The AG in CA has already declared that laws were broken. Who to prosecute and for exactly what is still outstanding. My feeling is that Patricia Dunn will be fired. The board member who leaked the information will actually be re-elected the first time around but not the 2nd time (years later). Perkins will stay away for some time and maybe in 3-5 years he'll go back.
The AG will bat around the idea that Patricia Dunn should be held criminally liable, but those campaign contributions will kick in. The private investigators will take the fall. HP will be fined but it won't impact them in any way.
That money will go to the city/state which will then be used for more decadent art and show palaces for the rich.
Essentially, the typical.
The only thing that could alter this is if the journalist that are potentially offended by this are to take government to task. They won't because they don't know how to persevere.
From all that I read, aside from one website that had photo copies of the letters from Perkins, I don't see any large media educating the American public about it sufficiently to cause the type of outcry this story deserves.
It doesn't brake any of the players or any of the services. It simply allows someone to take a file and convert it to a non-secure format. It simply allows the users of those proprietary DRM forms to have them removed so they can play their music on other OSes and via other players.
In WA state the programmer is a slave to overtime. WA state laws allows busineses to require overtime without having to pay for it on any salaried worker. This is a device of Microsoft. Microsoft lobbied to get he laws changed so that the programmer positions changed.
A programmer is the person who actually, through their very creativity and knowledge, makes the product come into being. This is far different than someone that works as an assembly line worker who just does their small part. Programmers are the reason the products exist. For me, that's the reason I don't work as a programmer. I don't want my blood, sweat, and creativity exploited by companies such as Microsoft that make billions of dollars a quarter on my work.
WA needs to revert back to the laws that allow these programmers to get paid overtime. It is only fair. This isn't a management position and thus should never have been changed. It only happened because Microsoft lobbied to make it happen.
The fucked up economy was Clinton's fault. Nothing one can do within a few months of the presidential election. Blame that on Clinton for sure.
Clinton was a fuck up also, dicking his aids in the oval office and then flat out lying about it. Every president is human and hence prone to big fuck ups.
Alot of this bullshit might not have happened had we not had 8 years of complacency about the Middle East fascists, dictators, and mass murders. So, I guess you can blame 9/11 on Bush when it was Clinton who really had things fucked up for the prior 8 years.
Those people murdered hundreds of thousands (even millions) of people. They were torturing average citizens, were denying people basic human rights, and made women second class citizens. Imagine those could have been you, your daughters, your sisters, your mothers. Children were murdered and tortured. Their parents were killed before their eyes. They were murdered before their parents eyes. Those same people defied the UN, they use chemical weapons on their own citizens--innocent people. Clinton, et al, let that continue. He had the chance to make change and he didn't. This war may cost half a trillion dollars but at least the terrorism isn't happening in our country. Had something not been done extreme islam would have grown potentially faster. If you are such a gutless moron as to think that we weren't hated by the middle eastern countries prior to the Iraq war you have a double digit IQ. Remember common sense doesn't require genious IQ.
Everyone was hated. If you weren't a muslim you were hated. If you were a citizen of the western world you were hated. America isn't a nation founded on religion. We are founded on laws. We don't have religious laws and aren't a religiously governed nation because we learned what that sort of oppression was long long ago. It doesn't work and never will, get over it. But we are a nation of people with varied views on religion and the primary uptake isn't Islam so we are hated. Live with it, but don't blame that hatred on Bush nor America. Blame needs to be placed on the crimials, murders, fascists, and their religious intolerance.
Clinton did pot (at least that's all he admitted to). Bush didn't admit to cocaine. But we should condemn everyone for their past mistakes?? Your character is so grand that you would never be condemned for your past mistakes, right?
All this has to do with Bush is that he's set some standards of questional practices, possibly illegal practices, that have provided cover for officers of companies to themselves commit illegal and immoral acts. They do this because they have learned that those of you that hate these things won't do anything about them or that you'll forget about them in a few months. Why not have HP commit these heinous acts against it's board? Hell if Bush can get away with it so can Patricia Dunn.
If there's an illegal act that was committed and she OK'd it even if it was on the advice of legal counsel she needs to go to jail. I don't see fines having any impact on a company that is growing market share.
The execs on these boards are out for themselves. If the board members object to the policies they have no way to bring this to the public eye. It won't be the last time one of them does it. To allow the Chairman and CEO to OK illegal activities is to allow every privacy right you have to be governed under the umbrella of whatever company you work for. To allow them to do this and get away with it is like saying you are willing to give up your rights to your privacy just by being their employee.
If a business is competent it is generally more secure. Working in business for as long as I have sometimes you find Business very anal about security. That is mostly good. XP Pro has more features to allow securing files/shares. It has more utilities to manage different aspects of computers.
XP Home users have their enhanced security disabled by default. You get basic file sharing. I see significantly more adware/spyware and viruses on home computers than I ever did in business computers.
For me, that's where the security issues need the most correction.
Yeah, the games play the same and so do the productivity application. Generally they perform the same.
It is the security that needs to be addressed in Vista (or better yet a SP3 for XP, since Vista is just a DRM infected verson of XP with a pretty interface (if you can afford the hardware and the OS costs)).
So yeah, there are difference which are mostly impreceptiable to the average XP Home user, but when push comes to shove it is that hidden difference that affects home users the most.
The fact that Vista is really just Winxp with a new interface. It is riddled with DRM. It requires much more hardware to fully see the beauty of it.
The bottom line is if you want to pay for Vista you will have to upgrade your hardware to get full benefit and you'll likely be dealing with DRM issue for years, not to mention that the "mechanism for reporting back to microsoft daily" such as the Genuine Notification program, is built into Vista. So, you pay to have essentially the same OS with much larger hardware requirements riddled with DRM and spyware.
I'd say just stay with WinXP and wait for SP3 to come out that adds security features we should have had a year ago.
Had Microsoft not cut into the meat of the features of Vista and in doing so relegated it to the position of XP with a new interface (one that will lead to alot of confusion amonths all segments of users), then maybe Vista would have been worth 50% of the upgrade costs.
OEM means that the OS is tied to the MOTHERBOARD. You upgrade that motherboard and the license is no longer valid. If you use that same license on that new motherboard you are effectively doing the same thing as stealing from Microsoft.
Frankly, I could care less about Microsoft, and I certainly don't agree with the OEM restrictions, but nonetheless the legal ramifications are there. I just want people to understand that OEM is not always a good thing, especially since so many people will have to make a more powerful computer to use Vista fully. That normally means an upgrade.
If Vista costs so much, then the revamping of the systems will generally come afterwards not before hand. That means a license tied to an old motherboard when users find out they need to upgrade that motherboard. A new motherboard equates to buying a new copy of Vista even if 3 months ago you just bought an OEM Vista license.
This is not the case with the RETAIL version of Windows.
Not to mention that it is not a valid contract, so no one, absolutely no consumer, has participated the negotiating the contract. As a consequence it won't hold up in court to protect EA nor Microsoft.
More people need to write letters to the company officers telling them explicitly that they cannot use your personal (or any collected) information outside of their direct company, including any affiliated companies. In other words, write them letters telling them that they may not sell nor transfer your information to anyone including providing it to any affiliated company. A letter just like it should be sent to Microsoft. Tell them that if they do they need to pay you $50,000 US dollars for the use of the information.
This will then have to be examined by them and they'll have to make a choice. Since they didn't include you in the negotiations of the privacy policy nor in the EULA they have to honor your letter by not providing it or by cutting a check to you for $50,000. If they refuse then you can sue them. Just keep a copy of the letter and/or ensure you send it certified.
The problem is that most don't understand that giving up your personal information when you are young (typically the time frame when you don't care about it) means that when you are older and mature companies have information about you that you don't want. When you want to be left alone they still have your information and can be invasive.
Not only that the more they collect the more they'll sell to others. The least they could do is give you a piece of the total when they sell the information they have collected.
Another thing is that these companies need to understand that our computers (game consoles included) are nothing more than extensions of our own homes, our property, and they have no more right to sell information about what we possess in our homes and what we use every day than they have selling our personal identification information. No more would we allow them to tack ads on our walls in our homes than they should be allowed to track us or tack ads on our computer screens without our permission.
The computer is a much different medium than the TV & radio, and hence we need to treat it differently. Don't click on those ads. They simply invite more ads. Advertisement is nothing more than legalized lying according to Orsen Wells. I can't see how I disagree with that.
Had Hitler survived instead of taking the easy way out, it would not have been unjustified to put him to work carrying the bodies of the Jewish people and placing them in dignified graves with his own bare hands. Then after that put him on trial for his crimes against humanity. If you think about the long hours carrying the deceased human beings under forced guard you'd understand the impact that the taking of each life would have had on him.
Anyone who calls for the extermination of the Jewish people is just as bad and deserves no less than what happened to Germany at the end of the war, and after. (This not to say that every German deserved what happened to them).
Just as the act of talking about killing important people in the US in particular the President is a crime so should just the proposal of killing anyone, including the Islamic people desiring to wipe Israel off the map.
The people of Israel have done far far less against humanity than the Islamic people have over the centuries. The christians are no better than the Islamic people in that they have murdered hundreds of millions in the name of their beliefs.
But the facts stand. The Islamic believing people have indeed murdered millions if not hundreds of millions of people in the name of their belief. That vastly outweighs any crimes against humanity that the modern Jewish people have committed, while enduring the deaths of millions of their own people during WWII.
When there's evil it doesn't matter if it comes from Christians or Islamic people because the end result is the same. Crimes against humanity.
But when it comes to muslims killing people--that's not enough justification for him to state that muslims are acting in a very un-mulsim way? How about him denying the terror and killing of civilians with weapons his country sold to the terrorists that launched rockets on civilian targets in Israel.
Nothing he says has any validity unless his words turn to action and that he applies them equally to his own people, the muslims, and the west. He's not well reasoned when it comes to that rather large missing section.
In some way, this can be nothing than the protectionism of Microsoft. Rather than addressing why Microsoft has been allowed to be a monopoly and hold so much influence while giving so little back to the world vs. what they have taken from it (the funds you see Gates giving away are technically our money). The DHS should be pushing Microsoft to spend some of that monopoly gained profit to spend that on fixing the issues once and for all.
In the end, Microsoft is being supported by them. What the DHS will be doing next is telling everyone that they need to be upgrading to Windows Vista because it is more secure. This is what this alert by the DHS is all about. If they can tell us to do those upgrades/patches then there is no reason either they or Microsoft couldn't just say that you need Vista to help foil terror plots.
I have to say this is the most crazy idea ever. Those that give their OS away for free still have problems competing with the commercial versions (OSX and WinXP). Why would anyone want a free OS without any supported applications when they can get one for free without them (Linux) and they can for a fraction of the bother pay $100 to never see ads. Are those guys just brain dead or what?
Paul is a promoter of Windows. You are right in that he does break you down to build you up. That's his tactic. Overall he's not bad. This time he's trying to protect Microsoft by saying that Vista is much more than XP. Here he almost outright lies to the public. Vista is nothing more than XP with a new interface and is highly infested with DRM at its core. Everything in this version of Windows is just fluff. The only real feature to be added to a stripped out OS is the security that prompts you to verify any change, and that is overdone.
Those vulnerabilities that exist in XP are being shown to still exist in Vista.
In my opinion, after more than 20 years in the field, is that there's no reason to upgrade to Vista.
I used linux as my main machine for about 3 years. I did look at Ubuntu and Kubuntu when they were first released. I also looked at maybe 7 other distros. Although I did not have the same problems with Ubuntu that I had with Vista or even XP, I had a greater share of other problems.
I signed up for the free download of the beta. After the download I installed it on one machine, a lesser of the many machines I have. Nonetheless it was a very capable machine. It was an AMD2500+ with an nforce2 board. It also had a 128mb 8x gforce 4 AGP card. Topping it off was an 80gig HDD with 1 gig of DDR 333 RAM. Oh, and it had a wireless card in it from ASUS.
As you can see that machine is very capable by today's standards.
I did a clean install without any other partitions. The install went well. After it booted up and I was able to work with it I noticed there was a driver for the video card but there was no AERO interface features. I searched and searched to see if I could find a spot to force it on. After some searching I found nothing.
I also found that the wireless card was essentially non-functional. This was also very disappointing. I connected up a wire and installed the nvidia drivers that were available for Vista. I managed to get to the internet and do all the updates where Microsoft's online update finally found a driver for the wireless NIC. I installed that and rebooted. After booting the OS reports that the connection for this is limited or has no connection.
I worked with it for a while. I looked and looked for video drivers that might provide me with the AERO interface. I also looked and looked for drivers and found none.
Most of the chipset drivers I had to use were older XP drivers. It was a serious hassle trying to get and install vista drivers.
I let that machine sit for some time but went back to it periodically to try to learn more about the interface. Networking sucked pretty bad. I couldn't find drivers for some devices. The lack of the AERO interface indicated that this was just XP with a new face. Sure there was IE 7.0 but I had given up on IE long ago in favor of Firefox. I looked at the configuration screens. Confusing but everything seemed to be there. One thing to note is that there were too many ways to get things done. There was a high percentage of features that didn't work and it was obvious that even the screens that did pop up for configuration often had the old XP graphics--indicating they were just altering existing code to work with Vista.
I then received a copy of Vista in my AP subscription and as coincidence would have it I had just backed up and was whiping my main XP box which has a 64 bit 3200+, 1 gig of ram and gforce 6600GT, and a few hundred gigabytes of storage.
I did the install and found that I had the AERO interface. I liked it. After using it for a while I downloaded the beta vista drivers from nvidia. I installed them and the system seemed fairly stable. I did notice huge clunkiness to accessing files and folders and determined that it was the promise SATA drivers. I moved my connectors to a different set of SATA ports off the mobo and the clunkiness went away.
I used Vista for a few weeks and tried to test every piece of hardware--printers, cameras, networking, external harddrives (usb and eSATA). I tried the microphone. Tried burning CD/DVDs. Tried flashcard readers, etc. Most everything worked. The only issue I had was with the file access. Opening a drive could take 30 seconds. Opening a folder after that another 30 seconds, clicking back another 30 seconds. Closing and reopening. More 30 second intervals if it even opened them at all. It didn't matter if it was my IDE drivers, my SATA or eSATA. It was incredibly slow. Often times it would lock.
Microsoft has taken so much out of Vista basically making it XP with a new interface. So far, it is hardly worth the update. No sense paying Microsoft all that money for a copy of a DRM infested product. If you think spying is bad now it is only going to get worse under Vista.
But all in all, it is a pretty attractive interface. The beta is extremely buggy. Virtually all features have serious problems. Accessing a SATA drive from allegedly support drivers/chipsets can still take you 30 seconds or longer to open a directory you were previously in but move away from and want to move back into. The network 100mb transfer rate is extremely slow. The same machine with XP works flawlessly at a nice speed. Wireless is essentially non-functional on most of my machines. The Aero interface is only working a the highest end 128mb cards when it should easily work on any card with 128mb of video ram. That 128mb requirement is more than some games for a simple interface.
But, aside from all that Vista has been trashed so badly with components being removed that Microsoft has felt that they need to insert features to make it seem so less bare-bones.
Even so, that feature is poorly implemented and weak and will fill people's drives with unwanted overhead and make a storage facility for spyware/adware/malware to hide--just like system restore.
It is essentially a non-feature for an OS lacking any real feature updates.
There is some misrepresentation going on here about oem versions of windows. Before I clarify, let me just bring up a couple of facts.
Windows is just a program.
Microsoft holds no special legal or commercial position that other sofware makes don't hold.
The OEM agreement is just an agreement. You should bide by it.
The OEM agreement doesn't tie the software to the hardware. It ties Windows to your motherboard.
Ok, so you have some facts. What does this mean?
1) You install that on a computer, say an older one, and it is contractually tied to that motherboard. Even if you bought it with a NIC or a HDD or some RAM, it is still tied to your mobo. In doing so you agree that if the mobo goes out you will replace the copy of windows, even if the software is line for line the same computer program (windows, that is).
2) You are required to attach the sticker to the side of the case in an easily visible position as per the requirements of Microsoft. That sticker cannot be removed or moved to a new case. Once you apply that sticker, if you choose to replace the case you must replace your license because it is not legal to pull the sticker from the case.
3) The reason the license is tied to your mobo is because Microsoft feels that if you replace your mobo, the company that sold you the license, which now becomes the support group, cannot, according to Microsoft, adequately support something that important that you didn't sell. Essentially, it is one of support.
The situation with the case and sticker are just arbitrary. Microsoft does not want to loose out on sales and requiring a new copy guarantees them a sale, that is, if you wish to remain legal.
Most of the OEM particulars were fleshed out with royal OEMs. These are the likes of Dell, HP, Sony, etc. These companies were looking for a way to guarantee that you, if you were a purchaser of their computers, would have to go back to them for replacement parts. Microsoft was happy to comply as long as those company stringently complied by forcing you to replace your copy of Windows.
These people are the ones that set/agreed to the requirements for the OEM license which then was carried down, because there was no real representation for all the small systems integrators. Basically, we all have to agree and systems integrators weren't represented.
You can understand this if you carefully think about that idea of the sticker and the mobo requirements, and then think about the royal OEMs. It will become quite clear.
Some advice:
Buy a retail copy. That isn't tied to the mobo.
If you buy OEM stick the sticker to a piece of plastic, clear plastic, and then attach that to the case instead of affixing it directly to the material that makes up the case. As long as it is properly placed and attached they can't complain.
If you had a legal copy prior to putting the illegal software on your computer just buy an upgrade. There's no reason to buy the full version.
Also, remember that Microsoft is a monopoly. They make huge sums of money every quarter. Some poor family that doesn't have alot of disposable income isn't going to be sued nor pursued by Microsoft as long as you don't start mass distributing it.
Finally, Vista is just a buggy XP with a newer interface and higher requirements centered on DRM.
If I were to be writing about why the Newton was doomed to failure back when it was first released (or even today) the reasons for its failure would be obvious. The Newton lacks what was necessary to make it a useable product. It was under powered, had no real uses, did not communicate over in a way the cell phones do (the way most other PDAs today do). When I read about it and saw it the obvious prediction was that it was doomed to failure because it just sucked, and boy it was a tragic attempt.
It was an idea before it's time but it was happening at a time when Apple and John Sculley was incapable of executing anything. It is amazing that device even made it out the door.
It was under powered, and utterly incapable as a communications device, and crawled out the door of a company unable to execute.
I loved macintoshes back then and I still covet the high end macs of today, but the bottom line was that the newton is better off forgotten rather than compared to current products.
If the Samsung device is what it is it will fail just the same and I'd rather not spend my time thinking about it one bit.
Bottom line is that it is unconstitutional. It will be challenged and overturned. That is if it gets passed.
This is stupid legislation for the purpose of stupid legislation. Don't the DC socialites have enough to do with their late night dinner parties and other social affairs to do other than to create legislation that does nothing but enact laws that are in violation of our constitution?
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The AG in CA has already declared that laws were broken. Who to prosecute and for exactly what is still outstanding. My feeling is that Patricia Dunn will be fired. The board member who leaked the information will actually be re-elected the first time around but not the 2nd time (years later). Perkins will stay away for some time and maybe in 3-5 years he'll go back.
The AG will bat around the idea that Patricia Dunn should be held criminally liable, but those campaign contributions will kick in. The private investigators will take the fall. HP will be fined but it won't impact them in any way.
That money will go to the city/state which will then be used for more decadent art and show palaces for the rich.
Essentially, the typical.
The only thing that could alter this is if the journalist that are potentially offended by this are to take government to task. They won't because they don't know how to persevere.
From all that I read, aside from one website that had photo copies of the letters from Perkins, I don't see any large media educating the American public about it sufficiently to cause the type of outcry this story deserves.
It doesn't brake any of the players or any of the services. It simply allows someone to take a file and convert it to a non-secure format. It simply allows the users of those proprietary DRM forms to have them removed so they can play their music on other OSes and via other players.
In WA state the programmer is a slave to overtime. WA state laws allows busineses to require overtime without having to pay for it on any salaried worker. This is a device of Microsoft. Microsoft lobbied to get he laws changed so that the programmer positions changed.
A programmer is the person who actually, through their very creativity and knowledge, makes the product come into being. This is far different than someone that works as an assembly line worker who just does their small part. Programmers are the reason the products exist. For me, that's the reason I don't work as a programmer. I don't want my blood, sweat, and creativity exploited by companies such as Microsoft that make billions of dollars a quarter on my work.
WA needs to revert back to the laws that allow these programmers to get paid overtime. It is only fair. This isn't a management position and thus should never have been changed. It only happened because Microsoft lobbied to make it happen.
The fucked up economy was Clinton's fault. Nothing one can do within a few months of the presidential election. Blame that on Clinton for sure.
Clinton was a fuck up also, dicking his aids in the oval office and then flat out lying about it. Every president is human and hence prone to big fuck ups.
Alot of this bullshit might not have happened had we not had 8 years of complacency about the Middle East fascists, dictators, and mass murders. So, I guess you can blame 9/11 on Bush when it was Clinton who really had things fucked up for the prior 8 years.
Those people murdered hundreds of thousands (even millions) of people. They were torturing average citizens, were denying people basic human rights, and made women second class citizens. Imagine those could have been you, your daughters, your sisters, your mothers. Children were murdered and tortured. Their parents were killed before their eyes. They were murdered before their parents eyes. Those same people defied the UN, they use chemical weapons on their own citizens--innocent people. Clinton, et al, let that continue. He had the chance to make change and he didn't. This war may cost half a trillion dollars but at least the terrorism isn't happening in our country. Had something not been done extreme islam would have grown potentially faster. If you are such a gutless moron as to think that we weren't hated by the middle eastern countries prior to the Iraq war you have a double digit IQ. Remember common sense doesn't require genious IQ.
Everyone was hated. If you weren't a muslim you were hated. If you were a citizen of the western world you were hated. America isn't a nation founded on religion. We are founded on laws. We don't have religious laws and aren't a religiously governed nation because we learned what that sort of oppression was long long ago. It doesn't work and never will, get over it. But we are a nation of people with varied views on religion and the primary uptake isn't Islam so we are hated. Live with it, but don't blame that hatred on Bush nor America. Blame needs to be placed on the crimials, murders, fascists, and their religious intolerance.
Clinton did pot (at least that's all he admitted to). Bush didn't admit to cocaine. But we should condemn everyone for their past mistakes?? Your character is so grand that you would never be condemned for your past mistakes, right?
All this has to do with Bush is that he's set some standards of questional practices, possibly illegal practices, that have provided cover for officers of companies to themselves commit illegal and immoral acts. They do this because they have learned that those of you that hate these things won't do anything about them or that you'll forget about them in a few months. Why not have HP commit these heinous acts against it's board? Hell if Bush can get away with it so can Patricia Dunn.
If there's an illegal act that was committed and she OK'd it even if it was on the advice of legal counsel she needs to go to jail. I don't see fines having any impact on a company that is growing market share.
The execs on these boards are out for themselves. If the board members object to the policies they have no way to bring this to the public eye. It won't be the last time one of them does it. To allow the Chairman and CEO to OK illegal activities is to allow every privacy right you have to be governed under the umbrella of whatever company you work for. To allow them to do this and get away with it is like saying you are willing to give up your rights to your privacy just by being their employee.
If a business is competent it is generally more secure. Working in business for as long as I have sometimes you find Business very anal about security. That is mostly good. XP Pro has more features to allow securing files/shares. It has more utilities to manage different aspects of computers.
XP Home users have their enhanced security disabled by default. You get basic file sharing. I see significantly more adware/spyware and viruses on home computers than I ever did in business computers.
For me, that's where the security issues need the most correction.
Yeah, the games play the same and so do the productivity application. Generally they perform the same.
It is the security that needs to be addressed in Vista (or better yet a SP3 for XP, since Vista is just a DRM infected verson of XP with a pretty interface (if you can afford the hardware and the OS costs)).
So yeah, there are difference which are mostly impreceptiable to the average XP Home user, but when push comes to shove it is that hidden difference that affects home users the most.
It would be worthwhile except for........
The fact that Vista is really just Winxp with a new interface. It is riddled with DRM. It requires much more hardware to fully see the beauty of it.
The bottom line is if you want to pay for Vista you will have to upgrade your hardware to get full benefit and you'll likely be dealing with DRM issue for years, not to mention that the "mechanism for reporting back to microsoft daily" such as the Genuine Notification program, is built into Vista. So, you pay to have essentially the same OS with much larger hardware requirements riddled with DRM and spyware.
I'd say just stay with WinXP and wait for SP3 to come out that adds security features we should have had a year ago.
Had Microsoft not cut into the meat of the features of Vista and in doing so relegated it to the position of XP with a new interface (one that will lead to alot of confusion amonths all segments of users), then maybe Vista would have been worth 50% of the upgrade costs.
OEM means that the OS is tied to the MOTHERBOARD. You upgrade that motherboard and the license is no longer valid. If you use that same license on that new motherboard you are effectively doing the same thing as stealing from Microsoft.
Frankly, I could care less about Microsoft, and I certainly don't agree with the OEM restrictions, but nonetheless the legal ramifications are there. I just want people to understand that OEM is not always a good thing, especially since so many people will have to make a more powerful computer to use Vista fully. That normally means an upgrade.
If Vista costs so much, then the revamping of the systems will generally come afterwards not before hand. That means a license tied to an old motherboard when users find out they need to upgrade that motherboard. A new motherboard equates to buying a new copy of Vista even if 3 months ago you just bought an OEM Vista license.
This is not the case with the RETAIL version of Windows.
Not to mention that it is not a valid contract, so no one, absolutely no consumer, has participated the negotiating the contract. As a consequence it won't hold up in court to protect EA nor Microsoft.
More people need to write letters to the company officers telling them explicitly that they cannot use your personal (or any collected) information outside of their direct company, including any affiliated companies. In other words, write them letters telling them that they may not sell nor transfer your information to anyone including providing it to any affiliated company. A letter just like it should be sent to Microsoft. Tell them that if they do they need to pay you $50,000 US dollars for the use of the information.
This will then have to be examined by them and they'll have to make a choice. Since they didn't include you in the negotiations of the privacy policy nor in the EULA they have to honor your letter by not providing it or by cutting a check to you for $50,000. If they refuse then you can sue them. Just keep a copy of the letter and/or ensure you send it certified.
The problem is that most don't understand that giving up your personal information when you are young (typically the time frame when you don't care about it) means that when you are older and mature companies have information about you that you don't want. When you want to be left alone they still have your information and can be invasive.
Not only that the more they collect the more they'll sell to others. The least they could do is give you a piece of the total when they sell the information they have collected.
Another thing is that these companies need to understand that our computers (game consoles included) are nothing more than extensions of our own homes, our property, and they have no more right to sell information about what we possess in our homes and what we use every day than they have selling our personal identification information. No more would we allow them to tack ads on our walls in our homes than they should be allowed to track us or tack ads on our computer screens without our permission.
The computer is a much different medium than the TV & radio, and hence we need to treat it differently. Don't click on those ads. They simply invite more ads. Advertisement is nothing more than legalized lying according to Orsen Wells. I can't see how I disagree with that.
Had Hitler survived instead of taking the easy way out, it would not have been unjustified to put him to work carrying the bodies of the Jewish people and placing them in dignified graves with his own bare hands. Then after that put him on trial for his crimes against humanity. If you think about the long hours carrying the deceased human beings under forced guard you'd understand the impact that the taking of each life would have had on him.
Anyone who calls for the extermination of the Jewish people is just as bad and deserves no less than what happened to Germany at the end of the war, and after. (This not to say that every German deserved what happened to them).
Just as the act of talking about killing important people in the US in particular the President is a crime so should just the proposal of killing anyone, including the Islamic people desiring to wipe Israel off the map.
The people of Israel have done far far less against humanity than the Islamic people have over the centuries. The christians are no better than the Islamic people in that they have murdered hundreds of millions in the name of their beliefs.
But the facts stand. The Islamic believing people have indeed murdered millions if not hundreds of millions of people in the name of their belief. That vastly outweighs any crimes against humanity that the modern Jewish people have committed, while enduring the deaths of millions of their own people during WWII.
When there's evil it doesn't matter if it comes from Christians or Islamic people because the end result is the same. Crimes against humanity.
But when it comes to muslims killing people--that's not enough justification for him to state that muslims are acting in a very un-mulsim way? How about him denying the terror and killing of civilians with weapons his country sold to the terrorists that launched rockets on civilian targets in Israel.
Nothing he says has any validity unless his words turn to action and that he applies them equally to his own people, the muslims, and the west. He's not well reasoned when it comes to that rather large missing section.
Once you purport the idea of pro zionist you must also understand how that same thing applies to pro extremist and terrorists.
And if it had been 6 million muslims killed in the same manner would he be saying the same thing?
In some way, this can be nothing than the protectionism of Microsoft. Rather than addressing why Microsoft has been allowed to be a monopoly and hold so much influence while giving so little back to the world vs. what they have taken from it (the funds you see Gates giving away are technically our money). The DHS should be pushing Microsoft to spend some of that monopoly gained profit to spend that on fixing the issues once and for all.
In the end, Microsoft is being supported by them. What the DHS will be doing next is telling everyone that they need to be upgrading to Windows Vista because it is more secure. This is what this alert by the DHS is all about. If they can tell us to do those upgrades/patches then there is no reason either they or Microsoft couldn't just say that you need Vista to help foil terror plots.
I have to say this is the most crazy idea ever. Those that give their OS away for free still have problems competing with the commercial versions (OSX and WinXP). Why would anyone want a free OS without any supported applications when they can get one for free without them (Linux) and they can for a fraction of the bother pay $100 to never see ads. Are those guys just brain dead or what?
Paul is a promoter of Windows. You are right in that he does break you down to build you up. That's his tactic. Overall he's not bad. This time he's trying to protect Microsoft by saying that Vista is much more than XP. Here he almost outright lies to the public. Vista is nothing more than XP with a new interface and is highly infested with DRM at its core. Everything in this version of Windows is just fluff. The only real feature to be added to a stripped out OS is the security that prompts you to verify any change, and that is overdone.
Those vulnerabilities that exist in XP are being shown to still exist in Vista.
In my opinion, after more than 20 years in the field, is that there's no reason to upgrade to Vista.
I used linux as my main machine for about 3 years. I did look at Ubuntu and Kubuntu when they were first released. I also looked at maybe 7 other distros. Although I did not have the same problems with Ubuntu that I had with Vista or even XP, I had a greater share of other problems.
If you are frustrated with that, try moving or deleting an item or creating an item (manually) on the start menu.
I signed up for the free download of the beta. After the download I installed it on one machine, a lesser of the many machines I have. Nonetheless it was a very capable machine. It was an AMD2500+ with an nforce2 board. It also had a 128mb 8x gforce 4 AGP card. Topping it off was an 80gig HDD with 1 gig of DDR 333 RAM. Oh, and it had a wireless card in it from ASUS.
As you can see that machine is very capable by today's standards.
I did a clean install without any other partitions. The install went well. After it booted up and I was able to work with it I noticed there was a driver for the video card but there was no AERO interface features. I searched and searched to see if I could find a spot to force it on. After some searching I found nothing.
I also found that the wireless card was essentially non-functional. This was also very disappointing. I connected up a wire and installed the nvidia drivers that were available for Vista. I managed to get to the internet and do all the updates where Microsoft's online update finally found a driver for the wireless NIC. I installed that and rebooted. After booting the OS reports that the connection for this is limited or has no connection.
I worked with it for a while. I looked and looked for video drivers that might provide me with the AERO interface. I also looked and looked for drivers and found none.
Most of the chipset drivers I had to use were older XP drivers. It was a serious hassle trying to get and install vista drivers.
I let that machine sit for some time but went back to it periodically to try to learn more about the interface. Networking sucked pretty bad. I couldn't find drivers for some devices. The lack of the AERO interface indicated that this was just XP with a new face. Sure there was IE 7.0 but I had given up on IE long ago in favor of Firefox. I looked at the configuration screens. Confusing but everything seemed to be there. One thing to note is that there were too many ways to get things done. There was a high percentage of features that didn't work and it was obvious that even the screens that did pop up for configuration often had the old XP graphics--indicating they were just altering existing code to work with Vista.
I then received a copy of Vista in my AP subscription and as coincidence would have it I had just backed up and was whiping my main XP box which has a 64 bit 3200+, 1 gig of ram and gforce 6600GT, and a few hundred gigabytes of storage.
I did the install and found that I had the AERO interface. I liked it. After using it for a while I downloaded the beta vista drivers from nvidia. I installed them and the system seemed fairly stable. I did notice huge clunkiness to accessing files and folders and determined that it was the promise SATA drivers. I moved my connectors to a different set of SATA ports off the mobo and the clunkiness went away.
I used Vista for a few weeks and tried to test every piece of hardware--printers, cameras, networking, external harddrives (usb and eSATA). I tried the microphone. Tried burning CD/DVDs. Tried flashcard readers, etc. Most everything worked. The only issue I had was with the file access. Opening a drive could take 30 seconds. Opening a folder after that another 30 seconds, clicking back another 30 seconds. Closing and reopening. More 30 second intervals if it even opened them at all. It didn't matter if it was my IDE drivers, my SATA or eSATA. It was incredibly slow. Often times it would lock.
No, Vista is FAR FAR from ready.
All that and no pictures. Pictures could have done wonders to those thousands of words.
Microsoft has taken so much out of Vista basically making it XP with a new interface. So far, it is hardly worth the update. No sense paying Microsoft all that money for a copy of a DRM infested product. If you think spying is bad now it is only going to get worse under Vista.
But all in all, it is a pretty attractive interface. The beta is extremely buggy. Virtually all features have serious problems. Accessing a SATA drive from allegedly support drivers/chipsets can still take you 30 seconds or longer to open a directory you were previously in but move away from and want to move back into. The network 100mb transfer rate is extremely slow. The same machine with XP works flawlessly at a nice speed. Wireless is essentially non-functional on most of my machines. The Aero interface is only working a the highest end 128mb cards when it should easily work on any card with 128mb of video ram. That 128mb requirement is more than some games for a simple interface.
But, aside from all that Vista has been trashed so badly with components being removed that Microsoft has felt that they need to insert features to make it seem so less bare-bones.
Even so, that feature is poorly implemented and weak and will fill people's drives with unwanted overhead and make a storage facility for spyware/adware/malware to hide--just like system restore.
It is essentially a non-feature for an OS lacking any real feature updates.
Even when you are wanking off? Because you might, should we all?
There is some misrepresentation going on here about oem versions of windows. Before I clarify, let me just bring up a couple of facts.
Windows is just a program.
Microsoft holds no special legal or commercial position that other sofware makes don't hold.
The OEM agreement is just an agreement. You should bide by it.
The OEM agreement doesn't tie the software to the hardware. It ties Windows to your motherboard.
Ok, so you have some facts. What does this mean?
1) You install that on a computer, say an older one, and it is contractually tied to that motherboard. Even if you bought it with a NIC or a HDD or some RAM, it is still tied to your mobo. In doing so you agree that if the mobo goes out you will replace the copy of windows, even if the software is line for line the same computer program (windows, that is).
2) You are required to attach the sticker to the side of the case in an easily visible position as per the requirements of Microsoft. That sticker cannot be removed or moved to a new case. Once you apply that sticker, if you choose to replace the case you must replace your license because it is not legal to pull the sticker from the case.
3) The reason the license is tied to your mobo is because Microsoft feels that if you replace your mobo, the company that sold you the license, which now becomes the support group, cannot, according to Microsoft, adequately support something that important that you didn't sell. Essentially, it is one of support.
The situation with the case and sticker are just arbitrary. Microsoft does not want to loose out on sales and requiring a new copy guarantees them a sale, that is, if you wish to remain legal.
Most of the OEM particulars were fleshed out with royal OEMs. These are the likes of Dell, HP, Sony, etc. These companies were looking for a way to guarantee that you, if you were a purchaser of their computers, would have to go back to them for replacement parts. Microsoft was happy to comply as long as those company stringently complied by forcing you to replace your copy of Windows.
These people are the ones that set/agreed to the requirements for the OEM license which then was carried down, because there was no real representation for all the small systems integrators. Basically, we all have to agree and systems integrators weren't represented.
You can understand this if you carefully think about that idea of the sticker and the mobo requirements, and then think about the royal OEMs. It will become quite clear.
Some advice:
Buy a retail copy. That isn't tied to the mobo.
If you buy OEM stick the sticker to a piece of plastic, clear plastic, and then attach that to the case instead of affixing it directly to the material that makes up the case. As long as it is properly placed and attached they can't complain.
If you had a legal copy prior to putting the illegal software on your computer just buy an upgrade. There's no reason to buy the full version.
Also, remember that Microsoft is a monopoly. They make huge sums of money every quarter. Some poor family that doesn't have alot of disposable income isn't going to be sued nor pursued by Microsoft as long as you don't start mass distributing it.
Finally, Vista is just a buggy XP with a newer interface and higher requirements centered on DRM.
If I were to be writing about why the Newton was doomed to failure back when it was first released (or even today) the reasons for its failure would be obvious. The Newton lacks what was necessary to make it a useable product. It was under powered, had no real uses, did not communicate over in a way the cell phones do (the way most other PDAs today do). When I read about it and saw it the obvious prediction was that it was doomed to failure because it just sucked, and boy it was a tragic attempt.
It was an idea before it's time but it was happening at a time when Apple and John Sculley was incapable of executing anything. It is amazing that device even made it out the door.
It was under powered, and utterly incapable as a communications device, and crawled out the door of a company unable to execute.
I loved macintoshes back then and I still covet the high end macs of today, but the bottom line was that the newton is better off forgotten rather than compared to current products.
If the Samsung device is what it is it will fail just the same and I'd rather not spend my time thinking about it one bit.
Bottom line is that it is unconstitutional. It will be challenged and overturned. That is if it gets passed.
This is stupid legislation for the purpose of stupid legislation. Don't the DC socialites have enough to do with their late night dinner parties and other social affairs to do other than to create legislation that does nothing but enact laws that are in violation of our constitution?