02.23.10
Posted in Bill Gates, Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Oracle, Patents, SUN at 2:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Criticism of the patent system is increasing and abolishment too is being considered for what became a hindrance — not a facilitator — to science
Filed under post slug “Patent Fail”, the following new post from Tim Bray is an expression of hatred of patents (Bray works for Oracle, but opinions in his blog are personal). He titled it “Giving Up On Patents”:
Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with fear and loathing of the hideous misconduct of the US Patent & Trademark Office, I retained some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is an unusually easy-to-read introduction to Patent Theory. But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once, but it doesn’t any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out.
[...]
And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You’re actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do.
Maybe Bray can confront his employer over this*. Among those new articles that he cites is this excellent Mises analysis which uses the confusing term “IP”:
How should the IP system be reformed? For those with a principled, libertarian view of property rights, it is obvious that patent and copyright laws are unjust and should be completely abolished.[2] Total abolition is, however, exceedingly unlikely at present. Further, most people favor IP for less principled, utilitarian reasons. They take a wealth-maximization approach to policy making. They favor patent and copyright law because they believe that it generates net wealth — that the value of the innovation stimulated by IP law is significantly greater than the costs of these laws.[3]
What is striking is that this myth is widely believed even though the IP proponents can adduce no evidence in favor of this hypothesis. There are literally no studies clearly showing any net gains from IP.[4] If anything, it appears that the patent system, for example, imposes a gigantic net cost on the economy (approximately $31 billion a year, in my estimate).[5] In any case, even those who support IP on cost-benefit grounds have to acknowledge the costs of the system, and they should not oppose changes to IP law that significantly reduce these costs, so long as the change does not drastically reduce the innovation gains that IP purportedly stimulates. In other words, according to the reasoning of IP advocates, if weakening patent strength reduces costs more than it reduces gains, this results in a net gain.
Economists recognise the fact that patents are harmful and so do engineers. But as long as lawyers run our governments and collude with other lawyers [1, 2], rules will be established by the wrong people. It’s a battle between creators and leeches of these creators. A lot of people may not remember this, but Bill Gates was bound to be a lawyer, raised by a prominent (and apparently corrupt) lawyer, so he is not an engineer. Tim Berners-Lee, a true innovator, says that “software patents are a terrible thing”, but Microsoft still uses these for racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], even this week. █
_____
* I had arguments with Sun about the subject (but a lot of employees suppress their own opinion because of a paycheck).
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Google, Hardware, Marketing, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, Search, Ubuntu at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Generic license (caption added by us, with Ballmer’s words
Summary: Brainwash receives a much greater emphasis at Microsoft, a CMO role is created, and Microsoft finds new ways of deceiving the masses
“I hope Ubuntu is getting lots of money for pissing off users with irrelevant search results from Bong [sic],” says our reader Ryan regarding the Yahoo-Canonical deal [1, 2, 3, 4]. “You can tell Yahoo is Bing now, the least relevant crap ends up on top.”
The news is pretty much official that Microsoft has hijacked Yahoo!, sucking the life out of Yahoo! for its own selfish good (and regulators are unable to stop this). To an extent, Microsoft is doing something similar in Amazon, namely gradual assimilation through strategic staff appointments. They don’t adhere to the basics of human resources (HR) or maybe they just simply don’t care.
Anyway, Jerry Yang has just dumped Yahoo! shares. That’s the company he once created, before he labeled Microsoft an “agitator” and saw the company destorying his “baby”.
Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) holders probably never want to hear the name Jerry Yang again. Well, those same holders will love this… Tonight after the close a filing at the SEC from Yahoo! showed that Jerry Yang is going to be selling stock in the company. David Filo, the other Yahoo founder, is also selling shares. Normally insider selling or founders selling is viewed with some caution. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, and for good reason.
Microsoft’s buddy, Carl Icahn, has also dumped his shares, as we noted a few days ago (more press coverage in [1, 2, 3]). Yahoo director Ron Burkle is quiting as well, which only shows what type of damage Microsoft did the company. Also see:
i. Yahoo! Director Burkle Stepping Down
Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) director Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate, won’t seek re-election to the Internet search company’s board at the annual meeting later this year.
ii. Ron Burkle to Quit Yahoo! Board
Ron Burkle will not seek re-election to Yahoo!’s Board of Directors at the annual shareholders’ meeting this year. Burkle gave the usual reasons about other business pursuits and spending more time with his family.
“Now Microsoft, Yahoo Can Tag-Team Google,” IDG says mercilessly and it also quotes the same Microsoft-corrupted DOJ [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] which blocked the Yahoo!-Google deal after intense AstroTurfing from Microsoft (political fights by secretive groups of paid-for protesters who fought for Microsoft and later got exposed). Here is the nonsense that IDG is quoting:
Bing will become a better search engine when Microsoft takes over Yahoo search, and better able to compete with search giant Google, the U.S. Department of Justice said in its decision supporting the deal.
Microsoft suffers over $2,000,000,000 in losses per year in this area. Microsoft has only itself to blame because what it shamelessly calls a “decision engine” is simply a tool for lying to the public. No wonder people don’t take it seriously. Microsoft is [p]rearranging the results such that they mock Microsoft’s competitors and hide Microsoft’s crimes. That alone is a reason to boycott Bing, as some journalists have already suggested. But Microsoft has found ways of forcing people to use its “decision engine”, namely paying carriers to remove Google as an option and probably repeating browser crimes in IE8. Microsoft also uses the Olympics again, not only to promote Silver Lie but also to make people use its “decision engine” and be indoctrinated the One Microsoft Way.
“Microsoft is [p]rearranging the results such that they mock Microsoft’s competitors and hide Microsoft’s crimes.”As usual, Microsoft will later lie about market share, citing US-only data so as to triple its real market share at least in the perceived sense. Microsoft is also using this type of deception to fraudulently enhance perception of Windows Mobile and to belittle GNU/Linux. If they are lying often enough for people to actually believe that Microsoft exceeded 10% market share in search (rather than maintained about 3%), then Microsoft believes that people are more likely to fulfill the bogus prophecy by giving Bing a try. In the same way, Microsoft discourages the industry from supporting Linux, based on some fake numbers that produce illusions.
“Ideally, use of the competing technology becomes associated with mental deficiency, as in, “he believes in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and OS/2.” Just keep rubbing it in, via the press, analysts, newsgroups, whatever. Make the complete failure of the competition’s technology part of the mythology of the computer industry. We want to place selection pressure on those companies and individuals that show a genetic weakness for competitors’ technologies, to make the industry increasingly resistant to such unhealthy strains, over time.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Microsoft has begun focusing on perception, not products. According to the news, Microsoft has just hired more marketing (i.e. deception) people from the outside [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft hires from the outside because this way it is not held accountable for overzealous behaviour (like phone-spamming that we mentioned over the weekend). Microsoft has also just created a new role, a CMO (chief marketing officer). That’s the equivalent or ministers who are responsible for lying and spinning in order for the public to think wrongly of everything and adhere to blind consent.
As part of a broader realignment of its Central Marketing Group, Microsoft on Thursday named Gayle Troberman to the newly created position of chief marketing officer.
Novell’s chief marketing officer is John Dragoon. Here is more information about Gayle Troberman:
ADOTAS – Microsoft has done some rearranging of its central marketing group and created the position of chief creative officer for Gayle Troberman, a 13-year veteran of the company who was most recently general manager for Microsoft advertising and consumer
Working for an abusive monopoly and lying on its behalf is nothing to be proud of. Steve Ballmer is about to give a keynote talk at a “Search Marketing Conference”. Will he explain to the public how he manipulated search results so as to mock everything he dislikes? That’s just Stalinist.
Two weeks ago we wrote about Microsoft's relationship with Facebook, which is becoming one of the most visited sites on the Web. Facebook will no longer allow Microsoft to spy on Facebook users for marketing reasons [1, 2], but it does embed Microsoft’s shameless “decision engine” in the site. According to another report, Microsoft also wants to buy a Facebook game developer and it tried to buy Yelp:
About two months ago, when Yelp turned down an offer from Google, there had been speculation that Yelp had received a counter offer from Microsoft.
That would allow Microsoft to rank competitors just as it demotes and mocks competitors in its so-called ‘search engine’. It’s a good thing that Yelp turned down the $700+ million Microsoft offer:
When Google offered $550 million to purchase Yelp, Yelp walked away saying it had another offer.
Looks like the other offer was Microsoft. According to Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek, Yelp had “a bid north of $700 million from Microsoft.”
If Microsoft is allowed to rank other businesses and products, then it will abuse this power. That’s exactly what it’s doing with Bing. Microsoft is a morally corrupt company, based on simple evidence.
Regarding the Facebook game developer, there are several more reports about it:
Microsoft Corp. is among companies in talks to buy CrowdStar, the creator of games for social- networking site Facebook, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft is still trying to control top sites and use them in all sorts of ways, especially spying for marketing reasons. There needn’t be a tacit admission of this.
Here is Microsoft doing some new sniffing for marketing reasons:
v”Microsoft, Starcom Initiate Research On Mothers
[...]
Commenting on the initiative, Pushkar Sane, chief digital officer, North and South Asia, Starcom MediaVest Group said, “This is one of the many joint initiatives with Microsoft Advertising. Our strategic partnership spans across research, education, measurement and innovation. Mothers are an important audience segment for many of our clients. This initiative will help us bridge the current information gap that exists in our understanding of this key demographic.”
For those who don’t know what Starcom is:
Welcome to Starcom. We are a media communications agency that specializes in making connections between consumers and brands.
Yes, more of that very same advertising/spying business.
There is another new liaison of a similar kind — one involving the Intel-Microsoft collusion partnership [1, 2].
Today, FedScoop announced that Intel and Microsoft will be sponsoring an educational campaign focused on the present and future possibilities of cloud computing called, “Minds in the Cloud.” Each week, for 25 weeks, new High Definition (HD) interviews of influential technologists from the government, non-profit, and private sectors discussing their views on the importance of the cloud will be posted to mindsinthecloud.org.
That’s more marketing and Intel is once again helping Microsoft. It will of course be geared towards selling Microsoft software and Intel gear. It’s not about the so-called ‘cloud’, but that’s the banner under which their campaign is disguised. They sort of hijack ‘cloud’ for their own purposes, just as they do with “business intelligence” in the following new case:
Microsoft, Solver and ProfitBase are to host a business intelligence (BI) event in Los Angeles on 23 February, which will look at how companies can leverage their existing investments in Microsoft technologies.
It’s not a “business intelligence event”, it’s a business intelligence with Microsoft software event. It’s a familiar strategy of hijacking movements like the green causes in order to promote heavy fuels (reversal of causes). That’s another subject that’s to do with ethical offences in PR/AstroTurfing where smoking or carbon, for example, are described as beneficial in a way that overlaps the reasons against them, which leads to confusion. Microsoft uses these tricks to make people confused about OpenOffice.org (Office Open XML, anyone?) and “open source”. █
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New estimates of the cost of turbulence and intrusion as applied to large businesses
Windows zombies are probably costing trillions of dollars to the economy. It depends on how one measures it, but a lot of what we do online and offline depends on the assumption that half of all Windows PCs are under control by someone other than the persons sitting before them. These are fairly conservative estimates that are being repeated by several separate sources and Microsoft can corroborate as a few months ago it said that one third of the machines it had scanned were in fact infected.
Cost of cyberattacks alone — attacks that are carried out from Windows zombies for the vast part — are estimated to have affected three quarters of enterprises and cost just over 2 million dollars on average (for each enterprise). Security vendors insist that most businesses keep breaches and attacks secret for all sorts of reasons, so the problem is underreported.
“OK, even allowing for the fact this comes from a newly published study (PDF) from a security company, that’s still one heck of a statistic. The fact that it’s Symantec, and so has access to perhaps more enterprises than most, makes it a double-heck with knobs on. Or how about this one for size: ‘every enterprise, yes, 100 percent, experienced cyber losses in 2009.’”
eWEEK also has this new article about the Zeus botnet:
Zeus is among the most popular crimeware tool kits out there and was placed in the spotlight last week due to NetWitness’ discovery of the Kneber botnet. In a discussion with eWEEK, security pros walk through some of the ways Zeus infiltrates organizations and discuss the importance of defense-in-depth as well as having sound policies governing the remediation and investigation process if infected by malware.
The article totally ‘forgets’ to mention Windows, but then again, it’s an article from Microsoft’s partner, Ziff Davis [1, 2, 3]. They would rather pretend it’s just a “computer issue” or “malware”, as usual. █
“Our products just aren’t engineered for security.”
–Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive at the time, now working for Amazon as Senior Vice President
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Servers at 3:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“That’s extortion and we should call it what it is. To say, as Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that’s just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
Summary: Not so long after getting a lot of Microsoft executives working for Amazon, the company decides to pay Microsoft for GNU/Linux
Amazon has just become a partner of Microsoft’s racketeering against GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. In the words of Microsoft Emil:
While Microsoft wouldn’t say which of its products and technologies Amazon is interested in, Microsoft did mention that Amazon’s Kindle, which employs open source and proprietary software components, as well as Amazon’s use of Linux-based servers are covered.
[...]
It’s possible that Amazon agreed to signing the deal to avoid patent-infringement lawsuits from Microsoft. The mention of Kindle and Linux is not likely to be coincidental: the software giant has put extensive work into tablets and e-readers of various form factors and has previously claimed that Linux infringes on its patented technologies, although it has never specified which patents it believes the Linux stack and kernel violate (the software giant did sue GPS maker TomTom over the FAT file format).
It is not exactly shocking that Amazon is doing this. Amazon was mentioned here yesterday for helping Microsoft and Amazon’s disgusting patent policy (1-click shopping being the most infamous example that we last mentioned yesterday) is a sign that Bezos and his boys (and girls) are interested in monopoly, not in software. But more importantly, this isn’t too surprising because of the corporate takeover through staff — one that leads to inevitable Microsoft influence in the board and in the management. Over the past two years we have covered many examples of high-level Microsoft employees joining the management of Amazon, so the deal above is likely to be signed by existing and some former Microsoft employees. The latest major example of a manager from Microsoft entering Amazon (Kindle to be precise) is Mike Nash, so DRM and takedowns (remote deletions) are likely to only be justified. Giving up on Amazon would have little negative effect at all (on Free software); their contribution to Linux is very scarce and even source code is something that they rarely give.
“This is a huge growth area for Linux, so Microsoft wants to steal its revenue and also make it less appealing from a cost perspective.”Microsoft did not invent Linux (it hardly ever invented anything) and it does not own Linux using imaginary software patents. Almost all E-readers run Linux, so Microsoft is trying to create precedence for extorting all of them and profiting from Linux devices, as Allison warned last month in LCA [1, 2]. This is a huge growth area for Linux, so Microsoft wants to steal its revenue and also make it less appealing from a cost perspective.
Microsoft is also going deeper into the patent racketeering business, with its investment in entities that it helped create, such as Intellectual Ventures which continues to receive flak:
If there is one thing you read today, go read Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures excellent essay titled Software patents are the problem not the answer.
Several years ago when I first started saying things like “software patents are invalid constructs” or “software shouldn’t be able to be patented” or “software patents are a huge drag on innovation”, I was told by many people (lawyers, journalists, patent trolls, and other VCs) that while I might be right, no other venture capitalist would agree with me or support this position.
Software patents are not legal (except in a few countries), let alone patents that Microsoft refuses to name. Buying a Kindle or server space at Amazon is paying Microsoft for GNU/Linux. That’s not an acceptable practice to support. Boycott Amazon and let them know how you feel. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, Open XML, OpenDocument, Servers, Windows at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Data corruption glitches inherent and more likely with Microsoft’s sub-standard products that do not comply with industry standards
TWO YEARS ago I called Windows Home Server (WHS) “data corruption server” because it turned out that its unique feature (or antifeature) was that it silently destroyed people’s data rather than make backups like it was supposed to. We wrote about the disaster which is Windows Home Server around that time; it’s built upon pretty much the same codebase that makes up Vista 7.
According to this very extensive new review of the Asus TS Mini Windows Home Server, GNU/Linux is still miles ahead of Microsoft when it comes to so-called “home servers” (Microsoft terminology for the most part). To quote some portions of the text:
Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are essentially small servers designed for use in the home, but generally use modified versions of Linux. It was only a matter of time before Microsoft got in on the action with Windows Home Server (WHS), which it introduced in 2007.
Most NAS devices run Linux on hardware based around embedded processors from manufacturers such as Marvell or Freescale, typically based on the ARM design. WHS, on the other hand, will run on standard PC hardware based around Intel or AMD x86 processors.
[...]
Linux is the obvious choice since many distributions are free and its reliability is well-documented. Installing, configuring and maintaining Linux can be a time consuming hassle though, even if you’re already familiar with the OS.
[...]
Overall, Asus’s Home Server TS Mini is a disappointment. The hardware’s clumsy design makes adding or replacing a hard disk more difficult than it has to be. Asus’ WHS plug-ins don’t add much value either, although these can always be updated in future or just replaced with alternatives of your choosing. The sluggish performance is particularly disappointing though, limiting the TS Mini’s usefulness.
All of this is a shame, since the WHS OS clearly has much potential, but it’s not without its flaws either. It’s disappointing that almost three years after its launch, there aren’t easily accessible printer sharing options or RAID support.
There is one area where the failure of Windows Home Server is similar to that of OOXML. According to this new post from Rob Weir, Microsoft Office has data corruption problems that affect OOXML.
In this post I take a look at Microsoft’s claims for robust data recovery with their Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. I show the results of an experiment, where I introduce random errors into documents and observe whether word processors can recover from these errors. Based on these result, I estimate data recovery rates for Word 2003 binary, OOXML and ODF documents, as loaded in Word 2007, Word 2003 and in OpenOffice.org Writer 3.2.
My tests suggest that the OOXML format is less robust than the Word binary or ODF formats, with no observed basis for the contrary Microsoft claims. I then discuss the reasons why this might be expected.
It is not exactly surprising because OOXML has corruption written all over it, but Microsoft’s crimes aside, there are clearly some technical deficiencies. Microsoft does not build software for robustness. The London Stock Exchange found this out the hard way [1, 2]. People inside Microsoft know this too. █
‘Eller and his team had written what they felt was some very good Windows code. When Konzen came over he appeared to want to counter this impression—he told the Windows team their code was garbage. They had completely misengineered the system, he said.
‘”These Apple guys really know their graphics,” Konzen told Eller.
‘”They’re better, faster, and simply easier to use. You chimps working on Windows don’t have a clue.”‘
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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