there are 20 or so big companies that can still stop software development dead even after the developer licenses with Microsoft, and that nobody but those 20 companies can afford to do business if they have to license all 20. Then you have to convince your legislator of that.
I'll keep that in mind. Perhaps it is time to for me to start talking to representatives and political types.
I'd like to think that every business that is not one of those 20 would want help out. They will all have to pay through then nose too.
Can posting on slashdot count as being media whore? Damn I hope not.
You are only a whore if you don't like being here, but do it anyway because someone is paying you. Here's a short list of people who hate Slashdot but post prolifically anyway:
The problem is that the law is not on our side.... the true answer to "show us the code" is "everything", and Microsoft could win some of those lawsuits, certainly enough to deter any part of Open Source or the whole movement. I think the only solution lies in legislative change.
The law may not be on our side but public and corporate opinion increasingly is. Microsoft has to deal with both large companies and large segments of the population who are not going to part with their freedom so easily. Look at the firestorm they have created with this menace. They are losing support from industry, users, even in the Wintel press. Just try to take Mepis away from my wife.
The sooner they bring on their nonsense, the sooner things will change. They should not be allowed to win any bogus patent lawsuit, so each should be fought tooth and nail. Each one they bring to trial will cost them. Court costs for them are dwarfed by the billions they spend each month on marketing. If they do win, the results need to be decried and circumvented. They are going to look like slothful, crazy and ineffective bullies. They are going to lose and with them will go all of the rotten "IP" laws they have pushed.
So, ze kiddie porn is on vor mind, eh Social Engineer? Very interesting. Who besides grandstanding politicians, media whores and actual pedophiles actually thinks or talks about kiddie porn? You must be one of the bag guys. The FBI vill be watching everything you do for the next ten years.
Let's face it, the best scenario for Linux is the one you have at the moment. It's free and you have all the software you need, and you don't have the preponderance of users, stupid or not, making it worse for everyone. Unfortunately, the more laymen you attract to the Linux desktop just makes it a worse experience for everyone.
Only someone from M$ could loath users like you do. The beauty of free software is the way it shares knowledge and experience without additional cost to the authors. As you might imagine from the class I help teach, I welcome everyone to the code I know and love. The growth of free software desktop market share is a good for me and everyone else.
You can run win 3.1 on dosbox. I imagine there's a 64 bit port in Debian and elsewhere. With a fast enough machine, it should be about as quick as it ever was. It's kind of slow on a 1GHz class 32bit cpu.
That's both factually wrong and logically wrong. The fact that MS was vulnerable to suit by Actel/Lucent despite doing everything legally and by the book (and respecting the IP in question) should make companies using Linux all the more worried.
The court and jury disagree with you. They found M$ guilty and imposed a monster fine which reflected their outrage and the magnitude of the offense. You know, M$ thinking an army of lawyers with endless bullshit would protect them is what the jury is angry about. Obviously, you share the M$ valuation of other`s IP to take defend them without citing details and how M$ really did everything by the book. I'm starting to think they simply payed the lowest bidder and screwed everyone else.
Seeing how abusable the patent system is should make you afraid; very afraid.
More hot air? Show me what you've got. M$ is full of beans and others will see it that way too. As M$ burns down, and they start pulling out vague and crazy patents, they might just take software patents down with them, as is currently being looked at in the US Supreme Court fight between M$ and ATT.
just imagine they did actually identify particular patents that Linux infringes - and let's be honest, with the current state of the patent system, is that so unlikely
Let's FUD the FUDster!
I'm sure they think Lame is in trouble, after they themselves have been bitch slapped with a $1.5 billion judgment. Too bad they can't hurt distributions like Debian that never carried it. Too bad free software has developed unassailable alternatives like ogg. What's Ballmer to do? Support crazy patents and put his money where his mouth is? Ha ha.
Oh wait, a court judgment is no longer FUD... it's fact. Nice try Steve-o but you had better get your own house in order.
It's nice to know what corner you are in but your reasons for being there are flawed, as is your entire analogy. You can't expect to be protected by a bully, no matter how strong they might appear. Sooner or later, they will make you pay for your mistaken and mean spirited loyalty.
The problem with all of the FUD is that it's becoming increasingly evident that M$ is threatening everyone. A business that threatens it's customers is generally on the way out.
The great irony in all of this is that M$ themselves has little respect for the IP of others and regularly violates patents, trademarks and copyrights, while simultaneously calling for fanatical protection and enforcement. Their recent loss to Actel/Lucent, and the $1,500,000,000.00 judgment highlights this. M$ themselves are more venerable to the litigation monster they helped create than free software makers who are much more careful. Ballmer has no more to offer than SCO did and I mean that in every way.
Excuse me, while I go listen to some nice oggfiles I downloaded from archive.org. I'll keep right on partying while M$ flunks the bluff, and keeps getting dumped by customers, partners and investors alike. It's about time.
it's sort of like watching an anti-Semite try and put a few jokes into his conspiracy-theory laden rants about how the Jews own everything.
If I kept company like that, jb, I might be an ass like you. You should find some nicer friends, as well as a nicer employer. That way, you might learn to relax and quit being such a persistent pest. If it's your family, I feel sorry for you.
Bill Gates told me that you were using a Mac, so I think you will be OK. Vista would look ugly to you, regardless of sexual preference. Vista is only beautiful to people who have been looking at the world through XP beer goggles. When the fog clears, they will chew their arm off rather than wake Vista.
Don't you think theres a problem citing a Linux site as fact when it concerns a Microsoft OS?
No, the author is honest. Don't project M$ "get the facts" type reports onto the free software world where there's little incentive to do more than report what you see. The results surprised the author as much as anyone else.
Crying, "It's not fair, they are all out to get Microsoft" and sticking your head in the sand is not going to teach you anything new.
DRM, funded by all those suckers who bought into code assurance plans thinking they would get an upgrade to Vista... three or four years ago. Vista outright obsoletes half of the world's computers and won't work well on 94% of them. Promising upgrades to newer software for hardware three years ago has to be one of the biggest scams ever. The magnitude of that scam will only be fully apparent as people realize how bad the DRM is.
If the cost per page was the total cost of paper manuals and McD's did not already have themselves networked, you might have a point. It's not and they do, so you don't.
They're claiming 100,000 "completely replaced" MS products.
Is it so hard to believe that 100,000 businesses decided to step off the upgrade train? Users who have been riding that train for a while are tired of always ending up in the same place. No one is going to buy Office 2007 for new features, they are going to buy it because they are afraid of not being able to use the new M$ format. Enough people are realizing that M$ is an expensive ride to nowhere and that other companies can do the same thing for less.
I also am almost completely sure this is a load of crap.
You will often find that where M$ likes to cram your head. Choo choo!
Microsoft is quaking in their boots about the prospect that they missed out on getting McDonald`s to shell out for Exchange licenses for all their employees...:)
They should be. The M$ solution is too expensive, that's true, but that does not mean there's not a demand. Google filling that demand on the cheap is going to force open standards at last and that will make everything M$ now makes money on into a commodity.
To continue your analogy, the Open Office - on line services vice works so much nicer because it has teeth that mate perfectly, open standards. Half of employees don't have email, so more than half don't have productivity software. What company wants to ignore half of their workforce? A company that only embraces half of the vice will still be doing that because M$ is going to fight ODF until they start losing serious market share, like they did... today! Once they embrace real standards, they will reduced to one of many options everyone has to chose from. The end of the monopoly is here.
maybe, 48% of all employees don't need email to get their jobs done. I know, it sounds heretical, but let's be honest, does K-Fed really need email to operate that McDonald's cash register? Nah, I didn't think so either.
I can't even begin to imagine how much McD spends printing propaganda and instructions for every single employee they have. There's got to be a better way than that. Where there's money, people will find a way.
I seriously doubt any company trying this as a free trial has "completly replaced" MS products with Google Apps.
No, but that does not mean there's not room for significant market share. In a world where half of employees don't have a company email address, you might imagine more than half of employees don't have a company provided productivity suit. That means those employees have no effective and reliable way to communicate electronically. You can't get them the word and they can't tell you what they know - and that's more than half of the people who work for and with you!
This is a double whammy for M$. It's not just market share they can't fill, it's a serious threat to the market share they already have. If Google makes these applications save out and email their work in ODF, M$ had better work with ODF or risk losing the other half of the market to Open Office even faster then they are. M$ has always depended on secret formats and "network effect" to push their expensive crap out. Cheap well adopted alternatives of any type will break that and force M$ to compete on merit instead of inertia.
You'll have to use a Pentium II or less. You should also avoid any commercial UNIX workstations as they've been embedding CPU IDs since the 1980s.
So? The OS does not have to return it to the net, does it? Binary blobs for network cards and "smart" networks bother me more. Everyting else should be able to return something random.
They don't give any details in the PR puff-piece that's linked from the Slashdot blurb, but it sounds like they must be issuing every client on the network its own externally-addressable IP address. While this is kinda cool, from the perspective of being able to run your own server or something, it also makes it exceptionally easy for the RIAA to home in on you. At other places, where individual PCs are hidden behind NAT, it's more difficult to pick out a particular client and send a subpoena / violation order. Having a single externally-facing IP per user pretty much eliminates their plausible deniability.
No, Federal law is eliminating anonymity on University networks. A fierce level of wiretaping capacity is required. This has less to do with the kind of addressability you have and more to do with book keeping. While the new network is easier for those in control to wiretap, it's harder for others, because they are going to switched networks more like the phone lines of old. In order to catch people, the RIAA either has botnets on campus or some kind of Carnivore network. Either way, the network and the bad guys know who you are.
Plausible deniability comes from the technical incompetence of the RIAA. This works regardless of network type as well. I expect a large fraction of the suspects are innocent, just like their last batch of extortion victims. The story that emerged from that fiasco is one of a sloppy dragnet based on hearsay, and hired guns.
The Boston Herald covered this a few days ago. While the year is only half over, the number of RIAA complaints is already three times what it was last year. It looks like the RIAA got smart and narrowed their indiscriminate abuse of 12 year olds and working moms in housing projects. Now they are indiscriminately abusing University students. The problem for them is that there's no good victim for their harassment, especially when they are wrong so often. The reaction from schools like Purdue is what I'd like to see. Purdue told them to find another bagman. Shame on those schools that have given in so quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
there are 20 or so big companies that can still stop software development dead even after the developer licenses with Microsoft, and that nobody but those 20 companies can afford to do business if they have to license all 20. Then you have to convince your legislator of that.
I'll keep that in mind. Perhaps it is time to for me to start talking to representatives and political types.
I'd like to think that every business that is not one of those 20 would want help out. They will all have to pay through then nose too.
Can posting on slashdot count as being media whore? Damn I hope not.
You are only a whore if you don't like being here, but do it anyway because someone is paying you. Here's a short list of people who hate Slashdot but post prolifically anyway:
There are plenty of others and they are easy to identify because they keep saying the same things: M$ rules, free software sucks and Slashdot sucks.
The problem is that the law is not on our side. ... the true answer to "show us the code" is "everything", and Microsoft could win some of those lawsuits, certainly enough to deter any part of Open Source or the whole movement. I think the only solution lies in legislative change.
The law may not be on our side but public and corporate opinion increasingly is. Microsoft has to deal with both large companies and large segments of the population who are not going to part with their freedom so easily. Look at the firestorm they have created with this menace. They are losing support from industry, users, even in the Wintel press. Just try to take Mepis away from my wife.
The sooner they bring on their nonsense, the sooner things will change. They should not be allowed to win any bogus patent lawsuit, so each should be fought tooth and nail. Each one they bring to trial will cost them. Court costs for them are dwarfed by the billions they spend each month on marketing. If they do win, the results need to be decried and circumvented. They are going to look like slothful, crazy and ineffective bullies. They are going to lose and with them will go all of the rotten "IP" laws they have pushed.
Any other result is too unAmerican to imagine.
So, ze kiddie porn is on vor mind, eh Social Engineer? Very interesting. Who besides grandstanding politicians, media whores and actual pedophiles actually thinks or talks about kiddie porn? You must be one of the bag guys. The FBI vill be watching everything you do for the next ten years.
Let's face it, the best scenario for Linux is the one you have at the moment. It's free and you have all the software you need, and you don't have the preponderance of users, stupid or not, making it worse for everyone. Unfortunately, the more laymen you attract to the Linux desktop just makes it a worse experience for everyone.
Only someone from M$ could loath users like you do. The beauty of free software is the way it shares knowledge and experience without additional cost to the authors. As you might imagine from the class I help teach, I welcome everyone to the code I know and love. The growth of free software desktop market share is a good for me and everyone else.
You can run win 3.1 on dosbox. I imagine there's a 64 bit port in Debian and elsewhere. With a fast enough machine, it should be about as quick as it ever was. It's kind of slow on a 1GHz class 32bit cpu.
That's both factually wrong and logically wrong. The fact that MS was vulnerable to suit by Actel/Lucent despite doing everything legally and by the book (and respecting the IP in question) should make companies using Linux all the more worried.
The court and jury disagree with you. They found M$ guilty and imposed a monster fine which reflected their outrage and the magnitude of the offense. You know, M$ thinking an army of lawyers with endless bullshit would protect them is what the jury is angry about. Obviously, you share the M$ valuation of other`s IP to take defend them without citing details and how M$ really did everything by the book. I'm starting to think they simply payed the lowest bidder and screwed everyone else.
Seeing how abusable the patent system is should make you afraid; very afraid.
More hot air? Show me what you've got. M$ is full of beans and others will see it that way too. As M$ burns down, and they start pulling out vague and crazy patents, they might just take software patents down with them, as is currently being looked at in the US Supreme Court fight between M$ and ATT.
The Bungi troll taunts:
Fascinating. So twitter, do you support software patents now? Or do you support them only when they are used to attack Microsoft?
I think software patents are a disaster that will destroy the bully that made them, sooner than it will those who have been circumspect.
Don't you have a school to sue or something?
just imagine they did actually identify particular patents that Linux infringes - and let's be honest, with the current state of the patent system, is that so unlikely
Let's FUD the FUDster!
I'm sure they think Lame is in trouble, after they themselves have been bitch slapped with a $1.5 billion judgment. Too bad they can't hurt distributions like Debian that never carried it. Too bad free software has developed unassailable alternatives like ogg. What's Ballmer to do? Support crazy patents and put his money where his mouth is? Ha ha.
Oh wait, a court judgment is no longer FUD ... it's fact. Nice try Steve-o but you had better get your own house in order.
my best advice would be......RUN Bitches!
It's nice to know what corner you are in but your reasons for being there are flawed, as is your entire analogy. You can't expect to be protected by a bully, no matter how strong they might appear. Sooner or later, they will make you pay for your mistaken and mean spirited loyalty.
The problem with all of the FUD is that it's becoming increasingly evident that M$ is threatening everyone. A business that threatens it's customers is generally on the way out.
The great irony in all of this is that M$ themselves has little respect for the IP of others and regularly violates patents, trademarks and copyrights, while simultaneously calling for fanatical protection and enforcement. Their recent loss to Actel/Lucent, and the $1,500,000,000.00 judgment highlights this. M$ themselves are more venerable to the litigation monster they helped create than free software makers who are much more careful. Ballmer has no more to offer than SCO did and I mean that in every way.
Excuse me, while I go listen to some nice oggfiles I downloaded from archive.org. I'll keep right on partying while M$ flunks the bluff, and keeps getting dumped by customers, partners and investors alike. It's about time.
it's sort of like watching an anti-Semite try and put a few jokes into his conspiracy-theory laden rants about how the Jews own everything.
If I kept company like that, jb, I might be an ass like you. You should find some nicer friends, as well as a nicer employer. That way, you might learn to relax and quit being such a persistent pest. If it's your family, I feel sorry for you.
you reach down and discover she has a dick.
When you sit up, something is sore.
I'm gay. I'd panic.
Bill Gates told me that you were using a Mac, so I think you will be OK. Vista would look ugly to you, regardless of sexual preference. Vista is only beautiful to people who have been looking at the world through XP beer goggles. When the fog clears, they will chew their arm off rather than wake Vista.
Don't you think theres a problem citing a Linux site as fact when it concerns a Microsoft OS?
No, the author is honest. Don't project M$ "get the facts" type reports onto the free software world where there's little incentive to do more than report what you see. The results surprised the author as much as anyone else.
Crying, "It's not fair, they are all out to get Microsoft" and sticking your head in the sand is not going to teach you anything new.
So what was MS working on all those years?
DRM, funded by all those suckers who bought into code assurance plans thinking they would get an upgrade to Vista ... three or four years ago. Vista outright obsoletes half of the world's computers and won't work well on 94% of them. Promising upgrades to newer software for hardware three years ago has to be one of the biggest scams ever. The magnitude of that scam will only be fully apparent as people realize how bad the DRM is.
Vista is not ready and may never be due to DRM nonsense. Check out this review of both Mepis and Vista. DRM breaks what hardware they managed to get drivers working for.
If the cost per page was the total cost of paper manuals and McD's did not already have themselves networked, you might have a point. It's not and they do, so you don't.
They're claiming 100,000 "completely replaced" MS products.
Is it so hard to believe that 100,000 businesses decided to step off the upgrade train? Users who have been riding that train for a while are tired of always ending up in the same place. No one is going to buy Office 2007 for new features, they are going to buy it because they are afraid of not being able to use the new M$ format. Enough people are realizing that M$ is an expensive ride to nowhere and that other companies can do the same thing for less.
I also am almost completely sure this is a load of crap.
You will often find that where M$ likes to cram your head. Choo choo!
Microsoft is quaking in their boots about the prospect that they missed out on getting McDonald`s to shell out for Exchange licenses for all their employees... :)
They should be. The M$ solution is too expensive, that's true, but that does not mean there's not a demand. Google filling that demand on the cheap is going to force open standards at last and that will make everything M$ now makes money on into a commodity.
To continue your analogy, the Open Office - on line services vice works so much nicer because it has teeth that mate perfectly, open standards. Half of employees don't have email, so more than half don't have productivity software. What company wants to ignore half of their workforce? A company that only embraces half of the vice will still be doing that because M$ is going to fight ODF until they start losing serious market share, like they did ... today! Once they embrace real standards, they will reduced to one of many options everyone has to chose from. The end of the monopoly is here.
Hasta la vista, M$.
maybe, 48% of all employees don't need email to get their jobs done. I know, it sounds heretical, but let's be honest, does K-Fed really need email to operate that McDonald's cash register? Nah, I didn't think so either.
I can't even begin to imagine how much McD spends printing propaganda and instructions for every single employee they have. There's got to be a better way than that. Where there's money, people will find a way.
I seriously doubt any company trying this as a free trial has "completly replaced" MS products with Google Apps.
No, but that does not mean there's not room for significant market share. In a world where half of employees don't have a company email address, you might imagine more than half of employees don't have a company provided productivity suit. That means those employees have no effective and reliable way to communicate electronically. You can't get them the word and they can't tell you what they know - and that's more than half of the people who work for and with you!
This is a double whammy for M$. It's not just market share they can't fill, it's a serious threat to the market share they already have. If Google makes these applications save out and email their work in ODF, M$ had better work with ODF or risk losing the other half of the market to Open Office even faster then they are. M$ has always depended on secret formats and "network effect" to push their expensive crap out. Cheap well adopted alternatives of any type will break that and force M$ to compete on merit instead of inertia.
Hasta la Vista, M$.
You'll have to use a Pentium II or less. You should also avoid any commercial UNIX workstations as they've been embedding CPU IDs since the 1980s.
So? The OS does not have to return it to the net, does it? Binary blobs for network cards and "smart" networks bother me more. Everyting else should be able to return something random.
They don't give any details in the PR puff-piece that's linked from the Slashdot blurb, but it sounds like they must be issuing every client on the network its own externally-addressable IP address. While this is kinda cool, from the perspective of being able to run your own server or something, it also makes it exceptionally easy for the RIAA to home in on you. At other places, where individual PCs are hidden behind NAT, it's more difficult to pick out a particular client and send a subpoena / violation order. Having a single externally-facing IP per user pretty much eliminates their plausible deniability.
No, Federal law is eliminating anonymity on University networks. A fierce level of wiretaping capacity is required. This has less to do with the kind of addressability you have and more to do with book keeping. While the new network is easier for those in control to wiretap, it's harder for others, because they are going to switched networks more like the phone lines of old. In order to catch people, the RIAA either has botnets on campus or some kind of Carnivore network. Either way, the network and the bad guys know who you are.
Plausible deniability comes from the technical incompetence of the RIAA. This works regardless of network type as well. I expect a large fraction of the suspects are innocent, just like their last batch of extortion victims. The story that emerged from that fiasco is one of a sloppy dragnet based on hearsay, and hired guns.
The Boston Herald covered this a few days ago. While the year is only half over, the number of RIAA complaints is already three times what it was last year. It looks like the RIAA got smart and narrowed their indiscriminate abuse of 12 year olds and working moms in housing projects. Now they are indiscriminately abusing University students. The problem for them is that there's no good victim for their harassment, especially when they are wrong so often. The reaction from schools like Purdue is what I'd like to see. Purdue told them to find another bagman. Shame on those schools that have given in so quickly.