No, because the question itself is wrong, and is really a red herring.
It isn't "Who do you sue?" because instead it's really "Who can I blame and send the heat somewhere besides me?" The IT management structure will take heat for any service problems, but with a Microsoft solution they have the perfect blame target. Between "Everybody uses Microsoft," which absolves blame for having chosen them, and the fact that Microsoft is essentially lawsuit-proof, between their EULA and size/tactics, things are nicely diffused. Doesn't keep the systems up an running, but at least you're suffering in the same boat with everyone else, and there's the general, "Nothing can be done any better," to protect you.
Contrast that with Linux and outsourced support. First off, you've chosen something different, and hence inherently risky. Second, your outsourced support is probably less lawsuit-proof, and therefore maybe something might actually have to be done, rather than sighing in resignation.
Also contrast with Linux and internal support. Now you're to your own resources, and directly and immediately responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Note that NONE of this says a single thing about service levels, outages, or whatever. It's merely about adequate 'diffusion or responsibility' to keep the IT peoples' jobs protected. Microsoft provides a great 'responsibility diffusion sink,' one of the best at that.
You mean it's this late into the topic, and someone has been asking on/. about who owns the moon, and the name David Delos Harriman hasn't come up, yet?
You'd think that some IT execs would look at the better-than-market performance of Microsoft, and then look at the *pain* they're having on their bottom line with IT expenses, and figure out that there is some relationship between the two. Then start plotting an escape.
There was a back-referenced/. article about RIAA reversing it's desire for "Work for hire" as part of some legislation. At the time there was speculation that it was due to pressure from artists, and fear of looking like a bunch of thieving bandits.
But we can concoct a more sinister reason, thanks to Sonny Bono.
If a work is copyrighted as "Work for hire", it get 95 years of protection. OTOH, if it's copyrighted under the artist's name(s) and rights assigned to the recording label, it gets life-of-the-artist plus 75 years protection. Most pop artists that generate the CD churn appear to have >20 years of lifetime left, if they can control their overstimulation habits. So for those folks, it's a better deal for the label to leave the copyright in the artist's name.
Somehow I doubt it would be worth the effort to have age-based policies on "work for hire", because it would probably raise more questions and lawsuits than it would gain in back-end revenue. Besides, the target audience may well be age-clustered with the artist, so the back-end revenue loss would be minimal.
Or maybe they're hoping that in about 15 years Disney's next piece of legislation will extend copyright "until the Sun goes out", arguing that that is limit enough to meet constitutional tests.
I guess you've taken my 'rebuild the BBS network' and done me one better. Great.
Next...
From what I hear, the next rev of 802.11 is something like 5 times faster. 11Mbps is pretty neat for what wireless is doing today, but not so hot when trying to rebuild the Internet we knew and loved. Robert Cringely had an article on taking wireless and hooking it to a high-gain antenna to make a line-of-sight connect well beyond normal range. Stuff like that is next.
What happens when two wireless bases have overlapping coverage?
The Internet runs on fat pipes, and access to those pipes can be throttled. You can weasel your away around all you want, but ultimately whoever can control a router between you and the backbone controls your ability to speak. Right now, cable providers have terribly restrictive TOS, such that in some ways I'd almost prefer dialup if I could really get 56k instead of never quite making it to the full 33.6k.
Unfortunately, the same entertainment industry we rail at for the DMCA and the like largely owns broadband to the home, (I guess ATT has some cable.) and they set the TOS. So far I haven't tried peer2peer, and I know that they've at least left port22 inbound open. But they could interpret their contract to shut down EVERY incoming port, if they so desired.
I wouldn't feel too flush with civil disobedient power, especially with a business friendly administration in place. Otherwise, we're going to have to start rebuilding the old home BBS network.
I agree that the real power of the Internet will emerge as peer2peer comes into its own, and flexes its muscles. But at the moment, the entertainment industries are POWERFUL and would just as soon turn the Internet into another broadcast medium, like the Vast Wasteland called TV.
Give up? No way. But choose battles carefully and keep an eye to the desired end.
Finally years later when it came out on TV, I was surprised to see how they 'fit it in'. There were obviously some scene crops, but the party across the ravine was topless in the movie, but they were wearing bikinis on TV. They must have shot the TV scenes at the same time as the theatricals. Obvious, but it's the first time I'd seen it that glaringly.
OK. Let's let Microsoft keep their security flaws secret. Do any of us think that will really work?
Part2: The flaws do need to be placed in 'escrow' in a secure database, with a planned release date, perhaps 6 months after first notice.
Then let's see if the situation is better or worse. After all, Code Red exploited a months-old hole, which could have been discovered by monitoring Microsoft's own update pages. Somehow it doesn't seem to me that the course of the Code Red mess this Summer would have been affected in the least by Microsoft's proposed policy.
Or do they consider publication of a bugfix tantamount to 'Security Anarchy', because it lets others know that a hole exists?
But the real goal here should be that we want to keep Bugtraq and the like alive for our own use. Let Microsoft mess their own sandbox, just don't mess ours.
Arthur C Clarke once wrote a story about a race in Earth-Moon space on space bicycles. (IIRC, it was Clarke) The bicycles were really Wimshurst (sp?) generators powering ion engines to provide thrust, and the course was somewhere in the range of 24 to 48 hours long. Minimal shell to hold in air and heat, minimal supplies, Kremer-caliber athletes, etc.
It was a fun idea, though somehow I can't quite believe it would all hold together. I didn't think ion engines would generate sufficient thrust to make it to cislunar space. Nor would I expect that even a 48-hour spacecraft could be made light enough. I'd expect temperature control to be the biggest problem, between sunlight and shadow, maximum exertion and resting/sleeping.
But with this idea, we could have it in sim form, and it wouldn't take 24-48 hours to get to cislunar space, either.
My family has been on cable for a little over a year now, since it first became available in our neighborhood. My selling point to my wife was that we were paying the $19.95 monthly usage cap every month on the phone bill, largely because of computer use, and we were paying $17.95 every month for ISP subscription. Add that up and we're a few bucks shy of $39.95, which was the cable fee. By acting early, we got installation and the first month free. Counting just that free first month against the extra expense of cable, we're still better than cost parity with phone+ISP.
The second factor was phone availability. We had constant contention between phone and computer on the line. I didn't mention this in my original sales pitch to my wife, but it quickly came out.
I never mentioned performance at all. I waited for her to tell me about how fast things suddenly became.
So far there appears to be the same chance for profit in space that there is in broadband and the web. In other words, nebulous and unproven, dependent on government supports and regulation, and a bunch of shirt-losing and money-destroying has already been done.
I don't credit US business with being sufficiently visionary to do anything with space. Space is a long-term thing, and a quarter-to-quarter focus just won't hack it. Space has 'worked' so far for business because the government has wanted stuff, and business will deliver it -- for a price.
I once read quite an analysis about why business would never develop a breakthrough launch technology on their own. It essentially works out to a combination of corporate and government business practices.
Maybe if we would allow someone to pull a 'Zephram Cochrane' and move their business off-planet to escape taxes and environmental reguations...
As for the Space Station, (and the Shuttle, for that matter) the thing that annoys me even more than the money waste by NASA is the government's response. "If you can't run this sprint, we're going to tie one leg and one arm behind your back, then expect you to run it faster." IMHO, the Space Station has been cut below viability. Unless we can get a re-entry vehicle and hab module up there, no science will get done because it takes the whole crew for maintenance.
From what I can see, IBM is already making out big from Linux investments. Largely because of Linux, the mainframe has gone from dinosaur to cool, and that shows up in the bottom line.
Linux is largely about meritocracy, and even in its bad old days IBM had products with merit. Now that the company appears to have refocused after the near-death of the early 1990's that merit appears to be improving and emerging again.
Chroot jails have their problems an annoyances. I've been toying around for a bit with the idea of using User Mode Linux as a security sandbox. This cluster-on-one-system looks even better, and a sibling comment to this one indicates that maybe User Mode isn't a safe jail, anyway.
Not having enough of a home DP Center to dedicate one box for a firewall, I end up running local services (properly configured for local ONLY access in addition to firewalled for local only) on the same machine. I think I've done a good job, but there's always that nagging doubt. Putting my local services in a -safe- virtual OS would give me an additional level of comfort. Chroot jails are ok for standalone things like BIND, but once you have several services interacting like a mail system, it gets a bit messy.
For the more salient example of looking the gift horse in the mouth, you need go no further than Microsoft.
Right now where I work we're seeing streaming media going over Windows Media Player, because it's free for both client and server. To Microsoft's credit, they don't jack the price up the minute the competitor dies in any given arena. In fact, they generally don't jack the price up at all. They merely use the new market lock as a tool to grab another market.
So right now, Windows Media Player is 'free', both client and server, at least until Real and QT both die out.
I always extended the old adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." At work when they offer us a 'free lunch' I figure we've either already paid for it, or will be called to in the near future. In either case, the work will be done whether or not the lunch is eaten. So I go and enjoy.
But with either the 'free lunch' or the 'gift horse', there's ALWAYS a price. Sometimes it isn't apparent, sometimes you can't avoid paying it anyway. But you should always try to know what the price is.
For a better view of why we're hated, consider the USA's actions after WWII and contrast them with our conduct during the Cold War.
After WWII, we learned from the mistakes of post-WWI and helped both Europe and Japan rebuild. We were taking what we talked about with the American Dream and helping others achieve it. Let's ignore for the moment whether the American Dream should be exported or not - that's not the point. The point is that we were doing what we were saying.
During the Cold War that all changed. While talking American Dream, our conduct was "Enemy of my enemy is my friend." We turned a blind eye towards their bad habits, and supported them if they were against the communists.
Defining yourself by what you are not is a terrible way to live a life, IMHO. That goes for a person, an organization, or a country. Perhaps we had to pursue our anti-communist foreign policy, but to have done so in so single-minded and negative a fashion, without similarly acting on our own positive beliefs was unwise. The aftereffects of our negative foreign policy are coming back to roost.
Globalization is a tool, like deCSS
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So far when we speak/write about globalization, we're talking about the corporate side of things. But if you really look at it, globalization is little more, and nothing less than an ability to transcend national boundaries. This has historically meant travel, expensive travel, restricting it to the Rich and corporations. Hence that's where we focus our rants on globalizations.
But two things have happened. First, transportation has gotten cheaper, so it isn't the province of merely the Rich. Second, the Internet has given us Virtual Travel. These changes ease globalization for all, including bringing it into the price range of more people/groups.
So one can argue that globalized corporations are Evil, though others would contend against that.
Most would argue that globalized institutions like the Red Cross are Good.
Then how about other globalized groups like the Mafia and El Quaeda?
Globalization isn't just for corporatization, any more.
I had a high-school friend who went into the Navy and spent time on a sub. This was back in the 70's, so things may have changed since then, but...
According to him, those things were *immensely* manual. He described some valve that was part of the diving process being behind/beside his bunk. When the dive alarm sounded, he (or whoever was bunking at the time) had to turn that valve. He got to where he could do it in his sleep and never know he had touched the valve.
From my own tour of the Battleship Massachusetts, that thing was a giant machine where some of the moving parts happened to be people. It took 25 men to keep one of the 5" gun turrets firing and fed with ammo, and 125 men for a 16" gun turret. There wasn't much automation. Granted it was WWII, but it also signifies a mind-set. I've been through the Albacore and Nautilus (both 50's era, I know) and have seen nothing to refute that mindset.
I can readily believe that opening the torpedo door was someone's personal responsibility, and perhaps he was even sleeping between torpedos at the time.
Not sure if this is exactly a right, or not, but remember that Al Gore built the Internet with your tax dollars. Theoretically, as a 1/250,000,000th owner, you should have unfettered access. Microsoft walling off parts of the Internet as Win-only or IE-only is kind of like General Motors walling off parts of the D.W.D. Interstate Highway system for only GM brand cars.
I remember seeing that commercial, from what I understand, the ONE time it was played.
It seems just a little odd that OS/X is to.1 already, and from what I can see, they've had no advertising geared toward the general public. Maybe it's time to dust off the old hammer commercial. From what I remember, it shouldn't be too tough to retouch the droning geezer into enough of a charicature of Gates to be recognizable, yet not too close so they can avoid a lawsuit.
Europe hasn't closed the books on any legal actions against Microsoft.
Microsoft has chosen to *specifically*block*Opera,*by*name* out of their web sites.
Opera is developed in Europe. (AFAIK)
This action would have looked a *whole* lot better had they specifically enabled XHTML-compatible browsers, and redirected you to a page with a list. Also on that page should have been a contact point to get your browser included on the list, *at no charge*.
I thought Mozilla was supposed to be The Most Standards-Compliant Browser out there, clearly better than Netscape 4.5x or 4.7x. Yet I've heard reports of NS 4.7x getting in and Mozilla not.
This stinks. I wonder how many people MS will fool. It really doesn't matter much to me, since I have the MS ClassB network firewalled off in order to prevent 'phoning home' when booted to Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
as a matter of fact, it's all dark.
The funny part is, within 90%-95%, this is really true of the entire universe.
No, because the question itself is wrong, and is really a red herring.
It isn't "Who do you sue?" because instead it's really "Who can I blame and send the heat somewhere besides me?" The IT management structure will take heat for any service problems, but with a Microsoft solution they have the perfect blame target. Between "Everybody uses Microsoft," which absolves blame for having chosen them, and the fact that Microsoft is essentially lawsuit-proof, between their EULA and size/tactics, things are nicely diffused. Doesn't keep the systems up an running, but at least you're suffering in the same boat with everyone else, and there's the general, "Nothing can be done any better," to protect you.
Contrast that with Linux and outsourced support. First off, you've chosen something different, and hence inherently risky. Second, your outsourced support is probably less lawsuit-proof, and therefore maybe something might actually have to be done, rather than sighing in resignation.
Also contrast with Linux and internal support. Now you're to your own resources, and directly and immediately responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Note that NONE of this says a single thing about service levels, outages, or whatever. It's merely about adequate 'diffusion or responsibility' to keep the IT peoples' jobs protected. Microsoft provides a great 'responsibility diffusion sink,' one of the best at that.
You mean it's this late into the topic, and someone has been asking on /. about who owns the moon, and the name David Delos Harriman hasn't come up, yet?
(acknowledgments to R.A.H.)
You'd think that some IT execs would look at the better-than-market performance of Microsoft, and then look at the *pain* they're having on their bottom line with IT expenses, and figure out that there is some relationship between the two. Then start plotting an escape.
And at the moment, I've even got the points. But it's currently marked "Funny", and maybe it would be, if it weren't true.
Where does he get this service?
I've been pondering the idea of such a 'connection reverser', but didn't know any existed.
There was a back-referenced /. article about RIAA reversing it's desire for "Work for hire" as part of some legislation. At the time there was speculation that it was due to pressure from artists, and fear of looking like a bunch of thieving bandits.
But we can concoct a more sinister reason, thanks to Sonny Bono.
If a work is copyrighted as "Work for hire", it get 95 years of protection. OTOH, if it's copyrighted under the artist's name(s) and rights assigned to the recording label, it gets life-of-the-artist plus 75 years protection. Most pop artists that generate the CD churn appear to have >20 years of lifetime left, if they can control their overstimulation habits. So for those folks, it's a better deal for the label to leave the copyright in the artist's name.
Somehow I doubt it would be worth the effort to have age-based policies on "work for hire", because it would probably raise more questions and lawsuits than it would gain in back-end revenue. Besides, the target audience may well be age-clustered with the artist, so the back-end revenue loss would be minimal.
Or maybe they're hoping that in about 15 years Disney's next piece of legislation will extend copyright "until the Sun goes out", arguing that that is limit enough to meet constitutional tests.
I guess you've taken my 'rebuild the BBS network' and done me one better. Great.
Next...
From what I hear, the next rev of 802.11 is something like 5 times faster. 11Mbps is pretty neat for what wireless is doing today, but not so hot when trying to rebuild the Internet we knew and loved. Robert Cringely had an article on taking wireless and hooking it to a high-gain antenna to make a line-of-sight connect well beyond normal range. Stuff like that is next.
What happens when two wireless bases have overlapping coverage?
The Internet runs on fat pipes, and access to those pipes can be throttled. You can weasel your away around all you want, but ultimately whoever can control a router between you and the backbone controls your ability to speak. Right now, cable providers have terribly restrictive TOS, such that in some ways I'd almost prefer dialup if I could really get 56k instead of never quite making it to the full 33.6k.
Unfortunately, the same entertainment industry we rail at for the DMCA and the like largely owns broadband to the home, (I guess ATT has some cable.) and they set the TOS. So far I haven't tried peer2peer, and I know that they've at least left port22 inbound open. But they could interpret their contract to shut down EVERY incoming port, if they so desired.
I wouldn't feel too flush with civil disobedient power, especially with a business friendly administration in place. Otherwise, we're going to have to start rebuilding the old home BBS network.
I agree that the real power of the Internet will emerge as peer2peer comes into its own, and flexes its muscles. But at the moment, the entertainment industries are POWERFUL and would just as soon turn the Internet into another broadcast medium, like the Vast Wasteland called TV.
Give up? No way. But choose battles carefully and keep an eye to the desired end.
Finally years later when it came out on TV, I was surprised to see how they 'fit it in'. There were obviously some scene crops, but the party across the ravine was topless in the movie, but they were wearing bikinis on TV. They must have shot the TV scenes at the same time as the theatricals. Obvious, but it's the first time I'd seen it that glaringly.
OK. Let's let Microsoft keep their security flaws secret. Do any of us think that will really work?
Part2: The flaws do need to be placed in 'escrow' in a secure database, with a planned release date, perhaps 6 months after first notice.
Then let's see if the situation is better or worse. After all, Code Red exploited a months-old hole, which could have been discovered by monitoring Microsoft's own update pages. Somehow it doesn't seem to me that the course of the Code Red mess this Summer would have been affected in the least by Microsoft's proposed policy.
Or do they consider publication of a bugfix tantamount to 'Security Anarchy', because it lets others know that a hole exists?
But the real goal here should be that we want to keep Bugtraq and the like alive for our own use. Let Microsoft mess their own sandbox, just don't mess ours.
Arthur C Clarke once wrote a story about a race in Earth-Moon space on space bicycles. (IIRC, it was Clarke) The bicycles were really Wimshurst (sp?) generators powering ion engines to provide thrust, and the course was somewhere in the range of 24 to 48 hours long. Minimal shell to hold in air and heat, minimal supplies, Kremer-caliber athletes, etc.
It was a fun idea, though somehow I can't quite believe it would all hold together. I didn't think ion engines would generate sufficient thrust to make it to cislunar space. Nor would I expect that even a 48-hour spacecraft could be made light enough. I'd expect temperature control to be the biggest problem, between sunlight and shadow, maximum exertion and resting/sleeping.
But with this idea, we could have it in sim form, and it wouldn't take 24-48 hours to get to cislunar space, either.
The first factor was simple economics.
My family has been on cable for a little over a year now, since it first became available in our neighborhood. My selling point to my wife was that we were paying the $19.95 monthly usage cap every month on the phone bill, largely because of computer use, and we were paying $17.95 every month for ISP subscription. Add that up and we're a few bucks shy of $39.95, which was the cable fee. By acting early, we got installation and the first month free. Counting just that free first month against the extra expense of cable, we're still better than cost parity with phone+ISP.
The second factor was phone availability. We had constant contention between phone and computer on the line. I didn't mention this in my original sales pitch to my wife, but it quickly came out.
I never mentioned performance at all. I waited for her to tell me about how fast things suddenly became.
So far there appears to be the same chance for profit in space that there is in broadband and the web. In other words, nebulous and unproven, dependent on government supports and regulation, and a bunch of shirt-losing and money-destroying has already been done.
I don't credit US business with being sufficiently visionary to do anything with space. Space is a long-term thing, and a quarter-to-quarter focus just won't hack it. Space has 'worked' so far for business because the government has wanted stuff, and business will deliver it -- for a price.
I once read quite an analysis about why business would never develop a breakthrough launch technology on their own. It essentially works out to a combination of corporate and government business practices.
Maybe if we would allow someone to pull a 'Zephram Cochrane' and move their business off-planet to escape taxes and environmental reguations...
As for the Space Station, (and the Shuttle, for that matter) the thing that annoys me even more than the money waste by NASA is the government's response. "If you can't run this sprint, we're going to tie one leg and one arm behind your back, then expect you to run it faster." IMHO, the Space Station has been cut below viability. Unless we can get a re-entry vehicle and hab module up there, no science will get done because it takes the whole crew for maintenance.
From what I can see, IBM is already making out big from Linux investments. Largely because of Linux, the mainframe has gone from dinosaur to cool, and that shows up in the bottom line.
Linux is largely about meritocracy, and even in its bad old days IBM had products with merit. Now that the company appears to have refocused after the near-death of the early 1990's that merit appears to be improving and emerging again.
Chroot jails have their problems an annoyances. I've been toying around for a bit with the idea of using User Mode Linux as a security sandbox. This cluster-on-one-system looks even better, and a sibling comment to this one indicates that maybe User Mode isn't a safe jail, anyway.
Not having enough of a home DP Center to dedicate one box for a firewall, I end up running local services (properly configured for local ONLY access in addition to firewalled for local only) on the same machine. I think I've done a good job, but there's always that nagging doubt. Putting my local services in a -safe- virtual OS would give me an additional level of comfort. Chroot jails are ok for standalone things like BIND, but once you have several services interacting like a mail system, it gets a bit messy.
For the more salient example of looking the gift horse in the mouth, you need go no further than Microsoft.
Right now where I work we're seeing streaming media going over Windows Media Player, because it's free for both client and server. To Microsoft's credit, they don't jack the price up the minute the competitor dies in any given arena. In fact, they generally don't jack the price up at all. They merely use the new market lock as a tool to grab another market.
So right now, Windows Media Player is 'free', both client and server, at least until Real and QT both die out.
I always extended the old adage, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." At work when they offer us a 'free lunch' I figure we've either already paid for it, or will be called to in the near future. In either case, the work will be done whether or not the lunch is eaten. So I go and enjoy.
But with either the 'free lunch' or the 'gift horse', there's ALWAYS a price. Sometimes it isn't apparent, sometimes you can't avoid paying it anyway. But you should always try to know what the price is.
You sue them under the DMCA, future SSSCA, Anti-Terrorism Act, or the like.
A testimony to the proposition that security CAN be legislated.
(Yeah, right.)
For a better view of why we're hated, consider the USA's actions after WWII and contrast them with our conduct during the Cold War.
After WWII, we learned from the mistakes of post-WWI and helped both Europe and Japan rebuild. We were taking what we talked about with the American Dream and helping others achieve it. Let's ignore for the moment whether the American Dream should be exported or not - that's not the point. The point is that we were doing what we were saying.
During the Cold War that all changed. While talking American Dream, our conduct was "Enemy of my enemy is my friend." We turned a blind eye towards their bad habits, and supported them if they were against the communists.
Defining yourself by what you are not is a terrible way to live a life, IMHO. That goes for a person, an organization, or a country. Perhaps we had to pursue our anti-communist foreign policy, but to have done so in so single-minded and negative a fashion, without similarly acting on our own positive beliefs was unwise. The aftereffects of our negative foreign policy are coming back to roost.
So far when we speak/write about globalization, we're talking about the corporate side of things. But if you really look at it, globalization is little more, and nothing less than an ability to transcend national boundaries. This has historically meant travel, expensive travel, restricting it to the Rich and corporations. Hence that's where we focus our rants on globalizations.
But two things have happened. First, transportation has gotten cheaper, so it isn't the province of merely the Rich. Second, the Internet has given us Virtual Travel. These changes ease globalization for all, including bringing it into the price range of more people/groups.
So one can argue that globalized corporations are Evil, though others would contend against that.
Most would argue that globalized institutions like the Red Cross are Good.
Then how about other globalized groups like the Mafia and El Quaeda?
Globalization isn't just for corporatization, any more.
I had a high-school friend who went into the Navy and spent time on a sub. This was back in the 70's, so things may have changed since then, but...
According to him, those things were *immensely* manual. He described some valve that was part of the diving process being behind/beside his bunk. When the dive alarm sounded, he (or whoever was bunking at the time) had to turn that valve. He got to where he could do it in his sleep and never know he had touched the valve.
From my own tour of the Battleship Massachusetts, that thing was a giant machine where some of the moving parts happened to be people. It took 25 men to keep one of the 5" gun turrets firing and fed with ammo, and 125 men for a 16" gun turret. There wasn't much automation. Granted it was WWII, but it also signifies a mind-set. I've been through the Albacore and Nautilus (both 50's era, I know) and have seen nothing to refute that mindset.
I can readily believe that opening the torpedo door was someone's personal responsibility, and perhaps he was even sleeping between torpedos at the time.
Not sure if this is exactly a right, or not, but remember that Al Gore built the Internet with your tax dollars. Theoretically, as a 1/250,000,000th owner, you should have unfettered access. Microsoft walling off parts of the Internet as Win-only or IE-only is kind of like General Motors walling off parts of the D.W.D. Interstate Highway system for only GM brand cars.
What the heck is that?
I thought the Senators for MPAA and RIAA outlawed that *years* ago.
I remember seeing that commercial, from what I understand, the ONE time it was played.
.1 already, and from what I can see, they've had no advertising geared toward the general public. Maybe it's time to dust off the old hammer commercial. From what I remember, it shouldn't be too tough to retouch the droning geezer into enough of a charicature of Gates to be recognizable, yet not too close so they can avoid a lawsuit.
It seems just a little odd that OS/X is to
Consider:
Europe hasn't closed the books on any legal actions against Microsoft.
Microsoft has chosen to *specifically*block*Opera,*by*name* out of their web sites.
Opera is developed in Europe. (AFAIK)
This action would have looked a *whole* lot better had they specifically enabled XHTML-compatible browsers, and redirected you to a page with a list. Also on that page should have been a contact point to get your browser included on the list, *at no charge*.
I thought Mozilla was supposed to be The Most Standards-Compliant Browser out there, clearly better than Netscape 4.5x or 4.7x. Yet I've heard reports of NS 4.7x getting in and Mozilla not.
This stinks. I wonder how many people MS will fool. It really doesn't matter much to me, since I have the MS ClassB network firewalled off in order to prevent 'phoning home' when booted to Windows.