Perhaps its only literate people that understand the difference of meaning between "there", "they're" and "their" that can understand the problem. Not to mention capitalization and grammar.
The problem is that MS uses their entrenched monopoly position to absolutely PREVENT any other business from existing and ever being able to compete with them. This is a violation of US anti-trust law, and MS HAS been convicted but caught a lucky break with a change of the US executive administration and escaped with basically no meaningful punitive or corrective action.
Yes, by bringing computing to idiots, MS has ensured that most computers use their OS, which only an idiot would use, thus ensuring that the vast majority of the public remains ignorant on the subject. What is good for MS is NOT what is good for the advancement of technology. It should be 'tuff' being a monopoly - its supposed to be illegal.
Personally, I will be glad when MS finally slips into the sidelines - it isn't a matter of hope, it is only a matter of time. As someone who chooses NOT to be an idiot, both as a matter of choosing software that doesnt suck, AND as a matter of principle, I avoid Windows and all other MS software like the plague.
As someone said in a certain movie, "The problem is choice", and MS wants to make sure that that vast majority are only aware of the choice on a subconscious level, if that.
None of the other brands/businesses you mention have a near total monopoly in their respective markets.
Also, if you buy the value meal, you PAY for the drink wether you drink it or not.
Also, if you buy a 'pee cee' at pretty much any retail outlet any of the vast majority of the 'average joe sixpack' 'consumers' would buy one from, you PAY for Windows wether you use it or not. Those same consumers are also only dimly aware of the existence of anything OTHER than Windows if that.
In a healthy, competitive market, the _average_ purchaser is very aware that they have choices, what those choices are, how to make those choices, and perhaps some reasons why they might want to make one choice or another. None of that is currently the case in the "OS for Intel-compatible personal computers" market.
If someone is going to have a monopoly on search, I'd much rather it be Google then MicroSoft. Microsoft has a documented history of abusing the monopolies they already have. Google's history is much more trustworthy.
Neither Firefox/Mozilla nor Google have a controlling monopoly on any related technologies - Microsoft DOES.
Google is not owned by the Mozilla Foundation
MSN Search IS owned by Microsoft.
People who actively choose to use either FireFox or Google (usually) have the knowledge and skills to understand what the concept of 'default' is, and that there is a reasonable chance that it isn't what they want. (Or at the very least, they have an association with someone else that has these qualities)
People who buy 'pee cees' from various retail outlets usually do not know this, and often dont even have a clue that there ARE operating systems other than Windows, or that they have any options to anything other than what comes preset and preinstalled.
Some replies have suggested that your bank DOES ask for your PIN/etc when you call in to use phone banking/etc, so I'm going to clarify your statement as follows:
Your bank will never initiate a contact TO you (email OR phone) and ask for your PIN, account number, CC#, etc (and if you ever really do get such a contact that turns out to be not a phish attempt but is really from your bank, its time to switch banks)
If YOU are contacting them (either by entering the website address that YOU know to be the correct one to access their online banking into a secure web browser [which primarily disqualifies MSIE], or you are calling the phone banking number printed on the literature you got while visiting the branch), then, yes, you will asked to enter PIN/password/account info.
The key point in the parent post was 'unsoclicited' communication. If YOU didnt specifically initiate the communication (whatever the medium: email, phone, etc), then you should mistrust any requests for such information.
It apparently didn't occur to the morons and businessweek to include say, the address to Vocation Vacations website. Easily found of course (vocationvacations.com) but still, you'd think that in these modern times we live in, something like that would be automatically included.
It will be good for the large monopoly telecom providers who already post huge profits (while at the same time whining about competition and slashing jobs and pay)
It will be bad for 'consumers', small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs with lots of innovative new ideas but no huge buckets of capital.
Telecom customers already pay for high speed access, and web service providers (eg google, etc), already pay for the high bandwidth connections. Why should they have to pay *again* to not be blocked or throttled?
You really think everyone would give the same response for those 4 items?
There is a difference between the product categories you mention, and the OS/software category:
There are two big fast foods, and the vast majority could easily think of 3 or 4 others.
'Burger' seems to be the same as the first.
There are two main competiting soda/pop names, and most people could think of at least one other.
There is no single winner for 'Computer', but I'm sure the average person could think of at least two or three, regardless of which they thought of first.
MS wants people to not even be aware of the existence of anything else, let alone consider it an option. In fact they'd rather people not even be aware of the concept of having an option - they want everyone to just automatically assume Windows is part of any computer they buy (and maybe be dimly aware of the existence of some sort of Apple thing that 'only a few weirdos use')
The reason for this is simple - the other types of products you mentioned, compete fairly on quality, features, taste, etc. For the most part, they are about par. MS has always relied on its monopoly and lock-in - its products, while the *look* snazzy, are, underneath, truly crap. Bloated, insecure, unreliable. If the market were a clean slate, and the huge entrenched MS market didnt exist, very few with any sense would actually *choose* MS products over some of the other choices that exist, given an opportunity to choose solely on the suitability of the product to the task (eg, barring bribery, graft, and other corrupt influence from MS marketing execs)
Actually, they are about companies who are spammers, who Verizon is willingly and knowingly continuing to provide connectivity to. And by 'connectivity', I'm referring to leased lines, server colocation, etc - a little bit more than just an emailbox for something@verizon.net
Wether Verizon's TOS allows them to disconnect customers who are spammers are not I'm not sure, but it probably does. That they choose not to says a lot.
The spam filtering problem wont be solved by filtering or hiding spam - it will only ever be solved by refusing to permit known persistent ongoing spammers connectivity from which to spam with.
1. The keyboards on those things are often tiny - no one with large hands need apply.
2. WHY do they have to have multiple pages? WHY cant all the info be on one 'page', that you simply scroll down, instead of entering one or two items, clicking next, waiting eons for it to load the next page, rinse, lather, repeat. This applies to websites too - if there is no reason not to collect more information on the same page, do it.
3. Often they have an alternative 'online' process, but these are very often so MS-centric that they dont work at all in anything other than the latest version of MSIE.
They arent prohibiting visitors from blocking ads - they are prohibiting their users (the ones who have chosen an 'ad-supported' level of service) from tweaking their pages to prevent the ads from showing at all.
Personally, I have no need for Windows on my desktop. Linux is more stable, doesnt cost anything, lets me do things the way *I* want to, and doesnt force obnoxious licensing schemes and restrictons down my throat. And I dont have to worry about the 'Internet worm/virus/trojan of the wee^H^H^Hday^H^H^Hhour'.
In fact, I've *never* used Windows on any machine that was primarily mine - only occasionally when visiting a relative or friend. I've supported it in a business setting, but thats it. I'm talking all the way back to 3.1 here - when it came out, I looked at it, realized it was slow and sucky, and went back to DOS. When I needed TCP/IP I went to Linux and have never gone back to the evil empire.
telnet *IS* long obsolete, insecure, and it would be a gross security hole to set one up on a server. The only use for the telnet client anymore is to connect to port 25 to debug SMTP or to connect to port 43 to manually query a WHOIS server.
I would suggest that *no* one that knows how to will help you set up a telnetd, for just this reason. And that applies wether they are concerned about the security of *your* box, or the other boxes that whoever hacks you will attack using yours as a base.
In fact, I wouldnt be surprised if the source and binaries for telnetd were removed from every ftp archive, and the linux (and *bsd) kernels adopted some means of detecting a telnetd server starting up and forced it to shut down.
If the full programming specs for the card were released, and the developers didnt have to rely on reverse engineering (which IS incredibly complex), then it would be a different story.
I'm pretty certain that there are fully capable drivers for video cards for which the specs *have* been released.
The debate isnt about wether Nvidia (or anyone else) is allowed to distribute binary standalone modules for linux - the issue is about wether the kernel itself should accept them to be part of the official kernel.
Then you should support keeping drivers open source.
See, a HW vendor will release a driver for their product for whatever the current version of linux is, may update it once or twice, but then once they no longer sell that product, wont bother anymore. Someone still using that hardware, who wants to upgrade to a version of linux newer than those supported by the HW vendor, is screwed. If the HW vendor either releases a driver that can be included in the kernel, or the information necesarry for a kernel developer to write one, (or better yet, designs their HW in such a fashion that a 'standard' driver is compatible), then as the kernel is updated, so can any necesarry changes to those drivers be made.
Any hardware that the drivers for is 'in kernel', it just works. You dont have to find the vendors driver disk or wade through their website trying to find the right version of the right driver for the right version of your HW for the right version of your OS. I think its far better to keep it that way, by not choosing HW that isnt supported by linux. As Linux gains in popularity, the HW vendors will realize that if they want to maintain market share, they need to let linux support their hardware.
The domain name system was never inteded to be a directory of companies. While many companies (and other organizations) have registered domain names which are identical or similar to their name, there isn't (nor should there be) any inherent right for them to have those names. And for the record, company names (and trademarks) arent even necesarrily unique within a country, or even a city. For example, there exist (in the US) both a 'Best Buy' which sells consumer electronics and a 'Best Buy' which sells used cars. Which would you propose has the right to take it from the other if one regstered it first?
The problem is that the domain name system was NEVER intended nor designed to be a 'list of cpmpany names', and legislating it to be that way is just stupid, and trying to do so across international boundries is mind-bogglingly stupid. So how about this - leave the gtld's (.com,.net, etc) alone as 'first come first serve', they were they were originally supposed to be and let each country that has its own ccTLD (.us,.uk, etc) set their own policy. And make sure that private individuals can still register a random name for their private use without fear that some company that they never heard of that happens to use that as their company name can come a few years later and demand it be handed over.
And yes, that might create a situation where clueless end users go to coke.com assuming it is the website of the beverage company and instead find something entirely different - if the domain was first registered by someone other than 'Coca Cola, Inc', then oh well - domain registration was always 'first come, first serve' until huge companies started throwing their money around.
Re:Something similar is already avaliable in the U
on
Is It Time For .tel?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, and when I first heard of it I though "Hey, I could register [mylastname].name, and let all my family have free [theirname.mylastname].name reg within it". Then I read their obnoxious rules that effectively prevented that, that would have instead required each family member to pay individually for each one, and wrote of.name as a complete waste.
1. Domain names are NOT about trademarks. A trademark doesnt (or shouldnt) entitle you to a matching trademark, and lack of a trademark doesnt prohibit you from registering a domain.
2. Your 'by country' resolution of domains is unworkable - it is NOT possible for a DNS server to determine the physical location of a client making a lookup request. There are schemes to GUESS at it, but nothing remotely close to accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps its only literate people that understand the difference of meaning between "there", "they're" and "their" that can understand the problem. Not to mention capitalization and grammar.
The problem is that MS uses their entrenched monopoly position to absolutely PREVENT any other business from existing and ever being able to compete with them. This is a violation of US anti-trust law, and MS HAS been convicted but caught a lucky break with a change of the US executive administration and escaped with basically no meaningful punitive or corrective action.
Yes, by bringing computing to idiots, MS has ensured that most computers use their OS, which only an idiot would use, thus ensuring that the vast majority of the public remains ignorant on the subject. What is good for MS is NOT what is good for the advancement of technology. It should be 'tuff' being a monopoly - its supposed to be illegal.
Personally, I will be glad when MS finally slips into the sidelines - it isn't a matter of hope, it is only a matter of time. As someone who chooses NOT to be an idiot, both as a matter of choosing software that doesnt suck, AND as a matter of principle, I avoid Windows and all other MS software like the plague.
As someone said in a certain movie, "The problem is choice", and MS wants to make sure that that vast majority are only aware of the choice on a subconscious level, if that.
Sounds like a good reason NOT to use MSIE (as if there weren't enough already).
None of the other brands/businesses you mention have a near total monopoly in their respective markets.
Also, if you buy the value meal, you PAY for the drink wether you drink it or not.
Also, if you buy a 'pee cee' at pretty much any retail outlet any of the vast majority of the 'average joe sixpack' 'consumers' would buy one from, you PAY for Windows wether you use it or not. Those same consumers are also only dimly aware of the existence of anything OTHER than Windows if that.
In a healthy, competitive market, the _average_ purchaser is very aware that they have choices, what those choices are, how to make those choices, and perhaps some reasons why they might want to make one choice or another. None of that is currently the case in the "OS for Intel-compatible personal computers" market.
If someone is going to have a monopoly on search, I'd much rather it be Google then MicroSoft. Microsoft has a documented history of abusing the monopolies they already have. Google's history is much more trustworthy.
Neither Firefox/Mozilla nor Google have a controlling monopoly on any related technologies - Microsoft DOES.
Google is not owned by the Mozilla Foundation
MSN Search IS owned by Microsoft.
People who actively choose to use either FireFox or Google (usually) have the knowledge and skills to understand what the concept of 'default' is, and that there is a reasonable chance that it isn't what they want. (Or at the very least, they have an association with someone else that has these qualities)
People who buy 'pee cees' from various retail outlets usually do not know this, and often dont even have a clue that there ARE operating systems other than Windows, or that they have any options to anything other than what comes preset and preinstalled.
Now do you understand the difference?
Some replies have suggested that your bank DOES ask for your PIN/etc when you call in to use phone banking/etc, so I'm going to clarify your statement as follows:
Your bank will never initiate a contact TO you (email OR phone) and ask for your PIN, account number, CC#, etc (and if you ever really do get such a contact that turns out to be not a phish attempt but is really from your bank, its time to switch banks)
If YOU are contacting them (either by entering the website address that YOU know to be the correct one to access their online banking into a secure web browser [which primarily disqualifies MSIE], or you are calling the phone banking number printed on the literature you got while visiting the branch), then, yes, you will asked to enter PIN/password/account info.
The key point in the parent post was 'unsoclicited' communication. If YOU didnt specifically initiate the communication (whatever the medium: email, phone, etc), then you should mistrust any requests for such information.
It apparently didn't occur to the morons and businessweek to include say, the address to Vocation Vacations website. Easily found of course (vocationvacations.com) but still, you'd think that in these modern times we live in, something like that would be automatically included.
It will be good for the large monopoly telecom providers who already post huge profits (while at the same time whining about competition and slashing jobs and pay)
It will be bad for 'consumers', small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs with lots of innovative new ideas but no huge buckets of capital.
Telecom customers already pay for high speed access, and web service providers (eg google, etc), already pay for the high bandwidth connections. Why should they have to pay *again* to not be blocked or throttled?
You really think everyone would give the same response for those 4 items?
There is a difference between the product categories you mention, and the OS/software category:
There are two big fast foods, and the vast majority could easily think of 3 or 4 others.
'Burger' seems to be the same as the first.
There are two main competiting soda/pop names, and most people could think of at least one other.
There is no single winner for 'Computer', but I'm sure the average person could think of at least two or three, regardless of which they thought of first.
MS wants people to not even be aware of the existence of anything else, let alone consider it an option. In fact they'd rather people not even be aware of the concept of having an option - they want everyone to just automatically assume Windows is part of any computer they buy (and maybe be dimly aware of the existence of some sort of Apple thing that 'only a few weirdos use')
The reason for this is simple - the other types of products you mentioned, compete fairly on quality, features, taste, etc. For the most part, they are about par. MS has always relied on its monopoly and lock-in - its products, while the *look* snazzy, are, underneath, truly crap. Bloated, insecure, unreliable. If the market were a clean slate, and the huge entrenched MS market didnt exist, very few with any sense would actually *choose* MS products over some of the other choices that exist, given an opportunity to choose solely on the suitability of the product to the task (eg, barring bribery, graft, and other corrupt influence from MS marketing execs)
Actually, they are about companies who are spammers, who Verizon is willingly and knowingly continuing to provide connectivity to. And by 'connectivity', I'm referring to leased lines, server colocation, etc - a little bit more than just an emailbox for something@verizon.net
Wether Verizon's TOS allows them to disconnect customers who are spammers are not I'm not sure, but it probably does. That they choose not to says a lot.
The spam filtering problem wont be solved by filtering or hiding spam - it will only ever be solved by refusing to permit known persistent ongoing spammers connectivity from which to spam with.
Verizon is a spam sewer itself.
r izon.net
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ve
1. The keyboards on those things are often tiny - no one with large hands need apply.
2. WHY do they have to have multiple pages? WHY cant all the info be on one 'page', that you simply scroll down, instead of entering one or two items, clicking next, waiting eons for it to load the next page, rinse, lather, repeat. This applies to websites too - if there is no reason not to collect more information on the same page, do it.
3. Often they have an alternative 'online' process, but these are very often so MS-centric that they dont work at all in anything other than the latest version of MSIE.
They arent prohibiting visitors from blocking ads - they are prohibiting their users (the ones who have chosen an 'ad-supported' level of service) from tweaking their pages to prevent the ads from showing at all.
Perhaps you missed the 'as root' part.
(And if you go and try that, you are an even greater fool)
Personally, I have no need for Windows on my desktop. Linux is more stable, doesnt cost anything, lets me do things the way *I* want to, and doesnt force obnoxious licensing schemes and restrictons down my throat. And I dont have to worry about the 'Internet worm/virus/trojan of the wee^H^H^Hday^H^H^Hhour'.
In fact, I've *never* used Windows on any machine that was primarily mine - only occasionally when visiting a relative or friend. I've supported it in a business setting, but thats it. I'm talking all the way back to 3.1 here - when it came out, I looked at it, realized it was slow and sucky, and went back to DOS. When I needed TCP/IP I went to Linux and have never gone back to the evil empire.
telnet *IS* long obsolete, insecure, and it would be a gross security hole to set one up on a server. The only use for the telnet client anymore is to connect to port 25 to debug SMTP or to connect to port 43 to manually query a WHOIS server.
I would suggest that *no* one that knows how to will help you set up a telnetd, for just this reason. And that applies wether they are concerned about the security of *your* box, or the other boxes that whoever hacks you will attack using yours as a base.
In fact, I wouldnt be surprised if the source and binaries for telnetd were removed from every ftp archive, and the linux (and *bsd) kernels adopted some means of detecting a telnetd server starting up and forced it to shut down.
If the full programming specs for the card were released, and the developers didnt have to rely on reverse engineering (which IS incredibly complex), then it would be a different story.
I'm pretty certain that there are fully capable drivers for video cards for which the specs *have* been released.
The debate isnt about wether Nvidia (or anyone else) is allowed to distribute binary standalone modules for linux - the issue is about wether the kernel itself should accept them to be part of the official kernel.
There is nothing preventing you from loading binary driver modules.
What is being argued is wether binary-only modules should be included directly in the kernel.
Then you should support keeping drivers open source.
See, a HW vendor will release a driver for their product for whatever the current version of linux is, may update it once or twice, but then once they no longer sell that product, wont bother anymore. Someone still using that hardware, who wants to upgrade to a version of linux newer than those supported by the HW vendor, is screwed. If the HW vendor either releases a driver that can be included in the kernel, or the information necesarry for a kernel developer to write one, (or better yet, designs their HW in such a fashion that a 'standard' driver is compatible), then as the kernel is updated, so can any necesarry changes to those drivers be made.
Any hardware that the drivers for is 'in kernel', it just works. You dont have to find the vendors driver disk or wade through their website trying to find the right version of the right driver for the right version of your HW for the right version of your OS. I think its far better to keep it that way, by not choosing HW that isnt supported by linux. As Linux gains in popularity, the HW vendors will realize that if they want to maintain market share, they need to let linux support their hardware.
The domain name system was never inteded to be a directory of companies. While many companies (and other organizations) have registered domain names which are identical or similar to their name, there isn't (nor should there be) any inherent right for them to have those names. And for the record, company names (and trademarks) arent even necesarrily unique within a country, or even a city. For example, there exist (in the US) both a 'Best Buy' which sells consumer electronics and a 'Best Buy' which sells used cars. Which would you propose has the right to take it from the other if one regstered it first?
.net, etc) alone as 'first come first serve', they were they were originally supposed to be and let each country that has its own ccTLD (.us, .uk, etc) set their own policy. And make sure that private individuals can still register a random name for their private use without fear that some company that they never heard of that happens to use that as their company name can come a few years later and demand it be handed over.
The problem is that the domain name system was NEVER intended nor designed to be a 'list of cpmpany names', and legislating it to be that way is just stupid, and trying to do so across international boundries is mind-bogglingly stupid. So how about this - leave the gtld's (.com,
And yes, that might create a situation where clueless end users go to coke.com assuming it is the website of the beverage company and instead find something entirely different - if the domain was first registered by someone other than 'Coca Cola, Inc', then oh well - domain registration was always 'first come, first serve' until huge companies started throwing their money around.
Yeah, and when I first heard of it I though "Hey, I could register [mylastname].name, and let all my family have free [theirname.mylastname].name reg within it". Then I read their obnoxious rules that effectively prevented that, that would have instead required each family member to pay individually for each one, and wrote of .name as a complete waste.
1. Domain names are NOT about trademarks. A trademark doesnt (or shouldnt) entitle you to a matching trademark, and lack of a trademark doesnt prohibit you from registering a domain.
2. Your 'by country' resolution of domains is unworkable - it is NOT possible for a DNS server to determine the physical location of a client making a lookup request. There are schemes to GUESS at it, but nothing remotely close to accurate.
If this is true I should start seeing those six figures offers I could have gotten for microwave.com in 2001 start coming in soon now.
Those guidelines havent been enforced or followed for quite a while.
http://www.icann.org/faq/#regrules