I wonder - if they "show edits" will there be proprietary stuff Microsoft still tried to kept hidden, revealed?
Ah what bloat will do to you. At 8,500 pages it probably took up the better part of a DVD. On closer inspection, you might find that Steve Balmer accidentally attached his whole Outlook file. Lots of "fucking" and "killing" there. Hoist by their own dogfood.
Then there might also be the usual M$ inside jokes and "Easter Eggs." An example would be a movie of the whole Redmond staff mooning you if you hold down the control and shift key while mousing over the section on SAMBA. Then there's the old M$ pilot game used by people training for the WTC, which will be modified with a Brussels city scape. It's still an official part of Excel. They may or may not have cleaned up the Thesaurus entry which contained, "Unable to read a manual" for "impotent." Now it's "Needs a manual we never wrote."
But von Lohmann said he was disappointed the Copyright Office rejected a number of exemptions that could have benefited consumers, including one that would have let owners of DVDs legally copy movies for use on Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod and other portable players.
It's a sham. You can imagine that means all the "exemptions" are only allowed through non free tools. The big dumb companies are still able to change the law with their software at will, so the tools will soon make the exemption impossible without specific permission. No one in the US will be able to distribute DeCSS and you don't really have the ability to use your media as you please. The copyright warriors, on the other hand, will all point to it and claim that "legitimate" fair use exists and that content is being archived and all the other criticism of the DMCA are bogus.
Bottom line: only big dumb companies like those that vend cell phones may break the DMCA because their activity was not supposed to be restricted in the first place.
Yes, Re:The entire book is about Microsoft?
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, if the summary is accurate, the whole book is some kind of, "M$ is the geniuz, and everyone else is the stupid," apology. Every one of those stories is easily dissmissed by use of memory, or reading old articles and the Microsoft Anti-Trust Trials. The destrution of Microsoft's former partners and competitors is mostly a matter of licensing and vendor deals that locked everyone else out. They have paid for those deals again and again and had judgment after judgement thrown at them. Their stratagy of destroying "loss leaders" instead of inventing things is something they brag about to shareholders.
The inside cover of this book should be a mirror. That way, anyone who's bought this book in a "search for stupidity" will find it when they open it. The publishers and Microsoft will agree.
... the number of distros alone should tip you off....the average American... head would explode if you started explaining all they could do with Linux. They'd probably rather be trapped in the movie Deliverance than be faced with building and configuring Linux from scratch.
That's why there are so many distributions and a free market would deliver the best for each customer. The question, "Are choices bad?" is one that only makes sense where people really don't have choices. As you noticed, it's not about telling people what they have no use for, it's a mater of understanding what your customer wants to get done and what tools do the job for them.
Slashdot is the perfect place to make that clear. People here know about the choices and who they are good for.
I don't want my text editor to have all the bells and whistles... I prefer Emacs over MS Word, the next person my prefer them flipped.... Ask your mother if she'd be able to user your software (provided it's meant for the general public). But the last people you should be asking are members of the Slashdot community.
Who else but a Slashdot user would be familiar with a spectrum of text editors and which is right for a given purpose and user?
Why would Gates want to give up so much power to become president? Wouldn't that be a step down?
Yes, he replaced the President with a small shell script long ago. It's clunky, garbles the English language, performs illegal operations and often freezes instead of making a decision, but it does just what His Gateness wants.
This way, America doesn't have to do any more work. You can just wait for someone else to lead and then copy them and bully them out from their own idea... Hey, wait, you guys do that anyway. What do you need Bill for?
Bill did what he usually does, and it was all sneaky. He sent a few tools to fish and dine a few influential people and poof, the president was replaced with a M$ shell script.
... wind up in a worse position than where they started. For example, I can see a day when juries will simply refuse to convict people
No, today's outlier is tomorrow's "good example" for the propaganda machine. You can be sure that the people pushing this monstrosity pointed with glee to the most restrictive portions of the DMCA and other "progressive" laws. On the other side of the equation, they pointed at piles of burning CDs as what happens if you don't make "piracy" against the law. I won't mention under the table threats for the world's largest economy because nothing like that would happen, right? That country's WPO trade representative was recently in favor of slavery. So judge for yourself what they think of your place in the corporate world.
Re:Nothing lasts forever.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
More because the number of people wanting Power PCs with Debian would be so small as to be inconsequential, and to make the whole affair commercially unviable.
Yeah, and no one wants AMD either, right? Are you telling me that there is no better combination for all users than Windoze on Intel? What you are saying makes no sense
If the market were free it would have as much competition and variety as produce. Big computer makers would offer "exotic" combinations to suit perverts such as Windows users like you and more practical combinations to everyone else. That the situation is reversed is the result of market coercion. It's not natural and it won't survive the downfall of non free software.
Re:That's not an obvious exercise.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
Oh please, it makes as much "sense" in terms of social and dollar costs as does any business in any field. I could just as easily say the social and dollar costs of charging people for food never made sense to begin with.
No, makers of non free software seek to own ideas and implementations of those ideas, like ip telephony, and this is different from all traditional business. Practitioners of other professions like engineering, medicine, law even cooking, have competed to publish their knowledge. They are secure in their ability to practice. Non free software has never been about practicing a profession, it's always been a greedy grab by "owners" of programs often developed at public expense. It has always been parasitic and now threatens to reach out into other fields. The result of "owning" medical and engineering ideas would be catastrophic.
Nothing lasts forever.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
E-nuff already - just buy what you like!
Hmmm, how about a nice Dell Power PC, preloaded with Debian? What, I can't buy such a nice hardware and software combination from the world's bigest PC maker? What gives? Oh yeah, the M$ monopoly I had almost forgoten about.
The market is not free to provide people what works best or even what they want. The Mac people, like everyone, puts up with the higher costs and intentional waste of M$'s dirty little tricks. It's worth documenting, but it won't last forever. The price is so high that people are looking for alternatives. M$ won't last much longer.
A Mac would be cheaper if Apple didn't have to develop OS X. Whether it would be worthwhile for them to do that I leave as a (rather obvious) exercise for the reader.
It might be worth while and they have already lessend their development costs with free software. Did Macs get cheaper when Apple started using GCC? How did they suddenly start shipping $500 minis? Did the quality suffer for that or the use of KDE? No, OSX is the best Mac ever. Apple is not immune to the truism: the more free software you use the better off you are. The social and dollar cost of proprietary software development never made sense to begin with.
What's that I hear? "If Apple makes OSX free, anyone can make it and the competition would kill them?" Sorry, staying non free won't keep that from happening, but will make it faster. Free software already provides compelling alternatives. Those alternatives will just get better, regardless of M$'s dirty tricks or how far into the sand Mac fans want to put their heads.
My browser [firefox] and email client [thunderbird] run executable code without asking? My, that's news to me.
You might be surprised. How "compatible" with the platform is the browser? If it happily hands things like "browser help objects" to the system underneath you are hosed. If you have Macromedia flash and Windows Media working with Firefox, then Firefox is handing your system content mixed with executable code. Because Windows has a poorly implemented super user concept, the processes owned by the average user are going to be able to overwrite system files. Firefox is a fine browser, but there's only so much they can do with a platform like Windows without pissing the user off. Holes in the underlying platform make it hard to give the user what they want and maintain system security.
The real reason Windows is so exploited has nothing to do with market share or platform user stereotypes. It's exploited because it's easy to do, hard to detect and harder still to fix.
I expect you to run away now and never reply to this comment, or even acknowledge it exists (except as some sort of proof that I stalk you about 2 months in the future, obviously)
Yes, it's obvious that you waste a large portion of your life stalking me.
Do you honestly think if the webpage said do X, Y, Z that Granny wouldn't do it?
Yes, I think that. A trojan that relies on human action is slow growing, even if the instructions are universally correct.
Why do you think backing up windows is any different than linux?
Because all the user's files are in one place under Linux. Program configurations, mail, pictures, music, you know everything.
Repair is *not* trivial, if you think it is than you are stupid (do you trust your kernel anymore, do your trust your package signatures, what can you trust if you possibly can't even trust your standard library files?
It takes about 20 minutes to install Mepis fresh from a CD. Your data and configurations will be untouched. I have yet to hear about a trojan that can respawn itself from user files. That kind of repair is trivial and usually an improvement, unlike the painful experience of using a Windoze "restore" CD.
On my XP load my...
Don't kid yourelf. Your box is probably part of someone's botnet.
What you really are saying is that linux is more protective because it's less userfreindly requiring granny to know run something, not because of any inherrent technical reasons.
No, that's not what I said at all. I said it's more secure because there's a clean separation between data and executable code, a diverse culture of distributions to thwart mono culture disasters. I further said that these things made it easier to back up data and recover. I consider those things part of what makes free software much easier to use. The kind of "ease of use" you are talking about, where web pages can put trash onto your computer without consent, is more of an "ease of abuse." My five year old girl thinks free software is easy enough to use, but I'll never stoop to the M$ low of blaming her for OS problems.
I'm not saying windows is better, but I'm also not saying linux is really any better either.
Yes, you sound like a broken record. You are also wrong for all of the reasons outlined above. It is possible, even easy, to make software better than Microsoft does. Only the most ardent fanboy would say that's impossible.
... the way the GPL (General Public License) works, and because open-source Linux does not come from a company -- Linux comes from the community -- the fact that that product uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations.
Of course, he's full of shit. He suggests SAMBA and the like are infringing because they are able to interoperate and somehow interoperability is tantamount to infringement. That's patent poppy cock, he might as well sue people for using ASCI. The moral argument he's trying to make is that some return is deserved from the big dollars he's wasting on an obsolete software development and promotion model. Sorry Stevie boy, that's not the was a free economy works. M$ is free to waste seven billion dollars digging a hole to China but they have no right to expect me to make that investment pay off when others build airplanes.
No, just that it's more difficult to do, more limited in scope and much easier to identify and repair. These things don't exist in the Unix world, which includes plenty of granmothers on Mac OS X. There's a reason for that and it's not some silly market share issue.
All I have to do is get granny to download it and run it [a silly script that hoses user files]
Like I said, hard to do, limited in scope and unable to create a botnet. I'd like to see you get granny to pull up a browser or prompt, change your silly script to executable and then actually run it. Right.... Other, more insidious problems you might think of are limited in ability to spread by differences between distributions. Repair is trivial. Replacing binaries always brings improvement and is never difficult. All my family's important personal files are backed up to separate machines periodically with no effort on their part, so it will take a dedicated attack by someone who knows what they are doing to cause me real grief. Some very rational coding choices and the ability to share those decisions and work make the free software world a much better place for users. The best part about it all is how cheap and easy it is.
This can be contrasted to the Winblows world where content and executable code are mixed, your browser and email client run both without asking you and the OS has services you can't turn off that listen to the network when they should not. A billion dollar "security" industry has not been able to cover all of these holes.
Why would you say the Windows OS is clearly the problem? The trojan *only* run on Windows, so one would expect that all of the clients are Windows.
Have you found a trojan in the wild that runs on anything but Windows? That would be like finding a species of oxygen that degrades gold. Quick dump all your gold, in my pocket please, it's all going to rust next year!
Oh yeah, I've heard about a ssh trojan that does dictionary attacks for weak passwords. That one has been stopped in it's tracks by distributions requiring a little effort to get openssh-server.
for some totally brain dead reason (probably because everyone else is doing it too), the medical industry as a whole has chosen Windows as its standard.
That is changing. GE's new CT runs Red Hat. Files are moved to and from it and other institutions by sftp. People don't stick with losers forever and change is on the way. A few more poster children like this is all it takes.
Really the issues here are all M$. The only reason people need Citrix is because of fundamental problems Microsoft has with networking. I've seen smaller shops use Citrix well. Going nation wide with it is just stupid. The bottom line of this problem is that they are sticking with Legacy software at the doctor's office. It just won't work.
Some random guy says things like "But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year." and we take him seriously? Of course, it's simple. Just a few lines of code.
Had M$ made APM and ACPI rationally in the first place, power management would already work. Instead, they made their typical "extensible" and "flexible" non standard to lock out competition. The result is the complex mess you complain is impossible to fix. I agree with the editors of Foreign Policy and hope they will carry their logic to it's conclusion.
Simply explain to them why Ford would pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Chevrolet for an agreement not to sue Mom (who drives a Chevy) for violating Ford's patents. There, that shouldn't be so difficult, right?
No, it's not so difficult when you realize that M$'s patents are not worth the paper they might be printed on. They are trying to buy recognition of those patents so they can lay claim to free software ownership and sell licenses to it and or shut it down. It's not like they have been able to compete. It's taken them six years to make Vista, which stinks out loud. They know the end of the line is here for them.
The "indemnification" only extends to M$ customers. It's kind of stupid to promise not to sue your own customers, but the threat is really aimed at companies who are about to dump their shit all together. The idea being conveyed is that M$ might forgive your cheating heart if you keep paying them. As Bruce Perens pointed out, M$ is effectively selling Linux licenses. It might not look like a sale now, because they are offering thirty pieces of silver to a select few, but the deal is to recognize M$'s bogus patents. Once that recognition is granted, M$ will attempt to collect licensing fees from free software vendors.
Red hat is right to reject such a deal. If M$ pulls it off, it will represent the largest theft of IP ever. In the last round of theft, the non free companies closed off software that was government funded. In this theft they lay claim to anything and everything of value anyone ever writes. Now that's evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah what bloat will do to you. At 8,500 pages it probably took up the better part of a DVD. On closer inspection, you might find that Steve Balmer accidentally attached his whole Outlook file. Lots of "fucking" and "killing" there. Hoist by their own dogfood.
Then there might also be the usual M$ inside jokes and "Easter Eggs." An example would be a movie of the whole Redmond staff mooning you if you hold down the control and shift key while mousing over the section on SAMBA. Then there's the old M$ pilot game used by people training for the WTC, which will be modified with a Brussels city scape. It's still an official part of Excel. They may or may not have cleaned up the Thesaurus entry which contained, "Unable to read a manual" for "impotent." Now it's "Needs a manual we never wrote."
It's a sham. You can imagine that means all the "exemptions" are only allowed through non free tools. The big dumb companies are still able to change the law with their software at will, so the tools will soon make the exemption impossible without specific permission. No one in the US will be able to distribute DeCSS and you don't really have the ability to use your media as you please. The copyright warriors, on the other hand, will all point to it and claim that "legitimate" fair use exists and that content is being archived and all the other criticism of the DMCA are bogus.
Bottom line: only big dumb companies like those that vend cell phones may break the DMCA because their activity was not supposed to be restricted in the first place.
Yes, if the summary is accurate, the whole book is some kind of, "M$ is the geniuz, and everyone else is the stupid," apology. Every one of those stories is easily dissmissed by use of memory, or reading old articles and the Microsoft Anti-Trust Trials. The destrution of Microsoft's former partners and competitors is mostly a matter of licensing and vendor deals that locked everyone else out. They have paid for those deals again and again and had judgment after judgement thrown at them. Their stratagy of destroying "loss leaders" instead of inventing things is something they brag about to shareholders.
The inside cover of this book should be a mirror. That way, anyone who's bought this book in a "search for stupidity" will find it when they open it. The publishers and Microsoft will agree.
That's why there are so many distributions and a free market would deliver the best for each customer. The question, "Are choices bad?" is one that only makes sense where people really don't have choices. As you noticed, it's not about telling people what they have no use for, it's a mater of understanding what your customer wants to get done and what tools do the job for them.
Slashdot is the perfect place to make that clear. People here know about the choices and who they are good for.
I don't want my text editor to have all the bells and whistles ... I prefer Emacs over MS Word, the next person my prefer them flipped. ... Ask your mother if she'd be able to user your software (provided it's meant for the general public). But the last people you should be asking are members of the Slashdot community.
Who else but a Slashdot user would be familiar with a spectrum of text editors and which is right for a given purpose and user?
Why would Gates want to give up so much power to become president? Wouldn't that be a step down?
Yes, he replaced the President with a small shell script long ago. It's clunky, garbles the English language, performs illegal operations and often freezes instead of making a decision, but it does just what His Gateness wants.
This way, America doesn't have to do any more work. You can just wait for someone else to lead and then copy them and bully them out from their own idea... Hey, wait, you guys do that anyway. What do you need Bill for?
Bill did what he usually does, and it was all sneaky. He sent a few tools to fish and dine a few influential people and poof, the president was replaced with a M$ shell script.
No, today's outlier is tomorrow's "good example" for the propaganda machine. You can be sure that the people pushing this monstrosity pointed with glee to the most restrictive portions of the DMCA and other "progressive" laws. On the other side of the equation, they pointed at piles of burning CDs as what happens if you don't make "piracy" against the law. I won't mention under the table threats for the world's largest economy because nothing like that would happen, right? That country's WPO trade representative was recently in favor of slavery. So judge for yourself what they think of your place in the corporate world.
More because the number of people wanting Power PCs with Debian would be so small as to be inconsequential, and to make the whole affair commercially unviable.
Yeah, and no one wants AMD either, right? Are you telling me that there is no better combination for all users than Windoze on Intel? What you are saying makes no sense
If the market were free it would have as much competition and variety as produce. Big computer makers would offer "exotic" combinations to suit perverts such as Windows users like you and more practical combinations to everyone else. That the situation is reversed is the result of market coercion. It's not natural and it won't survive the downfall of non free software.
Oh please, it makes as much "sense" in terms of social and dollar costs as does any business in any field. I could just as easily say the social and dollar costs of charging people for food never made sense to begin with.
No, makers of non free software seek to own ideas and implementations of those ideas, like ip telephony, and this is different from all traditional business. Practitioners of other professions like engineering, medicine, law even cooking, have competed to publish their knowledge. They are secure in their ability to practice. Non free software has never been about practicing a profession, it's always been a greedy grab by "owners" of programs often developed at public expense. It has always been parasitic and now threatens to reach out into other fields. The result of "owning" medical and engineering ideas would be catastrophic.
E-nuff already - just buy what you like!
Hmmm, how about a nice Dell Power PC, preloaded with Debian? What, I can't buy such a nice hardware and software combination from the world's bigest PC maker? What gives? Oh yeah, the M$ monopoly I had almost forgoten about.
The market is not free to provide people what works best or even what they want. The Mac people, like everyone, puts up with the higher costs and intentional waste of M$'s dirty little tricks. It's worth documenting, but it won't last forever. The price is so high that people are looking for alternatives. M$ won't last much longer.
A Mac would be cheaper if Apple didn't have to develop OS X. Whether it would be worthwhile for them to do that I leave as a (rather obvious) exercise for the reader.
It might be worth while and they have already lessend their development costs with free software. Did Macs get cheaper when Apple started using GCC? How did they suddenly start shipping $500 minis? Did the quality suffer for that or the use of KDE? No, OSX is the best Mac ever. Apple is not immune to the truism: the more free software you use the better off you are. The social and dollar cost of proprietary software development never made sense to begin with.
What's that I hear? "If Apple makes OSX free, anyone can make it and the competition would kill them?" Sorry, staying non free won't keep that from happening, but will make it faster. Free software already provides compelling alternatives. Those alternatives will just get better, regardless of M$'s dirty tricks or how far into the sand Mac fans want to put their heads.
My browser [firefox] and email client [thunderbird] run executable code without asking? My, that's news to me.
You might be surprised. How "compatible" with the platform is the browser? If it happily hands things like "browser help objects" to the system underneath you are hosed. If you have Macromedia flash and Windows Media working with Firefox, then Firefox is handing your system content mixed with executable code. Because Windows has a poorly implemented super user concept, the processes owned by the average user are going to be able to overwrite system files. Firefox is a fine browser, but there's only so much they can do with a platform like Windows without pissing the user off. Holes in the underlying platform make it hard to give the user what they want and maintain system security.
The real reason Windows is so exploited has nothing to do with market share or platform user stereotypes. It's exploited because it's easy to do, hard to detect and harder still to fix.
ROFLMAO! I just took a peek at your posting history twitter, and all I could hear was an annoying scratching sound.
Just? You are one of my biggest fans. You read more of my writing than my mom does.
I expect you to run away now and never reply to this comment, or even acknowledge it exists (except as some sort of proof that I stalk you about 2 months in the future, obviously)
Yes, it's obvious that you waste a large portion of your life stalking me.
Do you honestly think if the webpage said do X, Y, Z that Granny wouldn't do it?
Yes, I think that. A trojan that relies on human action is slow growing, even if the instructions are universally correct.
Why do you think backing up windows is any different than linux?
Because all the user's files are in one place under Linux. Program configurations, mail, pictures, music, you know everything.
Repair is *not* trivial, if you think it is than you are stupid (do you trust your kernel anymore, do your trust your package signatures, what can you trust if you possibly can't even trust your standard library files?
It takes about 20 minutes to install Mepis fresh from a CD. Your data and configurations will be untouched. I have yet to hear about a trojan that can respawn itself from user files. That kind of repair is trivial and usually an improvement, unlike the painful experience of using a Windoze "restore" CD.
On my XP load my ...
Don't kid yourelf. Your box is probably part of someone's botnet.
What you really are saying is that linux is more protective because it's less userfreindly requiring granny to know run something, not because of any inherrent technical reasons.
No, that's not what I said at all. I said it's more secure because there's a clean separation between data and executable code, a diverse culture of distributions to thwart mono culture disasters. I further said that these things made it easier to back up data and recover. I consider those things part of what makes free software much easier to use. The kind of "ease of use" you are talking about, where web pages can put trash onto your computer without consent, is more of an "ease of abuse." My five year old girl thinks free software is easy enough to use, but I'll never stoop to the M$ low of blaming her for OS problems.
I'm not saying windows is better, but I'm also not saying linux is really any better either.
Yes, you sound like a broken record. You are also wrong for all of the reasons outlined above. It is possible, even easy, to make software better than Microsoft does. Only the most ardent fanboy would say that's impossible.
The word "infringe" does not appear in TFA.
You can mince words, but the claim is the same
Of course, he's full of shit. He suggests SAMBA and the like are infringing because they are able to interoperate and somehow interoperability is tantamount to infringement. That's patent poppy cock, he might as well sue people for using ASCI. The moral argument he's trying to make is that some return is deserved from the big dollars he's wasting on an obsolete software development and promotion model. Sorry Stevie boy, that's not the was a free economy works. M$ is free to waste seven billion dollars digging a hole to China but they have no right to expect me to make that investment pay off when others build airplanes.
Are you saying that it's impossible to do?
No, just that it's more difficult to do, more limited in scope and much easier to identify and repair. These things don't exist in the Unix world, which includes plenty of granmothers on Mac OS X. There's a reason for that and it's not some silly market share issue.
All I have to do is get granny to download it and run it [a silly script that hoses user files]
Like I said, hard to do, limited in scope and unable to create a botnet. I'd like to see you get granny to pull up a browser or prompt, change your silly script to executable and then actually run it. Right.... Other, more insidious problems you might think of are limited in ability to spread by differences between distributions. Repair is trivial. Replacing binaries always brings improvement and is never difficult. All my family's important personal files are backed up to separate machines periodically with no effort on their part, so it will take a dedicated attack by someone who knows what they are doing to cause me real grief. Some very rational coding choices and the ability to share those decisions and work make the free software world a much better place for users. The best part about it all is how cheap and easy it is.
This can be contrasted to the Winblows world where content and executable code are mixed, your browser and email client run both without asking you and the OS has services you can't turn off that listen to the network when they should not. A billion dollar "security" industry has not been able to cover all of these holes.
The "we can't change anything because it is too hard waaaaaaa" post. Thank you for being a wimp.
The protocol is not the problem. The problem is a shitty OS from Redmond which is both easy and worthwhile to replace.
Why would you say the Windows OS is clearly the problem? The trojan *only* run on Windows, so one would expect that all of the clients are Windows.
Have you found a trojan in the wild that runs on anything but Windows? That would be like finding a species of oxygen that degrades gold. Quick dump all your gold, in my pocket please, it's all going to rust next year!
Oh yeah, I've heard about a ssh trojan that does dictionary attacks for weak passwords. That one has been stopped in it's tracks by distributions requiring a little effort to get openssh-server.
of course it didn't bash Microsoft hard enough for you. Unless they're bashed into the ground tirelessly, it's never enough.
Wow, that's rich. Fuck off, stalker, and take your filthy writing back to Redmond where it belongs.
for some totally brain dead reason (probably because everyone else is doing it too), the medical industry as a whole has chosen Windows as its standard.
That is changing. GE's new CT runs Red Hat. Files are moved to and from it and other institutions by sftp. People don't stick with losers forever and change is on the way. A few more poster children like this is all it takes.
Some random guy says things like "But correcting for critical systems should be very simple for a company that churns out millions of lines of code every year." and we take him seriously? Of course, it's simple. Just a few lines of code.
Had M$ made APM and ACPI rationally in the first place, power management would already work. Instead, they made their typical "extensible" and "flexible" non standard to lock out competition. The result is the complex mess you complain is impossible to fix. I agree with the editors of Foreign Policy and hope they will carry their logic to it's conclusion.
No, it's not so difficult when you realize that M$'s patents are not worth the paper they might be printed on. They are trying to buy recognition of those patents so they can lay claim to free software ownership and sell licenses to it and or shut it down. It's not like they have been able to compete. It's taken them six years to make Vista, which stinks out loud. They know the end of the line is here for them.
Red hat is right to reject such a deal. If M$ pulls it off, it will represent the largest theft of IP ever. In the last round of theft, the non free companies closed off software that was government funded. In this theft they lay claim to anything and everything of value anyone ever writes. Now that's evil.