Links 21/02/2008: Lots on Open Source, Lots of Trouble at Redmond, WA
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2008-02-21 15:12:17 UTC
- Modified: 2008-02-21 15:16:19 UTC
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Being Pro-Slop is Death Knell to One's Credibility
- It's not hard to see Ubuntu users resisting and antagonising this
- The Slop Bubble is Killing the Planet, Not Just the Economy
- The chatbot/LLM speculation bubble not only causes a health crisis, a mental health epidemic, and climate change; it's also crashing the economy on several levels
- Insolvency as the New Norm in the United States' Economy
- this is vastly worse than then 2008 subprime mortgage crisis
- IBM's CEO Might 'Retire' or 'Step Down' by Christmas
- PIP the CEO
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- Silent Layoffs (PIPs) Have Allegedly Accelerated Since IBM's Stock Cratered
- "IBM is Managing Decline, Not Building Growth"
- Non-Techs Using Slop Run Fedora and It's Turning Out to be a Total Disaster
- RIP, Fedora?
- In statCounter, a lot of "Unknown" Turns Out to be GNU/Linux
- GNU/Linux has more than doubled
- Gemini Links 26/07/2026: Beach Day, CAs, and Plaintext
- Links for the day
- Sweden Needs GNU/Linux and Free Software, Not GAFAM
- home of IKEA and ABBA
- Maintenance Today
- Preparing for more mass-publication activities
- Links 26/07/2026: "Zelenskyy Says Russia Wants To Bring North Korean Troops Into Ukraine", Muslim Van Ramming Attack on Berlin Pride
- Links for the day
- Centrica fraud exposed: worse than Palestine Action 'terrorists' with cardboard placards
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 26/07/2026: "Nate Silver Discovers the Educated Poor" and "India’s “Cockroach” Protest Movement Faces State Repression"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 25, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, July 25, 2026
- IBM Hammers a CoI Into a CoCed Fedora, RIP Fedora?
- Also in the "Fedora is dead" dept. today
- Gemini Links 25/07/2026: Zoo, MUD, Literature, EMF Camp, and e-ID
- Links for the day
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The Solution of No Choice: A Shortlist of One
- deployment of the "shortlist of one" by Campinos
- Wife of Dan Williams Has Explained Mental Factors Leading to His Death
- "We need to be open and honest about mental health," his wife pleads
- Several New Series Coming Soon
- we'll publish 8 series in tandem, in parallel
- Misleading Articles About YouTube and Google Financial Performance
- The future of Google is self-serving monopolisation and destruction of the Web
- Microsoft Cannot Survive the Fall of Windows
- It has amassed way too much debt
- Links 25/07/2026: Hong Kong Squashing Criticism/Dissent, Mirror Caught Breaking Into Voicemail
- Links for the day
- PIPs Are Shrinking IBM and "IBM is Managing Decline, Not Building Growth"
- IBM is going down the drain
- IBM is Killing the Fedora Community, Replacing It With LLM Slop From IBM Staff
- Krishna buys companies only to gut them. They've all learned this from experience.
- Give Me Your "Dumbest" (Devices)
- Why can't people accept that a "modern "smart" "phone" isn't necessary to check the time (overkill) and playing social control media "on the go" is far from necessary?
- Earlier This Year Dan Williams Prepared for Scenario Where Linus Torvalds Dies
- He had only just started a job at NVIDIA
- Links 25/07/2026: Data Breaches Abundant and Attribution Imperiled in the Age of Slop Hype
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/07/2026: Poetry and Plaintext Pages
- Links for the day
- What is Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
- In many cases, the acronym became a misnomer
- IBM PIPs Continue Until Morale Improves, Silent or Quiet Firings at IBM Explained
- IBM is a dying company
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 24, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, July 24, 2026
- Gemini Links 24/07/2026: Animal Friendship, Squirrels, and Lagrange
- Links for the day
- Links 24/07/2026: IOC Drops Russia Ban, New Internationalist Raises Money
- Links for the day
- Poor Piece From Valnet: Microsoft Keeps Sabotaging GNU/Linux, So You Should Quit Using GNU/Linux
- Really awful take
- We Need More Encryption, Not Less of It
- Use Free software and use encryption to ensure sources are fully protected
- At 3PM on a Friday The Register MS Collects Some 'Pyramid Scheme' Money From Communist China (ZTE)
- This won't age well for The Register MS
- Car Companies Fail Because They Don't Manufacture What Costumers Actually Want
- They try to impose their dumb vision on purchasers
- What Freedom Does Not Mean
- Tell Warren Buffett to go skiing; he'll soon understand how much freedom he truly has
- Linuxiac is Plagiarism
- We won't link to it, we're done [...] If you wish to support journalism about GNU/Linux, do not visit or link to slop
- Verizon is Over 200 Billion Dollars in Debt (US Telecoms Collapsing, Wrapping Up the Failure in "Hey Hi" Clothing)
- They will tell us this is "innovation", not a failure, and that only "Luddites" would oppose this
- You've Been Conned If You Ever Believed That MElon (MUSK, Elon) Was a Trillionaire
- Connected to corrupt officials
- The People Who Tried to 'Cancel' (or Deplatform/Censor) Daniel Pocock Are Annoyed That He's Mentioned in Dozens of Press Articles
- If Pocock's words did not matter, there would not be such a huge effort to silence him
- Cybershow Explains Why Only Sociopaths Gravitate Towards Leadership Position in 'Tech'
- The general thesis is a familiar one
- Speeding Up 'Down Under': Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania...
- As things stand, the best we can do is let people retrieve pages within less than 0.1 seconds since a request is received
- Google's Debt Trebled in Only 9 Months and It's Not Even the Full Picture (There's Secret Debt, Too)
- No wonder there are so many layoffs and workers try to unionise
- Links 24/07/2026: Mass Layoffs at Patreon, Netflix Deemed Bad for People's Brains
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Layoffs in India
- it's about cost-cutting
- Deregulation is Blowing Up the Economy, Which Has Become a Multi-Level Scheme or Pyramid Scheme
- Why did only Japanese media call out the BS; is that so hard to figure out and properly report on?
- Google Spreads Misinformation, Google's Slop Makes Stuff Up and Calls That "Intelligence"
- Google very well understands (and even publicly admits so, albeit only for legal reasons) that the slop does not work
- Daniel Pocock Proves Wikipedia is for Rich People or People Who Work for Very Rich People (the True Owners of Wikipedia)
- It's for billionaires and their faithful boot lickers
- GNOME: Your Personal Opinions Must Overlap GAFAM's (Otherwise Those Opinions Are Impermissible)
- Get well soon, GNOME
- Making Excuses for Stressful, Unrewarding, and Immoral Jobs
- excuses for difficult and/or barely-rewarding jobs. [...] People in tech must not be evaluated (or have their "worth" assessed) based on remuneration
- US is Insolvent, GAFAM is Buying Time by Hiding (Not Disclosing) Its True Debt Which Explains Never-ending Layoffs (Unrelated to Slop or "Efficiency Drives")
- Five Tech Giants are Hiding $1.65tn in AI Debt, Using the Trick that Toppled Enron
- Almost 5 Years Without Social Control Media ('Mind Prison')
- Life is too short to be stuck inside a skinnerbox
- Linux Must be About People (Humans), Not Bribery From Slop Companies Trillions of Dollars in Debt and in Pursuit of Positive Press
- We've lost Williams
- John Dvorak Understood That "MSM" Was a Vehicle of Censorship
- Independent publishing, which obviates the need to censor (influenced by existing advertisers or lookout for prospective advertisers), is the only credibly thing out there
- To Understand Why Linus Torvalds Became a Boot-Licking Booster of Slop Look at Another Operative of 'Linux' Foundation, the "Mentor" of Clickfraud SPAMnil (According to SPAMnil Himself)
- it seems like SJVN does not give a full disclosure
- Blaming "Computers" Instead of Blaming Microsoft
- Blaming Microsoft is "hate"
- "Online We Are All Refugees" and Slop Pushers Are the Oppressors
- They basically resort to nationalism and racism to distract from their commercial failure and fraud (pyramid scheme)
- PIP Apocalypse (PIPocalypse) at IBM, CEO Promotes Vapouware (Lying to Shareholders)
- Companies get to shrink while lying about it to the public, even to shareholders
- GNU/Linux Soaring in Antigua And Barbuda
- GNU/Linux is internationally approaching 8%
- Calling Out the Worst Culprits in "Linux" Slop (Slopfarms That Manipulate Information and Engage in Plagiarism)
- Once they're gone (offline), the slopfarms cannot carry on for much longer
- Defying Discrimination
- Rianne's birthday is exactly a month away
- Dan Williams Represented Real Diversity in Linux
- Williams probably understood based on personal experience what it was like to be marginalised and discriminated against
- The First Point About Software Freedom is, You Must Understand What It Really Means (Not "Open Source")
- Forty Three Years of Commitment to Software Freedom [...] Educating people about what Software Freedom actually means
- Gemini Links 24/07/2026: Recovering From Broken Shoulders, Loss of Passion, and "True Hacker Versus Growth Hacker"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 23, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 23, 2026
Comments
CoolGuy
2008-02-21 16:45:45
steve got pwned by larry.
seriously i think M$ is loosing out and steve has lost control over what he is doing. this is a guy who has zero technical knowledge, has never written a single line of code, cant make out any difference between a asp or php code...lol. i dont know if any m$ executive has advised steve over the technical hurdles of moving yahoo to m$ technology.
rofl.i think no one will dare to go near the chair throwing ninja.
entire blame of M$ doom will be on steve and bill has side stepped out of this mess really easy.
by doing a hostile take over - this is really going to blow out of proportion. everyone is making fun of m$ so openly, they have become a joke of what m$ used to be a decade back.
look at the action figures / toys stuff m$ is doing lately. everyone is laughing at them. they are trying so hard to be like google. haha.
just cant stop laughing.
CoolGuy
2008-02-21 16:49:00
BoomBoom
2008-02-21 18:28:35
- A BB for a brain in an empty head. Shake him and hear him rattle! - A pile of stolen patents for things someone else invented! - Extra sweat! - Awesome monkeydance action! - Developers developers developers developers! - Buggy software that doesn't work! - Buggy patches for buggy software that *still* doesn't work! - A fake sense of security! (along with thousands of exploits and weaknesses) - An EULA written by the Ghost of Stalin and the RIAA! - MONO! (Both the poisonware and the disease) - Office chair grenades! - FUD machinegun! - Arrogance out the wazoo! - Megalomaniac world domination plans! - And not a snowball's chance in Hell of ever having a clue.
:P
Roy Schestowitz
2008-02-21 22:39:12
This VNUnet article dovetails nicely with the recent piece on Groklaw[1]
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2210121/microsoft-engages-proxy-fight
I wonder if a deep-cutting summary or analysis can be written to Slashdot without using the M-word.
The plan seems to be to lobby and intrigue behind the scenes to replace the board with a more obedient set. Before that happens, Yahoo should re-license Zimbra as GPL. Also, how big a contributer is Yahoo to open source development in general and BSD in particular? That could be one of the main motivations for hostile take over.
I also notice that the astroturfers have returned to slashdot in droves since about Monday or so and, probably related, there is article after article of advertising.
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071023002351958
Also, about the last attempts to save the cash cow :
Houston, we have a problem ... ... when trying to paint a nice face before the BRM ...
Google News Alert for: (OpenDocument OR ODF) AND ("Ecma 376" OR OXML OR OOXML OR "office open xml" OR "open XML")
Microsoft pledges not to sue over open source CNet News.com Blog - USA The company does not natively support the alternative Open Document Format, or ODF, standard in Office 2007. Although it does not mention ODF specifically ... See all stories on this topic
MS to publish free APIs for Windows, Office Electronista - Santa Clara,CA,USA Office 2007 has been a particular subject of investigation and has been criticized for its switch to the Microsoft-made Office Open XML (OOXML) standard, ... See all stories on this topic
Microsoft Promises Interoperability Digitaltrends.com - Lake Oswego,OR,USA Microsoft also says it won't sue open source developers who build or distribute non-commercial implementations of its protocols, although developers who ... See all stories on this topic
Microsoft is fighting. Don't give it too much room for manipulation.