It has to be a conspiracy. Anyone who claims that this might be a consequence of the year-long security push for SP2 and that a high-level fix made during this push might prevent certain classes of bugs from being exploitable is clearly evil and has been exposed to too much software engineering. I'd suspect such a person of spreading facts instead of FUD.
I can see all the geeks with their idle NMR machines, private spectral analyzers, centrifuges, dna microarrays and 128-node clusters at home going at this one now that that paper has revealed that this might be a good idea.
I mean, what are all those people doing with $4,000,000 in equipment sitting in their garages anyway?
Funny thing is, if you create a _different_ version of a software, chances are you encur some extra cost in the process. So by rights, a version without Media player would be more costly.
Let me get this straight - so Microsoft publishes a program and, duh, it doesn't fully conform with some standard or other but is completely capable of being adapted to conformance with said standard using builtin means.
Instead of saying "Wow, we could have had a standards conformant browser by client side adaptions since its publication, that's actually pretty nifty" the reaction is "They should have done what we wanted from the start and it's a shame that we have to work to achieve something we desire"?
This is just another sad example of people not taking responsibility and tackle their own problems but making a fuss about how someone else should do their work for them. Most people don't care about conformance, and Microsoft targets "most people". For those who care, there is a solution that requires some extra work. Stop the whining and get on it. That's what being an engineer is all about.
The 10% figure applies exclusively to the cheapest of PCs. For a high end PC (around $4500), it would be a mere 1%. With volume licensing factored in, the percentage might be even less.
Uhm. I usually try to hold back in discussions of such religious zeal, but I feel compelled to point out that the US is actually a capitalist society. Things cost. Markets decide.
I am guessing the previous poster assumed the cost of the forms handed out for "free" was - zero? In that case, let me put up this question for public debate: would the situation be better if the government used tax revenue to pay for an edition of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office (and a Computer, ISP service and one mug of coffee per hour for everyone) as they do for the printing of the "free" tax forms?
Beg to differ - OEMs have been able to do that since the consent decree. It's actually rathe easy and straightforward and there is a tool that Microsoft offers to help do precisely that.
Uhm - it's not open source (the licence states clearly that it cannot be redistributed). Read the source, Luke!
The thought police furthermore points out that the no-reboot install comes courtesy of the patch being a plugin for IE using the MS APIs to extend the browser and idly wonders if your extensive testing also alerted you to the fact that the patch phones home...
On a sidenote, reading the source, understanding what the patch does and how it does it and then re-reading all of the comments on this pages results in the impression that there are a lot of contributors to slashdot who'd do well to excercise a little more caution before posting.
Which, by the way, makes this patch a fair illustration how Microsofts API design for IE is admirably extensible. The patch still is malware (it phones home), but it illustrates the power of extensible design.
Ahem - you have, of course, the data to back this up? I am looking specifically for the list of bugs Microsoft found and fixed internally before release and the list of bugs people external to Microsoft found and fixed for said release. It would also be nice to have an assessment of relative severity for those bugs.
OMG - finally someone else who doesn't think the movies a gift from a higher being. I thought they were way overacted. Retranslation into a book would go somewhat like this:
With a fiery passion burning in his deep, dark eyes, Frodo turned to Sam and exclaimed with determination: "Sam, I will now take a piss behind yonder shrub. While this is an important undertaking, and though I will put all my heart into it, it will not lead me astray from our great mission!" Our hero marched off into the general direction of a larger bush, confidence showing in every one of his steps, even though the tragic weight of the one ring tried to drag him down.
Other than that, there's this thing about mountaintops that Jackson seems to have. Does it strike anyone else as strange that travellers appear to always take the energetially least optimal (but admittedly most scenic) route from A to B?
Ironic that the U.S. legal system that was founded on principles of personal responsibility now rewards immaturity and greed.
It's not ironic, it's sad. Very sad. It's a consequence of 'the people' not being motivated enough to say 'hey, something is fucked up with certain class of persons using the legal system that was supposed to fairly resolve conflicts for what effectively boils down to blackmail.'
The problem is that everyone is too busy minding their own lives, individuals are unwilling to believe that they could theoretically change things, and public information relies on organs that have no interest in impartiality but profit best if issues are blown up into hollywood style dualistic fights betweent he 'good' and the 'evil'.
What everyone apparently needs to be reminded of is that if we do not want a legal system that can be used to with a single lawsuit amass personal wealth far beyond what can be earned by -say- a lifetime of work saving lives in an emergency room, we have the power to make it so (granted, it'll take a few years, a lot of organization and it won't be easy).
Warning - blatant promotion of organizations I support follows: If this seems like a worthwhile goal to you too, have a look at http://www.atra.org/atra/, http://www.overlawyered.com/ or join one of the many local 'Citizens against Lawsuit abuse' organizations (both sites have a number of local links). Contribute time or money, and maybe, five years down the road, people like David Boies will conclude that it is in their best interest to look for other ways to apply their intelligence to make a living. Any maybe, just maybe, they'll end up doing something that will actually be beneficial to society as a whole.
Beware of the dangers of subscribing to a narrow-bandwidth dualistic worldview: first off, the idea that people can be either good or evil and that labelling them as such will be a consistent predictor of future behaviour has caused a lot of bloodshed (not to mention time wasted in unproductive flamewars) on past occasions. It is more likely that such labelling is a good predictor of future interpretations of the actions of the labelled party by the person doing the labelling.
Secondly, Microsoft is not a person but a conglomerate of a large number of individuals with rather diverse worldviews and intentions.
Excourse and appeal: Adverse viewpoints of large groups will over the long term lead to either coexistence, conflict or compromise. Resolution by conflict is most often the worst alternative for everyone involved, and very frequently, there are better solutions available through compromise.
Back to the main thread: what I am trying to say is: maybe there is motivation for an internationally operating publicly held company to state their opposition to plans looking suspiciously like plans for the creation of a government held monopoly in their core market other than said company being 'evil'. Like an obligation to it's shareholders for instance.
And maybe, just maybe, this would also be in the best interested of the end users who might just not like using a potentially government-decreed and comittee-designed operating system. But it's far too early to judge that.
Keep in mind the source of your information and the interests of the parties involved.
The technology that burst.com patented is a blindingly obvious application of caching, so I have my doubts as to how much value software they might have written would have generated. I also doubt that the fact that WMP uses caching is sufficient evidence that Microsoft misappropriated technology from burst.com.
Slashdot Mirror
It has to be a conspiracy. Anyone who claims that this might be a consequence of the year-long security push for SP2 and that a high-level fix made during this push might prevent certain classes of bugs from being exploitable is clearly evil and has been exposed to too much software engineering. I'd suspect such a person of spreading facts instead of FUD.
I can see all the geeks with their idle NMR machines, private spectral analyzers, centrifuges, dna microarrays and 128-node clusters at home going at this one now that that paper has revealed that this might be a good idea.
I mean, what are all those people doing with $4,000,000 in equipment sitting in their garages anyway?
Shakes head and walks away sadly.
Funny thing is, if you create a _different_ version of a software, chances are you encur some extra cost in the process. So by rights, a version without Media player would be more costly.
Ok, forgive me, but I have to vent...
Let me get this straight - so Microsoft publishes a program and, duh, it doesn't fully conform with some standard or other but is completely capable of being adapted to conformance with said standard using builtin means.
Instead of saying "Wow, we could have had a standards conformant browser by client side adaptions since its publication, that's actually pretty nifty" the reaction is "They should have done what we wanted from the start and it's a shame that we have to work to achieve something we desire"?
This is just another sad example of people not taking responsibility and tackle their own problems but making a fuss about how someone else should do their work for them. Most people don't care about conformance, and Microsoft targets "most people". For those who care, there is a solution that requires some extra work. Stop the whining and get on it. That's what being an engineer is all about.
The 10% figure applies exclusively to the cheapest of PCs. For a high end PC (around $4500), it would be a mere 1%. With volume licensing factored in, the percentage might be even less.
Thus MS is not collecting "10% for every PC".
Uhm. I usually try to hold back in discussions of such religious zeal, but I feel compelled to point out that the US is actually a capitalist society. Things cost. Markets decide.
I am guessing the previous poster assumed the cost of the forms handed out for "free" was - zero? In that case, let me put up this question for public debate: would the situation be better if the government used tax revenue to pay for an edition of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office (and a Computer, ISP service and one mug of coffee per hour for everyone) as they do for the printing of the "free" tax forms?
Beg to differ - OEMs have been able to do that since the consent decree. It's actually rathe easy and straightforward and there is a tool that Microsoft offers to help do precisely that.
Uhm - it's not open source (the licence states clearly that it cannot be redistributed). Read the source, Luke!
The thought police furthermore points out that the no-reboot install comes courtesy of the patch being a plugin for IE using the MS APIs to extend the browser and idly wonders if your extensive testing also alerted you to the fact that the patch phones home...
On a sidenote, reading the source, understanding what the patch does and how it does it and then re-reading all of the comments on this pages results in the impression that there are a lot of contributors to slashdot who'd do well to excercise a little more caution before posting.
Which, by the way, makes this patch a fair illustration how Microsofts API design for IE is admirably extensible. The patch still is malware (it phones home), but it illustrates the power of extensible design.
Ahem - you have, of course, the data to back this up? I am looking specifically for the list of bugs Microsoft found and fixed internally before release and the list of bugs people external to Microsoft found and fixed for said release. It would also be nice to have an assessment of relative severity for those bugs.
OMG - finally someone else who doesn't think the movies a gift from a higher being. I thought they were way overacted. Retranslation into a book would go somewhat like this:
With a fiery passion burning in his deep, dark eyes, Frodo turned to Sam and exclaimed with determination: "Sam, I will now take a piss behind yonder shrub. While this is an important undertaking, and though I will put all my heart into it, it will not lead me astray from our great mission!" Our hero marched off into the general direction of a larger bush, confidence showing in every one of his steps, even though the tragic weight of the one ring tried to drag him down.
Other than that, there's this thing about mountaintops that Jackson seems to have. Does it strike anyone else as strange that travellers appear to always take the energetially least optimal (but admittedly most scenic) route from A to B?
Ironic that the U.S. legal system that was founded on principles of personal responsibility now rewards immaturity and greed.
It's not ironic, it's sad. Very sad. It's a consequence of 'the people' not being motivated enough to say 'hey, something is fucked up with certain class of persons using the legal system that was supposed to fairly resolve conflicts for what effectively boils down to blackmail.'
The problem is that everyone is too busy minding their own lives, individuals are unwilling to believe that they could theoretically change things, and public information relies on organs that have no interest in impartiality but profit best if issues are blown up into hollywood style dualistic fights betweent he 'good' and the 'evil'.
What everyone apparently needs to be reminded of is that if we do not want a legal system that can be used to with a single lawsuit amass personal wealth far beyond what can be earned by -say- a lifetime of work saving lives in an emergency room, we have the power to make it so (granted, it'll take a few years, a lot of organization and it won't be easy).
Warning - blatant promotion of organizations I support follows: If this seems like a worthwhile goal to you too, have a look at http://www.atra.org/atra/, http://www.overlawyered.com/ or join one of the many local 'Citizens against Lawsuit abuse' organizations (both sites have a number of local links). Contribute time or money, and maybe, five years down the road, people like David Boies will conclude that it is in their best interest to look for other ways to apply their intelligence to make a living. Any maybe, just maybe, they'll end up doing something that will actually be beneficial to society as a whole.
Beware of the dangers of subscribing to a narrow-bandwidth dualistic worldview: first off, the idea that people can be either good or evil and that labelling them as such will be a consistent predictor of future behaviour has caused a lot of bloodshed (not to mention time wasted in unproductive flamewars) on past occasions. It is more likely that such labelling is a good predictor of future interpretations of the actions of the labelled party by the person doing the labelling.
Secondly, Microsoft is not a person but a conglomerate of a large number of individuals with rather diverse worldviews and intentions.
Excourse and appeal: Adverse viewpoints of large groups will over the long term lead to either coexistence, conflict or compromise. Resolution by conflict is most often the worst alternative for everyone involved, and very frequently, there are better solutions available through compromise.
Back to the main thread: what I am trying to say is: maybe there is motivation for an internationally operating publicly held company to state their opposition to plans looking suspiciously like plans for the creation of a government held monopoly in their core market other than said company being 'evil'. Like an obligation to it's shareholders for instance.
And maybe, just maybe, this would also be in the best interested of the end users who might just not like using a potentially government-decreed and comittee-designed operating system. But it's far too early to judge that.
Keep in mind the source of your information and the interests of the parties involved.
The technology that burst.com patented is a blindingly obvious application of caching, so I have my doubts as to how much value software they might have written would have generated. I also doubt that the fact that WMP uses caching is sufficient evidence that Microsoft misappropriated technology from burst.com.
So. MS has this monopoly over the desktop market - and they can't even force the DOJ to publish in Word format, instead of PDF and WordPerfect? Sure.
come from?
Directly from the GNOME marketing department? ;)