Companies will try to take advantage of you and it's up to you to make sure they don't.
However, I think lawyers who dream up shit like this should still be victims of their own contracts one day. That would be fun, watching a fat arse lawyer slowly lose everything he has because he thought of it first.
People here seem to be taking this so seriously, discussing the ingredients in RedBull and how much further the birdmen in Japan can fly. Is doing silly things for fun an alien concept in geekland?
I will be buying a new iBook 12"/700MHz next week. I will almost defintely be installing YDL on it, but I'll get the ISO's or buy the distro. I have used YDL on my present 333MHz G3 Powerbook and apart from Linux being much faster on older hardware than OSX, YDL has one of the best text based installers that I've ever seen. To be honest they are helped in this by the fact that the hardware options are restricted but having recently installed RedHat on a Dell Laptop I really apreciated the lack of problems installing YDL.
Linux is just fine for what I do, and I can run OpenOffice, Mozilla, the Gimp and do my work in vim with less problems and headaches than I would have running the XDarwin environment in OSX. IN fact I have exactly one complaint in Linux on PPC and that is doing Java. Java is simply terrible without a JIT or HotSpot and there probably will never be one for PPCLinux. That is the reason I have to boot into OSX often. OK, that and EVNova.
The people to whom YDL are aiming their machines are the people who have switched to the Mac from Solaris and Linux and want their X11 chugging along at speed, instead of the relative slowness that it now does. They probably also don't want to have to wait for ports for Mac OSX of their favourite commandline utilities.
I can understand the author's sentiment. It is not hatred of the USA, as most blue eyed Americans think. It is the fact that the USA is acting in an increasingly totalitarian manner and unilateraly towards the rest of the world irrespective of what happens inside the USA. The USA gets bad press, not because of envy as so many think, but because it is so self absorbed at the cost of the rest of the world.
I personally don't want to be ruled by corrupt American politicians. My own corrupt politicians are more than enough thank you.
When did Linus alter the GPL? Can you state the date or offer a link please?
Re:Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 2
You're right. I do think I'm paranoid to a certain extent and I can't present you with examples apart from Hotmail. However the last time I personally clicked a MS EULA was about two years ago(Win98SE on an old home PC). I normally let someone else in the company do it so that I personally am not liable for it.
The Hotmail example is that for some unexplicable reaon spammers suddenly started knowing my first and family name although these were not in my hotmail address, but as the hotmail account was one that I had for many years before MS bought them out, I had my personal info in the profile area (stupidy, and forgot about it for years). It's not an example of conclusive proof but to be honest MS just scares me to death with their EULA's because they are asking me to trust them too much and they have a record of not being exactly trustworthy in their legal dealings.
Further up somone posted a copy of the changes to the EULA. Read the bit about MS sharing your information.
Re:Here is a copy of the changes...
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 2
If you choose to utilize the update features within the OS
Product or OS Components, it is necessary to use certain
computer system, hardware, and software information to
implement the features. By using these features, you
explicitly authorize Microsoft or its designated agent to
access and utilize the necessary information for updating
purposes. Microsoft may use this information solely to
improve our products or to provide customized services or
technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose this
information to others, but not in a form that personally
identifies you.
And you actually want to allow them to do this? If you agree to this it seems as if you are agreeing to them doing what they want on your computer, since they don't define what "improvements", "upgrades" or "services" mean.
Re:Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
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· Score: 2
If you'd have read what I posted above in response to your original post, you'd have seen that I didn't assert that Microsoftwas spamming anyone. I did assert that they sell your Hotmail data to spammers or at least allow certain "partners" access to this data.
Hotmail is of course not business critical. How are we supposed to trust MS that they will not do the same with our business data. They in no way refer to their ability to access private data and how they handle such a responsibility.
Re:Did you see the .NET clause?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 2
This is in the EULA? What on earth are they scared of? The only comparisons are with J2EE and nobody runs J2EE stuff on Windows machines anyway. Is the performance of.Net stuff so bad they they need to hide it?
Re:Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 2
"Having actual experience with the evil empire.."
Now this I can believe.;) Hourly or monthly wage?
Re:Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They might very well be. A case in point: My Hotmail account. Microsoft changed the default settings with respect to privacy without informing me some months ago. The new default settings allowed Microsoft to "share" my information with "business partners" without my consent.
At the very least this means that Microsoft would have been able to sell my personal data to spammers. (Did you ever wonder how so many spammers got that email address of your in your profile above?). We don't do this but assuming that we used a CRM solution that was from a competitor of Navision (has been bought up by Microsoft). Do you seriously belive that Microsoft would never consider using that information or private CRM DB info as a means of getting us to switch or at the very least using the fact that we might be using a competitor's software and sending our info to their CRM department so that Navision would suddenly be sending us spam or reps to sell their stuff to us.
Do you trust Microsoft that far, legally, when Microsoft takes great pains to avoid any liability whatsoever with their EULA's?
Somewhat somplistic, aren't you?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree that most users never read the EULA anyway, which is their fault, but they might just read it if it were understandable. How about saying no to the EULA box and mailing Microsoft for clarification on what exactly the EULA means? Surely this is within one's rights as a customer, or is it against the law in the USA now (unpatriotic?) to ask to understand what the EULA is requiring of you?
I have no "warez" on my machine or MP3's for that matter, and I do use my Windows machine to "make money" but I don't think I want to allow Microsoft access to my computer for other reasons. The reasons include Microsoft changing the OS to a subscription model without my consent, Microsoft having access to company and private information which would constitue a breach of my and my company's privacy (small company, no corporate versions) and Microsoft modifying the OS to exclude me using competitor's software without warning me in advance.
I think this is a case for the EU commission on privacy and legality of contracts here in Europe. I don't know about the USA though (OI assume that obviously such contracts are legal in the USA).
and was the distributor of Bulova watches in South Africa. I remember him showing me one of the Accutron Astronaut watches when Bulova started the campaign with posters of the the guys on the Moon along with a Bulova Accutron. Bulova made a special edition for that campaign with a quartz crystal transparent bottom piece. These watches were the holy grail of my fathers company for me and I really revered them. Sadly all these watches were killed by the digital watches with the funny pulsing red LEDs that turned up in the early 70's.
As someone who doesn't have much of an idea as to why webservices are needed (I've read the articles and looked at some examples) because I often just think that the whole idea of web services is like a minutarised packaged version of the ASP boom and flop a few years ago and that there are definitely other ways to do this. To me it seems as if the programming side is as much a marketing push by IBM,MS and others to generate more business than a real innovation.
To me the idea of webservices seems to be the ability for a client of some kind (could also be a server type of client) to send a stateful request for info to a server of some kind. Since developers have been working around the Browser's lack of state for years and non browser applications can use a myriad of protocols etc to communicate to their server, such as XML-RPC,RMI,CORBA or whatever.
Turning SOAP and UDDI into a universal standard is nice but can anybody tell me why companies trying to sell web services are any different from companies that tried to make a living (and flopped) with the ASP thing a few years back?
Your country also sold more weapon than any other country on the *fucking* planet until recently. Your country also consumes almost a quarter of all the worlds energy and produces more than half of all the CO2 produced. I suppose we should be thankful for that as well?
I am a South African living in Switzerland and even though I've been gone for many years I still love my country of birth for it's diversity of culture and it's survival despite so many problems. On top of this I was born and grew up in the South African version of the corn belt.
My worries and thoughts on reading this:
I find it starnge that US companies and organisations have this view that what other nations think is of no consequence. Here in Switzerland where I live, GM maize and animal hormone feeding are illegal and in the EU GM products have to be clearly marked as such on the product (similar to tobacco) and the EU has had a long runing argument with the USA because the view in the EU (quite correctly IMO) is that the hormones that are pumped into the animals destroy the animals natural growth potential and eventually end up in human bodies. In the USA it seems to be the norm to eat food that is technically processed and yet you Americans are one of the world's most overweight nations. Your government attempts to combat this with laws and even more high technology. Come over to Europe and look at the average weight of people here. You are what you eat!
Moving on to Mexico, a country that has readily adopted GM maize only to discover that the GM maize has taken over from many indigenous species, making some of them extinct. And it is spreading. Does anyone care? Will Mexico be the next recipient of USAID?
Zimbabwe has a government that is under sanctions for the abuse of power and the taking away of land from white farmers that up until now were profitable and producing a large crop surplus. The sanctions are by the US and the EU (amazingly agreeing on one issue for a change). This makes Zimbabwe an easy target for whatever action the west decides to take because it is a regional pariah. Mugabe is an evil bastard IMO, but he isn't stupid. One only has to read one in depth article on what happend in Mexico to know that it isn't something one would wish for one's own country. Being a slave to large food companies, supported by their government, is no joke I would imagine.
As a South African I would also worry that this maize would spread to South Africa and wreak it's havoc there as well. South Africa has enough problems without needing GM crops added to them.
Considering what it costs me to register a domain through verisign and the foul tricks verisign gets up to in order to get you to reregister the domain (spam mails warning about some theoretical domain loss) I can only laugh at this letter. Can you imagine what the prices would be if the 6$ wholesale cap were removed? $250 for personal use and $10000 if you're a business or some other Microsoft kind of price.
Perhaps private citizens of the world should get together to form a monopoly on businesses. Then every time a large corporation wants to speak to me via mail or advertising they can pay for the privilige.
I just got two troll points further odwn for making a wise crack about Apple and the sorry state of it's processors. Note that I'm a mac user. I personally was in the market for a new Mac laptop but was left wondering about the price/performance as compared to PC's which are so venemously put down by Mac users. Apple makes a brilliant OS in OSX but it's hardware is expensive and slow compared to PC's (Go and try a modern PC with XP or Linux to see for yourself. Look at the price tag while you're at it.)
I point out that Apple's iMac has stopped selling well and Macs are sitting in the stores in General at the moment. Apple doesn't acknowledge the fact that it is falling behind in performance and the macintosh fans are extremely reluctant to look at the facts in the face.
It is *NOT* getting better either as far as I can see. Even if Apple does get a break and manage to conjure up 1.8 to 2.0GHz CPU's how is Apple going to tell all those people that have recently bought a Macintosh that not only do they get to pay $129 for the OSX update but they also have machines that are less than half as fast as the newer ones selling at the same price. Wouldn't you be irritated?
If Apple doesn't get something done about the processor performance/speed in the near future they may as well move their next expo to Sioux Falls for all the interest it's going to generate.
There was this book by a scientist/philosopher called Fritjof Capra that I read many years ago that claimed that one cannot be objective as everything is part of some system. This sort of makes some kind of sense in that direction in that the solar system is not isolated from it's galaxy and is part of the "process" in our milky way.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies will try to take advantage of you and it's up to you to make sure they don't.
However, I think lawyers who dream up shit like this should still be victims of their own contracts one day. That would be fun, watching a fat arse lawyer slowly lose everything he has because he thought of it first.
America may have freedom of speech but it doesn't seem like it has freedom of thought.
but the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more.
People here seem to be taking this so seriously, discussing the ingredients in RedBull and how much further the birdmen in Japan can fly. Is doing silly things for fun an alien concept in geekland?
I will be buying a new iBook 12"/700MHz next week. I will almost defintely be installing YDL on it, but I'll get the ISO's or buy the distro. I have used YDL on my present 333MHz G3 Powerbook and apart from Linux being much faster on older hardware than OSX, YDL has one of the best text based installers that I've ever seen. To be honest they are helped in this by the fact that the hardware options are restricted but having recently installed RedHat on a Dell Laptop I really apreciated the lack of problems installing YDL.
Linux is just fine for what I do, and I can run OpenOffice, Mozilla, the Gimp and do my work in vim with less problems and headaches than I would have running the XDarwin environment in OSX. IN fact I have exactly one complaint in Linux on PPC and that is doing Java. Java is simply terrible without a JIT or HotSpot and there probably will never be one for PPCLinux. That is the reason I have to boot into OSX often. OK, that and EVNova.
The people to whom YDL are aiming their machines are the people who have switched to the Mac from Solaris and Linux and want their X11 chugging along at speed, instead of the relative slowness that it now does. They probably also don't want to have to wait for ports for Mac OSX of their favourite commandline utilities.
I can understand the author's sentiment. It is not hatred of the USA, as most blue eyed Americans think. It is the fact that the USA is acting in an increasingly totalitarian manner and unilateraly towards the rest of the world irrespective of what happens inside the USA. The USA gets bad press, not because of envy as so many think, but because it is so self absorbed at the cost of the rest of the world.
I personally don't want to be ruled by corrupt American politicians. My own corrupt politicians are more than enough thank you.
When did Linus alter the GPL? Can you state the date or offer a link please?
You're right. I do think I'm paranoid to a certain extent and I can't present you with examples apart from Hotmail. However the last time I personally clicked a MS EULA was about two years ago(Win98SE on an old home PC). I normally let someone else in the company do it so that I personally am not liable for it.
The Hotmail example is that for some unexplicable reaon spammers suddenly started knowing my first and family name although these were not in my hotmail address, but as the hotmail account was one that I had for many years before MS bought them out, I had my personal info in the profile area (stupidy, and forgot about it for years). It's not an example of conclusive proof but to be honest MS just scares me to death with their EULA's because they are asking me to trust them too much and they have a record of not being exactly trustworthy in their legal dealings.
Further up somone posted a copy of the changes to the EULA. Read the bit about MS sharing your information.
If you choose to utilize the update features within the OS
Product or OS Components, it is necessary to use certain
computer system, hardware, and software information to
implement the features. By using these features, you
explicitly authorize Microsoft or its designated agent to
access and utilize the necessary information for updating
purposes. Microsoft may use this information solely to
improve our products or to provide customized services or
technologies to you. Microsoft may disclose this
information to others, but not in a form that personally
identifies you.
And you actually want to allow them to do this? If you agree to this it seems as if you are agreeing to them doing what they want on your computer, since they don't define what "improvements", "upgrades" or "services" mean.
If you'd have read what I posted above in response to your original post, you'd have seen that I didn't assert that Microsoftwas spamming anyone. I did assert that they sell your Hotmail data to spammers or at least allow certain "partners" access to this data.
Hotmail is of course not business critical. How are we supposed to trust MS that they will not do the same with our business data. They in no way refer to their ability to access private data and how they handle such a responsibility.
This is in the EULA? What on earth are they scared of? The only comparisons are with J2EE and nobody runs J2EE stuff on Windows machines anyway. Is the performance of .Net stuff so bad they they need to hide it?
"Having actual experience with the evil empire.."
;) Hourly or monthly wage?
Now this I can believe.
They might very well be. A case in point: My Hotmail account. Microsoft changed the default settings with respect to privacy without informing me some months ago. The new default settings allowed Microsoft to "share" my information with "business partners" without my consent.
At the very least this means that Microsoft would have been able to sell my personal data to spammers. (Did you ever wonder how so many spammers got that email address of your in your profile above?). We don't do this but assuming that we used a CRM solution that was from a competitor of Navision (has been bought up by Microsoft). Do you seriously belive that Microsoft would never consider using that information or private CRM DB info as a means of getting us to switch or at the very least using the fact that we might be using a competitor's software and sending our info to their CRM department so that Navision would suddenly be sending us spam or reps to sell their stuff to us.
Do you trust Microsoft that far, legally, when Microsoft takes great pains to avoid any liability whatsoever with their EULA's?
I agree that most users never read the EULA anyway, which is their fault, but they might just read it if it were understandable. How about saying no to the EULA box and mailing Microsoft for clarification on what exactly the EULA means? Surely this is within one's rights as a customer, or is it against the law in the USA now (unpatriotic?) to ask to understand what the EULA is requiring of you?
I have no "warez" on my machine or MP3's for that matter, and I do use my Windows machine to "make money" but I don't think I want to allow Microsoft access to my computer for other reasons. The reasons include Microsoft changing the OS to a subscription model without my consent, Microsoft having access to company and private information which would constitue a breach of my and my company's privacy (small company, no corporate versions) and Microsoft modifying the OS to exclude me using competitor's software without warning me in advance.
I think this is a case for the EU commission on privacy and legality of contracts here in Europe. I don't know about the USA though (OI assume that obviously such contracts are legal in the USA).
I think we all knew this at least subconsciously didn't we?
and was the distributor of Bulova watches in South Africa. I remember him showing me one of the Accutron Astronaut watches when Bulova started the campaign with posters of the the guys on the Moon along with a Bulova Accutron. Bulova made a special edition for that campaign with a quartz crystal transparent bottom piece. These watches were the holy grail of my fathers company for me and I really revered them. Sadly all these watches were killed by the digital watches with the funny pulsing red LEDs that turned up in the early 70's.
As someone who doesn't have much of an idea as to why webservices are needed (I've read the articles and looked at some examples) because I often just think that the whole idea of web services is like a minutarised packaged version of the ASP boom and flop a few years ago and that there are definitely other ways to do this. To me it seems as if the programming side is as much a marketing push by IBM,MS and others to generate more business than a real innovation.
To me the idea of webservices seems to be the ability for a client of some kind (could also be a server type of client) to send a stateful request for info to a server of some kind. Since developers have been working around the Browser's lack of state for years and non browser applications can use a myriad of protocols etc to communicate to their server, such as XML-RPC,RMI,CORBA or whatever.
Turning SOAP and UDDI into a universal standard is nice but can anybody tell me why companies trying to sell web services are any different from companies that tried to make a living (and flopped) with the ASP thing a few years back?
Your country also sold more weapon than any other country on the *fucking* planet until recently. Your country also consumes almost a quarter of all the worlds energy and produces more than half of all the CO2 produced. I suppose we should be thankful for that as well?
I am a South African living in Switzerland and even though I've been gone for many years I still love my country of birth for it's diversity of culture and it's survival despite so many problems. On top of this I was born and grew up in the South African version of the corn belt.
My worries and thoughts on reading this:
I find it starnge that US companies and organisations have this view that what other nations think is of no consequence. Here in Switzerland where I live, GM maize and animal hormone feeding are illegal and in the EU GM products have to be clearly marked as such on the product (similar to tobacco) and the EU has had a long runing argument with the USA because the view in the EU (quite correctly IMO) is that the hormones that are pumped into the animals destroy the animals natural growth potential and eventually end up in human bodies. In the USA it seems to be the norm to eat food that is technically processed and yet you Americans are one of the world's most overweight nations. Your government attempts to combat this with laws and even more high technology. Come over to Europe and look at the average weight of people here. You are what you eat!
Moving on to Mexico, a country that has readily adopted GM maize only to discover that the GM maize has taken over from many indigenous species, making some of them extinct. And it is spreading. Does anyone care? Will Mexico be the next recipient of USAID?
Zimbabwe has a government that is under sanctions for the abuse of power and the taking away of land from white farmers that up until now were profitable and producing a large crop surplus. The sanctions are by the US and the EU (amazingly agreeing on one issue for a change). This makes Zimbabwe an easy target for whatever action the west decides to take because it is a regional pariah. Mugabe is an evil bastard IMO, but he isn't stupid. One only has to read one in depth article on what happend in Mexico to know that it isn't something one would wish for one's own country. Being a slave to large food companies, supported by their government, is no joke I would imagine.
As a South African I would also worry that this maize would spread to South Africa and wreak it's havoc there as well. South Africa has enough problems without needing GM crops added to them.
Considering what it costs me to register a domain through verisign and the foul tricks verisign gets up to in order to get you to reregister the domain (spam mails warning about some theoretical domain loss) I can only laugh at this letter. Can you imagine what the prices would be if the 6$ wholesale cap were removed? $250 for personal use and $10000 if you're a business or some other Microsoft kind of price.
Perhaps private citizens of the world should get together to form a monopoly on businesses. Then every time a large corporation wants to speak to me via mail or advertising they can pay for the privilige.
I just got two troll points further odwn for making a wise crack about Apple and the sorry state of it's processors. Note that I'm a mac user. I personally was in the market for a new Mac laptop but was left wondering about the price/performance as compared to PC's which are so venemously put down by Mac users. Apple makes a brilliant OS in OSX but it's hardware is expensive and slow compared to PC's (Go and try a modern PC with XP or Linux to see for yourself. Look at the price tag while you're at it.)
I point out that Apple's iMac has stopped selling well and Macs are sitting in the stores in General at the moment. Apple doesn't acknowledge the fact that it is falling behind in performance and the macintosh fans are extremely reluctant to look at the facts in the face.
It is *NOT* getting better either as far as I can see. Even if Apple does get a break and manage to conjure up 1.8 to 2.0GHz CPU's how is Apple going to tell all those people that have recently bought a Macintosh that not only do they get to pay $129 for the OSX update but they also have machines that are less than half as fast as the newer ones selling at the same price. Wouldn't you be irritated?
If Apple doesn't get something done about the processor performance/speed in the near future they may as well move their next expo to Sioux Falls for all the interest it's going to generate.
Only idiots use words like "edumacated".
There was this book by a scientist/philosopher called Fritjof Capra that I read many years ago that claimed that one cannot be objective as everything is part of some system. This sort of makes some kind of sense in that direction in that the solar system is not isolated from it's galaxy and is part of the "process" in our milky way.