Nope, it's definately a Linux Firefox issue. I have exactly the same problem.
I've found that the workaround is to hold down the mouse button, and only release the button once I've selected something from the list. That works reliably every time. Right-clicking once sometimes brings up the menu, sometimes fires off the last action, and sometimes fires off a completely random action.
And if you really, really have to allow some kind of code in documents, for the love of all that's holy, don't allow anything to execute by just hovering your mouse over it.
I don't know who to shout at more for this. Adobe for having such a stupid bug. Or Microsoft for allowing people to modify windows explorer in such an unsafe way.
If you're going to allow extensions to such a fundamental part of the OS, surely they should be sandboxed and isolated, to guard against exactly this kind of thing?
We have around 100 staff here, and our entire IT team consists of two technical people. At most we field maybe 5-10 questions an HOUR, and I feel that is too high. Very occasionally we won't even take 10 questions in an entire working DAY, and that's the kind of level we aim to.
The vast majority of our time is spent looking after the system, planning future deployments, and generally keeping things running smoothly. Our aim is to have the technology working and simple enough that all the staff can do their jobs without having to contact IT.
If you're seriously fielding enough questions to need three full time support staff something is very, very wrong. Not only is it causing you problems managing it from an IT point of view, but that is an awful lot of productive time being lost by your staff.
"MS uses IE for tons of stuff that isn't really web browsing at all. Now you've got a choice. You can either live without all those apps/utilities/features that use stuff that's under IE or you don't. FF, Opera, or others won't help you here. They'll get you on the net sure, but they won't get a whole lot of other apps to run properly."
Very true, and that's actually the crux of what was so wrong about MS getting away with this.
If they *hadn't* been able to muscle in on the browser market, they wouldn't have been in a position to dictate what was or was not possible in a browser. They would have had to make sure that all these extra apps/utilities/features *did* work under alternative browsers, and we wouldn't be in this position today. You'd be able to pick any standards compliant browser and be confident that everything you use will still work fine.
It's called competition, by getting rid of it you allow the monopoly holder to dictate how things are going to work, and once that's been allowed to happen it's very hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
"a washing mashing that takes up no volume".... riiight, not quite sure where you're going with this
"works for most common washing tasks"... yes, it does the job, never said it didn't.
"is unable to cause any damage"... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!! *breathes* *gasp* *choke*
UNABLE TO CAUSE ANY DAMAGE? IE? What planet have you been living on for the past 4 years my friend?
IE has been the root cause of more windows vulnerabilities than nearly anything I can think of and the web monopoly Microsoft gained as a result of this has played merry hell with web standards.
As a *direct* result of IE:
- Windows viruses have had an easy route onto PC's for years thanks to ActiveX, Javascript, and IE's integration with windows.
- DDoS, spam and Botnets are a worldwide problem for everybody.
- Web standards are shot to hell, I wouldn't even like to guess the amount of man hours that have been wasted by developers having to tweak their pages to support IE as well as the standards.
All three of those make my life hell, and take up time that I would much rather spend doing something useful... And to get back to your other points:
"a button that almost instantly provides me with any washing machine alternative that I'd like"... but conveniently leaves itself installed too, and you *have* to keep using it for a few key things. You know, like installing security patches.
"I certainly don't think the power company should be legally required to provide me with several washing machines when they only make one."... Yes, but that's missing the question of why is the *power* company providing you with a washing machine in the first place? What's wrong with leaving that to the washing machine vendors.
"Illegal just means the laws are wrong".... BWAHAHAHAHA So you won't mind me mugging you in the street? Illegal? Sure, but the laws are wrong.... o_0
"Monopoly? MS has no internet browser monopoly"... actually they pretty much do, but again, that's not the point. They have a *windows* monopoly, and that has been found in both the US and EU courts.
"Come to think of it, why isn't Apple included in this ruling with Safari?"... You're just not grasping this whole *monopoly* thing are you?
Way to miss the point bud. Yes, I chose windows. I *did not* choose IE. That was forced upon me by Microsoft. The point isn't that *I* chose Windows. It's that *Microsoft* decided to bundle IE with it.
And again, your car analogy misses the point. In a normal market, you can add features, but if your product is a monopoly (which again, has been proven through the courts), then there are restrictions on what you are allowed to do. Namely, you are not allowed to use that monopoly to leverage other markets.
A better car analogy would be: Say Honda had 90% of the car market, and decided they wanted to move into the caravan market. They wouldn't be allowed to just bundle a 'free' caravan with every car - the caravan makers would be up in arms. I mean, if they did that, before long everybody would have a Honda caravan, even if they didn't want or need one. And even if Honda caravans are terrible, who's going to go and buy another caravan when they already have one?
It's about a company using both their profits and their market position from a monopoly product to muscle in on other markets. This is not 'ruling in favour of the underdog', this is some of the top judges in a EU court applying the law.
And people can argue all they like that "the browser is part of the OS". No, it's not. It's a separate product that is *convenient* when it's bundled in. It's not requred, creating a mechanism to install one is easy, and it sure as hell shouldn't be tangled into the OS the way Microsoft did.
Why am I so bitter about this? Because I'm a network admin by trade, and I've spent the last four years trying to secure the nightmare that is Windows with a built in *unremovable* browser.
Dear god, how this got a +4 Insightful I'll never know.
Madness? Using an illegal monopoly to muscle into other markets is madness. You're saying you'd be quite happy for the electric company to bundle a crappy washing machine that tears your clothes with your electricity bill?
Oh, and the electric company have ensured that even if you buy another washing machine, you can't remove theirs. And theirs insists on washing your clothes from time to time, no matter how hard you try to remove it. That's what MS did here - they used one product that you pretty much *had* to buy to bundle in a bug ridden piece of crap and force it on customers.
You can't remove IE from a system, they managed to bodge it in pretty well. And no matter how many competitors products you install, from time to time IE will pop up again.
If you're going to talk about the freedom of a company to sell it's product without interference, go speak to Netscape. They deserved to be able to sell their product without Microsoft illegally killing their market. And yes, it was illegal. Both the US and the EU have ruled on that now.
Calling decisions by some of the top courts on two continents insane just shows how much you're missing the point here. You're right about a line needing to be drawn though; the courts are telling Microsoft they've stepped over it, and it's about time.
Great, I've got to wait 2-3 weeks for this to be patched.
Oh wait, Adobe have a 4 MONTH OLD bug that means we can't even run Acrobat 9 within our company: http://www.adobe.com/go/kb404597
*seethes*
What's worse is that Autodesk hit this exact same bug with their beta of Design Review, and fixed it within a couple of weeks, so I know there's a fix for this.
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, and realised that what I really wanted was a kind of interactive checklist system.
Imagine a wiki based checklist that supported expandable trees of information. Advanced users can simply tick top level items as completed, and if you need more help you can expand levels of the tree as needed, providing more detailed steps, or more information about the process.
Ideally you would have something that can save completed checklists, but just having the lists available to work from would be a great help.
Of course, with a small IT department, it really wasn't worth fleshing the idea out further, or developing it. For our needs I've found that a wiki works great (mindtouch deki actually - bloody superb product). Checklists are easily tagged, and written with bulleted or numbered lists, and further information is easily added and cross-referenced.
Took two days to copy/paste over 400 pages of documentation into it, and it's the best decision we've made in years.
Simple solution: For every piece of software you own, buy the software, then download a copy off the Pirate Bay. Claim you "just like to keep things in their boxes, like comics & stuff".
Now you never read, or agree to any EULA, and since you own the software I'd love to see the look on their lawyers faces if presented with this case:-D
The special casing for Netscape is purely because they were the ones to complain and bring the matter to the attention of the courts. It takes a lot of guts and some deep pockets to be prepared to go up against Microsoft in court. Just look at the other anti-competitive cases there have been, and how many witnesses have reached out of court settlements with Microsoft. The last case I remember reading about was the European Union case, and the Samba guys were the only people prepared to stick it out to the end - Microsoft had managed to get every single other witness to withdraw their complaint.
And you can download plenty without a browser, it's just that they're so common people think they're the only way the web works.
The internet is based on TCP/IP. The web is just html content that's delivered over that network. Windows Updates doesn't need Internet Explorer to install updates, and Microsoft could very easily create a small utility that's opened when Windows is first launched asking which browser you would like to use, and offering to download and install it for you. The most popular browsers could even be included by default so there's no download needed.
It really is incredibly easy to give the end user the choice of a browser.
Yes, I agree the question is there, and while I'm no lawyer, I expect the answer to it is something like:
"Was there an existing market for that product, and were other companies hurt as a result of using the Windows monopoly to distribute those applications?"
That was very definitely the case for the browser, and it was a concious decision by Microsoft to obtain dominance in a separate and already existing market. I think you have to look at whether they are legitimately extending the features of the OS, or using their monopoly to attack other markets, and answering questions like that are exactly what the courts are for.
And while I'd love to see an open source version of windows, I don't see what that has to do with bundling IE? This isn't about Microsoft vs Open Source, it's about what Microsoft did to Netscape. It's not about ideals, courts can't rule on those, it's about one specific instance of proven damage.
Also, Microsoft couldn't use this argument to remove Firefox from Ubuntu. Firstly they are two separate products from separate companies. Secondly Ubuntu isn't an illegal monopoly. Thirdly, Ubuntu has plenty of competition, you're free to download any version of Linux with any broser. Fourthly, you can remove Firefox and install any browser you like, and finally, the move isn't illegally helping Firefox push out competitors in a market.
All in all, it's a completely different situation. Firefox got itself legitimately included in Ubuntu by being better than the competition. That's exactly how markets are supposed to work, and exactly what Microsoft are desperate to prevent - they have a history of being unable to compete given a level playing field.
Err... no. Microsoft don't have the right to ship whatever they want. Before IE was released, Netscape had over 90% of the market, and was sold as a profitable product. Then Microsoft decided that they wanted a piece of that market, so used their profits and market from Windows (which had already been established as a monopoly) to force Netscape out, and ensure their own product obtained monopoly status in a new market.
And while that works, it's illegal behavior, but unfortunately for us the law moves slowly.
What's worse is that Microsoft knew full well what they were doing. They knew that bundling an application to muscle into a market like this was illegal, so they attempted to dress it up by making IE an integral part of windows, and saying it couldn't be removed.
That's what really pisses me off about all this, not only did they illegally stifle competition in the browser market, but the way they did it opened up hundreds of security holes in windows, and because the browser was "part of" the OS, there was no easy way to remove it or fix those holes. Network admins like myself have been having to work with the mess they created for years, and there was absolutely no need for it.
And saying OEM's should offer other OS choices is to ignore yet more illegal behavior from Microsoft, where they have been pressuring OEM to *only* provide windows.
Finally, the OOXML fiasco was just the latest incarnation of Microsoft using whatever tactics they feel like to beat the competition. They know full well what is and isn't legal, but they also know that they can move faster than the law, and they've relied on that to get themselves to the position they're in now.
First of all, why on earth are you assuming a multi million dollar project is going to be using software supported by some guy called bob?
Rewrite that as using open source software supported by Canonical, Novell, Red Hat or Sun, and all of a sudden Open Source is competing on much more equal footing, and your first argument goes out of the window. After all, you could just have easily bought some closed source software off 'Bob' for your multi-million pound project.
What that, you don't trust Bob's software, and would rather buy from a big company? Funny that.
And do you *really* think Microsoft's EULA disclaimers don't apply to large organizations? Bill Gates didn't get Microsoft to where they are today by the company being dumb. I've seen their volume license terms, and if anything they're *more* restrictive, not less. By all means, quote me a paragraph or two from one of these 'favourible' EULA's that show me I'm wrong, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
Protect people? Where on earth did you get that idea?
As far as I can see, UAC is all about protecting *Microsoft*. They've just shifted the responsibility for a whole class of security exploits to the end user:
"Infected by a virus? Oh dear, you must have clicked 'accept' at some point, not our fault." "What do you mean you have to click 'accept' for everything?"
If they were serious about security they wouldn't have buried things like Winternals Protection Manager. That had the potential to really improve security for Windows XP (you could finally run everything as a limited user, and assign individual applications greater rights if needed, and could also whitelist allowed applications in an easy to use manner), but surprise surprise, within a few months of its launch, Microsoft bought the company and discontinued that product.
Yup, and that's why they're loosing so badly to google online. Lock in doesn't exist online. Google understands that and each of its products is strong in its own right - the user gets to pick and choose which ones they'd like to use.
Microsoft don't understand that, they still try to tie their online services to their own operating system and browser. They even try to tie their games console to it. They have no concept that you can't control what people want to do online.
Tell me about it, I've been a hotmail user for > 13 years. Then they release an update that stops me sending emails (I use firefox). They fix that, but in a way that stops me searching through my mails.
Didn't take me long to move to gmail I can tell you. And since moving over I've found I'm using a whole host of other google services much more often: Google docs, calendar, photos, iGoogle and reader are now used daily.
For me, that really highlights the difference between Microsoft and Google online, and shows just how badly Microsoft are failing. Google understand that an annoyed customer is a lost customer. They realise the importance of getting it right, and keeping on getting it right. I'm using a whole bunch of their services because each and every one of them does what I want it to do, and does it quickly and easily.
Microsoft need to understand that customer churn online is vitally important, and they've got to loose the whole "we develop for IE, everyone else is irrelevant" attitude. That may have worked with windows where people are locked in, but online where it's a few seconds work to find another provider it's a recipe for disaster.
Hmm, in that case I might be ok. Double-clicking on a CD-ROM in My Computer just opens the folder with this policy in place, and the Autorun entry is completely gone from the right-click menu.
I wonder if there's been a stealth patch somewhere. I read that this *is* deployed for Vista & Server 2008 as part of another patch, so I wonder if it snuck in.
First of all, I absolutely love these devices. It's a great idea that's been well executed, and yes, they're a niche product, but we've one or two apps that would notice the increase in speed from these, and if I had the money I'd buy a whole bunch of them to stick in our servers.... except that you don't get 5.25" bays in an awful lot of modern rack mounted servers. Certainly none of our new kit has them; all that space is taken up with hot swap 3.5" or 2.5" drives.
And that's what kills it for me. Even if I'm looking at a new server I'd have to make sacrifices to fit one of these. My first choice for a new storage server is going to be one with 24x 2.5" drive bays. I'd have to sacrifice a full 8 drive bays to make room for one of these, and it's just not worth it. Not when I can buy an Intel SSD for the same price, loose just one bay, and have it hot swap to boot.
And even worse, there are PCIe devices just around the corner, with 3-4x the read and write speed of any SATA device. Those will drop straight into any of our current servers, no problem at all.
So unfortunately, much as I love the ANS-9010, I just can't see any reason to buy one:(
Thanks. How do you find out if updates like this are available through WSUS, or whether Microsoft has decided they're not important? I couldn't see anything in the update description to distinguish it from all the other security (and other) updates that are available.
And I guess my next question is how important is this? We disable autorun via group policy already, what exactly is missing without this patch?
We use a WSUS server to roll out updates to all our clients here and I can't find this patch for love nor money. Is there anybody running WSUS who's successfully rolled out this patch?
The CERT article says this has been updated in a security release from July 2008, the download KB950582 was released in August 2008. I find it very worrying that I can't find any trace of this on our update server. It makes me wonder what other security patches Microsoft haven't made available.
First of all, don't even think about converting your documents yet. You want to spend 6 months working with OpenOffice to ensure it meets your needs before you do something like that.
Here's how I would approach it:
1. Check the update / patch procedure for OpenOffice, ensure you can easily apply updates and security patches. 2. Train / engage staff. Set up a wiki or something for people to report problems & for tips to be documented. Make sure everybody understands that this is for long term benefits, and that you appreciate it's going to be awkward to begin with. 3. Install OpenOffice on all computers, set it as the default viewer, saving documents in Microsoft format. 4. Test. Run like this for at least 6 months, preferably 12 so you get a good idea that all documents work ok. 5. After a couple of months, if there are no major problems, start removing MS Office from machines, because I can guarantee there will be a bunch of people still quietly using it and buggering up your long term test.
In addition to making sure you don't get stuck with a lemon if you find it doesn't work, it also gives plenty of time for the conversion market to mature. In 6 months time, start looking for tools to bulk convert your existing documents. Then take a backup of everything and over one weekend, convert all your documents to ODF and set that as the default file format.
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Nope, it's definately a Linux Firefox issue. I have exactly the same problem.
I've found that the workaround is to hold down the mouse button, and only release the button once I've selected something from the list. That works reliably every time. Right-clicking once sometimes brings up the menu, sometimes fires off the last action, and sometimes fires off a completely random action.
And if you really, really have to allow some kind of code in documents, for the love of all that's holy, don't allow anything to execute by just hovering your mouse over it.
I don't know who to shout at more for this. Adobe for having such a stupid bug. Or Microsoft for allowing people to modify windows explorer in such an unsafe way.
If you're going to allow extensions to such a fundamental part of the OS, surely they should be sandboxed and isolated, to guard against exactly this kind of thing?
Dear god indeed!
We have around 100 staff here, and our entire IT team consists of two technical people. At most we field maybe 5-10 questions an HOUR, and I feel that is too high. Very occasionally we won't even take 10 questions in an entire working DAY, and that's the kind of level we aim to.
The vast majority of our time is spent looking after the system, planning future deployments, and generally keeping things running smoothly. Our aim is to have the technology working and simple enough that all the staff can do their jobs without having to contact IT.
If you're seriously fielding enough questions to need three full time support staff something is very, very wrong. Not only is it causing you problems managing it from an IT point of view, but that is an awful lot of productive time being lost by your staff.
"MS uses IE for tons of stuff that isn't really web browsing at all. Now you've got a choice. You can either live without all those apps/utilities/features that use stuff that's under IE or you don't. FF, Opera, or others won't help you here. They'll get you on the net sure, but they won't get a whole lot of other apps to run properly."
Very true, and that's actually the crux of what was so wrong about MS getting away with this.
If they *hadn't* been able to muscle in on the browser market, they wouldn't have been in a position to dictate what was or was not possible in a browser. They would have had to make sure that all these extra apps/utilities/features *did* work under alternative browsers, and we wouldn't be in this position today. You'd be able to pick any standards compliant browser and be confident that everything you use will still work fine.
It's called competition, by getting rid of it you allow the monopoly holder to dictate how things are going to work, and once that's been allowed to happen it's very hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Hahahaha....
"a washing mashing that takes up no volume" .... riiight, not quite sure where you're going with this
"works for most common washing tasks" ... yes, it does the job, never said it didn't.
"is unable to cause any damage" ... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!! *breathes* *gasp* *choke*
UNABLE TO CAUSE ANY DAMAGE? IE? What planet have you been living on for the past 4 years my friend?
IE has been the root cause of more windows vulnerabilities than nearly anything I can think of and the web monopoly Microsoft gained as a result of this has played merry hell with web standards.
As a *direct* result of IE:
- Windows viruses have had an easy route onto PC's for years thanks to ActiveX, Javascript, and IE's integration with windows.
- DDoS, spam and Botnets are a worldwide problem for everybody.
- Web standards are shot to hell, I wouldn't even like to guess the amount of man hours that have been wasted by developers having to tweak their pages to support IE as well as the standards.
All three of those make my life hell, and take up time that I would much rather spend doing something useful... And to get back to your other points:
"a button that almost instantly provides me with any washing machine alternative that I'd like" ... but conveniently leaves itself installed too, and you *have* to keep using it for a few key things. You know, like installing security patches.
"I certainly don't think the power company should be legally required to provide me with several washing machines when they only make one." ... Yes, but that's missing the question of why is the *power* company providing you with a washing machine in the first place? What's wrong with leaving that to the washing machine vendors.
"Illegal just means the laws are wrong".... BWAHAHAHAHA So you won't mind me mugging you in the street? Illegal? Sure, but the laws are wrong.... o_0
"Monopoly? MS has no internet browser monopoly"... actually they pretty much do, but again, that's not the point. They have a *windows* monopoly, and that has been found in both the US and EU courts.
"Come to think of it, why isn't Apple included in this ruling with Safari?" ... You're just not grasping this whole *monopoly* thing are you?
Way to miss the point bud. Yes, I chose windows. I *did not* choose IE. That was forced upon me by Microsoft. The point isn't that *I* chose Windows. It's that *Microsoft* decided to bundle IE with it.
And again, your car analogy misses the point. In a normal market, you can add features, but if your product is a monopoly (which again, has been proven through the courts), then there are restrictions on what you are allowed to do. Namely, you are not allowed to use that monopoly to leverage other markets.
A better car analogy would be: Say Honda had 90% of the car market, and decided they wanted to move into the caravan market. They wouldn't be allowed to just bundle a 'free' caravan with every car - the caravan makers would be up in arms. I mean, if they did that, before long everybody would have a Honda caravan, even if they didn't want or need one. And even if Honda caravans are terrible, who's going to go and buy another caravan when they already have one?
It's about a company using both their profits and their market position from a monopoly product to muscle in on other markets. This is not 'ruling in favour of the underdog', this is some of the top judges in a EU court applying the law.
And people can argue all they like that "the browser is part of the OS". No, it's not. It's a separate product that is *convenient* when it's bundled in. It's not requred, creating a mechanism to install one is easy, and it sure as hell shouldn't be tangled into the OS the way Microsoft did.
Why am I so bitter about this? Because I'm a network admin by trade, and I've spent the last four years trying to secure the nightmare that is Windows with a built in *unremovable* browser.
Dear god, how this got a +4 Insightful I'll never know.
Madness? Using an illegal monopoly to muscle into other markets is madness. You're saying you'd be quite happy for the electric company to bundle a crappy washing machine that tears your clothes with your electricity bill?
Oh, and the electric company have ensured that even if you buy another washing machine, you can't remove theirs. And theirs insists on washing your clothes from time to time, no matter how hard you try to remove it. That's what MS did here - they used one product that you pretty much *had* to buy to bundle in a bug ridden piece of crap and force it on customers.
You can't remove IE from a system, they managed to bodge it in pretty well. And no matter how many competitors products you install, from time to time IE will pop up again.
If you're going to talk about the freedom of a company to sell it's product without interference, go speak to Netscape. They deserved to be able to sell their product without Microsoft illegally killing their market. And yes, it was illegal. Both the US and the EU have ruled on that now.
Calling decisions by some of the top courts on two continents insane just shows how much you're missing the point here. You're right about a line needing to be drawn though; the courts are telling Microsoft they've stepped over it, and it's about time.
Great, I've got to wait 2-3 weeks for this to be patched.
Oh wait, Adobe have a 4 MONTH OLD bug that means we can't even run Acrobat 9 within our company:
http://www.adobe.com/go/kb404597
*seethes*
What's worse is that Autodesk hit this exact same bug with their beta of Design Review, and fixed it within a couple of weeks, so I know there's a fix for this.
I was thinking about this a few weeks ago, and realised that what I really wanted was a kind of interactive checklist system.
Imagine a wiki based checklist that supported expandable trees of information. Advanced users can simply tick top level items as completed, and if you need more help you can expand levels of the tree as needed, providing more detailed steps, or more information about the process.
Ideally you would have something that can save completed checklists, but just having the lists available to work from would be a great help.
Of course, with a small IT department, it really wasn't worth fleshing the idea out further, or developing it. For our needs I've found that a wiki works great (mindtouch deki actually - bloody superb product). Checklists are easily tagged, and written with bulleted or numbered lists, and further information is easily added and cross-referenced.
Took two days to copy/paste over 400 pages of documentation into it, and it's the best decision we've made in years.
Simple solution: For every piece of software you own, buy the software, then download a copy off the Pirate Bay. Claim you "just like to keep things in their boxes, like comics & stuff".
Now you never read, or agree to any EULA, and since you own the software I'd love to see the look on their lawyers faces if presented with this case :-D
"Anything MS takes an interest in... benefits us all"
You mean apart from Disk Compression, Web Browsers, Office Suites and International standards right?
The special casing for Netscape is purely because they were the ones to complain and bring the matter to the attention of the courts. It takes a lot of guts and some deep pockets to be prepared to go up against Microsoft in court. Just look at the other anti-competitive cases there have been, and how many witnesses have reached out of court settlements with Microsoft. The last case I remember reading about was the European Union case, and the Samba guys were the only people prepared to stick it out to the end - Microsoft had managed to get every single other witness to withdraw their complaint.
And you can download plenty without a browser, it's just that they're so common people think they're the only way the web works.
The internet is based on TCP/IP. The web is just html content that's delivered over that network. Windows Updates doesn't need Internet Explorer to install updates, and Microsoft could very easily create a small utility that's opened when Windows is first launched asking which browser you would like to use, and offering to download and install it for you. The most popular browsers could even be included by default so there's no download needed.
It really is incredibly easy to give the end user the choice of a browser.
Yes, I agree the question is there, and while I'm no lawyer, I expect the answer to it is something like:
"Was there an existing market for that product, and were other companies hurt as a result of using the Windows monopoly to distribute those applications?"
That was very definitely the case for the browser, and it was a concious decision by Microsoft to obtain dominance in a separate and already existing market. I think you have to look at whether they are legitimately extending the features of the OS, or using their monopoly to attack other markets, and answering questions like that are exactly what the courts are for.
And while I'd love to see an open source version of windows, I don't see what that has to do with bundling IE? This isn't about Microsoft vs Open Source, it's about what Microsoft did to Netscape. It's not about ideals, courts can't rule on those, it's about one specific instance of proven damage.
Also, Microsoft couldn't use this argument to remove Firefox from Ubuntu. Firstly they are two separate products from separate companies. Secondly Ubuntu isn't an illegal monopoly. Thirdly, Ubuntu has plenty of competition, you're free to download any version of Linux with any broser. Fourthly, you can remove Firefox and install any browser you like, and finally, the move isn't illegally helping Firefox push out competitors in a market.
All in all, it's a completely different situation. Firefox got itself legitimately included in Ubuntu by being better than the competition. That's exactly how markets are supposed to work, and exactly what Microsoft are desperate to prevent - they have a history of being unable to compete given a level playing field.
Err... no. Microsoft don't have the right to ship whatever they want. Before IE was released, Netscape had over 90% of the market, and was sold as a profitable product. Then Microsoft decided that they wanted a piece of that market, so used their profits and market from Windows (which had already been established as a monopoly) to force Netscape out, and ensure their own product obtained monopoly status in a new market.
And while that works, it's illegal behavior, but unfortunately for us the law moves slowly.
What's worse is that Microsoft knew full well what they were doing. They knew that bundling an application to muscle into a market like this was illegal, so they attempted to dress it up by making IE an integral part of windows, and saying it couldn't be removed.
That's what really pisses me off about all this, not only did they illegally stifle competition in the browser market, but the way they did it opened up hundreds of security holes in windows, and because the browser was "part of" the OS, there was no easy way to remove it or fix those holes. Network admins like myself have been having to work with the mess they created for years, and there was absolutely no need for it.
And saying OEM's should offer other OS choices is to ignore yet more illegal behavior from Microsoft, where they have been pressuring OEM to *only* provide windows.
Finally, the OOXML fiasco was just the latest incarnation of Microsoft using whatever tactics they feel like to beat the competition. They know full well what is and isn't legal, but they also know that they can move faster than the law, and they've relied on that to get themselves to the position they're in now.
err... less of the FUD please.
First of all, why on earth are you assuming a multi million dollar project is going to be using software supported by some guy called bob?
Rewrite that as using open source software supported by Canonical, Novell, Red Hat or Sun, and all of a sudden Open Source is competing on much more equal footing, and your first argument goes out of the window. After all, you could just have easily bought some closed source software off 'Bob' for your multi-million pound project.
What that, you don't trust Bob's software, and would rather buy from a big company? Funny that.
And do you *really* think Microsoft's EULA disclaimers don't apply to large organizations? Bill Gates didn't get Microsoft to where they are today by the company being dumb. I've seen their volume license terms, and if anything they're *more* restrictive, not less. By all means, quote me a paragraph or two from one of these 'favourible' EULA's that show me I'm wrong, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
Protect people? Where on earth did you get that idea?
As far as I can see, UAC is all about protecting *Microsoft*. They've just shifted the responsibility for a whole class of security exploits to the end user:
"Infected by a virus? Oh dear, you must have clicked 'accept' at some point, not our fault."
"What do you mean you have to click 'accept' for everything?"
If they were serious about security they wouldn't have buried things like Winternals Protection Manager. That had the potential to really improve security for Windows XP (you could finally run everything as a limited user, and assign individual applications greater rights if needed, and could also whitelist allowed applications in an easy to use manner), but surprise surprise, within a few months of its launch, Microsoft bought the company and discontinued that product.
What you need is a stuff bag, something I had the idea for after reading this:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=401814&cid=21857590
Yup, and that's why they're loosing so badly to google online. Lock in doesn't exist online. Google understands that and each of its products is strong in its own right - the user gets to pick and choose which ones they'd like to use.
Microsoft don't understand that, they still try to tie their online services to their own operating system and browser. They even try to tie their games console to it. They have no concept that you can't control what people want to do online.
Tell me about it, I've been a hotmail user for > 13 years. Then they release an update that stops me sending emails (I use firefox). They fix that, but in a way that stops me searching through my mails.
Didn't take me long to move to gmail I can tell you. And since moving over I've found I'm using a whole host of other google services much more often: Google docs, calendar, photos, iGoogle and reader are now used daily.
For me, that really highlights the difference between Microsoft and Google online, and shows just how badly Microsoft are failing. Google understand that an annoyed customer is a lost customer. They realise the importance of getting it right, and keeping on getting it right. I'm using a whole bunch of their services because each and every one of them does what I want it to do, and does it quickly and easily.
Microsoft need to understand that customer churn online is vitally important, and they've got to loose the whole "we develop for IE, everyone else is irrelevant" attitude. That may have worked with windows where people are locked in, but online where it's a few seconds work to find another provider it's a recipe for disaster.
Hmm, in that case I might be ok. Double-clicking on a CD-ROM in My Computer just opens the folder with this policy in place, and the Autorun entry is completely gone from the right-click menu.
I wonder if there's been a stealth patch somewhere. I read that this *is* deployed for Vista & Server 2008 as part of another patch, so I wonder if it snuck in.
First of all, I absolutely love these devices. It's a great idea that's been well executed, and yes, they're a niche product, but we've one or two apps that would notice the increase in speed from these, and if I had the money I'd buy a whole bunch of them to stick in our servers. ... except that you don't get 5.25" bays in an awful lot of modern rack mounted servers. Certainly none of our new kit has them; all that space is taken up with hot swap 3.5" or 2.5" drives.
And that's what kills it for me. Even if I'm looking at a new server I'd have to make sacrifices to fit one of these. My first choice for a new storage server is going to be one with 24x 2.5" drive bays. I'd have to sacrifice a full 8 drive bays to make room for one of these, and it's just not worth it. Not when I can buy an Intel SSD for the same price, loose just one bay, and have it hot swap to boot.
And even worse, there are PCIe devices just around the corner, with 3-4x the read and write speed of any SATA device. Those will drop straight into any of our current servers, no problem at all.
So unfortunately, much as I love the ANS-9010, I just can't see any reason to buy one :(
Thanks. How do you find out if updates like this are available through WSUS, or whether Microsoft has decided they're not important? I couldn't see anything in the update description to distinguish it from all the other security (and other) updates that are available.
And I guess my next question is how important is this? We disable autorun via group policy already, what exactly is missing without this patch?
We use a WSUS server to roll out updates to all our clients here and I can't find this patch for love nor money. Is there anybody running WSUS who's successfully rolled out this patch?
The CERT article says this has been updated in a security release from July 2008, the download KB950582 was released in August 2008. I find it very worrying that I can't find any trace of this on our update server. It makes me wonder what other security patches Microsoft haven't made available.
First of all, don't even think about converting your documents yet. You want to spend 6 months working with OpenOffice to ensure it meets your needs before you do something like that.
Here's how I would approach it:
1. Check the update / patch procedure for OpenOffice, ensure you can easily apply updates and security patches.
2. Train / engage staff. Set up a wiki or something for people to report problems & for tips to be documented. Make sure everybody understands that this is for long term benefits, and that you appreciate it's going to be awkward to begin with.
3. Install OpenOffice on all computers, set it as the default viewer, saving documents in Microsoft format.
4. Test. Run like this for at least 6 months, preferably 12 so you get a good idea that all documents work ok.
5. After a couple of months, if there are no major problems, start removing MS Office from machines, because I can guarantee there will be a bunch of people still quietly using it and buggering up your long term test.
In addition to making sure you don't get stuck with a lemon if you find it doesn't work, it also gives plenty of time for the conversion market to mature. In 6 months time, start looking for tools to bulk convert your existing documents. Then take a backup of everything and over one weekend, convert all your documents to ODF and set that as the default file format.
Who's modding this funny? That's downright Informative!