I can't argue with casual dismissal. But the same sorts of arguments you are making would work to prove that America has brought the world anything, I mean virtually every American invention of importance was being explored by somebody else and the ground was laid for it to be succesful.
Yeah, that's my point. Microsoft pulls a lot of weight in the industry and in the sense that a rising tide floats all boats, Microsoft displaces a lot of water, but so do Intel, IBM, etc. To point to Microsoft as the source of inspiration or the enabler behind most technologies is wrong - they benefit from it and do try to proliferate cheap office suites as you suggest, but only in that the next dose isn't free.
This isn't a Microsoft rant - this is about how people attribute invention to those who loudly sing their own praises. Microsoft claims to have invented ones and zeros, cheap office suites, and commodity hardware, but really, like everyone else who wasn't the first they were merely refiners and enablers of things that require much capital.
People were buying computers and office suites (primitive as they were in the era) with all signs of expanding exponentially back in the early 80s. No one element is essential to our success, but to let Microsoft claim to be and not refute their claims gives unreasonable weight to their requrests for industry stifling ideas like software patents. Once you realize that they, like everyone else, build on the collected ideas of the industry you're less willing to give them the keys.
We'll only keep moving forward if we remove economic friction. Computers enable us to work, they aren't the end result, so "obviously" any industry that tacks price onto an enabling technology is a middle-man that eventually the industry will evolve out of the need for. Microsoft wants to convince us that we can't live without them by falsly claiming we owe everything to them. (Also applies to Amazon on one-click patents, etc - as if other online stores wouldn't have come around without them.)
Microsoft did license basic, but it's not like they were the only ones. And OSes tended to come with PCs, they were an expected part of the package. Not only did the OS for my Apple2s come free, but it came with source.
But you're just parroting the Microsoft line. They didn't make hardware cheap - the Apple2, C64, and a host of other computers were cheaper than any IBM clone you could buy for quite a while. Did Microsoft make the IBM clones cheaper? No, they charged for what had always been free in the PC world - an OS, that made computers more expensive.
They didn't make the office suite mainstream, that was already happening. Sure, it kept happening while they were around, but it's not like they made something happen that wouldn't have otherwise.
OLE and similar technologies aren't bad, but they're nothing the market wasn't exploring at the time. Apple's OS does the same things.
As for the IDE, they do release the most popular, but that's a function of market share. They didn't invent it - the first I used was Borland C in the early 90s and it was a pale copy of what commercial IDEs were on big iron. As for mainstreaming rapid application development... whoa - where to start?
And I'll take issue with your taking issue with my comment on prices. Microsoft's sole price advantage has always been working on commodity hardware. Arguably this is Intel's doing - the cross licensing they did to be a military supplier and the "clone" market this caused made the x86 the defacto standard. Microsoft just rode the cheap Taiwanese hardware market.
Sure, many Microsoft products are now cheap, and many people who couldn't have had an office suite in the 80s now have one, but they'd have one on whatever hardware and OS existed - every type of product Microsoft makes was already around on other platforms. It might have been WordPerfect or Appleworks, but they were already around in the mid 80s and seem to
You simply miss the perspective you'd have gained if you watched the PC revolution unfold instead of listening to Microsoft tell the story.
Seeing as how Microsoft hasn't brought us anything that other companies wouldn't have bought (likely with less criminal actions involved), their anti-open source policies, and their format and licensing lock-in, I stand by my statement that a PC is more costly today and the market worse off than it would have been if Microsoft hadn't become an OS monopoly and illegally leveraged that into market share dominance in other areas.
Considering that most of Microsoft's money comes from the US, and most of the software they sell has cheaper and often better equivalents, you could instead say that they've been a huge drain on the economy.
What have they contributed? How has any Microsoft product ever made a business run better than the average competitor's product? But they certainly charge more, restrict more, lie/cheat/steal more, sue over invented infringment more, and hold back the industry more.
It's in everyone's interests to commoditize their complements, as an economist would put it. Hardware companies like free software (IBM, Intel, etc) and software companies like cheap hardware (Microsoft, etc). We the people, being neither hardware or software companies (usually), would benefit from cheaper hardware and software. Microsoft not only doesn't provide this, but goes out of their way to prevent anyone else providing it. They don't even have any confidence in their products themselves or they wouldn't be so busy locking people in with patent-encumbered data formats and just plain lies and obfuscation.
I submit that Microsoft is one of the biggest drains on the economy.
Microsoft has lobbied to keep the US government from using open source and has done their best to hurt open source and the people involved in it.
I'd say that's a good argument for them being prevented from using any open-source of public domain project. After all, it is communism...
But yeah, the point of the BSD license is to get closed-source companies like MS to use the standards. They in no way deserve it, but it's in everyone's best interests that they do.
Trusted Computing is a trademark, of a working group that Microsoft, AMD, Intel, and others are part of.
The trusted computing site disagrees about the possiblility of SELinux being involved with Trusted Computing (tm). They are quite sure that TC is tamper-proof hardware keys and strong encryption, providing an assurance that the key a message was signed with was itself signed by the TC group, in one form or another.
As such, it isn't for security, as I have described. It will provide next to no actual security benefits and most of the members of the TCG have stated that they see it providing a robust platform for DRM.
Thankfully a scheme like this can't work, too many secrets to keep. It'll be another DVD-CSS fiasco as it gets broken and stripped of watermarks. Unfortunately, it'll cost us a fortune to have implemented and it'll get in the way of many legitimate transactions. Like all other rights-denial software it'll end up harming the honest and unsophisticated users, but thanks to the nature of information, being broken by everyone who has heard of Google.
No, that was copyright. This is patents. With the current legal climate there's literally nothing you can't patent. (No, seriously, I mean it. You may not be able to defend it in court, but the PTO is giving patents out like candy.)
As another poster says, gmail lets you own your own data by providing a pop3 interface - I don't know if "religiously" describes telling Thunderbird to check pop.gmail.google.com every two minutes, but I suppose we all have different thresholds.
Besides, that has nothing to do with the issue. You can always give your data to someone else. I run GNU/Linux and open source software, but I can mistreat your data as well as everyone else, if I want. Open Source is all about making the tools (you know, open source webmail apps, what every ISP smaller than AOL/MSN uses) available and open so that you can take control if you want.
Nobody is forcing you to use Firefox, they just want you to stop using the proprietary features of IE and calling the result a webpage.
Exactly. My company is perfectly willing to take any free time I may have from managing the computers and put me to use writing code, researching new server technology, etc. They don't see value in paying me to do things the hard way.
My stated goal with IT is always the same - provide the tools the users need for the lowest cost possible. IT is the middle-man in most companies - lowering the transaction costs by cutting out and slimming down the middle-man is only smart business.
I'm not sure what your argument is, but it seems cargo-cultish. "That guy looks rich, let's pay him more!"
Sure, Microsoft is bigger, and sure, they make more money. How does that relate to me? Normally you'd look for a big supplier in order to ensure that products can be shipped on time (win for Open Source, loss for Microsoft), to ensure quality (win for Open Source, and Macs, loss for Microsoft), to ensure security (win for Open Source, loss for Microsoft). What are you getting here by going with the expensive alternative?
Not that I care. Small and mobile companies that pay $200/computer including software and that spend less than an hour ever maintaining that computer are going to eat your lunch. Lies, Damn-lies, and TCO FUD are all that Microsoft innovates these days. They can blab on and on about the costs of running Linux, but I've *never* seen it. I've never spent as much time patching a Linux server as I have patching Windows. Managing Windows computers means I get to be there at 2am to shut them down when nobody is using them. This is something that every group of MS patches I've ever installed has required at least once, often 3+ times, instead of just running apt-get update/upgrade on a live server.
With Linux I can write a simply script that SSHes (securely, unlike any Windows protocols) into all the machines I manage and runs something, collects stats, applies patches, etc. With Windows I can buy a new computer, an expensive server-version of the OS, and all the extras you need to really build a domain controller. Then, with a bunch of tools I could manage my own patch repository and control what I rolled out to my users, etc, etc. With Linux I just SSH in (or let the script do it) and run the same command that I'd run if I were doing it manually.
People advocate switching to Linux because it's better, cheaper, and not trying to lock you into sub-standard solutions. Sure, if you need a specific app you need to run the OS it's written for, but then, these days you rarely need anything on Windows - Mac or Linux, it's the new face of business computing.
Just as frequently, those users can't share data with each other and are trying to figure out why. Linux tools can easily render Microsoft formats and if they're not perfect, geeks don't care. The problem is when someone tries to use OfficeXP and find that it has a bug that means you can't use Office97 to open half of its documents, despite saving them in '97' format. For example. That problem I remember being a fairly easy hotfix, but the type of problem just keeps happening.
Open formats are mandatory, anything else means that you don't own your data.
That's what various security programs for Linux already do. But they do it without a secret RIAA/Microsoft key/backdoor in the BIOS.
Besides, Trusted Computing is about (supposedly) being able to trust the signed apps. Most bugs come from convincing the trusted application to do something it shouldn't, even just something that it'd be allowed to do. It's like convincing Outlook in windows to delete the user's email (or email it off to everyone in your address book), something Outlook will have the permissions to do.
Microsoft deliberately claims that Trusted Computing will make users safer. Something *no* security professional agrees with. Strangely, despite Microsoft's ethics, their past record of trying to control the user, and the RIAA/MPAA's desire to remotely authenticate you before you do ANYTHING with "their" movie/music, they want you to believe that this will make it safer for you. Give the keys to your computer to someone else, so that they can verify everything you are, and are not, doing, and they just might let you use media that the law says you own.
And it's no-doubt fun to be a Microsoft Astroturfer running around lying about how Trusted Computing isn't the first step to the brave new Microsoft Computer that you buy, but aren't able (or allowed to try) to run your own non-verified apps outside the "safety" of a sandbox, for your own protection.
Trusted Computing on its own isn't a problem, but it's an absolutely useless security measure. It does nothing that other, better, (ACLs, Capabilities, SELinux) technologies do, and it doesn't provide any real protection. It'll initially stop some "run this file" spam from working, but people send those inside password protected zip files - if they have to explain in the email how to right-click and 'sign' the applet, they will, and people will go along with it in order to view FunnyAd.wmv.
Trusted Computing is somewhere down by tripwire and other signature scanning utilities for how effective it'll be. It'll be good to know if someone trojaned outlook, but had you just used an OS with real file permissions, nobody could have done so anyway.
The fundamental problem with Trusted Computing is that it doesn't realize that there are bad actions that can be taken in the context of the sandbox a "valid" yet buggy app runs in. Sure, you've got Outlook locked into its area, but someone can tell outlook to delete all your email, not through a signed and safe program, but by exploiting yet another bug.
But, isn't it better than nothing? No. It doesn't offer any protections that better methods do not, and it does it in a way that is very amenable to remote oversight and having your privelleges on your computer overridden. If TrustedComputing were something that you setup in the bios, generated your own key for, and could view the key and use it on your own, then Trusted Computing would be for the user, as opposed to for the RIAA and Microsoft. But, we see the truth in this. For our own good the key will be determined when it leaves the factory and will be nothing but a RIAA/etc backdoor into your system. And yeah, yeah, we've all heard the joke about how it'll be optional. Optional as long as you don't want to do anything with a network cable plugged in, or view any media that you own.
Trusted Computing won't actually help security much at all. Look at the majority of the exploits - they're buffer overflows, ways of tricking a valid program into doing something you don't want.
Trusted computing is a red herring, intended solely to bring crippling DRM to the desktop. Enjoy.
Actually, shipping, packaging, marketing, display, and kickbacks (always the biggest expense) cost about 1/4 of the sticker price. The physical CD is about $.15, from what I've seen of bulk pressing. The label and case are $.15 - $.30 depending on what you decide to go with. The bulk of it is in marketing and paying for prime display - end-caps of aisles, etc. This includes kickbacks to radio stations and other things.
But, you're mostly right about the physical cost of the CD+case. In fact, at the $1 track you pay, if it went right to the artist instead of the label and the music store, could pay for them to send you your own poster or physical CD if you bought all the tracks on the disc. Could be a good way for them to convince people to not just get the top-40 songs. The physical media store and the cut they have to take to pay employees and rent, etc, is the biggest cost. Eliminate them and snail-mail CDs (after selling the MP3s) and it's just a funky extra, not the main cost - think of it as an advertising expense and it's easier to justify. Who better to ensure has your music than someone who has shown willingness to buy?
Does the vendor want to fix past mistakes, or replace everyone's expensive servers with a cupcake so they can never be hacked again?
Microsoft's solutions look like they were created without the customer in mind. We don't want email clients that refuse to accept attachments (At one time, the only security you could enable on OE (and maybe Outlook?) was to simply turn off this functionality at the server). We want email clients that simply don't execute attachments automatically.
Microsoft's patches always tell us what we can and can't do. They come all rolled together, even the ones they break out often have unannounced functionality, and they require us to reboot or have this OS-level modal window floating over the screen all day until we can finish whatever we're working on restart the bloody thing.
Anyways, do you hear frustration here? It's frustration at paying (at work, grumble) for an OS and having them leave such huge gaping holes in it that I quite literally must buy thousands of dollars in third-party products to make it safe to use as it was sold. This company then wants to turn around and rip out features, or add undesired ones, to the product I bought, simply as a cost of providing some small measure of what I paid for.
And you don't think we're cutting them any slack? What have they done to show they deserve it? Have they ever had a poll on their site asking admins how they'd prefer to get patches, and if the admins would feel more secure with unannounced bugs that are silently patched, or the more open process that could increase risk, but let everyone honestly evaluate the process and see that security was taken seriously. Why did they think that their reboot was so important that they had to float a window in front of me forever, but where it was so unimportant that, having hidden the useless window offscreen, I didn't shut down till the end of the week, when I would have anyways?
Like I said - there's no evidence they're trying to get over past mistakes, in fact, it looks like they're doing everything wrong that they were before.
I went to nVidia's and downloaded the drivers from my card. I'll check the link you gave me as well.
But what I mean, is that the design of the operating system - GUIs without advanced mode - means that the philosophy is of having them grant you the ability to do something. The philosophy of systems with where config file are the main resource you get GUIs that help with some things, but do not pretend to be completist. This means that they don't cripple you, or do things too badly, because you only use them where they help.
We see that the fight against European patents *could* get 800 people layed off. Does that mean we shouldn't fight patents, or that we realize we can't let the bad guys (whoever is willing to put us at each other's throats) make us enemies. They aren't right, they just say they are. Larry's license isn't just and moral because Larry says it is - Larry's license is just, or unjust, as the world around him decides.
Unfortunately, when you give something away to make it more popular, you risk having it go away entirely, or turned into something you never envisioned. Larry wanted to popularity of working with a big open-source project and that meant he had to let go of control - specifically he couldn't ask people to trust him so implicitly that they gave up their ethics and accepted lock-in, however velvet the handcuffs.
This potential accident only shows us how bad the unintended consequences of lockin are.
Linus has given away control of Linux, specifically GNU/Linux - he's the lead integrator, but has said that he's not the spititual leader, or the guy signing checks, so he doesn't get the final say when dealing "for the community". He knew that when he went in, and I believe he's happier this way - he certainly says that he is.
We should cut Larry no more slack when we asks us to stop reverse engineering than we would if Microsoft did.
Besides, a way to interoperate with a product isn't the same as the full product. I'm sure BK could have had plenty of competitive advantages. The problem is that Larry didn't want an advantage, he wanted a monopoly... What did we say when Microsoft called us communists and told us to go away??
Yeah, and if Microsoft politely asked "us" to stop working on Samba, we should all just say that perhaps this open source interoperability thing is a dying fad and wander off?
Get real! Closed formats are *always* bad for everyone except the creator. Already we'd seen a huge bug in the decrepit BitKeeper spreading in the form of corrupted data (allegedly caused by an accidental change to a file) that in Larry's words required $35k in development to find and fix.
Given the problem in getting off of BitKeeper now, in a slow and orderly fashion, imagine what it would be like if it, and all the recent updates, lay in a smoking wreck on the ground and everyone had to hand-merge the last few days of patches.
You can't rely on closed source. You simply can not. It's like buying a car with the hood welded shut.
Thankfully people like Tridge are around to save us all.
It's an appropriate response to Britney fans acting like she's the greatest thing (and to be fair, to most anyone else) - "there's a world of music out there and coincidently your favorite just happens to be the one that's on the radio 20+ times a day! Wow, what are the odds of that?"
By any objective judgement, the top-40 (on average) is poorly performed and mass-market-sanitized versions of better (more skilled artists, better song-writing, etc). That's a fact - record executives are open about it. They "create" groups so that they don't have to deal with older and wider musicians. They have complete editorial control over sound, lyrics, and presentation. They will all, naturally, produce pap that gravitates to the exact midline of every consumer preference they can measure.
In almost every industry you see the true ground-breaking work from the independents - software, music, art. The pros have too much invested to be able to take a year off and explore some neat idea. They're going to have less of the really good products that come from a gifted person exploring their craft.
It's all fact. Does that mean you should rub people's noses in it? No, but explaining it to someone when they, just as tiresomely I assure you, drool over some pop star helps them get a little perspective. If they manage to see past the glitz of the MTV videos it could help them find music they'd really enjoy. To replace britney, buy music from a good musician and porn from a pretty girl. Once you realize that this cool sound you really like in Star X's latest song is like the sound of this genre, which you hadn't heard of, you get exposed to a new world of music.
The problem is with people who don't realize this applies to them as well, and to people who are rude about it. Just like those guys who tell everyone they don't have a TV - I don't, but I don't bring it up in conversation, nor, unless asked once it does come up, my reasons.
The problem is that the media tries for a centrist view and they don't pursue the far-leaning stories and as such, they end up promoting the party line - if you don't add any spin and just report what you're given (which most TV news agencies seem to do these days) you end up reporting the right-wing news under a right-wing president, etc.
Any story other than "President lies - pursues multi-year war against unrelated country because of 'dick thing'" is untrue. With Bush as pres you need to sound far left to get balanced news. All the whitehouse is good for anymore is complete fabrications. "We have found a ton of WMD" -> "There are WMDs, we have proof, but you'll have to wait" -> "What WMDs? We didn't say that". Any responsible journalist would cover this story 24-fucking-7 until there was a resolution.
At this point Bush appears to be a liar and a criminal and thus legally unworthy to be president. Either pursue this and call for his resignation (and get your news crews to investigate this, big time) or go the other way and attempt to show how this isn't criminal.
Sitting on the fence appears neutral but it plays to the party in power and is thus useless. Thanks a lot news agencies - your fear of being sued or censored has made you useless.
This is why blogs are important. They don't have as much to lose and are harder to control - they can leak information and bandy it around, collecting additional facts and in general, doing a better job of it than news agencies. (Look at the faked typewritten memos - from what I saw, most of the "Research" was done by bloggers. Some guy at Fark was trying various fonts to match the layout, someone on Livejournal was going through industry papers from then trying to determine the availability of those typewriters, etc.) Then once it's too big to ignore and bloggers have done most of the legwork the TV news comes in, applies minimal oversight to checking the evidence, and runs with it.
Yeah, you can't forbid importing a product from one area to another. Doctrine of First Sale in the USA and quite a few other laws, in the USA and abroad, prevent this. What you can do though, is make something useless anywhere but where you sell it, and by pursuing needlessly harassing and expensive lawsuits, drive anyone without billions of dollars into the ground for trying to exercise their lawful rights.
Microsoft is trying their damndest to put me out of work by bribing politicians into banning open source (they've asked that OSS be banned - if they'd asked earlier they might have succeeded) and costing the world economy billions by sticking useless middleman costs onto all information processing. They didn't design the web, they didn't design any of the protocols we use, and they didn't add any value to any of the above, yet they claim to have invented modern computing and put a computer on everyone's desk - as if the innovation to charge ruinous lock-in rates is what sped adoption.
Fuck Microsoft for doing it, and fuck the MPAA for giving them the idea.
How can we cost Microsoft money? Anything from mailing them a brick in a prepaid envelope to hiring some Russians to hack in and wipe everything they can touch? Anything less is letting them win with their bribes and outright criminal actions.
You're under the impression that copying from Microsoft is immoral. (As opposed to misguided and pointless.)
Microsoft has spent more money than I'll ever have on what should be illegal, outright bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) to politicians who coincidently refuse to charge them for their crimes.
The reason I wouldn't pirate their software is that I wouldn't want to polute the world with more incompatible windocs and open my computer up to every virus under the sun. I'll do everything in my power to hurt Microsoft - they're waging a war against me - wanting to lock me out of my PC, wanting to lock me out of my media, wanting to make me a criminal for trying to make something work (EULAs that they say prohibit reverse-engineering.)
The worst thing right now for the computer market are the software vendors. They're rich because they came in at the right time and have released horrible, horrible software. Maybe open source software is crappy, but if you've ever tried to install and tweak XP you'll know it's just as bad. They've got the interfaces, but god fucking forbid you want to change settings on one monitor without fucking up the other. Impossible. Change the refresh on one, watch the color depth on the other change. Change the layout, watch the refresh change. Change you network name and reboot before it takes.
All that and they're trying to make tinkering illegal to force people to use them. Evidently capitalism, you know, competing by making a better product, is too much work for the poster boys of American industry - the only way Microsoft has "innovated" (and this counts Adobe, whose latest Photoshop is the old one, with a raw importer - wow! The power of industry!) is DRM and ways of keeping paying customers from using what they buy.
Anyone who has ever admined unix boxes and MS boxes knows of what I speak. In unix your config files are text files which can be SCPed around - with military grade encryption. With windows you can supposedly push changes, but it often doesn't work and when it does you're doing it with their proprietary software and its fragile and insecure. With Windows you can (oh all thank Lord Bill for saving us from even more useless clicking) push updates from your central server, but only if you buy about a few different packages from them and the stars are aligned correctly.
And they wonder why there are windows viruses. There are windows viruses because in 2005 it doesn't have actual fucking multi-user permissions and properly seperated logins. It still can't prevent local-root exploits. Rather than fix this though, they try to lobby congress and have open source software ruled a threat to advancement (for what, being better?) and try to ban it in any publicly funded arena, despite that being exactly where people deserve to have open source - where they pay for it with their tax dollars.
No, fuck Microsoft. I'll do my part by buying a CD here and shipping it to the Asian pirates. Anything else I can do to take a bite out of their bottom line? I only ask because they're willing to piss on everyone to get richer - seems like they should welcome the "competition".
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Yeah, that's my point. Microsoft pulls a lot of weight in the industry and in the sense that a rising tide floats all boats, Microsoft displaces a lot of water, but so do Intel, IBM, etc. To point to Microsoft as the source of inspiration or the enabler behind most technologies is wrong - they benefit from it and do try to proliferate cheap office suites as you suggest, but only in that the next dose isn't free.
This isn't a Microsoft rant - this is about how people attribute invention to those who loudly sing their own praises. Microsoft claims to have invented ones and zeros, cheap office suites, and commodity hardware, but really, like everyone else who wasn't the first they were merely refiners and enablers of things that require much capital.
People were buying computers and office suites (primitive as they were in the era) with all signs of expanding exponentially back in the early 80s. No one element is essential to our success, but to let Microsoft claim to be and not refute their claims gives unreasonable weight to their requrests for industry stifling ideas like software patents. Once you realize that they, like everyone else, build on the collected ideas of the industry you're less willing to give them the keys.
We'll only keep moving forward if we remove economic friction. Computers enable us to work, they aren't the end result, so "obviously" any industry that tacks price onto an enabling technology is a middle-man that eventually the industry will evolve out of the need for. Microsoft wants to convince us that we can't live without them by falsly claiming we owe everything to them. (Also applies to Amazon on one-click patents, etc - as if other online stores wouldn't have come around without them.)
Microsoft did license basic, but it's not like they were the only ones. And OSes tended to come with PCs, they were an expected part of the package. Not only did the OS for my Apple2s come free, but it came with source.
But you're just parroting the Microsoft line. They didn't make hardware cheap - the Apple2, C64, and a host of other computers were cheaper than any IBM clone you could buy for quite a while. Did Microsoft make the IBM clones cheaper? No, they charged for what had always been free in the PC world - an OS, that made computers more expensive.
They didn't make the office suite mainstream, that was already happening. Sure, it kept happening while they were around, but it's not like they made something happen that wouldn't have otherwise.
OLE and similar technologies aren't bad, but they're nothing the market wasn't exploring at the time. Apple's OS does the same things.
As for the IDE, they do release the most popular, but that's a function of market share. They didn't invent it - the first I used was Borland C in the early 90s and it was a pale copy of what commercial IDEs were on big iron. As for mainstreaming rapid application development... whoa - where to start?
And I'll take issue with your taking issue with my comment on prices. Microsoft's sole price advantage has always been working on commodity hardware. Arguably this is Intel's doing - the cross licensing they did to be a military supplier and the "clone" market this caused made the x86 the defacto standard. Microsoft just rode the cheap Taiwanese hardware market.
Sure, many Microsoft products are now cheap, and many people who couldn't have had an office suite in the 80s now have one, but they'd have one on whatever hardware and OS existed - every type of product Microsoft makes was already around on other platforms. It might have been WordPerfect or Appleworks, but they were already around in the mid 80s and seem to
You simply miss the perspective you'd have gained if you watched the PC revolution unfold instead of listening to Microsoft tell the story.
Seeing as how Microsoft hasn't brought us anything that other companies wouldn't have bought (likely with less criminal actions involved), their anti-open source policies, and their format and licensing lock-in, I stand by my statement that a PC is more costly today and the market worse off than it would have been if Microsoft hadn't become an OS monopoly and illegally leveraged that into market share dominance in other areas.
Considering that most of Microsoft's money comes from the US, and most of the software they sell has cheaper and often better equivalents, you could instead say that they've been a huge drain on the economy.
What have they contributed? How has any Microsoft product ever made a business run better than the average competitor's product? But they certainly charge more, restrict more, lie/cheat/steal more, sue over invented infringment more, and hold back the industry more.
It's in everyone's interests to commoditize their complements, as an economist would put it. Hardware companies like free software (IBM, Intel, etc) and software companies like cheap hardware (Microsoft, etc). We the people, being neither hardware or software companies (usually), would benefit from cheaper hardware and software. Microsoft not only doesn't provide this, but goes out of their way to prevent anyone else providing it. They don't even have any confidence in their products themselves or they wouldn't be so busy locking people in with patent-encumbered data formats and just plain lies and obfuscation.
I submit that Microsoft is one of the biggest drains on the economy.
Microsoft has lobbied to keep the US government from using open source and has done their best to hurt open source and the people involved in it.
I'd say that's a good argument for them being prevented from using any open-source of public domain project. After all, it is communism...
But yeah, the point of the BSD license is to get closed-source companies like MS to use the standards. They in no way deserve it, but it's in everyone's best interests that they do.
Trusted Computing is a trademark, of a working group that Microsoft, AMD, Intel, and others are part of.
The trusted computing site disagrees about the possiblility of SELinux being involved with Trusted Computing (tm). They are quite sure that TC is tamper-proof hardware keys and strong encryption, providing an assurance that the key a message was signed with was itself signed by the TC group, in one form or another.
As such, it isn't for security, as I have described. It will provide next to no actual security benefits and most of the members of the TCG have stated that they see it providing a robust platform for DRM.
Thankfully a scheme like this can't work, too many secrets to keep. It'll be another DVD-CSS fiasco as it gets broken and stripped of watermarks. Unfortunately, it'll cost us a fortune to have implemented and it'll get in the way of many legitimate transactions. Like all other rights-denial software it'll end up harming the honest and unsophisticated users, but thanks to the nature of information, being broken by everyone who has heard of Google.
No, that was copyright. This is patents. With the current legal climate there's literally nothing you can't patent. (No, seriously, I mean it. You may not be able to defend it in court, but the PTO is giving patents out like candy.)
As another poster says, gmail lets you own your own data by providing a pop3 interface - I don't know if "religiously" describes telling Thunderbird to check pop.gmail.google.com every two minutes, but I suppose we all have different thresholds.
Besides, that has nothing to do with the issue. You can always give your data to someone else. I run GNU/Linux and open source software, but I can mistreat your data as well as everyone else, if I want. Open Source is all about making the tools (you know, open source webmail apps, what every ISP smaller than AOL/MSN uses) available and open so that you can take control if you want.
Nobody is forcing you to use Firefox, they just want you to stop using the proprietary features of IE and calling the result a webpage.
Exactly. My company is perfectly willing to take any free time I may have from managing the computers and put me to use writing code, researching new server technology, etc. They don't see value in paying me to do things the hard way.
My stated goal with IT is always the same - provide the tools the users need for the lowest cost possible. IT is the middle-man in most companies - lowering the transaction costs by cutting out and slimming down the middle-man is only smart business.
I'm not sure what your argument is, but it seems cargo-cultish. "That guy looks rich, let's pay him more!"
Sure, Microsoft is bigger, and sure, they make more money. How does that relate to me? Normally you'd look for a big supplier in order to ensure that products can be shipped on time (win for Open Source, loss for Microsoft), to ensure quality (win for Open Source, and Macs, loss for Microsoft), to ensure security (win for Open Source, loss for Microsoft). What are you getting here by going with the expensive alternative?
Not that I care. Small and mobile companies that pay $200/computer including software and that spend less than an hour ever maintaining that computer are going to eat your lunch. Lies, Damn-lies, and TCO FUD are all that Microsoft innovates these days. They can blab on and on about the costs of running Linux, but I've *never* seen it. I've never spent as much time patching a Linux server as I have patching Windows. Managing Windows computers means I get to be there at 2am to shut them down when nobody is using them. This is something that every group of MS patches I've ever installed has required at least once, often 3+ times, instead of just running apt-get update/upgrade on a live server.
With Linux I can write a simply script that SSHes (securely, unlike any Windows protocols) into all the machines I manage and runs something, collects stats, applies patches, etc. With Windows I can buy a new computer, an expensive server-version of the OS, and all the extras you need to really build a domain controller. Then, with a bunch of tools I could manage my own patch repository and control what I rolled out to my users, etc, etc. With Linux I just SSH in (or let the script do it) and run the same command that I'd run if I were doing it manually.
People advocate switching to Linux because it's better, cheaper, and not trying to lock you into sub-standard solutions. Sure, if you need a specific app you need to run the OS it's written for, but then, these days you rarely need anything on Windows - Mac or Linux, it's the new face of business computing.
Just as frequently, those users can't share data with each other and are trying to figure out why. Linux tools can easily render Microsoft formats and if they're not perfect, geeks don't care. The problem is when someone tries to use OfficeXP and find that it has a bug that means you can't use Office97 to open half of its documents, despite saving them in '97' format. For example. That problem I remember being a fairly easy hotfix, but the type of problem just keeps happening.
Open formats are mandatory, anything else means that you don't own your data.
That's what various security programs for Linux already do. But they do it without a secret RIAA/Microsoft key/backdoor in the BIOS.
Besides, Trusted Computing is about (supposedly) being able to trust the signed apps. Most bugs come from convincing the trusted application to do something it shouldn't, even just something that it'd be allowed to do. It's like convincing Outlook in windows to delete the user's email (or email it off to everyone in your address book), something Outlook will have the permissions to do.
Microsoft deliberately claims that Trusted Computing will make users safer. Something *no* security professional agrees with. Strangely, despite Microsoft's ethics, their past record of trying to control the user, and the RIAA/MPAA's desire to remotely authenticate you before you do ANYTHING with "their" movie/music, they want you to believe that this will make it safer for you. Give the keys to your computer to someone else, so that they can verify everything you are, and are not, doing, and they just might let you use media that the law says you own.
Wow, where do I sign up for the kool-aid?
And it's no-doubt fun to be a Microsoft Astroturfer running around lying about how Trusted Computing isn't the first step to the brave new Microsoft Computer that you buy, but aren't able (or allowed to try) to run your own non-verified apps outside the "safety" of a sandbox, for your own protection.
Trusted Computing on its own isn't a problem, but it's an absolutely useless security measure. It does nothing that other, better, (ACLs, Capabilities, SELinux) technologies do, and it doesn't provide any real protection. It'll initially stop some "run this file" spam from working, but people send those inside password protected zip files - if they have to explain in the email how to right-click and 'sign' the applet, they will, and people will go along with it in order to view FunnyAd.wmv.
Trusted Computing is somewhere down by tripwire and other signature scanning utilities for how effective it'll be. It'll be good to know if someone trojaned outlook, but had you just used an OS with real file permissions, nobody could have done so anyway.
The fundamental problem with Trusted Computing is that it doesn't realize that there are bad actions that can be taken in the context of the sandbox a "valid" yet buggy app runs in. Sure, you've got Outlook locked into its area, but someone can tell outlook to delete all your email, not through a signed and safe program, but by exploiting yet another bug.
But, isn't it better than nothing? No. It doesn't offer any protections that better methods do not, and it does it in a way that is very amenable to remote oversight and having your privelleges on your computer overridden. If TrustedComputing were something that you setup in the bios, generated your own key for, and could view the key and use it on your own, then Trusted Computing would be for the user, as opposed to for the RIAA and Microsoft. But, we see the truth in this. For our own good the key will be determined when it leaves the factory and will be nothing but a RIAA/etc backdoor into your system. And yeah, yeah, we've all heard the joke about how it'll be optional. Optional as long as you don't want to do anything with a network cable plugged in, or view any media that you own.
Trusted Computing won't actually help security much at all. Look at the majority of the exploits - they're buffer overflows, ways of tricking a valid program into doing something you don't want.
Trusted computing is a red herring, intended solely to bring crippling DRM to the desktop. Enjoy.
Presumably the same way all the other open-source developers are. Huge wads of cold hard cash.
Actually, shipping, packaging, marketing, display, and kickbacks (always the biggest expense) cost about 1/4 of the sticker price. The physical CD is about $.15, from what I've seen of bulk pressing. The label and case are $.15 - $.30 depending on what you decide to go with. The bulk of it is in marketing and paying for prime display - end-caps of aisles, etc. This includes kickbacks to radio stations and other things.
But, you're mostly right about the physical cost of the CD+case. In fact, at the $1 track you pay, if it went right to the artist instead of the label and the music store, could pay for them to send you your own poster or physical CD if you bought all the tracks on the disc. Could be a good way for them to convince people to not just get the top-40 songs. The physical media store and the cut they have to take to pay employees and rent, etc, is the biggest cost. Eliminate them and snail-mail CDs (after selling the MP3s) and it's just a funky extra, not the main cost - think of it as an advertising expense and it's easier to justify. Who better to ensure has your music than someone who has shown willingness to buy?
Does the vendor want to fix past mistakes, or replace everyone's expensive servers with a cupcake so they can never be hacked again?
Microsoft's solutions look like they were created without the customer in mind. We don't want email clients that refuse to accept attachments (At one time, the only security you could enable on OE (and maybe Outlook?) was to simply turn off this functionality at the server). We want email clients that simply don't execute attachments automatically.
Microsoft's patches always tell us what we can and can't do. They come all rolled together, even the ones they break out often have unannounced functionality, and they require us to reboot or have this OS-level modal window floating over the screen all day until we can finish whatever we're working on restart the bloody thing.
Anyways, do you hear frustration here? It's frustration at paying (at work, grumble) for an OS and having them leave such huge gaping holes in it that I quite literally must buy thousands of dollars in third-party products to make it safe to use as it was sold. This company then wants to turn around and rip out features, or add undesired ones, to the product I bought, simply as a cost of providing some small measure of what I paid for.
And you don't think we're cutting them any slack? What have they done to show they deserve it? Have they ever had a poll on their site asking admins how they'd prefer to get patches, and if the admins would feel more secure with unannounced bugs that are silently patched, or the more open process that could increase risk, but let everyone honestly evaluate the process and see that security was taken seriously. Why did they think that their reboot was so important that they had to float a window in front of me forever, but where it was so unimportant that, having hidden the useless window offscreen, I didn't shut down till the end of the week, when I would have anyways?
Like I said - there's no evidence they're trying to get over past mistakes, in fact, it looks like they're doing everything wrong that they were before.
I went to nVidia's and downloaded the drivers from my card. I'll check the link you gave me as well.
But what I mean, is that the design of the operating system - GUIs without advanced mode - means that the philosophy is of having them grant you the ability to do something. The philosophy of systems with where config file are the main resource you get GUIs that help with some things, but do not pretend to be completist. This means that they don't cripple you, or do things too badly, because you only use them where they help.
We see that the fight against European patents *could* get 800 people layed off. Does that mean we shouldn't fight patents, or that we realize we can't let the bad guys (whoever is willing to put us at each other's throats) make us enemies. They aren't right, they just say they are. Larry's license isn't just and moral because Larry says it is - Larry's license is just, or unjust, as the world around him decides.
Unfortunately, when you give something away to make it more popular, you risk having it go away entirely, or turned into something you never envisioned. Larry wanted to popularity of working with a big open-source project and that meant he had to let go of control - specifically he couldn't ask people to trust him so implicitly that they gave up their ethics and accepted lock-in, however velvet the handcuffs.
This potential accident only shows us how bad the unintended consequences of lockin are.
Linus has given away control of Linux, specifically GNU/Linux - he's the lead integrator, but has said that he's not the spititual leader, or the guy signing checks, so he doesn't get the final say when dealing "for the community". He knew that when he went in, and I believe he's happier this way - he certainly says that he is.
We should cut Larry no more slack when we asks us to stop reverse engineering than we would if Microsoft did.
Besides, a way to interoperate with a product isn't the same as the full product. I'm sure BK could have had plenty of competitive advantages. The problem is that Larry didn't want an advantage, he wanted a monopoly... What did we say when Microsoft called us communists and told us to go away??
Yeah, and if Microsoft politely asked "us" to stop working on Samba, we should all just say that perhaps this open source interoperability thing is a dying fad and wander off?
Get real! Closed formats are *always* bad for everyone except the creator. Already we'd seen a huge bug in the decrepit BitKeeper spreading in the form of corrupted data (allegedly caused by an accidental change to a file) that in Larry's words required $35k in development to find and fix.
Given the problem in getting off of BitKeeper now, in a slow and orderly fashion, imagine what it would be like if it, and all the recent updates, lay in a smoking wreck on the ground and everyone had to hand-merge the last few days of patches.
You can't rely on closed source. You simply can not. It's like buying a car with the hood welded shut.
Thankfully people like Tridge are around to save us all.
It's an appropriate response to Britney fans acting like she's the greatest thing (and to be fair, to most anyone else) - "there's a world of music out there and coincidently your favorite just happens to be the one that's on the radio 20+ times a day! Wow, what are the odds of that?"
By any objective judgement, the top-40 (on average) is poorly performed and mass-market-sanitized versions of better (more skilled artists, better song-writing, etc). That's a fact - record executives are open about it. They "create" groups so that they don't have to deal with older and wider musicians. They have complete editorial control over sound, lyrics, and presentation. They will all, naturally, produce pap that gravitates to the exact midline of every consumer preference they can measure.
In almost every industry you see the true ground-breaking work from the independents - software, music, art. The pros have too much invested to be able to take a year off and explore some neat idea. They're going to have less of the really good products that come from a gifted person exploring their craft.
It's all fact. Does that mean you should rub people's noses in it? No, but explaining it to someone when they, just as tiresomely I assure you, drool over some pop star helps them get a little perspective. If they manage to see past the glitz of the MTV videos it could help them find music they'd really enjoy. To replace britney, buy music from a good musician and porn from a pretty girl. Once you realize that this cool sound you really like in Star X's latest song is like the sound of this genre, which you hadn't heard of, you get exposed to a new world of music.
The problem is with people who don't realize this applies to them as well, and to people who are rude about it. Just like those guys who tell everyone they don't have a TV - I don't, but I don't bring it up in conversation, nor, unless asked once it does come up, my reasons.
The problem is that the media tries for a centrist view and they don't pursue the far-leaning stories and as such, they end up promoting the party line - if you don't add any spin and just report what you're given (which most TV news agencies seem to do these days) you end up reporting the right-wing news under a right-wing president, etc.
Any story other than "President lies - pursues multi-year war against unrelated country because of 'dick thing'" is untrue. With Bush as pres you need to sound far left to get balanced news. All the whitehouse is good for anymore is complete fabrications. "We have found a ton of WMD" -> "There are WMDs, we have proof, but you'll have to wait" -> "What WMDs? We didn't say that". Any responsible journalist would cover this story 24-fucking-7 until there was a resolution.
At this point Bush appears to be a liar and a criminal and thus legally unworthy to be president. Either pursue this and call for his resignation (and get your news crews to investigate this, big time) or go the other way and attempt to show how this isn't criminal.
Sitting on the fence appears neutral but it plays to the party in power and is thus useless. Thanks a lot news agencies - your fear of being sued or censored has made you useless.
This is why blogs are important. They don't have as much to lose and are harder to control - they can leak information and bandy it around, collecting additional facts and in general, doing a better job of it than news agencies. (Look at the faked typewritten memos - from what I saw, most of the "Research" was done by bloggers. Some guy at Fark was trying various fonts to match the layout, someone on Livejournal was going through industry papers from then trying to determine the availability of those typewriters, etc.) Then once it's too big to ignore and bloggers have done most of the legwork the TV news comes in, applies minimal oversight to checking the evidence, and runs with it.
Yeah, you can't forbid importing a product from one area to another. Doctrine of First Sale in the USA and quite a few other laws, in the USA and abroad, prevent this. What you can do though, is make something useless anywhere but where you sell it, and by pursuing needlessly harassing and expensive lawsuits, drive anyone without billions of dollars into the ground for trying to exercise their lawful rights.
Microsoft is trying their damndest to put me out of work by bribing politicians into banning open source (they've asked that OSS be banned - if they'd asked earlier they might have succeeded) and costing the world economy billions by sticking useless middleman costs onto all information processing. They didn't design the web, they didn't design any of the protocols we use, and they didn't add any value to any of the above, yet they claim to have invented modern computing and put a computer on everyone's desk - as if the innovation to charge ruinous lock-in rates is what sped adoption.
Fuck Microsoft for doing it, and fuck the MPAA for giving them the idea.
How can we cost Microsoft money? Anything from mailing them a brick in a prepaid envelope to hiring some Russians to hack in and wipe everything they can touch? Anything less is letting them win with their bribes and outright criminal actions.
You're under the impression that copying from Microsoft is immoral. (As opposed to misguided and pointless.)
Microsoft has spent more money than I'll ever have on what should be illegal, outright bribes (oh, sorry, campaign contributions) to politicians who coincidently refuse to charge them for their crimes.
The reason I wouldn't pirate their software is that I wouldn't want to polute the world with more incompatible windocs and open my computer up to every virus under the sun. I'll do everything in my power to hurt Microsoft - they're waging a war against me - wanting to lock me out of my PC, wanting to lock me out of my media, wanting to make me a criminal for trying to make something work (EULAs that they say prohibit reverse-engineering.)
The worst thing right now for the computer market are the software vendors. They're rich because they came in at the right time and have released horrible, horrible software. Maybe open source software is crappy, but if you've ever tried to install and tweak XP you'll know it's just as bad. They've got the interfaces, but god fucking forbid you want to change settings on one monitor without fucking up the other. Impossible. Change the refresh on one, watch the color depth on the other change. Change the layout, watch the refresh change. Change you network name and reboot before it takes.
All that and they're trying to make tinkering illegal to force people to use them. Evidently capitalism, you know, competing by making a better product, is too much work for the poster boys of American industry - the only way Microsoft has "innovated" (and this counts Adobe, whose latest Photoshop is the old one, with a raw importer - wow! The power of industry!) is DRM and ways of keeping paying customers from using what they buy.
Anyone who has ever admined unix boxes and MS boxes knows of what I speak. In unix your config files are text files which can be SCPed around - with military grade encryption. With windows you can supposedly push changes, but it often doesn't work and when it does you're doing it with their proprietary software and its fragile and insecure. With Windows you can (oh all thank Lord Bill for saving us from even more useless clicking) push updates from your central server, but only if you buy about a few different packages from them and the stars are aligned correctly.
And they wonder why there are windows viruses. There are windows viruses because in 2005 it doesn't have actual fucking multi-user permissions and properly seperated logins. It still can't prevent local-root exploits. Rather than fix this though, they try to lobby congress and have open source software ruled a threat to advancement (for what, being better?) and try to ban it in any publicly funded arena, despite that being exactly where people deserve to have open source - where they pay for it with their tax dollars.
No, fuck Microsoft. I'll do my part by buying a CD here and shipping it to the Asian pirates. Anything else I can do to take a bite out of their bottom line? I only ask because they're willing to piss on everyone to get richer - seems like they should welcome the "competition".