RE: The Real Problem With Debian
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:debian-user@aphroland.org]
Sent: Wednesday, 2 October 2002 3:18 AM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org; 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 debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: