Pirating XP or Win2K is far more profitable than pirating Vista; from a pirate's point of view... I mean, a bloke willing to pirate Vista and save money is not gonna blow it all in high-end h/w for running it! Pirates are cunning and smart, much smarter than the folks at Redmond.
This means a lot...especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines,
So what? Don't you think an open dialogue between competitors is much better than shady backroom dealings that screw the customer?
who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.
ODF was the first to be recognised as an ISO standard, it's MS that's trying to compete and catch up... and making a very bad attempt of it, besides.
I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.
If it's FUD, why not expose it by refuting any opinions in the article. Not every corporate-sponsored research is FUD... not every company is Microsoft! Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?
Interesting 'resolution'.... still confusing!
on
OOXML's 662 Resolutions
·
· Score: 5, Informative
FTA: "The CHAR() function converts an integer into a character. But no character set was defined in the DIS to govern this conversion. Microsoft clarrified tis saying that the function uses the "Macintosh character set"on the Mac and ANSI on all other platforms."
That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN!
Also Rob responds to a query: "Even their correction is ambiguous. What is the "MacIntosh Character Set"? There is Mac OS Roman, MacCyrillic, MacIcelandic, Mac Central European, and with OS X we have UTF-8 as the default." Hilarious!
And again, probing a bit deeper into the ANSI character set for Windows... there's no such thing apparently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI
In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards[1]). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859 series, some of Microsoft's symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical. To top it all, quoting from a response:
One thing to note here is that MS explicitly do not support UTF-8 as an non-UCS2 encoding[1], while most Linux distributions are moving towards putting everything in UTF-8. So it would likely be the case in the near future that Linux and Windows users would not share a common platform character set, even if they spoke the same language. (e.g. Windows English British in Windows-1252, and Linux en_GB.UTF-8) And I thought Vista was the most confusing stuff from Microsoft!
I think Clington would've argued this case for Microsoft brilliantly:
It all depends on the meaning of the word 'Capable'... and then It all depends on the meaning of the word 'Vista'... and later It all depends on the meaning of the phrase 'Vista Capable' taken together.....your honour, I'm not finished yet!
sounds much better and simpler. Is branding the only thing confusing about Vista? Hardware requirements, Multiple versions, User Access Control, DRM, New Features, Service Pack Release Date, Activation, Remote SwitchOff, Genuine (Dis)Advantage... etc.; the list is long of things very vague and confusing about Vista. Not just the Branding.
"And I suppose if that shining example of coercion fails, "
Do you really honestly believe an operating system and a document editor need more than 64MB of RAM to run? What Microsoft has managed to do in the absence of competition is to continue to spread the myth of "Upgrade and you shall be liberated".
Even the EU remedy has been only to release the specs for some protocols, not the source code itself. If Microsoft is forced to release the exact source code ALONG WITH the documented protocols, under an 'Open source' license that permits modification - the market will definitely produce a very stable competing product in a year's time. This is not bound to failure, and given that the no. of PCs in the world is close to a billion - there is enough incentive and motivation for competitors to make it happen.
Unlike fellow-crooks like Dell and HP who continue to feed the 800lb gorilla.
Exactly! What the continuance of the monopoly has conclusively shown is that the 'monitoring' is the biggest failure in the whole process. Did the monitoring committee look into why the market has rejected Vista?
Did they bother to find out why Vista needs so much hardware resources and makes existing hardware obsolete?
I think the regulators must force Microsoft to open source Windows 2000 and Office 2000 - the entire source code. Anyone should be free to modify Win2K and O2K and make a good desktop OS that needs just 128MB RAM to run - without breaking every known hardware and software - like Vista does.
In a year, we will see lots of genuine competition.
some manufacturers are already putting out machines that are very difficult to find XP drivers for.
Please name these mfrs.... I will avoid them at my firm. We have decided to stick with XP; and our new machines will have only 512MB RAM and loaded with Corporate Licensed XP. The addl. cost of 2GB RAM and video cards with DX10 is too sttep. If however the h/w doesn't work with XP by design, you'd be doing us a favour to name the models and mfrs.
and didn't care much about the politics or market share of Linux... just in writing goog code; and preferring GPL2 to GPL3? So why should we care to read his views on topics that do not interest him?
The EEE PC from Asus shows the extents to which vested interests will go in ensuring drivers for display, ACPI, wifi etc. will be DRM-ridden binaries... and Linus hasn't had much to say about these things.
Maybe if he cared about the future of Linux so much, he would try and make as much of it GPL3 as he could?
"countries, like China and India, would have reason to be positively delighted at this mess. After all, while the US is circling the IT drain and losing impetus on innovation due to the all singing all dancing patent, they can get on with actually doing new stuff."
Couple of weeks ago, a senior official in IBM India announced they have applied for 14,000 patents from 'innovative contiributions' arising form their Indian R&D outfit. So not only is innovation happening outside the US (and innovation fetches more revenue for the employees than merely adopting technology); the fruits of this innovation will be increasingly less available in the US because of these patent trolls.
Except in press releases, we never get to know what's inside Vista! In the good old DOS days, there used to be fat manuals explaining the commands in the OS, but these days, press releases are full of features LEFT OUT in Vista. Nobody can program for Vista except with approval and continuous monitoring by Microsoft - Android is atleast much better in this aspect.
No no no... the real reason is a small mistake in a press release, he's rumoured not to have sent: "According to our Chair-Man , Vista offers Excel-lent value for our money...."
your complaint is more about the laziness of the MS developers that failed to create a waterproof detection algorithm for innocent content on the clipboard, then about any form of DRM.
So, there is more than one logical conclusion for this situation, and I think mine is better.
I don't think so, and I explained it in my initial post as well. Please note that EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT of this interaction is controlled by Microsoft - so there is no excuse for their innocence or ignorance of the exact nature of the underlying content.
It is a mix of DRM and non-standards-compliant proprietary junk that causes this behaviour.
As horrible as Word's proprietary format is, there isn't any DRM involved in it.
Try out this simple exercise. Type a paragraph using Word; now copy it to clipboard and paste it into an email... oops! you get a message: "Are you sure you want to 'display' insecure content?" Of course, use all Microsoft components.. you still get this error: Word, IE, Exchange and Windows.
What can be insecure in a piece of formatted text; and why should there be a restriction on 'displaying' it?
The only logical conclusion I can come to, relates to DRM. Word seems to have separate permissions for reading, copying, printing or sharing textual content therein. The very definition of Digital Restrictions Management.
Keep in mind, Novell sales are up 250% since their deal with Microsoft...
Novell wasn't doing so well prior to the MS tie up. So a 250% jump doesn't mean much. Once more corporates realise their portfolio is built on top of FUD, rather than Value; they will struggle to keep up the same turnover.
And then, Microsoft will simply ditch them and buy up another promising Open Source co. to kill off.
But it's not your responsibility to fix Microsoft's holes. Once you do take on that responsibility, are you also willing to face the consequences when your users blame you for their license revocation?
Fixing Microsoft-created holes is the basic reason why anti-virus firms exist; and why they do such roaring business; and also why they are trusted MORE than Microsoft, which makes the underlying crappy OS.
What is the worst that can happen when WGA fails? If the user gets no further updates from Microsoft... no problem; the anti-virus bloke is so much more clean and reliable.
But the problem is peculiar to IE7 and XP, NOT IE7 under Vista. This means that the billion dollar research has actually been completed, and that Vista includes the protection mechanism. Since IE7 was released after XP, it clearly indicates that this flaw has been on purpose; with some possible ulterior motive.
Already, trust has been lost with the stealth update of XP; now with IE7 being forced as a Critical Patch despite the broken security model; the mistrust is complete.
What Microsoft considers to be a critical patch is actually a cripppling security hazard! How ironic!!
They have admitted belatedly that IE7 on XP is broken; and that it is a very serious threat to security. So what prevents them from releasing a patch right away?
Is this vulnerability used / proposed to be used to make non-genuine Windows XP machines running IE7 unusable? Remember the unapproved, illegal stealth update that broke patching after a 'system restore'? Microsoft's continued silence is very intriguing.
No, the P-members that voted in September are the ones who will get to decide at the Ballot Resolution Meeting next year. If it happens. While this means that no demoted P-members can be kicked off
If a P-member chooses NOT TO participate in the interim period until the BRM, and gets demoted; then why should they be allowed to vote in the BRM?
Does that mean a loophole exists in the ISO whereby the entire standards making process can be sabotaged for a single submission? If a P-member gets demoted to O-member, they should not be eligible to further participate as a P-member. Simple as that.
"and none of the new members are bothering to vote, despite repeated pleas from the committee chair. "
They will not listen to the committee chair. If the Chair-Man shouts "P-members!, P-members!!, P-members!!!"...then they will all stand up and listen. They will even ask which way they should vote, and how much money they will get for doing so....
Except that's not what the OP had in mind. 4TB drives, 4 disks with a total overall capacity of 12TB. That's raid5.
Actually, the setup includes an off-site Disaster recovery setup that will have identical storage size, in an external drive cage, attached to vanilla hardware. So in the event of a major crash, I just need to transport the DR box and rebuild the RAID.
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I guess this is one way to get Vista's adoption rate to go up. Just let it be pirated!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ATeLDM1H4M
Pirating XP or Win2K is far more profitable than pirating Vista; from a pirate's point of view... I mean, a bloke willing to pirate Vista and save money is not gonna blow it all in high-end h/w for running it! Pirates are cunning and smart, much smarter than the folks at Redmond.
This means a lot...especially coming from a full-time salaried employee of International Business Machines,
So what? Don't you think an open dialogue between competitors is much better than shady backroom dealings that screw the customer?
who by cosmic coincidence recently released a product that uses ODF and competes (or tries to compete) Microsoft Office.
ODF was the first to be recognised as an ISO standard, it's MS that's trying to compete and catch up... and making a very bad attempt of it, besides.
I must've missed the memo that declared "evangelism" as the new corporate-sponsored FUD. But boy, it does feel wholesome.
If it's FUD, why not expose it by refuting any opinions in the article. Not every corporate-sponsored research is FUD... not every company is Microsoft! Maybe you are a full-time paid shill for them?
That means the same soon-to-be-ISO-standard OOXML file can be interpreted differently, depending on the 'platform' in which it is being used / read! Typical Microsoft rubbish.... and AGAIN!
Also Rob responds to a query: "Even their correction is ambiguous. What is the "MacIntosh Character Set"? There is Mac OS Roman, MacCyrillic, MacIcelandic, Mac Central European, and with OS X we have UTF-8 as the default." Hilarious!
And again, probing a bit deeper into the ANSI character set for Windows... there's no such thing apparently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI In Microsoft Windows, the phrase "ANSI" refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards[1]). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859 series, some of Microsoft's symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical. To top it all, quoting from a response: One thing to note here is that MS explicitly do not support UTF-8 as an non-UCS2 encoding[1], while most Linux distributions are moving towards putting everything in UTF-8. So it would likely be the case in the near future that Linux and Windows users would not share a common platform character set, even if they spoke the same language. (e.g. Windows English British in Windows-1252, and Linux en_GB.UTF-8) And I thought Vista was the most confusing stuff from Microsoft!
I think Clington would've argued this case for Microsoft brilliantly:
... and later ...your honour, I'm not finished yet!
It all depends on the meaning of the word 'Capable'... and then
It all depends on the meaning of the word 'Vista'
It all depends on the meaning of the phrase 'Vista Capable' taken together..
sounds much better and simpler. Is branding the only thing confusing about Vista? Hardware requirements, Multiple versions, User Access Control, DRM, New Features, Service Pack Release Date, Activation, Remote SwitchOff, Genuine (Dis)Advantage... etc.; the list is long of things very vague and confusing about Vista. Not just the Branding.
"And I suppose if that shining example of coercion fails, "
Do you really honestly believe an operating system and a document editor need more than 64MB of RAM to run? What Microsoft has managed to do in the absence of competition is to continue to spread the myth of "Upgrade and you shall be liberated".
Even the EU remedy has been only to release the specs for some protocols, not the source code itself. If Microsoft is forced to release the exact source code ALONG WITH the documented protocols, under an 'Open source' license that permits modification - the market will definitely produce a very stable competing product in a year's time. This is not bound to failure, and given that the no. of PCs in the world is close to a billion - there is enough incentive and motivation for competitors to make it happen.
Unlike fellow-crooks like Dell and HP who continue to feed the 800lb gorilla.
Exactly! What the continuance of the monopoly has conclusively shown is that the 'monitoring' is the biggest failure in the whole process. Did the monitoring committee look into why the market has rejected Vista?
Did they bother to find out why Vista needs so much hardware resources and makes existing hardware obsolete?
I think the regulators must force Microsoft to open source Windows 2000 and Office 2000 - the entire source code. Anyone should be free to modify Win2K and O2K and make a good desktop OS that needs just 128MB RAM to run - without breaking every known hardware and software - like Vista does.
In a year, we will see lots of genuine competition.
some manufacturers are already putting out machines that are very difficult to find XP drivers for.
Please name these mfrs.... I will avoid them at my firm. We have decided to stick with XP; and our new machines will have only 512MB RAM and loaded with Corporate Licensed XP. The addl. cost of 2GB RAM and video cards with DX10 is too sttep. If however the h/w doesn't work with XP by design, you'd be doing us a favour to name the models and mfrs.
Thanks.
and didn't care much about the politics or market share of Linux... just in writing goog code; and preferring GPL2 to GPL3? So why should we care to read his views on topics that do not interest him?
The EEE PC from Asus shows the extents to which vested interests will go in ensuring drivers for display, ACPI, wifi etc. will be DRM-ridden binaries... and Linus hasn't had much to say about these things.
Maybe if he cared about the future of Linux so much, he would try and make as much of it GPL3 as he could?
Can someone explain exactly how a license can extend Copyright?
The owner of the copyright might extend terms in his license, not the other way round.
"countries, like China and India, would have reason to be positively delighted at this mess. After all, while the US is circling the IT drain and losing impetus on innovation due to the all singing all dancing patent, they can get on with actually doing new stuff."
Couple of weeks ago, a senior official in IBM India announced they have applied for 14,000 patents from 'innovative contiributions' arising form their Indian R&D outfit. So not only is innovation happening outside the US (and innovation fetches more revenue for the employees than merely adopting technology); the fruits of this innovation will be increasingly less available in the US because of these patent trolls.
Except in press releases, we never get to know what's inside Vista! In the good old DOS days, there used to be fat manuals explaining the commands in the OS, but these days, press releases are full of features LEFT OUT in Vista. Nobody can program for Vista except with approval and continuous monitoring by Microsoft - Android is atleast much better in this aspect.
He was Chief Information officer, remember? So maybe he truthfully reported all the 14 sales of Vista?
No no no... the real reason is a small mistake in a press release, he's rumoured not to have sent: "According to our Chair-Man , Vista offers Excel-lent value for our money...."
your complaint is more about the laziness of the MS developers that failed to create a waterproof detection algorithm for innocent content on the clipboard, then about any form of DRM.
So, there is more than one logical conclusion for this situation, and I think mine is better.
I don't think so, and I explained it in my initial post as well. Please note that EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT of this interaction is controlled by Microsoft - so there is no excuse for their innocence or ignorance of the exact nature of the underlying content.
It is a mix of DRM and non-standards-compliant proprietary junk that causes this behaviour.
As horrible as Word's proprietary format is, there isn't any DRM involved in it.
Try out this simple exercise. Type a paragraph using Word; now copy it to clipboard and paste it into an email... oops! you get a message: "Are you sure you want to 'display' insecure content?" Of course, use all Microsoft components.. you still get this error: Word, IE, Exchange and Windows.
What can be insecure in a piece of formatted text; and why should there be a restriction on 'displaying' it?
The only logical conclusion I can come to, relates to DRM. Word seems to have separate permissions for reading, copying, printing or sharing textual content therein. The very definition of Digital Restrictions Management.
Keep in mind, Novell sales are up 250% since their deal with Microsoft. ..
Novell wasn't doing so well prior to the MS tie up. So a 250% jump doesn't mean much. Once more corporates realise their portfolio is built on top of FUD, rather than Value; they will struggle to keep up the same turnover.
And then, Microsoft will simply ditch them and buy up another promising Open Source co. to kill off.
2, 3, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7
Oh... it's worse in Excel 2007;
65533, 65534, 65535, 100000, 100000, 65538, 65539.. and so on!
Maybe there's some nice pattern too?
But it's not your responsibility to fix Microsoft's holes. Once you do take on that responsibility, are you also willing to face the consequences when your users blame you for their license revocation?
Fixing Microsoft-created holes is the basic reason why anti-virus firms exist; and why they do such roaring business; and also why they are trusted MORE than Microsoft, which makes the underlying crappy OS.
What is the worst that can happen when WGA fails? If the user gets no further updates from Microsoft... no problem; the anti-virus bloke is so much more clean and reliable.
Millions of dollars in research takes time.
But the problem is peculiar to IE7 and XP, NOT IE7 under Vista. This means that the billion dollar research has actually been completed, and that Vista includes the protection mechanism. Since IE7 was released after XP, it clearly indicates that this flaw has been on purpose; with some possible ulterior motive.
Already, trust has been lost with the stealth update of XP; now with IE7 being forced as a Critical Patch despite the broken security model; the mistrust is complete.
What Microsoft considers to be a critical patch is actually a cripppling security hazard! How ironic!!
They have admitted belatedly that IE7 on XP is broken; and that it is a very serious threat to security. So what prevents them from releasing a patch right away?
Is this vulnerability used / proposed to be used to make non-genuine Windows XP machines running IE7 unusable? Remember the unapproved, illegal stealth update that broke patching after a 'system restore'? Microsoft's continued silence is very intriguing.
No, the P-members that voted in September are the ones who will get to decide at the Ballot Resolution Meeting next year. If it happens. While this means that no demoted P-members can be kicked off
If a P-member chooses NOT TO participate in the interim period until the BRM, and gets demoted; then why should they be allowed to vote in the BRM?
Does that mean a loophole exists in the ISO whereby the entire standards making process can be sabotaged for a single submission? If a P-member gets demoted to O-member, they should not be eligible to further participate as a P-member. Simple as that.
The Emperor will just dissolve the Senate.
.. .then they will all stand up and listen. They will even ask which way they should vote, and how much money they will get for doing so....
Emperor or Chair-Man?
"and none of the new members are bothering to vote, despite repeated pleas from the committee chair. "
They will not listen to the committee chair. If the Chair-Man shouts "P-members!, P-members!!, P-members!!!"
It's the Swedish Bank's Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Nobel's estate doesn't recognize it..
Okay, I can see where you com from. We'll call it the SBP-Nobel Prize... just like GNU-Linux, does it make you happy now?
Except that's not what the OP had in mind. 4TB drives, 4 disks with a total overall capacity of 12TB. That's raid5.
Actually, the setup includes an off-site Disaster recovery setup that will have identical storage size, in an external drive cage, attached to vanilla hardware. So in the event of a major crash, I just need to transport the DR box and rebuild the RAID.