We made, for want of a better term, little bum pads for the models. So on their buttocks were some hard containers, and within these containers we had all the battery packs, controlling chips--the microcontrollers and microswitches--and little geared motors.
A representative at Sony was quick to reassure the designer than on one's ass would be burnt on this one.
Apple blames Windows for the Virus...but who put it on th ipod?
Some windoze user at the factory, of course. Isn't that the normal way W32 filth propagates? If you had read the article, you would have seen:
Joswiak said it was traced to a particular Windows machine in the manufacturing lines of a contract manufacturer that builds the iPods for Apple.
So, unless Apple is lying to cover up, this was not some targeted attack but just the usual Windoze born disease propagation. M$ is like a plague, and it should avoided as such. Apple should be embarrassing to admit needing it in any part of the process outside developing W32 iTunes. The only way to keep W32 infestations away is to never use it or let a M$ machine touch a filesystem of yours that it can read.
I haven't RTFA, but I'll be damned if I'm going to after that little choice excerpt
Good for you, it gets worse.
That stroking bit, and the brown color... I imagined someone fondling a turd under the watchful eye of the "assistant". Because the author is "anonymous", I imagine the whole thing was made up by some M$ PR firm to begin with. Here's a transcript of the contract negotiations:
Balmer I don't care what you say, just make it sexy.
PR Vole Yes, we have several concept that will appeal to our 23 predicted target markets. rambles on for a while...
Balmer "Don't bore me with details, asshole, just give me the shit I'm paying for!"
PR Vole -New concept pops into mind- Grins and says, "It will be everything you asked for."
He's a paid Microsoft shill! There's no way that it's as good as he says!
All true, and the marketer was so ashamed of what he wrote it as anonymous. Stroking the brown turd with disappearing songs, the absolute humiliation of such statements will haunt their dreams for years to come. In short, the article is one of the biggest AC trolls ever.
When I meet a girl in a bar, unless it was the starting subject, talk about music is usually scraping near the bottom of the conversation barrel. Even if music is an important subject, what are the odds that said girl will have dumped her $300 Ipod for a Zune and will be able to recieve your music?
Right on, but it's worse than that. If you do ever meet some kind of rare recorded music groupie, is there any chance in hell they would be impressed by "sharing" a song three times? Like Jobs said, it's much more fun to stick your headphone in her ear.
Where do you meet people who want to trade music anyway!?
Class, work, family reunions, anywhere people meet regularly. In that case, anyone who really cares to share or trade is going to haul their laptop, USB disk or non crippled music player. These people are the music industry's best customers, because having something to share brings prestige and CDs are good hard copy backups.
I'd like to see boyscouts or anyone else make it, but I doubt they will get an MPAA merit badge for it. Script posted previously.
It's stupid to create restrictions for ideas and that stupidity shines through if you apply the same logic to anything besides ideas. Publishing is about sharing, not hoarding. Those "publishers" who don't get it need to fade away.
Way to go twitter, nothing like an opportunity to do your "M$ windoze" routine. Are they letting you post again after all your troll and flamebait moderations? And why are you back on it again?
Someone blamed Apple for the M$ virus ecology, why not read the article and see that it had nothing to do with anything other than Genuine M$ software?
Of course, I'm not going to let a loser like you run me off with insults or mod bombs. Now go fuck yourself.
Apple blames Windows for the Virus...but who put it on th ipod?
Some windoze user at the factory, of course. Isn't that the normal way W32 filth propagates? If you had read the article, you would have seen:
Joswiak said it was traced to a particular Windows machine in the manufacturing lines of a contract manufacturer that builds the iPods for Apple.
So, unless Apple is lying to cover up, this was not some targeted attack but just the usual Windoze born propagation. M$ is like a plague, and it should avoided as such. Apple should be embarrassing to admit needing it in any part of the process outside developing W32 iTunes. The only way to keep W32 infestations away is to never use it or let a M$ machine touch a filesystem of yours that it can read.
OK, I suppose the constructive thing to say is, "Best Windoze evar!" Otherwise I'm a troll:
a troll is often someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude, repetitive or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy or antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion
Come on people, it's funny. How many useful things can anyone say about a buggy piece of commercial software that's not even finished yet. When it's done, a review or comparison might be useful... though I have zero use for Windoze. Until then, it's all marketing hype for something most people don't like from a company most people hate.
"This new build of Windows Vista offers users a higher level of performance and stability [almost as good as XP] - improving what was established in Windows Vista RC1 ["train wreck"]. We were able to also fix many of your bugs reported from RC1 and implement them for RC2 [A true embarrassment of riches!]. Thank you to our beta testers for the bugs and feedback you submitted for RC1 [Without alpha users to push our second rate product, no one would use it]. The improvement shows as we raised our quality bar even higher [from 0 to 1mm]! Platforms and Services Co-President Jim Allchin has just posted a special announcement letter of RC2 to Microsoft Connect for the Windows Vista Technical Beta Testers [billing will be automatic]."
We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support
Is that cheaper closed source stuff is bug free or "supported"? I don't think so. The biggest benefit of free software is not having to worry about such costs. If you want to distribute non free software, you are back in the non free world and I'm not sure that's a viable place to be in any case. We can look at each of your issues, but it's impossible to go to far because we don't really know what your business model is or what you want to do other than have bug free software.
QT, $3,000 per seat vrs M$VC at $700. How many M$VC's can you get at no cost for free software distribution? Is the difference in price worth the platform you will have to force on your customers? No version of Windows has ever worked as well as any Linux distribution I've used.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Once again, why don't you just write free software and what do think your users will think of WinCE?
Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. But Debian costs nothing and I never run into bugs. Fedora and a host of others are also available at no cost, why would you ever pay $140 for a Windoze seat?
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. Ugh, why not just sell your customer a box that is *nix, like GE and other big equipment makers are doing? Once again, consider your user's experience and the cost of "supporting" all of their calls back to you when M$ does something else nasty to Unix Services.
The cheapest place to be is free. You are going to have "bugs" wherever you go but there are fewer in the free world and you might be able to fix them.
The reports says itself that you have to be root to exploit it. It's already game-over. Yes, look for these sorts of things and find them but it's hardly worth the shock-factor of "Massive Hole Found In Linux" panic headlines.
This will make you think twice before installing non free software on your nice free system. You should already think twice about it because of all the advantages free software has, but every now and then you run into a device driver or game you want. If the computer is just a toy anyway, it does not matter, but it the computer is what you use for email, records keeping and research you should be careful. Anything you have to install as root that you or a package maintainer can't inspect should be assumed bad for security. Yeah, I know, you were in trouble before this little "exploit" but it's good to reamember why you should worry in the first place.
To get around the device problem, I do a little research up front and take it back if things don't work out. I refuse to torture myself with things like ndis wrappers to run a network card when there lots of others that work out of the box. Few non free programs besides accelerated graphics drivers have given me anything worth while.
Why didn't he just read Slashdot? Faster, cheaper, and probably holds the core user/developer base that would have the most to say on the subject of Microsoft software. Face it: even the most virulent criticism of MS here would contain enough useful information that if Gates & Co. actually paid attention, they'd find innumerable ideas for improving their wares. And all for free.
Slashdot is useless to them because people here realize that there is no way M$ can fix itself. Their strategy of buying "mature" software, marketing it loudly and destroying all "competition" ran out of steam ten years ago. Before it, the NDA, non free way ran out of steam back in the 80s, as explained here. If M$ did not represent a significant public harm, it would all be comical. Instead, a court proved monopoly that sues public schools has the advocacy of your federal government.
We can be sure they are following their 1998 Halloween document plan to disrupt the free software community by astroturfing Slashdot. Their goals would be to bury useful information in garbage and make reading and posting an consistently unpleasant experience.
I've seen a lot of attention from you too, dedazo and expect more now after outing your other sock puppet accounts. Eight of your last eleven posts have been dedicated to harassing twitter. Don't you have anything better to do?
Is anyone else thinking 'gee, maybe contacting people who are writing that they hate Microsoft aren't exactly feeling BETTER that they got contacted about it too?' Just remember, Big Brother IS watching and is scouring the net for you - whew, I'm glad they cleared that up to make me feel better!
If only they would confine their bullshit to their own blogs. They are famous for astroturfing other sites too. One of the earliest recorded attacks is Steve Barkto against OS/2. A famous and court proved case is the attack on DRDOS, where they made sure Win3.1 would not run on DRDOS and then spammed compuserve message groups with posts that blamed DRDOS. The pattern is repeated again and again with various permutations. Hiring a firm to fake letters to Congress, the Apple Switcher, and so on and so forth.
Of course their apologists swarm here too. There's always someone out there promoting M$ junk as "teh best evar" and we can be sure they are using every available trick to game Slashdot's moderation system. While I can't be sure some M$ PR firm is behind it, I am sure that there's at least one person dedicating a significant amount of their life harassing me personally. Here are just a few of the accounts they have set up or purchased:
Thier effort goes beyond the usual fanboy stuff. For about a year the attacks have been personal and nasty, as all Microsoft's name calling generally is. They even took the attack to my local LUG, which promptly dismissed their efforts. All this over a Slashdot user? Clearly, Microsoft is running scared.
Bruce Perens warned us the attack would come. As they noted in their 1998 Halloween document, free software is not a company they can destroy, it's a community they must destroy. How else can they do that but massively spam every free software group in existence?
Theres about 200 million computers sold each year nowadays
As if that would make any difference. How many years did it take XP to cross the 50% line? Five years on it's barely crossed 80% of the Windoze market share. IDC estimates there are only 400,000,000 XP users today. [wikipedia.org] Each new version of Windoze has taken longer to penetrate because each has been that much more outrageously bloated than it's predecessor. If nothing else has changed, it will be shocking to see so many Vista users in two years.
Changes make their target even less likely. M$'s established users have had enough of the upgrade train. 95 to 98 was bad, 98 to XP was worse and XP to Vista is freaking impossible. You can only fool people so many times and they have plenty of options now. Free alternatives are not only good enough, they are better in many ways. Even if you don't want to go free, you can go Mac and not spend as much as Vista will require. Worse for M$, a large portion of the new computer market is going to come from Europe and the developing world and free software enjoys tremendous advantages there. M$'s language support can't hold a candle to free software even where people have the money to be owned by a US company. Where people don't really have money to waste on basic operating software, free software rules. M$'s growth potential is strictly limited and their user base will collapse soon after Vista flops. The monopoly is based on lies which will vanish in two years.
It's all downhill for M$ now. Most people realize the M$ monopoly is in trouble. It's supposed strength is not going to sell Zune, which will be yet another failure of theirs to own the entertainment market. That failure is another punch to the M$ monopoly myth. It can't happen soon enough.
My favorite personal troll points out the security and freedom of Wince:
large parts of it are offered in source code form.
Microsoft's Shared source initiative is not free software and won't help anyone improve anything. First, you don't have all of the source, so the Trojan is still hidden. Second, you can't modify it and share your changes. The first problem negates the freedom you would have if distribution was unrestricted anyway. The "customizations" they are so proud of, therefore, are no better for security than changing the wallpaper on your desktop.
The results are typical of M$ junk. "ActiveSync, TCP/IP and 802.11b Wireless Vulnerabilities of WinCE", "The exploit is triggered by viewing the malicious MMS message", " FrSIRT Security Advisories - Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent... Note : In order to exploit these vulnerabilities the Program Neighborhood..", and so on and so forth.
I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).
Yes, bullies like to laugh, so I think it's time to hurt those feelings you are talking about. The behavior is anti-competitive, regardless of what acronyms and double talk you use to describe it. Unless the cable company offers me the same bandwith deal for other "data" as they offer me for their own "service" they are abusing their network in an anti-competitive way. The use of a second modem is entirely superfluous when they could just change the bandwith crimp. If they are discriminating on packets, they have broken net neutrality directly and must be willing to pay the fines associated. Those fines should be jacked up to prevent this obviously anti-social behavior which will leave us all with fewer service provideres and poorer service.
all the intelectual property developed by the 3 companies was transfered to the union.... they can choose to hire other comapnies to manufacture the units in the future if they son choose.
That's nice but your software is not the problem, using Wince is. People have shown how easy it is to physically break into Dibold systems, but that would not matter if there was decent code auditing in place. Your chances of getting that to work with WinCE are about as good as Dibold's. Bill Gates will have something to say about the ownership of WinCE and how it works, so it might be easier to start from scratch than transfer your source code out of that black hole. The ease of hacking into WinCE is another giant problem you won't have with other software. You can only trust a system as much as you can trust it's weakest part, regardless of what company builds the rest. The effort required to secure WinCE would be like rewriting the OS. It would be easier to start your code from scratch with an OS that works.
So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
Industrial recovery is not possible while we trade with non free China and your government/corporate masters have you screwed out for RD too.
GE, Microsoft and others have already started moving their research offshore. I'm talking about basic industrial research, like turbine design. "First World" Physics, no longer viable, so forget it. Brains are cheaper, and theoretically free, in Russia and India. The situation is worse in China, where people really are not free.
Our trade was supposed to set the Chinese free, but it's working the other way around. It's just business, right?, and China is just another big company. Not quite. Our big dumb companies might have you by the balls, read your email, and sell it all to big brother, but they can't put you in jail yet. That will take another dissaster like NorthWoods so that everyone is really paranoid and ready for rationing and a WW2 style command economy.
The only way out is lots of wealth creation to raise everyone's standard of living, but it's not happening. With all the mergers, wealth will continue to move to the already very rich owners of those companies. The mergers are the ultimate result of government favoritism of large companies. IT was supposed to be the poster child of new competition and robust US Performance. It has not happened because incumbent companies were allowed to crush new comers, so that "just enough" competition would be left. Now, we all sit under the M$ monopoly, two big media companies, two "broadband" companies, one electric company and a merged OPEC/ExxonMobileRoyalDoubleDutchFuck and wonder where the jobs are and why service sucks. If we can't help ourselves, we will never be able to help anyone else.
Eventually, this will get the rich too. A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level. When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China, kind of like the great Royal Fuck Festival that was the first World War.
Slashdot Mirror
A representative at Sony was quick to reassure the designer than on one's ass would be burnt on this one.
Apple blames Windows for the Virus...but who put it on th ipod?
Some windoze user at the factory, of course. Isn't that the normal way W32 filth propagates? If you had read the article, you would have seen:
So, unless Apple is lying to cover up, this was not some targeted attack but just the usual Windoze born disease propagation. M$ is like a plague, and it should avoided as such. Apple should be embarrassing to admit needing it in any part of the process outside developing W32 iTunes. The only way to keep W32 infestations away is to never use it or let a M$ machine touch a filesystem of yours that it can read.
I don't understand your point - if he had a name (like 'twitter', maybe?) would your "opinion" be any different?
The point, my dedicated little troll was summed up when I said, "In short, the article is one of the biggest AC trolls ever."
I haven't RTFA, but I'll be damned if I'm going to after that little choice excerpt
Good for you, it gets worse.
That stroking bit, and the brown color ... I imagined someone fondling a turd under the watchful eye of the "assistant". Because the author is "anonymous", I imagine the whole thing was made up by some M$ PR firm to begin with. Here's a transcript of the contract negotiations:
Balmer I don't care what you say, just make it sexy. ...
PR Vole Yes, we have several concept that will appeal to our 23 predicted target markets. rambles on for a while
Balmer "Don't bore me with details, asshole, just give me the shit I'm paying for!"
PR Vole -New concept pops into mind- Grins and says, "It will be everything you asked for."
He's a paid Microsoft shill! There's no way that it's as good as he says!
All true, and the marketer was so ashamed of what he wrote it as anonymous. Stroking the brown turd with disappearing songs, the absolute humiliation of such statements will haunt their dreams for years to come. In short, the article is one of the biggest AC trolls ever.
When I meet a girl in a bar, unless it was the starting subject, talk about music is usually scraping near the bottom of the conversation barrel. Even if music is an important subject, what are the odds that said girl will have dumped her $300 Ipod for a Zune and will be able to recieve your music?
Right on, but it's worse than that. If you do ever meet some kind of rare recorded music groupie, is there any chance in hell they would be impressed by "sharing" a song three times? Like Jobs said, it's much more fun to stick your headphone in her ear.
Where do you meet people who want to trade music anyway!?
Class, work, family reunions, anywhere people meet regularly. In that case, anyone who really cares to share or trade is going to haul their laptop, USB disk or non crippled music player. These people are the music industry's best customers, because having something to share brings prestige and CDs are good hard copy backups.
I'd like to see boyscouts or anyone else make it, but I doubt they will get an MPAA merit badge for it. Script posted previously.
It's stupid to create restrictions for ideas and that stupidity shines through if you apply the same logic to anything besides ideas. Publishing is about sharing, not hoarding. Those "publishers" who don't get it need to fade away.
Way to go twitter, nothing like an opportunity to do your "M$ windoze" routine. Are they letting you post again after all your troll and flamebait moderations? And why are you back on it again?
Someone blamed Apple for the M$ virus ecology, why not read the article and see that it had nothing to do with anything other than Genuine M$ software?
Of course, I'm not going to let a loser like you run me off with insults or mod bombs. Now go fuck yourself.
Apple blames Windows for the Virus...but who put it on th ipod?
Some windoze user at the factory, of course. Isn't that the normal way W32 filth propagates? If you had read the article, you would have seen:
Joswiak said it was traced to a particular Windows machine in the manufacturing lines of a contract manufacturer that builds the iPods for Apple.
So, unless Apple is lying to cover up, this was not some targeted attack but just the usual Windoze born propagation. M$ is like a plague, and it should avoided as such. Apple should be embarrassing to admit needing it in any part of the process outside developing W32 iTunes. The only way to keep W32 infestations away is to never use it or let a M$ machine touch a filesystem of yours that it can read.
Come on people, it's funny. How many useful things can anyone say about a buggy piece of commercial software that's not even finished yet. When it's done, a review or comparison might be useful ... though I have zero use for Windoze. Until then, it's all marketing hype for something most people don't like from a company most people hate.
"This new build of Windows Vista offers users a higher level of performance and stability [almost as good as XP] - improving what was established in Windows Vista RC1 ["train wreck"]. We were able to also fix many of your bugs reported from RC1 and implement them for RC2 [A true embarrassment of riches!]. Thank you to our beta testers for the bugs and feedback you submitted for RC1 [Without alpha users to push our second rate product, no one would use it]. The improvement shows as we raised our quality bar even higher [from 0 to 1mm]! Platforms and Services Co-President Jim Allchin has just posted a special announcement letter of RC2 to Microsoft Connect for the Windows Vista Technical Beta Testers [billing will be automatic]."
Linux and the various GUI's haven't added nearly as many features as Vista? Why?
Because users never asked for DRM or a penis trap? Name one actual feature in Vista that has not been available in free software for years.
What was that bit about the penis trap? Well, you will have to use Vista yourself to see.
We do not want to spend time for any OSS bug fixing so our main requirement was -official support
Is that cheaper closed source stuff is bug free or "supported"? I don't think so. The biggest benefit of free software is not having to worry about such costs. If you want to distribute non free software, you are back in the non free world and I'm not sure that's a viable place to be in any case. We can look at each of your issues, but it's impossible to go to far because we don't really know what your business model is or what you want to do other than have bug free software.
QT, $3,000 per seat vrs M$VC at $700. How many M$VC's can you get at no cost for free software distribution? Is the difference in price worth the platform you will have to force on your customers? No version of Windows has ever worked as well as any Linux distribution I've used.
Embedded Linux from a reputable RT vendor is $25,000 per 5 seats per year. We needed only 3 seats. We had to buy 5 nevertheless. The support was bad. We will go for VxWorks or WinCE in our next product. Once again, why don't you just write free software and what do think your users will think of WinCE?
Red Hat Linux WS is $299. An OEM version of Windows XP Pro is ~$140. But Debian costs nothing and I never run into bugs. Fedora and a host of others are also available at no cost, why would you ever pay $140 for a Windoze seat?
A Cygwin commercial license will cost tens of thousands of dollars and is only available for large shops. We need 5 seats. Windows Unix services are free. Ugh, why not just sell your customer a box that is *nix, like GE and other big equipment makers are doing? Once again, consider your user's experience and the cost of "supporting" all of their calls back to you when M$ does something else nasty to Unix Services.
The cheapest place to be is free. You are going to have "bugs" wherever you go but there are fewer in the free world and you might be able to fix them.
The reports says itself that you have to be root to exploit it. It's already game-over. Yes, look for these sorts of things and find them but it's hardly worth the shock-factor of "Massive Hole Found In Linux" panic headlines.
This will make you think twice before installing non free software on your nice free system. You should already think twice about it because of all the advantages free software has, but every now and then you run into a device driver or game you want. If the computer is just a toy anyway, it does not matter, but it the computer is what you use for email, records keeping and research you should be careful. Anything you have to install as root that you or a package maintainer can't inspect should be assumed bad for security. Yeah, I know, you were in trouble before this little "exploit" but it's good to reamember why you should worry in the first place.
To get around the device problem, I do a little research up front and take it back if things don't work out. I refuse to torture myself with things like ndis wrappers to run a network card when there lots of others that work out of the box. Few non free programs besides accelerated graphics drivers have given me anything worth while.
Why didn't he just read Slashdot? Faster, cheaper, and probably holds the core user/developer base that would have the most to say on the subject of Microsoft software. Face it: even the most virulent criticism of MS here would contain enough useful information that if Gates & Co. actually paid attention, they'd find innumerable ideas for improving their wares. And all for free.
Slashdot is useless to them because people here realize that there is no way M$ can fix itself. Their strategy of buying "mature" software, marketing it loudly and destroying all "competition" ran out of steam ten years ago. Before it, the NDA, non free way ran out of steam back in the 80s, as explained here. If M$ did not represent a significant public harm, it would all be comical. Instead, a court proved monopoly that sues public schools has the advocacy of your federal government.
We can be sure they are following their 1998 Halloween document plan to disrupt the free software community by astroturfing Slashdot. Their goals would be to bury useful information in garbage and make reading and posting an consistently unpleasant experience.
I've seen a lot of attention from you too, dedazo and expect more now after outing your other sock puppet accounts. Eight of your last eleven posts have been dedicated to harassing twitter. Don't you have anything better to do?
All with the same talking points and language as the other troll accounts. Fuck off.
Is anyone else thinking 'gee, maybe contacting people who are writing that they hate Microsoft aren't exactly feeling BETTER that they got contacted about it too?' Just remember, Big Brother IS watching and is scouring the net for you - whew, I'm glad they cleared that up to make me feel better!
If only they would confine their bullshit to their own blogs. They are famous for astroturfing other sites too. One of the earliest recorded attacks is Steve Barkto against OS/2. A famous and court proved case is the attack on DRDOS, where they made sure Win3.1 would not run on DRDOS and then spammed compuserve message groups with posts that blamed DRDOS. The pattern is repeated again and again with various permutations. Hiring a firm to fake letters to Congress, the Apple Switcher, and so on and so forth.
Of course their apologists swarm here too. There's always someone out there promoting M$ junk as "teh best evar" and we can be sure they are using every available trick to game Slashdot's moderation system. While I can't be sure some M$ PR firm is behind it, I am sure that there's at least one person dedicating a significant amount of their life harassing me personally. Here are just a few of the accounts they have set up or purchased:
Thier effort goes beyond the usual fanboy stuff. For about a year the attacks have been personal and nasty, as all Microsoft's name calling generally is. They even took the attack to my local LUG, which promptly dismissed their efforts. All this over a Slashdot user? Clearly, Microsoft is running scared.
Bruce Perens warned us the attack would come. As they noted in their 1998 Halloween document, free software is not a company they can destroy, it's a community they must destroy. How else can they do that but massively spam every free software group in existence?
Some silly troll pointed out:
Theres about 200 million computers sold each year nowadays
As if that would make any difference. How many years did it take XP to cross the 50% line? Five years on it's barely crossed 80% of the Windoze market share. IDC estimates there are only 400,000,000 XP users today. [wikipedia.org] Each new version of Windoze has taken longer to penetrate because each has been that much more outrageously bloated than it's predecessor. If nothing else has changed, it will be shocking to see so many Vista users in two years.
Changes make their target even less likely. M$'s established users have had enough of the upgrade train. 95 to 98 was bad, 98 to XP was worse and XP to Vista is freaking impossible. You can only fool people so many times and they have plenty of options now. Free alternatives are not only good enough, they are better in many ways. Even if you don't want to go free, you can go Mac and not spend as much as Vista will require. Worse for M$, a large portion of the new computer market is going to come from Europe and the developing world and free software enjoys tremendous advantages there. M$'s language support can't hold a candle to free software even where people have the money to be owned by a US company. Where people don't really have money to waste on basic operating software, free software rules. M$'s growth potential is strictly limited and their user base will collapse soon after Vista flops. The monopoly is based on lies which will vanish in two years.
It's all downhill for M$ now. Most people realize the M$ monopoly is in trouble. It's supposed strength is not going to sell Zune, which will be yet another failure of theirs to own the entertainment market. That failure is another punch to the M$ monopoly myth. It can't happen soon enough.
that's why our ballots are not connected to any kind of network during voting hours
They don't have to be to give faulty results.
and they have several physical security measures as well, like tamper proof locks, seals and intusion sensors.
Those kinds of measures have been easily defeated.
if those are violated before vote counting begins, the ballot and all it's votes are voided.
That's all it takes, sometimes, to throw an election.
large parts of it are offered in source code form.
Microsoft's Shared source initiative is not free software and won't help anyone improve anything. First, you don't have all of the source, so the Trojan is still hidden. Second, you can't modify it and share your changes. The first problem negates the freedom you would have if distribution was unrestricted anyway. The "customizations" they are so proud of, therefore, are no better for security than changing the wallpaper on your desktop.
The results are typical of M$ junk. "ActiveSync, TCP/IP and 802.11b Wireless Vulnerabilities of WinCE", "The exploit is triggered by viewing the malicious MMS message", " FrSIRT Security Advisories - Citrix Program Neighborhood Agent ... Note : In order to exploit these vulnerabilities the Program Neighborhood ..", and so on and so forth.
I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).
Yes, bullies like to laugh, so I think it's time to hurt those feelings you are talking about. The behavior is anti-competitive, regardless of what acronyms and double talk you use to describe it. Unless the cable company offers me the same bandwith deal for other "data" as they offer me for their own "service" they are abusing their network in an anti-competitive way. The use of a second modem is entirely superfluous when they could just change the bandwith crimp. If they are discriminating on packets, they have broken net neutrality directly and must be willing to pay the fines associated. Those fines should be jacked up to prevent this obviously anti-social behavior which will leave us all with fewer service provideres and poorer service.
all the intelectual property developed by the 3 companies was transfered to the union. ... they can choose to hire other comapnies to manufacture the units in the future if they son choose.
That's nice but your software is not the problem, using Wince is. People have shown how easy it is to physically break into Dibold systems, but that would not matter if there was decent code auditing in place. Your chances of getting that to work with WinCE are about as good as Dibold's. Bill Gates will have something to say about the ownership of WinCE and how it works, so it might be easier to start from scratch than transfer your source code out of that black hole. The ease of hacking into WinCE is another giant problem you won't have with other software. You can only trust a system as much as you can trust it's weakest part, regardless of what company builds the rest. The effort required to secure WinCE would be like rewriting the OS. It would be easier to start your code from scratch with an OS that works.
So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
Industrial recovery is not possible while we trade with non free China and your government/corporate masters have you screwed out for RD too.
GE, Microsoft and others have already started moving their research offshore. I'm talking about basic industrial research, like turbine design. "First World" Physics, no longer viable, so forget it. Brains are cheaper, and theoretically free, in Russia and India. The situation is worse in China, where people really are not free.
Our trade was supposed to set the Chinese free, but it's working the other way around. It's just business, right?, and China is just another big company. Not quite. Our big dumb companies might have you by the balls, read your email, and sell it all to big brother, but they can't put you in jail yet. That will take another dissaster like NorthWoods so that everyone is really paranoid and ready for rationing and a WW2 style command economy.
The only way out is lots of wealth creation to raise everyone's standard of living, but it's not happening. With all the mergers, wealth will continue to move to the already very rich owners of those companies. The mergers are the ultimate result of government favoritism of large companies. IT was supposed to be the poster child of new competition and robust US Performance. It has not happened because incumbent companies were allowed to crush new comers, so that "just enough" competition would be left. Now, we all sit under the M$ monopoly, two big media companies, two "broadband" companies, one electric company and a merged OPEC/ExxonMobileRoyalDoubleDutchFuck and wonder where the jobs are and why service sucks. If we can't help ourselves, we will never be able to help anyone else.
Eventually, this will get the rich too. A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level. When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China, kind of like the great Royal Fuck Festival that was the first World War.