>it almost seemed like a competition to see how much they could spend on new projects. >Justify your budget
Imagine how much more interesting projects could be if instead of spending 4K on a Windows server license, you could put the 4K on the hardware you are going to run your server on!
Or you could put the money you save on those licenses on your local developers, to pay them to customize your solution!
Lean & mean companies will get the message pretty quickly, don't worry.
You're right; Windows definitely makes it easier on the user.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
In effect, Microsoft reduces your options and makes many decisions for you so ou can have "an easy, all-in-one upgrade", so all a project would need to do to compete with something like that would be to make the same types of choices for the user.
That sounds like Lindows, doesn't it? I admit I haven't tried it yet, but I think that project is along the line you mentioned.
So with Linux, you get all that, AND the freedom to modify or change any aspect you like.
I'm even more sold on open-source, and the philosophy behind Gnu.
Re:Third Party Support & Open Source Alternati
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
·
· Score: 1
>I wonder if someone could make some money by doing third-party support of Windows98.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I expect that if there WAS a way for a group to do this without having access to the Windows 98 source-code, Microsoft itself would write and release a virus that would break the other group's method of fixing problems.
Microsoft want 98 to GO AWAY: They can't make any new money from it; they've made all the money they could from it.
Now, they want to get people on the upgrade-treadmill, and their new & improved treadmill has a EULA that will keep people paying for upgrades FOREVER!
Don't believe it?
Microsoft is pushing "trusted-computing" and "digital-rights-management" technologies because with them, you won't be able to get your data OFF their systems!
Once you'll be locked in and only able to access your creations from their software, they'll be able to make you pay through the nose to keep that access open.
This might take the form of MS licensing you to use Windows for a set period of time, after which you'll be locked out of your own data!
So users will have to pay MS just to keep accessing their own data!
In the end they'll be selling the access-time like cell-phone minutes, and if you get behind in payments, you'll be locked out.
> Just try to get support from Red Hat for RH 5.0. > if you criticize your ca. 2000 Linux distro with the 2.2 kernel, you get modded down and told to "get with the program" and stop running such an ancient OS, even though said OS is only the same age as Win 98 and is perhaps even younger.
Your points are valid, but the difference is upgrading Linux kernels costs nothing.
However, upgrading from Microsoft's 98 OS to any other MS OS WILL cost money, and the trend MS is trying to instill is to KEEP people on an upgrade-treadmill, where they can get money from them as often as possible.
Maybe a.o.l. lying about "being the internet" could be construed as a violation of many lame laws, which I won't name here (cough DCMA) but if the internet is about anything, it's that it belongs to the people, and education is the way.
Agreed, the public needs to reject trusted computing, you're right, and it will happen:
Trusted computing to get rid of Spam?
Someone will hack it, and there'll be as much spam as there ever was.
It'll never be shown to work effectively.
Good analogy (Windows XP and Turbo-Tax) : Have you seen Microsoft's financial results for the last quarter? Turbo-Tax's?
Looks like all people are waiting for is a product with a non-resrictive activation scheme to come along so they can switch.
Just like what happened to Wordstar:
Back in the beginning of he 1980s, Wordstar was THE word-processing program.
However, you've probably never even heard of it. Here's why:
People switched to running Wordperfect when the makers of Wordstar put this "activation" thingie in the software, and in the space of a year or two, Wordstar's market-share dropped off the face of the earth...
Everyone switched to Wordperfect, which had NO copy-protection mechanism.
If MS hadn't put code in Windows to hamper the proper functioning of Wordperfect, we'd all still be running it.
People can run their Windows aps on Linux with Wine, without fear that MS put in something to cripple their app.
You can run Windows apps on a "Windows" that doesn't crash (Linux)...
Not only is Linux free, but there is no "dirty" code in it to undermine independant vendors.
Any independant vendors knows that MS will try to strangle independants, so what will all independants choose? NOT Microsoft.
But you can't blame MS for trying:
It's the same old story, and NO ONE has learned from history.
So here's ANOTHER analogy, maybe a more accurate one:
MS is a dinosaur, and Linux is a planet-smashing asteroid.
That's a laugh; that the people running non-DRM hardware will be locked out of anything!
That's as dumb as saying non-a.o.l. users are locked out of the Internet: a.o.l. may *think* it is the Internet, but 99.999% percent of everybody else on earth couldn't give less of a care WHAT a.o.l. thinks.
Wouldn't THAT be a mind-blower, eh? Cutler and Torvalds creating the next-generation operating system together!
Why the heck not? They don't need a corporation: they'd have buyers on their stock the moment they looked for investors.
People have given Bill and Steve a chance, now it's Linus and Dave's turn.
Look at the independant websites out there like Slashdot or SourceForge and even any of the other big news services; they literally permit minds to meet!
Finally, it's always a question of what an audience decides it likes, and the internet provides all these communication channels for people to reach each other.
You can't help but expect that there would be natural synergy (call it what you will)...
So it's natural to feel that the actual true creative content will come from ordinary people most of the time; we have a wide sea (and getting wider!) of celebrities now, who are already diluting the popular media.
Basically, what I'm saying is that out of all that noise, it's inevitable that something unexpected (hopefully pleasant) will arise.
If you ask yourself what you thought 2003 was going to be like 15 years ago, you might not have had this in mind, so imagine what the next 15 could be like!
I put that organized entertainment is already in it's death-throes, because as diversity increases, the centralized media will never be able to follow it all, people connecting and exchanging with other people, really finding the content they want on their own and therefore having no time at all for the popular media.
Communications becoming so pourous that it drowns out conventional media; people programming their complete entertainment from the terrabyte streams.
So ordinary people, or brilliant engineers like Linus and Dave, researchers,... will be increasingly able to seek each other out and meet.
And the other funny thing is the most stable version of Windows I ever ran was Windows NT 3.1
I ran it on a 486DX2 66Mhz with 16MBs of RAM and a 500MB hard disk.
OK, so it couldn't print or do anything fancy, I admit that, but it WAS rock-steady!
The minute they pushed Dave Cutler out of the picture and started thinking along the lines of having featuresets by certain sales quarters, everything began to go downhill.
I really believed in Windows then, but now, it's just a big, slow, bloated abomination.
The plaintifss cannot possibly claim that they didn't know that this technology has been ubiquitous for some time, they should have filed years ago. They gave consent by not acting.
I didn't mean patenting it so it could be used for it could be charged for. I meant that that way, a corporation can't come along and patent it, even if the patent is not just.
Take Microsoft patenting the long-filename extensions to FAT.
It's NOT a just patent, but because they are a huge corporation, and can use lawyers to scare people, they'll probably get fees back from media manufacturers that ship their devices FAT32 ready-formatted anyway, because no one can afford to go to court to defend something like this.
So I pray the GPL covers this and it can't be hijacked by Microsoft or some other huge corporation.
No longer distributing the operating systems via MSDN has exactly the same effect.
Developers won't be able to test on those platforms, so they'll drop them too. All new products therefore will be available only for NEWER versions of Windows.
Also, the article clearly says MS won't SELL those products discontinued products.
>products that are being phased out >and that will no longer be available >to customers as of Dec. 15
Did YOU read the article?
This effectively brings the day closer when no one will run a Microsoft operating system that they OWN, only one that they RENT, so it plays into Microsoft's hand perfectly.
Windows95 went away (no longer patching or fixing it) at the 8 year mark, and now so is 98.
Want to bet in two years MS will discontinue W2K?
After that, there will only be subscription services that will REQUIRE you to patch your version of Windows to the next incremental version, and all this at a price!
If you ever get behind in your payments, MS can do just like any service company would and withold their service.
Only in this case, it'll lock you out of your computer and your documents.
Sort of like the phone company changing the locks on your house because you didn't pay your phone bill... The reasoning MS will use will be something like this; since you didn't pay on time, we can't let you use our operating system because anything you do with it, you need US to do, so in effect we OWN you.
Anyhow, I don't know why I bother replying to an anonymous coward who wouldn't have the guts to call me an idiot to my face about a point he didn't understand and that he tried to make out like I didn't understand...
Simple, They'll use retiring all those products to move people to a newer version of Windows, which will arguably be EVEN HARDER for users to migrate away from!
Every time Microsoft is sentenced to a "penalty" they find some way of using it to their advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
>it almost seemed like a competition to see how much they could spend on new projects.
>Justify your budget
Imagine how much more interesting projects could be if instead of spending 4K on a Windows server license, you could put the 4K on the hardware you are going to run your server on!
Or you could put the money you save on those licenses on your local developers, to pay them to customize your solution!
Lean & mean companies will get the message pretty quickly, don't worry.
You're right; Windows definitely makes it easier on the user.
Cool thing is that with the source-code available like it is, nothing prevents someone from putting together a Linux distribution that does the same.
In effect, Microsoft reduces your options and makes many decisions for you so ou can have "an easy, all-in-one upgrade", so all a project would need to do to compete with something like that would be to make the same types of choices for the user.
That sounds like Lindows, doesn't it? I admit I haven't tried it yet, but I think that project is along the line you mentioned.
So with Linux, you get all that, AND the freedom to modify or change any aspect you like.
I'm even more sold on open-source, and the philosophy behind Gnu.
>I wonder if someone could make some money by doing third-party support of Windows98.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I expect that if there WAS a way for a group to do this without having access to the Windows 98 source-code, Microsoft itself would write and release a virus that would break the other group's method of fixing problems.
Microsoft want 98 to GO AWAY: They can't make any new money from it; they've made all the money they could from it.
Now, they want to get people on the upgrade-treadmill, and their new & improved treadmill has a EULA that will keep people paying for upgrades FOREVER!
Don't believe it?
Microsoft is pushing "trusted-computing" and "digital-rights-management" technologies because with them, you won't be able to get your data OFF their systems!
Once you'll be locked in and only able to access your creations from their software, they'll be able to make you pay through the nose to keep that access open.
This might take the form of MS licensing you to use Windows for a set period of time, after which you'll be locked out of your own data!
So users will have to pay MS just to keep accessing their own data!
In the end they'll be selling the access-time like cell-phone minutes, and if you get behind in payments, you'll be locked out.
> Just try to get support from Red Hat for RH 5.0.
> if you criticize your ca. 2000 Linux distro with the 2.2 kernel, you get modded down and told to "get with the program" and stop running such an ancient OS, even though said OS is only the same age as Win 98 and is perhaps even younger.
Your points are valid, but the difference is upgrading Linux kernels costs nothing.
However, upgrading from Microsoft's 98 OS to any other MS OS WILL cost money, and the trend MS is trying to instill is to KEEP people on an upgrade-treadmill, where they can get money from them as often as possible.
Double-plus-good!
LOL
And Microsoft's crowning achievement,
MICROSOFT BOB!
Yes, Microsoft, will never rise that high ever again.
Wouldn't a doctor's hippocratic oath compel him to perform the procedure, no matter what the law says?
I wonder if the hippocratic oath is the oldest precedent in all law...
It also seems to be the path of least harm.
Can't we put some kind of emitter on these things that broadcasts "STAY AWAY" to the birds?
I seem to remember farmers using explosions to scare birds away from their crops, can't we do something similar here?
The Twilight Zone, "Nick of Time", written by Dr. Mality.
m l
Shatner is absolutely intense, brilliant and believable!
http://www.scifilm.org/tv/tz/twilightzone2-7.ht
I read somewhere that humor and especially satire are protected rights, so you're officially protected from the DCMA! ;-)
Go Red!
Maybe a.o.l. lying about "being the internet" could be construed as a violation of many lame laws, which I won't name here (cough DCMA) but if the internet is about anything, it's that it belongs to the people, and education is the way.
Be confused no more, Red.
You have a point.
Agreed, the public needs to reject trusted computing, you're right, and it will happen:
Trusted computing to get rid of Spam?
Someone will hack it, and there'll be as much spam as there ever was.
It'll never be shown to work effectively.
Good analogy (Windows XP and Turbo-Tax) : Have you seen Microsoft's financial results for the last quarter? Turbo-Tax's?
Looks like all people are waiting for is a product with a non-resrictive activation scheme to come along so they can switch.
Just like what happened to Wordstar:
Back in the beginning of he 1980s, Wordstar was THE word-processing program.
However, you've probably never even heard of it. Here's why:
People switched to running Wordperfect when the makers of Wordstar put this "activation" thingie in the software, and in the space of a year or two, Wordstar's market-share dropped off the face of the earth...
Everyone switched to Wordperfect, which had NO copy-protection mechanism.
If MS hadn't put code in Windows to hamper the proper functioning of Wordperfect, we'd all still be running it.
People can run their Windows aps on Linux with Wine, without fear that MS put in something to cripple their app.
You can run Windows apps on a "Windows" that doesn't crash (Linux)...
Not only is Linux free, but there is no "dirty" code in it to undermine independant vendors.
Any independant vendors knows that MS will try to strangle independants, so what will all independants choose? NOT Microsoft.
But you can't blame MS for trying:
It's the same old story, and NO ONE has learned from history.
So here's ANOTHER analogy, maybe a more accurate one:
MS is a dinosaur, and Linux is a planet-smashing asteroid.
That's a laugh; that the people running non-DRM hardware will be locked out of anything!
That's as dumb as saying non-a.o.l. users are locked out of the Internet: a.o.l. may *think* it is the Internet, but 99.999% percent of everybody else on earth couldn't give less of a care WHAT a.o.l. thinks.
Wouldn't THAT be a mind-blower, eh?
... will be increasingly able to seek each other out and meet.
Cutler and Torvalds creating the next-generation operating system together!
Why the heck not?
They don't need a corporation: they'd have buyers on their stock the moment they looked for investors.
People have given Bill and Steve a chance, now it's Linus and Dave's turn.
Look at the independant websites out there like Slashdot or SourceForge and even any of the other big news services; they literally permit minds to meet!
Finally, it's always a question of what an audience decides it likes, and the internet provides all these communication channels for people to reach each other.
You can't help but expect that there would be natural synergy (call it what you will)...
So it's natural to feel that the actual true creative content will come from ordinary people most of the time; we have a wide sea (and getting wider!) of celebrities now, who are already diluting the popular media.
Basically, what I'm saying is that out of all that noise, it's inevitable that something unexpected (hopefully pleasant) will arise.
If you ask yourself what you thought 2003 was going to be like 15 years ago, you might not have had this in mind, so imagine what the next 15 could be like!
I put that organized entertainment is already in it's death-throes, because as diversity increases, the centralized media will never be able to follow it all, people connecting and exchanging with other people, really finding the content they want on their own and therefore having no time at all for the popular media.
Communications becoming so pourous that it drowns out conventional media; people programming their complete entertainment from the terrabyte streams.
So ordinary people, or brilliant engineers like Linus and Dave, researchers,
And THEN we'll have leaders.
I didn't have the proper driver.
Your recap makes me marvel at how far we've come though...
Everything improved but software!
LOL
EXACTLY what the founding (US) fathers said
All men created equal.
And the other funny thing is the most stable version of Windows I ever ran was Windows NT 3.1
I ran it on a 486DX2 66Mhz with 16MBs of RAM and a 500MB hard disk.
OK, so it couldn't print or do anything fancy, I admit that, but it WAS rock-steady!
The minute they pushed Dave Cutler out of the picture and started thinking along the lines of having featuresets by certain sales quarters, everything began to go downhill.
I really believed in Windows then, but now, it's just a big, slow, bloated abomination.
I have to go cry now.
The plaintifss cannot possibly claim that they didn't know that this technology has been ubiquitous for some time, they should have filed years ago. They gave consent by not acting.
I didn't mean patenting it so it could be used for it could be charged for.
I meant that that way, a corporation can't come along and patent it, even if the patent is not just.
Take Microsoft patenting the long-filename extensions to FAT.
It's NOT a just patent, but because they are a huge corporation, and can use lawyers to scare people, they'll probably get fees back from media manufacturers that ship their devices FAT32 ready-formatted anyway, because no one can afford to go to court to defend something like this.
So I pray the GPL covers this and it can't be hijacked by Microsoft or some other huge corporation.
Can the idea of producing a modular-on-a-cd OS be patented?
Because if it can be, we have to secure it with something before a corporation patents it!
No longer distributing the operating systems via MSDN has exactly the same effect.
Developers won't be able to test on those platforms, so they'll drop them too. All new products therefore will be available only for NEWER versions of Windows.
Also, the article clearly says MS won't SELL those products discontinued products.
>products that are being phased out
>and that will no longer be available
>to customers as of Dec. 15
Did YOU read the article?
This effectively brings the day closer when no one will run a Microsoft operating system that they OWN, only one that they RENT, so it plays into Microsoft's hand perfectly.
Windows95 went away (no longer patching or fixing it) at the 8 year mark, and now so is 98.
Want to bet in two years MS will discontinue W2K?
After that, there will only be subscription services that will REQUIRE you to patch your version of Windows to the next incremental version, and all this at a price!
If you ever get behind in your payments, MS can do just like any service company would and withold their service.
Only in this case, it'll lock you out of your computer and your documents.
Sort of like the phone company changing the locks on your house because you didn't pay your phone bill... The reasoning MS will use will be something like this; since you didn't pay on time, we can't let you use our operating system because anything you do with it, you need US to do, so in effect we OWN you.
Anyhow, I don't know why I bother replying to an anonymous coward who wouldn't have the guts to call me an idiot to my face about a point he didn't understand and that he tried to make out like I didn't understand...
I forgive you.
Simple,
They'll use retiring all those products to move people to a newer version of Windows, which will arguably be EVEN HARDER for users to migrate away from!
Every time Microsoft is sentenced to a "penalty" they find some way of using it to their advantage.
No reason why this will be any different.
If every Open-Source advocate buys a share in this company it will prove that open-source is NOT communism.
It would take off like gangbusters! Think of it as a donation to get the initial chips produced and off it will go!
What's to stop them from making PC chips then?
What's their stock ticker symbol?
>net negative effect from copyright/patent/trademarks system
Yes all of us working together trying to fix problems instead of clogging the courts...
Sounds like a plan.
One thing is certain; it would take a radical change in both people's attitude and the systems of government we currently have in place.
>I might hate the final result
People could even use the things you invent in destructive ways, but that's always true anyway.
Ironically, the very first software application; calculating ballistics to target ordnance.
Governments have even been zealous enough to use scientists to create nuclear weapons!
It seems to me that at best, we have a failure to communicate.
Good point(s).
In retrospect, it seems the original poster was saying the same thing I was trying to get at.
Which is that people should behave in a civilized manner.
What you posted seems to be saying that there should be no such thing as intellectual property... Is that a fair analysis?