From the Slashdot story: "It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency."
That's why democracy doesn't always work: Many people don't understand the issues. Electric cars do not necessarily reduce the oil dependency, and definitely not greenhouse gases, because the electricity to run the car comes from power plants.
"The fact is that many people like Office and have a lot of time invested in learning it."
Yes, they have invested a lot of time learning it. I don't know people who "like" Microsoft Office. Some users can be given OpenOffice and not notice a difference. Others, very understandably, have learned to use Microsoft Office and don't want to invest time learning something new.
Only those who know two or more ways of capturing and formatting keystrokes and printing them can choose one or the other as something they "like".
My guess is that people who had invested an equal amount of time in Open Office would prefer that, and wouldn't want to change.
"... singling out Microsoft when every other company does the same thing, is blatant hypocrisy."
I am CERTAINLY not saying only Microsoft is abusive. The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries since the 2nd world war, and killed people and destroyed their property in each of them.
I was not claiming that OpenBSD is the equivalent of Microsoft Windows XP. I was only claiming that it is easily possible to create extremely complicated software that has very, very, very few vulnerabilities. That, to me, indicates that Microsoft doesn't want few vulnerabilities.
Already Microsoft Vista is being sold as the secure Windows, and Microsoft Windows OneCare is a profit center for Microsoft to protect you from problems Microsoft made. See the article, A Microsoft Safety Package. Grit Your Teeth.
"The first time I tried opening a large.doc file in Open Office, it crashed."
I've had that problem, too. But the latest version of Open Office seems very much improved. My experience has been that OO has done quite well with.DOC files since version 2.
The whole point of the very quirky Microsoft Office file format, it seems, is to be as incompatible and incomprehensible as possible. So, it is understandable that OO would have difficulty.
The Microsoft Office file format is part of Microsoft's unearned monopoly, an effective monopoly attained by trickery rather than caring for the customer and the people of the world. If Bill Gates truly cared about other people, he would have made good software products.
"Microsoft expended massive amounts of effort making it [Microsoft Office]
a better product..."
The last version I've used is Office 2000. It is remarkably unstable,
even after all the service packs are applied.
Sometimes, after several hours of editing, Microsoft Office stops
being able to read the file you've been saving. When that happens, open the
file in Open Office, save it as a.DOC file, and you will be able to open it
again in Microsoft Office.
Lotus Smartsuite was a contender. I liked Ventura Publisher.
WordPerfect had some advantages. I liked PageMaker. They made far less money
because of the widespread piracy of Microsoft Office. Eventually the quirky,
closed Office file format became the business standard.
"Most - if not all - of Microsoft's supposed "abuses" are
commonplace..."
They are not "supposed" abuses. They are abuses. It doesn't matter how
commonplace they are. They are abuses.
I am certainly aware that Microsoft employees have been recommending SysInternals free utilities
over Microsoft's sloppily coded and primitive utilities that do the same
thing.
I am also very aware that Microsoft has no utilities at all for some
of the Windows functions people need, and Microsoft employees have long been
recommending SysInternals utilities for those functions.
Remember, the Windows Command Line Interface and command line
utilities are upgraded DOS programs. DOS is shockingly primitive compared to
the Linux command line interfaces, for example. And not all of the DOS
utilities have been converted completely to 32-bit Windows; they fail in weird
ways that have not been fixed even though the failures have been discussed
thoroughly over the years.
The SysInternals programmers are some of the finest Windows coders in
the world, if not THE finest, in my opinion. However, I don't think the
SysInternals employees will stay long in the abusive and adversarial and
socially backward and ignorant Microsoft climate.
I think what will happen is that Microsoft will embrace and extend and
poison the SysInternals software, as they have done for the dBase language,
or, much more recently, for Giant's
AntiSpyware.
Microsoft began tinkering with Giant AntiSpyware, which became Windows
Defender. Giant was considered the best in its field. Now the Microsoft
version has problems. Sometimes, for example, it will fail, and re-installing
will not fix the failure.
Of course, Giant AntiSpyware was only a bandaid for problems that
exist because of Microsoft's sloppy coding that leaves huge numbers of
vulnerabilities. Remember that Microsoft makes more money if there are more
vulnerabilities, because people buy new computers as their old computer become
slow because of infestation.
Anyone who thinks that an OS is complicated, and therefore must have
vulnerabilities, should buy a secure OS like OpenBSD for $5,000 per copy. The
really expensive operating system organizations can hire extremely skilled
programmers who know how to eliminate vulnerabilities. Oh, wait, sorry, OpenBSD is FREE, and is coded by volunteers.
Microsoft is a socially backward and adversarial organization, in my
experience, but they aren't so dumb they don't know how to hire people who can
write secure software. The reason for the huge number of vulerabilities seems
to be that, when a company effectively has a temporary monopoly, more
vulnerabilities make more money.
"Honestly, the outrageous FUD and conspiracy theories the rabidly
anti-Microsoft crowd..."
Seriously, it's difficult to be outrageous when talking about
Microsoft's abuses. They've already thought of most of the possibilities.
People who don't work with them all the time, and who are not technically
knowledgeable, generally are aware of less than 0.1% of the abuses, in my
opinion.
For example, did you ever wonder how Microsoft Office became the
standard office software? It's because there is a 2-tier marketplace. The
first tier is that people pay a lot of money for Microsoft Office. The second
tier is that people buy a cheap pirated copy of Microsoft Office. That's why
Microsoft's competition was extinguished.
It is my opinion that Microsoft deliberately allows piracy, or, more
accurately, is careful not to stop most of the pirates. Several years ago I
got very, very upset about this, because the pirates were interfering with
part of my business, reselling legal software. At that time, it was possible
to call the Microsoft legal department and actually get someone on the line;
now they have closed that hole. I called and ranted and ranted about the 6
distributors who were ALL selling pirated Microsoft product.
The result was that Microsoft was accidentally placed in a position
that the company needed to show some action. Otherwise they were communicating
too publicly that Microsoft was pursuing a deliberate policy of allowing
low-level piracy. There was a court case; Microsoft's legal department asked
me to be a witness, and Microsoft won its case.
Microsoft is far, far more abusive than you apparently know.
Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.
Anything SysInternals did was the best, and made the sloppiness of Microsoft software obvious.
Excellent point. But the point can be taken further:
Countries, like companies, tend to talk toughest when they're in
decline. The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries
since the Second World War, killing people and destroying their property.
If you look around, it is more than a few organizations in decline. We
are experiencing a wholesaleculturalbreakdown.
It is also good to remember that Forbes Magazine is owned by Steve
Forbes, and Steve Forbes is a socially backward man with the past you would
expect of someone whose father was rich. Here is the second Google link to a
search on "Steve Forbes": Steve Forbes' Skeleton Closet
Here is the first Google search result: Steve Forbes. Remember, he
ran for president of the United States.
What is written in Forbes Magazine is valuable because it is an
example of how rich people think. The only thing that matters to them is their
own unbalanced ideas. When I say "rich people", I'm not talking about the
condition of having a lot of money. I'm talking about the condition of being
psychologically unbalanced by a lot of money.
This particular Forbes article is an example of the stream of
consciousness of the kind of people who have almost no inner principles except
that money is important, and of the kind of people who work for them and who
have adopted their view of life.
The author of the article, Parmy Olson, is "an Assistant News Editor
at Forbes.com", it says.
"I think The Ballmer was like that long before google. For him, I think Google has elevated his blood pressure to near coronary levels."
Your use of the word "coronary" assumes that Ballmer has a heart. Could you please post any evidence of that? Everything I've seen indicates that he is habitually adversarial, like Bill Gates. Has he ever done anything motivated by kindness? The sloppiness of Microsoft's products wastes the time of millions of people, for example.
See this thread: EFS is Microsoft encryption that is also poorly implemented.
I have heard no complaints about TrueCrypt, which is free, open source, developed by people with serious intelligence and dedication, and supports both Windows and Linux.
On Slashdot, only people not interested in commenting on the discussion can rate comments. So, many times readers visit stories in which they have no interest so that they can moderate.
The first link in the parent comment is not "Offtopic". It's an alternative way to update your Windows computers, which is exactly the subject of the discussion.
They are taking advantage of your lack of understanding. "Gross Domestic Product" is the turnover of all the money for one year. So, if all the money changed hands 100 times in one year, on average, 1% of the Gross Domestic Product would be all the money. Money doesn't change hands that fast, of course.
There is a general understanding that Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, is not doing his job well. He has, employees say, intensified the culture of adversarial behavior at Intel.
Intel has made some serious technical mistakes over the years, too. But the people who suffer from the lack of technical knowledge of top management are the workers, not the top managers. It has been established in the U.S. that top managers almost always benefit, even if they destroy the company.
There is another issue. After you have an Intel Pentium IV or AMD Thunderbird computer, you don't need another. In the past, people who owned Intel 8086 computers wanted to upgrade to 286 computers. Those who had 286 computers wanted to upgrade to 386s, then to 486s, then to Pentium I, II, III, and IV computers. But Thunderbird or Pentium IV computers do everything most people want.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Slashdot story: "It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency."
That's why democracy doesn't always work: Many people don't understand the issues. Electric cars do not necessarily reduce the oil dependency, and definitely not greenhouse gases, because the electricity to run the car comes from power plants.
--
Like where your money goes?
"The fact is that many people like Office and have a lot of time invested in learning it."
Yes, they have invested a lot of time learning it. I don't know people who "like" Microsoft Office. Some users can be given OpenOffice and not notice a difference. Others, very understandably, have learned to use Microsoft Office and don't want to invest time learning something new.
Only those who know two or more ways of capturing and formatting keystrokes and printing them can choose one or the other as something they "like".
My guess is that people who had invested an equal amount of time in Open Office would prefer that, and wouldn't want to change.
"... singling out Microsoft when every other company does the same thing, is blatant hypocrisy."
I am CERTAINLY not saying only Microsoft is abusive. The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries since the 2nd world war, and killed people and destroyed their property in each of them.
Consider also the Enron fraud, the WorldCom fraud, and the Tyco fraud.
I was not claiming that OpenBSD is the equivalent of Microsoft Windows XP. I was only claiming that it is easily possible to create extremely complicated software that has very, very, very few vulnerabilities. That, to me, indicates that Microsoft doesn't want few vulnerabilities.
Already Microsoft Vista is being sold as the secure Windows, and Microsoft Windows OneCare is a profit center for Microsoft to protect you from problems Microsoft made. See the article, A Microsoft Safety Package. Grit Your Teeth.
"The first time I tried opening a large .doc file in Open Office, it crashed."
.DOC files since version 2.
I've had that problem, too. But the latest version of Open Office seems very much improved. My experience has been that OO has done quite well with
The whole point of the very quirky Microsoft Office file format, it seems, is to be as incompatible and incomprehensible as possible. So, it is understandable that OO would have difficulty.
The Microsoft Office file format is part of Microsoft's unearned monopoly, an effective monopoly attained by trickery rather than caring for the customer and the people of the world. If Bill Gates truly cared about other people, he would have made good software products.
"Microsoft expended massive amounts of effort making it [Microsoft Office] a better product..."
.DOC file, and you will be able to open it
again in Microsoft Office.
The last version I've used is Office 2000. It is remarkably unstable, even after all the service packs are applied.
Sometimes, after several hours of editing, Microsoft Office stops being able to read the file you've been saving. When that happens, open the file in Open Office, save it as a
Lotus Smartsuite was a contender. I liked Ventura Publisher. WordPerfect had some advantages. I liked PageMaker. They made far less money because of the widespread piracy of Microsoft Office. Eventually the quirky, closed Office file format became the business standard.
"Most - if not all - of Microsoft's supposed "abuses" are commonplace..."
They are not "supposed" abuses. They are abuses. It doesn't matter how commonplace they are. They are abuses.
I am certainly aware that Microsoft employees have been recommending SysInternals free utilities over Microsoft's sloppily coded and primitive utilities that do the same thing.
I am also very aware that Microsoft has no utilities at all for some of the Windows functions people need, and Microsoft employees have long been recommending SysInternals utilities for those functions.
Remember, the Windows Command Line Interface and command line utilities are upgraded DOS programs. DOS is shockingly primitive compared to the Linux command line interfaces, for example. And not all of the DOS utilities have been converted completely to 32-bit Windows; they fail in weird ways that have not been fixed even though the failures have been discussed thoroughly over the years.
The SysInternals programmers are some of the finest Windows coders in the world, if not THE finest, in my opinion. However, I don't think the SysInternals employees will stay long in the abusive and adversarial and socially backward and ignorant Microsoft climate.
I think what will happen is that Microsoft will embrace and extend and poison the SysInternals software, as they have done for the dBase language, or, much more recently, for Giant's AntiSpyware.
Microsoft began tinkering with Giant AntiSpyware, which became Windows Defender. Giant was considered the best in its field. Now the Microsoft version has problems. Sometimes, for example, it will fail, and re-installing will not fix the failure.
Of course, Giant AntiSpyware was only a bandaid for problems that exist because of Microsoft's sloppy coding that leaves huge numbers of vulnerabilities. Remember that Microsoft makes more money if there are more vulnerabilities, because people buy new computers as their old computer become slow because of infestation.
Anyone who thinks that an OS is complicated, and therefore must have vulnerabilities, should buy a secure OS like OpenBSD for $5,000 per copy. The really expensive operating system organizations can hire extremely skilled programmers who know how to eliminate vulnerabilities. Oh, wait, sorry, OpenBSD is FREE, and is coded by volunteers.
Microsoft is a socially backward and adversarial organization, in my experience, but they aren't so dumb they don't know how to hire people who can write secure software. The reason for the huge number of vulerabilities seems to be that, when a company effectively has a temporary monopoly, more vulnerabilities make more money.
"Honestly, the outrageous FUD and conspiracy theories the rabidly anti-Microsoft crowd..."
Seriously, it's difficult to be outrageous when talking about Microsoft's abuses. They've already thought of most of the possibilities. People who don't work with them all the time, and who are not technically knowledgeable, generally are aware of less than 0.1% of the abuses, in my opinion.
For example, did you ever wonder how Microsoft Office became the standard office software? It's because there is a 2-tier marketplace. The first tier is that people pay a lot of money for Microsoft Office. The second tier is that people buy a cheap pirated copy of Microsoft Office. That's why Microsoft's competition was extinguished.
It is my opinion that Microsoft deliberately allows piracy, or, more accurately, is careful not to stop most of the pirates. Several years ago I got very, very upset about this, because the pirates were interfering with part of my business, reselling legal software. At that time, it was possible to call the Microsoft legal department and actually get someone on the line; now they have closed that hole. I called and ranted and ranted about the 6 distributors who were ALL selling pirated Microsoft product.
The result was that Microsoft was accidentally placed in a position that the company needed to show some action. Otherwise they were communicating too publicly that Microsoft was pursuing a deliberate policy of allowing low-level piracy. There was a court case; Microsoft's legal department asked me to be a witness, and Microsoft won its case.
Microsoft is far, far more abusive than you apparently know.
Some Microsoftie marked the parent comment as flamebait. However, it seems likely that Microsoft bought SysInternals to silence a web site that provided software of far higher quality than software from Microsoft.
Anything SysInternals did was the best, and made the sloppiness of Microsoft software obvious.
Excellent point. But the point can be taken further:
Countries, like companies, tend to talk toughest when they're in decline. The U.S. government has invaded 24 countries since the Second World War, killing people and destroying their property.
If you look around, it is more than a few organizations in decline. We are experiencing a wholesale cultural breakdown.
It is also good to remember that Forbes Magazine is owned by Steve Forbes, and Steve Forbes is a socially backward man with the past you would expect of someone whose father was rich. Here is the second Google link to a search on "Steve Forbes": Steve Forbes' Skeleton Closet
Here is the first Google search result: Steve Forbes. Remember, he ran for president of the United States.
What is written in Forbes Magazine is valuable because it is an example of how rich people think. The only thing that matters to them is their own unbalanced ideas. When I say "rich people", I'm not talking about the condition of having a lot of money. I'm talking about the condition of being psychologically unbalanced by a lot of money.
This particular Forbes article is an example of the stream of consciousness of the kind of people who have almost no inner principles except that money is important, and of the kind of people who work for them and who have adopted their view of life.
The author of the article, Parmy Olson, is "an Assistant News Editor at Forbes.com", it says.
"I think The Ballmer was like that long before google. For him, I think Google has elevated his blood pressure to near coronary levels."
Your use of the word "coronary" assumes that Ballmer has a heart. Could you please post any evidence of that? Everything I've seen indicates that he is habitually adversarial, like Bill Gates. Has he ever done anything motivated by kindness? The sloppiness of Microsoft's products wastes the time of millions of people, for example.
Millions of people are required to repeat something that should be done my Microsoft, once.
Microsoft has no respect for our time.
See this thread: EFS is Microsoft encryption that is also poorly implemented.
I have heard no complaints about TrueCrypt, which is free, open source, developed by people with serious intelligence and dedication, and supports both Windows and Linux.
On Slashdot, only people not interested in commenting on the discussion can rate comments. So, many times readers visit stories in which they have no interest so that they can moderate.
The first link in the parent comment is not "Offtopic". It's an alternative way to update your Windows computers, which is exactly the subject of the discussion.
They are taking advantage of your lack of understanding. "Gross Domestic Product" is the turnover of all the money for one year. So, if all the money changed hands 100 times in one year, on average, 1% of the Gross Domestic Product would be all the money. Money doesn't change hands that fast, of course.
AutoIt is excellent. Make sure you get the excellent IDE, also.
For keyboard macros, use AutoHotkey, a fork from an earlier version of AutoIt.
Both FREE.
Free Windows Update alternative is released
Genuine Advantage is Microsoft spyware
Dump Windows Update, use alternatives
In my opinion, delaying SP3 is VERY abusive.
"Iraq is safer than Atlanta"
Wow. There's a statement.
Is that the major difference in raw CPU power?
Number 1 reason "Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline": Americans are spending most of their money killing Iraqis.
I suppose that a lot of them think, "Why kill people in video games when we can kill real people?"
--
U.S. Gov. violence ended Iraq's thousands of years of violence. Oh, wait, the violence increased.
Yes, but that didn't answer the question.
Why do they call it an "AMD 4x4 enthusiast platform"? It seems to me that the 4x4 motherboard would be excellent for servers.
Vista is an attempt to create a need for people to buy new computers. What do YOU say? Will you buy a new computer? Will you run Vista?
There is a general understanding that Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, is not doing his job well. He has, employees say, intensified the culture of adversarial behavior at Intel.
Intel has made some serious technical mistakes over the years, too. But the people who suffer from the lack of technical knowledge of top management are the workers, not the top managers. It has been established in the U.S. that top managers almost always benefit, even if they destroy the company.
There is another issue. After you have an Intel Pentium IV or AMD Thunderbird computer, you don't need another. In the past, people who owned Intel 8086 computers wanted to upgrade to 286 computers. Those who had 286 computers wanted to upgrade to 386s, then to 486s, then to Pentium I, II, III, and IV computers. But Thunderbird or Pentium IV computers do everything most people want.