As long as you mandate open office or open document formats then there would be no problems with giving the occational user windows. In fact there should be a few copies of office so you can convert office documents to other formats anyway.
None of those things you mentioned are particularly innovative. They all have been around in lots of products and open source projects. By innovation I don't mean putting out a MS flavored implementation of some other technology. I mean something that is genuinely innovative.
Saying that vista has voice recognition when Mac has had for two years or that SQL server has a new indexing algorithm doesn't wash. Sorry.
Funny how the MS shills today are saying the same things the IBM shills were saying back then. I guess history repeats itself. Good to see lots of corporate shills still around though. God knows those corporations need defending from the unwashed linux users who are always mastubrating.
Yes but is it legal. You clicked on a EULA. What kind of a person does it make you when you enter into an agreement and then cheat. You bought windows and you agreed to a EULA. You agreed to a EULA when you downloaded the patch. Now you want to shirk on your part of the deal.
I think people who do this kind of thing or pirate windows or photoshop are the worst kind of cowards and scum. Be a man. Either live up to your word or ditch MS.
Let's presume you are right. Let's presume that the telcos get together and back three hundred or so candidates all across the US to replace their lackeys. Do you think the replacements might be just a little more afraid of the voters then the current crop of lackeys? I think they would.
Re:I hope Slashdot makes it into the "silver packa
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes. God forbid any information enters your brain that does not re-enforce your already held beliefs. You are much better off exclusivley watching fox news, reading free republic, and listening to Rush.
There is no sense in even coming near information or ideas that may contradict what your god and fox news says. Remember those liberal elite intellectual bloggers are probably french and most definately communists who hate america.
"No offense, but you don't have the facts about MS R&D budget correct,"
It is you who has it wrong. Go check their latest filings with the SEC. You can lie to the press, you can lie to your customers, but you can't lie to the SEC and the shareholders.
"et alone know much about the people or the projects and what has come out of them or you wouldn't discount MS R&D so easily..."
Name five things that came out of MS reasearch in the last five years. Five things that are now MS products and are innovative. I dare you.
You have never worked with VS and yet you think it will be easier? Why?
Managers are not influenced by rationality, reason or facts. They are influenced by golf games, junkets, and gold watches. That's how MS wins business. See godaddy for example. MS paid godaddy to switch their parking to IIS.
Money talks and the CIOs love gold watches and golf junkets in Hawaii.
MS has been cutting their R&D budget to make it's numbers look better. It's a recent trend and it's not likely to reverse itself. MS profitability is suffering due to deep discounts it has to make to combat linux and due to the flattning of their stock price (MS makes a ton of money buying and selling it's own stock). At this point they can not allow their stock price to drop at all because it would set up a chain reaction spiraling their stock downward and sending their profits to hell.
In order to avoid that they are cutting R&D to make their numbers look good.
It's a good tactic. It's not like their R&D has produced anything in the last five years anyway. Every product they have introduced in the last 10 years has been either an aquisition or a me too product. The research dept at MS is a wasteland where smart and talented people go to retire. The purpose of that dept is not to innovate, it's to remove smart people from the market.
you have presented the MS argument masterfully. Are you a professional PR person? Do you work for a PR or ad agency? I suspect you do.
Anyway your points are not really that relevent because they are not that true. HPC applications tend to be very complex. They are not the types of applications you are likely to trust to a bunch of VS monkeys who draw GUIs with bound controls and call it an application. As for administration there is a mountain of evidence that Nix administration is cheaper then MS administration. Studies have shown that the average linux admin administers significantly more amchines then your average windows admin. They may cost more but they admin more servers. Studies have also shown that windows shops tend to have more servers per user then unix shops and that unix servers tend to run more applications per server.
Ask anybody who has done both and they will tell you. It's much easier to maintain a mass of unix servers then a mass of windows servers. Have ever tried to back up a bunch of windows server? Try doing it without spending ten thousand dollars.
While MS has had success with it's servers it has not been able to achieve the same monopoly status in that market that is has on the desktop and the office software markets. Since then they have tried repetedly to attain dominance in other markets by dumping software for free, forcing downloads with windows, paying customers to use them etc. Despite all that they have not been able to get better then third place in anything. Xbox, SQL server, sharepoint, great plains (what ever it's called now), their CRM software, etc are doing at best third place in the market. Other products have been utter failures MSN, MS at work, webtv, money, works, and several other web sites which they have ditched all got shot down in flames after sucking up tons of money.
MS has cleary lost a lot of it's mojo. They are not the MS of old. Sure they can still sink billions into products which have no market share till kingdom come but that may not be enough anymore. Alas MS has that luxury due their monopoly level profits on office and windows and other companies don't have that luxury. That's definately a disadvantage for any other company in IT. Still though MS is so incompetent that they are unable get SQL server to any better position then third place. They have to pay people to use IIS. I mean what does that say about them? Is that the mark of a juggernaut? I don't think so. I think it's a stink of desparation.
Finally I don't think MS has in it's heart to build products anymore. All they talk about is advertising. They are clearly in the process of transforming their company to be able to deliver advertising to windows users. I don't think things like cluster server are high priority at MS. It's just a last minute entry into the marketplace to try and halt the growth of Linux there. It won't work and MS just doesn't care all that much about it anyway.
In most corporations users don't need to (actually are prevented from) installing software and games. They mostly run some office software, email, browser and some internally written app (usually in java). Linux is perfectly fine for that.
"I might as well say OSS is actively trying to destroy the software industry. It's about as valid. "
I think this statement says more about you then anything I could say.
"Look, if you want to come across as anything more than yet another Slashdot Anti-Microsoft Zealot, you'll need to try an sound a little less like Chicken Little."
And if you want to come across as anything but an astro turfer or a shill you need to be a little more rational.
"I can't profess to keeping up with every little thing that Microsoft does, but a quick google returned this suggesting it went to the IETF to be ratified."
Means nothing. If MS refuses to implement it then it's dead. They have refused to implement it. Yet one more standard MS refuses to implement.
"No, I just don't have an irrational hatred of anything Microsoft does and a reasonable grasp on how the business world operates."
Once again I don't buy the argument that every company is evil. Clearly there are some companies that are more ethical then others. MS is amongst the worst.
"I think you will have a great deal of difficulty finding anything Microsoft have done that every other sizable company (software industry or otherwise) hasn't also done. "
Nonsense. Maytag, rockport, snapper, and thousands of other companies seem to be able to function without resorting to lying, cheating or stealing.
"Once again, your real enemy here is not Microsoft, it is the "content" companies."
"Your arguments would be more convincing if some of these things Microsoft does that are supposedly "evil" were elaborated upon."
I already said them. Ms is actively trying to destroy innovation in the IT industry. It's a plauge on the industry as a whole. SInce the entire world communicates and does business via the IT industry MS is harmful to the world. Look at how hard they tried and succeeded in killing SPF for example. There was no need to do that. They just wanted their own patent encumbered standard so they killed an open standard. That's just one example. There are a million more. If you are not aware of them then you are wilfully ignorant.
In addition to their activities which harm the industry they have actively lied, cheated and stole from their partners. All of them!. That's sleazy, unethical and yes evil. It's evil to say you are entering into a partnership and then steal technology and customers from the partner.
"Microsoft are lobbying the Government to prevent the sale or contruction of any computers that don't run Microsoft software ? "
Yes but not specific. They are lobbying the govt to mandate DRMed bioses which won't run trusted code.
"Now *that* would be something worth reading about."
I wouln't be too sure that the court is going to throw out anything. This court has bent over backwards for them. SCO has violated or ignored at least a half a dozen orders from this judge and has suffered no penalty at all. It looks to me like the this judge is eating out of their hands.
This is the american legal system. Anything is possible. The law is like the bible. There are so many words in there and so many things contradict each other that you can pick and choose the parts you like and see if you can get a judge to buy it. Judges are all overworked and can't keep up with their own cases anyway so if you have a halfway decent argument they will allow it. A judge doesn't really care about anything. They just want to get the thing over with or put it in front of a jury.
In the SCO case the judge has numerous times asked the lawyers to remind her what was going on, what her rulings were, etc. It's been going on so long nobody even remembers the claims of line by line copying and the fact that the GPL is unconstitutional.
"You are not able to see the world of moral difference between the US being in Iraq and Saddam killing his own people"
No I am not. In either case innocent people are killed. In either case the killing is done in order to put down an insurgency. In either case the insurgency exists because people are objecting to living under the rule of a superior army. In either case the ruling army has resorted to mass murders, bombing cities, gathering up people without charges or trials, and torture.
Nope not much of a difference at all.
"Really. Let me guess what your idea is of "take credit for the massacres, the murders, the tortures done by itslef": never ever go to war."
Aaaah the straw men. So handy for a republitard. Oh well since it's been so much fun exposing your republitude I will knock it down anyway. Try not to reach for it too much though OK? I know it's the only tool in Oreillys belt you should strive for better.
Certainly going to war over fun and profit are immoral activities and should be avoided. War should be a last resort. What did Asimov say? "violence is the last resort of the incompetent". This war was planned by worlfowitz and rumsfeld during the reagan administration. This is a wholly discretionary way waged in order to secure oil supplies, to indimidate russia, and to establish permanent military presense in the middle east. In other words it a war for profit and that's immoral.
Now I realize that America will never stop going to war, it can't help it self. It has to go to war every five to eight years, it's addicted to killing. The first thing it could do however is to admit that it has a problem. Just admit that we have conducted massacres, apalogize to the people we killed, and then say we will never do it again. That's how I would want my child to behave, that's how I would want my country to behave.
"Cause war never solved anything right?"
Ooops there goes that straw man again. Like I said put it down before you hurt yourself.
"The soldier who kills an innocent Iraqi during a fire fight with terrorists is not a fanatic. Get it?"
No I don't get it. Why was the soldier in somebody elses country in the first place? If they were not asked there then they don't belong there. Your analogy of the cop doesn't work either. A police force is a civillian authority entitled by law to enforce the laws. A soldier who is a member of an occupying force in an illegal war is not a cop.
"A fanatic is someone who is beyond reason."
All religious people are fanatics who are beyond reason. It's not reasonable to believe in god.
"There's no mainstream school in Islam today that has denounced violent jihad against non-believers."
None? Not even one? If I find one will you admit that you have no idea what you are talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you mandate open office or open document formats then there would be no problems with giving the occational user windows. In fact there should be a few copies of office so you can convert office documents to other formats anyway.
None of those things you mentioned are particularly innovative. They all have been around in lots of products and open source projects. By innovation I don't mean putting out a MS flavored implementation of some other technology. I mean something that is genuinely innovative.
Saying that vista has voice recognition when Mac has had for two years or that SQL server has a new indexing algorithm doesn't wash. Sorry.
Funny how the MS shills today are saying the same things the IBM shills were saying back then. I guess history repeats itself. Good to see lots of corporate shills still around though. God knows those corporations need defending from the unwashed linux users who are always mastubrating.
Yes but is it legal. You clicked on a EULA. What kind of a person does it make you when you enter into an agreement and then cheat. You bought windows and you agreed to a EULA. You agreed to a EULA when you downloaded the patch. Now you want to shirk on your part of the deal.
I think people who do this kind of thing or pirate windows or photoshop are the worst kind of cowards and scum. Be a man. Either live up to your word or ditch MS.
OK. Some ease of use too. All in exchange for freedom. Any takers?
Let's presume you are right. Let's presume that the telcos get together and back three hundred or so candidates all across the US to replace their lackeys. Do you think the replacements might be just a little more afraid of the voters then the current crop of lackeys? I think they would.
Yes. God forbid any information enters your brain that does not re-enforce your already held beliefs. You are much better off exclusivley watching fox news, reading free republic, and listening to Rush.
There is no sense in even coming near information or ideas that may contradict what your god and fox news says. Remember those liberal elite intellectual bloggers are probably french and most definately communists who hate america.
Let's make it easy. Vote our anybody who voted for it. That way you can get rid of virtually all the republicans and half the democrats.
Sounds like a good outcome to me.
Yes. You trade off some functionality and eye candy for freedom. Any takers?
"No offense, but you don't have the facts about MS R&D budget correct,"
It is you who has it wrong. Go check their latest filings with the SEC. You can lie to the press, you can lie to your customers, but you can't lie to the SEC and the shareholders.
"et alone know much about the people or the projects and what has come out of them or you wouldn't discount MS R&D so easily..."
Name five things that came out of MS reasearch in the last five years. Five things that are now MS products and are innovative. I dare you.
You have never worked with VS and yet you think it will be easier? Why?
Managers are not influenced by rationality, reason or facts. They are influenced by golf games, junkets, and gold watches. That's how MS wins business. See godaddy for example. MS paid godaddy to switch their parking to IIS.
Money talks and the CIOs love gold watches and golf junkets in Hawaii.
MS has been cutting their R&D budget to make it's numbers look better. It's a recent trend and it's not likely to reverse itself. MS profitability is suffering due to deep discounts it has to make to combat linux and due to the flattning of their stock price (MS makes a ton of money buying and selling it's own stock). At this point they can not allow their stock price to drop at all because it would set up a chain reaction spiraling their stock downward and sending their profits to hell.
In order to avoid that they are cutting R&D to make their numbers look good.
It's a good tactic. It's not like their R&D has produced anything in the last five years anyway. Every product they have introduced in the last 10 years has been either an aquisition or a me too product. The research dept at MS is a wasteland where smart and talented people go to retire. The purpose of that dept is not to innovate, it's to remove smart people from the market.
you have presented the MS argument masterfully. Are you a professional PR person? Do you work for a PR or ad agency? I suspect you do.
Anyway your points are not really that relevent because they are not that true. HPC applications tend to be very complex. They are not the types of applications you are likely to trust to a bunch of VS monkeys who draw GUIs with bound controls and call it an application. As for administration there is a mountain of evidence that Nix administration is cheaper then MS administration. Studies have shown that the average linux admin administers significantly more amchines then your average windows admin. They may cost more but they admin more servers. Studies have also shown that windows shops tend to have more servers per user then unix shops and that unix servers tend to run more applications per server.
Ask anybody who has done both and they will tell you. It's much easier to maintain a mass of unix servers then a mass of windows servers. Have ever tried to back up a bunch of windows server? Try doing it without spending ten thousand dollars.
While MS has had success with it's servers it has not been able to achieve the same monopoly status in that market that is has on the desktop and the office software markets. Since then they have tried repetedly to attain dominance in other markets by dumping software for free, forcing downloads with windows, paying customers to use them etc. Despite all that they have not been able to get better then third place in anything. Xbox, SQL server, sharepoint, great plains (what ever it's called now), their CRM software, etc are doing at best third place in the market. Other products have been utter failures MSN, MS at work, webtv, money, works, and several other web sites which they have ditched all got shot down in flames after sucking up tons of money.
MS has cleary lost a lot of it's mojo. They are not the MS of old. Sure they can still sink billions into products which have no market share till kingdom come but that may not be enough anymore. Alas MS has that luxury due their monopoly level profits on office and windows and other companies don't have that luxury. That's definately a disadvantage for any other company in IT. Still though MS is so incompetent that they are unable get SQL server to any better position then third place. They have to pay people to use IIS. I mean what does that say about them? Is that the mark of a juggernaut? I don't think so. I think it's a stink of desparation.
Finally I don't think MS has in it's heart to build products anymore. All they talk about is advertising. They are clearly in the process of transforming their company to be able to deliver advertising to windows users. I don't think things like cluster server are high priority at MS. It's just a last minute entry into the marketplace to try and halt the growth of Linux there. It won't work and MS just doesn't care all that much about it anyway.
"but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively,' "
So the MS solution is cheaper then linux and easier to use the Mac clusters? I don't think so.
Ms is the "me too!" guy from the usenet. Everytime anybody else comes up with something Ms comes in afterwards and says "Me too!".
In most corporations users don't need to (actually are prevented from) installing software and games. They mostly run some office software, email, browser and some internally written app (usually in java). Linux is perfectly fine for that.
"I might as well say OSS is actively trying to destroy the software industry. It's about as valid. "
I think this statement says more about you then anything I could say.
"Look, if you want to come across as anything more than yet another Slashdot Anti-Microsoft Zealot, you'll need to try an sound a little less like Chicken Little."
And if you want to come across as anything but an astro turfer or a shill you need to be a little more rational.
"I can't profess to keeping up with every little thing that Microsoft does, but a quick google returned this suggesting it went to the IETF to be ratified."
Means nothing. If MS refuses to implement it then it's dead. They have refused to implement it. Yet one more standard MS refuses to implement.
"No, I just don't have an irrational hatred of anything Microsoft does and a reasonable grasp on how the business world operates."
Once again I don't buy the argument that every company is evil. Clearly there are some companies that are more ethical then others. MS is amongst the worst.
"I think you will have a great deal of difficulty finding anything Microsoft have done that every other sizable company (software industry or otherwise) hasn't also done. "
Nonsense. Maytag, rockport, snapper, and thousands of other companies seem to be able to function without resorting to lying, cheating or stealing.
"Once again, your real enemy here is not Microsoft, it is the "content" companies."
Closely allied with MS.
If they didn't move to Linux they would have moved to windows or Mac (well windows actually). So in a way that's 12000 desktops that MS lost.
And since when is deployment of 12000 desktops not evidence that linux is ready for the desktop? It's on the deskops right?
"Your arguments would be more convincing if some of these things Microsoft does that are supposedly "evil" were elaborated upon."
I already said them. Ms is actively trying to destroy innovation in the IT industry. It's a plauge on the industry as a whole. SInce the entire world communicates and does business via the IT industry MS is harmful to the world. Look at how hard they tried and succeeded in killing SPF for example. There was no need to do that. They just wanted their own patent encumbered standard so they killed an open standard. That's just one example. There are a million more. If you are not aware of them then you are wilfully ignorant.
In addition to their activities which harm the industry they have actively lied, cheated and stole from their partners. All of them!. That's sleazy, unethical and yes evil. It's evil to say you are entering into a partnership and then steal technology and customers from the partner.
"Microsoft are lobbying the Government to prevent the sale or contruction of any computers that don't run Microsoft software ? "
Yes but not specific. They are lobbying the govt to mandate DRMed bioses which won't run trusted code.
"Now *that* would be something worth reading about."
Google is your friend.
Most slashdotters wouldn't join a movement no matter what it was.
I wouln't be too sure that the court is going to throw out anything. This court has bent over backwards for them. SCO has violated or ignored at least a half a dozen orders from this judge and has suffered no penalty at all. It looks to me like the this judge is eating out of their hands.
"Wealthy Old White Men Reject Yet Another Form Of Equality." "
That should read "wealthy old white REPUBLICAN men reject another form of equality". It was a party line vote.
This is the american legal system. Anything is possible. The law is like the bible. There are so many words in there and so many things contradict each other that you can pick and choose the parts you like and see if you can get a judge to buy it. Judges are all overworked and can't keep up with their own cases anyway so if you have a halfway decent argument they will allow it. A judge doesn't really care about anything. They just want to get the thing over with or put it in front of a jury.
In the SCO case the judge has numerous times asked the lawyers to remind her what was going on, what her rulings were, etc. It's been going on so long nobody even remembers the claims of line by line copying and the fact that the GPL is unconstitutional.
"You are not able to see the world of moral difference between the US being in Iraq and Saddam killing his own people"
No I am not. In either case innocent people are killed. In either case the killing is done in order to put down an insurgency. In either case the insurgency exists because people are objecting to living under the rule of a superior army. In either case the ruling army has resorted to mass murders, bombing cities, gathering up people without charges or trials, and torture.
Nope not much of a difference at all.
"Really. Let me guess what your idea is of "take credit for the massacres, the murders, the tortures done by itslef": never ever go to war."
Aaaah the straw men. So handy for a republitard. Oh well since it's been so much fun exposing your republitude I will knock it down anyway. Try not to reach for it too much though OK? I know it's the only tool in Oreillys belt you should strive for better.
Certainly going to war over fun and profit are immoral activities and should be avoided. War should be a last resort. What did Asimov say? "violence is the last resort of the incompetent". This war was planned by worlfowitz and rumsfeld during the reagan administration. This is a wholly discretionary way waged in order to secure oil supplies, to indimidate russia, and to establish permanent military presense in the middle east. In other words it a war for profit and that's immoral.
Now I realize that America will never stop going to war, it can't help it self. It has to go to war every five to eight years, it's addicted to killing. The first thing it could do however is to admit that it has a problem. Just admit that we have conducted massacres, apalogize to the people we killed, and then say we will never do it again. That's how I would want my child to behave, that's how I would want my country to behave.
"Cause war never solved anything right?"
Ooops there goes that straw man again. Like I said put it down before you hurt yourself.
"The soldier who kills an innocent Iraqi during a fire fight with terrorists is not a fanatic. Get it?"
No I don't get it. Why was the soldier in somebody elses country in the first place? If they were not asked there then they don't belong there. Your analogy of the cop doesn't work either. A police force is a civillian authority entitled by law to enforce the laws. A soldier who is a member of an occupying force in an illegal war is not a cop.
"A fanatic is someone who is beyond reason."
All religious people are fanatics who are beyond reason. It's not reasonable to believe in god.
"There's no mainstream school in Islam today that has denounced violent jihad against non-believers."
None? Not even one? If I find one will you admit that you have no idea what you are talking about?