Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.
Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:
Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.
It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.
In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff
Both the frequency and volume of sales is increasing: They're all selling as fast as they get.
People, including CEOs, may not understand or wish to understand "IT" so it is easy to bullshit them. In contrast, nearly everyone understands money. So it's no surprise that, as the FTC is fixing to knock them in the head, there are many who see the club descending. If the FTC doesn't finish them, then losing monopoly rents will. It may drag out in the courts and ad campaigns a bit to give time for counting coup.
Given that there is a history of questionable accounting practices,
the accuracy of $ 52 900 000 000 current assets seems somewhat shakey. Especially since it is ultimately self-reported, albeit via Yahoo via Edgar. Enron was looking mighty good for a long while, too.
That Microsoft could have fixed many more bugs, is something that could be see as one possibility, but in only the past tense. It looks like things got out of hand a while ago and that the management could be just riding the company down - pump and dump
Don't forget that benefits have been cut way back and there's also been outsourcing like mad. Consultants and contractors don't show up as layoffs when you let them go.
There really does seem to be no difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not.
Those that can read wouldn't be caught using MS-Passport. Sadly, signal can be drowned out by noise coming from a colossal marketing blitz to last through september.
We'll see if they last that long. Windows2003 seems to be more of a push to get users over to OS X or Linux. Their other (2nd of 2) cash cow, the new MS-Office has already been postponed and seems to be more of an incentive to move to OpenOffice than to upgrade.
Take a look at the touch tone charges while you're at it. It's quite possible that it's it thoroughly unnecessary. I suspect that they've recovered their investment in electronic exchanges years ago.
Liberate Vinland from the Yoke of Canadian oppression!
Seriously, Black currant (Ribes nigrum), vinbär/solbær, makes excellent wine grows in cooler climates. Wine from grapes is probably an artifact of mediterranean culture / continental Europe. However, mead was more common as the wax was a sought after trade good for the Byzantine empire.
Cooling of the climate in the 1200's seemed to have killed off the Greenland colonies.
The Viking groups (Goths, Svear, Danes, Norrmen) had tradroutes from China/Bagdad to the east coast of what is now Canada. Iceland, Greenland, Shetlands, Froes, and parts of Ireland, England and Scotland were all settlements.
Aside from warm weather, technology made the long trips possible.
Iron nails and sails were just two of the improvements. Prior to that they were closer to home. The basic ship, even before sails and iron nails, was strong and light because they had no saws. Hewn planks have about twice the strength and flexibility of sawn ones.
Not all changes in technology are improvements. Later, European-style ships were heavier and less maneuverable and could neither handle shallow rivers nor be portaged.
Offtopic, but why on earth do you link to the CBC in your sig. I mean, if you really want to complain about the reporting of the war and it's relegation to entertainment, look no further than FOX or CNN, who, with their "embedded" reporters, have become nothing more than cheerleaders for the American military. I mean, really, IMHO, the CBC is probably one of the better news organizations out there...
Exactly my point. You said it in 405 chars, I said it in 38.;) CNN and FOX get too much attention as it is. Leading a link there would only further promote them and their imbalance. Of the other news sources CBC is probably the most (culturally) accessible to 'Mericans yet, in quality, one of the top two English news sources for now.
By nature, terrorists obviously aren't going to obey any laws... much less SOFTWARE LICENSES. This makes Windows a FREE OS.
Oops hit submit too early. Let's try that again.
Timothy is chipping in with his 2 cents for the Microsoft marketing drive starting tomorrow, Thursday. I really wish there were a way to block both the ads and the shills/astroturfers.
The high level of security potentially available from using OpenBSD has been named as a worry. A number of posts have mentioned the nebulus terrorist threat and touched on the effects of lobbying.
When you take into account lobbying from software companies, then the other real targets are nation states like Germany.
If Germany goes with Linux, BSD, or one of the other Free or Open Source operating systems, then they remain beholden to neither Microsoft nor the White House.
*BSD / GPL licenses ensure freedom in how the systems are used and deployed
Security + source code audits ensure that data and systems are less vulnerable to foreign control / monitoring.
Development money spent on F/OSS drives the local economy.
If, on the other hand, F/OSS is blocked then they suffer not only financial punishment for the recent UN Security Council issues but also stay on a short leash:
WPA ensures that MS/Bush can pull the plug
DRM + EUCD + proprietary file formats keeps them on the leash
Weak security and possible backdoors ensures that any resistance can be countered/monitored electronically.
The review articles seem to mention few changes from 2000/XP so it's funny how none of the artices really touch on the DRM problem and the licensing trap which seem to be the real purpose behind the new products.
Either problem alone would scare potential buyers, so it seems to be forbidden to discuss.
It would be convenient to skip the upcoming deluge of advertisements and astroturf and see trade magazines feature the F/OSS tools instead. Ads cost a fortune and MS could instead use the money to 1) hire developers to rewrite software in a secure, stable form, 2) hire lawyers for the upcoming willful negligence lawsuits.
The only thing not great about the Dell Inspiron I have, aside from the service, is the weight. I'd praise it to the sky as a desktop replacement, but advise strongly against using it for travel. Epsecially for his girlfriend since women, on average, have less upper body muscle mass then men.
It makes a great desktop replacement with the large screen, good resolution and nice keyboard. It runs various linux distrobutions problem free, I've found that in that regard it's few problems and faster than corresponding ThinkPads. The battery life is neither good nor bad, but it's a real brick in regards to weight.
My PowerBook, on the other hand is great for travel. Fast, full of good software, lightweight, and long battery life. If I had another 30 minutes of battery, I could do long haul trips without recharging. I think the G3 might be longer.
I could go on for hours about how bad/slow/obstreperous I found Dell service for both servers and notebooks. But that seems to be the standard these days, so I won't.
NB, I am not saying that Sweden and Singapore are completely comperable, just that they are the standout "see, it's not so bad" exemplars of their respective political philosophies. Although both are well-kempt and relatively free of gum on the sidewalks.
A minor correction, then a ramble:
Actually, Sweden used to follow the middle path between free market and socialism, using the best where it applied. In the late 1980's early 1990's there was an ideological shift manifested as a hard swing to the right and a mania for privitization, even in situations where it doesn't fit or even causes harm.
There's hard data should you care to look, but national debt, dirty sidewalks, street crime, bad grades, even bad teeth, rise in direct proportion to the imbalance.
There's also hard data should you care to look, showing that some of the controls really increased quality of life. Clean water was one of them. Stockholm, once, was the Calcutta of Europe but now the water is clean enough, for the time being, to swim and fish in. There's not a city in the U.S. that couldn't benefit from cleaning up their regional water ways. As an example, the Huron River, or any river connected to the Great Lakes, had been used for salmon and trout fishing for literally 1000's of years, prior to industrialization. It or any other river in the U.S., with effort and time, could be usable again.
Likewise with proper sick leave and health care. In the U.S. and many other countries it is difficult or impossible economically to take sick leave. To add damage, it is often considered status to show up sick at work and spread it to others.
To bring this back to topic, it's a variation of "your right to swing your fist ends at my face": your right to go 'round coughing up a lung ends at the point before it could spread to others.
SARS isn't so bad, yet there are quarantines, as well there should be for harmful diseases. If the world were interested in preventive medicine rather than reactive hype, then more quarantines should be made for MDR TBC which is real bad. Unlike the kinder, gentler SARS, MDR TBC is usually a death sentence which takes years of physical wasting until drowning/suffocation can occur. The exception is if rigorous attention to treatment and medical supervision is given.
The problem is (and always has been) Micro$oft's purposely broken version of Java.
Microsoft's behaving as if it is out of money and out of time and appears to be using social engineering rather than computer engineering.
Most of the headlines give very misleading takes on nearly every semi-weekly critical patch. Rather than fix a problem they alone produced (in this case with their Java-variant) , the response seems to be to work on editors to change headlines and/or slide unfavorable articles quickly off the front of the site and into the back pages. Rather than improving performance, interoperability, stability or security, new EULAs forbid the publication of benchmarks. Or Ballmer or Gates, in extreme cases, chase after decision makers with junkets, golf trips and such.
Isn't it about time some kid points and shouts, "the emperor has no clothes"? We are not dealing with a crappy software company, but at best a skilled marketing company or at worst a pyramid scheme.
It's the crap everyone uses! Therefore you must too, to be crap-compatible!
Whether or not the programs people use are crap should be a non-issue. It's the data format for the crap that everyone uses that is important! Therefore you need only be able to read/write/edit the crap files, to be crap-compatible!
No need then to get locked into crap programs, crap platforms, or even crap licensing. There is enough crap in the world as it is.
If you run a business of anything beyond a dozen people, you cannot just drop your IT Infrastructure and switch to Macs and/or Linux. I have an iBook. I just installed Red Hat 9 on one of my home servers last night
Clients and servers are two completely different animals and a properly set up infrastructure should work with MS-Windows/RedHat/OS X/whatever on the workstations. If not, then that's probably the place to start.
No it's not simple, but it's not as hard as you are told by the MS-Sales staff. Try to plan at least one move ahead and take your easy shots first and maybe there won't be any hard ones.
Start with using file more universal, or even open, file formats and protocols. Without open file formats, standards and protocols, you're not going anywhere. Replacing MS-products that have accidentally wandered into the server room should be the next order of business, if only for security. The move does not have to be big simultaneous all or nothing leap. Bring up one service at a time in parallel, test, and move.
Maybe that's their idea: "they're not about to change anytime soon, that'll be too difficult for them; let's go ahead and jab them with this new license."
Or, "Heck, let's just take their code, too, while were at it."
it's worth noting that the DeBeers monopoly got a huge kick in the kiwis a couple years ago when a small (for the industry) startup beat them to the discovery of huge diamond lodes up in the canadian arctic
Anyone got a reference for this?
No, but I remember the uproar when the smaller company beat them to buying up the land/rights to the land where there was plenty of the right type of kimberlite. Whether it turned out to have diamonds, I do not recall.
Perhaps this "leak" is to take attention away from new releases of excellent servers:
OpenBSD 3.3,
RedHat 9 (even w/4 business hour response time), and
Mandrake 9.1.
Oops, I missed one:
OpenBSD Lands $2 Million In DARPA Money. DARPA funded research lead, among other things, to the Internet. This pretty much guarantees now that the future of development is F/OSS.
Since the key is for the server, not the workstation, its release is not a big deal. Businesses eager to hand their IT budget to Microsoft will purchase the key anyway. Others would not waste resources playing with a toy that would set them up to be cleaned out by a lawsuit.
But I can guess at two reasons why it comes just now:
Perhaps this "leak" is to take attention away from new releases of excellent servers:
OpenBSD 3.3,
RedHat 9 (even w/4 business hour response time), and
Mandrake 9.1.
Or perhaps it is to drum up sympathy in congress for new legislation which could be used to mandate DRM in the U.S. This would hamstring the U.S. IT sector and many public institutions by taking money out of already tight budgets and sending it to Redmond in the form of forced purchases of new hardware and software.
I am reminded of an Arab proverb about not letting the camel's nose into the tent, as soon the rest of the camel will follow.
Indeed, even assuming that the Linux version works and continues to work in subsequent versions, the past practices of Microsoft suggest that this will only be a loss leader to gain critical market share with DRM-encumbered multi-media file formats.
Once the critical market share is reached, then client support for non-DRM/Palladium encumbered platforms can then be dropped.
A further indication is that Office 2003 won't be available for systems prior to Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP, plus the failure to join all other industry members and participate in creating open formats for productivity software.
Any doubts that DRM+Subscription is not the near term goal can be put to rest by comparing the EULAs for those with earlier EULAs. Or see the sudden departure from the Web services group.
Perhaps we should also extend our attention to Microsoft's other desperate lobbying efforts. Or even to their financial crisis.
Installing any of the Linux distributions from a CD has become so easy that I've had non-tech students and faculty do it without help, even. It looks like Michael's posting of the article or the article itself is part of some campaign.
Judging from the style of arguments, Slashdot is getting more heavily hit by astroturfers and trolls.
A common strategy for astroturfers and trolls is to first steer a discussion of facts to a discussion of opinions. Then they can discredit the facts by either giving them equal valence to opinions or by pulling people's chain until they start to bark...
Microsoft finally ran out of things to steal from Xerox Parc and Apple!
I don't think that Xerox Parc as we knew it exists any more. It seems to have been spun off and
privatized - a move that takes it out of research. A scan of web pages for the researchers also seems to indicate that many have moved on at about the same time.
If this is part of a general trend across the U.S. to ditch research, then there will be a very, very high economic price to pay when the current cycle of research/development/production finishes.
Or given the trend in the media and even some pulications to replace logic with rhetoric and replace fact with opinion, it could be part of a larger anti-intellectual movement, albeit a kinder, gentler one that the sort envisioned by Pol Pot, Mao and others.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotters defending DRM... am I crazy or am I the last sane one? I'm not sure sure anymore.
Slashdot continues to get more mainstream readership, even getting mentioned in print articles these days. As a side effect of this visibility, the activity of astroturfers has increased -- notice that the pro-MS AC(s) tend to have the same writing style and logical fallacies. When other readers put them in their place, a handful UIDs dog pile one or two posters with ad hominem attacks or the "you-just-don't-like-Microsoft" (appeal to emotion?) attack. Microsoft has a long practice of 'turfing in it's marketing:
Also, right now MS is in a panicked marketing blitz. notice all the product placement on the tech sites. The embarassing stuff just disappears from the top page less than a day, but the press releases sit there for weeks.
It makes sense. Most Windows users have both Windows and Office because it's what the OEMs had installed on the machines they bought, nothing more or less. Most of these are either apathetic or know nothin else, so they will not write. Others are pissed off at the low quality, made worse by Microsoft treating security and stability issues as PR issues -- How many times have you heard "computers" crash from BSD, Novell, QNX, Linux, or OS X users? Or is it just the MSCEs? Most remaining clients could go easily over to OS X or one of the Linux distros and the next IT boom would start, like the previous one, without Microsoft.
In short, they need DRM to survive the summer and few, except for MS and RIAA staff
People, including CEOs, may not understand or wish to understand "IT" so it is easy to bullshit them. In contrast, nearly everyone understands money. So it's no surprise that, as the FTC is fixing to knock them in the head, there are many who see the club descending. If the FTC doesn't finish them, then losing monopoly rents will. It may drag out in the courts and ad campaigns a bit to give time for counting coup.
That Microsoft could have fixed many more bugs, is something that could be see as one possibility, but in only the past tense. It looks like things got out of hand a while ago and that the management could be just riding the company down - pump and dump
Don't forget that benefits have been cut way back and there's also been outsourcing like mad. Consultants and contractors don't show up as layoffs when you let them go.
There really does seem to be no difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not. Those that can read wouldn't be caught using MS-Passport. Sadly, signal can be drowned out by noise coming from a colossal marketing blitz to last through september.
We'll see if they last that long. Windows2003 seems to be more of a push to get users over to OS X or Linux. Their other (2nd of 2) cash cow, the new MS-Office has already been postponed and seems to be more of an incentive to move to OpenOffice than to upgrade.
Why does hardware have to be super-hardened for military use, and, then, they go and install Windows?!?
Maybe because the market is not swallowing the MS marketing pitch anymore and it's one of the last ways to force a purchase.
While they're fixing Grub's problem with ROBOTS.TXT, they should also honor the robots META tag
Take a look at the touch tone charges while you're at it. It's quite possible that it's it thoroughly unnecessary. I suspect that they've recovered their investment in electronic exchanges years ago.
Seriously, Black currant (Ribes nigrum), vinbär/solbær, makes excellent wine grows in cooler climates. Wine from grapes is probably an artifact of mediterranean culture / continental Europe. However, mead was more common as the wax was a sought after trade good for the Byzantine empire.
Cooling of the climate in the 1200's seemed to have killed off the Greenland colonies. The Viking groups (Goths, Svear, Danes, Norrmen) had tradroutes from China/Bagdad to the east coast of what is now Canada. Iceland, Greenland, Shetlands, Froes, and parts of Ireland, England and Scotland were all settlements.
Aside from warm weather, technology made the long trips possible. Iron nails and sails were just two of the improvements. Prior to that they were closer to home. The basic ship, even before sails and iron nails, was strong and light because they had no saws. Hewn planks have about twice the strength and flexibility of sawn ones.
Not all changes in technology are improvements. Later, European-style ships were heavier and less maneuverable and could neither handle shallow rivers nor be portaged.
Exactly my point. You said it in 405 chars, I said it in 38. ;) CNN and FOX get too much attention as it is. Leading a link there would only further promote them and their imbalance. Of the other news sources CBC is probably the most (culturally) accessible to 'Mericans yet, in quality, one of the top two English news sources for now.
Oops hit submit too early. Let's try that again.
Timothy is chipping in with his 2 cents for the Microsoft marketing drive starting tomorrow, Thursday. I really wish there were a way to block both the ads and the shills/astroturfers.
The high level of security potentially available from using OpenBSD has been named as a worry. A number of posts have mentioned the nebulus terrorist threat and touched on the effects of lobbying. When you take into account lobbying from software companies, then the other real targets are nation states like Germany.
If Germany goes with Linux, BSD, or one of the other Free or Open Source operating systems, then they remain beholden to neither Microsoft nor the White House.
If, on the other hand, F/OSS is blocked then they suffer not only financial punishment for the recent UN Security Council issues but also stay on a short leash:
Timothy is chipping in with his 2 for the Microsoft marketing drive starting tomorrow, Thursday.
Either problem alone would scare potential buyers, so it seems to be forbidden to discuss.
It would be convenient to skip the upcoming deluge of advertisements and astroturf and see trade magazines feature the F/OSS tools instead. Ads cost a fortune and MS could instead use the money to 1) hire developers to rewrite software in a secure, stable form, 2) hire lawyers for the upcoming willful negligence lawsuits.
It makes a great desktop replacement with the large screen, good resolution and nice keyboard. It runs various linux distrobutions problem free, I've found that in that regard it's few problems and faster than corresponding ThinkPads. The battery life is neither good nor bad, but it's a real brick in regards to weight.
My PowerBook, on the other hand is great for travel. Fast, full of good software, lightweight, and long battery life. If I had another 30 minutes of battery, I could do long haul trips without recharging. I think the G3 might be longer.
I could go on for hours about how bad/slow/obstreperous I found Dell service for both servers and notebooks. But that seems to be the standard these days, so I won't.
Actually, Sweden used to follow the middle path between free market and socialism, using the best where it applied. In the late 1980's early 1990's there was an ideological shift manifested as a hard swing to the right and a mania for privitization, even in situations where it doesn't fit or even causes harm.
There's hard data should you care to look, but national debt, dirty sidewalks, street crime, bad grades, even bad teeth, rise in direct proportion to the imbalance.
There's also hard data should you care to look, showing that some of the controls really increased quality of life. Clean water was one of them. Stockholm, once, was the Calcutta of Europe but now the water is clean enough, for the time being, to swim and fish in. There's not a city in the U.S. that couldn't benefit from cleaning up their regional water ways. As an example, the Huron River, or any river connected to the Great Lakes, had been used for salmon and trout fishing for literally 1000's of years, prior to industrialization. It or any other river in the U.S., with effort and time, could be usable again.
Likewise with proper sick leave and health care. In the U.S. and many other countries it is difficult or impossible economically to take sick leave. To add damage, it is often considered status to show up sick at work and spread it to others.
To bring this back to topic, it's a variation of "your right to swing your fist ends at my face": your right to go 'round coughing up a lung ends at the point before it could spread to others.
SARS isn't so bad, yet there are quarantines, as well there should be for harmful diseases. If the world were interested in preventive medicine rather than reactive hype, then more quarantines should be made for MDR TBC which is real bad. Unlike the kinder, gentler SARS, MDR TBC is usually a death sentence which takes years of physical wasting until drowning/suffocation can occur. The exception is if rigorous attention to treatment and medical supervision is given.
Most of the headlines give very misleading takes on nearly every semi-weekly critical patch. Rather than fix a problem they alone produced (in this case with their Java-variant) , the response seems to be to work on editors to change headlines and/or slide unfavorable articles quickly off the front of the site and into the back pages. Rather than improving performance, interoperability, stability or security, new EULAs forbid the publication of benchmarks. Or Ballmer or Gates, in extreme cases, chase after decision makers with junkets, golf trips and such.
And the same problems surface again and again.
Isn't it about time some kid points and shouts, "the emperor has no clothes"? We are not dealing with a crappy software company, but at best a skilled marketing company or at worst a pyramid scheme.
Whether or not the programs people use are crap should be a non-issue. It's the data format for the crap that everyone uses that is important! Therefore you need only be able to read/write/edit the crap files, to be crap-compatible!
No need then to get locked into crap programs, crap platforms, or even crap licensing. There is enough crap in the world as it is.
No it's not simple, but it's not as hard as you are told by the MS-Sales staff. Try to plan at least one move ahead and take your easy shots first and maybe there won't be any hard ones.
Start with using file more universal, or even open, file formats and protocols. Without open file formats, standards and protocols, you're not going anywhere. Replacing MS-products that have accidentally wandered into the server room should be the next order of business, if only for security. The move does not have to be big simultaneous all or nothing leap. Bring up one service at a time in parallel, test, and move.
But I can guess at two reasons why it comes just now:
Perhaps this "leak" is to take attention away from new releases of excellent servers: OpenBSD 3.3, RedHat 9 (even w/4 business hour response time), and Mandrake 9.1.
Or perhaps it is to drum up sympathy in congress for new legislation which could be used to mandate DRM in the U.S. This would hamstring the U.S. IT sector and many public institutions by taking money out of already tight budgets and sending it to Redmond in the form of forced purchases of new hardware and software.
Once the critical market share is reached, then client support for non-DRM/Palladium encumbered platforms can then be dropped.
A further indication is that Office 2003 won't be available for systems prior to Windows 2000 SP3 and Windows XP, plus the failure to join all other industry members and participate in creating open formats for productivity software. Any doubts that DRM+Subscription is not the near term goal can be put to rest by comparing the EULAs for those with earlier EULAs. Or see the sudden departure from the Web services group.
Perhaps we should also extend our attention to Microsoft's other desperate lobbying efforts. Or even to their financial crisis.
Judging from the style of arguments, Slashdot is getting more heavily hit by astroturfers and trolls.
A common strategy for astroturfers and trolls is to first steer a discussion of facts to a discussion of opinions. Then they can discredit the facts by either giving them equal valence to opinions or by pulling people's chain until they start to bark...
I don't think that Xerox Parc as we knew it exists any more. It seems to have been spun off and privatized - a move that takes it out of research. A scan of web pages for the researchers also seems to indicate that many have moved on at about the same time.
If this is part of a general trend across the U.S. to ditch research, then there will be a very, very high economic price to pay when the current cycle of research/development/production finishes.
Or given the trend in the media and even some pulications to replace logic with rhetoric and replace fact with opinion, it could be part of a larger anti-intellectual movement, albeit a kinder, gentler one that the sort envisioned by Pol Pot, Mao and others.