Daniel Lyons wrote a scathing article asking why Microsoft invited 300 of his fellow journalists to an "Important Event", which happened to be scheduled at the same time as Novell's BrainShare. He reported that MS techies demonstrated flying whizbangs with VISTA, doing tricks so complex that "Average User" could never master them. What he got out of the whole event was the VISTA was XP with additional worthless bloat just piled on.
Apparently, Lyons must have been taken to the woodshed by Forbes (or MS) and this article demonstrates Lyons in his usual role as MS lawn jockey, dutifully feeding canned questions to Ballmer.
The question of major interest, "will Microsoft sue Linux for IP violations?" is amazing in its bluff and bravado. There is little doubt that this question was designed to deflect attention away from the FAILED LAUNCH of VISTA and, simultaneously, to slow the already rapid adoption rate of Linux. It has failed on both counts because MS has become too transparent and too desparate.
Microsoft (Gates and Ballmer) know FULL WELL that if they sue the Linux kernel poject they have sued IBM, Novell, RedHat, HP, several foreign governments and agencies, not to mention the US DOD, the NYSE, movie studios and PDA manufacturers the world over. This will open up counter suits claiming that MS has stolen Linux code/IP. Then they'll have to PRODUCE their proof, which will open up their own code to public scrutiny. Considering how many times they have already been convicted of stealing other folks code Microsoft wouldn't survive that revelation.
Ballmer would have been derilict in his duty "to the stock holders" IF he hasn't had MS coders scouring the Linux kernel source, and other FOSS projects, for YEARS, on the lookout for stolen MS IP. After all, UNLIKE Microsoft's practices, the development of the Linux kernel, and other FOSS projects, has always been and still is an OPEN PROCESS!
Further, I have no doubt that Gate's lawyers would already have filed a legal action if they found MS IP in ANY FOSS project, especially the Linux kernel and FireFox. In fact, if they are aware of such violations they have a legal obligation to inform those projects so that the projects can mitigate the damage.
No, the REAL QUESTION is: "How much Linux & FOSS IP is hiding in Microsoft's secret code base? I'll wager it's MILLIONS of lines of code.
Microsoft ended W2K server support ONLY 5 years after it was released, and W2K in now in Life Support until 6/30/2010. Of course, all those W2k users can shell out even MORE $$$ to 'upgrade" to VISTA this fall, since they are already on the infameous Microsoft upgrade treadmill, and continually shelling out more and more $$$ for upgrades and 3rd party stability and security support. Pavlov was right.
I have seen Linux machines remain online with no downtime for years on end. I have never even heard of a Windows machine remaining that matches this. The fact of the matter is, Windows vs. *nix is just another VHS vs. Betamax -- Windws is simply marketed better, despite technical deficiencies.
After Win95 was released and well after Win98 and W2K were released, there were Windows users CLAIMING, in response to Linux uptime reports, that they had equal uptimes of a year or more.
Then, the clock bug was revealed, establishing that when the clock rolled aover after 49.7 days Windows rebooted the PC. This made liars out of quite a few Microsurfties.
Another poster on this thread said that Windows was an "install and forget" proposition, but Netware had to be continually managed. Either they are lying or they are ignorant.
Your prostate is nowhere (topologically) near your asshole.
Then most physicians who use their finger to palpatate your prostate via the rectal sphincter don't know what they are doing , eh? What do you think they are thumping, your backbone?
Mandrake 8.2 was that distro's best release, IMO. I left it when they had that "burn your CDROM up" problem. Not for that, but because I felt it was going down hill. Now I run SimplyMEPIS.
A few weeks ago I booted a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS. It is, IMO, much better than Mandriva, from which it is derived. They have cleaned many of the bugs out. For those who run Mandriva I hope that PCLinuxOS has the horsepower to keep that distro alive on their own. I prefer distros that use *.deb packages so I won't be leaving SimplyMEPIS anytime soon.
First, I had to install proprietary software, mvplayer, to run it.
When I had tudos up and running I tried the qtdemo, but after I browsed the pages descibing how great it was, it wouldn't work. Then I tried the games. Quake wouldn't run, it just gave a bunch of error message trying to setup the video screen, I guess, and then a blinking red-orange ball just set at the "]" prompt and no further keyboard or mouse interaction was functional. Barrage wouldn't allow keyboard or mouse input, so I couldn't run it. I decided not to try Tetris.
I fired the L4Linux and popped up a console box. I could ls the bin, sbin, etc, sys, and dev directories but there was next to nothing in them. "ls" was about all the practical stuff I could do.
I couldn't fire an xwindow client. Even RH5.0 had more power than this puppy.
several of the demos didn't supply a "reboot" option so I had to exit the whole thing, delete the vmware files, except the vmx, and refire wmplayer so I could get the tudos menu again. It's been years since I've run a Linux distro that was this buggy or hard to use.
Oh, the other thing I noticed was that it was slow.
In 1962 I was at a 5 frat spring outing at a lake not far from York, Ne. We were playing king of the mountian and had stipped to our skivvies to protect our shirt and pants. There were probably 50 or 60 buys there. It was a moonless but clear night. While guarding our flag I happened to look into the northern sky and saw a long, tube shaped craft with a few orange portholes along the side. It passed by silently, amost overhead. I estimated it to be about 100 feet long and 20 feet in diameter. I wasn't the only one to see it. It scared us all and there was a mad dash to get back to the campus. Some of us forgot our clothes. It was a warm spring night (pre-air conditioning) and, as it turned out, some the girls were sleeping on the roof of the dorm. They had binocculars and it took us guys a while to figure out where the giggling was coming from.
Twenty years later while I was taking flight training my instructor happened to chose the "olive branch route", which was the route the B52's took when they were training for low level (under 200 feet) penetration. As I was heading south on a particular leg of the route I noticed below the lake at which we had our frat outing so many years previously. Running with internal red lights to aid in night vision, the light exiting the portals would have appeard to be orange. I don't know what technology the USAF has to muffle jet engine noise, but in researching the nighttime photos of B52s they looked very similar to what I remembered passing overhead.
If those "research" or "technical" firms whose only employees are lawyers filing submarine patents had to demonstrate working models of "their" inventions before a patent could be issued, we'd have less of this kind of patent nonsense.
While I don't disagree with you necessarily, I'd like to point out that that statement could have been cut an pasted from a post 6 years ago. And has yet to happen.
Actually, while that statement seems like an informed comment, it is not. No one could have claimed that any Linux desktop of 6 years ago was just as good as the Windows desktops of the period.
I've been running Linux for eight years, and it was JUST 6 years ago, on July 12, 1998, that KDE 1.0 was release. KDE 1.0 was the best desktop GUI available for Linux at the time, but it was NO WHERE NEAR as powerful as even Win95, to say nothing of WinNT, which was released two years earlier in July of 1996.
HOWEVER, as lot has happened in the last 6 years. Right now I am running SymplyMEPIS-3.4.3 with KDE 3.50 on my Gateway m675prr laptop. KDE 3.5 is, IMO, more powerful, flexible and easier to use than Microsoft's aging XP. From some of the previews I've read of VISTA, it seems to me that KDE 3.5 or the soon to be released KDE 4.0 will give VISTA a good match, especially for basic office uses.
As to when "it" will happen, don't be suprised if "it" blindsides both you and Microsoft. It is easy to keep track of Windows or Mac OS installs because of the retail channel count. No one is tracking how many times any Linux distro is downloaded, and it is impossible to keep track of how many different boxes an UNCOUNTED Linux distro has been installed on. My single download of MEPIS is at 6 installs and counting. In a couple of months I'll be giving a presentation of FOSS at a local college. Part of that presentation will be an installfest. Those won't be counted either.
How free is the BSD code when it is trapped inside a Microsoft or Apple's proprietary binary?
Can you add their improvements to your original code and released the improved versin under the BSD? Of course not, and you know it.
The biggest freedom the BSD license grants is the freedom of proprietary software houses to exploit the work of BSD coders without the necessity of returning anything back to the community except a restrictive EULA and an IP patent.
Microsoft will "cut of the air supply" of any major PC OEM whom Microsoft thinks is deviating from Microsoft bottom line.
China will cut of the air supply of anyone whom the Chinese Communist Party thinks is deviating from their party line.
To oppose the monopolists it's a death sentence for a PC OEM in America. In China it's a death sentence for citizens of that country.
It's even worse than that. China controls 2/3rds of all the people on the planet and their economy has the potential to dwarf all the others combined. If China creates its own Internet but requires users to follow their Marxist rules, which rules out freedom of speech or commerce, companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google will sell their mothers to gain access to that market. In fact, they already have. They've already proven that with a little sophisticated "reasoning" they can justify, in their own eyes, giving Communist Officials the names of Chinese whose postings deviate from the Party Line. To please radical Muslims countries will they require their female workers to start wear burkas and walk behind their male coworkers, or will they just fire them?
It would transfer those Billions TO MICROSOFT, as if they don't have enough already.
It's not new behavior for Microsoft. Netscape, Go, Pen, Stacker... just to name a few.
What folks don't realize is how Microsoft's economic behavior has transfered Billions from the government, pension funds and other companies to their company by a variety of means, all unethical and/or illegal. See: http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
Executive Summary: The only sure thing is that it will cost you a lot of $$$ per seat, and that seat has to be an EXPENSIVE seat as well. Forget using you one year old Dell box. You'll need to buy anti-virus/Trojan software. It still won't give you any more than you can get installing SUSE 10.0 or SimplyMEPIS-3.4.3 on your old Dell box, and either of them will cost you less than $100. and much less if you burn your own ISO.
1. Security, security, security:... but Vista takes security to the next level. Echos of Ballmer. And what level of security can that be when one of the negatives is that Vista won't be shipping with anti-virus? Linux still doesn't require antivirus software, even though antivirus software houses have done their best to create the illusion that Linux needs their products.
User Account Protection, which invokes administrator privileges as needed, A feature of Linux since the beginning.
2. Internet Explorer 7: A FireFox wannabe. Everything IE7 is 'going' to have is already in FireFox, and FireFox will add features and patches much faster than Microsoft service IE7.
But Vista users get an important extra level of protection: IE7 on Vista will run in what Microsoft calls "protected mode"--a limited-rights mode that prevents third-party code from reaching your system. It's about darn time. So Microsoft is going to try chroot. Nice, but a little late.
3. Righteous eye candy: Expensive eye candy, considering the hardware you need to buy to see that candy. Are there enough games and gamers to give Microsoft a return? Such eye candy won't be necessary for SOHO/Enterprise business. Maybe Microsoft is trying for the Hollywood movie production firms?
And is it me, or is Microsoft's VISTA just another way to eat up CPU cycles from the new expensive hardware that it needs to run on? Will the spreadsheets or databases run any faster?
4....The new OS tightly integrates instant desktop search, Wow! Can you say "locate" folks? It does everything VISTA's search function is supposed to do and it can be done from a commandline or from a gui interface. It has been in Linux almost from the beginning. If Linux developers had Microsoft's patent propensity they could lock M$ out of the search game.
5. Better updates: Vista does away with using Internet Explorer to access Windows Update, instead utilizing a new application to handle the chore of keeping your system patched and up-to-date. Microsoft saw Synaptic running apt-get and said "Wow!". Now they are copying it.
6.... the free stuff Gates and Company toss into the new OS, and Vista is no exception. Free? There's NOTHING free in Windows products that the consumer doesn't pay for several times over.
7. Parental controls:...screen out objectionable content... restrict each account's access by time of day or day of the week... Copying Linux again? In Linux you can give each child their own account, and when they can access it. And, control which websites they have access to and when they can access them. I don't need an expensive OS that will further restrict what I can do with my own computer to do that.
8. Better Backups Anything would beat using IE to drag files to your CD icon, but excellent backup software like K3B has been in Linux for several years.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration: Will that work as well with "cracker-to-cracker" collaboration?;-) Only time will time.
10. Quick setup:... slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes... Microsoft's "setup time" has NEVER been as low as an hour unless it was partially setup by the vendor. Those that purchase XP separately can count on setup times that will stretch to four hours, IF they have drivers for all their hardware. They can also count on several reboots.
You are assuming, of course, that the scientists haven't cook, fudged or trimmed the data. Or, that these studies were only funded because the anticipated outcome was promised. NIH and NSF have created in the last 30 years a track of funding only those research projects which seek to prove the accepted theories.
NOVA broadcast a show a few years ago called "Do Scientists Cheat?" and their research showed at least 48% of all published scientific research was 'adjusted' to arrive at the conclusions that were published. Some of that research involved the use of drugs to treat heart disease. In one case the scientst totally fabricated results which gave a test heart drug high marks for effectiveness. That 48% is despite the supposed existance of methods of verification, like peer review and replication. Unitl the arrival of the internet peer review wasn't possible unless a journal editor accepted your work. Replication isn't always possible because of the expense and man power requirements. Try to fund a replication of CERN's atom smashing experiements.
In fact, regarding global warming, there is a debate over the article that was published just before the Kyoto Accords meeting in Japan which purportedly showed a "hocky stick" graph effect. Later, researchers were able to get their hands on the data and discovered the cooking, trimming and extrapolation which was applied. When those manipualtions were removed the "hocky stick" disappeared. Lying by graphs is a common technique for deception. You can imagine how much grief that researcher accumulated for slaying the sacred cow of the global warming advocates.
Except for the fact that water vapor is SEVEN TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is, and it is present in the atmosphere in MUCH MUCH higher concentrations. Over all, water vapor contributes 280,000 time more to the greenhouse effect than CO2, and it's been doing it for ages, long before CO2 rose 25% to a measley 375 parts per million.
Possibly the real contributor to global warming is not the warm fuzzies of CO2 but the the heat itself that is released when Carbon based fuels are burned. A coal, oil or gas burning power plant needs to waste one unit of energy for every unit of energy it delivers to the consumer, and that is with the power plant operating at close to 100% efficiency. The worse the efficiency the worse the heat waste.
Eventually, all energy generated or wasted by power plants ends up as waste heat. That waste heat raises the mean temperature of the atmosphere until the T gets high enough so that the energy radiated (proportional to T^4) back into space equals the total of the incident Solar energy and the waste heat energy.
Atmospheric scientists know that the concentration of CO2 is not high enough by itself to cause global warming, so they postulate a "trigger" or "catalyst" effect, which is unproven. Neither my theory nor theirs can explain the last hot house period that occured 1,200 years ago. Then, the CO2 was lower than it is now and there were no power plants spewing heat, so the burning of fossile fuels was not the cause. That leave other possible causes: solar output or volcanos, to name a couple.
it looks like the Microsoft vulnerabilities covered both the OS and IE, not just IE. Mozzilla, afaik, only does the browsing and mail programs.
Except for one small fact: IE is part of (has been rolled into) the Microsoft kernel, according to Bill Gates and friends at the DOJ trial. Remember that faked video where they tried to prove it wasn't so?
So any discussion of IE vunerabilities must of necessity include the Windows kernel. Countless are the times IE or Windows explorer crashed, only to bring down Windows itself. Microsoft has rolled many services and devices into its kernel, so stability of the Windows platform is not entirely in Microsoft's hands. If a video card mfgr creates a buggy driver it is going to crash Windows.
Linux, on the other hand, does NOT need Mozilla for proper operation. If Mozilla crashes it goes away. The Linux kernel cleans up the mess and continues doing its job. When a buggy video driver in Linux fails one control is given back to the console.
Slashdot Mirror
Daniel Lyons wrote a scathing article asking why Microsoft invited 300 of his fellow journalists to an "Important Event", which happened to be scheduled at the same time as Novell's BrainShare. He reported that MS techies demonstrated flying whizbangs with VISTA, doing tricks so complex that "Average User" could never master them. What he got out of the whole event was the VISTA was XP with additional worthless bloat just piled on.
Apparently, Lyons must have been taken to the woodshed by Forbes (or MS) and this article demonstrates Lyons in his usual role as MS lawn jockey, dutifully feeding canned questions to Ballmer.
The question of major interest, "will Microsoft sue Linux for IP violations?" is amazing in its bluff and bravado. There is little doubt that this question was designed to deflect attention away from the FAILED LAUNCH of VISTA and, simultaneously, to slow the already rapid adoption rate of Linux. It has failed on both counts because MS has become too transparent and too desparate.
Microsoft (Gates and Ballmer) know FULL WELL that if they sue the Linux kernel poject they have sued IBM, Novell, RedHat, HP, several foreign governments and agencies, not to mention the US DOD, the NYSE, movie studios and PDA manufacturers the world over. This will open up counter suits claiming that MS has stolen Linux code/IP. Then they'll have to PRODUCE their proof, which will open up their own code to public scrutiny. Considering how many times they have already been convicted of stealing other folks code Microsoft wouldn't survive that revelation.
Ballmer would have been derilict in his duty "to the stock holders" IF he hasn't had MS coders scouring the Linux kernel source, and other FOSS projects, for YEARS, on the lookout for stolen MS IP. After all, UNLIKE Microsoft's practices, the development of the Linux kernel, and other FOSS projects, has always been and still is an OPEN PROCESS!
Further, I have no doubt that Gate's lawyers would already have filed a legal action if they found MS IP in ANY FOSS project, especially the Linux kernel and FireFox. In fact, if they are aware of such violations they have a legal obligation to inform those projects so that the projects can mitigate the damage.
No, the REAL QUESTION is: "How much Linux & FOSS IP is hiding in Microsoft's secret code base? I'll wager it's MILLIONS of lines of code.
Looks to me like it is. Especially the maintenance screens.
It's here already!
e rsity-partners.htm
It's called "Internet Learning".
http://www.worldwidelearn.com/online-degrees/univ
I wish I had a laptop when I was in college.
Your point?
x =14&y=12&p1=7274
Microsoft ended W2K server support ONLY 5 years after it was released, and W2K in now in Life Support until 6/30/2010. Of course, all those W2k users can shell out even MORE $$$ to 'upgrade" to VISTA this fall, since they are already on the infameous Microsoft upgrade treadmill, and continually shelling out more and more $$$ for upgrades and 3rd party stability and security support. Pavlov was right.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&
After Win95 was released and well after Win98 and W2K were released, there were Windows users CLAIMING, in response to Linux uptime reports, that they had equal uptimes of a year or more.
Then, the clock bug was revealed, establishing that when the clock rolled aover after 49.7 days Windows rebooted the PC. This made liars out of quite a few Microsurfties.
Another poster on this thread said that Windows was an "install and forget" proposition, but Netware had to be continually managed. Either they are lying or they are ignorant.
Then most physicians who use their finger to palpatate your prostate via the rectal sphincter don't know what they are doing , eh? What do you think they are thumping, your backbone?
of our mainframe Windows system, and it's only Tuesday! Why?
IT Guy: Because that's how you fix most Windows problems! You wouldn't want me to reinstall or rebuild, would you?
just in time.
Mandrake 8.2 was that distro's best release, IMO. I left it when they had that "burn your CDROM up" problem. Not for that, but because I felt it was going down hill. Now I run SimplyMEPIS.
A few weeks ago I booted a LiveCD of PCLinuxOS. It is, IMO, much better than Mandriva, from which it is derived. They have cleaned many of the bugs out. For those who run Mandriva I hope that PCLinuxOS has the horsepower to keep that distro alive on their own. I prefer distros that use *.deb packages so I won't be leaving SimplyMEPIS anytime soon.
First, I had to install proprietary software, mvplayer, to run it.
When I had tudos up and running I tried the qtdemo, but after I browsed the pages descibing how great it was, it wouldn't work. Then I tried the games. Quake wouldn't run, it just gave a bunch of error message trying to setup the video screen, I guess, and then a blinking red-orange ball just set at the "]" prompt and no further keyboard or mouse interaction was functional. Barrage wouldn't allow keyboard or mouse input, so I couldn't run it. I decided not to try Tetris.
I fired the L4Linux and popped up a console box. I could ls the bin, sbin, etc, sys, and dev directories but there was next to nothing in them. "ls" was about all the practical stuff I could do.
I couldn't fire an xwindow client. Even RH5.0 had more power than this puppy.
several of the demos didn't supply a "reboot" option so I had to exit the whole thing, delete the vmware files, except the vmx, and refire wmplayer so I could get the tudos menu again. It's been years since I've run a Linux distro that was this buggy or hard to use.
Oh, the other thing I noticed was that it was slow.
In 1962 I was at a 5 frat spring outing at a lake not far from York, Ne. We were playing king of the mountian and had stipped to our skivvies to protect our shirt and pants. There were probably 50 or 60 buys there. It was a moonless but clear night. While guarding our flag I happened to look into the northern sky and saw a long, tube shaped craft with a few orange portholes along the side. It passed by silently, amost overhead. I estimated it to be about 100 feet long and 20 feet in diameter. I wasn't the only one to see it. It scared us all and there was a mad dash to get back to the campus. Some of us forgot our clothes. It was a warm spring night (pre-air conditioning) and, as it turned out, some the girls were sleeping on the roof of the dorm. They had binocculars and it took us guys a while to figure out where the giggling was coming from.
Twenty years later while I was taking flight training my instructor happened to chose the "olive branch route", which was the route the B52's took when they were training for low level (under 200 feet) penetration. As I was heading south on a particular leg of the route I noticed below the lake at which we had our frat outing so many years previously. Running with internal red lights to aid in night vision, the light exiting the portals would have appeard to be orange. I don't know what technology the USAF has to muffle jet engine noise, but in researching the nighttime photos of B52s they looked very similar to what I remembered passing overhead.
patents should be disallowed.
If those "research" or "technical" firms whose only employees are lawyers filing submarine patents had to demonstrate working models of "their" inventions before a patent could be issued, we'd have less of this kind of patent nonsense.
Linux installs.
Actually, while that statement seems like an informed comment, it is not.
No one could have claimed that any Linux desktop of 6 years ago was just as good as the Windows desktops of the period.
I've been running Linux for eight years, and it was JUST 6 years ago, on July 12, 1998, that KDE 1.0 was release. KDE 1.0 was the best desktop GUI available for Linux at the time, but it was NO WHERE NEAR as powerful as even Win95, to say nothing of WinNT, which was released two years earlier in July of 1996.
HOWEVER, as lot has happened in the last 6 years. Right now I am running SymplyMEPIS-3.4.3 with KDE 3.50 on my Gateway m675prr laptop. KDE 3.5 is, IMO, more powerful, flexible and easier to use than Microsoft's aging XP. From some of the previews I've read of VISTA, it seems to me that KDE 3.5 or the soon to be released KDE 4.0 will give VISTA a good match, especially for basic office uses.
As to when "it" will happen, don't be suprised if "it" blindsides both you and Microsoft. It is easy to keep track of Windows or Mac OS installs because of the retail channel count. No one is tracking how many times any Linux distro is downloaded, and it is impossible to keep track of how many different boxes an UNCOUNTED Linux distro has been installed on. My single download of MEPIS is at 6 installs and counting. In a couple of months I'll be giving a presentation of FOSS at a local college. Part of that presentation will be an installfest. Those won't be counted either.
Pen based PDAs were being hailed as the latest and greatest.
I wonder how many people blew their $$$ chasing that fad?
FUDing again?
How free is the BSD code when it is trapped inside a Microsoft or Apple's proprietary binary?
Can you add their improvements to your original code and released the improved versin under the BSD? Of course not, and you know it.
The biggest freedom the BSD license grants is the freedom of proprietary software houses to exploit the work of BSD coders without the necessity of returning anything back to the community except a restrictive EULA and an IP patent.
I'll take the GPL any day, even v3.
A monopoly is a monopoly.
Microsoft will "cut of the air supply" of any major PC OEM whom Microsoft thinks is deviating from Microsoft bottom line.
China will cut of the air supply of anyone whom the Chinese Communist Party thinks is deviating from their party line.
To oppose the monopolists it's a death sentence for a PC OEM in America. In China it's a death sentence for citizens of that country.
It's even worse than that. China controls 2/3rds of all the people on the planet and their economy has the potential to dwarf all the others combined. If China creates its own Internet but requires users to follow their Marxist rules, which rules out freedom of speech or commerce, companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google will sell their mothers to gain access to that market. In fact, they already have. They've already proven that with a little sophisticated "reasoning" they can justify, in their own eyes, giving Communist Officials the names of Chinese whose postings deviate from the Party Line. To please radical Muslims countries will they require their female workers to start wear burkas and walk behind their male coworkers, or will they just fire them?
WRONG!
... just to name a few.
It would transfer those Billions TO MICROSOFT, as if they don't have enough already.
It's not new behavior for Microsoft. Netscape, Go, Pen, Stacker
What folks don't realize is how Microsoft's economic behavior has transfered Billions from the government, pension funds and other companies to their company by a variety of means, all unethical and/or illegal. See:
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
Executive Summary: The only sure thing is that it will cost you a lot of $$$ per seat, and that seat has to be an EXPENSIVE seat as well. Forget using you one year old Dell box. You'll need to buy anti-virus/Trojan software. It still won't give you any more than you can get installing SUSE 10.0 or SimplyMEPIS-3.4.3 on your old Dell box, and either of them will cost you less than $100. and much less if you burn your own ISO.
...The new OS tightly integrates instant desktop search,
... the free stuff Gates and Company toss into the new OS, and Vista is no exception.
...screen out objectionable content ... restrict each account's access by time of day or day of the week...
;-) Only time will time.
1. Security, security, security:... but Vista takes security to the next level.
Echos of Ballmer. And what level of security can that be when one of the negatives is that Vista won't be shipping with anti-virus? Linux still doesn't require antivirus software, even though antivirus software houses have done their best to create the illusion that Linux needs their products.
User Account Protection, which invokes administrator privileges as needed,
A feature of Linux since the beginning.
2. Internet Explorer 7:
A FireFox wannabe. Everything IE7 is 'going' to have is already in FireFox, and FireFox will add features and patches much faster than Microsoft service IE7.
But Vista users get an important extra level of protection: IE7 on Vista will run in what Microsoft calls "protected mode"--a limited-rights mode that prevents third-party code from reaching your system. It's about darn time.
So Microsoft is going to try chroot. Nice, but a little late.
3. Righteous eye candy:
Expensive eye candy, considering the hardware you need to buy to see that candy. Are there enough games and gamers to give Microsoft a return? Such eye candy won't be necessary for SOHO/Enterprise business. Maybe Microsoft is trying for the Hollywood movie production firms?
And is it me, or is Microsoft's VISTA just another way to eat up CPU cycles from the new expensive hardware that it needs to run on? Will the spreadsheets or databases run any faster?
4.
Wow! Can you say "locate" folks? It does everything VISTA's search function is supposed to do and it can be done from a commandline or from a gui interface. It has been in Linux almost from the beginning. If Linux developers had Microsoft's patent propensity they could lock M$ out of the search game.
5. Better updates: Vista does away with using Internet Explorer to access Windows Update, instead utilizing a new application to handle the chore of keeping your system patched and up-to-date.
Microsoft saw Synaptic running apt-get and said "Wow!". Now they are copying it.
6.
Free? There's NOTHING free in Windows products that the consumer doesn't pay for several times over.
7. Parental controls:
Copying Linux again? In Linux you can give each child their own account, and when they can access it. And, control which websites they have access to and when they can access them. I don't need an expensive OS that will further restrict what I can do with my own computer to do that.
8. Better Backups
Anything would beat using IE to drag files to your CD icon, but excellent backup software like K3B has been in Linux for several years.
9. Peer-to-peer collaboration:
Will that work as well with "cracker-to-cracker" collaboration?
10. Quick setup:... slash setup times from about an hour to as little as 15 minutes...
Microsoft's "setup time" has NEVER been as low as an hour unless it was partially setup by the vendor. Those that purchase XP separately can count on setup times that will stretch to four hours, IF they have drivers for all their hardware. They can also count on several reboots.
The last time I looked Microsoft was using over 100 Linux servers to despense their wares, patches, updates, etc... Akai (sp?) was their contractor.
Gateway's profit after deducting Microsoft's payoff was only $9M.
They paid the CEO $19 and bonuses for one year's work before he bails.
But, probably the real reason why he couldn't make a go of it at Gateway was inteference from Snyder and the rest of the board.
You are assuming, of course, that the scientists haven't cook, fudged or trimmed the data. Or, that these studies were only funded because the anticipated outcome was promised. NIH and NSF have created in the last 30 years a track of funding only those research projects which seek to prove the accepted theories.
NOVA broadcast a show a few years ago called "Do Scientists Cheat?" and their research showed at least 48% of all published scientific research was 'adjusted' to arrive at the conclusions that were published. Some of that research involved the use of drugs to treat heart disease. In one case the scientst totally fabricated results which gave a test heart drug high marks for effectiveness. That 48% is despite the supposed existance of methods of verification, like peer review and replication. Unitl the arrival of the internet peer review wasn't possible unless a journal editor accepted your work. Replication isn't always possible because of the expense and man power requirements. Try to fund a replication of CERN's atom smashing experiements.
In fact, regarding global warming, there is a debate over the article that was published just before the Kyoto Accords meeting in Japan which purportedly showed a "hocky stick" graph effect. Later, researchers were able to get their hands on the data and discovered the cooking, trimming and extrapolation which was applied. When those manipualtions were removed the "hocky stick" disappeared. Lying by graphs is a common technique for deception. You can imagine how much grief that researcher accumulated for slaying the sacred cow of the global warming advocates.
Except for the fact that water vapor is SEVEN TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is, and it is present in the atmosphere in MUCH MUCH higher concentrations. Over all, water vapor contributes 280,000 time more to the greenhouse effect than CO2, and it's been doing it for ages, long before CO2 rose 25% to a measley 375 parts per million.
Possibly the real contributor to global warming is not the warm fuzzies of CO2 but the the heat itself that is released when Carbon based fuels are burned. A coal, oil or gas burning power plant needs to waste one unit of energy for every unit of energy it delivers to the consumer, and that is with the power plant operating at close to 100% efficiency. The worse the efficiency the worse the heat waste.
Eventually, all energy generated or wasted by power plants ends up as waste heat. That waste heat raises the mean temperature of the atmosphere until the T gets high enough so that the energy radiated (proportional to T^4) back into space equals the total of the incident Solar energy and the waste heat energy.
Atmospheric scientists know that the concentration of CO2 is not high enough by itself to cause global warming, so they postulate a "trigger" or "catalyst" effect, which is unproven. Neither my theory nor theirs can explain the last hot house period that occured 1,200 years ago. Then, the CO2 was lower than it is now and there were no power plants spewing heat, so the burning of fossile fuels was not the cause. That leave other possible causes: solar output or volcanos, to name a couple.
Except for one small fact: IE is part of (has been rolled into) the Microsoft kernel, according to Bill Gates and friends at the DOJ trial. Remember that faked video where they tried to prove it wasn't so?
So any discussion of IE vunerabilities must of necessity include the Windows kernel. Countless are the times IE or Windows explorer crashed, only to bring down Windows itself. Microsoft has rolled many services and devices into its kernel, so stability of the Windows platform is not entirely in Microsoft's hands. If a video card mfgr creates a buggy driver it is going to crash Windows.
Linux, on the other hand, does NOT need Mozilla for proper operation. If Mozilla crashes it goes away. The Linux kernel cleans up the mess and continues doing its job. When a buggy video driver in Linux fails one control is given back to the console.