It's very hard (if not impossible) to press a false advertising claim for an intangible like "secure", "cheap", or "reliable
That may be true, but patently false claims will still get you busted. Both the ASA and FTC
have wised up. Sadly too many customers are still falling for the lines like "it will work in the next version" and "to learn if that feature works or not, you must buy the lastest version for all your workstations and infrastructure". Only a dyed-in-the-wool chump or a True Believer(tm) cultist would fall for those more than once.
Either it works now or it doesn't. Either it does what it says it does in the brochure or it doesn't. If it does, great, more power to them. If it doesn't, then they should lose their shirt.
Since the stock answer for most support calls to MS is to reformat the disk and do a clean install, it reduces the likelihood that 3rd party apps and plug-ins are going to make it back onto the hard disk. This is especially true the 4th or 5th time around or if the technician is pressed for time -- and odd's are if it's a full MS shop, they're already over-booked and don't have time for more than the bare minimum.
Slashdot's enough of a mainstream site that going over to PNG would do a lot to increase the visibility and popularity of the format. There can't be more than a couple of dozen images to convert. At worst, even with major fiddling that's about 2 hours work. At best it's a batch job for XV or Gimp...
GIF seems to have a lot of inertia as a legacy format, but has a lot of disadvantages. I don't think that it's going to bother PNG.
Though MSIE, might. In fact, it is the only browser that has (intentional) trouble with PNG and is just one of several MS products being discontinued soon. Also, the increased awareness of stability and security issues is going to lead many users to Mozilla, Opera, and other top of the line tools. MSIE may be popular now, but only because the OEMs include it. When OEM support for MSIE goes, then browsers will have to compete on technical merits, an area where MSIE is last in line.
In the cases named (MS-Outlook, MS-IE, MS-Office), the problems come from design problems. So even though it is a bit of a step "our products just aren't designed for security" to "upgrade to a different client", the only apparent preventative actions would be a fundamental rewrite of the client, completely changing the design...
...
or switching to better client packages. Isn't the latter what a free market economy about?
Based on the projects and products that have been recently cut or postponed by that company, I'd say that a redesign isn't going to happen. Even if it did, it would not happen in time to catch up with the competition. Microsoft had the lead in the stand-alone desktop, but everyone else got in on networked environments long ago. Chairman Bill himself likened the effort needed for clean up to the U.S. Apollo program, which was $25 000 000 000 USD over 10 years. That was in the 1960's, I'm sure $25x10^9 is much more in 2003 dollars...
I realize the editors are obligated to plug MS, including MSNBC, in any way, shape, or form that they can, but that only lends them credibility.
Most of the articles are edited from wire feeds like Reuters, API, UP, AFP (usch), BBC, and so on. Please use those.
In this case, other sites that covered this week's pair of Microsoft worms first -- and they'll cover next week's first, and so on. ZDNet, eWeek, Infoworld, Reuters, the Register and others covered it first. ZDNet has the bad habit however of sliding stories that reflect badly on MS quickly off the top pages and into obscurity.
Worms like sobig and bugbear
only affect products with design flaws. Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, said it best:
Our products just aren't engineered for security.
In short, there's nothing you can do to improve your security except upgrade to a different client: Mozilla or Opera instead of MSIE, Eudora or others instead of OutLook, OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect instead of MS-Office. Usually by upgrading you get better functionality, ease of use in addition to stability.
It's bad form to feed the trolls, but manual, three step process fo opening and converting files with a reader or with a previous verion of the full blown editor sucks. There is no substitute for direct access to the file. Fortunately, I had under 200 files to deal with.
Word 6 filters came months after Word 95. Other filters came late as well and I knew two that wrote their own for a much earlier version. Neither Word 6 for Windows nor Word 95 (subsequent versions) were an improvement over Word for Windows 2c. On the Macintosh, Word 6 was so bad that students were continuously re-installing Word 5. Eventually we had to work out a deal to keep Word 5 in the labs.
But that's gripes about bad design and bad programs, the heart of the issue is file format. The hassles could have been avoided by keeping the same file format.
Yes, they need cash cows besides Windows and Office, but every thing else is running a loss, even Xbox and those two will dry up before that happens. The profit from those two has been entirely dependent on monopoly rents. Using BSA last year not only borrowed against this year's spending budget, but ensured that customers are going to work out a way not to get burned again.
Enron, too, was rolling in dough until they got audited. Regarding the mythical $40 billion, although Microsoft reported a profit in 1998, it was later corrected to be a loss of $18 000 000 000 USD. Now that was when times were good and they had product to sell.
If Microsoft were to dry up and blow away, the IT sector would actually pick up. With Deflation/Depression/Recession hanging over the U.S. the last thing needed is economic sabotage caused from trying to keep the dead company afloat at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Yes, the consumer needs workstations that just work, is easy to use and has loads of familiar applications both commercial and F/OSS (OpenOffice.org).
Windows has gotten progressively harder to maintain and the security problems have not gone away, they're still just getting treated as a PR problem. If you look below the hourly press releases, you see that there are weekly advisories for Microsoft regarding remote exploits, many of which do not even need the user.
RedHat, SuSe, and Mandrake have gotten pretty much point-n-click installation. KDE and Gnome are so easy to use that non-technical people can find their way without help.
However, the OS X has got them all beat. It's not perfect, it's still missing multiple desktops, but
OS X is stable, easy to use and loads of familiar applications, plus it has exceptionally easy maintenance. That it also looks good, makes ideal for places where you have to look at it a lot -- home or a public reception area.
What plethora of formats? Everyone knows there's only the Word *.doc format!
That needs to be modded Funny.
By my reckoning, MS-Word has had more than 15 different formats in 9 years. I gave up MS-products for Lent a few years ago, but back in the day when my new laptop arrived with MS-Word95 (or whatever it was called), I had to go find MS-Word 6 and resave manually every last word document + metadata in RTF format in order to be able to read them in the new program.
Too bad the data format is tied into specific applications. This is an old archival issue that is fortunately being dealt with by establishing open file formats and cross-platform applications (staroffice, openoffice, wordperfect, abiword).
HTML caused the WWW, it will be interesting to see what happens with file formats for productivity suites.
No need to design new software. The government just needs to have full rights to the data format specifications. The govenrments don't even have to do much work themselves, OASIS (minus a one single member) is drafting open format. Conformance to the data format specifications can then be made part of the requirements.
Specifically, the applications must be able to save by default in the archival quality format.
This brings to mind the discussions of technological obsolesence that surfaced briefly in computer magazines a year or three ago. It's a timely subject, even if it is forbidden by Chairman Bill.
The Contents of the NDA
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
The contents of SCO's NDA would be very interesting and would give insight into both their strategy how empty their claims are.
With Open Source and Free Software, if one provider drops support anyone can pick it up. When commercial providers go bankrupt, the code becomes part of the asets and tied up in the courts. The only way for Microsoft, or any other closed-source vendor, to beat the saftey advantages of F/OSS would be to put the code in escrow before they go bankrupt, which in the case of Microsoft seems to be a distinct possibility. Here's a taste:
Even MS if survives the summer, they've already left Win95/98 behind and tried (or have)
dropped NT. So, in regards to "who do you sue?" logic, read your license. MS-Windows could be chock full of remote exploits or send your personal data abroad or monitor your files and habits or break your third party applications and you'd have no recourse whatsoever -- except maybe upgrade to OS X/*BSD/Linux/QNX/etc.
An old P-II laptop computer would be great for college use. I still use one for personal use -- an old Dell Inspiron with a Pentium-II/333MHz. It runs KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Opera, and Emacs so well that I've kept it years longer than any other computer mostly because of the big screen and the large keyboard. RedHat 7.x, 8.0 and 9 have all installed and run very smoothly. RedHat+KDE+OpenOffice is also faster, more responsive, stable and easier to maintain than the old WinNT+MS-Office that came with the machine a few years ago.
The small hard drive means that it's for home use only. I had tried for a time to use if for work but could not fit more than one devel project at a time. Zip drives were a good work around.
MS was to computers what Big Tobacco was to sports. If you didn't get in the pyramid by now, it's too late, forget it. It's over - especially now that Greenspan has said his. Too much attention is being spent on the antics of a dead company.
Slashdot's product placement and trolling stepped up while European legislators were discussing software patents. Picayune articles, many of which consisted of rehashed softer versions of old FUD and misinformation, covered topics which have already been
dealt with, again and again.
Since most novices do not understand the scope and severity of MS's problems and since any critique of MS, no matter the merit, gets written off as "MS-Bashing", it would be best to focus on the more successful areas of the IT sector. Here are a few examples:
As you suggest, AOL may not know or care what is going on. However, Time-Warner still does and press and broadcasting in the U.S. is going through further changes to increase consolidation again. Promulgation of WMP seems to be the real motive to pay AOL $750 000 000. The potential to block competing feeds or foreign feeds is built into the client...
Placing large amounts of money can have more with strategy than philantropy. Let's take your suggestion and look at the Gates Foundation. AIDS in India, despite what many in North America would like to wish, is a relatively minor health issue compared to clean water and, of all things, smokey kitchen fires.
Ok, no big deal fighting disease is good, but let's look a little more closely. Most of the foundations disease fighing is centered around providing expensive drug treatments. Now if this had happened before Chairman Bill bought massive quantities of stock in drug companies, it might be philantropy. However, since the purchases came first, it seems more like pumping up one's own stock portfolio...
This is a good time to point out the obvious, that most GNU tools can be put on top of other kernels. Even whole distrobutions like Debian can sit nicely on top of OpenBSD or even non-OSS products like QNX. It's often just this constellation of GNU tools that most non-tech people refer to collectively as Linux. While the Linux kernels certainly have advantages, so do others. OpenBSD
The Lemon seems weak on content, I realize that it's an attempt at humor, but there is not even a mention of Usenet. (IIRC, Clarinet was the first profitable uses of the 'net) Plus the some of the dates, e.g. for Apple, are wrong.
Not the same at all. One gains vendor lock-in through proprietary file formats. The other does not.
If you think that depending on a subscription to a suite of tools to continue having access to an undocumented, proprietary file format, think again. Look at the DMCA+EEA in the U.S. and the EUCD in Europe. If you think that the format will not be agressively protected, then look at the court cases like Skylarov or Johansen.
Stepping aside from file formats, one suite of tools is plagued weekly by security problems due to inherent security problems. The other isn't.
For either reason, OpenOffice, StarOffice, or something with comparable levels of flexibility is the obvious choice.
It would be no surprise if there were some sort of co-ordination with SCO. Considering their situation, this could be their last summer. A big summer marketing campaign is about the only thing that can be done quickly.
What I find annoying is that material about other products seems to get kicked off quickly from the front pages of many sites and some even disappear.
This is unfortunate because information is essential in making informed decisions.
Microsoft products have been unable to survive in a free market nor compete on technical merits, and then there are the image problems, security issues, fines.
The market has already changed and Microsoft has not. RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, and OS X are all far easier to install, use and maintain. And these are more secure. In other words, they are for all practical purposes, drop in replacements for most home and many business desktops, minus the games. For games, there's Playstation and Gamecube. The market has already said what it has to say about xbox
The U.S. economy is hurting so badly that deflation is now a danger. Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates' insistence on trying to keep a dead company afloat is just causing further harm. Enough all ready, if the executives haven't exercised their options by now, tough. Businesses and agencies now realize that by going with the better (i.e. non-Microsoft) systems, not only do they gain more flexibility, but can spend their time working rather than repair.
Either your in radio to provide content or in radio to push commercials. Anything in between is just pretending and inefficient. ClearChannel optimizes for pushing commecrials:
If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," says Mays, 67. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music.
Not surprisingly this points out the importance of public radio ( eg. NPR, BBC, NRK, DR, SR, etc. ) where the goal is to provide news, information or well-researched music.
In addition, the consolidation should be viewed as the number of potential listeners rather than the number of stations. For example, if 250 000 listen for 1 hour per week, that's 28.6 man-years of the same agenda, ideology or political message being pedaled, intentionally or unintentionally. That can have severe repercussions for the future of democratic process in the U.S.
Even if you don't subscribe to the agenda thing, there's still the issue of the underlying emotional tactic used by commercials wearing down the population.
The three dollar bill with Alfred E. Neuman worked fine for a while. It lead to a run on that particular issue of MAD:
We [Mad magazine] had published a three-dollar bill with Alfred's, instead of some President's, picture, on it. It was not a stat of any U.S. denomination bill. It was a Bob Clarke "simple" rendering of one. It lacked etched details, machined scrolls and all of the accouterments of a genuine bill. But it was, however, freakishly being recognized as a one-dollar bill by the newly-introduced, relatively primitive, technically unsophisticated change machines...
How about the Bollywood flicks? They have a pretty standard formula complete with the songs, the dance in the forest, the wet sari, and the big fight. The plot comes much lower on the priorities than the music.
Between Bollywood getting slightly better and Hollywood shovelling out drivel, it seems that there'd be more money in the Bollywood offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
Either it works now or it doesn't. Either it does what it says it does in the brochure or it doesn't. If it does, great, more power to them. If it doesn't, then they should lose their shirt.
Since the stock answer for most support calls to MS is to reformat the disk and do a clean install, it reduces the likelihood that 3rd party apps and plug-ins are going to make it back onto the hard disk. This is especially true the 4th or 5th time around or if the technician is pressed for time -- and odd's are if it's a full MS shop, they're already over-booked and don't have time for more than the bare minimum.
Slashdot's enough of a mainstream site that going over to PNG would do a lot to increase the visibility and popularity of the format. There can't be more than a couple of dozen images to convert. At worst, even with major fiddling that's about 2 hours work. At best it's a batch job for XV or Gimp...
Though MSIE, might. In fact, it is the only browser that has (intentional) trouble with PNG and is just one of several MS products being discontinued soon. Also, the increased awareness of stability and security issues is going to lead many users to Mozilla, Opera, and other top of the line tools. MSIE may be popular now, but only because the OEMs include it. When OEM support for MSIE goes, then browsers will have to compete on technical merits, an area where MSIE is last in line.
... or switching to better client packages. Isn't the latter what a free market economy about?
Based on the projects and products that have been recently cut or postponed by that company, I'd say that a redesign isn't going to happen. Even if it did, it would not happen in time to catch up with the competition. Microsoft had the lead in the stand-alone desktop, but everyone else got in on networked environments long ago. Chairman Bill himself likened the effort needed for clean up to the U.S. Apollo program, which was $25 000 000 000 USD over 10 years. That was in the 1960's, I'm sure $25x10^9 is much more in 2003 dollars...
In this case, other sites that covered this week's pair of Microsoft worms first -- and they'll cover next week's first, and so on. ZDNet, eWeek, Infoworld, Reuters, the Register and others covered it first. ZDNet has the bad habit however of sliding stories that reflect badly on MS quickly off the top pages and into obscurity.
Worms like sobig and bugbear only affect products with design flaws. Brian Valentine, senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, said it best:
In short, there's nothing you can do to improve your security except upgrade to a different client: Mozilla or Opera instead of MSIE, Eudora or others instead of OutLook, OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect instead of MS-Office. Usually by upgrading you get better functionality, ease of use in addition to stability.Word 6 filters came months after Word 95. Other filters came late as well and I knew two that wrote their own for a much earlier version. Neither Word 6 for Windows nor Word 95 (subsequent versions) were an improvement over Word for Windows 2c. On the Macintosh, Word 6 was so bad that students were continuously re-installing Word 5. Eventually we had to work out a deal to keep Word 5 in the labs.
But that's gripes about bad design and bad programs, the heart of the issue is file format. The hassles could have been avoided by keeping the same file format.
Enron, too, was rolling in dough until they got audited. Regarding the mythical $40 billion, although Microsoft reported a profit in 1998, it was later corrected to be a loss of $18 000 000 000 USD. Now that was when times were good and they had product to sell.
If Microsoft were to dry up and blow away, the IT sector would actually pick up. With Deflation/Depression/Recession hanging over the U.S. the last thing needed is economic sabotage caused from trying to keep the dead company afloat at the expense of the rest of the economy.
Time to cash out.
RedHat, SuSe, and Mandrake have gotten pretty much point-n-click installation. KDE and Gnome are so easy to use that non-technical people can find their way without help.
However, the OS X has got them all beat. It's not perfect, it's still missing multiple desktops, but OS X is stable, easy to use and loads of familiar applications, plus it has exceptionally easy maintenance. That it also looks good, makes ideal for places where you have to look at it a lot -- home or a public reception area.
That needs to be modded Funny.
By my reckoning, MS-Word has had more than 15 different formats in 9 years. I gave up MS-products for Lent a few years ago, but back in the day when my new laptop arrived with MS-Word95 (or whatever it was called), I had to go find MS-Word 6 and resave manually every last word document + metadata in RTF format in order to be able to read them in the new program.
Too bad the data format is tied into specific applications. This is an old archival issue that is fortunately being dealt with by establishing open file formats and cross-platform applications (staroffice, openoffice, wordperfect, abiword).
HTML caused the WWW, it will be interesting to see what happens with file formats for productivity suites.
Sounds like a cool idea. I guess you might be able to use XLST to transform to the different WAP flavors.
Specifically, the applications must be able to save by default in the archival quality format.
This brings to mind the discussions of technological obsolesence that surfaced briefly in computer magazines a year or three ago. It's a timely subject, even if it is forbidden by Chairman Bill.
The contents of SCO's NDA would be very interesting and would give insight into both their strategy how empty their claims are.
Even MS if survives the summer, they've already left Win95/98 behind and tried (or have) dropped NT. So, in regards to "who do you sue?" logic, read your license. MS-Windows could be chock full of remote exploits or send your personal data abroad or monitor your files and habits or break your third party applications and you'd have no recourse whatsoever -- except maybe upgrade to OS X/*BSD/Linux/QNX/etc.
Nice of Timothy to set up a straw man
The small hard drive means that it's for home use only. I had tried for a time to use if for work but could not fit more than one devel project at a time. Zip drives were a good work around.
Slashdot's product placement and trolling stepped up while European legislators were discussing software patents. Picayune articles, many of which consisted of rehashed softer versions of old FUD and misinformation, covered topics which have already been dealt with, again and again.
Since most novices do not understand the scope and severity of MS's problems and since any critique of MS, no matter the merit, gets written off as "MS-Bashing", it would be best to focus on the more successful areas of the IT sector. Here are a few examples:
Check the forums for tools that work - *BSD, Linux, QNX, Netware, eDirectory, LDAP, Kerberos, KDE, Gnome, Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, and so on ...
As you suggest, AOL may not know or care what is going on. However, Time-Warner still does and press and broadcasting in the U.S. is going through further changes to increase consolidation again. Promulgation of WMP seems to be the real motive to pay AOL $750 000 000. The potential to block competing feeds or foreign feeds is built into the client...
Ok, no big deal fighting disease is good, but let's look a little more closely. Most of the foundations disease fighing is centered around providing expensive drug treatments. Now if this had happened before Chairman Bill bought massive quantities of stock in drug companies, it might be philantropy. However, since the purchases came first, it seems more like pumping up one's own stock portfolio...
This is a good time to point out the obvious, that most GNU tools can be put on top of other kernels. Even whole distrobutions like Debian can sit nicely on top of OpenBSD or even non-OSS products like QNX. It's often just this constellation of GNU tools that most non-tech people refer to collectively as Linux. While the Linux kernels certainly have advantages, so do others. OpenBSD
The Hobbes' Internet Timeline and the ISOC list of Internet Histories give much better coverage.
If you think that depending on a subscription to a suite of tools to continue having access to an undocumented, proprietary file format, think again. Look at the DMCA+EEA in the U.S. and the EUCD in Europe. If you think that the format will not be agressively protected, then look at the court cases like Skylarov or Johansen.
Stepping aside from file formats, one suite of tools is plagued weekly by security problems due to inherent security problems. The other isn't.
For either reason, OpenOffice, StarOffice, or something with comparable levels of flexibility is the obvious choice.
What I find annoying is that material about other products seems to get kicked off quickly from the front pages of many sites and some even disappear. This is unfortunate because information is essential in making informed decisions. Microsoft products have been unable to survive in a free market nor compete on technical merits, and then there are the image problems, security issues, fines.
The market has already changed and Microsoft has not. RedHat, Mandrake, Suse, and OS X are all far easier to install, use and maintain. And these are more secure. In other words, they are for all practical purposes, drop in replacements for most home and many business desktops, minus the games. For games, there's Playstation and Gamecube. The market has already said what it has to say about xbox
The U.S. economy is hurting so badly that deflation is now a danger. Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates' insistence on trying to keep a dead company afloat is just causing further harm. Enough all ready, if the executives haven't exercised their options by now, tough. Businesses and agencies now realize that by going with the better (i.e. non-Microsoft) systems, not only do they gain more flexibility, but can spend their time working rather than repair.
In addition, the consolidation should be viewed as the number of potential listeners rather than the number of stations. For example, if 250 000 listen for 1 hour per week, that's 28.6 man-years of the same agenda, ideology or political message being pedaled, intentionally or unintentionally. That can have severe repercussions for the future of democratic process in the U.S.
Even if you don't subscribe to the agenda thing, there's still the issue of the underlying emotional tactic used by commercials wearing down the population.
Between Bollywood getting slightly better and Hollywood shovelling out drivel, it seems that there'd be more money in the Bollywood offerings.