mmm DRM - if ever an invasion of privacy....palladium, drm all of that stuff is crap. Bullshit. It's designed by government bodies that have been bribed humungous amounts by wealthy organisations like hollywood movie studios, riaa...need I say more. No i'm not being paranoid. Just think of this - details of the settlement between microsoft and the doj have been kept hidden - despite the tunney act 1967 (i'm an aussie, so i'm not totally verse in us law/acts). This to me smacks of a cover up *plays x files theme*.
Yes Nate is right, certain applications in ms office version "a" will have difficulties running (or not run at all) on ms office version b, c, d...Interestingly, microsoft users are forced to update. Note the stance of Microsoft recently saying that they will NO longer support NT or 98/95. Well...i'd honestly say that 80% of consumer microsoft users are using 95/98. Great way to generate money. FUD if ever I saw it. In this ever increasing security conscious world, people are going to ask themselves, "microsoft won't offer me any more security patches for 95/98 to download, I could get cracked". I'm sure I could find support for older kernels etc... I'll make one more comment on the subject that Nate has made. I used to work for Toshiba, and I gave openoffice a try on my workstation. I let my boss know, and a few of the system engineers know that i'd downloaded openoffice and was going to install it. This was done in the effort of saving Toshiba money in the long run, trying out openoffice which i'd heard was reliable and very good, and to satisfy my innate curiousity. Well let's just say that my boss came around late one afternoon a few days later and told me in no uncertain terms that "we are a microsoft company and we run ms office here, remove it[openoffice] NOW". To say that I was flabbergasted was the least...Here is a company (that in my experience on their internal helpdesk) had numerous problems with ms office - typically office 97 pro(software related, not user related), had bought 150 licenses for office xp way back in july 2001 (and when I left in July 2002 they still hadn't deployed it due to reliability/compatibility issues) - what a waste of money. So much for reliability. Why would you stick with ms software after that? The only thing I could think of, is that toshiba makes laptops. Laptops need an o/s...toshiba being a vendor is *obviously* having pressure placed on it (contracts perhaps, i'd love to see that contract that they have with microsoft) to not only ship ms products with its laptops, but to use ms products behind the scenes. Interesting eh? Remember what microsoft tried with dell (and the sickening thing on that aspect is that they tried that monopolistic behaviour with dell during their doj trial - nothing was done by the powers that be, go figure). They should have been immediately found in contempt of court, fined so many billions of dollars...but hang on, microsoft feeds a lot of money (and taxes) into the US economy...you wouldn't want to hurt microsoft would you? Think about it. Many KNOW I am right in my presumptions. I don't have too much of an issue with ms products, they do work *OK*, but ... they lack freedom. Freedom that I have with open source software. They lack security. They do lack reliability when compared to a unix or unix like operating system. Advantages are that they are easily used by most people, for most average tasks, in most cases. What I do have an ISSUE with is microsoft' monopolistic behaviour, the way they try and take RFC standards (or other standards) and mutate them to their own perverse versions. Then they try and monopolise the market and make themselves the no.1 defacto standard by sheer illegal behaviour. The way they contractually bully vendors. Dave -----Original Message----- From: nate [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, 2 October 2002 3:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; David Pastern Subject: Re: The Real Problem With Debian Ron Johnson said: > What are you talking about??? How about not using Windows because using > Windows, Office, WMP, etc, puts money into the pocket of a > blatant, unrepentant criminal organization? > don't forget vendor lock-in, hell I've read reports that even different versions of MS's office suite are not 100% compadible, thats just sad. and don't forget DRM, I gave a brief overview of what MS and the entertainment industry are trying to accomplish(e.g. preventing files from being copied, controlling how long you can keep media, how many times you can play it etc) and mentioned that they are doing it in such a way that the average consumer doesn't have any idea until it's too late. He was blown away. It really scares the hell out of me what MS is doing, makes me very glad I jumped ship 5-6 years ago. I remember in the mid 90s hearing about what the entertainment industry would try to do, but didn't believe it. DRM is what scares me the most about MS, they already take away so many rights from the OS(e.g. can't use task manager to kill a service(last I checked), can't delete files that are in use, can't force a driver to attempt to load, and other things which makes the OS think it's smarter then the user. The user should have the right to trash their system if they want, even if this feature is undocumented/obscure to enable). Being only 25 I was too young to remember(or maybe I wasn't around) the legal stuff that went on after video tapes came out so maybe I am overreacting and the industry will do the right thing(tm) to preserve freedom. nate -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
