People from all sectors are being laid off, primarily because hundreds of dot-com's are going out of business. Just because you're good, doesn't mean you won't get laid off if the company closes its doors.
Once you are laid off, finding a new job, even for those with a decade of experience and very relavant skills is still quite difficult. Where a year ago I couldn't get recruiters to stop calling, today they won't return my phone calls. The jobs are *REALLY* that scarce.
Actually, no. All your content is still there in its original form. The only thing that has changed is the presentation of that content, and presentation is entirely in the realm of the client software.
Ever noticed that pages don't look the same when viewed with different browsers? That's because the client can render the page any way it likes. The HTML formatting codes are at best a guideline which the browser need not follow (think Lynx).
IE is based on Mosaic because it was the fastest way to get a browser on the market back in 1995. IE today doesn't have a shred of Mosaic code in it anymore.
Of course, at least MS admits they stole their code from Mosaic, Netscape never did.
According to RMS, linking through any means is still making a derivitive work. He hasn't specifically made statements that i'm aware of about CORBA, but he's basically implied that this includes CORBA objects as well.
You are again ignoring the fact that being customer oriented doesn't mean that you are a saint and have your customers best interests in mind. It means you are *APPEASING* your customer. Giving them what they WANT, not what they NEED.
They reduce choice because they reduce demand for other products, and they do this by increasing the demand for their product.
Customers DEMAND Office. I know this because i've worked for OEM's that got sweet (pardon the pun) deals on Suites from Corel and Lotus, but when they tried to sell them, found their sales dropping through the floor on models with those products.
Office outsells Wordperfect and SmartSuite on the retail shelves by about 10:1 as well. People just don't WANT anything else, and that is a result of MS's "customer oriented" appeasement.
When you think "customer oriented", you think "concerned that my customer's needs are met in the best way possible".
That's not what it means, and it's certainly not what MS means. They mean "We appeal to our customers ego and make them want our products whether they are technically good for them or not".
The marketing and interfaces and point and drool mentality is all completely customer oriented.
Companies succeed by producing products their customers want, not products their customers need. And MS knows this.
Hmmm... If you don't think MS is a customer oriented company, then I think you're blind.
Everything MS does is customer oriented; The pretty interfaces, the marketing, etc... everything has a very customer driven focus. It may be that you as a customer are not represented in that, but then you're a minority. That doesn't mean they're not customer oriented simply because they don't address the concerns of EVERY customer.
It's not a non-sequiter. It's fact, and one most often overlooked by their opponents. They depend on customers demanding their product to survive, and the only way they can do that is to appease them in ways they like.
It's much like the roman emperors appeasing the people of Rome with gladiator games, while they went off and did whatever they wanted.
Hmm.. the kernel notes lists quite a few security patches to the kernels over the last 1-2 years. Many of them are DoS attacks, but that's still something that should be applied.
I didn't say that, so stop putting words in my mouth. In fact, I gave them the benefit of the doubt by saying that only 25% of the users would go and buy it, 75% would either find a crack or not use it in the first place.
This isn't about suing people. MS can't sue everyone, or even a tiny percentage of everyone that pirates. This is simply about preventing them from pirating in the first place.
Ok stoopid. Automatic means, you still enter the CD-key. The activation wizard goes out and sends them your hardware hash. If it's the same, no problem, it activates autmotically again without problem. If your hardware has changed, then it compares it to your allowed number of different hardware activations, and if you've exceeded that, then you have to call MS and explain. The phone jockeys don't have to get approval or anything, they can give you the key over the phone if you tell them "I've upgrade my hardware 3 times in the last year and reinstalled". No big deal.
Exactly. Everyone is bitching that this could be used to track you. Well, guess what? If MS *REALLY* wanted to track you, they could do it without you even knowing about it.
They have no reason to implement such a public policy and get everyone riled up for something they'd want to keep secret and clandestine.
This leads to the inescapable conclusion that maybe, just maybe, this isn't a nefarious plot to steal your credit card information or figure out if you've got illegal pr0n, but it's really what MS says it is. They have much easier methods to do anything more sinister.
They don't have the exact same hardware ID's. There are lots of unique ID's, even on identical hardware. For instance, Network cards have a unique IEEE mandated ID, Hard drives have serial numbers unique to the drive, if you have a PIII with processor ID enabled, that's another, etc..
Please, read the process before jumping to conclusions.
1) You have 30 days to activate the product from the time you install it. If you are reinstalling eveyr 30 days or so anyways, you have no reason to activate in the first place.
2) Because you have 30 days to activate, that gives you plenty of time to call MS whenever it's convenient for you.
Also, you don't have to tell MS who you are to activate the product. You just tell them what country you're in. If you're paranoid enough to think they might trace your IP, call from a phone. If you're even more paranoid and think they might trace your phone number, simply call form a pay phone in another part of the city.
Geez man, the article is *CLEARLY* false. Anyone who "worked for MS" and had enough inside information to know about this "clandestine" feature, would also have enough knowledge to know that you can't just disable RPCSS without breaking virtually everything in your system.
So, by the fact that the author of the letter suggests disabling the service, they're admitting that they don't know enough about the OS to know that you can't do it, therefore admitting that they don't know enough to know about any such alleged plot.
So please, do us a favor and stop spreading things like this. This is how false rumors quickly become "fact" reiterated by thousands of people (like the Windows 95 regwizard that steals your product information without your knowledge).
But, to address your point, even the DMCA does *NOT* give MS the right to violate your privacy, and if they were doing this, they would be liable to massive civil rights lawsuits. MS isn't that stupid.
Looking at the uptimes stats, it looks like there are literally 10's of thousands of Linux boxes that haven't been rebooted in more than a year. Lots of kernel patches have been released in that time, how come they haven't upgraded to newer kernels?
Doesn't anyone remember the Ramen Crew disaster recently?
Why does everyone always take the extremist view? "It won't completely stop piracy, so why bother?" "Not EVERYONE will buy it, so why bother?" "It'll be cracked in no-time, so nobody will buy it, why bother?"
It's not an all or nothing prospect. Even if 10% of the people that casually pirate go out and buy it because of the new antipiracy crap, that's still a big gain in revenue.
One might argue that they might lose as many paying customers who don't want to deal with it, but I doubt it. Few people stopped buying PIII's over the Processor ID, Intel just got tired of dealing with the vocal minority that kept making a big stink.
No, that's not it at all. MS knows it will make it's way onto the web, and quickly at that. It's just that the vast majority of "casual" pirates either don't use the web, or use it rarealy and wouldn't be able to find a crack, if they even knew one existed in the first place.
Ummm.. all you need to do is port scan to find Windows users. Why would a list of IP's be worth anything? I could generate such a list easily enough, not to mention that things like dynamic IP addressing, NAT, Firewalls, etc.. mean that an IP is often times worthless as a way of identifying someone unless you have a search warrant to retrieve logs from your ISP.
Man, people.. *THINK* before you jump to wild conclusions about how this or that is such a horrid security or privacy violation. This information is freely available from thousands of differnet sources.
Crackers are responsible for very little of the vast majority of piracy. The vast majority is casual, where most people don't even realize they're breaking the law ("Hey jim, can I borrow your Office CD for a few minutes?").
Sure, any protection will be cracked almost immediately, but very few people (compared to the people that use Office) will know how to get those cracks, or will be scared that MS will know that they've cracked it. (That's the real purpose, to scare people into complying, not whether the damn thing works or not).
Professional pirates will find ways to defeat it, and there isn't a lot any company can do about that.
This is a lot like putting locks on your doors. Any professional thief can bypass them. They even sell machines to do it automatically for people to use with little to no skill, but it keeps the vast majority of people from just walking in and taking what they want.
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. MS isn't trying to stop professional pirating with the activation method.
They're trying to stop Joe Sixpack from giving his CD to his friend to install, or to stop a small company from buying one copy of Office and installing it on 20 machines.
Sure, you can find a crack somewhere on the web, but the vast majority of casual copiers aren't going to be that resourceful.
Even if it reduces piracy by 25%, it's still a lot of money for them to recover from people that would otherwise buy it if they couldn't just use their friends CD.
This isn't saying I like activation, just that it's not trying to accomplish what you claim it is.
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I have to greatly disagree with you.
People from all sectors are being laid off, primarily because hundreds of dot-com's are going out of business. Just because you're good, doesn't mean you won't get laid off if the company closes its doors.
Once you are laid off, finding a new job, even for those with a decade of experience and very relavant skills is still quite difficult. Where a year ago I couldn't get recruiters to stop calling, today they won't return my phone calls. The jobs are *REALLY* that scarce.
Actually, no. All your content is still there in its original form. The only thing that has changed is the presentation of that content, and presentation is entirely in the realm of the client software.
Ever noticed that pages don't look the same when viewed with different browsers? That's because the client can render the page any way it likes. The HTML formatting codes are at best a guideline which the browser need not follow (think Lynx).
IE is based on Mosaic because it was the fastest way to get a browser on the market back in 1995. IE today doesn't have a shred of Mosaic code in it anymore.
Of course, at least MS admits they stole their code from Mosaic, Netscape never did.
Wrong.
According to RMS, linking through any means is still making a derivitive work. He hasn't specifically made statements that i'm aware of about CORBA, but he's basically implied that this includes CORBA objects as well.
You are again ignoring the fact that being customer oriented doesn't mean that you are a saint and have your customers best interests in mind. It means you are *APPEASING* your customer. Giving them what they WANT, not what they NEED.
They reduce choice because they reduce demand for other products, and they do this by increasing the demand for their product.
Customers DEMAND Office. I know this because i've worked for OEM's that got sweet (pardon the pun) deals on Suites from Corel and Lotus, but when they tried to sell them, found their sales dropping through the floor on models with those products.
Office outsells Wordperfect and SmartSuite on the retail shelves by about 10:1 as well. People just don't WANT anything else, and that is a result of MS's "customer oriented" appeasement.
When you think "customer oriented", you think "concerned that my customer's needs are met in the best way possible".
That's not what it means, and it's certainly not what MS means. They mean "We appeal to our customers ego and make them want our products whether they are technically good for them or not".
The marketing and interfaces and point and drool mentality is all completely customer oriented.
Companies succeed by producing products their customers want, not products their customers need. And MS knows this.
Hmmm... If you don't think MS is a customer oriented company, then I think you're blind.
Everything MS does is customer oriented; The pretty interfaces, the marketing, etc... everything has a very customer driven focus. It may be that you as a customer are not represented in that, but then you're a minority. That doesn't mean they're not customer oriented simply because they don't address the concerns of EVERY customer.
It's not a non-sequiter. It's fact, and one most often overlooked by their opponents. They depend on customers demanding their product to survive, and the only way they can do that is to appease them in ways they like.
It's much like the roman emperors appeasing the people of Rome with gladiator games, while they went off and did whatever they wanted.
There is no general way to upgrade the Linux kernel without restarting the kernel, either by a reboot or the two kernel monte.
If you're a kernel hacker, you could probably rig up a debugger to do this, but it would require a *LOT* of skill. Something a sysadmin wouldn't have.
Hmm.. the kernel notes lists quite a few security patches to the kernels over the last 1-2 years. Many of them are DoS attacks, but that's still something that should be applied.
The two kernel monte still reboots, it just doesn't require a reset. All kernel statistics get reset when you do a two kernel monte.
I didn't say that, so stop putting words in my mouth. In fact, I gave them the benefit of the doubt by saying that only 25% of the users would go and buy it, 75% would either find a crack or not use it in the first place.
This isn't about suing people. MS can't sue everyone, or even a tiny percentage of everyone that pirates. This is simply about preventing them from pirating in the first place.
Ok stoopid. Automatic means, you still enter the CD-key. The activation wizard goes out and sends them your hardware hash. If it's the same, no problem, it activates autmotically again without problem. If your hardware has changed, then it compares it to your allowed number of different hardware activations, and if you've exceeded that, then you have to call MS and explain. The phone jockeys don't have to get approval or anything, they can give you the key over the phone if you tell them "I've upgrade my hardware 3 times in the last year and reinstalled". No big deal.
Exactly. Everyone is bitching that this could be used to track you. Well, guess what? If MS *REALLY* wanted to track you, they could do it without you even knowing about it.
They have no reason to implement such a public policy and get everyone riled up for something they'd want to keep secret and clandestine.
This leads to the inescapable conclusion that maybe, just maybe, this isn't a nefarious plot to steal your credit card information or figure out if you've got illegal pr0n, but it's really what MS says it is. They have much easier methods to do anything more sinister.
They don't have the exact same hardware ID's. There are lots of unique ID's, even on identical hardware. For instance, Network cards have a unique IEEE mandated ID, Hard drives have serial numbers unique to the drive, if you have a PIII with processor ID enabled, that's another, etc..
Please, read the process before jumping to conclusions.
1) You have 30 days to activate the product from the time you install it. If you are reinstalling eveyr 30 days or so anyways, you have no reason to activate in the first place.
2) Because you have 30 days to activate, that gives you plenty of time to call MS whenever it's convenient for you.
Also, you don't have to tell MS who you are to activate the product. You just tell them what country you're in. If you're paranoid enough to think they might trace your IP, call from a phone. If you're even more paranoid and think they might trace your phone number, simply call form a pay phone in another part of the city.
Geez.
Geez man, the article is *CLEARLY* false. Anyone who "worked for MS" and had enough inside information to know about this "clandestine" feature, would also have enough knowledge to know that you can't just disable RPCSS without breaking virtually everything in your system.
So, by the fact that the author of the letter suggests disabling the service, they're admitting that they don't know enough about the OS to know that you can't do it, therefore admitting that they don't know enough to know about any such alleged plot.
So please, do us a favor and stop spreading things like this. This is how false rumors quickly become "fact" reiterated by thousands of people (like the Windows 95 regwizard that steals your product information without your knowledge).
But, to address your point, even the DMCA does *NOT* give MS the right to violate your privacy, and if they were doing this, they would be liable to massive civil rights lawsuits. MS isn't that stupid.
You're basing your argument on invalid data.
You don't have to connect to the net to activate. MS will have a toll-free number to call to activate as well.
Looking at the uptimes stats, it looks like there are literally 10's of thousands of Linux boxes that haven't been rebooted in more than a year. Lots of kernel patches have been released in that time, how come they haven't upgraded to newer kernels?
Doesn't anyone remember the Ramen Crew disaster recently?
Why does everyone always take the extremist view? "It won't completely stop piracy, so why bother?" "Not EVERYONE will buy it, so why bother?" "It'll be cracked in no-time, so nobody will buy it, why bother?"
It's not an all or nothing prospect. Even if 10% of the people that casually pirate go out and buy it because of the new antipiracy crap, that's still a big gain in revenue.
One might argue that they might lose as many paying customers who don't want to deal with it, but I doubt it. Few people stopped buying PIII's over the Processor ID, Intel just got tired of dealing with the vocal minority that kept making a big stink.
No, that's not it at all. MS knows it will make it's way onto the web, and quickly at that. It's just that the vast majority of "casual" pirates either don't use the web, or use it rarealy and wouldn't be able to find a crack, if they even knew one existed in the first place.
Ummm.. all you need to do is port scan to find Windows users. Why would a list of IP's be worth anything? I could generate such a list easily enough, not to mention that things like dynamic IP addressing, NAT, Firewalls, etc.. mean that an IP is often times worthless as a way of identifying someone unless you have a search warrant to retrieve logs from your ISP.
Man, people.. *THINK* before you jump to wild conclusions about how this or that is such a horrid security or privacy violation. This information is freely available from thousands of differnet sources.
Crackers are responsible for very little of the vast majority of piracy. The vast majority is casual, where most people don't even realize they're breaking the law ("Hey jim, can I borrow your Office CD for a few minutes?").
Sure, any protection will be cracked almost immediately, but very few people (compared to the people that use Office) will know how to get those cracks, or will be scared that MS will know that they've cracked it. (That's the real purpose, to scare people into complying, not whether the damn thing works or not).
Professional pirates will find ways to defeat it, and there isn't a lot any company can do about that.
This is a lot like putting locks on your doors. Any professional thief can bypass them. They even sell machines to do it automatically for people to use with little to no skill, but it keeps the vast majority of people from just walking in and taking what they want.
You're looking at this from the wrong angle. MS isn't trying to stop professional pirating with the activation method.
They're trying to stop Joe Sixpack from giving his CD to his friend to install, or to stop a small company from buying one copy of Office and installing it on 20 machines.
Sure, you can find a crack somewhere on the web, but the vast majority of casual copiers aren't going to be that resourceful.
Even if it reduces piracy by 25%, it's still a lot of money for them to recover from people that would otherwise buy it if they couldn't just use their friends CD.
This isn't saying I like activation, just that it's not trying to accomplish what you claim it is.