It would take like 3 Months if deal happened to get this message at Flickr, Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo "For the best Flickr (or whatever) experience install Silverlight now" and there would be a "bug"(!) preventing it to remember user rejected it. Call me paranoid? Well, it is what happens to Mac users if they browse Microsoft site. of course, Linux users would need "Moonlight alpha zero 0.0005" with a special Novell license.
I don't say people should sue them but we gotta find a way to stop Flash card manufacturers using the same trick.
Their sizes are much more lower such as MicroSD card (2GB) I purchased for my Nokia E65. Device says: Capacity=1920 MB . I wonder if that high end card manufacturer would go out of business if they shipped it as 2048 MB. They already sell it more expensive and people like me who got horrified already by the filesytem in use (FAT16!) buys them to make extra sure. At least to get spared from bad memory block problems.
If you didn't know already, Memory manufacturers started same trick via SD business.
Well, if history didn't happen and users would install anything to view anything in convenience of Flash, I would choose Real Networks servers (Helix) and Realvideo/Audio architecture with fallback/alternative as pure mp4 advanced profile.
Sadly it doesn't happen. You should see the feedback I got because I went with only mpeg 4 standard Quicktime files. I had to add "Flash Video" option and the quality is incomparable low compared to my mpeg 4s. Note that I can't enable ASP features 3ivx (my commercial mpeg4 provides) because that JUNK, Apple provides can't play them (Quicktime plugin) while a Sony PSP, a dumb game console with limited memory/CPU happily plays them.
There are standards and a "de facto" standard. Sadly, FLV became de-facto. I was just pointing it out.
Well, it seems everyone including Apple co-founder happily browsed that site and purchased their updates.
Anti Javascript etc. are so 90s if you ask me. Profile of your userbase matters. If you code an entire Application in Flash/Flex, you don't really CARE about bunch of lifeless idiots who tries to be different by turning off javascript on a legit site.
Turning off Javascript like things are basically non existent on OS X community and the Windows profile that kind of application serves to. Also, you would even call FBI about the webmaster since with a single click, you install Air Framework AND the Application same time. Oh the humanity! It should come as a tar.bz2 file, tar -xvzf to home directory and run as./earthbrowser --display-gui I think!
Check http://www.earthbrowser.com/ . An application dates back to MacOS 9 days. Matt Giger, single author of it upgraded to version 3 and it runs on both Windows and OS X without a single glitch. It was originally a C application, it was converted to Adobe AIR and the day Linux has a stable Adobe AIR (soon I think), it is also automatically shipped to Linux/FreeBSD.
That is the opportunity Sun missed with their Webstart/Java. People and industry looks at results, not promises. You can ship a full feature commercial application RIGHT NOW using Adobe AIR Framework. Most of your customers (like me) will be amazed at the fact that it uses LESS CPU compared to "real" previous version.
If they don't make stupid mistakes, Adobe also has a full feature multimedia player/content downloader which also perfectly works both on Windows and OS X. It will be huge in couple of months. http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/ . It is -of course- possible thanks to Adobe AIR. Needless to say, it is also automatically shipped to Linux when Adobe Air for Linux stable ships.
What did Silverlight do except bribing to some known figures to promise outdated versions emulator or abusing the panic state of Nokia? Right, Nokia says they will ship Silverlight too but everyone who is experienced on handheld/PDA knows that just by shipping a framework, you don't guarantee people who will code for it or use it. Why would established Flash developer use it instead of using Flash Lite which will be in third generation soon?
I got Silverlight on my Virtual PC 7 running XP SP2. I almost felt sad for Microsoft, shipping as a "optional windows update" with a "KB" number? Sigh.
As a side, cautionary note, Silverlight adds a potential security issue to Mac OS X since it installs as User 502 which people always use as secondary, "non admin" account. Hope they fixed it. That is MS for you and no, I am not confusing it with MS Office 08 bug.
Actually VP6 and 7, Sorenson Spark are very high end codecs. Youtube's problem was (deliberately?) encoding video like junk with horrible settings and the original's horrible quality as it is ripped from TV (already compressed), low end DV camera without colour correction.
The big issue was the Sorenson and On2 being big time MS Lapdogs and never offering any real solution except Windows market. Truth to be said, they are not bad quality codecs. Check their reference pages (demos etc.) to see what they actually are.
In fact, current quality/bandwidth/multiplatform champion is Realvideo 10 and it is MPEG4 based too. Of course it is a bit hard to convince user to install it even while Real gives whole thing (except codecs) as open source. You know, history haunting.
I think you better check real World. I am telling as a person who had to convert (keeping originals) hundreds of Quicktime Mov files to Flash to give option to people who refuses to install anything to view videos. Of course I keep the original Quicktime Mpeg4 files on site.
Multimedia vendors need to make sure their application/plugin supports Flash (FLV) giving more performance, quality and additional options than original Flash player to stay relevant. It seems only Real Networks figured this fact with their Realplayer 11 which supports easy downloading of FLV content.
Too late for who? 1% of market? People actually started to ask Sony, Philips to add FLV video options for their high end/connected TVs. The big "iPhone no Flash" debate actually is "iPhone no Flash Youtube" debate, Apple paid a lot to Youtube to temporarily silence their consumers but yet iPhone flash would be hit. What kind of market you speak about?
I wished Apple, Real Networks, Microsoft and to some degree open source guys weren't that stupid and didn't make 1994's "Download huge embedded single file to act like streaming" FLV a de-facto standard and we were using UDP/RTSP/Bandwidth switching actual media plugins now but it didn't happen. Apple still puts that God damn blue icon to taskbar, pushes Safari to unsuspecting users, Microsoft still doesn't ship a God damn player to any OS rather than Windows and Real Networks still makes people afraid to install their player. On the other hand, Adobe Flash, 1.1 MB single click download for ALL OS. Enough said.
Just had "Update" window at 1Password.app , a shareware, 2 guys coded password manager which is practically all browser support (except Opera). It is not from $billion Paypal/Ebay empire.
"The most notable improvements is a new Change Password window to make updating online password easy, as well as enhanced Anti-Phishing integration with PhishTank."
See? That was what I mean to Paypal or anyone with billions of dollars in hand and thousands of IT personnel. 2 Guys from Canada who are in fact new to OS X (coming from J2EE land) can do it.
Especially Phishtank is so reachable that their people (who runs OpenDNS) replies to my personal mails.
Think about something else, isn't a full feature extension mechanism like Firefox which has full access to user home dir/browser data a security risk? Certify? Apple? Can you imagine the feedback against them? They get flamed for enabling services functionality, their (and NeXT) OWN invention on web pages by some lifeless nerds.
""there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed"
He must be on "something" to claim something like that.
If I were you, I would advertise them in every opportunity. The only thing which would teach those ISPs is losing customers to another, good ISP. Do you believe they didn't know thousands of people are actively tracing their connections via plugin? They knew. They didn't care. The only thing that would drive them to panic is losing those sheep (for them) customers to a good, small ISP. Would it work? See what happened to AOL when they messed with their customers too much.
If they really care about degraded user experience and shape traffic, why don't they find the bandwidth of a normal, good Youtube performance (around 1024-1536 kbps) and filter the Youtube traffic stopping people from leeching 20 videos at once with that backwards, http system? If my ISP does traffic shaping, I demand them to shape Youtube junk. If people wants to stream things, there are better things since 1994 like UDP/RTSP/Bandwidth Switching actual media players/plugins.
They are horrified about another thing. You can ship a 4,2 GB (or more) HDTV 1080p movie over Vuze.com or Bittorrent without needing their overpriced dedicated server farms. The reliability thanks to thousands of seeds is excellent too. Who would buy their insane priced dedicated corporate lines if people get better performance over free P2P using the idle bandwidth?
For example, there is non DRM but WMV "Sanctuary" HDTV series on Vuze.com. What kind of mega price they would pay if they dared to ship it via ordinary http? If I was ISP, I would see the P2P as doom for my OC-192 etc. lines.
These guys are ISPs and they certainly know there is a huge, legal (and paid, real money!) traffic via Bittorrent.com , Vuze.com and of course GNU etc. software. They must have heard about the plugin too.
If they dare to send RST packets, intervene with users connection... One wonders what ELSE they could dare to do or already do? Profiling comes to mind.
Well here are facts. One of least popular (if popular at all) extensions for firefox is the EV certificate thing. They (Verisign) couldn't even make it work right. Phishing prevention is one thing, selling your soul to Google and send them every single URL (including the page part) you visit is another. There are Paypal phishing pages which are up for DAYS as you can see from http://www.phishtank.com/ which they (as they are mega corp) can call the countries police chief directly from his home phone and get site raided. If you get thousands of dollars stolen from your paypal recorded CC (never do it!) your support mail ends up in some typing/template monkey at Bangalore.
Also, another fact: Never, ever call a system default browser insecure if you are CTO of a high profile company like Paypal. Get the damned source from www.webkit.org , code and mail/call Apple "We think Safari would be better with EV certificate checking, here is the code you can review internally."
I have never seen a thing like that. Macintosh community hates them so much after that disastrous stupid statement that I STILL get new message alerts after 2 months as people keep commenting how stupid they are, Verisign bribed them, MS lapdog, eBay is scam.
This is a OS that loads ocsp on startup to check the SSL certs at core OS level: Apr 22 09:07:29 quad/usr/sbin/ocspd[1735]: starting (system.log)
EV matters? How much it cost to a commercial site at size of Paypal? Does Paypal feel their consumers are insecure instead of using FREE data from community powered services like http://www.phishtank.com/ ? Post a job listing for Cocoa/Carbon, Objective C developer. Cough some money and distribute your plugin. Don't use "No XUL" as excuse, it is easy to watch current URL on Safari. ICQ from 2003 can still read it.
They have lost the number 1 weapon for pushing people to new upgrade OS. Games. People who got real sick of their directx tricks, ATI/Nvidia gang scheme, Intel have all moved to consoles and they keep on moving.
They said "DirectX 10 can only work on Vista", people found a way to hack it to install it to XP. Rest didn't care and purchased a console which is guaranteed to work for at least 5 years or more with same performance.
Wonder if they will dare to make new Office "Vista only"?
I am sure Norway guy is not stupid. He knows a huge, monstrous and Govt. shaking scandal is just about to happen and tries to get himself out by putting the blame on a single bureaucrat.
It won't be that easy, that decision has a potential to disband whole ISO or setting up a new standards body for IT. Lets not forget the huge prices MS will have to pay if someone (will sure!) finds their link in all of this.
It is not only RMS/Open Source nerds they messed with. They messed with Big Blue and Sun. They really know how these govt. things work.
I got 3 macs running at my home including a Quad G5, all my devices are purchased with Apple compatibility in mind and I don't plan to buy iPhone since it is absurdly stupid to pay $600 to a device you will have to hack.
My Nokia E65's (Symbian S60) applications comes from Sourceforge (half of them) or they rely on open source like Apache/Python (Nokia webserver). Not like they are trying to stop me, they actually PUSH user to download and try new things (via Download! menu on root).
When I tell these facts, like your joke, I am called an Apple hater by people probably never paid for OS X or iLife which are things done in right way. Your +5 funny comment is not a joke unfortunately.
I am sad that iPhone with that management gang who decides these things will never be a true mobile computing revolution. That is all. I suggested iPhone to people who are only into basic things like multimedia but after figuring there is a huge multimedia application market for Symbian and WinCE, I took that suggestion back too. What if they want to watch XVid/Divx on their devices? Or play Ogg/Flac?
John Gruber of Daringfireball.net has said about the letter: "This is the white collar equivalent of Steve Ballmer showing up at Yahoo's door with a baseball bat in his hand."
Putting icons to users desktop and tricking users by Start menu didn't work well for MSN. Yahoo won because people have chosen it, not by a trap, by actually going to www.yahoo.com or getting their toolbar (as opt-in) from toolbar.yahoo.com . They have chosen Yahoo because it promises a minimal configuration need which definitely won't "punish" you for not using Windows OS.
AOL purchased Netscape just for home.netscape.com start page for $5 billion. What happened when they made Browser irrelevant? People basically changed their homepage. People aren't that stupid.
Web services needs user trust, especially for private data. There are people who rejects to validated their paid Windows and live with consequences since they don't trust to Microsoft, even a byte of their data.
Trust is earned thing, nobody can buy it. When MS purchases Yahoo and puts a minimum size "Microsoft" to end of page, trust is erased immediately. They gamble on people being stupid and ignorant, people have slightly opened their eyes. Their gamble didn't work in 1998 when they purchased Hotmail, why would it work in 2008? We could be without Yahoo account in months of time but a non working $40+ Billion agreement could be the last mistake of Microsoft. They can't afford that mistake. It is not a dotcom web 2.0 startup, it is $40 billion Yahoo.
It is very basic for me, the day the agreement voted "Yes", I will cancel/purge my account at Yahoo which I created when MS acquired Hotmail.
I know what will happen and I invite everyone to look for other options. It doesn't have to be Google. It won't be Google for me for example.
There are a huge amount of people like me, even completely non technical Yahoo mail "Plus" owners. They have chosen Yahoo not because they know FreeBSD or PHP, they have chosen because it is not Microsoft. For 10 years, I have seen the "free yahoo mail" down like 1-2 times at most.
Slashdot Mirror
It would take like 3 Months if deal happened to get this message at Flickr, Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo
"For the best Flickr (or whatever) experience install Silverlight now" and there would be a "bug"(!) preventing it to remember user rejected it. Call me paranoid? Well, it is what happens to Mac users if they browse Microsoft site.
of course, Linux users would need "Moonlight alpha zero 0.0005" with a special Novell license.
I don't say people should sue them but we gotta find a way to stop Flash card manufacturers using the same trick.
Their sizes are much more lower such as MicroSD card (2GB) I purchased for my Nokia E65. Device says: Capacity=1920 MB . I wonder if that high end card manufacturer would go out of business if they shipped it as 2048 MB. They already sell it more expensive and people like me who got horrified already by the filesytem in use (FAT16!) buys them to make extra sure. At least to get spared from bad memory block problems.
If you didn't know already, Memory manufacturers started same trick via SD business.
Well, if history didn't happen and users would install anything to view anything in convenience of Flash, I would choose Real Networks servers (Helix) and Realvideo/Audio architecture with fallback/alternative as pure mp4 advanced profile.
Sadly it doesn't happen. You should see the feedback I got because I went with only mpeg 4 standard Quicktime files. I had to add "Flash Video" option and the quality is incomparable low compared to my mpeg 4s. Note that I can't enable ASP features 3ivx (my commercial mpeg4 provides) because that JUNK, Apple provides can't play them (Quicktime plugin) while a Sony PSP, a dumb game console with limited memory/CPU happily plays them.
There are standards and a "de facto" standard. Sadly, FLV became de-facto. I was just pointing it out.
I am sure the respected and serious RBLs are waiting for the very first spam "cloud" from that IP block to add it to their list.
Also security companies must have noted the IP block too (not to forget Govt. agencies all over the World).
That IP block is already worthless if you ask me.
Well, it seems everyone including Apple co-founder happily browsed that site and purchased their updates.
./earthbrowser --display-gui I think!
Anti Javascript etc. are so 90s if you ask me. Profile of your userbase matters. If you code an entire Application in Flash/Flex, you don't really CARE about bunch of lifeless idiots who tries to be different by turning off javascript on a legit site.
Turning off Javascript like things are basically non existent on OS X community and the Windows profile that kind of application serves to. Also, you would even call FBI about the webmaster since with a single click, you install Air Framework AND the Application same time. Oh the humanity! It should come as a tar.bz2 file, tar -xvzf to home directory and run as
If they say KDE copied OS X because it supports OS X Widgets, you can tell them about this page:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-widgets-specification-1-0/#acknowledgments
"The specification for the widget object builds on Apple's [Dashboard] reference."
IMHO if everyone agrees on one specification, doesn't re-invent their own standard, Widgets _will be_ huge. They aren't huge because of anarchy yet.
I can tell what people did copy. Xerox. Of course, in MS case, it was like copy of copy so it sucked.
Yes, but they are archaic (Video 3). In fact, those junk codecs prevented Quicktime video to take off.
I thought there would be Spark codec. Industry standard codecs always have at least a Quicktime Export plugin. Spark never had it.
People moving to H264 on Flash and it doesn't even make On2 guys to ship a VPC7 encoder plugin for Quicktime too.
Check http://www.earthbrowser.com/ . An application dates back to MacOS 9 days. Matt Giger, single author of it upgraded to version 3 and it runs on both Windows and OS X without a single glitch. It was originally a C application, it was converted to Adobe AIR and the day Linux has a stable Adobe AIR (soon I think), it is also automatically shipped to Linux/FreeBSD.
That is the opportunity Sun missed with their Webstart/Java. People and industry looks at results, not promises. You can ship a full feature commercial application RIGHT NOW using Adobe AIR Framework. Most of your customers (like me) will be amazed at the fact that it uses LESS CPU compared to "real" previous version.
If they don't make stupid mistakes, Adobe also has a full feature multimedia player/content downloader which also perfectly works both on Windows and OS X. It will be huge in couple of months.
http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/ . It is -of course- possible thanks to Adobe AIR. Needless to say, it is also automatically shipped to Linux when Adobe Air for Linux stable ships.
What did Silverlight do except bribing to some known figures to promise outdated versions emulator or abusing the panic state of Nokia? Right, Nokia says they will ship Silverlight too but everyone who is experienced on handheld/PDA knows that just by shipping a framework, you don't guarantee people who will code for it or use it. Why would established Flash developer use it instead of using Flash Lite which will be in third generation soon?
I got Silverlight on my Virtual PC 7 running XP SP2. I almost felt sad for Microsoft, shipping as a "optional windows update" with a "KB" number? Sigh.
As a side, cautionary note, Silverlight adds a potential security issue to Mac OS X since it installs as User 502 which people always use as secondary, "non admin" account. Hope they fixed it. That is MS for you and no, I am not confusing it with MS Office 08 bug.
Actually VP6 and 7, Sorenson Spark are very high end codecs. Youtube's problem was (deliberately?) encoding video like junk with horrible settings and the original's horrible quality as it is ripped from TV (already compressed), low end DV camera without colour correction.
The big issue was the Sorenson and On2 being big time MS Lapdogs and never offering any real solution except Windows market. Truth to be said, they are not bad quality codecs. Check their reference pages (demos etc.) to see what they actually are.
In fact, current quality/bandwidth/multiplatform champion is Realvideo 10 and it is MPEG4 based too. Of course it is a bit hard to convince user to install it even while Real gives whole thing (except codecs) as open source. You know, history haunting.
I think you better check real World. I am telling as a person who had to convert (keeping originals) hundreds of Quicktime Mov files to Flash to give option to people who refuses to install anything to view videos. Of course I keep the original Quicktime Mpeg4 files on site.
Multimedia vendors need to make sure their application/plugin supports Flash (FLV) giving more performance, quality and additional options than original Flash player to stay relevant. It seems only Real Networks figured this fact with their Realplayer 11 which supports easy downloading of FLV content.
Too late for who? 1% of market? People actually started to ask Sony, Philips to add FLV video options for their high end/connected TVs. The big "iPhone no Flash" debate actually is "iPhone no Flash Youtube" debate, Apple paid a lot to Youtube to temporarily silence their consumers but yet iPhone flash would be hit. What kind of market you speak about?
I wished Apple, Real Networks, Microsoft and to some degree open source guys weren't that stupid and didn't make 1994's "Download huge embedded single file to act like streaming" FLV a de-facto standard and we were using UDP/RTSP/Bandwidth switching actual media plugins now but it didn't happen. Apple still puts that God damn blue icon to taskbar, pushes Safari to unsuspecting users, Microsoft still doesn't ship a God damn player to any OS rather than Windows and Real Networks still makes people afraid to install their player. On the other hand, Adobe Flash, 1.1 MB single click download for ALL OS. Enough said.
Just had "Update" window at 1Password.app , a shareware, 2 guys coded password manager which is practically all browser support (except Opera). It is not from $billion Paypal/Ebay empire.
"The most notable improvements is a new Change Password window to make updating online password easy, as well as enhanced Anti-Phishing integration with PhishTank."
See? That was what I mean to Paypal or anyone with billions of dollars in hand and thousands of IT personnel. 2 Guys from Canada who are in fact new to OS X (coming from J2EE land) can do it.
Especially Phishtank is so reachable that their people (who runs OpenDNS) replies to my personal mails.
Think about something else, isn't a full feature extension mechanism like Firefox which has full access to user home dir/browser data a security risk? Certify? Apple? Can you imagine the feedback against them? They get flamed for enabling services functionality, their (and NeXT) OWN invention on web pages by some lifeless nerds.
""there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed"
He must be on "something" to claim something like that.
If I were you, I would advertise them in every opportunity. The only thing which would teach those ISPs is losing customers to another, good ISP. Do you believe they didn't know thousands of people are actively tracing their connections via plugin? They knew. They didn't care. The only thing that would drive them to panic is losing those sheep (for them) customers to a good, small ISP. Would it work? See what happened to AOL when they messed with their customers too much.
If they really care about degraded user experience and shape traffic, why don't they find the bandwidth of a normal, good Youtube performance (around 1024-1536 kbps) and filter the Youtube traffic stopping people from leeching 20 videos at once with that backwards, http system? If my ISP does traffic shaping, I demand them to shape Youtube junk. If people wants to stream things, there are better things since 1994 like UDP/RTSP/Bandwidth Switching actual media players/plugins.
They are horrified about another thing. You can ship a 4,2 GB (or more) HDTV 1080p movie over Vuze.com or Bittorrent without needing their overpriced dedicated server farms. The reliability thanks to thousands of seeds is excellent too. Who would buy their insane priced dedicated corporate lines if people get better performance over free P2P using the idle bandwidth?
For example, there is non DRM but WMV "Sanctuary" HDTV series on Vuze.com. What kind of mega price they would pay if they dared to ship it via ordinary http? If I was ISP, I would see the P2P as doom for my OC-192 etc. lines.
These guys are ISPs and they certainly know there is a huge, legal (and paid, real money!) traffic via Bittorrent.com , Vuze.com and of course GNU etc. software. They must have heard about the plugin too.
If they dare to send RST packets, intervene with users connection... One wonders what ELSE they could dare to do or already do? Profiling comes to mind.
Well here are facts. One of least popular (if popular at all) extensions for firefox is the EV certificate thing. They (Verisign) couldn't even make it work right. Phishing prevention is one thing, selling your soul to Google and send them every single URL (including the page part) you visit is another. There are Paypal phishing pages which are up for DAYS as you can see from http://www.phishtank.com/ which they (as they are mega corp) can call the countries police chief directly from his home phone and get site raided. If you get thousands of dollars stolen from your paypal recorded CC (never do it!) your support mail ends up in some typing/template monkey at Bangalore.
Also, another fact: Never, ever call a system default browser insecure if you are CTO of a high profile company like Paypal. Get the damned source from www.webkit.org , code and mail/call Apple "We think Safari would be better with EV certificate checking, here is the code you can review internally."
I invite you to check Macworld discussion at
/usr/sbin/ocspd[1735]: starting (system.log)
http://forums.macworld.com/thread/98919?tstart=0
I have never seen a thing like that. Macintosh community hates them so much after that disastrous stupid statement that I STILL get new message alerts after 2 months as people keep commenting how stupid they are, Verisign bribed them, MS lapdog, eBay is scam.
This is a OS that loads ocsp on startup to check the SSL certs at core OS level:
Apr 22 09:07:29 quad
EV matters? How much it cost to a commercial site at size of Paypal? Does Paypal feel their consumers are insecure instead of using FREE data from community powered services like http://www.phishtank.com/ ?
Post a job listing for Cocoa/Carbon, Objective C developer. Cough some money and distribute your plugin. Don't use "No XUL" as excuse, it is easy to watch current URL on Safari. ICQ from 2003 can still read it.
They have lost the number 1 weapon for pushing people to new upgrade OS. Games. People who got real sick of their directx tricks, ATI/Nvidia gang scheme, Intel have all moved to consoles and they keep on moving.
They said "DirectX 10 can only work on Vista", people found a way to hack it to install it to XP. Rest didn't care and purchased a console which is guaranteed to work for at least 5 years or more with same performance.
Wonder if they will dare to make new Office "Vista only"?
"The UN replaced the failed League of Nations after the Second World War."
See? People figured League of Nations didn't work (World war happened!) and they disbanded it setting up UN.
If a standards body decides in favour of a company which may crash if everyone respects to true standards, it is time to disband it.
I am sure Norway guy is not stupid. He knows a huge, monstrous and Govt. shaking scandal is just about to happen and tries to get himself out by putting the blame on a single bureaucrat.
It won't be that easy, that decision has a potential to disband whole ISO or setting up a new standards body for IT. Lets not forget the huge prices MS will have to pay if someone (will sure!) finds their link in all of this.
It is not only RMS/Open Source nerds they messed with. They messed with Big Blue and Sun. They really know how these govt. things work.
I got 3 macs running at my home including a Quad G5, all my devices are purchased with Apple compatibility in mind and I don't plan to buy iPhone since it is absurdly stupid to pay $600 to a device you will have to hack.
My Nokia E65's (Symbian S60) applications comes from Sourceforge (half of them) or they rely on open source like Apache/Python (Nokia webserver). Not like they are trying to stop me, they actually PUSH user to download and try new things (via Download! menu on root).
When I tell these facts, like your joke, I am called an Apple hater by people probably never paid for OS X or iLife which are things done in right way. Your +5 funny comment is not a joke unfortunately.
I am sad that iPhone with that management gang who decides these things will never be a true mobile computing revolution. That is all. I suggested iPhone to people who are only into basic things like multimedia but after figuring there is a huge multimedia application market for Symbian and WinCE, I took that suggestion back too. What if they want to watch XVid/Divx on their devices? Or play Ogg/Flac?
John Gruber of Daringfireball.net has said about the letter:
"This is the white collar equivalent of Steve Ballmer showing up at Yahoo's door with a baseball bat in his hand."
Putting icons to users desktop and tricking users by Start menu didn't work well for MSN. Yahoo won because people have chosen it, not by a trap, by actually going to www.yahoo.com or getting their toolbar (as opt-in) from toolbar.yahoo.com . They have chosen Yahoo because it promises a minimal configuration need which definitely won't "punish" you for not using Windows OS.
AOL purchased Netscape just for home.netscape.com start page for $5 billion. What happened when they made Browser irrelevant? People basically changed their homepage. People aren't that stupid.
Web services needs user trust, especially for private data. There are people who rejects to validated their paid Windows and live with consequences since they don't trust to Microsoft, even a byte of their data.
Trust is earned thing, nobody can buy it. When MS purchases Yahoo and puts a minimum size "Microsoft" to end of page, trust is erased immediately. They gamble on people being stupid and ignorant, people have slightly opened their eyes. Their gamble didn't work in 1998 when they purchased Hotmail, why would it work in 2008? We could be without Yahoo account in months of time but a non working $40+ Billion agreement could be the last mistake of Microsoft. They can't afford that mistake. It is not a dotcom web 2.0 startup, it is $40 billion Yahoo.
It is very basic for me, the day the agreement voted "Yes", I will cancel/purge my account at Yahoo which I created when MS acquired Hotmail.
I know what will happen and I invite everyone to look for other options. It doesn't have to be Google. It won't be Google for me for example.
There are a huge amount of people like me, even completely non technical Yahoo mail "Plus" owners. They have chosen Yahoo not because they know FreeBSD or PHP, they have chosen because it is not Microsoft. For 10 years, I have seen the "free yahoo mail" down like 1-2 times at most.