Hehe - how 'bout some spell-checking to go with your arrogance? Or better yet, learn to write the language a little better so you make sense.
This is pure marketting [sic] forces coupled with monopolistic behaviour.
Define your articles, please. What exactly is "this" referring to? The DMCA? Reverse engineering? M$'s attempted Kerberos embrace-and-extend?
You're blaming the origional [sic] kerberos authors for bad behaviour actually originating from microsoft that may get accepted by the market.
Articles, please; pay attention to your articles. Is your "that" referring to the alleged bad behavior of the Kerberos authors? M$'s behavior? And where, exactly, am I casting aspersions on Kerberos developers? I'm trashing M$ for trying to hijack Kerberos. Not - let me repeat: NOT - for implementing dormant features already in the spec, but for trying to keep their enhancements proprietary.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
First, I don't hate Micro$loth. I'm typing this in IE5 while developing in Access 2000, and getting paid good money. M$ makes some authentically good products.
However, you can't deny that their "embrace and extend" tactic is one of the most predatory, if successful, business practices of the last 20 years. Sure, they're in a little hot water now, but things could still go either way. I bring them up because they're the most credible threat to Linux right now.
Secondly, I'm not talking about people who can hack code, but Joe User buying a computer. What if M$ releases M$Linux? "Reliability! Speed! And binary-only compatibility with M$ Office, IE and.NET." If they do, and it's successful, millions of people could be running Linux distros that are binary-incompatible with all current distros.
"Sorry - you can't run Apache on M$Linux, but IIS-Linux doesn't crash nearly as much as it used to."
"Sorry, Star Office has some odd crashing problems under M$Linux, but they've cut the price of Office 10 to only $500."
What's saving us from this scenario? The GPL.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Does the name "Kerberos" ring a bell? If Micro$loth can distribute Linux binaries without source, they can introduce code that breaks compatibility. And if we can't see the source, there's not much we can do. Especially under something evil like the DMCA, where we might not even be able to reverse-engineer it.
Come on - this is their stock in trade. It's how they killed DR DOS, Netscape, and Novell. It's how they'd love to kill Linux.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Yes, actually, right here is one of the best. Quote from the page:
"The Master List is the mother of all CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) charts, listing every aspect of the CSS spec and identifying how well it is supported by Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x for both Macintosh and Windows 95, and Opera 3.6 for Windows."
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
The new W3C standards - HTML4 and CSS - make support for users with different physical abilities dramatically better. Why don't you go and educate yourself a little before you look like an even bigger fool?
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx...
Ironic that you mention this. A web site well-designed with HTML4 and CSS will degrade much better to Lynx than a site marked up with lots of crap to support Netscape 4. HTML4 and CSS are very simply the separation of style and content, and that makes everyone's life easier.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Briefly, yes. HTML4, CSS and DOM have much, much greater support for users with various different physical abilities than any previous web standards. Here's [recent accessibility article on A List Apart] a good place to start.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
"Instead they keep upgrading the standards and thats whats causing these problems."
Bzzzzzzt... no, but thanks for playing. Try this - go read the HTML2.0 specification and then try to find a site that implements it WITHOUT using anything after it (HTML4, CSS, etc.). The standards are upgraded (very slowly, I might add) because there's a crying need for easier and better ways to present rich content to people over the web.
The problem is that browser manufacturers have spent the last few years vying for market control without keeping the good of the web as a whole in mind. Cascading Style Sheets has been a W3C recommendation for over 4 years (December 1996) and as yet no browser supports it 100% (although the newer ones are very close, and quite usable).
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Half the posts so far have been along the lines of, "You can't not support older browsers." No one, not even the WaSP, is saying that all sites should stop serving content to old browsers. For the link-reading impaired:
"This is radical," said Zeldman, "and not every site can participate. Yahoo and Amazon, for instance, can't afford to risk alienating a single visitor.
We recognize that many sites are in that position. Our hope is that if enough sites are willing to take the plunge, the typical 18-month user upgrade cycle will be drastically shortened, and a Web that works for all will no longer be something we just talk about: it will be every web user's experience."
If you read more about the campaign, you'll see that what the WaSP means by "not supporting" older browsers is simply using HTML4, CSS and DOM to its full potential. The worst-case scenario here is the someone using Netscape 4.7 will see content that is uglier than the designer intended, not that they won't see content at all.
And yes, JavaScript is risky as a fail-safe redirect, but that's why the WaSP-affiliated A List Apart is using a fairly elegant workaround: older browsers see all the content, minus styling, and a simple "Please upgrade" notice at the top of the page, with a handy link. Newer browsers don't see it at all - and there's no scripting involved.
This is a Good Thing, people. Jakob Nielsen has been saying for some time that we're 'Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003'. Frankly, this sucks. Using HTML4, CSS and DOM makes creating a web site that works for users and for the designers and maintainers an order of magnitude easier. No stupid nested tables, no <FONT> tags, etc.
Please, go read the damn links, then come back and contribute something meaningful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
These types of transportation devices -- small, one-person stand-up units, relatively slow, energy-efficient -- could be the future of the modern city. Look at Chinese cities - a sea of bicycles. If even 10% more of those people had cars, there'd be total chaos: the population is too dense to be able to accomodate large vehicles.
Compare this with the modern US city: cars, on average, getting bigger all the time; traffic jams getting worse. Christ, there's a whole industry in traffic jams, with news helicopters and on-board computers. Meanwhile, cities continue to get denser and populations continue to rise. There's a clear end to this: cars have to go as the primary means of inner-city transportation.
Some cities are taking steps already: Portland OR has expanded it's bike lanes over the last 15 years and they're now pretty pervasive. Other OR cities, like Salem and Eugene (college towns) have even more aggressive bike lane programs and laws. bike lanes are clear policy and popular support for smaller, more economical short-distance transportation.
What's to replace cars? Scooters, perhaps (cf. Ginger), or something similar. What are the major objections to scooters?
Safety. First, the system has to separate cars and small vehicles - they can't interact. Also, there has to be a licensing program, like for cars - we do NOT need thousands of untrained scooter riders - one fuck-up would take out a crowd. Finally, remember the dire predictions about cars? Thousands of deaths? Environmental destruction? (Well, ok, most of those seem to have come true, but why let that stop us?)
Social engineering. No, most people won't trade their V-16 Ford Luxohemoth in for a battery-powered skateboard anytime soon, but that can certainly change (look how well the US government managed people in WWII). People don't think they're as susceptible to propaganda anymore, but they're wrong. We just call it advertising now, and it works really well. I don't think this will be a real problem.
Climate. Here's the stake through the heart of this little idea. In Portland we get 36" of rain a year, and it's spread out very thinly - 5 or 6 days a week in winter are overcast and somewhat "moist." No way are people going to tool around in the open in a climate like that. So what do we need? Climate control.
Climate control. How can we get climate-controlled cities? Only in a closed, or at least roofed, environment. And the only real way to do this is with nanotechnology.
Thus, as I submit in the title, these types of transportation won't become widely used until we have pretty well-established nanotechnology. Unless, of course, the world eceonomy collapses or gets spread veeeeery evenly, in which case I guess even US citizens will be happy to ride bikes to work in the rain.
Just a thought...
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
First, you don't need to keep any GIS data in the car. The car sends its location to The System, and The System tells it how fast to go. The System is all that needs to be up-to-date. This also allows for tracking of all vehicles in real time: certainly a wet dream for many.
Second, the car doesn't have a position, it has a velocity vector. From one point of data no, you can't tell if the car's on I-78 or CR-513, but by checking where the car was 10 seconds ago you can take a pretty good guess. And by seeing where the car is in 10 more seconds, you can tell for sure.
Finally, this is already happening, and it works really well. In Portland, Oregon (my home) the location of each and every public bus is monitored (not sure exactly how). Each driver has a little LCD screen next to the steering wheel that displays the route time. It displays the bus's current position in 10-second increments: e.g. "40 seconds behind schedule."
There are reasons for this system not to work on a larger scale, but they're not the ones you cited (see sig;).
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
You're probably a troll, but here's something obvious that you've missed: ever bought a computer program and downloaded it? Mp3s? Porn? What are you getting? Nothing? Or a string of 1s and 0s that, in some configurations, is very useful?
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Yes, I love JunkScience.com. Makes me wish for the halycon days of my youth, before all this governmental regulation and labor rackateering. Days of child labor... unlimited coal smoke... even (dare I say it?) legal slavery. 'Tis a sad, sad thing when the lower classes conspire to rob industry of its well-earned profits.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
First, asking climate studies to be accurate on a scale of 3-4 years is stupid - pure chaos theory: noise. They're not talking about predicting whether a thunderstorm's going to hit your house today, but the average temperature of the globe. Ask someone to predict the position and velocity of a baseball and they'll do pretty well, because it's huge. An electron - no dice; too damn small (see, there was this guy called Heisenburg...).
Second, re: above, 5.8 degrees is a fucking huge difference. Again, not to you sitting in the heating/air-conditioning, and not on a yearly/seasonal scale. Averaged over the course of decades, though, such changes can wreak serious havok: melting ice caps, rising oceans.
Thirdly, you should really do some research on climate simulation. Here's a handy Google link to start you off If you really think climate simulation is bullshit, you're pitting yourself against some of the most hardcore and brilliant mathematical analysis ever done - WTF are your credentials?
Finally, let's be clear about what really matters here: Mother Earth is in absolutely no danger from us humans. Nothing we could do short of saturation-bombing the entire planet with nukes is going to "destroy the earth." She's been around 4 billion years and, on that scale, we're barely hiccups. The real danger is that we make our environment so toxic that we ourselves can't survive it. That's well within our power, even on such a short scale as 100 years.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Actually, I admin a network with 40 Windows 95 clients, among others, and they have no trouble on the hand-built white boxes I use: old and brand new, Intel and AMD. And lack of USB isn't much of a concern for a larger company, as much as I love it at home. Win95 still has its niche.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Technically, your laptop came with a disk-image restoration CD, not a Windows CD. And no, the restoration image isn't going to help anyone else.
Check out my earlier comment about M$ possible motivation for this kind of behaviour (like with everything else they do, it's about long-term control, not short-term profit).
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
From the article (paraphrased by the fish): the company had a spat [Babelfish link] with M$ a few months ago about a supposed illegal Windows 98 license. M$ seems to have suspended sale of OEM licenses to them, so they needed to find another way to sell PCs loaded with Windows.
Necessity being the mother of invention and all, I like the idea. What they're really talking about is continuously recycling Windows licenses. Rather than everyone pitching their Windows license when they pitch their old PC, the license could now be sold to someone else.
Of course, this is bad news for M$. Windows 95 is still a pretty decent consumer-level OS: unless you're going up to Win2k there's no real reason to upgrade beyond service packs (e.g. 98 & ME suck ass, NT sucks at multimedia). So this means that Germans could protest M$ snail's pace "innovation" by re-buying license for their old OS. Beautiful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Some years ago I made some notices on bright yellow paper (I mean the stuff that hurts your eyes):
This waste of your time and money was brought to you by:
[me]
[address]
Who would like to be removed from your mailing list.
You can leave me on the list if you want - I printed 100s of these flyers and I'm easily amused.
I did it for revenge, not thinking it would help, but it made a huge difference: within a few months my junk mail had dropped to 1 or 2 pieces a week from several per day. Highly recommended.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
"MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our MSN Hotmail users from spam," Sarah Lefko, MSN product manager.
I have literally *never* given my Hotmail address to anyone but personal friends (and of course, slightly obfuscated here on/.), and I just deleted 5 spams today. I've setup new Hotmail accounts with non-obvious addresses and had spam in less than 24 hours - the same shite every time: fake college diplomas, work from home, check out my pussy, etc.
Microsoft has turned into a bunch of politicians: How can you tell they're lying? Their spokesdroid's lips move.
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Assumption of criminality: "Pay this tax, just in case you're a criminal." This is ridiculous. Paying car insurance is one thing, because no one ever plans to have an accident, but taxing people just in case they decide to do something illegal. Bullshit.
Who will it help? Who is this supposed to benefit? The artists? Bullshit again - they're already getting screwed, just like they've always been, and will continue to be. Not that every musician is exploited, but very many are, and they won't see a cent from this.
Business model. At the core, this is government levying taxes on a population to prop up an outdated business model. If real competition were present in the industry, companies would seek to improve their business plans rather than ask government for a handout. It's not my job to compensate fools for failed business practices: stupidity should be painful.
Sigh. This has all been said before, though.
pessimistic legs signs off
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Microsoft does not want us (or anyone) to buy Windows, or Office, directly from them. As other posters have said, who's really going to pay $600 for a new copy of Office? Or $300 for Windows? Can you imagine paying a fucking GRAND just to word-process your resume, or send an email? Neither can anyone else.
What Microsoft does want is for us to get all this software from OEMs. Think about it (you know they've thought about it, and they're not stupid) - every move they make, every change, makes it more difficult for Joe Consumer to buy a few parts, build a computer, and load M$ software on it. Why?
Like many, I know that one of the biggest advantages of building my own boxen is upgrading cheaply to stay on the curve, rather than spend $2,500 every couple years on a new Dell. M$ wants to stop this.
Short-term money isn't the issue with them, and it never has been. More than most US companies, M$ thinks long-term, and long-term for them is one and only one goal: domination. They want every piece of hardware that boots to boot into some flavor of Windows, and run some suite of M$ apps. The best way to do this is to remove any user choice at all - you buy a new machine, you get it with Windows. OEMs are easy to control (the "Make them an offer they can't refuse" type of control), and they only have to control a few to control the industry.
IMNHO, this attitude will bite them in the ass, and hard. They're saying, in effect, "We don't care if we control every computer, but we'll damn sure control every computer with our software on it." Even M$ isn't big enough to do this, espectially with Apple making a comeback and *nux heating up.
Ob. Princess Leia quote: "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
question: is control controlled by its need to control? answer: yes
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism rewards innovation.
Yes, but capitalism rewards control even more. Being a monopoly means never having to say you're sorry.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Hehe - how 'bout some spell-checking to go with your arrogance? Or better yet, learn to write the language a little better so you make sense.
This is pure marketting [sic] forces coupled with monopolistic behaviour.
Define your articles, please. What exactly is "this" referring to? The DMCA? Reverse engineering? M$'s attempted Kerberos embrace-and-extend?
You're blaming the origional [sic] kerberos authors for bad behaviour actually originating from microsoft that may get accepted by the market.
Articles, please; pay attention to your articles. Is your "that" referring to the alleged bad behavior of the Kerberos authors? M$'s behavior? And where, exactly, am I casting aspersions on Kerberos developers? I'm trashing M$ for trying to hijack Kerberos. Not - let me repeat: NOT - for implementing dormant features already in the spec, but for trying to keep their enhancements proprietary.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
First, I don't hate Micro$loth. I'm typing this in IE5 while developing in Access 2000, and getting paid good money. M$ makes some authentically good products.
.NET." If they do, and it's successful, millions of people could be running Linux distros that are binary-incompatible with all current distros.
However, you can't deny that their "embrace and extend" tactic is one of the most predatory, if successful, business practices of the last 20 years. Sure, they're in a little hot water now, but things could still go either way. I bring them up because they're the most credible threat to Linux right now.
Secondly, I'm not talking about people who can hack code, but Joe User buying a computer. What if M$ releases M$Linux? "Reliability! Speed! And binary-only compatibility with M$ Office, IE and
"Sorry - you can't run Apache on M$Linux, but IIS-Linux doesn't crash nearly as much as it used to."
"Sorry, Star Office has some odd crashing problems under M$Linux, but they've cut the price of Office 10 to only $500."
What's saving us from this scenario? The GPL.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
You're a troll, but I'll bite.
Does the name "Kerberos" ring a bell? If Micro$loth can distribute Linux binaries without source, they can introduce code that breaks compatibility. And if we can't see the source, there's not much we can do. Especially under something evil like the DMCA, where we might not even be able to reverse-engineer it.
Come on - this is their stock in trade. It's how they killed DR DOS, Netscape, and Novell. It's how they'd love to kill Linux.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
The new W3C standards - HTML4 and CSS - make support for users with different physical abilities dramatically better. Why don't you go and educate yourself a little before you look like an even bigger fool?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Second, sometimes it is rather handy just to fire up lynx ...
Ironic that you mention this. A web site well-designed with HTML4 and CSS will degrade much better to Lynx than a site marked up with lots of crap to support Netscape 4. HTML4 and CSS are very simply the separation of style and content, and that makes everyone's life easier.
Third, how is this going to affect accessiblitiy for disabled people. Do the latest standards allow for this group of people to use the web?
Briefly, yes. HTML4, CSS and DOM have much, much greater support for users with various different physical abilities than any previous web standards. Here's [recent accessibility article on A List Apart] a good place to start.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
"Instead they keep upgrading the standards and thats whats causing these problems."
... no, but thanks for playing. Try this - go read the HTML2.0 specification and then try to find a site that implements it WITHOUT using anything after it (HTML4, CSS, etc.). The standards are upgraded (very slowly, I might add) because there's a crying need for easier and better ways to present rich content to people over the web.
Bzzzzzzt
The problem is that browser manufacturers have spent the last few years vying for market control without keeping the good of the web as a whole in mind. Cascading Style Sheets has been a W3C recommendation for over 4 years (December 1996) and as yet no browser supports it 100% (although the newer ones are very close, and quite usable).
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
If you read more about the campaign, you'll see that what the WaSP means by "not supporting" older browsers is simply using HTML4, CSS and DOM to its full potential. The worst-case scenario here is the someone using Netscape 4.7 will see content that is uglier than the designer intended, not that they won't see content at all.
And yes, JavaScript is risky as a fail-safe redirect, but that's why the WaSP-affiliated A List Apart is using a fairly elegant workaround: older browsers see all the content, minus styling, and a simple "Please upgrade" notice at the top of the page, with a handy link. Newer browsers don't see it at all - and there's no scripting involved.
This is a Good Thing, people. Jakob Nielsen has been saying for some time that we're 'Stuck With Old Browsers Until 2003'. Frankly, this sucks. Using HTML4, CSS and DOM makes creating a web site that works for users and for the designers and maintainers an order of magnitude easier. No stupid nested tables, no <FONT> tags, etc.
Please, go read the damn links, then come back and contribute something meaningful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Compare this with the modern US city: cars, on average, getting bigger all the time; traffic jams getting worse. Christ, there's a whole industry in traffic jams, with news helicopters and on-board computers. Meanwhile, cities continue to get denser and populations continue to rise. There's a clear end to this: cars have to go as the primary means of inner-city transportation.
Some cities are taking steps already: Portland OR has expanded it's bike lanes over the last 15 years and they're now pretty pervasive. Other OR cities, like Salem and Eugene (college towns) have even more aggressive bike lane programs and laws. bike lanes are clear policy and popular support for smaller, more economical short-distance transportation.
What's to replace cars? Scooters, perhaps (cf. Ginger), or something similar. What are the major objections to scooters?
- Safety. First, the system has to separate cars and small vehicles - they can't interact. Also, there has to be a licensing program, like for cars - we do NOT need thousands of untrained scooter riders - one fuck-up would take out a crowd. Finally, remember the dire predictions about cars? Thousands of deaths? Environmental destruction? (Well, ok, most of those seem to have come true, but why let that stop us?)
- Social engineering. No, most people won't trade their V-16 Ford Luxohemoth in for a battery-powered skateboard anytime soon, but that can certainly change (look how well the US government managed people in WWII). People don't think they're as susceptible to propaganda anymore, but they're wrong. We just call it advertising now, and it works really well. I don't think this will be a real problem.
- Climate. Here's the stake through the heart of this little idea. In Portland we get 36" of rain a year, and it's spread out very thinly - 5 or 6 days a week in winter are overcast and somewhat "moist." No way are people going to tool around in the open in a climate like that. So what do we need? Climate control.
Climate control. How can we get climate-controlled cities? Only in a closed, or at least roofed, environment. And the only real way to do this is with nanotechnology.Thus, as I submit in the title, these types of transportation won't become widely used until we have pretty well-established nanotechnology. Unless, of course, the world eceonomy collapses or gets spread veeeeery evenly, in which case I guess even US citizens will be happy to ride bikes to work in the rain.
Just a thought...
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
- First, you don't need to keep any GIS data in the car. The car sends its location to The System, and The System tells it how fast to go. The System is all that needs to be up-to-date. This also allows for tracking of all vehicles in real time: certainly a wet dream for many.
- Second, the car doesn't have a position, it has a velocity vector. From one point of data no, you can't tell if the car's on I-78 or CR-513, but by checking where the car was 10 seconds ago you can take a pretty good guess. And by seeing where the car is in 10 more seconds, you can tell for sure.
- Finally, this is already happening, and it works really well. In Portland, Oregon (my home) the location of each and every public bus is monitored (not sure exactly how). Each driver has a little LCD screen next to the steering wheel that displays the route time. It displays the bus's current position in 10-second increments: e.g. "40 seconds behind schedule."
There are reasons for this system not to work on a larger scale, but they're not the ones you cited (see sigquestion: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
You're probably a troll, but here's something obvious that you've missed: ever bought a computer program and downloaded it? Mp3s? Porn? What are you getting? Nothing? Or a string of 1s and 0s that, in some configurations, is very useful?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
a slashdot editor checking ... facts
... must lie down ...
head light
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Yes, I love JunkScience.com. Makes me wish for the halycon days of my youth, before all this governmental regulation and labor rackateering. Days of child labor ... unlimited coal smoke ... even (dare I say it?) legal slavery. 'Tis a sad, sad thing when the lower classes conspire to rob industry of its well-earned profits.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
What you need most is a sense of scale.
...).
First, asking climate studies to be accurate on a scale of 3-4 years is stupid - pure chaos theory: noise. They're not talking about predicting whether a thunderstorm's going to hit your house today, but the average temperature of the globe. Ask someone to predict the position and velocity of a baseball and they'll do pretty well, because it's huge. An electron - no dice; too damn small (see, there was this guy called Heisenburg
Second, re: above, 5.8 degrees is a fucking huge difference. Again, not to you sitting in the heating/air-conditioning, and not on a yearly/seasonal scale. Averaged over the course of decades, though, such changes can wreak serious havok: melting ice caps, rising oceans.
Thirdly, you should really do some research on climate simulation. Here's a handy Google link to start you off If you really think climate simulation is bullshit, you're pitting yourself against some of the most hardcore and brilliant mathematical analysis ever done - WTF are your credentials?
Finally, let's be clear about what really matters here: Mother Earth is in absolutely no danger from us humans. Nothing we could do short of saturation-bombing the entire planet with nukes is going to "destroy the earth." She's been around 4 billion years and, on that scale, we're barely hiccups. The real danger is that we make our environment so toxic that we ourselves can't survive it. That's well within our power, even on such a short scale as 100 years.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Actually, I admin a network with 40 Windows 95 clients, among others, and they have no trouble on the hand-built white boxes I use: old and brand new, Intel and AMD. And lack of USB isn't much of a concern for a larger company, as much as I love it at home. Win95 still has its niche.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Technically, your laptop came with a disk-image restoration CD, not a Windows CD. And no, the restoration image isn't going to help anyone else.
Check out my earlier comment about M$ possible motivation for this kind of behaviour (like with everything else they do, it's about long-term control, not short-term profit).
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
From the article (paraphrased by the fish): the company had a spat [Babelfish link] with M$ a few months ago about a supposed illegal Windows 98 license. M$ seems to have suspended sale of OEM licenses to them, so they needed to find another way to sell PCs loaded with Windows.
Necessity being the mother of invention and all, I like the idea. What they're really talking about is continuously recycling Windows licenses. Rather than everyone pitching their Windows license when they pitch their old PC, the license could now be sold to someone else.
Of course, this is bad news for M$. Windows 95 is still a pretty decent consumer-level OS: unless you're going up to Win2k there's no real reason to upgrade beyond service packs (e.g. 98 & ME suck ass, NT sucks at multimedia). So this means that Germans could protest M$ snail's pace "innovation" by re-buying license for their old OS. Beautiful.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Microsoft has turned into a bunch of politicians: How can you tell they're lying? Their spokesdroid's lips move.
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
- Assumption of criminality: "Pay this tax, just in case you're a criminal." This is ridiculous. Paying car insurance is one thing, because no one ever plans to have an accident, but taxing people just in case they decide to do something illegal. Bullshit.
- Who will it help? Who is this supposed to benefit? The artists? Bullshit again - they're already getting screwed, just like they've always been, and will continue to be. Not that every musician is exploited, but very many are, and they won't see a cent from this.
- Business model. At the core, this is government levying taxes on a population to prop up an outdated business model. If real competition were present in the industry, companies would seek to improve their business plans rather than ask government for a handout. It's not my job to compensate fools for failed business practices: stupidity should be painful.
Sigh. This has all been said before, though.pessimistic legs signs off
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Very cute. Got a better explanation, or are you just trolling?
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
Microsoft does not want us (or anyone) to buy Windows, or Office, directly from them. As other posters have said, who's really going to pay $600 for a new copy of Office? Or $300 for Windows? Can you imagine paying a fucking GRAND just to word-process your resume, or send an email? Neither can anyone else.
What Microsoft does want is for us to get all this software from OEMs. Think about it (you know they've thought about it, and they're not stupid) - every move they make, every change, makes it more difficult for Joe Consumer to buy a few parts, build a computer, and load M$ software on it. Why?
Like many, I know that one of the biggest advantages of building my own boxen is upgrading cheaply to stay on the curve, rather than spend $2,500 every couple years on a new Dell. M$ wants to stop this.
Short-term money isn't the issue with them, and it never has been. More than most US companies, M$ thinks long-term, and long-term for them is one and only one goal: domination. They want every piece of hardware that boots to boot into some flavor of Windows, and run some suite of M$ apps. The best way to do this is to remove any user choice at all - you buy a new machine, you get it with Windows. OEMs are easy to control (the "Make them an offer they can't refuse" type of control), and they only have to control a few to control the industry.
IMNHO, this attitude will bite them in the ass, and hard. They're saying, in effect, "We don't care if we control every computer, but we'll damn sure control every computer with our software on it." Even M$ isn't big enough to do this, espectially with Apple making a comeback and *nux heating up.
Ob. Princess Leia quote: "The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers."
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes