the majority of Vista users without problems are not out on the messages boards singing its praises, they (like me) are simply using their computer and find it more pleasent than XP.
What, all seven of them?
By your reasoning, the web should be filled with people complaining about gnu/linux, Apple and every OS. That's clearly not the case, as not even M$'s mighty astroturf engine can fill the web. People who use gnu/linux, OSX and other alternatives mostly love it. People who make the Vista mistake tend to hate it and there's lots of "give me back my XP" business going on in local shops.
People know about Vista but don't want it. M$ has done a good job telling everyone about Vista. 87% of home users know about it and 100% of business IT people know, but only 12% of either group wants it. The rejection is universal.
[some] (like me) are simply using their computer and find it more pleasent than XP.... I'm not posting to say you should upgrade or that I think you need Vista right now..
I'm happy Vista does what you want, but you have to realize that when the best that said is "wait" people are not going to want it. People who want a real upgrade and vendors who want to survive are going to look to gnu/linux, OSX or any other place that works. That goes double when there are people like me out there who will tell you that it does not take much to do better than XP's expensive, horribly annoying and unstable, single screen UI. When you throw in all the programs and hardware that won't work on Vista and that it's easier to move to gnu/linux, Vista's dead in the water.
XP did not do well but Vista is doing much worse. The rejection seems to be universal. The same low percentage (12%) of business and home users say they want an "upgrade". M$'s power to push upgrades is over and with that goes the whole vendor manipulation monopoly.
Either she wanted to see whatever movie so badly that she subjected herself to it, or she just wanted a reason to sue someone for $60k.
This is about humiliation. The first part was being tricked - there was no posting outside, you just got the choice to be searched or lose your tickets. Second, options are humiliating. Searches are usually reserved for people caught red handed committing a crime. "Show us the Maxi Pads or leave, lady." How nice. The attendant might have been rude.
$60,000 is little more than a slap on the wrist to a business and nothing compared to their damaged reputation. I hope she gets it and the movie theaters turn around and sue the dumb assed MAFIAA rep who forced them to do such a stupid thing. The word is out, go to Guzzo and be treated like a criminal. Ticket sales are going to the bottom and they will wish they had never heard of camcorder searches.
CONSPIRACY- If two or more persons conspire to commit an offense under paragraph (1) and one or more of such persons do any act to effectuate the object of the conspiracy, each shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.'.
This paragraph is more disturbing to me - language like that can be used to rope in just about anyone.
Screw the optical drive. The Armada M300 I've already mentioned somewhere above doesn't have one.
Agreed, my X30 does not have an optical drive and I've never missed the extra pound and power drain. Everywhere I go, I'm surrounded by big, honking desktops that invariably have an optical drive. At least one is an X forward away but I've needed them once or twice in a year's time. At home, I have a firewire DVD burner, which does the trick. The only other time I've wanted an optical drive was to install my OS, but GNU linux is flexible enough that that's not a problem.
This thing's 2.2 lbs and processor specs makes my X30 look old, hot and heavy. In a year or two, cheap laptops like this are going to be everywhere and I might just buy one.
Citation needed that a one-handed keyboard causes extreme frustration.
How about no one ever uses one? If they did you would have sales figures.
Now how about personal experience. I do the same thing with a normal keyboard from time to time. It's not easy and I think I'd shit if I had to hold a key down while reversing my hand's muscle memory like that.
There have been several small laptops with small keyboards. Only a few have been usable. Having a bezel around a screen makes sense and is an easy way to mate a large keyboard with a small screen.
And that's the problem, people will never be happy. Nothing MS ever does will ever be good enough, short of going all out, and that won't happen. [long winded, condescending apology for non free waste, blame the victim and other nonsense]
Poor little M$, all beat up by big mean Twitter. All of M$'s evil behavior is his fault. Right. Back in reality...
I'm perfectly happy without anything from M$. If and only if you can show me how they are willing to respect my software freedom will I consider any of their stuff. Free software has given me technically superior and easier to use alternatives. M$ is welcome to the party, but this big stinking turd they are trying to call free is not welcome anywhere.
I know many of you saw this as disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics on order with a politician, the RIAA or Steve Ballmer.
Can you tell me why someone who works for Steve Ballmer should not be looked on as a pawn, or why we should suddenly trust Ballmer/Gates? Do you really want them telling you what software freedom is?
Take a nice cold shower, compile a program with gcc and you will start to feel better.
the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.
What a pile of M$. The only barrier to products that interoperate better is them. Everyone else has bent over backwards for years, only to treated as a pawn in the quest for M$ dominance of everything. M$ is the only organization using such sleazy language. The goal is not some kind of imperfect interoperation, it's the use of real standards, the end of M$'s silly games and the beginning of real freedom. Without the four freedoms, everything M$ does is just another game.
If M$ sends the OSI software freedom, great. If they don't and the OSI certify it, the OSI will not have raised M$ in anyone's opinion, they will have disgraced themselves and further diluted the terms "free" and "open". We will all be able to judge for ourselves, but I don't expect anything useful from a company that's rabidly threatening everyone with patents.
At this point, M$ has very little of value to offer and the best thing they can do is cease hostilities and start to repair the damage they have done. It would take the community a decade to fix the mess Windoze and Intel BIOS are. It will take even longer to undo the DMCA, software patents and other evil stuff they have promoted. The market itself is doing a better job of fixing the problem by ignoring them.
The big picture is that the kids need great teachers who challenge them and parents encourage their kids to work hard in school.
Great teachers cost money and don't need expensive software that others have rejected. Even if you don't spend the money on teachers, you can spend it on something that can help students learn, rather than a DOCX translator. One outraged resident did a good job of expressing this:
What does the school district care about taxpayers money?? They have already got their referendum for $74 million and can afford the upgrade software... if you cant...so what..?? This is exactly why you should NEVER vote for a referendum that doesn't say HOW the money to be spent... Open source (read: free) office software is far better than Microsoft's Office as judged by Maximum PC magazine... Now... go buy your new computer and software for the school district while they think up the next excuse to drain your pocketbook.
This tells us that a large part of $74,000,000 was wasted on computers that no one needs, and software that no one else is running. The thourough investigation of the business affiliation mentioned in the article might send someone from the school's administration to jail.
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
Yeah MS is in such deep trouble they made record profits this year.
In an inflationary economy, every year is a record. Vista and Office 2007 should have made a difference but did not. Imagine a flat line, your brain and your balls are dying but non free CPR takes six years. The game is over - without money, they can't attract the programmers and vendor "support" they need to make product, and without product they will run out of money.
Just as those who have been proclaiming, the past few years, that whatever year it happened to be would be the year of Linux on the desktop were to early to proclaim victory, this is a bit too early to proclaim defeat.
Especially because communists have given Bill Gates a big parade. Only a small percentage of Chinese citizens are lucky enough to own a computer. When a majority of them are computer owners and suffer Windoze and pay for it, I'll think Mr. Gates has won something.
Back in reality, he's got big problems. I've never proclaimed a year of linux before 2007. Vista changed my mind.
Microsoft's income from China will be about the same order as that of the entire trade deficit.
For software? You think China is going to spend one hundred billion dollars each year on software, something they could copy with impunity. Let me ground you right here, before you get further carried away. M$ is falling apart and the monopoly is over.
Does anyone really think China will allow their citizens to use a free OS? Does Bill Gates really think Communist China will make a good paying customer?
Meanwhile back in reality, instead of conquering the world and prospering, M$ is in deep trouble.
With less than 1% of China's population on line, it's a little early to be taking "victory laps". Communists have glad handled western celebrities forever, so there's really nothing new or special about China's treatment of Gates. Fears of US spying have not gone anywhere, nor have issues of cost and reliability.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for the intelligence community to edit sensitive material on Wikipedia. Minor tweaks to the published performance data for military hardware for one.
No, you just need to not publish it in the first place and let people speculate in ignorance. Paying people to lie and stamp out non secrets is a waste of time and money. Trusting the results of such a stupid program is a waste of lives.
"Blocking" other P2P clients would involve restriction of ports at the network provider level, which pretty much ensures nothing that uses TCP/IP would work on Windows.
You must have missed this two days ago, where M$'s IE7 does something stupid to Firefox. That's a nice example of how they can make you not want to use an application, even before you buy into Visat's unsigned program nightmare. Combine the two methods, and your general PC is really just another network appliance.
It's P2P, remember, the thing everyone here loves? And now there's more of it!
No, now there's a crappy, non free M$ toy for all of those people M$ has scared away from P2P all these years. You can be sure it will do what M$ does, not what the user wants and that M$ crank up their message about dirty bad pirates and bittorrent. Remember the third E, Extinguish. M$ has not even bothered to embrace and extend this time, they have simply reinvented. You will soon have less of what you love not more of it. More obnoxiously, you will get to subsidize the cost of their anti-competitive and inefficient practices. When they switch over their "upgrading" software to this they will be shifting the vast cost to ISPs and you and other people who's choice will be Bill's way or the Highway.
Software is easy to judge when you have a clean set of principles, like the four software freedoms.
No wonder the M$ trolls are saying bad things about them. No? oh now I see the difference.
When M$ integrates this trash into their OS to reduce costs, they will quickly move to eliminate all other "untrusted" P2P in the same way they have attacked other "competitors" on their platform. They will also look for legal assistance, claiming stupid stuff like "free computing" is for "pirates" and criminals. They have been telegraphing the message for years, so bend over if you are still using Windoze.
The difference between a M$ fake-torrent client and a free P2P user is that a free P2P user has a choice about what to download. The M$ client will soon be used to download "patches" and other M$ cruft, which will pass that part of the cost of windows onto ISPs and subscribers. You will excuse me while I say that I don't want to subsidize M$'s lack of efficiency. Their client will also be "trusted" and refuse to download anything that could threaten the MAFIAA in any way - which is pretty much everything but what you can buy from M$ music services and squirt to your Zune.
even one of my favorite companies has resorted to similar tactics.
A single person saying things is nothing at all compared to what big dumb companies do through PR firms and other proxies. "Normal advertising" where supposedly "normal" companies like American Express, Home Depot etc, hire crackers to install push adserver viruses and trojans, is just the tip of the iceburg. Pretending to be popular support of a thing you are trying to sell (Zune) or badmouth (OSX) is bad enough. More disgusting efforts seek legislation that's bad for everyone:
The web is changing the way public opinion works. It's giving companies like Whole Foods a voice they never had before and it's taking away the power of broadcasters. The broadcasters seek to "harness" the internet and will use their money to keep as much of their power over public opinion as they can. It's a doomed effort because they can't hire enough PR people to do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
the majority of Vista users without problems are not out on the messages boards singing its praises, they (like me) are simply using their computer and find it more pleasent than XP.
What, all seven of them?
By your reasoning, the web should be filled with people complaining about gnu/linux, Apple and every OS. That's clearly not the case, as not even M$'s mighty astroturf engine can fill the web. People who use gnu/linux, OSX and other alternatives mostly love it. People who make the Vista mistake tend to hate it and there's lots of "give me back my XP" business going on in local shops.
People know about Vista but don't want it. M$ has done a good job telling everyone about Vista. 87% of home users know about it and 100% of business IT people know, but only 12% of either group wants it. The rejection is universal.
[some] (like me) are simply using their computer and find it more pleasent than XP. ... I'm not posting to say you should upgrade or that I think you need Vista right now..
I'm happy Vista does what you want, but you have to realize that when the best that said is "wait" people are not going to want it. People who want a real upgrade and vendors who want to survive are going to look to gnu/linux, OSX or any other place that works. That goes double when there are people like me out there who will tell you that it does not take much to do better than XP's expensive, horribly annoying and unstable, single screen UI. When you throw in all the programs and hardware that won't work on Vista and that it's easier to move to gnu/linux, Vista's dead in the water.
XP did not do well but Vista is doing much worse. The rejection seems to be universal. The same low percentage (12%) of business and home users say they want an "upgrade". M$'s power to push upgrades is over and with that goes the whole vendor manipulation monopoly.
No one is buying Vista and vendors are revolting. I'm making a list, enjoy!
Either she wanted to see whatever movie so badly that she subjected herself to it, or she just wanted a reason to sue someone for $60k.
This is about humiliation. The first part was being tricked - there was no posting outside, you just got the choice to be searched or lose your tickets. Second, options are humiliating. Searches are usually reserved for people caught red handed committing a crime. "Show us the Maxi Pads or leave, lady." How nice. The attendant might have been rude.
$60,000 is little more than a slap on the wrist to a business and nothing compared to their damaged reputation. I hope she gets it and the movie theaters turn around and sue the dumb assed MAFIAA rep who forced them to do such a stupid thing. The word is out, go to Guzzo and be treated like a criminal. Ticket sales are going to the bottom and they will wish they had never heard of camcorder searches.
From the bill:
This paragraph is more disturbing to me - language like that can be used to rope in just about anyone.
What's next, "Oooeeyaaaeee"???
Sounds like a pig. Is that what Steve Ballmer is going to say a flood of $200 gnu/linux laptops drive M$ to bankruptcy?
Screw the optical drive. The Armada M300 I've already mentioned somewhere above doesn't have one.
Agreed, my X30 does not have an optical drive and I've never missed the extra pound and power drain. Everywhere I go, I'm surrounded by big, honking desktops that invariably have an optical drive. At least one is an X forward away but I've needed them once or twice in a year's time. At home, I have a firewire DVD burner, which does the trick. The only other time I've wanted an optical drive was to install my OS, but GNU linux is flexible enough that that's not a problem.
This thing's 2.2 lbs and processor specs makes my X30 look old, hot and heavy. In a year or two, cheap laptops like this are going to be everywhere and I might just buy one.
Citation needed that a one-handed keyboard causes extreme frustration.
How about no one ever uses one? If they did you would have sales figures.
Now how about personal experience. I do the same thing with a normal keyboard from time to time. It's not easy and I think I'd shit if I had to hold a key down while reversing my hand's muscle memory like that.
There have been several small laptops with small keyboards. Only a few have been usable. Having a bezel around a screen makes sense and is an easy way to mate a large keyboard with a small screen.
And that's the problem, people will never be happy. Nothing MS ever does will ever be good enough, short of going all out, and that won't happen. [long winded, condescending apology for non free waste, blame the victim and other nonsense]
Poor little M$, all beat up by big mean Twitter. All of M$'s evil behavior is his fault. Right. Back in reality ...
I'm perfectly happy without anything from M$. If and only if you can show me how they are willing to respect my software freedom will I consider any of their stuff. Free software has given me technically superior and easier to use alternatives. M$ is welcome to the party, but this big stinking turd they are trying to call free is not welcome anywhere.
Ok, so after I submitted this story this morning (while I was grasping for sobriety), ...
Not another one night stand, I hope.
I know many of you saw this as disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics on order with a politician, the RIAA or Steve Ballmer.
Can you tell me why someone who works for Steve Ballmer should not be looked on as a pawn, or why we should suddenly trust Ballmer/Gates? Do you really want them telling you what software freedom is?
Take a nice cold shower, compile a program with gcc and you will start to feel better.
the same voices that have been calling for Microsoft products to better interoperate with open source products would voice their approval should the Open Source Initiative itself open up to more of the IT industry.
What a pile of M$. The only barrier to products that interoperate better is them. Everyone else has bent over backwards for years, only to treated as a pawn in the quest for M$ dominance of everything. M$ is the only organization using such sleazy language. The goal is not some kind of imperfect interoperation, it's the use of real standards, the end of M$'s silly games and the beginning of real freedom. Without the four freedoms, everything M$ does is just another game.
If M$ sends the OSI software freedom, great. If they don't and the OSI certify it, the OSI will not have raised M$ in anyone's opinion, they will have disgraced themselves and further diluted the terms "free" and "open". We will all be able to judge for ourselves, but I don't expect anything useful from a company that's rabidly threatening everyone with patents.
At this point, M$ has very little of value to offer and the best thing they can do is cease hostilities and start to repair the damage they have done. It would take the community a decade to fix the mess Windoze and Intel BIOS are. It will take even longer to undo the DMCA, software patents and other evil stuff they have promoted. The market itself is doing a better job of fixing the problem by ignoring them.
Your list is comprised of BBC, Oracle, FAA and DOT. That's not long.
You forgot Acer and Dell, but that does not matter much. Show me half as many who have rushed to Vista/Office 2007.
[the future belongs to gnu/linux ]You're kidding, right? I mean, you meant to be sarcastic, didn't you?
Not at all.
The big picture is that the kids need great teachers who challenge them and parents encourage their kids to work hard in school.
Great teachers cost money and don't need expensive software that others have rejected. Even if you don't spend the money on teachers, you can spend it on something that can help students learn, rather than a DOCX translator. One outraged resident did a good job of expressing this:
This tells us that a large part of $74,000,000 was wasted on computers that no one needs, and software that no one else is running. The thourough investigation of the business affiliation mentioned in the article might send someone from the school's administration to jail.
Basically what they're saying is, "We standardized on crappy software that probably isn't even compatible with its own previous version, so you better buy the newest one too so your kids won't be stupid."
You need to point out the long list of organizations rejecting both Office 2007 and Vista, particularly the US FAA and DOT. If the school district wants to be in step with government and business, it needs to hold off and consider migrating to gnu/linux.
Yeah MS is in such deep trouble they made record profits this year.
In an inflationary economy, every year is a record. Vista and Office 2007 should have made a difference but did not. Imagine a flat line, your brain and your balls are dying but non free CPR takes six years. The game is over - without money, they can't attract the programmers and vendor "support" they need to make product, and without product they will run out of money.
Just as those who have been proclaiming, the past few years, that whatever year it happened to be would be the year of Linux on the desktop were to early to proclaim victory, this is a bit too early to proclaim defeat.
Especially because communists have given Bill Gates a big parade. Only a small percentage of Chinese citizens are lucky enough to own a computer. When a majority of them are computer owners and suffer Windoze and pay for it, I'll think Mr. Gates has won something.
Back in reality, he's got big problems. I've never proclaimed a year of linux before 2007. Vista changed my mind.
Microsoft's income from China will be about the same order as that of the entire trade deficit.
For software? You think China is going to spend one hundred billion dollars each year on software, something they could copy with impunity. Let me ground you right here, before you get further carried away. M$ is falling apart and the monopoly is over.
Does anyone really think China will allow their citizens to use a free OS? Does Bill Gates really think Communist China will make a good paying customer?
Meanwhile back in reality, instead of conquering the world and prospering, M$ is in deep trouble.
With less than 1% of China's population on line, it's a little early to be taking "victory laps". Communists have glad handled western celebrities forever, so there's really nothing new or special about China's treatment of Gates. Fears of US spying have not gone anywhere, nor have issues of cost and reliability.
Bill Gates can hobnob with tyrants all day, what he needs to worry about is acceptance in his own back yard. Vista and Office 2007 have made no difference to M$ or anyone else's bottom line.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for the intelligence community to edit sensitive material on Wikipedia. Minor tweaks to the published performance data for military hardware for one.
No, you just need to not publish it in the first place and let people speculate in ignorance. Paying people to lie and stamp out non secrets is a waste of time and money. Trusting the results of such a stupid program is a waste of lives.
"Blocking" other P2P clients would involve restriction of ports at the network provider level, which pretty much ensures nothing that uses TCP/IP would work on Windows.
You must have missed this two days ago, where M$'s IE7 does something stupid to Firefox. That's a nice example of how they can make you not want to use an application, even before you buy into Visat's unsigned program nightmare. Combine the two methods, and your general PC is really just another network appliance.
It's P2P, remember, the thing everyone here loves? And now there's more of it!
No, now there's a crappy, non free M$ toy for all of those people M$ has scared away from P2P all these years. You can be sure it will do what M$ does, not what the user wants and that M$ crank up their message about dirty bad pirates and bittorrent. Remember the third E, Extinguish. M$ has not even bothered to embrace and extend this time, they have simply reinvented. You will soon have less of what you love not more of it. More obnoxiously, you will get to subsidize the cost of their anti-competitive and inefficient practices. When they switch over their "upgrading" software to this they will be shifting the vast cost to ISPs and you and other people who's choice will be Bill's way or the Highway.
Software is easy to judge when you have a clean set of principles, like the four software freedoms.
No wonder the M$ trolls are saying bad things about them. No? oh now I see the difference.
When M$ integrates this trash into their OS to reduce costs, they will quickly move to eliminate all other "untrusted" P2P in the same way they have attacked other "competitors" on their platform. They will also look for legal assistance, claiming stupid stuff like "free computing" is for "pirates" and criminals. They have been telegraphing the message for years, so bend over if you are still using Windoze.
The difference between a M$ fake-torrent client and a free P2P user is that a free P2P user has a choice about what to download. The M$ client will soon be used to download "patches" and other M$ cruft, which will pass that part of the cost of windows onto ISPs and subscribers. You will excuse me while I say that I don't want to subsidize M$'s lack of efficiency. Their client will also be "trusted" and refuse to download anything that could threaten the MAFIAA in any way - which is pretty much everything but what you can buy from M$ music services and squirt to your Zune.
even one of my favorite companies has resorted to similar tactics.
A single person saying things is nothing at all compared to what big dumb companies do through PR firms and other proxies. "Normal advertising" where supposedly "normal" companies like American Express, Home Depot etc, hire crackers to install push adserver viruses and trojans, is just the tip of the iceburg. Pretending to be popular support of a thing you are trying to sell (Zune) or badmouth (OSX) is bad enough. More disgusting efforts seek legislation that's bad for everyone:
The web is changing the way public opinion works. It's giving companies like Whole Foods a voice they never had before and it's taking away the power of broadcasters. The broadcasters seek to "harness" the internet and will use their money to keep as much of their power over public opinion as they can. It's a doomed effort because they can't hire enough PR people to do the job.
They did it to scare people and equate words with real violence.
I'm sure they had a good laugh and had a good high five. That's the way bullies always act.