I can't see why open software would be any better than closed software in this case.
You should try a visit to your local University's Nuclear Science Department or your local power plant's Reactor Engineering Department. There you will find the FORTRAN codes that people use to keep track of their inventories. The stuff from GE (3D Monocore) and Seimens comes with some strings attached, but the source is certianly open and long standing legacy stuff. Codes from places like Oak Ridge (SCALE an example) and Los Alamos (MCNP an example) are also open source, if not free.
Bugs of the kind that produce computational errors are not tollerated at all. Some assembly may be required, but if your build does not produce the same results as previous proved cases IT DOES NOT GET USED.
I've written a few dinky codes of my own for classes. Other people in those classes have contributed to the real packages. It's fun work, nothing LEET about it.
A continent that imports 2/3 of it's food needs the kind of net that catches fish. Stay home, make money, give to charities that send people who can and like to do things that will really help. Your contributions to, say Debian, will be felt in Africa too.
It's called a stockade. You lock loosers up in them for a few days so that they can piss themselves while people toss tomatoes and insults at them. Repeat visitors usually ended up on the gallows.
A good programmer checks the results of their code as well as the code itself.
True! and a good scientist would never trust MS.
I can't imagine using closed source programs for nuclear materials and I have not seen it either except for the most mundane additons and plotting. Some fool might be trying something more elaborate somewhere, but all software used in the US for this kind of thing has elaborate trails, proving and QC. This should serve as a wake up call to people trusting closed source junk on PC's for less critical, punn intended, applications.
Works great, and as a gigantor corperation, we can get away with it.
So what do you do with the Boss's Word attachments? How do you keep him and his secretary from running comet cursor or some other more malicious trojaned piece of fluff off the web? Have you disabled Java in Netscape and MSIE?
If you are so big, you might make a real difference and run a real OS! Good luck if you don't.
"Don't run Outlook" is what every PHB that reads this site needs to see. They also need to see and read parts of Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, Published by Wiley, 2/2/2000 where the authors point out exactly what's wrong with it, MSIE, non Mozilla Netscape, and Windows. They recomend never using Windows to connect to the internet, ever.
I work in a place that uses NT. When asked I will give my honest and full opinion of such things. I have my doubts that MS will ever fix its little problems, and know that free and superior alternatives exist.
Oh yeah, you know as well as I do that nothing is going to keep rouge applications from reading or writing your Outlook address book. Saying things you don't believe to garner ignorant responses is also known as trolling.
Don't worry, if the support mechanisms were in place to do this MS might have done it. It's not really there, as problems like this demonstrate, and they won't put it in either. It would cost about a billion $ to fix Windows, AKA the quick and dirty operating system (QDOS), and MS would rather spend that kind of money on Adverting the public.
Several Points here... First, why all this pleading that Java should be considered a vital part of the OS? Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the question, and
There, see, you said it not me.
Java was not part of MS OS like IE was because you could remove java and still work your computer. Remember the comingiling article you saw on Slashdot today? Ever tried to run an MS poluted PC without Exploder? It works just a little worse than one with Exploder.
Don't worry too much, there is no new microsoft. No one who uses MS or writes code for MS is free.
This has hardly been a black eye because people believe what they want. One MS dumb dumb in my office sees this as evidence that "Microsoft has changed". Some jerk below thinks that Netscape could have avoided problems by using the "com" package IE uses to "integrate" iteself with the OS better, as if that were possible without a complete code rewrite or desirable. MS claims that they are eliminating java for security reasons. Whatever! MS has got as large a black eye as it can possibly have from the poor perfomance of its OS and applications. What could be worse than that? All this desktop placement and JAVA FUD are just so many distractions and missinformation.
OEMs should dump MS altogether. A preconfigured Red Hat box is no more difficult to operate than a preconfigured MS box. Bundled up with something like Star Office, even the pointiest haired boss would appreciate it. With 5% of all desktops, linux is as mainstream as Apple. A few of these boxes on display at CompUSA and on sale at Dell would end all of this Monopoly liscence and compatibility BS forever.
not shipping Java with the OS anymore and requiring users to go out and download the JVM they want.
Sure, they will. They will get a message that says something like, "This page contains JAVA code that Microsoft no longer supports for security reasons. It may contain viruses and damage your computer. If you want to use it anyway, press yes." Right...
Then how long do you think it will take them to break Sun's JVM again? The trick of making competitors look unstable is starting to tell on M$, as most people now know who is to blame. Those idiots keep doing the same things. What a waste.
This kind of stuff makes me want to scream. Converting the net into a push media will destroy it.
It is good that people are waking up to the imposition placed on them, but I worry that they will just turn to the next bunch of scammers.
Email is a great example of what can happen. Two articles in the New York times just about made me cry. The first about people's inability to orgainze their mail focused on Outlook without noting that programs inability to notify the user about messages "filtered" into subfolders. The second touts a service that will take $10 a month from you to "forward" your email, as long as you keep your old ISP. What?! Email forwarding is part of the mail protocols and used to be a common courtesy. They don't do it to discourage users from moving. They can additionally argue that most of the mail is the junk that forced the user to want to move anyway. The user in these cases has been srewed out of technologicaly possible common coutesies and screwed relentlessly by spammers and are now forced to pay a monthly fee, all by people who are abusing a PUBLIC NETWORK. Then, a large number of them are forced to view all of this junk with a substandard mail browser that is able to destroy all of their files directly or indrectly through VBS viruses and a substandard OS.
I can imagine scammers setting up "sevice sites" that will, for a fee, remove adverts from content. I can also imagine "premium" browsers being sold to XP users that will remove all but MS sponsered adverts. Barf! The scum are feeding off the problems they create.
It's time to use this discontent and the US post office to sieze back the net. People should have a permenantly registered name, at no cost, from which they can serve as well as recieve mail. Private comunications should have the sanctity of snail mail, the protection the US government and encryption, and be absolutely uncensored and free.
With all the trash talk about GPL viruses, it would be good to hear from someone who knows all about such things. The author of the question may know better, but he's not looking for an ignorant answer to amuse himself and obfuscate useful information.
You and I may know about the problems of the MS way, but some people reading this don't. They might not be aware of all the trouble it was to free (re write from scratch!) the source code to X, Netscape, BSD and on and on so that everyone could use it without paying fees, signing non disclosure agreements and surrendering all rights in general. To them, some of this MS BS might make sense. Let the Kompany add it's best to the message.
MS does not have to give any "real" product away. This beta BS is just a mailer to get a few suckers to talk up the new product to people with broken machines (ie, those who have older MS OS installed.) Those poor suckers will go out and buy an new machine with XP on it or get the original beta tester to torture their older machine with it. The older machine will run slower with the new more bloated OS and the poor sucker will end up buying a new PC anyway.
History:
Win3.1 dead by shortly after the introduction of 95, forgoten with sneers after the introduction of 98.
Win95 dead shortly after the intorduction of 98. forgoten after introduction of win2k.
Prediction:
Win98 dead already, forgoten after introduction of XP.
WinXP dead on demand, forget it now. If it's anything like SMS, the dinky MS desktop manager I have to use at work, it's going to suck very often every day in the end.
The upgrade train rolls on, so long as people are afraid to put anything but that familiar MS junk on their machine. And why is it familiar? Because it's the same garbage they released in 1993 with a few changes to break other people's code!
Friends don't help friends put MS on their machines.
For example, I expect that within 5 years we'll see legislation forcing ISPs to verify the identities of users and log and store all traffic for a some minimum time frame; this minor step has already been taken over in the EU. I think it makes sense though, as a method to combat computer crime. The internet can't stay the wild-west forever.
This would be fine, so long as everyone was an ISP and could keep their own records! The whole structure of the internet is supposed to be peer to peer. Legislation that forces subservience to this otherwise equitable technology is a free speech, privacy and national security threat.
As the internet becomes the publishing medium of choice, it is important to preserve the ability of anyone to publish. Control of this medium would be much like the control that governments once imposed on printing presses, opressive, counterproductive and doomed to failure. Any attack on the ability to publish and publish anonymously should be seen as an attack on free speech.
Tracking internet usage by tracking user log ons and browsing is useless and oppresive. It has no use but invasion of privacy. Real criminals will always find away around measures like this. The computer time needed for this tracking would be better put to other purposes.
Finally, the equitable nature of internet protocalls is needed for national security reasons. The web was designed for redundency and continued operation in the event of nuclear war. It's a natural extention of Ham radio field day. Every computer should be able to serve as a true node in the net, if not redundancy is lost and the system becomes weak.
Computer "crime" is best fought by redundency and well educated adminsters who can track down attacks well.
Let other nations oppress their people and track their habbits like bugs. We should live free and thrive.
Hmmm, please reread that rant, I'm mostly with you.
I'm trying to present the PHB view of MS's constantly changing and bloated "standards". Like a wife beater, MS is using a twisted combination of flattery and abuse. They know it sucks because their computer is just as slow and crashes just as much or more as their old 486 running win93. But they feel trapped by their ignorance and MS encourages this feeling. When they get a letter from somone they can't open, they feel outdated and embarrased to seek help. That stupid little advert with the groovey young people on Smithsonian magazine's dead trees has worked it's magic on them. They know MS is going to change it's format and that is going to take some unpleasant action on their part. I'm surrounded by users like this at my job. They are just beat by it all.
Yes, this is an old story. MS has done this for years. It's the upgrade mill. Don't think the media is not going to coo, ohh and awe at XP or 2000 for one billion dollars worth of advert revenue.
What's different is the scale and the stupid and infurating public statements. Most people have not picked up those bizzare statements, and they don't know what an SDK is, or a GPL or a BSD, or whatever that alphabet soup is that might come out of your mouth. Remember that the average person spends less than 15 minutes a day getting their news. The statements are designed to make you look nuts for bothering over some arcane piece of junk you will never use. It's missinformation plain and simple, designed to waste your effort and discredit.
It's nice to hear that you have some more enlightened CIOs. The trade mags from Ziff Davis lying around here all have an MS focus still. Bill Gates himself gave my company a videotaped pat on the back for beeing such a good sucker, errr customer and inovator. The PR folks acutally put that tape on for their college tours two years ago!
This crap is part of #2, discredit Linux. How? Simple, they keep their usual marketing going and make us scream like ninnies and scare the hell out of PHBs.
MS is poised to spend ONE BILLION DOLLARS on XP junk. Last month's Smithsonian and National Geographic both featured two page spreads pommising that XP would make you feel complete, make you a magician, and a time warper. These expensive technicolor visions of young people and their computers are just the beginning of their campaign wich will be unescapable. It's business as usual, make a few minor changes and hype it up to PHB as the answer to all problems.
But what's that got to do with liscences to one goofey little SDK? Nothing, and that's the point!
This little insult to your freedom will be seen by the PHB as extreemist and wierd. Why do you care about being able to use VI, just get the job done you will be told.
The goal is to discredit YOU, and Linux by association. Expect MS to make other little insults like this to get everyone all keyed up about how rotten MS is right before they release the real orgy of self worship that is comming. While you are frothing in self imposed self rightous minority (still less than 5%?), they are going to present a smiling party face to everyone.
"What a looser! When I send him mail, he can't read it!" will be the thought many have as they use "Send to Mail Recipient" in Word. Don't trust Linux, it's all controled by those crazy loosers they will say. Barf. More of the same, bigger and uglier.
Too bad they don't really have a product to justify the party.
These showed how Microsoft's goal was domination with IE. (Never mind that, in the end,
they did make a better browser than Netscape.)
Ah, my favorite troll. I'm not sure why some people continue to think IE is worth anything. It could be that Windoze loads it on start up so that it looks faster to some people. It's still slower than Netscape 4.x on NT for me. I suppose people who must have all the flash trash, images and java that adverters can toss at them might like IE which won't let them turn them off. (I have to turn them off each time you open the thing). Some people might even like the total system integration that alows malicious web sites to own their computers. No, here at work I'll stick to Netscape. Others can continue to give away their freedoms by whatever means they will.
And that is the issue. It's not a single application, it's my ability to choose. MS has used all sorts of dirty tricks to force applications, all inferior, down people's throats on their platforms. They have also used all sorts of dirty tricks to keep hardware makers from even thinking of making drivers for other OSs. You know, that stupid little flag on the box, interface specs in a timely manner la la, so that you have less of a choice about platforms. They have refused to compete and will continue to refuse because they can't.
All those dirty tricks are haunting them. Win2k is NOT STABLE. A friend of mine's been running it and it's not much better than NT, a crash in six weeks or less ususally less. It could not even format a hard disk at my house for my wife's MS box. All the little breaks and odd things they put in to thwart competitors have got to make their code base a bloated hell. If only that effort had been put into fixing things instead. Still, their programers are no match for the thousands of happy volunteers a decade of abuse has spawed. Free software sucks less and there are now more Linux developers than Windows developers. Hearts and minds are lost to them and won't be comming back.
Ah! enlightenment. Thank you. It looks like the clever people at Caltech have figured out how to direct and multiply the force of the kite.
This is nice if the kite can be contoled from the ground by other than brute force. After all, if you can't you will expend just as much effort bringing it down as you got out of it while it was going up.
I still don't see it being very practical. A regualar wind mill exploits the wind in a more controlable fashion. I'm also still weary of relying on something as inconstant as the wind for a power source. When the wind dies, the load comes down unless it's well ratcheted. If I had all of that derick work, I'd get some friends to pull the load up. Still, it's a very interesting idea.
Microsoft has not invented anything here. We are talking about a hyperlink! These things have been around since someone invented a GUI (1960s).
What Microsoft has done is to litter other people's work with links of Microsoft's choosing. This is what the Washington Post author who broke the story found out. When he visited his own paper's sports page he found it covered with stupid little purple squirmy lines like Word spelling errors. They pointed to broken links and
MicroStupid's own little search engine.
You've even deluded yourself into thinking smart tags are even remotely like normal links - sorry this isn't the case.
Slashdot Mirror
You should try a visit to your local University's Nuclear Science Department or your local power plant's Reactor Engineering Department. There you will find the FORTRAN codes that people use to keep track of their inventories. The stuff from GE (3D Monocore) and Seimens comes with some strings attached, but the source is certianly open and long standing legacy stuff. Codes from places like Oak Ridge (SCALE an example) and Los Alamos (MCNP an example) are also open source, if not free. Bugs of the kind that produce computational errors are not tollerated at all. Some assembly may be required, but if your build does not produce the same results as previous proved cases IT DOES NOT GET USED.
I've written a few dinky codes of my own for classes. Other people in those classes have contributed to the real packages. It's fun work, nothing LEET about it.
A continent that imports 2/3 of it's food needs the kind of net that catches fish. Stay home, make money, give to charities that send people who can and like to do things that will really help. Your contributions to, say Debian, will be felt in Africa too.
It's called a stockade. You lock loosers up in them for a few days so that they can piss themselves while people toss tomatoes and insults at them. Repeat visitors usually ended up on the gallows.
Dude, those computers are so stoned!
God, how I hate stoners.
Those boxes really smoke when you turn them on.
True! and a good scientist would never trust MS.
I can't imagine using closed source programs for nuclear materials and I have not seen it either except for the most mundane additons and plotting. Some fool might be trying something more elaborate somewhere, but all software used in the US for this kind of thing has elaborate trails, proving and QC. This should serve as a wake up call to people trusting closed source junk on PC's for less critical, punn intended, applications.
The headline could have been "M$'s Munchie insults Rusian governement and scientific community by Blaming the User (TM)." Sounds like news to me.
So what do you do with the Boss's Word attachments? How do you keep him and his secretary from running comet cursor or some other more malicious trojaned piece of fluff off the web? Have you disabled Java in Netscape and MSIE?
If you are so big, you might make a real difference and run a real OS! Good luck if you don't.
MS clean sweep 2001, the "Standard" vacuum cleaner. You'de think it would suck, but it would not.
"Don't run Outlook" is what every PHB that reads this site needs to see. They also need to see and read parts of Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls, Published by Wiley, 2/2/2000 where the authors point out exactly what's wrong with it, MSIE, non Mozilla Netscape, and Windows. They recomend never using Windows to connect to the internet, ever.
I work in a place that uses NT. When asked I will give my honest and full opinion of such things. I have my doubts that MS will ever fix its little problems, and know that free and superior alternatives exist.
Oh yeah, you know as well as I do that nothing is going to keep rouge applications from reading or writing your Outlook address book. Saying things you don't believe to garner ignorant responses is also known as trolling.
Too bad they are like that.
This marked as flamebait is an abuse of moderation! Parent is reasonable, non offensive and should be reviewed.
There, see, you said it not me.
Java was not part of MS OS like IE was because you could remove java and still work your computer. Remember the comingiling article you saw on Slashdot today? Ever tried to run an MS poluted PC without Exploder? It works just a little worse than one with Exploder.
Don't worry too much, there is no new microsoft. No one who uses MS or writes code for MS is free.
OEMs should dump MS altogether. A preconfigured Red Hat box is no more difficult to operate than a preconfigured MS box. Bundled up with something like Star Office, even the pointiest haired boss would appreciate it. With 5% of all desktops, linux is as mainstream as Apple. A few of these boxes on display at CompUSA and on sale at Dell would end all of this Monopoly liscence and compatibility BS forever.
Sure, they will. They will get a message that says something like, "This page contains JAVA code that Microsoft no longer supports for security reasons. It may contain viruses and damage your computer. If you want to use it anyway, press yes." Right...
Then how long do you think it will take them to break Sun's JVM again? The trick of making competitors look unstable is starting to tell on M$, as most people now know who is to blame. Those idiots keep doing the same things. What a waste.
It is good that people are waking up to the imposition placed on them, but I worry that they will just turn to the next bunch of scammers.
Email is a great example of what can happen. Two articles in the New York times just about made me cry. The first about people's inability to orgainze their mail focused on Outlook without noting that programs inability to notify the user about messages "filtered" into subfolders. The second touts a service that will take $10 a month from you to "forward" your email, as long as you keep your old ISP. What?! Email forwarding is part of the mail protocols and used to be a common courtesy. They don't do it to discourage users from moving. They can additionally argue that most of the mail is the junk that forced the user to want to move anyway. The user in these cases has been srewed out of technologicaly possible common coutesies and screwed relentlessly by spammers and are now forced to pay a monthly fee, all by people who are abusing a PUBLIC NETWORK. Then, a large number of them are forced to view all of this junk with a substandard mail browser that is able to destroy all of their files directly or indrectly through VBS viruses and a substandard OS.
I can imagine scammers setting up "sevice sites" that will, for a fee, remove adverts from content. I can also imagine "premium" browsers being sold to XP users that will remove all but MS sponsered adverts. Barf! The scum are feeding off the problems they create.
It's time to use this discontent and the US post office to sieze back the net. People should have a permenantly registered name, at no cost, from which they can serve as well as recieve mail. Private comunications should have the sanctity of snail mail, the protection the US government and encryption, and be absolutely uncensored and free.
You and I may know about the problems of the MS way, but some people reading this don't. They might not be aware of all the trouble it was to free (re write from scratch!) the source code to X, Netscape, BSD and on and on so that everyone could use it without paying fees, signing non disclosure agreements and surrendering all rights in general. To them, some of this MS BS might make sense. Let the Kompany add it's best to the message.
History:
Win3.1 dead by shortly after the introduction of 95, forgoten with sneers after the introduction of 98.
Win95 dead shortly after the intorduction of 98. forgoten after introduction of win2k.
Prediction:
Win98 dead already, forgoten after introduction of XP.
WinXP dead on demand, forget it now. If it's anything like SMS, the dinky MS desktop manager I have to use at work, it's going to suck very often every day in the end.
The upgrade train rolls on, so long as people are afraid to put anything but that familiar MS junk on their machine. And why is it familiar? Because it's the same garbage they released in 1993 with a few changes to break other people's code!
Friends don't help friends put MS on their machines.
This would be fine, so long as everyone was an ISP and could keep their own records! The whole structure of the internet is supposed to be peer to peer. Legislation that forces subservience to this otherwise equitable technology is a free speech, privacy and national security threat.
As the internet becomes the publishing medium of choice, it is important to preserve the ability of anyone to publish. Control of this medium would be much like the control that governments once imposed on printing presses, opressive, counterproductive and doomed to failure. Any attack on the ability to publish and publish anonymously should be seen as an attack on free speech.
Tracking internet usage by tracking user log ons and browsing is useless and oppresive. It has no use but invasion of privacy. Real criminals will always find away around measures like this. The computer time needed for this tracking would be better put to other purposes.
Finally, the equitable nature of internet protocalls is needed for national security reasons. The web was designed for redundency and continued operation in the event of nuclear war. It's a natural extention of Ham radio field day. Every computer should be able to serve as a true node in the net, if not redundancy is lost and the system becomes weak.
Computer "crime" is best fought by redundency and well educated adminsters who can track down attacks well.
Let other nations oppress their people and track their habbits like bugs. We should live free and thrive.
Multi-platform runtime engine, like JAVA? No, I'm sure it will be much less than that even if it does try to turn everyting into VB.
I'm trying to present the PHB view of MS's constantly changing and bloated "standards". Like a wife beater, MS is using a twisted combination of flattery and abuse. They know it sucks because their computer is just as slow and crashes just as much or more as their old 486 running win93. But they feel trapped by their ignorance and MS encourages this feeling. When they get a letter from somone they can't open, they feel outdated and embarrased to seek help. That stupid little advert with the groovey young people on Smithsonian magazine's dead trees has worked it's magic on them. They know MS is going to change it's format and that is going to take some unpleasant action on their part. I'm surrounded by users like this at my job. They are just beat by it all.
Yes, this is an old story. MS has done this for years. It's the upgrade mill. Don't think the media is not going to coo, ohh and awe at XP or 2000 for one billion dollars worth of advert revenue.
What's different is the scale and the stupid and infurating public statements. Most people have not picked up those bizzare statements, and they don't know what an SDK is, or a GPL or a BSD, or whatever that alphabet soup is that might come out of your mouth. Remember that the average person spends less than 15 minutes a day getting their news. The statements are designed to make you look nuts for bothering over some arcane piece of junk you will never use. It's missinformation plain and simple, designed to waste your effort and discredit.
It's nice to hear that you have some more enlightened CIOs. The trade mags from Ziff Davis lying around here all have an MS focus still. Bill Gates himself gave my company a videotaped pat on the back for beeing such a good sucker, errr customer and inovator. The PR folks acutally put that tape on for their college tours two years ago!
In the begining, there was the Word and it had nothing to do with some stupid software company. Grief!
MS is poised to spend ONE BILLION DOLLARS on XP junk. Last month's Smithsonian and National Geographic both featured two page spreads pommising that XP would make you feel complete, make you a magician, and a time warper. These expensive technicolor visions of young people and their computers are just the beginning of their campaign wich will be unescapable. It's business as usual, make a few minor changes and hype it up to PHB as the answer to all problems.
But what's that got to do with liscences to one goofey little SDK? Nothing, and that's the point! This little insult to your freedom will be seen by the PHB as extreemist and wierd. Why do you care about being able to use VI, just get the job done you will be told.
The goal is to discredit YOU, and Linux by association. Expect MS to make other little insults like this to get everyone all keyed up about how rotten MS is right before they release the real orgy of self worship that is comming. While you are frothing in self imposed self rightous minority (still less than 5%?), they are going to present a smiling party face to everyone. "What a looser! When I send him mail, he can't read it!" will be the thought many have as they use "Send to Mail Recipient" in Word. Don't trust Linux, it's all controled by those crazy loosers they will say. Barf. More of the same, bigger and uglier.
Too bad they don't really have a product to justify the party.
Ah, my favorite troll. I'm not sure why some people continue to think IE is worth anything. It could be that Windoze loads it on start up so that it looks faster to some people. It's still slower than Netscape 4.x on NT for me. I suppose people who must have all the flash trash, images and java that adverters can toss at them might like IE which won't let them turn them off. (I have to turn them off each time you open the thing). Some people might even like the total system integration that alows malicious web sites to own their computers. No, here at work I'll stick to Netscape. Others can continue to give away their freedoms by whatever means they will.
And that is the issue. It's not a single application, it's my ability to choose. MS has used all sorts of dirty tricks to force applications, all inferior, down people's throats on their platforms. They have also used all sorts of dirty tricks to keep hardware makers from even thinking of making drivers for other OSs. You know, that stupid little flag on the box, interface specs in a timely manner la la, so that you have less of a choice about platforms. They have refused to compete and will continue to refuse because they can't.
All those dirty tricks are haunting them. Win2k is NOT STABLE. A friend of mine's been running it and it's not much better than NT, a crash in six weeks or less ususally less. It could not even format a hard disk at my house for my wife's MS box. All the little breaks and odd things they put in to thwart competitors have got to make their code base a bloated hell. If only that effort had been put into fixing things instead. Still, their programers are no match for the thousands of happy volunteers a decade of abuse has spawed. Free software sucks less and there are now more Linux developers than Windows developers. Hearts and minds are lost to them and won't be comming back.
This is nice if the kite can be contoled from the ground by other than brute force. After all, if you can't you will expend just as much effort bringing it down as you got out of it while it was going up.
I still don't see it being very practical. A regualar wind mill exploits the wind in a more controlable fashion. I'm also still weary of relying on something as inconstant as the wind for a power source. When the wind dies, the load comes down unless it's well ratcheted. If I had all of that derick work, I'd get some friends to pull the load up. Still, it's a very interesting idea.
Microsoft has not invented anything here. We are talking about a hyperlink! These things have been around since someone invented a GUI (1960s).
What Microsoft has done is to litter other people's work with links of Microsoft's choosing. This is what the Washington Post author who broke the story found out. When he visited his own paper's sports page he found it covered with stupid little purple squirmy lines like Word spelling errors. They pointed to broken links and MicroStupid's own little search engine.
You've even deluded yourself into thinking smart tags are even remotely like normal links - sorry this isn't the case.
You are so right! Nothing normal.