Microsoft up to their old nasty tricks

A little while back Microsoft astounded the open-source community by announcing a deal with SuSe Linux. At the time many people mused that Microsoft might be reforming their evil ways, and may have seen the light, but I just thought they were going to use their old technique of embrace and extend.

Seems I was right, but I didn't realise just how low they were stooping. They are also using that other old favorite of theirs FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) along with divide and conquer. Goddam monsters.

http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php?id=839593139&eid=-100

Oh, and the "intellectual property" he is talking about? My bet is that it's that stupid "Start" button most Linuxes now have on the bottom left of the (inaccurately named) taskbar. The buttons on it representing windows might be another. both should be ditched. The window menu (which every Linux has) is far more suitable for listing windows.

Ballmer certainly has a gall. He threatens people over the desktop that Microsoft copied from Apple who copied it from Xerox PARC?? What a nerve! The nasty little sod.

Microsoft has retarded the development of computing by about a decade. Their demise can't occur fast enough in my view.

can anyone remember...?

Years back Microsoft destroyed a company that produced a much improved command line for MSWindows. It was a drop-in replacement for DOS, and gave users much greater functionality. Microsoft saw it as a competitor and deliberately destroyed it by adding fake error messages into Windows. Running processes were checked to see if they used the "competitor" DOS, in which case Windows would put up a fake error message. Some years ago a computer magazine actually published the code in MSWindows which did this bit of nastiness. (I still have it somewhere.)

Can anybody remember what the name of that DOS was?

---

Found it: DR-DOS, by Digital Research.

Read this:
http://www.kickassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.htm
to get an idea of the depths of deception they indulged in. It features internal emails from Microsoft on how they lied to their customers and set about destroying the superior DR-DOS.

This one shows how Microsoft views their customers with disgust, considering crashing people's computers if they tried to install DR-DOS and to confuse people with legalistic FUD.
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9808&L=list310&P=2052

the cost of nuclear energy

The Australian government report on the cost of nuclear energy has come in with the verdict that coal is the cheapest power source until you factor in the costs of carbon emissions and then nuclear power becomes the cheapest. How very odd... and how very convenient. Like, none of us expected them to come up with that surprising finding, right? Riiiight. [rolls eyes]

The Queensland government did an investigation into the costs of power generation a couple of years ago. They came up with very different results. (They're ordered in a very telling way -- from the form the politicians love most to the ones politicians dislike most.)

Coal (steam turbine)	3 - 5
Natural gas (CCGT)	4 - 5
Nuclear (USA) (steam turbine)	19 - 25
Large hydro-electric	6 - 10
Small to medium hydro-electric	4 - 12
Wind	6 - 17
Solar thermal	18 - 25
Solar photovoltaic	30 - 50

I'm sure the government hasn't heard of the Internet Archive that can be used to undo orwellian rewriting of information:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041122235941/http://www.energy.qld.gov.au/infosite/electricity_generation.html

Strange how Nuclear power looks to the new fake report as the cheapest option. The costs cited don't (as far as I know) include the additional costs of storing the crap afterwards for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile there have been significant advances in renewable energy during the past 2 years that will have made them even cheaper.

And all this ignores social and security costs. Big, centralised power stations are inherently insecure. In a war, guess what gets bombed first? If solar voltaic cells are distributed then the initial cost might be high, but security is enhanced because there is nowhere to strike, and people are in charge of their own destiny. There is also the point that they don't have to pay through the nose for the rest of their life. (Of course that isn't to say solar voltaic cells don't have their own problems. I'm just using them as an example of the opposite to centralised mega-power.)

Distributed solutions are steadfastly ignored apparently because government is on a short leash from the big-money end of town. But distributed solutions make the most sense. Solar heating is safe, cheap, and after the initial costs, free! Solar cooling is also cheap and after initial costs, upkeep requires little.

This kind of result makes our government look like they're corrupt or liars or stupid.

cats are beautiful... why?

Am I the only one who sees the peculiarity here? Cats look beautiful to us. We frequently coo and aaww over them. Even people who hate the slaughter they wreak upon the Australian wildlife still have to admit they are gorgeous creatures.

But why?

We are humans. They are cats -- a totally different kind of mammal. They have a completely different language from us, both verbal and body-language. They are quite alien. So how could we ever consider them beautiful? They don't even benefit from crossed parental cues the way dogs do. Dogs even share the same language as us, both verbal and physical. If we should feel another species was beautiful you'd think it would be the dog, but they are described differently -- they're our best friend, loyal, steadfast, noble... but rarely beautiful.

The only thing I can come up with is that there may have been some early selection for those who like cats because they kill rodents that take grain and pass on diseases like bubonic plague. Cats won't hang around unless it is in their interests to do so -- they aren't social animals. So a person with a misplaced adoration for cats would have been be in a much better survival position.

Just pointless thoughts. Can't be proved or disproved so it's far from scientific. But an interesting puzzle.