Roy Silvernail wrote:

...

Linux advocates should announce Windows XP is the time to switch to Linux permanently.

Concur. MICROS~1 is moving steadily toward a secured platform that gives them full control of what will and won't run. Were it up to them, there would be no third-party development. Ironic, considering third-party development has played such a large part in their rise to ubiquity.

I doubt they want to get rid of 3rd parties. but I bet that someone had a wet dream about "run-license-fees" in addition to money for development kits and MCSE batches. so, the future for M$ may be even MORE 3rd party developers - but unless they ship, say, $1 to M$ per copy sold, their software simply won't run. oops. 10:1 that there will also be a deactivation feature. so the next DeCSS, asfrecorder or other thought-crime can be remotely disabled. just think about the potential! possible marketing lines include: "100% guaranteed virus resistant!" and, of course, "multimedia experience". but behind the scenes, practically anything that M$ or someone who can pay them enough for the favour doesn't like can be disabled. say that plugin which encrypts your passwords before storing them on the disk. of course, the program has a fallback to write plaintext passwords if it can't save encrypted ones... in short: if the software doesn't trust you anymore, you have ample reason to distrust the software in return.

Roy Silvernail wrote:

Concur. MICROS~1 is moving steadily toward a secured platform that gives them full control of what will and won't run. Were it up to them, there would be no third-party development. Ironic, considering third-party development has played such a large part in their rise to ubiquity.

I wouldn't worry about them. I have this analogy in mind that micro$hit is a lot like IBM. Once threatened with heavy competition from the pc clones, they went to microchannel. But no one followed. Most people decided to not go for proprietary, generic stuff. Until recently, the last time I've played with Linux was about 5 years ago and that was with Slackware. I've spent most of my unix time in OpenBSD or Solaris land. Recently having come back, I see little difference from a users point of view in installation or use difficulty to w98 or w2k and Mandrake 7.2 or RedHat 7. Sure 9x/NT/2k is not now nor has ever been remotely linux like, but the idea of getting your linux (or BSD) from a specific vendor doesn't stop you from running (open source) software. Even most non-open sourced stuff will run under linux emulation on *BSD boxes anyway. What the dickwads are doing is attempting to coerce hardware vendors to lock themselves into windows only. They won't do it. Those that will can look forward to huge losses of money or having their drivers reverse engineered. For more fun, see today's slashdot.org: http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/15/1825221.shtml Based on Allchin's words, I'd say they're seeing the writing on the wall. Perhaps some new survey indicating how many open source systems versus how many microsoft systems there really are out there crawled up his ass. -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------