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Microsoft policy and Linux

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bill

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Feb 7, 2012, 4:04:42 AM2/7/12
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Having just read a 'Windows 8' puff piece in a paper the other day and
realising that the latest version of Windows will be able to restore
itself without all that silly messing about with drivers for your
hardware it seems that Microsoft are forging anew policy.

This coupled with their 'cloud' based 'office' system will mean the
disappearance of local servers, along with server and desktop support,
for most small to medium businesses.

Nothing in on the local machine and everything is in the cloud.

Microsoft have been careful to keep within the required security
standards for medical and other 'personal' information and there are some
real savings to be made.

Of course this means that only larger institutions will be employing PC
support staff and most of them will be looking after server farms.

All those 'corner shop' computer companies whose bread and butter is a
small business with a dozen desk tops and a server will disappear as
well.

Microsoft will have pinched a whole raft of jobs, thrown thousands of
people all over the world out of work and more or less eliminated the
chance for Linux servers to get into any organisation before it is
already well established and locked into their services.

What's to be done?

What can be done?

Nothing much...

--
"Hopefully the fair wind will resume, or this may well take all day."

Admiral Collingwood on being becalmed under the guns of six French ships-
of-the-line at Trafalgar

Aragorn

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Feb 7, 2012, 4:18:53 AM2/7/12
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On Tuesday 07 February 2012 10:04, bill conveyed the following to
alt.comp.linux...

> Having just read a 'Windows 8' puff piece in a paper the other day and
> realising that the latest version of Windows will be able to restore
> itself without all that silly messing about with drivers for your
> hardware it seems that Microsoft are forging anew policy.
>
> This coupled with their 'cloud' based 'office' system will mean the
> disappearance of local servers, along with server and desktop support,
> for most small to medium businesses.
>
> Nothing in on the local machine and everything is in the cloud.

Microsoft aren't the only ones pushing the cloud hype. Google have been
doing that a long time already, and so are HP, Oracle and a whole bunch
of other companies.

> Microsoft have been careful to keep within the required security
> standards for medical and other 'personal' information and there are
> some real savings to be made.

I would never trust my life or that of any of my loved ones to the
"security" or stability of a Microsoft platform. Ever.

> Of course this means that only larger institutions will be employing
> PC support staff and most of them will be looking after server farms.
>
> All those 'corner shop' computer companies whose bread and butter is a
> small business with a dozen desk tops and a server will disappear as
> well.
>
> Microsoft will have pinched a whole raft of jobs, thrown thousands of
> people all over the world out of work and more or less eliminated the
> chance for Linux servers to get into any organisation before it is
> already well established and locked into their services.
>
> What's to be done?

That depends on you.

> What can be done?

Stop using Microsoft when must better alternatives (by the orders of
magnitude) exist.

With GNU/Linux you can set up your infrastructure the way _you_ want it,
not the way Microsoft or whoever else wants it.

> Nothing much...

If you say so. I beg to differ. But then again, I don't use any
Microsoft products.

--
= Aragorn =
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)

bill

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Feb 7, 2012, 11:42:43 AM2/7/12
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On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:18:53 +0100, Aragorn wrote:

>
>> Microsoft have been careful to keep within the required security
>> standards for medical and other 'personal' information and there are
>> some real savings to be made.
>
> I would never trust my life or that of any of my loved ones to the
> "security" or stability of a Microsoft platform. Ever.
>
Nobody mentioned risking lives, all that was mentioned was the
requirement laid upon organisations to keep personal information out of
the public gaze.

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 7, 2012, 7:17:01 PM2/7/12
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on Ter 07 Fev 2012 14:42, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Nobody mentioned risking lives, all that was mentioned was the
> requirement laid upon organisations to keep personal information out of
> the public gaze.

Not directly. If personal and health information are to be managed, then
lives are at stake.


--

Alexandre

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 7, 2012, 8:43:42 PM2/7/12
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on Ter 07 Fev 2012 07:04, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Having just read a 'Windows 8' puff piece in a paper the other day

As I am past the age of trusting M$ printed stuff I'll comment on your post.
Writing and paper are really wonderful inventions. Paper complements
writing in such a way that you can put anything you want on paper.

> realising that the latest version of Windows will be able to restore
> itself without all that silly messing about with drivers for your
> hardware it seems that Microsoft are forging anew policy.

For those who read Hellen Custer's book on NT some 22 or 23 years ago, it is
easy to realize that in M$ world accomplishments and deeds seldom reach
promises. If ever.

> This coupled with their 'cloud' based 'office' system will mean the
> disappearance of local servers, along with server and desktop support,
> for most small to medium businesses.

M$ very existence is based on the pathological need for control. The near
absence of creative spirit in that company forged this.

> Nothing in on the local machine and everything is in the cloud.

Ouch! What an unwarranted, unwanted and unlikely future M$ created for
us! :-D

> Of course this means that only larger institutions will be employing PC
> support staff and most of them will be looking after server farms.
> All those 'corner shop' computer companies whose bread and butter is a
> small business with a dozen desk tops and a server will disappear as
> well.

The reasoning above looks carefully created to produce the impression that
cloud is inevitable. This is far from truth. Unless computer prices rocket
up, even a single computer company will be able to maintain its tiny IT
structure.

Besides, users (companies in particular) do not change their working
structures to follow every new wave industry announces. Such moves are
slow. M$ knows about that and won't impose its cloud thing, indeed, a
cloudy landscape of the cloud. :-)

> Microsoft will have pinched a whole raft of jobs, thrown thousands of
> people all over the world out of work and more or less eliminated the
> chance for Linux servers to get into any organisation before it is
> already well established and locked into their services.

Do you really believe in this?

> What's to be done?
> What can be done?

Trying to impose its cloud will be a giant push towards Linux for companies
around the world.

> Nothing much...

M$ plays always its role of presenting itself as the only thing in the
world. Inside there they feel like that. They live like that. But a bit of
memories can draw a completely different landscape.

M$ has been always a step behind the rest of the world. Their most important
asset, their initial inertia generator, the link they managed to create
between IBM personal computers and msdos, nearly 30 years ago created the
big, fat and slow monster. IBM's size put M$ going. Doing nothing original,
this merely inertial growth can be observed as the progressively slower
growth rates of recent years. Surpassed even by Apple's (growth rate) in
2010. But the real comparison is with IT growth as a whole. M$ has been
behind for years now.

After IBM's impulse to the non-original msdos (CP/M was already there!), win
3 came second to Apple and was inferior as graphical interface, win32 came
second to OS/2 and Linux, around 1997 or 1998 M$ confessed the delay in
exploiting the Internet, win64 came second to many and now M$ is late
exploiting the cloud technologies. Their only original project, NT, failed
most of its promises, especially the most ambitious: high security levels.

M$ strategy is the same since IBMPC-msdos relation: plots with hardware
vendors and governments. M$ never created anything new and grew and exist
on the basis of collusions.

That said, everyone that takes the risk of rotating the head a bit to turn
the eyes to other horizons will find that there is much more than the
narrow M$ view. At this point the name Linux should ring a bell in
everyone's heads. :-)


--

Alexandre

Aragorn

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Feb 7, 2012, 11:43:10 PM2/7/12
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On Wednesday 08 February 2012 02:43, Alexandre Aguiar conveyed the
following to alt.comp.linux...

> [...]
> After IBM's impulse to the non-original msdos (CP/M was already
> there!), win 3 came second to Apple and was inferior as graphical
> interface, win32 came second to OS/2 and Linux, around 1997 or 1998 M$
> confessed the delay in exploiting the Internet, win64 came second to
> many and now M$ is late exploiting the cloud technologies. Their only
> original project, NT, failed most of its promises, especially the most
> ambitious: high security levels.
> [...]

Even NT wasn't really original to Microsoft. The idea for NT stems from
the collaboration between IBM and Microsoft on OS/2. It was decided
that NT was going to be OS/2 3.0 when IBM was still developing OS/2 2.0
- ant it was intended to be built on top of a Mach 2.5 microkernel - but
given the success of Windows 3.0, Microsoft blew up the agreement with
IBM and turned whatever code they already had for OS/2 3.0 NT into
Windows NT instead.

In addition to that, the NT kernel is not a Mach 2.5 microkernel, but a
near-identical copy of the DEC VMS kernel, written by one of DEC's VMS
developers. Rumor has it that Cutler - the developer in question - was
caught red-handed at DEC while copying the VMS kernel code into NT and
was fired on the spot, and subsequently officially hired by Microsoft.
DEC sued Microsoft but Bill Gates settled the matter out of court by
paying a large sum of money to DEC and conceding to supporting DEC's
Alpha architecture in NT.

Peter Hill

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Feb 8, 2012, 3:04:21 AM2/8/12
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On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:43:10 +0100, Aragorn
<str...@telenet.be.invalid> wrote:

>In addition to that, the NT kernel is not a Mach 2.5 microkernel, but a
>near-identical copy of the DEC VMS kernel, written by one of DEC's VMS
>developers. Rumor has it that Cutler - the developer in question - was
>caught red-handed at DEC while copying the VMS kernel code into NT and
>was fired on the spot, and subsequently officially hired by Microsoft.
>DEC sued Microsoft but Bill Gates settled the matter out of court by
>paying a large sum of money to DEC and conceding to supporting DEC's
>Alpha architecture in NT.

But failed dismally relying on an emulation of the X86 to run apps.
Which rendered a DEC Alpha running NT about as fast as a 486 in a
world full of Pentium's.

Even now there are questions as to M$'s ability and unwillingness to
port X86 apps to ARM etc.
http://betanews.com/2011/09/19/will-windows-8-have-an-arm-app-gap/
http://dfarq.homeip.net/2011/09/microsoft-no-x86-apps-for-arm/

The solution is to deliver apps as high level code and not binaries.
But M$ won't ever do that.

There was a move many years ago to supply hardware drivers in high
level code, like Forth.
--
Peter Hill
Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header
Can of worms - what every fisherman wants.
Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

Aragorn

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Feb 8, 2012, 3:45:19 AM2/8/12
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On Wednesday 08 February 2012 09:04, Peter Hill conveyed the following
to alt.comp.linux...

> On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:43:10 +0100, Aragorn
> <str...@telenet.be.invalid> wrote:
>
>> In addition to that, the NT kernel is not a Mach 2.5 microkernel, but
>> a near-identical copy of the DEC VMS kernel, written by one of DEC's
>> VMS developers. Rumor has it that Cutler - the developer in question
>> - was caught red-handed at DEC while copying the VMS kernel code into
>> NT and was fired on the spot, and subsequently officially hired by
>> Microsoft. DEC sued Microsoft but Bill Gates settled the matter out
>> of court by paying a large sum of money to DEC and conceding to
>> supporting DEC's Alpha architecture in NT.
>
> But failed dismally relying on an emulation of the X86 to run apps.
> Which rendered a DEC Alpha running NT about as fast as a 486 in a
> world full of Pentium's.

I don't even know whether it still supports the Alpha today. I've only
ever run one version of Windows NT - 4.0 Workstation, for two years - on
a computer of my own, and other than that, I've also only run Windows
3.x on a computer of my own for about six months. The years in between
I was using IBM OS/2 2.x, and I've been using GNU/Linux exclusively for
over twelve years now.

> Even now there are questions as to M$'s ability and unwillingness to
> port X86 apps to ARM etc.
> http://betanews.com/2011/09/19/will-windows-8-have-an-arm-app-gap/
> http://dfarq.homeip.net/2011/09/microsoft-no-x86-apps-for-arm/
>
> The solution is to deliver apps as high level code and not binaries.
> But M$ won't ever do that.
>
> There was a move many years ago to supply hardware drivers in high
> level code, like Forth.

Well, perhaps Microsoft's internal development could be a clue as to
what their plans or strategy for the future are. Their experimental
Singularity operating system is virtually entirely coded as bytecode
[*], including its kernel. Only the device drivers are written in
assembler.

The way privileges are separated in Singularity is also quite different.
They are separated in software, rather than in hardware.


[*] And that bytecode is - of course - .NET, also known as C#.

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 8, 2012, 7:05:21 AM2/8/12
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on Qua 08 Fev 2012 06:04, Peter Hill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Even now there are questions as to M$'s ability and unwillingness to
> port X86 apps to ARM etc.

Yes. M$ has failed miserably in a market that grows fast: mobile computing.
The failure was announced early in this market life, when device were
little more than phonebooks: wince never lifted off.



--

Alexandre

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 8, 2012, 7:50:38 AM2/8/12
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on Qua 08 Fev 2012 06:04, Peter Hill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Even now there are questions as to M$'s ability and unwillingness to
> port X86 apps to ARM etc.

Just realized that M$ living-from-plots policy is not viable in an
environment where too many different vendors and models exist in strong
competition in an quickly expanding market. Is is not possible (even for
all mighty M$) to buy everybody, everywhere all the time.

A symptom that things do not go as well as in M$ official versions is that
most M$ supporters use illegal copies of M$ products. :-)

Creation is still paramount in IT market. Except for M$, I do not remember
another company that has appeared and grown without creating. Many stopped
creating and eventually shrinked. There are several examples: Apple without
Jobs, Sun, Netware, Nantucket, Borland, just to mention a few.

The higher the demand for creativity (as there is today in the mobile
market), the less likely a policy like M$'s is to succeed. The ability of
changing fast and reliably we see in the Free Software model has been
essential in a fast and ever changing market. M$ is closed, Apple opened
part of its system, Google has one completely open. Current mobile market
is precisely stratified by how "open source" a company's products are: the
more "open source", the bigger the share in the mobile market.

Desktops evolve in a much lower pace than mobiles. Laptops are versions of
desktops that fit into a bag and won't cripple those who to have to carry
that bag all day long. This slowly evolving desktop market and laptop
market as extensions, is where M$ OS's still make their living.


--

Alexandre

J G Miller

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Feb 8, 2012, 8:06:01 AM2/8/12
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On Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, at 05:43:10h +0100, Aragorn wrote:

> Rumor has it that Cutler

Is this not "spreading rumors"?

Aragorn

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Feb 8, 2012, 8:13:47 AM2/8/12
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On Wednesday 08 February 2012 13:50, Alexandre Aguiar conveyed the
following to alt.comp.linux...

> [...]
> Desktops evolve in a much lower pace than mobiles. Laptops are
> versions of desktops that fit into a bag and won't cripple those who
> to have to carry that bag all day long. This slowly evolving desktop
> market and laptop market as extensions, is where M$ OS's still make
> their living.

That, and patent trolling. They seem to be making lots of money off of
Android over alleged infringement on (by Microsoft as yet unidentified)
Microsoft patents - and they are buying patents all the time, of course.
Except that now, Barnes & Noble have called Microsoft's bluff and have
sued them over this.

The litigation is still very young and it's already slipping down a very
dirty alley, but if Barnes & Noble win this case, then it could mean a
significant financial setback for Microsoft, given that the other
companies they've been extorting will most likely then file a class
action suit against Microsoft and demand refunding of the extorted
amounts of money.

Microsoft has always played the FUD machine very well. Back when Novell
entered an interoperability agreement with Microsoft, Steve Ballmer kept
on claiming that it was a non-litigation agreement because there were
Microsoft patents in GNU/Linux. Other and smaller distributions bought
the FUD and out of fear for litigation, entered a non-litigation
agreement with Microsoft. Yet truth be told, if Microsoft were so sure
that there were real Microsoft patents in GNU/Linux - and if this were
true, then they would have been able to identify the patents because
they have their own "Linux Lab" [sic] [*] - then they would have already
long sued RedHat, Oracle, Mandriva and many others. But they haven't,
so it was clearly all hot air.


[*] Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo, has worked in Microsoft's
"Linux Lab" [sic].

Aragorn

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Feb 8, 2012, 8:23:23 AM2/8/12
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On Wednesday 08 February 2012 14:06, J G Miller conveyed the following
to alt.comp.linux...

> On Wednesday, February 8th, 2012, at 05:43:10h +0100, Aragorn wrote:
>
>> Rumor has it that Cutler
>
> Is this not "spreading rumors"?

Actually it's not a rumor - I only chose to word it like this for now -
but the cleaned-up and propagandized Wikipedia page on the origin of
Windows NT contradicts it - or rather: does not mention those facts -
and Microsoft has - in good tradition, as they always do - made sure
that all incriminating information was removed from their own website.
[*]

The truth of the matter is that I know some people who were sufficiently
involved with the Big Guys (tm) back at the time - think "IBM" and
"Intel", possibly DEC as well - who all know the real story. But the
evidence is gone now, so it's hard to still find any documentation on
the events of that time. It was after all over two decades ago.


[*] Although there was some chap who meticulously collected all of
Microsoft's deceitful propaganda that they ever put on their website
and mirrored that somewhere under the GeoCities domain. There were
some real gems there on account of Microsoft FUD and misinformation.
Unfortunately, GeoCities has ceased activities, and I don't know
whether said person has relocated his archives on Microsoft
propaganda/spindoctoring to another domain.

bill

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Feb 8, 2012, 1:16:09 PM2/8/12
to
In the UK, where I live, the government defines such things and
Microsoft meets their standards.

This eliminates the major objection to it 0n the two small installations
using the M$ desktop/server model changing over to M$ 24/7 or whatever
they call it that I have an involvement in.

bill

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Feb 8, 2012, 1:26:36 PM2/8/12
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On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:43:42 -0200, Alexandre Aguiar wrote:

>
>> Of course this means that only larger institutions will be employing PC
>> support staff and most of them will be looking after server farms. All
>> those 'corner shop' computer companies whose bread and butter is a
>> small business with a dozen desk tops and a server will disappear as
>> well.
>
> The reasoning above looks carefully created to produce the impression
> that cloud is inevitable. This is far from truth. Unless computer prices
> rocket up, even a single computer company will be able to maintain its
> tiny IT structure.

That's not what costs the money.

The cost of a server and licenses for, for example, a charity or a
school, is trivial compared to the cost of supporting it.

Such institutions do not employ IT professionals to help them choose
their systems, they buy what the bean counters tell them they should
buy, and the bean counter's device of choice is always a M$ product.

> Besides, users (companies in particular) do not change their working
> structures to follow every new wave industry announces. Such moves are
> slow. M$ knows about that and won't impose its cloud thing, indeed, a
> cloudy landscape of the cloud. :-)

But they do upgrade from time to time and this new policy of M$ allows
something VERY important.

It allows them to stop a capital cost (the new server, licenses and etc)
and transfer those costs onto the running costs budget.

Everyone hates capital costs that have no effect on efficiency.

>> Microsoft will have pinched a whole raft of jobs, thrown thousands of
>> people all over the world out of work and more or less eliminated the
>> chance for Linux servers to get into any organisation before it is
>> already well established and locked into their services.
>
> Do you really believe in this?

I believe that M$ are sufficiently ruthless to refuse to provide server
licenses for organisations with less than 100 desktops, yes.

After that it's down to the bean counters.

Do they stay with the M$ 'corporate planned structured upgrade to the
cloud' or do they put a couple of geeks with beards on the payroll who
say they can work wonders with someone called Linus...

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 8, 2012, 9:04:26 PM2/8/12
to
on Qua 08 Fev 2012 02:43, Aragorn said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Even NT wasn't really original to Microsoft.

Thanks. After all it looks M$ not only does not create anything but also
despises creation. :-)

--

Alexandre

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 8, 2012, 9:04:31 PM2/8/12
to
on Qua 08 Fev 2012 16:16, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> In the UK, the government defines such things

In US both Google and M$ terminated their personal health information online
services. Official versions include government actions.

From a Google insider I learned that it was part of a wider strategic change
in the company. We'll never really know.

--

Alexandre

Alexandre Aguiar

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Feb 8, 2012, 9:09:18 PM2/8/12
to
on Qua 08 Fev 2012 16:26, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> The cost of a server and licenses for, for example, a charity or a
> school, is trivial compared to the cost of supporting it.

Something that has been very expensive to many companies (including M$
itself) is underrating the market and/or regarding users as eternally
blind, deaf and stupid.

The cloud, in the long run, may become extremely troublesome to a company
that is known to violate users privacy. Take a scenario of a 10 million
cloud clients. Now suppose that only 5 or 10 of them, noisy ones that are
able to use press as well as M$, file lawsuits against M$ for privacy
violations. This is enough to start a herd move that can flood M$ with
lawsuits beyond its capacity to settle with money. Many will simply flee.
Another scenario is similar to the week in which M$ paralyzed 100 thousand
european companies during a whole week because of a bug in its
update/licencing system. This single fact caused banishment of windoze from
german health services and costed M$ more than US$250 million. What if M$
cloud thing simply stopped working during a week?

The risk of such disastrous scenarios is a function of the strategic value
of the violated information and the number of clients.

> Such institutions do not employ IT professionals to help them choose
> their systems, they buy what the bean counters tell them they should
> buy, and the bean counter's device of choice is always a M$ product.

As I said, underrating users is a big mistake.

> But they do upgrade from time to time and this new policy of M$ allows
> something VERY important.

The extent of such moves is usually not that big except in case of a
disturbance in the market. For instance, XP support is already the longest
ever in M$ life because Vista was a disaster: 35% of Vista users downgraded
to XP. These same users did not upgrade to w7 so that XP share now is twice
the Vista share and equals that of w7. M$ moved precisely to fit market
needs. But was unable to stay above 90% share in the home desktop market.
Several measurements have even found windoze (all versions) below 80%. An
unknown number (something around 10% of all computer users as numbers
suggest is probably a huge overestimate) of users left Vista for other
platform and w7 did not bring them back.

A remarkable amount of new M$ products sales are through new machines. M$
relies heavily on plots with hardware vendors. As computers sales have had
a recent global decrease of 2%, windoze sales have fallen 6%. This is a big
lot of money and a much smaller boost of the upgrade sales that are
expected if the first wave in new computers succeeds.

Small business users can still use their older versions and rely on their
beans counters during many years before deciding whether M$ imposed (if
this is the case) cloud thing is reliable or not. Cheap operation! And
there is no hurry at all. :-)

> I believe that M$ are sufficiently ruthless to refuse to provide server

In regard to M$ ruthlessness we do agree. :-)

But other companies are not the 'good guys'. They know that a change of
paradigm in desktop computing could kill windoze within a decade or two but
such a change is so unlikely in the near future. Thus, they currently push
the tablet and mobile markets where they win: 1 out of every 12 computers
sold is a tablet.

> licenses for organisations with less than 100 desktops, yes.

That would be a bad move. First, because it would affect (downwards) only M$
server market share, currently between 38% and 48% depending on measurement
methods. Second, because many such customer companies, as many users did
upon the Vista fiasco, will migrate to platforms that do not impose
undesired clouds inflating these platforms respective server market shares.

Hosting strategic business information in M$ domains is suicidal: M$ sells
to US government the tools to break cryptography meant to protect users
that also paid for the M$ cryptography (closed source!) tools. What would
stop M$ from using the same tools it sells to US government? What kind of
privacy protection can M$ offer?

IMHO, M$ current surge of enthusiasm with cloud technologies is just
marketing fireworks of a big and slow company that arrived late (again) to
the real world.

M$ heads are smart. They know the windoze business is to shrink slowly.
There is something interesting that seems to confirm that and has gone
mostly unnoticed: M$ leading acquisitions have been directed towards the
communications and entertainment markets.


--

Alexandre

bill

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Feb 9, 2012, 3:28:20 AM2/9/12
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On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:09:18 -0200, Alexandre Aguiar wrote:


> Hosting strategic business information in M$ domains is suicidal: M$
> sells to US government the tools to break cryptography meant to protect
> users that also paid for the M$ cryptography (closed source!) tools.
> What would stop M$ from using the same tools it sells to US government?
> What kind of privacy protection can M$ offer?

I would like to agree with most of what you say, and hope that you are
right.

My personal experience is that people are inherently conservitave and the
sort of people who make thereal decisions tend to wiosh to stick to the
vendors they already have, especially when the alternative are people
who the press consider little better than hippies.


But your above paragraph quoted shows a certain level of misunderstanding
about the capability of major governments.

Any organisation who wants to keep their data secure from a major
government needs to do a sight more than not use the cloud.

Governments don't use screened rooms and on-line hardware cryptographic
equipment and ring-fenced closed Intranets for the fun of it.

All Micro$oft and its minions are doing is cutting government costs.

If they're really interested in you they can strip you to the bone in
hours.

bill

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 3:33:35 AM2/9/12
to
Google make no claims about security for their service, however
Microsoft claim they meet ISO 27000 family security standards.

In the UK that claim, and that claim alone, eliminates the requirement
for anyone to worry about it because it is Microsoft's problem and if
they don't keep to the bargain they're the ones who go to court.

The agencies and organisation using their service accepted their word in
good faith, and paid for the service, and in the UK the law assumes
people do business 'with an expectation of trust'.

Peter Hill

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Feb 9, 2012, 2:08:03 PM2/9/12
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On Thu, 9 Feb 2012 08:33:35 +0000 (UTC), bill <black...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:04:31 -0200, Alexandre Aguiar wrote:
>
>> on Qua 08 Fev 2012 16:16, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:
>>
>>> In the UK, the government defines such things
>>
>> In US both Google and M$ terminated their personal health information
>> online services. Official versions include government actions.
>>
>> From a Google insider I learned that it was part of a wider strategic
>> change in the company. We'll never really know.
>
>Google make no claims about security for their service, however
>Microsoft claim they meet ISO 27000 family security standards.
>
>In the UK that claim, and that claim alone, eliminates the requirement
>for anyone to worry about it because it is Microsoft's problem and if
>they don't keep to the bargain they're the ones who go to court.
>
>The agencies and organisation using their service accepted their word in
>good faith, and paid for the service, and in the UK the law assumes
>people do business 'with an expectation of trust'.

But with the cloud the offence will not be within the jurisdiction of
any British court. By putting stuff in the "cloud", it's the user
sending the data off to places unknown. No doubt without a proper
export licence.

Possibly not within EU courts jurisdiction.

Courts in The USA would go for it anyway.

Alexandre Aguiar

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:09:09 PM2/9/12
to
on Qui 09 Fev 2012 06:28, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> My personal experience is that people are inherently conservitave

This is one of the reasons why markets shift slowly during normal operation.
I apply the same reasoning to the acceptance of the Free Software business
model: people do not adhere because it is different. Android has the
potential to change that over time as people get used to it. The opposite,
that people become less used to M$ as windoze is less used in hand helds,
may not be true as long as desktop computing does not change.

> But your above paragraph quoted shows a certain level of misunderstanding
> about the capability of major governments.

Hopefully never had the kind of problem that would put a government on me.
In this regard it is fine to be silly. :-)

> Governments don't use screened rooms and on-line hardware cryptographic
> equipment and ring-fenced closed Intranets for the fun of it.
> All Micro$oft and its minions are doing is cutting government costs.
> If they're really interested in you they can strip you to the bone in
> hours.

Your statement is so interesting. Yes, you are completely right. The target
of my criticism to known M$ practices related to cryptography is the
vulnerability of computer files. The mention to government power do break
windoze users cryptography was used to expose that it is M$ that provides
the tools that grant such power and there is nothing to stop M$ from using
these tools itself or even selling them to others with the proper
disguises.

IMHO, government activities are usually less important to business in
general and usual threats to information security (secrecy, integrity and
availability) come from competitors and home based saboteurs.

In my experience, integrity and availability have been stronger arguments
when dealing with companies. Even those for which secrecy should be a major
concern. They seem to consider failures in integrity and availability more
disruptive in the short term than secrecy violations that usually affect
projects and products in a more distant future, with spare time to overcome
trouble. Accordingly, many clouds providers usually mention but do not
emphasize secrecy relevance in their services.

It seems also that an unreliable cloud provider just adds another degree of
vulnerability to an already vulnerable environment.

The cloud technologies may also suffer from the increase in the virulence of
(mostly DOS) attacks the ever faster Internet has favored. It is
predictable that a high P like M$ is going to be a preferred target,

BTW, I like to say that real secrets are to be kept in minds, not in files.


--

Alexandre

bill

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:16:29 PM2/9/12
to
On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:09:09 -0200, Alexandre Aguiar wrote:


> BTW, I like to say that real secrets are to be kept in minds, not in
> files.

My experience is that real secrets are kept in files with very small
circulation lists and marked 'By hand only, not to be stored on any
electronic system'...

bill

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:22:56 PM2/9/12
to
On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:08:03 +0000, Peter Hill wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Feb 2012 08:33:35 +0000 (UTC), bill <black...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:04:31 -0200, Alexandre Aguiar wrote:
>>
>>> on Qua 08 Fev 2012 16:16, bill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:
>>>
>>>> In the UK, the government defines such things
>>>
>>> In US both Google and M$ terminated their personal health information
>>> online services. Official versions include government actions.
>>>
>>> From a Google insider I learned that it was part of a wider strategic
>>> change in the company. We'll never really know.
>>
>>Google make no claims about security for their service, however
>>Microsoft claim they meet ISO 27000 family security standards.
>>
>>In the UK that claim, and that claim alone, eliminates the requirement
>>for anyone to worry about it because it is Microsoft's problem and if
>>they don't keep to the bargain they're the ones who go to court.
>>
>>The agencies and organisation using their service accepted their word in
>>good faith, and paid for the service, and in the UK the law assumes
>>people do business 'with an expectation of trust'.
>
> But with the cloud the offence will not be within the jurisdiction of
> any British court. By putting stuff in the "cloud", it's the user
> sending the data off to places unknown. No doubt without a proper export
> licence.

Nobody cares as long as the 'customer' has a valid defence when the shit
hits the fan and a newspaper buys the medical records of half the kingdom

The valid defence being:

"They are a large and reputable company with whom we have had a
relationship for many years. They stated to us that their systems
conformed to ISO 27000".

That's it, end of story, they acted in good faith and have been betrayed,
not their problem...

You do not need an export license for anything but weapons and certainly
not for private information, as the National Health Service discovered
recently and are now exploiting that by having a great deal of work done
on records in India...

Of course the companies concerned are fully accredited to ISO 27000
standards...

Alexandre Aguiar

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 4:52:10 PM2/9/12
to
on Qui 09 Fev 2012 17:08, Peter Hill said to people at <alt.comp.linux>:

> Possibly not within EU courts jurisdiction.

It would be nice to have some sort of confirmation of this. As far as I
could understand european citizens and companies would be unprotected by
in cases of privacy violations. Is this correct?

Also AFAIK, a default jurisdiction is usually defined by the place where the
contract was signed unless another jurisdiction is defined in the contract
itself as usual. In some places, a remote or otherwise impossible
jurisdiction defined in contract can be disregarded by courts in some
special situations.


--

Alexandre

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