I think the reason MS is doing this is obvious. Look at their financials - they *really* need people to upgrade to the new version of Office. End-users don't buy Office any more, CIOs and the like do. These people are just not gonna be impressed by another new word-processing feature, but they might be motivated to upgrade if they thought that they were opening up all their data to re-use by other programs.
Information Worker turned in healthy revenue growth of 26 percent, reflecting customer adoption of Microsoft Office XP through multi-year licensing programs. Customers acquiring Office this quarter included ChevronTexaco, Lockheed Martin, MetLife, Newell Company (Rubbermaid) and the US Department of the Army, Program Executive Office, Aviation.
and
Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $7.75 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2002, a 26 percent increase over revenue of $6.13 billion for the same quarter last year. Operating income for the first quarter was $4.05 billion, compared to $2.90 billion in the same period last year. Net income and diluted earnings per share for the first quarter of fiscal year 2003 were $2.73 billion and $0.50, which included an after-tax charge for investment impairments of $291 million or $0.05. For the same period of the previous year, net income and diluted earnings per share were $1.28 billion and $0.23, which included an after-tax charge for investment impairments of $1.22 billion.
"Results for the first quarter were exceptionally strong, exceeding our expectations. During the quarter, we saw broader customer adoption of our licensing programs than we anticipated, as customers recognized the value of entering into long-term licensing agreements for our products. This strength in licensing led to solid growth for Windows® XP, Office XP and.NET Enterprise Servers," said John Connors, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "Consistent with our view at the outset of this year, the global economic outlook continues to be uncertain, however we remain committed to making the investments necessary to drive long-term product innovation and customer value across our businesses."
I have a Masters in Computer Science with a focus on databases and storage technology and very little of what you said makes any sense to me. There's nothing easier than getting at data stored in SQL. Where I work, we've shipped a few products where we didn't document the schema because it was too complex and we didn't feel we could support it. Within weeks, almost all of our major customrs had it reverse-engineered anyway. SQL is very easy to get at!
kernel level SQL data
There's no such thing. SQL data is stored in tables. You use queries to get at it. Period.
Also, your story doesn't make any sense. The article says Office 11 is in Beta already. IIRC, the SQL Server and Palladium stuff in the OS doesn't come until Longhorn. Do you think they will actually release a version of Office which won't work until their next OS (who knows when that will be) is released and adopted? How will they make money off all the people who recently upgraded to Windows XP then?
How can we expect the patent office to keep track of all the prior art that there is out there when CmdrTaco can't even keep track of prior art for posts on Slashdot?
But it doesn't keep track of which sheet of paper you are writing on. For all the pad can tell, you could be writing everything on a single sheet of paper!
In fact, if that was all you wanted, it would be very easy to adapt to the ballpoint pen. You would need one sheet of paper where the dots were coordinates from the top left of the sheet and that would give you everything you need. The reason Logitech's paper probably costs so much is that each sheet is part of a 60,000 sq km plane so the pen can uniquely identify not just where you are on the page you're writing on but also which page you are on.
Suffice to say you don't understand the technology then. And other idiots who don't understand it will mod you up because they understand it even less than you do.
Many criticize RMS for what he says or where he says it; i.e., mentioning such things in newsgroups or forums which are "not meant for discussing those issues". But the politics of what he talks about is relevant to kernel developers and coders, even if they're too stupid to realize it.
This is genius! We're too stupid to understand what we want to do or talk about. Let RMS decide that for us.
If you don't use any of their products, why would you care that they didn't trust you?
If Hollywood wants to release movies in a format where THEY can be sure they are not copied and MS wants to support them doing that, why in the world would YOU have an objection to that?
And what of Microsoft? Remember, I don't use their operating system at home - and to reiterate, I've never paid them for anything, so why should I bow to their dictates, especially since I don't use their product?
Are you dense? You don't have to bow down to anyones dictates. Feel free to do things exactly the way you want to. However, don't whine when everyone else chooses to do things their way and it doesn't turn out to be the same as yours. Freedom works both ways - yours and theirs. You're a bigot if you don't believe that.
Please spend some time reading up about the technology before spouting off about it.
"Trusted" applications in Palladium run in a protected data space. As such, it is impossible (barring bugs in the hardware) for other applications to access their memory, etc.
Really, you should spend more time reading about Palladium before you believe the FUD that RMS et al spout off about it in the so-called FAQs.
this is an object lesson in how broken patent law is
No, it's not. There's nothing wrong with a bullshit patent application. The patent has not been approved yet. IF the patent was approved, ONLY THEN does it show patent law to be broken.
MS will not be able to buy a Dutch judges decision quite as easily as in USA
Are you actually suggesting that they are able to do that here in the US? Just because a judge doesn't agree with you does not mean that the judge is corrupt. At the same time, just because Judge Jackson agreed with the majority of people here doesn't mean he didn't do it because he's deranged.
There is no issue raised in that stupid article. Replace copyright law with any other law (gun control, abortion, stealing, fraud, etc.) and the story will remain the same.
Any law can be enforced in a police-state manner or it can not - it's a function of the government rather than the law itself.
But I don't expect a paranoid lunatic to understand that.
How is this breaking standards compliance if there's no standard in place? It's not "breaking" the way anything else is interpreted, is it?
It isn't. I was being sarcastic. IE gets accused of breaking standards compliance everytime they introduce a new feature that the w3c hasn't gotten around to standardizing yet.
Nonsense! I don't understand what the Naderites are whining about. They claim that it is deceptive because now you'll think there is an actual buzz about the product.
I'm sorry. If you are going to buy something not for its actual features but because you see other people using it, you are a fool and deserve to be parted from your money.
You missed the point. The Court says that these protocols are not to remain trade secrets, as that perpetuates Microsoft's illegal monopoly.
You are wrong. The Court hasn't said anything about these protocols. They are merely part of the proposed settlement which the court has not ruled upon yet.
The price of a CD (which consumers have an objection to) has very little to do with its cost. It costs about 1c/CD for mass-production so what you're paying for is not the cost of stamping the CD. It's likely the new format disks should cost about the same to produce (after the initial investments in the fabs). Of course, that doesn't mean they won't try and charge more for them (like they do for CDs which are cheaper to produce than tapes) but they don't have to. With the SACD format, there is a CD audio layer on the thing already so the disks will be indistinguishable from a regular CD for your existing equipment.
What is likely to cost more is the equipment to play it and there's lots of people out there who drop 100s of $ on their sound equipment and this will give them a reason to drop some more.
and respond by decreasing prices/increasing service
But that's not what the parent poster was talking about. The parent poster said EBay allowed auctions of pirated copies of his work. More competition is not going to stop that.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that the "Number Portability" or similar charge that has been on all my phone bills for ages now?
I think the reason MS is doing this is obvious. Look at their financials - they *really* need people to upgrade to the new version of Office. End-users don't buy Office any more, CIOs and the like do. These people are just not gonna be impressed by another new word-processing feature, but they might be motivated to upgrade if they thought that they were opening up all their data to re-use by other programs.
.NET Enterprise Servers," said John Connors, chief financial officer at Microsoft. "Consistent with our view at the outset of this year, the global economic outlook continues to be uncertain, however we remain committed to making the investments necessary to drive long-term product innovation and customer value across our businesses."
Uhh.. from this article.
Information Worker turned in healthy revenue growth of 26 percent, reflecting customer adoption of Microsoft Office XP through multi-year licensing programs. Customers acquiring Office this quarter included ChevronTexaco, Lockheed Martin, MetLife, Newell Company (Rubbermaid) and the US Department of the Army, Program Executive Office, Aviation.
and
Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $7.75 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2002, a 26 percent increase over revenue of $6.13 billion for the same quarter last year. Operating income for the first quarter was $4.05 billion, compared to $2.90 billion in the same period last year. Net income and diluted earnings per share for the first quarter of fiscal year 2003 were $2.73 billion and $0.50, which included an after-tax charge for investment impairments of $291 million or $0.05. For the same period of the previous year, net income and diluted earnings per share were $1.28 billion and $0.23, which included an after-tax charge for investment impairments of $1.22 billion.
"Results for the first quarter were exceptionally strong, exceeding our expectations. During the quarter, we saw broader customer adoption of our licensing programs than we anticipated, as customers recognized the value of entering into long-term licensing agreements for our products. This strength in licensing led to solid growth for Windows® XP, Office XP and
What a bunch of pseudo-technical garbage!
I have a Masters in Computer Science with a focus on databases and storage technology and very little of what you said makes any sense to me. There's nothing easier than getting at data stored in SQL. Where I work, we've shipped a few products where we didn't document the schema because it was too complex and we didn't feel we could support it. Within weeks, almost all of our major customrs had it reverse-engineered anyway. SQL is very easy to get at!
kernel level SQL data
There's no such thing. SQL data is stored in tables. You use queries to get at it. Period.
Also, your story doesn't make any sense. The article says Office 11 is in Beta already. IIRC, the SQL Server and Palladium stuff in the OS doesn't come until Longhorn. Do you think they will actually release a version of Office which won't work until their next OS (who knows when that will be) is released and adopted? How will they make money off all the people who recently upgraded to Windows XP then?
How can we expect the patent office to keep track of all the prior art that there is out there when CmdrTaco can't even keep track of prior art for posts on Slashdot?
The writing pads could be made much cheaper if each page didn't have to be unique.
But it doesn't keep track of which sheet of paper you are writing on. For all the pad can tell, you could be writing everything on a single sheet of paper!
In fact, if that was all you wanted, it would be very easy to adapt to the ballpoint pen. You would need one sheet of paper where the dots were coordinates from the top left of the sheet and that would give you everything you need. The reason Logitech's paper probably costs so much is that each sheet is part of a 60,000 sq km plane so the pen can uniquely identify not just where you are on the page you're writing on but also which page you are on.
Thats too bad, I now know of 4 congressman that I vote against in the upcoming election.
You don't understand a whole lot about the US electoral system do you?
Apparently some people misunderstand the word "Free". A license that restricts what I can do with software is not "freedom".
FREE is when I can take what is offered with no catches or gotchas.
RMS wants to take away our freedom to do what we wish.
Suffice to say you don't understand the technology then. And other idiots who don't understand it will mod you up because they understand it even less than you do.
Many criticize RMS for what he says or where he says it; i.e., mentioning such things in newsgroups or forums which are "not meant for discussing those issues". But the politics of what he talks about is relevant to kernel developers and coders, even if they're too stupid to realize it.
This is genius! We're too stupid to understand what we want to do or talk about. Let RMS decide that for us.
If you don't use any of their products, why would you care that they didn't trust you?
If Hollywood wants to release movies in a format where THEY can be sure they are not copied and MS wants to support them doing that, why in the world would YOU have an objection to that?
And what of Microsoft? Remember, I don't use their operating system at home - and to reiterate, I've never paid them for anything, so why should I bow to their dictates, especially since I don't use their product?
Are you dense? You don't have to bow down to anyones dictates. Feel free to do things exactly the way you want to. However, don't whine when everyone else chooses to do things their way and it doesn't turn out to be the same as yours. Freedom works both ways - yours and theirs. You're a bigot if you don't believe that.
Please spend some time reading up about the technology before spouting off about it.
"Trusted" applications in Palladium run in a protected data space. As such, it is impossible (barring bugs in the hardware) for other applications to access their memory, etc.
Really, you should spend more time reading about Palladium before you believe the FUD that RMS et al spout off about it in the so-called FAQs.
We need to come up with a good algorithm to determine which stories get posted multiple times.
this is an object lesson in how broken patent law is
No, it's not. There's nothing wrong with a bullshit patent application. The patent has not been approved yet. IF the patent was approved, ONLY THEN does it show patent law to be broken.
MS will not be able to buy a Dutch judges decision quite as easily as in USA
Are you actually suggesting that they are able to do that here in the US? Just because a judge doesn't agree with you does not mean that the judge is corrupt. At the same time, just because Judge Jackson agreed with the majority of people here doesn't mean he didn't do it because he's deranged.
There is no issue raised in that stupid article. Replace copyright law with any other law (gun control, abortion, stealing, fraud, etc.) and the story will remain the same.
Any law can be enforced in a police-state manner or it can not - it's a function of the government rather than the law itself.
But I don't expect a paranoid lunatic to understand that.
From the outset, this was being compared to Apple's 'Switch' campaign in which they use real people
Compared by who? A bunch of teenagers on Slashdot? I don't recall the website saying anything about the switch campaign.
How is this breaking standards compliance if there's no standard in place? It's not "breaking" the way anything else is interpreted, is it?
It isn't. I was being sarcastic. IE gets accused of breaking standards compliance everytime they introduce a new feature that the w3c hasn't gotten around to standardizing yet.
Is this a new W3C standard? I wasn't able to find any references from the page you pointed to or from a quick search on google.
So is this an implementation of an existing W3C standard or is it an example of an evil browser deliberately breaking standards compliance?
Nonsense! I don't understand what the Naderites are whining about. They claim that it is deceptive because now you'll think there is an actual buzz about the product.
I'm sorry. If you are going to buy something not for its actual features but because you see other people using it, you are a fool and deserve to be parted from your money.
You missed the point. The Court says that these protocols are not to remain trade secrets, as that perpetuates Microsoft's illegal monopoly.
You are wrong. The Court hasn't said anything about these protocols. They are merely part of the proposed settlement which the court has not ruled upon yet.
The price of a CD (which consumers have an objection to) has very little to do with its cost. It costs about 1c/CD for mass-production so what you're paying for is not the cost of stamping the CD. It's likely the new format disks should cost about the same to produce (after the initial investments in the fabs). Of course, that doesn't mean they won't try and charge more for them (like they do for CDs which are cheaper to produce than tapes) but they don't have to. With the SACD format, there is a CD audio layer on the thing already so the disks will be indistinguishable from a regular CD for your existing equipment.
What is likely to cost more is the equipment to play it and there's lots of people out there who drop 100s of $ on their sound equipment and this will give them a reason to drop some more.
Correction: India only has 18 official languages.
Yeah. I bet Microsoft has never thought of shipping software in Tamil or Hindi. They'd never think of making the support that either.
and respond by decreasing prices/increasing service
But that's not what the parent poster was talking about. The parent poster said EBay allowed auctions of pirated copies of his work. More competition is not going to stop that.