You can bet Microsoft doesn't want people knowing that they can get rid of that pesky ad....:)
Or maybe they do. Once they've killed off AIM and Yahoo they can close the loophole, but until then having the ad free version out there is better for them.
Surely providing the service for less means that more companies will be able to afford it, and economic growth for all.
With increasing globalisation, there must come a point where this petty our country/your country thing becomes irrelevant, and we can look upon the world as our home.
To keep up with IE, NN became free and open source in 1998.
To keep up? NN was always streets ahead. Microsoft somehow got away with bundling IE with the OS, and forcing retailers not to sell any other OS. Then when FF was taking over the world, they had the influence for about three very rapidly fixed vulnerabilities that briefly existed in FF to hit the front page of Google News, and *poof* FF starts slipping in the market.
There needs to be 50 million people prepared to take class action and sue for $1.17 every time MS slanders Free Software, and it affects business enough to affect the uptake of standards. Without a single entity to claim: this slander cost us $x this is the only way to protect mankind form these extortionists.
W95 just went:... non-DOS partition detected... Reformating...
And that was the end of my Mandrake.
I thought that someone could probably sue them for the value of the lost data. It was _clearly_ intentional
The company's profit margin is so high that Bill is the richest man in the world by half a mountain, where, were there competition in the marketplace that would have to be reinvested into R&D to keep up with the competition or returned to the consumer as lower prices, as long as the competition were happy to be the richest man in the world by less than half a mountain.
And the problem is the government not putting in the R&D dollars.
Have you heard of 64 bit computing? Windows is approximately 5 years behind Linux, 7 years behind Sun, and 2 years behind apple.
And Bill's right it is a crime. Antitrust. Abuse of Monopoly.
This Software patent thing only protects microsoft from possible competition in the distant future with companies that are very small or don't exist yet.
Even with a complete software patents victory in europe the war is still looking pretty grim.
To return the protection of and value to the consumer that is legislated for in every other field of commerce Microsoft must be broken up.
Stupid patent laws in Europe are a minor inconvenience in a long list of inconveniences that will continue to be forced upon the consumer until someone nukes redmond into submission.
At the moment, if there is even one error in the chip it has to be biffed.
Coding theory allows much better returns than 50% less errors with 50% more wires.
For instance the Hamming Codes will correct one error in a word 2 to the power of R bits long for the cost of R bits.
So if your chip processes 32-bit words, you could instead process 32-5=27 bit words, and if one of your 32 little gatey-things didn't dope correctly, you would still get the right answer.
For the chip to need to be chucked you would need to have two errors in the same 32-bit section, rather than one anywhere on the whole chip. Wasted calcuation width is about 16%.
No one has the gumption to pursue this route because many Americans politicians are in the pockets of the Taiwanese government.
No mate, they're just seeing the bigger picture.
At 9.1% growth per annum, China's economy will be larger than the USA's at 4.4% growth in 2015. Sooner if the flow of experts to Europe due to the weak american dollar starts affecting the rate at which technology advances in the USA.
It should be noticed that the thing about a world where there are tow super-powers is that they are at war.
Arms sales to, and economic support for Taiwan serves to decrease the stability of China, who have been building up their military near the Taiwan Strait since the communist revolution.
(Except that untill 10 years ago that meant hordes of peasants armed with handfuls of mud and sharpened kernels of rice). Now it means muti-headed balistic missiles, and more tanks than America could produce in a month of Sundays.
Situation 1:
An entity sells an operating system. After purchasing the operating system, taking it home, opening the package and inserting the media into their computer they are informed that they must agree to an EULA, which is then presented on screen in such a way as nearly all people don't read it.
Some of the patches that are automatically installed by this entity on the purchaser's computer change the EULA.
The Purchaser uses the product in such a way as to not comply with the EULA
Ethical question: Is the purchaser simply stealing, are both parties at fault, or has the producer of the operating system tainted their hands, so that the purchaser's actions are justifiable?
Situation 2:
An entity steals an operating system from the late great Kildall. Using illegal practices to force their (and only their) stolen operating system on consumers, and abusing their monopoly to the extent that consumers pay so much above what would be market value in a competitive environment that the CEO of the entity becomes the unassailably richest man in the world. The entity is convicted of abusing the monopoly, but has become powerful enough that they can manipulate the penalty, and continue to practice in an illegally anti-competitive manner.
A person purchases a product from this entity, and pays for it.
Ethical question: Is paying for the product ethical, given that it increases the money and power of the criminal entity? Or is stealing the only conscionable way to acquire the products of this entity?
More exposure to tech creates better techies.
Exposure to OSS includes the ability for the exposee to peep under the hood, and have a tweak, if one is that way inclined. And in a country of 1.4 thousand million, (or "billion" as americans insist on calling "thousand million"), more that one person is going to be that way inclined - Increasing the IT savvy of the people can only be good for the economy in the future.
Furthermore, extending the interface to all 22 official languages in India is going to be very useful and poplular, and expensive for closed source software companies to duplicate.
I wouldn't be suprised if there is also a lot of interest in these applications by expatriot Indians interested in bringing up multi-lingual children. (And Sri-Lankans, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis for that matter).
Yahoo are doing good work of late, and their Images search leaves Google for dead... but...
Did they have to do the little search box in the exact same colour and placement as the google search button, and colour the "search" button exactly the same as the google search button, with the same colour border popping up on mouseover?
That's just scarey.
But IP is all crap and we should respect companies that knock each other off like that.
Unless you live in Manhattan. Everything you buy in either country is made by the same Chinese guy. You notice petrol though - it's much cheaper in the Sates, but then the call it 'Gas'.
Mark my words...the M$ search engine project and it's (imho) inevitable failure will be the death knell for M$.
Bundle search with the operating system, and Google fails as did Netscape.
They don't need to compete with the product. They have a captive market - and it's 99% of the desktops out there.
Except in Munich. And Brazil.
I would just like to take a moment to thank Firefo
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 2
x and the Adblock plugin, without which I could never have read that article.
at Google, engineers are responsible for the software that they write--period. They don't hand it off to a "system operations" team to deal with bugs.
You've really got to admire Microsoft there. Instead of alowing the people with emotional investment and pride in the application nurture their children until they're the best that they can be, they fob off the bug fixing to a team of bored bug fixers - freeing up the development crew to cram out another highly hyped, bug-ridden, overpriced production for premature realease on the long suffering public.
Hey neat,
A microsoft troll that doesn't read like a marketing peice. You restore something of my faith in trolling.
.You're right -.pdf is mostly used for as a ubiquitous document format, but due to being designed with PDF forms (including mutimedia and javascript) in mind, they can, and if poorly created do, contain a lot more information than is neccesary for that.
Word is great if you're embedding other microsoft objects in it. Otherwise open office is just as good. And the open office programming language is much better than VB for word.
If you're using a word processor for school, you'll get better marks with wordperfect, because the grammar checker is much better than word's.
.pdf has been something of a standard for file formats for some time now. All the reports produced by our branch at work are supplied in this format when electronic formats are included.
There is a mis-perception that it is not an open format by people who only know microsoft office, because the most reliable method of converting MS office documents to.pdf is by printing to acrobat distiller, for which you need to buy about $300 worth of Adobe software.
Open office exports to.pdf from the file menu. This functionality cost $0 to include, because the format is open. If Microsoft had a business model that involved providing useful tools to their customers they could have included the same functionality, with the same $0 in licensing costs to them.
However since it is more important to them that they have as large a proportion of the world as possible locked into their own proprietary formats, so you find that despite charging you $600-$900 dollars simple, cheap, useful functionality is not included.
And the consequence? People think that.pdf is a proprietary format! You should realize by now that Microsoft's (illegal) business model is doing a great disservice to their customers and the world.
They are not selling a product that is good for their customers. They are selling a product that instead ensures that they will not have to sell a product that is good for their customers in the future.
Still want to buy their stuff?
"Extend an olive branch" - (vb)
(1) To attack with IP lawsuits, especially when the lawsuit is very weak, but the party being sued does not have the resources to fight it.
(2) To fund 3rd parties to attack with IP lawsuits. "Microsoft extended and olive branch, through SCO, to IBM and Daimler-Chrysler "
"Build some bridges" (vb)
To sit down with a party to decide how to most effectively extend an olive branch. (qv)
"Collaborate" (vb)
To protect one's monopoly by destroying ones opponents by any means, fair or foul. Especially of political bribery to effect legal changes that make the modus operandi of potential competitors illegal.
"Open up one's file formats"
(1) To obscure one's file formats, especially formatting, so that competitors products look buggy when viewing files.
(2) To send malformed files when ones servers are communicating with one's potential competitors. "Microsoft's web servers have opened their file formats to the Opera web-browser"
And what "trust rank" would you give "fox news" for the same reason?
It is an Australian Owned (except for a technicality), satellite, cable, and broadcast network with a lot of staff, a huge audience and the most valuable thing that it sells is manufactured consent.
Will you stop posting all these microsoft articles to the front page of slashdot please Zonk?
Yes, I know longhorn will be out within a few years, and I know it supports 64 bit computing, (leaving it about 10 years behing linux at projected date of release).
If they want their name everywhere, they can afford to buy ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Less than eager.
Or maybe they do. Once they've killed off AIM and Yahoo they can close the loophole, but until then having the ad free version out there is better for them.
With increasing globalisation, there must come a point where this petty our country/your country thing becomes irrelevant, and we can look upon the world as our home.
Roll on that time!
To keep up? NN was always streets ahead. Microsoft somehow got away with bundling IE with the OS, and forcing retailers not to sell any other OS.
Then when FF was taking over the world, they had the influence for about three very rapidly fixed vulnerabilities that briefly existed in FF to hit the front page of Google News, and *poof* FF starts slipping in the market.
There needs to be 50 million people prepared to take class action and sue for $1.17 every time MS slanders Free Software, and it affects business enough to affect the uptake of standards. Without a single entity to claim: this slander cost us $x this is the only way to protect mankind form these extortionists.
Redhat can just distribute and support Red-hat Solaris as well as Linux, if Solaris looks like being better to some segment of their customers.
W95 just went: ... non-DOS partition detected ... Reformating ...
And that was the end of my Mandrake.
I thought that someone could probably sue them for the value of the lost data. It was _clearly_ intentional
The company's profit margin is so high that Bill is the richest man in the world by half a mountain, where, were there competition in the marketplace that would have to be reinvested into R&D to keep up with the competition or returned to the consumer as lower prices, as long as the competition were happy to be the richest man in the world by less than half a mountain.
And the problem is the government not putting in the R&D dollars.
Have you heard of 64 bit computing? Windows is approximately 5 years behind Linux, 7 years behind Sun, and 2 years behind apple.
And Bill's right it is a crime. Antitrust. Abuse of Monopoly.
The MGM vs Grokster decision already did that
Even with a complete software patents victory in europe the war is still looking pretty grim.
To return the protection of and value to the consumer that is legislated for in every other field of commerce Microsoft must be broken up.
Stupid patent laws in Europe are a minor inconvenience in a long list of inconveniences that will continue to be forced upon the consumer until someone nukes redmond into submission.
The GP had 'l' sounds replacing 'r' sounds, which is a correct piss-take of a native Mandarin speaker.
Coding theory allows much better returns than 50% less errors with 50% more wires.
For instance the Hamming Codes will correct one error in a word 2 to the power of R bits long for the cost of R bits.
So if your chip processes 32-bit words, you could instead process 32-5=27 bit words, and if one of your 32 little gatey-things didn't dope correctly, you would still get the right answer.
For the chip to need to be chucked you would need to have two errors in the same 32-bit section, rather than one anywhere on the whole chip. Wasted calcuation width is about 16%.
No mate, they're just seeing the bigger picture.
At 9.1% growth per annum, China's economy will be larger than the USA's at 4.4% growth in 2015. Sooner if the flow of experts to Europe due to the weak american dollar starts affecting the rate at which technology advances in the USA.
It should be noticed that the thing about a world where there are tow super-powers is that they are at war.
Arms sales to, and economic support for Taiwan serves to decrease the stability of China, who have been building up their military near the Taiwan Strait since the communist revolution. (Except that untill 10 years ago that meant hordes of peasants armed with handfuls of mud and sharpened kernels of rice). Now it means muti-headed balistic missiles, and more tanks than America could produce in a month of Sundays.
Maybe Sunday afternoons.
An entity sells an operating system. After purchasing the operating system, taking it home, opening the package and inserting the media into their computer they are informed that they must agree to an EULA, which is then presented on screen in such a way as nearly all people don't read it.
Some of the patches that are automatically installed by this entity on the purchaser's computer change the EULA.
The Purchaser uses the product in such a way as to not comply with the EULA
Ethical question: Is the purchaser simply stealing, are both parties at fault, or has the producer of the operating system tainted their hands, so that the purchaser's actions are justifiable?
Situation 2:
An entity steals an operating system from the late great Kildall. Using illegal practices to force their (and only their) stolen operating system on consumers, and abusing their monopoly to the extent that consumers pay so much above what would be market value in a competitive environment that the CEO of the entity becomes the unassailably richest man in the world. The entity is convicted of abusing the monopoly, but has become powerful enough that they can manipulate the penalty, and continue to practice in an illegally anti-competitive manner.
A person purchases a product from this entity, and pays for it.
Ethical question: Is paying for the product ethical, given that it increases the money and power of the criminal entity? Or is stealing the only conscionable way to acquire the products of this entity?
More exposure to tech creates better techies.
Exposure to OSS includes the ability for the exposee to peep under the hood, and have a tweak, if one is that way inclined. And in a country of 1.4 thousand million, (or "billion" as americans insist on calling "thousand million"), more that one person is going to be that way inclined - Increasing the IT savvy of the people can only be good for the economy in the future.
Furthermore, extending the interface to all 22 official languages in India is going to be very useful and poplular, and expensive for closed source software companies to duplicate.
I wouldn't be suprised if there is also a lot of interest in these applications by expatriot Indians interested in bringing up multi-lingual children. (And Sri-Lankans, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis for that matter).
Did they have to do the little search box in the exact same colour and placement as the google search button, and colour the "search" button exactly the same as the google search button, with the same colour border popping up on mouseover?
That's just scarey.
But IP is all crap and we should respect companies that knock each other off like that.
Unless you live in Manhattan. Everything you buy in either country is made by the same Chinese guy. You notice petrol though - it's much cheaper in the Sates, but then the call it 'Gas'.
I guess they probably call gas 'plasma'.
Bundle search with the operating system, and Google fails as did Netscape.
They don't need to compete with the product. They have a captive market - and it's 99% of the desktops out there.
Except in Munich. And Brazil.
A microsoft troll that doesn't read like a marketing peice. You restore something of my faith in trolling.
Word is great if you're embedding other microsoft objects in it. Otherwise open office is just as good. And the open office programming language is much better than VB for word.
If you're using a word processor for school, you'll get better marks with wordperfect, because the grammar checker is much better than word's.
But up to you what you use.
There is a mis-perception that it is not an open format by people who only know microsoft office, because the most reliable method of converting MS office documents to .pdf is by printing to acrobat distiller, for which you need to buy about $300 worth of Adobe software.
Open office exports to .pdf from the file menu. This functionality cost $0 to include, because the format is open. If Microsoft had a business model that involved providing useful tools to their customers they could have included the same functionality, with the same $0 in licensing costs to them.
However since it is more important to them that they have as large a proportion of the world as possible locked into their own proprietary formats, so you find that despite charging you $600-$900 dollars simple, cheap, useful functionality is not included.
And the consequence? People think that .pdf is a proprietary format! You should realize by now that Microsoft's (illegal) business model is doing a great disservice to their customers and the world.
They are not selling a product that is good for their customers. They are selling a product that instead ensures that they will not have to sell a product that is good for their customers in the future.
Still want to buy their stuff?
"Extend an olive branch" - (vb)
(1) To attack with IP lawsuits, especially when the lawsuit is very weak, but the party being sued does not have the resources to fight it.
(2) To fund 3rd parties to attack with IP lawsuits. "Microsoft extended and olive branch, through SCO, to IBM and Daimler-Chrysler "
"Build some bridges" (vb)
To sit down with a party to decide how to most effectively extend an olive branch. (qv)
"Collaborate" (vb)
To protect one's monopoly by destroying ones opponents by any means, fair or foul. Especially of political bribery to effect legal changes that make the modus operandi of potential competitors illegal.
"Open up one's file formats"
(1) To obscure one's file formats, especially formatting, so that competitors products look buggy when viewing files.
(2) To send malformed files when ones servers are communicating with one's potential competitors. "Microsoft's web servers have opened their file formats to the Opera web-browser"
It is an Australian Owned (except for a technicality), satellite, cable, and broadcast network with a lot of staff, a huge audience and the most valuable thing that it sells is manufactured consent.
Yes, I know longhorn will be out within a few years, and I know it supports 64 bit computing, (leaving it about 10 years behing linux at projected date of release).
If they want their name everywhere, they can afford to buy ads.
Maybe underneath the plutocracy, there is still an unsmothered democracy that could still be coaxed to life?