The editorial points mostly at Microsoft's failed offerings like MSN and Xbox, saying that the 80% profit numbers for Windows and Office can only sustain the failed products as long as Windows and Office remain profitable
Humorously that article on the Inquirer (which is notorious for such factless drivel) repeats an oft stated claiming that only two Microsoft products make money (which is something that is classic in the community -- repetition eventually is presumed to be proof). In reality two Microsoft divisions make money by the truckload, and these divisions comprise all of the business software such as SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Ah well, I still would be saddened if I didn't see that myth repeated verbatim a million more times.
Microsoft has been plugging away at the set-top box market for years, and for a year or so has sold a media center edition intending to hit the Tivo type market (convergence).
To be fair, does Microsoft's flattening revenue have to do with "open source" taking their marketshare, or is it because many customers are quite happy with older Microsoft products and have refused to sign up to the recent licensing agreements? I know a couple of very large corporations whose desktops are NT 4, and they're only grudgingly finally upgrading to 2000. This same thing can be seen with countless users continuing to use Office 97, etc -- Given this, a flattening or declining revenue stream seems obvious.
Errr...straighten what out? He said that it isn't a desktop chip, while I said that it wasn't a workstation chip...in the context of this discussion they are synonyms. The Opteron is intended to be a server foundation in SMP systems running things like database systems, not running photoshop filters.
Of course realistically the Athlon 64 FX and the Opteron are almost entirely the same chip, and the Athlon 64 (minus the FX) is the same chip minus one of the memory channels, so the whole distinction between workstation (aka desktop)/server is sort of goofy, but it is one that hits your pocket book as such market focusing often comes with price premiums.
The Opteron wasn't intended as a workstation chip -- for that you need a Athlon FX. Indeed, realistically a pretty powerful workstation can be built around an Athlon 64, with the "3000" (2Ghz) version going for chump change currently.
I'm hardly an expert, but have come across this term quite a few times. In a nutshell, handling and control is improved with minimized unsprung weight (and conversely diminished with increased unsprung weight). The premise is that the shocks can "push down" on the tire and wheel assemblies to counteract the upward momentum when they hit a bump in the road, for example. With increased unsprung weight, the kinetic energy is too large for the shocks to counteract, so for brief instants the wheel loses contact with the roadway to varying degrees (or even if it maintains contact, the downward pressure is reduced and thus traction is compromised).
Interestingly I've seen this several times now in conversations about the Athlon 64, and it's a reasonable debate that I've tossed around many times in the past myself (i.e. "what is my upgrade path?").
The reality, though, is that I have never, ever upgraded just the chip on any motherboard, no matter how supposedly long its lifespan was -- there was always some new technology on the newer motherboards, be it faster AGP, better interconnect standards (USB2, Firewire, SATA), faster memory standards, etc. In other words who really cares how long the socket lasts? You'll likely replace the motherboard when you replace the chip anyways.
What a bunch of propaganda claptrap (you work for the Soviet communist party in a former life?) -- Lenin praises you comrade.
Microsoft has developed all of their code to be cross-platform for years (NT used to run on several processors, but when the same software was available on multiple platforms it strangely led people to Intel), and upwardly bit-scalable, and has been demoing 64-bit editions of Windows for years. Having the technical ability to toss a basic operating system out the door, and wanting to market and support a product homogenously in a product line are two very different things though.
Having said that, it is definitely true that this is one of those fulcrum moments -- Microsoft is still sitting on the can (I'm sure there's some imagery some can derive from that...cue the jokes), and it's one of those moments where a lot of IT directors may just decide to get in one of those Opteron boxes with Linux or whatever on it....and it grows from there. It is an opportunity for some of the unix variants now that AMD is ramping up their 64 bit processors.
The Iraq war was a completely separate war from the war in Afghanistan. I suppose the "Iraq=9/11" propaganda sank pretty deep into your psyche and you find this hard to separate now.
Any graphics that require interpretation will basically lose the audience, as the vast majority of people will tune you out and interpret it themselves. I've seen this in action at quite a few presentations.
Your points seem to propose a technique of "presenting to people who don't really care", and my experience is that such people don't really care regardless of how "jazzed up" your presentation is. If people care they're really there to listen and absorb a lecture of sorts, and the presentation is just something to point your eyes at rather than staring at the presenter, or as a medium to present data that's best formed as graphics, which is a subset.
Having said all of that, I have two pieces of advice for powerpoint presentations-
1) Never provide a hand-out of the presentation -- this is a way for people to escape your presentation and they'll just skim ahead, making presumptions about everything you're going to say, and then ignore the rest.
2) This is totally contrary to the whole subject of this article, but I truly believe that a presentation is a multimedia display, and in no way should the presentation have to hold up on its own -- i.e. If people weren't there, they shouldn't expect the same absorption or understanding skimming the presentation without the supporting presenter (unless you provide a full video recording of the presentation when you distribute it). Many people propose that presentations have to be fully self-supporting and that is just wrong.
If the Linux community _really_ wants to invade the desktop space, we need some killer games.
Actually you just need to relax while Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo fight it out -- once again the pendulum of game playing is swinging far back towards consoles, decoupling the need for your computer to be a great gaming platform.
Of course this applies to the market as a whole -- there are still lots of hardcore computer gamers, but it's a vastly declining market.
Do you really think the "director" of RBCFG sent down a memo to purchase some SCO shares? This is standard market analysis and hedging -- This doesn't indicate any agreement with SCO's business plan or practices.
Having said that, the stock market is pretty much gambling, albeit with analysis you can lead yourself to believe that you can count the cards.
But, a lot of people can do it. Too many actually, creating a glut in the market. And, Indians, Pakistanis, and others in Asia work for so much cheaper than Americans, that outsourcing saves money.
Actually, very few can actually develop software. Very, very few. I've worked in quite a few firms, and it astounds me how many people are just horribly bad at this profession. The myth that software development is easy betrays the ignorance of the repeater. Here's where things get complex, though, and it's where the blatant racists (such as the professor quoted) pop out of the woodwork: There are a couple of countries, such as India, that have fantastic educational systems for a small subsection of the population. Now racists may find this hard to believe, but just like in the "first world" there are a lot of pretty clever people in India - couple this with a first rate educational system, and you have some world-class developers. To make matters even more tasty for the outsourcer, the Indian "dollar" is grossly undervalued (intentionally), making Indian labour cheap.
The end result is that you can hire loads of incredibly intelligent, incredibly educated (phds out the wahoo) Indians for a fairly low fee. To racist idiots like Mr. Johnson, naturally this must mean that software development is a "low-skill" job...I mean if people way over there can do it...
As for Project Managers, it is a VERY different job than programming. Not only must a Project Manager know how to program at a reasonable level, they must know how to communicate exactly what is needed for a project to those who are coding.
What world are you living in? Again speaking as someone with a lot of experience at some pretty big firms, most project managers know NOTHING about software development, and their primary skills are a) using Microsoft Project, and b) communications. I am not implying that I disrespect their position (the (b) point is a very complex task in many firms), but the idea that a project manager is some sort of super-programmers is just the height of absurdity.
It really is a serious question. All software systems generally have a technical focus guiding their design, but when they're crammed into uses beyond that what they are designed for, product disasters usually result (see embedded NT. Indeed for the portable market Microsoft basically threw it all out and wrote CE from scratch for that platform).
I guess my question is given the plethora of extremely proven, capable solutions in the embedded market, what would make Linux (which was designed for the desktop/server market) a credible choice beyond perhaps catering to the hype machine?
A recent trend here in Canada is that if you use one of the bank machines of a bank other than the bank that issued your debit card, they tack on a $1.50 service charge (this is atop the Interac fee that your own bank charges you). Given that most people get our fairly small sums, like $40 - $60, this is an outrageous service charge and it's just another money grab by the big banks. In any case, and getting back to your point, if they do this they have to provide a notice that there will be a service fee, to which you have to agree.
My guess is that your own bank dinged you with a huge "cross-border" service charge for the electronic debit. This is surprizing, though, as I've used my Canadian bank card around the globe and have never gotten charged anything more than the Interac fee and the normal currency conversion.
(PS. $40 was $60 Canadian about two years ago, but today it's about $52 Canadian).
A scam that recently was in the news here in Ontario is gangs that put false fronts on ATMs. The faux-fronts contain a camera over the keypad and a magnetic reader on the card reader. These were found on bank machines of the big 5 banks (BMO, TD, RBC, Scotia, and CIBC). So the moral of the story is that even if you stick to the "name-brand" bank machines, you still might get scammed. Personally I'm astounded at the intricacy involved in someone putting fake-fronts on big bank bank machines (don't these things have cameras and some sort of security? How did someone pull up and pull that off?), though I guess that's the extent that organized crime can go.
I don't think your "Linux user's are shoeless beggars" angle is going to win you many friends here (there are a lot of people using Linux because it's the only platform currently fully supporting the Athlon 64FX, for example -- it isn't the financial dregs that use Linux). Then again, you did get moderated up heavily...
There aren't many ogg players quite simply because technologically mp3 is adequate for the marketplace (that is the majority of people). As mp3 got the first mover advantage both from a tool and market perspective, any contender to the thrown will require either a concerted effort by all vendors (a large "multilateral force"), or it'll have to be so superior that there is a very clear choice. Ogg doesn't fit the bill -- it is superior, but only marginally, and most end-users couldn't care less about licensing or patent issues.
As an example, overwhelmingly the compression format used on the Windows platform is ZIP, and on the UNIX platform it's GZIP. In either case there are a large number of superior solutions (such as BZIP2), yet ZIP/GZIP is adequate, so it entrenches (people would rather not deal with compatibility issues if they send a file to someone and then have to tutor them on getting a utility, using it, etc). The Qwerty keyboard is notoriously inefficient, yet again it is entrenched and most of us continue on it because we don't want "compatibility issues" when we need to type on other people's keyboards. There are examples abound.
it's the first time national corporate profits have ever hit a combined total of over a trillion dollars for on quarter
Look up "inflation". It's the same trick that allows Hollywood to produce a new super biggest-box-office-of-all-time every couple of years.
we all know it was because of Clinton and his *let's help the poorest people* mentality
We do? Funny, but most people I know believe that it was the inevitable crash after a period of irrational exuberance (a bubble), to quote Greenspan. Couple that with the fact that capitalist economies follow almost regular cyclical swings, and the downturn was absolutely inevitable.
Here in Canada I've seen kph quite a few times, and it most certainly is a correct usage, albeit it is not as common as km/h. I think a lot of car speedometers use kph.
Followed the link on your sig, and came across this text on the main page:
From 64 Mb Ram (Burstable to 768Mb)
Firstly are these memory amounts intended to be in bits rather than bytes?
Secondly, "burstable" memory? I understand that it's a VM and the static and short-term potential memory might be different, but the descriptor "burstable" is generally applied to bandwidth, not quantity. I could be wrong though....
I do this for some passwords. Indeed, thinking about it an old PGP keyring was protected by
djkfops55a96!
There is no chance I could ever have remembered this offhand, but there it was in motion memory. Each time I make a passphrase like this I just need to repeat it slow and methodically several times and it's stuck in memory for good.
(Go nuts and hack my backups and unencrypt those emails where myself and coworkers would bitch about how incompetent xyz was)
As a Canadian, I will state this with absolute sincerity: I currently make zero use of p2p software (not that copying copyrighted songs is the only use of p2p software, but I have no other use either) and buy several CDs every couple of months (just picked up the new Sarah McLachlan and Sam Roberts CDs). However, if this absolutely ludicrous levy passes I guarantee you that I will never buy another CD again, and I will feel absolutely no moral doubts about downloading whatever I want whenever I want. Basically the music industry would be impotent to charge anyone in court because they'd already levied fees.
This is one of those instances where SOCAN, like many who have fallen, have gotten too intoxicated on their own power. I sincerely hope this massively backlashes in their faces.
When you're replying to your own posts to try to support your own weak arguments, at least reply to the right post (hint: You replied to the parent).
The whole discussion has gone something like this:
-IE has security faults
-Let's see if IE can get a patch out as quick as open source
-Well they have to do a lot of regression testing first
-Why? It shouldn't affect anything else
-Well, that's the deal when you have code re-use - IE components are used throughout the system, such as the HTTP transport and the HTML renderer for the entire help system in almost all applications
-Blather blather...troll!...blather blather!
All you have done thus far is prove your stunning ignorance.
that they have _indeed_ tied Windows to IE
That's the whole bloody point! (your whole "argument" is entirely circular and mish-mashed that you really need to come together with at least one logical point) IE is a part of Windows (though you don't have to use it, you know. I'm typing this in Mozilla on an XP box) so they put basic functionality that involved "the web" in the IE components -- things like HTTP transports and HTML rendering. Whether you can get a zombie desktop working without these is as irrelevant, as not all of Windows works.
in the rush to defend MSFT
I saw no one defend Microsoft -- all I saw was simple statements of facts: When there is code reuse, there is the potential for impact, and IE's components are re-used in many places. In your rush to sound like some Linux fanboy from about 1997 you've tried for every convoluted argument possible thus far.
Slashdot Mirror
The editorial points mostly at Microsoft's failed offerings like MSN and Xbox, saying that the 80% profit numbers for Windows and Office can only sustain the failed products as long as Windows and Office remain profitable
Humorously that article on the Inquirer (which is notorious for such factless drivel) repeats an oft stated claiming that only two Microsoft products make money (which is something that is classic in the community -- repetition eventually is presumed to be proof). In reality two Microsoft divisions make money by the truckload, and these divisions comprise all of the business software such as SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Ah well, I still would be saddened if I didn't see that myth repeated verbatim a million more times.
Microsoft has been plugging away at the set-top box market for years, and for a year or so has sold a media center edition intending to hit the Tivo type market (convergence).
To be fair, does Microsoft's flattening revenue have to do with "open source" taking their marketshare, or is it because many customers are quite happy with older Microsoft products and have refused to sign up to the recent licensing agreements? I know a couple of very large corporations whose desktops are NT 4, and they're only grudgingly finally upgrading to 2000. This same thing can be seen with countless users continuing to use Office 97, etc -- Given this, a flattening or declining revenue stream seems obvious.
Errr...straighten what out? He said that it isn't a desktop chip, while I said that it wasn't a workstation chip...in the context of this discussion they are synonyms. The Opteron is intended to be a server foundation in SMP systems running things like database systems, not running photoshop filters.
Of course realistically the Athlon 64 FX and the Opteron are almost entirely the same chip, and the Athlon 64 (minus the FX) is the same chip minus one of the memory channels, so the whole distinction between workstation (aka desktop)/server is sort of goofy, but it is one that hits your pocket book as such market focusing often comes with price premiums.
The Opteron wasn't intended as a workstation chip -- for that you need a Athlon FX. Indeed, realistically a pretty powerful workstation can be built around an Athlon 64, with the "3000" (2Ghz) version going for chump change currently.
I'm hardly an expert, but have come across this term quite a few times. In a nutshell, handling and control is improved with minimized unsprung weight (and conversely diminished with increased unsprung weight). The premise is that the shocks can "push down" on the tire and wheel assemblies to counteract the upward momentum when they hit a bump in the road, for example. With increased unsprung weight, the kinetic energy is too large for the shocks to counteract, so for brief instants the wheel loses contact with the roadway to varying degrees (or even if it maintains contact, the downward pressure is reduced and thus traction is compromised).
All factual up until this turd...
Capital B is not necessarily a standard for "Bytes".. people just like to pretend it is.
Capital B is entirely a standard for bytes. I buy a 256MB DIMM, not a 2048Mb DIMM.
Interestingly I've seen this several times now in conversations about the Athlon 64, and it's a reasonable debate that I've tossed around many times in the past myself (i.e. "what is my upgrade path?").
The reality, though, is that I have never, ever upgraded just the chip on any motherboard, no matter how supposedly long its lifespan was -- there was always some new technology on the newer motherboards, be it faster AGP, better interconnect standards (USB2, Firewire, SATA), faster memory standards, etc. In other words who really cares how long the socket lasts? You'll likely replace the motherboard when you replace the chip anyways.
What a bunch of propaganda claptrap (you work for the Soviet communist party in a former life?) -- Lenin praises you comrade.
Microsoft has developed all of their code to be cross-platform for years (NT used to run on several processors, but when the same software was available on multiple platforms it strangely led people to Intel), and upwardly bit-scalable, and has been demoing 64-bit editions of Windows for years. Having the technical ability to toss a basic operating system out the door, and wanting to market and support a product homogenously in a product line are two very different things though.
Having said that, it is definitely true that this is one of those fulcrum moments -- Microsoft is still sitting on the can (I'm sure there's some imagery some can derive from that...cue the jokes), and it's one of those moments where a lot of IT directors may just decide to get in one of those Opteron boxes with Linux or whatever on it....and it grows from there. It is an opportunity for some of the unix variants now that AMD is ramping up their 64 bit processors.
The Iraq war was a completely separate war from the war in Afghanistan. I suppose the "Iraq=9/11" propaganda sank pretty deep into your psyche and you find this hard to separate now.
2) avoid text on your slides at all costs
Any graphics that require interpretation will basically lose the audience, as the vast majority of people will tune you out and interpret it themselves. I've seen this in action at quite a few presentations.
Your points seem to propose a technique of "presenting to people who don't really care", and my experience is that such people don't really care regardless of how "jazzed up" your presentation is. If people care they're really there to listen and absorb a lecture of sorts, and the presentation is just something to point your eyes at rather than staring at the presenter, or as a medium to present data that's best formed as graphics, which is a subset.
Having said all of that, I have two pieces of advice for powerpoint presentations-
1) Never provide a hand-out of the presentation -- this is a way for people to escape your presentation and they'll just skim ahead, making presumptions about everything you're going to say, and then ignore the rest.
2) This is totally contrary to the whole subject of this article, but I truly believe that a presentation is a multimedia display, and in no way should the presentation have to hold up on its own -- i.e. If people weren't there, they shouldn't expect the same absorption or understanding skimming the presentation without the supporting presenter (unless you provide a full video recording of the presentation when you distribute it). Many people propose that presentations have to be fully self-supporting and that is just wrong.
If the Linux community _really_ wants to invade the desktop space, we need some killer games.
Actually you just need to relax while Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo fight it out -- once again the pendulum of game playing is swinging far back towards consoles, decoupling the need for your computer to be a great gaming platform.
Of course this applies to the market as a whole -- there are still lots of hardcore computer gamers, but it's a vastly declining market.
Do you really think the "director" of RBCFG sent down a memo to purchase some SCO shares? This is standard market analysis and hedging -- This doesn't indicate any agreement with SCO's business plan or practices.
Having said that, the stock market is pretty much gambling, albeit with analysis you can lead yourself to believe that you can count the cards.
Lucent isn't Canadian, and was spun-off of AT&T. Did you mean Nortel?
But, a lot of people can do it. Too many actually, creating a glut in the market. And, Indians, Pakistanis, and others in Asia work for so much cheaper than Americans, that outsourcing saves money.
Actually, very few can actually develop software. Very, very few. I've worked in quite a few firms, and it astounds me how many people are just horribly bad at this profession. The myth that software development is easy betrays the ignorance of the repeater. Here's where things get complex, though, and it's where the blatant racists (such as the professor quoted) pop out of the woodwork: There are a couple of countries, such as India, that have fantastic educational systems for a small subsection of the population. Now racists may find this hard to believe, but just like in the "first world" there are a lot of pretty clever people in India - couple this with a first rate educational system, and you have some world-class developers. To make matters even more tasty for the outsourcer, the Indian "dollar" is grossly undervalued (intentionally), making Indian labour cheap.
The end result is that you can hire loads of incredibly intelligent, incredibly educated (phds out the wahoo) Indians for a fairly low fee. To racist idiots like Mr. Johnson, naturally this must mean that software development is a "low-skill" job...I mean if people way over there can do it...
As for Project Managers, it is a VERY different job than programming. Not only must a Project Manager know how to program at a reasonable level, they must know how to communicate exactly what is needed for a project to those who are coding.
What world are you living in? Again speaking as someone with a lot of experience at some pretty big firms, most project managers know NOTHING about software development, and their primary skills are a) using Microsoft Project, and b) communications. I am not implying that I disrespect their position (the (b) point is a very complex task in many firms), but the idea that a project manager is some sort of super-programmers is just the height of absurdity.
It really is a serious question. All software systems generally have a technical focus guiding their design, but when they're crammed into uses beyond that what they are designed for, product disasters usually result (see embedded NT. Indeed for the portable market Microsoft basically threw it all out and wrote CE from scratch for that platform).
I guess my question is given the plethora of extremely proven, capable solutions in the embedded market, what would make Linux (which was designed for the desktop/server market) a credible choice beyond perhaps catering to the hype machine?
A recent trend here in Canada is that if you use one of the bank machines of a bank other than the bank that issued your debit card, they tack on a $1.50 service charge (this is atop the Interac fee that your own bank charges you). Given that most people get our fairly small sums, like $40 - $60, this is an outrageous service charge and it's just another money grab by the big banks. In any case, and getting back to your point, if they do this they have to provide a notice that there will be a service fee, to which you have to agree.
My guess is that your own bank dinged you with a huge "cross-border" service charge for the electronic debit. This is surprizing, though, as I've used my Canadian bank card around the globe and have never gotten charged anything more than the Interac fee and the normal currency conversion.
(PS. $40 was $60 Canadian about two years ago, but today it's about $52 Canadian).
A scam that recently was in the news here in Ontario is gangs that put false fronts on ATMs. The faux-fronts contain a camera over the keypad and a magnetic reader on the card reader. These were found on bank machines of the big 5 banks (BMO, TD, RBC, Scotia, and CIBC). So the moral of the story is that even if you stick to the "name-brand" bank machines, you still might get scammed. Personally I'm astounded at the intricacy involved in someone putting fake-fronts on big bank bank machines (don't these things have cameras and some sort of security? How did someone pull up and pull that off?), though I guess that's the extent that organized crime can go.
BTW: Most Canadians I know call them ATMs.
I don't think your "Linux user's are shoeless beggars" angle is going to win you many friends here (there are a lot of people using Linux because it's the only platform currently fully supporting the Athlon 64FX, for example -- it isn't the financial dregs that use Linux). Then again, you did get moderated up heavily...
There aren't many ogg players quite simply because technologically mp3 is adequate for the marketplace (that is the majority of people). As mp3 got the first mover advantage both from a tool and market perspective, any contender to the thrown will require either a concerted effort by all vendors (a large "multilateral force"), or it'll have to be so superior that there is a very clear choice. Ogg doesn't fit the bill -- it is superior, but only marginally, and most end-users couldn't care less about licensing or patent issues.
As an example, overwhelmingly the compression format used on the Windows platform is ZIP, and on the UNIX platform it's GZIP. In either case there are a large number of superior solutions (such as BZIP2), yet ZIP/GZIP is adequate, so it entrenches (people would rather not deal with compatibility issues if they send a file to someone and then have to tutor them on getting a utility, using it, etc). The Qwerty keyboard is notoriously inefficient, yet again it is entrenched and most of us continue on it because we don't want "compatibility issues" when we need to type on other people's keyboards. There are examples abound.
it's the first time national corporate profits have ever hit a combined total of over a trillion dollars for on quarter
Look up "inflation". It's the same trick that allows Hollywood to produce a new super biggest-box-office-of-all-time every couple of years.
we all know it was because of Clinton and his *let's help the poorest people* mentality
We do? Funny, but most people I know believe that it was the inevitable crash after a period of irrational exuberance (a bubble), to quote Greenspan. Couple that with the fact that capitalist economies follow almost regular cyclical swings, and the downturn was absolutely inevitable.
I beg your pardon?
Here in Canada I've seen kph quite a few times, and it most certainly is a correct usage, albeit it is not as common as km/h. I think a lot of car speedometers use kph.
Followed the link on your sig, and came across this text on the main page:
From 64 Mb Ram (Burstable to 768Mb)
Firstly are these memory amounts intended to be in bits rather than bytes?
Secondly, "burstable" memory? I understand that it's a VM and the static and short-term potential memory might be different, but the descriptor "burstable" is generally applied to bandwidth, not quantity. I could be wrong though....
I do this for some passwords. Indeed, thinking about it an old PGP keyring was protected by
djkfops55a96!
There is no chance I could ever have remembered this offhand, but there it was in motion memory. Each time I make a passphrase like this I just need to repeat it slow and methodically several times and it's stuck in memory for good.
(Go nuts and hack my backups and unencrypt those emails where myself and coworkers would bitch about how incompetent xyz was)
As a Canadian, I will state this with absolute sincerity: I currently make zero use of p2p software (not that copying copyrighted songs is the only use of p2p software, but I have no other use either) and buy several CDs every couple of months (just picked up the new Sarah McLachlan and Sam Roberts CDs). However, if this absolutely ludicrous levy passes I guarantee you that I will never buy another CD again, and I will feel absolutely no moral doubts about downloading whatever I want whenever I want. Basically the music industry would be impotent to charge anyone in court because they'd already levied fees.
This is one of those instances where SOCAN, like many who have fallen, have gotten too intoxicated on their own power. I sincerely hope this massively backlashes in their faces.
When you're replying to your own posts to try to support your own weak arguments, at least reply to the right post (hint: You replied to the parent).
The whole discussion has gone something like this:
-IE has security faults
-Let's see if IE can get a patch out as quick as open source
-Well they have to do a lot of regression testing first
-Why? It shouldn't affect anything else
-Well, that's the deal when you have code re-use - IE components are used throughout the system, such as the HTTP transport and the HTML renderer for the entire help system in almost all applications
-Blather blather...troll!...blather blather!
All you have done thus far is prove your stunning ignorance.
that they have _indeed_ tied Windows to IE
That's the whole bloody point! (your whole "argument" is entirely circular and mish-mashed that you really need to come together with at least one logical point) IE is a part of Windows (though you don't have to use it, you know. I'm typing this in Mozilla on an XP box) so they put basic functionality that involved "the web" in the IE components -- things like HTTP transports and HTML rendering. Whether you can get a zombie desktop working without these is as irrelevant, as not all of Windows works.
in the rush to defend MSFT
I saw no one defend Microsoft -- all I saw was simple statements of facts: When there is code reuse, there is the potential for impact, and IE's components are re-used in many places. In your rush to sound like some Linux fanboy from about 1997 you've tried for every convoluted argument possible thus far.