"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they
be considered patriots." - George Bush
We wanted a president, and all we got was a character from Saturday Night
Live.
It takes smarts to actually RUN a government, rather than sell it to narrow
interests. Dim-witted people need representation, but it would be better for
them to choose someone smarter than themselves.
BigZoo.com has been a problem for me recently. They have charged me for calls that have not been connected. They have refused to review my bills with them for return of the money.
Are there any alternatives for inexpensive calling internationally?
What about in the U.S.? What is the cheapest phone-to-phone method of calling? What is the cheapest PC-to-phone method of calling?
You have brought up a very good question. Microsoft has been found guilty, the guilty verdict still stands, it was only the remedy that was overturned.
And yet, Microsoft is acting more abusive than ever before.
One possibility is that Microsoft may have made a deal with the powerful parts of the U.S. government that are engaged in surveillance: Allow us to use Windows to spy on people, and Microsoft will be able to break the law with immunity.
Someone posted the e-mail address of the CEO of Adobe to the Slashdot discussion. So, I sent him the message below. Notice that the attachment I sent was in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. I thought that was a nice touch. Maybe the fact that I am a licensed user of Acrobat will carry some weight.
___________
Subject: Discussion about Adobe on Slashdot
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 20:37:09 -0700
From: Michael Jennings
To: Bruce Chizen
bchizen at adobe.com
Bruce Chizen
CEO, Adobe
Mr. Chizen,
You maybe interested in my opinion below about Adobe's attacking of a man in Germany. I posted it to Slashdot,
http://slashdot.org/
I'm serious about applying for the marketing manager position at Adobe. I wrote an article, "Qualities of Excellence
in Marketing Management" which is attached.
Do you realize that Slashdot has hundreds of thousands of readers, most of whom are very knowledgeable about
computers? You are in a very, very expensive fight. Is that what you want?
Do you see that this fight may negatively affect your ability to hire knowledgeable programmers, now and in the future?
Michael Jennings
_________________
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. (Score:2) by Futurepower(tm)
(MichaelJennings at mailandnews dot com) on Tuesday July 03, @07:59PM PDT (#176)
(User #228467 Info)
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. Changing the name is all you need to do. Don't pay anything.
Adobe, duh!!! This is costing you in bad publicity far, far more than you could ever possibly gain.
To Adobe's marketing manager: I could send letters to all the members of Adobe's board of directors, pointing out your
obvious lack of understanding. I think I could make a good case that I should have your job, since I am smart enough to
keep Adobe away from financial violence when asking nicely would accomplish the purpose.
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. Changing the name is all you need to do. Don't pay anything.
Adobe, duh!!! This is costing you in bad publicity far, far more than you could ever possibly gain.
To Adobe's marketing manager: I could send letters to all the members of Adobe's board of directors, pointing out your obvious lack of understanding. I think I could make a good case that I should have your job, since I am smart enough to keep Adobe away from financial violence when asking nicely would do the job.
Microsoft has a monopoly, and is so abusive-minded that it can't see how abusiveness is self-destructive.
Microsoft can continue releasing deliberately poor quality software, so that users will always feel motivated to upgrade when a few of the bugs are fixed, and a few features are added.
In my opinion, Judge Jackson was correct to compare Microsoft with drug traffickers. However, it was not correct to do so publicly during judicial proceedings.
This shows that Nobel-Prize-winning economists are not always right.
Good information requires attention, but it creates more, and better, attention. Good information pulls our minds out of the chaos surrounding us. There is then more attention, and less chaos.
It amazes me how socially backward companies are, however. Adobe's way of defending the trademark has the opposite result that is intended. Annoying Slashdot people is the best way I can think of to eventually kill Illustrator. Adobe has assured that 1) KDE Illustrator has world-wide publicity among knowledgeable people, and 2) there are thousands of people who will now give the KDE version support.
Maybe it will be 5 years, or maybe it will be 10, but eventually all the features in Adobe Illustrator will be available in KDE Illustrator, and that will be the end of Adobe's product. Whereas, if Adobe maintained a good relationship with the computing community, maybe the open source programmers would work on other projects instead.
Wilson WindowWare's WinBatch does this, and it is comprehensive, but it is not-free shareware, not open source, and I have had problems with poor documentation and poor technical support: http://www.windowware.com/
Question: People who write open source software often pick poor names for their work. Why is that?
I wrote this article for my customers. You are welcome to use it without payment if you don't change it, show my name and company (with trademark registration symbol) as the author, and tell me where it appears.
Microsoft Breakup
Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals
Judge Jackson had
compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".
by Michael Jennings
(Thursday, June 28,
2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case
overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more
companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating
system in one company and created a second business for everything else.
This decision of the
Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour
of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required
appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft
to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the
Court's
decision [PDF format]).
The Court of Appeals
found that Judge Jackson's 206-page
Findings
of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct,
was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that
was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more
about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)
Earlier, many people
had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom.
Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very
well informed.
However, the penalty
that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his
public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge
examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.
Silicon
Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for
a while longer..."
There were two parts
to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings
of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity,
and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court
finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken
into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been
voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals
wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged
in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret
interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments
about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom,
giving rise to an appearance of partiality."
The Court of Appeals
added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions
of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District
Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."
The ruling of the Court
of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.
It seems to me that IBM has never been successful selling software for small systems. For example, OS/2 was a good operating system, but was terribly marketed. IBM called it Warp, as in bent out of shape.
IBM bought Lotus, and the Lotus desktop products continued dying.
Right now, IBM is trying to market web software using two men in funny-looking space suits. The woman who put the campaign together obviously is ignorant about technical products and technical people.
Is the involvement with Linux a way to ally IBM with a successful software product, so that it can concentrate on hardware and support? Why is IBM so terrible at marketing?
It's a very common 'technique' among codependents to bust down anyone who they percieve as 'needing them', in order to perpetuate the pattern of being needed. Perhaps what's going on here is Mr. Gates... filling a need created by getting teased at school or something stupid like that.
This is my guess, also. Bill Gates has been doing Microsoft exclusively since he was a teenager, and he has never given himself a chance to grow up. He is still acting out in an angry, socially backward way like a teenager might. He doesn't seem to realize that the situation in his life has changed.
It is interesting that what people should have for intentions are often not what their actions accomplish.
Profit should be Microsoft's intention. But there have been so many instances where the company's direction didn't seem to be motivated by profit.
For example, why did Microsoft become involved in a highly public argument with the Justice Department? Was that really necessary for profit? It seems instead to have weakened the company. The purpose of fighting the Justice Department seemed to be to establish that the company could continue to be abusive, not to make more profit.
There are two issues here. First, a lot of people in the world community want to stop a major abuser. Who wants to be a dog on a leash, and change direction every time Microsoft yanks his chain?
Second, many people feel that open source software is just better. Who wants to use sausage software? If you knew what was in it, you probably wouldn't want it.
For me, the most important issue is not between open and proprietary software, it is between living peacefully in the world and abusiveness.
People say bad things about Microsoft on Slashdot, but the full truth is much worse. Microsoft is so abusive that I have never known or heard about anyone who understood the complete scope of Microsoft abusiveness.
Everyone who is knowledgeable about this seems to have a different set of Microsoft abuses to mention.
Bruce Perens says in the SV.com Roundtable, "... you [Microsoft] have used your dominant position in the marketplace to force out competition through the... use of incompatibility. For example, you changed the file and printer sharing protocol, and then you patented the changes so that anyone who makes a system that is compatible with yours becomes a patent infringer."
If Microsoft's main intention seemed to be to create good software, I think that most people would be less opposed to closed source. But Microsoft's intentions seem to me to be extremely hostile. If you follow the effect of their actions
carefully, the company's main purpose seems to be to abuse its users. A case might be logically made that, for Microsoft, making a profit is secondary.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
We wanted a president, and all we got was a character from Saturday Night Live.
It takes smarts to actually RUN a government, rather than sell it to narrow interests. Dim-witted people need representation, but it would be better for them to choose someone smarter than themselves.
BigZoo.com has been a problem for me recently. They have charged me for calls that have not been connected. They have refused to review my bills with them for return of the money.
Are there any alternatives for inexpensive calling internationally?
What about in the U.S.? What is the cheapest phone-to-phone method of calling? What is the cheapest PC-to-phone method of calling?
Aunt Millie will buy a quantum computer at Radio Shack and use it for sending e-mail.
I told Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal the same joke, and he liked it.
You have brought up a very good question. Microsoft has been found guilty, the guilty verdict still stands, it was only the remedy that was overturned.
And yet, Microsoft is acting more abusive than ever before.
One possibility is that Microsoft may have made a deal with the powerful parts of the U.S. government that are engaged in surveillance: Allow us to use Windows to spy on people, and Microsoft will be able to break the law with immunity.
XP stands for "eXtra Pain".
Microsoft has always been a big pain. But, for some people, it wasn't enough. Now there's eXtra Pain for those who need extra strength suffering.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that anyone would say that Microsoft is arrogant.
-
Okay, I did MY part. Did you do yours???
Someone posted the e-mail address of the CEO of Adobe to the Slashdot discussion. So, I sent him the message below. Notice that the attachment I sent was in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. I thought that was a nice touch. Maybe the fact that I am a licensed user of Acrobat will carry some weight.
___________
Subject: Discussion about Adobe on Slashdot
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2001 20:37:09 -0700
From: Michael Jennings
To: Bruce Chizen
bchizen at adobe.com
Bruce Chizen
CEO, Adobe
Mr. Chizen,
You maybe interested in my opinion below about Adobe's attacking of a man in Germany. I posted it to Slashdot,
http://slashdot.org/
I'm serious about applying for the marketing manager position at Adobe. I wrote an article, "Qualities of Excellence
in Marketing Management" which is attached.
Do you realize that Slashdot has hundreds of thousands of readers, most of whom are very knowledgeable about
computers? You are in a very, very expensive fight. Is that what you want?
Do you see that this fight may negatively affect your ability to hire knowledgeable programmers, now and in the future?
Michael Jennings
_________________
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. (Score:2) by Futurepower(tm)
(MichaelJennings at mailandnews dot com) on Tuesday July 03, @07:59PM PDT (#176)
(User #228467 Info)
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. Changing the name is all you need to do. Don't pay anything.
Adobe, duh!!! This is costing you in bad publicity far, far more than you could ever possibly gain.
To Adobe's marketing manager: I could send letters to all the members of Adobe's board of directors, pointing out your
obvious lack of understanding. I think I could make a good case that I should have your job, since I am smart enough to
keep Adobe away from financial violence when asking nicely would accomplish the purpose.
__________________
Name: markt01e.pdf
Type: Acrobat (application/pdf)
Encoding: base64
Dr. Kai-Uwe Sattler, don't let them abuse you. Changing the name is all you need to do. Don't pay anything.
Adobe, duh!!! This is costing you in bad publicity far, far more than you could ever possibly gain.
To Adobe's marketing manager: I could send letters to all the members of Adobe's board of directors, pointing out your obvious lack of understanding. I think I could make a good case that I should have your job, since I am smart enough to keep Adobe away from financial violence when asking nicely would do the job.
This is an important point.
Microsoft has a monopoly, and is so abusive-minded that it can't see how abusiveness is self-destructive.
Microsoft can continue releasing deliberately poor quality software, so that users will always feel motivated to upgrade when a few of the bugs are fixed, and a few features are added.
In my opinion, Judge Jackson was correct to compare Microsoft with drug traffickers. However, it was not correct to do so publicly during judicial proceedings.
(See page 111 of the decision of the Court of Appeals [PDF format].)
Dan,
I found your comments very interesting.
Maybe Open Source programming needs an Open Source design team.
This shows that Nobel-Prize-winning economists are not always right.
Good information requires attention, but it creates more, and better, attention. Good information pulls our minds out of the chaos surrounding us. There is then more attention, and less chaos.
It is excellent that Microsoft is giving the GNU/Open Source movement free publicity. Keep it up, Microsoft!
Did you notice that the online dictionary definition for "Illustrator" is in error. The definition given is for "Illustrate".
Good idea! KDraw is a better name, anyway.
It is understandable that Adobe is annoyed.
Killustrator sounds like "Kill Illustrator."
It amazes me how socially backward companies are, however. Adobe's way of defending the trademark has the opposite result that is intended. Annoying Slashdot people is the best way I can think of to eventually kill Illustrator. Adobe has assured that 1) KDE Illustrator has world-wide publicity among knowledgeable people, and 2) there are thousands of people who will now give the KDE version support.
Maybe it will be 5 years, or maybe it will be 10, but eventually all the features in Adobe Illustrator will be available in KDE Illustrator, and that will be the end of Adobe's product. Whereas, if Adobe maintained a good relationship with the computing community, maybe the open source programmers would work on other projects instead.
For scripted control of setup and execution of Windows programs, including tasks in DOS windows, C Styled Scripting seems excellent.
Auto-It does this, and it is free, but it is not open source: http://www.hiddensoft.com/AutoIt/
Wilson WindowWare's WinBatch does this, and it is comprehensive, but it is not-free shareware, not open source, and I have had problems with poor documentation and poor technical support: http://www.windowware.com/
Question: People who write open source software often pick poor names for their work. Why is that?
I wrote this article for my customers. You are welcome to use it without payment if you don't change it, show my name and company (with trademark registration symbol) as the author, and tell me where it appears.
Microsoft Breakup Decision Overturned by the Court of Appeals
Judge Jackson had compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers".
by Michael Jennings
(Thursday, June 28, 2001) Today the Court of Appeals handling the Microsoft anti-trust case overturned the lower court's decision to split Microsoft into two or more companies. The breakup would have placed the Microsoft Windows operating system in one company and created a second business for everything else.
This decision of the Court of Appeals has been widely recognized as fair because of the behaviour of the judge of the lower court, in which he had not given the required appearance of impartiality. Judge Jackson had, for example, compared Microsoft to "drug traffickers", and Bill Gates to Napoleon. (See page 111 of the Court's decision [PDF format]).
The Court of Appeals found that Judge Jackson's 206-page Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal conduct, was entirely acceptable. It was his conduct outside the courtroom that was a violation of the code of conduct for United States judges. (For more about this, see pages 111 to 115 of the decision.)
Earlier, many people had praised Judge Jackson's skill in handling the case inside the courtroom. Technically oriented observers considered the Findings of Fact to be very well informed.
However, the penalty that Judge Jackson recommended for Microsoft was voided because of his public misconduct. The Court of Appeals directed that a new district judge examine the case, using the Findings of Fact as a starting point.
The story is very widely reported. For examples, see: ABC, AP, BBC, Washington Post, Seattle Times, CNet, The Industry Standard, Reuters, Guardian, Motley Fool, and MSNBC. The NY Times article requires that you register. Registration is free.
Silicon Valley.com said "[Microsoft] can continue its brutal practices for a while longer..."
There were two parts to the anti-trust case, 1) the Findings of Fact, in which Microsoft was found to have engaged in illegal activity, and 2) the remedy, which is what would happen as a result of the court finding illegal activity. Judge Jackson had ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. It is only this second part, the remedy, that has been voided (vacated) by the Court of Appeals.
The Court of Appeals wrote, "We vacate the judgment on remedies, because the trial judge engaged in impermissible ex parte [outside the court] contacts by holding secret interviews with members of the media and made numerous offensive comments about Microsoft officials in public statements outside of the courtroom, giving rise to an appearance of partiality."
The Court of Appeals added, "Although we find no evidence of actual bias, we hold that the actions of the trial judge seriously tainted the proceedings before the District Court and called into question the integrity of the judicial process."
The ruling of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, by a 7-0 vote.
More links:
Open Secrets.org report on Microsoft soft money donations
Common Cause report on Microsoft political contributions
Antitrust Law and Economics Review
Older Articles:
Microsoft Unfazed by Threat of New Antitrust Suits (Thursday, June 21, 2001)
What, me worry? Microsoft's Ballmer stays cool, confident, composed. (PC World, June 17, 1998)
Michael Jennings
Futurepower®
P.O. Box 14491
Portland, OR 97293-0491
U.S.A.
Tel: (503) 233-7820
Fax: (419) 781-4606
E-Mail: jennings_michael @ hotmail.com (remove spaces)
Futurepower is a registered trademark.
Copyright 2001
I agree. Great post!
Why is IBM so terrible at marketing?
It seems to me that IBM has never been successful selling software for small systems. For example, OS/2 was a good operating system, but was terribly marketed. IBM called it Warp, as in bent out of shape.
IBM bought Lotus, and the Lotus desktop products continued dying.
Right now, IBM is trying to market web software using two men in funny-looking space suits. The woman who put the campaign together obviously is ignorant about technical products and technical people.
Is the involvement with Linux a way to ally IBM with a successful software product, so that it can concentrate on hardware and support? Why is IBM so terrible at marketing?
"... Microsoft has proved untrustworthy in the past."
-- U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson is his order in case No. 98-1232.
I thought this was especially interesting:
It's a very common 'technique' among codependents to bust down anyone who they percieve as 'needing them', in order to perpetuate the pattern of being needed. Perhaps what's going on here is Mr. Gates
This is my guess, also. Bill Gates has been doing Microsoft exclusively since he was a teenager, and he has never given himself a chance to grow up. He is still acting out in an angry, socially backward way like a teenager might. He doesn't seem to realize that the situation in his life has changed.
It is interesting that what people should have for intentions are often not what their actions accomplish.
Profit should be Microsoft's intention. But there have been so many instances where the company's direction didn't seem to be motivated by profit.
For example, why did Microsoft become involved in a highly public argument with the Justice Department? Was that really necessary for profit? It seems instead to have weakened the company. The purpose of fighting the Justice Department seemed to be to establish that the company could continue to be abusive, not to make more profit.
I agree. If other companies were in a position to be more abusive, they would.
Often what limits corporate abusiveness is just the situation, not a determination to act in a sensible fashion.
There are two issues here. First, a lot of people in the world community want to stop a major abuser. Who wants to be a dog on a leash, and change direction every time Microsoft yanks his chain?
Second, many people feel that open source software is just better. Who wants to use sausage software? If you knew what was in it, you probably wouldn't want it.
For me, the most important issue is not between open and proprietary software, it is between living peacefully in the world and abusiveness.
People say bad things about Microsoft on Slashdot, but the full truth is much worse. Microsoft is so abusive that I have never known or heard about anyone who understood the complete scope of Microsoft abusiveness.
Everyone who is knowledgeable about this seems to have a different set of Microsoft abuses to mention. Bruce Perens says in the SV.com Roundtable, "... you [Microsoft] have used your dominant position in the marketplace to force out competition through the
If Microsoft's main intention seemed to be to create good software, I think that most people would be less opposed to closed source. But Microsoft's intentions seem to me to be extremely hostile. If you follow the effect of their actions carefully, the company's main purpose seems to be to abuse its users. A case might be logically made that, for Microsoft, making a profit is secondary.