You are right, SCO's opinions are mostly non sequitors extended from misinterpretations of the horrid reasoning that made the DMCA. In other words, poop that does not even follow other poop. Nothing new there.
I'm more concerened about "the facts". Daryl give us this promise:
the facts SCO has raised have become one of the most important and hotly debated technology issues this year, and often our positions on these issues have been misunderstood or misrepresented. Starting with this letter, I'd like to explain our positions on the key issues
I'm still waiting for them to present a single fact. Their opinions, much echoed in M$ trade rags, don't mean much without any factual support. They have yet to demonstrate a single copyright violation beside their own violation of the GPL. They have not even put forth a decent case of trade secret violation against IBM. Either of these factual issues could easily be presented in a single page of text. I'm not sure who, outide of Redmond, was impressed by Dayrl's binders of press releases at his stock holder's meeting. Not one word of any of this torrent of garbage has been used to present any real facts.
I'll tell you that.
on
AOL's $299 PC
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
You are telling me that you want people who are, almost by definition, too stupid to get a real Internet connection to have a LINUX PC? Damn, just invite the crackers to go nuts directly why don't ya?:)
Why not? It's got to be better than leaving them with XP. You can already get $200 Lindows computers at Walmart. Add a $10/month ISP and a little TLC and the user has the same thing AOL delivers for $320, less the history of bad cracks XP has.
Seriously though, these are the kind fo people who would whine about Lindows since it's different. Doesn't matter how much the same it is, they'd whine and not use it.... No man, you do NOT want these people on Linux, espically not one that is logged in as root by default.
Quit being such a snot. What I want for my clients is what my clients want. When they get tired of having their computers rooted and wrecked, I'm happy to tell them about free software, show them a Knoppix CD and let them make up their own minds. Microsoft makes the worst software on the market, bar none.
"For me it's a question of values, it's not a question of science," said commissioner Sam Schuchat. "I think selling genetically modified fish as pets is wrong."
Well, that one of three commissioners voted on his "values". Giving him the benifit of the doubt about there being no possible harm in the release of these fish, we can imagine the other two commissioners were moved by non-scientific arguments. I wish they could explain their moral delima, after all moral arguments should be reasonable rather than mindless emotional reactions.
I wish their position were better explained, but I'm afraid there is no reasonable basis for their objection. The rest of the article has some stuff about inapropriate exercise of human "power" over animals. If they realy felt that way, they might as well outlaw pet fish of any kind. I'm not aware of any pain or suffering that's special to these little genitically altered fish. If it's OK to breed goldfish simply to subject them to repulsive pet shop conditions and the ownership of 5 year olds, why not this new fish? We already tollerat the creation of pet dogs with gross and unhealthy deformaties through inbreeding, would there be any difference between that and altering the genes directly? How do these people jibe their "values" with California's abortion laws, which alow people to terminate tissue that would become a person if left alone? With one in three women in the US killing at least one of their babies, I don't understand handwringing about pet fish.
The facts are much worse than the verbal slip up. He also tried to keep it that way as long as he could. Nothing much has changed. When the 386 came out, M$ hobbled it with horid limitations by running the same old junk on it. It took ten years for them to finally catch up with it, each new OS introduced with cerimony as "the death of DOS" but each containing bits and pieces still and all a vastly overgorwn kludge. Free software, on the other hand has adopted best practices from Unix and is ported to all modern platforms, while M$ has yet to even manage a full Alpha port and did their best to kill that sorry plaform to hide their shameful failure. Pththth!
but he tried to keep it that way as long as he could.. Nothing much has changed. When the 386 came out, M$ hobbled it with horid limitations. Microsoft systems today still suffer under many of the limits imposed by 16 bit DOS as well as Intel's 10 year old 386. Free software, meanwhile, has adopted best practices from Unix and is ported to all modern platforms. The facts are much worse than the verbal slip up.
that insurance might not have been a bad deal.
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
I know it's agrivating, but you might want to check what that insurance covered and what your homeonwer's insurance covers. If it covered their property and your property against fire and other hazards, it might be worth the $5. Storing other people's stuff is risky. They improperly store paint, lawnmovers, gasoline, hair spray and all sorts of combustibles.
The "unfair" bit is straight forward. They have simply defined "unfair competition" with "unfair business act or practice" and "unfair advertising". The other good words in there, "frudulent" "deceptive" and "untrue" definately cover these accidental charges. The companies involved advertise rates they are not willing to provide and engage in other tricks to make the customer feel guilty about expecting what they were promissed. That is definatly deceptive advertising and a frudulent business practice. In telecomunications, where there are monopoly and regulatory concerns, the fraud also adds up to unfair competition when it's practiced by an incumbent provider. Unfair advertising and business practices are not just unfair to the customer, it's unfair to the competition as well.
Now if only the state has the backbone to enforce the law, all will be well.
Human nature, sure, good business, no.
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
This shouldn't really be a surprise unless you still believe in the essential goodness of humankind
You don't need to believe in any such thing, fraud is a bad buisness model. You may make a little money cheating people, but you can only do it once. More people than you might imagine would rather be without a cell phone than deal with a dishonest company. If they lied to you to take your money, what won't they do? Is a cell phone worth that kind of risk?
Cingular screwed me, Sprint has not. I'll never do business with Cingular again. I paid out my contract as soon as it cost me nothing to move to Sprint due to the difference in policy and I was nervous until I made that move. I also got rid of Bell South long distance because they are associated with Cingular. Cingular's mistake was bigger than they thought it was.
And the "buy it blank and format it yourself" theory only works for things like USB drives. It's not as easy to format other devices -- like a PDA or any other device that has to come with some amount of software already installed.
It would not be hard for device makers to switch to ext2. People only buy CF cards for devices that use them. All of the devices that use them come with Windoze drivers and programs to manipulate them. Each of these device makers could decide to switch to the superior ext2 file system and include all the software needed, if they don't just have that as an option on the device itself. This would simplify their devices and give them greater flexibility in their software. The only problem would be that people with older devices will have trouble sharing their CF media between the devices. That's no big deal when you consider how cheap CF is now and how much better the newer devices are. People who buy devices already have to go through the pain and suffering of windoze program installation, formatting the media is a small pain next to that. CF makers would come around quickly.
M$, you have screwed up trying to extort people for your ugly kludge.
At a time when commercial space flight is being touted as the most logical course, Bush is now saying that he wants to send people back to the moon?
Hopeuflly, Bush will try to unleash and provide a framework for America's creative genius. The big company / NASA / politics aproach is not working. The consolidate aero companies are currently wracked with scandal, though it's hard to think of ways to provide nuclear propulsion without heavy industry. The Wright Brothers were bicycle makers, but they beat out the whole world with it's huge companies, landed aristocrats and tyrants. We did it 100 years ago and many people are working to do it again today with cheap manned space flight. I don't know how Bush can encourage that kind of effort, but I know that it can and must be done. We shall see what Bush has to offer on the 100th aniversery of heavier than air flight. Simply paying attention to that day is a very good sign.
This is way better talk than the defeatist nonsense heard just a few years ago about ignoring the infinite resources waiting for us in space. Pro nuclear, pro space, great stuff.
In your White Paper, you say that Connectiva is interested in User Linux. I think you mean, Conectiva is interested, but I'm not sure. Connectiva pulls up www.buydomains.com. Conectiva pulls up United Linux, which gives me three languages worth of blank pop up window.
It makes a difference to me because I thought I'd pass a resume to anyone intersted in your excellent project. The first company did not look right, the second one provided me with no information.
Oh well. If you are bored after your marathon question and answer sesion here, have a flower, or a lizard or a spider. The flowers might be nice backgrounds for your corporate desktops. I had fun taking the pictures and hope other people enjoy looking at them. The flower page comes in handy when secretaries do nice things for me. =:>
This could easily have been done against *nix, MacOS, etc.. Once you get the user to run a program, all bets are off. Heck I could write a shell script that would send itself to everybody. all the tools you would need pretty much get installed with your default Linux install. find and mail come to mind. While I would love to blame $VENDOR we hate today, this is a user issue
It is much harder to do this on a Unix type system. Most reasonable mail clients won't load html off the net and those that do typically only run Java, nice and sandboxed. A shell script would have to have it's mode changed before it is run. Neither could be disguised as a text file and there is no brain dead "name.exe, pif, com, bat, etc" that will automatically run as root on Unix type systems. These differences are Microsoft's work and they are to blame for user and internet community suffering. They are traps for the type of user that is Microsoft's stated reason to exist, but they can not be avoided by anyone. There is nothing you can do for your users who use Microsoft junk regardless of their skill level. Microsoft's own networks get blown out by their own software. Do you think anyone can do better? Should we blame the users on Microsoft's own campus? Why is it that we don't hear similar stories at Apple, Sun or any large free software deployment? It's the software, not the users.
Of course it's the software! Blaming the user is lame.
As others have pointed out, this attack vector isn't persea the software that user is running. The attack vector is the user, the old PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair), which has been showing up as the resolution to many tickets in our troubleticket system.
I'd hate to be resolved by your company.
The problem is no matter what we do, we can't prevent our users from shooting themselves in the foot.
Do you have exploits available for mutt, kmail, mozilla mail or pine? Bill Gates would pay you good money for that. No? Oh well. A small amount of user education, the variety of free software and free software's far superior security models would stop the wholesale abuse of the internet that M$ crap enables. Users have to go therough lots of trouble to set up the kinds of junk that M$ enables without ANY user intervention.
Of course a big admin like you would never have to wipe an reload a machine, now would you? Ha, blame the user for having abused the poor little box. Give me a break. Clicking widgets on the world wide web should not be able to destroy a users machine.
That's exactly the problem. Mail is not supposed to be transmitted from any IP host to any IP host.
Bullshit, that's exactly how the internet is supposed to work. What's the difference between your computer and a MX? There does not have to be any and it's not hard to run one. Exim practically configures itself.
what if the recipient's workstation is off? What if the recipient uses several different computers (devices) to access their mail?
Ieeee! Why use your "workstation" when there's a perfectly good, dependable 486 lying around? Mine never goes down, except for power failure and it did great as a mail server until Cox forbade such things and blocked ports. I did not bother to set it up as a smart host to send out mail from all my workstations because it was much easier to set them up to send directly. I keep and read all of my mail on one machine that I get to through ssh with X forwarding internally. I use fetchmail to get mail to it and I can get my mail securely anywhere in the world via ssh. It's not hard, I'm not a wizard and that's the way the internet is spposed to work - a network of peer computers all equal.
If you would accept anything less for yourself than you expect for others, you are a slave.
I've just received a fake "mailer daemon" rejection message with a viral attachment; although my a/v program caught it, I can see this tactic catching even the most suspicious of us...
Oh, I'm so afraid - not. I'll see the "root_me" virus pretending to be text as an attachemet in my mail client, Balsa. When I click on it, it will open up in a text reader. This will get me if the virus author knows about a Basa text display exploit, but that's silly because they don't need to have me click on anything if they have a text exploit! If such a thing does exist, they will have to pull a privalidge escalation exploit in another program they can't be sure I have or what name it runs as. In fact, they can't be sure I've got Balsa instead of Mutt, Pine, Kmail, Mozilla Mail of dozens of others. So, even if free software adoption was 100%, the odds of a virus finding an exploit path are a small fraction of 10% for any free software machine. You just know that Bill Gates has legions of programers in India and China trying to break free software this way, but it's not happening.
Free software is better than comercial crap. Rooting free software machines will continue to be a difficult manual process that can't be automated. There are too many alternatives which are fixed too quickly. The variety alone would make a free software worm huge and this limits infection rates as it slows down tansfer, makes the worm easy to identify and less sucessful in finding what it needs. The quick repair time stomps the nasties out. We will never see the internet destabilizing worms in free software that we have repeatedly seen in the Microsoft Monoculture.
I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).
SSH and Mutt. He can load whatever he's working right up via sftp then send it out to as many people as he wants much faster than he can email 20 people per 10 minutes.
Any two slaves caught meeting together without permission will be put to death. Limiting the number of emails slaves send out at once will reduce the likelyhood of them getting together and Telestra will lose less of their property that way. For heaven's sake, don't let the slaves publish anything! If they knew the truth they would revolt in no time.
you have already lost the battle to keep garbage off your machines. You're running windows, aren't you? Har har.
Well, no I'm not. I've got one dinky 98 machine in the corner that talks to a few legacy devices. But that was my point, Windows blows and I think we agree about this. Use the right tool for the right job.
Also, you don't have to hook Windows up to the 'net for it to break. It can do that by itself.
True
And since you'll have a hard time getting updates without the network... it'll probably break sooner than if you were running windows update.
Not true. My expereince has been that any networked M$ machine dies right on upgrade train schedule. Non networked machines last much longer, as long as you don't do somehting stupid like install much newer software or hardware that comes with much newer software such as a USB all in one printer/fax/scanners. The only reason you should buy a M$ machine is if you simply can't get the task done any other way. If you buy the machine for that express purpose and leave it alone, it will do much better than if you try to hook it up to the internet and use it for stuff that other software does much better.
Personally, I do. My virus removal kit is a Linux CD.
Me too!
I'll support someone using Win95 or Win98, as long as they aren't connected to the net. After that the EULAs get too hairy for me, and I won't deal with them.
Well, the problem is that Dell can get a bad name for customer support, from idiots whose spyware-riddled computers don't work right. If Dell can't fix it for them, then Dell products must be crap, the idiot thinking goes.
There's nothing idiot about that. If Dell sells software with their computers that performs poorly, gets screwed over and then they can't fix it, well, Dell sucks. Dell IS a computer handyman and that's why people pay the Dell premium. About ten years ago, their tech support was clueful and the reputation has carried them to this day, but it's been going away. It's just another cost of business with Microsoft.
When Dell's reputation hit's the toilet because of Microsoft, Microsoft will be finished. People are turning to the latest and greatest M$ junk to avoid the plauge of viruses, worms and spyware that are making their computing a misserable eXPerience. Dell is the first choice of coporate drones and the last hope for people let down by M$ junk but both classes of purchasers are dissapointed. As the word gets out that the latest and greatest from Microsoft, configured by the best M$ toadies does not work, people are understanding that Microsoft will never meet their needs.
Dell is going to be just another dumb company that did not get free software till way late in the game because they put their own short term interests above their customer's long term interests. Anyone who recomends Microsoft for real work is screwing their customer big time.
Please don't buy from Dell if you intend to run Linux on the machine
I would not buy a new Dell anyway. I might buy one used, but the new ones are generally a rip-off. You can build a better machine yourself with a little research.
What spyware in XP, are you talking about automated error reporting? Or perhaps automatic windows updates.
Actually, Microsoft itself is spyware, if you take your EULA at face value. Microsoft's Automatic Updater does not ask you, but demands that you take whatever is pushed and that your entire system is open to spying. They have used the media player to push this EULA and DRM in general to all versions of their software. DRM, which subjects every file copy to inspection of the file's "owner" is spyware by definition as all files must be checked before copy. Little things, like CPU unique identifiers and Media Player keeping lists of every song and movie you play are trivial parts of Microsoft's Next Generation. Other companies do the same thing as M$ does because DLL hell does not and can not prevent it. Microsoft has made huge holes to screw their users and everyone else has jumped right into the party. None really cares about the user's performance, stability or bandwith so all suffer in the gang bang that is your average Windoze computer on the internet.
Hey thanks for that debian link, I've been looking for that site for ages.
No problem, I'm hoping the average Dell user finds it easily. I've done a couple of lectures for newbies on where to get free software. It's not easy wading through all the comercial and shareware crap to find honest software like Debian.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more concerened about "the facts". Daryl give us this promise:
the facts SCO has raised have become one of the most important and hotly debated technology issues this year, and often our positions on these issues have been misunderstood or misrepresented. Starting with this letter, I'd like to explain our positions on the key issues
I'm still waiting for them to present a single fact. Their opinions, much echoed in M$ trade rags, don't mean much without any factual support. They have yet to demonstrate a single copyright violation beside their own violation of the GPL. They have not even put forth a decent case of trade secret violation against IBM. Either of these factual issues could easily be presented in a single page of text. I'm not sure who, outide of Redmond, was impressed by Dayrl's binders of press releases at his stock holder's meeting. Not one word of any of this torrent of garbage has been used to present any real facts.
Why not? It's got to be better than leaving them with XP. You can already get $200 Lindows computers at Walmart. Add a $10/month ISP and a little TLC and the user has the same thing AOL delivers for $320, less the history of bad cracks XP has.
Seriously though, these are the kind fo people who would whine about Lindows since it's different. Doesn't matter how much the same it is, they'd whine and not use it. ... No man, you do NOT want these people on Linux, espically not one that is logged in as root by default.
Quit being such a snot. What I want for my clients is what my clients want. When they get tired of having their computers rooted and wrecked, I'm happy to tell them about free software, show them a Knoppix CD and let them make up their own minds. Microsoft makes the worst software on the market, bar none.
Well, that one of three commissioners voted on his "values". Giving him the benifit of the doubt about there being no possible harm in the release of these fish, we can imagine the other two commissioners were moved by non-scientific arguments. I wish they could explain their moral delima, after all moral arguments should be reasonable rather than mindless emotional reactions.
I wish their position were better explained, but I'm afraid there is no reasonable basis for their objection. The rest of the article has some stuff about inapropriate exercise of human "power" over animals. If they realy felt that way, they might as well outlaw pet fish of any kind. I'm not aware of any pain or suffering that's special to these little genitically altered fish. If it's OK to breed goldfish simply to subject them to repulsive pet shop conditions and the ownership of 5 year olds, why not this new fish? We already tollerat the creation of pet dogs with gross and unhealthy deformaties through inbreeding, would there be any difference between that and altering the genes directly? How do these people jibe their "values" with California's abortion laws, which alow people to terminate tissue that would become a person if left alone? With one in three women in the US killing at least one of their babies, I don't understand handwringing about pet fish.
Now if only the state has the backbone to enforce the law, all will be well.
You don't need to believe in any such thing, fraud is a bad buisness model. You may make a little money cheating people, but you can only do it once. More people than you might imagine would rather be without a cell phone than deal with a dishonest company. If they lied to you to take your money, what won't they do? Is a cell phone worth that kind of risk?
Cingular screwed me, Sprint has not. I'll never do business with Cingular again. I paid out my contract as soon as it cost me nothing to move to Sprint due to the difference in policy and I was nervous until I made that move. I also got rid of Bell South long distance because they are associated with Cingular. Cingular's mistake was bigger than they thought it was.
It would not be hard for device makers to switch to ext2. People only buy CF cards for devices that use them. All of the devices that use them come with Windoze drivers and programs to manipulate them. Each of these device makers could decide to switch to the superior ext2 file system and include all the software needed, if they don't just have that as an option on the device itself. This would simplify their devices and give them greater flexibility in their software. The only problem would be that people with older devices will have trouble sharing their CF media between the devices. That's no big deal when you consider how cheap CF is now and how much better the newer devices are. People who buy devices already have to go through the pain and suffering of windoze program installation, formatting the media is a small pain next to that. CF makers would come around quickly.
M$, you have screwed up trying to extort people for your ugly kludge.
Hopeuflly, Bush will try to unleash and provide a framework for America's creative genius. The big company / NASA / politics aproach is not working. The consolidate aero companies are currently wracked with scandal, though it's hard to think of ways to provide nuclear propulsion without heavy industry. The Wright Brothers were bicycle makers, but they beat out the whole world with it's huge companies, landed aristocrats and tyrants. We did it 100 years ago and many people are working to do it again today with cheap manned space flight. I don't know how Bush can encourage that kind of effort, but I know that it can and must be done. We shall see what Bush has to offer on the 100th aniversery of heavier than air flight. Simply paying attention to that day is a very good sign.
This is way better talk than the defeatist nonsense heard just a few years ago about ignoring the infinite resources waiting for us in space. Pro nuclear, pro space, great stuff.
It makes a difference to me because I thought I'd pass a resume to anyone intersted in your excellent project. The first company did not look right, the second one provided me with no information.
Oh well. If you are bored after your marathon question and answer sesion here, have a flower, or a lizard or a spider. The flowers might be nice backgrounds for your corporate desktops. I had fun taking the pictures and hope other people enjoy looking at them. The flower page comes in handy when secretaries do nice things for me. =:>
It is much harder to do this on a Unix type system. Most reasonable mail clients won't load html off the net and those that do typically only run Java, nice and sandboxed. A shell script would have to have it's mode changed before it is run. Neither could be disguised as a text file and there is no brain dead "name.exe, pif, com, bat, etc" that will automatically run as root on Unix type systems. These differences are Microsoft's work and they are to blame for user and internet community suffering. They are traps for the type of user that is Microsoft's stated reason to exist, but they can not be avoided by anyone. There is nothing you can do for your users who use Microsoft junk regardless of their skill level. Microsoft's own networks get blown out by their own software. Do you think anyone can do better? Should we blame the users on Microsoft's own campus? Why is it that we don't hear similar stories at Apple, Sun or any large free software deployment? It's the software, not the users.
As others have pointed out, this attack vector isn't persea the software that user is running. The attack vector is the user, the old PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair), which has been showing up as the resolution to many tickets in our troubleticket system.
I'd hate to be resolved by your company.
The problem is no matter what we do, we can't prevent our users from shooting themselves in the foot.
Do you have exploits available for mutt, kmail, mozilla mail or pine? Bill Gates would pay you good money for that. No? Oh well. A small amount of user education, the variety of free software and free software's far superior security models would stop the wholesale abuse of the internet that M$ crap enables. Users have to go therough lots of trouble to set up the kinds of junk that M$ enables without ANY user intervention.
Of course a big admin like you would never have to wipe an reload a machine, now would you? Ha, blame the user for having abused the poor little box. Give me a break. Clicking widgets on the world wide web should not be able to destroy a users machine.
Bullshit, that's exactly how the internet is supposed to work. What's the difference between your computer and a MX? There does not have to be any and it's not hard to run one. Exim practically configures itself.
what if the recipient's workstation is off? What if the recipient uses several different computers (devices) to access their mail?
Ieeee! Why use your "workstation" when there's a perfectly good, dependable 486 lying around? Mine never goes down, except for power failure and it did great as a mail server until Cox forbade such things and blocked ports. I did not bother to set it up as a smart host to send out mail from all my workstations because it was much easier to set them up to send directly. I keep and read all of my mail on one machine that I get to through ssh with X forwarding internally. I use fetchmail to get mail to it and I can get my mail securely anywhere in the world via ssh. It's not hard, I'm not a wizard and that's the way the internet is spposed to work - a network of peer computers all equal.
If you would accept anything less for yourself than you expect for others, you are a slave.
Oh, I'm so afraid - not. I'll see the "root_me" virus pretending to be text as an attachemet in my mail client, Balsa. When I click on it, it will open up in a text reader. This will get me if the virus author knows about a Basa text display exploit, but that's silly because they don't need to have me click on anything if they have a text exploit! If such a thing does exist, they will have to pull a privalidge escalation exploit in another program they can't be sure I have or what name it runs as. In fact, they can't be sure I've got Balsa instead of Mutt, Pine, Kmail, Mozilla Mail of dozens of others. So, even if free software adoption was 100%, the odds of a virus finding an exploit path are a small fraction of 10% for any free software machine. You just know that Bill Gates has legions of programers in India and China trying to break free software this way, but it's not happening.
Free software is better than comercial crap. Rooting free software machines will continue to be a difficult manual process that can't be automated. There are too many alternatives which are fixed too quickly. The variety alone would make a free software worm huge and this limits infection rates as it slows down tansfer, makes the worm easy to identify and less sucessful in finding what it needs. The quick repair time stomps the nasties out. We will never see the internet destabilizing worms in free software that we have repeatedly seen in the Microsoft Monoculture.
SSH and Mutt. He can load whatever he's working right up via sftp then send it out to as many people as he wants much faster than he can email 20 people per 10 minutes.
Because the VB script that does the counting uses an interger that can only count to 32,767 before becoming 0.
Well, no I'm not. I've got one dinky 98 machine in the corner that talks to a few legacy devices. But that was my point, Windows blows and I think we agree about this. Use the right tool for the right job.
Also, you don't have to hook Windows up to the 'net for it to break. It can do that by itself.
True
And since you'll have a hard time getting updates without the network ... it'll probably break sooner than if you were running windows update.
Not true. My expereince has been that any networked M$ machine dies right on upgrade train schedule. Non networked machines last much longer, as long as you don't do somehting stupid like install much newer software or hardware that comes with much newer software such as a USB all in one printer/fax/scanners. The only reason you should buy a M$ machine is if you simply can't get the task done any other way. If you buy the machine for that express purpose and leave it alone, it will do much better than if you try to hook it up to the internet and use it for stuff that other software does much better.
Me too!
I'll support someone using Win95 or Win98, as long as they aren't connected to the net. After that the EULAs get too hairy for me, and I won't deal with them.
I would not recomend anything for a client that I would not do myself. If a cliend does not mind monthly wipe and reloads, they can have M$ connected to the internet. I hate building M$ boxes and don't do it for myslef. All the stupid "I agree" buttons, reboots and EULAs that give M$ Complete control of what's installed on your computer along with inspection rights, aka total spyware, and force DRM really are as bad as it gets.
There's nothing idiot about that. If Dell sells software with their computers that performs poorly, gets screwed over and then they can't fix it, well, Dell sucks. Dell IS a computer handyman and that's why people pay the Dell premium. About ten years ago, their tech support was clueful and the reputation has carried them to this day, but it's been going away. It's just another cost of business with Microsoft.
When Dell's reputation hit's the toilet because of Microsoft, Microsoft will be finished. People are turning to the latest and greatest M$ junk to avoid the plauge of viruses, worms and spyware that are making their computing a misserable eXPerience. Dell is the first choice of coporate drones and the last hope for people let down by M$ junk but both classes of purchasers are dissapointed. As the word gets out that the latest and greatest from Microsoft, configured by the best M$ toadies does not work, people are understanding that Microsoft will never meet their needs.
Dell is going to be just another dumb company that did not get free software till way late in the game because they put their own short term interests above their customer's long term interests. Anyone who recomends Microsoft for real work is screwing their customer big time.
I would not buy a new Dell anyway. I might buy one used, but the new ones are generally a rip-off. You can build a better machine yourself with a little research.
What spyware in XP, are you talking about automated error reporting? Or perhaps automatic windows updates.
Actually, Microsoft itself is spyware, if you take your EULA at face value. Microsoft's Automatic Updater does not ask you, but demands that you take whatever is pushed and that your entire system is open to spying. They have used the media player to push this EULA and DRM in general to all versions of their software. DRM, which subjects every file copy to inspection of the file's "owner" is spyware by definition as all files must be checked before copy. Little things, like CPU unique identifiers and Media Player keeping lists of every song and movie you play are trivial parts of Microsoft's Next Generation. Other companies do the same thing as M$ does because DLL hell does not and can not prevent it. Microsoft has made huge holes to screw their users and everyone else has jumped right into the party. None really cares about the user's performance, stability or bandwith so all suffer in the gang bang that is your average Windoze computer on the internet.
No, I ignored it and provided the smarty-pants AC with a clue.
Hey thanks for that debian link, I've been looking for that site for ages.
No problem, I'm hoping the average Dell user finds it easily. I've done a couple of lectures for newbies on where to get free software. It's not easy wading through all the comercial and shareware crap to find honest software like Debian.