Writers must meet deadlines. The often are not given the time to learn
everything they need to know. So, they string together some nice-sounding
phrases. Sometimes, for a few sentences in a row, they sound like they
understand the subject. Then they say something that shows they don't really:
That is why Microsoft has always sold its operating system cheaply and has
done everything to make life easy for programmers.
"Make life easy" as in artificial limits on resources in Windows 95, 98, and
ME. Later this,
Microsoft will continue to be a kinder giant, predicts Rick Sherlund of
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, if only because "the whole world is
watching".
He called Microsoft kind. Oh yeah. They probably both have Microsoft stock
they would like to sell at less of a loss.
Then this:
It does not help Microsoft's credibility that its new-found faith in
openness does not seem to apply to Windows itself.
Whoops, not kind. More "kindness":
Microsoft's concept of openness is reminiscent of a funnel: easy to get
into, but hard to get out of. Visual Studio.NET allows programmers to write
software in many different programming languages. But the code the tool
generates runs only on.NET.
Sometimes writers just use their imagination:
To convince the world that it will henceforth compete on the quality of its
products alone, Microsoft must do something more radical. One possibility
would be to accept the kind of antitrust settlement that would clearly signal
a shift.
I think that most of the corruption comes from agencies of the U.S. government
that are allowed to break the law, secretly. This article is about that: What should be the Response to
Violence?
The paragraph you wrote in the parent post gives you powerful legal standing.
It is copied below, with improvements.
Clean up the paragraph and send it to Congressmen and Senators. Send it to the
courts!! File an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief. The court clerks
will tell you the necessary format. File the same brief at every court. There
are more than 30. Offer to serve as an expert witness. (Ask to be paid
expenses.)
You'll meet interesting people. The governors of several states are bringing
this case against Microsoft.
The people in authority cannot do anything if no one is complaining. If you
complain, you give them powerful help. You and your entire department are
being hurt by Microsoft's anti-competitive methods. Five years of work hangs
in the balance.
_________
Here is a re-written complaint. It is beginning to take the shape it would
need to be filed as a friend of the court brief:
As it stands now, the biggest single anti-competitive factor, by
far, driving Microsoft server technology into businesses is the fact that
Microsoft desktop operating systems communicate with Microsoft servers using a
secret method.
Microsoft Exchange, the mail server software, is forced into companies because
Microsoft Outlook (part of office, and so bundled everywhere) must communicate
with Exchange to do calendaring and scheduling.
Exchange 2000 communicates in a secret way with Microsoft's ActiveDirectory.
ActiveDirectory and Microsoft Windows 2000 are written in such a way as to
force customers to use Microsoft software for DNS (or else a lot of hand work
is necessary, or there is a lack of security). This is extremely
anti-competitive.
But Jon, you are not thinking like a marketing manager. You said,
Microsoft's control of the clients will still allow them to push the client
away...
Your manner of looking at the future is helping something bad happen instead
of something good. You and I both don't know what will happen. There are two
steps: 1) open source gets the software, and 2) open source people find some
way to keep Microsoft from being abusive.
Yes, number 2 is difficult, but it is not impossible. Neither of us know what
will happen. There are perhaps 30 legal cases against Microsoft now. I have
heard that at least one of them is investigating Microsoft's secret file
formats and protocols. It seems likely that what Microsoft is doing is so
anti-competitive that it is against anti-trust law.
It could happen that Microsoft is required by a court to publish all its
secret protocols. If not, would you give $300 to support a case against
Microsoft? I would. I think there are others who would give money also.
The world does not handle abusiveness well. We should not let abusers run our
lives.
If you think like a marketing man, you will think positively. Eventually, open
source will find a way.
You have the same problem closer to home. Ganymede is being under-sold. This
is VERY important!!!! It isn't only you. Most open source people are
under-selling their work.
Someone who thinks like a marketing manager will sell the benefit: Ganymede makes managing a large
network far easier. Manage up to 20,000 computers remotely, from ONE
computer.
Jon, respectfully, it amazes me how much open source people
under-communicate.
I took your post above (#2451850) and
re-wrote it, using exactly the same information. My version is 100 times
stronger. You call your post a tangent. How can what you said be a tangent? It
is EXTREMELY relevant. It changes everything.
There are legitimate times to stand on the rooftops and shout. This is one of
them, it seems to me.
In my opinion, Intel was TERRIBLE at making and marketing consumer products.
They would sell a product with important details still buggy.
For example, I bought an Intel computer video camera. There was software to
record videos, but there was no way to compress them so that the videos could
be sent by email.
There was software to record audio, but there was no way to pause the
recording. Each period of recording had to be a separate file.
Intel sold a PCMCIA network adapter that didn't work with Sony laptops. There
was a piece of paper in the box that said to visit a particular web site. The
site said that the adapter did not work with laptops using a particular
chipset. The main site for the product did not mention this, however, and
there was no link between the two..
I agree with what you said, Jon, but some people are moving to Linux
nevertheless. It's good to focus, not on what cannot be done now, but on what
CAN be done.
"The Multnomah Education Service District has successfully moved most of
it's core network services to Linux. Linux powers dns, dhcp, mail relays,
proxy servers, web filters, and directory services for the 45,000
administrators, teachers, and students within our agency and the school
districts we support . For our agency and a couple of our districts, Linux
powers the web, mail, ftp, and file servers. Tickled with our success, we have
started work on putting Linux workstations in the classroom. More on that to
come!" [my emphasis]
Check out this site about putting Linux workstations in the classroom:
Some friends here run a server farm for a school district. They switched to
Linux on ALL their servers. They say that the maintenance required with Linux
is far less. And, of course, there is no software upgrade cost. A Microsoft
sales person called and asked why they had not done any business recently.
It seems to me that the reason for Microsoft's increased abusiveness is that
every top Microsoft executive has plenty of experience seeing 5 years ahead.
They know they don't have long. So, they want to gouge everyone as much as
possible now.
The referenced article says that Linux can compete in the server market. You
can be sure that, if there are people on staff that know Linux, there will be
constant attempts to put Linux on desks.
The article said, Linux boosters insist that if free downloads and
pass-arounds were counted, that figure would be even higher; and they're
probably right.
Probably??? Certainly.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop
market in 2000. And that sliver is unlikely to grow in 2001.
Except, of course, the Chinese and Thai and maybe Indian governments are
switching to open source software, partly because they are afraid of possible back doors in U.S. software. Only the governments of 2 billion people. And some state and city governments in the United States. And... And...
Desktop computer users care about what they can do on their machines. They
want reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to
communicate easily with other users.
More nonsense. Many work users have computers dedicated to one task. If they
don't want that one task to crash, if they don't want Bill Gates coming around
and deciding on new ways of abusing them, they can do what?
As for its programs, Windows and Word sometimes drive me nuts.
Is that because they are buggy and quirky, and have numerous security risks due to low-quality source code?
The Thai language has 77 letters (or 76?), and requires complicated marks that
go above the letters. So, all word processing software must be modified
anyway. Thailand is a good country to begin with Open Source software.
Reading stories like this makes me happy to have good DSL service here in Portland, Oregon: Qwest wiring and Hevanet.com as ISP. Hevanet also has excellent tech support.
These AI competitions do not test the intelligence of the computer. They test
whether the humans are robotic.
Many people make themselves into robots, almost. They push themselves to
accomplish. They try to avoid their emotional conflict. They don't give
themselves time to be themselves. They don't have complicated involvement with
other people. After a few years of doing things in an anti-human way, anyone
would become a little bit robotic.
Such people are not good judges of human intelligence.
The quote by Ken Thompson at the bottom of the article referenced in the
Slashdot story is from a very interesting speech, Reflections on Trusting Trust.
Here is the quote:
"I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are
completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a
cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same
social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that
the neighbor's door is unlocked. The press must learn that misguided use of a
computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile."
Yes, but the problem is that you don't always know how formal your document will be when you start to write it. It is better to use software that already has everything you might need.
The point is that even DOS software had this feature many years ago. MS Word has a very poor implementation of it. Microsoft knows this is important, but they have not upgraded their implementation.
Do you really want to buy and learn two software packages, one for everyday documents and one for formal documents? No, you want a software provider who gives you what you need.
Microsoft Word does not have a method of adjusting the spacing between letters
while you are looking at the letters on the screen.
Adjusting the letter spacing is called kerning. Kerning is necessary when the
letter pair "Aw" is used in a large size, for example. If the spacing between these two is
not adjusted, there will be too much white space.
Some font styles have kerning built in, but these internal tables are never
perfect in all cases. Some font styles used for large headlines have no
built-in kerning.
Good software for producing professional-looking pages has had on-screen
kerning for a long, long time. Adobe PageMaker has had it since it was owned
by Aldus. Ventura Publisher has had on-screen kerning since before it was
owned by Xerox, when was owned by Ventura Publishing, and ran under the DOS
operating system. Framemaker has on-screen kerning. Quark Express has it.
Without good kerning it is impossible to produce a professional-looking
advertising page, for example.
People who care about the graphical look of their type must choose some other
software than Microsoft Word, which is too crude in the way it adjusts letter
spacing.
Most people don't use big headlines and most people don't notice when the
letter spacing is poor. However, for professionals, true on-screen kerning is considered a
basic feature.
This is only one feature that is poorly implemented in Microsoft Word. There
are many, many more. Microsoft Word does not handle the headings on tables
well, for example.
Mostly, though, Microsoft Word is quirky and buggy, in my opinion. It seems to
be an example of managing software development so that there is always a
reason to upgrade. That means that Microsoft is deliberately choosing to be
your enemy.
Oil company executive testifying to U.S. congress in 1998: "CentGas cannot begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place." For a link to this and other documents, do a search for the word "Taliban" in: What should be the Response to Violence?
"So it's in the manufacturer's best interest, at least financially, to make
products that need maintenance and that have to be continually improved with
successive updates, patches and versions that CIOs pay for up front. In sum,
bad software works for the vendors."
' "If software makers see they are losing money to people going the
open-source route, then they will change. Until then, it will be business as
usual despite appearances." '
This problem is MUCH worse than they are saying.
Microsoft Word, for example, after all these years, still does not have a way
to adjust letter spacing on screen. This is required to make headlines look
good.
In my opinion, Microsoft Word is quirky and buggy. The fundamental problem may
be that the top management of Microsoft doesn't care about Microsoft employees
any more than they care for their customers. A lot of the work that comes from
Microsoft is sloppy and uncaring.
Open source software solves this problem. You may not get everything you want,
but you will be involving yourself with people who CARE. To me that seems to
be a good recipe for a happy life: Involve yourself with people who care.
When I use software, I often have some contact with the people who produced
it, because I need upgrades or explanations. For me, one of the beautiful
things about open source software is that I like the people.
Even though open source projects don't try to make money, there is still a
marketing function. Marketing is creating communication between the project
and prospective users. Most projects ignore this requirement; some die as a
result of not communicating.
"... Samba as a server, and Linux based firewalls/proxies"
When there are discussions about open source, there doesn't seem to be enough
recognition that this is a sure way to use open source, even if it is
necessary to run Windows on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Writers must meet deadlines. The often are not given the time to learn everything they need to know. So, they string together some nice-sounding phrases. Sometimes, for a few sentences in a row, they sound like they understand the subject. Then they say something that shows they don't really:
That is why Microsoft has always sold its operating system cheaply and has done everything to make life easy for programmers.
"Make life easy" as in artificial limits on resources in Windows 95, 98, and ME. Later this,
Microsoft will continue to be a kinder giant, predicts Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, if only because "the whole world is watching".
He called Microsoft kind. Oh yeah. They probably both have Microsoft stock they would like to sell at less of a loss.
Then this:
It does not help Microsoft's credibility that its new-found faith in openness does not seem to apply to Windows itself.
Whoops, not kind. More "kindness":
Microsoft's concept of openness is reminiscent of a funnel: easy to get into, but hard to get out of. Visual Studio
Sometimes writers just use their imagination:
To convince the world that it will henceforth compete on the quality of its products alone, Microsoft must do something more radical. One possibility would be to accept the kind of antitrust settlement that would clearly signal a shift.
What should be the Response to Violence?
Moderate Governor King up!
Also see The War Powers Act of 1973.
I think that most of the corruption comes from agencies of the U.S. government that are allowed to break the law, secretly. This article is about that: What should be the Response to Violence?
Invalid form key: RY1U5tMMTq !
Not time to emigrate. Time to protest.
Don't let the abusers wear you down.
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Jon,
The paragraph you wrote in the parent post gives you powerful legal standing. It is copied below, with improvements. Clean up the paragraph and send it to Congressmen and Senators. Send it to the courts!! File an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief. The court clerks will tell you the necessary format. File the same brief at every court. There are more than 30. Offer to serve as an expert witness. (Ask to be paid expenses.)
You'll meet interesting people. The governors of several states are bringing this case against Microsoft.
The people in authority cannot do anything if no one is complaining. If you complain, you give them powerful help. You and your entire department are being hurt by Microsoft's anti-competitive methods. Five years of work hangs in the balance.
_________
Here is a re-written complaint. It is beginning to take the shape it would need to be filed as a friend of the court brief:
As it stands now, the biggest single anti-competitive factor, by far, driving Microsoft server technology into businesses is the fact that Microsoft desktop operating systems communicate with Microsoft servers using a secret method.
Microsoft Exchange, the mail server software, is forced into companies because Microsoft Outlook (part of office, and so bundled everywhere) must communicate with Exchange to do calendaring and scheduling.
Exchange 2000 communicates in a secret way with Microsoft's ActiveDirectory. ActiveDirectory and Microsoft Windows 2000 are written in such a way as to force customers to use Microsoft software for DNS (or else a lot of hand work is necessary, or there is a lack of security). This is extremely anti-competitive.
But Jon, you are not thinking like a marketing manager. You said, Microsoft's control of the clients will still allow them to push the client away...
Your manner of looking at the future is helping something bad happen instead of something good. You and I both don't know what will happen. There are two steps: 1) open source gets the software, and 2) open source people find some way to keep Microsoft from being abusive.
Yes, number 2 is difficult, but it is not impossible. Neither of us know what will happen. There are perhaps 30 legal cases against Microsoft now. I have heard that at least one of them is investigating Microsoft's secret file formats and protocols. It seems likely that what Microsoft is doing is so anti-competitive that it is against anti-trust law.
It could happen that Microsoft is required by a court to publish all its secret protocols. If not, would you give $300 to support a case against Microsoft? I would. I think there are others who would give money also.
The world does not handle abusiveness well. We should not let abusers run our lives.
If you think like a marketing man, you will think positively. Eventually, open source will find a way.
You have the same problem closer to home. Ganymede is being under-sold. This is VERY important!!!! It isn't only you. Most open source people are under-selling their work.
Your said at the bottom of your first post, "Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX." There are a lot of people who don't know what a metadirectory is.
You web site says, " GANYMEDE is a portable and customizable network directory management system
Someone who thinks like a marketing manager will sell the benefit: Ganymede makes managing a large network far easier. Manage up to 20,000 computers remotely, from ONE computer.
Jon, respectfully, you are too modest.
Why Microsoft is About to Lose: The Slashdot story is called, Why Linux is About to Lose. Journalistic fairness demands that the other side get attention. DCE/RPC.net lists numerous projects that will replace Microsoft: Open Source Win 2000 directory services, an MS-Exchange clone for Unix, an MS SQL clone, a
Jon, respectfully, it amazes me how much open source people under-communicate.
I took your post above (#2451850) and re-wrote it, using exactly the same information. My version is 100 times stronger. You call your post a tangent. How can what you said be a tangent? It is EXTREMELY relevant. It changes everything.
There are legitimate times to stand on the rooftops and shout. This is one of them, it seems to me.
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Could these be used to detect an individual person?
I'm getting a lot of Invalid form key errors: Invalid form key: CuhZiMm1UB !
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
In my opinion, Intel was TERRIBLE at making and marketing consumer products. They would sell a product with important details still buggy.
For example, I bought an Intel computer video camera. There was software to record videos, but there was no way to compress them so that the videos could be sent by email.
There was software to record audio, but there was no way to pause the recording. Each period of recording had to be a separate file.
Intel sold a PCMCIA network adapter that didn't work with Sony laptops. There was a piece of paper in the box that said to visit a particular web site. The site said that the adapter did not work with laptops using a particular chipset. The main site for the product did not mention this, however, and there was no link between the two..
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
I agree with what you said, Jon, but some people are moving to Linux nevertheless. It's good to focus, not on what cannot be done now, but on what CAN be done.
Check out this Linux success story: The "semi-official" distribution of the K12Linux Project. Here is a quote from that site:
"The Multnomah Education Service District has successfully moved most of it's core network services to Linux. Linux powers dns, dhcp, mail relays, proxy servers, web filters, and directory services for the 45,000 administrators, teachers, and students within our agency and the school districts we support . For our agency and a couple of our districts, Linux powers the web, mail, ftp, and file servers. Tickled with our success, we have started work on putting Linux workstations in the classroom. More on that to come!" [my emphasis]
Check out this site about putting Linux workstations in the classroom:
K-12Linux Project.
Here is a quote:
"We have FREE Xeon and Celeron processors to give to schools participating in STRUT and K12LTSP. See the applications page for more information."
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
"Microsoft is like a cuckoo bird..."
Excellent points.
Some friends here run a server farm for a school district. They switched to Linux on ALL their servers. They say that the maintenance required with Linux is far less. And, of course, there is no software upgrade cost. A Microsoft sales person called and asked why they had not done any business recently.
It seems to me that the reason for Microsoft's increased abusiveness is that every top Microsoft executive has plenty of experience seeing 5 years ahead. They know they don't have long. So, they want to gouge everyone as much as possible now.
The referenced article says that Linux can compete in the server market. You can be sure that, if there are people on staff that know Linux, there will be constant attempts to put Linux on desks.
The article said, Linux boosters insist that if free downloads and pass-arounds were counted, that figure would be even higher; and they're probably right.
Probably??? Certainly.
Conversely, Linux managed only 1.5 percent of shipments in the desktop market in 2000. And that sliver is unlikely to grow in 2001.
Except, of course, the Chinese and Thai and maybe Indian governments are switching to open source software, partly because they are afraid of possible back doors in U.S. software. Only the governments of 2 billion people. And some state and city governments in the United States. And... And...
Desktop computer users care about what they can do on their machines. They want reliability, simplicity, access to popular software, and the ability to communicate easily with other users.
More nonsense. Many work users have computers dedicated to one task. If they don't want that one task to crash, if they don't want Bill Gates coming around and deciding on new ways of abusing them, they can do what?
As for its programs, Windows and Word sometimes drive me nuts.
Is that because they are buggy and quirky, and have numerous security risks due to low-quality source code?
Secret U.S. hostile action tries to enhance oil profits. See the new section, "Avoid the common mistakes" in What should be the Response to Violence?
The Thai language has 77 letters (or 76?), and requires complicated marks that go above the letters. So, all word processing software must be modified anyway. Thailand is a good country to begin with Open Source software.
What should be the Response to Violence?
SE Portland here. If you had Hevanet, there would have been no hell.
Only good stuff.
Reading stories like this makes me happy to have good DSL service here in Portland, Oregon: Qwest wiring and Hevanet.com as ISP. Hevanet also has excellent tech support.
(Contact me for help programming your Cisco 675.)
These AI competitions do not test the intelligence of the computer. They test whether the humans are robotic.
Many people make themselves into robots, almost. They push themselves to accomplish. They try to avoid their emotional conflict. They don't give themselves time to be themselves. They don't have complicated involvement with other people. After a few years of doing things in an anti-human way, anyone would become a little bit robotic.
Such people are not good judges of human intelligence.
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
The quote by Ken Thompson at the bottom of the article referenced in the Slashdot story is from a very interesting speech, Reflections on Trusting Trust.
Here is the quote:
"I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked. The press must learn that misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile."
What should be the Response to Violence?
Yes, but the problem is that you don't always know how formal your document will be when you start to write it. It is better to use software that already has everything you might need.
The point is that even DOS software had this feature many years ago. MS Word has a very poor implementation of it. Microsoft knows this is important, but they have not upgraded their implementation.
Do you really want to buy and learn two software packages, one for everyday documents and one for formal documents? No, you want a software provider who gives you what you need.
Microsoft Word does not have a method of adjusting the spacing between letters while you are looking at the letters on the screen.
Adjusting the letter spacing is called kerning. Kerning is necessary when the letter pair "Aw" is used in a large size, for example. If the spacing between these two is not adjusted, there will be too much white space.
Some font styles have kerning built in, but these internal tables are never perfect in all cases. Some font styles used for large headlines have no built-in kerning.
Good software for producing professional-looking pages has had on-screen kerning for a long, long time. Adobe PageMaker has had it since it was owned by Aldus. Ventura Publisher has had on-screen kerning since before it was owned by Xerox, when was owned by Ventura Publishing, and ran under the DOS operating system. Framemaker has on-screen kerning. Quark Express has it.
Without good kerning it is impossible to produce a professional-looking advertising page, for example.
People who care about the graphical look of their type must choose some other software than Microsoft Word, which is too crude in the way it adjusts letter spacing.
Most people don't use big headlines and most people don't notice when the letter spacing is poor. However, for professionals, true on-screen kerning is considered a basic feature.
This is only one feature that is poorly implemented in Microsoft Word. There are many, many more. Microsoft Word does not handle the headings on tables well, for example.
Mostly, though, Microsoft Word is quirky and buggy, in my opinion. It seems to be an example of managing software development so that there is always a reason to upgrade. That means that Microsoft is deliberately choosing to be your enemy.
Oil company executive testifying to U.S. congress in 1998: "CentGas cannot begin construction until an internationally recognized Afghanistan government is in place." For a link to this and other documents, do a search for the word "Taliban" in: What should be the Response to Violence?
From the article:
"So it's in the manufacturer's best interest, at least financially, to make products that need maintenance and that have to be continually improved with successive updates, patches and versions that CIOs pay for up front. In sum, bad software works for the vendors."
' "If software makers see they are losing money to people going the open-source route, then they will change. Until then, it will be business as usual despite appearances." '
This problem is MUCH worse than they are saying.
Microsoft Word, for example, after all these years, still does not have a way to adjust letter spacing on screen. This is required to make headlines look good.
In my opinion, Microsoft Word is quirky and buggy. The fundamental problem may be that the top management of Microsoft doesn't care about Microsoft employees any more than they care for their customers. A lot of the work that comes from Microsoft is sloppy and uncaring.
Open source software solves this problem. You may not get everything you want, but you will be involving yourself with people who CARE. To me that seems to be a good recipe for a happy life: Involve yourself with people who care.
When I use software, I often have some contact with the people who produced it, because I need upgrades or explanations. For me, one of the beautiful things about open source software is that I like the people.
U.S. government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
My tests have shown that constant movement from an unstable floor does cause problems after perhaps a year. This is at a customer's site.
Government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
I find this really, really painful: I think the U.S. government is becoming thoroughly corrupt.
Lots of people are using the terrorism to accomplish sneaky goals.
Government corruption: What should be the Response to Violence?
Wow! Open Office has a Marketing project too!
Even though open source projects don't try to make money, there is still a marketing function. Marketing is creating communication between the project and prospective users. Most projects ignore this requirement; some die as a result of not communicating.
Secrecy corrupts democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?
"You techies disgust me!"
You modern whippersnappers disgust me! Whenever I want to listen to music, I have a band come to my house.
Secrecy corrupts democracy: What should be the Response to Violence?
"... Samba as a server, and Linux based firewalls/proxies"
When there are discussions about open source, there doesn't seem to be enough recognition that this is a sure way to use open source, even if it is necessary to run Windows on the desktop.