Re:The same old bad deal. Non free sucks.
on
UnBox Calls Home, A Lot
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· Score: 1, Interesting
If I'm to distribute my GPL'd app, you better believe it absolutely has to include the source code. And, if anyone wants to use it for their own purposes, their works have to be covered by the same license. And I have to include an obvious copy of the GPL license.
Yes, if you distribute someone else's software you have to pass on the same rights you received. That has nothing to do with your own software, for which you can use whatever license you please. If you want to distribute modified GPL'd software, you do have to make the license and source code, in the form that works for you, available. That's not a really big deal now is it? Of course you can use and modify GPL'd software for your own purposes without any restrictions whatsoever. It's only when you make a copy that the restrictions come into play because the authors don't want you to abuse other people with their work. That all seems fair to me. After all, I'd hate for some dork like Bill Gates to use my software to make money and prop up his little Windoze empire.
... Sony's hardware is basically just a 360 with blue ray bolted on and a cheap imitation of the Wii controller.
Sorry, the PS3 specs blow xbox away if the two pages I just read are current. PS3 has twice the floating point performance xbox 360 does
, not to mention a spec page with real specs. All the hype and bullshit on the xbox page makes my head hurt. Similarly, the software Xbox runs has a tendency to make computers hurt whereas what PS3 is leveraging is know to be clean. Sony's DRM might crap it up, but at least they are starting with something that works. I expect Xbox to be as buggy as any other Windoze box.
I noticed that the Amazon player had launched itself. Annoying. I looked in the program for a preference to stop it from launching itself, and there was none. Typical. So I went to msconfig and unchecked Amazon Unbox so that it would definitely not launch itself at start-up. When I rebooted, it was no longer there. However, my firewall warned me that a Windows service (ADVWindowsClientService.exe) was trying to connect to the Net. I clicked More Info in the firewall alert and found it was Amazon Unbox.
As a Debian user, all of the above is so much meaningless mumbo jumbo to me, but the details are unimportant. It did not do what he wanted it to do despite great effort. He finally figured out that it would pretend to uninstall itself if he allowed the still loaded client unrestricted access to the internet. Without a system audit from an independent operating system, there's no telling if it finally did what he wanted but ultimately the service failed him: this is not a good way to watch movies.
It's crap like that that keeps me away from non free software and non free media. I'm not going to give up control of the machine that gives me my mail and news just to hear a song or watch a movie. It's bad enough that the greed heads force me to watch adverts on rented movies when I play them through a set top box, bad enough for me to one day build a mythTV box. But install spyware on my normal computer or gateway? You have to be kidding.
Amazon is clearly catering to a single party -- motion picture copyright holders.
It's intersting that someone with the nick name, "gnu-sucks" would complain about non free software problems. Yes, the "single party" in this case is the MPA. In other cases it's M$ or the highest bidder. That's the way non most non free software works. It's non free because the author wants you to do as they say in one way or another. As lots of companies, such as IBM, have been making lots of money selling and servicing free software, you can't say the "do as I say" is about paying for development anymore. Amazon is offering the usual non-free media deal: In order to enjoy popular culture, you must surrender control of your computer. Use of WMP and Windoze DRM just makes the deal suck that much worse because WMP is buggy.
People selling DRM crippled junk are going to go out of business sooner or later.
You're living in the past. The distant past. My XP box goes into hibernation in about six seconds. I move the mouse, and it's up and running in about 15 seconds, most of which is spent waiting for the BIOS to come up.
Sure, my desktops are old but I did ask around for an update eight months ago, and I see the sufferings of my Windoze using peers every day. The update was usefull and I'm going to look into software suspend one day. The Windoze users are out of luck from what I can tell. That is amazing because M$ had a promenant hand in developing the lack of standards "standard" for both APM and APCI, and because M$ enjoys such great vendor support.
There's not much I can do for my Windoze using peers. My major professor tells me he does not use hibernation because apps like M$ Word fail on resume. None of my peers with "Designed for Windows" laptops uses suspend or hibernation and you are the first person who's ever told me they use it on their desktop. Hibernation has been so useful on my laptop that I can only imagine that the reason Windoze users don't use it is because it does not work. I imagine that they run into application level problems, like as described or that the OS itself is flaky and simply can't stay up for extended periods without a loss of work. Your claim is very unusual.
Ok, seriously now that you are used to XP would you really go back to 98?
I recommend that people get the benefits of Vista by upgrading to free software. Still, I prefer 98 to XP and respect people who are still running it. As usual, it's a matter of control. XP sucks and Vista is going to be worse. The features that people actually want are available in free software.
I still have windoze 98 somewhere myself. I keep it just in case there's some kind of DOS thing that has to be done with hardware. Because I've been careful with my hardware, I have not had to boot that partition in more than three years. I would not trade it for a version that has to be registered on line, pops up all sorts of Bob style messages and is generally obnoxious without real security improvement.
Various versions of debian deal with newer hardware just fine. Again, it takes some care. When things don't work, I send them back and say why, "It does not work with my computer."
I have an alternate explanation. The people saying this are Linux-users who haven't even LOOKED at Windows in years and years, and yet somehow think that Windows never changes.
I wish that M$ had vanished without a trace back in 1995, but sadly normal people are surrounded by them. By most M$'s own gloating, they dominate the home and business markets. M$ is still able to bully the big vendors, most people still pay a $70 windoze tax when they pay for a new computer and don't bother to replace what they get. Even at Universities, less than 20% of the people I meet have free software. I see them boot their laptops everyday, and you can't go to a public place without hearing the obnoxious start up noise every five minutes or so. Worse is all the work arounds you have to get up to to work with them. They don't have sftp and you would not want to give them a password anyway, so file exchange is by usb fob. Then you have to fire up that Open Office pig. No, we are all aware of M$'s flaws and limitations from personal experience, even if we don't run the crap.
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Oh yeah, there's always someone claiming "solid" system stability for Windoze. Keep telling yourself that and I'll keep using the perfectly good computers folks like you throw away. Putting any distribution of GNU/Linux on the thing magically fixes 90% of the problems, which is amazing given how sorry home electronics really are. Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
And that's on a laptop that IS faulty. I bought it used and crucial structural members had failed, so it flexes if you carry it around much but it works great as a desktop replacement. Laptops stay up longer because they are not dependent on the power grid, which is the limiting factor in most of my uptime.
Everyone I know who runs any version of M$ has routine crashes and crapouts, despite rebooting daily. There's about zero chance that all of their hardware is faulty. There's about the same chance that you really have that kind of system stability.
When M$ first marketed w2k and XP, they flooded the world with bullshit about how it was based on NT and therefore "stable". It was a lie then and it's a lie now that they have funked it all up with six years worth of DRM add-ons.
Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
Running Windoze is like living in an unfinished mansion in a war zone. It looks roomy and fancy on the outside, but you will spend all of your time cramped into the poorly built basement bomb shelter.
That's how I feel when I'm squeezed into that ugly, single screen monstrosity. There are so many utilities and tools missing that I don't see why anyone bothers to add them. To use your analogy, if there is a single thing Windoze does, it's users then waste all of their time building something comfortable around that snazzy garage door opener.
I doubt that having to wait a little longer will negatively impact anyone. After all, how many companies rush out and buy the latest OS in the month that it is released? I see potential problems for OEMs, but the average company waits for patches and better stability before adoption.
Are aware of the expensive code assurance programs M$ sold a few year back? Promissing to release all sorts of feature filled improvements in the near future since 2002, M$ suckered lots of big companies into buying software that had yet to be written instead of going for less expensive options that were available at the time. Vista has taken six years and has dropped most of the new features. Compared to free software, Vista is feature poor.
Is it me, or is this just yet another example of MS abusing their monopoly? I see the logic, but can't understand the justification for this argument -- MS shouldn't have to comply with anti-monopoly regulations because any delay will hurt European businesses due to MS's monopoly?
Yes, the ultimate harm of monopoly is exclusion. Competitors are not allowed to offer better goods and services and the monopolist is able to deny service to any they please.
This time, it's pure bullshit and won't work. No business that waits for Vista will be at a competitive disavantage. It's the businesses that adopt yet another secret format for communications that will have problems. It is incredible that M$ tries to spin abuse of formats into some kind of advantage. It took years for XP to gain any significant business presence and to this day, many if not most businesses use w2k. Sensible companies store their publications in PDF that can come from any source. We've all been through this song and dance before and most are sick of it. The massive inefficiency of the M$ upgrade train is the motivator for mass migration. Vista is going to flop when people see that it's only feature is buggy access to ancient non free music and movies. Superior alternatives exist and have been adopted by many, such as Lowes, IBM, Chrysler and countless small businesses and individuals. The Microsoft monopoly is cracked and will soon shatter.
I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
Google? What about Wikipedia? The mind spins at all of the things he might also include on the "bad list" until you realize that the "good list" is going to include nothing more than a few carefully selected M$ applications and Encarta. Microsoft hates everyone.
Graduation was expensively assured in two years but it will probably take six or so. The graduates will have minor, mostly cosmetic, improvements and be as reliable and trustworthy as any other Microsoft release. Some students, like Bob, will never make it.
Attempts to dominate gaming will produce a few interesting plays but will ultimately be an expensive distraction.
One of the many M$ troll accounts that cloud around here challenged me to produce references to M$'s infamous Windoze source code national security claim swiftly followed by sale of said code to China and Russia. Of course, I'd love to trot that whole mess out again. Non free software exists on trust alone and M$'s performance there really shows what contempt they have for the US Government and their customers.The memory hole has not yet extinguished the information presented by eweek and Microsoft themselves. You can read it all yourself.
From eWeek, 2002:
"A senior Microsoft Corp. [Jim Allchin's] executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
If you need to, you can always reference the anti-trust evidence, which is still published and available. The quotes in the article are more than enough for me.
A quick Google Search digs up all the articles here and a parade of Wintel rags falling over themselves to toe the party line. ZDNet echos Alchin again in 2004, a year after they had already sold out! Something called Neowin joins the chorus of woe that someone might look at the source code to W2k or NT4 and see how crappy it is. All as if any real hacker needed it.
The very next year, 2003, M$ announced sale to the highest bidding governments as noted above. Included was China and other friendly countries. But you know, Bill Gates it's just business buddies being chummy. Microsoft would never place the interests of Communist dictators over the rights and well being of their fellow citizens, would they?
The double talk going on at M$ was glaring and all of was bullshit. Access to the OpenBSD source code has not made OpenBSD less secure, it's made it better. The whole episode represented more perjury and a three year FUD attack on free software than it did treason, but you have to wonder what they really believe. Looking back, it's a low point in US corporate history that will only be made worse when they unravel like Enron did. The biggest lie of all is that the Microsoft Monopoly is based on anything more than mass delusion.
I ask you once again, do you trust Microsoft to do as they say? With your business? Code so crappy, it can't be shared but is shared with your worst enemies. If you do, you probably will tell me that Windows XP is easy to install, has good uptimes and other nonsense like that. I'm not sure anyone really believes anything other than Windoze is "good enough because I'm using it for one or two specific tasks." No, that's not good enough and Vista's imminent flop is a good chance to move on to something better. The market is filled with better contenders and M$ will not be missed.
What part of BULLSHIT don't you understand? I want to know how, exactly, you two fucked up a Windows XP SP2 install enough to require 16 reboots to patch up. It's about fucking time you provided some proof to back up the shit you spew every day.
What I don't understand is how I can tell you the truth over and over and you don't want to listen. How did he screw it up? He followed the directions. I trust that he did as he said and was competent enough because the monstrosity ran as well as I've ever seen it run.
I had nothing to do with the install, of course, and can't really tell you more than what he told me. I say, "Friends don't help friends install M$" and I mean it. The Ubuntu install I am helping someone with, worked out a lot easier.
was it Service Pack 2? If so, I call bullshit. Ain't no way you need that many reboots to bring an SP2 install up to the latest patch level, unless you're deliberately installing patches one-at-a-time with reboots in between.
It was and that's how Windoze guided him through it. Believe me, he did not like it.
I call bullshit either way, because anyone with a clue about Windows administration knows that you install Service Packs before individual patches.
It sounds like you are calling bullshit for the same reason. The user was not a moron, except for his decision to install XP. He read the instructions and clicked accordingly. What more clue is there than that? Is that the great "Microsoft support" I keep hearing about? The instructions waste your time and the fanboys call you are a moron? Great.
So much for the ease of use of M$. I'd say that install was far worse than any GNU/Linux install I've ever done and that includes Potato on 75 MHz Pentiums.
Yes, because clearly the video from my webcam is DRM'd... Give me a break.
Not yet, but components of directX enforce DRM. In order for DRM to work, all of the players have to co-operate. What if Adobe's software screwed up screen blanking while you were playing movies? DLL hell is going to be worse than ever.
You have taken on faith that M$ puts into patches what they say they put into patches. During the anti-trust trial, M$ swore that divulging the source code to Windoze would create a national security risk. Imagine that, they were hysterical before 911 but still have one of the easiest to crack OS's in the world. Next thing you know, they are selling the same source code to China and the former KGB. Now you trust them to not sneak in anything they please onto your system? Why? Isn't it part of their EULA that they can change any part of their OS on your computer with or without your consent?
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal.... All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS.... What am I doing wrong??
You are lying or you don't know when the thing reboots. If you are telling the truth you missed a year's worth of "critical" updates which required reboots. Given the rate of exploitation of those and other flaws, your little XP box has probably been rebooted several times over by other people who want to clean out the cruft you leave running.
About the only thing you said that's true is the bit about DOS being more stable than any M$ OS released after. The funny thing is that with each release M$ claims the new version of Windoze is more stable than the last. If that's true, DOS had 0 days of uptime. Of course, that's not true just like it's not true that M$ has improved stability with any release. It's all been buggy junk that's gotten worse as they continue to buy and kludge new parts onto it without ever really integrating any of it. They do not and never will have the resources to fix the problems the way the free software people can.
I find that 99% of things that ask for a reboot don't really need it, even in XP. I mean, I plugin my webcam, the drivers install, and it asks me to reboot, when I can bloody well see that the camera is working! Why?...
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
Last week a classmate of mine installed XP and it made him reboot -=16=- times because of all the "patches" required. He started from a brand new CD on a brand new laptop. A live CD would be a good move for M$, but a net install is the best because CDs get old fast. I thought that the five or six reboots required by Win98 and W2K was bad. I've never seen a stable distribution of GNU/Linux that needed more than one reboot on install.
Then you should've been fired from your job, cause you were doing something wrong. I work for an oil company,
Bullshit. IT is supposed to work for me, not the other way around. I never did anything to my computer but I should have been able to do whatever I could. Blaming the user for using their machine is a pretty sorry excuse for softare that simply does not do what it should. Given your attitude, the only kind of oil your company sells comes from snakes. In my brief stay at Murphy Exploration, I mostly saw Unix workstations for that kind of work.
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If I'm to distribute my GPL'd app, you better believe it absolutely has to include the source code. And, if anyone wants to use it for their own purposes, their works have to be covered by the same license. And I have to include an obvious copy of the GPL license.
Yes, if you distribute someone else's software you have to pass on the same rights you received. That has nothing to do with your own software, for which you can use whatever license you please. If you want to distribute modified GPL'd software, you do have to make the license and source code, in the form that works for you, available. That's not a really big deal now is it? Of course you can use and modify GPL'd software for your own purposes without any restrictions whatsoever. It's only when you make a copy that the restrictions come into play because the authors don't want you to abuse other people with their work. That all seems fair to me. After all, I'd hate for some dork like Bill Gates to use my software to make money and prop up his little Windoze empire.
Sorry, the PS3 specs blow xbox away if the two pages I just read are current. PS3 has twice the floating point performance xbox 360 does
, not to mention a spec page with real specs. All the hype and bullshit on the xbox page makes my head hurt. Similarly, the software Xbox runs has a tendency to make computers hurt whereas what PS3 is leveraging is know to be clean. Sony's DRM might crap it up, but at least they are starting with something that works. I expect Xbox to be as buggy as any other Windoze box.From the Fine Article:
I noticed that the Amazon player had launched itself. Annoying. I looked in the program for a preference to stop it from launching itself, and there was none. Typical. So I went to msconfig and unchecked Amazon Unbox so that it would definitely not launch itself at start-up. When I rebooted, it was no longer there. However, my firewall warned me that a Windows service (ADVWindowsClientService.exe) was trying to connect to the Net. I clicked More Info in the firewall alert and found it was Amazon Unbox.
As a Debian user, all of the above is so much meaningless mumbo jumbo to me, but the details are unimportant. It did not do what he wanted it to do despite great effort. He finally figured out that it would pretend to uninstall itself if he allowed the still loaded client unrestricted access to the internet. Without a system audit from an independent operating system, there's no telling if it finally did what he wanted but ultimately the service failed him: this is not a good way to watch movies.
It's crap like that that keeps me away from non free software and non free media. I'm not going to give up control of the machine that gives me my mail and news just to hear a song or watch a movie. It's bad enough that the greed heads force me to watch adverts on rented movies when I play them through a set top box, bad enough for me to one day build a mythTV box. But install spyware on my normal computer or gateway? You have to be kidding.
Amazon is clearly catering to a single party -- motion picture copyright holders.
It's intersting that someone with the nick name, "gnu-sucks" would complain about non free software problems. Yes, the "single party" in this case is the MPA. In other cases it's M$ or the highest bidder. That's the way non most non free software works. It's non free because the author wants you to do as they say in one way or another. As lots of companies, such as IBM, have been making lots of money selling and servicing free software, you can't say the "do as I say" is about paying for development anymore. Amazon is offering the usual non-free media deal: In order to enjoy popular culture, you must surrender control of your computer. Use of WMP and Windoze DRM just makes the deal suck that much worse because WMP is buggy.
People selling DRM crippled junk are going to go out of business sooner or later.
You're living in the past. The distant past. My XP box goes into hibernation in about six seconds. I move the mouse, and it's up and running in about 15 seconds, most of which is spent waiting for the BIOS to come up.
Sure, my desktops are old but I did ask around for an update eight months ago, and I see the sufferings of my Windoze using peers every day. The update was usefull and I'm going to look into software suspend one day. The Windoze users are out of luck from what I can tell. That is amazing because M$ had a promenant hand in developing the lack of standards "standard" for both APM and APCI, and because M$ enjoys such great vendor support.
There's not much I can do for my Windoze using peers. My major professor tells me he does not use hibernation because apps like M$ Word fail on resume. None of my peers with "Designed for Windows" laptops uses suspend or hibernation and you are the first person who's ever told me they use it on their desktop. Hibernation has been so useful on my laptop that I can only imagine that the reason Windoze users don't use it is because it does not work. I imagine that they run into application level problems, like as described or that the OS itself is flaky and simply can't stay up for extended periods without a loss of work. Your claim is very unusual.
Ok, seriously now that you are used to XP would you really go back to 98?
I recommend that people get the benefits of Vista by upgrading to free software. Still, I prefer 98 to XP and respect people who are still running it. As usual, it's a matter of control. XP sucks and Vista is going to be worse. The features that people actually want are available in free software.
I still have windoze 98 somewhere myself. I keep it just in case there's some kind of DOS thing that has to be done with hardware. Because I've been careful with my hardware, I have not had to boot that partition in more than three years. I would not trade it for a version that has to be registered on line, pops up all sorts of Bob style messages and is generally obnoxious without real security improvement.
Various versions of debian deal with newer hardware just fine. Again, it takes some care. When things don't work, I send them back and say why, "It does not work with my computer."
I have an alternate explanation. The people saying this are Linux-users who haven't even LOOKED at Windows in years and years, and yet somehow think that Windows never changes.
I wish that M$ had vanished without a trace back in 1995, but sadly normal people are surrounded by them. By most M$'s own gloating, they dominate the home and business markets. M$ is still able to bully the big vendors, most people still pay a $70 windoze tax when they pay for a new computer and don't bother to replace what they get. Even at Universities, less than 20% of the people I meet have free software. I see them boot their laptops everyday, and you can't go to a public place without hearing the obnoxious start up noise every five minutes or so. Worse is all the work arounds you have to get up to to work with them. They don't have sftp and you would not want to give them a password anyway, so file exchange is by usb fob. Then you have to fire up that Open Office pig. No, we are all aware of M$'s flaws and limitations from personal experience, even if we don't run the crap.
Those who claim XP is unstable are nothing more than trolls, or are running it on faulty hardware.
Oh yeah, there's always someone claiming "solid" system stability for Windoze. Keep telling yourself that and I'll keep using the perfectly good computers folks like you throw away. Putting any distribution of GNU/Linux on the thing magically fixes 90% of the problems, which is amazing given how sorry home electronics really are. Let me know when your little XP box can do something like this:
twitter@gift:~$ uptime
08:37:14 up 71 days, 16:53, 6 users, load average: 0.28, 0.50, 0.38
twitter@gift:~$
And that's on a laptop that IS faulty. I bought it used and crucial structural members had failed, so it flexes if you carry it around much but it works great as a desktop replacement. Laptops stay up longer because they are not dependent on the power grid, which is the limiting factor in most of my uptime.
Everyone I know who runs any version of M$ has routine crashes and crapouts, despite rebooting daily. There's about zero chance that all of their hardware is faulty. There's about the same chance that you really have that kind of system stability.
When M$ first marketed w2k and XP, they flooded the world with bullshit about how it was based on NT and therefore "stable". It was a lie then and it's a lie now that they have funked it all up with six years worth of DRM add-ons.
Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
Running Windoze is like living in an unfinished mansion in a war zone. It looks roomy and fancy on the outside, but you will spend all of your time cramped into the poorly built basement bomb shelter.
That's how I feel when I'm squeezed into that ugly, single screen monstrosity. There are so many utilities and tools missing that I don't see why anyone bothers to add them. To use your analogy, if there is a single thing Windoze does, it's users then waste all of their time building something comfortable around that snazzy garage door opener.
Are aware of the expensive code assurance programs M$ sold a few year back? Promissing to release all sorts of feature filled improvements in the near future since 2002, M$ suckered lots of big companies into buying software that had yet to be written instead of going for less expensive options that were available at the time. Vista has taken six years and has dropped most of the new features. Compared to free software, Vista is feature poor.
Is it me, or is this just yet another example of MS abusing their monopoly? I see the logic, but can't understand the justification for this argument -- MS shouldn't have to comply with anti-monopoly regulations because any delay will hurt European businesses due to MS's monopoly?
Yes, the ultimate harm of monopoly is exclusion. Competitors are not allowed to offer better goods and services and the monopolist is able to deny service to any they please.
This time, it's pure bullshit and won't work. No business that waits for Vista will be at a competitive disavantage. It's the businesses that adopt yet another secret format for communications that will have problems. It is incredible that M$ tries to spin abuse of formats into some kind of advantage. It took years for XP to gain any significant business presence and to this day, many if not most businesses use w2k. Sensible companies store their publications in PDF that can come from any source. We've all been through this song and dance before and most are sick of it. The massive inefficiency of the M$ upgrade train is the motivator for mass migration. Vista is going to flop when people see that it's only feature is buggy access to ancient non free music and movies. Superior alternatives exist and have been adopted by many, such as Lowes, IBM, Chrysler and countless small businesses and individuals. The Microsoft monopoly is cracked and will soon shatter.
Isn't that how a lot of us got our surnames anyway?
Yes, many people in the US are named after the people who owned their ancestors. Most people do not want to resurrect the practice.
Don't forget the Steve Ballmer music appreciation and research course
:I've got my kids brainwashed: You don't use Google, and you don't use an iPod.
Google? What about Wikipedia? The mind spins at all of the things he might also include on the "bad list" until you realize that the "good list" is going to include nothing more than a few carefully selected M$ applications and Encarta. Microsoft hates everyone.
Do they have deadlines on assignments?
Graduation was expensively assured in two years but it will probably take six or so. The graduates will have minor, mostly cosmetic, improvements and be as reliable and trustworthy as any other Microsoft release. Some students, like Bob, will never make it.
Attempts to dominate gaming will produce a few interesting plays but will ultimately be an expensive distraction.
He seems important. I've got no fewer than nine business cards from him, all different.
One of the many M$ troll accounts that cloud around here challenged me to produce references to M$'s infamous Windoze source code national security claim swiftly followed by sale of said code to China and Russia. Of course, I'd love to trot that whole mess out again. Non free software exists on trust alone and M$'s performance there really shows what contempt they have for the US Government and their customers.The memory hole has not yet extinguished the information presented by eweek and Microsoft themselves. You can read it all yourself.
From eWeek, 2002:
If you need to, you can always reference the anti-trust evidence, which is still published and available. The quotes in the article are more than enough for me.
A quick Google Search digs up all the articles here and a parade of Wintel rags falling over themselves to toe the party line. ZDNet echos Alchin again in 2004, a year after they had already sold out! Something called Neowin joins the chorus of woe that someone might look at the source code to W2k or NT4 and see how crappy it is. All as if any real hacker needed it.
The very next year, 2003, M$ announced sale to the highest bidding governments as noted above. Included was China and other friendly countries. But you know, Bill Gates it's just business buddies being chummy. Microsoft would never place the interests of Communist dictators over the rights and well being of their fellow citizens, would they?
The double talk going on at M$ was glaring and all of was bullshit. Access to the OpenBSD source code has not made OpenBSD less secure, it's made it better. The whole episode represented more perjury and a three year FUD attack on free software than it did treason, but you have to wonder what they really believe. Looking back, it's a low point in US corporate history that will only be made worse when they unravel like Enron did. The biggest lie of all is that the Microsoft Monopoly is based on anything more than mass delusion.
I ask you once again, do you trust Microsoft to do as they say? With your business? Code so crappy, it can't be shared but is shared with your worst enemies. If you do, you probably will tell me that Windows XP is easy to install, has good uptimes and other nonsense like that. I'm not sure anyone really believes anything other than Windoze is "good enough because I'm using it for one or two specific tasks." No, that's not good enough and Vista's imminent flop is a good chance to move on to something better. The market is filled with better contenders and M$ will not be missed.
What part of BULLSHIT don't you understand? I want to know how, exactly, you two fucked up a Windows XP SP2 install enough to require 16 reboots to patch up. It's about fucking time you provided some proof to back up the shit you spew every day.
What I don't understand is how I can tell you the truth over and over and you don't want to listen. How did he screw it up? He followed the directions. I trust that he did as he said and was competent enough because the monstrosity ran as well as I've ever seen it run.
I had nothing to do with the install, of course, and can't really tell you more than what he told me. I say, "Friends don't help friends install M$" and I mean it. The Ubuntu install I am helping someone with, worked out a lot easier.
was it Service Pack 2? If so, I call bullshit. Ain't no way you need that many reboots to bring an SP2 install up to the latest patch level, unless you're deliberately installing patches one-at-a-time with reboots in between.
It was and that's how Windoze guided him through it. Believe me, he did not like it.
I call bullshit either way, because anyone with a clue about Windows administration knows that you install Service Packs before individual patches.
It sounds like you are calling bullshit for the same reason. The user was not a moron, except for his decision to install XP. He read the instructions and clicked accordingly. What more clue is there than that? Is that the great "Microsoft support" I keep hearing about? The instructions waste your time and the fanboys call you are a moron? Great.
So much for the ease of use of M$. I'd say that install was far worse than any GNU/Linux install I've ever done and that includes Potato on 75 MHz Pentiums.
Not yet, but components of directX enforce DRM. In order for DRM to work, all of the players have to co-operate. What if Adobe's software screwed up screen blanking while you were playing movies? DLL hell is going to be worse than ever.
You have taken on faith that M$ puts into patches what they say they put into patches. During the anti-trust trial, M$ swore that divulging the source code to Windoze would create a national security risk. Imagine that, they were hysterical before 911 but still have one of the easiest to crack OS's in the world. Next thing you know, they are selling the same source code to China and the former KGB. Now you trust them to not sneak in anything they please onto your system? Why? Isn't it part of their EULA that they can change any part of their OS on your computer with or without your consent?
Okay... my little XP box, a lowly P3-500 built mostly from salvage, has an uptime record of 350 days (which only ended when it did because of being powered down during a lightning storm). It thinks this is normal. ... All small potatoes next to my old DOS6 machine, which got restarted just twice -- in a span of 5 YEARS. ... What am I doing wrong??
You are lying or you don't know when the thing reboots. If you are telling the truth you missed a year's worth of "critical" updates which required reboots. Given the rate of exploitation of those and other flaws, your little XP box has probably been rebooted several times over by other people who want to clean out the cruft you leave running.
About the only thing you said that's true is the bit about DOS being more stable than any M$ OS released after. The funny thing is that with each release M$ claims the new version of Windoze is more stable than the last. If that's true, DOS had 0 days of uptime. Of course, that's not true just like it's not true that M$ has improved stability with any release. It's all been buggy junk that's gotten worse as they continue to buy and kludge new parts onto it without ever really integrating any of it. They do not and never will have the resources to fix the problems the way the free software people can.
I find that 99% of things that ask for a reboot don't really need it, even in XP. I mean, I plugin my webcam, the drivers install, and it asks me to reboot, when I can bloody well see that the camera is working! Why? ...
DRM?
Things are getting better on the "install == reboot" assumption front.
Last week a classmate of mine installed XP and it made him reboot -=16=- times because of all the "patches" required. He started from a brand new CD on a brand new laptop. A live CD would be a good move for M$, but a net install is the best because CDs get old fast. I thought that the five or six reboots required by Win98 and W2K was bad. I've never seen a stable distribution of GNU/Linux that needed more than one reboot on install.
Why do brief? *ponders*
Because it was a temp job, stupid.
Then you should've been fired from your job, cause you were doing something wrong. I work for an oil company,
Bullshit. IT is supposed to work for me, not the other way around. I never did anything to my computer but I should have been able to do whatever I could. Blaming the user for using their machine is a pretty sorry excuse for softare that simply does not do what it should. Given your attitude, the only kind of oil your company sells comes from snakes. In my brief stay at Murphy Exploration, I mostly saw Unix workstations for that kind of work.