Actually, now that they are absolutely decreed a monopoly, with no further opportunity for appeal, it opens the door wide open for civil suits by any company that their illegal behavior harmed financially.
If you go to the vast majority of banks and ask "Does your banking portal work with Linux broswers?" they won't have a clue what you are talking about.
If you go to the vast majority of banks with $100 million in assets and ask "Does your banking portal work with Linux broswers?" they'll say "If you want it to!"
Actually, telling people how they can use technology effectively IS what an IT department is supposed to be doing.
No, no, no, no. IT people attend sales presentations where the speaker spends 2.5 out of 3 hours telling you that their company is viable, then 30 minutes to demonstrate all the features of their product that you're not interested. Then, they ask the vendor questions about how the product can be applied in thier particular implementations so the sales people can read the glossy brochures out loud.
Then, the IT people gather for coffee to figure out what their best guess is of what the CIO thinks is the shiniest product. Then they take all the glossy brochures from all competing venders and copy all the buzzwords (and any other word they don't understand) and put them in a "white paper".
This whitepaper is passed up through the management chain so that any factual information not properly obscured by buzzwords can be filtered out. When complete, it is presented to the CIO who understands it to mean exactly what he thought all along: "Do what that company in the magazine on the airplane did!" So that's what he dictates.
Then after the implementation, the users figure out how to work around it in order to do their jobs.
They use Access databases, to extract and consolidate the information they really need from the applications that were shoved down their throat. They write VB applications to integrate data from various incompatible data sources into and out of those databases. The really creative ones will even write "screen-scrapers" and tie in to those old legacy mainframe applications.
The IT people like this method because now they can go to the users and actually see what the requirements are. Then they can call in vendors of "Enterprise Solutions" so all those little departmental applications can be "integrated into the core business solution".
I've considered suing Microsoft regarding all of this (seriously) but have put that on the back burner for now.
Do it! Take them to small claims court. Chances are they won't even show up and you'll get a real judicial judgement that you can use as your own cudgel when you want to do it again, and others can point to to strenghten their cases.
Then get the customer service rep to provide a statement that the return was not allowed. This can be a simple as a copy of their return policy (although I'd get someone to sign and date it). Since most EULA's I've read say "If you don't agree, return to the place of purchase for a full refund", you've attempted to comply in good faith and they have failed to live up to their end of the agreement. Since you have clearly indicated you do not agree and they, acting as Microsoft's agent have failed to honor the license to the license is voided and your rights to the software are restricted only by copyright law.
If Microsoft then attempts to sue you for a license violation, the clerks refusal to provide a refund as specified by the license is your evidence that there was no license "agreement" so they can go pound sand. Either that, or convince their retailers that the really are agents acting on MS behalf and that the must accept returns on opened software. Retail agents will love this.
In fact, how about we arrange a software return day? Gather intelligence regarding software licenses with stupid restrictions, get a few thousand people to go out and buy a copy each from the same major retailer. Then, on a particular day everyone returns the opened software with a license complaint and charge that under terms of the license they must accept the return. If they fail, take them to small claims court. How long do you think retail outlets will continue to carry products with both onerous terms and terms that require them to accept returns? Do this a few times, with a few big retailers, and they'll be on the consumer's side when it comes to licensing.
With a credit card, I hold my tastes, wants and desires; all information relevant to the process of negotiation; back until I am ready to buy. This lets me look around for what I want. With Passport, the minute I click in, I'm attacked with what the vendor thinks I want which is almost always wrong. (Like quorum.org's "relevancy" thingie is always wrong for me.)
Plus there's a good chance they've got an idea about how much I might be willing to spend. Ever shop on-line for an airline ticket? I shopped for prices, decided what I wanted and went back to it to find the price went up. Huh? It was less than 5 minutes ago! Found a cookie from the airline, deleted it, and the price dropped back down. With a CC, the price is set before they know who I am, where I've been, or how I'm going to pay. All their tracking buys them is what kind of "special deals" to mail me so I can throw them away for them.
According to the advocacy group Public Citizen (see MaineToday article):
Public Citizen reported that the pharmaceutical industry spent $177 million on lobbying, $65 million on issue ads and $20 million in campaign contributions in the last two-year election cycle.
But the industry keeps its research figures secret. Public Citizen based its review on a 1991 Tufts University study that estimated research costs at $500 million to develop each new drug. Public Citizen said the figure was before taxes, ignoring that businesses could deduct one-third of the cost of research.
They also report taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 55% of the research behind the top 5 best selling drugs. Foreign institutions contributed another 30% of the research.
Basically, I agree that there needs to be profit to motivate R&D. There also needs to be an ethical business plan to keep the cost to patients down as well. I hope this action does not become routine ripping of drug companies' research, but I also hope it sounds a wake-up call to pharmaceutical companies' management that they had better do what any company is supposed to do; provide a good product at a reasonable cost.
This is the process that is used in the Virus community today, and it's been working well.
Really? That's great! *cough*SirCam*cough*
Full disclosure may give malware authors ammunition, but it also gives IDS writers, including open source authors who more than likely would not "qualify" for a vendor list, the information necessary to write assesment and detection tools.
What you're describing is like having the generals know what weapons the enemy is likely to use, without telling the soldiers how to defend against them.
The suits tried that. It's called AOL, and it did pretty good. What really got people to sign up for it, though, was when they opened it up to the internet.
It doesn't matter what belle and whistles Son of Internet has, if it doesn't have content, user's will still demand access to the internet.
I completely agree. Consumer Windows has no raw sockets now, so do not revise it. Windows users can get low-level socket access now, if they need it, with the NT/2K versions. What possible legitimate use is there for low level socket access in a consumer OS?
Eminent Domain is a process whereby the *government* pays the property holder for forced takings.
And copyrights and patents are limited monopolies granted by the government. Without them, everything would be in the public domain, and nobody would be required to pay the author a dime. This is a similar extension in that the ruling assures that the public continues to have access to copyrighted material that has already been voluntarily released as long as the copyright owner is reasonably compensated for the additional distribution.
Actually, it can also be used by non-child processes as long as they have permission to search for the socket and pid. There's a script at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ssh/fsa
that does just that (drop the trailing/fsa for more hints). This allows you to launch an agent and provide an identity at boot and make that identity available to cron jobs for scp or other secure remote functions. Very useful.
As long as we keep up the pressure on Adobe, the more they and other content provides will think before they try to exercise their DMCA "rights" again. Until Adobe actively supports the repeal of the DMCA, they are an enemy of the Constitution of the United States, and should be treated as such.
make congress uphold their oaths and protect the constitiution like they should have done
Do you suppose impeachment for deriliction of duty would get their attention? This is what irks me most of all. Most of the members of congress are lawyers, for crying out loud. They obviously are not reading the stuff their voting on.
I noticed as I went through the list of recommendations, almost every one is in KDE 2.2. Yes, it's very "Windows-ish" but now I have to fight off my wife AND my two teenage kids to use my Linux box while the Windows 98 machine gathers dust. When my mother comes over to visit, she'll just plop down to play a game, again on Linux.
And having it installed doesn't mean that everyone in the house has to use it. After watching me use icewm for a month, my wife decided to check out the other options on the kdm login screen. Now she spends most her time in icewm. Having a Windows-like environment just establishes a comfort level for people moving to a different platform. Once they feel at home, then they're ready to try something different.
Just as soon as I get migrated to GnuCash or Kapital, Windows is history at my house.
Microsoft has given in and will now give OEMs and possibly end users the abiliy to remove IE from their
Windows machines
No, they won't. They are giving OEMs and users the option of removing the icons and start menu. They are putting IE in the "Add/Remove programs feature". They even say:
Consumers will be able to use the Add-Remove Programs feature
in Windows XP to remove end-user access to the Internet
Explorer components of the operating system.
Isn't one of the new features of XP a built-in push-button type method to "clean" the desktop?
Doesn't that make undoing vender changes just a click away?
I have the same problem with time. What bothers me is that I have found cases where click-thru's where held to be valid, particularly some lumber co. got royaly screwed by an application with a known bug that calculated estimations extremely short. They lost a bundle and couldn't collect from the software vendor because of the clicked on disclaimer, er, eula.
In the meantime, I treat my software purchases as purchases and agree with myself that I'll only use one copy at a time. So far, no vendor has disagreed with me (as if they know I exist...)
Can you please site a reference to a legal precedent. I've looked but haven't found one. I have considered buying a piece of software just to attempt to return it after opening it. Most retail outlets will not accept opened software for returns. So if you don't accept the license, return the software, then the retail outlet, acting on behalf of Microsoft (as specified in the EULA's "return to the place of purchase"), fails to fulfill their part of the agreement, then the agreement would be null and void.
Fortunately, I have no real need for such software...
If a patch, any patch, security or otherwise, is going to irreversibly disable access to something you've already done it should pop up a warning message on installation. What does that take under Windows, a one-line call to msgDialog() or some such? (I don't really want an answer, it just can't be that difficult.)
Add to that that we are taking about a programmer, here; someone who knows something about computers. Suppose Granny accidentily discovers she needs a security patch (she's not likely to go looking) and couragously attempts to install it, do you think she's going to understand the release notes even if she does read them?
I'm sorry, you just added to the case in point. Microsoft products make simple tasks complex and complex task incomprehensible. I believe you are mistaking "attractive" for "quality".
IIRC, You can also make Outlook automatically encrypt (or sign) all outbound messages as well. That way, the recipient can know without doubt that the trojan on your system did, in fact, use Outlook to spread itself via email....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, now that they are absolutely decreed a monopoly, with no further opportunity for appeal, it opens the door wide open for civil suits by any company that their illegal behavior harmed financially.
If you go to the vast majority of banks with $100 million in assets and ask "Does your banking portal work with Linux broswers?" they'll say "If you want it to!"
No, no, no, no. IT people attend sales presentations where the speaker spends 2.5 out of 3 hours telling you that their company is viable, then 30 minutes to demonstrate all the features of their product that you're not interested. Then, they ask the vendor questions about how the product can be applied in thier particular implementations so the sales people can read the glossy brochures out loud.
Then, the IT people gather for coffee to figure out what their best guess is of what the CIO thinks is the shiniest product. Then they take all the glossy brochures from all competing venders and copy all the buzzwords (and any other word they don't understand) and put them in a "white paper".
This whitepaper is passed up through the management chain so that any factual information not properly obscured by buzzwords can be filtered out. When complete, it is presented to the CIO who understands it to mean exactly what he thought all along: "Do what that company in the magazine on the airplane did!" So that's what he dictates.
Then after the implementation, the users figure out how to work around it in order to do their jobs.
They use Access databases, to extract and consolidate the information they really need from the applications that were shoved down their throat. They write VB applications to integrate data from various incompatible data sources into and out of those databases. The really creative ones will even write "screen-scrapers" and tie in to those old legacy mainframe applications.
The IT people like this method because now they can go to the users and actually see what the requirements are. Then they can call in vendors of "Enterprise Solutions" so all those little departmental applications can be "integrated into the core business solution".
GOTO FIRST-LINE
Do it! Take them to small claims court. Chances are they won't even show up and you'll get a real judicial judgement that you can use as your own cudgel when you want to do it again, and others can point to to strenghten their cases.
If Microsoft then attempts to sue you for a license violation, the clerks refusal to provide a refund as specified by the license is your evidence that there was no license "agreement" so they can go pound sand. Either that, or convince their retailers that the really are agents acting on MS behalf and that the must accept returns on opened software. Retail agents will love this.
In fact, how about we arrange a software return day? Gather intelligence regarding software licenses with stupid restrictions, get a few thousand people to go out and buy a copy each from the same major retailer. Then, on a particular day everyone returns the opened software with a license complaint and charge that under terms of the license they must accept the return. If they fail, take them to small claims court. How long do you think retail outlets will continue to carry products with both onerous terms and terms that require them to accept returns? Do this a few times, with a few big retailers, and they'll be on the consumer's side when it comes to licensing.
Plus there's a good chance they've got an idea about how much I might be willing to spend. Ever shop on-line for an airline ticket? I shopped for prices, decided what I wanted and went back to it to find the price went up. Huh? It was less than 5 minutes ago! Found a cookie from the airline, deleted it, and the price dropped back down. With a CC, the price is set before they know who I am, where I've been, or how I'm going to pay. All their tracking buys them is what kind of "special deals" to mail me so I can throw them away for them.
apt-get remove netscape mozilla galeon konqueror
And they're all completely gone. I've installed 98Lite on my Win98 box, and Microsoft Embeded Tools refuses to install on that machine.
That's the difference between including and tying.
Public Citizen reported that the pharmaceutical industry spent $177 million on lobbying, $65 million on issue ads and $20 million in campaign contributions in the last two-year election cycle.
But the industry keeps its research figures secret. Public Citizen based its review on a 1991 Tufts University study that estimated research costs at $500 million to develop each new drug. Public Citizen said the figure was before taxes, ignoring that businesses could deduct one-third of the cost of research.
They also report taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 55% of the research behind the top 5 best selling drugs. Foreign institutions contributed another 30% of the research.
Basically, I agree that there needs to be profit to motivate R&D. There also needs to be an ethical business plan to keep the cost to patients down as well. I hope this action does not become routine ripping of drug companies' research, but I also hope it sounds a wake-up call to pharmaceutical companies' management that they had better do what any company is supposed to do; provide a good product at a reasonable cost.
Really? That's great! *cough*SirCam*cough*
Full disclosure may give malware authors ammunition, but it also gives IDS writers, including open source authors who more than likely would not "qualify" for a vendor list, the information necessary to write assesment and detection tools.
What you're describing is like having the generals know what weapons the enemy is likely to use, without telling the soldiers how to defend against them.
It doesn't matter what belle and whistles Son of Internet has, if it doesn't have content, user's will still demand access to the internet.
I completely agree. Consumer Windows has no raw sockets now, so do not revise it . Windows users can get low-level socket access now, if they need it, with the NT/2K versions. What possible legitimate use is there for low level socket access in a consumer OS?
I agree %100. I'd rather have to teach new employees how to use a computer than have to them how to think.
Let's make a law that makes it illegal to pass a law about something that you're completely ignorant about.
And copyrights and patents are limited monopolies granted by the government. Without them, everything would be in the public domain, and nobody would be required to pay the author a dime. This is a similar extension in that the ruling assures that the public continues to have access to copyrighted material that has already been voluntarily released as long as the copyright owner is reasonably compensated for the additional distribution.
Actually, it can also be used by non-child processes as long as they have permission to search for the socket and pid. There's a script at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ssh/fsa that does just that (drop the trailing /fsa for more hints). This allows you to launch an agent and provide an identity at boot and make that identity available to cron jobs for scp or other secure remote functions. Very useful.
As long as we keep up the pressure on Adobe, the more they and other content provides will think before they try to exercise their DMCA "rights" again. Until Adobe actively supports the repeal of the DMCA, they are an enemy of the Constitution of the United States, and should be treated as such.
Do you suppose impeachment for deriliction of duty would get their attention? This is what irks me most of all. Most of the members of congress are lawyers, for crying out loud. They obviously are not reading the stuff their voting on.
And having it installed doesn't mean that everyone in the house has to use it. After watching me use icewm for a month, my wife decided to check out the other options on the kdm login screen. Now she spends most her time in icewm. Having a Windows-like environment just establishes a comfort level for people moving to a different platform. Once they feel at home, then they're ready to try something different.
Just as soon as I get migrated to GnuCash or Kapital, Windows is history at my house.
I just tried it and the first one I tried wouldn't read, but using /usr/bin/xpdf instead worked great. One less Adobe user here.
No, they won't. They are giving OEMs and users the option of removing the icons and start menu. They are putting IE in the "Add/Remove programs feature". They even say:
Nowhere do they say that anyone can remove IE.
Isn't one of the new features of XP a built-in push-button type method to "clean" the desktop? Doesn't that make undoing vender changes just a click away?
In the meantime, I treat my software purchases as purchases and agree with myself that I'll only use one copy at a time. So far, no vendor has disagreed with me (as if they know I exist...)
Fortunately, I have no real need for such software...
Add to that that we are taking about a programmer, here; someone who knows something about computers. Suppose Granny accidentily discovers she needs a security patch (she's not likely to go looking) and couragously attempts to install it, do you think she's going to understand the release notes even if she does read them?
I'm sorry, you just added to the case in point. Microsoft products make simple tasks complex and complex task incomprehensible. I believe you are mistaking "attractive" for "quality".
IIRC, You can also make Outlook automatically encrypt (or sign) all outbound messages as well. That way, the recipient can know without doubt that the trojan on your system did, in fact, use Outlook to spread itself via email....