04 January 2003

Halloween VIII leaks out and ?MS? 's Worst Enemy The latest Halloween document [Doing the Damage-Control Dance] is released with the compliments of ESR. In short, it reads like a campaign to defend MS's hegemonic role within large corporate IT depts. and governments. It stresses that Linux has the upper hand when it comes to cost and security benefits and as a result it is increasingly gaining the respect of organisations and governments alike, but this nonetheless does not amount for good marketing and world domination which is only attainable by forging webs of manipulation based on corrupt distinguished public policy figures and opinion leaders and unleashing the fury of FUD against anyone not aligned with the strategy from Seattle. The MS guy signing the memo is called 'Orland' and prompts a team of well equipped for both the battlefield and executive meetings MS's VPs and the likes of them to defend the empire by striking deals with media and anyone else who's capable of influencing public policy and corporate behemoths.Ahh, it also mentions somewhere that MS intends to give seminars to its business clients to introduce Linux to them (as if they're so stupid they can't find about Linux themselves or they're just living under a stone) and educate them regarding the pros and cons of implementing an OS solution. Is that a brilliant joke or it's just me? I also retrieved an excellent story on MS and who's MS's real enemy. Joel Hruska says it's neither Linux nor OS, but MS's marketing arm persistently lying to its customers and trying to rip them off with suspicious licensing schemes that at the end of the day offer no tangible incentives and no real value, patronizing anyone within their power reach to not consider other options but MS's products or otherwise to suffer the consequences, FUDing and BSing towards all possible directions and most importantly, as the author clearly recognises, MS' s introduction of spyware and DRM mechanisms into its  flagship OS that's meant to take freedom out of end users' hands and hand it over to Hollywood studios, record companies and anyone else big and "liquid" enough to provide MS with financially compelling reasons for doing so. 12:21:13 PMSay it loud  []

the hierarchical file system finally gets out of the way Manuel Arriaga has just released a novel document management system called newdocms which is bound to change the way we manipulate files. In a posting to slashdot, Manuel claims that "No longer will you browse complex directory trees or directly interact with the HFS; instead, you define any number of document attributes when saving a document and then query a database of those attributes when trying to retrieve it later on. For the first time you have a true alternative to the hierarchical file system at the OS level...this is a testament to the power of free software: this sort of innovation could never happen if it weren't for the free software nature of the underlying systems". Newdocms currently works with all KDE apps but help is on its way for GNOME and OpenOffice too!!! Sensational, truly sensational!!!! 12:12:47 PMSay it loud  []