I would expect they would be laughed out of the courtroom in the best case. At worst, this might be viewed as a thinly diguised extortion attempt.
Is there any other way of looking at this other then as extortion and theft? M$ is claiming ownership to code they had nothing to do with, have actively slandered and that's eating their lunch.
Yesterday there was a link to a story on this issue, followed by lots of discussion as to why Microsoft is doing what they are doing. Today there is an opinion piece regarding the original story, in which someone lays out unsubstantiated brainstorms, all of which were covered yesterday.
Microsoft won't reveal it's supposed patents. That's a fact worth searing a Slashdot summary. A casual reader may have missed it. The Fortune article was long and will dissapear but the astroturfers can not deny the fact while the article is up. This story will preserve that fact for people who may later not believe that such a company as M$ existed and could be so brazen.
Seriously, Microsoft is getting ready to pull off their kid gloves, now.... Get ready for the fight of your lives - this will make SCO look like yesterday's donuts.
They never wore kid gloves and have poured as much FUD as hard as they can from the very beginning. This is really their last ditch. When it fails, and it will, they have nothing left.
Perhaps, as in the case of SCO, MSFT would rather not have PJ at Groklaw dissect their claims...
Worthy claims can stand up to review. Worthy software can stand up to competition. Once again, M$ has nothing but judicial extortion. Their failure is at hand.
Hey, I'm posting this from my Powerbook. Though I could have posted it from my FreeBSD computer as well. No microsoft here, so I'm afraid I'm not one of those rabid MS evangelists you seem worried about.
Here you claim to use M$ at both home and work. The 17 day uptime boast is classic.
Here you claim that M$'s registry is robust and deride the parent as someone who lives in their parent's basement for believing otherwise. Looks rabid to me.
I could dig up more but I'd rather go eat dinner. From this small sampling, I'd say your deluded view of M$'s reliability and utility puts you solidly in the M$ cult, regardless of what other software you claim to use. Still, it's good to see you branch out. Alternate software use eventually brings enlightenment and a better temper.
Wait until there is a story about a vulnerability in Linux.
Nothing amuses me quite like M$ predictions of OS X and GNU/Linux security doom. M$ fanboys are starting to believe in the free software rapture, where vendors, companies and individual users will be embraced and empowered by free software and M$ falls off the face of the Earth. They project their own version of hell past that rapture however, so that they will never be tempted beyond what they know. All of the unfaithful shall suffer worms, trojans ad servers, poor performance and all the other crap users of Winblows put up with now.
The main article of M$ faith is that M$ is "good enough" and that everything else must suck as hard as M$ does. It is followed blindly, without trial and against all evidence.
One of the main reasons "normal" people don't know anything different is because people like you, practitioners of the M$ cult. Did you even realize that you were a member of a cult?
Microsoft isn't the underdog and Microsoft doesn't require a positive choice.
As a managed desktop it's a bad and irrational choice. The exercise of this irrationality is the hallmark of a cult.
Similar things can and have been said by M$ executives about major vendors and software developers. M$ is less under the spell of their own marketing and said back in 2002 that it was in Dell's best interest to sell and promote GNU/LInux. M$ also routinely misleads their developers, considering them "Pawns" and "One night stands" to be lied to and fucked over.
A billion dollars a month in marketing, the trading of secrets for power, lying to and robbing those who trust you... there are lots of parallels between M$ and any other evil cult. Their adherents promote a immoral code of "sharp business", laugh at "do no evil" and openly advocate anti-social practices. What further evidence do you need?
I know plenty of really passionate Microsoft fanbois. In fact they are the only people I know who have copies of Vista Ultimate.
I know lots of less passionate Microsoft fanboys. They are like drunk people who don't know they are drunk. The very idea of anything but M$ on their networks is unpossible to them. They don't know how anyone can get along without M$ and treat them suspiciously like a witch or nija. Because M$ is closed source, you have to take it on faith, but they confuse M$ with science. Their OS and software choice is a constant source of irritation and dissaster for them but they refuse to seek alternatives. They consider themselves perfectly rational and normal. These are more dangerous than those who realize their own passions and irrationality.
If you redefine your group to be Computer professionals, M$ is an abhorant, abusive and dominant cult. Using the Wiki definition you so kindly provided,
beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be outside the mainstream
and realizing that:
OS experts abhor the ugly kludge that is winDOS.
GUI experts abhor the winDOS GUI
Security experts abhor the security practices of winDOS.
and so on and so forth through filesystems, busses, storage, search and every other atom of Computer Science.
The M$ practices are uniformly considered dated, wrong, dangerous and anything but mainstream. Nothing they do has ever been accepted as excellent and apologists always have to point to some ugly piece of hardware or software lock in to justify their choice, the rest being "good enough". The acceptance of the sum of these things AT ANY COST, against all evidence of efficacy, by many of the same experts who then inflict it upon the ignorant masses is the hallmark of an irrational cult member. It is doublethink.
The damage done by this cult is beyond that done by most religious cults by far, and second only to Communism in modern times. The more zealous members have an intolerance found only in those who have confused their faith for science. Simply mentioning alternatives in front of them is unpleasant enough to enrage them and torrents of abuse soon follow. They demand that people modify their morals to accommodate their obsolete business and software development models, which would otherwise perish. They engage in character and economic assassination, but such individual damage pales in comparison to the damage done by the inadequacy of the "product" they have such blind faith in. winDOS was a virus and worm infested pit from the beginning, using it for control systems was unethical and connecting it to networks has been a dissaster that has cost us all plenty.
the idea of this project was to put the laptop metaphor into something you could store in your pocket.
Hmmm, I really love my laptop's power management and having everything I want where I left it as I walk around.... and it's only got some 4 GB of system files and swap to make it happen....
So how does it actually work? What do you have to run on each machine to have it work? From your paper I get the hazy idea that some kind of virtual machine software is running and loads an image off the USB stick. The closest thing I can think of is qemu with a saved state that loads up and fullscreens on login.
If the host is using it, Onthego does not require you to boot the machine and KDE's session management should bring up everything where you left it. That's not as nifty as what I'm starting to see in your project.
In any scheme, all the other applications have to be installed somewhere too and this is where M$'s little project will fall on it's face. They are way too paranoid to just let you walk around with precious "IP" like Word on a stick that could be shared.
Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now...
BIOS makes it hard to boot from external media and PCs have all sorts of M$ damaged hardware attached to them. M$ has played the same sorts of games with BIOS that they have played with Winmodems and word docs. Their specs are usually over complex "extensible" non standards that encourage wasteful customizations that no one but M$ can deal with. The success of Linux on such hardware is a miracle that proves the power of free software development. You can make linux system images that are 60MB and smaller, but you are hard pressed to make the average PC boot off anything but a CD or hard drive.
The workaround is to cart a "liveCD" and a USB flash home drive. Live CDs pack in 2 Gigs worth of system files, which is enough to haul around a complete and auto configuring system. A DVD can contain an insane quantity of software. Flash drives are now large enough to carry lots of files, but it's still easier to sftp to your home box.
Mepis used flash for your home directory, with optional encryption, in 2005. Here's the announcement. You booted off the CD and logged in as the "onthego" user. This is not as quick sounding as yours, but it's easy.
I'm not sure if they had it set up to install applications to the flash drive, but that should not be hard. It would also not be hard to make a custom boot CD with Debian.
I decided to wait and get it pristine on DVD, rather than have it "spoilered" by watching it on TV
The more control you have over the viewing, the better. For some reason, the DVDs have lots of spoilers that are hard to skip. Every episode starts out with the same "trailer" which is followed by spoilers that consume at least 10% of the viewing. When you combine that with a crappy remote blocking player, you end up watching tons of FBI warnings, Warner Brother's logos and spoilers. It would be unbearable broken up with advertisements.
And did you notice how blurry the image was of the 'standard' text. Nice job there. "look how much easier the text on the right is to read compared to the old stuff on the left!". This is a SERIOUSLY flawed example.
The system knows when the light is going to change and what's around the corner. You may know some of that from experience, but you will never be as good as a system that really knows current conditions. Much to the ire of other people on the road, I already drive slowly. It helps but I doubt it helps by 33%.
A combination of smart roads and hybrids would be better still, but I'm not sure that I want to leave my driving to big brother.
I can say that because she not only participates in a system she thinks is wrong, she revels in it and thinks that's clever. Don't take my word for it, read her blog for yourself:
... they don't realize that their real enemy is probably the community board that is cracking down on underage drinking in the East Village, and the Liquor Board that would revoke our license to serve beer legally if we too didn't do everything in our power to stop underage drinkers from obtaining beer at our bars.... my friends work in the service industry in the neighborhood that if I don't confiscate the ID's, I'm putting their jobs and livelihoods at risk.... I'm required to do this. I don't mind because frankly, our bar is for adults, and not a NYU undergrad hangout.
The message is contradictory as most flaky stories are. She claims she takes IDs out of fear of the law but then tells us that she would tell the same people to piss off anyway.
Neither of those reasons justify the extra defamatory steps she then takes. She looks up her victims and publishes enough details to leave no question as to who the victim was, then adds further "hilarious" insult. Why? All because the victim thought Rachel's bar would be a nice place to have a drink. I wonder if her boss knows what she's been up to.
Rachel, here's a big Fuck You with your name on it. New York is a depressing place because of people like you. The odd mix of hopelessness, servility, arrogance and cruelty is a terrible thing to behold and exasperating to deal with. The only thing more depressing is to see one of these fish out of water. In any other environment, away from the hype, pressure, money and bullshit, no one understands and the behavior is exposed for what it is. It's not clever, it's not funny, it's just craven, cruel, and stupid.
Why did Microsoft sit on their hands as Google slowly built up their capabilities to match those of Outlook? Why didn't Microsoft work on porting what they had done for Outlook to their Hotmail servers?
Because they would rather sell Outlook in a box, per user to big dumb companies. Office, one of M$'s two money makers is next. The only reason business "needs" Windoze is to run Office.... You see where this is going, don't you? They don't want you to think computers work without them. Web based competition shows them up.
M$'s late 1980's format lock in is over. Format wars sucked then and they suck now. Their OS monopoly will follow shortly. Good riddance, it can't happen soon enough.
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
The economy is better off without your restrictions. From what I've read, most software people make their living by making software work for a company and they are better served by free software. Like most people, they get by on their ability to solve problems. It's a tiny minority that actually makes a living from non-free, precompiled binaries in a box. For that tiny minority, the rest of us suffer the DMCA and other methods to lock people in that you are talking about. You can keep them to yourself.
Your argument is just another variant of the economic arguments made against free software from day one. The massive success of GNU, Debian and other organizations prove this argument was flawed. Free software is not only sustainable, it's use and production are economically sound.
Put another way - Free Software is the only way I'd consider solving a new problem for myself or an employer. Non free software's low quality and inflexibility add long term costs that are impossible to justify.
States have secrets worth protecting, people have secrets worth revealing.
Really though, Big Brother did not justify himself this way. He'd just throw you in jail until you were ready to say how much you loved the state and then murder you. Thank goodness the US does not have prisons where you can be thrown without charge and murdered for spite without a fair trial. Stuff like that would make the US a police state. Thinking otherwise is a thought crime that will put you on a domestic spying list. Can't let one or two bad apples sink the whole country!
Slashdot Mirror
I would expect they would be laughed out of the courtroom in the best case. At worst, this might be viewed as a thinly diguised extortion attempt.
Is there any other way of looking at this other then as extortion and theft? M$ is claiming ownership to code they had nothing to do with, have actively slandered and that's eating their lunch.
Yesterday there was a link to a story on this issue, followed by lots of discussion as to why Microsoft is doing what they are doing. Today there is an opinion piece regarding the original story, in which someone lays out unsubstantiated brainstorms, all of which were covered yesterday.
Microsoft won't reveal it's supposed patents. That's a fact worth searing a Slashdot summary. A casual reader may have missed it. The Fortune article was long and will dissapear but the astroturfers can not deny the fact while the article is up. This story will preserve that fact for people who may later not believe that such a company as M$ existed and could be so brazen.
Seriously, Microsoft is getting ready to pull off their kid gloves, now. ... Get ready for the fight of your lives - this will make SCO look like yesterday's donuts.
They never wore kid gloves and have poured as much FUD as hard as they can from the very beginning. This is really their last ditch. When it fails, and it will, they have nothing left.
it will be really easy to convince about 90% of the population that buying a computer with Microsoft inside is evil...
90% of the population wants nothing to do with Vista already. M$ is breaking XP, and a nice live CD like Mepis can seal the deal.
Perhaps, as in the case of SCO, MSFT would rather not have PJ at Groklaw dissect their claims...
Worthy claims can stand up to review. Worthy software can stand up to competition. Once again, M$ has nothing but judicial extortion. Their failure is at hand.
Hey, I'm posting this from my Powerbook. Though I could have posted it from my FreeBSD computer as well. No microsoft here, so I'm afraid I'm not one of those rabid MS evangelists you seem worried about.
You have been and still are a M$ user and rabid defender. The first two hits for your user name and XP bring up you bragging about how cool XP is at home and at work.
I could dig up more but I'd rather go eat dinner. From this small sampling, I'd say your deluded view of M$'s reliability and utility puts you solidly in the M$ cult, regardless of what other software you claim to use. Still, it's good to see you branch out. Alternate software use eventually brings enlightenment and a better temper.
M$ is like a good drug: it makes you lose all touch with reality.
There's not much "good" in the M$ nightmare these lost souls consider reality.
If they were actually on drugs, the good and bad experiences would at least come from within.
Wait until there is a story about a vulnerability in Linux.
Nothing amuses me quite like M$ predictions of OS X and GNU/Linux security doom. M$ fanboys are starting to believe in the free software rapture, where vendors, companies and individual users will be embraced and empowered by free software and M$ falls off the face of the Earth. They project their own version of hell past that rapture however, so that they will never be tempted beyond what they know. All of the unfaithful shall suffer worms, trojans ad servers, poor performance and all the other crap users of Winblows put up with now.
The main article of M$ faith is that M$ is "good enough" and that everything else must suck as hard as M$ does. It is followed blindly, without trial and against all evidence.
Slasdot is obsessed with MS, everything they do or say is subjected to unending speculation here, albeit negative.
and mostly correct, because M$ is evil.
Outside of Slashdot I dont know a soul who really gives a rats ass what MS do ...
That's because they don't know what M$ does. They know that their computer sucks life more than anything else in their life but they don't know why or that things could be different.
One of the main reasons "normal" people don't know anything different is because people like you, practitioners of the M$ cult. Did you even realize that you were a member of a cult?
Microsoft isn't the underdog and Microsoft doesn't require a positive choice.
As a managed desktop it's a bad and irrational choice. The exercise of this irrationality is the hallmark of a cult.
Similar things can and have been said by M$ executives about major vendors and software developers. M$ is less under the spell of their own marketing and said back in 2002 that it was in Dell's best interest to sell and promote GNU/LInux. M$ also routinely misleads their developers, considering them "Pawns" and "One night stands" to be lied to and fucked over.
A billion dollars a month in marketing, the trading of secrets for power, lying to and robbing those who trust you ... there are lots of parallels between M$ and any other evil cult. Their adherents promote a immoral code of "sharp business", laugh at "do no evil" and openly advocate anti-social practices. What further evidence do you need?
The last time I mentioned linux in public an angry mob of microsoft enthusiasts formed and chased me out of town.
You should do like me and stand your ground, but thanks for the example of derision.
Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?
Knoppix has been using such a file system for years. The Linux kernel also has built in support for encrypted file systems.
I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.
I can't think of a less mainstream idea. Thanks, you made my day.
I know plenty of really passionate Microsoft fanbois. In fact they are the only people I know who have copies of Vista Ultimate.
I know lots of less passionate Microsoft fanboys. They are like drunk people who don't know they are drunk. The very idea of anything but M$ on their networks is unpossible to them. They don't know how anyone can get along without M$ and treat them suspiciously like a witch or nija. Because M$ is closed source, you have to take it on faith, but they confuse M$ with science. Their OS and software choice is a constant source of irritation and dissaster for them but they refuse to seek alternatives. They consider themselves perfectly rational and normal. These are more dangerous than those who realize their own passions and irrationality.
If you redefine your group to be Computer professionals, M$ is an abhorant, abusive and dominant cult. Using the Wiki definition you so kindly provided,
beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be outside the mainstream
and realizing that:
The M$ practices are uniformly considered dated, wrong, dangerous and anything but mainstream. Nothing they do has ever been accepted as excellent and apologists always have to point to some ugly piece of hardware or software lock in to justify their choice, the rest being "good enough". The acceptance of the sum of these things AT ANY COST, against all evidence of efficacy, by many of the same experts who then inflict it upon the ignorant masses is the hallmark of an irrational cult member. It is doublethink.
The damage done by this cult is beyond that done by most religious cults by far, and second only to Communism in modern times. The more zealous members have an intolerance found only in those who have confused their faith for science. Simply mentioning alternatives in front of them is unpleasant enough to enrage them and torrents of abuse soon follow. They demand that people modify their morals to accommodate their obsolete business and software development models, which would otherwise perish. They engage in character and economic assassination, but such individual damage pales in comparison to the damage done by the inadequacy of the "product" they have such blind faith in. winDOS was a virus and worm infested pit from the beginning, using it for control systems was unethical and connecting it to networks has been a dissaster that has cost us all plenty.
the idea of this project was to put the laptop metaphor into something you could store in your pocket.
Hmmm, I really love my laptop's power management and having everything I want where I left it as I walk around .... and it's only got some 4 GB of system files and swap to make it happen ....
So how does it actually work? What do you have to run on each machine to have it work? From your paper I get the hazy idea that some kind of virtual machine software is running and loads an image off the USB stick. The closest thing I can think of is qemu with a saved state that loads up and fullscreens on login.
If the host is using it, Onthego does not require you to boot the machine and KDE's session management should bring up everything where you left it. That's not as nifty as what I'm starting to see in your project.
In any scheme, all the other applications have to be installed somewhere too and this is where M$'s little project will fall on it's face. They are way too paranoid to just let you walk around with precious "IP" like Word on a stick that could be shared.
Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now ...
BIOS makes it hard to boot from external media and PCs have all sorts of M$ damaged hardware attached to them. M$ has played the same sorts of games with BIOS that they have played with Winmodems and word docs. Their specs are usually over complex "extensible" non standards that encourage wasteful customizations that no one but M$ can deal with. The success of Linux on such hardware is a miracle that proves the power of free software development. You can make linux system images that are 60MB and smaller, but you are hard pressed to make the average PC boot off anything but a CD or hard drive.
The workaround is to cart a "liveCD" and a USB flash home drive. Live CDs pack in 2 Gigs worth of system files, which is enough to haul around a complete and auto configuring system. A DVD can contain an insane quantity of software. Flash drives are now large enough to carry lots of files, but it's still easier to sftp to your home box.
Mepis used flash for your home directory, with optional encryption, in 2005. Here's the announcement. You booted off the CD and logged in as the "onthego" user. This is not as quick sounding as yours, but it's easy.
I'm not sure if they had it set up to install applications to the flash drive, but that should not be hard. It would also not be hard to make a custom boot CD with Debian.
I decided to wait and get it pristine on DVD, rather than have it "spoilered" by watching it on TV
The more control you have over the viewing, the better. For some reason, the DVDs have lots of spoilers that are hard to skip. Every episode starts out with the same "trailer" which is followed by spoilers that consume at least 10% of the viewing. When you combine that with a crappy remote blocking player, you end up watching tons of FBI warnings, Warner Brother's logos and spoilers. It would be unbearable broken up with advertisements.
And did you notice how blurry the image was of the 'standard' text. Nice job there. "look how much easier the text on the right is to read compared to the old stuff on the left!". This is a SERIOUSLY flawed example.
The Declaration of Independence example is similar but both use fuzzy type. I like the original better. Then again, I'm biased because I've always done better than average with these kinds of tests.
The system knows when the light is going to change and what's around the corner. You may know some of that from experience, but you will never be as good as a system that really knows current conditions. Much to the ire of other people on the road, I already drive slowly. It helps but I doubt it helps by 33%.
A combination of smart roads and hybrids would be better still, but I'm not sure that I want to leave my driving to big brother.
I can say that because she not only participates in a system she thinks is wrong, she revels in it and thinks that's clever. Don't take my word for it, read her blog for yourself:
The message is contradictory as most flaky stories are. She claims she takes IDs out of fear of the law but then tells us that she would tell the same people to piss off anyway.
Neither of those reasons justify the extra defamatory steps she then takes. She looks up her victims and publishes enough details to leave no question as to who the victim was, then adds further "hilarious" insult. Why? All because the victim thought Rachel's bar would be a nice place to have a drink. I wonder if her boss knows what she's been up to.
Rachel, here's a big Fuck You with your name on it. New York is a depressing place because of people like you. The odd mix of hopelessness, servility, arrogance and cruelty is a terrible thing to behold and exasperating to deal with. The only thing more depressing is to see one of these fish out of water. In any other environment, away from the hype, pressure, money and bullshit, no one understands and the behavior is exposed for what it is. It's not clever, it's not funny, it's just craven, cruel, and stupid.
Do these desktop application have the microsoft useless celebrity gossip as the main page when you load them?
Depends on how long you've had your PC on the network and how many ad servers it has collected.
I'll bet M$'s $3 OS suite, which is supposed to compete with OLPC, will have all of that out of the box.
Why did Microsoft sit on their hands as Google slowly built up their capabilities to match those of Outlook? Why didn't Microsoft work on porting what they had done for Outlook to their Hotmail servers?
Because they would rather sell Outlook in a box, per user to big dumb companies. Office, one of M$'s two money makers is next. The only reason business "needs" Windoze is to run Office .... You see where this is going, don't you? They don't want you to think computers work without them. Web based competition shows them up.
M$'s late 1980's format lock in is over. Format wars sucked then and they suck now. Their OS monopoly will follow shortly. Good riddance, it can't happen soon enough.
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
The economy is better off without your restrictions. From what I've read, most software people make their living by making software work for a company and they are better served by free software. Like most people, they get by on their ability to solve problems. It's a tiny minority that actually makes a living from non-free, precompiled binaries in a box. For that tiny minority, the rest of us suffer the DMCA and other methods to lock people in that you are talking about. You can keep them to yourself.
Your argument is just another variant of the economic arguments made against free software from day one. The massive success of GNU, Debian and other organizations prove this argument was flawed. Free software is not only sustainable, it's use and production are economically sound.
Put another way - Free Software is the only way I'd consider solving a new problem for myself or an employer. Non free software's low quality and inflexibility add long term costs that are impossible to justify.
I think their reasoning is more like:
Exposure is Truth
Disclosure is Duty
Hidden is Guilty
Self is Wrong
States have secrets worth protecting, people have secrets worth revealing.
Really though, Big Brother did not justify himself this way. He'd just throw you in jail until you were ready to say how much you loved the state and then murder you. Thank goodness the US does not have prisons where you can be thrown without charge and murdered for spite without a fair trial. Stuff like that would make the US a police state. Thinking otherwise is a thought crime that will put you on a domestic spying list. Can't let one or two bad apples sink the whole country!