...it's funny but also true. If people would ARM themselves with knowledge and caution, there would less trespassing to begin with.
Funny but true. However, a lot of "IT" stuff falls between the cracks. Ongoing security problems aside, take for example, Windows XP >=SP1 and 2000 >= SP3, which grant remote admin rights to MS or its designated representative (or whoever can figure out how to crack or social engineer that same level of access). Those are full admin rights and are not only the ability to mess with programs and configurations, but also to rummage around in data files and their contents.
The maintenance staff (e.g. sysadmins) write it off saying that's a problem for the legal dept and the legal dept dismisses it as "an IT issue". And all the while neither group is addressing the problem, people outside your business have access to your businesses data. It's not just businesses which would have legal issues with a system designed to give third party access to company data, university researchers often collaborate closely with industry and sign very serious non-disclosure agreements assuring explicitly that the contents (and sometimes even the nature) of the research will not be disclosed by outsiders.
Isn't third party access, whether spyware or not, implicitly condoned already? If it weren't then legal departments all over would be making a big deal about remote access. I suppose it's more likely, however, that no one in a position of authority actually reads either the licensing agreement or the functional specifications, assuming either are actually available.
So unlock them in a country that doesn't have the DMCA. No problem.
Except that it's getting harder to find countries to do that in. The US has the DMCA, European countries are signing on to the EUCD, which in some ways is more harmful to both the industry and to consumers. If the DMCA-like agenda is being pursued with any of the same vigor as the US is pushing sw patents, then the conditions of the DMCA are probably being piggybacked onto trade agreements as we speak. That's assuming they're not already in place.
t's simple: Chairman Bill pulls the chain and y'all bark.
Did you have enough Microsofot bashing little troll?
Sorry if my words hurt your feelings or insulted your political movement there. The body of the message, however, was about the frequency and timing of the fluff pieces filling up the press.
I infer then that you have noticed that most magazines and news sites seem to have a quota to churn out a pair of MS articles regardless of relevance or merit. Also how many times a month to we have to see statement-retraction-restatement? The most recent one was the read-once DVD.
Oh, they don't seem to be allowed to discuss current or on going illegal behavior or, worse, discussing security or other technical shortcomings. The EU cases have all but disappear off the radar. Not even the reviews mention a word about DRM, even to state its claimed capabilities. And the most recent security patches/hotfixes covered holes that were known for months, but no advice on interim solutions to harden the machines.
The frequency and timing of the fluff pieces on MS seem to suggest to me that their sole purpose is to keep MS in the headlines and fill up the tech news so that there isn't time to cover other companies or technologies.
I find it interesting that it is "leaked" the same day as Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" 5.10. Is MS trying to subvert its toughest FOSS competitor?
It worked. It made you look. It got on the main page of Slashdot even and Ubuntu's breezy badger didn't. Besides, haven't you noticed that most magazines and news sites have a quota to churn out a pair of MS articles regardless of relevance or merit -- oh, as long as they don't discuss current or on going illegal behavior or, worse, discussing security or other technical shortcomings.
It's simple: Chairman Bill pulls the chain and y'all bark.
Neither is Microsoft, Apples existence proves that (Not to mention Linux, UNIXex etc)
I can see the MS crowd is out in force again and having another go at creating revisionist history. However, contrary to the wishes of the MS crowd, courts in both the US and in Europe have found MS to be a monopoly. Furthermore, courts in both the US and Europe have found MS to have illegally abused that monopoly on many occasions to harm competition. And as long as we still have access to those court records and decisions, piece of history will remain fact.
Stepping back a bit, one almost gets the impression that MS primary business plan has, since its deal with IBM over QDOS^H^H^H^H MS-DOS in the early 80's, been to illegally leverage its monopoly. Any deal MS is trying to make with Real is at best a delaying tactic and at worst just another attempt to buy complicity.
Could come in handy if you're watching the Olympics
And just how do you expect to get access to coverage of the Olympics. The major networks in the US negotiate exclusive deals which cover whole geographic regions. They're not going to give that up willingly or easily. They've got too much riding on not letting you watch via other means to let that happen.
Unusable interfaces aside, as the EUCD starts to take effect it is going to make working with computer-based communications systems much more of a pain than it already is. That and if the problem off software/algorithm/business method patents becomes real in Europe will make it so the only option will be to rearrange what they already have.
I don't think Microsoft is scared about the competition in the Office space, because they haven't started priceslashing Office yet.
It's just not highly publicized anymore. But over the last two or three years, if you're not getting a better than 60% discount when making a deal for MS Office, then you're not trying or should fire your negotiator. Uppsala University got a 90% discount on MS Office to keep them from switching, for example. But there have been many others. The more realistic or likely the defection, the more seriously it will be treated by Redmond. The University of Michigan, for example, will be receiving a personal visit from Chairman Gates around the middle of this month to be the big hammer in the negotiations.
When you have a monopoly, the most important activity is to, above all, maintain that monopoly. If you can, then there will always be time later to regain what you lost during any price cuts. The OpenOffice.org suite and, especially, the OpenDocument format have them in fear - MS' current business model is dependent on income from MS Office and without it, MS itself is likely not profitable in its current structure.
Another way to look at that would be that DRM violates both points of Article 20 of the UN Agreement on Human Rights.
Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
The right to peaceful assemble would be violated if the DRM in anyway starts restricting access to non-DRM'd sites, documents, or e-mails. Nothing can be done or organized without full web and e-mail access these days. Cutting that off is cutting off the right to peaceful assembly.
Compulsory membership in an association would be where the DRM is tied to a specific platform or ideology. You can still (for a short while longer) argue whether or not MS is a political movement or ideology, but you cannot argue that a DRM forcing people to be customers of a specific company is not compulsory membership. Later on down the road if the vendor- or platform- specific DRM is used for voting, then it amounts to a poll tax, too.
The EUCD make these hypothetical problems real legal problems.
All well and good but Hunter Gatherers socioty doesn't scale very well. If we all decided to revert to hunter gatherers then the worlds resources of food would be gone in less than a week.
It would eventually balance out again and reach a state of sustainable dynamic equilibrium between food and people. But however you slice it we can't keep storing extra people in large cities while simultaneously paving over the local farmland. Sure you can import food, if you want to be in such a vulnerable position, but that will only last until their farmland is paved over (or salinated, or washed out to sea, or converted to desert) to the point were all crops are consumed domestically.
It comes to this: you can sell extra food, but you can't eat money.
Sorry, you should read the whole statement, which specifically states that you CAN listen to it on M$, but if you have anything else, you should buy a CD player.
Also consider the fact that since earlier this year a former MS executive, Mikael Jungner, is now in charge of Finnish public radio and television for the whole country (YLE). He was hustled through and appointed with nearly a complete absence of a normal interview process after several highly qualified and experienced candidates were passed over. The SDP has more to say if someone is looking for details.
Jungner came to MS after work in the government as special assistant to a politician forced to step down after a scandal involving over stepping his authority and illegal deals with the Bush junta over the War on Iraq
Why does every review and/or FAQ skip covering the DRM features and how they work? Does the NDA for reviewers prohibit discussion or even mentioning it?
DRM is there in Office 12, MS had been bragging about it. It's more than before and requires ties to MS Passport or MS Server. Why all the secrecy if it's such a good thing?
There are four rights that Microsoft, the RIAA/MPAA, Disney, etc. want you to believe don't apply to electronic resources:
The Doctrine of First Sale - you bought it you can, sell it to some one else.
Fair Use - there is some leeway even for items with restricted distribution, e.g. citing excerpts or sampling
Freedom of Information - the US recently took a step away from this and towards the British secrecy-by-default model
Common Carriage - nondiscriminatory access to any customer willing to pay the standard tariff
If these don't make any sense to you in an electronic context. Think what you can currently do with a paper book or land line telephone. Rules of commerce haven't changed and still apply to electronic resources and services just as they do to physical ones, even if there's a push by MPAA/RIAA/MS/DIsney to propagate a meme to the contrary.
"Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS," the report says.
I hope Trolltech keeps this in mind and backs off on both considering an IPO and hiring MS staff to the board.
Once you go public, the company is burdened with a need to focus on short term advantages at the cost of long term development. Quarterly or monthly balances take precedence over longer term plans unfortunately, even if the longer term plans would net more profit.
Microsoft's business strategy is well-known: Entering an existing market, form an alliance with the 2nd strongest player, gut that players efforts with your own product, and outspend the top player on marketing dollars. That's it.
Though not necessarily 2nd in the market, IBM's OS/2 certainly got that treatment. Rather than making good on the deal to develop MS applications for OS/2 as agreed, MS spent time developing for Win95 (and developing Win95). NDAs for third party developers prevented working on OS/2 if they were going to develop for Win95, which was then still vaporware.
... they've shown themselves to be quite capable of displacing their competition when it matters. I'm not saying that MS will inevitably win, but I *am* saying that while they may be worried about Google's industry presence, I doubt very much that they're not confident in the plan that they're working on to come out on top.
Smaller competitors, with the exception of Intuit which was blocked by the courts, MS has been able to buy out. Larger competitors and those already dominating the market have been displaced by leveraging the desktop monopoly.
Seeing as MSIE is on 100% of MS-Windows machines, all that really has to happen is that a "security" patch, service pack or upgrade sets the default home page for MSIE to MSN. Since few people mess with the default settings, such a maneuver would drop Google off of most people's radars.
I use linux daily and enjoy it, but is it really ready for your standard mom-and-pop windows users anyways?
In a word, yes. If "linux", meaning a linux distro, is pre-installed, then it is just fine for mom-and-pop users who want simply a low-/non-maintenance machine to check e-mail, surf, write letters, listen to music, edit and manage digital photos, and balance the check book. Default
KDE is just as hard to use as MS Windows XP, but it is easier to customize. So if the home desktop machine has "linux" pre-installed, then the answer to your question is "yes".
On and off for five years, I've seen a range of people from grade schoolers to retirees come into the library and use various linux distros without noticing. For a few years now, the distros are set up to detect and mount floppies and flash drives automatically. Unmounting the drives is actually easier than on MS-Windows.
Try it. I recommend Mandriva or Ubuntu for that purpose. Linux distros are there. The only thing lacking is either 1) OEM installations on new machines and/or 2) consumer awareness. And you know the obstacle with those already...
There's also a growing trend here in the states of people moving further away from cities into rural farming areas.
That's as much as zoning problem as it is a problem with national agricultural policy. In some areas, the construction firms (I refuse to call them developers, because that's the opposite of what they do) are able to get near by farm land re-zoned. The farmers can't often form a coalition to fight the lobbyists and end up paying in appropriately high taxes, as if they were the ones doing the real estate speculation themselves. Then when someone gets old enough to retire or one of the kids decides 18-hour days just aren't his thing, they sell and *pow* a standard 80-acre lot becomes 320 particle board McMansions with wall-to-wall shag carpeted saunas on 1/4 acre lots.
I would love to bike to work. I live nine miles from where I work and the commute is essentially a straight shot down a state highway.
I hear you. In the US and some other countries, if you are on a bike, motorcycle or any kind of vehicle smaller than your opponents^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fellow commuters, they seem to take sadistic pleasure in dangerous and threatening maneuvers. Not to mention that it is usually prohibited by law to take bicycles out on the highway.
A safer option would be a separate bike path. (Note, a bike path if possible, not just a bike lane. There are lots of good examples in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden if a study visit is needed.)
Get together with some of the more articulate and polite bicyclists in your area, summarize the benefits based on research, wrap yourselves in a flag;) and then contact you local road or transportation commission. It may take 3 - 5 years to get a bike path parallel to the highway, but it can be done. Anyone with more than a few brain cells can see that we're in for higher prices for petroleum-based fuels.
You'll have to call around to find the best contact people and may have to cultivate contacts on the zoning commission as well.
You'll want to point out the economic value to the region, including "quality of life" which makes the area more desirable. reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and traffic accidents are tangible benefits. Improved fitness of commuters reduces illnesses and increases their productivity both at work and in free time.
Be patient. It may be necessary to build up in many small increments. It's not a fast process, but once the gears are turning, progress will occur.
Running a business is more than a ledger
on
TrollTech to IPO?
·
· Score: 1
Nice ad hominem there. Here's a clarification of the point avoided by it:
I'm saying that by working for Microsoft, the culture there must have rubbed off on them, whether a little or a lot or voluntarily or non-voluntarily. It is well documented that M$ is one of the least ethical companies in the IT sector and has repeatedly been found guilty of illegal business methods which range from illegal tying to false advertising. What I'm saying is that it would be a bad idea for TrollTech to bring in people straight from that environment without a cooling off period at another business, just to see where these people really are. That is especially important when making long term strategic decisions, like the consideration of an IPO, which contains high risk.
Running a business is not just crunching a column of numbers. It's about getting things done and that needs a lot of common goals and values or else the team won't work smoothly (or may not work at all).
Slashdot Mirror
The maintenance staff (e.g. sysadmins) write it off saying that's a problem for the legal dept and the legal dept dismisses it as "an IT issue". And all the while neither group is addressing the problem, people outside your business have access to your businesses data. It's not just businesses which would have legal issues with a system designed to give third party access to company data, university researchers often collaborate closely with industry and sign very serious non-disclosure agreements assuring explicitly that the contents (and sometimes even the nature) of the research will not be disclosed by outsiders.
Isn't third party access, whether spyware or not, implicitly condoned already? If it weren't then legal departments all over would be making a big deal about remote access. I suppose it's more likely, however, that no one in a position of authority actually reads either the licensing agreement or the functional specifications, assuming either are actually available.
I infer then that you have noticed that most magazines and news sites seem to have a quota to churn out a pair of MS articles regardless of relevance or merit. Also how many times a month to we have to see statement-retraction-restatement? The most recent one was the read-once DVD.
Oh, they don't seem to be allowed to discuss current or on going illegal behavior or, worse, discussing security or other technical shortcomings. The EU cases have all but disappear off the radar. Not even the reviews mention a word about DRM, even to state its claimed capabilities. And the most recent security patches/hotfixes covered holes that were known for months, but no advice on interim solutions to harden the machines.
The frequency and timing of the fluff pieces on MS seem to suggest to me that their sole purpose is to keep MS in the headlines and fill up the tech news so that there isn't time to cover other companies or technologies.
Dress like your favorite StarWars/StarTrek character and win chance to get free Vista developer's kit
Free MS-Linux preview CDs to all attendees!
Free MS Office for Linux beta for first 100
Sign up for free MS Linux Developers Kit
That ought to make the question and answer session interesting.
It's simple: Chairman Bill pulls the chain and y'all bark.
Stepping back a bit, one almost gets the impression that MS primary business plan has, since its deal with IBM over QDOS^H^H^H^H MS-DOS in the early 80's, been to illegally leverage its monopoly. Any deal MS is trying to make with Real is at best a delaying tactic and at worst just another attempt to buy complicity.
and the EUCD as well...
Unusable interfaces aside, as the EUCD starts to take effect it is going to make working with computer-based communications systems much more of a pain than it already is. That and if the problem off software/algorithm/business method patents becomes real in Europe will make it so the only option will be to rearrange what they already have.
When you have a monopoly, the most important activity is to, above all, maintain that monopoly. If you can, then there will always be time later to regain what you lost during any price cuts. The OpenOffice.org suite and, especially, the OpenDocument format have them in fear - MS' current business model is dependent on income from MS Office and without it, MS itself is likely not profitable in its current structure.
Compulsory membership in an association would be where the DRM is tied to a specific platform or ideology. You can still (for a short while longer) argue whether or not MS is a political movement or ideology, but you cannot argue that a DRM forcing people to be customers of a specific company is not compulsory membership. Later on down the road if the vendor- or platform- specific DRM is used for voting, then it amounts to a poll tax, too.
The EUCD make these hypothetical problems real legal problems.
It comes to this: you can sell extra food, but you can't eat money.
Jungner came to MS after work in the government as special assistant to a politician forced to step down after a scandal involving over stepping his authority and illegal deals with the Bush junta over the War on Iraq
DRM is there in Office 12, MS had been bragging about it. It's more than before and requires ties to MS Passport or MS Server. Why all the secrecy if it's such a good thing?
- The Doctrine of First Sale - you bought it you can, sell it to some one else.
- Fair Use - there is some leeway even for items with restricted distribution, e.g. citing excerpts or sampling
- Freedom of Information - the US recently took a step away from this and towards the British secrecy-by-default model
- Common Carriage - nondiscriminatory access to any customer willing to pay the standard tariff
If these don't make any sense to you in an electronic context. Think what you can currently do with a paper book or land line telephone. Rules of commerce haven't changed and still apply to electronic resources and services just as they do to physical ones, even if there's a push by MPAA/RIAA/MS/DIsney to propagate a meme to the contrary.The difference, real or perceived, is enough that sites are going out of their way to choose Apache.
Once you go public, the company is burdened with a need to focus on short term advantages at the cost of long term development. Quarterly or monthly balances take precedence over longer term plans unfortunately, even if the longer term plans would net more profit.
Seeing as MSIE is on 100% of MS-Windows machines, all that really has to happen is that a "security" patch, service pack or upgrade sets the default home page for MSIE to MSN. Since few people mess with the default settings, such a maneuver would drop Google off of most people's radars.
On and off for five years, I've seen a range of people from grade schoolers to retirees come into the library and use various linux distros without noticing. For a few years now, the distros are set up to detect and mount floppies and flash drives automatically. Unmounting the drives is actually easier than on MS-Windows.
Try it. I recommend Mandriva or Ubuntu for that purpose. Linux distros are there. The only thing lacking is either 1) OEM installations on new machines and/or 2) consumer awareness. And you know the obstacle with those already ...
A safer option would be a separate bike path. (Note, a bike path if possible, not just a bike lane. There are lots of good examples in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden if a study visit is needed.)
Get together with some of the more articulate and polite bicyclists in your area, summarize the benefits based on research, wrap yourselves in a flag ;) and then contact you local road or transportation commission. It may take 3 - 5 years to get a bike path parallel to the highway, but it can be done. Anyone with more than a few brain cells can see that we're in for higher prices for petroleum-based fuels.
You'll have to call around to find the best contact people and may have to cultivate contacts on the zoning commission as well.
You'll want to point out the economic value to the region, including "quality of life" which makes the area more desirable. reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and traffic accidents are tangible benefits. Improved fitness of commuters reduces illnesses and increases their productivity both at work and in free time.
Be patient. It may be necessary to build up in many small increments. It's not a fast process, but once the gears are turning, progress will occur.
I'm saying that by working for Microsoft, the culture there must have rubbed off on them, whether a little or a lot or voluntarily or non-voluntarily. It is well documented that M$ is one of the least ethical companies in the IT sector and has repeatedly been found guilty of illegal business methods which range from illegal tying to false advertising. What I'm saying is that it would be a bad idea for TrollTech to bring in people straight from that environment without a cooling off period at another business, just to see where these people really are. That is especially important when making long term strategic decisions, like the consideration of an IPO, which contains high risk.
Running a business is not just crunching a column of numbers. It's about getting things done and that needs a lot of common goals and values or else the team won't work smoothly (or may not work at all).