Some guy asked a better 'what if' recently in another discussion on Palladium. What if systems using this technology are required to access the Internet?
Oh, Microsoft controls the Internet now?
No, but what if your ISP required a Palladium-signed ID to sign on? Or your company VPN required a Palladium key to permit remote access? Never mind the prospect of requiring Pd elements to view online content, which to most users is "the Internet".
The danger is not in the tool, it's in the deployment. Lock-in is most effective and most powerful when it is enacted through partnerships, and that is exactly Microsoft's strength.
Don't make the mistake of underestimating the risk just because the potential threat has yet to manifest.
Not so. If software is vulnerable but documented, you can work around it.
Slammer is a good, if tired, example of this. You don't really need to patch the server at all (and there were customers who couldn't because the patch broke bespoke apps) - you just need to control traffic on that port.
It's rarely necessary to patch a server RIGHTTHISMINUTE. Workarounds are your friend - they give you time to test, test, and test again before pushing the patch onto production systems.
Yeah, but where does that argument lead? If Microsoft tried to claim that each net worth of each Windows 2003 CD is 25c, all their anti-piracy arguments would fall to pieces.
I think black hole lists are a great thing, but I will admit, they are certainly censorship
I really wish people would get a grip on this. A black hole list is not censorship. It's a list of addresses from which spam is known to originate. Publishing that list does NOT, in ANY way, censor anything, nor does it block email, nor does it infringe anyones' rights.
What it does is allow a mail administrator to make an informed judgement. That admin may block the mail, in which case HE is making a decision to censor, in exactly the same way that any other spam filter would facilitate.
Alternatively, that admin may just use it to insert a custom header, and allow users to filter the mail themselves - into a low-priority folder, or the trash, or/dev/null, or whatever.
It's just about giving users one more tool, that's all. Not dictating how it should be used, nor mandating its use.
As it happens, I'm due to meet with the chairman of the BSA in the UK, a fortnight from now, to grill him about issues like this. What would you put to him, in that position?
I'm very disappointed that many ISVs only get serious about security when someone rats to the press. As a member of the press, I'm all for it:) but it's still disappointing.
Rather like those investigative shows on TV which examine cases of customers getting raw deals, often for years, from vendors/shops/etc. But when the journos arrive, they're all smiles and terribly-sorry-we'll-make-it-all-better, paying off that one customer and still ignoring the many who are still being screwed the same way.
Why does it have to get to the stage of negative publicity before firms get a clue about customer service? Commercial reasons, obviously - customer care is overhead - but it's still sad.
That's a rather naive line of thinking. Slammer did _collateral_ damage - ATMs knocked offline, 911 call centers affected, MS authentication servers downed - not because they were infected SQL servers, but becaused their networks were DDOSed by the packet flood of other infected hosts.
The same packet flood coming from ANYWHERE would have the same effect. The issue is the number of vulnerable hosts out there. If the number is high enough, the danger is real.
The conclusion drawn may be oversimplified but nonetheless pragmatic: 1) forged headers should be illegal 2) a specific header entry should identify the email as unsolicited
Assuming that'll never happen ('illegal' never stopped a spammer, and they'd never comply with a suicide-tag), an easier way would surely be to provide header analysis in email clients, or mail servers, or both.
If I (as a user or mail server admin) could detect (a la Spamcop) forged or rewritten headers and discard/bounce those messages as fake, most of the immediate problem is addressed. Why don't mail clients/servers offer this out of the box?
That step achieved, those messages from non-forged addresses can be filtered and, if spam, automatically actioned with the source ISP - that should be the role of anti-spam software, IMHO.
...to argue that by taking the work out of print, the copyright owner has admitted that the work has negligible market value...
Actually, when an item goes out of print, it's value tends to go UP. That's the very nature of collectable anythings, like baseball cards.
The revenue to the PUBLISHER goes away, unless they're participating in second-hand purchasing, but the value to the MARKET increases. Unless no-one wants the stuff, of course:)
So. If you could make perfect reproductions of out-of-print baseball cards, what would that do to the collectors' investments? Destroy them, that's what.
What Valenti et al want you to believe is that music (and video) works the same way as baseball cards. Obviously they do not - their market value goes up as distribution (official or not) widens, as has been discussed at great length in/. threads regarding the RIAA, P2P and the experiences of musicians.
How many people have died trying to get into space? 14 from the challenger and columbia, shoot from the hip says no more than double that have died?
I hate these stats. No argument with the rest of your post, just that I hear these numbers thrown about all the time, and it's a PITA because it misses the point. Several points.
It's like "fewer people have died in space than in airplanes, therefore flying from Seattle to New York is more dangerous than flying to the moon". Spare me.
Try the numbers this way: 40% of NASA's space shuttles have exploded with complete loss of life to the crew. Doesn't look nearly as positive, does it?
Granted, that's just as useless a statistic. Which, I hope, kinda makes the point.
> I've paid zero for Windows (came with computers)
You did not pay zero for Windows, unless you paid zero for the computers themselves. Just because the item is not priced separately doesn't mean it's free.
It's a common user mistake, to view bundled software as free, but it's a fallacy for all sorts of obvious reasons.
You can overanalyse data and get anything out of it. Stats are useful, but only in perspective. I wouldn't make any big decisions based on this survey.
For a start, 200+ does not an authoritative respondent base make. That's a relatively tiny survey, especially when you bear in mind that "2,196 practitioners completed some portion of the survey. The statistics in this report reflect responses from 215 qualified respondents"
So, 90% of respondents were invalidated. Why? Didn't fit the curve? Sure, you clean survey data, but when you're left with so few discrete results, any anomaly will look like a trend.
One other thought (or this'll turn into an essay): of _course_ security spending per user decreases with the size of the organisation. That's what "economy of scale" means!
The point that organisations tend to underspend IS true, but the predetermined conclusions of surveys like these aren't doing much to dispell FUD.
I'm not impressed. ISM should be doing a lot better than this. It's not all bad, but it's far from realistic.
It looks funky, but I'm not convinced it'll play in the form factors they're planning.
Mainly, it's the notebook (ironically enough) form factor that I'm not sure about. Some vertical markets might love it - those that need real computing and portable computing but struggle with the average handheld. Healthcare, education...that sort of thing.
But for the rest of us? Dunno about you, but I just don't work like that. I'm used to scrolling through long documents. I like being able to have wide windows for some tasks (mainly spreadsheets).
In its handheld/subnotebook model, now that could work. My feeling is that would suit the type of use you'd expect - holding a gadget like a book is pretty natural for some tasks.
I'm particularly dubious of the exec's claim that the book format is "proven to be better" for comprehension. That's because people are used to it. Same way that people who type on a standard keyboard struggle to use a Dvorak layout, but that doesn't mean the former is better. And that, to me, sums up a lot of their arguments in favour of the thing.
But hey. Maybe I'll recant when I've had the chance to play with one at a tradeshow and get hooked:)
It may disappoint you to hear it, but Japan is a good way ahead of many other markets (yes, even *gasp* Atlanta) when it comes to mobile data services.
Not that I really give a damn about the console market, but I think MS estimated the state of the market poorly, and then proceded to make every mistake possible in execution. Surprising, really - they had plenty of time and research.
It's priced too high, came out too late, had quality problems, and didn't managed to capture any mindset. (Which isn't surprising, if the UK TV ads are anything to go by. They're crap. Well put-together, but crap.)
I think Microsoft must have forgotten to carry the 1 in some market research somewhere. But the company does have a history of turning initial market failures into winners later on, so I wouldn't write them off just yet.
On the other hand, Sony has just been handed a fraction more breathing space to do a cracking job on the PS3. If they play it right, they could bury the X-Box. Do it wrong, and MS will have a good shot at a second chance. Giving MS a second chance is not a great idea, competitively.
Like so many other things, globalisation can be good, or can be bad. Make that "can be great, or can be dreadful". Unfortunately, it seems to swing to one or t'other extremes, and the rhetoric certainly focuses on little else.
Certainly the removal of trade barriers should be a force for good all round, but not when unrestricted trade allows a masive multinational to come in and crush local industry by running at a loss until the market is "secure".
The only possible solution is a carefully moderated one, but that's what the EU was supposed to achieve, and it's proving a MUCH more painful process than expected.
Trouble is, the conglomerates only ever talk about the pros, and the protesters only ever talk about the cons. It's very very rare to encounter a forum which discusses both sides frankly, AND attempts to find middle ground. Which is silly - there's no fundamental reason why everyone couldn't benefit from the process.
2c, anyway.
At least they handled being slashdotted gracefully
on
New Clie Handhelds
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Hooray. Finally I see someone handling the/. effect intelligently. This is the first I've seen, although there probably have been plenty of others. I hope more sites catch on. It's a terrible shame when interesting pages are unavailable because they've been/.ed. Good Thing to get all the hits, Bad Thing not to be able to handle them. Well done Sony.
The military has been using self-heating ration packs for years - first ones I saw were US Army issue, but the UK armed forces use them too. And Nestle has been piloting self-heating cans of coffee in the UK (and probably elsewhere) for at least several months now, so there's already an emerging consumer market.
Do you own the software, or have you just purchased the right (ie: license) to use it? Usually, the latter. The software belongs to the author, you just have permission to use it under certain conditions (like, having paid for it).
Similarly, you don't own the music on a CD. You own the CD - the medium - but NOT the music itself.
This is just the sort of discussion I like to see happening. Not a "my language is better than yours" bout, but a frank examination of what makes a language good, and what makes it better.
I get very tired of the "X is better than Y" fights. They're pointless, and if this collection of language pros can avoid it, so can we. The better language is the one that gets the job done best for you, period.
Rather than clinging to our cliques, getting together with users and creators of other languages is beneficial to everyone. Hybrid vigour, if you like.
It's this sort of cooperation the open source movement in particular should embrace, not petty squabbles over syntax preferences. In the end, everyone should win.
I've just had a CD key experience with Quake 3. Having bought the game, I moved countries, taking the box (flattened to fit in a bag), manual and whatnot with me. What I didn't take was the jewel case, just the insert, and of course the damn key is on a sticker on the case. Silly me.
One reinstall later, I need the key. Exchanged a couple of emails with the support team which boiled down to "we sympathise but we can't help you". Great.
So, I've effectively been forced to become a pirate, and download a CD key from a warez site. Stoopid.
I understand their position too. "Oh, I lost the key" is a pretty transparent line after all:) Still, it's frustrating and unnecessary. I don't believe CD keys prevent piracy or even discourage it, and in my case it's actually hindering legitimate use and _encouraging_ piracy. Go figure.
Bah. Looks great...if you're right handed. The trend of phones (and loads of other peripherals) to be of completely right-handed design is a pain.
Sure, squeeze in those little ergonomic gimmicks, but not if it's going to render the device unusable to a fair chunk of the population. There's an entire swathe of peripherals - mice, joysticks, phones and so on - that lefties struggle to use. The IBM TransNote is probably the culmination of that trend.
There are plenty of really good devices on the market that cater to either handedness. It's not like you have to leave off features, just design a bit more considerately and intelligently. Is that so much to ask?
Kmail put all mails into different files corresponding to folder in ~/Mail in mbox format. So, i "cat" every files into one big file and i tell evolution it's my mailbox.
Why did you do this? Evolution also maintains separate mbox files for each folder. Look in ~/evolution/local/
All you need to do is create directories off ~/evolution/local/[folder] for each mail folder and move the mbox file in there, renaming the file to "mbox" on the way.
In brief, for each mail folder, you want ~/evolution/local/[folder]/mbox
Evolution (IIRC) will create the various control files as required.
Those that promote their name are usually the kind that are just out to get money anyway they can
Er. What? There are these things called "marketing" and "branding" that you may have heard of? Promoting a name is fairly fundamental to business.
Establishing a strong brand is one step, associating it with a web presence is the next. Logical, no?
However, this is why I think the whole TLD business is such pointless crap. I can't go and register ibm.info, for obvious reasons, nor should I be able to. Creating new namespaces just creates redundancy that companies are forced to pay to fill. A license to print virtual money, if you will.
In turn, this is why regional TLDs make sense, for all the Internet is global. Foo Inc in the US and Foo Ltd in the UK may be entirely separate institutions with no conflict of trademark, and it's only sensible to have namespaces that accommodate this.
This is not a good idea, for at least two reasons that strike me as being so obvious I can't believe the marketing idio..er..moro..um..people at Microsoft didn't consider it.
Firstly, where's the accountability? Who's making the decision about which words to omit, and which to include? Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language? Not really. This is not going to do much to raise trust in MS, although it probably won't do much to lower it either. It's a small enough fringe issue that most people will never know, which is part of why it's dangerous.
Second, there's the issue of market appeal. Office is supposed to be a writing (etc) tool for professionals. But writing professionals _need_ tools such as thesauri, dictionaries and the like, and we rely on them to be comprehensive. A thesaurus that gives me only a limited number of options is of very limited worth. Sometimes I need to use words that some people might find offensive.
This strikes me as an absurd move on the part of Microsoft; they're dabbling in an area where they have no expertise, making decisions for which they are unqualified. It's not like they would have got any criticism for leaving un-PC terms in the damn thesaurus. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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The danger is not in the tool, it's in the deployment. Lock-in is most effective and most powerful when it is enacted through partnerships, and that is exactly Microsoft's strength.
Don't make the mistake of underestimating the risk just because the potential threat has yet to manifest.
Not so. If software is vulnerable but documented, you can work around it.
Slammer is a good, if tired, example of this. You don't really need to patch the server at all (and there were customers who couldn't because the patch broke bespoke apps) - you just need to control traffic on that port.
It's rarely necessary to patch a server RIGHTTHISMINUTE. Workarounds are your friend - they give you time to test, test, and test again before pushing the patch onto production systems.
Yeah, but where does that argument lead? If Microsoft tried to claim that each net worth of each Windows 2003 CD is 25c, all their anti-piracy arguments would fall to pieces.
:)
Not that this is inherently a bad thing
I really wish people would get a grip on this. A black hole list is not censorship. It's a list of addresses from which spam is known to originate. Publishing that list does NOT, in ANY way, censor anything, nor does it block email, nor does it infringe anyones' rights.
What it does is allow a mail administrator to make an informed judgement. That admin may block the mail, in which case HE is making a decision to censor, in exactly the same way that any other spam filter would facilitate.
Alternatively, that admin may just use it to insert a custom header, and allow users to filter the mail themselves - into a low-priority folder, or the trash, or /dev/null, or whatever.
It's just about giving users one more tool, that's all. Not dictating how it should be used, nor mandating its use.
As it happens, I'm due to meet with the chairman of the BSA in the UK, a fortnight from now, to grill him about issues like this. What would you put to him, in that position?
I'm very disappointed that many ISVs only get serious about security when someone rats to the press. As a member of the press, I'm all for it :) but it's still disappointing.
Rather like those investigative shows on TV which examine cases of customers getting raw deals, often for years, from vendors/shops/etc. But when the journos arrive, they're all smiles and terribly-sorry-we'll-make-it-all-better, paying off that one customer and still ignoring the many who are still being screwed the same way.
Why does it have to get to the stage of negative publicity before firms get a clue about customer service? Commercial reasons, obviously - customer care is overhead - but it's still sad.
That's a rather naive line of thinking. Slammer did _collateral_ damage - ATMs knocked offline, 911 call centers affected, MS authentication servers downed - not because they were infected SQL servers, but becaused their networks were DDOSed by the packet flood of other infected hosts.
The same packet flood coming from ANYWHERE would have the same effect. The issue is the number of vulnerable hosts out there. If the number is high enough, the danger is real.
Assuming that'll never happen ('illegal' never stopped a spammer, and they'd never comply with a suicide-tag), an easier way would surely be to provide header analysis in email clients, or mail servers, or both.
If I (as a user or mail server admin) could detect (a la Spamcop) forged or rewritten headers and discard/bounce those messages as fake, most of the immediate problem is addressed. Why don't mail clients/servers offer this out of the box?
That step achieved, those messages from non-forged addresses can be filtered and, if spam, automatically actioned with the source ISP - that should be the role of anti-spam software, IMHO.
Actually, when an item goes out of print, it's value tends to go UP. That's the very nature of collectable anythings, like baseball cards.
The revenue to the PUBLISHER goes away, unless they're participating in second-hand purchasing, but the value to the MARKET increases. Unless no-one wants the stuff, of course :)
So. If you could make perfect reproductions of out-of-print baseball cards, what would that do to the collectors' investments? Destroy them, that's what.
What Valenti et al want you to believe is that music (and video) works the same way as baseball cards. Obviously they do not - their market value goes up as distribution (official or not) widens, as has been discussed at great length in /. threads regarding the RIAA, P2P and the experiences of musicians.
I hate these stats. No argument with the rest of your post, just that I hear these numbers thrown about all the time, and it's a PITA because it misses the point. Several points.
It's like "fewer people have died in space than in airplanes, therefore flying from Seattle to New York is more dangerous than flying to the moon". Spare me.
Try the numbers this way: 40% of NASA's space shuttles have exploded with complete loss of life to the crew. Doesn't look nearly as positive, does it?
Granted, that's just as useless a statistic. Which, I hope, kinda makes the point.
You did not pay zero for Windows, unless you paid zero for the computers themselves. Just because the item is not priced separately doesn't mean it's free.
It's a common user mistake, to view bundled software as free, but it's a fallacy for all sorts of obvious reasons.
You can overanalyse data and get anything out of it. Stats are useful, but only in perspective. I wouldn't make any big decisions based on this survey.
For a start, 200+ does not an authoritative respondent base make. That's a relatively tiny survey, especially when you bear in mind that "2,196 practitioners completed some portion of the survey. The statistics in this report reflect responses from 215 qualified respondents"
So, 90% of respondents were invalidated. Why? Didn't fit the curve? Sure, you clean survey data, but when you're left with so few discrete results, any anomaly will look like a trend.
One other thought (or this'll turn into an essay): of _course_ security spending per user decreases with the size of the organisation. That's what "economy of scale" means!
The point that organisations tend to underspend IS true, but the predetermined conclusions of surveys like these aren't doing much to dispell FUD.
I'm not impressed. ISM should be doing a lot better than this. It's not all bad, but it's far from realistic.
It looks funky, but I'm not convinced it'll play in the form factors they're planning.
:)
Mainly, it's the notebook (ironically enough) form factor that I'm not sure about. Some vertical markets might love it - those that need real computing and portable computing but struggle with the average handheld. Healthcare, education...that sort of thing.
But for the rest of us? Dunno about you, but I just don't work like that. I'm used to scrolling through long documents. I like being able to have wide windows for some tasks (mainly spreadsheets).
In its handheld/subnotebook model, now that could work. My feeling is that would suit the type of use you'd expect - holding a gadget like a book is pretty natural for some tasks.
I'm particularly dubious of the exec's claim that the book format is "proven to be better" for comprehension. That's because people are used to it. Same way that people who type on a standard keyboard struggle to use a Dvorak layout, but that doesn't mean the former is better. And that, to me, sums up a lot of their arguments in favour of the thing.
But hey. Maybe I'll recant when I've had the chance to play with one at a tradeshow and get hooked
It may disappoint you to hear it, but Japan is a good way ahead of many other markets (yes, even *gasp* Atlanta) when it comes to mobile data services.
Not that I really give a damn about the console market, but I think MS estimated the state of the market poorly, and then proceded to make every mistake possible in execution. Surprising, really - they had plenty of time and research.
It's priced too high, came out too late, had quality problems, and didn't managed to capture any mindset. (Which isn't surprising, if the UK TV ads are anything to go by. They're crap. Well put-together, but crap.)
I think Microsoft must have forgotten to carry the 1 in some market research somewhere. But the company does have a history of turning initial market failures into winners later on, so I wouldn't write them off just yet.
On the other hand, Sony has just been handed a fraction more breathing space to do a cracking job on the PS3. If they play it right, they could bury the X-Box. Do it wrong, and MS will have a good shot at a second chance. Giving MS a second chance is not a great idea, competitively.
Like so many other things, globalisation can be good, or can be bad. Make that "can be great, or can be dreadful". Unfortunately, it seems to swing to one or t'other extremes, and the rhetoric certainly focuses on little else.
Certainly the removal of trade barriers should be a force for good all round, but not when unrestricted trade allows a masive multinational to come in and crush local industry by running at a loss until the market is "secure".
The only possible solution is a carefully moderated one, but that's what the EU was supposed to achieve, and it's proving a MUCH more painful process than expected.
Trouble is, the conglomerates only ever talk about the pros, and the protesters only ever talk about the cons. It's very very rare to encounter a forum which discusses both sides frankly, AND attempts to find middle ground. Which is silly - there's no fundamental reason why everyone couldn't benefit from the process.
2c, anyway.
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/. effect intelligently. This is the first I've seen, although there probably have been plenty of others. I hope more sites catch on. It's a terrible shame when interesting pages are unavailable because they've been /.ed. Good Thing to get all the hits, Bad Thing not to be able to handle them. Well done Sony.
Hooray. Finally I see someone handling the
The military has been using self-heating ration packs for years - first ones I saw were US Army issue, but the UK armed forces use them too. And Nestle has been piloting self-heating cans of coffee in the UK (and probably elsewhere) for at least several months now, so there's already an emerging consumer market.
Do you own the software, or have you just purchased the right (ie: license) to use it? Usually, the latter. The software belongs to the author, you just have permission to use it under certain conditions (like, having paid for it).
Similarly, you don't own the music on a CD. You own the CD - the medium - but NOT the music itself.
This is just the sort of discussion I like to see happening. Not a "my language is better than yours" bout, but a frank examination of what makes a language good, and what makes it better.
I get very tired of the "X is better than Y" fights. They're pointless, and if this collection of language pros can avoid it, so can we. The better language is the one that gets the job done best for you, period.
Rather than clinging to our cliques, getting together with users and creators of other languages is beneficial to everyone. Hybrid vigour, if you like.
It's this sort of cooperation the open source movement in particular should embrace, not petty squabbles over syntax preferences. In the end, everyone should win.
I've just had a CD key experience with Quake 3. Having bought the game, I moved countries, taking the box (flattened to fit in a bag), manual and whatnot with me. What I didn't take was the jewel case, just the insert, and of course the damn key is on a sticker on the case. Silly me.
:) Still, it's frustrating and unnecessary. I don't believe CD keys prevent piracy or even discourage it, and in my case it's actually hindering legitimate use and _encouraging_ piracy. Go figure.
One reinstall later, I need the key. Exchanged a couple of emails with the support team which boiled down to "we sympathise but we can't help you". Great.
So, I've effectively been forced to become a pirate, and download a CD key from a warez site. Stoopid.
I understand their position too. "Oh, I lost the key" is a pretty transparent line after all
Sure, squeeze in those little ergonomic gimmicks, but not if it's going to render the device unusable to a fair chunk of the population. There's an entire swathe of peripherals - mice, joysticks, phones and so on - that lefties struggle to use. The IBM TransNote is probably the culmination of that trend.
There are plenty of really good devices on the market that cater to either handedness. It's not like you have to leave off features, just design a bit more considerately and intelligently. Is that so much to ask?
Sheesh, this sounds peevish :)
Kmail put all mails into different files corresponding to folder in ~/Mail in mbox format. So, i "cat" every files into one big file and i tell evolution it's my mailbox.
Why did you do this? Evolution also maintains separate mbox files for each folder. Look in ~/evolution/local/
All you need to do is create directories off ~/evolution/local/[folder] for each mail folder and move the mbox file in there, renaming the file to "mbox" on the way.
In brief, for each mail folder, you want ~/evolution/local/[folder]/mbox
Evolution (IIRC) will create the various control files as required.
Er. What? There are these things called "marketing" and "branding" that you may have heard of? Promoting a name is fairly fundamental to business.
Establishing a strong brand is one step, associating it with a web presence is the next. Logical, no?
However, this is why I think the whole TLD business is such pointless crap. I can't go and register ibm.info, for obvious reasons, nor should I be able to. Creating new namespaces just creates redundancy that companies are forced to pay to fill. A license to print virtual money, if you will.
In turn, this is why regional TLDs make sense, for all the Internet is global. Foo Inc in the US and Foo Ltd in the UK may be entirely separate institutions with no conflict of trademark, and it's only sensible to have namespaces that accommodate this.
This is not a good idea, for at least two reasons that strike me as being so obvious I can't believe the marketing idio..er..moro..um..people at Microsoft didn't consider it.
Firstly, where's the accountability? Who's making the decision about which words to omit, and which to include? Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language? Not really. This is not going to do much to raise trust in MS, although it probably won't do much to lower it either. It's a small enough fringe issue that most people will never know, which is part of why it's dangerous.
Second, there's the issue of market appeal. Office is supposed to be a writing (etc) tool for professionals. But writing professionals _need_ tools such as thesauri, dictionaries and the like, and we rely on them to be comprehensive. A thesaurus that gives me only a limited number of options is of very limited worth. Sometimes I need to use words that some people might find offensive.
This strikes me as an absurd move on the part of Microsoft; they're dabbling in an area where they have no expertise, making decisions for which they are unqualified. It's not like they would have got any criticism for leaving un-PC terms in the damn thesaurus. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.