Most ISPs rate-limit outbound SMTP. Some will shut down a client that appears to be spamming, and force the user to call in to reestablish service.
So the spammer gets your first 100 mails a day, your friends and family get none and you end up getting cut off. AWESOME. Cutting off infected boxes is nice, but silly limits that will prevent people from running legitimate mail lists and turn them off for trying is not nice at all.
The Microsoft Solution to software that eliminates their fake Server/Client model is to coerce ISPs to eliminate service.
My ISP doesn't block 25 outgoing but a few spam blacklists have my IP range on their "DSL/Cable/Dialup" listings so I send mail from my internal server through the ISP. The result? No more "You're on a dynamic IP" bounce messages.
Problem: Your friends have dickhead ISPs that bounce your mail back instead of sending it to them.
Grub Solution: Have a dickhead ISP for yourself that blocks all of your mail so none of your friends get it unless you use their Carnivored SMTP spam server. Sweet!
Closing port 25 is pointless because the owners of the botnet already know to use the ISP's SMTP server, just like the victim does, to send mail. You won't really stop the spam or DDoS this way, you will just stop normal users from doing something that's easy and useful.
There's nothing difficult about running a mail server. Exim comes with debian and has reasonable default values set in a script that tells you what it's doing. It's no harder to run than it is to use a GUI client. There are many advantages to it as well, such as custom mail addresses for registrations and other junk.
Reducing redundancy is bad for national security. In the end, it's much easier to DDoS email by targeting two broadband providers than it is to target thousands of individual users with a clue. The setback will be temporary. As email dies as a useful communication media, Jabber and others will rise in it's place.
And not one story about all the presentations given at Linux World that were done using Power Point on Windows.
If what you say is true, it's not news and it just goes to show the power of free software. Everyone has to deal with legacy equipment using Winblows. Despite the great efforts by M$, using such equipment is not too difficult and happens routinely. Free software efforts have managed to decode M$ formats, a task which well funded companies were not able to do as well or as quickly. The ability of free software to keep up with that kind of crap is miraculous. Free software is able to deal with other people's stupidity and malice. As demonstrated here, relying on M$ to get things done is stupid, but it's possible that the Linux World Expo had crufty projection equipment and did not let anyone boot anything else. So what?
Microsoft's poor performance is a self inflicted discgrace. Despite their monopoly power over hardware makers, which results in every hardware maker on earth creating drivers for M$, M$ routinely fails to deliver. Recommendations of daily reboot, four minitue to own times when connected to a network and the BSoD the happens all too frequently are symptoms of M$'s inability to deal with their own anti-competitive complexity. They have put so many barbs in for everyone else, and have so long neglected real quality issues that their products are unstable and essentially unusable. We're not talking about any old schmoe here, we're talking about a Microsoft Representative who should have the best support and upkeep possible. When people like that, or Bill Gates himself, the blame is easy to place.
At the time, nobody realized (that they'll admit) how inflated AOL stock was, so it seemed to make sense to structure the merger as acquisition.... Time-Warner management initially had an equal role in the combined company. And "equal" soon changed to "dominant" as it become more and the AOL part would never lived up to initial expectations...
I see it more as TW destroyed AOL with mailice and self destructive spite. AOL with full ability to distribute TW content would indeed have lived up to expectations. TW made themselves dominant and eliminated the world's largest ISP as potential competition by NOT letting AOL distribute said content. AOL under TW has not only stagnated, they have fallen behind. It's destruction is a shameful reflection on TW's missmanagement. If you can't make money with AOL style control over the largest online group in the world, there's something seriously wrong with you or you intended to destroy it from the beginning.
Old media won, for a while. Of the new media companies, AOL, M$, Napster, MP3.COM, only M$ is left and they are owned. Who else is there to compete against the 4 big music publishers and the one or two movie publishers? Creative commons will undo the greedy morons.
If that's not good enough try deductive reasoning, such as:
K/sec is good, therefore "storre et bedre" is something like "bigger is better".
"mindre" is not "storre" and must mean something different. "CPU last" is most likely CPU load, read all about it here: bonnie docs.
What's clear to me is that ordinary SCSI kicks SATA ass, software or hardware. If you want to be cheap, buy used equipment from ebay or pricewatch. Works for me.
Microsoft is losing the FUD war big time. 51% of CIOs at SMB have an interest in Linux and free software. With live CD distros like Knoppix, the FUD dies quickly.
The only thing that's changed is that CowboyNeal fell for the stupid paper that claims M$ is winning and Microsoft's use of said paper that they bought.
I predict that by this time next year, 75% will be interested and 25% will be evaluating while the confused and no interest crowd will shrink.
You're splitting hairs to justify doing something that is clearly ethically wrong, that is pirating movies
Pirate movies are bad, but I would not call them ethically wrong. International Talking Like a Pirate Day, however is pretty much immoral.
Oh wait, you are telling me that copyright law is ethical. I dissagree. Copyright "protection" exists to enrich the public domain and encourage the arts and science. "Protection" that lasts longer than the life of the media fails most of it's public obligation. Firms that take your talent and call it their own then keep all of their films in a vault until they rot are robbing all of us of our cultural heritage. A great example of this is the Disney film, "Song of the South". It's owners are embarrassed of it and refuse to release it. Every bit of talent that went into that film is doomed to oblivion and you won't ever see it outside of a "pirated" version.
Note that no ships were stolen and no sailors were killed to bring you these bits or those of those of the leaked copy of ROTS. The only pirates are those idiots trying to shut down the internet because it threatens their 100 year old business model.
You ask us "How can you be betraying your fiduciary [konqueror spell check used, thank you] responsibilities to shareholders by delaying products in the name of security... why don't you return to your security-be-damned buggy strategy and return your stock to the glorious heights it once held."
Don't worry, our future products (TM) will always be buggy. The only problem is that we are out of start-ups to screw out of mature programs because all the developers and startups are now geared to Linux, that evil unAmerican cancer that's draining the life blood out of the stocks you were so foolish to buy from us. In time, if you click your heels together three times and chant, "No stock is better than Microsoft stock," we promise that you will feel better. This works remarkably well for our software users and is the basis of our famous $50/hour phone support. If you are really lucky, hardware manufacturers will collude with us to lock our Linux and all other software, leaving nothing but buggy junk for those without keys. At that time Microsoft will internally switch to Linux and our relative productivity will dynamically soar, and the predicted dinosaur domination will be a reality.
Even talking about the cost of the patching process itself is missing the point. [that it is trivial and low cost in the free world]
I dissagree, the relative costs and benefits should be discussed. There are significant costs to Winblows that do not exist in your nice apt-get world. There are also significant advantages to free software that will never exist in the non free world. With blowhards paid to publish nonsense about "complication", it's good to do a quick reality check.
The real world of enterprise M$ upkeep is completely foo-bared by useless, paranoid anti-copy mechanisms. A typical upgrade of software is done by third parties who hire gangs of floppy pushing drones for after hour shift work. Not all applications can be upgraded from a central server, regardless of what server you are running, Zen included. Many packages have to be installed individually, so they can update the stupid registry properly.
The cost and complexity of upgrading even single packages is a reason Big Dumb Companies take so long to get new software. They have to wait until enough work is accumulated to justify the costs. This is a significant disadvantage for obvious reasons.
Some of the advantages, other than trivial application, to free systems are worth mentioning as well. By making custom meta packages, accounting or clerical for example, you can precisely control what packages are put onto everyone's systems. Because any old white box can be a repository, outside bandwith can be cut down to a single sync operation per location. Microsoft, I think, still makes patch serving difficult and version upgrading impossible. Even a PHB can understand the benefit of such flexibility - the right tool goes to the right person at the right time at lower costs.
Take your pick, gangs of slaves or a few customized deb repositories. I can't imagine how the gangs could ever be cheaper, and of course, the result shows up in real TCO studdies better than it does marketing BS from M$.
If you don't have such a system WTF are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?
I don't work for a big company, but one day I'd like to own one. In the mean time, the news is entertaining and helps me keep up the simple home network I have.
Cam-rips are usually unwatchable... I can't imagine a low-resolution recording of a movie being any sort of substitute for actually seeing the film.
For the vast majority of the population who don't have home theaters equal to a real theater, a full quality DVD is no substitute either. Star Wars is all about eye candy and special effects. It's just not the same when the sound does not punch you in the chest and the ships are not near life size when they explode. While it's technically possible to get the same quality viewing in your house, few people go to the trouble and expense. DVDs, wherever you get them, are nice but there are some movies you still have to go see.
Ballmer would have done had he not joined Microsoft (MSFT ) 25 years ago (probably auto-insurance sales)
You don't say! I can just imagine that. "Gecko, Gecko, Gecko! I love this company! - profuse sweat - " It's all the same, less a few billion dollars worth of damage to the US and world economy.
Ballmer told the audience he sees himself working another 12 years, which would take him to age 61, before retiring. "I don't have to do what I do," he remarked.
No one has to do what he does, I wish that they would not and I would not call it work.
... "how much better does it get?"
Work a little harder, Steve old boy, and you might reach Barnum infamy. I recommend a partnership with Sports Illustrated for Windoze Swimsuit, followed by Playboy and other entertaining ventures. Get Madonna to take her pants off for the release. It's not like you are going to take back developers or the enterprise and server markets, or make a decision without "help" from Bill. Go for the gusto, Monkey Boy!
Calling it a PDA just glosses over all its *other* capabilities (2X wireless, high-res screen, voice recording, A/V playback, camera buddy, etc.), the sum of which really haven't been seen before.
So my Personal Data Assistant can't help me organize my music, movies, bookmarks, email, voice recordings, notes and all that? OK, I'll just call it a computer.
I'm sure there must be a situations where PDAs using current technology must be useful, I'll even hazard a guess: mobile, local database access for doctors, engineers and stock controllers, but really that's an industrial application for a consumer product.
OK fine, it's best for business. A PDA replaces slips of paper that get lost, is much easier to search than a spiral notepad, and peeps to remind you things. The average person does not need one. A music player that is also a PDA is a better deal than a music player that is not a PDA if the price and performance are equal.
I know one person who runs their business off an old Palm device. He's a contractor of sorts and contact information, scheduling and project notes are his bread and butter. He's got it glued to the dashboard of his truck and has a spare. It's so good at what it does that between it and a cell phone he does not need email or bother syncing it with a desktop computer.
I use my Palm much the same way and so can any professional. It peeps to remind you to go to that dull meeting, that's important. It syncs with Windoze, KDE and Gnome. It still runs for a month or more off a pair of AAAs. Cell phone interfaces still don't match the ease of lookup and information contained in the average Palm.
Newer devices running Familiar offer some improvements. Wifi does indeed make such devices close to a laptop replacement. With Dillo or Minimo, surfing works. Email also works just fine, as it did with Palm to begin with. Familiar and Opie also sync with most platforms, though it may be tricky. Using OpenSSH, syncs will get much better than they are today. Having a nice picture viewer is a plus for the wife and very very useful to other people like me who are challenged by name face recognition. Music is a nice addition as is voice recording.
So whats to stop US companies from opening 'Chinese' companies?
They can and will, but the Honorable Tom Davis says:
The rules require American software companies that wish to sell to the Chinese government to manufacture all of their products in China and to register their copyrights first in China.
The proposed regulation would also require that at least 50 percent of the development be done in China.
In a lawless land, the law is not much of a problem. The first one is easy to get around by selling to a vendor. The second one stops you cold, until you remember that China is as corrupt as all hell. Those with power will continue to do exactly as they please.
They could and should, of course, do completely without US commercial software. There are more than enough free software alternatives which can be "developed" by recompile in China. A totalitarian state ironically can have much better control of their IT if they are the root user of their own free software. No government, including the US government, should tolerate a third party owning their IT infrastructure the way US commercial software vendors demand.
How will this change the world economy? Not at all! The whole "engagement" deal Bill Clinton came up with was a pipe dream. China's leaders have made themselves rich of US and European trade by making slaves of their own people. Leaders who screw their own people like that will surely screw everyone else if they can. There are no surprises here, except to those dumb and immoral enough to do business with and invest in communist China.
Of course M$ loves this one. Check out this wopping loophole:
These prohibitions do not apply to any monitoring of a subscriber's internet service by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service for network or computer security purposes.
So, when M$ looks at and deletes your files for supposed copyright violations, that's a "security" issue and they are OK. It does not matter that they have all of the other definitions of spyware and are much more invasive, they are a "software provider" doing it for "security".
The definition is so broad that it's hard to imagine who is not a "software provider" doing something for "security". Oh wait, now I know, anyone Microsoft does not like is not a "software provider".
A real spyware law would spank M$, HP and many other "software providers" for all the things this bill legitimately complains about and then allows.
How is this ruining the RIAA in court? It only reduces the amount of damages per COUNT of people downloading.. that's all....
Sure, the RIAA can charge an "uploader" $5/month for the equivalent upload as I might download from Yahoo. Given the average 40K/s crippled upload cable modem speed, the average "uploader" will be able to push out about 1/100th of what I might get out of Yahoo. The low price of music really does make the actual "damages" low as well.
Music heard on the radio is to music what toilet paper is to literature and should be valued accordingly.
Speculation about Microsoft efforts to make the free software community look bad through astroturfing is not unjustified. The main tactic used by Microsoft so far has been name calling. I'm using an "unAmerican" "cancer" written by "communists" to post this, right? Their own marketing showed that direct insults backfired on them, so indirect means should come as no surprise. Inscent whining about "extremists" and death threats have been a constant companion of the whole fiaSCO. It would not surprise me at all if 99% of those threatening letters were in fact written by PR firms paid by M$ on the QT the same way they invented the Apple Switcher.
We get a much greater feeling for what they want when Dorvak claims,
If anything is going to kill Linux and the open-source movement, it's the presence of certifiable lunatics in the ranks representing the users.... I can tell you this much: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics. Once Linux gets the image as the OS for the criminally insane, it's a dead duck. Unless the community gets a handle on this, grows up, and rebukes the extremists, the trash heap of history is where this is all headed.
Now there's some wishful M$ thinking. Free software just goes away because they can make it look bad. It's been their fantasy means of competing from day 1. They know they can't make a better piece of software, so name calling is all they have to work with. Pathetic.
Once again, of course, it's not going to work because it's not supported by reality. Free software authors and users are far more relaxed and much less assnine than M$ fanboys. People who give their code away for free and invite both criticism and participation are much nicer than defensive dorks who want your money. People who experiment with software and judge things by objective standards of merit and perceived benefit are by definition less fanatical than marketroids who never leave the start menu. Normal people can see this. What they won't see is the strange, irrational and threatening people Ballmer imagines and tries to create.
Create, you might ask. Sure, create by harassment. If M$ is not above spamming death threats out to it's own supporters, do you think they are above harassing their detractors? Wanna bet how many of the flame bait posts here come from Redmond? The themes have all the flavors of M$; obfuscation, lack of originality, non free is reasonable and has a place, IE is great, XP is solid, blah blah blah. Yeah, I've gotten death threats in responses to my posts here. I also get between 50 and 100 spams a day, which started soon after posting to a local LUG. If it were not for spamassassin and kmail, I might indeed feel harassed.
Microsoft has the means, money and ethics to do these kinds of things. Microsoft's long astroturf history points in this direction, and they have only their own behavior to blame when people connect the dots. I can't prove that they do, but I'm not going to be surprised when they get busted, just like they have in so many other cases.
"Windows XP Starter Edition is designed for beginner home computer users who are seeking a more affordable computing solution for their homes. As such, it is designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors," a representative for Microsoft said in an e-mail.
The parts they left out were, "Microsoft operating systems are not designed for security, performance or anything really. We buy things and sell them to suck your money. Now give it up, bitch!"
Well, it's not really that bad but it's close.
Because of that, Starter Edition is an excellent introduction to the world of Microsoft. It's not that they won't port to another platform, so that they might really have an affordable system, it's that they can't really. They sort of have a crippled version for powerPC, xbox. They kind of have a crippled version for arm, Wince and friends. They tried to make a version for Alpha and failed. One day, real soon they swear, they might have a version for Athlon 64 with DRM, Paladium and other bigger badder restrictions. The only thing that's consistent between their versions is that none of them work very well and have silly limits. Starter edition is an excellent introduction to those kinds of arbitrary limits and attitude.
As for the part about them all running Windows, let's just say that remains to be seen.
There's nothing really new here. What Bill said in that article, he's said for 10 years now. Let me make that obvious by quoting the article:
Partly in response to pressure from Apple, Microsoft is now positioning itself to be a key player in the growing market for digital movies, pictures and music and grow beyond its core Windows operating system business.
Those dorks have been trying to be the middle man and own all your media since the wildly unjustified success of Windoze 95. The terms Ipod and cellphone are just frills on an old, old story of "multimedia integration". It's not going to work because neither users nor manufacturers want to be tied down.
The reasons for their failure in media, games and cellphones will apply to music playing cellphones. No one wants a media player, cellphone, PDA, or music playing cellphone PDA that shows the Blue Screen of Death a large percentage of the time. Microsoft's bad reputation with worms, trojans, spyware and all that on their desktop follows them elswhere. Even where they have a supposed strength, such as gaming, Microsoft has been unable to do reach outside their Monopoly OS racket. Anywhere there is any real competition, Microsoft is defeated. When there is a connection to that monoply, like there is with PDAs, Microsoft simply destroys the market. Those who feel trapped into the M$ desktop end up with second rate and unusable PDAs from Microsoft or one they can't sync from someone else. Cellphone makers, we can hope will have learned their lesson from the PDA market the same way everyone else has learned their lesson from Windoze Media Player. DVD makers never made the M$ mistake.
Outside of Microsoft, the world is much brighter. Good quality PDAs, music players and cellphones can be synced with good quality PIM software from KDE and Gnome. This relationship will continue to get better as more people adopt free software.
I teach old people Linux and they love it. The tipping point is here, baby.
Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development.... The more general version of this problem is that there are too many new ideas for companies to explore them all. There might be 500 startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house... It's common for startup founders of all ages to build things no one wants....[go get to work so you can build something M$ can buy]
A few things have changed since Bill Gates, who is mentioned frequently, was 19 years old. One of them is Paladium and other market dominance from one obnoxious early entrant. The other is that people have wised up about working in the Microsoft world, hoping to be the ONE that gets bought.
Microsoft's publicly stated policy is to buy "loss leaders" in mature markets. It's no real change from the man who bought the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) and sold it to IBM or dumpster dived Basic when he was 19 and then sold it to others. Why the hell would I want to be one of those loss leaders? Competition is hard enough in a free world. It's impossible in a world that's owned by one or two dominant players. They are going to come to you an offer you some pathetic sum which they will gladly take to your striving and starving competitors and break you later if you don't play.
M$ is 20 years ago, free software is where things are now. A few people made money on M$ but there are far more corpses than there are companies today. Since then, the real success like Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and others have taken free software and done the end run the author says but does not drive home: they pleased the end user. That's way better than being bought by some big dumb company so your ideas and talent can rot in it's even bigger belly.
BECTA don't recommend dumping anyone, let alone naming Microsot. They instead recommend that savings can be made by looking towards Free (as in beer) solutions.
You don't mind linking to the BECTA publication. As I recall, BECTA "got the facts" on TCO and found free software to be 25% cheaper than current, M$ dominated, junk.
Let them know when M$ provides free as in beer solutions.
Maybe we should stop running all those stories about how evil WindowsUpdate is, and how Microsoft is spying on your computer?
It's a lack of information that's bothering us both. Most users are unaware of anything useful Winblows Upbreaker will do for them. It's not the fifteen worms Upbreaker stops, it's the one or two that that get through that the user notices eventually. The same users know upbreaker also stops things from working, so their choice is have M$ break their computer now or wait for a spammer to break it later. A more educated user will dump Winblows all together so that neither will happen, but those kind of users are few and far between.
If it's true that you can really secure a Winblows box, you might make a page or two about it. Fortune 500 companies can't manage it, so I doubt you can, but it would be interesting.
... the fact that there will always be bugs in code. As a Senior Programmer for a fortune 500, I can back up that statement. Bugs/exploits happen and there is nothing anyone including MS can do about it.
Very subtle. Admit that M$ junk is full of holes. Admit that M$ will never be able to fix them and that this announcement is just another PR stunt from the kings of marketing BS. Then, slip - o - change - o, spout that other M$ company line, "no software is better than ours."
Not all bugs are created equal. Give me a call when you find a few holes in OpenBSD. You might find one in the next decade. Give me a call when Linux boxes are responsible for 1/100th the spam, extortion and other malice that floods out of broken M$ members of the Botnet. I don't think so, ever, not even when M$ is driven down to the legacy 10% of the market they deserve. It's not that people are not trying to break high profile free software run sites, it's that they can't. Fortune 500 companies, such as yours, lavish more money per function on Winblows boxes than they do on *nix, so it's not because Winblows is not as well maintained. Desktop linux users are all over the place, where are the automated worms? It's not happening.
The best/only thing MS should do is just have a mailing list that notifies any subscriber about any reported possible bug/exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
The Quick and Dirty OS sold to IBM by a man who dumpster dived previous "works". Remember though, without him, you would not have such quality code deluging the market. Two decades later, he's still pushing the same codebase, despite twice declaring it dead.
So the spammer gets your first 100 mails a day, your friends and family get none and you end up getting cut off. AWESOME. Cutting off infected boxes is nice, but silly limits that will prevent people from running legitimate mail lists and turn them off for trying is not nice at all.
The Microsoft Solution to software that eliminates their fake Server/Client model is to coerce ISPs to eliminate service.
Problem: Your friends have dickhead ISPs that bounce your mail back instead of sending it to them.
Grub Solution: Have a dickhead ISP for yourself that blocks all of your mail so none of your friends get it unless you use their Carnivored SMTP spam server. Sweet!
Closing port 25 is pointless because the owners of the botnet already know to use the ISP's SMTP server, just like the victim does, to send mail. You won't really stop the spam or DDoS this way, you will just stop normal users from doing something that's easy and useful.
There's nothing difficult about running a mail server. Exim comes with debian and has reasonable default values set in a script that tells you what it's doing. It's no harder to run than it is to use a GUI client. There are many advantages to it as well, such as custom mail addresses for registrations and other junk.
Reducing redundancy is bad for national security. In the end, it's much easier to DDoS email by targeting two broadband providers than it is to target thousands of individual users with a clue. The setback will be temporary. As email dies as a useful communication media, Jabber and others will rise in it's place.
If what you say is true, it's not news and it just goes to show the power of free software. Everyone has to deal with legacy equipment using Winblows. Despite the great efforts by M$, using such equipment is not too difficult and happens routinely. Free software efforts have managed to decode M$ formats, a task which well funded companies were not able to do as well or as quickly. The ability of free software to keep up with that kind of crap is miraculous. Free software is able to deal with other people's stupidity and malice. As demonstrated here, relying on M$ to get things done is stupid, but it's possible that the Linux World Expo had crufty projection equipment and did not let anyone boot anything else. So what?
Microsoft's poor performance is a self inflicted discgrace. Despite their monopoly power over hardware makers, which results in every hardware maker on earth creating drivers for M$, M$ routinely fails to deliver. Recommendations of daily reboot, four minitue to own times when connected to a network and the BSoD the happens all too frequently are symptoms of M$'s inability to deal with their own anti-competitive complexity. They have put so many barbs in for everyone else, and have so long neglected real quality issues that their products are unstable and essentially unusable. We're not talking about any old schmoe here, we're talking about a Microsoft Representative who should have the best support and upkeep possible. When people like that, or Bill Gates himself, the blame is easy to place.
I see it more as TW destroyed AOL with mailice and self destructive spite. AOL with full ability to distribute TW content would indeed have lived up to expectations. TW made themselves dominant and eliminated the world's largest ISP as potential competition by NOT letting AOL distribute said content. AOL under TW has not only stagnated, they have fallen behind. It's destruction is a shameful reflection on TW's missmanagement. If you can't make money with AOL style control over the largest online group in the world, there's something seriously wrong with you or you intended to destroy it from the beginning.
Old media won, for a while. Of the new media companies, AOL, M$, Napster, MP3.COM, only M$ is left and they are owned. Who else is there to compete against the 4 big music publishers and the one or two movie publishers? Creative commons will undo the greedy morons.
While not perfect it backs your mindre as small.
If that's not good enough try deductive reasoning, such as:
What's clear to me is that ordinary SCSI kicks SATA ass, software or hardware. If you want to be cheap, buy used equipment from ebay or pricewatch. Works for me.
The only thing that's changed is that CowboyNeal fell for the stupid paper that claims M$ is winning and Microsoft's use of said paper that they bought.
I predict that by this time next year, 75% will be interested and 25% will be evaluating while the confused and no interest crowd will shrink.
Pirate movies are bad, but I would not call them ethically wrong. International Talking Like a Pirate Day, however is pretty much immoral.
Oh wait, you are telling me that copyright law is ethical. I dissagree. Copyright "protection" exists to enrich the public domain and encourage the arts and science. "Protection" that lasts longer than the life of the media fails most of it's public obligation. Firms that take your talent and call it their own then keep all of their films in a vault until they rot are robbing all of us of our cultural heritage. A great example of this is the Disney film, "Song of the South". It's owners are embarrassed of it and refuse to release it. Every bit of talent that went into that film is doomed to oblivion and you won't ever see it outside of a "pirated" version.
Note that no ships were stolen and no sailors were killed to bring you these bits or those of those of the leaked copy of ROTS. The only pirates are those idiots trying to shut down the internet because it threatens their 100 year old business model.
You ask us "How can you be betraying your fiduciary [konqueror spell check used, thank you] responsibilities to shareholders by delaying products in the name of security ... why don't you return to your security-be-damned buggy strategy and return your stock to the glorious heights it once held."
Don't worry, our future products (TM) will always be buggy. The only problem is that we are out of start-ups to screw out of mature programs because all the developers and startups are now geared to Linux, that evil unAmerican cancer that's draining the life blood out of the stocks you were so foolish to buy from us. In time, if you click your heels together three times and chant, "No stock is better than Microsoft stock," we promise that you will feel better. This works remarkably well for our software users and is the basis of our famous $50/hour phone support. If you are really lucky, hardware manufacturers will collude with us to lock our Linux and all other software, leaving nothing but buggy junk for those without keys. At that time Microsoft will internally switch to Linux and our relative productivity will dynamically soar, and the predicted dinosaur domination will be a reality.
Have a nice day.
I dissagree, the relative costs and benefits should be discussed. There are significant costs to Winblows that do not exist in your nice apt-get world. There are also significant advantages to free software that will never exist in the non free world. With blowhards paid to publish nonsense about "complication", it's good to do a quick reality check.
The real world of enterprise M$ upkeep is completely foo-bared by useless, paranoid anti-copy mechanisms. A typical upgrade of software is done by third parties who hire gangs of floppy pushing drones for after hour shift work. Not all applications can be upgraded from a central server, regardless of what server you are running, Zen included. Many packages have to be installed individually, so they can update the stupid registry properly.
The cost and complexity of upgrading even single packages is a reason Big Dumb Companies take so long to get new software. They have to wait until enough work is accumulated to justify the costs. This is a significant disadvantage for obvious reasons.
Some of the advantages, other than trivial application, to free systems are worth mentioning as well. By making custom meta packages, accounting or clerical for example, you can precisely control what packages are put onto everyone's systems. Because any old white box can be a repository, outside bandwith can be cut down to a single sync operation per location. Microsoft, I think, still makes patch serving difficult and version upgrading impossible. Even a PHB can understand the benefit of such flexibility - the right tool goes to the right person at the right time at lower costs.
Take your pick, gangs of slaves or a few customized deb repositories. I can't imagine how the gangs could ever be cheaper, and of course, the result shows up in real TCO studdies better than it does marketing BS from M$.
If you don't have such a system WTF are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?
I don't work for a big company, but one day I'd like to own one. In the mean time, the news is entertaining and helps me keep up the simple home network I have.
For the vast majority of the population who don't have home theaters equal to a real theater, a full quality DVD is no substitute either. Star Wars is all about eye candy and special effects. It's just not the same when the sound does not punch you in the chest and the ships are not near life size when they explode. While it's technically possible to get the same quality viewing in your house, few people go to the trouble and expense. DVDs, wherever you get them, are nice but there are some movies you still have to go see.
You don't say! I can just imagine that. "Gecko, Gecko, Gecko! I love this company! - profuse sweat - " It's all the same, less a few billion dollars worth of damage to the US and world economy.
Ballmer told the audience he sees himself working another 12 years, which would take him to age 61, before retiring. "I don't have to do what I do," he remarked.
No one has to do what he does, I wish that they would not and I would not call it work.
Work a little harder, Steve old boy, and you might reach Barnum infamy. I recommend a partnership with Sports Illustrated for Windoze Swimsuit, followed by Playboy and other entertaining ventures. Get Madonna to take her pants off for the release. It's not like you are going to take back developers or the enterprise and server markets, or make a decision without "help" from Bill. Go for the gusto, Monkey Boy!
So my Personal Data Assistant can't help me organize my music, movies, bookmarks, email, voice recordings, notes and all that? OK, I'll just call it a computer.
OK fine, it's best for business. A PDA replaces slips of paper that get lost, is much easier to search than a spiral notepad, and peeps to remind you things. The average person does not need one. A music player that is also a PDA is a better deal than a music player that is not a PDA if the price and performance are equal.
I know one person who runs their business off an old Palm device. He's a contractor of sorts and contact information, scheduling and project notes are his bread and butter. He's got it glued to the dashboard of his truck and has a spare. It's so good at what it does that between it and a cell phone he does not need email or bother syncing it with a desktop computer.
I use my Palm much the same way and so can any professional. It peeps to remind you to go to that dull meeting, that's important. It syncs with Windoze, KDE and Gnome. It still runs for a month or more off a pair of AAAs. Cell phone interfaces still don't match the ease of lookup and information contained in the average Palm.
Newer devices running Familiar offer some improvements. Wifi does indeed make such devices close to a laptop replacement. With Dillo or Minimo, surfing works. Email also works just fine, as it did with Palm to begin with. Familiar and Opie also sync with most platforms, though it may be tricky. Using OpenSSH, syncs will get much better than they are today. Having a nice picture viewer is a plus for the wife and very very useful to other people like me who are challenged by name face recognition. Music is a nice addition as is voice recording.
They can and will, but the Honorable Tom Davis says:
In a lawless land, the law is not much of a problem. The first one is easy to get around by selling to a vendor. The second one stops you cold, until you remember that China is as corrupt as all hell. Those with power will continue to do exactly as they please.
They could and should, of course, do completely without US commercial software. There are more than enough free software alternatives which can be "developed" by recompile in China. A totalitarian state ironically can have much better control of their IT if they are the root user of their own free software. No government, including the US government, should tolerate a third party owning their IT infrastructure the way US commercial software vendors demand.
How will this change the world economy? Not at all! The whole "engagement" deal Bill Clinton came up with was a pipe dream. China's leaders have made themselves rich of US and European trade by making slaves of their own people. Leaders who screw their own people like that will surely screw everyone else if they can. There are no surprises here, except to those dumb and immoral enough to do business with and invest in communist China.
These prohibitions do not apply to any monitoring of a subscriber's internet service by a telecommunications carrier, cable operator, computer hardware or software provider, or provider of information service for network or computer security purposes.
So, when M$ looks at and deletes your files for supposed copyright violations, that's a "security" issue and they are OK. It does not matter that they have all of the other definitions of spyware and are much more invasive, they are a "software provider" doing it for "security".
The definition is so broad that it's hard to imagine who is not a "software provider" doing something for "security". Oh wait, now I know, anyone Microsoft does not like is not a "software provider".
A real spyware law would spank M$, HP and many other "software providers" for all the things this bill legitimately complains about and then allows.
Sure, the RIAA can charge an "uploader" $5/month for the equivalent upload as I might download from Yahoo. Given the average 40K/s crippled upload cable modem speed, the average "uploader" will be able to push out about 1/100th of what I might get out of Yahoo. The low price of music really does make the actual "damages" low as well.
Music heard on the radio is to music what toilet paper is to literature and should be valued accordingly.
We get a much greater feeling for what they want when Dorvak claims,
If anything is going to kill Linux and the open-source movement, it's the presence of certifiable lunatics in the ranks representing the users. ... I can tell you this much: Normal people do not like being associated with fanatics and lunatics. Once Linux gets the image as the OS for the criminally insane, it's a dead duck. Unless the community gets a handle on this, grows up, and rebukes the extremists, the trash heap of history is where this is all headed.
Now there's some wishful M$ thinking. Free software just goes away because they can make it look bad. It's been their fantasy means of competing from day 1. They know they can't make a better piece of software, so name calling is all they have to work with. Pathetic.
Once again, of course, it's not going to work because it's not supported by reality. Free software authors and users are far more relaxed and much less assnine than M$ fanboys. People who give their code away for free and invite both criticism and participation are much nicer than defensive dorks who want your money. People who experiment with software and judge things by objective standards of merit and perceived benefit are by definition less fanatical than marketroids who never leave the start menu. Normal people can see this. What they won't see is the strange, irrational and threatening people Ballmer imagines and tries to create.
Create, you might ask. Sure, create by harassment. If M$ is not above spamming death threats out to it's own supporters, do you think they are above harassing their detractors? Wanna bet how many of the flame bait posts here come from Redmond? The themes have all the flavors of M$; obfuscation, lack of originality, non free is reasonable and has a place, IE is great, XP is solid, blah blah blah. Yeah, I've gotten death threats in responses to my posts here. I also get between 50 and 100 spams a day, which started soon after posting to a local LUG. If it were not for spamassassin and kmail, I might indeed feel harassed.
Microsoft has the means, money and ethics to do these kinds of things. Microsoft's long astroturf history points in this direction, and they have only their own behavior to blame when people connect the dots. I can't prove that they do, but I'm not going to be surprised when they get busted, just like they have in so many other cases.
"Windows XP Starter Edition is designed for beginner home computer users who are seeking a more affordable computing solution for their homes. As such, it is designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors," a representative for Microsoft said in an e-mail.
The parts they left out were, "Microsoft operating systems are not designed for security, performance or anything really. We buy things and sell them to suck your money. Now give it up, bitch!"
Well, it's not really that bad but it's close.
Because of that, Starter Edition is an excellent introduction to the world of Microsoft. It's not that they won't port to another platform, so that they might really have an affordable system, it's that they can't really. They sort of have a crippled version for powerPC, xbox. They kind of have a crippled version for arm, Wince and friends. They tried to make a version for Alpha and failed. One day, real soon they swear, they might have a version for Athlon 64 with DRM, Paladium and other bigger badder restrictions. The only thing that's consistent between their versions is that none of them work very well and have silly limits. Starter edition is an excellent introduction to those kinds of arbitrary limits and attitude.
As for the part about them all running Windows, let's just say that remains to be seen.
There's nothing really new here. What Bill said in that article, he's said for 10 years now. Let me make that obvious by quoting the article:
Partly in response to pressure from Apple, Microsoft is now positioning itself to be a key player in the growing market for digital movies, pictures and music and grow beyond its core Windows operating system business.
Those dorks have been trying to be the middle man and own all your media since the wildly unjustified success of Windoze 95. The terms Ipod and cellphone are just frills on an old, old story of "multimedia integration". It's not going to work because neither users nor manufacturers want to be tied down.
The reasons for their failure in media, games and cellphones will apply to music playing cellphones. No one wants a media player, cellphone, PDA, or music playing cellphone PDA that shows the Blue Screen of Death a large percentage of the time. Microsoft's bad reputation with worms, trojans, spyware and all that on their desktop follows them elswhere. Even where they have a supposed strength, such as gaming, Microsoft has been unable to do reach outside their Monopoly OS racket. Anywhere there is any real competition, Microsoft is defeated. When there is a connection to that monoply, like there is with PDAs, Microsoft simply destroys the market. Those who feel trapped into the M$ desktop end up with second rate and unusable PDAs from Microsoft or one they can't sync from someone else. Cellphone makers, we can hope will have learned their lesson from the PDA market the same way everyone else has learned their lesson from Windoze Media Player. DVD makers never made the M$ mistake.
Outside of Microsoft, the world is much brighter. Good quality PDAs, music players and cellphones can be synced with good quality PIM software from KDE and Gnome. This relationship will continue to get better as more people adopt free software.
I teach old people Linux and they love it. The tipping point is here, baby.
Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development. ... The more general version of this problem is that there are too many new ideas for companies to explore them all. There might be 500 startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house... It's common for startup founders of all ages to build things no one wants. ...[go get to work so you can build something M$ can buy]
A few things have changed since Bill Gates, who is mentioned frequently, was 19 years old. One of them is Paladium and other market dominance from one obnoxious early entrant. The other is that people have wised up about working in the Microsoft world, hoping to be the ONE that gets bought.
Microsoft's publicly stated policy is to buy "loss leaders" in mature markets. It's no real change from the man who bought the Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) and sold it to IBM or dumpster dived Basic when he was 19 and then sold it to others. Why the hell would I want to be one of those loss leaders? Competition is hard enough in a free world. It's impossible in a world that's owned by one or two dominant players. They are going to come to you an offer you some pathetic sum which they will gladly take to your striving and starving competitors and break you later if you don't play.
M$ is 20 years ago, free software is where things are now. A few people made money on M$ but there are far more corpses than there are companies today. Since then, the real success like Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and others have taken free software and done the end run the author says but does not drive home: they pleased the end user. That's way better than being bought by some big dumb company so your ideas and talent can rot in it's even bigger belly.
You don't mind linking to the BECTA publication. As I recall, BECTA "got the facts" on TCO and found free software to be 25% cheaper than current, M$ dominated, junk.
Let them know when M$ provides free as in beer solutions.
It's a lack of information that's bothering us both. Most users are unaware of anything useful Winblows Upbreaker will do for them. It's not the fifteen worms Upbreaker stops, it's the one or two that that get through that the user notices eventually. The same users know upbreaker also stops things from working, so their choice is have M$ break their computer now or wait for a spammer to break it later. A more educated user will dump Winblows all together so that neither will happen, but those kind of users are few and far between.
If it's true that you can really secure a Winblows box, you might make a page or two about it. Fortune 500 companies can't manage it, so I doubt you can, but it would be interesting.
Very subtle. Admit that M$ junk is full of holes. Admit that M$ will never be able to fix them and that this announcement is just another PR stunt from the kings of marketing BS. Then, slip - o - change - o, spout that other M$ company line, "no software is better than ours."
Not all bugs are created equal. Give me a call when you find a few holes in OpenBSD. You might find one in the next decade. Give me a call when Linux boxes are responsible for 1/100th the spam, extortion and other malice that floods out of broken M$ members of the Botnet. I don't think so, ever, not even when M$ is driven down to the legacy 10% of the market they deserve. It's not that people are not trying to break high profile free software run sites, it's that they can't. Fortune 500 companies, such as yours, lavish more money per function on Winblows boxes than they do on *nix, so it's not because Winblows is not as well maintained. Desktop linux users are all over the place, where are the automated worms? It's not happening.
The best/only thing MS should do is just have a mailing list that notifies any subscriber about any reported possible bug/exploit.
I think they should just give up and go away.