Oh, that's what you thought? Hmmmm. Whatever else, I can assure you that wasn't my point or intention. In fact, I apologize for my snap reply, since I didn't realize you had replied to me because of that.
I didn't mean it as the classic "OMFG teh amerikanz teh think they 0wn teh continent" crap that I'm starting to realize it sounds like - rather more like a "is that what they call it in normal conversation over there?" kind of "duh" moment. I thought the brits called us "yanks" all the time =)
Nice. Man do I wish that VB6 was available when I was doing VB coding.
Ah, Batman. Full of shit, as always. You based your entire retarded rant on VB4, didn't you? You said "I did a lot of coding with VB5" but somehow you missed the fact that class instances could be created?
What a hoot. But hey, bashing Microsoft never cost anyone any karma around here, eh?
Nope. Go educate yourself. Completely different group of people.
So to placate them
That's ridiculous. I bet your view would be slightly different if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who were being displaced, tortured, prosecuted and massacred.
Number 1 - FROM WHO?
It was Saudi Arabia shitting their pants at 6 Iraqi divisions parked in Kuwait that asked the (previous) Bush administration to set up camp. The Saudis could not defend their asses if their collective lives depended on it. And of course if Hussein had actually marched into Saudi Arabia (over parts of which he also had vague historic claims) the world would be much different now.
Yes, liberating Kuwait wasn't a bad thing
Except if you're Kuwaiti.
We WERE going to march to Baghdad during that war
Absolutely not. Read up and educate yourself. That everyone and their mom wanted the 101st Airborne in Baghdad just for shits and giggles doesn't mean the administration was actually considering it. They never did.
no knowledge whatsoever of the area
That's rich, considering the ball of tripe you just wrote up.
At the time, code was shared freely, to the profit of everyone involved.
Software was given away to sell boxes, because they had not yet become commoditized. It was Gates who saw the possibilities of turning the computer into the equivalent of an appliance and sell the software instead. Today boxes are dirt cheap and software is expensive. You can try to play history revisionism all you want, and since you call him a "gutter-sniping rich punk" I guess we know where you're coming from on this. But regardless of whether the business model he came up with fits your tastebuds, he did come up with it, and it made him and a lot of other people a lot of money.
The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all.
A popular POV for sure, but a POV nonetheless. You would deny him his business model as you claim yours is "the right one".
Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code?
By your calculations I suppose nothing good ever came out of any company that does not give its code away for free. I don't think that's quite the case.
Regardless of the chuckles and oh-so-funny jokes coming from the peanut gallery on this, software sold by Microsoft then and now (and by thousands of other commercial vendors) has a certain licensing agreement associated with it. Whether this is "right", "wrong", "good" or "evil", that's the way it is. The alternative is not to use the software - just as the alternative to dealing with the RIAA is not to listen to their music.
You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?
Netscape had lost the ability to ship working software long before Microsoft's monopoly became an issue. NS4 was a qualified bust. It's all out there, from jzw's essays on the matter to USENET flamewars and the cries of pain in companies everywhere when they took NS at their word based on their past performance and deployed the Navigator "suite" to all their employees. The NS "suite" had become so bloated and unstable that it was difficult to keep it running for more than a few hours at a time, and NS themselves could not make up their mind as to whether they were making a "groupware" product or just a browser and an email/news client. This is hardly apocryphal stuff, you can look it up. If anything the antitrust trial simply saved Andreseen et.al. from having to deal with their massive failure and just welp at having been "destroyed" by Microsoft.
BTW, I find it hilarious that someone of your ilk would shed a tear for Netscape, who not only were trying to make money off substandard software, but whose executives pretty much went on every TV program they could to claim they had somehow "invented" the web browser, nay, the world wide web.
IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience.
Ah, twitter, IE delivered the experience. Before anyone else. When you were still using lynx to check altavista.net, IE4 was kicking ass. Certainly IE4 was a far superior piece of software than Netscape could ever hope to ship at the time. NS2 was the best, but they fell asleep thinking they were on top of the world. Much like Mozilla is now kicking Microsoft's ass with Firefox. That's how it works.
IE itself is about three generations behind every other major browser
Well, not three generations, but your hyperbolic bullshit aside, that really doesn't matter. Microsoft (oh, sorry "M$") fell asleep at the wheel and Mozilla is now cleaning the floor with them.
Compare it to KDE's excellent desktop integration
Oh, yes. I seem to remember it was KDE who came up with the idea of integrating a browser into the shell. You're too funny. Hell, WIndows had "Desktop Items" in 1998 that worked off of RDF feeds. Seems to me KDE are "three generations" behind Microsoft, there.
Blah blah blah windoze sux blah blah blah M$ blah blah blah linux is teh bestest blah blah blah.
That's all nice and good, and while I appreciate your essay on hybernation and the things Windows cannot do (which are all untrue, since of course the last time you used Windows Bill Clinton was still president), you happily did some selective quoting and failed to address the fact that I and everyone else called you on your ignorance about cell processors.
But hey, I see your pathetic little crusade is still going strong so I'm not surprised.
IBM cell based hardware running GNU/Linux is going to blow all of this trash into a distantly remembered nightmare.
Ah, twitter. As always, in your desperate attempt to make your usual "microsoft sucks" argument you expose your ignorance. Cell processors are not intended for commodity computing, and I very much doubt your next "boxen" running "GNU/Linux" is going to include one of these processors - unless you want a "PC" that is good mostly for very specific math-intensive applications.
BTW, I've used hibernation with W2K, XP and 2003 and interestingly I've never observed these side effects you talk about (except that pre-SP2 Windows 2000 sometimes would fail to wake up, though that was fixed), but then I don't know what would be the point of leaving a machine in that state for 40 days. I guess if your machines hibernate for that long then you can't come back and tell us what fantastic uptime you're getting from them.
Yes, because we all know running operating system X on hardware type Y is an important civil right protected by constitutional amendments.
Incidentally, MLK Day is tomorrow so I guess you can go march on Washington to demand Congress enforce said amendment and "stick it" to Apple, as it were.
Right after that you might want to pick up a highschool text that covers civil liberties and give it a flip or two.
To stick it to Sun. Or do you think the name "Eclipse" is a coincidence? In any case, US$10M (or whatever) is a drop in the bucket for IBM. It's two weeks of wacky ads on national TV. Four weeks of stationary expenses in Armonk.
In any case, I'm not contesting what they have already done or trying to diminish it. On the contrary. I'm pointing out that it's a litle disingenious to hype "Linux" (which I suppose is what they conceptualize as "open source") so much but still operate essentially the same way - as a commercial software vendor. And not a very nice one at that. Ever seen a UDB enterprise site license/support contract? I'm not kidding when I say "draconian licensing" at all.
Maybe one of these days I'll see the source to DB2, Websphere, MQ and such. Heck, never mind the source... I'll settle for less draconian licensing. Open source and all that, IBM is now.
Then again probably not.
IBM can talk the talk all day but at the end of the day regardless of all the Linux lip service they really don't walk the walk, and probably never will.
Here's the rub in that. Let's say that Siegenthaler had seen the incorrect (libelous!) information on his bio. And then actually figured out how to edit the page, which is not trivial for most users (simple as you and I might think it is). And then actually went in and removed the offending paragraph.
Let me tell you what happens then, in case you don't know. Some tightass elitist prick "editor" would have seen the change and reverted it because Siegenthaler probably would not have managed to produce a "valid reason" for the change, assuming he also figured out how to do that while editing. Then Siegenthaler would have (obviously) gone back to see the page and seen his changes had been undone and the problem was still there. So, he would have made his changes again. Then he would have been banned by said elitist prick editor on the basis of being a "vandal", with a terse message saying that if Siegenthaler corrects the evil of his ways, he can be unbanned again. At this point Mr. Siegenthaler would have been besides himself because the page is still there, he can't change it and any cursory search of his name would have revealed the same WKP entry in one of the hundreds of sleazy and not so sleazy websites out there that leech WKP content to drive search traffic from Google.
Want to know how many times I've seen this happen? Enough that I know it's probably more common than changes to low-traffic pages being accepted at face value. And who the hell cares if you're logged in or not? Like the Register says, it's not the victim's (how else can you call them?) responsibility to correct these problems.
The article is right in that if "Wikipedia" didn't have the "pedia" part in its name and wasn't so massively hyped, no one would care. But that's not the case now, is it? It's simple really - the more "famous" and visible you are out there the more responsibility you have to exercise. The technorati that run Wikipedia basically have the position that this is not true; that there are no problems, everything is A-OK and all will be well in time because Wikipedia has a higher moral standard than everyone else. How can it not be so?
Well, Microsoft works with the W3C, ECMA et. al on a lot of standards. Is that what you were looking for? Or were you just not aware of that?
And BTW, I'll take a standard developed by a governing body or company any day over a hacked-together "standard" like RSS or yENC or any of those others developed by people in their basement. While they are often "good enough", they tend to be underdocumented, hard to extend/adapt and are the source of wide-ranging pointless flamewars on teh interwebs. More often than not they are a worse mess than the one they're trying to "standardize". Ditto languages that evolve without formal specs.
Re:This just in MS sucks...already Slash Dotted
on
The Microsoft Singularity
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just goes to show what IIS and SQL Server will do for you....
Wow, and the last time I saw a/.'ed site spewing MySQL and Apache errors I thought it was just me. Because, well, I've heard that using open source will automagically upgrade your DSL to a T3. Free!
What about the Mozilla foundation? Opera? KDE? Apple? Because armed with this precendent Eolas is going to go after anyone who has ever coded a browser with the ability to host an applet.
I thought it was interesting that he commented on the record profits the oil companies have been pulling in and how they had done nothing to alleviate the costs at the pump for the rest of us. True, he says 'republicans don't punish success' or something like that, but for the life of me I cannot fathom why he would bring up the refineries issue. I heard on NPR the other day about how the price of heating oil was going to go up *more* this winter because many of the oil companies were shipping refined product from the US to other countries instead of feeding the surplus back into the national market and taking a small hit on the bottom line.
The democrats won't let them build new refineries because that might kill some migratory bird, and the republicans allow them to ship the stuff out to make a few cents more on the barrel because they refuse to legislate more stringent regulations into the system...
It's a free market and all, but sometimes you have to wonder if they're not a little bit more evil than they should be.
Exactly, absolutely true. It's been that way since 2002 and despite repeated attempts and promises that they would fix it, it's still severely broken. Google is much better at finding content within MSDN. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Microsoft needs to start from the inside out if they want to compete with Google and Yahoo. How can they even think of indexing the internet when they can't index MSDN correctly?
If I was Ballmer or Gates that's what I'd be worried about. The MSN folks are not the same ones that have repeatedly b0rked MSDN, but it's still a sore spot in the company's overall search strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mean it as the classic "OMFG teh amerikanz teh think they 0wn teh continent" crap that I'm starting to realize it sounds like - rather more like a "is that what they call it in normal conversation over there?" kind of "duh" moment. I thought the brits called us "yanks" all the time =)
And if I were as obviously hysterical as you seem to be, I'd agree with you. Thankfuly stupidity is not contagious.
Surely they meant the United States. America is a continent.
When you have 300,000,000 users things are a little more complicated than when you have 3,000.
Ah, Batman. Full of shit, as always. You based your entire retarded rant on VB4, didn't you? You said "I did a lot of coding with VB5" but somehow you missed the fact that class instances could be created?
What a hoot. But hey, bashing Microsoft never cost anyone any karma around here, eh?
Yay innovation.
Nope. Go educate yourself. Completely different group of people.
So to placate them
That's ridiculous. I bet your view would be slightly different if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who were being displaced, tortured, prosecuted and massacred.
Number 1 - FROM WHO?
It was Saudi Arabia shitting their pants at 6 Iraqi divisions parked in Kuwait that asked the (previous) Bush administration to set up camp. The Saudis could not defend their asses if their collective lives depended on it. And of course if Hussein had actually marched into Saudi Arabia (over parts of which he also had vague historic claims) the world would be much different now.
Yes, liberating Kuwait wasn't a bad thing
Except if you're Kuwaiti.
We WERE going to march to Baghdad during that war
Absolutely not. Read up and educate yourself. That everyone and their mom wanted the 101st Airborne in Baghdad just for shits and giggles doesn't mean the administration was actually considering it. They never did.
no knowledge whatsoever of the area
That's rich, considering the ball of tripe you just wrote up.
Software was given away to sell boxes, because they had not yet become commoditized. It was Gates who saw the possibilities of turning the computer into the equivalent of an appliance and sell the software instead. Today boxes are dirt cheap and software is expensive. You can try to play history revisionism all you want, and since you call him a "gutter-sniping rich punk" I guess we know where you're coming from on this. But regardless of whether the business model he came up with fits your tastebuds, he did come up with it, and it made him and a lot of other people a lot of money.
The whole idea of someone "owning" a chunk of computing is bunk. It always has been. It hurts us all.
A popular POV for sure, but a POV nonetheless. You would deny him his business model as you claim yours is "the right one".
Do you think Microsoft would be where they are today without freely-available code?
By your calculations I suppose nothing good ever came out of any company that does not give its code away for free. I don't think that's quite the case.
Regardless of the chuckles and oh-so-funny jokes coming from the peanut gallery on this, software sold by Microsoft then and now (and by thousands of other commercial vendors) has a certain licensing agreement associated with it. Whether this is "right", "wrong", "good" or "evil", that's the way it is. The alternative is not to use the software - just as the alternative to dealing with the RIAA is not to listen to their music.
You don't remember a little anti-trust trial do you?
Netscape had lost the ability to ship working software long before Microsoft's monopoly became an issue. NS4 was a qualified bust. It's all out there, from jzw's essays on the matter to USENET flamewars and the cries of pain in companies everywhere when they took NS at their word based on their past performance and deployed the Navigator "suite" to all their employees. The NS "suite" had become so bloated and unstable that it was difficult to keep it running for more than a few hours at a time, and NS themselves could not make up their mind as to whether they were making a "groupware" product or just a browser and an email/news client. This is hardly apocryphal stuff, you can look it up. If anything the antitrust trial simply saved Andreseen et.al. from having to deal with their massive failure and just welp at having been "destroyed" by Microsoft.
BTW, I find it hilarious that someone of your ilk would shed a tear for Netscape, who not only were trying to make money off substandard software, but whose executives pretty much went on every TV program they could to claim they had somehow "invented" the web browser, nay, the world wide web.
IE has yet to deliver a decent browsing experience.
Ah, twitter, IE delivered the experience. Before anyone else. When you were still using lynx to check altavista.net, IE4 was kicking ass. Certainly IE4 was a far superior piece of software than Netscape could ever hope to ship at the time. NS2 was the best, but they fell asleep thinking they were on top of the world. Much like Mozilla is now kicking Microsoft's ass with Firefox. That's how it works.
IE itself is about three generations behind every other major browser
Well, not three generations, but your hyperbolic bullshit aside, that really doesn't matter. Microsoft (oh, sorry "M$") fell asleep at the wheel and Mozilla is now cleaning the floor with them.
Compare it to KDE's excellent desktop integration
Oh, yes. I seem to remember it was KDE who came up with the idea of integrating a browser into the shell. You're too funny. Hell, WIndows had "Desktop Items" in 1998 that worked off of RDF feeds. Seems to me KDE are "three generations" behind Microsoft, there.
Blah blah blah windoze sux blah blah blah M$ blah blah blah linux is teh bestest blah blah blah.
That's all nice and good, and while I appreciate your essay on hybernation and the things Windows cannot do (which are all untrue, since of course the last time you used Windows Bill Clinton was still president), you happily did some selective quoting and failed to address the fact that I and everyone else called you on your ignorance about cell processors.
But hey, I see your pathetic little crusade is still going strong so I'm not surprised.
Ah, twitter. As always, in your desperate attempt to make your usual "microsoft sucks" argument you expose your ignorance. Cell processors are not intended for commodity computing, and I very much doubt your next "boxen" running "GNU/Linux" is going to include one of these processors - unless you want a "PC" that is good mostly for very specific math-intensive applications.
BTW, I've used hibernation with W2K, XP and 2003 and interestingly I've never observed these side effects you talk about (except that pre-SP2 Windows 2000 sometimes would fail to wake up, though that was fixed), but then I don't know what would be the point of leaving a machine in that state for 40 days. I guess if your machines hibernate for that long then you can't come back and tell us what fantastic uptime you're getting from them.
Incidentally, MLK Day is tomorrow so I guess you can go march on Washington to demand Congress enforce said amendment and "stick it" to Apple, as it were.
Right after that you might want to pick up a highschool text that covers civil liberties and give it a flip or two.
In any case, I'm not contesting what they have already done or trying to diminish it. On the contrary. I'm pointing out that it's a litle disingenious to hype "Linux" (which I suppose is what they conceptualize as "open source") so much but still operate essentially the same way - as a commercial software vendor. And not a very nice one at that. Ever seen a UDB enterprise site license/support contract? I'm not kidding when I say "draconian licensing" at all.
Novell is no different in this regard.
Then again probably not.
IBM can talk the talk all day but at the end of the day regardless of all the Linux lip service they really don't walk the walk, and probably never will.
Let me tell you what happens then, in case you don't know. Some tightass elitist prick "editor" would have seen the change and reverted it because Siegenthaler probably would not have managed to produce a "valid reason" for the change, assuming he also figured out how to do that while editing. Then Siegenthaler would have (obviously) gone back to see the page and seen his changes had been undone and the problem was still there. So, he would have made his changes again. Then he would have been banned by said elitist prick editor on the basis of being a "vandal", with a terse message saying that if Siegenthaler corrects the evil of his ways, he can be unbanned again. At this point Mr. Siegenthaler would have been besides himself because the page is still there, he can't change it and any cursory search of his name would have revealed the same WKP entry in one of the hundreds of sleazy and not so sleazy websites out there that leech WKP content to drive search traffic from Google.
Want to know how many times I've seen this happen? Enough that I know it's probably more common than changes to low-traffic pages being accepted at face value. And who the hell cares if you're logged in or not? Like the Register says, it's not the victim's (how else can you call them?) responsibility to correct these problems.
The article is right in that if "Wikipedia" didn't have the "pedia" part in its name and wasn't so massively hyped, no one would care. But that's not the case now, is it? It's simple really - the more "famous" and visible you are out there the more responsibility you have to exercise. The technorati that run Wikipedia basically have the position that this is not true; that there are no problems, everything is A-OK and all will be well in time because Wikipedia has a higher moral standard than everyone else. How can it not be so?
And BTW, I'll take a standard developed by a governing body or company any day over a hacked-together "standard" like RSS or yENC or any of those others developed by people in their basement. While they are often "good enough", they tend to be underdocumented, hard to extend/adapt and are the source of wide-ranging pointless flamewars on teh interwebs. More often than not they are a worse mess than the one they're trying to "standardize". Ditto languages that evolve without formal specs.
Microsoft Research. Quite a different thing.
Wow, and the last time I saw a /.'ed site spewing MySQL and Apache errors I thought it was just me. Because, well, I've heard that using open source will automagically upgrade your DSL to a T3. Free!
Moron.
And you're more than willing to believe that. From a company that uses submarine patents offensively. Unlike Microsoft. Right?
I have a bridge you might be interested in.
What about the Mozilla foundation? Opera? KDE? Apple? Because armed with this precendent Eolas is going to go after anyone who has ever coded a browser with the ability to host an applet.
Does it sound bad enough now?
First they make him change his name and now they're installing spyware on his Mac. What's next? A monthly charge? Oh the humanity!
Ah, another retard who thinks the US was founded six years ago. Thanks for playing.
The democrats won't let them build new refineries because that might kill some migratory bird, and the republicans allow them to ship the stuff out to make a few cents more on the barrel because they refuse to legislate more stringent regulations into the system...
It's a free market and all, but sometimes you have to wonder if they're not a little bit more evil than they should be.
Microsoft needs to start from the inside out if they want to compete with Google and Yahoo. How can they even think of indexing the internet when they can't index MSDN correctly?
If I was Ballmer or Gates that's what I'd be worried about. The MSN folks are not the same ones that have repeatedly b0rked MSDN, but it's still a sore spot in the company's overall search strategy.