What a confused and insulting post. It does not take long for the Microsoft Defenders to act, does it?
s/b: The harder they try, the more extensive the monopoly becomes the more people will be unable to escape.
You can't expand a monopoly, you can only lose it.
It doesn't show any costs to me. What it shows is that MS is willing to use its considerable clout to get what it wants politically.
Microsoft spends about a billion dollars a month in marketing and dirty tricks like this. These three "Men in Black" are part of that, according to the article, costing a minimum of $100,000 in Florida alone. You pay for it everytime you purchase something from someone who's passed their M$ costs along to you. Slavery is one of the names used for situations where you have to pay and you have no choice due to fraud and force others have used.
What bothers me about your post is that it's the same as the rest of your posts -- all you ever really say is "haha M$ is PWNed".... In all, I'm not surprised to see the same post from you as always -- but I'm also sure you actually have interesting and insightful observations. Why not bother thinking a bit before you post and include them in your comments?
My message is as constant as reality, try arguing with something of substance rather than my supposed writing style, history or personality. You can't really, because there is little of substance behind M$. The people of Florida will be better off with Open Formats but M$'s dirty tricks would keep them from even discussing the issue. This is a game M$ can't really win.
Let any reasonably sized enterprise outside of Sun/IBM, or governmental entity show that they can use OOS successfully and they'll become an example showing Microsoft's lies.
Lowes made the move years ago. Just walk into any Lowes and have a look at the computers they are still running. Chrysler and many others have also made moves like this. The move is already on and Vista is going to turn it into a tidal wave.
M$'s lie is about public perception, not fact. It's always been this way and all lies ultimately are. If they had anything other than lock in as a competitive advantage, they would not have to lie in the first place.
Doesn't exactly strike me as an open or up front method of passing legislation.
Advertising changes to a bill before you add them is not a common method of modifying bills. The process is as open as can be because everyone will get a chance to comment on it later. What's under the table is threatenting legislators to make sure the item is never talked about.
After what happened to Peter J. Quinn, everyone has every right to fear the Men in Black. In that case they:
and they are now trying to dismantle his department to destroy it's policies.
What policy was that? you might ask. It was simply to use a cheaper, more reliable and more open alternative to M$ Office. Peter Quinn was crucified for thinking his state could save money and have their documents available in digital form 100 year from now if they simply moved away from the M$ domination. For this correct assertion, his reputation and career were damaged.
M$'s efforts are both civil and criminal violation and those responsible should be held accountable.
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate.
They have, of course. Netscape, IBM, Sun, Google, Caldera, Red Hat, Novel, and many others have and are doing everything any company should be expected to do. They are producing superior alternatives and offering them at a fair price. It is only because of M$'s abusive anti-trust activities that their sub standard software "dominates" government and business data transactions. In response to M$'s many abusive practices, many of these companies have gone further than they naturally should. Sun has fostered and supports an entire alternative Office Suite, which is M$'s big money earner, as free software and spends real money reverse engineering M$'s dirty tricks. The result is competitive on both features and cost. When M$ blocks this natural competition by legislative tampering, we all lose the benefits of a free market.
The size of those losses is the size of Bill Gates' fortune and the pile of money his company sits on. The cost of all the dirty tricks is rolled up in the billion dollars a month they spend on "marketing." Every dollar they spend comes out of your hide. It's part of the cost of everything you buy.
Microsoft has a right to withhold campaign funding. They have a right to lobby.
Rights? What are you talking about? No one has the right to threaten legislators. Offering them money in exchange for votes is also a criminal violation. Even the usual "rights" you might ascribe to a public company have no force when you are talking about a convicted monopolist like M$. Microsoft's reported behavior is unethical at best, criminal at worst.
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac. Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
Each of us can only do so much but none of us should shut up as you suggest. Migrating what you control from M$ is a great idea but that's hard to do when M$ makes sure everything in your life is done with their crappy formats. Reading about how they do that is not a waste of time, nor is thinking about and telling others the cost and implications of that kind of bullying. As word spreads, your legislators are apt to get on the bandwagon and M$ will lose.
The above goes double for all of those unfortunate state employees who know how bad M$ sucks from having to use it daily. They are the ones who can provide the most insightful commentary and should comment here more than others.
This just proves how much of a threat MS perceives OO.o and other open source projects.
It also shows the costs of maintaining the monopoly we are all paying. The slave holder gets all tools and income from slaves.
It's a death spiral for M$. The harder they try, the more expensive the monopoly becomes the more people will want to escape. News of this "success" will quickly turn into dozens of challenges. Real successes, where states and businesses actually save time money and trouble by bucking M$, will be promote even more challenges.
It's funny that consideration of any alternative should be considered a "challenge" but that's they way M$ sees it and acts. Kudoos to you, Peter Quinn! The M$ monopoly is on the way out.
So you see the absurd effort M$ must make to continue it's format monopoly. You can imagine they monitor all state legislators and are ready to send in people like this every time. Because there is such a huge performance and cost difference between M$ and their competitor's products, the "men in black" are going to be very busy.
The only person who has to be more vigilant than a free man is a slave owner.
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
It's nice to be able to mix http, ftp, sftp and smb in an application that has good viewing capability. Typically http will me to some kind of file that I want to download. In the case of code, it's nice to be able to right click open it in a new tab and check it out before dragging and dropping the files I want to the place I want to keep them. Programs like Kget automate downloading links, and it's nice to be able to manipulate the place I'm going to put them before I download.
There are lots of other places where mixed behavior is nice and once you get used to it, it's hard to do without. I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. Between that and clumsy virtual desktops, the system drives me nuts.
Could it have anything to do with how easy it is to get Firefox in your local language? Correct my North-American egocentrism
A proper bigot believes there is no "internet" outside the English language. You get a cookie for realizing that free software is easier to localize and that local translators do a better job than McDon^H^H^H^H Microsoft.
Konqueror and Safari both use KHTML (although Apple has forked it and added some things KHTML still hasn't)
Safari only gives you a taste of what KDE has for Konqueror users. Missing items include split panes, sftp and other common features. Konqueror is the network transparency people have dreamed about for more than a decade.
Mozilla makes a good browser but it's not a great file manager.
And how many of those are real apps you could use on the desktop of a large enterprise organisation and how many of them are competeing implementations of libdosomethingmundanetheuserneversees and its separate -devel packages?
Library reuse is the reason a GNU/Linux desktop takes less than 2GB while others ask for 10 before you start adding applications. Each package, however, requires a lot of effort so there's really not that much duplication.
Not that I'm knocking Linux, I'm just saying comparing 'applications' to 'packages' is bogus.
No, what you are knocking it the quality of Debian packages. That's only something that can be done in ignorance or malice.
The numbers might be fuzzy, but they are firmly in favor of Debian and GNU/Linux. Every one of the Debian packages does something that someone was interested enough in to write a program for and every one of them works. As is obvious, not every "application" ever written survives the M$ upgrade cycle. Like I said, the fanboys would come out and say silly things like, "the Windoze packages are the ones that matter."
I've been Microsoft application free since 2001 because everything I've ever needed was in Debian.
People are tricked every day into installing spyware and trojans. I'm glad about any additional protection that stops people installing that stuff, even if the side effect is a slight PITA when installing legit software.
Proper user permissions makes it both easy to install software and stop trojans. People complain because M$ has yet to implement the simple read write execute and user flags common and effective in Unix since the 1970s. Instead they use annoying warnings that cry wolf and make the user think it's their fault when they turn those off.
Vista proves that compatibility with previous applications is not the reason they have not adopted a sane user model. Vista is all driven by digital restrictions for media companies. Where those restrictions break applications they were only too happy to do it.
one big fat Microsoft Fanboy/Salesman argument isn't true for Vista: "Windows has more applications..."
That lie has been dead for a long time. Debian has 18,733 packages now. I doubt they will ever be obsoleted the way non free software is and Debian, while huge, is only a part of the free software world. You have to go back 20 year to be in a world where non free software outnumbers free. Today, you can easily run systems that are completely free.
The M$ fanboys will say silly things now about how those 1,000 Vista ready applications you don't have to fiddle with too much are the ones that matter and are better in some way than others. That too is a lie and the difference is only going to become more obvious.
Developers left the non free world long ago when it was clear that only M$ and friends got anything out of it. The non free software world collapsed more than ten years ago as M$ crushed rivals like Netscape, OS/2, Word Perfect and others. Everything since then has been a desperate struggle by M$ to stop or steal free software.
if he is seen spending his earnings from the windos tax on frivolities like this one.
Oh come on, be creative and you can make it into a religious transformation. They can pump out copy about how Mr. Gates, the god, looked down on a "fragile earth" and came away a new man ready to do good for the whole world. He can combine it with some blather about the joys of parenting and might actually fool people into thinking he's changed. M$'s propaganda machine is all about convincing people Mr. Gates is full of good will. The props required to pull off that illusion are getting expensive.
He won't really change anything he's doing and his organizations will continue to push their "IP" empire into medicine and other places you don't want immoral people. He thinks he owns computing and is close to owning your culture. Next on the list is your health and life.
The photo also unintentionally captures classic Gates: completely wrecked hair, terrible looking clothes, generally slovenly appearance, and two glazed eyes staring out past thick glasses. This image changed very little over the bulk of Gates' career, with the shower taps running at much less frequency than the money taps. It should also be noted that this isn't some heaping of sour grapes from the gutter staring up at Bill's mountain of success; throughout the time he has been known in public, Bill's dedication to all-nighters and in-the-trenches energy ensured a number of high-profile press conferences and demonstrations where his lack of hygiene became as breathtaking as the product being demonstrated.
Hard work is OK. It's the "go to hell" attitude for the rest of the world that turned out to be a problem. That and a lack of product. No one really wants to be confined with that, so I doubt even the Russians will put Mr. Gates on a rocket.
Yeah, he'd know it's a cracked copy and want to "Whack" the Russian Space Agency. It would take him a few minutes to get out of his usual mindset and realize that he's the user this time and that failure matters.
Read the comments for the article you linked to. The author gets torn to shreds by people with actual knowledge of Vista.
Way to miss the point, M$ defender Macthrope. You can keep Vista and all of it's restrictions but no one else is going to want them and their sales are going to go the same place the major music publisher's sales have gone. There, people continue to purchase CDs and avoid DRM'd content. When they sabotaged CDs too, they really screwed up. Their sales have been falling by 20% a year for years.
I don't think you are going to get very far if you try to equate free software advocates with PR hitmen. One group is composed of volunteers out to promote software freedom and your rights. To do this, they share their code and documentation freely. The other group is composed of people who are paid to advocate positions, regardless of their personal beliefs - a job the more closely resembles prostitution than other professions. The company they represents thinks of developers as pawns to fuck over and routinely calls their users worse. It's a good thing that most people can see through the bullshit this second group has to offer.
Of course, you might be able to point out some kind of vast conspiracy to strip me of my rights that I might have missed. I have not seen it in the GPL, or on the FSF site or in anything Perens has ever written. Go ahead, make my day.
how much of this could be due to dual-booting OSX and Vista on the same machine?
They are all switchers, Microsoft told me so. Apple is dying because people clamoring for the stabbibilty and ease of use of Vista. If you look at the numbers right, they have switched more than half of Apple users already!
Who do these people think they are fooling? Vista does not have 2% of the world's 1E9 internet connected computers, because a large percentage of the 20E6 versions of Vista sold are sitting on store shelves, or the bottom of a shredder.
The other option is that their websites mainly attract Windows users. It could be something to do with them being served off IIS, using activeX so they only work with the latest IE on Windows and blinking signs that say, "This Web Site is Optimized for Vista." I know it's hard to find sites so poorly run even in the wintel press, but anything can happen when you "get the facts".
Slashdot Mirror
What a confused and insulting post. It does not take long for the Microsoft Defenders to act, does it?
s/b: The harder they try, the more extensive the monopoly becomes the more people will be unable to escape.
You can't expand a monopoly, you can only lose it.
It doesn't show any costs to me. What it shows is that MS is willing to use its considerable clout to get what it wants politically.
Microsoft spends about a billion dollars a month in marketing and dirty tricks like this. These three "Men in Black" are part of that, according to the article, costing a minimum of $100,000 in Florida alone. You pay for it everytime you purchase something from someone who's passed their M$ costs along to you. Slavery is one of the names used for situations where you have to pay and you have no choice due to fraud and force others have used.
What bothers me about your post is that it's the same as the rest of your posts -- all you ever really say is "haha M$ is PWNed". ... In all, I'm not surprised to see the same post from you as always -- but I'm also sure you actually have interesting and insightful observations. Why not bother thinking a bit before you post and include them in your comments?
My message is as constant as reality, try arguing with something of substance rather than my supposed writing style, history or personality. You can't really, because there is little of substance behind M$. The people of Florida will be better off with Open Formats but M$'s dirty tricks would keep them from even discussing the issue. This is a game M$ can't really win.
Let any reasonably sized enterprise outside of Sun/IBM, or governmental entity show that they can use OOS successfully and they'll become an example showing Microsoft's lies.
Lowes made the move years ago. Just walk into any Lowes and have a look at the computers they are still running. Chrysler and many others have also made moves like this. The move is already on and Vista is going to turn it into a tidal wave.
M$'s lie is about public perception, not fact. It's always been this way and all lies ultimately are. If they had anything other than lock in as a competitive advantage, they would not have to lie in the first place.
2007 is the year of GNU/Linux.
Doesn't exactly strike me as an open or up front method of passing legislation.
Advertising changes to a bill before you add them is not a common method of modifying bills. The process is as open as can be because everyone will get a chance to comment on it later. What's under the table is threatenting legislators to make sure the item is never talked about.
After what happened to Peter J. Quinn, everyone has every right to fear the Men in Black. In that case they:
What policy was that? you might ask. It was simply to use a cheaper, more reliable and more open alternative to M$ Office. Peter Quinn was crucified for thinking his state could save money and have their documents available in digital form 100 year from now if they simply moved away from the M$ domination. For this correct assertion, his reputation and career were damaged.
M$'s efforts are both civil and criminal violation and those responsible should be held accountable.
Everytime the "M$" rings, an AC loses his wings.
They act angry about it too. How hopeless.
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate.
They have, of course. Netscape, IBM, Sun, Google, Caldera, Red Hat, Novel, and many others have and are doing everything any company should be expected to do. They are producing superior alternatives and offering them at a fair price. It is only because of M$'s abusive anti-trust activities that their sub standard software "dominates" government and business data transactions. In response to M$'s many abusive practices, many of these companies have gone further than they naturally should. Sun has fostered and supports an entire alternative Office Suite, which is M$'s big money earner, as free software and spends real money reverse engineering M$'s dirty tricks. The result is competitive on both features and cost. When M$ blocks this natural competition by legislative tampering, we all lose the benefits of a free market.
The size of those losses is the size of Bill Gates' fortune and the pile of money his company sits on. The cost of all the dirty tricks is rolled up in the billion dollars a month they spend on "marketing." Every dollar they spend comes out of your hide. It's part of the cost of everything you buy.
Microsoft has a right to withhold campaign funding. They have a right to lobby.
Rights? What are you talking about? No one has the right to threaten legislators. Offering them money in exchange for votes is also a criminal violation. Even the usual "rights" you might ascribe to a public company have no force when you are talking about a convicted monopolist like M$. Microsoft's reported behavior is unethical at best, criminal at worst.
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac. Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
Each of us can only do so much but none of us should shut up as you suggest. Migrating what you control from M$ is a great idea but that's hard to do when M$ makes sure everything in your life is done with their crappy formats. Reading about how they do that is not a waste of time, nor is thinking about and telling others the cost and implications of that kind of bullying. As word spreads, your legislators are apt to get on the bandwagon and M$ will lose.
The above goes double for all of those unfortunate state employees who know how bad M$ sucks from having to use it daily. They are the ones who can provide the most insightful commentary and should comment here more than others.
This just proves how much of a threat MS perceives OO.o and other open source projects.
It also shows the costs of maintaining the monopoly we are all paying. The slave holder gets all tools and income from slaves.
It's a death spiral for M$. The harder they try, the more expensive the monopoly becomes the more people will want to escape. News of this "success" will quickly turn into dozens of challenges. Real successes, where states and businesses actually save time money and trouble by bucking M$, will be promote even more challenges.
It's funny that consideration of any alternative should be considered a "challenge" but that's they way M$ sees it and acts. Kudoos to you, Peter Quinn! The M$ monopoly is on the way out.
So you see the absurd effort M$ must make to continue it's format monopoly. You can imagine they monitor all state legislators and are ready to send in people like this every time. Because there is such a huge performance and cost difference between M$ and their competitor's products, the "men in black" are going to be very busy.
The only person who has to be more vigilant than a free man is a slave owner.
Another thought, I don't see web browsing and file managing overlapping in features that much (maybe in the visual presentation a bit), why do you assume that it makes sense for them to be integrated? To have one less app?
It's nice to be able to mix http, ftp, sftp and smb in an application that has good viewing capability. Typically http will me to some kind of file that I want to download. In the case of code, it's nice to be able to right click open it in a new tab and check it out before dragging and dropping the files I want to the place I want to keep them. Programs like Kget automate downloading links, and it's nice to be able to manipulate the place I'm going to put them before I download.
There are lots of other places where mixed behavior is nice and once you get used to it, it's hard to do without. I notice that it's missing when I use an XP system and the silly thing insists on opening separate windows. It takes time, obscures what I'm looking at and is hard to drag and drop between. Between that and clumsy virtual desktops, the system drives me nuts.
Could it have anything to do with how easy it is to get Firefox in your local language? Correct my North-American egocentrism
A proper bigot believes there is no "internet" outside the English language. You get a cookie for realizing that free software is easier to localize and that local translators do a better job than McDon^H^H^H^H Microsoft.
Konqueror and Safari both use KHTML (although Apple has forked it and added some things KHTML still hasn't)
Safari only gives you a taste of what KDE has for Konqueror users. Missing items include split panes, sftp and other common features. Konqueror is the network transparency people have dreamed about for more than a decade.
Mozilla makes a good browser but it's not a great file manager.
IE is a bad joke.
Hi there twitter! Let's play Debunk The Zealot!
Hello pest. Vista Sucks.
An AC, who should remain anonymous, asks:
And how many of those are real apps you could use on the desktop of a large enterprise organisation and how many of them are competeing implementations of libdosomethingmundanetheuserneversees and its separate -devel packages?
Library reuse is the reason a GNU/Linux desktop takes less than 2GB while others ask for 10 before you start adding applications. Each package, however, requires a lot of effort so there's really not that much duplication.
Not that I'm knocking Linux, I'm just saying comparing 'applications' to 'packages' is bogus.
No, what you are knocking it the quality of Debian packages. That's only something that can be done in ignorance or malice.
The numbers might be fuzzy, but they are firmly in favor of Debian and GNU/Linux. Every one of the Debian packages does something that someone was interested enough in to write a program for and every one of them works. As is obvious, not every "application" ever written survives the M$ upgrade cycle. Like I said, the fanboys would come out and say silly things like, "the Windoze packages are the ones that matter."
I've been Microsoft application free since 2001 because everything I've ever needed was in Debian.
People are tricked every day into installing spyware and trojans. I'm glad about any additional protection that stops people installing that stuff, even if the side effect is a slight PITA when installing legit software.
Proper user permissions makes it both easy to install software and stop trojans. People complain because M$ has yet to implement the simple read write execute and user flags common and effective in Unix since the 1970s. Instead they use annoying warnings that cry wolf and make the user think it's their fault when they turn those off.
Vista proves that compatibility with previous applications is not the reason they have not adopted a sane user model. Vista is all driven by digital restrictions for media companies. Where those restrictions break applications they were only too happy to do it.
one big fat Microsoft Fanboy/Salesman argument isn't true for Vista: "Windows has more applications..."
That lie has been dead for a long time. Debian has 18,733 packages now. I doubt they will ever be obsoleted the way non free software is and Debian, while huge, is only a part of the free software world. You have to go back 20 year to be in a world where non free software outnumbers free. Today, you can easily run systems that are completely free.
The M$ fanboys will say silly things now about how those 1,000 Vista ready applications you don't have to fiddle with too much are the ones that matter and are better in some way than others. That too is a lie and the difference is only going to become more obvious.
Developers left the non free world long ago when it was clear that only M$ and friends got anything out of it. The non free software world collapsed more than ten years ago as M$ crushed rivals like Netscape, OS/2, Word Perfect and others. Everything since then has been a desperate struggle by M$ to stop or steal free software.
if he is seen spending his earnings from the windos tax on frivolities like this one.
Oh come on, be creative and you can make it into a religious transformation. They can pump out copy about how Mr. Gates, the god, looked down on a "fragile earth" and came away a new man ready to do good for the whole world. He can combine it with some blather about the joys of parenting and might actually fool people into thinking he's changed. M$'s propaganda machine is all about convincing people Mr. Gates is full of good will. The props required to pull off that illusion are getting expensive.
He won't really change anything he's doing and his organizations will continue to push their "IP" empire into medicine and other places you don't want immoral people. He thinks he owns computing and is close to owning your culture. Next on the list is your health and life.
Given Mr. Gate's reputation for hygiene, his fellow cosmonauts would fix him up with duct tape in no time.
Hard work is OK. It's the "go to hell" attitude for the rest of the world that turned out to be a problem. That and a lack of product. No one really wants to be confined with that, so I doubt even the Russians will put Mr. Gates on a rocket.
Slashdot provides a link to what Fyodor Yurchikhin said about what Charles Simonyi said about what Bill Gates supposedly intends to do.
Windows development is always that way, pawn, and that's why most people don't bother. Windoze - the only way to win is not to play.
Yeah, he'd know it's a cracked copy and want to "Whack" the Russian Space Agency. It would take him a few minutes to get out of his usual mindset and realize that he's the user this time and that failure matters.
Read the comments for the article you linked to. The author gets torn to shreds by people with actual knowledge of Vista.
Way to miss the point, M$ defender Macthrope. You can keep Vista and all of it's restrictions but no one else is going to want them and their sales are going to go the same place the major music publisher's sales have gone. There, people continue to purchase CDs and avoid DRM'd content. When they sabotaged CDs too, they really screwed up. Their sales have been falling by 20% a year for years.
I don't think you are going to get very far if you try to equate free software advocates with PR hitmen. One group is composed of volunteers out to promote software freedom and your rights. To do this, they share their code and documentation freely. The other group is composed of people who are paid to advocate positions, regardless of their personal beliefs - a job the more closely resembles prostitution than other professions. The company they represents thinks of developers as pawns to fuck over and routinely calls their users worse. It's a good thing that most people can see through the bullshit this second group has to offer.
Of course, you might be able to point out some kind of vast conspiracy to strip me of my rights that I might have missed. I have not seen it in the GPL, or on the FSF site or in anything Perens has ever written. Go ahead, make my day.
how much of this could be due to dual-booting OSX and Vista on the same machine?
They are all switchers, Microsoft told me so. Apple is dying because people clamoring for the stabbibilty and ease of use of Vista. If you look at the numbers right, they have switched more than half of Apple users already!
Who do these people think they are fooling? Vista does not have 2% of the world's 1E9 internet connected computers, because a large percentage of the 20E6 versions of Vista sold are sitting on store shelves, or the bottom of a shredder.
The other option is that their websites mainly attract Windows users. It could be something to do with them being served off IIS, using activeX so they only work with the latest IE on Windows and blinking signs that say, "This Web Site is Optimized for Vista." I know it's hard to find sites so poorly run even in the wintel press, but anything can happen when you "get the facts".
you don't expect Vista to show up on more than 2% of desktops? I would like some of whatever it is you smoked this afternoon.
I think he was smoking WinME or maybe Bob. Face it, M$ has a problem child on it's hands.