Because Microsoft forced manufacturers into using only DOS until it became a monopoly . . .
It certainly helped when Microsoft did a whole bunch of nasty tricks to prevent DR-DOS from working properly (such as Windows 3.1 complaining when DR-DOS was installed instead of MS-DOS.) DR DOS was a far better version of DOS. Never went anywhere, but unlike Microsoft DOS, DR DOS had the capability of backups and memory management as well as task switching (basic windowing) that you had to buy from third parties when using Microsoft.
The Google part of that particular falsehood stems from the fact that these morons seem to think that any widespread opinion on tech matters must come from Google to fit some kind of agenda they have.
Thanks PaulT, I was thinking the same thing myself, but you did a pretty good job summing it up.
The "lies and fear" part seems to stem from the fact that people were looking at how these laws could be used as written, rather than how the maximalists originally intended them to be used.
This has always been what bothered me about the letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law debate. The whole fact that we base our laws on what we think the people who made the law were thinking leaves a big gray area when it comes to morality laws like this. When it is a law about running a stoplight, anyone who looks at the law knows exactly what the person was thinking when they made that law. It is a safety issue...if someone runs a red light, other people who are travelling through the intersection on a green light are put in danger. However, in the case of SOPA, it is really difficult to know what it is that the author was thinking when they wrote the law, other than protecting the profits of publishers and the middlemen because they gave the author some dough in exchange. It isn't that it is difficult to understand, but that it is difficult to believe that when a judge and jury gets ahold of this...that they may not go a different way. Too many variables.
They've been exaggerating for a very long time. Sun said Kevin stole software valued at $8 million that anyone could have gotten for $30 from their website at the time.
It's relatively cheap and people know how it works.
I'd rephrase that to "It's relatively cheap and people are familiar with it." Nobody, not even Microsoft themselves, knows how it works.
Just ask their Configuration Management (CM) team. There was a time when Microsoft decided to eat their own dogfood and started using their own software for everything, and one of their CM guys told me that this was a pain for them, because after a while it wasn't clear who was running what code because employees would push patches in to their own systems to fix stuff they were seeing and nobody was keeping track of what was being pushed. This was the cause of many of the reversions in the past, where security fixes would come out that fixed one problem and reintroduced another one. Apparently they have gotten better at it, but I suspect there still are too many cooks in the kitchen and they still don't understand everything in there.
(Unrelated) Especially after what Oracle did to OpenOffice.
I find it really hard to be sympathetic with Oracle after what Oracle did to Oracle. Anyone remember Ellison's "Unbreakable" fiasco? That guy has had a problem with the truth for at least 15 years now, and it is no surprise he is conflicted now during sworn testimony.
Oracle has always been evil in every possible meaning of the word. I still remember having to deal with Oracle not releasing security patches for their products unless you had a ridiculous and burdensome support agreement. We found multiple security issues with their software and after a long discussion with them trying to get fixes pushed out to our people running their software, eventually an edict came out that said "Thou shalt not use Oracle software in our corporate environment." They weren't willing to work with us until that edict came out and they realized they were losing all the plushy contracts, and then they bent over backwards to make sure those problems were taken care of. There was a collective cry around here when they bought out Mysql.
Sorry you feel that way. I love Epic Rap Battles, and apparently so do 128,960 other people. What do you want, blood and carnage (the link already was NSFW, but whatever?)
only as far as it pushes their point of view and or agenda
EFF has nothing to do with copyleft, though they have been involved in lawsuits about violations of the GPL. Copyleft is pretty much a Richard Stallman thing. And as Stallman has said, if copyright didn't exist for software, neither would copyleft. Fairusefriendly is right, the only time folks have been sued for violating copyleft, it is because they took GPL works and modified and distributed them without releasing the source (as required by GPL.) Thus, copyleft is using copyrights to keep the content freely accessible.
oh please. It's an established fact that Google used lies and fear tactics to induce people into protesting SOPA.
Established in your mind, maybe, but not in anyone elses. Google arrived to the game late, as has been pointed out many times in the past, and had little if anything to do with the uproar. If you want someone to blame, it was Wikipedia and Reddit, and neither are owned by or have much to do with Google.
But again, you have your facts and the rest of the world has it's own. Feel free to avoid letting reality enter into your fantasy.
What are you, a shill? You've got to comment on EVERY post?
I just wish every shill here was as easy to understand and well reasoned. Even if I don't agree with him, if Derek is a shill, he is one of the best ones here on Techdirt.
yes, but also an indication that run away costs could kill and ISP if they got enough bandwidth to allow unlimited everything for eveyrone all the time.
To reiterate and expand on grandparent's comment, to control the run-away costs, wouldn't it be better to have a sit down with your marketing department and correct them then try to correct your customer, who is just doing what the marketing department told them they could do with your service when they sold them unlimited internet at blazing fast speed?
Most technically aware customers know this is a joke, but there are still a lot of people I know that complain that they can't get the speeds and capabilities they were promised when they bought the service.
Oh wait! He did hire people to do that for him and paid them for their work. Nice try!
He even said so in his letter that accompanied the site that Anonymous Coward apparently didn't read. He specifically said that the video cost him $170,000 to make, which meant that he paid someone (many people) that money. Of course, he also said that the original $170,000 spent to make the video came from the cost of the tickets he sold for the live performances. But he still paid a bunch of people for the help.
He also handed out bonuses from the million plus to those who helped. Just wish I had a chance to help...could have used the bonus.
Just Anonymous Coward not paying attention, as usual.
So hard drive manufacturers made up new words? Interesting.
If I remember correctly, it was the scientists/engineers who made up words because of the confusion caused by hard drive manufacturers ignoring what scientists called a megabyte (which was at one time, 1024 kilobytes,) and choosing their own measure.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: DandonTRJ on Apr 12th, 2012 @ 4:28pm
True IP maximist heroes if there ever were.
Also noted examples of artists who created works without copyrights. Every time an ip maximalists says that good works cannot be created without copyright, here is the antithesis, since neither lived in a world where copyrights existed.
You went too far back for a ranty exaggeration and not far enough back for hyperbole.
I was going for the truth, but guess maybe 70s was a little bit of a ranty exaggeration. The phone companies want to deal with landline phones and the cable companies want the heyday of running cables for television. No legacy company wants to deal with modems, cellphones, data, smartphones, internet, etc. If they did, they wouldn't be trying everything they can to restrict our capabilities and wind us back to the dark ages (remember, AT&T just not long ago tried to push the several governments to adopt 200kbps as broadband.) I suspect they would be happy with us renting the headsets again if they think they could get away with it.
Sure the internet didn't exist until the 90s, but as a bulletin board operator in the 80s and early 90s, I can assure you that the phone companies hated us just as much as they now hate the internet. They tried on numerous times to get me to buy a business data line (at huge markups,) in order to run my BBS, because they couldn't understand how someone who was doing this for free would expect their modem to work on a regular phone line when the government said that the phone lines must be able to support modems.
They went so far as to move my phone line to the bottom of the stack, so that every time it rained and the switching station flooded out, my lines would die, I would complain, and end up bringing in regulators to check the lines and confirm that the lines were unfit for voice communication. Then they'd "fix" it, and the next time it rained I was back to calling them because I couldn't even get a dialtone. I knew this because every time a technician was sent out, they would explain to me that they could not guarantee my modem would work and I should upgrade to the digital business line and eventually one of them told me that they fixed it by moving me from the bottom of the stack up to the top, and then came by the next week to tell me that they had an order from the company to move me back down.
They've been playing this game since before the world wide web, and before the internet was publicly available.
Microsoft finally admitting how insecure it is, being an enabler of theft
And how crappy its licensing system is.
According to the website, if you buy a computer with Windows 7 Home Edition on it, and then you buy a Windows 7 Professional Volume License and install it on the computer, you are violating their license. Apparently you can only buy computers with Windows 7 Professional on them and then "upgrade" them with a Windows 7 Professional Volume License (that of course you pay more money for.) Talk about confusing.
When it comes to the point that you have to have your lawyer review the license for software you plan on buying, they are doing it wrong. Lucky for them, they have marketshare to keep them afloat, but at some point customers are going to say "to hard," and walk away to systems that have easier to understand licensing.
I'm not one to shy from bashing Microsoft, but I think you're confusing "most insecure" with "most highly targeted".
Nope. I never said that they were the most insecure. I did say that they were the number one target. However, it begs the question, why are they a number one target? Its an argument I really don't want to get into because it borders on jedi wars (religion,) but the usual answers as to why is that they have one of the largest footprints (which may be true for workstations, but certainly not servers,) or they are commercial and nobody hacks open source (which is arguable,) or that they are easier to hack. I left it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why they are the most targeted.
I have Windoze machines, which I am able to secure quite well, but what I really want to understand is why do you have to have elevated privileges to install user software on Windows? And why do large numbers of "user" software require privileged accounts in order to run properly. Once Microsoft figures out how to run a system so that elevated privileges are the exception and not the rule, things will be a lot better for them, but we've gone through a number of iterations and they haven't managed to do so yet.
I do like how when I have run across trojans or viruses on the non-Windows side, I clear out the user's directory and anything they had write access to and its done, whereas I have to format and reload Windows every-time because the user was using elevated privileges to web-browse. Non-windows systems tell you when you log in (at least through X-Windows running GNOME/KDE,) that you are being stupid if you log into the root account, and dropping root privileges doesn't prevent stuff from working properly.
So yeah, I said number 1 target but I think it is safe to say that they are pretty damn insecure too.
Hah! I froze it at 0:23, and it all makes sense...she is buying the software from an auction site! She isn't buying it from Microsoft directly. So LitWare is some sort of EBay site.
Piracy apparently now includes buying legitimate software from auction sites too. If you don't buy from Microsoft, you are apparently getting ripped off. Still don't understand the rest, but ok.
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Re: Humans!
It certainly helped when Microsoft did a whole bunch of nasty tricks to prevent DR-DOS from working properly (such as Windows 3.1 complaining when DR-DOS was installed instead of MS-DOS.) DR DOS was a far better version of DOS. Never went anywhere, but unlike Microsoft DOS, DR DOS had the capability of backups and memory management as well as task switching (basic windowing) that you had to buy from third parties when using Microsoft.
On the post: Guess What? Most Cybercrime 'Losses' Are Massively Exaggerated As Well
Re: Re: Ask Kevin Mitnick...
Wow, so my swapfile must be worth 1 quadrillion dollars by now. If only I could cash that in?
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Try To Regroup And Figure Out How To 'Fight Back' Against The Public
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Legitimate complaints?
Thanks PaulT, I was thinking the same thing myself, but you did a pretty good job summing it up.
The "lies and fear" part seems to stem from the fact that people were looking at how these laws could be used as written, rather than how the maximalists originally intended them to be used.
This has always been what bothered me about the letter-of-the-law vs. spirit-of-the-law debate. The whole fact that we base our laws on what we think the people who made the law were thinking leaves a big gray area when it comes to morality laws like this. When it is a law about running a stoplight, anyone who looks at the law knows exactly what the person was thinking when they made that law. It is a safety issue...if someone runs a red light, other people who are travelling through the intersection on a green light are put in danger. However, in the case of SOPA, it is really difficult to know what it is that the author was thinking when they wrote the law, other than protecting the profits of publishers and the middlemen because they gave the author some dough in exchange. It isn't that it is difficult to understand, but that it is difficult to believe that when a judge and jury gets ahold of this...that they may not go a different way. Too many variables.
On the post: Guess What? Most Cybercrime 'Losses' Are Massively Exaggerated As Well
Ask Kevin Mitnick...
On the post: Did The Publisher's Own Insistence On DRM Inevitably Lead To The Antitrust Lawsuit Against Them?
Re: Re: Humans!
I'd rephrase that to "It's relatively cheap and people are familiar with it." Nobody, not even Microsoft themselves, knows how it works.
Just ask their Configuration Management (CM) team. There was a time when Microsoft decided to eat their own dogfood and started using their own software for everything, and one of their CM guys told me that this was a pain for them, because after a while it wasn't clear who was running what code because employees would push patches in to their own systems to fix stuff they were seeing and nobody was keeping track of what was being pushed. This was the cause of many of the reversions in the past, where security fixes would come out that fixed one problem and reintroduced another one. Apparently they have gotten better at it, but I suspect there still are too many cooks in the kitchen and they still don't understand everything in there.
On the post: Fight Is On Between Oracle And Google Over Java API Copyrights
Re:
I find it really hard to be sympathetic with Oracle after what Oracle did to Oracle. Anyone remember Ellison's "Unbreakable" fiasco? That guy has had a problem with the truth for at least 15 years now, and it is no surprise he is conflicted now during sworn testimony.
Oracle has always been evil in every possible meaning of the word. I still remember having to deal with Oracle not releasing security patches for their products unless you had a ridiculous and burdensome support agreement. We found multiple security issues with their software and after a long discussion with them trying to get fixes pushed out to our people running their software, eventually an edict came out that said "Thou shalt not use Oracle software in our corporate environment." They weren't willing to work with us until that edict came out and they realized they were losing all the plushy contracts, and then they bent over backwards to make sure those problems were taken care of. There was a collective cry around here when they bought out Mysql.
On the post: CISPA Sponsor Mike Rogers Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence' On Landing
Re: Re: Re: This jackass should change his name!
Sorry you feel that way. I love Epic Rap Battles, and apparently so do 128,960 other people. What do you want, blood and carnage (the link already was NSFW, but whatever?)
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Try To Regroup And Figure Out How To 'Fight Back' Against The Public
Re: Re: Re: Legitimate complaints?
EFF has nothing to do with copyleft, though they have been involved in lawsuits about violations of the GPL. Copyleft is pretty much a Richard Stallman thing. And as Stallman has said, if copyright didn't exist for software, neither would copyleft. Fairusefriendly is right, the only time folks have been sued for violating copyleft, it is because they took GPL works and modified and distributed them without releasing the source (as required by GPL.) Thus, copyleft is using copyrights to keep the content freely accessible.
On the post: CISPA Sponsor Mike Rogers Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence' On Landing
Re: This jackass should change his name!
You mean this Mr. Rogers? After what he did to Mr. T, I'd love to see him take on Congress again. I watched him daily as a child growing up.
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Try To Regroup And Figure Out How To 'Fight Back' Against The Public
Re: Re: Re: Legitimate complaints?
Established in your mind, maybe, but not in anyone elses. Google arrived to the game late, as has been pointed out many times in the past, and had little if anything to do with the uproar. If you want someone to blame, it was Wikipedia and Reddit, and neither are owned by or have much to do with Google.
But again, you have your facts and the rest of the world has it's own. Feel free to avoid letting reality enter into your fantasy.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
I just wish every shill here was as easy to understand and well reasoned. Even if I don't agree with him, if Derek is a shill, he is one of the best ones here on Techdirt.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know
To reiterate and expand on grandparent's comment, to control the run-away costs, wouldn't it be better to have a sit down with your marketing department and correct them then try to correct your customer, who is just doing what the marketing department told them they could do with your service when they sold them unlimited internet at blazing fast speed?
Most technically aware customers know this is a joke, but there are still a lot of people I know that complain that they can't get the speeds and capabilities they were promised when they bought the service.
On the post: Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He's Not Monetizing
Re: Re:
He even said so in his letter that accompanied the site that Anonymous Coward apparently didn't read. He specifically said that the video cost him $170,000 to make, which meant that he paid someone (many people) that money. Of course, he also said that the original $170,000 spent to make the video came from the cost of the tickets he sold for the live performances. But he still paid a bunch of people for the help.
He also handed out bonuses from the million plus to those who helped. Just wish I had a chance to help...could have used the bonus.
Just Anonymous Coward not paying attention, as usual.
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Re: Re: Re: Debate Ended
If I remember correctly, it was the scientists/engineers who made up words because of the confusion caused by hard drive manufacturers ignoring what scientists called a megabyte (which was at one time, 1024 kilobytes,) and choosing their own measure.
On the post: A Perspective On The Complexities Of Copyright And Creativity From A Victim Of Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: DandonTRJ on Apr 12th, 2012 @ 4:28pm
Also noted examples of artists who created works without copyrights. Every time an ip maximalists says that good works cannot be created without copyright, here is the antithesis, since neither lived in a world where copyrights existed.
On the post: UK Community Gives Up Waiting For High Speed Broadband: Digs Its Own Fiber Trenches
Re: Re:
I was going for the truth, but guess maybe 70s was a little bit of a ranty exaggeration. The phone companies want to deal with landline phones and the cable companies want the heyday of running cables for television. No legacy company wants to deal with modems, cellphones, data, smartphones, internet, etc. If they did, they wouldn't be trying everything they can to restrict our capabilities and wind us back to the dark ages (remember, AT&T just not long ago tried to push the several governments to adopt 200kbps as broadband.) I suspect they would be happy with us renting the headsets again if they think they could get away with it.
Sure the internet didn't exist until the 90s, but as a bulletin board operator in the 80s and early 90s, I can assure you that the phone companies hated us just as much as they now hate the internet. They tried on numerous times to get me to buy a business data line (at huge markups,) in order to run my BBS, because they couldn't understand how someone who was doing this for free would expect their modem to work on a regular phone line when the government said that the phone lines must be able to support modems.
They went so far as to move my phone line to the bottom of the stack, so that every time it rained and the switching station flooded out, my lines would die, I would complain, and end up bringing in regulators to check the lines and confirm that the lines were unfit for voice communication. Then they'd "fix" it, and the next time it rained I was back to calling them because I couldn't even get a dialtone. I knew this because every time a technician was sent out, they would explain to me that they could not guarantee my modem would work and I should upgrade to the digital business line and eventually one of them told me that they fixed it by moving me from the bottom of the stack up to the top, and then came by the next week to tell me that they had an order from the company to move me back down.
They've been playing this game since before the world wide web, and before the internet was publicly available.
On the post: UK Community Gives Up Waiting For High Speed Broadband: Digs Its Own Fiber Trenches
Our city is supposedly a city of the future, but our Cable ISP/DSL Providers are still stuck in the 70s.
On the post: Microsoft Releases Utterly Bizarre And Confusing Anti-Piracy Video
Re: it's so obvious
And how crappy its licensing system is.
According to the website, if you buy a computer with Windows 7 Home Edition on it, and then you buy a Windows 7 Professional Volume License and install it on the computer, you are violating their license. Apparently you can only buy computers with Windows 7 Professional on them and then "upgrade" them with a Windows 7 Professional Volume License (that of course you pay more money for.) Talk about confusing.
When it comes to the point that you have to have your lawyer review the license for software you plan on buying, they are doing it wrong. Lucky for them, they have marketshare to keep them afloat, but at some point customers are going to say "to hard," and walk away to systems that have easier to understand licensing.
On the post: Microsoft Releases Utterly Bizarre And Confusing Anti-Piracy Video
Re: Re: Re:
Nope. I never said that they were the most insecure. I did say that they were the number one target. However, it begs the question, why are they a number one target? Its an argument I really don't want to get into because it borders on jedi wars (religion,) but the usual answers as to why is that they have one of the largest footprints (which may be true for workstations, but certainly not servers,) or they are commercial and nobody hacks open source (which is arguable,) or that they are easier to hack. I left it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why they are the most targeted.
I have Windoze machines, which I am able to secure quite well, but what I really want to understand is why do you have to have elevated privileges to install user software on Windows? And why do large numbers of "user" software require privileged accounts in order to run properly. Once Microsoft figures out how to run a system so that elevated privileges are the exception and not the rule, things will be a lot better for them, but we've gone through a number of iterations and they haven't managed to do so yet.
I do like how when I have run across trojans or viruses on the non-Windows side, I clear out the user's directory and anything they had write access to and its done, whereas I have to format and reload Windows every-time because the user was using elevated privileges to web-browse. Non-windows systems tell you when you log in (at least through X-Windows running GNOME/KDE,) that you are being stupid if you log into the root account, and dropping root privileges doesn't prevent stuff from working properly.
So yeah, I said number 1 target but I think it is safe to say that they are pretty damn insecure too.
On the post: Microsoft Releases Utterly Bizarre And Confusing Anti-Piracy Video
Re: umm
Hah! I froze it at 0:23, and it all makes sense...she is buying the software from an auction site! She isn't buying it from Microsoft directly. So LitWare is some sort of EBay site.
Piracy apparently now includes buying legitimate software from auction sites too. If you don't buy from Microsoft, you are apparently getting ripped off. Still don't understand the rest, but ok.
Next >>