You'll have a hard time finding any believer in any religion who would admit to the biases in their beliefs.
Proprietary software isn't a religion. It's politics.
Microsoft's Software is Malware
131–140 of 185 posts
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the meantime, the EFF is actually fighting for your freedom and right to not be spied on. Consider donating to them. I switched my monthly donation to the FSF to the EFF instead many years ago as I feel they're doing more to help keep society free than the FSF.
If you care about software freedom, do donate to fsf. eff leaves that to fsf and they already have 50x more funding. Of course eff also has much broader and less well defined goals of things like "internet freedom."
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Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#133This is way a Neo Nazi or KKK member would describe people of color, cherry picked 'facts' to build an absurd argument.
Cutely emotive comparison, but you have the power dynamic backwards.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#134PC Does What?
What an apropos marketing campaign.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When support ends for an old version of a free software distribution, users have the ability to hire someone else to maintain it. This is the exception rather than the rule (speaking in general terms) You can pay someone else to isolate and secure your XP installation as well (for the minimum amount of stuff you need in there). Put it in a VM, behind a firewall, secure it, prevent unknown services from running in i…
> You can pay someone else to isolate and secure your XP installation as well (for the minimum amount of stuff you need in there). Put it in a VM, behind a firewall, secure it, prevent unknown services from running in it, etc. Of course, you can also pay someone to do the same for a free software OS. You might even have more options for safely isolating it. I suspect the main point is that you have options, e.g. you…
> you could also maintain / fork it
That's true. However, for the majority of cases, it's not worth it.
You theoretically could have an old version of Red Hat running and then self-support there, but I believe the answer is probably something similar to what would be done with Windows XP. Even if what you need to run there is Free Software. Easier and probably more feasible, true. Still, very unlikely.
The last option you pointed out is a possibility as well and it happens, however it's usually a way of throwing a lot of money for very little gain
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#136All of this is true, but where is the equivalent attack on Google, whose software is essentially entirely designed to spy on you. Isn't that also Malware? Or is this sort of malware ok because it runs the Linux kernel? I really want to support GNU and FSF but they seem to be constantly fighting some 20 year stale war against a company that is in many ways way more open than Google, Facebook, and Apple.
One more thing, Microsoft is a hypocrite. Microsoft employed a number of marketing campaigns to smear Google. They even went so far as to hire Mark Penn, a political smear campaign hitman, to carry out their plans. Now that we know all of the nefarious activities Microsoft has been up to and tried to conceal from the press their actions are even more despicable. From breaking into their users accounts and rifling thr…
Looks like the Microsoft reputation manager dogs were notified.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#137This is way a Neo Nazi or KKK member would describe people of color, cherry picked 'facts' to build an absurd argument.
What's absurd about it? Which of the items presented are untrue, as suggested by your scare quotes around "facts"? Yes, the article is one-sided, but these are all real points of concern about the direction Windows is going in.
I'm a sysadmin, I deal with malware on a very regular basis, saying MS software is malware is an absurd statement. Equal to saying black people are all criminals and then quoting incarceration reports.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#138You'll have a hard time finding any believer in any religion who would admit to the biases in their beliefs.
Proprietary software isn't a religion. It's politics.
I'm not really aware of a practical difference when considering the nature of political and religious beliefs, so sure, substitute politics into my thought at will.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#139http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.en.h... Stallman feels the same way about Facebook as well. He got mad at Berkeley when he came to speak and found out someone posted a Facebook event about him coming to campus to speak lol. He also feels cloud computing endangers us because we aren't in full control or fully aware of the computations being done with our data. (He told us this at a meeting in B…
Stallman has the nasty little habit of being right in the long run. So even if his views may appear 'a little extreme' today give it a decade or two, you'll come around.
He's been doing this stuff for around 30 years so far, and I don't see the evidence of him being exclusively right about anything very much. What have I missed?
Far from "coming around", the invention of "open source" was specifically a way of removing the moral tub-thumping "philosophically- and politically-focused" aspect of Free Software and the FSF. http://opensource.org/history
I think he's done a lot of good work on DRM and software patents in general, but a lot of people have had the same or similar worries without his involvement.
Re: Microsoft's Software is Malware
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets not forget that Windows XP is a commercial product, for which people paid money and that was the only reasonable choice for about 8 years, the gap between the release of XP and that of Windows 7 (Vista was a flop due to poor drivers). In these 8 years a lot of companies and individuals bought computers and then stayed on XP because (1) Windows upgrades cost money, (2) compatibility issues and (3) fear of upgrade…
I think it's a bit selective to exclude Vista's timeline from XP's concurrency just to make a point. But even that aside, 4 years of concurrency is still pretty good compared to most other Linux distributions. Ubuntu Desktop's long term support (LTS) is only 3 years and that's one of the better supported Linux desktops. Granted Ubuntu Server LTS is 5 years, but then we'd have to compare Linux with Server 2003 to be c…
"In previous releases, a Long Term Support (LTS) version had 3 years support on Ubuntu (Desktop) and 5 years on Ubuntu Server. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, both versions will receive 5 years support." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS