"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users."
Microsoft NEVER focused on end users, corporate users, or any OTHER users.
Microsoft has always, solely and forever been focused on extracting as much money as possible from EVERYONE for the personal benefit of one Bill Gates.
As the song says, "And nothing else matters..."
This is why security has NEVER been an issue for Microsoft. Security does not make Bill any more money (until he can sell a fake copy of it back to you with Live Care, of course.)
Chimps are afraid of each other. So any time any chimp does anything, it's automatically fear time for everyone else.
As I've said many times before, humans work like this: "If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And if necessary, you're dead."
Bill Gates steals money from consumers via fraudulent Discount coupons.
I mean, how cheap can you get?
Is Bill going to be stealing money out of the church plate now?
Stealing food stamps from welfare mothers?
Stealing kids piggy banks?
How low can this guy get before somebody gets a clue?
I mean, I can understand Bush just sneering at the rest of the planet and planning his attack on Iran (scheduled for sometime in the next ninety days, apparently, based on Navy carrier movements), but Bill is not the President and doesn't command the military and secret police apparatus.
So why does this country let Bill get away with this crap?
Any other company would be in deep shit doing this stuff. The FTC would be on them like flies on shit.
Is it just because Bill's Dad is connected to Abramoff and Bush and the rest of the crime family that Bill gets a skate on this stuff?
Gee, only two sentences from the last Microsoft shill.
Running out of energy, shill?
Or Bill didn't pay you enough this month to keep flying in the face of reality?
Or maybe somebody hosed your regular work PC today with the Vista voice exploit and you have to use the backup machine which has a slower connection to your ISP?
Pissed off all the Microsoft shills! Again! They can't answer the simple fact that the article is an exact duplicate of every Microsoft shill article published over the last five years!
Is that all you've got? Is that the best you can do? Huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
When the blowback comes and car bombs are blowing up in Times Square and the New York Subway and BART stations and airports at rush hour, this country is going to find out what terrorism really is.
And this country's citizens can't take it.
If they panic over some lighted signs, they're going to be begging the government to drop the Constitution and initiate martial law nationwide five minutes after the first car bomb goes off.
Go look at this YouTube video about binary explosives. Put a somewhat larger dab of this thing in a container that will temporarily contain the explosive force to make it more effective. Surround it with a few hundred ball bearings. Put it in a small bag. Walk into any crowded area and set it off with a simple heat-ignited fuse. Kill several hundred people with a miniature "Claymore mine".
This country is MADE for car bombs and IEDs. You could bring this country to its knees in three to six months with a concerted campaign involving no more than a few hundred trained terrorists.
I mean, signs with lights and images on them? When was the last terrorist bomb you saw one that ADVERTISED ITS PRESENCE BEFORE BLOWING UP?
I mean, Jesus Baron von Fucking Christ! How goddamn stupid do you humans have to be?
They apparently think that they can ratchet up their profit infinitely.
Economics doesn't work that way.
Once these dolts are charging for every line of code in their bloated OS, people - INCLUDING corporations - will simply stop buying their product and switch to Linux.
Microsoft is already at nearly the tipping point for this with the ridiculous prices on Vista. Why do they think everyone is looking for "academic" editions of the product (as the comments attached to the "Vista install work-around" article proves)?
Microsoft is well on the way to pricing itself entirely out of business - just as thousands of businesses have done before.
"Bill Gates's personal philanthropy boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft"
How many times have I said this? Not to mention how many times I've pointed out that he benefits personally by being able to use the stock that the SEC won't let him sell personally to influence companies through the Foundation's investment portfolio.
"Jeanie Cummins, a survey respondent and homemaker in Olive Hill, Ky., says Mr. Gates's philanthropy made her a much bigger fan of Microsoft. "He showed he cared more for people than all the money he made building Microsoft from the ground up," she says."
Yeah, and this homemaker hasn't read the articles pointing out how the Gates Foundation barely qualifies as a charity under Federal law given how little they actually give out, and the recent articles on how most of their investment portfolio actually harms the people they're supposed to be helping.
We're talking about using an upgrade version of Vista to install on a Dell whose XP has disappeared due to a hard disk crash that wiped out Dell's stupid "recovery partition". Now you don't have an original OS any more to use to install a Vista upgrade edition.
You did take the time to read the posts, didn't you?/.r's - Jesus Christ!
But we can blame Dell, HP, and the other jackasses who only supply "recovery partitions" on said failed hard drive...
In fact, this is probably why Microsoft did this. They KNOW that Dell, HP and the others aren't even SUPPLYING "former OS" CDs any more! So they assume all you have to do to reinstall XP on a Dell is recover the partition, then install Vista.
Except, of course, when your hard drive crashes, you won't have a "former OS" any more.
Not until you wait a couple days for Dell to Fed Ex you one...
Smart thinking, Bill... Way to go, Steve...
And Microsoft shills wonder why everybody hates Microsoft...
It's fucking BRAINDEAD DECISIONS like this one, folks.
I've noticed that Ubuntu is KNOWN for terrible decisions.
The whole "dumb down root" thing makes no sense to me at all.
What they should have done is allow you to install without formatting if the previous Linux on the partition IS an older version of Ubuntu. I can understand requiring formatting if it isn't.
I recently reinstalled Windows 2000 on a client's machine and left the previous NTFS file system intact. The install worked, but 2000 didn't on reboot. Formatting the partition first fixed the problem. So Windows can't even upgrade itself let alone another OS.
Such decisions shouldn't be rocket science, but we all know how these decisions are made - by some geek at 3AM over a can of Jolt cola...
Is there a way to "format" Bill Gates, so we could lose him, too (without too much in the way of criminal penalties?)
Say, have a hacker revoke his passport or put him on the watch list while he's at Davos, so he can't get back into the country without being sent to Guantanamo as a potential terrorist?
If she says she's for "privacy", she means only where it's an invasion of her husband's propensity for pussy.
Anybody who buys a politician's "soundbites" - especially a Clinton (or Bush) soundbite - has to have their head examined for leaks. And that goes for all Republican AND Democratic politicians.
Good luck getting an updated install disk from the brand makers.
These morons are using "restore partitions" now (useless when your partition table takes a hit as well.)
Anybody who buys Dell, HP, Gateway or any of that crap is just setting themselves up to have problems in the future.
PCs are a commodity. Buy them that way. Go to a local storefront with some Chinese guys behind the counter and buy a white box with a full OEM installation CD included, and no crap on the desktop. And all your hard disk space is available to you.
The manufacturers need to stop selling PCs with Windows preinstalled on one big partition. They need to pre-partition the drives for an OS partition and a data partition. They need to automatically move "My Documents" to the data partition as well as any preinstalled apps need to have their default save locations directed to that partition. The software manufacturers need to follow suit - all applications should avoid the C: drive like the plague. And they need to stop inserting their stupid buggy keys into that goddamned Registry and become "clean, green" installs that use INI files that are NEVER updated programmatically - like Linux.
People need to learn to separate the OS and their applications and their data, so that when the OS gets hosed and needs to be reinstalled, they don't have to reload all their data (barring a bug or accident during OS restore - this doesn't eliminate backups.)
In other words,/root and/home - like UNIX has been doing for thirty years.
By the way, the Linux installers need to do this automatically as well. Putting/home on the main partition is NEVER a good idea.
I read one clown recently who said NTFS works best with one large partition, and he said keeping the data on the main partition was best because with a modern OS, it is "never" necessary to reformat a partition to reinstall. Tell that to me when I reinstalled Windows 2000 on a client's box last week. In a hurry, I left the previous NTFS file system intact. The install worked - Windows 2000 subsequently didn't; printer problems inherited from the previous install. I formatted the partition, reinstalled 2000 - no problem.
Windows was NEVER a multiuser system and the layout of the system proves it.
Most people don't even use My Documents - they put everything on the fraggin' DESKTOP! They forget that the point of a desktop is NOT to cover it up with documents, but to be able to SEE it and work with what's on it a little bit at a time. This applies to physical as well as computer desktops.
Security in ALL OS's is a joke - but in Windows it is a very unfunny joke.
This fits right in with the rest of the Bush administration's approach:
1) Democracy means we kill you.
2) Birth control means abstinence.
3) Secrecy means protection.
4) Surveillance means freedom.
5) The Constitution doesn't support habeus corpus.
6) The Constitution means "I'm the Decider."
Before the Bush shills complain that nothing in the article refers to Bush, the bottom line is: this is the corporate world's (not to say human) basic attitude, and Bush merely represents that attitude. So there is nothing different between the publishers trying to limit access and Bush's political behavior.
It's the same mind-set: The "Enemy" is everybody but me.
Everything is a "technical problem" to a geek - and the only thing that matters is a "technical solution" - not whether the "solution" is actually worth a shit to anybody else being forced to use it.
Just "solve it" and move on to the next "interesting technical problem."
This - along with human nature - is why the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, Woody Allen, once summed up the human condition - which applies doubly to the IT industry - "Nothing works and nobody cares."
Slashdot Mirror
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users."
Microsoft NEVER focused on end users, corporate users, or any OTHER users.
Microsoft has always, solely and forever been focused on extracting as much money as possible from EVERYONE for the personal benefit of one Bill Gates.
As the song says, "And nothing else matters..."
This is why security has NEVER been an issue for Microsoft. Security does not make Bill any more money (until he can sell a fake copy of it back to you with Live Care, of course.)
is all you need to know to understand "security".
Chimps are afraid of each other. So any time any chimp does anything, it's automatically fear time for everyone else.
As I've said many times before, humans work like this: "If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And if necessary, you're dead."
It's that simple.
Bill Gates steals money from consumers via fraudulent Discount coupons.
I mean, how cheap can you get?
Is Bill going to be stealing money out of the church plate now?
Stealing food stamps from welfare mothers?
Stealing kids piggy banks?
How low can this guy get before somebody gets a clue?
I mean, I can understand Bush just sneering at the rest of the planet and planning his attack on Iran (scheduled for sometime in the next ninety days, apparently, based on Navy carrier movements), but Bill is not the President and doesn't command the military and secret police apparatus.
So why does this country let Bill get away with this crap?
Any other company would be in deep shit doing this stuff. The FTC would be on them like flies on shit.
Is it just because Bill's Dad is connected to Abramoff and Bush and the rest of the crime family that Bill gets a skate on this stuff?
Gee, only two sentences from the last Microsoft shill.
Running out of energy, shill?
Or Bill didn't pay you enough this month to keep flying in the face of reality?
Or maybe somebody hosed your regular work PC today with the Vista voice exploit and you have to use the backup machine which has a slower connection to your ISP?
I HAVE moved along - to Linux.
Hah!
Pissed off all the Microsoft shills! Again! They can't answer the simple fact that the article is an exact duplicate of every Microsoft shill article published over the last five years!
Is that all you've got? Is that the best you can do? Huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Hah!
Pissed off all the Microsoft shills!
Is that all you've got? Is that the best you can do? Huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Hah!
Pissed off all the Microsoft shills!
Is that all you've got? Is that the best you can do? Huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
When the blowback comes and car bombs are blowing up in Times Square and the New York Subway and BART stations and airports at rush hour, this country is going to find out what terrorism really is.
And this country's citizens can't take it.
If they panic over some lighted signs, they're going to be begging the government to drop the Constitution and initiate martial law nationwide five minutes after the first car bomb goes off.
Go look at this YouTube video about binary explosives. Put a somewhat larger dab of this thing in a container that will temporarily contain the explosive force to make it more effective. Surround it with a few hundred ball bearings. Put it in a small bag. Walk into any crowded area and set it off with a simple heat-ignited fuse. Kill several hundred people with a miniature "Claymore mine".
This country is MADE for car bombs and IEDs. You could bring this country to its knees in three to six months with a concerted campaign involving no more than a few hundred trained terrorists.
I mean, signs with lights and images on them? When was the last terrorist bomb you saw one that ADVERTISED ITS PRESENCE BEFORE BLOWING UP?
I mean, Jesus Baron von Fucking Christ! How goddamn stupid do you humans have to be?
Gutless punks, the lot.
They apparently think that they can ratchet up their profit infinitely.
Economics doesn't work that way.
Once these dolts are charging for every line of code in their bloated OS, people - INCLUDING corporations - will simply stop buying their product and switch to Linux.
Microsoft is already at nearly the tipping point for this with the ridiculous prices on Vista. Why do they think everyone is looking for "academic" editions of the product (as the comments attached to the "Vista install work-around" article proves)?
Microsoft is well on the way to pricing itself entirely out of business - just as thousands of businesses have done before.
Program HIS machine to tell him what a fucking asshole he is and how stupid and incompetent his entire company is.
I'm not even going to bother reading the whole piece. I don't have to - the quoted material gives the game away.
This is the SAME CRAP EVERY Windows shill writes on every Web site and in every article on the subject:
"Gee, I really LOVE Linux and OSS, BUT..."
It's bullshit. That type of sentence is a DEAD GIVEAWAY that this guy is a paid shill for Microsoft. Period.
If you want to integrate with Microsoft Exchange, you're an idiot in the first place.
There is nothing from Exchange either that most companies need or can't be found in other mail/groupware clients.
The article is the same bullshit we've seen from every other article from shills.
"Bill Gates's personal philanthropy boosted the public's opinion of Microsoft"
How many times have I said this? Not to mention how many times I've pointed out that he benefits personally by being able to use the stock that the SEC won't let him sell personally to influence companies through the Foundation's investment portfolio.
"Jeanie Cummins, a survey respondent and homemaker in Olive Hill, Ky., says Mr. Gates's philanthropy made her a much bigger fan of Microsoft. "He showed he cared more for people than all the money he made building Microsoft from the ground up," she says."
Yeah, and this homemaker hasn't read the articles pointing out how the Gates Foundation barely qualifies as a charity under Federal law given how little they actually give out, and the recent articles on how most of their investment portfolio actually harms the people they're supposed to be helping.
Which makes her a moron, like most people.
Suckers.
Dummy.
/.r's - Jesus Christ!
We're talking about using an upgrade version of Vista to install on a Dell whose XP has disappeared due to a hard disk crash that wiped out Dell's stupid "recovery partition". Now you don't have an original OS any more to use to install a Vista upgrade edition.
You did take the time to read the posts, didn't you?
True.
But we can blame Dell, HP, and the other jackasses who only supply "recovery partitions" on said failed hard drive...
In fact, this is probably why Microsoft did this. They KNOW that Dell, HP and the others aren't even SUPPLYING "former OS" CDs any more! So they assume all you have to do to reinstall XP on a Dell is recover the partition, then install Vista.
Except, of course, when your hard drive crashes, you won't have a "former OS" any more.
Not until you wait a couple days for Dell to Fed Ex you one...
Smart thinking, Bill... Way to go, Steve...
And Microsoft shills wonder why everybody hates Microsoft...
It's fucking BRAINDEAD DECISIONS like this one, folks.
I've noticed that Ubuntu is KNOWN for terrible decisions.
The whole "dumb down root" thing makes no sense to me at all.
What they should have done is allow you to install without formatting if the previous Linux on the partition IS an older version of Ubuntu. I can understand requiring formatting if it isn't.
I recently reinstalled Windows 2000 on a client's machine and left the previous NTFS file system intact. The install worked, but 2000 didn't on reboot. Formatting the partition first fixed the problem. So Windows can't even upgrade itself let alone another OS.
Such decisions shouldn't be rocket science, but we all know how these decisions are made - by some geek at 3AM over a can of Jolt cola...
Is there a way to "format" Bill Gates, so we could lose him, too (without too much in the way of criminal penalties?)
Say, have a hacker revoke his passport or put him on the watch list while he's at Davos, so he can't get back into the country without being sent to Guantanamo as a potential terrorist?
Why wasn't this modded +5, Funny, in stead of 1?
The Windows shills are out in force again today, I see.
Yes, but if it's a 64-bit machine, maybe somebody would want to run the 32-bit version of Vista on it instead of the 64-bit version?
Dumb, maybe, but it does remove the choice, doesn't it? Whle at the same time requiring the OEM to maintain two different versions of the CDs.
CDs? What am I talking about? Nobody supplies CDs any more - we have "recovery partitions"...
"its a very bad idea to make a program for everything but windows, thats just plain stupid."
Linus Torvalds would disagree...
Since you're now modded "Offtopic", why do you bother posting?
Is first post THAT orgasmic for you?
If so, that's really pathetic.
If she says she's for "privacy", she means only where it's an invasion of her husband's propensity for pussy.
Anybody who buys a politician's "soundbites" - especially a Clinton (or Bush) soundbite - has to have their head examined for leaks. And that goes for all Republican AND Democratic politicians.
Good luck getting an updated install disk from the brand makers.
These morons are using "restore partitions" now (useless when your partition table takes a hit as well.)
Anybody who buys Dell, HP, Gateway or any of that crap is just setting themselves up to have problems in the future.
PCs are a commodity. Buy them that way. Go to a local storefront with some Chinese guys behind the counter and buy a white box with a full OEM installation CD included, and no crap on the desktop. And all your hard disk space is available to you.
The manufacturers need to stop selling PCs with Windows preinstalled on one big partition. They need to pre-partition the drives for an OS partition and a data partition. They need to automatically move "My Documents" to the data partition as well as any preinstalled apps need to have their default save locations directed to that partition. The software manufacturers need to follow suit - all applications should avoid the C: drive like the plague. And they need to stop inserting their stupid buggy keys into that goddamned Registry and become "clean, green" installs that use INI files that are NEVER updated programmatically - like Linux.
People need to learn to separate the OS and their applications and their data, so that when the OS gets hosed and needs to be reinstalled, they don't have to reload all their data (barring a bug or accident during OS restore - this doesn't eliminate backups.)
In other words,
By the way, the Linux installers need to do this automatically as well. Putting
I read one clown recently who said NTFS works best with one large partition, and he said keeping the data on the main partition was best because with a modern OS, it is "never" necessary to reformat a partition to reinstall. Tell that to me when I reinstalled Windows 2000 on a client's box last week. In a hurry, I left the previous NTFS file system intact. The install worked - Windows 2000 subsequently didn't; printer problems inherited from the previous install. I formatted the partition, reinstalled 2000 - no problem.
Windows was NEVER a multiuser system and the layout of the system proves it.
Most people don't even use My Documents - they put everything on the fraggin' DESKTOP! They forget that the point of a desktop is NOT to cover it up with documents, but to be able to SEE it and work with what's on it a little bit at a time. This applies to physical as well as computer desktops.
Security in ALL OS's is a joke - but in Windows it is a very unfunny joke.
Do the Linux advocates advise Nancy Pelosi?
While the Windows advocates advise Karl Rove?
Here's how I do it:
Windows is CRAP.
Linux is ALSO CRAP.
BUT Linux is FREE CRAP.
Right.
This fits right in with the rest of the Bush administration's approach:
1) Democracy means we kill you.
2) Birth control means abstinence.
3) Secrecy means protection.
4) Surveillance means freedom.
5) The Constitution doesn't support habeus corpus.
6) The Constitution means "I'm the Decider."
Before the Bush shills complain that nothing in the article refers to Bush, the bottom line is: this is the corporate world's (not to say human) basic attitude, and Bush merely represents that attitude. So there is nothing different between the publishers trying to limit access and Bush's political behavior.
It's the same mind-set: The "Enemy" is everybody but me.
Why? Why, you ask?
Ask why every geek doesn't have ANY common sense.
Everything is a "technical problem" to a geek - and the only thing that matters is a "technical solution" - not whether the "solution" is actually worth a shit to anybody else being forced to use it.
Just "solve it" and move on to the next "interesting technical problem."
This - along with human nature - is why the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century, Woody Allen, once summed up the human condition - which applies doubly to the IT industry - "Nothing works and nobody cares."