This attach on us was the best thing to ever happen to bush. It made him look good, it hid his idiocy, it made people afraid to critisize him. If Bin Laden didn't do it he would have to.
Now all he has to do is to time the attack on iraq just right and he is assured of re-election. Nothing like killing arabs to get people to vote for you.
A good hurricane or an earthquake can easily cause 8 billion worth of damage. A draught or a flood can do the same thing. You don't see people calling for restricting freedoms whenever aan hurricane happens do you?
No they are not. Crimes committed by rich people are never serious (by definition). Steal a 30 thousand dollar car and you will get 10 years in prison, steal 4 billion and you won't even the see the inside of one.
When you get a chance read up on some statistics of jailtimes for rich people. As a general rule even if they do get jail time it's much much less then any poor person would get. Even for murder, rape and child molestation.
After the last election fiasco will any democrat stay at home and not vote? It sucks to have the election stolen from you and I bet they will turn out in droves.
In a world where law and order ruled, in a world where the politicians were not bought by Microsoft, in a world where people lived in a democracy Microsoft would have no right to tell computer stores what they could and could not sell. Too bad we don't live in such a world.
Define "emergency". We were attacked by terrorists that's true. About three thousand people died and that's tragic. None of this is enough of an "emergency" to warrant a reduction in freedom. More then three thousand people die every week from smoking, car accidents etc.
" It wasn't arbitrary. It was a major shift between major versions. It was well publicized before hand, and I know, at the time, my IT department was ready for it"
Maybe I would buy this argument if we were talking about the difference between word 6 and 95 but between 95 and 97 it was basically a bug fix upgrade.
I don't know where you get this "major shift" shit from.
"What you probably mean is "SQL Server doesn't have the same defaults as Oracle"
What YOU really mean is that it does not have the same defaults as ony other database including sybase. All databases install with a case sensitive collation as default.
" Oh, yeah, and Netscape never put in their own HTML extensions."
There must a be memo floating around M$ which instructs their employees and astro turfers how to counter arguments because I see this one all the time. Apparently it gives two possible answers when somebody points out something slimy M$ does.
1) They do it too. Simply point out that there is at least one other sleazy company in the world. 2) They would do it if they had the chance.
In this case you have chosen to use answer number one. Do me a favor get a hold of whoever wrote that memo and tell them that it sounds like a whine of a two year old. "Gee mom everybody else does it!".
BTW Opera does not do it, mozilla does not do it, netscape does not do it anymore. Only MS is being sleazy and unethical these days in this regard.
"I rarely see AX on public internet sites"
Liar.
"And the windows forms may not be complete yet,"
Like I said no windows forms no ADO.NET which makes c# useless in anything but windows. Both windows windows forms and ado.net are patented. If the mono guys ever got it working they would get their assess sued off.
" First, it's a corporate entity, not a human entity."
Legally and morally it makes no difference.
" I take it you're of the mindset that believe once you commit a crime, you can never truly repent and make up for"
First of all MS shows no sign of repentence. Bill and Steve and the rest are still liars and still sleazy. Second of all yes those things stay with you. You mean to tell me that you would completely ignore the past acts of a murderer? Of course not.
" You don't really want to compare MS v Communism and OSS v Communism do you?"
Of course I do. Especially when it comes to Russian style of communism. There is no difference between centrally controlled economies and MS. MS is exactly like the former soviet republic and OSS is exactly like capitalistic societies that are decentralized and freedom loving. Democracy = OSS, COmmunism=M$.
"And I'm not saying predatory tactics weren't employed and shouldn't be reprimanded, but again, i don't think the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater"
Lots of people lost jobs because of those practices, many business were ruined, millions of consumers overpaid. Sorry that's the reality.
"It's corporate Darwinism"
I suppose some people have a stronger sense of morals and right and wrong. Apparently just about any act is OK as long as it's done in the name of profit. That is not the case with me. I believe that if the choice is between making more money or acting ethically you should choose act in a moral way. Apparently nobody at MS feels that way.
Well let's not forget that NDS is more mature and works with MANY more products and services. It's also more scalable and more standards compliant. Lastly it's not marketed by an evil corporation.
I submit to you that in a capitalistic society morals, ethics and consumerism is tightly bound together. How you spend your money is more important then how you vote. You should always exercize full moral authority with every penny you spend.
If people were moral and expected corporations to be moral then this would be a better world. If people punished immoral and unethical companies by not giving them money it would be an even better world.
It has everything to do with morals. It's immoral to give MS money they use it increase the amount of evil in the world.
" This is far and away the best large corporate desktop resources location system ever written bar none"
Well I doubt it's as good as NDS but we'll let that one go.
"For Active Directory to work however virtually every server and every desktop needs to be using Windows 2000 / XP. Samba does not support Active Directory and further Samba is a long way away from supporting this"
By the time the corporations upgrade every single one of their desktops to windows 2K linux will be able to connect to a AD server. In fact it can do that now! Check out this or this
"But from a company / OEM perspective it doesn't really matter why this issue it exists;"
True for some people but not others. There are some ethical people in business and surely there must a few business people whith a moral compass. I would even venture to guess that there might be a few business executives who could muster more synapses then a couple of dead files and could see through this situation. But then again with all that's happening in the business world today I may be totally off base.
" Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats have been released by MS"
Not all of it. Some of it relies on OLE so it can not be used on any other OS. Some of it is patented.
"When you roll out Word 97, it by default maintains compatability with Word 95."
I think he meant it the other way. MS arbitrarily changed the word format for a minor upgrade. This forced people to upgrade to 97 when they got files written in 97 and 95 would not open it. By default word did not save documents in RTF or 95 format. He was not talking about backward compatibility.
"OPTIONAL FEATURES YOU MAY CHOOSE TO USE. SQL 92 "
MS SQL server by default uses case insensitive collation which is not SQL 92 compliant. That's just one I bet I can find a few more if I dig around.
" Active X is a standard."
Very funny! Which standard body approved it?
"You can do it if you'd like, it's well documented."
If it was easy it would have been done but it's damned near impossible. Besides who knows what inside is patented.
" your C# code will work on Linux."
Well except that you can't code GUI and Database which makes it just about useless outside of.NET.
"As for HTML that only works in IE, this is a subject we could spend hours on."
You are conveniently overlooking the many "extensions" IE supports. I know you have to do that because (apparently) it's your job to spread MS FUD here but we all have visited sites which are useless in non IE borwsers. From vbscript to activeX controls, to proprietary tags. Embrace and extend.
"God forbid they use an EXPLICITLY ALLOWED vendor specific extension field for EXACTLY the purpose it was built for in the Kerberos specification. It's in the protocol for a reason."
The guys who programmed the protocol never even imagined that somebody would use that field and not document it. Furthermore they never in a thousand years imagined that somebody would protect it as a trade secret. Sometimes people who are good, decent and honest presume everybody is the same they never once considered that evil people would take advantage of them. I bet they are all kicking themselves now for not releasing the original code as GPL. MS took the code and used it to shut out linux and freebsd shame on them.
" How about we worry about what's going on now,"
When you are talking about the character of somebody it's perfectly OK to point out evil acts in their past. Should we ignore the past records of child molesters, murderers and rapist because "they are not doing it now"?.
" OK, so long as we don't get into generalizations."
Nice. You totaly destroyed his argument.
" I guess as a developer, they've only put money into the my pockets (and bank accounts). "
Good for you! During the communist regime in the soviet republic people stood in bread lines but there were always a few who made out like bandits. In a totalitatian govt the masses starve and the party heads drive bentleys. Sure you made money but a bunch of people paid to buy crappy shit that broke, were coerced into buying shit they did not want, were denied competing products, yadda yadda yadda. I'm glad you made out great just recognize that a ton of people got ripped off.
I don't want to single out Peru but in most countries in the world (including the US) corporations can grease the palms to get what they want.
It would not surprise me one bit to find out that a good chunk of this money will end up in the hands of politicians or their friends and families. There are also probably all kinds of back door deals in the works too.
To MS it's a trivial to spend a million or two bribing a third world country. The money goes a long way and they will get it back when the country upgrades.
Until open source advocates start bribing politicians MS will win.
Fist of all it was not really an analogy. I was answering an anology by replying to both parts of the previous post. Please learn to read.
"has helped boost the density of America's forests to about 700 trees-per-acre, versus about 70 in 1900."
And this is a bad thing? The forest density levels are still not where they were "pre white man" and will never get back there. During the settling of north east the land was razed pretty good and thanks to the efforts of the environmentalists (not the loggers mind you) we have replanted a lot of those forests. Of course the nature of the forest has changed. The trees are monocultured and planted in neat and straight rows which adds a un-natural feel to them but at least they are trees and not a parking lot.
As for the wild fires so what? fires have gone on for billions of years and will go on for a billion more. We should let the forests burn it's good for them. Decades of fire surpression has harmed the forests just as bad as clearcutting has. Please go do some research for gods sake. When you are doing your research you may want to consider sources other then Rush Limbaugh of the cato institute or other republican/big business lapdogs. Fires are good. If you are afraid of fires live in the city. If you build a house in the forest then expect your house to burn, your dogs to get attacked by wild animals etc. Take some god damned personal responsibilty for your idiotic decisions.
"Joe Blow's biggest problem in life isn't whether or not the company he works for might be acting like a corporation or not. In fact, like MSFT employees more after your comment,"
Well duh you moron. Did I say MSFT employees didn't have bigger problems? Like I said learn to read you retard. Of course they have bigger problems but that does not negate their complicity in the evil acts done by their bosses. They knowing work for an evil company and are contributing to the bottom line of that company. They are morally culpable. On the other hand I doubt any of them are lining up to give you kisses or money because you like them so much.
"took about 10 seconds to find some numbers to show that what you were saying is fluff "
Ah yes now I know why you are so ignorant. You think 10 seconds of research is enough to understand the complexities of forest ecosystems.
Sorry Just a job does not cut it. Every single person who works for MS is at least partially responsible for everything evil MS does. Just like loggers are responsible for the clearcuts.
Slashdot Mirror
This attach on us was the best thing to ever happen to bush. It made him look good, it hid his idiocy, it made people afraid to critisize him. If Bin Laden didn't do it he would have to.
Now all he has to do is to time the attack on iraq just right and he is assured of re-election. Nothing like killing arabs to get people to vote for you.
A good hurricane or an earthquake can easily cause 8 billion worth of damage. A draught or a flood can do the same thing. You don't see people calling for restricting freedoms whenever aan hurricane happens do you?
"These are not serious crimes?"
No they are not. Crimes committed by rich people are never serious (by definition). Steal a 30 thousand dollar car and you will get 10 years in prison, steal 4 billion and you won't even the see the inside of one.
When you get a chance read up on some statistics of jailtimes for rich people. As a general rule even if they do get jail time it's much much less then any poor person would get. Even for murder, rape and child molestation.
"The dramatic drop in crime in the late 1980s and into the 1990s was largely attributable to the prison building programs of the 1980s"
This is pure bullshit. It was mostly attributable to an aging population and good economic opportunities.
The real question is this.
After the last election fiasco will any democrat stay at home and not vote? It sucks to have the election stolen from you and I bet they will turn out in droves.
What for? They are going to kill hundreds of thousands in iraq. How else do you think they'll win the election.
There is a reason why the war with iraq hasn't started yet, the elections are still too far away.
In a world where law and order ruled, in a world where the politicians were not bought by Microsoft, in a world where people lived in a democracy Microsoft would have no right to tell computer stores what they could and could not sell. Too bad we don't live in such a world.
Let's not forget an attack on iraq conveniently executed just in time for the next election.
Define "emergency". We were attacked by terrorists that's true. About three thousand people died and that's tragic. None of this is enough of an "emergency" to warrant a reduction in freedom. More then three thousand people die every week from smoking, car accidents etc.
Damn you beat me to the link.
"The world (and barely even the U.S.) hasn't been in a state of peace since WW2."
I am trying to think of a 5 year span in the last 30 years or where the US did not bomb shit out some country or another.
" It wasn't arbitrary. It was a major shift between major versions. It was well publicized before hand, and I know, at the time, my IT department was ready for it"
Maybe I would buy this argument if we were talking about the difference between word 6 and 95 but between 95 and 97 it was basically a bug fix upgrade.
I don't know where you get this "major shift" shit from.
"What you probably mean is "SQL Server doesn't have the same defaults as Oracle"
What YOU really mean is that it does not have the same defaults as ony other database including sybase. All databases install with a case sensitive collation as default.
" Oh, yeah, and Netscape never put in their own HTML extensions."
There must a be memo floating around M$ which instructs their employees and astro turfers how to counter arguments because I see this one all the time. Apparently it gives two possible answers when somebody points out something slimy M$ does.
1) They do it too. Simply point out that there is at least one other sleazy company in the world.
2) They would do it if they had the chance.
In this case you have chosen to use answer number one. Do me a favor get a hold of whoever wrote that memo and tell them that it sounds like a whine of a two year old. "Gee mom everybody else does it!".
BTW Opera does not do it, mozilla does not do it, netscape does not do it anymore. Only MS is being sleazy and unethical these days in this regard.
"I rarely see AX on public internet sites"
Liar.
"And the windows forms may not be complete yet,"
Like I said no windows forms no ADO.NET which makes c# useless in anything but windows. Both windows windows forms and ado.net are patented. If the mono guys ever got it working they would get their assess sued off.
" First, it's a corporate entity, not a human entity."
Legally and morally it makes no difference.
" I take it you're of the mindset that believe once you commit a crime, you can never truly repent and make up for"
First of all MS shows no sign of repentence. Bill and Steve and the rest are still liars and still sleazy. Second of all yes those things stay with you. You mean to tell me that you would completely ignore the past acts of a murderer? Of course not.
" You don't really want to compare MS v Communism and OSS v Communism do you?"
Of course I do. Especially when it comes to Russian style of communism. There is no difference between centrally controlled economies and MS. MS is exactly like the former soviet republic and OSS is exactly like capitalistic societies that are decentralized and freedom loving. Democracy = OSS, COmmunism=M$.
"And I'm not saying predatory tactics weren't employed and shouldn't be reprimanded, but again, i don't think the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater"
Lots of people lost jobs because of those practices, many business were ruined, millions of consumers overpaid. Sorry that's the reality.
"It's corporate Darwinism"
I suppose some people have a stronger sense of morals and right and wrong. Apparently just about any act is OK as long as it's done in the name of profit. That is not the case with me. I believe that if the choice is between making more money or acting ethically you should choose act in a moral way. Apparently nobody at MS feels that way.
Well let's not forget that NDS is more mature and works with MANY more products and services. It's also more scalable and more standards compliant. Lastly it's not marketed by an evil corporation.
"Global warming? It's not true, and besides, there's nothing you can do about it."
Actually the rich have so far tried the following arguments in this order.
"Global warming does not exist"
"Global warming might exists but it's not our fault and we can't do anything about it"
and finally when people didn't buy either one they are now increasingly trying this one.
"global warming is good for you"
That last one has also been used for toxic waste, genetic engineering, pesticides etc.
" This has nothing to do with ethics or morals."
I submit to you that in a capitalistic society morals, ethics and consumerism is tightly bound together. How you spend your money is more important then how you vote. You should always exercize full moral authority with every penny you spend.
If people were moral and expected corporations to be moral then this would be a better world. If people punished immoral and unethical companies by not giving them money it would be an even better world.
It has everything to do with morals. It's immoral to give MS money they use it increase the amount of evil in the world.
Choosing Windows because you've been told by some Ballmer wannabe might well be very bad decision too.
No it's better to call them communists and un-american.
The only people who object to M$ are M$ trolls. I have never heard anybody else conplain.
" This is far and away the best large corporate desktop resources location system ever written bar none"
Well I doubt it's as good as NDS but we'll let that one go.
"For Active Directory to work however virtually every server and every desktop needs to be using Windows 2000 / XP. Samba does not support Active Directory and further Samba is a long way away from supporting this"
By the time the corporations upgrade every single one of their desktops to windows 2K linux will be able to connect to a AD server. In fact it can do that now! Check out this or
this
"But from a company / OEM perspective it doesn't really matter why this issue it exists;"
True for some people but not others. There are some ethical people in business and surely there must a few business people whith a moral compass. I would even venture to guess that there might be a few business executives who could muster more synapses then a couple of dead files and could see through this situation. But then again with all that's happening in the business world today I may be totally off base.
What the hell I'll take a swipe at it.
.NET.
" Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats have been released by MS"
Not all of it. Some of it relies on OLE so it can not be used on any other OS. Some of it is patented.
"When you roll out Word 97, it by default maintains compatability with Word 95."
I think he meant it the other way. MS arbitrarily changed the word format for a minor upgrade. This forced people to upgrade to 97 when they got files written in 97 and 95 would not open it. By default word did not save documents in RTF or 95 format. He was not talking about backward compatibility.
"OPTIONAL FEATURES YOU MAY CHOOSE TO USE. SQL 92 "
MS SQL server by default uses case insensitive collation which is not SQL 92 compliant. That's just one I bet I can find a few more if I dig around.
" Active X is a standard."
Very funny! Which standard body approved it?
"You can do it if you'd like, it's well documented."
If it was easy it would have been done but it's damned near impossible. Besides who knows what inside is patented.
" your C# code will work on Linux."
Well except that you can't code GUI and Database which makes it just about useless outside of
"As for HTML that only works in IE, this is a subject we could spend hours on."
You are conveniently overlooking the many "extensions" IE supports. I know you have to do that because (apparently) it's your job to spread MS FUD here but we all have visited sites which are useless in non IE borwsers. From vbscript to activeX controls, to proprietary tags. Embrace and extend.
"God forbid they use an EXPLICITLY ALLOWED vendor specific extension field for EXACTLY the purpose it was built for in the Kerberos specification. It's in the protocol for a reason."
The guys who programmed the protocol never even imagined that somebody would use that field and not document it. Furthermore they never in a thousand years imagined that somebody would protect it as a trade secret. Sometimes people who are good, decent and honest presume everybody is the same they never once considered that evil people would take advantage of them. I bet they are all kicking themselves now for not releasing the original code as GPL. MS took the code and used it to shut out linux and freebsd shame on them.
" How about we worry about what's going on now,"
When you are talking about the character of somebody it's perfectly OK to point out evil acts in their past. Should we ignore the past records of child molesters, murderers and rapist because "they are not doing it now"?.
" OK, so long as we don't get into generalizations."
Nice. You totaly destroyed his argument.
" I guess as a developer, they've only put money into the my pockets (and bank accounts). "
Good for you! During the communist regime in the soviet republic people stood in bread lines but there were always a few who made out like bandits. In a totalitatian govt the masses starve and the party heads drive bentleys. Sure you made money but a bunch of people paid to buy crappy shit that broke, were coerced into buying shit they did not want, were denied competing products, yadda yadda yadda. I'm glad you made out great just recognize that a ton of people got ripped off.
Will it run on palms?
I don't want to single out Peru but in most countries in the world (including the US) corporations can grease the palms to get what they want.
It would not surprise me one bit to find out that a good chunk of this money will end up in the hands of politicians or their friends and families. There are also probably all kinds of back door deals in the works too.
To MS it's a trivial to spend a million or two bribing a third world country. The money goes a long way and they will get it back when the country upgrades.
Until open source advocates start bribing politicians MS will win.
Liberty alliance is more then just sun and there is nothing wrong stopping Microsoft.
Of course they were.
Fist of all it was not really an analogy. I was answering an anology by replying to both parts of the previous post. Please learn to read.
"has helped boost the density of America's forests to about 700 trees-per-acre, versus about 70 in 1900."
And this is a bad thing? The forest density levels are still not where they were "pre white man" and will never get back there. During the settling of north east the land was razed pretty good and thanks to the efforts of the environmentalists (not the loggers mind you) we have replanted a lot of those forests. Of course the nature of the forest has changed. The trees are monocultured and planted in neat and straight rows which adds a un-natural feel to them but at least they are trees and not a parking lot.
As for the wild fires so what? fires have gone on for billions of years and will go on for a billion more. We should let the forests burn it's good for them. Decades of fire surpression has harmed the forests just as bad as clearcutting has. Please go do some research for gods sake. When you are doing your research you may want to consider sources other then Rush Limbaugh of the cato institute or other republican/big business lapdogs. Fires are good. If you are afraid of fires live in the city. If you build a house in the forest then expect your house to burn, your dogs to get attacked by wild animals etc. Take some god damned personal responsibilty for your idiotic decisions.
"Joe Blow's biggest problem in life isn't whether or not the company he works for might be acting like a corporation or not. In fact, like MSFT employees more after your comment,"
Well duh you moron. Did I say MSFT employees didn't have bigger problems? Like I said learn to read you retard. Of course they have bigger problems but that does not negate their complicity in the evil acts done by their bosses. They knowing work for an evil company and are contributing to the bottom line of that company. They are morally culpable. On the other hand I doubt any of them are lining up to give you kisses or money because you like them so much.
"took about 10 seconds to find some numbers to show that what you were saying is fluff "
Ah yes now I know why you are so ignorant. You think 10 seconds of research is enough to understand the complexities of forest ecosystems.
Sorry Just a job does not cut it. Every single person who works for MS is at least partially responsible for everything evil MS does. Just like loggers are responsible for the clearcuts.