Unless the e-mail address is intended for receiving huge amounts of e-mail, it IS inconsiderate to post it on the front page of a news site that gets several hundred thousand viewers a day.
We would hope the minister of a good size country would have a big email box and that/var/spool/mail is a seperate device. Then again, she might be running IIS, and the M$ astro turfs took it out yesterday.
Yes, I imagine the M$ astroturfers are pretending to be Linux Zealots. You are right about it being a turn off, therfore I expect the Gates drones to adopt it quickly.
/. is _NOT_ the place to post email addresses of individuals who are percieved not to get it. The typical/. reader is not going to be objective or polite. It mostly certainly is not going to aid the cause of putting Linux on these machines.
Gee, from the tone of your letter we might assume that people on Slashdot are rude. You abuse the people who run the site you seem to enjoy and that seems to be the sum of your contribution. Thank goodness you are not the typical Linux user.
Now let's think a little about that. What makes you think that M$ slaves are not already flooding the address with tons of abusive and stupid comments (like yours!) for us already? You know, trolls like we see here all day? In this instance, as in so many others, the finacial incentives for such "aggresive" abouse are clear. If it were not for the moderation system that Hemos and others developed, useful comments would be lost in piles of M$ astroturf here. Even so, it's difficult to fight all the toads. Your example proves the usefulness of the address inclusion, thank you.
Hopefully many people will write well reasoned letters that will shine through the noise. We all know the superiority of any Linux distro: stability, privacy, ease of use, ease of upkeep, ease of software upgrade and addition. We all know the good things that all the money not spent on M$ "products" can buy. We can write many inpired and polite letters expressing those things. I'm proud of all the useful, well reasoned and well put letters I've seen from previous letter campaigns, such as the RAND fiasco, and I expect to be proud of the letters that get sent this time too. The exercise is much easier after reading some of the nice clear posts that will rise to displace your abuse.
Who's going to pay for all of the O'Reilly Books if they do use linux? And then you bet there'll be a flame war about which distro to use.
God forbid they use the money saved on O$ to buy books, or that they put those books in a public library! The information anarcy must be stoped burn the libraries now.
Here is a vote for Debian, one distro that will always be free. I can see some other great uses for that O$ savings. State funded mirror sites, mmmmm, a help office with a nice little web site and staff dedicated to making EVERY piece of hardware distributed work perfectly, mmmm a tuned distro via deb packages, more computers for everyone, mmmmmmmmmm.
I've got an overwhelming urge to eat ice cream now. You M$ trolls don't go pretending to be Linux zelots flooding the emails while I'm gone. I hate it when people act like jerks for me.
It sounds to me like the budget has already been ironed out and that the budget for these PC's includes a provision for Windows. If so, can we stop for a minute and think about the GOOD things that come out of this?
Let's do think of the good that can be done. While dumping M$ boxes on the world may be better than dropping bombs, we can always do better if we try.
Let's say Microsoft decides to dump windows on these poor people at no cost. They should refuse on grounds of security. Why would they want to make their internet look like SirCam and "I love you" all day? Sorry, that's not a rant it's a simple statement of fact that M$ makes a single user OS that does more to cripple a machine than use it.
If M$ does not dump the reasons are even more obvious. Every Euro not spent on OS can be spent on computers. This means more people get them faster, or the savings can be put to something else useful. One useful thing might be to fund a configurations and help group to work out hardware problems and offer other general help. The publication of such a group would be of use to all. Money spent on a second rate OS from a forgein company is not money well spent.
This all reeks of sensationalism and media-based MS-bashing. Whether you like MS or not, MS-bashing is old-hat.
Yeah, I'm getting sick of hearing about M$ astroturfing, as has been reported here and there and everwhere!. I wish that company would devote as much time to making a decent program instead.
What supprises me more is the crowd of trolls like you who always come to the aid of M$.
Is this terribly different from what happens when slashdot has a post announcing some poll about linux? I'm sure we've rigged our share in the past. Not that I think Microsoft is right. I'm just trying to give a little perspective and play devil's advocate for a moment.
Slasdot is free. Slashdotings and poll rigging are not paid for here. You are free to think as you will and not have to worry about your boss monitoring your vote. So this is no more a rig than the local newspaper reporting something unfavorable about a candidite in an election. You are free to care about Gary Hart's "Monkey Business", and not care about Bill Clinton's filegate, monicagate, dopegate, murdergate, chickengate, gategate gate gate.
Oh yeah, another thing. The opinions posted here are not always those of Slashdot, VAWhatever, the FSF, Bill Gates, or my grandmother's. Mostly they are our opinions because WE WRITE THEM. Oh, I forgot I was writing an opinion.
As it is wasteful and ineficient to have more than one set of wires maintained by more than one company, telco services that use wires have traditionally been regulated. Today it's a luxury, but it might be the cheapest way to make the phone system work. You might not need it to live, but society as a whole is much better off for having it. It can be argued that the total social savings under a well regulated telco industry far outweigh the costs, and that those costs are much lower than those charged by a cartel.
If there was a failure in telco regulation, it was a failure to promote the public interest. Short sighted opinions like yours are both cause and effect.
Yes, a kind of government regulation is to blame, judicial extortion. The Washington Post stated it beter than I can:
Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet. Napster was the most famous of these companies, but it was not the only or even the most important example. A company called MP3.COM, for example, had not only developed new ways to deliver content but had also enabled new artists to develop and distribute their content outside the control of the existing labels.
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
Whether or not these courts were right as a matter of substantive copyright law, what is important is the consequence of this regulation: innovation and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.
Surely the laws that govern publishing can be considered "regulation". They limit who can do what and how. These laws have now been abused, and the silence of our elected officials is all that is needed for these decisions to continue to have the force of law.
I can't wait to have the mailman loose my important papers in my neighbor's junk mail for me. It's one thing when my papers arrive at my neighbor's house. It will be another when they get recycled.
Why won't they just NOT TAKE MONEY FOR TRASH TO BEGIN WITH? Junk mail has helped make the US post unusable and in the long run is a huge waste of public resources. It has tarnished their image, wrecked their efficiency, and made their service into a burden. This is just a measure to squeeze more money from their bulk mailers. If we are lucky it will backfire and eliminate bulk mail.
You already have trust relationships with many companies and organizations: your employer, your bank, your credit card company, your lawyer, cpa, realtor, insurance agent, the IRS, etc. The list is long.
All of these people/companies/whatever have some of your sensitive personal information. You trust them with it. It's in their best interest to use it to serve you better, in ways that do not annoy you, or betray your trust.
I don't trust my credit card company, the IRS and a long list of others who have forced me to give them information. When they use that information to annoy me, there is nothing I can do about it. When they give it to others to anoy me, I get really pissed about it. How do I know? They all make little mistakes, like my middle initial as J instead of H. J is for junk.
Have you heard of the ATM and debit cards yet, people?
Yeah, my wife had all the money stolen from her account like that. I suggest a credit card or a check. If you say something rude to my wife while she writes a check, she'll kick you in the balls. There you go, two caveats for the price of one.
Back to topic, you are right. I hate it when some clerk thinks they know me because they've wasted my time reading what their database thinks about me. Moreover, the whole point of the book seems to be how to be a creep without getting caught. It's not going to work, especially with people filling up the databases with inccorect information. Fight the droids, lie to them when they waste your time.
I bet that the RealMedia formatted stuff will be the stuff that Tivo downloads via the phone line like previews and commercials
In the future, computers will not be programed to help you select the content you want, they will be programed to force you to watch even more comercials. "Don't touch that dial while I play this new Lexus advert. I won't let you anyway."
Really, I hope not but it looks like the TV is creeping closer to my computer than the other way around.
Unfortunately, because you're dealing with politicians and contracters, both of whom love to lie to get money, the city is losing a bunch of money and the project is in terrible debt. All because of that old problem: if you ask voters whether giving out ponies to everyone is a good idea, they say "yes!", without realizing that it'll actually cost the government money.
It's happened over and over again and people just never learn. The Paris sewer system. The London underground. The US rural electrification and interstate. Look at the costs of these huge projects. Everybody now want underground sewers, running water, public transportation, electricity, roads, phones. Each new work is a new chance to screw the public. You know, it's hard to find new houses that don't come with all of these uneeded luxuries. Dear God! When will it all end?!
10 years ago, I was on like, 14.4kbps. If they installed some sort of hypothetical 14.4kbps dedicated line to everyone's home then it'd be sorely out of date by now. If they just did it within, say, a year or 2 but 10? Any reply on this would be good.
Well, well. I'd be happy with 14.4 dedicated everywhere at a nice low price, but things would be better than that. Let's say your town had put in a whole new dedicated network of phone lines and finished it last year. The wires would be there and you could run more through them and modify them as your town sees fit. It would not cost that much more to bump up to 56.6, now would it?
So what have you got instead? Because nothing was done ten years ago, you are stuck with aging phone company owned lines. You might be lucky enough to pay fifty bucks for cable TV on your puter, no servers, blocked email, barf. You might also be lucky enough to have some poor DSL company being raped by the local telco so that you can pay them fifty bucks a month for a line that's roughly twice the speed of a regualar dial up. If you are really lucky that poor dog of a company will give you a fixed IP and a TOS that's designed to keep you from obnoxing your neighbors but little else. Chaces are, the telco won't let you get that lucky.
So you see, when you sit on your ass and do nothing, people will take advantage of you.
Sure you can use pay-routes to get online, (ISP's) just as you can use toll-roads and turnpikes. The most-used routes to get online will probably be supported via tax dollars in the near to medium future.
Private turnpikes happen when your elected representatives fail you. Think about it. Why would you set up some private interest where they can collect money impeeding the public forever? It is always better for the public to recognize it's best interest and cooperate to bring it about. When you fail to do this, someone gets to earn a living at your expense.
Sure, private interests have a place. They can bid against each other to build it. When it's in place, they can either bid for the business or be regulated. Regulation, when it's not all fouled by an ignorant public, works for large well known and fixed indstries. There private interests can be garanteed a modest profit for their services and everyone gets their modern necessities.
We know what we want, let's try to get it. The internet is a different kind of tellecomunications that will require different regulations. There is no more need for "content" regulation than phone conversations. Private communications should be protected from interception the same way US post is. The ability to publish on it in any form must be as free as your ability to buy a Xerox machine and make a newspaper anonymously. These things, while natural extentions of our ordinary rights, have powerful enemies in government, telecomunications and publishing industries. Keep screaming your heads off.
Ouch, that's harsh but then again the standards are set high. From the alternatives to NR page:
It is naïve to hope that every computational problem can be solved by a simple procedure that can be described in a few pages of chatty prose, and using a page or two of Fortran or C code. Today's ambitions for correctness, accuracy, precision, stability, "robustness", efficiency, etc. demand sophisticated codes developed by experts with deep understanding of their disciplines. We have long ago outgrown the capabilities of the simplistic approaches of 30 years ago.
Well! True. At the same time, it's not a bad place to start. Sometimes a chatty breeze is better for understanding than a phd level peer review trade journal. A fourth order Runge Kutta routine should not be your first ODE solver any more than an extrapolation routine should be used in production.
By the way, the NR authors themselves recomend FORTRAN over C.
Not be able to show CD's and DVD's with WMV's on them. Big deal.
So M$ has convinced hardware makers to spend extra money supporting an inferior media format for auidio. The inferior media format has provisions for inferior video too, hmmm. Do you think it will take that long for M$ to push that too if they have not already?
Gee Bill, that's almost as bad as that book you wrote about the road ahead.
M$ does not make the box, they just make owning one that does not work suck. Seeing other posts that claim that M$ won't let stores take back the broken boxes in exchange for one that work, ha ha.
Are we doomed forever to have all the power, but none of the content?
Sometimes I have to stop myself. While the fact that M$ has managed to twist the arms of hardware manufactures to spend money on inferior "standards" that won't work tomorow, and the implications of this are ominous, the reality today is not so bad. Do I really need the kinds of canned crap the RIAA puts out? I have not bought a non local CD in years. Do I really need a computer to look at crappy movies? On the rare occasion a movie is worth seeing, I go watch it in a theater.
The implications are the things to worry about, not the content. Worry about your ability to publish in a format that you can share with others. Isn't it more important to share pictures of your wedding with your friends and family than it is to show "Shreck"? How about your ability to publish ordinary papers? Worry about your ability to share published works in a public library. Do we really want to hoard information that way, so that it's pay per play or nothing? Isn't it more important that children and adults can research questions they have at a public library than it is for you to be able to read the latest pulp fiction? It is important to realize that the "content" control we see being born here is comming from the bassest of publishers, and stop the practice before it becomes universal practice. We must also work to make sure we can continue to publish on the internet.
Exercise your own power and refuse to publish in inferior, non free formats. Creating the financial incentive for hardware makers to respect your interests is just as easy as that. People who buy these new players are going to get burnt when WMA changes two years from now. The makers of those devices are going to get a big black eye from it. Don't you think that part of the tech slowdown comes from user uncertianty created by nothing M$ working right? It hurts to screw up. Meanwhile, my png, ogg mpegs and what not will work the same.
Name calling like this is a really good way to take credibility away from your post....
I don't use Office, so I can't comment on how stable it is. All I can comment on is my own experience with 2000, which has been very good. (Others have given similar reports...)
Well, you are right the name calling was dumb. Allow me to explain.
Lies make me angry, and there's plenty of them aroun here. There are so many microturds around these days pumping up stuff that I know is terrible. They post all day about how wonderful this and that M$ junk is, try to make flames where they can, and are outrageous in general. If M$'s history of Astroturfing is a guide, most of these folks are paid to post their dishonesty. It makes me angry to hear people say that NT, w2k and what not are "solid", stable, or anything like that. I know that they are not and I know that the instability extends further than Office. In fact the instablilty applies to just about everything non M$ and a few M$ things. Applying the razor, we see that the root of the problem is what they all have in common, M$. Your experience is atypical or your standards of "very good" are low.
Slashdot Mirror
We would hope the minister of a good size country would have a big email box and that /var/spool/mail is a seperate device. Then again, she might be running IIS, and the M$ astro turfs took it out yesterday.
Yes, I imagine the M$ astroturfers are pretending to be Linux Zealots. You are right about it being a turn off, therfore I expect the Gates drones to adopt it quickly.
Gee, from the tone of your letter we might assume that people on Slashdot are rude. You abuse the people who run the site you seem to enjoy and that seems to be the sum of your contribution. Thank goodness you are not the typical Linux user.
Now let's think a little about that. What makes you think that M$ slaves are not already flooding the address with tons of abusive and stupid comments (like yours!) for us already? You know, trolls like we see here all day? In this instance, as in so many others, the finacial incentives for such "aggresive" abouse are clear. If it were not for the moderation system that Hemos and others developed, useful comments would be lost in piles of M$ astroturf here. Even so, it's difficult to fight all the toads. Your example proves the usefulness of the address inclusion, thank you.
Hopefully many people will write well reasoned letters that will shine through the noise. We all know the superiority of any Linux distro: stability, privacy, ease of use, ease of upkeep, ease of software upgrade and addition. We all know the good things that all the money not spent on M$ "products" can buy. We can write many inpired and polite letters expressing those things. I'm proud of all the useful, well reasoned and well put letters I've seen from previous letter campaigns, such as the RAND fiasco, and I expect to be proud of the letters that get sent this time too. The exercise is much easier after reading some of the nice clear posts that will rise to displace your abuse.
God forbid they use the money saved on O$ to buy books, or that they put those books in a public library! The information anarcy must be stoped burn the libraries now.
Here is a vote for Debian, one distro that will always be free. I can see some other great uses for that O$ savings. State funded mirror sites, mmmmm, a help office with a nice little web site and staff dedicated to making EVERY piece of hardware distributed work perfectly, mmmm a tuned distro via deb packages, more computers for everyone, mmmmmmmmmm.
I've got an overwhelming urge to eat ice cream now. You M$ trolls don't go pretending to be Linux zelots flooding the emails while I'm gone. I hate it when people act like jerks for me.
Let's do think of the good that can be done. While dumping M$ boxes on the world may be better than dropping bombs, we can always do better if we try.
Let's say Microsoft decides to dump windows on these poor people at no cost. They should refuse on grounds of security. Why would they want to make their internet look like SirCam and "I love you" all day? Sorry, that's not a rant it's a simple statement of fact that M$ makes a single user OS that does more to cripple a machine than use it.
If M$ does not dump the reasons are even more obvious. Every Euro not spent on OS can be spent on computers. This means more people get them faster, or the savings can be put to something else useful. One useful thing might be to fund a configurations and help group to work out hardware problems and offer other general help. The publication of such a group would be of use to all. Money spent on a second rate OS from a forgein company is not money well spent.
You are obviously a man.
Dude, where were you? Did'nt ya see the Poll? Everybody is doing it.
SUPER SECRET, NO EYES ONLY, DESTROY ON SIGHT.
Yes, it's true. As a recent ZDnet Poll showed,
the majority of virus writers are developing for the !NET.
Don't let anyone know.
I think they proved their point.
Failure depends on goal. You have presumed a goal, "ownership of the office suite market."
vauge@trollbot: cat troll_post
A large number of $fims have ceased to exist in the last while because they couldn't make money from $product.
In light of this do you believe that it is possible to make money from $product alone or does a company need a hardware arm like Sun?
Kewl post dude! Try:
firm = restaurant, law firm, consulting firm, doctor's office, courrier service or nasty nails.
product = food, legal advice, advice, health care, delivery service or toe funk cleaning.
Do you think we can make money off it, or do we need to sell some kind of hardware too?
pththth-th-th-fit!
Yeah, I'm getting sick of hearing about M$ astroturfing, as has been reported here and there and everwhere!. I wish that company would devote as much time to making a decent program instead.
What supprises me more is the crowd of trolls like you who always come to the aid of M$.
Slasdot is free. Slashdotings and poll rigging are not paid for here. You are free to think as you will and not have to worry about your boss monitoring your vote. So this is no more a rig than the local newspaper reporting something unfavorable about a candidite in an election. You are free to care about Gary Hart's "Monkey Business", and not care about Bill Clinton's filegate, monicagate, dopegate, murdergate, chickengate, gategate gate gate.
Oh yeah, another thing. The opinions posted here are not always those of Slashdot, VAWhatever, the FSF, Bill Gates, or my grandmother's. Mostly they are our opinions because WE WRITE THEM. Oh, I forgot I was writing an opinion.
I'd rather play the devil than his pimp.
If there was a failure in telco regulation, it was a failure to promote the public interest. Short sighted opinions like yours are both cause and effect.
Online music is the best example of this potential. Five years ago the market saw online music as the next great Internet application. A dozen companies competed to find new and innovative ways to deliver and produce music using the technologies of the Internet. Napster was the most famous of these companies, but it was not the only or even the most important example. A company called MP3.COM, for example, had not only developed new ways to deliver content but had also enabled new artists to develop and distribute their content outside the control of the existing labels.
These experiments in innovation are now over. They have been stopped by lawyers working for the recording industry. Every form of innovation that they disapproved of they sued. And every suit they brought, they won. Innovation outside the control of the "majors" has stopped.
Whether or not these courts were right as a matter of substantive copyright law, what is important is the consequence of this regulation: innovation and growth in broadband have been stifled as courts have given control over the future to the creators of the past. The only architecture for distribution that these creators will allow is one that preserves their power within a highly concentrated market.
Surely the laws that govern publishing can be considered "regulation". They limit who can do what and how. These laws have now been abused, and the silence of our elected officials is all that is needed for these decisions to continue to have the force of law.
Why won't they just NOT TAKE MONEY FOR TRASH TO BEGIN WITH? Junk mail has helped make the US post unusable and in the long run is a huge waste of public resources. It has tarnished their image, wrecked their efficiency, and made their service into a burden. This is just a measure to squeeze more money from their bulk mailers. If we are lucky it will backfire and eliminate bulk mail.
All of these people/companies/whatever have some of your sensitive personal information. You trust them with it. It's in their best interest to use it to serve you better, in ways that do not annoy you, or betray your trust.
I don't trust my credit card company, the IRS and a long list of others who have forced me to give them information. When they use that information to annoy me, there is nothing I can do about it. When they give it to others to anoy me, I get really pissed about it. How do I know? They all make little mistakes, like my middle initial as J instead of H. J is for junk.
Yeah, my wife had all the money stolen from her account like that. I suggest a credit card or a check. If you say something rude to my wife while she writes a check, she'll kick you in the balls. There you go, two caveats for the price of one.
Back to topic, you are right. I hate it when some clerk thinks they know me because they've wasted my time reading what their database thinks about me. Moreover, the whole point of the book seems to be how to be a creep without getting caught. It's not going to work, especially with people filling up the databases with inccorect information. Fight the droids, lie to them when they waste your time.
In the future, computers will not be programed to help you select the content you want, they will be programed to force you to watch even more comercials. "Don't touch that dial while I play this new Lexus advert. I won't let you anyway."
Really, I hope not but it looks like the TV is creeping closer to my computer than the other way around.
It's happened over and over again and people just never learn. The Paris sewer system. The London underground. The US rural electrification and interstate. Look at the costs of these huge projects. Everybody now want underground sewers, running water, public transportation, electricity, roads, phones. Each new work is a new chance to screw the public. You know, it's hard to find new houses that don't come with all of these uneeded luxuries. Dear God! When will it all end?!
10 years ago, I was on like, 14.4kbps. If they installed some sort of hypothetical 14.4kbps dedicated line to everyone's home then it'd be sorely out of date by now. If they just did it within, say, a year or 2 but 10? Any reply on this would be good.
Well, well. I'd be happy with 14.4 dedicated everywhere at a nice low price, but things would be better than that. Let's say your town had put in a whole new dedicated network of phone lines and finished it last year. The wires would be there and you could run more through them and modify them as your town sees fit. It would not cost that much more to bump up to 56.6, now would it?
So what have you got instead? Because nothing was done ten years ago, you are stuck with aging phone company owned lines. You might be lucky enough to pay fifty bucks for cable TV on your puter, no servers, blocked email, barf. You might also be lucky enough to have some poor DSL company being raped by the local telco so that you can pay them fifty bucks a month for a line that's roughly twice the speed of a regualar dial up. If you are really lucky that poor dog of a company will give you a fixed IP and a TOS that's designed to keep you from obnoxing your neighbors but little else. Chaces are, the telco won't let you get that lucky.
So you see, when you sit on your ass and do nothing, people will take advantage of you.
Private turnpikes happen when your elected representatives fail you. Think about it. Why would you set up some private interest where they can collect money impeeding the public forever? It is always better for the public to recognize it's best interest and cooperate to bring it about. When you fail to do this, someone gets to earn a living at your expense.
Sure, private interests have a place. They can bid against each other to build it. When it's in place, they can either bid for the business or be regulated. Regulation, when it's not all fouled by an ignorant public, works for large well known and fixed indstries. There private interests can be garanteed a modest profit for their services and everyone gets their modern necessities.
We know what we want, let's try to get it. The internet is a different kind of tellecomunications that will require different regulations. There is no more need for "content" regulation than phone conversations. Private communications should be protected from interception the same way US post is. The ability to publish on it in any form must be as free as your ability to buy a Xerox machine and make a newspaper anonymously. These things, while natural extentions of our ordinary rights, have powerful enemies in government, telecomunications and publishing industries. Keep screaming your heads off.
Chcicago is beautiful.
It is naïve to hope that every computational problem can be solved by a simple procedure that can be described in a few pages of chatty prose, and using a page or two of Fortran or C code. Today's ambitions for correctness, accuracy, precision, stability, "robustness", efficiency, etc. demand sophisticated codes developed by experts with deep understanding of their disciplines. We have long ago outgrown the capabilities of the simplistic approaches of 30 years ago.
Well! True. At the same time, it's not a bad place to start. Sometimes a chatty breeze is better for understanding than a phd level peer review trade journal. A fourth order Runge Kutta routine should not be your first ODE solver any more than an extrapolation routine should be used in production.
By the way, the NR authors themselves recomend FORTRAN over C.
So M$ has convinced hardware makers to spend extra money supporting an inferior media format for auidio. The inferior media format has provisions for inferior video too, hmmm. Do you think it will take that long for M$ to push that too if they have not already?
Gee Bill, that's almost as bad as that book you wrote about the road ahead.
M$, we don't make things, we make them suck.
Sometimes I have to stop myself. While the fact that M$ has managed to twist the arms of hardware manufactures to spend money on inferior "standards" that won't work tomorow, and the implications of this are ominous, the reality today is not so bad. Do I really need the kinds of canned crap the RIAA puts out? I have not bought a non local CD in years. Do I really need a computer to look at crappy movies? On the rare occasion a movie is worth seeing, I go watch it in a theater.
The implications are the things to worry about, not the content. Worry about your ability to publish in a format that you can share with others. Isn't it more important to share pictures of your wedding with your friends and family than it is to show "Shreck"? How about your ability to publish ordinary papers? Worry about your ability to share published works in a public library. Do we really want to hoard information that way, so that it's pay per play or nothing? Isn't it more important that children and adults can research questions they have at a public library than it is for you to be able to read the latest pulp fiction? It is important to realize that the "content" control we see being born here is comming from the bassest of publishers, and stop the practice before it becomes universal practice. We must also work to make sure we can continue to publish on the internet.
Exercise your own power and refuse to publish in inferior, non free formats. Creating the financial incentive for hardware makers to respect your interests is just as easy as that. People who buy these new players are going to get burnt when WMA changes two years from now. The makers of those devices are going to get a big black eye from it. Don't you think that part of the tech slowdown comes from user uncertianty created by nothing M$ working right? It hurts to screw up. Meanwhile, my png, ogg mpegs and what not will work the same.
Name calling like this is a really good way to take credibility away from your post. ...
I don't use Office, so I can't comment on how stable it is. All I can comment on is my own experience with 2000, which has been very good. (Others have given similar reports...)
Well, you are right the name calling was dumb. Allow me to explain.
Lies make me angry, and there's plenty of them aroun here. There are so many microturds around these days pumping up stuff that I know is terrible. They post all day about how wonderful this and that M$ junk is, try to make flames where they can, and are outrageous in general. If M$'s history of Astroturfing is a guide, most of these folks are paid to post their dishonesty. It makes me angry to hear people say that NT, w2k and what not are "solid", stable, or anything like that. I know that they are not and I know that the instability extends further than Office. In fact the instablilty applies to just about everything non M$ and a few M$ things. Applying the razor, we see that the root of the problem is what they all have in common, M$. Your experience is atypical or your standards of "very good" are low.