If Linux/bsd/osx were at 90% market share, I am sure these &#@%$! will still be selling/buying vulnerabilities at these prices.
So why is anyone buying Vista exploits? To answer that question you have to admit either that M$ does not fix problems for months and years or that the "popularity" argument is bogus. People traffic Windoze exploits because they work today and keep working tomorrow. Non free is a broken development model.
Oh, ho ho. All the apologists are quick to argue that, "The only reason the bad guys target Windoze is because it's popular." What bullshit that is.
Vista has what market share now? Less than Mac or Linux I'm sure and everyone knows that it's going to stay that way for years. Yet there's already a market for exploits. What this should tell you is that the value of an exploit it's ability to work, regardless of market share. The bad guys know that M$ security sucks and that the holes they buy today will be good for months if not years to come. No one bothers with GNU/Linux exploits because the GNU/Linux market is fragmented and quick healing. Linux exploits don't take down every distribution but just about every distribution is quick to fix problems. GNU/Linux exploits, relative to Windoze, don't work or last long.
this One Laptop Per Child idea should remove its Linux OS as an installed default and allow the children to choose which operating system they want to use with their laptop.
You can be sure that the OLPC project will be much easier for HP to work with than Microsoft is. As things stand now, if HP did bother to sell the OLPC they would have to make it more expensive than any similar laptops they have that are able to run Windoze. The day OLPC charges money for their software and threatens vendors with higher prices for anything that violates OLPC's will, that will be the day your post starts to make sense. In the mean time, HP can't do so much as tell you how much M$ charges them for their distinctly third rate OS which they must sell below the cost of much better alternatives.
In France, the OLPC costs will be easy to break down for legal compliance: laptop - subsidized $100, Linux OS - free and complete with source code for any hardware you chose, Alternate OS - unknown ask Bill gates why.
the whole point of this is that claiming that all alternatives available are better is a pretty broad and stupid statement. I would say I even enjoy Office 2007 quite a bit.
That is stupid. Only one alternative has to be better for each purpose and person and there are very few places that is not true. This is a natural consequence of free software - users make the thing they want and there are many users. For Word, I can name OO, Kword, Abiword, Scribus, Lyx, Kile and others I have not used. Each one has it's strengths and is better than Word in that situation. Abiword and Kword are good for quick reports, Microsoft's mainstay, but is better because they are not resource hungry and save to formats that everyone can read without problems. Kile, Lyx or regular latex are best for complex reports. Scribus is best for newspapers and posters. I don't have to mention the scores of other specific text editors, like kate or Bluefish, because word does not even pretend to fill those needs. The typical Windows computer, to my way of thinking, is a barren place with a few clumsy tools loved only by the ignorant and loathed by most.
The Windows platform itself is so bad that there are very few applications that can justify using it. Everything, from the 1993 single desk GUI to it's 4 minute half life on any network, to restrictive EULA's make it a very poor choice. More importanlty, for any given M$ thing, I can name two or three that are better suited to any particular purpose. The only real reason for using Windows is inability to move legacy work, but that's a task that happens in the Windows world more than elsewhere so getting out is something better done sooner than later.
I know a lot of people on here look at Linux with adoring eyes, but come on, it's not ready for the desktop. I want to install an OS, and have it work. My printer. My camera. My weird NIC. My DVDRW burner. My 2 month old Video Card. Maybe I should go Mac then? That really doesn't solve the problem because it's hardware controlled
That's not true anymore. All of that stuff works for me. The only real problem I have is with accelerated graphics, but both Nvidia and ATI have non free drivers just as good as they make for windoze. Any commercial distribution of Linux will have those drivers and use them. Outside of gaming, I never notice the difference because processor speed over 400 MHz completely makes up for it for "normal" desktop applications. There will always be a few dumb hardware makers, like Broadcom, but avoiding their crap is as easy as taking it back and trading it in for another $20 NIC that works better anyway.
I'm sure there are plenty of evil bits in this new M$TCP/IP. Remember, folks, the 1998 Halloween document called for replacing all of the world's simple protocols. They have finally gotten around to DHCP and TCP. Hopefully vendors will have the good sense to ignore the whole scheme. A network that discriminates on OS brand rather than behavior is worse than one that does not discriminate at all.
Allowing sysadmins to keep unpatched Windows boxes off their networks is obviously nothing but pure evil. It's Microsoft, so it must be evil, right?
Keeping windows boxes off a network would be nice, but it would be better to simply cut off machines that misbehave. Every machine on the botnet is going to know exactly what to tell the silly C(luster fuck)DHCP server for maximum access. Brands of OS M$ does not like will not. DHCP is already slow, adding this overhead won't rid your network of infections, it will just make it slower.
Yes, Microsoft is evil and commits both technical and social vandalism. They break competitor's products and do things behind their sysadmin's backs. Don't you remember how their resolve configuration had M$ IP addresses hard coded, overriding your hosts files? Think this DHCP thing will be any easier to override? The social aspects of discouraging sharing and suing public schools beggar debate. So there you have it, evil from propaganda to implementation and enforcement. You still trust those people?
Whats really funny is to go online and see that MS critics think everyone feels the way they do or even cares about the subject.
You apologists are so blind.
You don't see that there's a huge problem there? The fact that you find "MS critics" everywhere you look on line, where you expect find most computer savvy people, should be a clue. The second fact, that they think any informed observer would agree, should be your second alarm bell. Is there any company that's even half as hated by so many reasonable and knowledgable people as Microsoft is? I don't thinks so, but there's no other company that's been dumb enough to sue public schools from one end of the country to another now is there?
First of all you must not live anywhere near Seattle if you think letting people know you work at MS is a bad thing to do in a social situation or towards former classmates. Its the complete opposite.... People are stupid...
So, can I take it that you work for the company? If there's any kind of talk M$ needs to put a muzzle on, it's the "people are stupid" line. If that kind of attitude is prevalent, the problem is incurable.
You forgot the option where Forrester really did show pathetic and declining sales that are backed up by other studies. Orlowski's odd opinion about the whole issue is shown in today's follow up article where he tries to imagine the "heavenly jukebox" again and tells us why we need it to be controlled by three big media companies:
We need to remind ourselves that physical product is merely a container for rights - and this container may take many formats. Looking at the rise of superior quality packaging, the book may well be the container that record companies adopt for premium product.
Imagine that, buying your rights one song at a time from someone else who owns them all. When I write something for publication, I have no idea that what I'm doing is creating rights that will be sold to others, rather than sharing knowledge and opinions. What exactly those others will do with those rights that I can't or why I did not have them to sell myself is beyond me. I thought copyright was a time limited right created by government to encourage publishing back in the days when that was rare and expensive. No, I don't get where this guy is coming from at all.
His blanket license, where everyone is forced to pay to some industry serving organization, like it or not, is an abomination. It's also a deal that has been overwhelmingly rejected as anyone who follows the Microsoft music story can tell you.
None of that, however, makes the iTunes situation any better. It has not caught on and it's not going to.
It seems sometimes that Slashdot readers think that everybody in a company think the same, eat the same, say the same.... Microsoft is full of real people that probably cares about their job and just want to show it in the best light.
How nice and diverse they are does not matter. The company sues public schools and is at war with free software. No one in a position to change that was mentioned and no changes should be anticipated. This trip was pure propaganda.
You may be under the delusion that M$ is some kind of democracy and that the opinions of their people matter to them any more than the opinions of their customers and shareholders matter. That this is not true is easy to gauge from the cult like avoidance of real questions, complete with sheepish smiles and scripted answers. Decisions are still made by a very select few at the top. How well mannered, nice, attractive, wealthy those employees may be makes no more difference than what cute cats they may have.
Just how empty a PR move this whole trip was is very well summarized by Rob in the opening paragraphs:
asking event organizer Nick White (whose business card describes him as "Product Manager, Windows Marketing Communications") why I should trust a company whose CEO consistently threatens to sue me and other Linux users over unspecified patent violations.... "Well, that's not really anything I can comment on," he replied. "I'm a product marketing guy."
This was the kind of answer I got to all the hard questions I asked, including several suggested by Pamela Jones of Groklaw. None of the Microsoft people I met had anything to say about their deal with Novell, working with the Open Document Format (ODF), acceptance of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a legitimate software license, how DRM built into Vista may anger users, or other topics I thought might interest you.
The whole thing was a sales pitch for their second rate toys and company. No substantial questions were answered and no changes should be anticipated.
thousands of M$ employees who will read this who can express themselves without being fired,
those few being paid by M$ to read this and present an objective report to those who make decisions
those fewer who actually can make decisions and are also reading this
but neglecting those hundreds paid to astroturf, who's opinion is neither respected or listened to.
The way everyone there danced around "hard" questions, it should be obvious that one or two people are actually making decisions that others must follow or quit. The results of those decisions are equally obvious, a second rate product from a hated company. Those at M$ are going to be the ones who know all of the wrongs better than anyone else. None can miss the summary opinion offered by Rob:
Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease.
I can say I'll never buy from itunes as long as they have DRM.
You are not alone. It's a shame this related article is not mentioned yet. People's overwhelming dismissal of DRM'd music, even in the case of easy and well promote iTunes, leads directly to this story. Portable music owners buy more music because they can enjoy it more but they are purchasing CDs instead of DRM'd downloads.
CD sales might be declining, but it's only because the industry has been doing it's best to defeat their fans and take all the fun out of music. They have sued their biggest fans - those using p2p services and plenty of innocents by accident. Who wants to give their money to people who sue 12 year olds in public housing? They have colluded with M$ to force DRM on everyone though crap like WMP. The continuing dissaster that is M$ music sales and subscriptions should be a blueprint of exactly what not to do to your customers. Publishers have even put crappy DRM on CDs, making CD purchase a gamble. You know what happens to music sales the first time a customer gets their hands on a CD they cant rip or get their money back from? That's right, sales drop by one pissed off customer. They go straight to independent lables, legal free downloads or the p2p you hate so much and then forever consider your corrupted trash to be legacy. CLUE to Music Execs: Music is supposed to be fun, restrictions, intimidation and guilt don't sell.
I look forward to reading about how Windows Vista 2010 Special Edition will be the last version of Windows when the time comes.
It's taken them six years to get Vista out the door. You might want to push the next planned release back to at least 2013. Do you think that people are going to be satisfied with Vista's rather limited feature set that long?
Vista is doomed. For most people, it's going to be a big step backward, doing less for them but requiring more hardware. They are tired of the upgrade train trashing their hardware without feature gain. This time, it's DOA.
Have you ever read a political blog? They spend half their time shouting that the mainstream media is biased and ineffective, and the other half quoting MSM articles that happen to flatter their preconceptions....There is very little "news" that percolates from the blogosphere, compared to traditional, full-time, employed journalists.
Well, that's what the journalist's job is... but they get tipped by your neighbor and critiqued by the blogs. Not even Clark Kent could see everything. It takes a whistle blower to out a scandal. All the gumshoe can do is some crude fact checking before passing the story on. If there's an advertiser conflict of interest, even that might not happen. If it does happen, there are thousands of people who know what they are talking about, ready to share their opinion. You might not be able to tell the difference but neither can the average gumshoe and that does not make the good opinions any less of a new resource.
Those resources are getting better too. As more people catch the news as it happens, you will see more of that first hand footage. There are also lots of good new news sites that are hiring full time journalists as well as taking whatever comes their way.
An interesting and good political blog comes from none other than RMS. I don't think he's ever found anything useful on MSNBC.
If Microsoft survive and so well for a couple of years will Moglens theory of sharing then be proved false?
No, sharing has already produced superior results and the theory is already proved.
Microsoft's survival over the next two or three years will only prove that money can manipulate markets and laws. Vista will completely end their credibility. Their survival depends on increased government subsidy and protection at the expense of your freedom.
It's funny how I've been enjoying multiple month up time on Windows computers too. Sometimes 4 to 6 months at a time, continuously on... The only times the computer goes off is literally when the power gets disconnected.
So, how do you avoid the monthly mandatory "update" reboot? I can see how you might not bother with patches, given how poorly they work.
How do you monitor your uptime? Has Microsoft included an "uptime" utility yet?
Finally, I envy the reliability of your power company. Mine can't keep things going more than 140 days and usually goes down once every two months on average.
I've read claims like yours, but have never seen a real machine do as you say. For the average user, performance like yours is as removed from reality as a trip to the moon. I doubt Steve Balmer's workstation can keep it up more than 30 days.
I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead.
That's a relief because VB sucks. The article's budget planning by spreadsheet sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. VBA, like VB itself, had more versions than Windows itself and each new version broke the old scripts. The scripts in the last fortune 100 company I worked for would be fixed by a student intern. The idea behind using PCs in the first place was to give workers power and flexibility in their jobs so they could get what they wanted without an IT guy. It did not work out that way because the workers were too busy getting their jobs done to keep up with ever changing shit like VBA. Deployment of decent collaboration tools is the way forward and that's all happening outside the M$ world.
Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
If the "feature" is free, no one will denounce them for it. When I see it in the Debian repositories, I'll know it's free and commend them for the contribution. Apple users will thank them too. If they had to sign NDA's and can't distribute it, then it's just another M$ owned prop for a non-free annoyance that should be left to die. If they are using such non free props to promote their distribution, they have indeed sold the free software community out.
I've concluded that power management is just insanely tricky. APM/ACPI must be inconsistently implemented on every device, otherwise it could never work as poorly as it does.
ACPI does suck. It's a typical M$, "extensible," "do it in software" nightmare described in 500 pages of spec. It reminds me of nothing more than a winmodem. It will be hard even for careful hardware makers to follow and that's what M$ likes.
APM, on the other hand, worked well for laptops and still does if supported. I close the lid and it suspends. I open the lid and everything comes back. Yes, you have to unplug things still but I actually like that. That way, I can close the lid and have some boring operation still going without fear my cats will dance on the keyboard and screw it up. Other quirks are largely due to the fact that APM too is a M$ written "extensible" standard.
The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling. At the same time, I've been enjoying multiple month uptime on my laptops for years. The non free way of making code work together is simply broken.
One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation
The only problem I have is Microsoft's continued claim of working power management. I don't know any Windows users who are able to use power management. I've never seen someone open a Windows laptop and just use it, they always have to boot. Even if the OS itself comes up, they say an application like Word screws up what they were doing and the system just works better with frequent reboots. Corporate users, of course, would love to have the power savings for their thousands of desktops and the labor savings of not having to wait for a boot but have to tell their employees to boot every day instead. Given this history it would have been nothing short of a miracle if Vista worked.
The extreme irony here is that M$ has all the advantages but does not work as well as alternatives. They helped make both APM and ACPI. They also enjoy a tremendous hardware advantage due to cross licensing and vendor extortion. Both "standards" are typical M$ monstrosities, being "extensible" and having frequent "upgrades" which make implementation complex. The ACPI specs are said to be 500 pages long. You would think all of the inside information and help they have would overcome that for them but it's not so. Free software kicks their ass all over the place. These days, I never have a problem with APM on any laptop that supports it. ACPI has a good chance of working too. Oh yeah, everything else under Linux works once the laptop wakes up: programs, video, sound etc. The best way to show someone that there is nothing wrong with their laptop is to boot a recent live CD. Yes, it wakes up that way too. If it does not it's either broken on non standards conforming, which are two sides of the same coin.
The Warner CEO should not be able to violate his company's own policy.
The Warner CEO has nothing to say about the "property" of the other three big music companies. I'd say "any other" but few outside the RIAA want to rob children of their parent's life savings.
I work at a school district. I'm the most Linux-saavy of the four IT employees, and I'm still very much a novice. For us to make a transition to Linux, we'd need training and good support.... So how about it? What's a good way for us to make the leap into Linux without dropping a load of cash?
Just Google for the local LUG. Chances are they will know about a class like the one linked to in my URL. The cost of that class is.... zero.
You will have plenty of time to learn once you make the switch because Linux boxes just work. Instead of fooling around with defrag, anti-virus, reinstalls and all that, you can look into software that helps you teach, like KDE's education software.
Given the great choice, slavery or death, I'd say the guy was a Draka. OK, the choice is not really death, it's don't share or risk being sued out of your house and savings and having your wages attached so that you will never profit from your earnings again - which is really just two choices of slavery. Oh yeah, if you try to get out of paying the rest of your life, you will be thrown into jail. So, get back to work and don't hum anything loud enough to be heard by your peers.
The form response in less than three minutes. Do you have a script to post that garbage? How many botnet members does it take to assure at least one is up to the task?
Slashdot Mirror
If Linux/bsd/osx were at 90% market share, I am sure these &#@%$! will still be selling/buying vulnerabilities at these prices.
So why is anyone buying Vista exploits? To answer that question you have to admit either that M$ does not fix problems for months and years or that the "popularity" argument is bogus. People traffic Windoze exploits because they work today and keep working tomorrow. Non free is a broken development model.
Oh, ho ho. All the apologists are quick to argue that, "The only reason the bad guys target Windoze is because it's popular." What bullshit that is.
Vista has what market share now? Less than Mac or Linux I'm sure and everyone knows that it's going to stay that way for years. Yet there's already a market for exploits. What this should tell you is that the value of an exploit it's ability to work, regardless of market share. The bad guys know that M$ security sucks and that the holes they buy today will be good for months if not years to come. No one bothers with GNU/Linux exploits because the GNU/Linux market is fragmented and quick healing. Linux exploits don't take down every distribution but just about every distribution is quick to fix problems. GNU/Linux exploits, relative to Windoze, don't work or last long.
this One Laptop Per Child idea should remove its Linux OS as an installed default and allow the children to choose which operating system they want to use with their laptop.
You can be sure that the OLPC project will be much easier for HP to work with than Microsoft is. As things stand now, if HP did bother to sell the OLPC they would have to make it more expensive than any similar laptops they have that are able to run Windoze. The day OLPC charges money for their software and threatens vendors with higher prices for anything that violates OLPC's will, that will be the day your post starts to make sense. In the mean time, HP can't do so much as tell you how much M$ charges them for their distinctly third rate OS which they must sell below the cost of much better alternatives.
In France, the OLPC costs will be easy to break down for legal compliance: laptop - subsidized $100, Linux OS - free and complete with source code for any hardware you chose, Alternate OS - unknown ask Bill gates why.
the whole point of this is that claiming that all alternatives available are better is a pretty broad and stupid statement. I would say I even enjoy Office 2007 quite a bit.
That is stupid. Only one alternative has to be better for each purpose and person and there are very few places that is not true. This is a natural consequence of free software - users make the thing they want and there are many users. For Word, I can name OO, Kword, Abiword, Scribus, Lyx, Kile and others I have not used. Each one has it's strengths and is better than Word in that situation. Abiword and Kword are good for quick reports, Microsoft's mainstay, but is better because they are not resource hungry and save to formats that everyone can read without problems. Kile, Lyx or regular latex are best for complex reports. Scribus is best for newspapers and posters. I don't have to mention the scores of other specific text editors, like kate or Bluefish, because word does not even pretend to fill those needs. The typical Windows computer, to my way of thinking, is a barren place with a few clumsy tools loved only by the ignorant and loathed by most.
The Windows platform itself is so bad that there are very few applications that can justify using it. Everything, from the 1993 single desk GUI to it's 4 minute half life on any network, to restrictive EULA's make it a very poor choice. More importanlty, for any given M$ thing, I can name two or three that are better suited to any particular purpose. The only real reason for using Windows is inability to move legacy work, but that's a task that happens in the Windows world more than elsewhere so getting out is something better done sooner than later.
I know a lot of people on here look at Linux with adoring eyes, but come on, it's not ready for the desktop. I want to install an OS, and have it work. My printer. My camera. My weird NIC. My DVDRW burner. My 2 month old Video Card. Maybe I should go Mac then? That really doesn't solve the problem because it's hardware controlled
That's not true anymore. All of that stuff works for me. The only real problem I have is with accelerated graphics, but both Nvidia and ATI have non free drivers just as good as they make for windoze. Any commercial distribution of Linux will have those drivers and use them. Outside of gaming, I never notice the difference because processor speed over 400 MHz completely makes up for it for "normal" desktop applications. There will always be a few dumb hardware makers, like Broadcom, but avoiding their crap is as easy as taking it back and trading it in for another $20 NIC that works better anyway.
falls short of implementing the "Evil Bit."
I'm sure there are plenty of evil bits in this new M$TCP/IP. Remember, folks, the 1998 Halloween document called for replacing all of the world's simple protocols. They have finally gotten around to DHCP and TCP. Hopefully vendors will have the good sense to ignore the whole scheme. A network that discriminates on OS brand rather than behavior is worse than one that does not discriminate at all.
Allowing sysadmins to keep unpatched Windows boxes off their networks is obviously nothing but pure evil. It's Microsoft, so it must be evil, right?
Keeping windows boxes off a network would be nice, but it would be better to simply cut off machines that misbehave. Every machine on the botnet is going to know exactly what to tell the silly C(luster fuck)DHCP server for maximum access. Brands of OS M$ does not like will not. DHCP is already slow, adding this overhead won't rid your network of infections, it will just make it slower.
Yes, Microsoft is evil and commits both technical and social vandalism. They break competitor's products and do things behind their sysadmin's backs. Don't you remember how their resolve configuration had M$ IP addresses hard coded, overriding your hosts files? Think this DHCP thing will be any easier to override? The social aspects of discouraging sharing and suing public schools beggar debate. So there you have it, evil from propaganda to implementation and enforcement. You still trust those people?
Whats really funny is to go online and see that MS critics think everyone feels the way they do or even cares about the subject.
You apologists are so blind.
You don't see that there's a huge problem there? The fact that you find "MS critics" everywhere you look on line, where you expect find most computer savvy people, should be a clue. The second fact, that they think any informed observer would agree, should be your second alarm bell. Is there any company that's even half as hated by so many reasonable and knowledgable people as Microsoft is? I don't thinks so, but there's no other company that's been dumb enough to sue public schools from one end of the country to another now is there?
First of all you must not live anywhere near Seattle if you think letting people know you work at MS is a bad thing to do in a social situation or towards former classmates. Its the complete opposite. ... People are stupid ...
So, can I take it that you work for the company? If there's any kind of talk M$ needs to put a muzzle on, it's the "people are stupid" line. If that kind of attitude is prevalent, the problem is incurable.
We need to remind ourselves that physical product is merely a container for rights - and this container may take many formats. Looking at the rise of superior quality packaging, the book may well be the container that record companies adopt for premium product.
Imagine that, buying your rights one song at a time from someone else who owns them all. When I write something for publication, I have no idea that what I'm doing is creating rights that will be sold to others, rather than sharing knowledge and opinions. What exactly those others will do with those rights that I can't or why I did not have them to sell myself is beyond me. I thought copyright was a time limited right created by government to encourage publishing back in the days when that was rare and expensive. No, I don't get where this guy is coming from at all.
His blanket license, where everyone is forced to pay to some industry serving organization, like it or not, is an abomination. It's also a deal that has been overwhelmingly rejected as anyone who follows the Microsoft music story can tell you.
None of that, however, makes the iTunes situation any better. It has not caught on and it's not going to.
It seems sometimes that Slashdot readers think that everybody in a company think the same, eat the same, say the same. ... Microsoft is full of real people that probably cares about their job and just want to show it in the best light.
How nice and diverse they are does not matter. The company sues public schools and is at war with free software. No one in a position to change that was mentioned and no changes should be anticipated. This trip was pure propaganda.
You may be under the delusion that M$ is some kind of democracy and that the opinions of their people matter to them any more than the opinions of their customers and shareholders matter. That this is not true is easy to gauge from the cult like avoidance of real questions, complete with sheepish smiles and scripted answers. Decisions are still made by a very select few at the top. How well mannered, nice, attractive, wealthy those employees may be makes no more difference than what cute cats they may have.
Just how empty a PR move this whole trip was is very well summarized by Rob in the opening paragraphs:
The whole thing was a sales pitch for their second rate toys and company. No substantial questions were answered and no changes should be anticipated.
OK, how about, "Hey, all of you:
but neglecting those hundreds paid to astroturf, who's opinion is neither respected or listened to.
The way everyone there danced around "hard" questions, it should be obvious that one or two people are actually making decisions that others must follow or quit. The results of those decisions are equally obvious, a second rate product from a hated company. Those at M$ are going to be the ones who know all of the wrongs better than anyone else. None can miss the summary opinion offered by Rob:
Yeah, it's that bad.
I can say I'll never buy from itunes as long as they have DRM.
You are not alone. It's a shame this related article is not mentioned yet. People's overwhelming dismissal of DRM'd music, even in the case of easy and well promote iTunes, leads directly to this story. Portable music owners buy more music because they can enjoy it more but they are purchasing CDs instead of DRM'd downloads.
CD sales might be declining, but it's only because the industry has been doing it's best to defeat their fans and take all the fun out of music. They have sued their biggest fans - those using p2p services and plenty of innocents by accident. Who wants to give their money to people who sue 12 year olds in public housing? They have colluded with M$ to force DRM on everyone though crap like WMP. The continuing dissaster that is M$ music sales and subscriptions should be a blueprint of exactly what not to do to your customers. Publishers have even put crappy DRM on CDs, making CD purchase a gamble. You know what happens to music sales the first time a customer gets their hands on a CD they cant rip or get their money back from? That's right, sales drop by one pissed off customer. They go straight to independent lables, legal free downloads or the p2p you hate so much and then forever consider your corrupted trash to be legacy. CLUE to Music Execs: Music is supposed to be fun, restrictions, intimidation and guilt don't sell.
I look forward to reading about how Windows Vista 2010 Special Edition will be the last version of Windows when the time comes.
It's taken them six years to get Vista out the door. You might want to push the next planned release back to at least 2013. Do you think that people are going to be satisfied with Vista's rather limited feature set that long?
Vista is doomed. For most people, it's going to be a big step backward, doing less for them but requiring more hardware. They are tired of the upgrade train trashing their hardware without feature gain. This time, it's DOA.
I'm cruel. ... Windows and BeOS to 2010. ====> BeOS is the winner!
BeOS is better than XP and Vista, what's cruel about that? Is there any GUI that's not as good or better than Microsoft?
Have you ever read a political blog? They spend half their time shouting that the mainstream media is biased and ineffective, and the other half quoting MSM articles that happen to flatter their preconceptions. ...There is very little "news" that percolates from the blogosphere, compared to traditional, full-time, employed journalists.
Well, that's what the journalist's job is ... but they get tipped by your neighbor and critiqued by the blogs. Not even Clark Kent could see everything. It takes a whistle blower to out a scandal. All the gumshoe can do is some crude fact checking before passing the story on. If there's an advertiser conflict of interest, even that might not happen. If it does happen, there are thousands of people who know what they are talking about, ready to share their opinion. You might not be able to tell the difference but neither can the average gumshoe and that does not make the good opinions any less of a new resource.
Those resources are getting better too. As more people catch the news as it happens, you will see more of that first hand footage. There are also lots of good new news sites that are hiring full time journalists as well as taking whatever comes their way.
An interesting and good political blog comes from none other than RMS. I don't think he's ever found anything useful on MSNBC.
If Microsoft survive and so well for a couple of years will Moglens theory of sharing then be proved false?
No, sharing has already produced superior results and the theory is already proved.
Microsoft's survival over the next two or three years will only prove that money can manipulate markets and laws. Vista will completely end their credibility. Their survival depends on increased government subsidy and protection at the expense of your freedom.
It's funny how I've been enjoying multiple month up time on Windows computers too. Sometimes 4 to 6 months at a time, continuously on ... The only times the computer goes off is literally when the power gets disconnected.
So, how do you avoid the monthly mandatory "update" reboot? I can see how you might not bother with patches, given how poorly they work.
How do you monitor your uptime? Has Microsoft included an "uptime" utility yet?
Finally, I envy the reliability of your power company. Mine can't keep things going more than 140 days and usually goes down once every two months on average.
I've read claims like yours, but have never seen a real machine do as you say. For the average user, performance like yours is as removed from reality as a trip to the moon. I doubt Steve Balmer's workstation can keep it up more than 30 days.
I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead.
That's a relief because VB sucks. The article's budget planning by spreadsheet sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. VBA, like VB itself, had more versions than Windows itself and each new version broke the old scripts. The scripts in the last fortune 100 company I worked for would be fixed by a student intern. The idea behind using PCs in the first place was to give workers power and flexibility in their jobs so they could get what they wanted without an IT guy. It did not work out that way because the workers were too busy getting their jobs done to keep up with ever changing shit like VBA. Deployment of decent collaboration tools is the way forward and that's all happening outside the M$ world.
Open Office is getting that same feature, for which contribution Novell is being roundly denounced for conspiring with Microsoft to bring about the end of open-source software.
If the "feature" is free, no one will denounce them for it. When I see it in the Debian repositories, I'll know it's free and commend them for the contribution. Apple users will thank them too. If they had to sign NDA's and can't distribute it, then it's just another M$ owned prop for a non-free annoyance that should be left to die. If they are using such non free props to promote their distribution, they have indeed sold the free software community out.
I've concluded that power management is just insanely tricky. APM/ACPI must be inconsistently implemented on every device, otherwise it could never work as poorly as it does.
ACPI does suck. It's a typical M$, "extensible," "do it in software" nightmare described in 500 pages of spec. It reminds me of nothing more than a winmodem. It will be hard even for careful hardware makers to follow and that's what M$ likes.
APM, on the other hand, worked well for laptops and still does if supported. I close the lid and it suspends. I open the lid and everything comes back. Yes, you have to unplug things still but I actually like that. That way, I can close the lid and have some boring operation still going without fear my cats will dance on the keyboard and screw it up. Other quirks are largely due to the fact that APM too is a M$ written "extensible" standard.
The funny thing about all of this is that free software will give you a working system but M$ never has. I've never seen a windoze user who can make good use of power management, despite all sorts of time wasted hunting down drivers and fiddling. At the same time, I've been enjoying multiple month uptime on my laptops for years. The non free way of making code work together is simply broken.
One thing we just can't wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation
The only problem I have is Microsoft's continued claim of working power management. I don't know any Windows users who are able to use power management. I've never seen someone open a Windows laptop and just use it, they always have to boot. Even if the OS itself comes up, they say an application like Word screws up what they were doing and the system just works better with frequent reboots. Corporate users, of course, would love to have the power savings for their thousands of desktops and the labor savings of not having to wait for a boot but have to tell their employees to boot every day instead. Given this history it would have been nothing short of a miracle if Vista worked.
The extreme irony here is that M$ has all the advantages but does not work as well as alternatives. They helped make both APM and ACPI. They also enjoy a tremendous hardware advantage due to cross licensing and vendor extortion. Both "standards" are typical M$ monstrosities, being "extensible" and having frequent "upgrades" which make implementation complex. The ACPI specs are said to be 500 pages long. You would think all of the inside information and help they have would overcome that for them but it's not so. Free software kicks their ass all over the place. These days, I never have a problem with APM on any laptop that supports it. ACPI has a good chance of working too. Oh yeah, everything else under Linux works once the laptop wakes up: programs, video, sound etc. The best way to show someone that there is nothing wrong with their laptop is to boot a recent live CD. Yes, it wakes up that way too. If it does not it's either broken on non standards conforming, which are two sides of the same coin.
The man is a jackass.
I work at a school district. I'm the most Linux-saavy of the four IT employees, and I'm still very much a novice. For us to make a transition to Linux, we'd need training and good support. ... So how about it? What's a good way for us to make the leap into Linux without dropping a load of cash?
Just Google for the local LUG. Chances are they will know about a class like the one linked to in my URL. The cost of that class is .... zero.
You will have plenty of time to learn once you make the switch because Linux boxes just work. Instead of fooling around with defrag, anti-virus, reinstalls and all that, you can look into software that helps you teach, like KDE's education software.
Given the great choice, slavery or death, I'd say the guy was a Draka. OK, the choice is not really death, it's don't share or risk being sued out of your house and savings and having your wages attached so that you will never profit from your earnings again - which is really just two choices of slavery. Oh yeah, if you try to get out of paying the rest of your life, you will be thrown into jail. So, get back to work and don't hum anything loud enough to be heard by your peers.
Well, there's a typical Slashdot-centric, OSS zealot response.
Without the useless inflammatory language, you have a point but you could not be more wrong. The mission, according to the MIT site is:
Education is about much more than software but software freedom is essential to the goals of education.
The form response in less than three minutes. Do you have a script to post that garbage? How many botnet members does it take to assure at least one is up to the task?