Who cares if they lost? They lost before and all they got was a slap on the wrist. This court is going to do the same thing. They are utterly immune from any and all pressures from the govt. MS is above the law. If you need proof take a look at the trial. For most people tampering with evidence is a crime for MS executives there is zero punishment for evidence tampering. Same with witness tampering, intimidating witnesses, and of course lying under oath.
BTW if you think smart tags are gone you are really stupid.
Actually the number one reason for serious system crashes is probably IE upgrades, MDAC upgrades or service patches. Not even MS can write stable software for MS how do they expect everybody else to.
"But the fact is, the watchdogs are going to be all over this"
Yea right dream on. The entire justice system can't touch MS but they will be afraid of watchdogs. Where do you get this stuff?
MS has a monopoly and they can do whatever they damned well please. They have 30 billion in cash for chrissake they can buy the entire congress and have change left over to buy the president. Oh I forgot they already bought the president and the attorney general nevermind.
The tactic I describe were not used by Amiga and OS/2 people. Unfortunately those people were also naive, ethical and moral. They actually thought that in the end superior technology and the truth would win. They were wrong. The only way to fight MS is with their own tactics and more. Here is how you fight MS.
1) Name calling. Every time an MS executive lies call them out. Not one person in the open source community has dared to call Scott Mundie or Steve Ballmer habitual liars even though they are. Worse yet they all sat around doing nothing while MS called them communist, un-american and a "cancer". While MS troops were going around yelling "open sores" we just sat around doing nothing. Hit them back with the same verbiage. Call them immoral pigs, habitual liars, and criminals because it's the truth. Why doesn't ERS or RMS have the guts to tell Ballmer "I am not a communist and I resent you calling me that, apologize now or face a libel suit". It's becasause they are gutless. It's time to get brave people.
2) Holding MS employees and shareholders personally responsible for their actions. Every time Ballmer goes on a rampage you must hold every single MS employee personally responsible. They make it possible for these bastards to exist and stay in power. Point out that no matter how insignificant your job or how many shares you have as long as you choose to help an evil empire you are evil too. Make fun of them, deride them in public, refuse to associate with them and let them know you are doing it because you don't want to hang around evil people.
3) Go talk to the press. You will never yell loud enough to counterbalance the MS PR juggernaut but you have to do it anyways. Instead of whining on slashdot you need to make calls to the NY times or Washington Post. If they refuse to print your letters take a lesson from Horowitz and raise a stink about it. Accuse them of censorship and worse. Listen to the republicans and learn from them, they know how to fight nasty.
4) Raise money. No you will never have 30 billion in cash or be able to install your hand picked attorney general in office but you may have enough money to slap a briefcase full in front of one or two housemembers. At least your views will be heard on the floor of the congress. It's not much but it's a start
5) Use your imagination. You are fighting a war against an opponent who is better then you, richer then you, bigger then you, and is better organized then you. The odds are against you but it's not impossible. We were able to defeat the British army by adopting the tactics of the indians and by fighting guerilla style while they were marching in columns. In the same way maybe just maybe we can fight them by thinking of things they can't adopt to.
6) Fuck with their heads. Monkey wrench MS operations and buildings if you can get physical access to them. Break into their servers if you can and plant backdoors. Call in bomb threats. Abandon your car in front of the MS campus but put some fertilizer in the trunk first. Scare the shit out them, and up their paranoia to the level where they become paralyzed with fear. Take a lesson from right to lifers and put pictures of MS employees on the web accusing them of crimes against mankind. Plant stinkbombs and other disruptive materials in the MS campus or MS offices near you. Take a lesson from the scientologists and picket in front of them (take a video camera with you). Disrupt their operations every day and make their employees think twice about working there.
7) Shed all your sense of pity, morality, rightness and wrongness and do whatever else it takes.
Well if you want to deny reality then by all means go ahead. A quick perusing of any thread will bear out the fact that the best way to get moderated up to +5 is to say linux sux, MS rules, or slashdot sucks.
This board once was a great place full of insightful advocates of open source. MS saw this and waged a very succesfull war against slashdot. They did it by flooding the board with anonymous and semianonymous posters with incoherent postings and porn increasing the noise ratio and by organized effort to drown out open source opionions using the moderation system. They were very succesful in that. Eventually most of the early posters left no longer being able to be heard above the noise and sick of being moderated down just for critizing MS.
The fact that MS was able to so effectively destroy slashdot should be a lesson to us all. MS is no slouch when waging astro-turf wars. They have years of experience, tens of thousands of employees who are serously brainwashed every day at headquarters and a leigon of VARs and MVPs and MCSE who get their daily "you are going to die unless you defend MS from all enemies foreign and domestic" mails. MS knows how to generate a seige mentality in their brownshirts and has been doing it effectively for years. If you think that objectivity is lacking in open source advocates go talk to a MS employee. Go ask them their opinions on Open source programmers or RMS I dare you.
MS knows this is a war. We don't. We go on as if this was some sort of a game or sport but MS is out to kill and we are counting coup. In the end we will suffer the same fate the indians did. If you don't fight a war to kill you will be killed.
We lost this battle. Slashdot is dead and by and large only the MS employees hang out here anymore. Chances are the rest of the open source movement will go the same way. It's time to stop whining and start acting forcefully and violently. It's time to fight evil with evil. You can not keep turning the other cheek every time MS slaps you around. Like Machiavelli states we can not be contrained by our sense of morals, war has it's own code and you have shed your perceptions of right and wrong otherwise you will be crushed. The generals in the MS army have no moral or ethical contraints. They lie to the media, lie under oath, cheat, break laws, tamper with evidence, break contracts, steal technologies, excute their enemies and stab their partners in the back. You can not fight these people by tying your hands behind your back with moral or ethical baggage.
If all we can muster against these immoral, well funded, and well connected generals is "irrational venom" then we are doomed.
BTW. I don't think anybody actually believes that you are a "proponent of non-MS operating systems". IF you are then you are one of the most worthless and weak of them. All it takes to dissuade you from reccomending non MS systems is some vauge "associations" with undesirables. Well with friends like you open source needs no enemies. Only an idiot would make a platform choice not on technical merit, cost, or suitability to task but on what other people might think of you if you propose this solution. Why not grow a spine and make the right choice and stick with it. Better yet just shut the hell up and let real men fight this war. We don't need people like you giving everybody a bad name.
Isn't cool that you can do that? That you can unzip mozilla into a directory and doubleclick on it at go? It's so rare these days when an ap does not blast itself all over you hard drive putting god know what in whatever directories it likes.
"The "standards" that Sun wouldn't submit to a standard board because they wanted to retain the right to change things behind the scenes and simultaneously come out with the new Sun version and the new version of the "standard" (which of course meant that Sun was guaranteed to be in the lead...at least hypothetically."
Java is the intellectual property of Sun. MS signed a contract with Sun. MS violated that contract (big surprise there huh?). Sun sued MS. The court ruled in favor of Sun. MS instead of developing a JVM that honored the intellectual property of SUN decided to take their ball and go home.
The sad thing is that the SUN lawyers actually thought they were negotiating with human beings when they signed the contract. They should have known by then they were dealing with pond scum who could never be expected to actually honor any contract.
It's a troll because you actually dared to critizise Microsoft. Anybody who says anything negative about MS gets modded down. You can easily get you karma back up by doing a "sure windows used to suck but I haven't rebooted my W2K box in a year and XP is even better" post. While you are at it also mention that "I love linux but I gotta have my (fill in the blank) app and windows never crashes anymore". These two formulas are guaranteed to get you a +5 from all the MS employees who troll slashdot and mod up pro-MS posts.
IMHO this is actually a defect of debian. There is no reason why a released and relatively bug free version of apache, postgres etc could not be integrated into the stable distribution. The debian philosophy seems to be that once it's "stable" no package can ever change. As brice stated debian forces you into unstable because stable is so old as to be useless. For me I don't see why newer packages could not be integrated.
Not to press any buttons but as much as I love debian I am seriously thinking about FreeBSD for those exact reasons.
Wow did the BBC actually kill someone? Cool can you provide a link to where the BBC actually used a gun to threaten or kill someone that would be an interesting read.
"1. How does a schema copyright limit a competitor?
2. Can't this be circumvented using a clean room approach, much like the clones did with IBM BIOS in the early days?"
DMCA.
"can't blame me for being skeptical in believing Microsoft is going to get away with screwing over all of these corporations without offering a competitive service."
You make a great point. All these ads popups etc are only annoying to the people who are too stupid to do something about it. Like most sheeple on this planet they will use whatever browser came with their computer, set to whatever so called security settings it came with, and of course whatever home page was preset.
We have to start realizing that the sheeple allow us to have free content. We certainly can avoid popups, banner ads, cookies, and whatever else we deem annoying or harmful. If everybody was able to install junkbusters or a re-write proxy or if everybody could download mozilla and install it then the providors would have to think of different ways to raise money.
Let the ads get as annoying as they want to, they don't bother the smart people on the stupid have to look at them.
Don't call it a blackout. Call it a moment of silence. As a protest have everybody who can disconnect whatever machine(s) they are in charge of machine from the network (whatever network that might be) for a couple of minutes. If enough people in charge of routers do this the internet would shut down for a minute or two.
If the entire internet shut down for a minute or two no real harm would come but the message would be sent loud and clear.
If the event was executed correctly and your boss got mad at you you could always point your fingers at everybody else and say "gee boss our systems are working fine but there seems to be a internet wide strike" it's not like your boss would know.
If that fails you can always rely on "just reboot your machine it should work fine afterwards" it's not like they haven't heard that one before.
You seem to be pretty complacent and most americans are. Most americans like yourself thinks that people are starving or slaves in other countries and thinks to themselves "man am I glad I am an american" and do nothing to improve the country. Get out once in a while perhaps take a trip to europe or the far east. You'll see people living pretty much like you. They get up, go to work, come back home and watch TV or hang out with their friends.
America is not as nice as you think it is and the rest of the world is not as awful as you think it is.
One final note. If you were to throw a thousand random innocent black people into the legal system how many of them would come out? How many of them would get the death penalty?
"Homosexual people are NOT second-class citizens in this country."
Where do you get this from? They can be denied jobs they are qualified for. They can be denied housing they can afford. They are not allowed to serve in the military. They are not allowed to get married. Anal sex is illegal in most states.
In what way is that NOT a second class citizen. They don't enjoy all the same rights as heterosexuals do they?
You seem to be confused about our legal system (do you live in America?). First somebody has to press charges, some party has to be wronged enough to take the offending party to court. So far apparently Apple has not effended anybody enough to actually warrant a charge being filed.
Also It is not illegal to actually have a monopoly it's illegal to abuse that monopoly. Even if apple has the monopoly the management at apple are apparently more ethical amd moral people then the management at MS (not surprising given the slimyness of the MS executives).
MS could press charges against apple but I would doubt they would win.
"the judge was illogical."
A panel of judges on the appeals court upheld the judge so I guess he was not illogical. Maybe you are unable to grasp the complexities of our legal system and are reaaching for overly simplistic answers to your own overly simplistic questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares if they lost? They lost before and all they got was a slap on the wrist. This court is going to do the same thing. They are utterly immune from any and all pressures from the govt. MS is above the law. If you need proof take a look at the trial. For most people tampering with evidence is a crime for MS executives there is zero punishment for evidence tampering. Same with witness tampering, intimidating witnesses, and of course lying under oath.
BTW if you think smart tags are gone you are really stupid.
Actually the number one reason for serious system crashes is probably IE upgrades, MDAC upgrades or service patches. Not even MS can write stable software for MS how do they expect everybody else to.
Wow when did mozilla or opera become drivers.
"But the fact is, the watchdogs are going to be all over this"
Yea right dream on. The entire justice system can't touch MS but they will be afraid of watchdogs. Where do you get this stuff?
MS has a monopoly and they can do whatever they damned well please. They have 30 billion in cash for chrissake they can buy the entire congress and have change left over to buy the president. Oh I forgot they already bought the president and the attorney general nevermind.
The tactic I describe were not used by Amiga and OS/2 people. Unfortunately those people were also naive, ethical and moral. They actually thought that in the end superior technology and the truth would win. They were wrong. The only way to fight MS is with their own tactics and more. Here is how you fight MS.
1) Name calling. Every time an MS executive lies call them out. Not one person in the open source community has dared to call Scott Mundie or Steve Ballmer habitual liars even though they are. Worse yet they all sat around doing nothing while MS called them communist, un-american and a "cancer". While MS troops were going around yelling "open sores" we just sat around doing nothing. Hit them back with the same verbiage. Call them immoral pigs, habitual liars, and criminals because it's the truth. Why doesn't ERS or RMS have the guts to tell Ballmer "I am not a communist and I resent you calling me that, apologize now or face a libel suit". It's becasause they are gutless. It's time to get brave people.
2) Holding MS employees and shareholders personally responsible for their actions. Every time Ballmer goes on a rampage you must hold every single MS employee personally responsible. They make it possible for these bastards to exist and stay in power. Point out that no matter how insignificant your job or how many shares you have as long as you choose to help an evil empire you are evil too. Make fun of them, deride them in public, refuse to associate with them and let them know you are doing it because you don't want to hang around evil people.
3) Go talk to the press. You will never yell loud enough to counterbalance the MS PR juggernaut but you have to do it anyways. Instead of whining on slashdot you need to make calls to the NY times or Washington Post. If they refuse to print your letters take a lesson from Horowitz and raise a stink about it. Accuse them of censorship and worse. Listen to the republicans and learn from them, they know how to fight nasty.
4) Raise money. No you will never have 30 billion in cash or be able to install your hand picked attorney general in office but you may have enough money to slap a briefcase full in front of one or two housemembers. At least your views will be heard on the floor of the congress. It's not much but it's a start
5) Use your imagination. You are fighting a war against an opponent who is better then you, richer then you, bigger then you, and is better organized then you. The odds are against you but it's not impossible. We were able to defeat the British army by adopting the tactics of the indians and by fighting guerilla style while they were marching in columns. In the same way maybe just maybe we can fight them by thinking of things they can't adopt to.
6) Fuck with their heads. Monkey wrench MS operations and buildings if you can get physical access to them. Break into their servers if you can and plant backdoors. Call in bomb threats. Abandon your car in front of the MS campus but put some fertilizer in the trunk first. Scare the shit out them, and up their paranoia to the level where they become paralyzed with fear. Take a lesson from right to lifers and put pictures of MS employees on the web accusing them of crimes against mankind. Plant stinkbombs and other disruptive materials in the MS campus or MS offices near you. Take a lesson from the scientologists and picket in front of them (take a video camera with you). Disrupt their operations every day and make their employees think twice about working there.
7) Shed all your sense of pity, morality, rightness and wrongness and do whatever else it takes.
Well if you want to deny reality then by all means go ahead. A quick perusing of any thread will bear out the fact that the best way to get moderated up to +5 is to say linux sux, MS rules, or slashdot sucks.
This board once was a great place full of insightful advocates of open source. MS saw this and waged a very succesfull war against slashdot. They did it by flooding the board with anonymous and semianonymous posters with incoherent postings and porn increasing the noise ratio and by organized effort to drown out open source opionions using the moderation system. They were very succesful in that. Eventually most of the early posters left no longer being able to be heard above the noise and sick of being moderated down just for critizing MS.
The fact that MS was able to so effectively destroy slashdot should be a lesson to us all. MS is no slouch when waging astro-turf wars. They have years of experience, tens of thousands of employees who are serously brainwashed every day at headquarters and a leigon of VARs and MVPs and MCSE who get their daily "you are going to die unless you defend MS from all enemies foreign and domestic" mails. MS knows how to generate a seige mentality in their brownshirts and has been doing it effectively for years. If you think that objectivity is lacking in open source advocates go talk to a MS employee. Go ask them their opinions on Open source programmers or RMS I dare you.
MS knows this is a war. We don't. We go on as if this was some sort of a game or sport but MS is out to kill and we are counting coup. In the end we will suffer the same fate the indians did. If you don't fight a war to kill you will be killed.
We lost this battle. Slashdot is dead and by and large only the MS employees hang out here anymore. Chances are the rest of the open source movement will go the same way. It's time to stop whining and start acting forcefully and violently. It's time to fight evil with evil. You can not keep turning the other cheek every time MS slaps you around. Like Machiavelli states we can not be contrained by our sense of morals, war has it's own code and you have shed your perceptions of right and wrong otherwise you will be crushed. The generals in the MS army have no moral or ethical contraints. They lie to the media, lie under oath, cheat, break laws, tamper with evidence, break contracts, steal technologies, excute their enemies and stab their partners in the back. You can not fight these people by tying your hands behind your back with moral or ethical baggage.
If all we can muster against these immoral, well funded, and well connected generals is "irrational venom" then we are doomed.
BTW. I don't think anybody actually believes that you are a "proponent of non-MS operating systems". IF you are then you are one of the most worthless and weak of them. All it takes to dissuade you from reccomending non MS systems is some vauge "associations" with undesirables. Well with friends like you open source needs no enemies. Only an idiot would make a platform choice not on technical merit, cost, or suitability to task but on what other people might think of you if you propose this solution. Why not grow a spine and make the right choice and stick with it. Better yet just shut the hell up and let real men fight this war. We don't need people like you giving everybody a bad name.
Isn't cool that you can do that? That you can unzip mozilla into a directory and doubleclick on it at go? It's so rare these days when an ap does not blast itself all over you hard drive putting god know what in whatever directories it likes.
Any post praising MS is insighful by definition. This is slashdot where MS employees outnumber open source developers by at least two to one.
"The "standards" that Sun wouldn't submit to a standard board because they wanted to retain the right to change things behind the scenes and simultaneously come out with the new Sun version and the new version of the "standard" (which of course meant that Sun was guaranteed to be in the lead...at least hypothetically."
Java is the intellectual property of Sun. MS signed a contract with Sun. MS violated that contract (big surprise there huh?). Sun sued MS. The court ruled in favor of Sun. MS instead of developing a JVM that honored the intellectual property of SUN decided to take their ball and go home.
The sad thing is that the SUN lawyers actually thought they were negotiating with human beings when they signed the contract. They should have known by then they were dealing with pond scum who could never be expected to actually honor any contract.
It's a troll because you actually dared to critizise Microsoft. Anybody who says anything negative about MS gets modded down. You can easily get you karma back up by doing a "sure windows used to suck but I haven't rebooted my W2K box in a year and XP is even better" post. While you are at it also mention that "I love linux but I gotta have my (fill in the blank) app and windows never crashes anymore". These two formulas are guaranteed to get you a +5 from all the MS employees who troll slashdot and mod up pro-MS posts.
Really try it sometimes it works every time.
16% is 16%. Who cares how much the stock actually costs. It's a pretty good return if you bought the stock a few days ago and sold today.
If I was to bet I'd guess MS. They have a history of sleazy behaviour.
They already did. Go read John Ashcroft's resume and then read his daughters resume.
You can then start crying about how our justice system is bought and sold like so many brussel sprouts.
IMHO this is actually a defect of debian. There is no reason why a released and relatively bug free version of apache, postgres etc could not be integrated into the stable distribution. The debian philosophy seems to be that once it's "stable" no package can ever change. As brice stated debian forces you into unstable because stable is so old as to be useless. For me I don't see why newer packages could not be integrated.
Not to press any buttons but as much as I love debian I am seriously thinking about FreeBSD for those exact reasons.
Wow did the BBC actually kill someone? Cool can you provide a link to where the BBC actually used a gun to threaten or kill someone that would be an interesting read.
BTW both the PBS and the NPR get federal funding.
"1. How does a schema copyright limit a competitor?
2. Can't this be circumvented using a clean room approach, much like the clones did with IBM BIOS in the early days?"
DMCA.
"can't blame me for being skeptical in believing Microsoft is going to get away with screwing over all of these corporations without offering a competitive service."
They have been doing it for years why not now?
You make a great point. All these ads popups etc are only annoying to the people who are too stupid to do something about it. Like most sheeple on this planet they will use whatever browser came with their computer, set to whatever so called security settings it came with, and of course whatever home page was preset.
We have to start realizing that the sheeple allow us to have free content. We certainly can avoid popups, banner ads, cookies, and whatever else we deem annoying or harmful. If everybody was able to install junkbusters or a re-write proxy or if everybody could download mozilla and install it then the providors would have to think of different ways to raise money.
Let the ads get as annoying as they want to, they don't bother the smart people on the stupid have to look at them.
The cato institute is a fund raising arm of the republican party.
The law was challenged in Montana. The lawmakers refused to take it off the books because "it's never enforced anyways".
I just went to the CATO institute search site and there in no mention of either Sklyarov or the DMCA.
The silence is remarkable -- and deafening.
All you republicans should take note of this.
Don't call it a blackout. Call it a moment of silence. As a protest have everybody who can disconnect whatever machine(s) they are in charge of machine from the network (whatever network that might be) for a couple of minutes. If enough people in charge of routers do this the internet would shut down for a minute or two.
If the entire internet shut down for a minute or two no real harm would come but the message would be sent loud and clear.
If the event was executed correctly and your boss got mad at you you could always point your fingers at everybody else and say "gee boss our systems are working fine but there seems to be a internet wide strike" it's not like your boss would know.
If that fails you can always rely on "just reboot your machine it should work fine afterwards" it's not like they haven't heard that one before.
Yea thay said the same thing about Java.
If an MS employee hasn't lied to ten people by lunch he will be fired.
You seem to be pretty complacent and most americans are. Most americans like yourself thinks that people are starving or slaves in other countries and thinks to themselves "man am I glad I am an american" and do nothing to improve the country. Get out once in a while perhaps take a trip to europe or the far east. You'll see people living pretty much like you. They get up, go to work, come back home and watch TV or hang out with their friends.
America is not as nice as you think it is and the rest of the world is not as awful as you think it is.
One final note. If you were to throw a thousand random innocent black people into the legal system how many of them would come out? How many of them would get the death penalty?
Yes that's your country.
"Homosexual people are NOT second-class citizens in this country."
Where do you get this from? They can be denied jobs they are qualified for. They can be denied housing they can afford. They are not allowed to serve in the military. They are not allowed to get married. Anal sex is illegal in most states.
In what way is that NOT a second class citizen. They don't enjoy all the same rights as heterosexuals do they?
You seem to be confused about our legal system (do you live in America?). First somebody has to press charges, some party has to be wronged enough to take the offending party to court. So far apparently Apple has not effended anybody enough to actually warrant a charge being filed.
Also It is not illegal to actually have a monopoly it's illegal to abuse that monopoly. Even if apple has the monopoly the management at apple are apparently more ethical amd moral people then the management at MS (not surprising given the slimyness of the MS executives).
MS could press charges against apple but I would doubt they would win.
"the judge was illogical."
A panel of judges on the appeals court upheld the judge so I guess he was not illogical. Maybe you are unable to grasp the complexities of our legal system and are reaaching for overly simplistic answers to your own overly simplistic questions.