This article's viewpoint is pretty puzzling to me. It says in essence: "How can there be change and progress in Web standards during a long gap between versions of IE? Oh no!"
I don't get the "Oh no!" part. I see this as good news. If the article's author sees IE's "monopoly" on Joe Q. Normal's computer as a problem, he should be jumping for joy that Microsoft has left the arena open for competition. Quoting the article's comments on Mozilla:
But will it, even with continual improvement, on top of what is already a fine platform, be sufficiently compelling to have Windows users replace IE 6 as their browser of choice? Some certainly, but enough to worry Microsoft?
Why do we care if MS is worried? The question is only whether we can get enough people to adopt an alternate browser, and MS is clearly not worried enough to compete anymore. Perhaps they're HOPING someone will take the browser market away from them. Perhaps they want to train computer users onto a less frequent release schedule so they don't have to release code that's as buggy. I don't care.
We should see this as an opportunity, as should the developers of Mozilla, Opera, and the rest, to remind Joe Q. Normal that he doesn't have to accept a crappy, stagnant, buggy browser as his one and only window to the Internet.
The thing is, those things are true in small numbers. Jedi are great special forces, but you wouldn't want them as your infantry, because the sheer scale of ground combat in those numbers means even your best warrior will fall. The Jedi did a great job against really bad odds in EpII, but it took Yoda in his 'Nam helicopter to save them.
So the Emperor has the clones, the Trade Federation has the droids, and once the Empire is formed they'll turn both against the Jedi and crush them like bugs.
Heaven forbid someone might like these movies. Certainly there's nothing going on here along the lines of critics blowing their childhood myths out of proportion and then making unfair comparisons. No.
If I had a nickel for every study that told me it had proven something unpleasant that was going to rock my world any day now, and then two months later heard about another, even more reliable study that proved the exact opposite, I would have one hell of a lot of nickels.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And yeah, computers are hard. Big news.
Now try posting on some Christian Coalition blog: "Satan not so bad after all, says new study"
[blah] > Evidently I was misinformed when told that Canada, and, indeed, every civilized nation on > earth, has prisons full of convicts who got there as a result of being arrested by the > police, including some who were convicted in trials by the weight of evidence seized with > search warrants. [blah]
Fallacy: oversimplification. (and overrated, and pompous, if you ask me) The allegation is not that other countries have no laws and no police, but rather that the FBI and Secret Service are worse/much worse than other federal police groups in the world. I don't know if that's true, but it is easy to believe such a claim (which doesn't make it true) in connection with the infringements on personal freedoms which I am led to believe are happening in the States.
Anybody out there with experience with such groups in other countries? Better? Worse?
> Remember when we laughed at their attempt to > combat Netscape in the Internet browser market? > Take a look now...
AOL buying Netscape and driving it into the ground was not necessarily related to the development curve of IE. Also, when I take a look now I see Mozilla, open source child of Netscape, kicking IE's ass. All it took was one halfway-strong (and standards-compliant instead of standards-creating) competitor and IE falls over like a dead monkey. Take a look in six months.
Yes, and also companies can (and do!) hire a series of Windows "consultants" to come in and do this or that, because their main, low-paid drone who maintains the system is only an MCSE and doesn't know all the "cool" "new" "stuff". Short-term hires and consultants come out of a different money bucket, and I wouldn't be surprised if this makes the Windows maint figure a bit slimmer.
Unix/Linux folken, on the other hand, tend to get installed permanently with sturdy mounting brackets, and since we know that we are going to get asked to do Every Little Thing with free software we have to know about ourselves, we ask for some decent money in return.
I know that in my current job, I was able to do bunches and bunches of things for people that simply wouldn't have been possible had the software not been free and the OS consistent and stable. The software costs would simply have been prohibitively high, so Dude A wouldn't have been able to (through me) launch his tiny CRM system that turned into a gigantor and still ate up remarkably few resources. There are probably a hundred examples of this in my current job, and I'm just one dumb sysadmin in a world of smarter ones.
So I just don't buy it. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I doubt that this acquisition has coincidentally happened so close to the RedHat announcement. I have the feeling that the big pay distros are circling the wagons. I wonder if Novell/SuSE will shortly make an announcement similar to RedHat's?
We are not doing SCO's legal work. They have thought of all of this, because (like any company pursuing a well-financed legal action) they have lawyers and paralegals working for them whose bread and butter depends on pounding the law books into pulp to find a good strategy that isn't full of holes.
Whereas here on/. only one out of 100 posts even mentions "contract law", most of their intellectual power is already focused in the right direction. I'm not giving them too much credit or saying they're perfect... but they are probably by and large as smart as we are, plus they are trained in law and are using their access to the vast body of case law.
Hmm, this sounds like when SCO said only the FSF can enforce the GPL, so IBM can't use the GPL against SCO.:)
IANAL, but it seems to me that "unconstitutional" here means that if a court of law were to uphold the terms of the GPL, that would be a legal precedent that could be challenged on the grounds that it's unconstitutional. That being said, I imagine that private contracts can have terms that are valid yet "unconstitutional", i.e. can have terms that don't square up with the U.S. Constitution. Whether a legal body making a precedent that upholds the GPL is subject to the terms of the U.S. Constitution -- that's unclear to me.
But yeah, the question isn't whether the terms are "unconstitutional" per se -- the question is whether the terms are considered legal. Even a private contract's terms can be considered null and void despite signatures on both sides because the terms within the contract are illegal ("Party of the first part will assassinate Party of the second part"). This is probably what SCO means.
Re:Double charging...
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, this is the exact type of use RFIDs are good for. Borders knows you bought that last week because the object is unique and is registered as sold in their database. And if the consumer protection groups are able to do what I think they will try to do, you will have elected to turn the RFID off at the point of purchase and they will have done so, for fear of you detecting it with your homemade RFID detector and suing them for invasion of privacy.
Such a detector will work great when we begin to suspect that there are secretly active RFIDs on/in our purchases, etc. Assuming consumer protection agencies manage to get some rudimentary law passed (or a precedent set extrapolated out of existing law), having such a detector will allow us to nail businesses or agencies that break the law, and they'll stop trying by and large. After all, if just a few people are adequately informed and use law to protect themselves, the media will do the rest.
However, a problem I see is Federal Reserve Notes (a.k.a. money -- see the article). Since they are considered the property of the government, we can't exactly refuse to accept FRNs (unlike goods we could purchase elsewhere/not for cash) even if we suspect there are RFIDs in them, assuming there's no other convenient way to move the funds, and actually electronic money is much easier to trace than RFIDs.
So if I want to track you, I simply see to it that you receive an FRN (in the change for your Whopper, say) that I can track. And if you then go home or to Joe's house and discover the RFID, can you disable it? Meanwhile I know you where you went and disabled/tried to disable the RFID. I can also try to pass a law making RFID detectors illegal, but I think it's too late for that to have any effect, unless they insinuate RFIDs into all crucial parts for such a detector! (Paranoia!)
Or I plant an RFID in your tax return check. Or in a letter, or any piece of paper I want.
Another problem with regard to detection is an RFID that starts out dormant and becomes active at a later time, or in response to some stimulus. We'd need some kind of detector that wasn't based on active radio transmission, but rather that detects the unit itself.
I'm going to stop now while things like "RFID dart guns" and "non-radio transmission options" flit through my head...
> If Linux were in the mainstream, everyone and their mom would be logged in as root
This is just not so. The dumbing-down of an operating system implies first and foremost (for me) an installer and user environment that takes away some (or a lot of) responsibility from the user.
That could be seen as a bad thing, but what that has led to in mainstream Linux distros is forcing you to create a non-root user during the install and setting up your X, etc., as that user. And when you log in as root under X you get a patronizing (for us) message. And what newbies will know to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1?
No, the problem I see is more the opposite -- when something goes wrong with the system, nobody has the root password (because it never gets used) and if they did, they wouldn't know how to fix things. But there are worse hells.
You cannot keep information like this secure forever, or even very long. Someone will always have this information. The question is, will we allow the US government to to deprive us of our liberties to the extent that the gov't really can keep this information for ourselves, and only let it out when it's in their interest for a building to get bombed, or do we fight to keep information free?
People who claim this information is a security risk are looking at things the wrong way round.
Slashdot's summary of this article is way off base, and the article itself couldn't be less useful. Counting the number of "errors" in lines of code... and the ratio is supposed to mean something to us? As compared to unnamed other software? C'mon, I have better things to do with my time.
As much as I agree with these sentiments, I must say this: Bayesian filters are really cool, and I use one myself, but a) that's just an arms race status that is temporarily in our favor, and b) after 6 months of scrupulous Bayesian filtering and feeding the filter (ifile), I still get quite a bit of spam in my inbox.
Why? Spammers are getting through my filter by, among other things, jamming my filter with words it's never seen before, like nonsense words or genus/species designations that have nothing to do with the email. It won't be long now.
I think the idea is, if one Linux is going to make it to the desktop of Joe Blow, wouldn't it be great if it were Debian? And if you think (like I do) that it *would* be great, what needs to change to make that happen?
The usability problem is really big. I still kick myself that I didn't use debian for as long as I didn't. Now, for example, I deeply regret installing other distros at work which I considered at the time easier to keep current. But there was a big obstacle -- the installer and the apt system were completely opaque to me.
Seems to me an airtight installer and a simple apt frontend (graphical, sorry) can't be *that* hard. For all I know there could be projects in existence that are well on their way. And aside from the usability, I think debian will be OK marektingwise. Quality gets talked about, especially suddenly easily accessible quality.
My whole point was that there is a level missing in your analysis, namely that of the UI. I stand by my statement that there are enough satisfying features packed into the ten tons of crap I never use, because it's not about that, it's about the UI.
The concept of Office as an application development platform is a little exaggerated in my opinion. People don't necessarily need to let their way of working be shaped by what MS chooses to offer them in its Office package. Everything that Office offers can be had elsewhere. Or if not, then I'm not seeing that one magic thing in Office that you wouldn't get if you (foolishly) decided to slap all those open source things together. There are also open source application development platforms, after all.
No, Mom doesn't care that it runs Microsoft Office, she just calls it Microsoft Office because she doesn't know any better. She just wants programs that do what she wants, and she wants to be able to find and run them easily.
The issue is not whether open source developers can make programs that do what users want; they definitely can and have. I see it more as creating an environment (OS & user interface & applications) that users can and will use. It doesn't have to be like Windows, it needs to be intelligently enough conceived that its quality will recommend it over time, with features people need, not with features that bloat and not with features that blur the distinction between these three levels.
On the operating system level, Linux is already well on its way to achieving this level of quality and IMNSHO needs no guidance.
On the user interface level, to use two ready examples, I find both KDE and Gnome to be pretty good, but the last time I checked they still seemed to be addressing savvier people as an audience. I find Lindows to be essentially a good idea if misguided (due to its basis on Windows). I have yet to see a New Idea in UIs -- it's what's most needed.
On the application level it's all about features and capabilities. Slap together the features contained in OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, and other stuff I never use and, feature-wise, and you've got more than enough features to do the stuff you need to do -- it's just a question of the user being able to figure out how to do it easily, and that goes back to the UI again.
Problem is, trailblazing is hard. It's not like I have some magic idea for a new UI -- I just know in my gut that with some new UI ideas from some kind of Xerox PARC: The Next Generation, after not too long we won't need to make reference to Windows to make our applications usable.
I know I'm responding to a troll, but still: once you've gotten through the hell of setting up X under Debian for the first time, it is unbelievably stable, as is everything else I've ever touched in Debian, and I use sid.
I was forced to use Lindows recently when I went back to visit the United States and stayed in the Green Tortoise youth hostel in North Beach. Until I found an open wireless access point, I had to use the free Internet workstations in the hostel itself.
I must say, nobody seemed to have a single problem during many hours of the six stations being in constant use, and the people staying at the hostel didn't strike me as the geek type. I was impressed that the hostel didn't seem to constantly have confused users bugging them all the time. And it wasn't too bad to use for me, either, although I was glad when my laptop finally found that access point:)
No, instead I think I'll point a decent browser (Opera) there instead. Hey! It doesn't work. Okay, I'll tell Opera to advertise itself as MSIE 5.0. Nope! Still no go.
In a way this actually makes me happy. Everything like this that MS does turns the people who are against them even more against them. Problem is, it numbs the people who happily use their products even further. "Duh, OK, I guess my Netscape browser needs an upgrade! I'll download MSIE now." I like that they call it an upgrade.
An ignorant consumer is a useful consumer. Make more ignorant consumers!
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're thinking of Larry Niven's misquotation of Sam Butler, my friend. Check Google.
Thanks for the on-topic response to my comment, btw.
This article's viewpoint is pretty puzzling to me. It says in essence: "How can there be change and progress in Web standards during a long gap between versions of IE? Oh no!"
I don't get the "Oh no!" part. I see this as good news. If the article's author sees IE's "monopoly" on Joe Q. Normal's computer as a problem, he should be jumping for joy that Microsoft has left the arena open for competition. Quoting the article's comments on Mozilla:
But will it, even with continual improvement, on top of what is already a fine platform, be sufficiently compelling to have Windows users replace IE 6 as their browser of choice? Some certainly, but enough to worry Microsoft?
Why do we care if MS is worried? The question is only whether we can get enough people to adopt an alternate browser, and MS is clearly not worried enough to compete anymore. Perhaps they're HOPING someone will take the browser market away from them. Perhaps they want to train computer users onto a less frequent release schedule so they don't have to release code that's as buggy. I don't care.
We should see this as an opportunity, as should the developers of Mozilla, Opera, and the rest, to remind Joe Q. Normal that he doesn't have to accept a crappy, stagnant, buggy browser as his one and only window to the Internet.
The thing is, those things are true in small numbers. Jedi are great special forces, but you wouldn't want them as your infantry, because the sheer scale of ground combat in those numbers means even your best warrior will fall. The Jedi did a great job against really bad odds in EpII, but it took Yoda in his 'Nam helicopter to save them.
So the Emperor has the clones, the Trade Federation has the droids, and once the Empire is formed they'll turn both against the Jedi and crush them like bugs.
Heaven forbid someone might like these movies. Certainly there's nothing going on here along the lines of critics blowing their childhood myths out of proportion and then making unfair comparisons. No.
If I had a nickel for every study that told me it had proven something unpleasant that was going to rock my world any day now, and then two months later heard about another, even more reliable study that proved the exact opposite, I would have one hell of a lot of nickels.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
And yeah, computers are hard. Big news.
Now try posting on some Christian Coalition blog: "Satan not so bad after all, says new study"
Whatever.
Tungsten carbide drills?!
[blah]
> Evidently I was misinformed when told that Canada, and, indeed, every civilized nation on
> earth, has prisons full of convicts who got there as a result of being arrested by the
> police, including some who were convicted in trials by the weight of evidence seized with
> search warrants.
[blah]
Fallacy: oversimplification. (and overrated, and pompous, if you ask me) The allegation is not that other countries have no laws and no police, but rather that the FBI and Secret Service are worse/much worse than other federal police groups in the world. I don't know if that's true, but it is easy to believe such a claim (which doesn't make it true) in connection with the infringements on personal freedoms which I am led to believe are happening in the States.
Anybody out there with experience with such groups in other countries? Better? Worse?
> Remember when we laughed at their attempt to
> combat Netscape in the Internet browser market?
> Take a look now...
AOL buying Netscape and driving it into the ground was not necessarily related to the development curve of IE. Also, when I take a look now I see Mozilla, open source child of Netscape, kicking IE's ass. All it took was one halfway-strong (and standards-compliant instead of standards-creating) competitor and IE falls over like a dead monkey. Take a look in six months.
Yes, and also companies can (and do!) hire a series of Windows "consultants" to come in and do this or that, because their main, low-paid drone who maintains the system is only an MCSE and doesn't know all the "cool" "new" "stuff". Short-term hires and consultants come out of a different money bucket, and I wouldn't be surprised if this makes the Windows maint figure a bit slimmer.
Unix/Linux folken, on the other hand, tend to get installed permanently with sturdy mounting brackets, and since we know that we are going to get asked to do Every Little Thing with free software we have to know about ourselves, we ask for some decent money in return.
I know that in my current job, I was able to do bunches and bunches of things for people that simply wouldn't have been possible had the software not been free and the OS consistent and stable. The software costs would simply have been prohibitively high, so Dude A wouldn't have been able to (through me) launch his tiny CRM system that turned into a gigantor and still ate up remarkably few resources. There are probably a hundred examples of this in my current job, and I'm just one dumb sysadmin in a world of smarter ones.
So I just don't buy it. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Yesterday was the big day. What happened?
I doubt that this acquisition has coincidentally happened so close to the RedHat announcement. I have the feeling that the big pay distros are circling the wagons. I wonder if Novell/SuSE will shortly make an announcement similar to RedHat's?
We are not doing SCO's legal work. They have thought of all of this, because (like any company pursuing a well-financed legal action) they have lawyers and paralegals working for them whose bread and butter depends on pounding the law books into pulp to find a good strategy that isn't full of holes.
/. only one out of 100 posts even mentions "contract law", most of their intellectual power is already focused in the right direction. I'm not giving them too much credit or saying they're perfect... but they are probably by and large as smart as we are, plus they are trained in law and are using their access to the vast body of case law.
Whereas here on
Hmm, this sounds like when SCO said only the FSF can enforce the GPL, so IBM can't use the GPL against SCO. :)
IANAL, but it seems to me that "unconstitutional" here means that if a court of law were to uphold the terms of the GPL, that would be a legal precedent that could be challenged on the grounds that it's unconstitutional. That being said, I imagine that private contracts can have terms that are valid yet "unconstitutional", i.e. can have terms that don't square up with the U.S. Constitution. Whether a legal body making a precedent that upholds the GPL is subject to the terms of the U.S. Constitution -- that's unclear to me.
But yeah, the question isn't whether the terms are "unconstitutional" per se -- the question is whether the terms are considered legal. Even a private contract's terms can be considered null and void despite signatures on both sides because the terms within the contract are illegal ("Party of the first part will assassinate Party of the second part"). This is probably what SCO means.
Well, this is the exact type of use RFIDs are good for. Borders knows you bought that last week because the object is unique and is registered as sold in their database. And if the consumer protection groups are able to do what I think they will try to do, you will have elected to turn the RFID off at the point of purchase and they will have done so, for fear of you detecting it with your homemade RFID detector and suing them for invasion of privacy.
Such a detector will work great when we begin to suspect that there are secretly active RFIDs on/in our purchases, etc. Assuming consumer protection agencies manage to get some rudimentary law passed (or a precedent set extrapolated out of existing law), having such a detector will allow us to nail businesses or agencies that break the law, and they'll stop trying by and large. After all, if just a few people are adequately informed and use law to protect themselves, the media will do the rest.
However, a problem I see is Federal Reserve Notes (a.k.a. money -- see the article). Since they are considered the property of the government, we can't exactly refuse to accept FRNs (unlike goods we could purchase elsewhere/not for cash) even if we suspect there are RFIDs in them, assuming there's no other convenient way to move the funds, and actually electronic money is much easier to trace than RFIDs.
So if I want to track you, I simply see to it that you receive an FRN (in the change for your Whopper, say) that I can track. And if you then go home or to Joe's house and discover the RFID, can you disable it? Meanwhile I know you where you went and disabled/tried to disable the RFID. I can also try to pass a law making RFID detectors illegal, but I think it's too late for that to have any effect, unless they insinuate RFIDs into all crucial parts for such a detector! (Paranoia!)
Or I plant an RFID in your tax return check. Or in a letter, or any piece of paper I want.
Another problem with regard to detection is an RFID that starts out dormant and becomes active at a later time, or in response to some stimulus. We'd need some kind of detector that wasn't based on active radio transmission, but rather that detects the unit itself.
I'm going to stop now while things like "RFID dart guns" and "non-radio transmission options" flit through my head...
> If Linux were in the mainstream, everyone and their mom would be logged in as root
This is just not so. The dumbing-down of an operating system implies first and foremost (for me) an installer and user environment that takes away some (or a lot of) responsibility from the user.
That could be seen as a bad thing, but what that has led to in mainstream Linux distros is forcing you to create a non-root user during the install and setting up your X, etc., as that user. And when you log in as root under X you get a patronizing (for us) message. And what newbies will know to hit Ctrl-Alt-F1?
No, the problem I see is more the opposite -- when something goes wrong with the system, nobody has the root password (because it never gets used) and if they did, they wouldn't know how to fix things. But there are worse hells.
You cannot keep information like this secure forever, or even very long. Someone will always have this information. The question is, will we allow the US government to to deprive us of our liberties to the extent that the gov't really can keep this information for ourselves, and only let it out when it's in their interest for a building to get bombed, or do we fight to keep information free?
People who claim this information is a security risk are looking at things the wrong way round.
Slashdot's summary of this article is way off base, and the article itself couldn't be less useful. Counting the number of "errors" in lines of code... and the ratio is supposed to mean something to us? As compared to unnamed other software? C'mon, I have better things to do with my time.
*plonk*
As much as I agree with these sentiments, I must say this: Bayesian filters are really cool, and I use one myself, but a) that's just an arms race status that is temporarily in our favor, and b) after 6 months of scrupulous Bayesian filtering and feeding the filter (ifile), I still get quite a bit of spam in my inbox.
Why? Spammers are getting through my filter by, among other things, jamming my filter with words it's never seen before, like nonsense words or genus/species designations that have nothing to do with the email. It won't be long now.
I think the idea is, if one Linux is going to make it to the desktop of Joe Blow, wouldn't it be great if it were Debian? And if you think (like I do) that it *would* be great, what needs to change to make that happen?
The usability problem is really big. I still kick myself that I didn't use debian for as long as I didn't. Now, for example, I deeply regret installing other distros at work which I considered at the time easier to keep current. But there was a big obstacle -- the installer and the apt system were completely opaque to me.
Seems to me an airtight installer and a simple apt frontend (graphical, sorry) can't be *that* hard. For all I know there could be projects in existence that are well on their way. And aside from the usability, I think debian will be OK marektingwise. Quality gets talked about, especially suddenly easily accessible quality.
My whole point was that there is a level missing in your analysis, namely that of the UI. I stand by my statement that there are enough satisfying features packed into the ten tons of crap I never use, because it's not about that, it's about the UI.
The concept of Office as an application development platform is a little exaggerated in my opinion. People don't necessarily need to let their way of working be shaped by what MS chooses to offer them in its Office package. Everything that Office offers can be had elsewhere. Or if not, then I'm not seeing that one magic thing in Office that you wouldn't get if you (foolishly) decided to slap all those open source things together. There are also open source application development platforms, after all.
Quality will win out in the end.
No, Mom doesn't care that it runs Microsoft Office, she just calls it Microsoft Office because she doesn't know any better. She just wants programs that do what she wants, and she wants to be able to find and run them easily.
The issue is not whether open source developers can make programs that do what users want; they definitely can and have. I see it more as creating an environment (OS & user interface & applications) that users can and will use. It doesn't have to be like Windows, it needs to be intelligently enough conceived that its quality will recommend it over time, with features people need, not with features that bloat and not with features that blur the distinction between these three levels.
On the operating system level, Linux is already well on its way to achieving this level of quality and IMNSHO needs no guidance.
On the user interface level, to use two ready examples, I find both KDE and Gnome to be pretty good, but the last time I checked they still seemed to be addressing savvier people as an audience. I find Lindows to be essentially a good idea if misguided (due to its basis on Windows). I have yet to see a New Idea in UIs -- it's what's most needed.
On the application level it's all about features and capabilities. Slap together the features contained in OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, and other stuff I never use and, feature-wise, and you've got more than enough features to do the stuff you need to do -- it's just a question of the user being able to figure out how to do it easily, and that goes back to the UI again.
Problem is, trailblazing is hard. It's not like I have some magic idea for a new UI -- I just know in my gut that with some new UI ideas from some kind of Xerox PARC: The Next Generation, after not too long we won't need to make reference to Windows to make our applications usable.
I know I'm responding to a troll, but still: once you've gotten through the hell of setting up X under Debian for the first time, it is unbelievably stable, as is everything else I've ever touched in Debian, and I use sid.
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 saved my soul!
I was forced to use Lindows recently when I went back to visit the United States and stayed in the Green Tortoise youth hostel in North Beach. Until I found an open wireless access point, I had to use the free Internet workstations in the hostel itself.
:)
I must say, nobody seemed to have a single problem during many hours of the six stations being in constant use, and the people staying at the hostel didn't strike me as the geek type. I was impressed that the hostel didn't seem to constantly have confused users bugging them all the time. And it wasn't too bad to use for me, either, although I was glad when my laptop finally found that access point
No, instead I think I'll point a decent browser (Opera) there instead. Hey! It doesn't work. Okay, I'll tell Opera to advertise itself as MSIE 5.0. Nope! Still no go.
In a way this actually makes me happy. Everything like this that MS does turns the people who are against them even more against them. Problem is, it numbs the people who happily use their products even further. "Duh, OK, I guess my Netscape browser needs an upgrade! I'll download MSIE now." I like that they call it an upgrade.
An ignorant consumer is a useful consumer. Make more ignorant consumers!