11.19.09
Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 9:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“37 letters with exactly the same words. Some of the senders didn’t even care to remove the ‘Type company name here’ text.
“Simular letters has been circulating in Denmark as an e-mail from the Danish MD Jørgen Bardenfleth to customers and business partners.
“I call it fraud, cheating and disgusting. If I wasn’t anti-Microsoft before, I am now. Disgusting !”
–Leif Lodahl
Summary: The rather secret story of migrations to Free software and ODF in Danish municipalities
A government delegate once compared Microsoft's methods to “Scientology cult” because along with its partners it is hunting down resistance to Microsoft products.
We have already seen Microsoft getting 'disobedient' CIOs fired/ousted, which is only to be expected from a company that endorses bribing people and using an "insider friend"/"fox". A lot of people still think of Microsoft as an innocent and professional company, but that’s because they never encountered the wrath one does when getting on Microsoft’s “wrong side” [1, 2] (or "Wong" side).
OSOR has just published this report which is encouraging news for ODF.
Representatives from three European member states, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, took part in the second Open Document Format (ODF) interoperability workshop held in the Italian town of Orvieto at the beginning of this month.
Fabio Pistella, president of Italy’s Center for ICT in Public Administrations (CNIPA), in his opening address told the attendees of the workshop that Italy is about to start a three-year promotion campaign on open source software, writes Roberto Gallopini, one of the organisers of the ODF workshop on his web blog.
OSOR has another new report about migration to ODF and Free software in Denmark (also here):
The municipality announced on 6 November 2009 that, as from the next week, it will start to use OpenOffice, alongside its proprietary alternative. However, the municipality plans to fully move to OpenOffice eventually.
Rødovre has installed OpenOffice on seven hundred desktop PCs.
The municipality’s move to OpenOffice was announced at the annual OpenOffice conference ‘OOoCon 2009′ which took place in Orvieto, Italy, from 3 to 6 November 2009. At the conference, Leif Lodahl, a volunteer project manager for the Danish OpenOffice project, gave a presentation on the integration of existing document management tools with OpenOffice: “Moving to OpenOffice improves control over the documents and allows the municipality to automatically convert relevant documents to PDF.”
Microsoft will not let this be. It never does, as Russian schools teach us.
“Microsoft will not let this be. It never does, as Russian schools teach us.”One of our readers from around this region writes: “Rødovre, Denmark, just west of Copenhagen, has kept secret its deployment of OOo on 700 machines until recently, to avoid interference from Microsoft. Over in Lyngby-Tarbæk, which has already made a switch to OOo, Microsoft is trying to get key municipal staff fired, a tactic which has been used with success elsewhere by finding weak-willed or easily “influenced” bureaucrats.
“Rødovre currently has OOo deployed parallel to Microsoft Office, an option that many are apparently unaware of being able to do. That allows the legacy software to be phased out gradually and smoothly.”
Regarding an interference, worth including here is the Turku incident (cited in this Comes vs Microsoft exhibit along with other places in Finland and Scandinavia in general).
Our reader continues: “Underneath the facade of desktop software is a fight for control over the information flow and, by extension, the work flow and thus governance of the population. Rødovre is still limited by a proprietary document management system, but like other municipalities will publish open source extensions to OOo that work with that document management system. The fight to get Rødovre’s governance out from under the absolute control of an outside, foreign interest is by definition a fight for local, if not also national, sovereignty. Sedition using backstabbing over smiles and beer is no less sedition through other means.
“There are good, FOSS-based document management systems in wide use already around the world, including but not limited to these:
“To paraphrase a point in the argument, a school does buy a text book when it does meet the educational requirements and especially when it is also cheaper than one that doesn’t.
“It’s not Microsoft fighting for a contract, it’s Microsoft fighting to gain or retain control over the governance mechanism — against the local, national and EU governments.”
It may also be about gateways to and formats for accessing information, which is why Microsoft goes crazy over Google.
To say more about Denmark, there are the banking issues that are rarely talked about. In light of the Bing failure [1, 2], we also happen to learn that “it is an example that the problems exist even today, as they have at the beginning. The hole in Bing is about the same as last year’s Danske Bank (DB) catastrophe. It was actually a consortium of banks, but we’ll call it DB, who fell victim to Microsoft Sharepoint’s security. DB’s business and individual customers lost an inestimable amount of money by having inaccessible or pillagable online accounts. AFAIK the amount these customers lost has not been published it is so big.”
We would like to finish with a somewhat mystifying new press release. Watch what it says there at the end:
Product highlights include new visual mapping of relational data sources; new XQuery code refactoring functionality; increased support for several EDI data formats; SOAP 1.2 support; and new integrated data sources including ZIP, Java™ Archive (JAR), Microsoft Open Office and OpenDocument.
Does Microsoft own OpenOffice.org and ODF now? Or is this an erroneous reference to Office ‘Open’ XML, which is a name Microsoft chose in order to confuse? █
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, GPL, Microsoft at 8:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Mischaracterisation and demeaning sensationalism as tools of making sticklers of law and ethics look bad
LAST WEEK we pointed out that critics of criminal activity tend to be portrayed as 'bad guys'. This is very sad. In essence, it leads us to a state where criminals are glorified and they also set an example for others to follow, having shown what felons can get away with. Nice guys need not finish last and good people need not be excluded from deciding on world policy. It takes a lot of talent to take people whose intentions are good and moral value is high and then totally reverse this, casting them as “irrational haters”. Richard Stallman is a good example of victims of this tactic. He is a big target to many.
It is almost understandable that some people view Microsoft’s GPL violation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and the company’s response to it as something worthy of credit. Even proponents of GNU/Linux are led into feeling this way.
To its credit, rather than damning the tool to program hell, Microsoft released the tool’s source code under the GPLv2 licence.
Microsoft’s PR people are trying to portray this latest GPL violation as something positive instead. But why “credit”? Microsoft had no choice. As we put it back in July when Microsoft was caught violating the GPL, "Microsoft's Goodwill is to Obey the Law" (having broken it and gotten caught). This is a repeating pattern wherein Microsoft is trying to inverse truisms and add exaggeration with strong words like “evil” or “hate” to provoke or stigmatise critics.
“This is a repeating pattern wherein Microsoft is trying to inverse truisms and add exaggeration with strong words like “evil” or “hate” to provoke or stigmatise critics.”Yesterday we gave an example of this in relation to Matt Asay’s “The convenient fiction that Microsoft is evil.” We deliberately link to the Linux Today page which contains a lot of comments. The response from Linux Today is largely negative, and rightly so.
What a terrible, almost trollish, headline to use. Maybe this is why Microsoft employees (or former Microsoft employees who now serve Microsoft from the outside, e.g. Mono) pretend that he is the second most influential person in “open source” (never mind those developers, lawyers and marketing people are much more important!), expecting that he’ll reciprocate.
It is rather insulting when people who work with Microsoft preach to people who strictly stick to the law about how irrational and intolerant they are. As if to say, “follow my lead for peace and harmony along with peace-loving and harmony-loving Steve Ballmer. We should forgive Microsoft every year for any crime that’s committed again and again. What’s a bribe between two tolerant people? What’s a recurrence of hundreds of times to a behavioural pattern? Let us have compassion.”
It’s a patronising attitude and it is not fair.
The facts speak for themselves. Microsoft is still attacking GNU/Linux in very disgusting ways [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Here is one new response to Asay’s piece. It’s titled “Convenient Fictions” and it is sarcastic.
It’s a convenient fiction that a vocal minority within the open-source community believes Microsoft is the source of all evil in the technology world.
For “such people“, it is far easier to denounce an imaginary one-dimensional straw man directing irrational “hate” towards a single entity than a principled stand against anti-freedom activities, no matter the source.
The fact of the matter, as a moment of honest research will show, is that the “vocal minority” has something to say about Microsoft, Apple, Intel, the MPAA, the RIAA, and many other entities – large and small – that engage in anti-user, anti-Freedom activites.
[...]
However, it makes no more sense to take this single incident and use it as exculpatory evidence than it would to use this single incident as damming evidence. Yet, by connecting this single “error” to the hateful straw man, that is exactly what “such people” are attempting – avoiding any mention of over a decade of history of clearly-not-mistake hostile and illegal actions.
Such dishonest apologetics do no one a favor. They do not cast Microsoft in a more favorable light. They do not strengthen the credibility of the apologist. And they do not convert the critic.
Asay was not alone with this line of argument. A decades-long writer of books about Microsoft development is sort of trivialising criminal activities and describing critics as though they are kids or “Star Wars” enthusiasts by exaggerating. It’s titled “IT Needs Its Darth Vaders” and the response to it is negative. Rainer Weikusat calls it “babble”.
Does the psychiatrist know about the existence of control freaks?
Well, does the psychiatrist know about the existence of (still kicking and very much alive) control freaks? For example, what’s going on with the secret ACTA negotiations — the looming threats of global DMCA, three strikes laws, etc.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_ta gs&task=view&tag=acta
Or does the author believe that we should all sit down and relax and trust our future to the the benevolent senator Palpatine?
A few days ago we wrote about Microsoft’s latest PR move for “open source”. Well, “open source spin” is what it ought to be called when Microsoft does useless things to confuse people and characterise something whose core is all proprietary as “open”. Moreover:
[T]he TCP/IP stack will not be open-sourced – because, as Peter Galli, who runs Port 25, Microsoft’s means of communicating with open source, says , “the TCP/IP stack is third party software that Microsoft licenses from EBSNet, so we do not have the rights to distribute that source code.
“If someone needs to access the source code for the TCP/IP stack, they can contact EBSNet directly.”
What use is a framework that caters to internet-connected devices without a TCP/IP stack?
Watch “FOSS” mentioned in relation to Word documents in this new press release. It was a long time ago that we warned about "Open Source" losing its meaning because of Microsoft (OOXML described as “open source” in the Times of India right after massive corruption). █
“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”
–Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark
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Posted in ECMA, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell, Patents, Red Hat at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Fedora 12 includes Microsoft/Novell software that falls outside the ECMA standard, despite the fact that such code is problematic
MICROSOFT APOLOGISM is a subject that we wrote about yesterday and will revisit later today. Regarding Matt Asay’s “Apache: ‘No jerks allowed’,” a reader tells us: “Matt seems to have a self-contradictory summary. Which is it? Microsoft is part of Apache or no jerks allowed in Apache?“
As a reminder about Microsoft and Apache, see [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18].
“The tail bit of the article seems to neglect the Apache perspective. It is, or at least was, about the Apache Foundation and its projects. What about the quality of Apache? What about the sustainability of Apache? Those are important.
“Microsoft’s Novell’s Greg Kroah-Hartman works with the Linux kernel and got caught with his mouth open. Microsoft did a hit and run on him, with his own help.”
–Anonymous“To look to another project, the Linux kernel, we see what can go wrong if a project lets naive people let jerks walk all over them. Microsoft’s Novell’s Greg Kroah-Hartman works with the Linux kernel and got caught with his mouth open.”
“Microsoft did a hit and run on him,” argues our reader, “with his own help.” We wrote about this right here.
Our anonymous reader concludes as follows: “The assertion that code should matter, if taken at face value, should also then take into consideration the history of coding and engineering quality coming out of Redmond. Or should it? Maybe there is only One Microsoft Way for all projects and code quality should be a thing of the past.”
The bottom line is that Microsoft code cannot be trusted because it only serves Microsoft shareholders, to whom GNU/Linux and Free software are not acceptable, as they are antithetical. Red Hat is making a mistake right now because it follows the footsteps of OpenSUSE 11.2 by becoming dependent on Winforms. As the following new post emphasises:
The Fedora 12 Constantine GNOME Live CD is Mono free, but installing GNOME from the DVD pulls in not only Mono itself, but also support for Windows.Forms (mono-winforms), which is outside the ECMA standard (and not covered under Microsoft’s horribly inadequate Community Promise).
While Constantine no longer includes Tomboy, it does still include F-Spot which is a .NET application.
Mono was removed from the Live CD of Cambridge, but is it not time to apply the same policy to a full install? F-Spot can be replaced by Solang, for example. █
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Posted in Australia, Law, Patents at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An Australian patent lawyer lobbies for more patents; other examples of lawyers using the legal system for selfish purposes of profit
APART from monopolies and patent trolls, some of the biggest proponents of widening the scope of patents are actually lawyers, many of whom are also patent trolls. The patent system was originally created to reward and incentivise inventors*, not legal middlemen, but that’s just where we ended up; today’s patent system tends to be a wasteful system which provides protectionist measures in various fields, enabling giants in their respective areas to either exclude competitors or to tax them. In one form or another, we have actually said this many times before. That’s the gist of where we are today, namely a system consisting clerks, lawyers and parasites guarding their own profit. They will not let this system go without a fight and they will invest in lobbying as much they are able to milk this system. At some point last year, staff of the EPO protested over this problem and there was a strike.
TechDirt has just done some fantastic job showing what type of people defend ridiculous practices of patenting; it is sometimes people who haven’t patents but instead they exploit those who have some (emphasis in red is ours):
Australian Patent Lawyers Claim Patenting Genes Is Necessary For Biomedical Research
[...]
This is, of course, ridiculous. First of all, much of the research on these things is often done via government and university funding — and it’s often done for reasons other than locking up a monopoly on the technique. Reasons such as helping people live better lives (*gasp* — what a concept!). Or, more to the point, it’s done so that firms can sell an actual product. If they have to compete in the marketplace, that’s a good thing, as it pushes them to be more efficient and offer a better overall service, rather than just jacking up prices. And how do they offer a better overall service? Oh yeah, often by continuing to do more research and creating new breakthroughs.
These sorts of claims of industries collapsing are moral panics and folk devils put forth by patent attorneys who are really afraid that it’s going to hurt their own business.
TechDirt has also found this new AP report which says: [via]
Jackpot: Lawyers earn fees from law they wrote
Every lawsuit filed or even threatened under a California law aimed at electing more minorities to local offices — and all of the roughly $4.3 million from settlements so far — can be traced to just two people: a pair of attorneys who worked together writing the statute, The Associated Press has found.
That is pretty much what one finds in patent law too; it’s about using and bending the law to increase profit, not to increase value to society (“innovation” for example).
Our reader Jose X has had the following to say about this problem:
Bad laws don’t last forever
I’d love to hear the argument that a broad description of something (the patent claims), which keeps the whole world from using or experimenting with anything that falls under that general description and hence remove as well the incentives (to everyone but trolls) for “improving” such a broadly described invention, somehow doesn’t stifle and slow down innovation, at least as these patents add up and start getting enforced so that the “wow” of the patenting system wears away.
If you create great software, good for you. Sell it or share it or do whatever you want. It’s illegal to infringe on my rights to also build great software. One of the exceptions possibly being that by infringing on my rights (and on the rights of everyone else on the planet) that this will somehow promote progress.
Remember, every single necessarily broad (and useful) patent removes rights that everyone had prior to that patent. And this presumably can happen for 20 years (a large fraction of each inventors/users productive life). So patent after patent handcuffs all inventors further and further. The better the patent, the stronger the handcuff, even if other very smart inventors find the (broad) invention obvious, have already made the discoveries/inventions in essence, or could within days, weeks, or months.
The necessarily broad patents, very possibly written up by someone that doesn’t really have very deep knowledge of the area, prevents those with real knowledge and many years of work from continuing along perhaps some very important path (at least this is the case if the patent vaguely describes an important path). All patent claims are quite vague. It’s easy to get the general idea down without knowing the nitty-gritty details and deeper implications and implementation details.
Software and the Internet have enabled virtually everyone to participate and contribute to society as inventors and inventor’s aids: to invent things and sell or share them or use them however they want. We aren’t talking about billion dollar factories whose control and reconfiguration is inaccessible to most people because of the extremely high price tag to play that game.
Software patent advocates, meanwhile, want to prop up the existing market leaders (who are already protected by copyright monopolies and by the very successful trade secret protections that foil interoperability) by preventing competition from less well funded and smaller competitors and from those collaborating on open source. In short, to prevent real competition from the very many hungry and competent folks lying outside the castle walls.
The only justification they have left is: “but the law says I can because the law says I can get 20 years of exclusive access because I wrote a description for something that (gulp) is new and nonobvious to the majority of laypeople — I mean, practitioners. So there.
Fortunately the Constitution trumps bad (and illegal) laws.
BTW, software stands out. I don’t see anyone ever copy/pasting/editing/manufacturing/redistributing a skyscraper with rocket boosters at virtually $0 and 0 time in the material world. But such is absolutely possible with software.
Software is open to all. Any monopoly on software (if it’s over something important) will likely have GARGANTUAN opportunity costs for society.
Remove my rights and incentives (and everyone else’s) to develop thoughts so that they can sit on these for 20 years. Yeah, no wonder some with savviness and money support software patents.
The transition from developed thought to implementation is trivial for software. The reason is because of how precise is the math that lies as the foundation of digitalization, where the abstract models and the physical models, for all intents and purposes, work identically.
And still, some with supposed experience in the field (and assumed honesty) state that software inventions are no different than material inventions and/or should not be treated differently.
Wow!
Some of those people just happen to be patent lawyers, to whom more patents mean more revenue. █
“Staff at the European Patent Office went on strike accusing the organization of corruption: specifically, stretching the standards for patents in order to make more money.
“One of the ways that the EPO has done this is by issuing software patents in defiance of the treaty that set it up.”
–Richard Stallman
____
* Or to encourage more new creations, perhaps defending small inventors from companies with investors and high capacity for copying ideas. That is what the system is said to have been conceived for.
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Posted in Google, Humour, Microsoft at 12:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Image from Wikipedia
Summary: A hypothetical exchange of ideas published for humour
AS a little bit of background, see:
One of our readers has produced this spoof ‘memo’, which reuses some phrases that can be seen in real memos. It goes like this:
-----------------------------
------- memo to billg -------
From: nathanm
To: billg
Date: 6 November 2009, 3:05 am
Subject: the threat from Google
It’s come to my attention that Google is making money out of Internet Search. This despite our best efforts, buying up Yahoo search patents, promoting litigation against the Google book deal and so on. I mean it’s not as if we went after Google to pay up royalties on our patented search patent technology, oh, wait, we did so just that… never mind.
I think our forward looking strategy is to tie up with some mega-media corporation offering them prime place on Bing and get them to criticise Google for stealing content. We’ll get them to enthuse the rest of the online media to move to paid content, despite the fact they are virtually cutting their own throat. Whatever we do we mustn’t ever let slip that content – paid or otherwise – is next to useless, if no one can find it, and we will of course control exactly that.
We’ll also plant… er… seed the media with suggestions as to paying people to move from Google to Bing. Make sure it looks like it isn’t coming from us. Once we’ve got ‘free’ content shutdown and most content on Bing, we effectively control the Internet toll road…
First thing in the morning:
From: billg
To: rupertm@wsj.com
Date: 6 November 2009, 9:05 am
Subject: lets be partners and make lots of money
Dear Rupert,
Those evil people at Google are stealing all your content, but I can help you. Lets be ‘partners’ and Microsoft will give your material exclusive priority on our upcoming Bing. All we ask in return is you remove your content from Google and trash them in the press and government. Of course once Google is defeated and Microsoft owns Internet search, we’ll effectively own both you and your content, but by then it’ll be too late. And it isn’t as if you are clever enough to notice you being used as a stalking horse in out battle against Google. It isn’t the first time we played one ‘partner’ off against another with empty sweet nothings.
Thanks to our anonymous reader who wrote these E-mails/memos. █
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11.18.09
Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 11:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: China demands that Windows XP should not be sold, but in a state where Microsoft turns a blind eye to counterfeiting the impact will be low
THIS morning we wrote very briefly about the verdict which bans sales of Windows XP in China. “Microsoft ordered to halt Win XP sales in China,” says news coverage that we cited earlier.
Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm’s intellectual property.
The following newer article says that “China orders Microsoft to halt some Windows sales”
Microsoft Corp has been ordered by a Chinese court to stop selling versions of its Windows operating systems that include fonts designed by a local company, citing a violation of licensing agreements.
So what will Microsoft do? Well, over in China Windows gets copied more often than bought (Microsoft reportedly sold just 244 copies of Windows Vista in its first two weeks, despite a huge population size), so the impact will be small regardless of appeals and reversals. Microsoft is actually happy to see people who illegally copy its software. Homer/Slated put it as follows earlier in the day:
In fact Microsoft do benefit from piracy, in exactly the same way they benefit from dumping “products” (i.e. licenses) at a loss (assuming it is even possible to make a loss on something so ethereal, which can be reproduced virtually for nothing, as “permission to use”). The purpose of dumping (and the benefit of piracy) is market saturation, which has the short-term effect of excluding competition at a loss, but the long-term effect of ensuring market dominance, which assures the continued survival of the company, increased profits, and little need to rely on marketing or product improvement, in the absence of any competition.
It’s a deeply cynical business development method that favours attacks on the competition over self-improvement. Why improve oneself when one can simply destroy others, thus becoming “improved” by default?
“If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else” ~ Jeff Raikes, former Microsoft Business Group president.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198000211
“As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.” ~ Bill Gates.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-212942.html
“[Microsoft] are willing to lose money for years and years just to make sure that you don’t make any money, either.” – Bob Cringely.
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2007/07/cringely-the-un.html
All that remains is to maintain that dominance, by suppressing others’ attempts to (re)enter the market. Microsoft accomplishes this in three ways: Lobbying, propaganda, and exclusive contracts. In this way their monopoly is protected by a closed-shop system, comprising partners and other paid agents persuaded to exclusively promote the Microsoft stack … criticising and rejecting everything else. The result is consumers are inundated with pro-Microsoft propaganda on the one hand and denied access to competing technology on the other. IOW, Microsoft is engaged in racketeering, and is tolerant of those who don’t pay the protection money, because non-payers nonetheless help support the ecosystem which protects Microsoft’s racket.
For improved perspective, also see [1, 2]. █
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 11:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Mobile king Symbian put to rest, giving another huge endorsement to Linux which will replace it
It’s not just supercomputers where GNU/Linux is a winner; in mobile phones too, based on several independent predictions from industry analysts, Linux is expected to become dominant. Smartphones are a growth market, despite the deprived economy.
The latest news is that Nokia will be replacing Symbian with Linux. This news is dynamite because Symbian is the dominant mobile platform at the moment and it is owned only by Nokia.
Nokia says it will replace Symbian with its Maemo Linux by 2012.
It is already happening.
“NSeries Nokias Say Goodbye to Symbian, Hello to Maemo
[...]
Here’s a bold statement: Symbian S60 is simply not good enough. I’m sure that many Nokia owners and analysts who know that Symbian currently holds around 50% of the smartphone OS market would disagree. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the new generation of smartphones – primarily Androids, the iPhone, and webOS based devices – are simply better than Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile (up to) 6.5 when it comes to doing what the users today want from a smartphone: browsing the web, using Facebook and Twitter, gaming, and finding simple apps that will satisfy their specific needs.
Nokia’s migration to Linux is fantastic news, but ‘Microsoft Enderle’ is already attacking Nokia using revisionism — a subject that we wrote about just days ago when another Microsoft partner did its own share of revisionism.
In his typical way, Microsoft’s close ally Rob Enderle [1, 2] rewrites the history of Novell along the lines of “it was all Novell’s fault”. He also keeps warping the history of Netscape in this way and if Microsoft is allowed to get away with it (via partners and people whom it hires), then it’s truly sinful to future generations. These Microsoft boosters are putting out there newer articles that modify the past and (over)write it differently; this tends to get precedence in search results because of age (more recent items prioritised). Other examples of revisionism are listed below. █
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Posted in Hardware, Microsoft, Security, Vista, Vista 7, Windows at 10:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More concrete problems, some of which artificially introduced, in Windows Vista and possibly its successors
LAST WEEK we saw Vista 7 getting cracked and the ramifications are highlighted as follows:
Trojans likely to follow Win 7 activation hack
[...]
Trojan attacks are likely in the wake of the Windows 7 product activation system cracks developed last week, less than a month after the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system.
The reality behind Vista 7 is not a convenient one and as it turns out, based on one of our readers, a “Microsoft hardware licence” is now required in Vista — an antifeature which was probably inherited by Vista 7.
That 32-bit editions of Windows Vista are limited to 4GB is not because of any physical or technical constraint on 32-bit operating systems. The 32-bit editions of Windows Vista all contain code for using physical memory above 4GB. Microsoft just doesn’t license you to use that code.
[...]
For the question of whether 32-bit Windows Vista will use all your physical memory, the hard-coded limit of 4GB is dominant as the maximum address for the ordinary kernel, which truly cannot form addresses for physical memory above 4GB, but the license limit is dominant for the PAE kernel. If you have physical memory above 4GB and wonder how it can be that the PAE kernel does not use that memory, the answer is licensing. The 32-bit code for using memory beyond 4GB is present in Windows Vista as Microsoft supplies it, but Microsoft prepares license values in the registry so that this code never gets to work with any physical addresses above 4GB.
This is ridiculous. There will probably be more coverage of this in days to come, so a followup is likely. Artificial limitations are a mockery as code is infinitely abundant. █
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