If it is (and I think it is), then kdawson, you really need to give this up already. You are fast becoming notorious for posting complete non-stories, especially when the subject is Microsoft.
It's an interesting story which can be deflated by geniouses like you if it's wrong. We can imagine kdawson made a good faith effort to find xbox policy, but the documentation is lacking as most from M$ is. Find it and post it right here in the story. What other newspaper gives you that ability? CNN? Ha!
Others are reporting that "Microsoft" is also banned, so the trademark theory might be right. That would make sense from an advertising exclusivity standpoint.
M$'s great respect for IP extend to user behavior, not their own. It's funny that they would also prevent people from using "Microsoft" too, but your theory of trademark respect would cover that. Try it out with some others like Kleenex or Coke.
An alternate theory is that M$ wants to be the only Xbox spammer. If that's true, the system will flag all brand names in all forms of user speech. When everything is locked down like the Xbox, you must pay toll to the Redmond troll to annoy M$ users.
just maybe, if M$ lost a FEDERAL antitrust case? Nah, THAT could never happen...
Cheaper by the dozen, it seems.
An easier deterrent would be to quit sending M$ your money in the first place. Migrating to gnu/linux and friends would take care of all monopoly concerns at once. IT people would be dancing in the streets if they were told they could go ahead and do this. Sooner or later, it's going to happen.
I'd be seriously pissed if I found out lawyers were skimming massive amounts from public settlements on behalf of my state or county.
It's not skimming when there's enough money to pay the damages AND the fees.
If you really want to be pissed, just look at all them money M$ extracts from local, state and federal government every day. When schools, the DOT, charity hospitals and other offices spend money on software they have that much less to spend on their actual purpose. This is wasted money because every task done by non free software can be done at significantly lower cost with free software. M$ derives a large portion of their revenue directly from that kind of corporate welfare. They derive another large portion of their revenue by the "network" effect this has, where others feel compelled to use the same software. Over it's history, M$ has enjoyed uncommon, monopoly like, return on investment. The $40 billion in cash that M$ has sitting around comes from that giant rip off.
If Iowa and other states really wanted to punish M$, they would quit sending M$ their money.
You already know how and what to teach. The only change will be that you can reuse your notes directly and can drag in new content from Wikipedia and other nice places. Instead of having to write everything every time, you can just point to what you are talking about.
The drawbacks are that students can glaze over if they are not busy taking notes, and that you might run too fast for them because you are not pacing yourself by writing.
What you use to present does not matter. The easiest way is to take pictures of your notes and project those. Typesetting is time consuming and error prone and that's where images help most. Just hold the camera high enough over the page for good focus and zoom in to crop what you don't want. Images can be stuck into a "Power Point" slide show, but you are better off using Open Office and exporting the result to html with frames.
Overall, you are replacing a blackboard with a slide show and augmenting the notes your students would take. The real learning comes from assignments, but you already know that.
That would violate the robustness principle summed up in RFC 1122: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." In this respect, both Microsoft and the city are in the wrong.
The point of standards is to make things easier. M$ has broken yet another one and you point the finger at a city?
The server is only wrong if there's a way to interpret Vista's output. M$ might have a way they want it to work and they should publish it if they do. That way, the rest of the world won't waste a lot of effort trying on mind reading.
The city is right in any case. If this becomes a real issue, it will be fixed upstream. Not everyone should jump everytime M$ does something different. The only way the city is wrong is if you subscribe to the general M$ principle of, "suck it up, bitch." Sooner or later, M$ will learn that it can no longer push the whole world.
The world is learning that the best way to avoid problems like this is to avoid software from the people who intentionally create problems.
Will they follow the Microsoft KB item above and "fix" the problem on every new Vista box they buy? Or will the replace the Linux DHCP box with Windows Server?
Vista is going the way of ME, so it's not really an issue. There are so many bugs in Vista than people can hardly stand to run it on a single computer and no sane organization is deploying it. These problems will remain an issue only for enthusiasts and other victims of non free hype. Handwring that assumes Vista will gain significant market share just because M$ made it, is part of that hype.
The coming Vista September will seal Vista's reputation and fate. It was not ready when they released it and never will be because digital restrictions are snake oil. People have been sick of the M$ treadmill for a long time but digital restrictions and the bugs they bring really puts them over the top. Vista is a flop.
Part of it is [M$ Office's inability to work with itself] that they simply can't. Hell even if there's a difference in the installed fonts or a different sized screen, documents have to be reformatted by hand to look good.
They could use ODF without charge any time they want. The same thing goes for every other file format they have a special, inferior version of. I can easily share my work across gnu/linux distributions, Solaris and Mac. M$ is always the problem child.
Very good points, as is the death of non free competition on Windoze, satirically reported as Microsoft Antitrust Settlement Is a Success! Everywhere you look, you find yet more evidence of coercion and wrong doing.
someone named plague, claims Vista is "stable" and blithers
Stability and performance are not the same. I never said performance was not an issue, nor did I say stability was unimportant...
Without stability you don't get performance of anykind. The fact remains that adding Vista to any computer is both a performance and stability hit with little to justify it.
I'm happy for you if Vista does anything right and is worth your use, but really I think you are a liar. More reliable people than you have thrown in the towel on Vista.
If you don't like it, don't click through. Stick your head in the sand while Steve and Bill throw chairs. I like my little list and there's something new to add to it almost every day.
If the vote was really invalidated for those reasons, it was very nice of M$ to confess and blame their actions on yet another "junior" employee. It was also nice of them to not pay the tools who signed up on the day and voted for M$. The only thing consistent here is dishonesty and betrayal.
Sweden will probably not have time to do another round of voting, so it looks as they will abstain.
I hope not. Being able to scuttle an unfavorable vote one way is just as bad as another.
It is good to see the SIS is protecting it's integrity.
One of the usual gadflies steps up to defend Vista after less than a day of use:
I just sat down and used Windows Vista properly for the first time today.... Clean installs... Apple's Boot Camp drivers (which, on the negative side, crashed the system.)... [Vista is] far from the sinking crater that you seem to think it is.
It's clear that our idea of "clean" is different, but the opinion I have comes from others who have worked with Vista for months. People like this really should not have problems. "Ordinary" users have told me worse things. No one, not even dedicated people who have managed to make Vista work, has told me that the system is ready. Let me know nine months from now if Vista can actually do anything for you that XP, Mac or gnu/linux could not do faster. Until then, Vista is crater that's sucking a large chunk of the PC industry down with it.
Everyone should be pissed that the reason for these bugs and performance hits are tools designed to keep you from making copies of your media files and run things from competitors. I know those kinds of things don't bother you, but they do bother me and many others. I have serious doubts in M$'s willingness or ability to pull those restrictions out or make them really work. This is not another ME change the interface and and rename it problem. This is a problem of effort wasted on things that thwart competition and the customer.
I can understand why Nick White would want you to buy Vista, but I don't see any real changes that address the problems people are having. He can say whatever he wants about process, it's product that counts.
M$ has burnt a lot of what little credibility it had left with Vista. Apologies from editors are not going to do the trick as long as there is real fair and independent review of performance. Windoze users have waited seven years for an upgrade and they can easily afford to wait another to see if Vista has anything that warrents it's cost and restrictions.
After 10 years of development, you'd think XP would work at least as well as 2K.
After 13 years of development you would think w2k would work as well as NT
After 16 years of development, you would think NT would work as well as VMS.
Hmm, I think we've hit bedrock there. It's a shame people would ever use a non free OS that does not even work as well as other non free OS when they could just have a free one that works.
s a Technology specialist company that also does cameras, we find that 9 times out fo ten the default passwords are set for the administration access of the DVR and even the IP cameras.
Although it is possible to hack these systems, it is a remote chance if configured properly like anything else.
I've seen these systems being sold to Casinos and what not. The fancy video cards only work with Winblows, so hacking them is only as hard as that.
how did they find the IP of a target store?
You look for the web page they serve with Google. If you don't customize every page and eliminate the keyword combinations, your site can be found.
This is an issue people need to be aware of. Security is only as strong as it's weakest link. People should demand video systems that work with a better OS.
A touchy spun spins out over what should be good news to him:
Screw you twitter. I use Linux every day, at work and at home. I'm sysadmin for thirty Linux servers in a state department that is dedicated to switching to Linux, buttmunch. I searched the MEPIS site for info on flash and found none.
Next time, just download the CD and boot it like I keep telling you, or do a Google search. While flash brings up a bunch of stuff about memory, you kind of see that it's something that just comes on the CD. The Mepis site itself suffers from the same kind of astroturf that Slashdot does. M$ took early aim at one of the first really easy to use desktop distributions, especially one with a book written by a Slashdot editor. But surely a person with a four digit UID knows that.
There's nothing like a does of Register reality to make your morning. "Microsoft promises less-annoying Vista OS early next year" gets right to the M$ money line:
[Vista product manager Nick White] "as always, we're first and foremost focused on delivering a high-quality release, so we'll determine the exact release date of SP1 after we have reached that quality bar."
Limbo, limbo, how low can you go? After six years of development, you would think Vista would at least work as well as XP. It does not because big dumb media companies were the customer, not you. Most of you have given this "little-used operating system" the thumbs down it deserves. One more year is not going to make a big difference and you have to wonder if M$ will be able to recover such a wrecked code base. They are not going to give up their expensive digital restrictions but those will never work, what can they do?
But at work, that's another story. Unless you are working in a Mac shop, or unless your duties are mere wordprocessing and email, you'd be often unable to fit a Mac into the process, and Linux would be similarly "against the grain."
You mean like AutoDesk and other terminal M$ Partners applications? Nope, a gnu/linux is still less trouble than a Winblows box. There is nothing you can't do on a distribution like Xandros with Parallels and Crossover Office. The combination takes a little time to get up and running but is more stable and easier to keep running than Winblows on it's own. The only real barrier is how ingrained bad attitudes are at your company.
It's not worth getting fired over but you might want to look for another job if your employer has barriers like this in place. If you can't experiment to know what tool is best for the job, you are surely not using it. Companies like that defeat themselves and make life miserable for everyone in countless other ways. Top down sucks life.
the aunt Tillys of the world like to do? Browse the web. Preferably any part of the web that requires a bazillion plugins like flash. And here MEPIS falls flat. Getting all the required add ons into any Linux based browser has always been a total pain in the ass... multimedia playback and browser plug-in support have always been a nightmare under Linux, and those are two of the most important issues to the vast majority of potential adoptees.
Unlike most OEM versions of Windoze, Mepis comes with Adobe Flash. I agree that keeping up with non free software is a pain in the ass and that's why I recommend Mepis to people who must have Flash. When you need a newer version, it's painless to upgrade with a newer CD. Tilde gets her YouTube, the kids get most of their games and all is well. Mepis also comes with Amarok and a decent movie player. Out of the box, it just works.
From what you say above, it's been too long since you have given gnu/linux distributions like Mepis a fair chance. That's too bad because it's a much easier way to make most of your relatives happy. Things are only getting better, but you owe it to yourself to look again.
Autopatcher is for when you are visiting your aunt Tilly and don't want to spend four hours downloading all the latest patches for her over her dialup.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a list of reasons to avoid Vista. Enjoy!
If it is (and I think it is), then kdawson, you really need to give this up already. You are fast becoming notorious for posting complete non-stories, especially when the subject is Microsoft.
It's an interesting story which can be deflated by geniouses like you if it's wrong. We can imagine kdawson made a good faith effort to find xbox policy, but the documentation is lacking as most from M$ is. Find it and post it right here in the story. What other newspaper gives you that ability? CNN? Ha!
Others are reporting that "Microsoft" is also banned, so the trademark theory might be right. That would make sense from an advertising exclusivity standpoint.
M$'s great respect for IP extend to user behavior, not their own. It's funny that they would also prevent people from using "Microsoft" too, but your theory of trademark respect would cover that. Try it out with some others like Kleenex or Coke.
An alternate theory is that M$ wants to be the only Xbox spammer. If that's true, the system will flag all brand names in all forms of user speech. When everything is locked down like the Xbox, you must pay toll to the Redmond troll to annoy M$ users.
Xbox - the only way to win is not to play.
just maybe, if M$ lost a FEDERAL antitrust case? Nah, THAT could never happen...
Cheaper by the dozen, it seems.
An easier deterrent would be to quit sending M$ your money in the first place. Migrating to gnu/linux and friends would take care of all monopoly concerns at once. IT people would be dancing in the streets if they were told they could go ahead and do this. Sooner or later, it's going to happen.
I'd be seriously pissed if I found out lawyers were skimming massive amounts from public settlements on behalf of my state or county.
It's not skimming when there's enough money to pay the damages AND the fees.
If you really want to be pissed, just look at all them money M$ extracts from local, state and federal government every day. When schools, the DOT, charity hospitals and other offices spend money on software they have that much less to spend on their actual purpose. This is wasted money because every task done by non free software can be done at significantly lower cost with free software. M$ derives a large portion of their revenue directly from that kind of corporate welfare. They derive another large portion of their revenue by the "network" effect this has, where others feel compelled to use the same software. Over it's history, M$ has enjoyed uncommon, monopoly like, return on investment. The $40 billion in cash that M$ has sitting around comes from that giant rip off.
If Iowa and other states really wanted to punish M$, they would quit sending M$ their money.
You already know how and what to teach. The only change will be that you can reuse your notes directly and can drag in new content from Wikipedia and other nice places. Instead of having to write everything every time, you can just point to what you are talking about.
The drawbacks are that students can glaze over if they are not busy taking notes, and that you might run too fast for them because you are not pacing yourself by writing.
What you use to present does not matter. The easiest way is to take pictures of your notes and project those. Typesetting is time consuming and error prone and that's where images help most. Just hold the camera high enough over the page for good focus and zoom in to crop what you don't want. Images can be stuck into a "Power Point" slide show, but you are better off using Open Office and exporting the result to html with frames.
Overall, you are replacing a blackboard with a slide show and augmenting the notes your students would take. The real learning comes from assignments, but you already know that.
That would violate the robustness principle summed up in RFC 1122: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." In this respect, both Microsoft and the city are in the wrong.
The point of standards is to make things easier. M$ has broken yet another one and you point the finger at a city?
The server is only wrong if there's a way to interpret Vista's output. M$ might have a way they want it to work and they should publish it if they do. That way, the rest of the world won't waste a lot of effort trying on mind reading.
The city is right in any case. If this becomes a real issue, it will be fixed upstream. Not everyone should jump everytime M$ does something different. The only way the city is wrong is if you subscribe to the general M$ principle of, "suck it up, bitch." Sooner or later, M$ will learn that it can no longer push the whole world.
The world is learning that the best way to avoid problems like this is to avoid software from the people who intentionally create problems.
Will they follow the Microsoft KB item above and "fix" the problem on every new Vista box they buy? Or will the replace the Linux DHCP box with Windows Server?
Vista is going the way of ME, so it's not really an issue. There are so many bugs in Vista than people can hardly stand to run it on a single computer and no sane organization is deploying it. These problems will remain an issue only for enthusiasts and other victims of non free hype. Handwring that assumes Vista will gain significant market share just because M$ made it, is part of that hype.
The coming Vista September will seal Vista's reputation and fate. It was not ready when they released it and never will be because digital restrictions are snake oil. People have been sick of the M$ treadmill for a long time but digital restrictions and the bugs they bring really puts them over the top. Vista is a flop.
Part of it is [M$ Office's inability to work with itself] that they simply can't. Hell even if there's a difference in the installed fonts or a different sized screen, documents have to be reformatted by hand to look good.
They could use ODF without charge any time they want. The same thing goes for every other file format they have a special, inferior version of. I can easily share my work across gnu/linux distributions, Solaris and Mac. M$ is always the problem child.
Eweek has an interesting view of what all of this has done to Windoze itself.
Very good points, as is the death of non free competition on Windoze, satirically reported as Microsoft Antitrust Settlement Is a Success! Everywhere you look, you find yet more evidence of coercion and wrong doing.
someone named plague, claims Vista is "stable" and blithers
Stability and performance are not the same. I never said performance was not an issue, nor did I say stability was unimportant...
Without stability you don't get performance of anykind. The fact remains that adding Vista to any computer is both a performance and stability hit with little to justify it.
I'm happy for you if Vista does anything right and is worth your use, but really I think you are a liar. More reliable people than you have thrown in the towel on Vista.
enough with your stupid journal already
If you don't like it, don't click through. Stick your head in the sand while Steve and Bill throw chairs. I like my little list and there's something new to add to it almost every day.
If the vote was really invalidated for those reasons, it was very nice of M$ to confess and blame their actions on yet another "junior" employee. It was also nice of them to not pay the tools who signed up on the day and voted for M$. The only thing consistent here is dishonesty and betrayal.
Sweden will probably not have time to do another round of voting, so it looks as they will abstain.
I hope not. Being able to scuttle an unfavorable vote one way is just as bad as another.
It is good to see the SIS is protecting it's integrity.
One of the usual gadflies steps up to defend Vista after less than a day of use:
It's clear that our idea of "clean" is different, but the opinion I have comes from others who have worked with Vista for months. People like this really should not have problems. "Ordinary" users have told me worse things. No one, not even dedicated people who have managed to make Vista work, has told me that the system is ready. Let me know nine months from now if Vista can actually do anything for you that XP, Mac or gnu/linux could not do faster. Until then, Vista is crater that's sucking a large chunk of the PC industry down with it.
Everyone should be pissed that the reason for these bugs and performance hits are tools designed to keep you from making copies of your media files and run things from competitors. I know those kinds of things don't bother you, but they do bother me and many others. I have serious doubts in M$'s willingness or ability to pull those restrictions out or make them really work. This is not another ME change the interface and and rename it problem. This is a problem of effort wasted on things that thwart competition and the customer.
I think you need to stop looking at things as black and white. Its not "stable vs. unstable."
Performance issues are important, even to the absurdly forgiving Windoze crowd. Even in a monopoly, the market can object.
Yes, Vista has failed and there are signs of it everyday. The stink is especially obvious when, former advocates in the tech press apologize for saying Vista was worth buying, and many other editors agree.
I can understand why Nick White would want you to buy Vista, but I don't see any real changes that address the problems people are having. He can say whatever he wants about process, it's product that counts.
M$ has burnt a lot of what little credibility it had left with Vista. Apologies from editors are not going to do the trick as long as there is real fair and independent review of performance. Windoze users have waited seven years for an upgrade and they can easily afford to wait another to see if Vista has anything that warrents it's cost and restrictions.
After 10 years of development, you'd think XP would work at least as well as 2K.
After 13 years of development you would think w2k would work as well as NT
After 16 years of development, you would think NT would work as well as VMS.
Hmm, I think we've hit bedrock there. It's a shame people would ever use a non free OS that does not even work as well as other non free OS when they could just have a free one that works.
s a Technology specialist company that also does cameras, we find that 9 times out fo ten the default passwords are set for the administration access of the DVR and even the IP cameras.
So tell me how things look these days, if I want a multi camera system outside of Winblows. What good is configuration on top of XP?
Although it is possible to hack these systems, it is a remote chance if configured properly like anything else.
I've seen these systems being sold to Casinos and what not. The fancy video cards only work with Winblows, so hacking them is only as hard as that.
how did they find the IP of a target store?
You look for the web page they serve with Google. If you don't customize every page and eliminate the keyword combinations, your site can be found.
This is an issue people need to be aware of. Security is only as strong as it's weakest link. People should demand video systems that work with a better OS.
A touchy spun spins out over what should be good news to him:
Screw you twitter. I use Linux every day, at work and at home. I'm sysadmin for thirty Linux servers in a state department that is dedicated to switching to Linux, buttmunch. I searched the MEPIS site for info on flash and found none.
Next time, just download the CD and boot it like I keep telling you, or do a Google search. While flash brings up a bunch of stuff about memory, you kind of see that it's something that just comes on the CD. The Mepis site itself suffers from the same kind of astroturf that Slashdot does. M$ took early aim at one of the first really easy to use desktop distributions, especially one with a book written by a Slashdot editor. But surely a person with a four digit UID knows that.
Good luck with the migration. I look forward to hearing more about it, so don't fire yourself for browsing Slashdot at work.
There's nothing like a does of Register reality to make your morning. "Microsoft promises less-annoying Vista OS early next year" gets right to the M$ money line:
Limbo, limbo, how low can you go? After six years of development, you would think Vista would at least work as well as XP. It does not because big dumb media companies were the customer, not you. Most of you have given this "little-used operating system" the thumbs down it deserves. One more year is not going to make a big difference and you have to wonder if M$ will be able to recover such a wrecked code base. They are not going to give up their expensive digital restrictions but those will never work, what can they do?
But at work, that's another story. Unless you are working in a Mac shop, or unless your duties are mere wordprocessing and email, you'd be often unable to fit a Mac into the process, and Linux would be similarly "against the grain."
You mean like AutoDesk and other terminal M$ Partners applications? Nope, a gnu/linux is still less trouble than a Winblows box. There is nothing you can't do on a distribution like Xandros with Parallels and Crossover Office. The combination takes a little time to get up and running but is more stable and easier to keep running than Winblows on it's own. The only real barrier is how ingrained bad attitudes are at your company.
It's not worth getting fired over but you might want to look for another job if your employer has barriers like this in place. If you can't experiment to know what tool is best for the job, you are surely not using it. Companies like that defeat themselves and make life miserable for everyone in countless other ways. Top down sucks life.
Spun spews ignorance:
Unlike most OEM versions of Windoze, Mepis comes with Adobe Flash. I agree that keeping up with non free software is a pain in the ass and that's why I recommend Mepis to people who must have Flash. When you need a newer version, it's painless to upgrade with a newer CD. Tilde gets her YouTube, the kids get most of their games and all is well. Mepis also comes with Amarok and a decent movie player. Out of the box, it just works.
From what you say above, it's been too long since you have given gnu/linux distributions like Mepis a fair chance. That's too bad because it's a much easier way to make most of your relatives happy. Things are only getting better, but you owe it to yourself to look again.
if you really worked for a computer repairshop, why would you ever see a computer that was working?
Upgrades. I visit computer shops myself from time to time but don't have any that are broken.
Autopatcher is for when you are visiting your aunt Tilly and don't want to spend four hours downloading all the latest patches for her over her dialup.
Next time, just bring a CD.
It's more like a tremendous savings in time and trouble.