And thus you cut right to the heart of the problem.
One issue is that there is only ONE office application currently well supported by Screen Reader software. Microsoft has crushed all competing office software through some highly unethical and often illegal leveraging of their OS monopoly. Accessability software already has a relatively small market, and thus it is not economically viable for any accessability company to support anyone else's office suite. The OSS community is working on it and making fairly swift progress, but even when we get there most blind users will be reluctant to move away from the software (both screen reader and office suite) that they're already familiar with.
And so Microsoft, having got themselves into such a position, refuse to add support for Open Document format. Let's place the blame squarely where it belongs. Microsoft could add opendocument support to office in a matter of weeks if they really wanted to.
I seem to recall someone had written a prototype virus within 24 hours of the first beta being released, which caused Microsoft to drop the advanced scripting they had planned.
I'd try and find a reference but I really can't be arsed. Vista won't be out until next year and by all accounts it's going to suck just as badly as any previous version of windows. Dapper Drake will be out next month and it's going to rock! I've been running it since flight4, it was awesome even back then and it just keeps getting better.
I once thought about writing a 'sneeches' virus. Every time your machine manages to infect another they swap CD keys. After some time limit or number of successful infections, the virus completely removes itself.
The result on Microsoft's antipiracy effort would have been (or still would be) absolutely crippling.
Microsoft's knowledge base is wrong (and not for the first time either)
I have experienced this update first hand;
You can decline the EULA, but most people blindly click YES without even reading them.
The nag is highly annoying. It brands the login/shutdown screen, popus up a confirmation dialog with a short pause when you login, randomly shows a bubble dialog and puts a star-like icon in the system tray.
You CANNOT remove it from add/remove programs (perhaps you can if Windows is considered legitimate, but I certainly couldn't). And if you have pirated windows the WGA-related updates will be completely hidden after your next reboot. Seriously; both the Windows Update and Notifications patches were visible after I installed them, but HIDDEN the next time I rebooted!! Perhaps Microsoft will go the whole way and just install a rootkit next time? (or perhaps they already have.. I probably should check that too)
To dissable the warning requires that you run an ActiveX control from microsoft's website (and probably fill out a form identifying where you got windows from, I don't know..). There's no legitimate way of making the warnings go away without going through Microsoft.
You CAN still use system-restore and return to a point before it was installed. Microsoft might dissable this in future.
I already found a hack to cripple WGA Notification, which also prevents Windows Update from being able to restore it. Digg it.
Microsoft have NOT gone far enough. This patch is nothing but a minor inconvenience and is not going to push widescale migration to Linux as I'd originally hoped.
Someone was working on one at least 5 years ago, although it was far from useful at the time. The driver could already pick up and drop the phone line and do audio, which was about all it should have needed for hardware support. V.90 is a documented standard.
I'm surprised and dissapointed. I really thought the community would have done this by now.
Switching a drive into an entirely new system with new chipset, different CPU, and completely different peripherals always worked relatively well for Windows 98 (I've done it many times) and for ubuntu (I did this to this, my main machine, just after christmas with no hesitation. It worked as expected.)
It frequently does not work for Windows2000 or WindowsXP although you might be surprised how often it still does work.
Swapping a nearly-identical mobo shouldn't break any operating system, but of course it always breaks Windows Product Activation.
The majority of 'winmodems' are supported in Linux now. Sometimes the drivers are even open source! It's also worth keeping in mind that many winmodems need the appropriate drivers to work in Windows too; it just happens that most people get Windows preinstalled or a driver CD with their modem.
I have a collection of older hardware here including a number of Winmodems, and I often find it's easier to get the hardware working in Ubuntu than XP. If they stopped making the card before 2000 and it's not already supported by Windows, then the chances of finding a working XP driver are often slim, but most of that hardware (older soundcards, bt848 video capture, early realtek network cards) works out of the box in Linux.
The particularly common 'lucent chipset' modems used to work in Ubuntu out of the box just like they do in windows, but for some reason breezy stopped doing that. I hope they'll put it back for Dapper.
Windows 95 or 98 were pretty good for major hardware swaps, just boot safemode, remove all the drivers and it'll probe new hardware on the next reboot.
My experience shifting a windows XP or 2000 drive from one machine to another results in a 'stop screen' perhaps 1/3 of the time (and for XP, loss of product activation at least 100% of the time).. if you can boot safemode it might be fixable but most of the time a reinstall is easier.
Shifting ubuntu to new hardware has always been painless, worst case I have to change a few packages around and reconfigure X.
Quite seriously, apart from (perhaps) 3d games and tax software there is really nothing the average user might want that can't be found for OSX or Linux.
About the only other thing Windows has that other OS's don't is a staggering variety of malware; viruses, worms, spyware, adware, keyloggers, etc. I won't argue that there is _no_ malware on other OS's but in variety of malware and and number of infections, Windows is ahead by several orders of magnitude.
It would seem that some banks require very little identification to open an account. If the bank's not giving them any credit, there's very little risk to the bank in not identifying the customer.
Or money can be laundered through any number of online payment systems who mostly only need an email address. And I suppose well-funded criminals could find sufficiently good fake ID if required.
This is what really bugs me about all the 'anti-keylogger' measures banks seem to be taking lately. It's ultimately pointless. At some point after the two-factor authentication or fancy ActiveX keypad where the buttons swap around randomly, or whatever other asinine steps you take (which are invariably hostile to visually impaired users, btw) you actually get to the point of doing a transaction.
At this point some rootkit swaps the actual amount for $500,000 or your available balance which you probably just looked up, and the actual payee for their own account number. When the confirmation page comes back they swap in the original details and wait for you to confirm it.
Amount of work required; slightly more than a keylogger, but not excessive. Slightly trickier to launder the money. In theory the software could look for signed updates on p2p, but otherwise you need to know an account number in advance and have a limited window before it gets closed.
Advantages; less of a trail, login details don't have to be sent anywhere and the bank never gets a chance to log the attacker's IP.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect in the vast majority of cases it's so that they can still use ActiveX but not get viruses from untrusted sites, or so that badly written applications can run as Administrator without the user having to have full administrator access.
iow I've always had the impression that people complaining about Linux's lack of AD and Policies was in much the same category as people complaining that Linux doesn't have any decent antivirus or antispyware or disk defrag applications.
I am not prepared to give up my freedom where the computer is concerned.
I can live without movies and music on my computer. In fact if you don't drop the anti-consumer "Rights Management" crap, I can and will do without movies and mainstream music completely.
Unfortunately I am very much the minority, and big media will probably still do quite well without me. Sometimes I feel like it's just me and RMS against the rest of the world.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
Microsoft's original reason was defensive. The patent FUD against Open Source is more recent, and trying to actually use those patents may be a very bad move;
Open Source Developers are very often individuals, non-profit organisations, or a loose collection of interested parties. There may be no clearly defined target, or nobody with deep pockets worth sueing.
Open Source Development is too agile; A court case could take years, the infringing parts may be rewritten in weeks or even days.
The patent itself may well be overturned. If the patent is at all questionable sites like Groklaw will rapidly uncover prior art or any other grounds to dispute the patent's validity.
Microsoft was claiming it will indemnify _some_ of it's most valuable corporate customers.
Home and small businesses users were never included, and anyone who wanted this protection had to be prepared to immediately upgrade/downgrade to whatever non-infringing alternative Microsoft offers, which may include the removal of functionality your business has come to rely on.
All very reassuring, as long as you don't read the fine print!
If you own a patent-violating xbox and decide to keep using it (because, for example, the replacement from Microsoft can't play DVD's any more) then you are personally responsible for continuing to violate whatever patents apply.
And should you be personally sued for using infringing technology, the following paragraph gives you a fairly clear idea of what help you can expect from Microsoft;
17; exclusion of incidental, consequential and certain other damages. to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, punitive, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence, and for any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever) arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the software, the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, informaton, software, and related content through the software or otherwise arising out of the use of the software, or otherwise under or in connection with any provision of this eula, even in the event of the fault, tort (including negligence), misrepresentation, strict liability, breach of contract or breach of warranty of microsoft or any supplier, and even if microsoft or any supplier has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
They need to dump about 8 hours worth of sedatives into the bloodstream and log their last known position after being tampered with. That gives parents plenty of time to get to the scene without having to worry that their untagged child will wander away:-)
Perhaps we should rephrase the question;
How is this not an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly? Threats of investigation and (by logical extension) costly software licence audits for anyone who doesn't want a Microsoft Operating System isn't going to stifle the market for other operating systems?
Slashdot Mirror
Most likely, it is a rouge copy of DNA. In which case the police's "genuine disadvatage" program would have caught him and he would go back to jail.
Nah, they'll just tattoo his forehead with a box that says "You may be the victim of DNA counterfeiting"
"BPL and other tall tales spun by Willian Luke Stewart"
It came up in the BPL discussion yesterday...
And thus you cut right to the heart of the problem.
One issue is that there is only ONE office application currently well supported by Screen Reader software. Microsoft has crushed all competing office software through some highly unethical and often illegal leveraging of their OS monopoly. Accessability software already has a relatively small market, and thus it is not economically viable for any accessability company to support anyone else's office suite. The OSS community is working on it and making fairly swift progress, but even when we get there most blind users will be reluctant to move away from the software (both screen reader and office suite) that they're already familiar with.
And so Microsoft, having got themselves into such a position, refuse to add support for Open Document format. Let's place the blame squarely where it belongs. Microsoft could add opendocument support to office in a matter of weeks if they really wanted to.
90 days? that's a tad optimistic.
I seem to recall someone had written a prototype virus within 24 hours of the first beta being released, which caused Microsoft to drop the advanced scripting they had planned.
I'd try and find a reference but I really can't be arsed. Vista won't be out until next year and by all accounts it's going to suck just as badly as any previous version of windows. Dapper Drake will be out next month and it's going to rock! I've been running it since flight4, it was awesome even back then and it just keeps getting better.
man who go to sleep with problem in hand, wake with solution on chest.
Fuck it, I had mod points this morning!
Only until they extend copyright to 'forever, minus one day' like Jack originally wanted!
I once thought about writing a 'sneeches' virus. Every time your machine manages to infect another they swap CD keys. After some time limit or number of successful infections, the virus completely removes itself.
The result on Microsoft's antipiracy effort would have been (or still would be) absolutely crippling.
Microsoft's knowledge base is wrong (and not for the first time either)
I have experienced this update first hand;
You can decline the EULA, but most people blindly click YES without even reading them.
The nag is highly annoying. It brands the login/shutdown screen, popus up a confirmation dialog with a short pause when you login, randomly shows a bubble dialog and puts a star-like icon in the system tray.
You CANNOT remove it from add/remove programs (perhaps you can if Windows is considered legitimate, but I certainly couldn't). And if you have pirated windows the WGA-related updates will be completely hidden after your next reboot. Seriously; both the Windows Update and Notifications patches were visible after I installed them, but HIDDEN the next time I rebooted!! Perhaps Microsoft will go the whole way and just install a rootkit next time? (or perhaps they already have.. I probably should check that too)
To dissable the warning requires that you run an ActiveX control from microsoft's website (and probably fill out a form identifying where you got windows from, I don't know..). There's no legitimate way of making the warnings go away without going through Microsoft.
You CAN still use system-restore and return to a point before it was installed. Microsoft might dissable this in future.
I already found a hack to cripple WGA Notification, which also prevents Windows Update from being able to restore it. Digg it.
Microsoft have NOT gone far enough. This patch is nothing but a minor inconvenience and is not going to push widescale migration to Linux as I'd originally hoped.
Damn.
Someone was working on one at least 5 years ago, although it was far from useful at the time. The driver could already pick up and drop the phone line and do audio, which was about all it should have needed for hardware support. V.90 is a documented standard.
I'm surprised and dissapointed. I really thought the community would have done this by now.
That's my point.
Switching a drive into an entirely new system with new chipset, different CPU, and completely different peripherals always worked relatively well for Windows 98 (I've done it many times) and for ubuntu (I did this to this, my main machine, just after christmas with no hesitation. It worked as expected.)
It frequently does not work for Windows2000 or WindowsXP although you might be surprised how often it still does work.
Swapping a nearly-identical mobo shouldn't break any operating system, but of course it always breaks Windows Product Activation.
The majority of 'winmodems' are supported in Linux now. Sometimes the drivers are even open source! It's also worth keeping in mind that many winmodems need the appropriate drivers to work in Windows too; it just happens that most people get Windows preinstalled or a driver CD with their modem.
I have a collection of older hardware here including a number of Winmodems, and I often find it's easier to get the hardware working in Ubuntu than XP. If they stopped making the card before 2000 and it's not already supported by Windows, then the chances of finding a working XP driver are often slim, but most of that hardware (older soundcards, bt848 video capture, early realtek network cards) works out of the box in Linux.
The particularly common 'lucent chipset' modems used to work in Ubuntu out of the box just like they do in windows, but for some reason breezy stopped doing that. I hope they'll put it back for Dapper.
I thought it _stopped_ in 1998.
Windows 95 or 98 were pretty good for major hardware swaps, just boot safemode, remove all the drivers and it'll probe new hardware on the next reboot.
My experience shifting a windows XP or 2000 drive from one machine to another results in a 'stop screen' perhaps 1/3 of the time (and for XP, loss of product activation at least 100% of the time).. if you can boot safemode it might be fixable but most of the time a reinstall is easier.
Shifting ubuntu to new hardware has always been painless, worst case I have to change a few packages around and reconfigure X.
Similar but real example.
I was pretty impressed how far it got in wine too! :-)
Quite seriously, apart from (perhaps) 3d games and tax software there is really nothing the average user might want that can't be found for OSX or Linux.
About the only other thing Windows has that other OS's don't is a staggering variety of malware; viruses, worms, spyware, adware, keyloggers, etc. I won't argue that there is _no_ malware on other OS's but in variety of malware and and number of infections, Windows is ahead by several orders of magnitude.
It would seem that some banks require very little identification to open an account. If the bank's not giving them any credit, there's very little risk to the bank in not identifying the customer.
Or money can be laundered through any number of online payment systems who mostly only need an email address. And I suppose well-funded criminals could find sufficiently good fake ID if required.
This is what really bugs me about all the 'anti-keylogger' measures banks seem to be taking lately. It's ultimately pointless. At some point after the two-factor authentication or fancy ActiveX keypad where the buttons swap around randomly, or whatever other asinine steps you take (which are invariably hostile to visually impaired users, btw) you actually get to the point of doing a transaction.
At this point some rootkit swaps the actual amount for $500,000 or your available balance which you probably just looked up, and the actual payee for their own account number. When the confirmation page comes back they swap in the original details and wait for you to confirm it.
Amount of work required; slightly more than a keylogger, but not excessive. Slightly trickier to launder the money. In theory the software could look for signed updates on p2p, but otherwise you need to know an account number in advance and have a limited window before it gets closed.
Advantages; less of a trail, login details don't have to be sent anywhere and the bank never gets a chance to log the attacker's IP.
What do people need policies for?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect in the vast majority of cases it's so that they can still use ActiveX but not get viruses from untrusted sites, or so that badly written applications can run as Administrator without the user having to have full administrator access.
iow I've always had the impression that people complaining about Linux's lack of AD and Policies was in much the same category as people complaining that Linux doesn't have any decent antivirus or antispyware or disk defrag applications.
I am not prepared to give up my freedom where the computer is concerned.
I can live without movies and music on my computer. In fact if you don't drop the anti-consumer "Rights Management" crap, I can and will do without movies and mainstream music completely.
Unfortunately I am very much the minority, and big media will probably still do quite well without me. Sometimes I feel like it's just me and RMS against the rest of the world.
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most
of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry
would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large
company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation,
algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this
company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take
as much of our profits as they want. The solution to this is patent exchanges
with large companies and patenting as much as we can.
Challenges and Strategy, Bill Gates, May 16, 1991
Microsoft's original reason was defensive. The patent FUD against Open Source is more recent, and trying to actually use those patents may be a very bad move;
Open Source Developers are very often individuals, non-profit organisations, or a loose collection of interested parties. There may be no clearly defined target, or nobody with deep pockets worth sueing.
Open Source Development is too agile; A court case could take years, the infringing parts may be rewritten in weeks or even days.
The patent itself may well be overturned. If the patent is at all questionable sites like Groklaw will rapidly uncover prior art or any other grounds to dispute the patent's validity.
Microsoft was claiming it will indemnify _some_ of it's most valuable corporate customers.
Home and small businesses users were never included, and anyone who wanted this protection had to be prepared to immediately upgrade/downgrade to whatever non-infringing alternative Microsoft offers, which may include the removal of functionality your business has come to rely on.
All very reassuring, as long as you don't read the fine print!
If you own a patent-violating xbox and decide to keep using it (because, for example, the replacement from Microsoft can't play DVD's any more) then you are personally responsible for continuing to violate whatever patents apply.
And should you be personally sued for using infringing technology, the following paragraph gives you a fairly clear idea of what help you can expect from Microsoft;
17; exclusion of incidental, consequential and certain other damages. to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, punitive, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence, and for any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever) arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the software, the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, informaton, software, and related content through the software or otherwise arising out of the use of the software, or otherwise under or in connection with any provision of this eula, even in the event of the fault, tort (including negligence), misrepresentation, strict liability, breach of contract or breach of warranty of microsoft or any supplier, and even if microsoft or any supplier has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Neither.
:-)
They need to dump about 8 hours worth of sedatives into the bloodstream and log their last known position after being tampered with. That gives parents plenty of time to get to the scene without having to worry that their untagged child will wander away
Perhaps we should rephrase the question;
How is this not an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly? Threats of investigation and (by logical extension) costly software licence audits for anyone who doesn't want a Microsoft Operating System isn't going to stifle the market for other operating systems?