MS looks like it's goal is to catch up with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, which have had this kind of XML support for many years. Other, lesser, suites also have zipped XML files, like AbiWord.
The one thing that these others have in common, that MS Office lacks, is support for the OpenDocument DTD. OpenOffice.org v2 will use OpenDocument as its main format.
Note that many of the articles linked to by the original post express skepticism about how open MS' XML will actually be. Recall that in the last year, and even in the last weeks, MS has sought patents from the USPTO for XML and XML related functions. And is even now pushing to get legislation in Europe to make those same patents valid in the EU. That smacks more of a PR stunt rather than an actual opening up.
Furthermore, since the articles don't mention the current leaders in productivity tools with XML-based formats (i.e. OpenOffice.org or StarOffice), that looks all the more like warmed over press release being passed of onto the public as news. What's next? A press release about MS suddenly supporting PDF export like in OOo or StarOffice?
It's not yours anymore. How hard is that to understand?
Between DRM and third party admin access it's not your system. Yeah, you bought the hardware and exhibit some level of control over the documents, but yours is not the last word on anything that happens on that machine while it's running MS-Windows.
I can't believe anybody is giving a microsecond of thought to what enderlee and his ilk say. Has he said anything in the last five years that proved to be insightful, interesting, or informative?
No, he probably hasn't ever said anything insightful, interesting, or informative. However, he's not an idiot. I've heard him evade interview questions on the fly for the better part of an hour with more skill than most professional politicians. He may be for-sale, scruple-free, without morals, and many other faults related to being ethically challenged, but not an idiot.
He's merely paid by someone, group or company to write whatever it is that he writes. If you have the money, I'd expect you could get him to change his tune this afternoon. And he, perhaps only with help of his financers, gets published prominently. So, it's not interesting what he says, but that he has been hired to say it and hired to say it just now.
It's a really tough line, sure, we have lost maybe 3 customers as a result in 18 months (average spend per customer is $34 per month), out of 20,000. But it is far, far cheaper that the cost of just letting it happen unchecked.
It sounds like a practical method of addressing zombies. Though it addresses the symptoms. Stepping back a bit, the causes go beyond what a single ISP can address.
All the reports say the spam problem is worse "over there", with "over there" being decided by the report writer. Rather than falling for the distraction let's look at the common denominator:
MS still needs constant tinkering, it's not for amateurs or home users. Use OS X, BSD or Linux instead.
MS is like the old style Harleys. You know the ones from decades ago, before the retooling, where you had to have your toolkit with for any serious road trips. Neither is practical for your casual user.
Even recent versions like XP, still aren't ready for the desktop. Though some claim that XP about even with KDE.
For home users that surf, check e-mail, listen to music, watch DVDs and maybe edit a few digital images, there's no need to waste time and money on a system which required esoteric knowledge and constant tinkering. A machine with a pre-installed and pre-configured Linux distro or OS X will save home users AND their ISPs weeks of headache per year. And, unless your time is free, this means substantially less burden.
Even if we pretend the funny money listed on the books is real, MS has no where near enough stockpiled to take on the EU or, for that matter, any individual nation.
As a shareholder you are now aware that the same people and lists that put Enron tinto a "buy" category shortly before all the trouble now list MS as "buy"
It's been about a week or so since the new theme started. Even Enderle's in on the game again. There was a quiet period between the old theme and the new one.
Perhaps it is related to the current marketing blitz or which ever budget is getting Chairman Bill's mug on the cover of every magazine and MS the topic of every third CNet article.
Exactly. If they were to pull out of EU, then it would be completely reasonable to simply stop honoring their copyright (as opposed to jeopardizing national security by crippling their IT infrastructure). No profits for MS, and no harm to the EU.
Would MS then try to use WPA to shutdown Windows machines in the EU?
The whole point of the current anti-trust deal in the EU is similar to the one in the US: Microsoft has been illegally leveraging its monopoly in one market to break into another market / crush competition in another market.
In this case, MS has been trying to use its desktop monopoly to break into multimedia and kickstart a monopoly using the WMV and WMA formats by bundling vector (WMP) on Windows. MS was told to stop that illegal, anti-freemarket activity and ship a version of Windows not locked into WMV or WMA.
That version is called now
XP Home Edition N (MS tried to call it Reduced Media Edition) and it is broken. Of course, Windows Media Player, the vector to spread WMA and WMV, is absent as required by the court. But MS has also removed the rest of the libraries needed for other media players to use Windows. That in itself is contempt.
This is made obvious by the EU's 5% daily sales fine.
The 5% fine is too small. MS has dragged on this case for years, each day hurts competition and the free market. Now MS is dragging on the punishment. The strategy is if it is able to wait long enough the problem goes away on its own.
The other interesting figure is that Linux server sales are up 35.2% That's kick ASS.
IMHO that should have been the headline. The Register's gone increasingly soft on MS since becoming an advertising partner of some sort. A 35.2% increase is more worthy of a headline than 12.3%
However, sales are completely unrelated to install base. Many machines sold with Windows end up running F/OSS sooner or later. We saw that in the late 90's, too. It's still difficult to get OEMs to supply white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. It's still difficult to get the MBAs or MSCEs in charge of ordering to order white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. And often it's fastest delivery to just bite the bullet and pay the MS tax.
So - a large number of MS' sales can be attributed to people who are going to be using the hardware for Linux. In other cases, if the new box gets used for Windows, then the old box gets wiped and then uses Linux from then on, thus an indirect increase in Linux.
The U.S. government is bankrupt. The value of the U.S. dollar is dropping fast because the Bush administration is rapidly borrowing money.
One thing that US citizens don't mention because it goes without saying, and the EU citizens don't ask about because it is a foreign concept is the economic condition of individual US states.
The federal government offloaded enormous debts and budgets onto the individual states years ago. And the states have since then been worst off and more or less bankrupt. Too bad the 'news' won't cover these topics.
So, if you include the catastrophic economic conditions of the individual states in the overall evaluation, then things are truly bad off. Largely, due to direct actions taken by the current administration.
Then you have the question of whether the charitable donations are just that. From the outside, it looks miore like they are trying to use the money to block or outmaneuver competing technologies.
Don't forget that money came from charging 4 to 5 times the market value of the products (most vouchers were never cashed so there was in practice no punishment) and from scams like Microsoft Software Assurance.
If you're stuck on Windows still, then Eudora is probably the best way to go. I'd pay for a Linux version if they had one. Though many others I know also like Thunderbird
Rather, you mean the IPv6 standard requires that IPv6 implementations must have IPSEC, I am guessing. IPv6 with IPSEC is no more secure than IPv4 with IPSEC.
Yes. That's true for the machines, but for the people, IPSEC is something extra that must be added to IPv4. When was the last time PHBs, MBA, or MSCEs did something extra? Or worse, customised basic protocols or services? Even for basic desktop icons, something like 60% of users leave the default icons, etc. (back in '96 during one of the DOJ vs MS trials). That figure is going to approach 100% as you start to deal with basic components of the infrastructue, like IP.
Obviously you seem to have much more experience and knowledge of IPv6. IPSEC is a good thing and it should be used, but it isn't. The way to get people to use IPSEC is through IPv6. This may end up being like the metric system and the world will have IPv6, the US IPv4.
It's got built in equivalent of IPSEC. That alone would go a long way in improving most computing environments.
"Improved routing" refers to, among other things, route aggregation which reduces the size of routing tables
which is helped by the simplified header which reduce router processing loads.
Someone with more networking knowledge can clarify why the IPv6 functions are much better than the IPv4 ones, where they may appear to overlap.
The biggest problem is probably lack of awareness, just like in many other situations.
Few articles actually address real IPv6 benefits and instead pull out strawmen about a purported shortage of IP addresses. That's got to be the least significant and least relevant change between IPv4 and IPv6. Maybe that's all the 'journalists' can get their teeny minds around, or maybe it's mandated spin because certain key advertising accounts *cough*MS*cough* aren't looking to be IPv6 compliant any time soon.
Some of the main advantages of IPv6 over IPv4 are:
quality of service
simplified headers
multicasting
security (that's certainly buzzword compliant, why is it never brought up?)
autoconfiguration
improved routing
authentication
Japan and China are already rolling out IPv6 networks. Since the article specifically points out the U.S., maybe it's time that U.S. businesses start getting technical news from sources other than their MS account representative.
Plus, after years of hotair, RedHat just became credible Windows alternative for internal applications. cheep.
Assuming that the context of your statement is still directory services, on what basis to you make your implied claim that MS-Windows is a credible alternative for internal directory applications?
Its support for LDAP/OpenLDAP and Kerberos leave a lot to be desired compared to other platforms, unless you count third party options. Is there anything that can hold a candle to Novell's Directory Services (NDS) yet? Don't bark about "Active Directory" it has terrible scalibility problems, is not crossplatform and can't really do LDAP. What is left?
Hmm... Circa 1997 80%+ of country MSFT ops ran their webservers on Linux or Solaris. The moment Netcraft published this and they became a laughing stock it was all migrated to IIS within 2 weeks.
More likely they just changed the identification strings sent out by the server. Or else just slapped a proxy in front of the offending servers, like with Hotmail.
Two weeks, without warning, would be an incredibly short time for any large migration let alone major servers. Given that they've been unable to port Hotmail off of BSD and on to their own crufty products for going on a decade, I think that the proxy trick is more likely than real migration.
Only if you are planning on selling ASAP. Otherwise the eyesore is lowering your taxes by lowering the 'value' of the property.
Down the street from my elementary school was an old house that hadn't been painted in decades nor had the yard been maintained. Apparently the old crank who lived there got nailed by a major tax increase weeks after he painted it. When he complained and tried to appeal, the administration claimed that the taxes reflected the improvements.
Re:I'm not a Californian
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
how come polititians and regulators wont change the building codes to allow you to have rooms without natural light?
Because then landlords will rent out rooms without natural light. There is also health and safety issues. With a window, you can theoretically get fresh air or escaping a fire or after an earthquake.
Why can't they be fascist about the butt-ugly McMansions on postag stamp-sized lots?
Why can't they be fascist about the fire code? Fire's part of the ecology there in California, yet you'd think you were in rainy Switzerland from all the wood shingles on the roof and incendiary foliage up against the wall of the house.
Seriously, though humans may have large, biologically expensive brains and the option to use them, mostly they seem driven by the same factors as monkeys and beetles and only use those brains to further their goals.
If you commute and it's not standing room only, then try watching your fellow passengers with the sound turned off. You'll see all kinds of interactions reminicent of other primates, especially when there are two individuals of similar status.
Not since Slate (created to take out Salon) has taken over content in that area. But that's not alone, Chairman Bill's foundation dumps many hundreds of thousands of dollars on NPR each year. Probably those 'donations' have strings attached if places like India, Australia show us anything.
Slashdot Mirror
The one thing that these others have in common, that MS Office lacks, is support for the OpenDocument DTD. OpenOffice.org v2 will use OpenDocument as its main format.
Note that many of the articles linked to by the original post express skepticism about how open MS' XML will actually be. Recall that in the last year, and even in the last weeks, MS has sought patents from the USPTO for XML and XML related functions. And is even now pushing to get legislation in Europe to make those same patents valid in the EU. That smacks more of a PR stunt rather than an actual opening up.
Furthermore, since the articles don't mention the current leaders in productivity tools with XML-based formats (i.e. OpenOffice.org or StarOffice), that looks all the more like warmed over press release being passed of onto the public as news. What's next? A press release about MS suddenly supporting PDF export like in OOo or StarOffice?
Between DRM and third party admin access it's not your system. Yeah, you bought the hardware and exhibit some level of control over the documents, but yours is not the last word on anything that happens on that machine while it's running MS-Windows.
He's merely paid by someone, group or company to write whatever it is that he writes. If you have the money, I'd expect you could get him to change his tune this afternoon. And he, perhaps only with help of his financers, gets published prominently. So, it's not interesting what he says, but that he has been hired to say it and hired to say it just now.
All the reports say the spam problem is worse "over there", with "over there" being decided by the report writer. Rather than falling for the distraction let's look at the common denominator: MS still needs constant tinkering, it's not for amateurs or home users. Use OS X, BSD or Linux instead.
MS is like the old style Harleys. You know the ones from decades ago, before the retooling, where you had to have your toolkit with for any serious road trips. Neither is practical for your casual user.
Even recent versions like XP, still aren't ready for the desktop. Though some claim that XP about even with KDE. For home users that surf, check e-mail, listen to music, watch DVDs and maybe edit a few digital images, there's no need to waste time and money on a system which required esoteric knowledge and constant tinkering. A machine with a pre-installed and pre-configured Linux distro or OS X will save home users AND their ISPs weeks of headache per year. And, unless your time is free, this means substantially less burden.
For businesses you get economy of scale. Plus, zombies are not your only threat. If MS can read your business files and mail so can your competitors.
As a shareholder you are now aware that the same people and lists that put Enron tinto a "buy" category shortly before all the trouble now list MS as "buy"
Perhaps it is related to the current marketing blitz or which ever budget is getting Chairman Bill's mug on the cover of every magazine and MS the topic of every third CNet article.
In this case, MS has been trying to use its desktop monopoly to break into multimedia and kickstart a monopoly using the WMV and WMA formats by bundling vector (WMP) on Windows. MS was told to stop that illegal, anti-freemarket activity and ship a version of Windows not locked into WMV or WMA.
That version is called now XP Home Edition N (MS tried to call it Reduced Media Edition) and it is broken. Of course, Windows Media Player, the vector to spread WMA and WMV, is absent as required by the court. But MS has also removed the rest of the libraries needed for other media players to use Windows. That in itself is contempt.
The 5% fine is too small. MS has dragged on this case for years, each day hurts competition and the free market. Now MS is dragging on the punishment. The strategy is if it is able to wait long enough the problem goes away on its own.However, sales are completely unrelated to install base. Many machines sold with Windows end up running F/OSS sooner or later. We saw that in the late 90's, too. It's still difficult to get OEMs to supply white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. It's still difficult to get the MBAs or MSCEs in charge of ordering to order white boxes with no operating system or ones with BSD or Linux. And often it's fastest delivery to just bite the bullet and pay the MS tax.
So - a large number of MS' sales can be attributed to people who are going to be using the hardware for Linux. In other cases, if the new box gets used for Windows, then the old box gets wiped and then uses Linux from then on, thus an indirect increase in Linux.
The federal government offloaded enormous debts and budgets onto the individual states years ago. And the states have since then been worst off and more or less bankrupt. Too bad the 'news' won't cover these topics.
So, if you include the catastrophic economic conditions of the individual states in the overall evaluation, then things are truly bad off. Largely, due to direct actions taken by the current administration.
Don't forget that money came from charging 4 to 5 times the market value of the products (most vouchers were never cashed so there was in practice no punishment) and from scams like Microsoft Software Assurance.
If you're stuck on Windows still, then Eudora is probably the best way to go. I'd pay for a Linux version if they had one. Though many others I know also like Thunderbird
- Debian or debian based distro pre-installed
- ARM or PPC based
- optional/removable CD or DVD
- optional internal HD
- no FD
- 2 x USB 2 ports
- 2 x PCMCIA (or whatever the new one is called)
- bootable internal compact flash
- screen with similar aspect ratio as PowerBooks
- 8+ hours of battery (could it be done w/ARM?)
- modem (optional ISDN/GSM)
- ethernet
- DVI port (capable of split screens)
- audio out (no speakers)
- aux audio in or mic in (no mic)
Is it currently possible? Maybe. Will any hardware manufacturers go for it? Who knows.Obviously you seem to have much more experience and knowledge of IPv6. IPSEC is a good thing and it should be used, but it isn't. The way to get people to use IPSEC is through IPv6. This may end up being like the metric system and the world will have IPv6, the US IPv4.
It's got built in equivalent of IPSEC. That alone would go a long way in improving most computing environments.
"Improved routing" refers to, among other things, route aggregation which reduces the size of routing tables which is helped by the simplified header which reduce router processing loads.
Someone with more networking knowledge can clarify why the IPv6 functions are much better than the IPv4 ones, where they may appear to overlap.
See my previous post.
Few articles actually address real IPv6 benefits and instead pull out strawmen about a purported shortage of IP addresses. That's got to be the least significant and least relevant change between IPv4 and IPv6. Maybe that's all the 'journalists' can get their teeny minds around, or maybe it's mandated spin because certain key advertising accounts *cough*MS*cough* aren't looking to be IPv6 compliant any time soon.
Some of the main advantages of IPv6 over IPv4 are:
- quality of service
- simplified headers
- multicasting
- security (that's certainly buzzword compliant, why is it never brought up?)
- autoconfiguration
- improved routing
- authentication
Japan and China are already rolling out IPv6 networks. Since the article specifically points out the U.S., maybe it's time that U.S. businesses start getting technical news from sources other than their MS account representative.Its support for LDAP/OpenLDAP and Kerberos leave a lot to be desired compared to other platforms, unless you count third party options. Is there anything that can hold a candle to Novell's Directory Services (NDS) yet? Don't bark about "Active Directory" it has terrible scalibility problems, is not crossplatform and can't really do LDAP. What is left?
Two weeks, without warning, would be an incredibly short time for any large migration let alone major servers. Given that they've been unable to port Hotmail off of BSD and on to their own crufty products for going on a decade, I think that the proxy trick is more likely than real migration.
Down the street from my elementary school was an old house that hadn't been painted in decades nor had the yard been maintained. Apparently the old crank who lived there got nailed by a major tax increase weeks after he painted it. When he complained and tried to appeal, the administration claimed that the taxes reflected the improvements.
Why can't they be fascist about the fire code? Fire's part of the ecology there in California, yet you'd think you were in rainy Switzerland from all the wood shingles on the roof and incendiary foliage up against the wall of the house.
Seriously, though humans may have large, biologically expensive brains and the option to use them, mostly they seem driven by the same factors as monkeys and beetles and only use those brains to further their goals.
If you commute and it's not standing room only, then try watching your fellow passengers with the sound turned off. You'll see all kinds of interactions reminicent of other primates, especially when there are two individuals of similar status.
ICT issues? Not anymore.
Not since Slate (created to take out Salon) has taken over content in that area. But that's not alone, Chairman Bill's foundation dumps many hundreds of thousands of dollars on NPR each year. Probably those 'donations' have strings attached if places like India, Australia show us anything.