Glad to see that not only are Marks old free tools still free, but that Microsoft is allowing new tools of his to be free also. Very un-microsoft of microsoft.
Not really. Microsoft will charge for the primary applications, but it is generally in their best interest to have a whole bunch of useful scripts and tools and so forth available for free. (Somehow they never really got this hint on the old NT Resource Kit, boo.)
There is a wealth of stuff out there on the download section of their website. Just a week ago I needed a batch converter to convert Word 2003 documents to Word 2007 DOCX format. Lo and behold, if you can edit an INI file you can use the Office Migration Toolkit. Yep, it's free. Makes sense...they wanted to make it easy for people to upgrade to Office 2007, so they put out tools to scan for certain types of documents, convert them, report on what was out there, etc. This is not uncommon; especially when upgrading or migrating, Microsoft will put out a whole slew of support tools.
So what's fair? You (and a lot of other people here) seem to advocate a system that gives no reward or incentive to succeed. It doesn't seem to matter to you how amazing a work someone produces; the viewpoint I'm reading says they are entitled to the same share as someone else who makes a totally mediocre piece of work.
If someone is so lucky/skillful/visionary that they create something that is still beloved years later, why shouldn't they be able to enjoy the fruits of that labor and luck/skill/vision? Or would you rather apportion everyone a flat reward amount?
They robbed US FIRST, by stealing our public domain away from us, our kids, our grandkids, etc, and by locking our entire culture up behind a paywall
How about putting down the shrill bleating for a moment and giving a rationale? Who robbed whom of what? OUR public domain? Ah, good old entitlement theory again. "I DESERVE everything ever produced, it is MINE by RIGHT!" No. Not fair, not just. If you create something amazing and decide you want to waive all rights and reward, great, I admire your altruism. But you don't have a God-given RIGHT to anything else anyone ever produces, JUST because you can argue it's an intangible value.
In other words, WE are expending money, effort and time so a tiny fraction of potential visitors can save on money, time and effort. I call that a parasitic relationship.
I call it a business decision. Someone made the decision to continue supporting IE6 browsers. It's either due to some kind of regulatory requirement or because it was deemed worthwhile for whatever reason (e.g. economically profitable, or politically necessary).
I suppose it's possible that the opposite is true; no-one actively decided to stop supporting IE6, it's just something you've always done. In such a situation, I'd think you would go to your manager and explain the situation (hopefully in a slightly calmer fashion than this rant) and then let the higher-ups make the decision.
In the US, I get vast quantities of stuff (medicine, scanners, machines) thrown at me whenever I go to the doctor or hospital, but to get an appointment at the doctor takes a minimum of two weeks.
In NZ, I didn't get as much stuff thrown at me, but I still got what I needed, and I could see a doctor within a day or two.
In the US, I have a phenomenally good health care plan thanks to my employer, so whenever I have to go to the doctor or the hospital the amount I have to pay only costs between $5 and $20. For the benefit of non-US readers, a "phenomenally good health care plan" means I get a very wide range of coverage and I only pay about $100 a month. Prior to this job, I paid several hundred dollars a month, even with that employer kicking in a contribution towards my health care plan.
In NZ, just about everything was free. (Yes, I know I paid for it in taxes. Employers also paid for it in some of their company taxes.) Including my two week stay in hospital after a car crash, all the surgeries, physical therapy, etc. No health insurance or health care plan needed. If I wanted one, however, I could still have bought one and gotten private coverage. My brother worked for Telecom, for instance, so he had private health insurance through them.
Overall, even with my fantastic health care plan provided by my employer here, I still pay more per annum than I did in NZ.
And in NZ, I once had occasion to take a guest from the US, who was visiting for two weeks, to the hospital to get emergency treatment when she broke her foot. It was 100% free for her, too, thanks to the NZ taxpayer. No travel insurance was necessary. If the situations were reversed and I had to take a guest to a US hospital and they didn't have insurance, I don't even want to guess how much it'd cost.
Dislaimer: it's been ten years since I was in New Zealand. Things may have changed. If so, I'm sure someone will update me.
I'm not a hater; I've lived in the US for many years and like it here. There are some things about living here which I like better than in NZ, and there are some things I really miss about living in NZ that I think are better than in the US. No one country has the best of everything, and, from my personal experience, I happen to prefer the health care system in NZ.
And you probably need to cut back on the pompous asshattery.
For/., actually, that was pretty mild.
I know people that do senior software deployment for Fortune 100 companies and still refer to themselves as a techie.
The comment wasn't insulting people who call themselves techies. It was panning the typical Geek Squad so-called techie.
It's mystifying why you got so many positive mods for insulting someone and then re-stating the exact same point they made.
He/she didn't restate the exact same point you made. Go back and read again; he/she made a contention that was exactly opposite. Your point was essentially "it used to be said you never buy a Microsoft OS until they get to SP 1, and now you have to wait until SP 2". 0racle's point was "people should evaluate the OS on its own merits, and Windows 7 was found upon evaluation to be fit for deployment at release".
Hear hear. Down time is definitely necessary, but hours chatting about football? I know what this guy is talking about, because I see exactly the same at my place of work (not an IT company but a company with a large IT division).
Before I came here, I had been a consultant my entire career. I sometimes fantasize about the IT guys here being told to fill out timesheets showing what they were doing in six minute increments, just as an experiment for a few weeks, which is what I used to have to do.
When I joined this company, I thought I was being eased in because it was very relaxed and easy to finish my tasks, and everyone around me was complaining and frantic because they were so busy and pressured. Took me a few weeks to recognize that:
they had no idea what real pressure was;
it does make it hard to get your work done in the time allotted if you come in to work at 9:30 or 10:00, talk about fantasy football for an hour and a half non-stop, take a two hour lunch, and then waltz out of the door at 4:30 or 5:00;
special case here, perhaps, but most of the guys in that group were inept and would take three to four times as long to do something as it should've taken.
The IT guys in this company (who very much resemble the original poster's colleagues) wouldn't last a week in any of my old consulting jobs, and would get a real shock if they had to work in other divisions of this company. I liaise a lot with the business units and those people work hard. And yet, the sense of entitlement is incredible.
I understand and agree with the need for breaks. But this poster is clearly describing a situation of extreme idleness, where there are problems with both workers and management.
What I read about in the post, and what I see in my current company,is a group of spoiled whiny brats who (at least at work) act like they're still in a college fraternity, despite being in their 30s and married with children, and are in a company where management doesn't have the courage to do anything about it. It is not everywhere; I've worked as a consultant in plenty of other companies, and this kind of behavior and attitude would simply not be tolerated in most places. But it's far too prevalent amongst IT people.
Two final observations: in the places where I've seen this kind of behavior tolerated, the grandiose self-image of highly skilled tech wizardry is a complete illusion. The worst offenders are the individuals who've been doing the job for several years and still don't know the basics. (E.g. senior admins who don't understand how file and share permissions work.) Secondly, it's the server admins who are lazy and inept, not the developers. The developers I've worked with are professional and take pride in their work. Take from this what you will.
I was a boy when my father taught me two wrongs don't make a right. Evidently you have still to learn this moral truism.
I have worked in the electronics test/measurement/repair industry for ten years
Ten...whole...years... Wow. Get off my lawn. Is/. really this juvenile nowadays? Just a few days ago I read some other post where someone was pretending expertise because he'd worked in the industry for a whole five years. Tell you what: come back when you've been doing it for, say, 20 years, like I have. Or 40 years, like some of the real experts with whom I work.
You and me both. My completely unscientific and subjective anecdotal experience suggests I get more results with Google but better results with Yahoo. And there is no way I will give up my Yahoo mail. I've tried GMail a few times, and it is painful for me to use. The layout is weird and I can never find anything (commands or e-mails...that's not helpful). Perhaps Yahoo mail is easier because I've been using it for so long (well over a decade, since the time when AltaVista was king) and have become accustomed to its interface. Whatever the explanation, I just know I have thousands of e-mails and records in my Yahoo e-mail and can easily find what I need, whereas even with just a handful of e-mails in my Google mail account I could never find anything without a struggle.
I do like being able to manually alter my route in Google maps, but I've had so many problems with it being down or flaky this year that I always go back to good old reliable MapQuest.
I suppose this shows that Google is like Microsoft; if you are the most ubiquitous in your market (OS, search engine, what have you), you will be targeted (viruses, search engine spammers). Yahoo search is my Linux...it's there, but everyone is targeting the big guy in the room and is ignoring my favorite. Yay!
Hear hear. I actually did start to read the article, but I gave up before the end of the first page because of unintelligible nonsense like that. A "writer" who doesn't even know when to use "than" and when to use "then"? Sod that, I'm not going to waste my time reading such drivel.
when I work on code while I wait for slow eaters in the family to finish eating
In whose family? Your own? I can't imagine why you'd be waiting for slow eaters in someone else's family to finish eating, but then I also am finding it hard to imagine why you'd be so anti-social as to go out for a meal with your family and start coding during the meal.
Same here with an HP desktop. 11 months after purchase, it started to fail. I had a heck of a time with HP on the line, insisting it was out of warranty. They finally did determine it was still under warranty and fixed everything for no charge.
Now it's just died again. It's 16 months old, very light use, and completely useless. HP support has told me:
They'll sell me a 1 year extended warranty for $79.99;
Whoops, they mean that an extended warranty is only valid while it's still in the original warranty period, and it's not so they won't sell me a warranty for $79.99, even after I requested they pull the phone call recording to listen to the offer being made on the phone;
Sorry, my system is refurbished and doesn't qualify;
Okay, seeing as how you've realized that means I bought an allegedly new system which was really refurbished they changed their claim and said it isn't refurbished, but they still won't support it;
That instead I have to pay $49 to get it diagnosed over the phone (after the guy already told me it was a total failure and I'd have to send it in);
And after that $49 I have to pay all shipping, as well as $302 to get it repaired (even if it's a bad battery).
Forget that; it breaks twice (conveniently the second time about four weeks after the last repair warranty expired) with 16 months of light use? I'm buying a new PC, seriously considering the extended warranties, and it won't be an HP.
Yeah, I'm bitter after spending way too much time on the phone with them.
Yes it is; that's why state tax forms give you a way out by allowing you to estimate how much you owe (see several other posts in this article for more detail). Just because something is legally due, or legally prohibited, does not mean it is possible for every violation to be tracked. This falls into the realm of logically incorrect. It's analogous to the following examples.
If it was legally prohibited for me to bring wine across the state border into Pennsylvania, then I would be sued and asked to pay a lot of money. It is legally prohibited. I haven't.
If was legally prohibited to exceed the speed limit, then people wouldn't do it. It is. And they do.
Exactly. I think I may have clicked on a tinyurl link precisely once, when it was from someone I knew and trusted. Otherwise...forget it. It's the perfect way to obfuscate a malicious link.
Oh, someone please mod "Insightful". I have said on/. many times in the past that here, of all places, people should appreciate the choice...and if I choose, voluntarily, after having tried the alternatives, to stay with IE instead of Firefox, or Windows instead of Linux, then the/. community should embrace that decision. Sometimes I feel that there are people on/. who will not be satisfied until there is no OS besides Linux. Ironic, really.
By ignoring costs for retraining on the new OS, retraining on the new applications, headache costs when the specialized educational/academic/back office software doesn't run on Linux, and so forth?
Everyone is saying dob them in because they're dishonest/lacking ethics/etc., and nobody is calling you out on calling it piracy rather than copyright infringement. I wish the average slashdotter was so upstanding when it came to discussions on pirating music and movies.
Well, personally, I hope the first companies to get nailed to the wall (who arguably really are doing something dishonest and immoral and which should be stopped, if you believe in this logic) are those like Accenture (headquartered in Dublin, previously Bermuda), Global Crossing (HQ: Bermuda) and Seagate (HQ: Cayman Islands).
With Microsoft, you're bickering over which state gets which benefits. At least it's still going to the U.S.
And, as was pointed out in the previous story referenced in the summary, it's not much different from the firms who register in Delaware (banks, lots of, for example) for reasons of "tax simplicity".
Is it all good and holy and pure? Maybe not in the idealogue viewpoint...but there are a lot of companies out there doing much, much worse.
Of course...they're not the evil Microsoft. Any other kdawson story would filled with vitriolic complaints about the nonsense he posts.
I think it'd have to be almost illegally old if that were the case. My green card also has my picture and fingerprints on it already and is nearly ten years old. Which means I have to pay a visit to the lovely INS sometime soon. You have to renew your green card every ten years.
No, because they branded it Lotus, thereby invoking a ton of dreadful baggage. If they'd called it some else, they might have had a chance.
P.S. Why is Slashdot slower than an old age pensioner snail crawling up a cliff covered in wet tar today? And why did Slashdot totally ignore the Google outage a week or so back?
P.P.S. From the article:
It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.
Slashdot (and the gaming media in general) are doing a fantastic job feeding his narcissism just by reporting on every frivolous lawsuit. He's just a really skilled troll, and everyone always falls for him.
Just like Slashdot (and Groklaw) did with SCO. Not that anyone outside the geek community actually cared, despite the desperate assertions of some of those posts from a couple of years ago; regardless of the desire to believe that this was critical, to the general public it was an obscure and somewhat incomprehensible mishmash involving a company they'd never heard of.
In all fairness, when did Microsoft ever have fanfare?
Windows 95 launch. Rolling Stones songs, midnight televised launch parties in New Zealand...maybe the "informed computing enthusiasts" didn't care (and by the way, as someone who was there and remembers this very well, I think that's a vastly over-reaching generalization), but everyone else was stoked.
Slashdot Mirror
Wordpad? Or is that too complex? What exactly do you want in a simple stripped down editor?
Glad to see that not only are Marks old free tools still free, but that Microsoft is allowing new tools of his to be free also. Very un-microsoft of microsoft.
Not really. Microsoft will charge for the primary applications, but it is generally in their best interest to have a whole bunch of useful scripts and tools and so forth available for free. (Somehow they never really got this hint on the old NT Resource Kit, boo.)
There is a wealth of stuff out there on the download section of their website. Just a week ago I needed a batch converter to convert Word 2003 documents to Word 2007 DOCX format. Lo and behold, if you can edit an INI file you can use the Office Migration Toolkit. Yep, it's free. Makes sense...they wanted to make it easy for people to upgrade to Office 2007, so they put out tools to scan for certain types of documents, convert them, report on what was out there, etc. This is not uncommon; especially when upgrading or migrating, Microsoft will put out a whole slew of support tools.
So what's fair? You (and a lot of other people here) seem to advocate a system that gives no reward or incentive to succeed. It doesn't seem to matter to you how amazing a work someone produces; the viewpoint I'm reading says they are entitled to the same share as someone else who makes a totally mediocre piece of work.
If someone is so lucky/skillful/visionary that they create something that is still beloved years later, why shouldn't they be able to enjoy the fruits of that labor and luck/skill/vision? Or would you rather apportion everyone a flat reward amount?
They robbed US FIRST, by stealing our public domain away from us, our kids, our grandkids, etc, and by locking our entire culture up behind a paywall
How about putting down the shrill bleating for a moment and giving a rationale? Who robbed whom of what? OUR public domain? Ah, good old entitlement theory again. "I DESERVE everything ever produced, it is MINE by RIGHT!" No. Not fair, not just. If you create something amazing and decide you want to waive all rights and reward, great, I admire your altruism. But you don't have a God-given RIGHT to anything else anyone ever produces, JUST because you can argue it's an intangible value.
Grow up.
In other words, WE are expending money, effort and time so a tiny fraction of potential visitors can save on money, time and effort. I call that a parasitic relationship.
I call it a business decision. Someone made the decision to continue supporting IE6 browsers. It's either due to some kind of regulatory requirement or because it was deemed worthwhile for whatever reason (e.g. economically profitable, or politically necessary).
I suppose it's possible that the opposite is true; no-one actively decided to stop supporting IE6, it's just something you've always done. In such a situation, I'd think you would go to your manager and explain the situation (hopefully in a slightly calmer fashion than this rant) and then let the higher-ups make the decision.
I have lived in both NZ and the US.
In the US, I get vast quantities of stuff (medicine, scanners, machines) thrown at me whenever I go to the doctor or hospital, but to get an appointment at the doctor takes a minimum of two weeks.
In NZ, I didn't get as much stuff thrown at me, but I still got what I needed, and I could see a doctor within a day or two.
In the US, I have a phenomenally good health care plan thanks to my employer, so whenever I have to go to the doctor or the hospital the amount I have to pay only costs between $5 and $20. For the benefit of non-US readers, a "phenomenally good health care plan" means I get a very wide range of coverage and I only pay about $100 a month. Prior to this job, I paid several hundred dollars a month, even with that employer kicking in a contribution towards my health care plan.
In NZ, just about everything was free. (Yes, I know I paid for it in taxes. Employers also paid for it in some of their company taxes.) Including my two week stay in hospital after a car crash, all the surgeries, physical therapy, etc. No health insurance or health care plan needed. If I wanted one, however, I could still have bought one and gotten private coverage. My brother worked for Telecom, for instance, so he had private health insurance through them.
Overall, even with my fantastic health care plan provided by my employer here, I still pay more per annum than I did in NZ.
And in NZ, I once had occasion to take a guest from the US, who was visiting for two weeks, to the hospital to get emergency treatment when she broke her foot. It was 100% free for her, too, thanks to the NZ taxpayer. No travel insurance was necessary. If the situations were reversed and I had to take a guest to a US hospital and they didn't have insurance, I don't even want to guess how much it'd cost.
Dislaimer: it's been ten years since I was in New Zealand. Things may have changed. If so, I'm sure someone will update me.
I'm not a hater; I've lived in the US for many years and like it here. There are some things about living here which I like better than in NZ, and there are some things I really miss about living in NZ that I think are better than in the US. No one country has the best of everything, and, from my personal experience, I happen to prefer the health care system in NZ.
And you probably need to cut back on the pompous asshattery.
For /., actually, that was pretty mild.
I know people that do senior software deployment for Fortune 100 companies and still refer to themselves as a techie.
The comment wasn't insulting people who call themselves techies. It was panning the typical Geek Squad so-called techie.
It's mystifying why you got so many positive mods for insulting someone and then re-stating the exact same point they made.
He/she didn't restate the exact same point you made. Go back and read again; he/she made a contention that was exactly opposite. Your point was essentially "it used to be said you never buy a Microsoft OS until they get to SP 1, and now you have to wait until SP 2". 0racle's point was "people should evaluate the OS on its own merits, and Windows 7 was found upon evaluation to be fit for deployment at release".
Hear hear. Down time is definitely necessary, but hours chatting about football? I know what this guy is talking about, because I see exactly the same at my place of work (not an IT company but a company with a large IT division).
Before I came here, I had been a consultant my entire career. I sometimes fantasize about the IT guys here being told to fill out timesheets showing what they were doing in six minute increments, just as an experiment for a few weeks, which is what I used to have to do.
When I joined this company, I thought I was being eased in because it was very relaxed and easy to finish my tasks, and everyone around me was complaining and frantic because they were so busy and pressured. Took me a few weeks to recognize that:
The IT guys in this company (who very much resemble the original poster's colleagues) wouldn't last a week in any of my old consulting jobs, and would get a real shock if they had to work in other divisions of this company. I liaise a lot with the business units and those people work hard. And yet, the sense of entitlement is incredible.
I understand and agree with the need for breaks. But this poster is clearly describing a situation of extreme idleness, where there are problems with both workers and management.
What I read about in the post, and what I see in my current company,is a group of spoiled whiny brats who (at least at work) act like they're still in a college fraternity, despite being in their 30s and married with children, and are in a company where management doesn't have the courage to do anything about it. It is not everywhere; I've worked as a consultant in plenty of other companies, and this kind of behavior and attitude would simply not be tolerated in most places. But it's far too prevalent amongst IT people.
Two final observations: in the places where I've seen this kind of behavior tolerated, the grandiose self-image of highly skilled tech wizardry is a complete illusion. The worst offenders are the individuals who've been doing the job for several years and still don't know the basics. (E.g. senior admins who don't understand how file and share permissions work.) Secondly, it's the server admins who are lazy and inept, not the developers. The developers I've worked with are professional and take pride in their work. Take from this what you will.
and rip them off...
Uh, read the article. Who's ripping who off?!
I was a boy when my father taught me two wrongs don't make a right. Evidently you have still to learn this moral truism.
I have worked in the electronics test/measurement/repair industry for ten years
Ten...whole...years... Wow. Get off my lawn. Is /. really this juvenile nowadays? Just a few days ago I read some other post where someone was pretending expertise because he'd worked in the industry for a whole five years. Tell you what: come back when you've been doing it for, say, 20 years, like I have. Or 40 years, like some of the real experts with whom I work.
Kids...
You and me both. My completely unscientific and subjective anecdotal experience suggests I get more results with Google but better results with Yahoo. And there is no way I will give up my Yahoo mail. I've tried GMail a few times, and it is painful for me to use. The layout is weird and I can never find anything (commands or e-mails...that's not helpful). Perhaps Yahoo mail is easier because I've been using it for so long (well over a decade, since the time when AltaVista was king) and have become accustomed to its interface. Whatever the explanation, I just know I have thousands of e-mails and records in my Yahoo e-mail and can easily find what I need, whereas even with just a handful of e-mails in my Google mail account I could never find anything without a struggle.
I do like being able to manually alter my route in Google maps, but I've had so many problems with it being down or flaky this year that I always go back to good old reliable MapQuest.
I suppose this shows that Google is like Microsoft; if you are the most ubiquitous in your market (OS, search engine, what have you), you will be targeted (viruses, search engine spammers). Yahoo search is my Linux...it's there, but everyone is targeting the big guy in the room and is ignoring my favorite. Yay!
Hear hear. I actually did start to read the article, but I gave up before the end of the first page because of unintelligible nonsense like that. A "writer" who doesn't even know when to use "than" and when to use "then"? Sod that, I'm not going to waste my time reading such drivel.
Single anecdote, but I was in Little Rock airport last week and they had free wi-fi.
when I work on code while I wait for slow eaters in the family to finish eating
In whose family? Your own? I can't imagine why you'd be waiting for slow eaters in someone else's family to finish eating, but then I also am finding it hard to imagine why you'd be so anti-social as to go out for a meal with your family and start coding during the meal.
Same here with an HP desktop. 11 months after purchase, it started to fail. I had a heck of a time with HP on the line, insisting it was out of warranty. They finally did determine it was still under warranty and fixed everything for no charge.
Now it's just died again. It's 16 months old, very light use, and completely useless. HP support has told me:
Forget that; it breaks twice (conveniently the second time about four weeks after the last repair warranty expired) with 16 months of light use? I'm buying a new PC, seriously considering the extended warranties, and it won't be an HP.
Yeah, I'm bitter after spending way too much time on the phone with them.
Yes it is; that's why state tax forms give you a way out by allowing you to estimate how much you owe (see several other posts in this article for more detail). Just because something is legally due, or legally prohibited, does not mean it is possible for every violation to be tracked. This falls into the realm of logically incorrect. It's analogous to the following examples.
If it was legally prohibited for me to bring wine across the state border into Pennsylvania, then I would be sued and asked to pay a lot of money. It is legally prohibited. I haven't.
If was legally prohibited to exceed the speed limit, then people wouldn't do it. It is. And they do.
Exactly. I think I may have clicked on a tinyurl link precisely once, when it was from someone I knew and trusted. Otherwise...forget it. It's the perfect way to obfuscate a malicious link.
Oh, someone please mod "Insightful". I have said on /. many times in the past that here, of all places, people should appreciate the choice...and if I choose, voluntarily, after having tried the alternatives, to stay with IE instead of Firefox, or Windows instead of Linux, then the /. community should embrace that decision. Sometimes I feel that there are people on /. who will not be satisfied until there is no OS besides Linux. Ironic, really.
How else can you beat free software?
By ignoring costs for retraining on the new OS, retraining on the new applications, headache costs when the specialized educational/academic/back office software doesn't run on Linux, and so forth?
Same with the sanctimonious "music piracy is copyright infringement, it's not theft or stealing", blah blah blah.
Everyone is saying dob them in because they're dishonest/lacking ethics/etc., and nobody is calling you out on calling it piracy rather than copyright infringement. I wish the average slashdotter was so upstanding when it came to discussions on pirating music and movies.
Seriously...what's the difference?
Well, personally, I hope the first companies to get nailed to the wall (who arguably really are doing something dishonest and immoral and which should be stopped, if you believe in this logic) are those like Accenture (headquartered in Dublin, previously Bermuda), Global Crossing (HQ: Bermuda) and Seagate (HQ: Cayman Islands).
With Microsoft, you're bickering over which state gets which benefits. At least it's still going to the U.S.
And, as was pointed out in the previous story referenced in the summary, it's not much different from the firms who register in Delaware (banks, lots of, for example) for reasons of "tax simplicity".
Is it all good and holy and pure? Maybe not in the idealogue viewpoint...but there are a lot of companies out there doing much, much worse.
Of course...they're not the evil Microsoft. Any other kdawson story would filled with vitriolic complaints about the nonsense he posts.
Oh dear Lord, really? Look up "opportunity cost" and go from there.
I think it'd have to be almost illegally old if that were the case. My green card also has my picture and fingerprints on it already and is nearly ten years old. Which means I have to pay a visit to the lovely INS sometime soon. You have to renew your green card every ten years.
Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?
No, because they branded it Lotus, thereby invoking a ton of dreadful baggage. If they'd called it some else, they might have had a chance.
P.S. Why is Slashdot slower than an old age pensioner snail crawling up a cliff covered in wet tar today? And why did Slashdot totally ignore the Google outage a week or so back?
P.P.S. From the article:
It's unlikely that IBM's pricing strategy will cause competitors to lower fees for their offerings, according to Cain. For one thing, Microsoft already has a $2 per month Exchange Online option called "Deskless Worker," Cain noted.
Slashdot (and the gaming media in general) are doing a fantastic job feeding his narcissism just by reporting on every frivolous lawsuit. He's just a really skilled troll, and everyone always falls for him.
Just like Slashdot (and Groklaw) did with SCO. Not that anyone outside the geek community actually cared, despite the desperate assertions of some of those posts from a couple of years ago; regardless of the desire to believe that this was critical, to the general public it was an obscure and somewhat incomprehensible mishmash involving a company they'd never heard of.
In all fairness, when did Microsoft ever have fanfare?
Windows 95 launch. Rolling Stones songs, midnight televised launch parties in New Zealand...maybe the "informed computing enthusiasts" didn't care (and by the way, as someone who was there and remembers this very well, I think that's a vastly over-reaching generalization), but everyone else was stoked.