Yes, it was a little bit of an exagerated comparision. It has nothing to do with being paranoid. It is hatred for a nasty monopoly. It is called an exaggerated point. Get over it.
Don't get your panties in such a bind! Yes, it was a little bit of an exagerated comparision. MS as well as hitler wanted total power. While what hitler did was worse in the sense of killing people, IMO it is not too far from what MS is doing to the IT industry. This has nothing to do with being paranoid. It is just hatred. Yes, that is a strong word and that is how I feel about a nasty monopoly such as MS and the unethical actions they do, the freedoms they take away and the destruction they cause to a society based on capitalism.
Did ya ever think if left to their own devices the powers that be may have chosen MS anyway? The US military did...it isn't inconceivable.
BS. The US military has been paid for by MS and their lobbying goons. There was no choice about it, it was a higher up decision that was paid for by MS. These are the types of tactics that cause me to hate MS.
That is because Apple is not a convicted monopoly. MS is doing this to strenghten their monopoly. Apple donates computers and software. MS is donating a project manager. Guess what solutions this "project manager" will demand? MS ONLY solutions. This is a way to entrench themselves more. These tactics are not much worse then what Hitler was doing. Hitler would only let you read approved books, Hitler wanted one race of people who all thought the same. Just as MS will only let this school used "approved" technology (read MS ONLY) and will try to produce a region of students who will look to MS only. Linux is much better as a network server OS then MS. Will this MS "project manager" recommend that? IMO, Mac OS X is a much better desktop experience, will the MS "project manager" reccommend that? No. I lived in the Philadelphia area for 15 years before moving to Florida. I know if I was still there I would protest this crap. I only hope others there will do the same. Sadly, in this country money makes the rules, and we know MS has a lot of that to throw around. Why doesn't MS just donate some PC's and software? Most poeple wouldn't care about that. By "donating" training and a "project manager", MS will have complete control over what technology that school uses, over every choice that school makes regarding technology. This is the reason people get pissed. MS is not doing this to help out the school, they are doing it for their best interest. With MS it all comes down to control, if they cannot have contorl they don't want any part of it.
Did you read the page? It is a fake 404 to protest against the possibility of having software patents in Europe. At the bottom of the page is the link into the MPlayer site.
Yes, lets limit our right to know what a software program is doing with our PERSONAL information and property so that we can make sure that computer games are protected from cheaters. This is good logic and I hope that a member of congress gets to read your suggestion! Sorry, binary packages DO NOT tell you what a software program is doing with your personal information or property. How many home users knew that MS was sending back information on what DVD they were playing or connecting to the internet when you did a file system search? Ofcourse, MS covered it up nicely by saying that the information was sent back was completly "anonymous" and that the MS Search thingy was just trying to connect to MSN. Though we will never know what it was really doing or if that is even true since we cannot see the code. I do agree that the average user does not need to see the code nor can then understand it. However, a programmer like myself can and we can relay that information in layman terms. Just as I rely on a medical doctor to relay medical information to me in layman terms. People have rights to protect their information and property. In a closed source world, we cannot protect those rights. I personally don't see the big deal in showing source code. Copyright law limits what one can do with it. So even if MS posted the code to all their products tomorrow, no one could use it and then sell it. The only thing someone could do with it is learn from it and create from it and also use it for interoperabilty. Ofcourse, MS does not want that since they want to be the "One Ring To Rule Them All".
You are assuming that the only problems with MS software are because a user runs some email attachment. Outlook, Outlook Express and IE would auto-run many attachments/scipts for you for a long time. Most of the other problems are because of silly things MS does such as having SQL server annouce it's presence to the rest of the network. This give a worm a target to look for. The SMB protocol has been riddled with problems. A user has to do nothing, this is enabled by default. Also, having every user a member of the Administrator group is just brain dead. Most home users do not have an admin sitting around to tell them it is a bad choice to run as a user in the administrator group. Oh, and if you take a user out of the admnistrator group, the usability of MS Windows drops VERY low, for the average user. Most home users don't have the technical ability to grasp the runas command. So MS made a choice to put all users in the administrator group which just makes any exploit that much more devastating.
And as for the logic of your sig. 1st those are not Linux issues. Those are issues for APPLICATIONS. Linux is a kernel. Those are applications that run on linux as well as other OSes. Many of them are NOT security issues at all, just bug fixes. If you want to count them as Linux security issues, then we need to count EVERY security and bug issue for EVERY application that runs under MS windows as a Microsoft security issue. That seems fair to me. Imagine the size of THAT database!
It doesn't mean that it has to LEAVE your computer unencrypted. Just that you need to see the unecrypted data, such as a window that shows you the contents of what is to bee transfered before it is encrypted and sent. This would give you the ability to approve that personal information being sent.
It is pretty sad that in the USA a law needs to be funded by ANY corporation for consideration. Since when did corporate sponsorship become part of our law making process?
You should really stop pulling on Billy Boy's peter so hard. It is really messing up your ability to think clearly. Maybe try to base your statement on facts. Linux has very good UTF-8 support. The benefit in Linux is that toolkits such as QT and GTK both support UTF-8 which makes applications written in those toolkits UTF-8 compatible. This is not the situation under MS Windows. MS Windows may support UTF-8 at a lower API level, however it does not propegate into the applications. I edited some guys asp page from my Linux workstation at work and saved it in UTF-8 with DOS line endings. IIS choked on the file. Saving the file as plain ole ascii fixed the problem for IIS. So even MS and their own application suite does not support unicode across the board. GTK and pango can handle a lot of different character encodings including left to right and right to left. Red Flag Linux has far better Asian language support then MS Windows hands down. The big problem with the way MS did their unicode support is that an application NEEDS to specifically handle it by making differnt calls between similar API's.
Unicode string in SQL Server require special coding: "SELECT N'Hello'"
API calls are broken into one that handle ascii and ones that handle unicode such as
SetWindowTextW
SetWindowTextA
This required people to make programming changes and to code specifically for unicode. This is a brain dead way to do it IMO. It should be transparent to the programmer. Maybe next time base your statements on facts and personal knowledge instead of blind ingnorance.
I don't see it happening this way. The process of putting together these types of devices is not performed by some monkey with an IQ of 4. If they develop a product and don't secure it properly, they have no right telling consumers what they can or cannot do with their PROPERTY. Even if they put top notch security into the devices, they still have no right telling a consumer how they are allowed to use that device. If I want to use my new Linux based Tivo as a paper weight, then that is my right. If I want to use it to prop my door open then that is my right. If I find a way to get into it and use it as a nice little web server, then that is my right. I also don't think that any manufacturer would be dumb enough to blame misuse of a product on the embedded OS that they chose. Look at the XBox. People have been hacking that since day one. Does that mean that for the next XBox MS will use a different OS on it becasue some people have hacked it? No. The fact is, is that MOST comsumers do not mess with their products so that they do not break it or void their warranty. It is no different then me going out and buying a new Ford Taurus, taking it apart, finding different uses for the various parts and then telling others about those various uses. Ford won't care, they were already paid for the product. And they have no legal grounds to complain about how I legally used my property.
The one way will take place is through a sufficient, standardised, framework through which applications can be developed. I'm not talking about GTK or QT, but the whole environment surrounding it; and more importantly, one that's not constantly in flux for long periods of time. Once that happens, then a trickle of applications will start to appear.
This already exists. Gnome and KDE both provide a complete programming environment to work in. If you need lower level stuff, that is where POSIX and the std C library come in. It is no different under MS Windows. You can use MFC or program directly against the Win32 API. There is also the std C library for handling other tasks. MS changes things almost as fast as under Linux. They are constantly introducing new buzz words and trying to make that the new "standard". MS Messaging Queue, COM, COM+, J++,.Net, ADO, OLEDB, etc, etc. What it comes down to on ANY platform is to find what tookits/API's fit your needs and use them. There are already 1,000's of applications under Linux, commercial and Open Source. Oracles whole line runs under Linux, the same for much of IBM's stuff, PeopleSoft, SAP, Network Associates, etc, etc. The current situation with commercial applications under Linux is mostly server oriented. Though that is changing over time. Hopefully the next 2-4 years will see more commerical applications under Linux geared for the desktop user to allow even more choice. While I am a big supporter of Open Source, I also think that the "IT Pie" is big enough to sustain a healthy commercial and Open Source marktet without one being force to choose one or the other. The only problem I see right now is that software patents are giving an unfair advantage to larger corporations. And as far as desktop interoperability goes, just about ever distribution of Linux comes with the libraries needed for Gnome and KDE. While I use Gnome as my desktop, if there is a KDE app I want to use, I am able to use it without a problem since the required libraries are there. This is no different then a MS Windows user needing certain libraries to use an MFC app or a VB app or an app that needs the MDAC libraries, etc.
The problem is with Mandrake. IMO, it is the buggiest and most unstable Linux distro I have used. Try Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, etc. Any of them should be much more stable. I did give Mandrake 9.1 a try and I had the same exact problem. Though, I let it sit for about 1 minute and then formated the drive and put Red Hat 9 on it.
The first is that IMO they charge too much . Though I just read that they dropped the price to click-n-run to about $49 a year which is not bad.
The biggest problem I have with them is that they by default use the root user. This is a big no-no. This is just as bad as MS and having all users in the Administrators group. Using root all the time under Linux or any Unix is the biggest brain dead move a distro could make. It opens the user to all kinds of exploits and make it no better then MS windows. IMO, Red Hat is doing things the correct way as far as users needing to do things as root. You work as a normal user and when you need to do something that requires root, you get prompted for the root password. Stay away from Lindows OS.
Then don't buy a stupid marketing gimmick. All it is, is an Intell processor and a wireless card. Buy a regular Intel/AMD and a PCMCIA wireless card and your set. And you don't have to pay extra for the marketing crap or be locked into proprietary junk.
My point was I could see calling a line of products from one company insecure. Such as MS has bad security because of IIS, Outlook, Outlook Express, IE, Office VBA, RPC, etc. However to say MS is insecure because an exploint in Photoshop brought down 1,000's of systems is just sillly. The latter is what this topic is suggesting. The security of Apache has nothing to do with the security of Linux. Oh, and for a very long time, outlook and outlook express would happily "autorun" viruses for you. It took MS a LONG time to understand the simple concept of not "autorunning" attachments. I do agree that most MS Windows users would not be getting hit so hard by viruses if they would patch sooner and not run unknown attachments. However, MS has focused on the non-technical and have done a good job at simplifying the UI, and have done a bad job at giving that non-technical user a secure environment.
How can you make a statement on Linux security based on Apace? If Apache is hacked it has nothing to do with Linux. It is just an application that is completely unrelated to Linux. Saying Linux is insecure because of the last Apaceh/OpenSSL hole would be the same as saying FreeBSD or OpenBSD are insecure because someone broke in through Apache. Apache is a whole lot more secure then IIS, though it still had some problems. While it may make sense to complain about MS security problems because IIS is one of their products, it is silly to say Linux is insecure because of Apache. I do think security under Linux needs to constantly be watched, it is very easy to get a big head, become lazy and sloppy and get all kinds of holes. Thanks to efforts like SE Linux by the NSA, Linux will keep getting more and more secure.
Tell me about it. I can't stand BEA Weblogic and the People Soft Portal we have running. It was the biggest mess to develop with. We are switching all of our other J2EE servers to Oracle 9iAS, and I hope that is much better. I have sent in bugs/complaints to PeopleSoft and I think it just goes to/dev/null
Well bone head, that was a typo. I meant winders 2003. All developers where I work have an Enterprise MSDN subscription and we get ALL MS products and OSes including early beta releases.
You sound like a little MS monkey. I bet your are one of their paid monkeys that are hired to comment on these types of sites in favor of MS. My disklike against MS has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge of MS products, it in fact has EVERY thing to do with the last 8 years I have developed with their crap. I started as an MS only developer with plain ole c/win32 and then on to C++/MFC. Over the last 8 years or so, it has been MS that has driven developers like myself away. Having Ballmer dance around like a monkey crying "developers, developers, developers" is not enough to make programmers under MS happy. You see, if MS was not a convicted monopoly and would allow competition and interoperabilty, then developers would have the freedom to CHOOSE what THEY want and what technology is best for THEM. Sometimes it may be MS and their products and sometimes it won't. The sad state of MS the monopoly is that they DO NOT want you to use ANY other product other then theirs and they make it very difficult for programmers like myself to choose what solution is best. I think Linux is a better chioce then MS Windows for certain task, just as I think MS Windows is a better choice then Linux for certain tasks. However, MS continues to leverage their monopoly to make it very difficult for developers to do something as simple as make an informed choice on what technology to choose.
I'm not sure what idea you're trying to sell me on with the rest of your post
Just where was I trying to sell YOU on anything? You are free to worship MS all you want. By all means have a ball. However, MS and the crap they have pulled as a MONOPOLY have created a very nasty taste in the mouths of many developers and customers.
Remember Monday August 25, 2003 as the day that freedom of speech was lost in America for corporate profit. There is no legal definition for "IP". Soon, companies will be calling EVERYTHING "IP" and will be stripping away more and more rights. If "IP" is infact stolen from a company, then yes, freedom of speech should not allow that stolen "IP" to be spread. However, if that "IP" is gained by legal reverse engineering, then freedom of speech should in fact have more weight over "IP". In this case, nothing was stolen, the DeCSS code was created NEW from reverse engineering, which is totally legal. If a corporation does not make efforst to protect their "IP", then they have no right to later call it trade secrets. It is a sad day to be an American for me.
Sorry champ, I have been devloping Windows applications for 8 years in C, C++ and Java. I also develop on Linux. I have been using Longhorn and it blows as a development platform, just as thier windows 2003 server does. The server is bogged down and dumbed down with their poor gui. The Longhorn/Blackcomb GUI will be just the same. 500 wizards that are jack of all trades and masters of none is not the way to administer a machine. GUI apps by nature are NOT very scriptable, especially the MS GUI apps for administration. That means each server needs some monkey to sit there an point and click.
Oh, and Palladium is nothing to be proud of, unless you don't mind having some monopoly tell you what you are allowed to do with YOUR computer, I sure as hell don't. WinFS is a joke. Linux has had all kinds of journaling file systesm for a long time now. JFS, XFS, Ext3, ReiserFS. ReiserFS4 and its features make WinFS look silly. As far as an Anti-Virus API from MS, you have got to be kidding me right? MS has no concept of anti-virus. There have been over 80,000 viruses for the MS platform and that did not make MS change their ways. All that was needed were a few simple changes to their email client that would have stopped a large part of those viruses. Look at the last two weeks, there have been a few million PC's that have been infected by a virus thanks to MS and thier anti-virus. MS has had MANY years to work on their OS and it was not until about 2 years ago until they put out an OS that has some stability. To me the are nothing more than a nasty monopoly set out to control every aspect of the IT world. Maybe you want to be an MS monkey and that is fine, however, I for one think for myself and will not let some monopoly dictate "where I want to go".
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, you should not count on it. The Gates foundation makes donations to get publicity and for their own benefit. Take a look at this: BILL GATES: KILLING AFRICANS FOR PROFIT AND P.R.
As a lower post points out Godwin Law
I was hoping that no one would remember the last part of Godwin's law, however, it back fired.
Yes, it was a little bit of an exagerated comparision. It has nothing to do with being paranoid. It is hatred for a nasty monopoly. It is called an exaggerated point. Get over it.
That is because Apple is not a convicted monopoly. MS is doing this to strenghten their monopoly. Apple donates computers and software. MS is donating a project manager. Guess what solutions this "project manager" will demand? MS ONLY solutions. This is a way to entrench themselves more. These tactics are not much worse then what Hitler was doing. Hitler would only let you read approved books, Hitler wanted one race of people who all thought the same. Just as MS will only let this school used "approved" technology (read MS ONLY) and will try to produce a region of students who will look to MS only. Linux is much better as a network server OS then MS. Will this MS "project manager" recommend that? IMO, Mac OS X is a much better desktop experience, will the MS "project manager" reccommend that? No. I lived in the Philadelphia area for 15 years before moving to Florida. I know if I was still there I would protest this crap. I only hope others there will do the same. Sadly, in this country money makes the rules, and we know MS has a lot of that to throw around. Why doesn't MS just donate some PC's and software? Most poeple wouldn't care about that. By "donating" training and a "project manager", MS will have complete control over what technology that school uses, over every choice that school makes regarding technology. This is the reason people get pissed. MS is not doing this to help out the school, they are doing it for their best interest. With MS it all comes down to control, if they cannot have contorl they don't want any part of it.
Did you read the page? It is a fake 404 to protest against the possibility of having software patents in Europe. At the bottom of the page is the link into the MPlayer site.
worked for me.
This has been available in Ximian Evolution for a while now.
Yes, lets limit our right to know what a software program is doing with our PERSONAL information and property so that we can make sure that computer games are protected from cheaters. This is good logic and I hope that a member of congress gets to read your suggestion! Sorry, binary packages DO NOT tell you what a software program is doing with your personal information or property. How many home users knew that MS was sending back information on what DVD they were playing or connecting to the internet when you did a file system search? Ofcourse, MS covered it up nicely by saying that the information was sent back was completly "anonymous" and that the MS Search thingy was just trying to connect to MSN. Though we will never know what it was really doing or if that is even true since we cannot see the code. I do agree that the average user does not need to see the code nor can then understand it. However, a programmer like myself can and we can relay that information in layman terms. Just as I rely on a medical doctor to relay medical information to me in layman terms. People have rights to protect their information and property. In a closed source world, we cannot protect those rights. I personally don't see the big deal in showing source code. Copyright law limits what one can do with it. So even if MS posted the code to all their products tomorrow, no one could use it and then sell it. The only thing someone could do with it is learn from it and create from it and also use it for interoperabilty. Ofcourse, MS does not want that since they want to be the "One Ring To Rule Them All".
You are assuming that the only problems with MS software are because a user runs some email attachment. Outlook, Outlook Express and IE would auto-run many attachments/scipts for you for a long time. Most of the other problems are because of silly things MS does such as having SQL server annouce it's presence to the rest of the network. This give a worm a target to look for. The SMB protocol has been riddled with problems. A user has to do nothing, this is enabled by default. Also, having every user a member of the Administrator group is just brain dead. Most home users do not have an admin sitting around to tell them it is a bad choice to run as a user in the administrator group. Oh, and if you take a user out of the admnistrator group, the usability of MS Windows drops VERY low, for the average user. Most home users don't have the technical ability to grasp the runas command. So MS made a choice to put all users in the administrator group which just makes any exploit that much more devastating.
And as for the logic of your sig. 1st those are not Linux issues. Those are issues for APPLICATIONS. Linux is a kernel. Those are applications that run on linux as well as other OSes. Many of them are NOT security issues at all, just bug fixes. If you want to count them as Linux security issues, then we need to count EVERY security and bug issue for EVERY application that runs under MS windows as a Microsoft security issue. That seems fair to me. Imagine the size of THAT database!
It doesn't mean that it has to LEAVE your computer unencrypted. Just that you need to see the unecrypted data, such as a window that shows you the contents of what is to bee transfered before it is encrypted and sent. This would give you the ability to approve that personal information being sent.
It is pretty sad that in the USA a law needs to be funded by ANY corporation for consideration. Since when did corporate sponsorship become part of our law making process?
You should really stop pulling on Billy Boy's peter so hard. It is really messing up your ability to think clearly. Maybe try to base your statement on facts. Linux has very good UTF-8 support. The benefit in Linux is that toolkits such as QT and GTK both support UTF-8 which makes applications written in those toolkits UTF-8 compatible. This is not the situation under MS Windows. MS Windows may support UTF-8 at a lower API level, however it does not propegate into the applications. I edited some guys asp page from my Linux workstation at work and saved it in UTF-8 with DOS line endings. IIS choked on the file. Saving the file as plain ole ascii fixed the problem for IIS. So even MS and their own application suite does not support unicode across the board. GTK and pango can handle a lot of different character encodings including left to right and right to left. Red Flag Linux has far better Asian language support then MS Windows hands down. The big problem with the way MS did their unicode support is that an application NEEDS to specifically handle it by making differnt calls between similar API's.
Unicode string in SQL Server require special coding:
"SELECT N'Hello'"
API calls are broken into one that handle ascii and ones that handle unicode such as
SetWindowTextW
SetWindowTextA
This required people to make programming changes and to code specifically for unicode. This is a brain dead way to do it IMO. It should be transparent to the programmer. Maybe next time base your statements on facts and personal knowledge instead of blind ingnorance.
I don't see it happening this way. The process of putting together these types of devices is not performed by some monkey with an IQ of 4. If they develop a product and don't secure it properly, they have no right telling consumers what they can or cannot do with their PROPERTY. Even if they put top notch security into the devices, they still have no right telling a consumer how they are allowed to use that device. If I want to use my new Linux based Tivo as a paper weight, then that is my right. If I want to use it to prop my door open then that is my right. If I find a way to get into it and use it as a nice little web server, then that is my right. I also don't think that any manufacturer would be dumb enough to blame misuse of a product on the embedded OS that they chose. Look at the XBox. People have been hacking that since day one. Does that mean that for the next XBox MS will use a different OS on it becasue some people have hacked it? No. The fact is, is that MOST comsumers do not mess with their products so that they do not break it or void their warranty. It is no different then me going out and buying a new Ford Taurus, taking it apart, finding different uses for the various parts and then telling others about those various uses. Ford won't care, they were already paid for the product. And they have no legal grounds to complain about how I legally used my property.
The problem is with Mandrake. IMO, it is the buggiest and most unstable Linux distro I have used. Try Red Hat, SuSE, Debian, Slackware, etc. Any of them should be much more stable. I did give Mandrake 9.1 a try and I had the same exact problem. Though, I let it sit for about 1 minute and then formated the drive and put Red Hat 9 on it.
I personally have two problems with Lindows.
The first is that IMO they charge too much . Though I just read that they dropped the price to click-n-run to about $49 a year which is not bad.
The biggest problem I have with them is that they by default use the root user. This is a big no-no. This is just as bad as MS and having all users in the Administrators group. Using root all the time under Linux or any Unix is the biggest brain dead move a distro could make. It opens the user to all kinds of exploits and make it no better then MS windows. IMO, Red Hat is doing things the correct way as far as users needing to do things as root. You work as a normal user and when you need to do something that requires root, you get prompted for the root password. Stay away from Lindows OS.
Then don't buy a stupid marketing gimmick. All it is, is an Intell processor and a wireless card. Buy a regular Intel/AMD and a PCMCIA wireless card and your set. And you don't have to pay extra for the marketing crap or be locked into proprietary junk.
My point was I could see calling a line of products from one company insecure. Such as MS has bad security because of IIS, Outlook, Outlook Express, IE, Office VBA, RPC, etc. However to say MS is insecure because an exploint in Photoshop brought down 1,000's of systems is just sillly. The latter is what this topic is suggesting. The security of Apache has nothing to do with the security of Linux. Oh, and for a very long time, outlook and outlook express would happily "autorun" viruses for you. It took MS a LONG time to understand the simple concept of not "autorunning" attachments. I do agree that most MS Windows users would not be getting hit so hard by viruses if they would patch sooner and not run unknown attachments. However, MS has focused on the non-technical and have done a good job at simplifying the UI, and have done a bad job at giving that non-technical user a secure environment.
How can you make a statement on Linux security based on Apace? If Apache is hacked it has nothing to do with Linux. It is just an application that is completely unrelated to Linux. Saying Linux is insecure because of the last Apaceh/OpenSSL hole would be the same as saying FreeBSD or OpenBSD are insecure because someone broke in through Apache. Apache is a whole lot more secure then IIS, though it still had some problems. While it may make sense to complain about MS security problems because IIS is one of their products, it is silly to say Linux is insecure because of Apache. I do think security under Linux needs to constantly be watched, it is very easy to get a big head, become lazy and sloppy and get all kinds of holes. Thanks to efforts like SE Linux by the NSA, Linux will keep getting more and more secure.
Tell me about it. I can't stand BEA Weblogic and the People Soft Portal we have running. It was the biggest mess to develop with. We are switching all of our other J2EE servers to Oracle 9iAS, and I hope that is much better. I have sent in bugs/complaints to PeopleSoft and I think it just goes to /dev/null
You sound like a little MS monkey. I bet your are one of their paid monkeys that are hired to comment on these types of sites in favor of MS. My disklike against MS has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge of MS products, it in fact has EVERY thing to do with the last 8 years I have developed with their crap. I started as an MS only developer with plain ole c/win32 and then on to C++/MFC. Over the last 8 years or so, it has been MS that has driven developers like myself away. Having Ballmer dance around like a monkey crying "developers, developers, developers" is not enough to make programmers under MS happy. You see, if MS was not a convicted monopoly and would allow competition and interoperabilty, then developers would have the freedom to CHOOSE what THEY want and what technology is best for THEM. Sometimes it may be MS and their products and sometimes it won't. The sad state of MS the monopoly is that they DO NOT want you to use ANY other product other then theirs and they make it very difficult for programmers like myself to choose what solution is best. I think Linux is a better chioce then MS Windows for certain task, just as I think MS Windows is a better choice then Linux for certain tasks. However, MS continues to leverage their monopoly to make it very difficult for developers to do something as simple as make an informed choice on what technology to choose. Just where was I trying to sell YOU on anything? You are free to worship MS all you want. By all means have a ball. However, MS and the crap they have pulled as a MONOPOLY have created a very nasty taste in the mouths of many developers and customers.
Remember Monday August 25, 2003 as the day that freedom of speech was lost in America for corporate profit. There is no legal definition for "IP". Soon, companies will be calling EVERYTHING "IP" and will be stripping away more and more rights. If "IP" is infact stolen from a company, then yes, freedom of speech should not allow that stolen "IP" to be spread. However, if that "IP" is gained by legal reverse engineering, then freedom of speech should in fact have more weight over "IP". In this case, nothing was stolen, the DeCSS code was created NEW from reverse engineering, which is totally legal. If a corporation does not make efforst to protect their "IP", then they have no right to later call it trade secrets. It is a sad day to be an American for me.
Sorry champ, I have been devloping Windows applications for 8 years in C, C++ and Java. I also develop on Linux. I have been using Longhorn and it blows as a development platform, just as thier windows 2003 server does. The server is bogged down and dumbed down with their poor gui. The Longhorn/Blackcomb GUI will be just the same. 500 wizards that are jack of all trades and masters of none is not the way to administer a machine. GUI apps by nature are NOT very scriptable, especially the MS GUI apps for administration. That means each server needs some monkey to sit there an point and click.
Oh, and Palladium is nothing to be proud of, unless you don't mind having some monopoly tell you what you are allowed to do with YOUR computer, I sure as hell don't. WinFS is a joke. Linux has had all kinds of journaling file systesm for a long time now. JFS, XFS, Ext3, ReiserFS. ReiserFS4 and its features make WinFS look silly. As far as an Anti-Virus API from MS, you have got to be kidding me right? MS has no concept of anti-virus. There have been over 80,000 viruses for the MS platform and that did not make MS change their ways. All that was needed were a few simple changes to their email client that would have stopped a large part of those viruses. Look at the last two weeks, there have been a few million PC's that have been infected by a virus thanks to MS and thier anti-virus. MS has had MANY years to work on their OS and it was not until about 2 years ago until they put out an OS that has some stability. To me the are nothing more than a nasty monopoly set out to control every aspect of the IT world. Maybe you want to be an MS monkey and that is fine, however, I for one think for myself and will not let some monopoly dictate "where I want to go".