SkillSoft didn't work for me... at least not using Galeon. I got an error telling me I needed to enable Java. Which, of course, is already enabled. So much for cross-platform
So then I tried it on Mozilla 0.9.8 and it puked again.
Finally, what the hell, I fired up my venerable Netscape 4.78 and, Viola!, it worked. I learned that MS Exchange server will cost lots more to implement than just using sendmail on a Linux box at each office. New administrators, new servers, new software... whew! No wonder there are so many MCSEs.
Nice java when it finally worked, though. Jave would likely be the best way to implement cross platform products for this application... but it's wise to make sure that it really works across platforms. This one doesn't.
and pay for my ISP's uplink so we can provide WiFi for free? Let's see, a dozen T1s (we have the routers) would run under $10,000 a month. And *still* only provide full utilization to 1.5 11mbps WiFi users.
There are good, solid reasons for making fun of M$ Windoze. This is a war to gain users and if users can be convinced that using MS products is, somehow, less cool than using open source products then we win, or at least gain.
Must I point out to you all the instances of products which were clearly superior but lost out because of public perceptions, advertising, or ridicule? Open source advocates may not have the resources to buy advertising like M$ does, but we do have the resources to ridicule them in subtle ways. The only downside is the risk of losing guys like you who, in all probability, are already on one side or the other.
This is not, despite what you'd like to think, a gentlemen's quarrel. Micro$oft will do anything *they* can to win. Let's not try to fight fair.
Besides, whining about it won't change it. Learn to live with it.:)
Bruce got caught in office politics, where several managers thought his stance on open source threatened their agenda with Windows. It's one thing I like about running a small company: we don't have a problem determining the difference between corporate goals and personal goals. They are one and the same right now.
Hire a manager, however, and you suddenly introduce another variable. Is *his* agenda the same as yours? Or does he want to cultivate contacts while being paid by you so that he can go out on his own in 2 years?
Everyone in a corporation has an agenda and it's surprising how often those agendas don't conform to what would be good for the corporation that pays them. In this case I'm pretty sure HP/Compaq will live to regret firing Bruce.
Our company hasn't bought (or even recommended) a Compaq or an HP in years. We recommend Dell almost exclusively (even if we don't get a dime out of it) because we think boxes from Dell offer the best value for our clients. This may change in the future to HP, but somehow I doubt it.
I have seen many comments on the perceived shallowness of an on-line gamer's life.. the "get a life" syndrom. But what if an on-line life is the only life you have access to?
Many people who are physically restricted in their movements find that on-line life is vastly superior to having only doctors and nurses for "friends". Warsinger, with a heart problem, may not have had access to a girlfriend in the "real world" but in a gamer's world he did.
There are lots of reasons people move to on-line life for therapy. I had a young IRC friend who used her on-line life to recover from years of sexual abuse. In my case an on-line life helped me recover from a terrible accident that left me unable to walk at all for a year, and without help for a decade.
Under these circumstances, any friends at all, even "virtual" friends are a step up from what they've got now. And enough of them find their way out of whatever darkness they're in now because of their friends on line.
The expression of sorrow on the part of these gamers for a friend touched me deeply. Some of us have to make our community where we can get the access. And heroic hearts often dwell in unlikely bodies.
Apparently MLB Properties hassled the Houston Astros site without the knowledge of the Houston Astros. In "A note to any newcomers to the Astos Daily" dated yesterday and featured prominently on their home page, Ray Kerby, the owner of http://www.astrosdaily.com said, "I just ant to make it clear that the Houston Astros had nothing to do with the "Cease & Desist" letter sent to me by MLB Properties on July 5th."
The Houston Astos themselves helped resolve the problem between astrostoday.com and MLB Properties which revolved around the use of player photographs. Kerby says that he was a guest of Astros owner Drayton Mclane at a game Sunday just to show there are no hard feelings.
While I, personally, have elected to boycott professional sports in their entirety due to their attitude of "screw the fans... build us another stadium or we'll leave" attitude, at least in this case the team behaved properly. And the site itself (astrostoday.com) is a very good fan site.
There are several "Deputy Directors" of CIA and it would not surprise me at all if there were not several at NSA. This is the title given to the equivalent of "Vice-President".
Several IRC admins had similar problems with Galaxynet when two people who had control over services and the domain name summarily canceled the democratic principles of the original Policy and created a "founders" group with total control and no accountability. Exiled split away, wrote up its own Charter where even the IRCops have a vote and a say in the way the network is run.
Exiled is free and will remain so. It is strugging at the moment to find users and contributer to the coding of services and ircd. Debian (and any other users) is cordially invited to visit and try us out.
I'll have to wait til I get to work to see if the demo will work on Galeon. How ironic if this Linux-based environment has a demo that will only work on MSIE.
If she can use her fingers well enough to touch thumb to another finger, she can touch the conductive material (aluminum foil if nothing else) together to short them out... then the buzzer goes off. This sort of device is available at Radio Shack stores plus the 'net. Cheap. Easy. The only downside is if she accidentally touches, then hubby wakes up for no good reason.
The upside to this is that by actually learning morse code (presuming she is able to learn) she could actually communicate using this device.
Yes... but when he's done he'll have a clue...
on
Cheap KVM Over IP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
which is more than most of the "buy it off the shelf" people often have. The advantages to experimentation are many. While time savings is probably not one of them (at least in the short run) by the time the project is done, the experimenter has a better idea of how to go about getting things done than the buy-it-off-the-shelf guy.
A few years down the road and most of us will want to hire the experimenter who has tried several different OSes, hacked out a wireless network out of a couple 2-meter transceivers, set up two 486 DX66 boxes as a dedicated VPN between his bedroom and his girlfriend's house, and wired up the girl's locker room with x10. Those are the guys who can think their way through a problem rather than hitting the catalogs looking for a million dollar solution.
I received my license flying at Minden, Nevada... which is, I think, the home of the current altitude record. The 49,000 foot record was flown without a pressure suit but with oxygen; anything above about 13,000 feet MSL is done on oxygen.
Flying a sailplane (glider) is one of the most intense things I've ever done. Few/. posters have any idea of the concentration required just to keep a glider aloft for longer than it would normally take to glide back to earth. It's not at all unusual to get a sailplane above 13,000 feet (which is why virtually all sailplanes come equipped with an oxygen system... unlike most powered planes).
Glider pilots fly for the personal satisfaction of pitting their skills against gravity and nature. It's non-polluting except for the ten minutes or so it takes to get the glider to 3,000 feet above ground level, it's relatively inexpensive (my sailplane - with a 39:1 glide ratio cost me $12,000 including trailer and instrumentation).
But an altitude record which now requires pressure suits and/or pressurized aircraft takes more money than most of us have available. This guy is truly risking his life for a project that, in my mind, is valuable if only for the fact that its challenging. The collection of data on using the atmosphere to perhaps save fuel on future airliners is even more incentive.
So hell, I say "bravo" to anyone willing to go try it.
PS: My other hobby is white water kayaking... and I'll be 60 years old next March.
Not that anyone will read this, but just as an update:
We installed the Linux workstation and I configured a username and password that was the same as the employee had used on her Win2k box. I used SuSE 8.0 and selected Gnome as the default GUI. We took off most of the desktop icons, and took most of the launchers out of the launch panel. I made a new launcher for Galeon and gave it a "globe" Icon to make it more resemble what she's used to for a browser.
I also made a launcher for their major business application (a medical database) and gave it their normal description so that when she mouses over the panel the familiar name will show up. This was really a launcher to the Citrix client which was set up to automatically log her into the NT4 server and present a full-screen desktop of her own desktop (from her user profile in NT).
There was no printer attached to her workstation so I didn't configure that. I did configure sound but didn't put any icons or launchers for a cd player. In fact, she doesn't have speakers on her desk so that was not used, apparently, in her old environment.
This is an experiment to see whether a MS-centric operation can be moved to a Linux environment. We plan to slowly introduce the employees to Abiword and OpenOffice (I demonstrated both of these for them yesterday) and Evolution for email.
We had an intern with us during the install who had never seen a Linux box before (going to a local community college which is *only* MS). He was amazed that I could turn what he thought was only a server machine into such an effective and useful desktop. He was further amazed when I demonstrated some of the more arcane features of Linux to him (sending email using the local box smtp server without having to go to the ISP's mail server, for instance).
All in all, a most interesting experience for all of us.
at a customer's worksite. Yesterday I took a win2k workstation, blew off the OS and installed SuSE 8.0. Then I downloaded the Citrix client for Linux and installed that and configured it for the user. Today we'll take the box to the client and put it to work.
The biggest problem we've encountered with Linux on the desktop isn't using Linux (I've used it on my desktop for years) but interfacing it with the applications that have been sold to businesses that only work with MS operating systems. This particular customer uses its main application over a Citrix server and we convinced them to give Linux a try. After all, there isn't much difference between using Citrix on a Win2k box than on a Linux box... but the websurfing will be done with Linux (Galeon)... and email with Evolution.
The problem with focusing on growth is that nothing grows forever (including your standard of living). Regardless of the market, sooner or later it will be filled and at that point everyone who is still trying to fill it will lose their shirts.
I'm not beating capitalism up over this, mind you, I'm one myself. But there must be something better.
is the requirement for growth. It's easy for a manager to panic over a zero-growth quarter because cash-flow isn't as important as growth. Even small business people are stampeded into making bad decisions because their business isn't growing. Never mind that they have cash-flow, it's the growth they think they need.
In large corporations a new manager will be under the gun to produce more than the last manager. When there is no more growth to be had, then they are forced to invent it. Hence the accounting scandals.
We will see further examples of this problem as companies look to foreign markets for sales growth and to foreign production to reduce expenses. And, when those fail, to accounting tricks to make it look like they've succeeded.
All the same comments were made against the civil rights and the Vietnam war protestors as are being made in this forum except that in place of "nerds" and "geeks" it was "students" and "hippies". Labeling someone by the way they look is practically traditional. And, even though there are always some (on both sides) who overreact I still think it's important to get "in their faces" when it comes to standing up for ourselves.
but sometimes impolite behavior is necessary. During the Vietnam War the protesters were continually asked to work within the system. Civil rights activists in the 60s were told to work within the system. In 1770 the founding fathers of the United States of America were told to work within the system. That's because, boys and girls, they control the system.
Throughout history people demanding their rights have had to do just that: DEMAND THEIR RIGHTS! Sometimes being polite just isn't enough.
I actually emailed them about this and they replied saying only that the change was "necessary" and that the karma is still there, just that no one can see it.
Yes, yes... we know it's off-topic but since no one sees the karma any more, who cares?
for my company over the past several years. We use SuSE for workstations and various servers at dozens of locations. Everything from a terabyte NAS box to a school district's email server to a corporate firewall to a simple dhcp/dns server at an ISP and on down to the desktop for me and a couple other employees.
I think that it's this feature of Linux which causes the problem. As others have said before me, there are things that an "average user" might want from his desktop that a systems administrator wouldn't want from his server box. Who needs decent anti-aliasing on a DNS or email server, after all? And yet, the idea of fragmenting Linux into specific versions (like RH and SuSE and others are trying to do with email, firewall, "personal", database, etc.) makes me very nervous.
I *like* being able to buy one distro and modifying it to behave the way I want it. I don't want to have to buy 15 different specific versions of Linux.
Are the two ideals, a decent workstation and a usable server, mutually exclusive within the same distribution? I hope not. SuSE seems to be the best at marrying these two but then they are busily marketing job-specific (email, database and firewall) distros at the same time.
I'd like to see a better separation of the desktop/server model in the install sequence. Something that addresses all the points in this article but leaves server admins some latitude.
There is a difference between a speed governor and "top speed". Just because your Ford won't hit 250mph doesn't mean it has a speed governing device on it.
can be found in a story here (//www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/9/17842/90350) in which Peter Biddle is a MS manager involved with helping to develop technology to keep control over content on DVD and other devices. This seems to be the same Peter Biddle quoted in the Salon article here and introduced in this way: "According to Peter Biddle, a Microsoft product manager, Palladium is nothing more than an elegant solution to the vexing problem of keeping people secure on the Internet..."
Why would an employee who specialized in content protection for Sony/Time-Warner etc. suddenly be interested in keeping "people secure on the Internet"? It seems far more likely to me that he'd be much more interested in DRM and control.
Why wouldn't we trust Microsoft? The better question is "Why would we trust Microsoft?". MS is a convicted monopolist (the only thing left is to determine the penalty) and a convicted copyright thief. MS has had a pattern of never inventing or creating anything but instead either buying or stealing it. MS has never before acted in the public good but only for the good of MS. Why would it change now? The answer is, I'm afraid, "It wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
SkillSoft didn't work for me... at least not using Galeon. I got an error telling me I needed to enable Java. Which, of course, is already enabled. So much for cross-platform
So then I tried it on Mozilla 0.9.8 and it puked again.
Finally, what the hell, I fired up my venerable Netscape 4.78 and, Viola!, it worked. I learned that MS Exchange server will cost lots more to implement than just using sendmail on a Linux box at each office. New administrators, new servers, new software... whew! No wonder there are so many MCSEs.
Nice java when it finally worked, though. Jave would likely be the best way to implement cross platform products for this application... but it's wise to make sure that it really works across platforms. This one doesn't.
Your egregious use of the word "egregious".
I wonder who they'll steal the design from for this product.
and pay for my ISP's uplink so we can provide WiFi for free? Let's see, a dozen T1s (we have the routers) would run under $10,000 a month. And *still* only provide full utilization to 1.5 11mbps WiFi users.
There are good, solid reasons for making fun of M$ Windoze. This is a war to gain users and if users can be convinced that using MS products is, somehow, less cool than using open source products then we win, or at least gain.
:)
Must I point out to you all the instances of products which were clearly superior but lost out because of public perceptions, advertising, or ridicule? Open source advocates may not have the resources to buy advertising like M$ does, but we do have the resources to ridicule them in subtle ways. The only downside is the risk of losing guys like you who, in all probability, are already on one side or the other.
This is not, despite what you'd like to think, a gentlemen's quarrel. Micro$oft will do anything *they* can to win. Let's not try to fight fair.
Besides, whining about it won't change it. Learn to live with it.
Bruce got caught in office politics, where several managers thought his stance on open source threatened their agenda with Windows. It's one thing I like about running a small company: we don't have a problem determining the difference between corporate goals and personal goals. They are one and the same right now.
Hire a manager, however, and you suddenly introduce another variable. Is *his* agenda the same as yours? Or does he want to cultivate contacts while being paid by you so that he can go out on his own in 2 years?
Everyone in a corporation has an agenda and it's surprising how often those agendas don't conform to what would be good for the corporation that pays them. In this case I'm pretty sure HP/Compaq will live to regret firing Bruce.
Our company hasn't bought (or even recommended) a Compaq or an HP in years. We recommend Dell almost exclusively (even if we don't get a dime out of it) because we think boxes from Dell offer the best value for our clients. This may change in the future to HP, but somehow I doubt it.
for making my life easier, saving me money, earning me new clients, and pissing off Microsoft in the bargain.
I have seen many comments on the perceived shallowness of an on-line gamer's life.. the "get a life" syndrom. But what if an on-line life is the only life you have access to?
Many people who are physically restricted in their movements find that on-line life is vastly superior to having only doctors and nurses for "friends". Warsinger, with a heart problem, may not have had access to a girlfriend in the "real world" but in a gamer's world he did.
There are lots of reasons people move to on-line life for therapy. I had a young IRC friend who used her on-line life to recover from years of sexual abuse. In my case an on-line life helped me recover from a terrible accident that left me unable to walk at all for a year, and without help for a decade.
Under these circumstances, any friends at all, even "virtual" friends are a step up from what they've got now. And enough of them find their way out of whatever darkness they're in now because of their friends on line.
The expression of sorrow on the part of these gamers for a friend touched me deeply. Some of us have to make our community where we can get the access. And heroic hearts often dwell in unlikely bodies.
Apparently MLB Properties hassled the Houston Astros site without the knowledge of the Houston Astros. In "A note to any newcomers to the Astos Daily" dated yesterday and featured prominently on their home page, Ray Kerby, the owner of http://www.astrosdaily.com said, "I just ant to make it clear that the Houston Astros had nothing to do with the "Cease & Desist" letter sent to me by MLB Properties on July 5th."
The Houston Astos themselves helped resolve the problem between astrostoday.com and MLB Properties which revolved around the use of player photographs. Kerby says that he was a guest of Astros owner Drayton Mclane at a game Sunday just to show there are no hard feelings.
While I, personally, have elected to boycott professional sports in their entirety due to their attitude of "screw the fans... build us another stadium or we'll leave" attitude, at least in this case the team behaved properly. And the site itself (astrostoday.com) is a very good fan site.
There are several "Deputy Directors" of CIA and it would not surprise me at all if there were not several at NSA. This is the title given to the equivalent of "Vice-President".
Several IRC admins had similar problems with Galaxynet when two people who had control over services and the domain name summarily canceled the democratic principles of the original Policy and created a "founders" group with total control and no accountability. Exiled split away, wrote up its own Charter where even the IRCops have a vote and a say in the way the network is run.
Exiled is free and will remain so. It is strugging at the moment to find users and contributer to the coding of services and ircd. Debian (and any other users) is cordially invited to visit and try us out.
Swedchef
admin of seattle.wa.us.exiled.net
I'll have to wait til I get to work to see if the demo will work on Galeon. How ironic if this Linux-based environment has a demo that will only work on MSIE.
If she can use her fingers well enough to touch thumb to another finger, she can touch the conductive material (aluminum foil if nothing else) together to short them out... then the buzzer goes off. This sort of device is available at Radio Shack stores plus the 'net. Cheap. Easy. The only downside is if she accidentally touches, then hubby wakes up for no good reason.
The upside to this is that by actually learning morse code (presuming she is able to learn) she could actually communicate using this device.
which is more than most of the "buy it off the shelf" people often have. The advantages to experimentation are many. While time savings is probably not one of them (at least in the short run) by the time the project is done, the experimenter has a better idea of how to go about getting things done than the buy-it-off-the-shelf guy.
A few years down the road and most of us will want to hire the experimenter who has tried several different OSes, hacked out a wireless network out of a couple 2-meter transceivers, set up two 486 DX66 boxes as a dedicated VPN between his bedroom and his girlfriend's house, and wired up the girl's locker room with x10. Those are the guys who can think their way through a problem rather than hitting the catalogs looking for a million dollar solution.
I received my license flying at Minden, Nevada... which is, I think, the home of the current altitude record. The 49,000 foot record was flown without a pressure suit but with oxygen; anything above about 13,000 feet MSL is done on oxygen.
/. posters have any idea of the concentration required just to keep a glider aloft for longer than it would normally take to glide back to earth. It's not at all unusual to get a sailplane above 13,000 feet (which is why virtually all sailplanes come equipped with an oxygen system... unlike most powered planes).
Flying a sailplane (glider) is one of the most intense things I've ever done. Few
Glider pilots fly for the personal satisfaction of pitting their skills against gravity and nature. It's non-polluting except for the ten minutes or so it takes to get the glider to 3,000 feet above ground level, it's relatively inexpensive (my sailplane - with a 39:1 glide ratio cost me $12,000 including trailer and instrumentation).
But an altitude record which now requires pressure suits and/or pressurized aircraft takes more money than most of us have available. This guy is truly risking his life for a project that, in my mind, is valuable if only for the fact that its challenging. The collection of data on using the atmosphere to perhaps save fuel on future airliners is even more incentive.
So hell, I say "bravo" to anyone willing to go try it.
PS: My other hobby is white water kayaking... and I'll be 60 years old next March.
Not that anyone will read this, but just as an update:
We installed the Linux workstation and I configured a username and password that was the same as the employee had used on her Win2k box. I used SuSE 8.0 and selected Gnome as the default GUI. We took off most of the desktop icons, and took most of the launchers out of the launch panel. I made a new launcher for Galeon and gave it a "globe" Icon to make it more resemble what she's used to for a browser.
I also made a launcher for their major business application (a medical database) and gave it their normal description so that when she mouses over the panel the familiar name will show up. This was really a launcher to the Citrix client which was set up to automatically log her into the NT4 server and present a full-screen desktop of her own desktop (from her user profile in NT).
There was no printer attached to her workstation so I didn't configure that. I did configure sound but didn't put any icons or launchers for a cd player. In fact, she doesn't have speakers on her desk so that was not used, apparently, in her old environment.
This is an experiment to see whether a MS-centric operation can be moved to a Linux environment. We plan to slowly introduce the employees to Abiword and OpenOffice (I demonstrated both of these for them yesterday) and Evolution for email.
We had an intern with us during the install who had never seen a Linux box before (going to a local community college which is *only* MS). He was amazed that I could turn what he thought was only a server machine into such an effective and useful desktop. He was further amazed when I demonstrated some of the more arcane features of Linux to him (sending email using the local box smtp server without having to go to the ISP's mail server, for instance).
All in all, a most interesting experience for all of us.
at a customer's worksite. Yesterday I took a win2k workstation, blew off the OS and installed SuSE 8.0. Then I downloaded the Citrix client for Linux and installed that and configured it for the user. Today we'll take the box to the client and put it to work.
The biggest problem we've encountered with Linux on the desktop isn't using Linux (I've used it on my desktop for years) but interfacing it with the applications that have been sold to businesses that only work with MS operating systems. This particular customer uses its main application over a Citrix server and we convinced them to give Linux a try. After all, there isn't much difference between using Citrix on a Win2k box than on a Linux box... but the websurfing will be done with Linux (Galeon)... and email with Evolution.
The problem with focusing on growth is that nothing grows forever (including your standard of living). Regardless of the market, sooner or later it will be filled and at that point everyone who is still trying to fill it will lose their shirts.
I'm not beating capitalism up over this, mind you, I'm one myself. But there must be something better.
is the requirement for growth. It's easy for a manager to panic over a zero-growth quarter because cash-flow isn't as important as growth. Even small business people are stampeded into making bad decisions because their business isn't growing. Never mind that they have cash-flow, it's the growth they think they need.
In large corporations a new manager will be under the gun to produce more than the last manager. When there is no more growth to be had, then they are forced to invent it. Hence the accounting scandals.
We will see further examples of this problem as companies look to foreign markets for sales growth and to foreign production to reduce expenses. And, when those fail, to accounting tricks to make it look like they've succeeded.
All the same comments were made against the civil rights and the Vietnam war protestors as are being made in this forum except that in place of "nerds" and "geeks" it was "students" and "hippies". Labeling someone by the way they look is practically traditional. And, even though there are always some (on both sides) who overreact I still think it's important to get "in their faces" when it comes to standing up for ourselves.
but sometimes impolite behavior is necessary. During the Vietnam War the protesters were continually asked to work within the system. Civil rights activists in the 60s were told to work within the system. In 1770 the founding fathers of the United States of America were told to work within the system. That's because, boys and girls, they control the system.
Throughout history people demanding their rights have had to do just that: DEMAND THEIR RIGHTS! Sometimes being polite just isn't enough.
I actually emailed them about this and they replied saying only that the change was "necessary" and that the karma is still there, just that no one can see it.
Yes, yes... we know it's off-topic but since no one sees the karma any more, who cares?
for my company over the past several years. We use SuSE for workstations and various servers at dozens of locations. Everything from a terabyte NAS box to a school district's email server to a corporate firewall to a simple dhcp/dns server at an ISP and on down to the desktop for me and a couple other employees.
I think that it's this feature of Linux which causes the problem. As others have said before me, there are things that an "average user" might want from his desktop that a systems administrator wouldn't want from his server box. Who needs decent anti-aliasing on a DNS or email server, after all? And yet, the idea of fragmenting Linux into specific versions (like RH and SuSE and others are trying to do with email, firewall, "personal", database, etc.) makes me very nervous.
I *like* being able to buy one distro and modifying it to behave the way I want it. I don't want to have to buy 15 different specific versions of Linux.
Are the two ideals, a decent workstation and a usable server, mutually exclusive within the same distribution? I hope not. SuSE seems to be the best at marrying these two but then they are busily marketing job-specific (email, database and firewall) distros at the same time.
I'd like to see a better separation of the desktop/server model in the install sequence. Something that addresses all the points in this article but leaves server admins some latitude.
There is a difference between a speed governor and "top speed". Just because your Ford won't hit 250mph doesn't mean it has a speed governing device on it.
can be found in a story here (//www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/9/17842/90350) in which Peter Biddle is a MS manager involved with helping to develop technology to keep control over content on DVD and other devices. This seems to be the same Peter Biddle quoted in the Salon article here and introduced in this way: "According to Peter Biddle, a Microsoft product manager, Palladium is nothing more than an elegant solution to the vexing problem of keeping people secure on the Internet..."
Why would an employee who specialized in content protection for Sony/Time-Warner etc. suddenly be interested in keeping "people secure on the Internet"? It seems far more likely to me that he'd be much more interested in DRM and control.
Why wouldn't we trust Microsoft? The better question is "Why would we trust Microsoft?". MS is a convicted monopolist (the only thing left is to determine the penalty) and a convicted copyright thief. MS has had a pattern of never inventing or creating anything but instead either buying or stealing it. MS has never before acted in the public good but only for the good of MS. Why would it change now? The answer is, I'm afraid, "It wouldn't.