I don't know if it is or isn't in use, but if you do some research, you will find that they will probably be guarding it for quite some time.
There were several civilian employees that worked there and they became ill. They sued the government due to what they said were illnesses resulting from EPA violations (burning toxic chemicals). Apparently all the experimental stuff they have been doing has some nasty bi-products. They were running out of storage room so naturally they just burnt it. Apparently if a base doesn't exist, it is free from abiding by EPA regulations. That is a whole topic for another discussion though.
To make a long story short, they weren't allowed to sue because officially the base didn't exist. I do not know the final outcome of the case since the base has been acknowledged.
If they were handling toxic stuff there, it is possible that they will continue to guard it even if it isn't used anymore to prevent hapless curious seekers from exposing themselves to lethal substances.
Line of sight - It is not just sight as in if you shot a laser beam it would hit the target. Rather, it is defined by the clarity of the Fresnel Zone. Radio waves do not travel like a laser beam as they are in a "wave" pattern.
There exists an area above and below the straight line between two points that cannot have excessive blockage. The shape to imagine is like an eye as it tapers down on the two end points and gets very big in the middle.
For short distances, this isn't significant. It is when you start breaking the half-mile to a mile range that it gets interesting.
I remember that there used to be a calculator somewhere on Cisco's website that would calculate the size of the Fresnel Zone based on distance (it grows), but I am too lazy to look it up.
Ok . . . I will call them AGAIN . . . ahh, to hell with it, I will just check their website. Wow! Look what I found!!!
http://www.vonage.com/area_codes.php
To quote:
"With Vonage, you are no longer tied to your "local area code". You can select any Area Code you want from our list of available area codes. This means even if you live in New York, you can have a California area code."
So, in a few infamous words from Seinfeld, "NO SOUP FOR YOU!"
Sorry, you are mistaken. Call Vonage and ask. I called corporate headquarters and talked with some of their expansion people on how it works.
Also, a phone number does not necessarily tie you to any exhange just like in IP address doesn't necessarily tie you to a physical location. Phone networks are _switched_ and it is trivial for a phone number to answer anywhere.
How do you think you can port your home phone to a cell phone and back again?
By the way, when signing up on Vonage YOU get to choose your area code. Physical proximity need not apply.
t does have to connect to a real telephone exchange SOMEWHERE.
That is irrelevant. You are taxed on your phone line at home because you use a piece of wired infastructure COMING TO YOUR HOME. You are not taxed for contacting others. You are taxed if you never make a call. If you were taxed at both ends, that would be double taxation.
Your call to Vonage only touches the line when it goes to someone that isn't a Vonage user and thus is paying taxes on THEIR line.
If you the customer have to pay tax on using a line that you don't actually use, that is, IMHO, taxation without representation.
The right to communicate should not be taxable. Public utility infastructure should. The Internet is not public utility infastructure even though at points it uses it.
Certainly vonage users should have to pay the 911 taxes.
I think 911 taxes should be tied to physical addresses and not phone numbers of any kind. I can have a New York phone number with Vonage and live in Florida. You are telling me I should have to pay New York 911 taxes while living in Florida? Better yet, I can be a Vonage customer with a New York phone number and live in Canada. Should I have to pay 911 taxes there?
Keep in mind that the calls I receive while on Vonage would NEVER touch any infastructure in New York if I lived elsewhere unless the caller was in New York.
Because unless you establish yourself as a CLEC, you will ALWAYS be subjected to the TOS a company has with anything you do online.
Bellsouth, Verizon, etc. doesn't like what you are doing? They can terminate your ability to connect.
That is a form of corporate censorship. This is also along the lines of the Moore/Disney thing. What you are seeing is corporations are starting to dictate what you can and can't do.
THAT scares me more than goverment intervention. Think Rollerball where corporations control everything. Quite frankly we aren't worlds away from that kind of reality.
Since I operate a WISP, I can say with complete confidence based on in the field experience that your assertions are demonstrably false.
First and foremost, everyone I have ever spoken with that is on dial-up is very unsatisfied with it. It ties up their phone, is slow and often unreliable.
More and more people I talk with are becoming increasingly aware of what they call "wireless Internet" that basically encompasses all forms of accessing the Internet wirelessly.
They don't fully understand the different types (hotspot/wireless broadband/cell phones/home wireless networks) but they do understand one fundamental principle--cell phones made it possible to receive and place calls almost anywhere so eventually wireless Internet will make the same possible for web surfing.
And as far as catering to any one company, I find that silly unless they plan on auctioning it off. I doubt that. A huge market has developed because of the current free spectrum and they are not closed to opening more if feasible. Once it is open, there is no way any one company can capitalize because anyone anywhere can make use of it within the rules and limitations on the spectrum.
The cost of an employee is never just their wages. There amny other factors to take into account. In the case of India, there could potentially be even more than a domestic worker (number, not price).
To quote Matrix: Revlutions, "There are levels of survival we are willing to accept." I guess it all boils down to choice--do you want to be out of work and struggle for employment OR do you want to move out of your plush apartment into a cheaper rural location and commute (potentially e-commute) to work and cut down your living expenses?
Also keep in mind that the living standards and salaries in India are improving gradually. While not on the level of the US, it is getting better.
Computers -- Britain, sort of, via the Colossus. It was not very programmable though. ENIAC post-date's it but was a true computer in the modern sense that it was designed to be Turing complete.
Space Travel -- Germany was actually the first to send an object into space in 1942. The U.S. was the first to send a living organism into space in 1946. Russia was the first to achieve an orbital launch in 1957 and subsequently send the first animal up one month later. They also sent the first human up in 1961
I am under the impression that what compmanies that are outsourcing are looking for are reasonably qualified and capable programming drones that don't demand high pay to cut costs.
They may find that now but wait until the state of the programmer in India and other places change. As people's standard of living increases, their demands increase until one day they will not be cheaper anymore.
It might take years to happen, but I suspect that those jobs will one day make their way back here due to simple economic principles.
That money CAN be recovered anyway in the form of exports to India to fill the desires of those newly paid programmers.
When confronted by competition (cheaper labor), programmers have the choice to either compete on price and take pay cuts or lose their business to Indian programemrs. Maybe they never had the choice but my guess is that if all the programmers at a company banded together and sent a note to upper managment saying they would match the savings in pay and benefit cuts, management would choose not to outsource.
I suppose you should tell that to the 3 families I just switched a few weeks ago. Even when I told one family they might not be able to play their favorite games they had, they said, "If it will make the computer quit locking up all the time and keep out those worms, I don't care if I can't play games anymore at all."
Real quote. People are starting to get fed up with all the worms, viruses and security risks that Microsoft has subjected them to. I fully expect this sentiment to pick up steam.
One would think with lots of API documentation available that a near perfect compatibility layer should have been feasible by now. This has not happened and many people (myself included) don't really understand why.
What hurdles stand between Wine/Codeweavers and a near-flawless Windows compatibility layer?
I wonder if the cost of antivirus subscriptions has traditionally been included in the TCO studies out there comparing Windows and Linux. Somehow I bet not.
That really doesn't make sense either. If what you say is true--that the courts are like Vegas and the money you spend increases your chances--then you would you bet on?
SCO with about 70-80 million in the bank and a negative cash flow
or
IBM that probably has at least 10 to 20 times that and a positive cash flow?
In the enterprise, support is not a hard sell even for rock solid products. Managers that know little or nothing about how each product actually works want to know that there is someone they can call in the event of a complete disaster.
Think a scenario where the entire IT staff was on their way to lunch in a few cars on a bridge that collapsed. The next day, all systems suffered a failure.
Quality of service is a concern for almost any type of service you get. I have seen people have extreme problems with their landline phone only to discover much later that it was water getting in their line. For a while I could hear other conversations on my landline (not a cordless phone) everytime I placed a call. I could still manage a call but it was hard to ignore.
Any type of wireless service (regardless of type) is subject to serious issues. On my cellphone, I occasionally place or receive calls and I can't hear the person on the other end and they can't hear me. There are places where my calls drop out like clockwork even though a tower is not far away. For a while, my phone would bounce randomly back and forth between a tower very close and very far at my house causing dropped calls and choppy conversations.
I have seen everything from fiber cables stop working inexplicably to wireless point to point shots that should be impossible (that didn't stop us trying) start working hours after the equipment was put in place (and an alternative was being devised) and never have a problem again.
Bottom line is that it doesn't matter what service you have, quality of service is not a guarantee. Some services are certainly more susceptible than others, but none are for certain, period.
The problem is that things don't always work right, and when they don't work right, getting them fixed is usually much more difficult on Linux than it is on Windows.
By what metric?
Quick rebuttal story. Doing consulting work for an auto-parts factory, I ran across a strange phenomenon where a third party app suddenly broke on a bunch of systems. After racking my brain and chasing down strange error messages for days on end, I found the culprit.
How? I had to install and run a very obscure program that monitors all registry calls so you can see what a program is doing. After pouring over the logs for hours I figured it out. The program was calling for an ODBC information entry that had moved.
Why did it move? An automatic update pushed by Novel Groupwise installed something that altered some settings. How did I determine that? By setting up a fresh system and updating manually until the app broke.
The other day, my Red Hat Fedora Core 2 Test 1 system began behaving badly. Turned out to be a problem with an RPM that was installed. How did I figure that? Rollback updates until the system worked. Yeah, that was very hard. Then it hit me--there was no such rollback option on those Windows machines.
Disclosure, in case it matters: I'm an editor for the magazine. Hey, its nothing to me that you are an editor. However, you boss might be pissed that your web server just caught fire due to/.ing.
Do they prevent you from installing other browsers?
No, but that wasn't my argument. My argument with my original post was that Microsoft:
-Ties Explorer irrovocably to Windows in ways that without some major hacks, cannot be undone
-Has signed OEM deals that prevent the vendor (Dell, HP, etc.) from including competing software. That is fact.
-KDE and all of the FOSS world has not done anything remotely like that before that I am aware of.
Can you install something other than Explorer on Windows? Sure. Can you do it from an MS installation CD for the OS? No way in hell.
Now with every flavor of Linux I am aware of, there many different choices included.
With KDE, I believe it is possible to remove Konqueror, but for Mandrake (with which I have the most experience)
Honestly, I plead ignorance on what you can and can't do with KDE. I only know that you _can_ remove any package you want from a Linux machine if you are so inclined. Would it break KDE to totally remove Konq? I don't know. I prefer Red Hat + Gnome. I just think it is simpler and prettier but this isn't a Gnome/KDE debate.
See my reply to the other reply to my par=nt for most of your arguments.
For the one specific to yours, I never said Windows would let you install those things. It is that you don't have a choice as to whether Explorer (in some fashion) gets installed.
That has nothing to do with what I was asking, which is the difference between Microsoft integrating its net and file browser and KDE doing the exact same thing.
It has everything to do with it. KDE will overlay on Unix and Linux running many different flavors. How many OS's will the Windows desktop environment run on? Only one or one type from one vendor--the same one that makes both.
If you refuse to see the importance of that distinction, I think there is no point in arguing the difference.
You can do the same with Windows...
Please send me a link to the documentation provided on Microsoft that tells how you can either A) Install Windows without Explorer or B) Uninstall Explorer completely from an existing installation.
By the way, on XP if you set the OS to specifically NOT allow someone to use explorer as a web browser, they can still open My Computer and type a web address in the address location and BINGO, explorer is off to the races. Just an interesting tidbit.
That's so vague, it's not even a valid point that really says anything about the subject we're discussin which is integrating a file and net browser, which KDE and Microsoft both did.
Vague? OK, how's this? You can add/remove Konquerer at will and even replace it with something else. You don't even have to install it in the first place. You can rewrite the source code to Konquerer if you wish. Heck, you can rewrite the entire codebase to KDE if you really want.
With Microsoft, you can't. You can't even see the code. You could reverse engineer it at the expense of breaking the law. To my knowledge, you cannot install Windows without some version of Explorer being installed (such as the file browser). Again, if that is not the case, please link to some documentation so I can uninstall Explorer from a few machines I manage.
Again, has absolutely nothing to do with KDE integrating its file and net browser and Microsoft integrating its file and net browser, and somehow one being a-okay with Slashdotters.
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. You asked what the difference between Microsoft integrating and KDE. Microsoft integrates then refuses to let others onto the field to play. KDE does nothing of the sort. Again, if you refuse to see the connection, there is no point arguing further.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it is or isn't in use, but if you do some research, you will find that they will probably be guarding it for quite some time.
There were several civilian employees that worked there and they became ill. They sued the government due to what they said were illnesses resulting from EPA violations (burning toxic chemicals). Apparently all the experimental stuff they have been doing has some nasty bi-products. They were running out of storage room so naturally they just burnt it. Apparently if a base doesn't exist, it is free from abiding by EPA regulations. That is a whole topic for another discussion though.
To make a long story short, they weren't allowed to sue because officially the base didn't exist. I do not know the final outcome of the case since the base has been acknowledged.
If they were handling toxic stuff there, it is possible that they will continue to guard it even if it isn't used anymore to prevent hapless curious seekers from exposing themselves to lethal substances.
Line of sight - It is not just sight as in if you shot a laser beam it would hit the target. Rather, it is defined by the clarity of the Fresnel Zone. Radio waves do not travel like a laser beam as they are in a "wave" pattern.
There exists an area above and below the straight line between two points that cannot have excessive blockage. The shape to imagine is like an eye as it tapers down on the two end points and gets very big in the middle.
For short distances, this isn't significant. It is when you start breaking the half-mile to a mile range that it gets interesting.
I remember that there used to be a calculator somewhere on Cisco's website that would calculate the size of the Fresnel Zone based on distance (it grows), but I am too lazy to look it up.
I could say something about a pot and a kettle, but instead I will just refer you to this site. Good luck!
http://www.contactlenses.com/
Ok . . . I will call them AGAIN . . . ahh, to hell with it, I will just check their website. Wow! Look what I found!!!
http://www.vonage.com/area_codes.php
To quote:
"With Vonage, you are no longer tied to your "local area code". You can select any Area Code you want from our list of available area codes. This means even if you live in New York, you can have a California area code."
So, in a few infamous words from Seinfeld, "NO SOUP FOR YOU!"
Sorry, you are mistaken. Call Vonage and ask. I called corporate headquarters and talked with some of their expansion people on how it works.
Also, a phone number does not necessarily tie you to any exhange just like in IP address doesn't necessarily tie you to a physical location. Phone networks are _switched_ and it is trivial for a phone number to answer anywhere.
How do you think you can port your home phone to a cell phone and back again?
By the way, when signing up on Vonage YOU get to choose your area code. Physical proximity need not apply.
t does have to connect to a real telephone exchange SOMEWHERE.
That is irrelevant. You are taxed on your phone line at home because you use a piece of wired infastructure COMING TO YOUR HOME. You are not taxed for contacting others. You are taxed if you never make a call. If you were taxed at both ends, that would be double taxation.
Your call to Vonage only touches the line when it goes to someone that isn't a Vonage user and thus is paying taxes on THEIR line.
If you the customer have to pay tax on using a line that you don't actually use, that is, IMHO, taxation without representation.
The right to communicate should not be taxable. Public utility infastructure should. The Internet is not public utility infastructure even though at points it uses it.
Certainly vonage users should have to pay the 911 taxes.
I think 911 taxes should be tied to physical addresses and not phone numbers of any kind. I can have a New York phone number with Vonage and live in Florida. You are telling me I should have to pay New York 911 taxes while living in Florida? Better yet, I can be a Vonage customer with a New York phone number and live in Canada. Should I have to pay 911 taxes there?
Keep in mind that the calls I receive while on Vonage would NEVER touch any infastructure in New York if I lived elsewhere unless the caller was in New York.
Because unless you establish yourself as a CLEC, you will ALWAYS be subjected to the TOS a company has with anything you do online.
Bellsouth, Verizon, etc. doesn't like what you are doing? They can terminate your ability to connect.
That is a form of corporate censorship. This is also along the lines of the Moore/Disney thing. What you are seeing is corporations are starting to dictate what you can and can't do.
THAT scares me more than goverment intervention. Think Rollerball where corporations control everything. Quite frankly we aren't worlds away from that kind of reality.
Since I operate a WISP, I can say with complete confidence based on in the field experience that your assertions are demonstrably false.
First and foremost, everyone I have ever spoken with that is on dial-up is very unsatisfied with it. It ties up their phone, is slow and often unreliable.
More and more people I talk with are becoming increasingly aware of what they call "wireless Internet" that basically encompasses all forms of accessing the Internet wirelessly.
They don't fully understand the different types (hotspot/wireless broadband/cell phones/home wireless networks) but they do understand one fundamental principle--cell phones made it possible to receive and place calls almost anywhere so eventually wireless Internet will make the same possible for web surfing.
And as far as catering to any one company, I find that silly unless they plan on auctioning it off. I doubt that. A huge market has developed because of the current free spectrum and they are not closed to opening more if feasible. Once it is open, there is no way any one company can capitalize because anyone anywhere can make use of it within the rules and limitations on the spectrum.
Irrelevant? Without the underlying Internet, there would be no WWW.
That is like saying that wheels are irrelevant pre-automobile.
The cost of an employee is never just their wages. There amny other factors to take into account. In the case of India, there could potentially be even more than a domestic worker (number, not price).
To quote Matrix: Revlutions, "There are levels of survival we are willing to accept." I guess it all boils down to choice--do you want to be out of work and struggle for employment OR do you want to move out of your plush apartment into a cheaper rural location and commute (potentially e-commute) to work and cut down your living expenses?
Also keep in mind that the living standards and salaries in India are improving gradually. While not on the level of the US, it is getting better.
According to wikipedia.com:
Automobile -- France via Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
Television -- Germany via Paul Gottlieb Nipkow
Computers -- Britain, sort of, via the Colossus. It was not very programmable though. ENIAC post-date's it but was a true computer in the modern sense that it was designed to be Turing complete.
Space Travel -- Germany was actually the first to send an object into space in 1942. The U.S. was the first to send a living organism into space in 1946. Russia was the first to achieve an orbital launch in 1957 and subsequently send the first animal up one month later. They also sent the first human up in 1961
Internet -- US via DARPA.
I am under the impression that what compmanies that are outsourcing are looking for are reasonably qualified and capable programming drones that don't demand high pay to cut costs.
They may find that now but wait until the state of the programmer in India and other places change. As people's standard of living increases, their demands increase until one day they will not be cheaper anymore.
It might take years to happen, but I suspect that those jobs will one day make their way back here due to simple economic principles.
That money CAN be recovered anyway in the form of exports to India to fill the desires of those newly paid programmers.
When confronted by competition (cheaper labor), programmers have the choice to either compete on price and take pay cuts or lose their business to Indian programemrs. Maybe they never had the choice but my guess is that if all the programmers at a company banded together and sent a note to upper managment saying they would match the savings in pay and benefit cuts, management would choose not to outsource.
I could be wrong.
Linux ain't ready for the home desktop market
I suppose you should tell that to the 3 families I just switched a few weeks ago. Even when I told one family they might not be able to play their favorite games they had, they said, "If it will make the computer quit locking up all the time and keep out those worms, I don't care if I can't play games anymore at all."
Real quote. People are starting to get fed up with all the worms, viruses and security risks that Microsoft has subjected them to. I fully expect this sentiment to pick up steam.
One would think with lots of API documentation available that a near perfect compatibility layer should have been feasible by now. This has not happened and many people (myself included) don't really understand why.
What hurdles stand between Wine/Codeweavers and a near-flawless Windows compatibility layer?
I wonder if the cost of antivirus subscriptions has traditionally been included in the TCO studies out there comparing Windows and Linux. Somehow I bet not.
Oops, guess I should have read the next few sentences. It was an intentional typo.
Believe or not, from the article:
A standard pizza operates at 2.4 GHz
I remember in college a few guys had "special" pizza, but I don't think it had anything to do with radio frequencies.
That has to be one of the funniest typos I have seen in a while.
That really doesn't make sense either. If what you say is true--that the courts are like Vegas and the money you spend increases your chances--then you would you bet on?
SCO with about 70-80 million in the bank and a negative cash flow
or
IBM that probably has at least 10 to 20 times that and a positive cash flow?
Seems pretty obvious.
In the enterprise, support is not a hard sell even for rock solid products. Managers that know little or nothing about how each product actually works want to know that there is someone they can call in the event of a complete disaster.
Think a scenario where the entire IT staff was on their way to lunch in a few cars on a bridge that collapsed. The next day, all systems suffered a failure.
Quality of service is a concern for almost any type of service you get. I have seen people have extreme problems with their landline phone only to discover much later that it was water getting in their line. For a while I could hear other conversations on my landline (not a cordless phone) everytime I placed a call. I could still manage a call but it was hard to ignore.
Any type of wireless service (regardless of type) is subject to serious issues. On my cellphone, I occasionally place or receive calls and I can't hear the person on the other end and they can't hear me. There are places where my calls drop out like clockwork even though a tower is not far away. For a while, my phone would bounce randomly back and forth between a tower very close and very far at my house causing dropped calls and choppy conversations.
I have seen everything from fiber cables stop working inexplicably to wireless point to point shots that should be impossible (that didn't stop us trying) start working hours after the equipment was put in place (and an alternative was being devised) and never have a problem again.
Bottom line is that it doesn't matter what service you have, quality of service is not a guarantee. Some services are certainly more susceptible than others, but none are for certain, period.
The problem is that things don't always work right, and when they don't work right, getting them fixed is usually much more difficult on Linux than it is on Windows.
By what metric?
Quick rebuttal story. Doing consulting work for an auto-parts factory, I ran across a strange phenomenon where a third party app suddenly broke on a bunch of systems. After racking my brain and chasing down strange error messages for days on end, I found the culprit.
How? I had to install and run a very obscure program that monitors all registry calls so you can see what a program is doing. After pouring over the logs for hours I figured it out. The program was calling for an ODBC information entry that had moved.
Why did it move? An automatic update pushed by Novel Groupwise installed something that altered some settings. How did I determine that? By setting up a fresh system and updating manually until the app broke.
The other day, my Red Hat Fedora Core 2 Test 1 system began behaving badly. Turned out to be a problem with an RPM that was installed. How did I figure that? Rollback updates until the system worked. Yeah, that was very hard. Then it hit me--there was no such rollback option on those Windows machines.
Disclosure, in case it matters: I'm an editor for the magazine. /.ing.
Hey, its nothing to me that you are an editor. However, you boss might be pissed that your web server just caught fire due to
Do they prevent you from installing other browsers?
No, but that wasn't my argument. My argument with my original post was that Microsoft:
-Ties Explorer irrovocably to Windows in ways that without some major hacks, cannot be undone
-Has signed OEM deals that prevent the vendor (Dell, HP, etc.) from including competing software. That is fact.
-KDE and all of the FOSS world has not done anything remotely like that before that I am aware of.
Can you install something other than Explorer on Windows? Sure. Can you do it from an MS installation CD for the OS? No way in hell.
Now with every flavor of Linux I am aware of, there many different choices included.
With KDE, I believe it is possible to remove Konqueror, but for Mandrake (with which I have the most experience)
Honestly, I plead ignorance on what you can and can't do with KDE. I only know that you _can_ remove any package you want from a Linux machine if you are so inclined. Would it break KDE to totally remove Konq? I don't know. I prefer Red Hat + Gnome. I just think it is simpler and prettier but this isn't a Gnome/KDE debate.
See my reply to the other reply to my par=nt for most of your arguments.
For the one specific to yours, I never said Windows would let you install those things. It is that you don't have a choice as to whether Explorer (in some fashion) gets installed.
That has nothing to do with what I was asking, which is the difference between Microsoft integrating its net and file browser and KDE doing the exact same thing.
It has everything to do with it. KDE will overlay on Unix and Linux running many different flavors. How many OS's will the Windows desktop environment run on? Only one or one type from one vendor--the same one that makes both.
If you refuse to see the importance of that distinction, I think there is no point in arguing the difference.
You can do the same with Windows...
Please send me a link to the documentation provided on Microsoft that tells how you can either A) Install Windows without Explorer or B) Uninstall Explorer completely from an existing installation.
By the way, on XP if you set the OS to specifically NOT allow someone to use explorer as a web browser, they can still open My Computer and type a web address in the address location and BINGO, explorer is off to the races. Just an interesting tidbit.
That's so vague, it's not even a valid point that really says anything about the subject we're discussin which is integrating a file and net browser, which KDE and Microsoft both did.
Vague? OK, how's this? You can add/remove Konquerer at will and even replace it with something else. You don't even have to install it in the first place. You can rewrite the source code to Konquerer if you wish. Heck, you can rewrite the entire codebase to KDE if you really want.
With Microsoft, you can't. You can't even see the code. You could reverse engineer it at the expense of breaking the law. To my knowledge, you cannot install Windows without some version of Explorer being installed (such as the file browser). Again, if that is not the case, please link to some documentation so I can uninstall Explorer from a few machines I manage.
Again, has absolutely nothing to do with KDE integrating its file and net browser and Microsoft integrating its file and net browser, and somehow one being a-okay with Slashdotters.
It has EVERYTHING to do with it. You asked what the difference between Microsoft integrating and KDE. Microsoft integrates then refuses to let others onto the field to play. KDE does nothing of the sort. Again, if you refuse to see the connection, there is no point arguing further.