If I were to go to a junction box and use it to turn your computer on and off six or seven times, would you blame me when it would not start or would you blame M$ for not having a journaled file system a binary registry and not enough ability to "self heal"? In this case, why are you blaming Skype?
The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
This is just another example of M$'s poor quality code threatening the stability of network services. No other Software distribution besides Windoze has a monthly patch that requires a restart like this. Sane software distributions make fixes available as soon as they are ready. For marketing and big dumb company reasons, M$ saves them up for a once a month ordeal instead of letting users have things in a timely fashion and chose their time and size of their pain. This problem was significant but is trivial next to threat posed by the 25% of all Windows computers that belong to a botnet.
Sure, there was a problem with Skype's code and Skype admitted to it, but the initiating factor is all M$. That's blame casting and M$ deserves it. The summary mentions the code flaw, so I don't see what your problem besides an outsided love for an incompetent software maker. For anyone to report things differently is to misconstrue things.
Ah the irony, a computer museum filled with old M$ OS. Bill Gates once boasted that he would keep a copy of gnu/linux for his computer museum but would eliminate it otherwise. Yet nothing is more useless than an old copy of Windoze. They can be fun, but they are tied to a particular set of hardware and software that's all rotting away. Emulation is interesting but difficult thanks to all the built in traps. Still, it's nice someone is keeping these things around.
Roughly Drafted has a set of articles detailing the OS wars that would complement the physical collection. If you are looking for a trip down memory lane, here it is:
MPEG-4 would be an excellent example. It is an open standard, but has a whole lot of patents covering it.
That's an example of a scandal, not good practice. You can only believe that it's good practice if you believe in software and business method patents. Both of those things have been discredited as a corruption of the patent process and both are stiflingly anti-competitive. RAND is an obfuscation that reasonable standards bodies reject.
OOXML would be an even bigger scandal because it does not even pass your ludicrously low qualifications.
1) The format is open and not subject to change/closure at the whim of a company (generally controlled by a standards body).
OOXML is neither open nor complete because it contains insane specifications that basically say, "do this exactly like Word for Mac with a HP Laser Jet printer did" without further instructions.
The whole point of OOXML is for M$ to have a "standard" they control. If they wanted an open and reasonable standard, they would be using ODF.
All patent holders have agreed that the format can use their parents and that the only compensation they'll get is from those fees.
M$ always presses their advantage. You may wish they did not, but company history proves otherwise, and people who partner with or trust M$ are always crushed.
Now I know you are less than honest or say things without thinking enough.
How is turning off my computer at night a "technical limitation"?... you don't know what you are talking about in terms of media production.
I don't need to be a media expert to know that daily booting is a waste of time and that single desktop GUIs are constraining. Even if your editors can load each of your files perfectly each day you boot, it would be easier if you did not have to wait for that to happen every day. You also have to start up browsers, email and all those other things normal people do. Being able to leave all of your work open is a great advantage free software has over the technical limitations of Windoze. OSX and Windoze are finally making virtual desktops available, something free software users have enjoyed without interruption for more than a decade. Virtual desktops extend the utility of good uptime and the result is a product not a sum of the parts. The number of projects I can work on at the same time is constrained by processor speed and the amount of RAM I have, not the size and number of monitors. These advantages apply to any kind of serious work.
why do companies (who have a profit-driven bottom-line) choose MS products over free ones?
Legacy and that little thing called a Federal Court Proved Coercive Monopoly.
Despite these things, more businesses are choosing free software. IBM, Google, Chrysler, Lowes, and others have all begun a radical shift away from M$ and have saved themselves all sorts of money and heartache.
I reboot when I install driver updates, but other than that the apps I use 90% of the time are SF, Vegas and Pro Tools and they are solid. In other words they don't crash, even when I push them. I can do 60 tracks of audio with no problems and render HD video with multi-track audio and effects and I don't remember a crash. Do I leave my PC on 100% of the time? No, but that's a personal choice and is more about power consumption than anything.
In other words, you boot your computer daily and use if for fancy audio and video work. It rarely crashes while you do this. That's nice, but I expect better and can never, go back to working that way.
I expect better than one day uptime and all the benefits that brings. Instead of booting my laptop, I open the lid and it wakes up. All my work is right where I left it spread across 54 well organized virtual desktops. I can comfortably work on five major projects at once and never forget what I was doing with any of them.
I can't help you with non free video and audio formats but cinerella and audacity are first rate editors. I do not know if they can do everything you need because that's not the kind of work I do.
I'm happy things are working for you but that's more a testament to you being able to work around technical limitations than a story of how great Windoze is.
Calling Windows XP a 7-year-old OS is like calling modern Linux systems nearly 4 years old because the 2.6 branch was released in late 2003.
Don't you wish M$ had anything that new for you? Still, there's no comparing the two, because there's no branch of free software that's ever kept from the public.
M$ is completely outnumbered and outclassed anyway. If M$ put the same kind of work into XP as free software authors put into their work, XP would have become Vista by 2003, M$ would be releasing Win7 and you would have a vast choice of file systems, window managers and programs for every purpose. Non free software does not evolve the same way free software does and much of Vista is really code that goes all the way back to DOS and early Windows. That's why exploits for the newest systems always go back as many versions of Windoze as the AV community cares to report. The non free way of doing things has been over a long time. Vista may really be the last version of Windows.
Those are both nice posts. Many thanks, The Bungi. You are allways like a breath of ass. Have you ever said anyting nice to anyone?
Now for a significant distinction. I don't hate the software, I hate it's owners because they are a bunch of evil and abusive people like yourself. The software is second rate, but it came for all sorts of places and is just a tool, like The Bungi.
I have not submitted the Vista failure log because it's a log, not news. I do submit individual items and many of them have been published. The log strings them together to form a compelling picture of failure that anyone can review and comment on. Show me something wrong and I'll correct it.
The balance here is that a BWR doing a startup has little to no voids (steam replacing water), so many more neutrons are available for fission. Unless the reactor is in "coastdown" where U-235 (and other fissile material) is in limited supply, the effect of more neutrons available to the fissile material exceeds the poisoning effect of additional Xe-135.
I'm starting to wonder at this point is... how much of the Vista hate is just hype-driven?... [people] dislike it because others, whose opinions they're willing to trust, do.
No one hates Vista, it's just software. Only tools from M$ talk about "hate" when people have the nerve to say Vista does not work. That kind of talk makes me think you have a strange definition of "happy" when you say are a happy Vista user.
Trusting someone like Louderback is entirely reasonable. He's a M$ fan. He gave Vista nine months and worked hard to make it work for him. As Editor in Chief of PC Magazine, he has access to resources that should have made him happy. If M$ can't make him happy, they won't make you happy. It's a lot more reasonable than listening to some random dude from Slashdot who looks like astroturf.
There are clear risks and no benefit to Vista and it's hurting PC sales. Are you going to spend $300 and play application roulette for something with bugs the size of Manhattan? Are you going to buy a new computer with it? Few of us will. I'm not, unless it comes with gnu/linux on it. M$ fans are not because they can't be sure XP will work with it. You are going to have to produce a big list of cool stuff Vista does to convince even M$ users to migrate when other M$ fans have such negative opinions.
You might be happy with a seven year old OS, but most of us would like something a little more modern. Most GNU/Linux distributions have been through two stable releases since 2001 and each brought real improvements and features.
I don't begrudge your happiness but that kind of thing is short lived. Sooner or later XP users are going to join w2k, ME, 98, 95, 3.1 and DOS users who can't find new software or replacement devices that work with their OS. The non free software forces are working on new formats and devices that won't work with XP. If you wait too long, your work harder to transfer and your losses will mount. The waste of your time and effort is intentional and is the way the upgrade treadmill works. Those who think otherwise live in a fool's paradise.
Free software is the only upgrade that escapes the non free data trap and upgrade treadmill. The purpose of non free software is to make money for it's owners. To do this, the owners must keep users helpless and divided. Free software has a simpler purpose, to do what users want.
"We don't believe we've ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature," said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tenn. based utility.
I don't know about you, but I'm used to rivers being cool. From mountain springs to the Mississippi, I've never seen a whole river at 90 F. It's crazy and says something about global warming and the extensive drought the US is experiencing.
Someone who works at a nuke should care more than you do. Reducing capacity is one thing, but turning off a reactor is a pain in the ass. Depending on burnup and time down, you may have to wait weeks before binging it back on line. I pity the people who work there. An outage in that kind of heat is going to suck for everyone who has to crawl around. It's also bad for the people you serve. Essentially, you have lost 1 GW of baseline power. According to the article, that's about 3% of their best generation capacity. An idle nuke makes expensive electricity. Using coal instead is just going to make things worse - more pollution and more carbon emissions.
Apparently there are more people reading Distrowatch with Vista than they are with Debian,... The ultimate irony here - Distrowatch.com. It just kills me.
Vista owners are looking for a new OS. Why does this confuse you? If Vista is as bad as Louderback says it is, gnu/linux is the only upgrade option that will work. Large numbers of Windoze users looking at a site like Distrowatch is bad news for M$ and good news for software freedom.
I guess all this nonsense about Vista being a flop is far from true.
Visit the Vista failure log and wake up. M$ can't push Vista. It's SP1 won't fix things and I doubt they can come up with a new OS people will really want. They have gone too far down the digital restrictions path to recover.
ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities.
Charge by the minute ISP sucked, but it's nice of you to compare it to other monopoly services. You might as well tell me the break up of Bell was a bad idea.
Outside of a monopoly, charge per bandwith will fail and drive most people right off the internet. 25% of windoze users are part of a botnet. Disconnecting them until their computers are clean is a better idea than serving them a big fat bill. It would also clear up a lot of bandwith that people could use for things they want, which is the point of internet service to begin with. Only a monopoly service would dare hinder the core function of a service. If they dare make it so that one in four people are ripped off at random, average users will panic and drop their subscriptions. The people served big bills may never come back.
Ah, would that that were true! Our corporate-mandated travel web site is travelport.net.
So, this and a few dozen other nasty things your company has done forces you to have Windoze somewhere. If you are lucky enough to be able to use gnu/linux at all, you can use Xandros and Crossover Office or Parallels to deal with that. I don't know how I'd get anything done without a decent window manager and all the tools I'm used to. In that case, right click open that nasty site in IE. If you are forced to use Windoze it's probably easier to find another job than it is to fight.
What I've read does not support the assertion. In the last year, M$ has made a few converters that imperfectly use the text document branch of ODF. These converters are poorly integrated into Office and not at all into the OS, so using ODF on a M$ platform without Open Office is painful.
If a user wants ODF, you would think that they would just get Open Office. It's interface is more familiar than Office 2007 and the user gets a next generation file format, free from vendor lock-in.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the article which is about no one outside of Redmond using M$XML.
The problem, as I see it is people are using ODF/.doc/Microsoft-whatever to often for documents that are really supposed to be just electronically published documents.
The real problem is that there is still a difference. You should be able to edit documents with ease. "Publication formats" like pdf are kludges that get around the fact that.DOC produced different results on different machines. Word Perfect did not have this problem and was the defacto standard before MicroSquish got them. M$'s abandonment of thier binary format is an admission of this failure, but their new format does not fix it. ODF comes closer and is being used more.
It is remarkably good news that M$ has not been able to force.docx, ie7 or Vista.
Office 2007 users don't like posting documents on the interweb.
But Office 2003 do? I know that M$ hates the internet and all, but another M$ apologist in the room has pointed to the existence of many ordinary.doc as proof of I don't know what.
You will have to try harder to mask OOXML's poor adoption rates.
Old word formats are still a poor way to share documents and are probably outnumbered by pdf.
The new formats are supposed to address these problems and deliver a fundamental promise of electronic editing: seemless collaboration. The M$ format is really more of the same old M$ only, version dependent stuff M$ has always served. Because it offers no real improvement, it's adoption will have to be forced. ODF, on the other hand, offers a choice of editors and OS, and is being used by people. Free and open standards work. M$XML is not really free and won't work. The M$ monopoly is failing.
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Necessary is the keyword, and no site dumb enough to do this is necessary. The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power. They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric. A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share. Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue. Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
It's better to punish the offending site by going elsewhere. When you change your user agent, you tell the world that it's OK to do dumb stuff like this.
All we have here is an attempt by microsoft to shuffle quietly away from the failed strategy that was drm. One teensy problem. Microsoft don't have the power to force other media file players to enact its scheme...
The new "scheme" is just another form of DRM. All digital restrictions schemes have the same problem - the present is more free than their proposed non free future and people prefer freedom. Vista may be a failure, but it proves that M$ is the world's biggest promoter of digital slavery. M$ knows this and promotes digital restrictions as "enablers" and givers of freedom. It's always a lie.
People say I'm too grumpy so maybe TV hasn't reach most people's limit yet...
They perceive you as grumpy because they are brainwashed. They get angry when you say something that offends their favorite brand loyalty. You don't get the joke when they reference the latest cable broadcast advert. You have to walk on eggshells to avoid pissing them off and it's getting worse.
People immersed in corporate culture have a collection of dangerous inner tensions and repressed emotions. Digital editing has made advertising orders of magnitude more manipulative. Advertisers are toying with potent subliminal content like sex, death and other x rated horrors. You are better off spending your time looking at porn and crime scene photos because you can process that rationally and resolve issues you might have. The goal of advertising is to create irrational responses that fuel purchases. It also creates dangerous impatience and tempers as a byproduct. Those exposed are essentially are walking around with post traumatic stress disorders. Real stress pushes them over the edge.
There's nothing new in this watermarking schmeme, except to get people used to obligatory advertising on their computers and portable music players. It is a re-branding and extension of DRM.
whenever a watermarked file is played on an ActiveNow-enabled device, the service could dynamically insert some sort of advertising--presumably audio, but perhaps video or text depending on the device being used."
The only thing that does not ring true about this scheme is the false choice between watermarks and DRM. You are going to get both. What's to keep me from using a free player that won't bomb me with adverts? Digital restrictions, of course. They may call it something else, but it's the same game and it will use all the same tools. The DMCA, bogus patents and all the rest will keep MAFIAA content under wraps on non free systems. It will remain hard to use. The "great juke box in the sky" is further away than it was ten years ago. The MAFIAA goal is to impose all the restrictions of 1940 media onto digital content.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were to go to a junction box and use it to turn your computer on and off six or seven times, would you blame me when it would not start or would you blame M$ for not having a journaled file system a binary registry and not enough ability to "self heal"? In this case, why are you blaming Skype?
The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
This is just another example of M$'s poor quality code threatening the stability of network services. No other Software distribution besides Windoze has a monthly patch that requires a restart like this. Sane software distributions make fixes available as soon as they are ready. For marketing and big dumb company reasons, M$ saves them up for a once a month ordeal instead of letting users have things in a timely fashion and chose their time and size of their pain. This problem was significant but is trivial next to threat posed by the 25% of all Windows computers that belong to a botnet.
Sure, there was a problem with Skype's code and Skype admitted to it, but the initiating factor is all M$. That's blame casting and M$ deserves it. The summary mentions the code flaw, so I don't see what your problem besides an outsided love for an incompetent software maker. For anyone to report things differently is to misconstrue things.
Ah the irony, a computer museum filled with old M$ OS. Bill Gates once boasted that he would keep a copy of gnu/linux for his computer museum but would eliminate it otherwise. Yet nothing is more useless than an old copy of Windoze. They can be fun, but they are tied to a particular set of hardware and software that's all rotting away. Emulation is interesting but difficult thanks to all the built in traps. Still, it's nice someone is keeping these things around.
Roughly Drafted has a set of articles detailing the OS wars that would complement the physical collection. If you are looking for a trip down memory lane, here it is:
They are all well written, entertaining and accurate.
MPEG-4 would be an excellent example. It is an open standard, but has a whole lot of patents covering it.
That's an example of a scandal, not good practice. You can only believe that it's good practice if you believe in software and business method patents. Both of those things have been discredited as a corruption of the patent process and both are stiflingly anti-competitive. RAND is an obfuscation that reasonable standards bodies reject.
OOXML would be an even bigger scandal because it does not even pass your ludicrously low qualifications.
1) The format is open and not subject to change/closure at the whim of a company (generally controlled by a standards body).
OOXML is neither open nor complete because it contains insane specifications that basically say, "do this exactly like Word for Mac with a HP Laser Jet printer did" without further instructions.
The whole point of OOXML is for M$ to have a "standard" they control. If they wanted an open and reasonable standard, they would be using ODF.
All patent holders have agreed that the format can use their parents and that the only compensation they'll get is from those fees.
M$ always presses their advantage. You may wish they did not, but company history proves otherwise, and people who partner with or trust M$ are always crushed.
Now I know you are less than honest or say things without thinking enough.
How is turning off my computer at night a "technical limitation"? ... you don't know what you are talking about in terms of media production.
I don't need to be a media expert to know that daily booting is a waste of time and that single desktop GUIs are constraining. Even if your editors can load each of your files perfectly each day you boot, it would be easier if you did not have to wait for that to happen every day. You also have to start up browsers, email and all those other things normal people do. Being able to leave all of your work open is a great advantage free software has over the technical limitations of Windoze. OSX and Windoze are finally making virtual desktops available, something free software users have enjoyed without interruption for more than a decade. Virtual desktops extend the utility of good uptime and the result is a product not a sum of the parts. The number of projects I can work on at the same time is constrained by processor speed and the amount of RAM I have, not the size and number of monitors. These advantages apply to any kind of serious work.
why do companies (who have a profit-driven bottom-line) choose MS products over free ones?
Legacy and that little thing called a Federal Court Proved Coercive Monopoly.
Despite these things, more businesses are choosing free software. IBM, Google, Chrysler, Lowes, and others have all begun a radical shift away from M$ and have saved themselves all sorts of money and heartache.
DaveCBio brags:
I reboot when I install driver updates, but other than that the apps I use 90% of the time are SF, Vegas and Pro Tools and they are solid. In other words they don't crash, even when I push them. I can do 60 tracks of audio with no problems and render HD video with multi-track audio and effects and I don't remember a crash. Do I leave my PC on 100% of the time? No, but that's a personal choice and is more about power consumption than anything.
In other words, you boot your computer daily and use if for fancy audio and video work. It rarely crashes while you do this. That's nice, but I expect better and can never, go back to working that way.
I expect better than one day uptime and all the benefits that brings. Instead of booting my laptop, I open the lid and it wakes up. All my work is right where I left it spread across 54 well organized virtual desktops. I can comfortably work on five major projects at once and never forget what I was doing with any of them.
I can't help you with non free video and audio formats but cinerella and audacity are first rate editors. I do not know if they can do everything you need because that's not the kind of work I do.
I'm happy things are working for you but that's more a testament to you being able to work around technical limitations than a story of how great Windoze is.
Is it me? Or are AC's not even trying anymore?
They never had much to work with but now they have nothing left but harassment and distraction.
Calling Windows XP a 7-year-old OS is like calling modern Linux systems nearly 4 years old because the 2.6 branch was released in late 2003.
Don't you wish M$ had anything that new for you? Still, there's no comparing the two, because there's no branch of free software that's ever kept from the public.
M$ is completely outnumbered and outclassed anyway. If M$ put the same kind of work into XP as free software authors put into their work, XP would have become Vista by 2003, M$ would be releasing Win7 and you would have a vast choice of file systems, window managers and programs for every purpose. Non free software does not evolve the same way free software does and much of Vista is really code that goes all the way back to DOS and early Windows. That's why exploits for the newest systems always go back as many versions of Windoze as the AV community cares to report. The non free way of doing things has been over a long time. Vista may really be the last version of Windows.
Those are both nice posts. Many thanks, The Bungi. You are allways like a breath of ass. Have you ever said anyting nice to anyone?
Now for a significant distinction. I don't hate the software, I hate it's owners because they are a bunch of evil and abusive people like yourself. The software is second rate, but it came for all sorts of places and is just a tool, like The Bungi.
I have not submitted the Vista failure log because it's a log, not news. I do submit individual items and many of them have been published. The log strings them together to form a compelling picture of failure that anyone can review and comment on. Show me something wrong and I'll correct it.
The balance here is that a BWR doing a startup has little to no voids (steam replacing water), so many more neutrons are available for fission. Unless the reactor is in "coastdown" where U-235 (and other fissile material) is in limited supply, the effect of more neutrons available to the fissile material exceeds the poisoning effect of additional Xe-135.
So what can you do with a BWR that does not Boil?
I'm starting to wonder at this point is... how much of the Vista hate is just hype-driven? ... [people] dislike it because others, whose opinions they're willing to trust, do.
No one hates Vista, it's just software. Only tools from M$ talk about "hate" when people have the nerve to say Vista does not work. That kind of talk makes me think you have a strange definition of "happy" when you say are a happy Vista user.
Trusting someone like Louderback is entirely reasonable. He's a M$ fan. He gave Vista nine months and worked hard to make it work for him. As Editor in Chief of PC Magazine, he has access to resources that should have made him happy. If M$ can't make him happy, they won't make you happy. It's a lot more reasonable than listening to some random dude from Slashdot who looks like astroturf.
There are clear risks and no benefit to Vista and it's hurting PC sales. Are you going to spend $300 and play application roulette for something with bugs the size of Manhattan? Are you going to buy a new computer with it? Few of us will. I'm not, unless it comes with gnu/linux on it. M$ fans are not because they can't be sure XP will work with it. You are going to have to produce a big list of cool stuff Vista does to convince even M$ users to migrate when other M$ fans have such negative opinions.
You might be happy with a seven year old OS, but most of us would like something a little more modern. Most GNU/Linux distributions have been through two stable releases since 2001 and each brought real improvements and features.
I don't begrudge your happiness but that kind of thing is short lived. Sooner or later XP users are going to join w2k, ME, 98, 95, 3.1 and DOS users who can't find new software or replacement devices that work with their OS. The non free software forces are working on new formats and devices that won't work with XP. If you wait too long, your work harder to transfer and your losses will mount. The waste of your time and effort is intentional and is the way the upgrade treadmill works. Those who think otherwise live in a fool's paradise.
Free software is the only upgrade that escapes the non free data trap and upgrade treadmill. The purpose of non free software is to make money for it's owners. To do this, the owners must keep users helpless and divided. Free software has a simpler purpose, to do what users want.
The TVA thinks this is remarkable:
"We don't believe we've ever shut down a nuclear unit because of river temperature," said John Moulton, spokesman for the Knoxville, Tenn. based utility.
I don't know about you, but I'm used to rivers being cool. From mountain springs to the Mississippi, I've never seen a whole river at 90 F. It's crazy and says something about global warming and the extensive drought the US is experiencing.
Someone who works at a nuke should care more than you do. Reducing capacity is one thing, but turning off a reactor is a pain in the ass. Depending on burnup and time down, you may have to wait weeks before binging it back on line. I pity the people who work there. An outage in that kind of heat is going to suck for everyone who has to crawl around. It's also bad for the people you serve. Essentially, you have lost 1 GW of baseline power. According to the article, that's about 3% of their best generation capacity. An idle nuke makes expensive electricity. Using coal instead is just going to make things worse - more pollution and more carbon emissions.
A silly AC writes:
Apparently there are more people reading Distrowatch with Vista than they are with Debian, ... The ultimate irony here - Distrowatch.com. It just kills me.
Vista owners are looking for a new OS. Why does this confuse you? If Vista is as bad as Louderback says it is, gnu/linux is the only upgrade option that will work. Large numbers of Windoze users looking at a site like Distrowatch is bad news for M$ and good news for software freedom.
I guess all this nonsense about Vista being a flop is far from true.
Visit the Vista failure log and wake up. M$ can't push Vista. It's SP1 won't fix things and I doubt they can come up with a new OS people will really want. They have gone too far down the digital restrictions path to recover.
ISPs should start charging for bandwidth used just like electric, gas, and other utilities.
Charge by the minute ISP sucked, but it's nice of you to compare it to other monopoly services. You might as well tell me the break up of Bell was a bad idea.
Outside of a monopoly, charge per bandwith will fail and drive most people right off the internet. 25% of windoze users are part of a botnet. Disconnecting them until their computers are clean is a better idea than serving them a big fat bill. It would also clear up a lot of bandwith that people could use for things they want, which is the point of internet service to begin with. Only a monopoly service would dare hinder the core function of a service. If they dare make it so that one in four people are ripped off at random, average users will panic and drop their subscriptions. The people served big bills may never come back.
Ah, would that that were true! Our corporate-mandated travel web site is travelport.net.
So, this and a few dozen other nasty things your company has done forces you to have Windoze somewhere. If you are lucky enough to be able to use gnu/linux at all, you can use Xandros and Crossover Office or Parallels to deal with that. I don't know how I'd get anything done without a decent window manager and all the tools I'm used to. In that case, right click open that nasty site in IE. If you are forced to use Windoze it's probably easier to find another job than it is to fight.
This would be wonderful if it were true.
MS Office supports ODF just fine.
What I've read does not support the assertion. In the last year, M$ has made a few converters that imperfectly use the text document branch of ODF. These converters are poorly integrated into Office and not at all into the OS, so using ODF on a M$ platform without Open Office is painful.
If a user wants ODF, you would think that they would just get Open Office. It's interface is more familiar than Office 2007 and the user gets a next generation file format, free from vendor lock-in.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the article which is about no one outside of Redmond using M$XML.
The problem, as I see it is people are using ODF/.doc/Microsoft-whatever to often for documents that are really supposed to be just electronically published documents.
The real problem is that there is still a difference. You should be able to edit documents with ease. "Publication formats" like pdf are kludges that get around the fact that .DOC produced different results on different machines. Word Perfect did not have this problem and was the defacto standard before MicroSquish got them. M$'s abandonment of thier binary format is an admission of this failure, but their new format does not fix it. ODF comes closer and is being used more.
It is remarkably good news that M$ has not been able to force .docx, ie7 or Vista.
Office 2007 users don't like posting documents on the interweb.
But Office 2003 do? I know that M$ hates the internet and all, but another M$ apologist in the room has pointed to the existence of many ordinary .doc as proof of I don't know what.
You will have to try harder to mask OOXML's poor adoption rates.
Old word formats are still a poor way to share documents and are probably outnumbered by pdf.
The new formats are supposed to address these problems and deliver a fundamental promise of electronic editing: seemless collaboration. The M$ format is really more of the same old M$ only, version dependent stuff M$ has always served. Because it offers no real improvement, it's adoption will have to be forced. ODF, on the other hand, offers a choice of editors and OS, and is being used by people. Free and open standards work. M$XML is not really free and won't work. The M$ monopoly is failing.
This is almost always a mistake:
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Necessary is the keyword, and no site dumb enough to do this is necessary. The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power. They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric. A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share. Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue. Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
It's better to punish the offending site by going elsewhere. When you change your user agent, you tell the world that it's OK to do dumb stuff like this.
You bought the lie:
All we have here is an attempt by microsoft to shuffle quietly away from the failed strategy that was drm. One teensy problem. Microsoft don't have the power to force other media file players to enact its scheme ...
The new "scheme" is just another form of DRM. All digital restrictions schemes have the same problem - the present is more free than their proposed non free future and people prefer freedom. Vista may be a failure, but it proves that M$ is the world's biggest promoter of digital slavery. M$ knows this and promotes digital restrictions as "enablers" and givers of freedom. It's always a lie.
They perceive you as grumpy because they are brainwashed. They get angry when you say something that offends their favorite brand loyalty. You don't get the joke when they reference the latest cable broadcast advert. You have to walk on eggshells to avoid pissing them off and it's getting worse.
People immersed in corporate culture have a collection of dangerous inner tensions and repressed emotions. Digital editing has made advertising orders of magnitude more manipulative. Advertisers are toying with potent subliminal content like sex, death and other x rated horrors. You are better off spending your time looking at porn and crime scene photos because you can process that rationally and resolve issues you might have. The goal of advertising is to create irrational responses that fuel purchases. It also creates dangerous impatience and tempers as a byproduct. Those exposed are essentially are walking around with post traumatic stress disorders. Real stress pushes them over the edge.
There's nothing new in this watermarking schmeme, except to get people used to obligatory advertising on their computers and portable music players. It is a re-branding and extension of DRM.
The only thing that does not ring true about this scheme is the false choice between watermarks and DRM. You are going to get both. What's to keep me from using a free player that won't bomb me with adverts? Digital restrictions, of course. They may call it something else, but it's the same game and it will use all the same tools. The DMCA, bogus patents and all the rest will keep MAFIAA content under wraps on non free systems. It will remain hard to use. The "great juke box in the sky" is further away than it was ten years ago. The MAFIAA goal is to impose all the restrictions of 1940 media onto digital content.