We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A small amount of justice As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. I am not tremendously keen on their software from a design or reliability point of view, and I find their business practices at times to be a bit dubious.
However, yesterday they won 3.95 million dollars in damages from a spammer in Washington DC, who sent out huge numbers of e-mail messages that claimed to come from Microsoft in order to encourage people to download a toolbar that then downloaded all manner of nasty spyware and advertising.
Microsoft have won a total of $54m in recent judgements in their campaign against spammers. Generally the judgements have not been against the practice of spam per se but against the deceptive practices of the spammers (ie the spams have been full of lies).
Might I wish Bill and the boys continued success in this campaign.
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Have you tried running Linux? Something along the lines of Mandrake Linux?
As a matter of fact I am posting this comment from Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 running on Linux. So the answer is yes.
The machine is dual boot SuSe Linux 9.1 / Windows 2000. Linux is by far the more stable of the two operating systems.
If Apple were to release a Linux port of iTunes, I might even abandon Windows entirely.
I haven’t tried Mandrake though.
You should also try Debian. I’ve never had an RPM distro that didn’t need to be periodically scrubbed and reinstalled from scratch in order to stay current. Debian seem to be immune to that.
Rhythmbox is a pretty good replacement for iTunes and can play all the formats (aac included) that iTunes can. Though, if you want to purchase music or play purchased music you are out of luck.
Hmm. I might have a look at it. Will it play music from my iTunes library without messing with the directory structure or files in any way? My music is on my Windows partition and I would rather leave it there.
Hmm. Let me go and install it and see.
I assume they are going to donate some of this money to all those people who bought what are in effect defective products from them?
Doh
One born every minute…
Ian MS didn’t actually sell the toolbars.
No, sorry – it seems there are three born every minute.
Maybe Microsoft can win enough from spammers to pay off the EU’s anti-trust sentence.
MJ: iTunes and the Apple music store is one of the only reasons why I keep a Microsoft partition on my machine.
I use Fedora Core 2 (the free Red Hat distribution) and I’m the administrator for FedoraForum.org the biggest Red Hat forum on the internet. I also write for Newsforge.
Wake up Lummy – have you noticed there’s been a bit in the press recently about security loopholes in MS Windows?
And of course the other OSs are perfect.
I think your beloved market has decided which is the best OS.
Quit Microsoft hating