"During the 1999-2000 election cycle, Microsoft contributed more than $4.7 million in soft money, PAC and individual contributions to federal candidates and parties--almost three times what the company contributed during the previous three election cycles combined. More than two-thirds of that money went to Republicans."
You get what you pay for, eh? Or, in this case, a lot more -- an excellent return on investment.
And Bush was the guy that was going to bring honor and integrity back to the White House? Not bloody likely.
Possibly because of the restrictive immigration and work-permit rules. And the increased competition to get into selected EU countries. It's getting harder to get in.
The article implies that until recently, journalists were ethical. How about George Will, who loves to pontificate about ethics on ABC's "This Week" program? Remember how badly he wanted Ronald Reagan to do well in a pre-election presidential debate? He coached Mr. Reagan secretly beforehand even though Mr. Will was going to serve as one of the debate's questioners! And this guy is still allowed to practice journalism and editorialize (about ethics, among other things).
Whoring journalists are nothing new. Being online just gives them better opportunities to pimp themselves.
One of the reasons none of the OEM agreements have been leaked is because of an insinuation that was made by one of Microsoft"s representatives: there are slight changes among the versions distributed to the various companies, and if the document were made public Microsoft would be able to determine which company leaked it and send an army of lawyers to punish the company that allowed the agreement to get into public hands and lose its 'trade secret' status.
If you're referring to the United States, no, they don't live in a democracy. That's why the guy who got half a million less votes than the other guy was the "official" winner of the election. Heck, citizens of the U.S. don't even have the right to have their votes counted enumerated in their constitution.
1. Microsoft wants to shove a new protocol down everybody's throats (called "TCP/MS" here for convenience sake)
2. easiest way to push the new is to eventually break the old. easiest way to break the old is the ship new versions of windows with the stacks' legs wide open so the hackers see nothing but forests of available holes. Wham bam thank you mam times powers of ten = happy DoS script kiddie and the eventual signal/noise death of the Internet
3. At which point American Businesses wail for their lost bandwidth, AOL cries for more paid connections and the FBI sternly insists that terrorists and child pornographers will be shopping at Safeway tonight if John Law can't look at every packet crawlin' down the wire and know its exact origin complete with social security number and DNA sample.
4. Captain Microsoft to the rescue! With TCP/MS, we can offer higher grades of service for deeper pocketbooks with our prioritized packet handling, authenticated connections with our Hailstorm/Passport servers and everybody will always know who you are because you ain't gettin' in without a credit card. From which we will be performing a cashectomy each month. Along with all your personal details. Trust us. Heck, it's what our ads tell you, isn't it!
Meanwhile...
anybody for the resurrection of Fidonet?
So I can go somewhere with unstable politics, dirty water, poverty, that sounds like its a huge petri dish for breeding the new most dangerous diseases on the planet PLUS I get to be a walking target because I'm white?
Yummy, this sounds more fun than the dot-coms last year or Y2K coding two years ago!
"The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint."
We can only hope that the conservative activists on the court don't find a good reason to revisit this issue or the U.S. can probably chalk up another loss among the first ten amendments.
The appeals court judges ranked pretty high on the jackass scale, too. They say they see no bias in Jackson's ruling but don't like his style and let Microsoft off the hook for that?
Especially after Microsoft lies often and repeatedly to him...waste his time, disrespect him, and he's not supposed to say what he thinks of them afterwards?
If he's to be pushed off cases for that behavior, more than half the US Supreme Court should be retired.
The single best story online was a very good analysis of the Supreme Court's actions concerning the recent U.S. elections. "None Dare Call It Treason" was written by Vincent Bugliosi and was online well before it saw print in The Nation.
link: http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20010205 &s=bugliosi
Just a slight note: I hope that when you send reports to your clients, you say "The other managers and I" rather than "Me and the other managers at the consultancy where I work"...at least when you're starting a sentence.
Me read reports too, but me try write better.
Also: "When my corporation pays for research, we absolutely do not want them to tell us what we want to hear. We want to know the FACTS. Bill Gates (the world's most succesful businessman) is no different."
You're assuming Microsoft wants facts and not marketing crap to try to prop up W2K. You know, stuff marketing can put out alongside statements like "W2K IS a serious Enterprise-ready scaleable and reliable OS." Which might be true in comparison to LAN Manager, but not if it's up against UNIX.
Finally: "Just because Microsoft commissioned the research does not render it invalid."
Agreed. It does, however, render it highly suspect. That it's from Gartner renders it likely invalid. They haven't been trusted by any of the techies I know since about 1996 and even the sales types I know don't take them seriously anymore.
A number of items that were public domain became unavailable in the U.S when we hooked into the G.A.T.T. Treaty. That is bad law and a good example of the sort of thing RMS is warning us about.
And as far as getting specialists in international law to write about this subject, I suppose we could fund two of them and get twelve opinions but I have a great deal of respect for RMS, despite/because he's been such a pain-in-the-ass about the GPL over the years and now (it appears) proven absolutely correct in having done it the way he did.
The problem is that the Judicial branch gets to interpret the Constitution and lately they seem to have no problem at all shoveling the rights of U.S. citizens out the window...
If I worked at a company which considered using this product what I'd be concerned about would be whether there were any nice juicy backdoors for Altavista to use to spy on my data.
A Mayo Clinic study will be published tomorrow with a headline saying something like "CTS not found in computer users".
Something decidedly fishy is going on here. The raw numbers for the study are 250 users, none of whom ever used a computer for more than 7 hours a day! And these are supposedly heavy users?
Whoever said follow the money hit it dead on. Somebody's trying to sell us an idea here...
You can find an old PowerMac 7200 for next to nothing these days. Load MKLinux on it and you've got a ready-configured dual-boot multimedia RISC Linux box for a bunch cheaper than any of the ones in this guy's test suite.
"Clarify" in this case equals "I didn't put this stuff in my original license but maybe I should have"?
Weasel-words by any other name. I'd think Reed would rather be remembered for his skill using words accurately in computer code instead of how poorly his home-crafted legalese was cobbled together. I don't know if the code is worth forking, but adding phrases after the fact to your license and saying that's what you really meant all along...? Lame. And it won't protect the code written before the added verbiage.
As unfriendly as the Clinton administration was to notions of anonymity and privacy, the last U.S. election brought to power the guy Microsoft backed -- and they want Hailstorm/Passport to take hold, so the architecture of the net will change to accomodate it. Whatever power They (insert whatever governmental/quasi-governmental/corporate group you like here) didn't already have via Carvivore and god-knows-what-else to spy on us will be completed when we are forced to use Microsoft's authentication servers to accomplish anything on the net.
Never happen? How many sites require cookies, javascript, or worse to function properly these days? How fast did everybody give up their privacy and security of their computer just to look at stuff on websites?
"professional attire leads to professional conduct"
Well, not really. But the attire a business demands does reflect what it considers important.
In my case, I avoid companies that are so mentally arthritic that they worry more about what I wear than how much money I can bring in. If their mindset is so hobbled on one issue, they aren't likely to be able to change rapidly enough on other issues to survive.
The last time I wore a suit to work, my boss called me into the office and asked if I was sick, going to a funeral or jobhunting. And then gave me a raise just to be sure it wasn't that last thing.
You're missing some pretty significant history there. The applications that really got things moving weren't from Microsoft, they were WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics and Ashton-Tate's DB3 Plus. NOT Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.
Heck, Framework and Symphony were more popular than Office in its earlier incarnations and I didn't much like supporting either of those. But for the first few revisions we literally couldn't GIVE Office away as part of a PC Application bundle; corporations considered it poison. It wasn't until sometime after Windows 95 that we could get any acceptance of it at all and then only with really cut-rate pricing.
Lots of U.S. businesses spend their time begging, they just go for people with deeper pockets: senators and congressmen. Subsidies, tax breaks, resource bargains or giveaways, favorable legislation and outright handouts are a response to a lot of corporate begging. Major difference is the money they rebate to the givers in the form of contributions and jobs for friends.
The referenced article and the links to e-mails from Earthlink customers inside the article and several comments in this thread say that Earthlink increased the price to $49.95 BEFORE the end of the six-month term, a clear breach of contract and not a sound business practice. Are these customers all lying?
Last night I was doing tech support for a friend who is trying out trial subscriptions on three providers competing for her business. Set up three dialups all in the same exchange. Ran a series of connects to test: results on provider #1 never got above 28.8K, provider #2 varied between 33.6K and 48K and provider #3 hit 52K every time. This is the same computer, same modem, same phone line and same phone exchange on the same night. So there's some other factor involved besides phone line quality.
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From opensecrets.org:
"During the 1999-2000 election cycle, Microsoft contributed more than $4.7 million in soft money, PAC and individual contributions to federal candidates and parties--almost three times what the company contributed during the previous three election cycles combined. More than two-thirds of that money went to Republicans."
You get what you pay for, eh? Or, in this case, a lot more -- an excellent return on investment.
And Bush was the guy that was going to bring honor and integrity back to the White House? Not bloody likely.
Possibly because of the restrictive immigration and work-permit rules. And the increased competition to get into selected EU countries. It's getting harder to get in.
The article implies that until recently, journalists were ethical. How about George Will, who loves to pontificate about ethics on ABC's "This Week" program? Remember how badly he wanted Ronald Reagan to do well in a pre-election presidential debate? He coached Mr. Reagan secretly beforehand even though Mr. Will was going to serve as one of the debate's questioners! And this guy is still allowed to practice journalism and editorialize (about ethics, among other things).
Whoring journalists are nothing new. Being online just gives them better opportunities to pimp themselves.
One of the reasons none of the OEM agreements have been leaked is because of an insinuation that was made by one of Microsoft"s representatives: there are slight changes among the versions distributed to the various companies, and if the document were made public Microsoft would be able to determine which company leaked it and send an army of lawyers to punish the company that allowed the agreement to get into public hands and lose its 'trade secret' status.
If you're referring to the United States, no, they don't live in a democracy. That's why the guy who got half a million less votes than the other guy was the "official" winner of the election. Heck, citizens of the U.S. don't even have the right to have their votes counted enumerated in their constitution.
1. Microsoft wants to shove a new protocol down everybody's throats (called "TCP/MS" here for convenience sake)
/Passport servers and everybody will always know who you are because you ain't gettin' in without a credit card. From which we will be performing a cashectomy each month. Along with all your personal details. Trust us. Heck, it's what our ads tell you, isn't it!
2. easiest way to push the new is to eventually break the old. easiest way to break the old is the ship new versions of windows with the stacks' legs wide open so the hackers see nothing but forests of available holes. Wham bam thank you mam times powers of ten = happy DoS script kiddie and the eventual signal/noise death of the Internet
3. At which point American Businesses wail for their lost bandwidth, AOL cries for more paid connections and the FBI sternly insists that terrorists and child pornographers will be shopping at Safeway tonight if John Law can't look at every packet crawlin' down the wire and know its exact origin complete with social security number and DNA sample.
4. Captain Microsoft to the rescue! With TCP/MS, we can offer higher grades of service for deeper pocketbooks with our prioritized packet handling, authenticated connections with our Hailstorm
Meanwhile...
anybody for the resurrection of Fidonet?
So I can go somewhere with unstable politics, dirty water, poverty, that sounds like its a huge petri dish for breeding the new most dangerous diseases on the planet PLUS I get to be a walking target because I'm white?
Yummy, this sounds more fun than the dot-coms last year or Y2K coding two years ago!
"The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint."
We can only hope that the conservative activists on the court don't find a good reason to revisit this issue or the U.S. can probably chalk up another loss among the first ten amendments.
The appeals court judges ranked pretty high on the jackass scale, too. They say they see no bias in Jackson's ruling but don't like his style and let Microsoft off the hook for that?
Especially after Microsoft lies often and repeatedly to him...waste his time, disrespect him, and he's not supposed to say what he thinks of them afterwards?
If he's to be pushed off cases for that behavior, more than half the US Supreme Court should be retired.
The single best story online was a very good analysis of the Supreme Court's actions concerning the recent U.S. elections. "None Dare Call It Treason" was written by Vincent Bugliosi and was online well before it saw print in The Nation.5 &s=bugliosi
link: http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=2001020
Betcha they've lost more time to VB scripting, Outlook viruses, IE security holes, GPFs or BSODs than the silly SETI screensaver.
Heck, they've probably lost more time trying to comply with silly directives from Richard Chambers than they ever will from the SETI screensaver.
Just a slight note: I hope that when you send reports to your clients, you say "The other managers and I" rather than "Me and the other managers at the consultancy where I work"...at least when you're starting a sentence.
Me read reports too, but me try write better.
Also: "When my corporation pays for research, we absolutely do not want them to tell us what we want to hear. We want to know the FACTS. Bill Gates (the world's most succesful businessman) is no different."
You're assuming Microsoft wants facts and not marketing crap to try to prop up W2K. You know, stuff marketing can put out alongside statements like "W2K IS a serious Enterprise-ready scaleable and reliable OS." Which might be true in comparison to LAN Manager, but not if it's up against UNIX.
Finally: "Just because Microsoft commissioned the research does not render it invalid."
Agreed. It does, however, render it highly suspect. That it's from Gartner renders it likely invalid. They haven't been trusted by any of the techies I know since about 1996 and even the sales types I know don't take them seriously anymore.
A number of items that were public domain became unavailable in the U.S when we hooked into the G.A.T.T. Treaty. That is bad law and a good example of the sort of thing RMS is warning us about.
And as far as getting specialists in international law to write about this subject, I suppose we could fund two of them and get twelve opinions but I have a great deal of respect for RMS, despite/because he's been such a pain-in-the-ass about the GPL over the years and now (it appears) proven absolutely correct in having done it the way he did.
The problem is that the Judicial branch gets to interpret the Constitution and lately they seem to have no problem at all shoveling the rights of U.S. citizens out the window...
If I worked at a company which considered using this product what I'd be concerned about would be whether there were any nice juicy backdoors for Altavista to use to spy on my data.
A Mayo Clinic study will be published tomorrow with a headline saying something like "CTS not found in computer users".
Something decidedly fishy is going on here. The raw numbers for the study are 250 users, none of whom ever used a computer for more than 7 hours a day! And these are supposedly heavy users?
Whoever said follow the money hit it dead on. Somebody's trying to sell us an idea here...
You can find an old PowerMac 7200 for next to nothing these days. Load MKLinux on it and you've got a ready-configured dual-boot multimedia RISC Linux box for a bunch cheaper than any of the ones in this guy's test suite.
"Clarify" in this case equals "I didn't put this stuff in my original license but maybe I should have"?
Weasel-words by any other name. I'd think Reed would rather be remembered for his skill using words accurately in computer code instead of how poorly his home-crafted legalese was cobbled together. I don't know if the code is worth forking, but adding phrases after the fact to your license and saying that's what you really meant all along...? Lame. And it won't protect the code written before the added verbiage.
As unfriendly as the Clinton administration was to notions of anonymity and privacy, the last U.S. election brought to power the guy Microsoft backed -- and they want Hailstorm/Passport to take hold, so the architecture of the net will change to accomodate it. Whatever power They (insert whatever governmental/quasi-governmental/corporate group you like here) didn't already have via Carvivore and god-knows-what-else to spy on us will be completed when we are forced to use Microsoft's authentication servers to accomplish anything on the net.
Never happen? How many sites require cookies, javascript, or worse to function properly these days? How fast did everybody give up their privacy and security of their computer just to look at stuff on websites?
"professional attire leads to professional conduct"
Well, not really. But the attire a business demands does reflect what it considers important.
In my case, I avoid companies that are so mentally arthritic that they worry more about what I wear than how much money I can bring in. If their mindset is so hobbled on one issue, they aren't likely to be able to change rapidly enough on other issues to survive.
The last time I wore a suit to work, my boss called me into the office and asked if I was sick, going to a funeral or jobhunting. And then gave me a raise just to be sure it wasn't that last thing.
Make it worse? OK, how about Lotus Notes?
MS Office is why PCs got popular???
You're missing some pretty significant history there. The applications that really got things moving weren't from Microsoft, they were WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics and Ashton-Tate's DB3 Plus. NOT Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.
Heck, Framework and Symphony were more popular than Office in its earlier incarnations and I didn't much like supporting either of those. But for the first few revisions we literally couldn't GIVE Office away as part of a PC Application bundle; corporations considered it poison. It wasn't until sometime after Windows 95 that we could get any acceptance of it at all and then only with really cut-rate pricing.
Lots of U.S. businesses spend their time begging, they just go for people with deeper pockets: senators and congressmen. Subsidies, tax breaks, resource bargains or giveaways, favorable legislation and outright handouts are a response to a lot of corporate begging. Major difference is the money they rebate to the givers in the form of contributions and jobs for friends.
The referenced article and the links to e-mails from Earthlink customers inside the article and several comments in this thread say that Earthlink increased the price to $49.95 BEFORE the end of the six-month term, a clear breach of contract and not a sound business practice. Are these customers all lying?
Last night I was doing tech support for a friend who is trying out trial subscriptions on three providers competing for her business. Set up three dialups all in the same exchange. Ran a series of connects to test: results on provider #1 never got above 28.8K, provider #2 varied between 33.6K and 48K and provider #3 hit 52K every time. This is the same computer, same modem, same phone line and same phone exchange on the same night. So there's some other factor involved besides phone line quality.