MS Windows is not "broadly distributed". It is only distributed to those who have signed up to be guinea^H^H^H testers. All these few hundreds (a few thousands at most) of people are registered with Microsoft.
If Microsoft cannot even control over who has which copy of its OS when it puts it out to be tested then how can it possibly keep this OS secure when people deploy it into production environments?!!
Oh yeah. It can't do that either!
We're not talking about people pushing ripped copies of a purchased CD here - we're talking about pre-release copies that have been distributed to a limited number of testers for testing purposes.
It is not too big a leap, based on the known business practises of this dodgy corporation, to consider what underhand marketing ploys they would use, or continue to use.
Putting its own OS up on bit torrent is not beyond the realm of what Microsoft would do if by doing so it gave a marketing advantage against its perceived opposition.
Games don't factor into this. Microsoft's dodgy business practises do.
> And as I stated, it looked a lot like fair use to me - but reading this > thread further, it looks like the license that Gatehouse put on the RSS > feed explicitly disallows exactly this kind of commercial use.
I wasn't aware that you could contract out of the Law.
And what has Gatehouse's own RSS feed got to do with someone else directly linking to Gatehouse's website my means of using the headline and the first few sentences?
A beta version of MS Windows Vista Mark 2 (AKA MS Windows 7) could only be available via Bit Torrent as a result of either MS itself putting up this torrent, or one of its partners putting it up.
I personally tend to the view that it was MS Marketing that put it up, as I'm convinced that MS would rather their software be "pirated" and used almost everywhere than not pirated and to have a majority of people using anything else.
> Boston.com's position as a competing entity (vs. Google's position > as a search engine) lends credence to this point. Boston.com is > essentially getting Gatehouse to write it's site's local content for them.
I can't see what is wrong with using the original headline and the first couple of sentences in order to show people what is at the other end of a link.
That helps people to decide if they want to visit that site - or not.
I think that is very much fair use.
It's no different from taking the title of a novel and quoting the first couple of sentences of the first chapter.
If that is sufficient to entice you to look further then the novelist has scored a page view from someone who might not otherwise have heard of that work; and might therefore end up with a sale.
> I think a good compromise plan would be to establish a projected > required operating budget (maybe $10M / year, growing at 10% per > year until reaching $100M / year), and put up the display ads, rake > in the cash far faster than they need it, set the excess aside in > an endowment (hopefully invested wisely, whatever that means), and > when the endowment can fund future operations from interest > alone, kill the display ads.
Sounds good to me.
Personally I only rarely see adverts unless they originate as a part of the specific page that I'm viewing. I have setup Firefox with some plugins that kill virtually all banner advertising.
> It doesn't matter if we're right. What matters to them is we > don't agree with them. So they'll stomp on us and shit on us > and delete entries anyway, out of spite or some twisted logic > that what was originally founded as a public resource is > somehow divinely theirs.
In my opinion, I think you're wrong.
The reason why I think you're wrong is because I see the role of these people is to prevent vandals from deleting the good information that other people have voluntarily put into the Wiki.
Certain topics are so contentious that they get vandalized on a weekly, even daily, basis. If those moderators were not around to guide the construction of the Wiki then it would be a poorer quality repository of information.
Consider them to be the editors, and you the journalist. You make your contributions, and the editors decide where they go, if at all.
Good luck to them in their designated role, and may their decisions be wise ones.
> Or, you could move to Hawaii where no billboards > are allowed anywhere.
From a visual pollution perspective Hawaii sounds like an enlightened place.
If only more places had such enlightened laws.
Where I live (Wellington) they've now got billboards in just about every possible place that a billboard can be placed, and in my opinion all it's succeeded in doing is to make a beautiful city look very ugly.
If I had my way then all the real-estate-based advertising that a business would be able to do would be a modest sign above the entrance and, maybe, a sandwichboard or equivalent standing on the footpath. No billboards would be permitted, and all the existing ones would be pulled down.
I personally don't like sandwichboards out on the footpath. On busy streets they are, for the most part, merely obstacles to the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic.
Too bad if that means a money-grubbing advertising company goes out of business!
> Most organizations eventually do, but it can take > many decades if the founders are careful about > the culture they create.
Ultimately, who cares what any given organisation does, or how they do it, so long as it is ethical and within the law, except for those who are members of said organisation? It is all a largely moot/irrelevant point.
... and mate it with another - preferably of the opposite sex and preferably married.
Viola. More Jobs.;o)
Heh heh.
Yeah - I know - So that was just a tad bit too microsoft even for here. But hey - its Christmas Eve already and an hour ago I finished work for the year.:o)
> So if a housekeeper using her desktop on my hospital > network gets infected by malware, no doctor in the > hospital can use email? Hmmm...I foresee no problems > whatsoever. Let's do it!
Of course in a corporate environment that is behind a firewall, the only way for email to get out is via that corporation's SMTP server. I'm sure that a large corporation such as a hospital would be able to manage what is connected to its network.
And, of course, you're taking a totally blind approach to what I suggested. I'm saying that ICANN needs to have TEETH and needs to use those teeth against those ISPs who do nothing about spam traveling out of their network when they should be contacting their customer in order to get the spambot removed from the network and fixed before it is permitted to connect to the network again.
What went wrong is that the ISPs have not been made responsible to ensure that their clients do not send out large quantities of spam.
If the ISPs were required by law to temporarily disable or even permanently terminate all internet connections that have ANY computer that is sending out quantities of spam - ie if the ISP was at risk of having their own network existence permanently deleted/deregistered by ICANN if they did not actively ensure their network was not a source of spam or a source of the management of spambots...
The onus needs to be forcibly put onto the ISPs in order to compel them to keep their part of the Internet free from spam - and the penalty needs to be draconian.
Otherwise the basic greed of the owners of that ISP will cause them to not do anything that would hurt their revenue from spammers.
Do that and spam will disappear within weeks - just as soon as ICANN finds the balls to start deleting/deregistering those ISPs from which spam is constantly spewing out.
> Something that was worth $5K last year is suddenly > worth $0 because the free version is just as good > as the paid.
So move to the Service model - sell your high-quality/high-value support services.
Most Open Source software - by the very fact that the source code is freely published on the Internet - follows the service model by selling support services.
If you are very good at supporting your software, and at a commercially reasonable price, then you won't need to worry about the competition walking in and taking your customers away from you - because they won't be able to.
So why does anybody need a cluster of MS Windows servers to run MS Exchange so that people can merely read their email?
If MS can rake up a machine to hit Nr 10 in the performance stakes why can't it make a regular server that can cope with the BAU workloads of medium-sized businesses?
Yeah, but you still need to have a central place - a URL - to which you go to access this "cloud". Most people call that a website, or a web application hosted on a server and accessed via a browser.
Nothing new here. "Cloud computing" is just the current Microsoft marketing speak for their current attempt to embrace and extend, and extinguish, current non-microsoft-specific browser based activities.
Cloud computing? You want to steer well clear of it if you want to continue to control your own resources.
Microsoft doesn't own The browser - it is released under an Open Source license.
Microsoft doesn't own The server - it is released under the GNU General Public License.
Microsoft doesn't own The Internet - that is what WE choose to make it. This "cloud" is nothing other than the use of browser-based applications were all the hard processing is all done centrally on the server and the browser is merely the graphical interface.
Microsoft doesn't own The Desktop - it too is released under the GNU General Public Licence, and is what we choose to make it.
This announcement is nothing more than more marketing speak from Microsoft as it still tries to catch up with the Internet.
Nothing new here. Move along.:o)
-- Dilger: "Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing company that flogs third rate technology products."
> "The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows > Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft.
While I agree that Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate/whatever is a hideous iteration of MS Windows, I can't agree that it has been all that disastrous for Microsoft.
Each copy costs _considerably_ more than MS Windows XP Pro, and almost all retailed versions of MS windows today are OEM installed copies of MS Windows Vista Ultimate/whatever.
Microsoft is still making a fortune from MS Windows Vista.
My own personal view is that MS Windows Vista is an unfinished POS and I certainly won't be using it. But it *is* a financial winner for MS.
This is a deliberate and orchestrated part of Microsoft's marketing campaign that will gradually intensify up until the time when it is foisted onto the general public as the next "most secure version ever" release (together with several increasingly crippled "home" or "business" versions) of the next iteration of WindowsNT (WinNT7).
This only demonstrates to me that laws such as the DMCA (given their extremely wide scope and the relative inability of any USian citizen to challenge a (good or bad) takedown notice without spending a fortune on lawyers and court fees) could only have been passed by a body that only has the interests of commercial corporations at heart.
Surely information such as the reception range of various television stations quite rightly is public information.
DMCA notices shouldn't have been needed for this. Simply going in and making the requisite modifications, or asserting that certain information is copyrighted, and then citing proof of copyright should have been all that is required.
And besides that, isn't the Neilson corporation about producing viewer statistics not about regulating the reception areas of the transmitters for various television stations?
Slashdot Mirror
MS Windows is not "broadly distributed". It is only distributed to those who have signed up to be guinea^H^H^H testers. All these few hundreds (a few thousands at most) of people are registered with Microsoft.
If Microsoft cannot even control over who has which copy of its OS when it puts it out to be tested then how can it possibly keep this OS secure when people deploy it into production environments?!!
Oh yeah. It can't do that either!
We're not talking about people pushing ripped copies of a purchased CD here - we're talking about pre-release copies that have been distributed to a limited number of testers for testing purposes.
It is not too big a leap, based on the known business practises of this dodgy corporation, to consider what underhand marketing ploys they would use, or continue to use.
Putting its own OS up on bit torrent is not beyond the realm of what Microsoft would do if by doing so it gave a marketing advantage against its perceived opposition.
Games don't factor into this. Microsoft's dodgy business practises do.
> And as I stated, it looked a lot like fair use to me - but reading this
> thread further, it looks like the license that Gatehouse put on the RSS
> feed explicitly disallows exactly this kind of commercial use.
I wasn't aware that you could contract out of the Law.
And what has Gatehouse's own RSS feed got to do with someone else directly linking to Gatehouse's website my means of using the headline and the first few sentences?
I mean, anybody can link to anything on the WWW.
A beta version of MS Windows Vista Mark 2 (AKA MS Windows 7) could only be available via Bit Torrent as a result of either MS itself putting up this torrent, or one of its partners putting it up.
I personally tend to the view that it was MS Marketing that put it up, as I'm convinced that MS would rather their software be "pirated" and used almost everywhere than not pirated and to have a majority of people using anything else.
> Boston.com's position as a competing entity (vs. Google's position
> as a search engine) lends credence to this point. Boston.com is
> essentially getting Gatehouse to write it's site's local content for them.
I can't see what is wrong with using the original headline and the first couple of sentences in order to show people what is at the other end of a link.
That helps people to decide if they want to visit that site - or not.
I think that is very much fair use.
It's no different from taking the title of a novel and quoting the first couple of sentences of the first chapter.
If that is sufficient to entice you to look further then the novelist has scored a page view from someone who might not otherwise have heard of that work; and might therefore end up with a sale.
I can't see how the author loses on this.
> If no agreement is reached, those channels are supposed
> to be dropped just after midnight tonight.
Don't you mean they should have been dropped already?
At the time of me writing this it's nearly 5pm on 1/Jan/2009!
> I think a good compromise plan would be to establish a projected
> required operating budget (maybe $10M / year, growing at 10% per
> year until reaching $100M / year), and put up the display ads, rake
> in the cash far faster than they need it, set the excess aside in
> an endowment (hopefully invested wisely, whatever that means), and
> when the endowment can fund future operations from interest
> alone, kill the display ads.
Sounds good to me.
Personally I only rarely see adverts unless they originate as a part of the specific page that I'm viewing. I have setup Firefox with some plugins that kill virtually all banner advertising.
> Maybe there's room for a Wiki variant paid for by
> ads, but also less strict on notability, etc
There is.
I believe it is operated by Google and is called Knol.
http://knol.google.com/k/knol
Their view is that the quality of information should be better if people are prepared to put their real name to what they write.
> It doesn't matter if we're right. What matters to them is we
> don't agree with them. So they'll stomp on us and shit on us
> and delete entries anyway, out of spite or some twisted logic
> that what was originally founded as a public resource is
> somehow divinely theirs.
In my opinion, I think you're wrong.
The reason why I think you're wrong is because I see the role of these people is to prevent vandals from deleting the good information that other people have voluntarily put into the Wiki.
Certain topics are so contentious that they get vandalized on a weekly, even daily, basis. If those moderators were not around to guide the construction of the Wiki then it would be a poorer quality repository of information.
Consider them to be the editors, and you the journalist. You make your contributions, and the editors decide where they go, if at all.
Good luck to them in their designated role, and may their decisions be wise ones.
> Or, you could move to Hawaii where no billboards
> are allowed anywhere.
From a visual pollution perspective Hawaii sounds like an enlightened place.
If only more places had such enlightened laws.
Where I live (Wellington) they've now got billboards in just about every possible place that a billboard can be placed, and in my opinion all it's succeeded in doing is to make a beautiful city look very ugly.
If I had my way then all the real-estate-based advertising that a business would be able to do would be a modest sign above the entrance and, maybe, a sandwichboard or equivalent standing on the footpath. No billboards would be permitted, and all the existing ones would be pulled down.
I personally don't like sandwichboards out on the footpath. On busy streets they are, for the most part, merely obstacles to the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic.
Too bad if that means a money-grubbing advertising company goes out of business!
Just my view. :o)
> Most organizations eventually do, but it can take
> many decades if the founders are careful about
> the culture they create.
Ultimately, who cares what any given organisation does, or how they do it, so long as it is ethical and within the law, except for those who are members of said organisation? It is all a largely moot/irrelevant point.
> Yay, newly-created organization which hasn't accumulated a ... yet!
> work-impeding bureaucracy.
Given a little time I'm sure it will. ;o)
... and mate it with another - preferably of the opposite sex and preferably married.
Viola. More Jobs. ;o)
Heh heh.
Yeah - I know - So that was just a tad bit too microsoft even for here. But hey - its Christmas Eve already and an hour ago I finished work for the year. :o)
> So if a housekeeper using her desktop on my hospital
> network gets infected by malware, no doctor in the
> hospital can use email? Hmmm...I foresee no problems
> whatsoever. Let's do it!
Of course in a corporate environment that is behind a firewall, the only way for email to get out is via that corporation's SMTP server. I'm sure that a large corporation such as a hospital would be able to manage what is connected to its network.
And, of course, you're taking a totally blind approach to what I suggested. I'm saying that ICANN needs to have TEETH and needs to use those teeth against those ISPs who do nothing about spam traveling out of their network when they should be contacting their customer in order to get the spambot removed from the network and fixed before it is permitted to connect to the network again.
What went wrong is that the ISPs have not been made responsible to ensure that their clients do not send out large quantities of spam.
If the ISPs were required by law to temporarily disable or even permanently terminate all internet connections that have ANY computer that is sending out quantities of spam - ie if the ISP was at risk of having their own network existence permanently deleted/deregistered by ICANN if they did not actively ensure their network was not a source of spam or a source of the management of spambots...
The onus needs to be forcibly put onto the ISPs in order to compel them to keep their part of the Internet free from spam - and the penalty needs to be draconian.
Otherwise the basic greed of the owners of that ISP will cause them to not do anything that would hurt their revenue from spammers.
Do that and spam will disappear within weeks - just as soon as ICANN finds the balls to start deleting/deregistering those ISPs from which spam is constantly spewing out.
> The RIAA are one of the most despised groups in North America now (I want to say the world, but don't know how true that would be),
Indeed the RIAA _is_ one of the most despised organisations in the world.
Another is the government of the USA, and another is the MPAA.
Why is it that the top three most-despised organisations are all USian organisations?
> It's for XP and Vista only.
Well that rules me out - I don't run any M$ software on my computers.
Not sure that I'd want a three-headed browser in any case.
> Something that was worth $5K last year is suddenly
> worth $0 because the free version is just as good
> as the paid.
So move to the Service model - sell your high-quality/high-value support services.
Most Open Source software - by the very fact that the source code is freely published on the Internet - follows the service model by selling support services.
If you are very good at supporting your software, and at a commercially reasonable price, then you won't need to worry about the competition walking in and taking your customers away from you - because they won't be able to.
So why does anybody need a cluster of MS Windows servers to run MS Exchange so that people can merely read their email?
If MS can rake up a machine to hit Nr 10 in the performance stakes why can't it make a regular server that can cope with the BAU workloads of medium-sized businesses?
So what impact will all that vaporised rubbish have on the ionosphere?
Yeah, but you still need to have a central place - a URL - to which you go to access this "cloud". Most people call that a website, or a web application hosted on a server and accessed via a browser.
Nothing new here. "Cloud computing" is just the current Microsoft marketing speak for their current attempt to embrace and extend, and extinguish, current non-microsoft-specific browser based activities.
Cloud computing? You want to steer well clear of it if you want to continue to control your own resources.
Microsoft doesn't own The browser - it is released under an Open Source license.
Microsoft doesn't own The server - it is released under the GNU General Public License.
Microsoft doesn't own The Internet - that is what WE choose to make it. This "cloud" is nothing other than the use of browser-based applications were all the hard processing is all done centrally on the server and the browser is merely the graphical interface.
Microsoft doesn't own The Desktop - it too is released under the GNU General Public Licence, and is what we choose to make it.
This announcement is nothing more than more marketing speak from Microsoft as it still tries to catch up with the Internet.
Nothing new here. Move along. :o)
--
Dilger: "Microsoft is first and foremost a marketing
company that flogs third rate technology products."
> "The State of Maine is the latest organization to skip Windows
> Vista, which has been a near-disaster for Microsoft.
While I agree that Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate/whatever is a hideous iteration of MS Windows, I can't agree that it has been all that disastrous for Microsoft.
Each copy costs _considerably_ more than MS Windows XP Pro, and almost all retailed versions of MS windows today are OEM installed copies of MS Windows Vista Ultimate/whatever.
Microsoft is still making a fortune from MS Windows Vista.
My own personal view is that MS Windows Vista is an unfinished POS and I certainly won't be using it. But it *is* a financial winner for MS.
Correct.
WinNT6 = "Vista"
WinNT5.x = 2000/XP/2003
WinNT4.x = WinNT4.x
WIN4.9 = WinME
WIN4.1 = Win98/SE
WIN4.0 = Win95/a/b/c
Nothing prior to this matters as the release prior to this was the first generally usable version of MS Windows.
This is Microsoft we're talking about.
This is a deliberate and orchestrated part of Microsoft's marketing campaign that will gradually intensify up until the time when it is foisted onto the general public as the next "most secure version ever" release (together with several increasingly crippled "home" or "business" versions) of the next iteration of WindowsNT (WinNT7).
Do not be fooled by this "leaked" bullshit.
This only demonstrates to me that laws such as the DMCA (given their extremely wide scope and the relative inability of any USian citizen to challenge a (good or bad) takedown notice without spending a fortune on lawyers and court fees) could only have been passed by a body that only has the interests of commercial corporations at heart.
Surely information such as the reception range of various television stations quite rightly is public information.
DMCA notices shouldn't have been needed for this. Simply going in and making the requisite modifications, or asserting that certain information is copyrighted, and then citing proof of copyright should have been all that is required.
And besides that, isn't the Neilson corporation about producing viewer statistics not about regulating the reception areas of the transmitters for various television stations?