Saturday
(0)As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. I am not tremendously keen on their software from a design or reliability point of view, and I find their business practices at times to be a bit dubious.
However, yesterday they won 3.95 million dollars in damages from a spammer in Washington DC, who sent out huge numbers of e-mail messages that claimed to come from Microsoft in order to encourage people to download a toolbar that then downloaded all manner of nasty spyware and advertising.
Microsoft have won a total of $54m in recent judgements in their campaign against spammers. Generally the judgements have not been against the practice of spam per se but against the deceptive practices of the spammers (ie the spams have been full of lies).
Might I wish Bill and the boys continued success in this campaign.
Have you tried running Linux? Something along the lines of Mandrake Linux?
Posted by Gareth Russell at July 17, 2004 09:30 PM
As a matter of fact I am posting this comment from Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 running on Linux. So the answer is yes.
The machine is dual boot SuSe Linux 9.1 / Windows 2000. Linux is by far the more stable of the two operating systems.
If Apple were to release a Linux port of iTunes, I might even abandon Windows entirely.
I haven't tried Mandrake though.
Posted by Michael Jennings at July 17, 2004 10:10 PM
You should also try Debian. I've never had an RPM distro that didn't need to be periodically scrubbed and reinstalled from scratch in order to stay current. Debian seem to be immune to that.
Posted by Julian Morrison at July 18, 2004 01:20 AM
Rhythmbox is a pretty good replacement for iTunes and can play all the formats (aac included) that iTunes can. Though, if you want to purchase music or play purchased music you are out of luck.
Posted by drscroogemcduck at July 18, 2004 07:13 AM
Hmm. I might have a look at it. Will it play music from my iTunes library without messing with the directory structure or files in any way? My music is on my Windows partition and I would rather leave it there.
Hmm. Let me go and install it and see.
Posted by Michael Jennings at July 18, 2004 12:36 PM
I assume they are going to donate some of this money to all those people who bought what are in effect defective products from them?
Posted by ian at July 18, 2004 06:22 PM
Doh
One born every minute...
Ian MS didn't actually sell the toolbars.
Rhythmbox is a pretty good replacement for iTunes and can play all the formats (aac included) that iTunes can. Though, if you want to purchase music or play purchased music you are out of luck.
Posted by drscroogemcduck at July 18, 2004 07:13 AM
Hmm. I might have a look at it. Will it play music from my iTunes library without messing with the directory structure or files in any way? My music is on my Windows partition and I would rather leave it there.Hmm. Let me go and install it and see.
Posted by Michael Jennings at July 18, 2004 12:36 PM
No, sorry - it seems there are three born every minute.
Posted by Lord Lummy at July 18, 2004 10:42 PM
Maybe Microsoft can win enough from spammers to pay off the EU's anti-trust sentence.
Posted by Beck at July 18, 2004 11:49 PM
MJ: iTunes and the Apple music store is one of the only reasons why I keep a Microsoft partition on my machine.
I use Fedora Core 2 (the free Red Hat distribution) and I'm the administrator for FedoraForum.org the biggest Red Hat forum on the internet. I also write for Newsforge.
Posted by Gareth Russell at July 19, 2004 09:04 AM
Wake up Lummy - have you noticed there's been a bit in the press recently about security loopholes in MS Windows?
Posted by ian at July 19, 2004 05:40 PM
And of course the other OSs are perfect.
I think your beloved market has decided which is the best OS.
Quit Microsoft hating
Posted by Lord Lummy at July 19, 2004 05:55 PM
