Now This Makes Me Sick

OK, this is probably the most outrageous Microsoft story I have heard in a while.

David Zamos, a 21 year old college student, one day bought the student edition of Windows XP and Office XP from his college computer store for a total of $60. He got back and realized he would have to reformat his drive. He didn’t want to loose all the important stuff on it, so he tried to return the software to the store. The store cashier told him that they had an agreement with Microsoft to not accept returns (why the hell would Microsoft do that, anyway?).

After that, he tried to request a return directly from Microsoft. He sent it by priority mail, so he knew when it arrived. Bill replied while counting his money, and it only took him 34 days to do that. He was denied.

So what did he do? He did what any other internet user would have done and tried selling it on eBay. Office sold for $112.50. He put up an auction for Windows XP, but that was taken down by a “Microsoft Investor” who accused him of infringing on the company’s copyright.

According to eBay, Microsoft’s resale policy is “Qualified end users may resell and purchase software through eBay.” He had no idea what he did wrong.

He contacted one of Microsoft’s lawyers about the case, and he replied stating several lawsuits where large companies pirated copies of their software and sold it. He replied, asking what this had to do with him and never got a response.

Soo, he sent a counterclaim to eBay and reposted the sale (stating the reselling policy in the description).

After selling for $91, he made a profit of $143.50 from both sales.

Microsoft came back at him with a lawsuit, stating “irreparable injury to its business reputation and goodwill”, and even accused him of unfair competition (WTF?)

The article goes on, but I’ll tell you that they did reach an agreement after a lot of embarrassment on Microsoft’s part.

This kind of thing really gets to me. Microsoft operating systems are on over 90% of desktops, and their software is being used everywhere. Why would they waste their time suing the pants off of a college student who simply tried selling unopened educational software on eBay. They’re in it purely for the money.

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Why Not to Run Windows

I just came across this video (yes, on digg) that reminded me why people tend to ‘hate computers’ and why some of us don’t use it. I’d like to quote part of it here (it’s from BBC)

Jack wanted to show me how risky it is to connect an unprotected PC to the net. This poor Windows XP machine has no firewall and no AntiVirus software. Connecting to the internet would be like throwing it into a lion pen with raw meat straped to it’s hard drive.

So how long would it be before we were hit with something nasty on the net? Hours? Minutes? As it turned out, 8 seconds.

Jack: Well, we just connected to the internet, and we’ve been hit by the sasser worm. Already.

It gets even better, but I won’t ruin it. Go see the video.

Video

Good Job, Massachusetts!

You may remember when I posted about Massachusetts dumping MS Office in favor of the Open Document Format? Well, now we have some more information.

InformationWeek has an article about both sides of the dispute, Microsoft and Massachusetts.

From the InformationWeek Article:

Kriss said, however, the state’s IT administration carefully reviewed and considered both Microsoft’s Office XML schemas and OpenDocument but voted for the latter as the standard that would best meet the needs of the citizens of Massachusetts. He said the state had concerns about the openness of the XML schemas and potential patent issues that could arise in the future.

I couldn’t have said it better.

While any company can adopt the royalty free standard, Microsoft will not support OpenDocument in its next version of Office 12 because it is an inferior file format and is not compatible with older versions of Office, one Microsoft executive said this week after the report was released. Office 12 is due next year.

Inferior? Excuse me, Microsoft, but if it is in fact ‘inferior’, then why is it being used? Free Software isn’t inferior, it is much, much better.

“No,” said Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft’s Information Worker Business Strategy, when asked by CRN about the potential for Office to support OpenDocument. “The Office “12″ formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue,” Yates said.

Further, he added, “this proposal acknowledges that Open Document does not address pictures, audio, video, charts, maps, voice, voice-over-IP, and other kinds of data our customers are increasingly putting in documents and archiving.”

Actually, I have a story about this, to prove that these things are not always good.

I have a friend, who sent me an IM one day. This friend isn’t very computer smart, but isn’t computer stupid either. She needed help uploading her picture to her blog. I told her to browse to where she saved the picture (in the webpage), and click on upload. She did this, but it didn’t work. Suspecting that it was an issue of how big the picture was, I asked her to paste the text on the page where she got the error. It said that the format was not a picture. What kind of format was it? “application/msword”. I asked her why she tried to upload a Word document to put her picture up, and she said that she pasted the picture into a Word document. I rest my case.

InformationWeek Article

Massachusetts Dumps MS Office

Another digged link…

Apparently, Massachusetts has dumped MS Office and their proprietary file formats in favor of open formats, PDF and OpenOffice. I think this is a smart move, since you want papers to be viewable by the widest audience. Think about it – how often has it happened that you wanted to send someone a Word document (or some other format) only to find out that they can’t open it because they have something like Works (which is fairly common on preinstalled desktop machines).

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What if Microsoft Made Vi?

This is YET ANOTER link that I found on digg.

Imagine what would happen if Microsoft made Vi…

Eww.

Watch Entire Animation

Vista, Opening Doors for Desktop Linux

Could the release of Windows Vista possibly lead the way to Linux Desktop Dominance? I came across this article today on Slashdot, and they seem to think so.

From the article:

As the time gets closer and closer to the public debut of Vista the operating system seems to be constantly losing the luster which was associated with Longhorn. It seems that this new version was originally planned to be a large step forward from XP but as we learn more about it and Microsoft’s plans for the future, the changes are constantly being scaled back from what was originally promised. Whether it’s the lack of a new file system or the “Monad” scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye, no matter how nice the GUI is or how much Internet Explorer 7 resembles FireFox.

If this was not enough to turn people off from Vista, there are the hardware requirements. Though the exact minimum system requirements have not yet been made clear, it has been stated that a “Vista Ready” system will have 512 megabytes or more of RAM, a dedicated graphics card with DirectX 9.0 support, and a will be “modern” Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon-based PC. An older system or one with integrated graphics will be able to run Vista but will probably have to do so in more of a legacy mode, without full use of the new Aero graphics package. Speculation is rampant about what the CPU requirement will be for optimum use, but consumers may need as fast a 3.0 GHz Intel P4, or the equivalent.

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Slashdot Page

What?!?!?

Now take a look at this. How would you like going to an ATM to make a transaction… and discover that unreliable Windows has crashed? I’d get very annoyed very quickly.

Someone put together a Flickr album and has this shot as well as shots of the machine booting up.

Flickr Album

Zotob Virus Spreading

I read it on Slashdot last night and just heard it on our local news – The Zotob Virus (ok, worm) is spreading. It has already hit CNN, the Associated Press, New York Times, and I even heard from a friend that the Red Cross has been hit as well.

Want to know what I’m saying about this? Ha ha! Screw them, they should be running Linux!

While Viruses are bad, they can mean good news to us Linux fans: the more serious viruses hit large buisnesses, the more likely they are to switch. Let them learn from their mistakes.

IBM SoulPad

I just heard about the IBM SoulPad on Engadget. The SoulPad allows you to hibernate your computer to a removable device (Like an iPod), plug that iPod into another SoulPad and resume working. IBM claims that it takes about 30 seconds to Hibernate and about 3 minutes to resume.

When you plug the device into the USB port, the SoulPad will detect it and boot up, you guessed it, Knoppix to detect any changed hardware (I guess Windows is too stupid to do that for itself). Then it asks for a password. You can stick a USB stick in another USB port and hit enter. It then loads Windows back up just as if nothing happend.

In my opinion, there are some problems with this. I know that Hibernation in Windows takes up about 500 MB. For iPods, this will be fine. For smaller things like Cell Phones, I’m not sure…

I also don’t think Linux will be supported, but it damn well should be. Why the hell would they use Knoppix to help restore the computer and not support it?

And what’s the chance that you and your friend would both have IBM SoulPads?

Besides that, I really don’t know why I would want to bring my work to my friend’s computer. Especially if it is a Laptop. If you need to show them something, just bring it over there. We’re forgetting the whole purpose of a Laptop!!!

Video (14 MB WMV)

The Mighty M$ is Checking Us Out!

Yes, it’s true! Looking at the stats last night, I was surprised to get a hit from Redmond, but I was more surprised when the IP traced back to Microsoft’s servers. Guess which pages they accessed? They accessed the two posts I made about the WGA being cracked. Go figure!

What’s odd is that they didn’t visit the blog index, they went directly to the permalink URL. I think this means that they are searching the web for these types of pages.

I know, you’re thinking that this is just a bot. I don’t think it’s a bot because StatCounter indicated that the operating system was Windows XP and the browser was IE6. But it also had an entry for screen resolution and javascript was enabled… I am pretty sure that bots have javascript disabled.

Oh, and remember when I said that I was going to install Kanotix a few days ago? I lied. I’m going to be busy until next Tuesday, so I’ll probably install it then or on Wednesday.