After the deal was lost, he was seen crying in his beer at the Hofbrau. It was hard to make out what he was saying, none of it was coherent but some fragments are reproduced here:
More beeer, Shot-zeee! [this might have been an attempt at German, but could have just been a drink order.]
Damn communists, bolshovicks! I should have known...
The GPL is the natural enemy of Microsoft and must be destroyed. [A few other tourists nodded their heads at this, but most had no idea what he was talking about.]
We shall fight them in the air, on the sea, on land and in the streets and we shall never, ever surrender. [This cleared his table and several others.]
Monkeydance, I'll get those bastards and make them pay. Where's my camera? [The police were called, ruining everone else's night. No camera was found.]
If you read carefully, you'll note that the "honest work" sentence is NOT Davak's
I read carefully and noticed that the only sentences that were Davak's bitched about AC posting. Because he had nothing else to offer, I imagined he agreed with what he posted from the FAQ. Once again, I can thank him for nothing. Next time he might add some commentary to the FAQ or just say it ain't so.
If you're trying to reverse-engineer someone else's code, shame on you; go find honest work.
Shame on you Davak, you should go find honest code. There's nothing wrong with trying to understand how things work. Some people are stuck with legacy equipment or code they can't replace easily and this is their only option for improvement or even fixing it. Those people would be better off if free code were available. Sometimes the only way to make that free code is to understand the original code. There's nothing wrong with reverse engineering software, ever. Republishing someone else's binary is not legal, but it's not immoral. If the code were honest to begin with, the reverse engineer part would not be required. These days, it's cheaper to throw out the dis-honest code and hardware and buy some hardware that's well understood. If you make hardware or software, I hope you understand the implications for your product - I'm not buying it.
For instance, I get mail from a cow-orker who loves to send us a lot of junk mail. Problem is, I can't just write a write a filter or auto delete. One day, he's gonna ask me something, then report to my manager how I'm ignoring him.
Try asking them not to send you that stuff. If that does not work. Get four co-workers to auto reply "that's funny". They will quit when they get's 4 times as much mail as he puts out. It's an easy way to make the point.
Currently, I gotta write a status report every day of what I do. I'm a programmer. I get projects that last me weeks at a time. Writing, "I wrote a function" is kinda.. lame.
Share the reports out. If you are lucky enough to use Linux, run boa. If you suffer under a corporate M$ set up, use a windoze share and remember you computer's name. Not only do you get to see your information wherever you are, you can make a book mark or shortcut for anyone who ever had to ask you for one of those reports. No more emailing that lame crap and you can send a link as a reply to questions. Easy no? That's what the web was invented for, pull information!
It might be true and it's going to get worse. Individuals and clubs put up useful information. Corporations polute the net with crap, adverts and other shit not even the boss will read. As the web is more dominated by corporate interests, the crap content will increase.
Stuff that's put up by an individual is read and useful by definition. At work, I share my information as well as the company will let me. Even if no one else is interested in the details of what I'm doing, I am and want to have them wherever I am. It beats printing and lugging paper files. My personal web pages are looked at by people in my family. It's so much nicer to send an email with a link to pictures than it is to cram megabytes worth on them.
Corporate pages, on the other hand, can be driven by useless make work projects. The best of them are adverts and manuals, giving the public information they might want. It's no big deal when these things go unread, but it's good to have them. Internal pages are a nightmare that mimic internal memos. People put up loads of poorly designed junk that's devoid of useful content. I've seen pages that look like the author would have been happier selling used cars.
In any case, we can look at the figure positively. 30% is an astonishinly high read rate. The web has been here for 10 years and 30% of it has been read? Wow. What percentage of the local newspaper actually gets read? What percentage of books at the local library are even checked out? The web is astonishingly accesible, convienient and useful. As long as individuals continue to have publishing rights on it, it will continue to be a lively place. No, I don't mean blogs, I mean you can set up your 486 behind a cable modem and serve to the world. Anything less will make the web as sterile and useless as the local newspaper.
Is this something that will let them fire/layoff people remotely? That's what "force management" tends to mean to me.;)
Oh yeah, paperless pink slip. It's so much cheaper to give someone a pink slip, but hey this is the 00's. Gotta keep up with the newest way of shit-canning.
-employee recieves gadget labled "force management" and nervously turns it on.
Gadget: You are fired. Plese press the X to callibrate the screen, then follow the directions.
Cool, the supervisor does not even have to waste his lunch breaking the news, HR no longer need work overtime shuffling people out the door and you won't need security to watch as employees clean their desks. That's three more people you can fire, right? Wowzer! what a great idea.
Nah, fortunatley these things are for truck drivers. Thanks to GPS in cellphones, the company can have a rough idea of where the truck is. A cell phone is a nice thing for a driver to have and might be cheaper than alternate communications systems by now. An organizer is good for detailed written instructions and might even be used to capture signatures, giving a timestamp for delivery.
No text editor is complete untill it's a web browser. Conversly, no web browser is complete untill it can edit text. In this case we see that no PDA is complete untill it's a cell phone and no cell phone is complete untill it's a PDA. Free softare projects are more complete than their propriatory counterparts which bloat disproportionatly.
In other words, try making a cell phone out of an organiser, not the other way around.
Isn't that what the Handspring Treo is? I'm not sure what can be done about the SMS problem, except that most carriers are building out their web services and may offer "normal" email one day. Old Palm software suffers from it's legacy roots as a plug it into the PC to work thingy. It would "sync" with an email client instead of having it's own mail agent. PDA's like the Zaurus are finally breaking away from that model.
Another thing: PDA's are fully programmable. Here's a tip for mobile data providers, we don't need proprietary mobile data applications, we just need data transport. Once we have that and our programmable PDA's, we can build our own apps.
These new gadgets use jvm's. Take your pick, java or PDA programming. If only someone would make a cell phone out of the Zaurus.
The reason old PDA's are more expensive than cell phones to maintain is that it had to work with a PC, generally a M$ PC. Keeping the sync programs working was a hastle. Though I'm shocked to hear that it cost more than an actual service like cell phone, I can believe it. Things that are a pain for an individual are bank breaking when deployed by the hundreds. Even if you toss out the M$ desktop, you are still stuck with the PDA. I've had trouble syncing my Handspring Visor even with things as easy and good as KDE stuff. It's just another example of the intentional waste propriatory software brings. Devices that avoid the desktop are cheaper, though this is a high price to pay in itself. A device using free software talking to a free desktop would be the cheapest solution of all.
$120/year by sticking $6000 up front in any safe investment that earns 2% interest. Yeah, I know that would be a silly thing to do!:-)
Anyway, I'd prefer a rental system with an option to buy. I could then fill the device with rental music, and when I decide I like something enough to want it permanently, I'd buy it.
So, you are willing to give M$ the equivalent of $6000 of your cash for songs that will go poof into the eather just as soon as M$ bellies up on declining windblows sales? Yeah, try buying the "rental" music for a buck a song then, sucker.
All of this is going to blow over. The RIAA will soon realize that they have been "giving" away music on the radio forever because it drives sales. They will soon figure out that sales can be driven by free MP3s too. They will also notice that their Gestapo techinques to stamp out music sharing have failed. None of this crap will survive the colapse of the record companies and their obsolete business model except gimped boxes you can't use anymore.
Part of the "advantage" of Microsoft's DRM is that the files will expire if you don't pay your bills. So you don't really own the songs. You're subscribing to a service, like cable.
Does this mean all my outlook mail is going away if I ever stop paying the M$ tax?
M$ has promissed their investors and other suckers world domination. Even a year ago they were spouting shit about 99.99% of all computing devices running winblows in the future. It ain't going to happen and every stratagy they have that demands it will fail. Hell, it's enough for the world to know that they don't have to have M$ Word to exchange emails for Office to fail. The only thing that Microsoft has is the false notion that you need their crappy propriatory formats to get along in "the real world". The real world has looked around and realized that's BS.
If you are having trouble exchanging email and you are running XP, the reason you are having trouble exchanging email is that you are running M$. The rest of us don't have that problem, even when exchanging email with win98 and 2k clients. We only have trouble talking to you. You don't need XP and you are better off not giving M$ permission to search through and delete your personal files.
The pyramid is collapsing because it was hollow inside.
If we let the market handle everything, there'd be no need for bribing the government. Corporations would do whatever they wanted to, and we'd be working 12 hours a day for starvation wages. That's the problem with the Randite pipedream - it has as little to do with reality as Communism.
Jump back, alley cat! Government controls of public easement is one of the big problems. If just anyone could put their wires into those easments, you bet me and all sorts of others would be stringing the ugliest community WAN you ever saw tomorrow. The technology exists so that those ugly WANS would work together and replace conventional telcoms in less than a year. Boom, end of story. As it is, no one can touch it. Wireless is going to take it's place instead.
GEEZ man.. READ THE FREAKIN' ARTICLE, not the first line before posting your rant, and especially before you speak ill of Andy and DDJ.... [blah blah] you concluded from your detailed analysis of the first paragraph.
Uh, no it was the sixth or seventh paragraph. It contained the spirit of the whole article and also admitted to the reader that the author is a paid defendant of Microsoft.
The article is an extremely incriminating analysis of Microsoft and alludes to some vicious monopolistic strategies by the Evil One. He NOT condoning MS or their actions...
No it's not incriminating. Much doubt is cast on others, the harm done is downplayed and intent on Microsoft's part is dennied. His little write up stands as a wonderful example of M$ double talk. Microsoft's emails, on the other hand, were incriminating in exactly the way Andy said could not be proved. His caution, in hindsight, looks like a paid oppinion from Microsoft.
I would suggest that ALL Microsoft supporters read this article to really see what a monopoly can get away with.
Yes, people who "support" M$ should be indoctrinated this way. People who want to know what Microsoft is really thinking and planning for them should read Microsoft's email.
mdielmann has these words of praise for Anrew, "The way I see it, he has nothing good to say about what MS was doing in that article, but he doesn't condone attacking MS every time something goes wrong."
What are you talking about? The whole point of Andy's appology was that the bugs are elswhere and what a great company M$ is to get along with anyone. It was pure appology and bullshit. If you follow the link I provided, you will see that Microsoft intentionally broke their competitor's code to eliminate them. This is a direct refutation of much Microsoft bullshit, from Microsoft own mouth.
Let's quote a few chunks for you:
Microsoft's David Cole emailed Phil Barrett on September 30 1991: "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect DR DOS 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface."
Brad Silverberg, the Microsoft exec who had been responsible for Windows 95, emailed Jim Allchin (now Senior Vice President of MS) on September 27th 1991: "after IBM announces support for dr-dos at comdex, it's a small step for them to also announce they will be selling netware lite, maybe sometime soon thereafter. but count on it. We don't know precisely what ibm is going to announce. my best hunch is that they will offer dr-dos as the preferred solution for 286, os 2 2.0 for 386. they will also probably continue to offer msdos at $165 (drdos for $99). drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future."
Jim Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future.:-)".
Andy Hill emailed David Cole, Windows group manager: "Janine has brought up some good questions on how we handle the error messages that the users will get if they aren't using MS-DOS. The beta testers will ask questions. How should the techs respond: Ignorance, the truth, other? This will no doubt raise a stir on Compuserve. We should either be proactive and post something up there now, or have a response already constructed so we can flash it up there as soon as the issue arises so we can nip it in the bud before we have a typical CIS snow-ball mutiny."
The point of all this is not to blame M$ for things that go wrong, it's that you can't ever rule it out. Microsoft is a dishonest company and you are better off having nothing to do with them at all. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. One such incident was good enough for me.
Even still, the moitves, depth of malice and planning is shocking. You have to wonder what goodies Caldera dug up are now going into toilet paper. It's apparent that Microsoft not only lied about what they were doing, they got others to lie on their behalf. The findings of fact on the Netscape trials showed that nothing at Microsoft had changed since they disposed of OS/2, DRDOS and other competing OS. Only a fool would countinue to trust them or their software for their business recoords.
In other words, not all of the legal documents are being destroyed. Most of those 937 pages of documents may just be legal thickness, with little relevant information...obviously, Sun thought so, as they only scanned in 40 of 937 boxes of documents.
You expect Sun to fight for free software? Nope, they only care about java and other Sun stuff.
Irrelevant of the fact that SCO and MS are a bunch of lying cheating fucks, it's unreasonable to ask anyone to spend thousands of dollars to continue storing documents that are useless to them.
SCO did not think $1,500/month was an unreasonable price between the 2000 settlement and six months ago. All this shows is that SCO changed their business model in October of 2002. That must be the date that they gave up fighting M$ and being a software compnay once and for all. This silly Linux suit came shortly thereafter.
Important evidence of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior and longstanding hatred of free software is going to be destroyed. I imagine that the EU, which is also investigating M$ anti-trust, will not be amused and it's just one more reason to get away from M$ junk. They have to burn these records because they are lying to you.
I've often had to publicly defend Microsoft against what I felt were acts of scapegoating from whining competitors (including Novell, Borland, Lotus, and Wordperfect), complaints which remind me of the way some Americans like to blame Japan for what are ultimately our own domestic problems.
Funny how the US Government later decided that M$ did indeed engage is such practices. Andy and DDJ should be ashamed of that article.
Let's see how the US government saw things. The jucky bits about DRDOS have been dug up by others. Have a look at M$ email for yourself. It was orchestrated from the start to crush an admitedly superior technology, included abouse of Microsoft's own custormers and malicious PR. Anyone who says differently has been proven a fool.
The destruction of court records is evil because it burries evidence of wrongdoing by a convicted monopolist that has yet to be punished and is proceeding as if nothing at all had happened. These letters may be published elsewhere, but they need to be preserved in context if an objective history is to be written. There's no telling what goodies the Caldera folks dug up before they became M$'s next shill. Evidence of Microsoft's concerted effort to eliminate free software is going to be lost.
The lawyers at MS, realizing that the GPL is about to put on trial, initially rejoice but then realize that their own eula is also in danger. Bill Gates donates a billion dollars to the FSF legal fund as a "gesture of goodwill".
It's more likely that M$ will put people up to this kind of thing to generate as much FUD as possible before Paladium ends software choice forever. They don't care if they win or lose. All M$ has to do is keep demand for non Paladium hardware low for a year or so and the chip makers will shut down the lines. This "viral, lose your natures" FUD is to convince big dumb companies to buy one more wave of M$ PCs. That will tie up the supply chain for two or three years. Then, everything will be over and EULAs won't matter anymore.
Microsoft will make some more noise about the invalidity of of the GPL, but it's tangential as outlined above. We might expect the M$ sophists to call the GPL's conditional release policy a requirement of postive and costly action and other blither one step above the name calling of the last few years. They will do this as they bring aid and comfort to the firms they put up to GPL violations. They will be able to find firms like they can use, poorly planned businesses teetering on bankruptcy are susceptable to M$ promises of cash. But again, it does not matter. Microsoft's big picture strategy is a hardware lock down. If they get thay, they have won.
Oh well, if you can't get pyDDR try "worm" instead. It will practice your vi movements. Put on some headphones and sync your hjkl pressing to the beat. That'll lern your computer to sing and dance.
So you have found a particular configuration of software, hardware and usage that doesn't cause any crashes. Ok, so I can do that with closed source too.
No, I've found many combinations of sofware that work on many platforms. I've built up everything from a 33MHz 486 terminal machine for email to a Soyo Dragon. I'm currently running six computers and a P90 thinkpad. I've used them for everything from particle transport and fluids calculations to ripping CDs. None of them has ever just crashed. I use one of them everyday for email, browsing and the usual stuff. Sometimes applications flake out, no big deal.
Now, let me come play with your system
I doubt you could be as random as my 18 month old daughter. Oh yeah, I'm sure you could do something nasty so just stay away. Normal and abnormal use has caused me no problems. Malicious use is something I'm not willing to put up with.
There was an exploit in BIND a while back. IT affected basically every version EVER.
I remember that. It did not affect the then currently stable Debian bind and no harm came of it. There is no comparing the world of M$ exploits to the few free software rabbits you might pull out of your hat. The game is not useless, the results are real.
Too bad there are so many things you can't do when you've crippled your hardware with an OS with so few apps.
Debian now has 8,710 applications. There are few things I'd like to do that I can't. I spend much less time "rebuilding" computers and more time doing those things now.
I mean, you can't do much except play back multimedia,
Hmmm, ever heard of film gimp? Sure, there are some hardware problems but those will go away as M$ dies. Hardware makers are already taking free software into account.
there's seldom any games you can play on it.
I'm not a game boy, quake II is good enough for me. More will come, in the mean time dual boot. Woody takes care of that auto-magically now.
I liken it to a rock in the middle of a field. Damned stable, that rock. It just sits there.
Yes that's the picture you drew. Reality is different. Think of it as a tremendous magic building, where everyone is invited to come and do as they please. Building materials are free, and so long as you follow a few basic guidlines, your changes and additions will be as sturdy as any piece and everyone can enjoy it at once.
people are willing to pay for features, they're rarely willing to pay more for stability.
Isn't it amazing how free software costs less to get and own, yet works better too? It's like people are paying extra money to have infexible and unreliable software. I've got more features that I know what to do with under free software, yet I never have to "restart" my comouters. Don't worry, the invisible hand will soon correct things.
Debian tested in every state, works good everywhere. I have yet to prove that it does not work anywhere in any way. I can not say the same thing for any other software I've ever run on a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidently, his last thought was the stongest.
I read carefully and noticed that the only sentences that were Davak's bitched about AC posting. Because he had nothing else to offer, I imagined he agreed with what he posted from the FAQ. Once again, I can thank him for nothing. Next time he might add some commentary to the FAQ or just say it ain't so.
Shame on you Davak, you should go find honest code. There's nothing wrong with trying to understand how things work. Some people are stuck with legacy equipment or code they can't replace easily and this is their only option for improvement or even fixing it. Those people would be better off if free code were available. Sometimes the only way to make that free code is to understand the original code. There's nothing wrong with reverse engineering software, ever. Republishing someone else's binary is not legal, but it's not immoral. If the code were honest to begin with, the reverse engineer part would not be required. These days, it's cheaper to throw out the dis-honest code and hardware and buy some hardware that's well understood. If you make hardware or software, I hope you understand the implications for your product - I'm not buying it.
Try asking them not to send you that stuff. If that does not work. Get four co-workers to auto reply "that's funny". They will quit when they get's 4 times as much mail as he puts out. It's an easy way to make the point.
Currently, I gotta write a status report every day of what I do. I'm a programmer. I get projects that last me weeks at a time. Writing, "I wrote a function" is kinda.. lame.
Share the reports out. If you are lucky enough to use Linux, run boa. If you suffer under a corporate M$ set up, use a windoze share and remember you computer's name. Not only do you get to see your information wherever you are, you can make a book mark or shortcut for anyone who ever had to ask you for one of those reports. No more emailing that lame crap and you can send a link as a reply to questions. Easy no? That's what the web was invented for, pull information!
Stuff that's put up by an individual is read and useful by definition. At work, I share my information as well as the company will let me. Even if no one else is interested in the details of what I'm doing, I am and want to have them wherever I am. It beats printing and lugging paper files. My personal web pages are looked at by people in my family. It's so much nicer to send an email with a link to pictures than it is to cram megabytes worth on them.
Corporate pages, on the other hand, can be driven by useless make work projects. The best of them are adverts and manuals, giving the public information they might want. It's no big deal when these things go unread, but it's good to have them. Internal pages are a nightmare that mimic internal memos. People put up loads of poorly designed junk that's devoid of useful content. I've seen pages that look like the author would have been happier selling used cars.
In any case, we can look at the figure positively. 30% is an astonishinly high read rate. The web has been here for 10 years and 30% of it has been read? Wow. What percentage of the local newspaper actually gets read? What percentage of books at the local library are even checked out? The web is astonishingly accesible, convienient and useful. As long as individuals continue to have publishing rights on it, it will continue to be a lively place. No, I don't mean blogs, I mean you can set up your 486 behind a cable modem and serve to the world. Anything less will make the web as sterile and useless as the local newspaper.
Oh yeah, paperless pink slip. It's so much cheaper to give someone a pink slip, but hey this is the 00's. Gotta keep up with the newest way of shit-canning.
-employee recieves gadget labled "force management" and nervously turns it on.
Gadget: You are fired. Plese press the X to callibrate the screen, then follow the directions.
Cool, the supervisor does not even have to waste his lunch breaking the news, HR no longer need work overtime shuffling people out the door and you won't need security to watch as employees clean their desks. That's three more people you can fire, right? Wowzer! what a great idea.
Nah, fortunatley these things are for truck drivers. Thanks to GPS in cellphones, the company can have a rough idea of where the truck is. A cell phone is a nice thing for a driver to have and might be cheaper than alternate communications systems by now. An organizer is good for detailed written instructions and might even be used to capture signatures, giving a timestamp for delivery.
No text editor is complete untill it's a web browser. Conversly, no web browser is complete untill it can edit text. In this case we see that no PDA is complete untill it's a cell phone and no cell phone is complete untill it's a PDA. Free softare projects are more complete than their propriatory counterparts which bloat disproportionatly.
Isn't that what the Handspring Treo is? I'm not sure what can be done about the SMS problem, except that most carriers are building out their web services and may offer "normal" email one day. Old Palm software suffers from it's legacy roots as a plug it into the PC to work thingy. It would "sync" with an email client instead of having it's own mail agent. PDA's like the Zaurus are finally breaking away from that model.
Another thing: PDA's are fully programmable. Here's a tip for mobile data providers, we don't need proprietary mobile data applications, we just need data transport. Once we have that and our programmable PDA's, we can build our own apps.
These new gadgets use jvm's. Take your pick, java or PDA programming. If only someone would make a cell phone out of the Zaurus.
The reason old PDA's are more expensive than cell phones to maintain is that it had to work with a PC, generally a M$ PC. Keeping the sync programs working was a hastle. Though I'm shocked to hear that it cost more than an actual service like cell phone, I can believe it. Things that are a pain for an individual are bank breaking when deployed by the hundreds. Even if you toss out the M$ desktop, you are still stuck with the PDA. I've had trouble syncing my Handspring Visor even with things as easy and good as KDE stuff. It's just another example of the intentional waste propriatory software brings. Devices that avoid the desktop are cheaper, though this is a high price to pay in itself. A device using free software talking to a free desktop would be the cheapest solution of all.
Anyway, I'd prefer a rental system with an option to buy. I could then fill the device with rental music, and when I decide I like something enough to want it permanently, I'd buy it.
So, you are willing to give M$ the equivalent of $6000 of your cash for songs that will go poof into the eather just as soon as M$ bellies up on declining windblows sales? Yeah, try buying the "rental" music for a buck a song then, sucker.
All of this is going to blow over. The RIAA will soon realize that they have been "giving" away music on the radio forever because it drives sales. They will soon figure out that sales can be driven by free MP3s too. They will also notice that their Gestapo techinques to stamp out music sharing have failed. None of this crap will survive the colapse of the record companies and their obsolete business model except gimped boxes you can't use anymore.
Does this mean all my outlook mail is going away if I ever stop paying the M$ tax?
M$ has promissed their investors and other suckers world domination. Even a year ago they were spouting shit about 99.99% of all computing devices running winblows in the future. It ain't going to happen and every stratagy they have that demands it will fail. Hell, it's enough for the world to know that they don't have to have M$ Word to exchange emails for Office to fail. The only thing that Microsoft has is the false notion that you need their crappy propriatory formats to get along in "the real world". The real world has looked around and realized that's BS.
If you are having trouble exchanging email and you are running XP, the reason you are having trouble exchanging email is that you are running M$. The rest of us don't have that problem, even when exchanging email with win98 and 2k clients. We only have trouble talking to you. You don't need XP and you are better off not giving M$ permission to search through and delete your personal files.
The pyramid is collapsing because it was hollow inside.
Jump back, alley cat! Government controls of public easement is one of the big problems. If just anyone could put their wires into those easments, you bet me and all sorts of others would be stringing the ugliest community WAN you ever saw tomorrow. The technology exists so that those ugly WANS would work together and replace conventional telcoms in less than a year. Boom, end of story. As it is, no one can touch it. Wireless is going to take it's place instead.
Uh, no it was the sixth or seventh paragraph. It contained the spirit of the whole article and also admitted to the reader that the author is a paid defendant of Microsoft.
The article is an extremely incriminating analysis of Microsoft and alludes to some vicious monopolistic strategies by the Evil One. He NOT condoning MS or their actions ...
No it's not incriminating. Much doubt is cast on others, the harm done is downplayed and intent on Microsoft's part is dennied. His little write up stands as a wonderful example of M$ double talk. Microsoft's emails, on the other hand, were incriminating in exactly the way Andy said could not be proved. His caution, in hindsight, looks like a paid oppinion from Microsoft.
I would suggest that ALL Microsoft supporters read this article to really see what a monopoly can get away with.
Yes, people who "support" M$ should be indoctrinated this way. People who want to know what Microsoft is really thinking and planning for them should read Microsoft's email.
It's more likely that SCO people cut and paste things from your resume into their own. There are many reasons for this, all true.
What are you talking about? The whole point of Andy's appology was that the bugs are elswhere and what a great company M$ is to get along with anyone. It was pure appology and bullshit. If you follow the link I provided, you will see that Microsoft intentionally broke their competitor's code to eliminate them. This is a direct refutation of much Microsoft bullshit, from Microsoft own mouth.
Let's quote a few chunks for you:
Microsoft's David Cole emailed Phil Barrett on September 30 1991: "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect DR DOS 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface."
Brad Silverberg, the Microsoft exec who had been responsible for Windows 95, emailed Jim Allchin (now Senior Vice President of MS) on September 27th 1991: "after IBM announces support for dr-dos at comdex, it's a small step for them to also announce they will be selling netware lite, maybe sometime soon thereafter. but count on it. We don't know precisely what ibm is going to announce. my best hunch is that they will offer dr-dos as the preferred solution for 286, os 2 2.0 for 386. they will also probably continue to offer msdos at $165 (drdos for $99). drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future."
Jim Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)".
Andy Hill emailed David Cole, Windows group manager: "Janine has brought up some good questions on how we handle the error messages that the users will get if they aren't using MS-DOS. The beta testers will ask questions. How should the techs respond: Ignorance, the truth, other? This will no doubt raise a stir on Compuserve. We should either be proactive and post something up there now, or have a response already constructed so we can flash it up there as soon as the issue arises so we can nip it in the bud before we have a typical CIS snow-ball mutiny."
The point of all this is not to blame M$ for things that go wrong, it's that you can't ever rule it out. Microsoft is a dishonest company and you are better off having nothing to do with them at all. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. One such incident was good enough for me.
Even still, the moitves, depth of malice and planning is shocking. You have to wonder what goodies Caldera dug up are now going into toilet paper. It's apparent that Microsoft not only lied about what they were doing, they got others to lie on their behalf. The findings of fact on the Netscape trials showed that nothing at Microsoft had changed since they disposed of OS/2, DRDOS and other competing OS. Only a fool would countinue to trust them or their software for their business recoords.
You expect Sun to fight for free software? Nope, they only care about java and other Sun stuff.
Irrelevant of the fact that SCO and MS are a bunch of lying cheating fucks, it's unreasonable to ask anyone to spend thousands of dollars to continue storing documents that are useless to them.
SCO did not think $1,500/month was an unreasonable price between the 2000 settlement and six months ago. All this shows is that SCO changed their business model in October of 2002. That must be the date that they gave up fighting M$ and being a software compnay once and for all. This silly Linux suit came shortly thereafter.
Important evidence of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior and longstanding hatred of free software is going to be destroyed. I imagine that the EU, which is also investigating M$ anti-trust, will not be amused and it's just one more reason to get away from M$ junk. They have to burn these records because they are lying to you.
I've often had to publicly defend Microsoft against what I felt were acts of scapegoating from whining competitors (including Novell, Borland, Lotus, and Wordperfect), complaints which remind me of the way some Americans like to blame Japan for what are ultimately our own domestic problems.
Funny how the US Government later decided that M$ did indeed engage is such practices. Andy and DDJ should be ashamed of that article.
Let's see how the US government saw things. The jucky bits about DRDOS have been dug up by others. Have a look at M$ email for yourself. It was orchestrated from the start to crush an admitedly superior technology, included abouse of Microsoft's own custormers and malicious PR. Anyone who says differently has been proven a fool.
The destruction of court records is evil because it burries evidence of wrongdoing by a convicted monopolist that has yet to be punished and is proceeding as if nothing at all had happened. These letters may be published elsewhere, but they need to be preserved in context if an objective history is to be written. There's no telling what goodies the Caldera folks dug up before they became M$'s next shill. Evidence of Microsoft's concerted effort to eliminate free software is going to be lost.
It's more likely that M$ will put people up to this kind of thing to generate as much FUD as possible before Paladium ends software choice forever. They don't care if they win or lose. All M$ has to do is keep demand for non Paladium hardware low for a year or so and the chip makers will shut down the lines. This "viral, lose your natures" FUD is to convince big dumb companies to buy one more wave of M$ PCs. That will tie up the supply chain for two or three years. Then, everything will be over and EULAs won't matter anymore.
Microsoft will make some more noise about the invalidity of of the GPL, but it's tangential as outlined above. We might expect the M$ sophists to call the GPL's conditional release policy a requirement of postive and costly action and other blither one step above the name calling of the last few years. They will do this as they bring aid and comfort to the firms they put up to GPL violations. They will be able to find firms like they can use, poorly planned businesses teetering on bankruptcy are susceptable to M$ promises of cash. But again, it does not matter. Microsoft's big picture strategy is a hardware lock down. If they get thay, they have won.
You will find out soon enough, when we liberate your country.
I don't get it, the US is suppose to be the land of the free, isn't it ?
Yes, it's just that some people have been working to redefine free. For some strange reason, the Supreme Court has gone along with them.
Oh well, if you can't get pyDDR try "worm" instead. It will practice your vi movements. Put on some headphones and sync your hjkl pressing to the beat. That'll lern your computer to sing and dance.
No, I've found many combinations of sofware that work on many platforms. I've built up everything from a 33MHz 486 terminal machine for email to a Soyo Dragon. I'm currently running six computers and a P90 thinkpad. I've used them for everything from particle transport and fluids calculations to ripping CDs. None of them has ever just crashed. I use one of them everyday for email, browsing and the usual stuff. Sometimes applications flake out, no big deal.
Now, let me come play with your system
I doubt you could be as random as my 18 month old daughter. Oh yeah, I'm sure you could do something nasty so just stay away. Normal and abnormal use has caused me no problems. Malicious use is something I'm not willing to put up with.
There was an exploit in BIND a while back. IT affected basically every version EVER.
I remember that. It did not affect the then currently stable Debian bind and no harm came of it. There is no comparing the world of M$ exploits to the few free software rabbits you might pull out of your hat. The game is not useless, the results are real.
Debian now has 8,710 applications. There are few things I'd like to do that I can't. I spend much less time "rebuilding" computers and more time doing those things now.
I mean, you can't do much except play back multimedia,
Hmmm, ever heard of film gimp? Sure, there are some hardware problems but those will go away as M$ dies. Hardware makers are already taking free software into account.
there's seldom any games you can play on it.
I'm not a game boy, quake II is good enough for me. More will come, in the mean time dual boot. Woody takes care of that auto-magically now.
I liken it to a rock in the middle of a field. Damned stable, that rock. It just sits there.
Yes that's the picture you drew. Reality is different. Think of it as a tremendous magic building, where everyone is invited to come and do as they please. Building materials are free, and so long as you follow a few basic guidlines, your changes and additions will be as sturdy as any piece and everyone can enjoy it at once.
Isn't it amazing how free software costs less to get and own, yet works better too? It's like people are paying extra money to have infexible and unreliable software. I've got more features that I know what to do with under free software, yet I never have to "restart" my comouters. Don't worry, the invisible hand will soon correct things.
ziggy ... .... ....
the Matrix has you
follow the penguin
knock knock ...
Debian tested in every state, works good everywhere. I have yet to prove that it does not work anywhere in any way. I can not say the same thing for any other software I've ever run on a PC.