Evidently, the courts disagree with your definition of a monopoly. Being a monopoly is not illegal, being an abusive monopoly is. Interesting that you should bring up selling at a loss or giving away products. MS killed Netscape by giving away a browser, and-because a browser was Netscape's only real product-MS succeeded in killing them. Not satisfied with being able to kill them by giving a browser away, they also used coercion on OEMs to keep them from even loading Netscape on new computers.
Nor is that all, they used the same tactics to keep WordPerfect and Lotus off of new computers. That cost me hundreds of dollars on my first computer. Their "big-hearted giveaways" cost me that money. MS also supplied developers working for rivals with phony specs for Windows, and strangely enough, those competitors' products had a tendency to crash. They are still being sued over that.
If your heart is still bleeding for poor oppressed, downtrodden, paragon-of-sweetness-and-light MS, why don't you send them all your paychecks for the next 10 years. Bill's dogs will probably appreciate tha extra caviar.
You must be dreaming. One of Daryl's lawyers is Bret Hatch. Bret Hatch is Orrin Hatch's son. Orrin Hatch is a U.S. senator from Utah. Darlie et al. could be clubbing old ladies for their Social Security checks in broad daylight. Nothing will happen. Zero, zilch, nada, nichts, nil. Orrin and Billy will take protect their spawn.
As the parent say further down, if none of the above wins, the ofiice should go unfilled until there is a real winner. Better still, those who lose to "None of the Above" should be barred from running for ANY office for 4 to 10 years.
They are still supporting MS-Windows, evil or not. They could easily have made it cross-platform but chose not to. Wonder how much M$ spends to keep Aussie politicos and bureaucrats "informed."
Maybe the so-called IT "press" was in on it. Most of the alleged IT "press" seems to be nothing more than MS sock puppets, ad-servers, lapdogs, and "yes men" and no more. Care to bet your mortgage payment they're not getting payola?
A community of users who actually give a rat's ass about other users. That's the difference I've seen among BSD and Linux users that I don't ever remember encountering in the in the Windows world. There was some among DOS users, but not like what I've found among *nix users.
By the way, thanks to all you Windows & MAC fanatics for the amusing [not-quite] flamewars. You made my last hour.
No they can't. They will never rest until they OWN everthing. Every phone, every house, every bank, every farm... ultimately every last soul on earth. Opressive tyrants can never rest.
Interesting reflections. Reminds me of the old(?) saw about time being God's/the Universe's way of keeping everything from happening at once! Hope you get modded up.
You are so right about using directories. How to create dirs, sub-dirs etc. were among the first things I was taught. I have little or no problem finding what I'm looking for despite having about 15 years accumulation of documents. Never have used "MyDocuments" or whatever that rubbish-pile is called.
Crap like this is a good reason to flush cookies down the electron-toilet. I think I'll start visting random sites before going to Amazon & clicking random stuff while there. Let them crunch that!
Open Office already can; at least on Debian. Opened a wpd of circa 396KB (92 pages) lots of complex, heavily formatted tables. WP versions 6-12 have essentially the same basic format. Supposedly MS Word can open a WP 6 doc? I still have my [bought from Borland] copy of WP 6.0c for DOS. I used it regularly until WP 9 had been out for about a year. Killer word-processor!
MS fans are nothing if not devoted lapdogs. Lets see now: Mac O/S-- who cares? Linux--who cares? BSD-O/Ss--who cares? Munich--who cares? Brazil--who cares?... China--who cares? Norway--who cares?
That's peachy by me. Enjoy your shrinking world. Keep an eye on those horizons, though... they can pack a mean wallop. Not that one! It'll be the one you are not looking at.
ox is fairly decent here (Gulf Coast; with nothing else to caomape them with I'm inclined to guess 8.5. They're 2/3s or 1/2 the price of the local DSL.. My downloads may be over 510 Kbyte/sec; much depends on the distant server. Good spam filtering & what theirs doesn't get, SpamAssassin does. No one seems to know zip about Linux, although Netcraft indicates they are on Solaris. Thus far, haven't needed tech support. Knock on wood..twice...three times.
I don't know where you live, but here in NW Florida, the developers own the governments and the newspaper. They constantly claim that they bought stuff in "good faith" assuming they'd be allowed to do what they damn well please with it, regardless of the effect it has on others and they threaten to sue everyone in sight if they are not allowed to. And this usually works for them.
We are within 10 to 20 years of a situation where ordinary people like myself will have no legal access to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico save where public parks front it (and there are smear campaigns against them). Last Sunday's paper had a number of [shill?] letters to the editor claiming that landowners own the beach out into the water (the law says to the average high tide line--for now) and should be able to deny people access. Their attitude/position was that if you can't afford to own beachfront property, you are a nothing. Were it not for Eglin Air Force base which owns most of Okaloosa/Santa Rosa Island, there would only be a few hundred meters of public access in the 50-odd mile stretch between Pensacola and Destin, aside from the parks. "Curiously" anti-Eglin letters have been showing up in the papers here, too.
As if the govermnment would hold them accountable for fraud. They were convicted of being an abusive monopoly. So what? Their "punishment" was to make more copies of Office available, i.e. spread the infection, and for a few cents a CD... So what?
Microsoft has learned that they are not accountable for anything they do. John W. Campbell, the now-deceased editor of Analog magazine hit it dead on: It's not power that corrupts, if it did, God would be the ultimate in corruption. It's immunity that corrupts and absolute immunity corrupts absolutely. [my paraphrase~30+yrs later] Microsoft is absolutely immune. Go figure.
I followed in the link in the middle of your post and there it says:
"No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein.
There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform to the Specification."
I'm no lawyer, but what's quoted above seems to negate the idea that you have a liscence to use the specification.
These's also another link to some legal page.
Then you will be overjoyed when your home is taken from you and the property turned over to a developer who sells it for twice as much? Find yourself some place where you can sell yourself into slavery... and do it.
This is horrible: it opens the floodgates to the mass appropriation of private homes to benefit the wealthy and powerful. ready, set, steal...profit!
Choice. Choice is the point. There's really no point in dethroning one tyrannical despot only to replace it with another despot, however benign it may be.
At the moment OO-w does better than K-Write with big (over 250K) WordPerfect documents, which I have to be able to open at home. That may change with K-Office 1.4, & if so I'll be able to choose to use it, instead. Either way, at the moment, I don't have to pollute this box with Windows, just to be able to edit a wpd. Competition is grand!
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Evidently, the courts disagree with your definition of a monopoly. Being a monopoly is not illegal, being an abusive monopoly is. Interesting that you should bring up selling at a loss or giving away products. MS killed Netscape by giving away a browser, and-because a browser was Netscape's only real product-MS succeeded in killing them. Not satisfied with being able to kill them by giving a browser away, they also used coercion on OEMs to keep them from even loading Netscape on new computers.
Nor is that all, they used the same tactics to keep WordPerfect and Lotus off of new computers. That cost me hundreds of dollars on my first computer. Their "big-hearted giveaways" cost me that money. MS also supplied developers working for rivals with phony specs for Windows, and strangely enough, those competitors' products had a tendency to crash. They are still being sued over that.
If your heart is still bleeding for poor oppressed, downtrodden, paragon-of-sweetness-and-light MS, why don't you send them all your paychecks for the next 10 years. Bill's dogs will probably appreciate tha extra caviar.
You must be dreaming. One of Daryl's lawyers is Bret Hatch. Bret Hatch is Orrin Hatch's son. Orrin Hatch is a U.S. senator from Utah. Darlie et al. could be clubbing old ladies for their Social Security checks in broad daylight. Nothing will happen. Zero, zilch, nada, nichts, nil. Orrin and Billy will take protect their spawn.
As the parent say further down, if none of the above wins, the ofiice should go unfilled until there is a real winner. Better still, those who lose to "None of the Above" should be barred from running for ANY office for 4 to 10 years.
I can't put "trust" and "Microsoft" together:
If Microsoft = true, then trust = false.
They are still supporting MS-Windows, evil or not. They could easily have made it cross-platform but chose not to. Wonder how much M$ spends to keep Aussie politicos and bureaucrats "informed."
Good luck, pal. We need it. Looks ugly. From Ft. Walton Beach
Maybe the so-called IT "press" was in on it. Most of the alleged IT "press" seems to be nothing more than MS sock puppets, ad-servers, lapdogs, and "yes men" and no more. Care to bet your mortgage payment they're not getting payola?
A community of users who actually give a rat's ass about other users. That's the difference I've seen among BSD and Linux users that I don't ever remember encountering in the in the Windows world. There was some among DOS users, but not like what I've found among *nix users.
By the way, thanks to all you Windows & MAC fanatics for the amusing [not-quite] flamewars. You made my last hour.
when they own everything, there won't be any competition.
No they can't. They will never rest until they OWN everthing. Every phone, every house, every bank, every farm... ultimately every last soul on earth. Opressive tyrants can never rest.
Interesting reflections. Reminds me of the old(?) saw about time being God's/the Universe's way of keeping everything from happening at once! Hope you get modded up.
You are so right about using directories. How to create dirs, sub-dirs etc. were among the first things I was taught. I have little or no problem finding what I'm looking for despite having about 15 years accumulation of documents. Never have used "MyDocuments" or whatever that rubbish-pile is called.
Crap like this is a good reason to flush cookies down the electron-toilet. I think I'll start visting random sites before going to Amazon & clicking random stuff while there. Let them crunch that!
So if I patent thinking, you won't mind being lobotomized to avoid infringing my patent. After all, it would just be sour grapes to object. Yes?
Open Office already can; at least on Debian. Opened a wpd of circa 396KB (92 pages) lots of complex, heavily formatted tables. WP versions 6-12 have essentially the same basic format. Supposedly MS Word can open a WP 6 doc? I still have my [bought from Borland] copy of WP 6.0c for DOS. I used it regularly until WP 9 had been out for about a year. Killer word-processor!
MS fans are nothing if not devoted lapdogs. Lets see now: Mac O/S-- who cares? Linux--who cares? BSD-O/Ss--who cares? Munich--who cares? Brazil--who cares? ... China--who cares? Norway--who cares?
... they can pack a mean wallop.
That's peachy by me. Enjoy your shrinking world. Keep an eye on those horizons, though
Not that one! It'll be the one you are not looking at.
ox is fairly decent here (Gulf Coast; with nothing else to caomape them with I'm inclined to guess 8.5. They're 2/3s or 1/2 the price of the local DSL.. My downloads may be over 510 Kbyte/sec; much depends on the distant server. Good spam filtering & what theirs doesn't get, SpamAssassin does. No one seems to know zip about Linux, although Netcraft indicates they are on Solaris. Thus far, haven't needed tech support. Knock on wood..twice...three times.
I don't know where you live, but here in NW Florida, the developers own the governments and the newspaper. They constantly claim that they bought stuff in "good faith" assuming they'd be allowed to do what they damn well please with it, regardless of the effect it has on others and they threaten to sue everyone in sight if they are not allowed to. And this usually works for them.
We are within 10 to 20 years of a situation where ordinary people like myself will have no legal access to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico save where public parks front it (and there are smear campaigns against them). Last Sunday's paper had a number of [shill?] letters to the editor claiming that landowners own the beach out into the water (the law says to the average high tide line--for now) and should be able to deny people access. Their attitude/position was that if you can't afford to own beachfront property, you are a nothing. Were it not for Eglin Air Force base which owns most of Okaloosa/Santa Rosa Island, there would only be a few hundred meters of public access in the 50-odd mile stretch between Pensacola and Destin, aside from the parks. "Curiously" anti-Eglin letters have been showing up in the papers here, too.
As if the govermnment would hold them accountable for fraud. They were convicted of being an abusive monopoly. So what? Their "punishment" was to make more copies of Office available, i.e. spread the infection, and for a few cents a CD... So what?
Microsoft has learned that they are not accountable for anything they do. John W. Campbell, the now-deceased editor of Analog magazine hit it dead on: It's not power that corrupts, if it did, God would be the ultimate in corruption. It's immunity that corrupts and absolute immunity corrupts absolutely. [my paraphrase~30+yrs later] Microsoft is absolutely immune. Go figure.
I followed in the link in the middle of your post and there it says:
"No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein. There is a separate patent license available to parties interested in implementing software programs that can read and write files that conform to the Specification."
I'm no lawyer, but what's quoted above seems to negate the idea that you have a liscence to use the specification. These's also another link to some legal page.
Warning. Warning. Warning. Sounds like a clear warning that they are going to have a loaded gun ready to blast any GPL developers.
Then you will be overjoyed when your home is taken from you and the property turned over to a developer who sells it for twice as much? Find yourself some place where you can sell yourself into slavery ... and do it.
...profit!
This is horrible: it opens the floodgates to the mass appropriation of private homes to benefit the wealthy and powerful. ready, set, steal
Choice. Choice is the point. There's really no point in dethroning one tyrannical despot only to replace it with another despot, however benign it may be.
At the moment OO-w does better than K-Write with big (over 250K) WordPerfect documents, which I have to be able to open at home. That may change with K-Office 1.4, & if so I'll be able to choose to use it, instead. Either way, at the moment, I don't have to pollute this box with Windows, just to be able to edit a wpd. Competition is grand!
Well said.
Most Linux GUI software isn't usable from the command line
Oh really? I started this browser (Galeon)--from a terminal shell, e.g Konsole, on KDE.