But to be honest, this is probably the only way that MS will be able to take on OSS and have a chance to win.
By the late 80's early 90's it had already become a marketing company. Since the anti-trust trials in the mid-90's It's become mostly a lobbying organization. Even back 3 - 4 years ago,
Microsoft's lobbying budget "outstripped Enron's".
So my hat is off to them on that.
Not me. MS has caused enough harm to everybody, not just the IT sector with its anti-competitive practices and bottom of the line products. The sooner they get off the playing field the sooner the rest can get back to using their computers instead of fiddling with malware, defects and incompatibilities.
Why not just focus on the core competency of marketing and lobbying and drop the pretense of making software? Oh, wait. That's being done.
As usual their tricks have backfired. Instead of trying to pull another Stac or Sendo, they should have just made a deal up front with George Foreman rather than trying to "innovate" his technology into their product.
C'mon it should have been obvious to any one. LAN party = food + CPUs. Intel CPUs = heat.
heat + food = grill
Besides, it's not like any of his public health donations address priority issues or even have a proactive lean to them. Nope, it's largely pushing corrective measures that rely on large purchases from his other investments.
C'mon you remember when his media circus when to India. Smoke from kitchen fires is a larger and more concrete problem than expensive AIDS treatments. However, AIDS is a high profile event in the US media plus he gets to push sales of expensive pharmaceuticals.
It's probably just funny money to him anyway. He gets MSFT stock for free and then "donates" enough to neutralize any taxes he might accidently still have.
By getting people used to idea of being tracked when they are young and powerless, you have a better chance of not making them question the tracking when they are adults.
I had always assumed that was one of reasons for both the nature and name of the "Big Brother" so-called reality television shows. It struck me as an obvious attempt to reflag the negative term "Big Brother" and to get teenagers excited about being monitored.
Many kids would have otherwise first encountered the term "Big Brother" in its original, very negative context when reading George Orwell's 1984 in school.
I find man pages very useful in most cases. But what on earth is the point of info pages? Is there anything about them that cannot be done in HTML 2.0 and lynx?
In my rather outdated way of thinking, I consider CDs and downloadable songs to be different from albums. I consider a real album to be an LP or two or four with a cardboard jacket that may or may not fold out. Those were definitely works of art, especially those from the psychadelic era, and you could spend hours looking at them even sober.
... and for good or bad, those works of art are definitely gone.
Look at the printing quality for graphics on the CD inserts, they're not better than a cheap newspaper. And when was the last time (or the first for that matter) you saw a fold out or a hologram or other amusement on a CD insert? Some of them don't even provide textual info regarding when and where the recordings were made and who is playing.
What's innovative about that ? It's a browser. People have done browsers
NCSA Mosaic, if you're splitting hairs. It certainly was certainly innovative by nearly any ('cept Chairman Bill's) definition of the term. BTW even the infamously poor MSIE is based on Mosaic.
However, Mozilla and Firefox do have a lot of improvements over Mosaic and are innovative in their own right.
There are civil as well as religious uses for this -- e.g. in Maryland, Good Friday and the Monday after Easter are school holidays.
Once upon a time I had a program which knew Easter, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, the start and end of Daylight Savings Time, the phases of the Moon, and could convert all it to the Mayan calendar. One could Easily Manipulate and Add CalendarS. Can't think of the name, though. It will come to me presently.
The algorithms to calculated the holidays (not the Regicon) are publicly available and well documented. There are even ready made modules like Date::Cac to name the first one that comes to mind.
Flight plans in parts of Europe were so cranked down on Sept 10, 2001 that I was convinced that an attack had already happened somewhere in Europe.
If European agencies foresaw the risk of a kamikaze attack using airliners and took extreme counter measures like the ones I witnessed on the 10th, then yes I expect the U.S. to take such measures as well. It's not like none of the countries lack established protocols for such warnings or that sending a message across the Atlantic still takes weeks. It's also Osama's modus operendi to call his shots in advance.
Choosing not to take action is still a decision, ableit a passive one. Decisions in that case permitted the attacks. If you want a less controversial example, then look at the attack in 1983 on the Marine barracks in Beirut. Intel had provided pretty much everything in advance except the shoe size of the driver, yet the administration still chose to let the attack occur, even going as far as providing an obstacle free approach and ordering the gate guards to remove ammo from their weapons.
Is it too early to consider Open Sky as an alternative?
It's not too early for that.
There is also a
Dark Sky alternative. Most inhabitants of urban areas in the U.S. and other areas, though have never actually seen a night sky, especially the younger ones. Limiting the light shining up into the night would allow a view of the stars even in or near urban centers.
With all the talk of being efficient or getting a return on investment, you'd think that at least a few would complain about using good money to light the sky instead of the ground.
FOIA inquires that are won in court shouldn't be returned without the information content redacted. To a very great extent the workings of our government need to become less secretive lest we lose the freedoms we cherish.
The are several ways to censor. One is to deny access to records. Another is to destroy the records so that they cannot be requested.
The Bush junta has recently replaced the head of NARA (National Archives and Records Administration). The new director will be in office at a time when the records from Bush's father are scheduled to be subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and could be opened. Other areas which can be affected are, obviously, the 2000 election scandal, the events (misdeeds) permitting the Sept 11 2001 attack, the controversy about the decision to attack Iraq and, last but not least, irregularities regarding the 2004 election.
The new director will also oversee the Electronic Records Management e-government and the Electronic Records Archives projects. Note that electronic records, unlike paper, go away by default unless timely, correct, and proactive action is planned and taken.
Now there are many different views on those controversial topics, but getting the relevant government records into the light of day is about the only democratic way to resolve those questions.
One is I've known people that used only WordPerfect and had never used MS-Word and never had it on their machines, but still insisted on refering to WordPerfect as "Word"
Another is a few months ago, I demostrated wireless networking / file sharing using two notebook computers to two well-educated, non-tech people who use computers daily. I had them open and edit the same file using both machines. However, I had AppleWorks on one and OpenOffice.org on the other. When it was finished, one bragged to the other about having used "Word" to edit a document using wireless.
Unless there are very specific features that the users are asking for, the name "Word" has fallen into the same category as Kleenex and Xerox. It now refers to something in general and not a specific brand, especially among non-English speakers.
I think the same can be said of "Windows", which for most just means a GUI or Windowing system. Every week I see people ranging in age from grade schoolers to retirees site down at Mandrake and Fedora stations running KDE, without really noticing. Some of the kids say something, but that's usually when they steer away from the remaining MS-Windows machine while commenting that it's not as fast as the other (Linux) machines, despite slightly better hardware.
Since people don't notice or don't care, and OOo actually supports open formats as well as a few closed, legacy ones, MA and others should reject both WordML and MSO and thus save taxpayer time and money.
How many insecurities has Internet Explorer had since it was launched with XP? I lost count.
So, you don't actually know, then? How can you criticise them meaningfully if you don't know?
Well then look it up.
According to Secunia,
MSIE 5.5 has had 55 so far with 10 remaining unpatched.
MSIE 6 has had 76 so far with 20 remaining unpatched, 98% are remote exploits.
SP2 was supposed to fix many things, but it was as as difficult as a major OS upgrade, just ended up breaking many things, not fixing much and not really fixing what it claimed to fix. Granted, it's slightly more than purely a PR move, but not by much. However, it burned up valuable staff time that could have otherwise been used to evaluate competing products. The delay doesn't help MS' claim of prioritizing security much either.
It's common knowledge that MS products just aren't designed with security in mind, but if you want details, then look it up.
I installed Open Office for a staff member of a customer's company. She had been using a computer with Microsoft Word before. She didn't notice that anything had changed.
A similar thing happened to my dad a year or so ago, except he tricked himself. He likes to download and try out software and put OOo on his computer and had been using it along side MS Word for some months. One day he opened a document with revisions, reviewed the revisions and made his own changes, and transferred it back to the author -- all in OOo. He didn't notice until he was finished that it was OOo and not MS-Word. He had intended to use MS-Word, but since then it's been largely neglected and probably won't make it onto the next machine he buys.
It's funny that the group that whines about tools not being identical to MS' current version don't get up in arms when the change applies to MS products. Current versions become the old version and the menus and functions get changed all around anyway.
It's just that Steve Wozniak is probably where he got the idea. He's got a long story about it that is pretty old, if I could find the link to the write up on it.
When did Steve Wozniak do this? The joker I wrote about did this around 1988/1989. Now deceased at a ripe old age so there's no way to find out how long he'd been doing the pad of bills.
I would like to know:
Is Microsoft working with hardware and computer manufacturers to make PC's "unfriendly to Linux"?
In that specific case? Probably not.
In general? It looks like it. The potential is there to ensure that rival software and operating systems will not work on this hardware:
At the BIOS level:
Microsoft has made a deal with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies intended to more closely integrate the basic building blocks of the PC with the Windows operating system.
The deal would allow the operating system to directly control hardware and raises concerns over who controls the software in microcomputers.
At the CPU level:
LaGrande is DRM at the CPU level.
There are similar activities for baking DRM into harddrives and other storage media.
Weather in developing nations: hot or very hot
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 1
Agreed.
I'd certainly pay for a low cost, low power unit with some simple video output. But I certainly want to stay away from the x86 architecture. It was fun while it lasted and is fun for some others now, but it's not on my list anymore. ARM or PPC is the way to go for now.
ARM is low power so it may be easy to make ones where the batteries are charged by solar powered ones or bicycle power / cranking. Maybe an underclocked ARM would tolerate heat as well as save power.
Many developing nations have two kinds of weather: hot and very hot. Some have relative humidities of over 80% months at a time. Others have dust and low humidities below 10%. If he wants world-wide distribution the units better be able to handle upwards of +50 C (+40 C room temp +10 C from the device itself) and extreme high or low humidity and the fungus / corrosion / dust found in those conditions. Current options with extended temperature ranges usually cap out at less than 28 C, but tolerate cold better, so something new is needed.
Linux and opensource in general must be getting on Bill's nerves. He or Ballmer usually hop in front of the camera when anything F/OSS or any other competitor to gets attention in the press.
Chairman Bill would rather be the target of rapt cult-like adoration. But he'll settle for folks laughing at him or Ballmer. Any attention is good and means that people aren't spending time with the competition or with controversial legal issues.
This interview probably means that there's something very interesting happening with the anti-trust trial or software patents in the EU, or with F/OSS there or somewhere else in the world.
Larger list at the Internet Public Library
on
Free Scientific Journals
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Internet Public Library has the largest catalog of peer reviewed journals, they're just currently mixed in with all the others.
The profit, despite plummeting revenue is due to MS gutting its research and development. That means no new products in the pipe, except spin, hype and lobbying.
It's been a long time since MS was an IT company and for the last few years it's even been leaving the marketing sector in favor of international lobbying. I suppose this is just a watershed moment.
MSIE was its chance to get a death grip on the WWW, but MSIE won't last without the desktop monopoly. The desktop monopoly has been eroding quietly for some time, especially in Europe, China, S America and Africa. Now the sound of the erosion is not so quiet as the world discovers that Linux and other F/OSS is easy to install and use.
Yes, MS still sells MS-Windows like no other piece of software has ever sold. However, the mainstay of the desktop monopoly has been control of the OEMs, which supply over 90% of the sales of MS-Windows and about 70% of MS-Office sales. Without those two, there is no revenue to speak of. Get the OEMs and the whole dot-com bubble called Microsoft goes away overnight.
Cutting off R&D is cutting off future revenue. MS is now demonstrating how dire its situation is. It's become redundant as its defective products are replaced around the world with competing ones that actually get the job done for a change.
Chairman Bill looks like he plans to walk over anyone and any country that will allow it. He has already been in effect designating consuls / ambassadors to keep designated countries on the short leash and away from open standards or open source.
I had no reason to doubt him. He was a joker but not a bullshitter. He was a straight forward person, a WWII bomber vet and ran a very stable pizzeria / beer garden for decades since before either was popular in the States. He even gave me a jar of the goo he used for the backing and showed me and my colleagues one of the pads he had made.
Years ago, a retired restaurant owner taking some night classes where I worked explained one of his favorite jokes with US $2 bills: He'd get a stack of new ones from the bank and then attach the stack to cardboard backing like a pad of note paper in the time before stickies/post-its.
When paying for his meal or coffee, he'd make sure he had the attention of the waitress and then make like he was about to forget the tip. The at the last minute, he'd "remember" the tip and in full view of the waitress, reach into his jacket, pull out the pad of bills, rip off the top one (or two) and place the tip on the table. Some would get quite flustered and want "real" money.
You could probably do this with the Scottish 1 £ note or 5 £ note.
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Why not just focus on the core competency of marketing and lobbying and drop the pretense of making software? Oh, wait. That's being done.
As usual their tricks have backfired. Instead of trying to pull another Stac or Sendo, they should have just made a deal up front with George Foreman rather than trying to "innovate" his technology into their product.
C'mon it should have been obvious to any one.
LAN party = food + CPUs.
Intel CPUs = heat.
heat + food = grill
Besides, it's not like any of his public health donations address priority issues or even have a proactive lean to them. Nope, it's largely pushing corrective measures that rely on large purchases from his other investments.
C'mon you remember when his media circus when to India. Smoke from kitchen fires is a larger and more concrete problem than expensive AIDS treatments. However, AIDS is a high profile event in the US media plus he gets to push sales of expensive pharmaceuticals.
It's probably just funny money to him anyway. He gets MSFT stock for free and then "donates" enough to neutralize any taxes he might accidently still have.
Patriot Act wouldn't have helped. And so far it has only harmed.
Many kids would have otherwise first encountered the term "Big Brother" in its original, very negative context when reading George Orwell's 1984 in school.
I find man pages very useful in most cases. But what on earth is the point of info pages? Is there anything about them that cannot be done in HTML 2.0 and lynx?
In my rather outdated way of thinking, I consider CDs and downloadable songs to be different from albums. I consider a real album to be an LP or two or four with a cardboard jacket that may or may not fold out. Those were definitely works of art, especially those from the psychadelic era, and you could spend hours looking at them even sober.
However, Mozilla and Firefox do have a lot of improvements over Mosaic and are innovative in their own right.
The algorithms to calculated the holidays (not the Regicon) are publicly available and well documented. There are even ready made modules like Date::Cac to name the first one that comes to mind.
If European agencies foresaw the risk of a kamikaze attack using airliners and took extreme counter measures like the ones I witnessed on the 10th, then yes I expect the U.S. to take such measures as well. It's not like none of the countries lack established protocols for such warnings or that sending a message across the Atlantic still takes weeks. It's also Osama's modus operendi to call his shots in advance.
Choosing not to take action is still a decision, ableit a passive one. Decisions in that case permitted the attacks. If you want a less controversial example, then look at the attack in 1983 on the Marine barracks in Beirut. Intel had provided pretty much everything in advance except the shoe size of the driver, yet the administration still chose to let the attack occur, even going as far as providing an obstacle free approach and ordering the gate guards to remove ammo from their weapons.
There is also a Dark Sky alternative. Most inhabitants of urban areas in the U.S. and other areas, though have never actually seen a night sky, especially the younger ones. Limiting the light shining up into the night would allow a view of the stars even in or near urban centers.
With all the talk of being efficient or getting a return on investment, you'd think that at least a few would complain about using good money to light the sky instead of the ground.
The Bush junta has recently replaced the head of NARA (National Archives and Records Administration). The new director will be in office at a time when the records from Bush's father are scheduled to be subject to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and could be opened. Other areas which can be affected are, obviously, the 2000 election scandal, the events (misdeeds) permitting the Sept 11 2001 attack, the controversy about the decision to attack Iraq and, last but not least, irregularities regarding the 2004 election.
The new director will also oversee the Electronic Records Management e-government and the Electronic Records Archives projects. Note that electronic records, unlike paper, go away by default unless timely, correct, and proactive action is planned and taken.
Now there are many different views on those controversial topics, but getting the relevant government records into the light of day is about the only democratic way to resolve those questions.
One is I've known people that used only WordPerfect and had never used MS-Word and never had it on their machines, but still insisted on refering to WordPerfect as "Word"
Another is a few months ago, I demostrated wireless networking / file sharing using two notebook computers to two well-educated, non-tech people who use computers daily. I had them open and edit the same file using both machines. However, I had AppleWorks on one and OpenOffice.org on the other. When it was finished, one bragged to the other about having used "Word" to edit a document using wireless.
Unless there are very specific features that the users are asking for, the name "Word" has fallen into the same category as Kleenex and Xerox. It now refers to something in general and not a specific brand, especially among non-English speakers.
I think the same can be said of "Windows", which for most just means a GUI or Windowing system. Every week I see people ranging in age from grade schoolers to retirees site down at Mandrake and Fedora stations running KDE, without really noticing. Some of the kids say something, but that's usually when they steer away from the remaining MS-Windows machine while commenting that it's not as fast as the other (Linux) machines, despite slightly better hardware.
Since people don't notice or don't care, and OOo actually supports open formats as well as a few closed, legacy ones, MA and others should reject both WordML and MSO and thus save taxpayer time and money.
According to Secunia, MSIE 5.5 has had 55 so far with 10 remaining unpatched.
MSIE 6 has had 76 so far with 20 remaining unpatched, 98% are remote exploits.
SP2 was supposed to fix many things, but it was as as difficult as a major OS upgrade, just ended up breaking many things, not fixing much and not really fixing what it claimed to fix. Granted, it's slightly more than purely a PR move, but not by much. However, it burned up valuable staff time that could have otherwise been used to evaluate competing products. The delay doesn't help MS' claim of prioritizing security much either.
It's common knowledge that MS products just aren't designed with security in mind, but if you want details, then look it up.
It's funny that the group that whines about tools not being identical to MS' current version don't get up in arms when the change applies to MS products. Current versions become the old version and the menus and functions get changed all around anyway.
Why? Only he can say for sure, but possible reasons could be:
- distract the public from trying Linux or other Free or Open Source Software, or at least delay them.
- distract the public from real open document standards
- distract policy makers from the fact that WordML is still closed
- distract home users and businesses from OpenOffice.org
- distract everybody from FireFox, Mozilla and Opera.
- distract the public from ongoing Windows security failures
- distract investors from the fact that MS has halved research and development
- distract pundits from Longhorn's list of features getting shorter and release getting later
- distract home users from the Mac mini
- distract investors from the EU anti-trust case
- distract businesses and lawmakers from the VC-1 codec
- distract European businesses from the software patent threat
- ... etc.
You get the picture.In general? It looks like it. The potential is there to ensure that rival software and operating systems will not work on this hardware:
At the BIOS level: Microsoft has made a deal with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies intended to more closely integrate the basic building blocks of the PC with the Windows operating system. The deal would allow the operating system to directly control hardware and raises concerns over who controls the software in microcomputers.At the CPU level: LaGrande is DRM at the CPU level. There are similar activities for baking DRM into harddrives and other storage media.
I'd certainly pay for a low cost, low power unit with some simple video output. But I certainly want to stay away from the x86 architecture. It was fun while it lasted and is fun for some others now, but it's not on my list anymore. ARM or PPC is the way to go for now. ARM is low power so it may be easy to make ones where the batteries are charged by solar powered ones or bicycle power / cranking. Maybe an underclocked ARM would tolerate heat as well as save power.
Many developing nations have two kinds of weather: hot and very hot. Some have relative humidities of over 80% months at a time. Others have dust and low humidities below 10%. If he wants world-wide distribution the units better be able to handle upwards of +50 C (+40 C room temp +10 C from the device itself) and extreme high or low humidity and the fungus / corrosion / dust found in those conditions. Current options with extended temperature ranges usually cap out at less than 28 C, but tolerate cold better, so something new is needed.
Chairman Bill would rather be the target of rapt cult-like adoration. But he'll settle for folks laughing at him or Ballmer. Any attention is good and means that people aren't spending time with the competition or with controversial legal issues.
This interview probably means that there's something very interesting happening with the anti-trust trial or software patents in the EU, or with F/OSS there or somewhere else in the world.
The Internet Public Library has the largest catalog of peer reviewed journals, they're just currently mixed in with all the others.
It's been a long time since MS was an IT company and for the last few years it's even been leaving the marketing sector in favor of international lobbying. I suppose this is just a watershed moment.
MSIE was its chance to get a death grip on the WWW, but MSIE won't last without the desktop monopoly. The desktop monopoly has been eroding quietly for some time, especially in Europe, China, S America and Africa. Now the sound of the erosion is not so quiet as the world discovers that Linux and other F/OSS is easy to install and use.
Yes, MS still sells MS-Windows like no other piece of software has ever sold. However, the mainstay of the desktop monopoly has been control of the OEMs, which supply over 90% of the sales of MS-Windows and about 70% of MS-Office sales. Without those two, there is no revenue to speak of. Get the OEMs and the whole dot-com bubble called Microsoft goes away overnight.
Cutting off R&D is cutting off future revenue. MS is now demonstrating how dire its situation is. It's become redundant as its defective products are replaced around the world with competing ones that actually get the job done for a change.
I had no reason to doubt him. He was a joker but not a bullshitter. He was a straight forward person, a WWII bomber vet and ran a very stable pizzeria / beer garden for decades since before either was popular in the States. He even gave me a jar of the goo he used for the backing and showed me and my colleagues one of the pads he had made.
When paying for his meal or coffee, he'd make sure he had the attention of the waitress and then make like he was about to forget the tip. The at the last minute, he'd "remember" the tip and in full view of the waitress, reach into his jacket, pull out the pad of bills, rip off the top one (or two) and place the tip on the table. Some would get quite flustered and want "real" money.
You could probably do this with the Scottish 1 £ note or 5 £ note.