Actually, you are wrong. EFS can only be recovered by the Domain admin, which is off the system (unless they brought their domain controller through the airport with them). This "hole" doesn't help break EFS at all.
"The details that we have documented in this article match the vague information provided by Microsoft."
Sounds like they already told you what they were going to do.
Basically, I completely back this. Much in the way that Redhat scans my computer to tell me what packages I have installed and then tells me what I need to download for updates, this scans the HW and SW I have installed and tells me about updates.
Well, I'm not sure if you've heard of them, but Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server are available for Itanium. And they run the second fastest database machine ever, for the lowest price per TPC benchmark (adding up to literally millions of dollars of savings)
you know, a lot of people say this stuff, but show me anything ANYWHERE where something was invented from scratch. I'm happy to wait. And because this is all within the world of software, things are going to be even more overlapping. To quote the SVP of IBM who presented at Linuxworld: "Innovation isn't just invention for invention's sake. It's being able to take a product and make it available to the widest amount of people."
Uh, MS is going to pay dividends. Further, take a company like the one Warren Buffet runs. He's never issued a dividend ever. A company that does not issue dividends but continues to fund new developments and increase earnings is a perfectly reasonable way to spend its additional capital. No one in history has ever associated the lack of a dividend with a Ponzi scheme. Do you have any economics background at all? Your comments clearly indicate a fundamental misunderstanding with the concepts of reinvestment in the business, diversification, stock market dynamics, and basic economic principles.
You know, i never understood how this is ANYTHING but legal. They don't have a monopoly in portals. They aren't leveraging their OS monopoly into portals. Even if, and this is a big assumption for something that can easily be chalked up to programmer error, they did it intentionally, what's the problem? MSN.com has no ties what so ever to Windows, they could make it completely impossible to view in any competing browser, and that's their right.
Further, MS has no monopoly on the server either. The majority of deployments out there, by revenue, are on UNIX. If that's the case, Sun should LOVE Windows being slower at all, as it just gives them additional fodder. The funny part is that Oracle IS slower, but never chalk up to malice what you can attribute to bad programming. Larry actually takes resources off the Windows team at Oracle to fund the Unix and Linux teams (because he thinks that this will help kill Windows).
All you need is an invoice showing you've paid. That's it, really. And because your company is a non-profit, they'll likely have all expense reports back 5 years (as they get audited very frequently).
Um, if i understand you right, you're disabling things based on the name of the file and directory? That's seems kind of weird, don't you think? wutrack.bin is Windows Up-date Track which means that computer can tell the site the last time it accessed the page and what it downloaded. As for DRM, whether or not you use it, MS is going to use it for its own software, and disabling it seems a little strange.
From 1998/1999 Fiscal Year to the 1999/2000 Fiscal Year they had a 424% increase in revenues. From 1999/2000 to 2000/2001 they had an 18% increase. And from 2000/2001 to 2001/2002 they've reported a 31% increase.
Consider for a moment Microsoft Corporation. Between 1998 and 1999 they had a 29% increase in revenues. 1999-2000 16% increase. 2000-2001 10% increase. 2001-2002 12% increase.
Mandrake went from 500k to 3.5M in 2 years... Microsoft went from $6 B to $8 B. The two are so vastly different even hearing this comparison makes me want to cry. It's like saying last week my parents paid me $5 for cleaning the garage and this week they paid me $15 for cleaning the attic and painting a fence. I have a revenue growth rate of 300%! I should be valued 30x more than MS who has only a 10% increase y/y!
sorry, but this is not dumping according to the FTC or the DOJ or any standard economic theory. Many businesses do this kind of profit shifting. If you drive anything but a Ford Explorer (or SUV), it's likely the division that you purchased from loses money. The only divisions of car companies that make money are light trucks (incl. SUVs) and financing. The rest are sold at a loss.
Perhaps it is because Microsoft really is doing *nothing* new. Name one innovative product to come out of Microsoft that they have not purchased from someone else or outright copied........Clippy? Bob? Please. People are reluctant to want to support Microsoft because of bloated and inefficient programming and third rate design and implementation among many other reasons.
Um I challenge you to name anything that anyone has ever done that is completely new. EVER.
"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants..." -- Isaac Newton
All inventions are based on things that were developed before them.
But to satisfy you, here's an innovation from which I'd like to quote Philip Greenspun, no MS fan by any stretch.
"Ironically this approach to distributed computing over the Internet was ignored by most of the rest of the world except for one company: Microsoft! If you look at Microsoft.NET you'll see that it provides extensive support for building applications like this wealth clock." -- from the Bill Gates Wealth Clock
Innovation isn't just the invention of something new (which MS earns millions of patents for a year), but the ability to distribute it to the public in a new way.
Call me crazy, but don't you think it's a little early to call MS clearly guilty? If, as according to the article, there really is prior art out of academia and other companies publications (IBM was mentioned) and MS clean roomed based on THAT implementation, and not the InterTrust one, then there's no harm, no foul.
I dunno, I find these companies who go around doing nothing but filing patents to be the most absurd abuses of the patent system. The festo case is a perfect example of this, where someone will just patent everything under the sun and make changes to the patent to accomodate how the tech is actually being used.
you know, this is not a true statement. GPL does nothing to help Oracle. Or Palm. Or any of millions of companies that compete against MS. They create just as much intellectual property that helps them differentiate from their competition as MS does. Aligning with Linux DOES compete with MS, aligning with the GPL as the unwanted side effect of killing all your IP.
Conover: Unfortunately, Bart, your little escapade could not have come at a worse time. [sets up screen] Americo-Australianian relations are at an all-time low. [talks over a slide show] As I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the US experienced a short-lived infatuation with Australian culture. For some bizarre reason, the Aussies thought this would be a permanent thing. Of course, it wasn't. [a slide shows "Yahoo Serious Festival"] Lisa: I know those words, but that sign makes no sense.
michael's behavior continues to astound. If MS had done something even remotely similar to this, he would have launched into them with a tirade that would still be going on, yet, here, he equivocates for Yahoo. I realize this is not much of a surprise to some, but it still amazes me how utterly biased the slashdot editors are.
ObTopic: Generally, i think the EULA game is just a giant CYA exercise. Companies absolutely have to do this kind of stuff because you never know how you're going to get sued. MS had to word the EULA that way because thhe web-updates would download and install only IF you gave the auto-updater the chance to do so. Yahoo, similarly, IS exchanging financial info, and has to be restrictive. EULAs are EULAs. If you don't like them, don't play.
Normally I'm a big fan, but really this seems unrealistically harsh. This entire thing couldn't have taken him more than a couple hours, and I'm sure as a sum total many many more hours are wasted by PhD students WATCHING buffy than presenting this. And probably orders of magnitude more than that are spent reading and posting to slashdot! (to say nothing of the work force:) The real problem is I'm not sure if you joking or not:)
But this is not correct either! The contract that you purchase through MS for your copy of whatever is good forever. There is no expiration on the item that you purchased (read the EULA or contract). This is not directionally suggested by the fact that components connect to MS. I can run my laptop forever with never connecting to MS once! (Try it by blocking *.microsoft.com on your firewall). I only call this out as a single section of your article which is wrong... the entire piece is full of fallacies, that's just an example.
According to the 10-Q filing, the article is wrong. The $177M net loss is for all of home and entertainment, only a subset of which is Xbox. In fact, comparing it to last year, where the losses were at $68 M and there was NO xbox, you can conclude that total losses resulting from xbox activities would not be greater than $109 M, and in fact probably even less than that. There are many other things in the home and entertainment division such as Windows Media Center PC, UltimateTV, MSN TV, and so on, many of which were probably not profitable, and contributed to the overall losses.
Mod this parent up... even simple math says that without the PR says they're more than $300 M in the black! That's pretty phenomenal for a box that's been out for just over 1 year (as of today!). This is actually amazingly good, not bad.
No I read that bit. I agree there are components of your article which are true. But I have a paper that says 2+2 = 4 and also 4+4 = 6 and 5+5=11, certainly you would call into question the point of the paper (if any). Your paper's point seems to be to MS's current behavior, and then project future behavior based on that. The fact that most of your factual points today are wrong or grossly distorted seems to indicate that your conclusions would suffer the same maladies.
For example, you state that Windows 98 does not connect to MS computers where as XP can connect to MS computers in 18 ways. This is false. The most of the components you have listed as connecting under Windows XP ALSO can connect under Windows 98. But let's assume that you're correct and that these components don't connect under Windows 98. So what? How many components in DOS 6.22 had a TCP stack? Technologies change, and now that the internet is available (which was in limited scope in 1995-1997 when Win98 was first being built), you would think that they would adopt these components into their architecture. Wouldn't you?
Hidden downloads, etc are just FUD. There's little example of MS doing hidden downloads of any sort. And linking to 4 year old sites about people switching from Windows is great... if you want the story of one person moving. Generally, they have little credibility.
I am not saying anything about the government's case. I AM saying your conclusions are nearly universally wrong, misinformed and flamebait. Your article has little or no worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you are wrong. EFS can only be recovered by the Domain admin, which is off the system (unless they brought their domain controller through the airport with them). This "hole" doesn't help break EFS at all.
"The details that we have documented in this article match the vague information provided by Microsoft."
Sounds like they already told you what they were going to do.
Basically, I completely back this. Much in the way that Redhat scans my computer to tell me what packages I have installed and then tells me what I need to download for updates, this scans the HW and SW I have installed and tells me about updates.
Well, I'm not sure if you've heard of them, but Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server are available for Itanium. And they run the second fastest database machine ever, for the lowest price per TPC benchmark (adding up to literally millions of dollars of savings)
s p? resulttype=noncluster
http://tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.a
The second highest rated TPC box in the world is running Itaniums...
t s. asp?resulttype=noncluster
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_resul
you know, a lot of people say this stuff, but show me anything ANYWHERE where something was invented from scratch. I'm happy to wait. And because this is all within the world of software, things are going to be even more overlapping. To quote the SVP of IBM who presented at Linuxworld: "Innovation isn't just invention for invention's sake. It's being able to take a product and make it available to the widest amount of people."
Uh, MS is going to pay dividends. Further, take a company like the one Warren Buffet runs. He's never issued a dividend ever. A company that does not issue dividends but continues to fund new developments and increase earnings is a perfectly reasonable way to spend its additional capital. No one in history has ever associated the lack of a dividend with a Ponzi scheme. Do you have any economics background at all? Your comments clearly indicate a fundamental misunderstanding with the concepts of reinvestment in the business, diversification, stock market dynamics, and basic economic principles.
You know, i never understood how this is ANYTHING but legal. They don't have a monopoly in portals. They aren't leveraging their OS monopoly into portals. Even if, and this is a big assumption for something that can easily be chalked up to programmer error, they did it intentionally, what's the problem? MSN.com has no ties what so ever to Windows, they could make it completely impossible to view in any competing browser, and that's their right.
Further, MS has no monopoly on the server either. The majority of deployments out there, by revenue, are on UNIX. If that's the case, Sun should LOVE Windows being slower at all, as it just gives them additional fodder. The funny part is that Oracle IS slower, but never chalk up to malice what you can attribute to bad programming. Larry actually takes resources off the Windows team at Oracle to fund the Unix and Linux teams (because he thinks that this will help kill Windows).
All you need is an invoice showing you've paid. That's it, really. And because your company is a non-profit, they'll likely have all expense reports back 5 years (as they get audited very frequently).
You don't consider 1% of his net worth (>$500M) to be a lot of money? And much more is coming, it's just he can't sell MS stock at any faster rate.
Um, if i understand you right, you're disabling things based on the name of the file and directory? That's seems kind of weird, don't you think? wutrack.bin is Windows Up-date Track which means that computer can tell the site the last time it accessed the page and what it downloaded. As for DRM, whether or not you use it, MS is going to use it for its own software, and disabling it seems a little strange.
From 1998/1999 Fiscal Year to the 1999/2000 Fiscal Year they had a 424% increase in revenues. From 1999/2000 to 2000/2001 they had an 18% increase. And from 2000/2001 to 2001/2002 they've reported a 31% increase.
Consider for a moment Microsoft Corporation. Between 1998 and 1999 they had a 29% increase in revenues. 1999-2000 16% increase. 2000-2001 10% increase. 2001-2002 12% increase.
Mandrake went from 500k to 3.5M in 2 years... Microsoft went from $6 B to $8 B. The two are so vastly different even hearing this comparison makes me want to cry. It's like saying last week my parents paid me $5 for cleaning the garage and this week they paid me $15 for cleaning the attic and painting a fence. I have a revenue growth rate of 300%! I should be valued 30x more than MS who has only a 10% increase y/y!
sorry, but this is not dumping according to the FTC or the DOJ or any standard economic theory. Many businesses do this kind of profit shifting. If you drive anything but a Ford Explorer (or SUV), it's likely the division that you purchased from loses money. The only divisions of car companies that make money are light trucks (incl. SUVs) and financing. The rest are sold at a loss.
Perhaps it is because Microsoft really is doing *nothing* new. Name one innovative product to come out of Microsoft that they have not purchased from someone else or outright copied........Clippy? Bob? Please. People are reluctant to want to support Microsoft because of bloated and inefficient programming and third rate design and implementation among many other reasons.
.NET you'll see that it provides extensive support for building applications like this wealth clock." -- from the Bill Gates Wealth Clock
Um I challenge you to name anything that anyone has ever done that is completely new. EVER.
"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants..." -- Isaac Newton
All inventions are based on things that were developed before them.
But to satisfy you, here's an innovation from which I'd like to quote Philip Greenspun, no MS fan by any stretch.
"Ironically this approach to distributed computing over the Internet was ignored by most of the rest of the world except for one company: Microsoft! If you look at Microsoft
Innovation isn't just the invention of something new (which MS earns millions of patents for a year), but the ability to distribute it to the public in a new way.
blah blah blah DRM
blah blah blah EULA
blah blah blah Big Brother, not-Linux compatible, monopolistic so on and so forth
Call me crazy, but don't you think it's a little early to call MS clearly guilty? If, as according to the article, there really is prior art out of academia and other companies publications (IBM was mentioned) and MS clean roomed based on THAT implementation, and not the InterTrust one, then there's no harm, no foul.
I dunno, I find these companies who go around doing nothing but filing patents to be the most absurd abuses of the patent system. The festo case is a perfect example of this, where someone will just patent everything under the sun and make changes to the patent to accomodate how the tech is actually being used.
you know, this is not a true statement. GPL does nothing to help Oracle. Or Palm. Or any of millions of companies that compete against MS. They create just as much intellectual property that helps them differentiate from their competition as MS does. Aligning with Linux DOES compete with MS, aligning with the GPL as the unwanted side effect of killing all your IP.
Conover: Unfortunately, Bart, your little escapade could not have come at a worse time. [sets up screen]
Americo-Australianian relations are at an all-time low.
[talks over a slide show]
As I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the US experienced a short-lived infatuation with Australian culture. For some bizarre reason, the Aussies thought this would be a permanent thing. Of course, it wasn't.
[a slide shows "Yahoo Serious Festival"]
Lisa: I know those words, but that sign makes no sense.
michael's behavior continues to astound. If MS had done something even remotely similar to this, he would have launched into them with a tirade that would still be going on, yet, here, he equivocates for Yahoo. I realize this is not much of a surprise to some, but it still amazes me how utterly biased the slashdot editors are.
ObTopic: Generally, i think the EULA game is just a giant CYA exercise. Companies absolutely have to do this kind of stuff because you never know how you're going to get sued. MS had to word the EULA that way because thhe web-updates would download and install only IF you gave the auto-updater the chance to do so. Yahoo, similarly, IS exchanging financial info, and has to be restrictive. EULAs are EULAs. If you don't like them, don't play.
Dan--
:) The real problem is I'm not sure if you joking or not :)
Normally I'm a big fan, but really this seems unrealistically harsh. This entire thing couldn't have taken him more than a couple hours, and I'm sure as a sum total many many more hours are wasted by PhD students WATCHING buffy than presenting this. And probably orders of magnitude more than that are spent reading and posting to slashdot! (to say nothing of the work force
The server division made $350 M covering most of the losses from other divisions. Just FYI.
But this is not correct either! The contract that you purchase through MS for your copy of whatever is good forever. There is no expiration on the item that you purchased (read the EULA or contract). This is not directionally suggested by the fact that components connect to MS. I can run my laptop forever with never connecting to MS once! (Try it by blocking *.microsoft.com on your firewall). I only call this out as a single section of your article which is wrong... the entire piece is full of fallacies, that's just an example.
According to the 10-Q filing, the article is wrong. The $177M net loss is for all of home and entertainment, only a subset of which is Xbox. In fact, comparing it to last year, where the losses were at $68 M and there was NO xbox, you can conclude that total losses resulting from xbox activities would not be greater than $109 M, and in fact probably even less than that. There are many other things in the home and entertainment division such as Windows Media Center PC, UltimateTV, MSN TV, and so on, many of which were probably not profitable, and contributed to the overall losses.
Mod this parent up... even simple math says that without the PR says they're more than $300 M in the black! That's pretty phenomenal for a box that's been out for just over 1 year (as of today!). This is actually amazingly good, not bad.
you can do this with the acer. You rotate the screen 180 degs and fold it back. Boom, tablet only (keyboard off).
No I read that bit. I agree there are components of your article which are true. But I have a paper that says 2+2 = 4 and also 4+4 = 6 and 5+5=11, certainly you would call into question the point of the paper (if any). Your paper's point seems to be to MS's current behavior, and then project future behavior based on that. The fact that most of your factual points today are wrong or grossly distorted seems to indicate that your conclusions would suffer the same maladies.
For example, you state that Windows 98 does not connect to MS computers where as XP can connect to MS computers in 18 ways. This is false. The most of the components you have listed as connecting under Windows XP ALSO can connect under Windows 98. But let's assume that you're correct and that these components don't connect under Windows 98. So what? How many components in DOS 6.22 had a TCP stack? Technologies change, and now that the internet is available (which was in limited scope in 1995-1997 when Win98 was first being built), you would think that they would adopt these components into their architecture. Wouldn't you?
Hidden downloads, etc are just FUD. There's little example of MS doing hidden downloads of any sort. And linking to 4 year old sites about people switching from Windows is great... if you want the story of one person moving. Generally, they have little credibility.
I am not saying anything about the government's case. I AM saying your conclusions are nearly universally wrong, misinformed and flamebait. Your article has little or no worth.