The director of the project is quoted as saying the SD slot was added "just for Bill" is that true? As a Zaurus owner, I'd say that Windoze is the last thing I'd want an SD slot for and that a SD slot is very useful. 512 MB is large enough to run a good Linux distro but several gigs will run a better one and give the user room for their file storage.
It's hard to share and grow your culture without storage space, even if you have good network connectivity. Without storage space, you at the whim of others for what you keep and share. That makes you a consumer instead of a participant. Information consumption is a nice start where people can't afford text books, but it's not the end goal. The end goal, I would think, is the end goal of education - to create new socioeconomic participants who can help themselves and others.
It goes without saying that blowing all of your storage space on non free binaries defeats the purpose. It eliminates your ability to share and even reduces your ability to consume. Doesn't running Winblows on the OLPC go counter to the entire mission?
why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone?
Because newer phones can act as voice recorders and transmit the data later. You don't really think that an ordinary cell phone connection would have sufficient quality do you? It would be much better to make a high quality voice recording and transmit it as a file late at night or while the target is actually using the phone to talk or upload their favorite pictures to Photobucket. Internet capable phones can do all sorts of things regardless of your subscriber allowing you to benefit or not. They are computers with a good chunk of flash memory.
Everyone Playing Catch Up to ... Pages Jaunes
on
Windows Live and Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The French Yellow Pages has had street level photos for at least eight years. Some people, it seems, make their tax dollars work.
As for M$ doing anything useful, I'll believe it when I can see it with free software. Until then, I'll just imagine they bought someone out and made their stuff crappier, like Hotmail. Is there anything that M$ borgification has improved rather than extinguished?
So Linux is safer because when you get a "free" Vista CD you KNOW it isn't legit, while the "free and open Linux distro" CD you get may or may not be a trap? I'm all for bashing Microsoft, but that line of "reasoning" isn't.
No, I think his point was that the restrictive nature of non free software yields both high prices and malice. Interestingly enough, this is one place where the "popularity contest" argument makes sense - Vista is a more attractive target for this kind of abuse because it is more demanded. Because cracks inherently disable WGA and other M$ based checks, there's not even a fig leaf of verification for Vista. It's always been difficult to tell the malicious cracks from the info anarchy cracks. With XP's half life of four minutes on any network, the practical difference never existed.
As far as trust goes, you don't really need it in the free softare world. Frauds don't last long when anyone can compare hashes on binaries and compile the source for themselves. I can say categorically that the larger GNU/Linux distributions are zealously guarded and that you can trust a reputation that's so easy to verify.
I trust Knoppix from any server and can verify it with a md5sum. I would not trust Vista if Bill Gates himself put it in my hand.
Faster CPUs these days are comsuming LESS Power, Memory is consuming less but not as much so as CPUs, Hard Drives are smaller and use less energy (smaller = less mass = less energy to get to speed)...
This has always been the case, but power requirements for Microsoft systems have climbed from 150 to 500 watts over the last fifteen years. Most of it has been driven by Microsoft bloat, which has delivered the same features at ever greater clock cycle cost. I'm writing this on a PII laptop. Debian Etch runs well on it but XP won't even install. At the same time, I doubt you can show me a Vista ready laptop that uses less than 50 watts as this one does.
The most important thing missing from your list is GPUs which can consume up to 350 watts on their own. If you are going to Vista, you are doing it for games and eye candy and want a super card. Vista computers are going to suck power, as the usual M$ upgrade does.
Outside the M$ world, people are doing more with less. Playstation manages to provide outstanding graphics while Xbox is setting carpets on fire.
Proposed justification of Visat/Hardware purchase:
How about less power use by the newest generation of CPUs and hard drives, when a company has 1000's of Desktops that power bill is a factor.
"Vista Ready" machines are going to suck more power, not less. The demand much greater clock rates, video support and RAM. Compare this to the average coporate network full of PIIIs more or less. "Vista Premium" of course is much worse.
I'll believe the better power management hype when I see it in operation. If M$ cared about your electric bill, ACPI and WOL would already work. When I can buy a desktop from Dell that works that way, I'll say it's about time.
System recovery from USB sounds good, but I've never used it. CDs are still cheaper and easier. I can see it being the way of the future, avoiding the CD writing stage, but most machines still work better with CDs. The recovery tools for me are still Knoppix and Debian images. Apart from the recent AMD intiramfs tools problem, I have not had a system fail in years. The real future is systems that simply don't fail and need to be "recovered." Outside of system recovery, I make lots of use of flash memory and can offer you feed back on two types of card readers.
PC card style readers for laptops are very durable and inexpensive. A MMC reader can typically read six or so different kinds of flash cards. "Compact Flash" format readers are equally durable and even cheaper as the format fades away. All mount like any other media in Konqueror's "system:/media". Most better laptops will boot off of them.
One of my music players has a SD slot in the back and I often use it as a usb card reader. It has lasted more than a year and works just fine. Some Windoze systems prompt me about "RaveMP", which is annoying but it works great in the normal software world as a simple USB fob.
It's great to see them want to spend ALL of their money on charity and that they will liquidate their assets to do so. A cynical person might say that any large pile of money will attract people more interested in themselves than the charity's mission. Making the organization spend them money will insure the money goes to the immediate purpose.
As long as there's a court order, I don't care whose phone is getting bugged or how. Technology is constantly changing, so our abilities to moniter the public changes as well. It is the job of the courts to assure the public that this does not occur without probable cause.
How exactly is a court supposed to stop some clerk at the phone company from doing whatever they like? The phone company itself has proved again and again they can't keep a secret and can't control their own networks.
The only solution is to have a device that's secure an under your own control. Until there are free handsets, you can not trust your cell phone. If you are in business and don't want your competition to know what you are doing, you will have to take other measures to protect yourself. A sound proof box is a good idea for important meetings.
Oh yeah, the Patriot act got rid of the fed's need to go though the messy and time consuming warrent process. They had their own little secret court they can apply to in secret but even that was too much trouble. Big brother is mostly a concern when he colludes with or is used by your competitors to screw you. This has gotten easier to do, but it's all still secondary to the previously mentioned incompetence and stupidity.
As someone who has on several occasions had to listen to my brother's phone pick up in his pocket without him realizing, I don't think this is much of a problem.
Applying what you know to news is a good idea, but I don't think you have exhausted what you know. The root cause of the problem is one that non free software always has: the device does what it's owners want; you are not the owner and never fully trust or even enjoy the capabilities of the device.
First off, you should know that the technique works. It's about to be presented it a court and will be used to convince people who hear it to put others in jail. Sounds solid to me. There must be a difference between what you do and what they do.
Now let's think of how they might do it. As you noticed, the phone company does not give you much bandwith so conversations from your brother's pocket sound like shit. Imagine what they might give themselves. The list of materials includes:
A network that can carry thousands of crappy single conversations at the same time.
Devices that contain hundreds of megabytes of flash and CD quality AD/DA converters for music play.
Sophisticated squelch control and noise cancellation.
A computer in your target's pocket that can control all of the above
Given all of that, you can easily imagine recording excellent quality voice and transmitting it at your leasure. Given the dismal security record most telcos have, anyone with enough time and effort will be able to help themselves. Devices that can be abused are.
... or stick on one of those funny led-light-devices which lights up when the phone transmits data.
A phone that can act as a voice recorder does not have to transmit all the time. In fact, a phone that was always transmitting would arouse suspicion with or without a little red light. It would be warm and have really poor battery life. You just have to love these new convergence devices that can store hours of your favorite music!
Even in court, M$'s strategy is not to build something useful but to disrupt and destroy the opposition. If it's going to be decided on "bully" they had better learn how to talk about their strategy. Witness:
Microsoft lawyer Rich Wallis,... Microsoft can question him when plaintiffs' lawyers are finished with him. The ruling is a strategic win for Microsoft, Wallis said, because it will allow the company to begin presenting its defense before the plaintiffs have finished their case. That could be important in a lengthy trial, because it will disrupt the flow of evidence and testimony against Gates and Microsoft, he said.
The anti-microsoft guy is not the best to ask. He has not been off the platfrom for more than six month and he's not really off it. He sometimes uses a Mac and only briefly implied free software. Give him a year or two and the scales will really fall out of his eyes. Right now, Scoble can run circles around him mentioning Halo and the disaster of HDTV, which is an example of how bad M$ sucks the life from technology. I can play "high definition" movies on my 233 MHz PII when they are put into a reasonable format, but this ten year old technology has yet to make it to the point where you can go to a store and buy a movie player that works with a screen. No, it should be easy to show how lame M$ is, but the champion foisted on the WSJ fell down from lack of experience.
If they have framed the debate in terms of innovation or "catch up" they have overlooked the destructive results of Microsoft's domination and "improvements." The third of the three Es is Extinguish. This is played out by breaking competitor's programs on their platform. Once M$ has driven their competitors out they stagnate. XP was behind the free world when it was released and today it's pathetic. Vista has not even close to having caught up. The world of M$ PDAs is much the same outside of Japan. Fortunately they have not been able to push the Xbox, media PC and Zune onto the world but you can see how grossly inferior they are to their competitors. Microsoft will never innovate because they waste time and resources thinking of ways to put others out of business.
Allard and the rest of the Xbox senior executives gathered to write brief statements on what motivates them to come to work every morning. The mission: to inspire the group's rank and file. "Most people put down flowery, make-the-world-a-better-place, Miss America types of things," Allard says. "I wrote: What gets me out of bed and into the office every day is the thought of Ken Kutaragi's resignation letter, framed, hanging next to my desk."
A beautiful pair of articles but they fall apart when considering Vista.
I, for one, applaud Microsoft's recent efforts and results. I predict that Vista will have quite a positive effect on the overall state of computer security and we may see a Vista Ripple Effect throughout the industry. However, technology alone will not solve the security challenges and how well Microsoft has implemented the security features in Vista is still yet to be determined.
It's amazing that he can do such a great job of documenting failure but then recommend vaporware from a disreputable company over proven and easy to use solutions.
Today we REQUIRE that individuals that just want to do their jobs, communicate with colleagues or play games online (i.e., normal and common behavior) have to become advanced computer users in order to do so.
Bull! Free software and Mac both offer easy fixes that are available today. My life is much easier because of the way free software deals with the problems he mentions. Kmail displays all of my mail in plain text but an html rendering is only a button click away. There's not much I can do about all of spam my neighbors send me, but I know I'm not sending it and what little gets through my ISP and then my own filters is not going to make a bot out of my machine. Oh yeah, whitelist filters in my mail client make sure that mail I care about gets put where it belongs. I'm not going to delete a letter from my mom while cleaning out the inbox because my client puts the mail in a folder labled "mom" leaving the spam behind. For those that complain that installing and using free software is too hard because there's not enough vendor support (thanks to M$!), I recommend a Mac. Apple has brought a lot of the technical achievements from the free software world to the public. It's a shame they don't also give them their freedom, and that does reduce Apple's ability to keep ahead of the bad guys, but the platform is usable and safe for "normal" use by non experts. At less than $600, the mini is also affordable. That and or the big $0.24 it costs to burn a Mepis CD are all it takes to escape the Windoze dissaster.
Why is it that he overlooks these two excellent options and praises an OS that's still as buggy as all hell from a company with a history of empty security prommisses amped by billions in advertisement spending?
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite".
Your schools could afford textbooks and libraries. That's why most of your peers are literate. Those things don't work where you can't afford them. Today, you consider electronic publications cheaper and better than paper publications. It's the same way for schools and that's the point of the OLPC program.
These laptops are designed to replace textbooks. The infrastructure required to print, distribute and inventory paper textbooks is bigger and more expensive than you might think. The OLPC devices are designed to be simple, rugged and self networking. Abandoning them will doom the country to an expensive past and yield the same results as it always has. No learning, no bread.
You, posting here on Slashdot are data rich. When was the last time you needed a library for anything? Sooner or later, everyone will realize how much cheaper and easier digital publishing really is.
Next thing you know, they will start pushing creationism.
I've been waiting more than 20 years for market forces to take hold and allow technology to evolve in a marketplace that encourages competition, i.e., one that diminishes the Microsoft effect.
If the BW article is correct about J Allard running the "new direction", the change you seek will not come from within M$. Allard is the worst of the old M$ and represents a promotion of the most predatory attitude. Even from a business perspective, he looks like poop. The market is going to get away from M$ because M$ is self destructing - that's about as close as they will get to actually competing.
Allard landed his first job at Microsoft in 1991, after scoring moxie points for showing up as the lone Caucasian at an MIT minority job fair.... In January 1994, Allard, then 25, banged out a memo titled "Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet," in which he coined the infamous embrace and extend mantra.
Wow, how many radioactive words concepts can you fit into a single paragraph with a straight face? M$ holds a minority job fair and then hires the only white guy who shows up. It only took him three years to understand how the company worked and coin "Embrace, extend, extinguish." Microsoft has been on the same track forever. It's not how good they can be, it's how bad they can be to everone else.
The only nice thing is that it's not working. M$ has, thankfully, failed to conquer the internet. Xbox has yet to earn a profit and won't, thanks to being completely outclassed by the competition - three cores, ha ha how cute. Zune stands to be the biggest flop ever. Media center? bad joke. Vista.... going down. Microsoft has been floundering for five years and has produced stuff that's outclassed before it's available. That's what happens when you spend too much of your time screwing your competition instead of making your product better.
It's too late for them to find a heart. Their core product has been and will remain a bad attitude. Market failure does not change that, it only makes them worse. The sooner they are gone, the better off we will all be.
... there are a lot more people around who know how to get OKish results out of MS stuff than there are who know how to get much better results out of non-MS stuff, and that the MS-using folks therefore tend to be easier to find and cheaper to hire.
I love it when someone tries to make a business case to pay more for second rate tools. "Everyone is doing it, you should too." What balls.
The bottom line for companies is to hire and train qualified people. The right people using the right tools will always get better results. The wrong people using the wrong tools is always more expensive. The best a Microsoft admin can do should not be considered good enough when free software does it better with fewer licensing hassles.
The bottom line for employees is to learn to use the best tool. Amazingly, it's cheaper and easier to learn how to use free tools than it is to delve into the ever changing M$ nightmare. Anyone can use just about any hardware to learn the LAMP chain.
These conditions will apply to all future versions of Windows _ including the upcoming Vista operating system.
So, at the going rate, we can expect Vista documentation sometime in the next four to six years. I'd say it mostly depends on how quickly M$ comes up with a new version. I hope the EU people get fed up and fine them sooner this time. If their intention was interoperability and preventing monoply abuse, they failed.
This is why Microsoft won against IBM, Apple and Commodore: Windows was comparably cheap, offered more functionality and was easy to develop for.
Windows has never been comparably cheap except as the result of vendor intimidation. Then as now, Microsoft makes sure that every major vendor prices computers with Windoze on them cheaper than anything else. Computers from Dell, for example, still cost more with a no cost OS or even "naked." It is still virtually impossible for large institutions to purchase computers with anything but Windoze preloaded, despite vendors like Lindows and Red Hat who would love to co-operate and give the customer a better deal. Any vendor that tries will instantly be slammed by M$ in every way - they will pay more for M$ licenses and Windoze will develop mysterious problems on the platforms.
Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.
When you consider that it was 2004 when they were asked to present this document, you can say they have yet to even pretend to co-operate. It's possible that they will document 2003 software, which they have worked over and are about to replaced entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
The director of the project is quoted as saying the SD slot was added "just for Bill" is that true? As a Zaurus owner, I'd say that Windoze is the last thing I'd want an SD slot for and that a SD slot is very useful. 512 MB is large enough to run a good Linux distro but several gigs will run a better one and give the user room for their file storage.
It's hard to share and grow your culture without storage space, even if you have good network connectivity. Without storage space, you at the whim of others for what you keep and share. That makes you a consumer instead of a participant. Information consumption is a nice start where people can't afford text books, but it's not the end goal. The end goal, I would think, is the end goal of education - to create new socioeconomic participants who can help themselves and others.
It goes without saying that blowing all of your storage space on non free binaries defeats the purpose. It eliminates your ability to share and even reduces your ability to consume. Doesn't running Winblows on the OLPC go counter to the entire mission?
why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone?
Because newer phones can act as voice recorders and transmit the data later. You don't really think that an ordinary cell phone connection would have sufficient quality do you? It would be much better to make a high quality voice recording and transmit it as a file late at night or while the target is actually using the phone to talk or upload their favorite pictures to Photobucket. Internet capable phones can do all sorts of things regardless of your subscriber allowing you to benefit or not. They are computers with a good chunk of flash memory.
The French Yellow Pages has had street level photos for at least eight years. Some people, it seems, make their tax dollars work.
As for M$ doing anything useful, I'll believe it when I can see it with free software. Until then, I'll just imagine they bought someone out and made their stuff crappier, like Hotmail. Is there anything that M$ borgification has improved rather than extinguished?
So Linux is safer because when you get a "free" Vista CD you KNOW it isn't legit, while the "free and open Linux distro" CD you get may or may not be a trap? I'm all for bashing Microsoft, but that line of "reasoning" isn't.
No, I think his point was that the restrictive nature of non free software yields both high prices and malice. Interestingly enough, this is one place where the "popularity contest" argument makes sense - Vista is a more attractive target for this kind of abuse because it is more demanded. Because cracks inherently disable WGA and other M$ based checks, there's not even a fig leaf of verification for Vista. It's always been difficult to tell the malicious cracks from the info anarchy cracks. With XP's half life of four minutes on any network, the practical difference never existed.
As far as trust goes, you don't really need it in the free softare world. Frauds don't last long when anyone can compare hashes on binaries and compile the source for themselves. I can say categorically that the larger GNU/Linux distributions are zealously guarded and that you can trust a reputation that's so easy to verify.
I trust Knoppix from any server and can verify it with a md5sum. I would not trust Vista if Bill Gates himself put it in my hand.
Establish a chain of trust before downloading a Vista distro.
Let me know when I can apt-get, compile then share modified versions of the source.
Faster CPUs these days are comsuming LESS Power, Memory is consuming less but not as much so as CPUs, Hard Drives are smaller and use less energy (smaller = less mass = less energy to get to speed) ...
This has always been the case, but power requirements for Microsoft systems have climbed from 150 to 500 watts over the last fifteen years. Most of it has been driven by Microsoft bloat, which has delivered the same features at ever greater clock cycle cost. I'm writing this on a PII laptop. Debian Etch runs well on it but XP won't even install. At the same time, I doubt you can show me a Vista ready laptop that uses less than 50 watts as this one does.
The most important thing missing from your list is GPUs which can consume up to 350 watts on their own. If you are going to Vista, you are doing it for games and eye candy and want a super card. Vista computers are going to suck power, as the usual M$ upgrade does.
Outside the M$ world, people are doing more with less. Playstation manages to provide outstanding graphics while Xbox is setting carpets on fire.
Proposed justification of Visat/Hardware purchase:
How about less power use by the newest generation of CPUs and hard drives, when a company has 1000's of Desktops that power bill is a factor.
"Vista Ready" machines are going to suck more power, not less. The demand much greater clock rates, video support and RAM. Compare this to the average coporate network full of PIIIs more or less. "Vista Premium" of course is much worse.
I'll believe the better power management hype when I see it in operation. If M$ cared about your electric bill, ACPI and WOL would already work. When I can buy a desktop from Dell that works that way, I'll say it's about time.
if I had a foundation, I might buy a few independent newspapers so that we at least have a couple of independent companies left to provide the news.
If you buy them, they are no longer independent.
If you were Bill Gates, you would already own a lot of media outlets.
System recovery from USB sounds good, but I've never used it. CDs are still cheaper and easier. I can see it being the way of the future, avoiding the CD writing stage, but most machines still work better with CDs. The recovery tools for me are still Knoppix and Debian images. Apart from the recent AMD intiramfs tools problem, I have not had a system fail in years. The real future is systems that simply don't fail and need to be "recovered." Outside of system recovery, I make lots of use of flash memory and can offer you feed back on two types of card readers.
PC card style readers for laptops are very durable and inexpensive. A MMC reader can typically read six or so different kinds of flash cards. "Compact Flash" format readers are equally durable and even cheaper as the format fades away. All mount like any other media in Konqueror's "system:/media". Most better laptops will boot off of them.
One of my music players has a SD slot in the back and I often use it as a usb card reader. It has lasted more than a year and works just fine. Some Windoze systems prompt me about "RaveMP", which is annoying but it works great in the normal software world as a simple USB fob.
It's great to see them want to spend ALL of their money on charity and that they will liquidate their assets to do so. A cynical person might say that any large pile of money will attract people more interested in themselves than the charity's mission. Making the organization spend them money will insure the money goes to the immediate purpose.
Given such intents, it's strange to see the foundation money spent buying independent newspapers. The Contra Costa Times and the San Jose Mercury News don't seem to have much to do with AIDS.
As long as there's a court order, I don't care whose phone is getting bugged or how. Technology is constantly changing, so our abilities to moniter the public changes as well. It is the job of the courts to assure the public that this does not occur without probable cause.
How exactly is a court supposed to stop some clerk at the phone company from doing whatever they like? The phone company itself has proved again and again they can't keep a secret and can't control their own networks.
The only solution is to have a device that's secure an under your own control. Until there are free handsets, you can not trust your cell phone. If you are in business and don't want your competition to know what you are doing, you will have to take other measures to protect yourself. A sound proof box is a good idea for important meetings.
Oh yeah, the Patriot act got rid of the fed's need to go though the messy and time consuming warrent process. They had their own little secret court they can apply to in secret but even that was too much trouble. Big brother is mostly a concern when he colludes with or is used by your competitors to screw you. This has gotten easier to do, but it's all still secondary to the previously mentioned incompetence and stupidity.
As someone who has on several occasions had to listen to my brother's phone pick up in his pocket without him realizing, I don't think this is much of a problem.
Applying what you know to news is a good idea, but I don't think you have exhausted what you know. The root cause of the problem is one that non free software always has: the device does what it's owners want; you are not the owner and never fully trust or even enjoy the capabilities of the device.
First off, you should know that the technique works. It's about to be presented it a court and will be used to convince people who hear it to put others in jail. Sounds solid to me. There must be a difference between what you do and what they do.
Now let's think of how they might do it. As you noticed, the phone company does not give you much bandwith so conversations from your brother's pocket sound like shit. Imagine what they might give themselves. The list of materials includes:
Given all of that, you can easily imagine recording excellent quality voice and transmitting it at your leasure. Given the dismal security record most telcos have, anyone with enough time and effort will be able to help themselves. Devices that can be abused are.
A phone that can act as a voice recorder does not have to transmit all the time. In fact, a phone that was always transmitting would arouse suspicion with or without a little red light. It would be warm and have really poor battery life. You just have to love these new convergence devices that can store hours of your favorite music!
More dirty tricks, before they event start.
The anti-microsoft guy is not the best to ask. He has not been off the platfrom for more than six month and he's not really off it. He sometimes uses a Mac and only briefly implied free software. Give him a year or two and the scales will really fall out of his eyes. Right now, Scoble can run circles around him mentioning Halo and the disaster of HDTV, which is an example of how bad M$ sucks the life from technology. I can play "high definition" movies on my 233 MHz PII when they are put into a reasonable format, but this ten year old technology has yet to make it to the point where you can go to a store and buy a movie player that works with a screen. No, it should be easy to show how lame M$ is, but the champion foisted on the WSJ fell down from lack of experience.
If they have framed the debate in terms of innovation or "catch up" they have overlooked the destructive results of Microsoft's domination and "improvements." The third of the three Es is Extinguish. This is played out by breaking competitor's programs on their platform. Once M$ has driven their competitors out they stagnate. XP was behind the free world when it was released and today it's pathetic. Vista has not even close to having caught up. The world of M$ PDAs is much the same outside of Japan. Fortunately they have not been able to push the Xbox, media PC and Zune onto the world but you can see how grossly inferior they are to their competitors. Microsoft will never innovate because they waste time and resources thinking of ways to put others out of business.
Witness the Bad Attitude:
What an asshole.
It's amazing that he can do such a great job of documenting failure but then recommend vaporware from a disreputable company over proven and easy to use solutions.
Bull! Free software and Mac both offer easy fixes that are available today. My life is much easier because of the way free software deals with the problems he mentions. Kmail displays all of my mail in plain text but an html rendering is only a button click away. There's not much I can do about all of spam my neighbors send me, but I know I'm not sending it and what little gets through my ISP and then my own filters is not going to make a bot out of my machine. Oh yeah, whitelist filters in my mail client make sure that mail I care about gets put where it belongs. I'm not going to delete a letter from my mom while cleaning out the inbox because my client puts the mail in a folder labled "mom" leaving the spam behind. For those that complain that installing and using free software is too hard because there's not enough vendor support (thanks to M$!), I recommend a Mac. Apple has brought a lot of the technical achievements from the free software world to the public. It's a shame they don't also give them their freedom, and that does reduce Apple's ability to keep ahead of the bad guys, but the platform is usable and safe for "normal" use by non experts. At less than $600, the mini is also affordable. That and or the big $0.24 it costs to burn a Mepis CD are all it takes to escape the Windoze dissaster.
Why is it that he overlooks these two excellent options and praises an OS that's still as buggy as all hell from a company with a history of empty security prommisses amped by billions in advertisement spending?
I didn't see my first computer until I was 11, didn't own a Pc until I was 13, and didn't own a PC with a GUI until I was 18. Yet here I am, a member of the "techno elite".
Your schools could afford textbooks and libraries. That's why most of your peers are literate. Those things don't work where you can't afford them. Today, you consider electronic publications cheaper and better than paper publications. It's the same way for schools and that's the point of the OLPC program.
These laptops are designed to replace textbooks. The infrastructure required to print, distribute and inventory paper textbooks is bigger and more expensive than you might think. The OLPC devices are designed to be simple, rugged and self networking. Abandoning them will doom the country to an expensive past and yield the same results as it always has. No learning, no bread.
You, posting here on Slashdot are data rich. When was the last time you needed a library for anything? Sooner or later, everyone will realize how much cheaper and easier digital publishing really is.
Next thing you know, they will start pushing creationism.
I've been waiting more than 20 years for market forces to take hold and allow technology to evolve in a marketplace that encourages competition, i.e., one that diminishes the Microsoft effect.
If the BW article is correct about J Allard running the "new direction", the change you seek will not come from within M$. Allard is the worst of the old M$ and represents a promotion of the most predatory attitude. Even from a business perspective, he looks like poop. The market is going to get away from M$ because M$ is self destructing - that's about as close as they will get to actually competing.
First, let's look at where Allard comes from and what he's done:
Wow, how many radioactive words concepts can you fit into a single paragraph with a straight face? M$ holds a minority job fair and then hires the only white guy who shows up. It only took him three years to understand how the company worked and coin "Embrace, extend, extinguish." Microsoft has been on the same track forever. It's not how good they can be, it's how bad they can be to everone else.
The only nice thing is that it's not working. M$ has, thankfully, failed to conquer the internet. Xbox has yet to earn a profit and won't, thanks to being completely outclassed by the competition - three cores, ha ha how cute. Zune stands to be the biggest flop ever. Media center? bad joke. Vista .... going down. Microsoft has been floundering for five years and has produced stuff that's outclassed before it's available. That's what happens when you spend too much of your time screwing your competition instead of making your product better.
It's too late for them to find a heart. Their core product has been and will remain a bad attitude. Market failure does not change that, it only makes them worse. The sooner they are gone, the better off we will all be.
I love it when someone tries to make a business case to pay more for second rate tools. "Everyone is doing it, you should too." What balls.
The bottom line for companies is to hire and train qualified people. The right people using the right tools will always get better results. The wrong people using the wrong tools is always more expensive. The best a Microsoft admin can do should not be considered good enough when free software does it better with fewer licensing hassles.
The bottom line for employees is to learn to use the best tool. Amazingly, it's cheaper and easier to learn how to use free tools than it is to delve into the ever changing M$ nightmare. Anyone can use just about any hardware to learn the LAMP chain.
These conditions will apply to all future versions of Windows _ including the upcoming Vista operating system.
So, at the going rate, we can expect Vista documentation sometime in the next four to six years. I'd say it mostly depends on how quickly M$ comes up with a new version. I hope the EU people get fed up and fine them sooner this time. If their intention was interoperability and preventing monoply abuse, they failed.
This is why Microsoft won against IBM, Apple and Commodore: Windows was comparably cheap, offered more functionality and was easy to develop for.
Windows has never been comparably cheap except as the result of vendor intimidation. Then as now, Microsoft makes sure that every major vendor prices computers with Windoze on them cheaper than anything else. Computers from Dell, for example, still cost more with a no cost OS or even "naked." It is still virtually impossible for large institutions to purchase computers with anything but Windoze preloaded, despite vendors like Lindows and Red Hat who would love to co-operate and give the customer a better deal. Any vendor that tries will instantly be slammed by M$ in every way - they will pay more for M$ licenses and Windoze will develop mysterious problems on the platforms.
Microsoft could submit "up to date" documents and later change interoperability metrics of what these docs represent. They have done something similar before.
When you consider that it was 2004 when they were asked to present this document, you can say they have yet to even pretend to co-operate. It's possible that they will document 2003 software, which they have worked over and are about to replaced entirely.
The only way to win the M$ game is not to play.