The courts will find that Viacom has been wronged, that Google has not done enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and that Google owes Viacom reparations.
"Reparations"? I suppose the copyright warriors think they are at war. I just wish they would defend their own best interests instead of big dumb companies that have nothing to do with them. "Rights of copyright holders," they must think they are freedom fighters too. The double talk is thick here.
Viacom and other large publishers have and continue to harm the public though outrageous copyright laws and greed. Most of the shows should already belong to the public and Viacom should be ashamed that someone else managed to make money off of it while they sat on their ass. There's obviously a large demand for the works, and Viacom should have been making money off of it ten years ago instead of being afraid for their cable TV franchises which have not really suffered at all.
100 year copyrights are absurd and most of their "investments" should already be public domain. The original makers knew the content would belong to the public sooner than later and made their shows and their money anyway. Those who have "invested" in content that has been retroactively "protected" deserve to be burnt. They want to own your culture and decide who can use it to express themselves, fuck them.
At the same time, it's pathetic that Viacomm and other publishers have not come up with a business model better than suing the crap out of others. What do they tell their investors, "Teh people at Google are the smart and we are the dumb but we will make it back though lots of litigation"? Where's the Viacomm download channel for people who just have to have 20 year old music videos?
Anyway you look at this issue, Viacomm is a loser and they have harmed not just their investors but the public at large. The public has had enough of it and is routing around the damage with free content. That free content competition is the real target of this lawsuit.
Would you mind explaining to the rest of us where Microsoft Windows is a specific requirement for any of the stated conditions?
Sure, I can do that. It's not really a requirement, it just makes it easy to do and expands the scope out again. Of course, there's not much of a reason to nail the OpenBSD machine if you already own the clients that enter the data in the first place. I suppose the point of all of this is to worry about and eliminate the biggest problems first. Things like OpenBSD are broken once a decade, while Windoze is never fixed.
does not, in any way, mean "far away," as the attacker has to be able to inject fragmented IPv6 packets, which is extremely hard to control (impossible?) from the other side of a layer 3 device.
If that's true, they nail the Windoze machine on the other side and blast you from your own DMZ. Once again, your network is only as strong as it's weakest link. This is why I have no Windoze in my network.
Reminds me of when my brother got busted with pot. He lost his car and about $3k in fines and court costs. My parents blamed pot. Although pot didn't do that to him the government did. Pot only ever got us high.
Funny thing. A friend of mine smoked some pot and totaled his car. The police issued lots of fines but missed his stash. He did not blame the cops, government or pot. He blamed those damn bats that ran him off the road.
He first saw those bats on a Madonna video, which he watched on Youtube and then shared by accident with Communist China. Arguably, the bats, and P2P by extension, are both a menace to corporate profits and a national security risk. They sure did him harm.
I don't even want to mention the spiders he's talked about.
As to the problem of theft, don't take anything you are not fully prepared to lose. or break. If you MUST take a laptop, get an old junky one, and make sure it has zero personal info on it.
Yes, if I want a laptop that's what I do. The US border guards have been looking very closely at laptops so don't give them a lot of stuff to waste everyone's time. You should be able to get and put the data you want by secure shell where ever you go anyway. Next time I go anywhere, I'm lugging along the old Thinkpad 600. It's heavy but it's tough, works for me and no one else is going to want to steal it.
The prices were lower, but never much less than Windoze system prices at the same time. The savings were not passed along to the customer to help overcome the perceived risk. Moreover, the systems were never really promoted and I never saw one in a store. Crummy hardware, same price, no advertising, that's not exactly a recipe for success. At the same time, I don't know if they systems actually lost money. As far as Wallmart goes, relation ship with M$ is muddy, and you should do as they do not as they sell.
A company like Dell is in an entirely different position. They have the size to get low hardware costs and can make a dramatic price difference and still make good money. Obviously, the demand is there and the perceived risk is much smaller.
[Dell could] say something along the lines of "After seeing the survey results, the demands of the Linux community are too diverse. For reasons of technical support, we cannot offer Linux as an OS option on our computers."
Which everone knows is BS. All they need to do is select components with free drivers and pressure their suppliers to provide specs and free drivers.
Sooner or later, someone is going to sell computers like that and the price difference without the M$ tax will be great enough to blow out everyone who does not follow. The endgame is very close. That's why M$ is making noises about patents and IP like every other non free IT giant that was outcompeted before.
He said we are fussy, without making any judgements. And that this fact would make it harder for Dell to satisfy us.
All anyone cares about is to have hardware with free drivers, from there any distro can be installed. The continued acceptance of M$'s inferior GUI and software for "hardware compatibility" is proof that the vast majority of computer users just want the system to work and will put up with all sorts of security and performance issues to get that level of "convenience". If Dell would select or demand hardware with free drivers, every major gnu/linux distribution would work - that's not hard at all. Picky people are going to reinstall the OS anyway and no one will blame Dell for that.
The of Mark's criticism that sticks is this:
If Microsoft reduces the per-PC marketing contribution it makes for a particular reseller, that puts them at a huge financial disadvantage relative to their competitors. This means that one of the biggest issues a computer manufacturer or reseller faces in considering Linux pre-installations is the impact it will have on the Microsoft relationship, and hence bottom line.
Anti-competitive pressure is what this ever boils down to. It will go away as hardware prices drop below $200 or so, because there's no room for software costs at that price point. That Dell is making noises like this now is good evidence that there's not much room for software costs at the $400 price point. The corporate price point is already there and that's why so many companies are dumping M$. The first vendor to deliver a $200 computer with nothing but free software on it is going to win big time and there's nothing M$ will be able to do about it.
why would premature combustion still be a problem in a direct-injection engine? It should be possible to inject the fuel when it is needed, and not before. Or would that lead to timing problems?
If you can define what mature combustion is, your engine will be very satisfied. Is it true that Honda's charge shaping hits her G-spot? Lube and timing are critical, especially on start up. Chitty-chitty bang-bang, we love you.
An actual answer to your question can be found in the above link. You need the correct distribution of fuel for proper operation and might not be able to get that with direct injection and still avoid pre-ignition.
Maybe one day you'll understand that you'd be far more efficient if you didn't come across as such an asshole.
Only people hoplessly in love with M$ think like that.
Slashdot mod points are not real, you know. They don't validate your existence.
Mod points are not real, but he conversation is. Even you, a paid harassment drone, are dreaming my dream by reading what I write. M$ spends about a billion dollars a month harassing others and promoting themselves, but it all falls apart here where people spend a little of their spare time, memory and critical thinking.
How many times have you posted your anual "XXXX is the year of Linux" deal? What, seven years and counting?
No, I have not been saying that as long as M$ has been working on Vista. This year is the first I've thought of as a tipping point.
I think I'm all grown up now and I can figure out when I need to be "liberated". I love that you have lots of free time because your computers "work", and I'm trapped with "M$ Windoze workarounds" yet I have all this free time to "harrass" you.
You and others are paid to do what you do. You need to quit because it's a waste of your time at any price.
"FUD" when it's about the only thing you have left as your desperation over your failure to do anything meaningful becomes more and more evident.
I'm going to go home and play with my little girls now. Have a nice night.
Why is it the government's job to make sure people can still watch TV[?]
It's not their job but they want to tell you what to think.
Sure, they'll raise more than $1B money by auctioning off the spectrum.
Selling spectrum is a crime. It belongs to all of us but will be given to the highest bidders - those able to extract the money from all of us. This is a corporate tax and it's evil because it comes with very little accountability. A large portion of your cellphone bill goes towards paying for the spectrum which Bill Clinton auctioned off. Do you know what that money is spent on? Is that what you want when you buy into a cell phone plan. You are right when you say there are better uses for the money than providing the highest bidder with a larger customer base. Every dollar taken from the people by government needs to be justified and accounted for in advance. Taking money from one group and given to another is either Communism or robbery depending on the progressiveness of the tax and neither are good. Your continued support of unaccountable government depends on you not having decent news services, something which can only be provided by a continuation of the current broadcast monopolies. This wastes a precious public commodity and does so with the express intent to make it that public commodity worthless.
Has it occurred to you just for a second that people actually naming you around here might be a sign that you're doing something wrong?
No.
Or are you still chalking that up to Microsoft's expensive and concerted effort to stalk you personally on Slashdot?
Yes, M$ is doing it's best to disrupt and abuse Slashdot. The harassment dished out to me personally is part of that. They think they can make things unpleasant and disinformative here as they have elsewhere. They consider that, "competition" and that's about the best they have to offer. How pathetic. They are a blight with nothing better to offer.
... what exactly do you find "inflammatory" here? I'll tell you: You don't.
That's not the first time you have tried to read my mind.
"Kumbaya", "dirty", dismissing the idea that M$ might not really be sincere without further investigation. All these things are insults, the same M$ is known for when talking about those, "dirty commie hippies, misguided at best, impractical day dreamers, destructive at worst... a cancer, unAmerican, zealots" and so on and so forth, just like you deadzo. Well look, more of the same:
Have you ever considered doing something actually useful for free software instead? All that time, trying to influence (I guess?) the group of people most likely to agree with you in the first place. If that's not a perfect example of your beloved "intentional waste" punchline, I don't know what is.
I'll define what constitutes a waste of my time, thank you. I've got time because my computers work effortlessly, so I get to spend my time using them for fun things like sparring with you trolls.
This audience has a fair number of Windoze users and that should change. Though they may agree with me about freedom in principle, they are still wasting their time with M$ workarounds. Those kinds of people think they know what they are talking about, but they don't. They have fallen for the FUD and don't really know how much easier their lives could be. Everyone here needs to finally make the switch and stick to it for a couple of months. Very few will ever go back.
What have YOU done for OSS? You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good.
Advocating freedom never hurts anyone in a free society, but thanks for thinking of me. I love you guys, and all this new M$ tone that spews forth here.
What you say about Mr. Hilf may be true, but I'd like to know what he's done since joining M$. The article is a collection of confusing propaganda, more inflammatory than informative, and I hope it does not really reflect Mr. Hilf's beliefs:
When Bill Hilf came from IBM Corp. to join Microsoft three years ago, the company's stance on open source vacillated wildly. It would swing from outright indifference to overt nastiness. Today, something else is unfolding: Microsoft is striking a surprising balance. It has stopped dismissing open source licensing and community development as dangerous folly or evil foe, and is looking for a way to both compete and co-exist.
...
Before we start singing Kumbaya, let's state clearly it's inconceivable that Microsoft's efforts around open source have yet been widely greeted as sincere, altruistic or even legitimate by a large faction of the open source community.
Nice flame but not much content. Mr. Hilf's "dirty little secret" comment about most people being forced to run M$ first, without mention of the Federally proved monopoly, is more of the same. Oh wow, this is rich:
"I ask those folks, 'How often has Microsoft sued over IP?' The answer is two [times]," he says. "We are not a patent troll company. We protect our IP and our licenses, but we do not want to litigate."
The company responsible for the fiaSCO that's threatening everyone that they own patents on everything is not a troll? OK, that's enough fantasy reading for me today. Mr. Hilf is not the first nice thing that M$ has bought and ruined.
If these things don't reflect Mr. Hilf's opinion, let it be a lesson for those who consider working for "the enemy". they will use you and hang whatever opinion around your neck they please before they dismiss you.
According to this, the office was a scandal. If anything, it's an example of how not to do things.
Central Management Services is the agency in charge of most state purchasing and hiring. Its influence over other agencies has expanded sharply under Blagojevich.
State auditors repeatedly have found management problems there.
One particularly scathing audit, released just as Campbell was taking over the agency, found CMS had paid improper expenses to contractors, failed to document the cost-cutting it claimed to have achieved and sometimes allowed contractors to start working before having a signed deal.
Follow-up audits six months and one year later found continuing problems, as well as some improvement.
Blagojevich's hiring practices have raised questions, particularly from federal prosecutors.
Where there's corruption, expect M$ to be crammed down your throat.
Free Software/Open Source folk need to be even more anal retentive than the BSA regarding software piracy. Zero tolerance! Report em all. Take piracy off the table as an option and we can make some major inroads from people who can't afford Microsoft and other commercial products now.
That's a very bad idea which plays into the M$ game plan and makes you a scape goat. Getting the user to "pay later" is what the BSA is for.
It's better to have nothing to do with "piracy" and help people with things that just work. M$'s dirty secret is that they depend on a community of users just like free software does. It's more than rip offs of BSD and start up companies. The average person does not know how to install Windoze, much less find and install a cracked version. The real enabler of M$'s plans are those people who "pirate" and many of them are right here reading along with you - the fixers. M$ is losing them because free software does things better. That more than anything else will end the lock in. Everyone of us supports a group of friends and helps them get things done. It's up to us to stop piracy and the M$ domination. The word is getting out and that's what really scares them.
The "M$ wag" where you posted your brilliant "bubba" flamebait [msdn.com]?... Is that it? Feels good insulting people on the internets, doesn't it? Calling them names behind their backs? For someone who complains so much about how "insulting" people who don't agree with you are, you sure know how to "dish it out" like a big tough dude. Way to go.
Well, no, I did not mention anyone in particular, nor did I point to that site where you can find the same M$ party line as you will find everywhere in the M$ press. So, no, I did not call Jones a wag. I'll wait till I know more about him to call him names. At this point, all I know is that he's working for the Beast and I feel sorry for him.
People like you, Bungi, are very insulting and you are one of many I have to put up with here. There's a whole cloud of assholes who all write the same kind of bullshit under different screen names. I post at random times, but they are always there like the paid guards they are. I'm reasonably certain that M$ pays these people, just like they paid for Steve Barkto, Compuserve BBS spam, letters from dead people against the M$ anti-trust case and so on and so forth in the info-war hall of astroturf shame.
He answered but it's a disappointing answer. I don't really feel like looking through his "many previous posts on my blog dealing with this issue." If he's got a real answer, he could point to it. Nor did I find it in his history file. Using my memory, I get an answer that's opposite his when I look at that file. In 2002, when Sun submitted to Oasis, M$ was using "XML" for a decidedly second rate html implementation. At that point, they could easily have jumped on the bandwagon and helped make something good for everyone.
Microsoft ALREADY added ODF support. Microsoft provides technical and architectural guidance, and pays for that project. I'm all for bashing MS where it's due, but try not to bash them on topics where you're wrong.
Oh, give me a break. M$'s behavior is right on track with previous behavior and may even surpass it in some ways. All of it's silly, because they could have simply used the freely available and better format and everyone would have been happy. No, not them, they have to use their own which was "created for a different purpose." Oh yeah, I'd almost like to know what that purpose is outside of typesetting text, spreadsheets and presentations.
Once upon a time they "supported" Word Perfect too. Word Perfect did a much better job. M$ document conversion was all one way, but at least they did it. This time they are simply "supporting" other people's efforts to help them out.
With ODF specifications already published and in use, M$ could just code it themselves and have already included it in Office 2007. KDE put it into kword, kformula and other programs months ago and made it their default format. But noooo, M$ users are going to have to write and download the converter themselves, nice. It's also nice of them to release it under a "very liberal BSD-like license" so they can suck it up later and lock everyone else out.
Thanks for pointing to the Source Forge Page. The list of ODF features not available in MSOfficeXML is amazing. The M$ format, despite it's 6000 pages of specs, is feature poor. I'll bet M$ did not know they would be paying for that kind of advertisement.
Throw in the pile of patent uncertainty M$ is waving around, and MSOfficeXML is something I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole. If their goofey new format takes off, they are going to be hammering everyone else with those patents. Hopefully, people are just going to use Google Office or download Open Office instead of paying $400 for the next roach motel for their work.
One M$ Wag claimed "the format wars are over," before they have user one. I'll believe that when the secret format has gone unused and is long forgotten. With patents to back it, this format war is the nastiest yet. For them to win, everyone else must lose.
Their "old binary cruft" preserves backwards compatibility. Are you against that for some reason?
No, it was designed to break compatibility with other Word Processors back when their was competition on M$ platforms. They are abandoning those formats now and may or may not preserve that compatibility. It's obvious to me as a user that they did not care much about it in the past, because old documents lost their format regularly before I decided to not use stuff from M$.
Is there some sort of predisposition against protecting an investment in your world?
Not at all. I'm worried about user's investment in time and effort, which the M$ upgrade train routinely wastes. That's a much larger investment than M$ ever put into anything.
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The courts will find that Viacom has been wronged, that Google has not done enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and that Google owes Viacom reparations.
"Reparations"? I suppose the copyright warriors think they are at war. I just wish they would defend their own best interests instead of big dumb companies that have nothing to do with them. "Rights of copyright holders," they must think they are freedom fighters too. The double talk is thick here.
Viacom and other large publishers have and continue to harm the public though outrageous copyright laws and greed. Most of the shows should already belong to the public and Viacom should be ashamed that someone else managed to make money off of it while they sat on their ass. There's obviously a large demand for the works, and Viacom should have been making money off of it ten years ago instead of being afraid for their cable TV franchises which have not really suffered at all.
100 year copyrights are absurd and most of their "investments" should already be public domain. The original makers knew the content would belong to the public sooner than later and made their shows and their money anyway. Those who have "invested" in content that has been retroactively "protected" deserve to be burnt. They want to own your culture and decide who can use it to express themselves, fuck them.
At the same time, it's pathetic that Viacomm and other publishers have not come up with a business model better than suing the crap out of others. What do they tell their investors, "Teh people at Google are the smart and we are the dumb but we will make it back though lots of litigation"? Where's the Viacomm download channel for people who just have to have 20 year old music videos?
Anyway you look at this issue, Viacomm is a loser and they have harmed not just their investors but the public at large. The public has had enough of it and is routing around the damage with free content. That free content competition is the real target of this lawsuit.
Would you mind explaining to the rest of us where Microsoft Windows is a specific requirement for any of the stated conditions?
Sure, I can do that. It's not really a requirement, it just makes it easy to do and expands the scope out again. Of course, there's not much of a reason to nail the OpenBSD machine if you already own the clients that enter the data in the first place. I suppose the point of all of this is to worry about and eliminate the biggest problems first. Things like OpenBSD are broken once a decade, while Windoze is never fixed.
It's nice to see you back Kieth.
From the context, Linux is only more expensive than Windoze when you have Linux and Windoze.
So nobody from the net can crack your machine, they must already me on your local net. This greatly reduces the scope of this attack.
That's only true if your local network is not filled with an OS that has a 1/4 botnet ownership rate. When your own machines can be used against you, all bets are off.
does not, in any way, mean "far away," as the attacker has to be able to inject fragmented IPv6 packets, which is extremely hard to control (impossible?) from the other side of a layer 3 device.
If that's true, they nail the Windoze machine on the other side and blast you from your own DMZ. Once again, your network is only as strong as it's weakest link. This is why I have no Windoze in my network.
Reminds me of when my brother got busted with pot. He lost his car and about $3k in fines and court costs. My parents blamed pot. Although pot didn't do that to him the government did. Pot only ever got us high.
Funny thing. A friend of mine smoked some pot and totaled his car. The police issued lots of fines but missed his stash. He did not blame the cops, government or pot. He blamed those damn bats that ran him off the road.
He first saw those bats on a Madonna video, which he watched on Youtube and then shared by accident with Communist China. Arguably, the bats, and P2P by extension, are both a menace to corporate profits and a national security risk. They sure did him harm.
I don't even want to mention the spiders he's talked about.
As to the problem of theft, don't take anything you are not fully prepared to lose. or break. If you MUST take a laptop, get an old junky one, and make sure it has zero personal info on it.
Yes, if I want a laptop that's what I do. The US border guards have been looking very closely at laptops so don't give them a lot of stuff to waste everyone's time. You should be able to get and put the data you want by secure shell where ever you go anyway. Next time I go anywhere, I'm lugging along the old Thinkpad 600. It's heavy but it's tough, works for me and no one else is going to want to steal it.
Didn't Walmart do exactly that a couple of years back, with Lindows preinstalled?
You might be referring to a few low end deals like:
The prices were lower, but never much less than Windoze system prices at the same time. The savings were not passed along to the customer to help overcome the perceived risk. Moreover, the systems were never really promoted and I never saw one in a store. Crummy hardware, same price, no advertising, that's not exactly a recipe for success. At the same time, I don't know if they systems actually lost money. As far as Wallmart goes, relation ship with M$ is muddy, and you should do as they do not as they sell.
A company like Dell is in an entirely different position. They have the size to get low hardware costs and can make a dramatic price difference and still make good money. Obviously, the demand is there and the perceived risk is much smaller.
[Dell could] say something along the lines of "After seeing the survey results, the demands of the Linux community are too diverse. For reasons of technical support, we cannot offer Linux as an OS option on our computers."
Which everone knows is BS. All they need to do is select components with free drivers and pressure their suppliers to provide specs and free drivers.
Sooner or later, someone is going to sell computers like that and the price difference without the M$ tax will be great enough to blow out everyone who does not follow. The endgame is very close. That's why M$ is making noises about patents and IP like every other non free IT giant that was outcompeted before.
He said we are fussy, without making any judgements. And that this fact would make it harder for Dell to satisfy us.
All anyone cares about is to have hardware with free drivers, from there any distro can be installed. The continued acceptance of M$'s inferior GUI and software for "hardware compatibility" is proof that the vast majority of computer users just want the system to work and will put up with all sorts of security and performance issues to get that level of "convenience". If Dell would select or demand hardware with free drivers, every major gnu/linux distribution would work - that's not hard at all. Picky people are going to reinstall the OS anyway and no one will blame Dell for that.
The of Mark's criticism that sticks is this:
If Microsoft reduces the per-PC marketing contribution it makes for a particular reseller, that puts them at a huge financial disadvantage relative to their competitors. This means that one of the biggest issues a computer manufacturer or reseller faces in considering Linux pre-installations is the impact it will have on the Microsoft relationship, and hence bottom line.
Anti-competitive pressure is what this ever boils down to. It will go away as hardware prices drop below $200 or so, because there's no room for software costs at that price point. That Dell is making noises like this now is good evidence that there's not much room for software costs at the $400 price point. The corporate price point is already there and that's why so many companies are dumping M$. The first vendor to deliver a $200 computer with nothing but free software on it is going to win big time and there's nothing M$ will be able to do about it.
Only people hoplessly in love with M$ think I'm an asshole, generally because they don't believe in being nice to anyone.
why would premature combustion still be a problem in a direct-injection engine? It should be possible to inject the fuel when it is needed, and not before. Or would that lead to timing problems?
If you can define what mature combustion is, your engine will be very satisfied. Is it true that Honda's charge shaping hits her G-spot? Lube and timing are critical, especially on start up. Chitty-chitty bang-bang, we love you.
An actual answer to your question can be found in the above link. You need the correct distribution of fuel for proper operation and might not be able to get that with direct injection and still avoid pre-ignition.
Maybe one day you'll understand that you'd be far more efficient if you didn't come across as such an asshole.
Only people hoplessly in love with M$ think like that.
Slashdot mod points are not real, you know. They don't validate your existence.
Mod points are not real, but he conversation is. Even you, a paid harassment drone, are dreaming my dream by reading what I write. M$ spends about a billion dollars a month harassing others and promoting themselves, but it all falls apart here where people spend a little of their spare time, memory and critical thinking.
How many times have you posted your anual "XXXX is the year of Linux" deal? What, seven years and counting?
No, I have not been saying that as long as M$ has been working on Vista. This year is the first I've thought of as a tipping point.
I think I'm all grown up now and I can figure out when I need to be "liberated". I love that you have lots of free time because your computers "work", and I'm trapped with "M$ Windoze workarounds" yet I have all this free time to "harrass" you.
You and others are paid to do what you do. You need to quit because it's a waste of your time at any price.
"FUD" when it's about the only thing you have left as your desperation over your failure to do anything meaningful becomes more and more evident.
I'm going to go home and play with my little girls now. Have a nice night.
Why is it the government's job to make sure people can still watch TV[?]
It's not their job but they want to tell you what to think.
Sure, they'll raise more than $1B money by auctioning off the spectrum.
Selling spectrum is a crime. It belongs to all of us but will be given to the highest bidders - those able to extract the money from all of us. This is a corporate tax and it's evil because it comes with very little accountability. A large portion of your cellphone bill goes towards paying for the spectrum which Bill Clinton auctioned off. Do you know what that money is spent on? Is that what you want when you buy into a cell phone plan. You are right when you say there are better uses for the money than providing the highest bidder with a larger customer base. Every dollar taken from the people by government needs to be justified and accounted for in advance. Taking money from one group and given to another is either Communism or robbery depending on the progressiveness of the tax and neither are good. Your continued support of unaccountable government depends on you not having decent news services, something which can only be provided by a continuation of the current broadcast monopolies. This wastes a precious public commodity and does so with the express intent to make it that public commodity worthless.
Has it occurred to you just for a second that people actually naming you around here might be a sign that you're doing something wrong?
No.
Or are you still chalking that up to Microsoft's expensive and concerted effort to stalk you personally on Slashdot?
Yes, M$ is doing it's best to disrupt and abuse Slashdot. The harassment dished out to me personally is part of that. They think they can make things unpleasant and disinformative here as they have elsewhere. They consider that, "competition" and that's about the best they have to offer. How pathetic. They are a blight with nothing better to offer.
That's not the first time you have tried to read my mind.
"Kumbaya", "dirty", dismissing the idea that M$ might not really be sincere without further investigation. All these things are insults, the same M$ is known for when talking about those, "dirty commie hippies, misguided at best, impractical day dreamers, destructive at worst ... a cancer, unAmerican, zealots" and so on and so forth, just like you deadzo. Well look, more of the same:
Have you ever considered doing something actually useful for free software instead? All that time, trying to influence (I guess?) the group of people most likely to agree with you in the first place. If that's not a perfect example of your beloved "intentional waste" punchline, I don't know what is.
I'll define what constitutes a waste of my time, thank you. I've got time because my computers work effortlessly, so I get to spend my time using them for fun things like sparring with you trolls.
This audience has a fair number of Windoze users and that should change. Though they may agree with me about freedom in principle, they are still wasting their time with M$ workarounds. Those kinds of people think they know what they are talking about, but they don't. They have fallen for the FUD and don't really know how much easier their lives could be. Everyone here needs to finally make the switch and stick to it for a couple of months. Very few will ever go back.
How does one become the Open Source Software evangelist at a practically 100% proprietary company?
Sell out.
What have YOU done for OSS? You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good.
Advocating freedom never hurts anyone in a free society, but thanks for thinking of me. I love you guys, and all this new M$ tone that spews forth here.
What you say about Mr. Hilf may be true, but I'd like to know what he's done since joining M$. The article is a collection of confusing propaganda, more inflammatory than informative, and I hope it does not really reflect Mr. Hilf's beliefs:
Nice flame but not much content. Mr. Hilf's "dirty little secret" comment about most people being forced to run M$ first, without mention of the Federally proved monopoly, is more of the same. Oh wow, this is rich:
The company responsible for the fiaSCO that's threatening everyone that they own patents on everything is not a troll? OK, that's enough fantasy reading for me today. Mr. Hilf is not the first nice thing that M$ has bought and ruined.
If these things don't reflect Mr. Hilf's opinion, let it be a lesson for those who consider working for "the enemy". they will use you and hang whatever opinion around your neck they please before they dismiss you.
According to this, the office was a scandal. If anything, it's an example of how not to do things.
Where there's corruption, expect M$ to be crammed down your throat.
Free Software/Open Source folk need to be even more anal retentive than the BSA regarding software piracy. Zero tolerance! Report em all. Take piracy off the table as an option and we can make some major inroads from people who can't afford Microsoft and other commercial products now.
That's a very bad idea which plays into the M$ game plan and makes you a scape goat. Getting the user to "pay later" is what the BSA is for.
It's better to have nothing to do with "piracy" and help people with things that just work. M$'s dirty secret is that they depend on a community of users just like free software does. It's more than rip offs of BSD and start up companies. The average person does not know how to install Windoze, much less find and install a cracked version. The real enabler of M$'s plans are those people who "pirate" and many of them are right here reading along with you - the fixers. M$ is losing them because free software does things better. That more than anything else will end the lock in. Everyone of us supports a group of friends and helps them get things done. It's up to us to stop piracy and the M$ domination. The word is getting out and that's what really scares them.
Once again, life imitates parody. I did not know they were worth a billion dollars.
The "M$ wag" where you posted your brilliant "bubba" flamebait [msdn.com]? ... Is that it? Feels good insulting people on the internets, doesn't it? Calling them names behind their backs? For someone who complains so much about how "insulting" people who don't agree with you are, you sure know how to "dish it out" like a big tough dude. Way to go.
Well, no, I did not mention anyone in particular, nor did I point to that site where you can find the same M$ party line as you will find everywhere in the M$ press. So, no, I did not call Jones a wag. I'll wait till I know more about him to call him names. At this point, all I know is that he's working for the Beast and I feel sorry for him.
People like you, Bungi, are very insulting and you are one of many I have to put up with here. There's a whole cloud of assholes who all write the same kind of bullshit under different screen names. I post at random times, but they are always there like the paid guards they are. I'm reasonably certain that M$ pays these people, just like they paid for Steve Barkto, Compuserve BBS spam, letters from dead people against the M$ anti-trust case and so on and so forth in the info-war hall of astroturf shame.
He answered but it's a disappointing answer. I don't really feel like looking through his "many previous posts on my blog dealing with this issue." If he's got a real answer, he could point to it. Nor did I find it in his history file. Using my memory, I get an answer that's opposite his when I look at that file. In 2002, when Sun submitted to Oasis, M$ was using "XML" for a decidedly second rate html implementation. At that point, they could easily have jumped on the bandwagon and helped make something good for everyone.
Microsoft ALREADY added ODF support. Microsoft provides technical and architectural guidance, and pays for that project. I'm all for bashing MS where it's due, but try not to bash them on topics where you're wrong.
Oh, give me a break. M$'s behavior is right on track with previous behavior and may even surpass it in some ways. All of it's silly, because they could have simply used the freely available and better format and everyone would have been happy. No, not them, they have to use their own which was "created for a different purpose." Oh yeah, I'd almost like to know what that purpose is outside of typesetting text, spreadsheets and presentations.
Once upon a time they "supported" Word Perfect too. Word Perfect did a much better job. M$ document conversion was all one way, but at least they did it. This time they are simply "supporting" other people's efforts to help them out.
With ODF specifications already published and in use, M$ could just code it themselves and have already included it in Office 2007. KDE put it into kword, kformula and other programs months ago and made it their default format. But noooo, M$ users are going to have to write and download the converter themselves, nice. It's also nice of them to release it under a "very liberal BSD-like license" so they can suck it up later and lock everyone else out.
I also noticed the noise about the Novel version that does similar for MSOfficeXML. Again, a stunning underachievement for the world's richest software company.
Thanks for pointing to the Source Forge Page. The list of ODF features not available in MSOfficeXML is amazing. The M$ format, despite it's 6000 pages of specs, is feature poor. I'll bet M$ did not know they would be paying for that kind of advertisement.
Throw in the pile of patent uncertainty M$ is waving around, and MSOfficeXML is something I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole. If their goofey new format takes off, they are going to be hammering everyone else with those patents. Hopefully, people are just going to use Google Office or download Open Office instead of paying $400 for the next roach motel for their work.
One M$ Wag claimed "the format wars are over," before they have user one. I'll believe that when the secret format has gone unused and is long forgotten. With patents to back it, this format war is the nastiest yet. For them to win, everyone else must lose.
Is there some sort of predisposition against protecting an investment in your world?
Is there a reason you place M$'s interests and investments before your own?
Their "old binary cruft" preserves backwards compatibility. Are you against that for some reason?
No, it was designed to break compatibility with other Word Processors back when their was competition on M$ platforms. They are abandoning those formats now and may or may not preserve that compatibility. It's obvious to me as a user that they did not care much about it in the past, because old documents lost their format regularly before I decided to not use stuff from M$.
Is there some sort of predisposition against protecting an investment in your world?
Not at all. I'm worried about user's investment in time and effort, which the M$ upgrade train routinely wastes. That's a much larger investment than M$ ever put into anything.