1) Windows Server 2008 can run Apache, PHP, and PERL.
True.
2) Group Policies (and other Windows security features) are superior to SELinux.
True, SELinux sucks.
3) Windows has better support than Linux.
True.
4) Windows has more enterprise partners and applications than Linux.
True.
5) Windows Server 2008 is more interoperable with your old Microsoft products than Linux.
Again, true.
The only thing I see fishy on the front page is the "TCO" arguments, which are a bit dubious. Of course, MS is making arguments that heavily favor their platform. But they're MARKETING people for crying out loud. They're very explicitly ADVOCATES. Nobody should be suprised if the saing Windows Server 2008 cures cancer and raises the dead.
This douchebag should spend his time going after supposedly "objective" reviewers, but he'd rather piss and moan about MS.
It is impossible to get support from Microsoft for a company based in India; even if one is willing to pay money. Microsoft sells Server licenses and Volume licenses and Corporate licenses; but nowhere do they sell Support for server, desktop or home software - atleast in India. Total bullshit. Microsoft offers more support in more languages than any other OS vendor, and it's been that way for a long time. Try to get support for MacOS or Solaris in India.
One has to go in for support from Microsoft partners and such, but the MCSEs who work there have little clue as to real problems faced by end users. Virtually EVERYONE goes to the partners, whether they're in the US or not. MS only deals directly with the "top tier" customer that spend millions of dollars. The reality with Windows is that you can generally get outstanding support if, and only if, you're willing to pay for it. This is pretty similar to every other OS vendor.
It thus makes a lot of sense to invest in Linux-based Open Source solutions because IT users have no use buying just Servers and Licenses - the benefit comes from the applications built on top of the servers So you dislike MS because of their poor support and propose as an alternative systems which have no support whatsoever?
That is difficult to achieve when, for example, Microsoft and Oracle EULAs prohibit releasing the results of benchmarking. Yeah, and? EULAs are not valid contracts. You can safely ignore them.
As far as I'm aware, nobody has ever been sued for posting MSSQL or Oracle benchmarks. If you can come up with a case I'll consider this a serious problem.
I've never seen any benchmarks for WMP11 except encoding benchmarks, which are everywhere as well.
Fortunately I don't have any such concerns with the software I use, OpenBSD. Does that make me a shill? Yes, because it's nonsense that you can't benchmark MS products. And it's not like you need to use this kind of bullshit to defend mySQL or whatever. MSSQL is not a particularly fast database.
There are two groups of people who don't like P2P - the RIAA who want to spin it as content thievery (which, ok, it often is), and the ISPs, who don't like getting their networks swamped and having to pay more for transit with upstream ISPs or increasing the size of their peering with peers and their internal distribution links. Right now, both of those forces are pointed in the same direction. Well, you might notice that the cable companies are doing a lot of throttling and the phone companies... aren't. Why do you think that is? It's because the lion's share of bittorrent traffic is video, often the very same video the cable companies are broadcasting. IPTV has been taking off in a huge way lately. They don't want the competition, which is why they're not going to cooperate with this initiative. Their partnership with bittorrent is about mooching their user's bandwidth to SELL PPV video and movies.
This is mainly about control of video distribution, and to a lesser extent, content distribution in general.
Did he have a choice? Yes. Contrary to his claims, the Hitler Youth was optional. Many young people that opposed the Nazi Party did not join.
And was there really anything fundamentally wrong with the group that would be obvious to a 14 year old child at the time? Yes. Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth during the Holocaust. The actual events of the Holocaust (concentration camps, etc.) were well-known among the German population. I consider a 14 year old to have enough presence in mind not to aid in mass murder.
He did run away when the Nazi government was collapsing and they started drafting teenagers. There is no reason to believe this was anything other than cowardice.
Razinger's involvement with the Nazis was a clear moral failing, but it's really nothing compared to his coverup of massive sexual abuse. As far as I'm concerned, Razinger is a child molester and rapist and should be swinging from the nearest tree.
People are always hating on the Jews, even if any given Jew is agnostic. There is no such thing as an "agnostic Jew". Judaism is a religion. If you identify as a Jew but don't conduct any Jewish ritual, you're a "non-practicing Jew". A Christian that never goes to church is a "non-practicing Christian". If you're agnostic... that's it. You're agnostic. There is not ritual or dogma associated with Judaism. People who come from a Jewish background that no longer buy into Judaism are no longer Jews. Even the Nazis, who largely bought into the "Jews as race" nonsense, didn't necessarily execute "ex-Jews".
People who don't identify as Jews are not "hated" as Jews because the only way to identify Jews is by their BEHAVIOR. If you're not ACTING Jewish, you're not Jewish. The only physical identification of male Jews is circumcision, and as Muslims and Christian Americans practice circumcision, this is not particularly reliable. This is not to say that the Nazis, etc. did not try to identity on this basis, but it's nonsense.
If someone's willing to kill you because of your biological relation to something else, that's racial. And how do you propose they do this? Let's say that your grandfather was a Mormon but you are now a Buddhist, and I hate Mormons and want to kill them. How can I tell, other than genealogical records, that you descended from a Mormon? Such obscure prejudices don't mean much in practice. The Nazis put a lot of effort into trying to figure this out and they failed spectacularly.
You are obviously full of shit, because I *am* the lead IMAP developer for Citadel and I have not ever said any such thing to you or anyone else. What I have said, on many occasions, is that IMAP is, architecturally speaking, a very ugly protocol, and it's a shame that something so inelegant became the standard. But it is the standard. What you said is that the IMAP spec is broken, not that Citadel is doomed. *I* think Citadel is doomed because it relies on completely broken "standards" like IMAP and LDAP. I'm sorry if that was unclear. I'll have to track it down, but we were discussing it on the Citadel web site. You pointed out (or I pointed it out and you agreed with it) that there are lots of bugs when using pretty much any IMAP server with different IMAP clients due the difficulty of implementation. And the RFC was recently revised because of bugs.
Outlook is not the be-all and end-all of client software. Working well with one client is better than working poorly with lots of clients.
And yeah, if you want to replace Exchange in the enterprise you better have a drop-in client that's almost identical to Outlook. Few companies are going to bother to retrain their employees for email.
You've already been caught in a lie, so why should we believe that you've ever set foot inside a Fortune 1000 company? Don't take my word for it, read any survey of Fortune 1000 companies. You'll find I'm right.
Believe it or not, I'm trying to be constructive here. I sincerely believe that the best competitor for Exchange will effectively be a Linux Exchange knock-off based on MAPI. Basically Scalix, or something very much like it.
Trivia: I ran a Citadel BBS for a little while back in the day and I used the Dog Pound BBS.
Viet-Nam: Chinese-backed NVA So the United States fought the NVA in Toledo and New York? Last time I checked the Vietnam war was IN Vietnam. The United States INVADED Vietnam to intervene in a civil war. The fact that you think the Vietnamese Communists were "evil" is not relevant.
Hell, I'd almost call them heroic. The NLF were fighting a corrupt government against incredible odds. And as soon as they took over, one of the first things they did was crush the incredibly evil Khmer Rogue government that the US inadvertently created.
Without the USA, the world would starve. You are aware of the volume of US food exports, aren't you? The current food shortages are in large part caused by the United States which first devastated local crop production in poor countries like Haiti with cheap government-subsidized food exports (which the local farmers couldn't compete with) and then spiked up the cost through production cuts and diversion of grain to ethanol production. The US food industry is making record profits while people are starving. This "free trade" thing conservatives keep pitching is pretty one-sided.
The economies of Europe would rapidly collapse, seeing that we have effectively been their guardian for the past 50 years, allowing national budgets to be repurposed for things like extravagant social welfare programmes. Guardian from who? Despite hysterical Cold War propaganda the Soviet Union was not poised to invade Europe. We have chosen to spent the lion's share of our national budget on weapons because weapon lobbyists own the military and many people in Congress.
And even if the Soviet Union WAS poised to invade, why haven't we substantially disarmed since the end of the Cold War? Do we really need Joint Strike, missile destroyers, or nuclear weapons to fight "the terrorists", who exclusively use small arms? The very notion is retarded.
And don't bring up China. China isn't going to attack the United States, the very idea is completely batshit crazy. The Chinese economy is COMPLETELY dependent on the USA, attacking us would be committing suicide (quite literally).
Hussein was bragging he had WMDs in order to stave off an invasion by Iran. Really? You have videotape of that? Can you come up with any credible evidence for this? And nothing coming from Chalabi and the INC is credible.
Unfortunately his bragging was picked up by U.S. intelligent forces which of course assumed he wasn't bluffing.
This is a grotesque mischaracterization of what happened. Before the invasion the CIA and NSA knew without a shadow of a doubt that Iraq DID NOT have WMD. Cheney and his band of cutthroats knew this was the case but wanted to invade Iraq for other reasons so tapped Doug Feith (and others) at the Defense Intelligence Agency to create a special intelligence unit in the DIA to handle Iraq WMD issues and then instructed Chalabi and the INC to feed that unit false information. The CIA knew the information was false, but Cheney overruled them and fired or forced out anyone in the CIA who disagreed with his line. Many of the principals like Douglas Feith. Chalabi, etc. have admitted this.
WMD in Iraq was a carefully orchestrated campaign of lies by the White House. They were not "duped". They were not incompetent. They are liars, traitors, and war criminals.
Iran is the real threat. And Iraq used to be the "real threat". There is not one iota of CREDIBLE (there's that word again) evidence that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. The IAEA (which was 100% right about Iraq) has seen no evidence of such a program.
And even if Iran had a nuclear weapons program, so what? You're mentally ill if you think a nuclear-armed Iran would attack the United States or Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran clearly wants nuclear weapons to deter aggression from the United States and Israel. You want to guarantee they don't develop nuclear weapons? Disarm Israel and sign a non-aggression pact with Iran.
Of course, the neocons want to keep making shitloads of money off war and oil so they WANT to bomb Iran, regardless of what Iran says or does. Until there is a US puppet government back in Iran they won't be happy.
If Microsoft was to change the subject, or take another path in deception, like continuing to sling mud at Blueray that would just be sly because they had never given their word. But when you ask someone to trust you by making a public statement then say the opposite of what you know to be true, then it is nothing short of betrayal. There STILL is no confirmation from MS that they're including Blu-Ray drive in the 360. And what you call "lying" my simply be a change in corporate strategy. I know that a year ago MS was fully committed to downloadable video and internally considered BOTH of the HD formats "stillborn" and believed downloaded video was/is the future.
Toshiba simply gave MS a large pile of money to make a the HD-DVD add-on. It was video-only, and MS had made it very clear that NO 360 game would ever be released on HD-DVD. I seriously doubt that Sony is willing to give MS a pile of money for a Blu-Ray add-on, and MS has NO interest in putting games on Blu-Ray (given the technical problems in doing so). There have been rumors of a "PVR" version of the 360, much like Sony's PSX, that might include a Blu-Ray drive, but not an add-on.
What may actually be happening here is that a THIRD PARTY is making a Blu-Ray add-on for the 360.
The inclusion of a hard disk on all PS3 models was a smart move (and removing it as standard from the 360 has proven to be a big mistake by Microsoft, which has really hurt the performance and design of some titles on the 360). I'd point out that Sony didn't really have a choice. One of the biggest problems with the PS3 is that the Blu-Ray drive is S-L-O-W. This means that in order to play many games the PS3 HAS to install a large number of game assets to the HD to make playback possible. For example, GTA IV has a mandatory 3.4 GB HD install. The 360 has a far speedier 16X DVD-ROM drive and so this is less of an issue. I'd agree that making the HD STANDARD would have been very useful for the 360 as then developers could offload assets to the HD and improve performance.
OTOH, it doesn't seem to have made a major impact on the 360 versions of GTA and Oblivion. And I'd argue that Oblivion is the multiplayer game that best shows the technical advantages of the PS3 (the PS3 version of Oblivion looks a bit better, has better draw distance, and loads a bit faster than the 360 version due to the HD install).
Disclaimer: I'm a Citadel developer, and a proponent of end-to-end FOSS solutions rather than weird commercial hybrids such as Zimbra (or Scalix, for that matter). I'd argue that Scalix and Zimbra are the only apps that had a chance of unseating Exchange because they use MAPI. IMAP is broken, and any mail system that depends on it is doomed (Citadel, for example). The lead IMAP developer for Citadel has told me this personally. I've now heard this from 3 different sets of IMAP developers (Netscape, Sun, and Citadel) and my personal reading of the spec is that it's near-gibberish, but I am not an expert.
More importantly, Exchange/MAPI have a robust calendering system that works very well, this is not the case with Citadel or eGroupWare. Citadel and eGroupware also have major problems integrating with Active Directory, the directory system that works (LDAP is broken too) and everybody uses. If you're smart, you'll focus heavily on AD support and forget about OpenLDAP.
Lest you call bullshit, I'm familiar with the networks of most of the Fortune 1000. Not one of them is running LDAP or IMAP, except a few people running Sun Directory Server for legacy Sun systems. I can think of 2 that use eDirectory. EVERYONE else uses Active Directory+Exchange. With hosted Exchange/SharePoint providers costs have gone dramatically down for smaller companies, so twitchy Linux groupware software is an even harder sell.
Don't get me wrong, I work for a Linux company. But I don't see Linux replacing Windows in the "LAN/Groupware/Collaboration" space anytime soon.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft really wanted Yahoo!, they simply didn't expect the hostility they would receive from CEO Jerry Yang and other boardmembers, who made it clear to MS that he'd rather completely destroy the company (by firing all the key staff and pissing away as much money as possible) than let MS have it.
Contrary to what others are thinking, I believe this is the last gasp for Yahoo. Their stock is going to be devastated by this announcement. They're the next AltaVista.
In this edit you describe CAIR as "radical" and "left-wing".
You also attacked a number of food pages claiming hummus and falafel are Jewish, not Arab dishes. As far as racism goes this seems REALLY petty to me and appears to be the main reason why you were blocked.
Based on your posts and my experience (going way back) on BBS' and other forums AKG was being extraordinarily kind, holding your hand in IRC and giving you many opportunities to change your behavior.
Hardly. I'd likely never notice that you were Jewish, or care if I did, as Jewish is a race first, then a religion, and never a country. Jews are not a "race", that's Nazi propaganda.
Jews are not genetically or physically distinct from the populations in which they reside. Judaism is a religion, culture, and lifestyle. There are black Jews, white Jews, asian Jews, etc. It is not a "race" any more that being Christian or Muslim is a "race".
Those dastardly Jews, wanting to preserve their culture, faith, and race by.. not marrying outsiders particularly often. If this is your position how can you reasonably object to the policies of the KKK, Christian Identity, and even Neo-Nazis that "race mixing" is a bad idea and that their should be strong laws against it? This *IS* the case in Israel. Jews are not allowed to marry non-Jews and retain their citizenship.
Give this reasoning, why would it be wrong for, say, France to pass a law saying that if a white Christan marries an Arab Muslim or a Jew they would lose their French citizenship and be deported to Arab nations or Israel (as appropriate)?
Some Arab nations have passed laws restricting Jews in various ways, which has encouraged them to relocate to Israel or elsewhere. I assume you have no objection to such laws?
"I'm not an anti-semite, I'm just anti-Israel" ranks up with "I'm not a racist, some of my best friends are (black, hispanic, asian, etc)" on the bullshit-o-meter, buddy. About 15% of Jews worldwide oppose the EXISTENCE of the state of Israel and about 70% worldwide oppose the policies of the current Israeli government. Are they all "self-hating Jews"?
Is everyone who opposed the apartheid government in South Africa and supported the "terrorists" in the African National Congress "anti-white"? If not, why not?
And just so you know: Israel was the #1 supporter of apartheid South Africa, giving them weapons, torture equipment, and training SA torturers. Israel continued to trade with SA when the entire rest of the world, even the USSR and China, has SA under an trade embargo. Numerous Israeli officials, including prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, are on record as supporting apartheid and regarding it as a model for the treatment of the Palestinians.
Out of curiosity, what exactly would you put in those PCI slots if Apple made such a consumer machine? Sure:
Assuming PCI Express, a better video card for Photoshop or any other video task. Or gaming. Aftermarket sound cards Hardware video encoding cards DTV tuner cards
The operating not booting because of a bad patch is not "bricking". The term "bricking" is properly reserved for firmware updates. It's easily possible for a bad firmware update to destroy the bootloader for the hardware, meaning the only way to repair it is to re-flash the chip using specialized hardware (and if it's soldered on, even that may be difficult). That's "bricking" a device. This is very common with motherboards, to the point that many have backup BIOS chips.
I don't even need a sales force. True, it cost me more to have in house peons gather virus signatures and add them to my database, or add algorithms to my AV tools, but since I don't have to pay nearly as much for a sales force more viruses equals greater profits. I think this part of your calculation is a little off. Virus scanners are not just signature engines (ideally). I think the "actual threat" of viruses is far less significant that the "percieved threat", and anyone with money prepares for the "perceived threat". I'd draw an analogy with home security systems. The people that buy home security systems are typically the least likely to need them because they are liklely to be relatively wealthy and live in relatively low-crime areas. So even though the threat is comparatilvely low, they implement the expensive home security system.
What the AV companies want is for the ACTUAL threat to be low, but the PERCEIVED threat to be high. This is what the situation USED to be, lots of hype and little actual threat. Now that the threats are actually beginning to match the hype the AV companies are struggling to keep up. New threats directly translate to more development time to meet these threats, and therefore lower profits, that's why the AV companies are pissed about this.
Basically, at this point, they don't need hype. The threats are out there and very real, to the point that most Windows users consider AV a REQUIREMENT. Given that reality, the issue is really competition between the vendors for the "best" AV product and "best" basically means manageability, ease of use, etc. in a corporate environment because that's the majority of AV sales.
But for product that they're still selling or have plans to still sell (for example, anything that's on the Wii virtual console, or could be on the VC), they can quite easily demonstrate lost revenue from your copying the files. In the case of old games, 9/10 times you don't have the OPTION of paying for it because it's impossible to find the old hardware/software.
In the case of the VC... The N64 emulator on my original XBOX is DRAMATICALLY better than then emulator on the Wii. It manages to play games without glitches and stuttering. The same is true of most of the other emulators on the wii. I'll be fucked if I'm going to pay Nintendo 10 bucks for an ancient game that doesn't work as well as my 5-year-old hacked XBOX running emulators thrown together on a weekend.
Lost revenue does harm the publisher, which in turn harms the developer.... Just because you don't know the person that your actions harm, or you don't like them, doesn't mean that your actions don't have consequences. Man, I wish this was true. If I could actually harm the big record labels by pirating their music I'd do it as a full-time job. Ditto for EA.
so in reality.. the CC has to do a few more transactions and alittle leg work.. (what my 50$ covers) and the company selling stuff gets nothing but lost inventory and the fraud guy makes off with the stuff.. Actually, the merchant ("company selling stuff") gets charged a fee on top of their lost merchandise.
untill the CC companies here in the US are held accountable for the transactions then they have zero incentive on putting together more expenisve and effective security into the cards/transactions.. because it doesn't effect their bottom line.. Do you really think the CC companies or banks are going to soak this up? Not a chance. They'll just pass it onto consumers. I'd rather have the merchants charged than the consumers because THEY can get insurance and THEY can write-off all their losses. I'm not crying over Wal-mart.
If MS decides they want to switch off the activation servers they've already committed to releasing a patch that will remove WPA from XP. I suspect they'll do this by 2010 at the latest. Such a patch already exists, in several different forms.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly are they lying about? I didn't bother to dig into the case studies, but if you look at actual pagehttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/default.mspx, they make the following claims:
1) Windows Server 2008 can run Apache, PHP, and PERL.
True.
2) Group Policies (and other Windows security features) are superior to SELinux.
True, SELinux sucks.
3) Windows has better support than Linux.
True.
4) Windows has more enterprise partners and applications than Linux.
True.
5) Windows Server 2008 is more interoperable with your old Microsoft products than Linux.
Again, true.
The only thing I see fishy on the front page is the "TCO" arguments, which are a bit dubious. Of course, MS is making arguments that heavily favor their platform. But they're MARKETING people for crying out loud. They're very explicitly ADVOCATES. Nobody should be suprised if the saing Windows Server 2008 cures cancer and raises the dead.
This douchebag should spend his time going after supposedly "objective" reviewers, but he'd rather piss and moan about MS.
As far as I'm aware, nobody has ever been sued for posting MSSQL or Oracle benchmarks. If you can come up with a case I'll consider this a serious problem.
I've never seen any benchmarks for WMP11 except encoding benchmarks, which are everywhere as well. Fortunately I don't have any such concerns with the software I use, OpenBSD. Does that make me a shill? Yes, because it's nonsense that you can't benchmark MS products. And it's not like you need to use this kind of bullshit to defend mySQL or whatever. MSSQL is not a particularly fast database.
This is mainly about control of video distribution, and to a lesser extent, content distribution in general.
He did run away when the Nazi government was collapsing and they started drafting teenagers. There is no reason to believe this was anything other than cowardice.
Razinger's involvement with the Nazis was a clear moral failing, but it's really nothing compared to his coverup of massive sexual abuse. As far as I'm concerned, Razinger is a child molester and rapist and should be swinging from the nearest tree.
People who don't identify as Jews are not "hated" as Jews because the only way to identify Jews is by their BEHAVIOR. If you're not ACTING Jewish, you're not Jewish. The only physical identification of male Jews is circumcision, and as Muslims and Christian Americans practice circumcision, this is not particularly reliable. This is not to say that the Nazis, etc. did not try to identity on this basis, but it's nonsense. If someone's willing to kill you because of your biological relation to something else, that's racial. And how do you propose they do this? Let's say that your grandfather was a Mormon but you are now a Buddhist, and I hate Mormons and want to kill them. How can I tell, other than genealogical records, that you descended from a Mormon? Such obscure prejudices don't mean much in practice. The Nazis put a lot of effort into trying to figure this out and they failed spectacularly.
And yeah, if you want to replace Exchange in the enterprise you better have a drop-in client that's almost identical to Outlook. Few companies are going to bother to retrain their employees for email. You've already been caught in a lie, so why should we believe that you've ever set foot inside a Fortune 1000 company? Don't take my word for it, read any survey of Fortune 1000 companies. You'll find I'm right.
Believe it or not, I'm trying to be constructive here. I sincerely believe that the best competitor for Exchange will effectively be a Linux Exchange knock-off based on MAPI. Basically Scalix, or something very much like it.
Trivia: I ran a Citadel BBS for a little while back in the day and I used the Dog Pound BBS.
Hell, I'd almost call them heroic. The NLF were fighting a corrupt government against incredible odds. And as soon as they took over, one of the first things they did was crush the incredibly evil Khmer Rogue government that the US inadvertently created.
And even if the Soviet Union WAS poised to invade, why haven't we substantially disarmed since the end of the Cold War? Do we really need Joint Strike, missile destroyers, or nuclear weapons to fight "the terrorists", who exclusively use small arms? The very notion is retarded.
And don't bring up China. China isn't going to attack the United States, the very idea is completely batshit crazy. The Chinese economy is COMPLETELY dependent on the USA, attacking us would be committing suicide (quite literally).
Unfortunately his bragging was picked up by U.S. intelligent forces which of course assumed he wasn't bluffing.
This is a grotesque mischaracterization of what happened. Before the invasion the CIA and NSA knew without a shadow of a doubt that Iraq DID NOT have WMD. Cheney and his band of cutthroats knew this was the case but wanted to invade Iraq for other reasons so tapped Doug Feith (and others) at the Defense Intelligence Agency to create a special intelligence unit in the DIA to handle Iraq WMD issues and then instructed Chalabi and the INC to feed that unit false information. The CIA knew the information was false, but Cheney overruled them and fired or forced out anyone in the CIA who disagreed with his line. Many of the principals like Douglas Feith. Chalabi, etc. have admitted this.
WMD in Iraq was a carefully orchestrated campaign of lies by the White House. They were not "duped". They were not incompetent. They are liars, traitors, and war criminals. Iran is the real threat. And Iraq used to be the "real threat". There is not one iota of CREDIBLE (there's that word again) evidence that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. The IAEA (which was 100% right about Iraq) has seen no evidence of such a program.
And even if Iran had a nuclear weapons program, so what? You're mentally ill if you think a nuclear-armed Iran would attack the United States or Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran clearly wants nuclear weapons to deter aggression from the United States and Israel. You want to guarantee they don't develop nuclear weapons? Disarm Israel and sign a non-aggression pact with Iran.
Of course, the neocons want to keep making shitloads of money off war and oil so they WANT to bomb Iran, regardless of what Iran says or does. Until there is a US puppet government back in Iran they won't be happy.
Um?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937279/en-us
Toshiba simply gave MS a large pile of money to make a the HD-DVD add-on. It was video-only, and MS had made it very clear that NO 360 game would ever be released on HD-DVD. I seriously doubt that Sony is willing to give MS a pile of money for a Blu-Ray add-on, and MS has NO interest in putting games on Blu-Ray (given the technical problems in doing so). There have been rumors of a "PVR" version of the 360, much like Sony's PSX, that might include a Blu-Ray drive, but not an add-on.
What may actually be happening here is that a THIRD PARTY is making a Blu-Ray add-on for the 360.
OTOH, it doesn't seem to have made a major impact on the 360 versions of GTA and Oblivion. And I'd argue that Oblivion is the multiplayer game that best shows the technical advantages of the PS3 (the PS3 version of Oblivion looks a bit better, has better draw distance, and loads a bit faster than the 360 version due to the HD install).
More importantly, Exchange/MAPI have a robust calendering system that works very well, this is not the case with Citadel or eGroupWare. Citadel and eGroupware also have major problems integrating with Active Directory, the directory system that works (LDAP is broken too) and everybody uses. If you're smart, you'll focus heavily on AD support and forget about OpenLDAP.
Lest you call bullshit, I'm familiar with the networks of most of the Fortune 1000. Not one of them is running LDAP or IMAP, except a few people running Sun Directory Server for legacy Sun systems. I can think of 2 that use eDirectory. EVERYONE else uses Active Directory+Exchange. With hosted Exchange/SharePoint providers costs have gone dramatically down for smaller companies, so twitchy Linux groupware software is an even harder sell.
Don't get me wrong, I work for a Linux company. But I don't see Linux replacing Windows in the "LAN/Groupware/Collaboration" space anytime soon.
As others have pointed out, Microsoft really wanted Yahoo!, they simply didn't expect the hostility they would receive from CEO Jerry Yang and other boardmembers, who made it clear to MS that he'd rather completely destroy the company (by firing all the key staff and pissing away as much money as possible) than let MS have it.
Contrary to what others are thinking, I believe this is the last gasp for Yahoo. Their stock is going to be devastated by this announcement. They're the next AltaVista.
This isn't evidence of anything other than AKG thinks you're using anti-Muslim hate speech. Can you post some of the edits AKG is complaining about?
I did find one interesting edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Council_on_American-Islamic_Relations&diff=196579217&oldid=196564079#_ref-CAIR-25FACTS_0
In this edit you describe CAIR as "radical" and "left-wing".
You also attacked a number of food pages claiming hummus and falafel are Jewish, not Arab dishes. As far as racism goes this seems REALLY petty to me and appears to be the main reason why you were blocked.
Based on your posts and my experience (going way back) on BBS' and other forums AKG was being extraordinarily kind, holding your hand in IRC and giving you many opportunities to change your behavior.
Jews are not genetically or physically distinct from the populations in which they reside. Judaism is a religion, culture, and lifestyle. There are black Jews, white Jews, asian Jews, etc. It is not a "race" any more that being Christian or Muslim is a "race".
Give this reasoning, why would it be wrong for, say, France to pass a law saying that if a white Christan marries an Arab Muslim or a Jew they would lose their French citizenship and be deported to Arab nations or Israel (as appropriate)?
Some Arab nations have passed laws restricting Jews in various ways, which has encouraged them to relocate to Israel or elsewhere. I assume you have no objection to such laws?
Is everyone who opposed the apartheid government in South Africa and supported the "terrorists" in the African National Congress "anti-white"? If not, why not?
And just so you know: Israel was the #1 supporter of apartheid South Africa, giving them weapons, torture equipment, and training SA torturers. Israel continued to trade with SA when the entire rest of the world, even the USSR and China, has SA under an trade embargo. Numerous Israeli officials, including prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, are on record as supporting apartheid and regarding it as a model for the treatment of the Palestinians.
Assuming PCI Express, a better video card for Photoshop or any other video task. Or gaming.
Aftermarket sound cards
Hardware video encoding cards
DTV tuner cards
What the AV companies want is for the ACTUAL threat to be low, but the PERCEIVED threat to be high. This is what the situation USED to be, lots of hype and little actual threat. Now that the threats are actually beginning to match the hype the AV companies are struggling to keep up. New threats directly translate to more development time to meet these threats, and therefore lower profits, that's why the AV companies are pissed about this.
Basically, at this point, they don't need hype. The threats are out there and very real, to the point that most Windows users consider AV a REQUIREMENT. Given that reality, the issue is really competition between the vendors for the "best" AV product and "best" basically means manageability, ease of use, etc. in a corporate environment because that's the majority of AV sales.
In the case of the VC... The N64 emulator on my original XBOX is DRAMATICALLY better than then emulator on the Wii. It manages to play games without glitches and stuttering. The same is true of most of the other emulators on the wii. I'll be fucked if I'm going to pay Nintendo 10 bucks for an ancient game that doesn't work as well as my 5-year-old hacked XBOX running emulators thrown together on a weekend. Lost revenue does harm the publisher, which in turn harms the developer.
If MS decides they want to switch off the activation servers they've already committed to releasing a patch that will remove WPA from XP. I suspect they'll do this by 2010 at the latest. Such a patch already exists, in several different forms.