No, rolling an actual "stock car" at 120 mph is basically fatal. If you go upside down on the pavement at 120 mph, you're dead.. maybe decapitated. You might escape as a vegatable, but not likely.
(Or do we just watch them die?:) )
That's where I think you are wrong. The success of Open Source isn't in the fact that there is source per se. The success is that it fills other tangible needs.
1. Open Source doesn't have crappy restrictive complicated licensing. Microsoft needs to address this.
2. Open Source is more transparent because of the community. And not just because of the source. It is a good process. Even with most projects 99% of the people contributing are working on bug reports and/or documentation. Only a small small number contribute patches. Microsoft is addressing this.
3. There is a large market that is not diminished for software that is "good enough" - that's not everything to everyone but that is broad and general purprose. Open Source excels at very focused products. The market for larger platform and enterprise products is real even in the face of Linux. Microsoft is addressing this aggressively.
The point? Microsoft isn't dying. It's not even close. These moves they are making are pre-emptive, not a fitfull act of a dying company.
No you asshat, a piece of paper per se won't stop a person from maiming/beating/killing you. But it provides legal justification for you to go the police and ask for protection in a formal manner. With a TRO, in most jurisdictions, the police are obligated to help you maintain personal security - whether that's protective custody, added patrols in your neighborhood, round the clock intervention, etc.
I don't think MS has reached the "pain" threshold, but some interesting things are going on Microsoft:
1. They are creating a much more robust community than they ever have. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com sometime. They have a lot of their developers - and not just low level guys - blogging on a regular basis. It's an interesting thing to watch these people work. And it really gets out of that "faceless corproate entity" mold they were heading down.
2. The software is getting better. Windows is pretty reliable now. It's not perfect by any means, but Windows 2000 was the first shot. Windows XP and Windows 2003 are really quite a bit better. It's easy to joke about "the most reliable Windows ever". In the real world there isn't that dread like there was in the NT4 days about BSOD's and reliablitly problems.
3. They have opened up a lot. And they are testing the waters on where to go. The VS.NET 2005 has a pretty open feedback and bug reporting system. My guess is that if this shows signs of promise they will expand the effort and create a company-wide public bug-tracking/feature request/complaint system similiar to BugZilla or the like.
Why is this important? Open Source has some big pluses going for it. For one, the software is percieved rightly to be of higher quality. Microsoft is agressively working to beat that notion.
Second, Open Source is considered to be cheap. Of course it's "free", but we can all think how it costs in a business sense: opportunity cost, labor, upkeep, etc. Microsoft is agressively challenging Open Source on this front. If they can keep some developers who would have gone to Linux by offering free development tools, or development editions of products, then they are doing good. And MS is dropping prices on a lot of the commonly used components: Small Business Server 2003 which includes Windows server, exchange, SQL Server, and a bunch of useful features costs about 1/2 of what SBS2000 cost a typical setup.
Finally, the big thing Open Source has going is the source. You can modify, redistribute, improve, etc. That's good. But that targets a small market. We know that even in the community of Linux users 99% or higher of users never look or touch the code. A high percentage don't even compile from source. What a lot of Linux users like is that it is easy to get fixes into source (by going to the programmer who wrote the code) and the community around the product is very transparent.
MS is working very agressively to beat Open Source at it's own game. To make a company of 50,000 responsive, transparent, vital and robust without stopping the profitable business of selling software.
Right now as far as the balance sheet and growth projections report MS isn't in any pain. They are working though to maintain it's market position and beat back the growth that Linux has seen. Remember, most of the growth that Linux has seen is at the expense of other Unix vendors, not Microsoft.
Major security holes in ssh didn't lead to the Microsoft related worm/virus/trojan "funfare". They never had and never will.
It didn't lead to front page news, but did hundreds of boxes get rooted? Are there probably boxes out there still to this day that are rooted without people knowing?
Yes, absolutely.
Just because it's not a national epidemic doesn't mean that the major security problems didn't make a living hell out of IT people's lives.
Don't underestimate the effect of major bugs on people's lives.. yes, even the bugs in OSS/FOSS cause major harm.
Except that what you've described isn't new to the furniture or computing industries. And it's obvious to a person with knowledge of the industry. So you wouldnt have much of a case really..
This is ri God Damned diculous
What is your specific problem with this patent? Or are you just pissed off and venting "to the choir"?
Of all the patent stories on slashdot recently, this is probably one of the ones you should get least "pissed" about.
Screw it I'm going to get a patent for my messy room and anybody who has a messy room will have to pay me.
Ahh, see. You are being stupid. Is your messy room novell and/or a non-trivial improvement over a previous design? Is it non-obvious to people with industry knowledge?
Of course, the answers are no. Therefore, you would be rejected for a patent.
Ask yourself the same about the bank concept. Have you been to or heard of a bank that is designed as such? Do you think other people in the banking industry thought of this before? If you walked into this bank for the first time, would be apt to say "huh, this is an interesting idea"? Is this a non-trivial change from exisiting bank designs and layouts? Is this significantly different from how the banking industry has been operating for 300 years? Is this a different concept in the banking industry?
What I can't take anymore is people blowing off steam and sounding all dramatic and revolutionary even without considering the merits of the case.
That would be true if this was for a teller-free banking establishment. You make it sound like any place with a play center for kids and coffee machine is infringing.
Hopefully you know that your over simplification is moronic.
You are considering hiring someone who ten years ago was given a speeding ticket - a big one.
Do you never hire that person because, hey, he was a law breaker? Even if insists that hey, since then, he hasn't had more speeding tickets? And he has references, good work history, and significant good works of charity?
"Look, I got a $10,000 dollar fine when I was convicted, but you can trust me now, as I'm really rich and I could easily pay fines like that now."
The implication being that once you've comitted a crime you can never redeem yourself. If that's the case, we ought to just make every crime capital. That way we don't have a bunch of people walking around who can't ever find work or ever be members of good standing in the community again. Once a criminal, always a criminal right?
The bottom line here is that the people responsible for the misdeed were let go over a decade ago. The company as a whole has been completly overhauled. The management from top to bottom was shaken up.
1. I referring specifically to the part about them putting more people out of business than they employ. That is not proven, and has never been argued in court. They have comitted infractions and crimes and torts, and have dealt with them all.
2. Your descrption of what happened is false. The Justice department didnt just decide to drop the case. You made that up. The choose to not pursue a breakup order - that's a remedy - after losing several appeals. The political system is legal. FYI.
3. Sadly, it is you who makes no sense. You claim MS superior software only when sabotaging someone else's software. That is absurd and provably false. However, it is irrelevant.
4a. Time is valid argument. Do you hold Volkswagen of 2004 responsible for actions of Volkswagen of 1944 in moral sense? I don't. It is reasonable to expect that after a given period of time things change within a corporation. This is true at Microsoft. They have a major management shakeup since the anti-trust trial. Or did you not notice that Bill Gates was ousted as CEO and President of Microsoft?
4b. Settling is a perfect reason why you should let it go. They admitted liability, paid a settlement, and that's it. The case cited has no relevance on today's project management techniques. None whatsoever.
4c. The act WAS UNIQUE. Microsoft did not sabotage any other version of DOS to be incompatible with Windows. Just one - DR-DOS. They did not cause other purposeful incompatibilies with Windows 3.x and alternate DOS's. It's just that simple. If you have other cases to cite, than speak up. What you seem to be suggesting is that comitted similiar crimes with other products and software makers. But the other cases you will likely cite are vastly different. The Java situation, the Netscape scandal, etc are TOTALLY DIFFERENT ACTS, falling under TOTALLY DIFFERENT legal definitions.
5. Of course my point was good. Microsoft today - both managerially and technologically - is completely different from the company it was in the early 1990s.
In conclusion, the statement "Let it go" demonstrates ignorance, complacency and stupidty
Hardly.
You are basically saying it is OK to commit crimes. A better statement would have been.
I am saying that as critique of Microsoft bringing up a case that is over 10 years old, references completely obslete products, involves defunct vendors, was settled in court, and which is unrelated to anything at all to do with the article is a crappy proposition. It shows a general status of being out-of-touch with the situation. It shows a patetically reduced sense of scale. It shows that you equate an action that was eventually determined to be worth $23M to be the only deciding factor in the quality of a company that employes 50,000 and has an annual revenue in the high tens-of-billions.
"That crime has been paid for and irrelevant to this discussion". That would have been accurate, intelligent, fair.
If you think it's irrelevant to this discussion, why did you feel compelled to post?
after 20 years of writing operating systems, they still can't keep it from crashing?
You can easily say the same thing about ANY commerical Unix vendor. For example, after 30 years of writing operating systems, AIX still crashes. What is wrong with IBM?
But on to your actual questions
1. Less Secure. Any version of IRIX before 6.2 or 6.3. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of unchecked buffers, etc etc. Worst yet is you have absolutely no help if you are on a pre-R4000 CPU since those versions of IRIX are completely abandoned.
2. Crashes more frequently. SCO Unix, versions 5.0.6 and thereabouts. Useless. Core-dumps all over the place. Kernel problems all over the place. Littlest hardware error cause a complete mess. Filesystem problems all over the place. Unless setup perfectly, completely unusable.
3. More restricive EULA. This isn't even hard. So many UNIX license pale in comparison to the Windows EULA. It's a joke. Some versions of Unix you can't even buy. Or sell. Or rent space on. Or give shell access to. It's a joke. Again, SCO Unix. Also, any of the System IV stuff from At&T. Horrendous terms and conditions depending on your vendor, product combination, level of support etc.
4. Ship date problems. What a joke. Again, not even close. Anything from Novell. Netware 5 was completely botched in terms of ship date. Netware 6 was at one point reportedly 18 months late if that's even possible. Netware 3.12 languished.
Your problem is that you can't examine MS products without lumping them into a big ball. People don't lump everything on Sourceforge.net into a big category, and it's not wise to do the same with Microsoft. Some of MS's products are very very good. Some are terrible. Some are so bad they've been discontinued. You may not like Windows, fine. But I tell you what, compare VS.NET 2004 head to head with other IDEs and you'll reach the same conclusion as many developers: it's good stuff. Compare Excel 2003 versus other spreadsheets, and you'll find what people who have actually researched the data learn: Excel 2003 is exceptionally good.
And that's just big name products. What about underlying stuff? For example, take a look at the ActiveX Data Object (ADO). A well design and thoughout project. The right trade-off between abstraction and flexibility. Turns out that a project that started off small came to be a great selling point for Microsoft client/server software development. So much so that other products have copied it virtually down to the names of the constants used.
The problem with your post, as I see it, is that as you and alot of fanboys are finding out, Microsoft is turning out to be a very agile business. The sutff coming out there right now as beta's is going to surprise many many people. Spend 1-2 hrs reading the blogs at blogs.msdn.com. These guys are smart. They capable. They are highly talented. Management has been changed. Microsoft has changed. A major shakeup started and continues within Microsoft. It's a big deal.
And as MS changes and gets *better*, the fanboys on Slashdot whine and bitch.
Let me put it to you this way. As all the complaining about MS's stuff goes on, MS has lowered prices and improved their products. I work with small businesses and their IT needs, right? A few years, Small Business Server cost between $1299 and $1899 depending on what you needed in terms of users. At the time, I was recommending my clients go with the same piece of hardware (low-end Dell 'server') with FreeBSD on it or perhaps RedHat linux. For the cost, SBS2000 wasn't that good a deal. Plus with Exchange problems, and virus, etc etc - it was a pain. Since then, SBS2003 is out. Now it's less money $599 for the most common edition and usuage needs. You get everything you need to run an office of less than 50 people. It runs better on the 2 yr old hardware than SBS2000
Microsoft has repeatedly used illegal methods to put more people out of business then they employ.
That has never been proven, or attempted to be proven. It's your speculation.
They weasel there way out stuff.
They use the legal system.
Their products are not superior except where they sabotage other people's products
I disagree. I believe that in many many categories Microsoft software is superior to any other widely available offering. But's besides the point. There is no law against selling mediocre software. MS has always targed that ripe middle class of software users. The 90% that make up the majority.
Why should anyone let it go?
You should let go the case you mentioned because:
1. It was over a decade ago.
2. The people making the claim settled the case for many many many millions of dollars.
3. The act was unique.
You don't have to forget it, but it is irrelevant when discussing MS's current engineering practices.
The reason it is parse down to a finite level is that "issue" is a generic term - and that's what we want
I am a developer. I have to track issues with my code. I have a single database to track feature requests, problem reports, bug reports, enhancement requests, and general suggestions. Each of these is referred to as an "issue". I frequently change an issue from being bug report to being an enhancement request. For example, "The software is broken because it won't rotate to 37 degrees. It will only rotate to 90, 180, or 270 degrees!".
This that a bug? The user reported it is a bug. Does that make it a bug? Is the software defective? Or is that a feature that needs coding?
Bug doesn't sound bad to anyone who knows something about software development. "Defect" sounds bad to just about everyone. Issue is used because it is vague, and that is often what is called for.
Microsoft may be a marketing company, but one that happens to be the world's largest and most profitable seller of software.
Remember how they sabotaged Windows so that it would not run with a competitor's version of DOS? Exactly what customer problem did that solve?
That was ten+ years ago. Let it go. Plus it didnt ship in the final release copy of Windows.
"astroturfing" is creating the appearance of a grass roots movement when there isn't. It's a website where you can go and fill in your info and a fax, email, or postal letter is generated that intends to look as though it's not coming from a single source. There isn't nothing inherently illegal about that. You'd have to outlaw using a template to write a political or socially motivated missive.
Defamation also doesn't apply.
Why is your first reaction to "sue" since someone must be "breaking the law". Letter writing and lobbying is a fundamental bit of democracy. Why restrict it?
It was a good idea.. secure login path.. then MS went ahead and undid themselves.. putting in kernel level overide hooks that will let DirectX application intercept or nullify those keystrokes...
Maybe such a system would be a more polite society, but it wouldn't be crime free.
It would be violent crime free. Excepting people "not in the their right mind" - aka street muggers, drug addicts, mentally unfit, etc. White collar crimes would still, of course, be completely possible.
Unneccessary. I could send you photos (har har har) of houses that people were going to build.. and then they ran out of money after just putting in a full basement (required in my area.. Maine.. brr that's cold). They just slap a half tall roof on the property, put in a nice entry way, and call it a day.
There is no reason that it couldn't be hidden with some shrubbery, or even sunked a few feet deeper and a submarine style entrance attached.
1. MS wants to be folks regarded as "solving" SPAM.
2. E-mail is declining in value as a business tool thanks to SPAM, and as result MS's products have reduced usefullness. This hurts their core business.
3. SPAM and Trojans/Viruses etc go hand in hand. This is yet another way for MS to prevent their software from being cracked all to shreds.
Contact me by e-mail if you want to seriously wager on the topic. My position is that MS will not in fact make this "outlook" only - but instead end up giving it away as widely as possible for themselves.
1. Michael, the guy behind Lindows, has a history of trying to piss off MS. He has funded challenges to reverse engineer MS technoloy. He has funded lawsuits. He has given money and effort to promote F/OSS.
2. The original intent of Lindows - since shied away from - was that it would run Windows software flawlessly. In essense, when Lindows was named, it was designed to be a cheaper Windows knockoff. The goal was to provide a similiar interface, similiar functionality, and parallel compatibility with most off the shelf Windows software. Technical requirements of making this happened has caused this to decline in promienence as a goal, to the point now that they mostly focus on packaging good apps for easy expensive download.
3. Lindows is only one letter from Windows. The interface is designed to look similiar. The market segment is the same. X11 is not an operating system. It is a window system. Neither Lindows NOR Windows is solely a windowing system although they both contain one.
The problem is that thin clients have never caught on in the consumer market (aka, not business market). Any type of thin-client I've seen starts at at least $200, with most of them with any type of warranty or serviability being in the $300-$350 range. It's a lot of functionality to give up for such a small price savings.
Slashdot Mirror
No, rolling an actual "stock car" at 120 mph is basically fatal. If you go upside down on the pavement at 120 mph, you're dead.. maybe decapitated. You might escape as a vegatable, but not likely.
(Or do we just watch them die? :) )
That's where I think you are wrong. The success of Open Source isn't in the fact that there is source per se. The success is that it fills other tangible needs.
1. Open Source doesn't have crappy restrictive complicated licensing. Microsoft needs to address this.
2. Open Source is more transparent because of the community. And not just because of the source. It is a good process. Even with most projects 99% of the people contributing are working on bug reports and/or documentation. Only a small small number contribute patches. Microsoft is addressing this.
3. There is a large market that is not diminished for software that is "good enough" - that's not everything to everyone but that is broad and general purprose. Open Source excels at very focused products. The market for larger platform and enterprise products is real even in the face of Linux. Microsoft is addressing this aggressively.
The point? Microsoft isn't dying. It's not even close. These moves they are making are pre-emptive, not a fitfull act of a dying company.
No you asshat, a piece of paper per se won't stop a person from maiming/beating/killing you. But it provides legal justification for you to go the police and ask for protection in a formal manner. With a TRO, in most jurisdictions, the police are obligated to help you maintain personal security - whether that's protective custody, added patrols in your neighborhood, round the clock intervention, etc.
I don't think MS has reached the "pain" threshold, but some interesting things are going on Microsoft:
1. They are creating a much more robust community than they ever have. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com sometime. They have a lot of their developers - and not just low level guys - blogging on a regular basis. It's an interesting thing to watch these people work. And it really gets out of that "faceless corproate entity" mold they were heading down.
2. The software is getting better. Windows is pretty reliable now. It's not perfect by any means, but Windows 2000 was the first shot. Windows XP and Windows 2003 are really quite a bit better. It's easy to joke about "the most reliable Windows ever". In the real world there isn't that dread like there was in the NT4 days about BSOD's and reliablitly problems.
3. They have opened up a lot. And they are testing the waters on where to go. The VS.NET 2005 has a pretty open feedback and bug reporting system. My guess is that if this shows signs of promise they will expand the effort and create a company-wide public bug-tracking/feature request/complaint system similiar to BugZilla or the like.
Why is this important? Open Source has some big pluses going for it. For one, the software is percieved rightly to be of higher quality. Microsoft is agressively working to beat that notion.
Second, Open Source is considered to be cheap. Of course it's "free", but we can all think how it costs in a business sense: opportunity cost, labor, upkeep, etc. Microsoft is agressively challenging Open Source on this front. If they can keep some developers who would have gone to Linux by offering free development tools, or development editions of products, then they are doing good. And MS is dropping prices on a lot of the commonly used components: Small Business Server 2003 which includes Windows server, exchange, SQL Server, and a bunch of useful features costs about 1/2 of what SBS2000 cost a typical setup.
Finally, the big thing Open Source has going is the source. You can modify, redistribute, improve, etc. That's good. But that targets a small market. We know that even in the community of Linux users 99% or higher of users never look or touch the code. A high percentage don't even compile from source. What a lot of Linux users like is that it is easy to get fixes into source (by going to the programmer who wrote the code) and the community around the product is very transparent.
MS is working very agressively to beat Open Source at it's own game. To make a company of 50,000 responsive, transparent, vital and robust without stopping the profitable business of selling software.
Right now as far as the balance sheet and growth projections report MS isn't in any pain. They are working though to maintain it's market position and beat back the growth that Linux has seen. Remember, most of the growth that Linux has seen is at the expense of other Unix vendors, not Microsoft.
Major security holes in ssh didn't lead to the Microsoft related worm/virus/trojan "funfare". They never had and never will.
It didn't lead to front page news, but did hundreds of boxes get rooted? Are there probably boxes out there still to this day that are rooted without people knowing?
Yes, absolutely.
Just because it's not a national epidemic doesn't mean that the major security problems didn't make a living hell out of IT people's lives.
Don't underestimate the effect of major bugs on people's lives.. yes, even the bugs in OSS/FOSS cause major harm.
The same thing in different industries or applications are often patentable, for very good reason.
For example, what is a dishwaser? Its and automated thing that throws water and soap at dirty things and then blows heat on it and then it's done.
Is that the same thing as an automated car wash that you can drive your car through? It throws water and soap and hot air at your car.
Same thing. Different application.
Except that what you've described isn't new to the furniture or computing industries. And it's obvious to a person with knowledge of the industry. So you wouldnt have much of a case really..
This is ri God Damned diculous
What is your specific problem with this patent? Or are you just pissed off and venting "to the choir"?
Of all the patent stories on slashdot recently, this is probably one of the ones you should get least "pissed" about.
Screw it I'm going to get a patent for my messy room and anybody who has a messy room will have to pay me.
Ahh, see. You are being stupid. Is your messy room novell and/or a non-trivial improvement over a previous design? Is it non-obvious to people with industry knowledge?
Of course, the answers are no. Therefore, you would be rejected for a patent.
Ask yourself the same about the bank concept. Have you been to or heard of a bank that is designed as such? Do you think other people in the banking industry thought of this before? If you walked into this bank for the first time, would be apt to say "huh, this is an interesting idea"? Is this a non-trivial change from exisiting bank designs and layouts? Is this significantly different from how the banking industry has been operating for 300 years? Is this a different concept in the banking industry?
What I can't take anymore is people blowing off steam and sounding all dramatic and revolutionary even without considering the merits of the case.
That would be true if this was for a teller-free banking establishment. You make it sound like any place with a play center for kids and coffee machine is infringing.
Hopefully you know that your over simplification is moronic.
It's much more like this:
You are considering hiring someone who ten years ago was given a speeding ticket - a big one.
Do you never hire that person because, hey, he was a law breaker? Even if insists that hey, since then, he hasn't had more speeding tickets? And he has references, good work history, and significant good works of charity?
"Look, I got a $10,000 dollar fine when I was convicted, but you can trust me now, as I'm really rich and I could easily pay fines like that now."
The implication being that once you've comitted a crime you can never redeem yourself. If that's the case, we ought to just make every crime capital. That way we don't have a bunch of people walking around who can't ever find work or ever be members of good standing in the community again. Once a criminal, always a criminal right?
The bottom line here is that the people responsible for the misdeed were let go over a decade ago. The company as a whole has been completly overhauled. The management from top to bottom was shaken up.
Thats antecdotal evidence. However, if you could put together some type of documented paper trail that is reproducable, you'd have a good court case.
Until then, its pretty much unfounded rumor mongering. Can you say really that Office intentionally corrupted wordperfect.exe?
1. I referring specifically to the part about them putting more people out of business than they employ. That is not proven, and has never been argued in court. They have comitted infractions and crimes and torts, and have dealt with them all.
2. Your descrption of what happened is false. The Justice department didnt just decide to drop the case. You made that up. The choose to not pursue a breakup order - that's a remedy - after losing several appeals. The political system is legal. FYI.
3. Sadly, it is you who makes no sense. You claim MS superior software only when sabotaging someone else's software. That is absurd and provably false. However, it is irrelevant. 4a. Time is valid argument. Do you hold Volkswagen of 2004 responsible for actions of Volkswagen of 1944 in moral sense? I don't. It is reasonable to expect that after a given period of time things change within a corporation. This is true at Microsoft. They have a major management shakeup since the anti-trust trial. Or did you not notice that Bill Gates was ousted as CEO and President of Microsoft?
4b. Settling is a perfect reason why you should let it go. They admitted liability, paid a settlement, and that's it. The case cited has no relevance on today's project management techniques. None whatsoever.
4c. The act WAS UNIQUE. Microsoft did not sabotage any other version of DOS to be incompatible with Windows. Just one - DR-DOS. They did not cause other purposeful incompatibilies with Windows 3.x and alternate DOS's. It's just that simple. If you have other cases to cite, than speak up. What you seem to be suggesting is that comitted similiar crimes with other products and software makers. But the other cases you will likely cite are vastly different. The Java situation, the Netscape scandal, etc are TOTALLY DIFFERENT ACTS, falling under TOTALLY DIFFERENT legal definitions.
5. Of course my point was good. Microsoft today - both managerially and technologically - is completely different from the company it was in the early 1990s.
In conclusion, the statement "Let it go" demonstrates ignorance, complacency and stupidty
Hardly.
You are basically saying it is OK to commit crimes. A better statement would have been.
I am saying that as critique of Microsoft bringing up a case that is over 10 years old, references completely obslete products, involves defunct vendors, was settled in court, and which is unrelated to anything at all to do with the article is a crappy proposition. It shows a general status of being out-of-touch with the situation. It shows a patetically reduced sense of scale. It shows that you equate an action that was eventually determined to be worth $23M to be the only deciding factor in the quality of a company that employes 50,000 and has an annual revenue in the high tens-of-billions.
"That crime has been paid for and irrelevant to this discussion". That would have been accurate, intelligent, fair.
If you think it's irrelevant to this discussion, why did you feel compelled to post?
after 20 years of writing operating systems, they still can't keep it from crashing?
You can easily say the same thing about ANY commerical Unix vendor. For example, after 30 years of writing operating systems, AIX still crashes. What is wrong with IBM?
But on to your actual questions
1. Less Secure. Any version of IRIX before 6.2 or 6.3. Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of unchecked buffers, etc etc. Worst yet is you have absolutely no help if you are on a pre-R4000 CPU since those versions of IRIX are completely abandoned.
2. Crashes more frequently. SCO Unix, versions 5.0.6 and thereabouts. Useless. Core-dumps all over the place. Kernel problems all over the place. Littlest hardware error cause a complete mess. Filesystem problems all over the place. Unless setup perfectly, completely unusable.
3. More restricive EULA. This isn't even hard. So many UNIX license pale in comparison to the Windows EULA. It's a joke. Some versions of Unix you can't even buy. Or sell. Or rent space on. Or give shell access to. It's a joke. Again, SCO Unix. Also, any of the System IV stuff from At&T. Horrendous terms and conditions depending on your vendor, product combination, level of support etc.
4. Ship date problems. What a joke. Again, not even close. Anything from Novell. Netware 5 was completely botched in terms of ship date. Netware 6 was at one point reportedly 18 months late if that's even possible. Netware 3.12 languished.
Your problem is that you can't examine MS products without lumping them into a big ball. People don't lump everything on Sourceforge.net into a big category, and it's not wise to do the same with Microsoft. Some of MS's products are very very good. Some are terrible. Some are so bad they've been discontinued. You may not like Windows, fine. But I tell you what, compare VS.NET 2004 head to head with other IDEs and you'll reach the same conclusion as many developers: it's good stuff. Compare Excel 2003 versus other spreadsheets, and you'll find what people who have actually researched the data learn: Excel 2003 is exceptionally good.
And that's just big name products. What about underlying stuff? For example, take a look at the ActiveX Data Object (ADO). A well design and thoughout project. The right trade-off between abstraction and flexibility. Turns out that a project that started off small came to be a great selling point for Microsoft client/server software development. So much so that other products have copied it virtually down to the names of the constants used.
The problem with your post, as I see it, is that as you and alot of fanboys are finding out, Microsoft is turning out to be a very agile business. The sutff coming out there right now as beta's is going to surprise many many people. Spend 1-2 hrs reading the blogs at blogs.msdn.com. These guys are smart. They capable. They are highly talented. Management has been changed. Microsoft has changed. A major shakeup started and continues within Microsoft. It's a big deal.
And as MS changes and gets *better*, the fanboys on Slashdot whine and bitch.
Let me put it to you this way. As all the complaining about MS's stuff goes on, MS has lowered prices and improved their products. I work with small businesses and their IT needs, right? A few years, Small Business Server cost between $1299 and $1899 depending on what you needed in terms of users. At the time, I was recommending my clients go with the same piece of hardware (low-end Dell 'server') with FreeBSD on it or perhaps RedHat linux. For the cost, SBS2000 wasn't that good a deal. Plus with Exchange problems, and virus, etc etc - it was a pain. Since then, SBS2003 is out. Now it's less money $599 for the most common edition and usuage needs. You get everything you need to run an office of less than 50 people. It runs better on the 2 yr old hardware than SBS2000
Microsoft has repeatedly used illegal methods to put more people out of business then they employ.
That has never been proven, or attempted to be proven. It's your speculation.
They weasel there way out stuff.
They use the legal system.
Their products are not superior except where they sabotage other people's products
I disagree. I believe that in many many categories Microsoft software is superior to any other widely available offering. But's besides the point. There is no law against selling mediocre software. MS has always targed that ripe middle class of software users. The 90% that make up the majority.
Why should anyone let it go?
You should let go the case you mentioned because:
1. It was over a decade ago.
2. The people making the claim settled the case for many many many millions of dollars.
3. The act was unique.
You don't have to forget it, but it is irrelevant when discussing MS's current engineering practices.
And it makes you look petty.
The reason it is parse down to a finite level is that "issue" is a generic term - and that's what we want
I am a developer. I have to track issues with my code. I have a single database to track feature requests, problem reports, bug reports, enhancement requests, and general suggestions. Each of these is referred to as an "issue". I frequently change an issue from being bug report to being an enhancement request. For example, "The software is broken because it won't rotate to 37 degrees. It will only rotate to 90, 180, or 270 degrees!".
This that a bug? The user reported it is a bug. Does that make it a bug? Is the software defective? Or is that a feature that needs coding?
Bug doesn't sound bad to anyone who knows something about software development. "Defect" sounds bad to just about everyone. Issue is used because it is vague, and that is often what is called for.
Microsoft may be a marketing company, but one that happens to be the world's largest and most profitable seller of software.
Remember how they sabotaged Windows so that it would not run with a competitor's version of DOS? Exactly what customer problem did that solve?
That was ten+ years ago. Let it go. Plus it didnt ship in the final release copy of Windows.
"Microsoft Windows sucks" you can bet Microsoft would sue.
I bet they wouldn't. I know they wouldn't. I've seen banner ads that say that verbatim.
And my point is. So what. Bad publicity isn't illegal. Am I legally able to criticize Linux? I think I am.
"I think the typical Linux init process is overly complex, crufty, and hard to maintain. I much prefer Windows startup process."
There. Now. Should it be illegal for me to take MS for saying that?
"astroturfing" is creating the appearance of a grass roots movement when there isn't. It's a website where you can go and fill in your info and a fax, email, or postal letter is generated that intends to look as though it's not coming from a single source. There isn't nothing inherently illegal about that. You'd have to outlaw using a template to write a political or socially motivated missive.
Defamation also doesn't apply.
Why is your first reaction to "sue" since someone must be "breaking the law". Letter writing and lobbying is a fundamental bit of democracy. Why restrict it?
Hotels I've stayed at recently actually did have copies of the Koran right next to the copy of the Gideon bible.
It was a good idea.. secure login path.. then MS went ahead and undid themselves.. putting in kernel level overide hooks that will let DirectX application intercept or nullify those keystrokes...
Maybe such a system would be a more polite society, but it wouldn't be crime free.
It would be violent crime free. Excepting people "not in the their right mind" - aka street muggers, drug addicts, mentally unfit, etc. White collar crimes would still, of course, be completely possible.
Unneccessary. I could send you photos (har har har) of houses that people were going to build.. and then they ran out of money after just putting in a full basement (required in my area.. Maine.. brr that's cold). They just slap a half tall roof on the property, put in a nice entry way, and call it a day.
There is no reason that it couldn't be hidden with some shrubbery, or even sunked a few feet deeper and a submarine style entrance attached.
I bet you are wrong.
1. MS wants to be folks regarded as "solving" SPAM.
2. E-mail is declining in value as a business tool thanks to SPAM, and as result MS's products have reduced usefullness. This hurts their core business.
3. SPAM and Trojans/Viruses etc go hand in hand. This is yet another way for MS to prevent their software from being cracked all to shreds.
Contact me by e-mail if you want to seriously wager on the topic. My position is that MS will not in fact make this "outlook" only - but instead end up giving it away as widely as possible for themselves.
You can tell easily:
1. Michael, the guy behind Lindows, has a history of trying to piss off MS. He has funded challenges to reverse engineer MS technoloy. He has funded lawsuits. He has given money and effort to promote F/OSS.
2. The original intent of Lindows - since shied away from - was that it would run Windows software flawlessly. In essense, when Lindows was named, it was designed to be a cheaper Windows knockoff. The goal was to provide a similiar interface, similiar functionality, and parallel compatibility with most off the shelf Windows software. Technical requirements of making this happened has caused this to decline in promienence as a goal, to the point now that they mostly focus on packaging good apps for easy expensive download.
3. Lindows is only one letter from Windows. The interface is designed to look similiar. The market segment is the same. X11 is not an operating system. It is a window system. Neither Lindows NOR Windows is solely a windowing system although they both contain one.
The problem is that thin clients have never caught on in the consumer market (aka, not business market). Any type of thin-client I've seen starts at at least $200, with most of them with any type of warranty or serviability being in the $300-$350 range. It's a lot of functionality to give up for such a small price savings.