has been crushed by Sound Exchange and mandatory fees. Content filtering threatens to exterminate Google and the extensive collection of news and media supported by adverts. When it's all said and done, TW's network will look a lot like cable TV does now. This was their intention when they bought AOL.
The effect on the economy will likely cause a recession. Lots of money is tied up in new businesses that would work if the US had a reasonable internet. All other businesses will feel the pinch of high telco costs and slow, unreliable networks. People at TW and other major ISPs should be facing anti-trust, bribery and negligence charges.
The information clampdown comes from the top and it's root is corruption. Government scientists are all to happy to publish their findings but have been threatened when those findings goes against administration and industrial goals. They are hiding evidence of collusion with big oil and auto makers. If you were free to look back at their records you would see step changes in their publications that accompany high level appointments. GWB claims he has already reduced emissions. That's true, but he backed off more stringent requirements and those requirements were justified by previous, slightly less corrupt administration.
The big picture is that auto makers are right back where they were in the early 70's, pushing big, dangerous and gas guzzling cars. Curb weights have finally matched or exceeded those of late 70's cars. Typical SUVs, like the Jeep Cheroce, get 16 MPG or worse.
Just as it was back then, we have an oil crisis. The automakers themselves are huge money losers but big oil is laughing all the way to the bank with year after year of "best year ever" profits. Despite year after year of best year ever production to match, the price of oil has caught up with it's late 70's inflation value and gasoline is headed for $5/gallon. Everyone driving those clunkers has the blood of US servicemen and innocent Iraqi citizens on their hands. As the price of energy goes up, the already faltering US economy looks ready to fall on it's ass.
The point of corruption is to make money at the expense of others. That money has been made and more will come as people default on their home loans. Pushed too far, all but the ultra rich will take a bath. We are dangerously close to that bath.
[won't power down because electricity is cheap and] Sorry, i'm not a treehugger.
It's about not having to waste money and lives conquering oil rich nations and not fucking up the climate in ways that will really cost you. More US citizens have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. The US invasion purposely and accidently killed more than 600,000 Iraq citizens and turned millions more into refugees. Large parts of the US are suffering the worst droughts since the dust bowl. Tropical disseases are already encroaching into the US. Wasteful policies are short sighted and stupid.
I meant the lock in game. The tactics are different but the idea is the same: the social networking company owns the contacts and the data.
How can you even think like that? M$ can break your client on 80% of desktops at anytime with an autoupdate. M$'s crappy protocols have to be reverse engineered so that it's hard for others to implement them. No other company has both the malice and power that M$ combines. Even TW/AOL is moving to jabber. M$ is not fighting for your info, they already have that with Winblows. M$ is fighting to expand it's dominant position into yet another "proffit center".
Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
Your neighbors are not the problem. New charges just mean you will be paying more. Monopolies do that kind of thing without rolling out better service. The real problem is that you don't have competition for your money.
It's disturbing that charges of corruption will impede honest regulation. Someone guilty need to be fined and jailed for "filtering", wiretapping and bribery.
Shuttle is smart and will have a hard time losing money on this. GNU/Linux enthusiasts will buy machines for servers if the Windoze users don't migrate. It's all about Vista baby, thanks M$!
Windows users want to replace their aging XP rigs and represent a huge market. They have put off new hardware purchases for ever. Cheap GNU/Linux machines give them a relatively risk free alternative to the Vista dissaster. They can try it out and load it with XP if they don't like it. Most people will be happy as long as they get their email, chat and YouTube.
It does look tempting as a network device. Shuttle makes small, quite computers. I'll wait to see if ARM based machines become more common (even cheaper) and put a free OS on that to save even more power. As always, I can move my hard drives and have more than enough capacity. Everything I've got works well so I'm not in a rush.
If a file sharer can lose their house for "making available" twenty songs, network chiefs can pay the same price for such a blatant rip off. No actual damage was done in one case, but the other leveraged public broadcasting to publically humiliate private individuals. A swank mansion would go a long way to make those people feel better, but the yacht and golf club membership will fix things right. It would be nice to see people punished for greed instead of ruined for sharing.
Everyone has noticed that Vista sucks, one wants it and is hurting PC sales, but this article puts it into perspective. Despite PC sales being double what they were in 2001, the Vista only sales hurt vendors so much that they had to offer buyers a difficult to find choice of XP and even more difficult to find GNU/Linux choice. Users then flooded into those hard to find choices. You can only wonder what sales would have looked like if they had not offered choices or if real choices were allowed.
Thanks again astroturfing trolls, for holding me a nice spot in this conversation. I don't like what you have to say, which is why I did not mention any of it.
you can outsource whatever you like as long as you have the proper contractual language and the outsourcer takes appropriate action/care with the data.
You will always need someone like yourself to make sure things are "proper". There are things that lawyers don't know and those technical details makes a difference. You also need someone to deal with things that really can't be trusted outside the company.
You also need to maintain the physical plant, and it's here that the M$ people get angry because the author is really talking about them. Even while doing exactly the same tasks as a Unix shop, they require 5 times as many people but not all of those tasks are needed. People need computers, but they don't need the M$ upgrade train wreck. Most of the really needed tasks, like custom data analysis, can be done with any tool but are better done with free tools. Instead, people waste their time fighting M$'s formats and failures. IT will survive as a career path, but monkey boy patching and M$ specific crap is going to go as people escape the M$ monopoly.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux.
What does your student's GNU/Linux preference have to do with getting your work done? As long as you can exchange files with them everything should be cool. I can understand how Windoze users and the impossible myriad of application/OS combinations is a drag, but OSX and GNU/Linux get along fine for the most part. You should be able to standardize things around web service, sftp, Open Office, latex and other common things.
This comment states that Vista is inevitable in the same way that GM is thriving because it's hard to find parts for older GM cars. Me thinks Vista is not inevitable.
This dullard fails to realize the weakness of IE7 when confronted with 37% IE7 vrs 36% Firefox use on a Windoze heavy site that should see 100% IE use. Firefox is impossible to ignore and is the major browser many sites will see despite a Windoze Update forced upgrade.
There are a ton of Astroturf posts about how Vista is not really so bad and should be used, how the browser stats are flawed and the usual garbage claiming that no one uses GNU/Linux and it sucks. All of that is now far below this because the PR crap flood pushes everything down. Ha ha, PR losers even your dirty marketing tricks are second rate. I too, "penis all over your fp. Bitch". Thanks for saving me a place in the discussion thread.
Polar Oposites. M$ Must Be Destroyed.
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: -1, Troll
To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is
That would be fair if M$ Word were developed in public as free software. It's not, which is why RTF, DOC and now OOXML (aka MSXML) were not and will not ever be standards that other people can use. They never were and never will be fully documented. The MSXML saga is proof positive that M$ has no intentions of playing nice, is still at war with reasonable standards and will to commit any crime to win. If you want a change just use software, where everything really is documented.
Slashdot Mirror
ME worked if you got it on a new computer and you will still come across machines running it, despite the fact that few people bought it. My mom used it for five years and only replaced it when she bought a new laptop. Vista is more than a sales dissaster.
Read the polls for yourself, more people think the Earth orbits the Sun than think anyone in IT is honest. The number of people who trust software and hardware makers took a big drop in 2007.
Adblock, or that 80% of Slashdot readers are GNU/Linux users and that even the biggest Vista fanboy here would not install software served in a popup and they trouble themselves with a monthly wipe and reloads for that fresh M$ smell.
It's a non free software problem. Free software users don't have to download software from untrusted third parties. No closed source software can be trusted, so Windoze users who don't get software from Snopes ads should not feel so smug. There is very little difference between M$ and Zango.
surfing outside our informed group here, websites talk about recent fantastic record results and outlooks for Microsoft, among other things fueled by strong Windows growth. ... where do they get there information from.
Yes, some news sources take what M$ says at face value. Outside M$NBC and the Wintel press, there's not many of them.
One of the more interesting, but old, trick M$ pulled over the year was to delay $1 billion dollars in revenue. The excuse was the late start of Vista last year. The delay makes it look like they were having a surge of profit (3.6 becomes 4.7) instead of the flat performance of reality. Vista sales were actually falling while M$ proclaimed strength and growth and backed it with phony profit statements. This is par for the M$ PR team but most people would consider it fraud.
Sorry AC but Vista is a failure.
Awww, come on AC, you can be my friend. I know you read everything I write and are my biggest fan. What's keeping you from pushing that little button and sharing your true love?
Yet XP has been pushed onto home and business users alike. If XP is the successor to ME, then everyone has been forced to take M$'s very worst. That's the way a monopoly market works isn't it? If you want to see real differences in software aimed at real categories of users you have to look at a really free market. Today's M$ choices are as trivial as branding on US automobiles, exactly the same obsolete engine and body designs with different stickers, paint and price tags. The major new feature of Vista was digital restrictions that no one wanted.
Every M$ change since the mid 90s has been M$ tightening their monopoly grip. The M$ branching of the early 90s was the result of real competition in the non free software world which is now largely extinct. The Win98 register has been followed by WGA and network enabled kill switches. This kind of spy and malware has always been written into M$ EULAs but they now have the technical mechanisms to enforce them. Proof of M$ code recycling can be found in any listing M$ OS remote exploits. Invariably these hit many versions of M$ that the reporting site cares to list because the binaries are largely unchanged i386 junk. They can't afford a rewrite.
M$'s cash has been flowing out at $10 billion a year. At that rate, they have two years to zero. If they had spent that money on code instead of their billion dollar a month marketing blitz, they might have a competitive product. They did not, so they don't. Good riddance.
I'd rather the energy was put into GNU/Linux. Most Windoze users will take years to embrace KDE but the trolls will call GNU/Linux a "second class citizen" as the Ars author did because Windoze and OSX users could run newwer code from easy to install binaries. KDE 4.0 will take time to get into stable distributions. Had the effort been spent on GNU/Linux, KDE 4.0 would all be in Debian testing already. Right now, it requires unstable archives. While that's a better performer than any version of Winblows, it's more effort than I'm willing to go to. I'd rather the effort was taken to shoring up some bugs in KDE 3.5 and getting 4.0 out the door. The more comfortable you make people in their slavery, the longer they will stay there.
Yes, they are know it's a failure like ME was.
First, who cares if Yahoo patents some tiny area? This patent is so specific that few will ever feel the need to violate it. Second, this patent sucks because it's a software patent, not because it's obvious.
We should all care because it wipes out a lot of good software. Context sensitive drag and drop is obvious and Konqueror, for example, makes extensive use of the concept. Menu options change based on file types and associations. Files dropped to players play, dropped to file managers produce a menu about move, copy or link. Even if you buy into the foolish notion of software patents, you should hate this one because it's obvious and there's lots of prior art.
Things stop working. Really, running Firefox won't keep M$ from swapping system files around. Everytime that happens, some non free piece of code that someone considers vital is going to be broken. That's why sysadmins at big companies waste all sorts of time testing out these updates before rolling them out. For home users the situation is more dire. Bit rot is inevitable and sooner or later their computers don't work at all.
Things are much better in the free software world, where things are tested and can easily be fixed before being pushed onto the public. Things are broken from time to time but those are exceptions that prove the rule. Reasonable standards and excellent package management take the dread out of updates and software experimentation. Knowing you can install and rip software out, even kernels, without much harm is one of the great advantages of free software.
Business Week has numbers today
:That means movies downloaded will cost you about $10 each, significantly more than the nearest competition which is movie rental. Think about that, you can only watch five or six hours of good quality video a month via internet.
What this means is that TW and the MAFIAA have effectively countered internet media competition. While places like Japan have laid fiber networks, our ISPs have intentionally held back broadband deployment and spent your money on their profits and performance degrading filtering equipment. There are now 25 countries with better networks than ours. The capacity really is there on US cable networks, but it's all wastefully dedicated to broadcasts that mostly go unwatched. TW and other ISPs are rocketing us back to the bad old days of pay per minute access, all so incumbents can keep their positions. Internet radio has been crushed by Sound Exchange and mandatory fees. Content filtering threatens to exterminate Google and the extensive collection of news and media supported by adverts. When it's all said and done, TW's network will look a lot like cable TV does now. This was their intention when they bought AOL.
The effect on the economy will likely cause a recession. Lots of money is tied up in new businesses that would work if the US had a reasonable internet. All other businesses will feel the pinch of high telco costs and slow, unreliable networks. People at TW and other major ISPs should be facing anti-trust, bribery and negligence charges.
The information clampdown comes from the top and it's root is corruption. Government scientists are all to happy to publish their findings but have been threatened when those findings goes against administration and industrial goals. They are hiding evidence of collusion with big oil and auto makers. If you were free to look back at their records you would see step changes in their publications that accompany high level appointments. GWB claims he has already reduced emissions. That's true, but he backed off more stringent requirements and those requirements were justified by previous, slightly less corrupt administration.
The big picture is that auto makers are right back where they were in the early 70's, pushing big, dangerous and gas guzzling cars. Curb weights have finally matched or exceeded those of late 70's cars. Typical SUVs, like the Jeep Cheroce, get 16 MPG or worse.
Just as it was back then, we have an oil crisis. The automakers themselves are huge money losers but big oil is laughing all the way to the bank with year after year of "best year ever" profits. Despite year after year of best year ever production to match, the price of oil has caught up with it's late 70's inflation value and gasoline is headed for $5/gallon. Everyone driving those clunkers has the blood of US servicemen and innocent Iraqi citizens on their hands. As the price of energy goes up, the already faltering US economy looks ready to fall on it's ass.
The point of corruption is to make money at the expense of others. That money has been made and more will come as people default on their home loans. Pushed too far, all but the ultra rich will take a bath. We are dangerously close to that bath.
[won't power down because electricity is cheap and] Sorry, i'm not a treehugger.
It's about not having to waste money and lives conquering oil rich nations and not fucking up the climate in ways that will really cost you. More US citizens have died in Iraq than died on 9/11. The US invasion purposely and accidently killed more than 600,000 Iraq citizens and turned millions more into refugees. Large parts of the US are suffering the worst droughts since the dust bowl. Tropical disseases are already encroaching into the US. Wasteful policies are short sighted and stupid.
I meant the lock in game. The tactics are different but the idea is the same: the social networking company owns the contacts and the data.
How can you even think like that? M$ can break your client on 80% of desktops at anytime with an autoupdate. M$'s crappy protocols have to be reverse engineered so that it's hard for others to implement them. No other company has both the malice and power that M$ combines. Even TW/AOL is moving to jabber. M$ is not fighting for your info, they already have that with Winblows. M$ is fighting to expand it's dominant position into yet another "proffit center".
Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
Your neighbors are not the problem. New charges just mean you will be paying more. Monopolies do that kind of thing without rolling out better service. The real problem is that you don't have competition for your money.
Really, it's not funny. Be prepared to drive and walk to Canada or Mexico to escape.
It's disturbing that charges of corruption will impede honest regulation. Someone guilty need to be fined and jailed for "filtering", wiretapping and bribery.
Shuttle is smart and will have a hard time losing money on this. GNU/Linux enthusiasts will buy machines for servers if the Windoze users don't migrate. It's all about Vista baby, thanks M$!
Windows users want to replace their aging XP rigs and represent a huge market. They have put off new hardware purchases for ever. Cheap GNU/Linux machines give them a relatively risk free alternative to the Vista dissaster. They can try it out and load it with XP if they don't like it. Most people will be happy as long as they get their email, chat and YouTube.
It does look tempting as a network device. Shuttle makes small, quite computers. I'll wait to see if ARM based machines become more common (even cheaper) and put a free OS on that to save even more power. As always, I can move my hard drives and have more than enough capacity. Everything I've got works well so I'm not in a rush.
If a file sharer can lose their house for "making available" twenty songs, network chiefs can pay the same price for such a blatant rip off. No actual damage was done in one case, but the other leveraged public broadcasting to publically humiliate private individuals. A swank mansion would go a long way to make those people feel better, but the yacht and golf club membership will fix things right. It would be nice to see people punished for greed instead of ruined for sharing.
Everyone has noticed that Vista sucks, one wants it and is hurting PC sales, but this article puts it into perspective. Despite PC sales being double what they were in 2001, the Vista only sales hurt vendors so much that they had to offer buyers a difficult to find choice of XP and even more difficult to find GNU/Linux choice. Users then flooded into those hard to find choices. You can only wonder what sales would have looked like if they had not offered choices or if real choices were allowed.
Thanks again astroturfing trolls, for holding me a nice spot in this conversation. I don't like what you have to say, which is why I did not mention any of it.
you can outsource whatever you like as long as you have the proper contractual language and the outsourcer takes appropriate action/care with the data.
You will always need someone like yourself to make sure things are "proper". There are things that lawyers don't know and those technical details makes a difference. You also need someone to deal with things that really can't be trusted outside the company.
You also need to maintain the physical plant, and it's here that the M$ people get angry because the author is really talking about them. Even while doing exactly the same tasks as a Unix shop, they require 5 times as many people but not all of those tasks are needed. People need computers, but they don't need the M$ upgrade train wreck. Most of the really needed tasks, like custom data analysis, can be done with any tool but are better done with free tools. Instead, people waste their time fighting M$'s formats and failures. IT will survive as a career path, but monkey boy patching and M$ specific crap is going to go as people escape the M$ monopoly.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux.
What does your student's GNU/Linux preference have to do with getting your work done? As long as you can exchange files with them everything should be cool. I can understand how Windoze users and the impossible myriad of application/OS combinations is a drag, but OSX and GNU/Linux get along fine for the most part. You should be able to standardize things around web service, sftp, Open Office, latex and other common things.
Vista's weakness and Firefox's strength both mean the same thing: M$ can't compete. Here are some of the more interesting comments in the thread:
There are a ton of Astroturf posts about how Vista is not really so bad and should be used, how the browser stats are flawed and the usual garbage claiming that no one uses GNU/Linux and it sucks. All of that is now far below this because the PR crap flood pushes everything down. Ha ha, PR losers even your dirty marketing tricks are second rate. I too, "penis all over your fp. Bitch". Thanks for saving me a place in the discussion thread.
To be fair, ODF started out as a documentation of the 'StarOffice XML' format. And it still pretty much is
That would be fair if M$ Word were developed in public as free software. It's not, which is why RTF, DOC and now OOXML (aka MSXML) were not and will not ever be standards that other people can use. They never were and never will be fully documented. The MSXML saga is proof positive that M$ has no intentions of playing nice, is still at war with reasonable standards and will to commit any crime to win. If you want a change just use software, where everything really is documented.