are you going to teach my mom to use ftp.exe... because i sure as hell ain't
No. You are. I won't sharecrop for Chairman Bill. Nor during this holiday season will I do any free work for him either.
The least we could have gotten from the guilty verdict from anti-trust trial + appeal would be the unbundling of MSIE. That way OEMs could install a more useful, less troublesome, more secure tool like Mozilla or Opera. Or if users had to decide on a browser there'd be a higher probability of choosing one based on technical merits.
Actually the main reason was that in order to get the official "works with windows 95" sticker on the package, developers had to also produce a version for NT (aka 2000 aka XP). In addition to providing an escape from the chicken-vs-egg dilema which would otherwise keep NT a dead end platform, this squeezed Apple pretty much out of the loop. Most developers could not maintain three platforms and focus only on the larger two, making them even larger.
These days the pendulum is starting to swing back. It is rather easy to develop cross platform applications for OS X, BSD, Linux and such. The same goes for embedded devices, also running Linux, BSD, QNX, etc.
These days, Internet applications are essential and no longer optional and these platforms are designed from the ground up for Interent use and thus rather secure and robust.
Microsoft's whole business model was to leverage the DOS near monopoly into a Window monopoly. These days it is to hide the fact that it's current product line is not Internet ready and to treat design and production flaws as a PR issue, blaming the user if their machine gets a case of
Phthirus microsoftus pubis
every time it gets plugged into the Internet, checks a tainted web page, or receives a mail.
Harddisk wipe = tactic to block competing software
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Uninstalling is as simple as wiping your main partition and re-installing Windows.
Were it that simple. Third party apps cannot be reinstalled that way, they get removed again and again. Eventually the maintenance staff get tired or run out of time to reinstall them and you're left with the cruft.
I'm dissapointed that the EU anti-trust activities have not yet taken this tactic into account.
File format incompatibility common on any platform
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
- not being able to open that complex word attachment that your coworker mailed you
You get this anyway between different versions of MS Word. Not every department is guaranteed to run the same version of the same word processor, nor are your "coworkers" guaranteed to be in the same department or even the same company or organization. So you're still looking at loss of data, especially metadata, and formatting.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you're all in the same department and running the same version of MS-Word. Wait 3 years and you've likely gone through at least two different versions of MS-Word and your older documents are not in the new file format. So you're still looking at loss of data, especially metadata, and formatting.
This is a long standing PC annonance and is starting to cost. Therefore many government agencies, businesses and institutions are looking at the OASIS format, which being open would reduce the rate at which it becomes obsolete. The Kingdom of Denmark is even taking the issue so seriously that there is consideration of an additional open format.
Personally, I figured out that most of my PC annoyances were really MS annoyances and things have been much simplified by using better products even if they are free (Linux, KDE, OOo, Mozilla) or not free (OS X, Opera).
Good guess based on geography, but history gets in the way.
So, no, few know Russian. Until recently it's been terrible unpopular. Even today people will refer to their homes relative to the coast rather than the Russian border, even if they're only a few km from the border and 200 km from the gulf.
The roads and railways even run mostly north-south to hinder accession in case of another war.
The Finns were able to throw the Russians out twice, but only with great difficulty and at the cost of losing the Kola Penninsula and the region around Lake Ladoga (still have Finnish place names) and Finnmark to the Norwegians. Not only did a lot of people die many went hungry for years, very few families were unaffected -- e.g. children in their early teens forced to drop education or training which would have led to long careers and instead work low wages to support their siblings and remaining adults.
However, some of the older [orthodox] monasteries do have Russian texts in their collections and as part of their studies.
The Brazilian government is up and going, too.
There may be little or no correlationl, but stock took off there, but has been dragging everywhere else. I'd think less of it, but two of the larger European OSS nations, Germany and France, are showing better optimism
than the UK which has been hamstrung by MS on a few occasions in the last 5 years. It's still possible to drop MS and restore the lead in IT that the UK used to enjoy.
The same economic benefits apply to rich nations as well as developing ones. However, I'd expect several orders of magnitude greater benefit.
While I appreciate the work on Gnome, I am more curious about the other parts, especially the ones which might show up later in court. Is there writen or otherwise documented permission in those cases?
Sounds like they've waited too long to be able to support the patent. However, if the object is to cause hassle and financial drain to competitors, then it might work for a while.
Along the same lines, I'd like to have some verification that de Icaza is not setting Ximian or Gnome up to be taken down by submarine patents at some future date. So far I've not heard anything other than vague verbal assurances that it's been taken care of or that some non-distinct vocal noises from Chairman Bill have been interpreted as "A-OK". "Taken care of" can be interpreted in too many ways.
Back to FAT. I think that everyone now recognizes that Enron^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft has entered the final phase of the death spiral and that the accounting discrepancies can no longer be hidden. We'll see even more litigation and cancelled products and services before the end. We'll also see more fines for failed security, false advertising, back taxes and anti-competitive practices. C'mon. For years, the only profit has been from MS-Windows and MS-Office and those have been losing market share.
A product rewrite would take too many years and there is not enough money in the bank to keep the company afloat until the next infusion from the product cycle in 2008 -- even without massive security, fraud and anti-trust fines. But let's say for the sake of argument that a magic version is available at the end of 2005, for an additional %40 increase plus inflation. That's still another 2 years with at least $ 36 000 000 000 in unnecessary costs to industry due to product defects.
It's much cheaper and easier to go with something that's Internet-ready now, especially in the server dept. Even on the corporate or university desktop, where an IT team handles maintenance, Linux, BSD, OS X, and QNX are ready now.
Is there any service that ranks by counting a server only once, no matter how many domain names actually point there...?
This would bias heavily against Apache, Zeus and the other mid- and high-end servers that host multiple sites. IIS needs more hardware to handle a comparable number of sites, this increases further if you expect it to handle a comparable load, even discounting uptime and security.
The moderators really showed their butt by posting such flawed marketing crap.
To make it up, can we please have one 24-hour block without any articles that focus on MS-Windows, MS in general or it's subsidiaries like Slate, MSNBC, MSNPR, etc.?
it is not the work they are destroying (stealing/copying) but just a copy of it.
To a certain extent many are not seeing the forest for the trees. The individual files are replacable. However, it was having the all in one place, organized, with publicity which added to the usefulness of the site. In short, it is the accumulated collection that s valuable.
The Usenet archives at Google are another such collection. Yeah, you could say that there are probably backups spread around on various disks and tapes, but again it is having the posts all in one place that makes it useful. Again, such a valuable collection could be wiped if new owners decided that it's contents are not short term 40% profit or don't toe the corporate party line.
Let's be fair...
Is there any reason to share 1,100 copyrighted files?
Yes. Some files are licensed in such a way that sharing is both legal and encouraged. See the GPL and the BSD licenses for the two most famous examples.
Since the thread is about music, there are similar examples were musicians grant such rights to the public. Recording and sharing music from Grateful Dead concerts is permitted, but not of their published works (CDs, LPs, tapes, etc). Others here can probably throw in more examples -- myself I listen to more live music than canned.
While it's possible that this girl's entire collection consisted of music with such rights, it's not a probability. But that's not enough reason to feed RIAA/MPAA fallacies; File sharing of copyrighted works, even of copyrighted music, is perfectly legal if the license for those works says so.
A more controversial issue is the claim about lost revenue. At the time "illegal" music sharing was at its peak, CD sales were also reaching their peak.
Well, let's see. During the anti-trust trial in the U.S. one of Microsoft's executives testified under oath that Microsoft's code was so full of holes it would be a threat to national security to open it up. Then the company turns around and offers code to China. So was it treason or perjury? I don't see an in-between there. Neither strikes me as ethical or moral.
Ok how about just perjury alone. Forged video evidence was also presented in the anti-trust trial in the U.S.
Ok how about the court's decision, upheld on appeal, that the company used illegal methods to maintain a desktop monopoly?
There are also the false and misleading advertising, against palm, novell, and regarding MS-Passport. MS-Passport cannot be secure even in theory, so any claims were clearly known to be falsehoods. And since MS-Office 2003 is tied into that, expect more legal action.
Then there have been a series of fines regarding patent infringements. The most recent being from SPX.
Where I come from, all that's called lying or stealing.
Well, Ballmer's unloaded already and the company is no longer giving options to the employees. In fact, many others have bailed (see form 3 or 4) as well. Those that still have options find them currently underwater.
If you trust its reporting, you can see that its main two cash cows are sliding and more and more is spent on marketing. I'd speculate that even some of the non-marketing line items include activities that other companies would consider marketing.
Keep in mind that other hype engines, Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, to name a few, also showed nice profits -- until their books got a proper going over. Given that it's a company found guilty of illegal anti-comptetitive activities and during the trial video testimony was forged and several contradictions in executive testimonies leave a suspicion of perjury and there is a history of cooking the books to hide an $18 billion loss, I'd be suspicious of any self-reported figures. But, hey, it's your money.
Even if the oft-cited-but-still-unseen money in the bank is real, it could disappear in security penalties, false advertising fines or anti-trust action. $1 trillion is a lot larger than $50 billion. Or, even if it is real and does not disappear in fines, then it could be used up trying to get vapourware such as.not and leghorn to market by 2006. Three years is too long for businesses to suffer with tools that are not ready for the Internet when most have enterprise level drop-in GNU/Linux, BSD, or Mac OS X replacements which are Internet ready now.
Once national investments and the larger funds have divested, there won't be any pretense to pretend that the company is viable.
Being able to browse old posts in Usenet is very embarassing for Microsoft in regards to security, failed promises, missed deadllines, canned features, and anti-competitive practices. Hiding the Usenet archives which Google acquired from Deja News would remove a convenient source of dirt.
This would fall in line with the security-as-PR campaign. MS has been fighting to prevent further discussion or disclosure of problems in order to prevent all-out panic from end users as it goes over to monthly patching. Since there have been several indications that it wishes to show a short turn around time, the easiest way is to delay the announcement of the bug / hole/ flaw. Since the present is under attack, it would only make sense to revise the past.
Online "communities" have been around since before the comercialization of the Internet in the mid 1990s and even long before the WWW in the early 1990s. It is the interchange of data streams using Usenet, MOOs, IRC (and other chat/IM), BBS, Blogs and forums that form "communities". DRM means being able to prevent individuals or groups from forming.
Or it could just be jealousy. Microsoft's claim of increased security were unfounded in south africa. This is not the first time it has been busted for false advertising, it seems to be a habit.
Everytime I found a form factor I liked with a nice display or whatever, it always have some friggin' blasted camera function or voice recorder. Enough with the added features. ...
How about a solid, reliable phone that just makes really, really, really good, clear calls?
I hear you. I found a relatively simple model, yet it had many "features" I do not use and a few I do not want. The first thing I wanted to do (and still want to do) with my new phone was to hack the menu and delete about two thirds of the items and rearrange the remaing one third.
Central Authentication/Access Control
This is done with OpenLDAP (unix clients), Samba3 (for Windows clients). Enforcing settings has not been integrated yet (but they could be enforced - at least with KDE - via config files which could be distributed via the package management system). Updates should not be pushed via AD IMHO. apt-get, urpmi, yum etc can do this well enough (only thing is setting this up initially is not automatic).
Don't forget Kerberos, it can be used alone or in conjunction with LDAP and others using PAM, and there are many Kerberized tools already available and in wide use. There are many advantages to using Kerberos.
Also, just an addendum about Samba. It outperforms the corresponding Windows alternative.
It looks like they've weighed in on this issue several times. Most recently they've chose after the acquistion to drop versions that run on other platforms. You can look at it from several points of view:
a) cheap marketing gimmick to get free publicity out of Linux,
b) cheap attempt to force VirtualPC users onto Windows,
c) cheap marketing gimmick to distract from bad press on failed security and lawsuits,
d) a company dropping products and services to hide financial difficulties,
Slashdot Mirror
No. You are. I won't sharecrop for Chairman Bill. Nor during this holiday season will I do any free work for him either.
The least we could have gotten from the guilty verdict from anti-trust trial + appeal would be the unbundling of MSIE. That way OEMs could install a more useful, less troublesome, more secure tool like Mozilla or Opera. Or if users had to decide on a browser there'd be a higher probability of choosing one based on technical merits.
It's not like there wasn't a warning ... for the last 10 years.
These days the pendulum is starting to swing back. It is rather easy to develop cross platform applications for OS X, BSD, Linux and such. The same goes for embedded devices, also running Linux, BSD, QNX, etc.
These days, Internet applications are essential and no longer optional and these platforms are designed from the ground up for Interent use and thus rather secure and robust. Microsoft's whole business model was to leverage the DOS near monopoly into a Window monopoly. These days it is to hide the fact that it's current product line is not Internet ready and to treat design and production flaws as a PR issue, blaming the user if their machine gets a case of Phthirus microsoftus pubis every time it gets plugged into the Internet, checks a tainted web page, or receives a mail.
I'm dissapointed that the EU anti-trust activities have not yet taken this tactic into account.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you're all in the same department and running the same version of MS-Word. Wait 3 years and you've likely gone through at least two different versions of MS-Word and your older documents are not in the new file format. So you're still looking at loss of data, especially metadata, and formatting.
This is a long standing PC annonance and is starting to cost. Therefore many government agencies, businesses and institutions are looking at the OASIS format, which being open would reduce the rate at which it becomes obsolete. The Kingdom of Denmark is even taking the issue so seriously that there is consideration of an additional open format.
Personally, I figured out that most of my PC annoyances were really MS annoyances and things have been much simplified by using better products even if they are free (Linux, KDE, OOo, Mozilla) or not free (OS X, Opera).
So, no, few know Russian. Until recently it's been terrible unpopular. Even today people will refer to their homes relative to the coast rather than the Russian border, even if they're only a few km from the border and 200 km from the gulf. The roads and railways even run mostly north-south to hinder accession in case of another war.
The Finns were able to throw the Russians out twice, but only with great difficulty and at the cost of losing the Kola Penninsula and the region around Lake Ladoga (still have Finnish place names) and Finnmark to the Norwegians. Not only did a lot of people die many went hungry for years, very few families were unaffected -- e.g. children in their early teens forced to drop education or training which would have led to long careers and instead work low wages to support their siblings and remaining adults.
However, some of the older [orthodox] monasteries do have Russian texts in their collections and as part of their studies.
The same economic benefits apply to rich nations as well as developing ones. However, I'd expect several orders of magnitude greater benefit.
That implies Macintosh. Tho' most web designers I know also run some flavor of Linux. Now ex-web designers are another matter...
While I appreciate the work on Gnome, I am more curious about the other parts, especially the ones which might show up later in court. Is there writen or otherwise documented permission in those cases?
Along the same lines, I'd like to have some verification that de Icaza is not setting Ximian or Gnome up to be taken down by submarine patents at some future date. So far I've not heard anything other than vague verbal assurances that it's been taken care of or that some non-distinct vocal noises from Chairman Bill have been interpreted as "A-OK". "Taken care of" can be interpreted in too many ways.
Back to FAT. I think that everyone now recognizes that Enron^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoft has entered the final phase of the death spiral and that the accounting discrepancies can no longer be hidden. We'll see even more litigation and cancelled products and services before the end. We'll also see more fines for failed security, false advertising, back taxes and anti-competitive practices. C'mon. For years, the only profit has been from MS-Windows and MS-Office and those have been losing market share.
Or $ 84 100 000 000 USD to be more precise:
A product rewrite would take too many years and there is not enough money in the bank to keep the company afloat until the next infusion from the product cycle in 2008 -- even without massive security, fraud and anti-trust fines. But let's say for the sake of argument that a magic version is available at the end of 2005, for an additional %40 increase plus inflation. That's still another 2 years with at least $ 36 000 000 000 in unnecessary costs to industry due to product defects.
It's much cheaper and easier to go with something that's Internet-ready now, especially in the server dept. Even on the corporate or university desktop, where an IT team handles maintenance, Linux, BSD, OS X, and QNX are ready now.
The moderators really showed their butt by posting such flawed marketing crap.
To make it up, can we please have one 24-hour block without any articles that focus on MS-Windows, MS in general or it's subsidiaries like Slate, MSNBC, MSNPR, etc.?
The Usenet archives at Google are another such collection. Yeah, you could say that there are probably backups spread around on various disks and tapes, but again it is having the posts all in one place that makes it useful. Again, such a valuable collection could be wiped if new owners decided that it's contents are not short term 40% profit or don't toe the corporate party line.
Since the thread is about music, there are similar examples were musicians grant such rights to the public. Recording and sharing music from Grateful Dead concerts is permitted, but not of their published works (CDs, LPs, tapes, etc). Others here can probably throw in more examples -- myself I listen to more live music than canned.
While it's possible that this girl's entire collection consisted of music with such rights, it's not a probability. But that's not enough reason to feed RIAA/MPAA fallacies; File sharing of copyrighted works, even of copyrighted music, is perfectly legal if the license for those works says so.
A more controversial issue is the claim about lost revenue. At the time "illegal" music sharing was at its peak, CD sales were also reaching their peak.
Dunno. Good troll.
Ok how about just perjury alone. Forged video evidence was also presented in the anti-trust trial in the U.S.
Ok how about the court's decision, upheld on appeal, that the company used illegal methods to maintain a desktop monopoly?
There are also the false and misleading advertising, against palm, novell, and regarding MS-Passport. MS-Passport cannot be secure even in theory, so any claims were clearly known to be falsehoods. And since MS-Office 2003 is tied into that, expect more legal action.
Then there have been a series of fines regarding patent infringements. The most recent being from SPX.
Where I come from, all that's called lying or stealing.
If you trust its reporting, you can see that its main two cash cows are sliding and more and more is spent on marketing. I'd speculate that even some of the non-marketing line items include activities that other companies would consider marketing.
Keep in mind that other hype engines, Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, to name a few, also showed nice profits -- until their books got a proper going over. Given that it's a company found guilty of illegal anti-comptetitive activities and during the trial video testimony was forged and several contradictions in executive testimonies leave a suspicion of perjury and there is a history of cooking the books to hide an $18 billion loss, I'd be suspicious of any self-reported figures. But, hey, it's your money.
Even if the oft-cited-but-still-unseen money in the bank is real, it could disappear in security penalties, false advertising fines or anti-trust action. $1 trillion is a lot larger than $50 billion. Or, even if it is real and does not disappear in fines, then it could be used up trying to get vapourware such as .not and leghorn to market by 2006. Three years is too long for businesses to suffer with tools that are not ready for the Internet when most have enterprise level drop-in GNU/Linux, BSD, or Mac OS X replacements which are Internet ready now.
Once national investments and the larger funds have divested, there won't be any pretense to pretend that the company is viable.
This would fall in line with the security-as-PR campaign. MS has been fighting to prevent further discussion or disclosure of problems in order to prevent all-out panic from end users as it goes over to monthly patching. Since there have been several indications that it wishes to show a short turn around time, the easiest way is to delay the announcement of the bug / hole/ flaw. Since the present is under attack, it would only make sense to revise the past.
Corporate abuse has gotten out of hand and the bill of rights ought to apply to them as well.
Or it could just be jealousy. Microsoft's claim of increased security were unfounded in south africa. This is not the first time it has been busted for false advertising, it seems to be a habit.
Also, just an addendum about Samba. It outperforms the corresponding Windows alternative.
From the earlier article:
and