I'm sorry twitter, are you actually suggesting that Firefox's failure to verify input is somehow Microsoft's fault? Wow, that's a new low.
You're going to have to come up with an actual example of Microsoft "disabling" an actual third party application because they feel threatened by it, which is the insinuation you made in your original post. Otherwise, may I interest you in a nice warm cup of STFU?
This might be bad news for Google. WP is about the only "organization" capable of putting together a human-vetted search with the Grub software. I have no idea of people will go for that sort of thing (I like my search results from an algorithm, thanks) but if they do, and the search results work correctly (that relevance is what made Google to begin with) then Google might just be in trouble.
Of course at that point Google will buy Wikia and whatever other properties seem relevant... and then Google will have completed the transition from "do no evil" to "if you can't beat them, buy them" that started with YouTube.
Of course this might not be the case, but I have trouble trying to come up with a reason why Wikia might want something like Grub.
No, now there's a crappy, non free M$ toy for all of those people M$ has scared away from P2P all these years.
It's really becoming a pain to have to point this out twitter, but this technology is intended to be used for updates to Microsoft products. I just fail to see where you made the jump from that to Microsoft somehow attacking or harming other P2P technologies.
As usual, your entire post reads like Fox News copy about the Democratic Party. Soundbytes, oblique references and catchy phrases designed to make sure everyone who reads it simply loses track of the original topic.
That's funny, I could swear that I've made a lot of money over the past twelve years using their software. I also know a *lot* of other people who have as well. And any number of companies who have enabled their business processes and models with Microsoft software, and thus enabled them to prosper as well*. So unless you mean "Microsoft has also made a lot of money from their clients" I must conclude that you have your reality distortion field turned up a bit too high.
* I don't know how to write that so that it doesn't sound like PR copy, but then I can't believe I have to spell out something like that to begin with.
For all your creative spelling and gloom-and-doom predictions, exaggerations and misrepresentations ("lack of efficiency", as in Windows Update?), you astoundingly manage to miss the wee fact that Microsoft intends to use this as a specialized content swarming technology for their own products, for people who use Windows. Just as you can't download "stuff" using Windows Update. If you need to use a P2P technology to download the latest Britney Spears album, I'm sure you'll be able to use the one of your choice. uTorrent works fine on Vista, if you're interested.
And yes, I'm sure it will be "trusted" in the sense that it will work correctly by signing packages with certificates and so on, the same way Windows Update works today. As far as I know no one has ever managed to defeat that protection.
"Blocking" other P2P clients would involve restriction of ports at the network provider level, which pretty much ensures nothing that uses TCP/IP would work on Windows. So I must conclude that your prediction of how "M$" will disable other P2P applications is just for laughs, much like that "M$ music services and squirt to your Zune" bit.
Psychotic zealot twitter crawled out of his barren warren and with much drooling said:
I like that link because it shows a clear pattern of behavior
I'm not sure we are clear on the meaning of the word "pattern". Perhaps you could provide additional examples? After all, that's what makes a pattern, or at least that's what I was taught in elementary school. Hopefully ones that are not almost two decades old? Surely if this is a pattern you will be able to, well, prove it is a pattern.
I also like pointing to the case of Steve Barkto
Of course you do. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we would like you to also prove a pattern there.
If they are not paying you to be so annoying
When Bill Gates came to Elbonia to personally deliver my paycheck for making sure that Free Software is thwarted merely by pointing out that you are a pathological liar, he said to say "Hi!".
Limiting the availability of XP does not mean they are going to "break it", which was the FUD insinuation you originally made. Microsoft (oh, I'm sorry, "M$") limited the availability of "Windoze" 2000 and people continued to use it. And they still do.
Vista is the most restrictive and buggy version of Windoze yet
Hilarity ensues.
making life hard for anti-virus makers, Google, Firefox, iPod, Palm and OpenOffice, even Adobe.
I'm a little fuzzy on this twitter. "M$" is making life hard on AV makers because Vista is much more secure out of the box, they are making life hard for Google because their search is much better out of the box, and they are making life hard for Palm and Apple because Palm and Apple failed to test their software during the REALLY LENGTHY beta and RC process that Vista went through. Am I reading your outrage right, here?
And do share why they are making life difficult for Adobe and OpenOffice.
They have been playing the blame game for a long time now
Why do you keep using the same bogus, lame tired arguments? That "feature" never even shipped with Windows 3.x. Funny how you never link to the Wikipedia entry for DR-DOS, which explains the issue better than that fanboy link you use. You figure people who read Slashdot are stupid and won't bother to check your links?
People want a new Office format, a new computer and a new GUI like they want a hole in their head.
You certainly have the pulse of the world's personal and corporate computer markets.
It's finally come home to them in poor sales
Well, given that in six months Vista has far out-matched every other non-Microsoft OS in terms of market share and Linux still has a lower share than Windows 98, I don't see how this is true at all. Wait, these must be the 40 million Vista licenses you said Microsoft "stuffed the channel" with! It seems there's a problem, because they seem to be connected to the internet at the moment =(
The implication is that obesity in this context is caused by the social and cultural environment you function in and the peer pressure exerted by the types of people you frequent within that environment. If all your friends eat greasy burgers and pizza and have beer and then plop down to watch the game, you are likely to do the same to fit in. You also change your expectation of what health and looks are based on the people who are around you most of the time. Grok?
It's truly dumb to make it sound like you're outraged because the study says your fat friends will make you fat if they touch you.
why did did Microsoft exec privately decide they had to 'leverage' their Windows distribution channel to get people to use MS Internet Explorer?
Because Microsoft is paranoid and very competitive, and they always want 100% of every market they enter. That they had the superior product and Netscape screwed themselves up royally is a matter of fact, and is unrelated to what they did after. The rest is just the overzealous desire of the company to nail everyone around them without realizing they had already won, which was used to good effect by the DoJ in the antitrust trial.
The question here is not whether or not Microsoft did some unsavory things with their browser/OS double whammy, the question is what enabled them to be in that position. Just bundling IE would have been simply insufficient if IE sucked and NS4 was teh bomb the Netscape boys promised the world for years before shipping that abomination they weren't sure was a "groupware platform" or a frakin' web browser.
*shrug* NT4 was never marketed to home users, it was used almost exclusively in corporate environments - corporations that very likely were already standardized on Netscape anyway because it was the only game in town. IE2 was laughable compared to Netscape at the time, to put it mildly.
OSR2 shipped what, a couple of million copies before Windows 98 arrived? Irrelevant, all the more so because IE3 was also unusable. With that fab memory I'm surprised you didn't take that into account.
As for IE4 not being "significantly enough worse" than NS4, that's a matter of opinion. Most people think it was inherently superior, maybe even because it didn't crash every on every fifth page load. Netscape had lost the ability to ship usable software by then. It's not like I'm making this up.
The timeline is clear enough, I think. By the time Windows 98 came around it was all over for Netscape anyway. People will download what they need and want regardless of time or bandwidth. They downloaded Netscape 2 and 3 by the millions, didn't they? Microsoft bundled WMP with Windows for years, but everyone downloaded Winamp, Musicmatch, Real and Sonique anyway. It wasn't until WMP became actually usable that RealNetworks had to go whine to the EU that Microsoft was interfering in their attempts to ship their spyware to unsuspecting users, so today you're lucky to be able to buy "Windows XP N", if you want the spyware and an OS without a usable media player.
because of the included email/IRC/kitchen sink that were bundled with the product, despite the fact that virtually nobody used or wanted them.
Exactly. Netscape had gotten high on the "groupware" hype, and by the time they shipped (nay, shoved out the door) NS4 the company was in deep trouble because it had gone from building a browser to trying to be a client platform for internet communications or whatever. Lofty goals, incredibly bad execution. Any company that loses sight of is core competency becomes a prime candidate for extinction.
People suffer from amazingly deficient long-term memory when it comes to this topic. Netscape was dead long before Microsoft shipped Windows 98, which was the first version of the OS to include IE. And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. The vulnerabilities and ActiveX fiasco would come much later, but are irrelevant to Netscape's fate - as is the bundling itself.
Netscape killed themselves with uncanny precision long before Microsoft started bundling IE with Windows, never mind actually shipping a viable version of IE. Navigator 4 was, much like the first WordPerfect for Windows, the worst possible product at the worst possible time. Netscape's reaction to their inability to ship working software and Microsoft's ability to do so was to go whine about it to the DoJ, which promptly nailed Microsoft to the wall.
The "Microsoft killed Nescape" meme is completely wrong, but most people who are predisposed toward MS to begin with don't realize that or simply don't care because it's inconvenient.
Not to say Microsoft is some sort of angelical organization, but they are certainly not guilty of "killing" Netscape. Marc Andreessen and Co. are solely responsible for that. Just go read Jamie Zawinski's diary and do the math.
No, of course not. Linux is where it's at, right? Except that even Windows 98 has more market share. With a combined market share of 93% for all "M$" operating systems, I can see how they're going to disappear in three years. Oh, wait. You said that in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Oh yeah, 2008 is the year of Linux in the desktop according to you. No, really. Too bad the desktop doesn't really work. Anyone who uses Linux knows this (and many other things), but it's just too inconvenient to mention them. Instead it's so much more productive to troll Slashdot with hilarious FUD and spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.
I've always been curious twitter, do you really believe this stuff you write? Seriously? Are you just delusional or does someone pay you to preach the same tired mantra year after year?
Yes, I expect that's because Windows 95 was still cooperative multitasking not much better than Mac OS 9. But clearly you haven't used Windows since then, because the annoyance of having a single application freeze and bring down the whole thing is gone now, and has been getting better with each release while people like you toed the "it's better because I say so" party line.
As for "trojan infestations", well that's entirely up to you. It's not like Windows is impossible to secure or something.
I agree with what you're saying to a certain extent but in reality Linux is "hard" simply because it's different. People who are used to Windows will inevitably find Linux complicated and hard, but nowadays that's just the differences between the two platforms. It's like going from driving a car with an automatic transmission to one with a 6-speed stick shift. It's just different. That's why it's "hard".
The caveat here of course is that there are still things in Linux that are impossible to pull off without a console, and a lot of the settings for KDE and GNOME are placed in unintuitive locations or have misleading or useless names. This has been getting a lot better lately with Ubuntu and whatnot, and a lot of it is distro-specific, but I think it's still a problem. I've seen people move from Windows to Macs much more smoothly than to Linux, and that's why Apple's investment in its UI pays off. Microsoft's defaults are not exactly hot, but everyone is used to them so they're not a problem.
Linux needs to be a hell of a lot better than just the "good enough, close enough" and DIY attitude it currently has to really succeed on the desktop. It needs to be better than Windows and Apple. Normal consumers don't care about the religious "you get all this freedom" bullshit enough to drop Windows, and if they do drop something they'd rather pay $$ for a Mac than tinker endlessly with Linux.
That's OK, you already proved you are in the percentile of the "community" that can't take constructive criticism worth shit and instead find it more convenient to blame Microsoft or the easter bunny for anything that's wrong with your pet technologies, along with that wholesome "kill the messenger" attitude everyone loves so much. So I'd recommend just quitting while you're ahead.
Well, of course it's the criminal's fault, not the victim's. The victims could do (or not do) a hell of a lot more to avoid being "victimized", though.
Both ignorance and apathy would be cured by kicking off infected computers
Well, yes. That's one solution I guess.
I'd be looking forward to "responsible user" dedazo being kicked off
Unfortunately for you, none of my "M$ Windoze" machines are in any botnets, have any malware or are otherwise compromised, much like many other hundreds of millions of other PCs running "Windoze" out there.
I think the PR firm he works for uses a botnet to post all it's pro M$ blather
Jeepers, you are so cool.
Steve Jobs does not have a problem with average users on Apple. Sun does not have a problem with Solaris in hospitals.
Neither Apple nor Sun have a billion users - which is of course the inconvenient little detail you conveniently "forget" all the time.
Other than that aimed at users being responsible for their own computers. The botnet's root cause is not "Windoze", it's the people who are ignorant or lazy enough to let their computers be taken over by trojans and worms. Since it's stupidly simple to avoid that, the problem lies squarely between keyboard and chair.
I expect that the same people who neglect their PCs by downloading and opening random crap and not even bothering to leave automatic updates running will be as detrimental to OS X or Linux if they ever grow tired of "Windoze" and blame Microsoft (or as you like you call them, "M$") for their inexperience and lack of interest in basic security enough to switch platforms. You know what? You're more than welcome to them. Those of us who choose to run Windows and do it responsibly as with any other OS can certainly do without the "wow this email with a zip attachment from the CIA looks important, I think I'll open it and run it" masses. You can have all of them, and then when there's enough of them and malware writers start targeting them, you can post on Slashdot about how "Linsux" is third rate because it lets these stupid people install stuff on their own computers. I'll be looking forward to that.
No, please be so kind as to stay on topic please. You can go thread drift later if you want, but your "I've run out of semi-clever things to say" non-sequitur flamebait will have to wait.
The way it works is you make a ridiculous claim, someone rips it apart and then you get to defend it. You should know this by now, since it's pretty much a daily thing in your life. I've noticed that when you post something actually intelligent that doesn't contain FUD, lies or zealot bullshit then you're pretty much left alone. That's the thing you should strive for.
Go ahead and criticize Microsoft all you want. They mostly deserve it. But lies and fanboy crud with liberal amounts of infantile creative spelling are a disservice to the "cause" you claim to be fighting for.
Slashdot Mirror
You're going to have to come up with an actual example of Microsoft "disabling" an actual third party application because they feel threatened by it, which is the insinuation you made in your original post. Otherwise, may I interest you in a nice warm cup of STFU?
Of course at that point Google will buy Wikia and whatever other properties seem relevant... and then Google will have completed the transition from "do no evil" to "if you can't beat them, buy them" that started with YouTube.
Of course this might not be the case, but I have trouble trying to come up with a reason why Wikia might want something like Grub.
It's really becoming a pain to have to point this out twitter, but this technology is intended to be used for updates to Microsoft products. I just fail to see where you made the jump from that to Microsoft somehow attacking or harming other P2P technologies.
As usual, your entire post reads like Fox News copy about the Democratic Party. Soundbytes, oblique references and catchy phrases designed to make sure everyone who reads it simply loses track of the original topic.
* I don't know how to write that so that it doesn't sound like PR copy, but then I can't believe I have to spell out something like that to begin with.
And yes, I'm sure it will be "trusted" in the sense that it will work correctly by signing packages with certificates and so on, the same way Windows Update works today. As far as I know no one has ever managed to defeat that protection.
"Blocking" other P2P clients would involve restriction of ports at the network provider level, which pretty much ensures nothing that uses TCP/IP would work on Windows. So I must conclude that your prediction of how "M$" will disable other P2P applications is just for laughs, much like that "M$ music services and squirt to your Zune" bit.
I'm not sure we are clear on the meaning of the word "pattern". Perhaps you could provide additional examples? After all, that's what makes a pattern, or at least that's what I was taught in elementary school. Hopefully ones that are not almost two decades old? Surely if this is a pattern you will be able to, well, prove it is a pattern.
Of course you do. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we would like you to also prove a pattern there.
When Bill Gates came to Elbonia to personally deliver my paycheck for making sure that Free Software is thwarted merely by pointing out that you are a pathological liar, he said to say "Hi!".
Anything else? This is really easy.
You mean when "M$" stops supporting it in 2014, or are you referring to something else?
Hilarity ensues.
I'm a little fuzzy on this twitter. "M$" is making life hard on AV makers because Vista is much more secure out of the box, they are making life hard for Google because their search is much better out of the box, and they are making life hard for Palm and Apple because Palm and Apple failed to test their software during the REALLY LENGTHY beta and RC process that Vista went through. Am I reading your outrage right, here?
And do share why they are making life difficult for Adobe and OpenOffice.
Why do you keep using the same bogus, lame tired arguments? That "feature" never even shipped with Windows 3.x. Funny how you never link to the Wikipedia entry for DR-DOS, which explains the issue better than that fanboy link you use. You figure people who read Slashdot are stupid and won't bother to check your links?
You certainly have the pulse of the world's personal and corporate computer markets.
Well, given that in six months Vista has far out-matched every other non-Microsoft OS in terms of market share and Linux still has a lower share than Windows 98, I don't see how this is true at all. Wait, these must be the 40 million Vista licenses you said Microsoft "stuffed the channel" with! It seems there's a problem, because they seem to be connected to the internet at the moment =(
Yeah, it's always somebody else's fault.
It's truly dumb to make it sound like you're outraged because the study says your fat friends will make you fat if they touch you.
Because Microsoft is paranoid and very competitive, and they always want 100% of every market they enter. That they had the superior product and Netscape screwed themselves up royally is a matter of fact, and is unrelated to what they did after. The rest is just the overzealous desire of the company to nail everyone around them without realizing they had already won, which was used to good effect by the DoJ in the antitrust trial.
The question here is not whether or not Microsoft did some unsavory things with their browser/OS double whammy, the question is what enabled them to be in that position. Just bundling IE would have been simply insufficient if IE sucked and NS4 was teh bomb the Netscape boys promised the world for years before shipping that abomination they weren't sure was a "groupware platform" or a frakin' web browser.
OSR2 shipped what, a couple of million copies before Windows 98 arrived? Irrelevant, all the more so because IE3 was also unusable. With that fab memory I'm surprised you didn't take that into account.
As for IE4 not being "significantly enough worse" than NS4, that's a matter of opinion. Most people think it was inherently superior, maybe even because it didn't crash every on every fifth page load. Netscape had lost the ability to ship usable software by then. It's not like I'm making this up.
The timeline is clear enough, I think. By the time Windows 98 came around it was all over for Netscape anyway. People will download what they need and want regardless of time or bandwidth. They downloaded Netscape 2 and 3 by the millions, didn't they? Microsoft bundled WMP with Windows for years, but everyone downloaded Winamp, Musicmatch, Real and Sonique anyway. It wasn't until WMP became actually usable that RealNetworks had to go whine to the EU that Microsoft was interfering in their attempts to ship their spyware to unsuspecting users, so today you're lucky to be able to buy "Windows XP N", if you want the spyware and an OS without a usable media player.
Exactly. Netscape had gotten high on the "groupware" hype, and by the time they shipped (nay, shoved out the door) NS4 the company was in deep trouble because it had gone from building a browser to trying to be a client platform for internet communications or whatever. Lofty goals, incredibly bad execution. Any company that loses sight of is core competency becomes a prime candidate for extinction.
People suffer from amazingly deficient long-term memory when it comes to this topic. Netscape was dead long before Microsoft shipped Windows 98, which was the first version of the OS to include IE. And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. The vulnerabilities and ActiveX fiasco would come much later, but are irrelevant to Netscape's fate - as is the bundling itself.
The "Microsoft killed Nescape" meme is completely wrong, but most people who are predisposed toward MS to begin with don't realize that or simply don't care because it's inconvenient.
Not to say Microsoft is some sort of angelical organization, but they are certainly not guilty of "killing" Netscape. Marc Andreessen and Co. are solely responsible for that. Just go read Jamie Zawinski's diary and do the math.
No, of course not. Linux is where it's at, right? Except that even Windows 98 has more market share. With a combined market share of 93% for all "M$" operating systems, I can see how they're going to disappear in three years. Oh, wait. You said that in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Oh yeah, 2008 is the year of Linux in the desktop according to you. No, really. Too bad the desktop doesn't really work. Anyone who uses Linux knows this (and many other things), but it's just too inconvenient to mention them. Instead it's so much more productive to troll Slashdot with hilarious FUD and spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.
I've always been curious twitter, do you really believe this stuff you write? Seriously? Are you just delusional or does someone pay you to preach the same tired mantra year after year?
Well, you were being modded up and I assume that's important for most Slashbots, so that's why I said you were ahead. But never mind that now.
As for "trojan infestations", well that's entirely up to you. It's not like Windows is impossible to secure or something.
The caveat here of course is that there are still things in Linux that are impossible to pull off without a console, and a lot of the settings for KDE and GNOME are placed in unintuitive locations or have misleading or useless names. This has been getting a lot better lately with Ubuntu and whatnot, and a lot of it is distro-specific, but I think it's still a problem. I've seen people move from Windows to Macs much more smoothly than to Linux, and that's why Apple's investment in its UI pays off. Microsoft's defaults are not exactly hot, but everyone is used to them so they're not a problem.
Linux needs to be a hell of a lot better than just the "good enough, close enough" and DIY attitude it currently has to really succeed on the desktop. It needs to be better than Windows and Apple. Normal consumers don't care about the religious "you get all this freedom" bullshit enough to drop Windows, and if they do drop something they'd rather pay $$ for a Mac than tinker endlessly with Linux.
That's OK, you already proved you are in the percentile of the "community" that can't take constructive criticism worth shit and instead find it more convenient to blame Microsoft or the easter bunny for anything that's wrong with your pet technologies, along with that wholesome "kill the messenger" attitude everyone loves so much. So I'd recommend just quitting while you're ahead.
Well, of course it's the criminal's fault, not the victim's. The victims could do (or not do) a hell of a lot more to avoid being "victimized", though.
Well, yes. That's one solution I guess.
Unfortunately for you, none of my "M$ Windoze" machines are in any botnets, have any malware or are otherwise compromised, much like many other hundreds of millions of other PCs running "Windoze" out there.
Jeepers, you are so cool.
Neither Apple nor Sun have a billion users - which is of course the inconvenient little detail you conveniently "forget" all the time.
I expect that the same people who neglect their PCs by downloading and opening random crap and not even bothering to leave automatic updates running will be as detrimental to OS X or Linux if they ever grow tired of "Windoze" and blame Microsoft (or as you like you call them, "M$") for their inexperience and lack of interest in basic security enough to switch platforms. You know what? You're more than welcome to them. Those of us who choose to run Windows and do it responsibly as with any other OS can certainly do without the "wow this email with a zip attachment from the CIA looks important, I think I'll open it and run it" masses. You can have all of them, and then when there's enough of them and malware writers start targeting them, you can post on Slashdot about how "Linsux" is third rate because it lets these stupid people install stuff on their own computers. I'll be looking forward to that.
The way it works is you make a ridiculous claim, someone rips it apart and then you get to defend it. You should know this by now, since it's pretty much a daily thing in your life. I've noticed that when you post something actually intelligent that doesn't contain FUD, lies or zealot bullshit then you're pretty much left alone. That's the thing you should strive for.
Go ahead and criticize Microsoft all you want. They mostly deserve it. But lies and fanboy crud with liberal amounts of infantile creative spelling are a disservice to the "cause" you claim to be fighting for.
That's why they're Brazil, and not, say, Argentina =)