It's too bad users here on Slashdot don't simply take the time to read MS code. Windows kernel code is available for researchers. You can see the code for the CLR largely in Rotor. And the .NET Fx source code has been released as well. It's not hard to see what they're code looks like. And for the most part the code is very reasonable looking. MS doesn't have the problem with code quality they get accused of. There real problem historically has been lack of vision. If you give them a target they can generally hit it -- see how they've done on things like security, IE (until IE6), Win7, Bing, etc... What they don't do is see what's over the hill, ala the iPhone. This is why I think WinMo7 will be a very solid OS as they have competitors to target, but I'm not sure they know what's after that.

First of all, what Schmidt says isn't wrong. If you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, it may be because you value your privacy, but it may also be because it's wrong, and you know it's wrong

The problem is that is not what Schmidt said. But regardless who is he to judge the morality of my searches/email? He should have said, "if you don't want anyone to know what you're doing, then don't use Google as we can not guarantee privacy. Period." He can make a statement that captures their lack of willingness to anonymize data without casting moral judgment on the desire of users to do so.
But for some reason Google has decided that their lack of willingness to anonymize data effectively puts your searches/data in the public sphere. And he is attempting to justify it by saying that this is OK, because only "evil" people would care that their data is public.
The other point to note is that Google gives you no option to anonymize your searches. It's actually relatively straightforward to give users the ability to opt-in for this. The technology to do so is there, but they essentially require you to use a 3rd party service to do this. Of course anonymizing email is harder, but they could encrypt the emails and require the client decrypt it (this way all their servers have is a blob with a public key). Admittedly, no one else does this either for email. But it is disappointing that Google has taken arguably the most "evil" route (moral judgment and justification) for a company that is supposed to do none of it (evil).

Much to my wife's chagrin, I actually enjoy watching commercials. Not all or even most commercials, but I like to do 30s skip to see which commercials look interesting, then I'll rewind and watch them.

When I'm online I'm just not that interested in going to a website to watch movie trailers, but if one happens to be on while I'm 30s skipping, I'm a lot more inclind to watch. My web-mode is very reading centric with lots of clicking. My TV mode is very much a passive observer.

Your grasp of history seems wrong on several counts. Not sure if its intentional or simple ignorance. In any case... In reality they should have gone through the JCP, which was and is the Java standards body.

"In reality" the JCP didn't exist at the time. In any case McNealy would have been a jerk, like he was the whole process. While I'm sure he would have helped out IBM or DEC, he would do anything in his power to hurt MS.

Many companies besides Sun were definining extensions to the Java language and VM using that process just fine, which results in the Java you see today.

At the time many companies were not doing this. That didn't happen until post-1998. And yes, the result is the Java you see today -- clearly the process does not work.

They had a decent OS that a lot of users really loved. Then - nothing happened. All we know is that a company with a popular platform and a lot of very smart developers was taken out of the game, so we can't say what might have been from them.

You do realize that they apparently went to work on Pink. Admittedly Pink doesn't look so hot,but I seriously doubt they paid $500m and put them on a project so the project could suck. I think it was a bad move to buy Danger, but I really don't think that anyting in the world would be different today had they not purchased Danger. If anything most of the top talent from Danger had already left before the acquisition by MS (as many had gone to Android)..

Having the ability to publish is NOTHING like being forced to, regularly. They have they freedom to do anything, and so like a guy laid off with a bunch of videogames - nothing happens, they just play and the world is not made better as a result.

So let me get this straight. The fact that MS is the most prolific computer science research institution in the world, and publishes at conferences and journals for all to read is a bad thing. They should not have that freedom, but rather should be forced to work on Outlook? And I guess MIT and Caltech are bad for letting researchers study basic science, and not figuring out how to make Burger King fries taste like McDonald fries? That's one of the oddest complaints I've heard of MS. They give their researchers too much freedom, so much so that they're ridiculously productive, but we still hate them because they don't write code for Word?

The HD-DVD war was totally lost from day 1 with Blu-Ray having Disney and Fox and Sony totally on it's side.

Your history of this is all screwed up. From Wikipedia: "Studio alliances shifted over time. Before October 2005 and the release of either format, each had the exclusive support of three of the Big Six. HD DVD had Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros Pictures, while Blu-ray Disc started out with Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, and 20th Century Fox.". Readers should go to Wikipedia to read the history. You'll learn a few things: (1) HD-DVD was in the running until WB went to Blu-Ray exclusive and (2) it was hardly MS that was keeping HD-DVD in the game. In fact if the studios got their act together and all picked one format, it wouldn't matter who MS or Sony supported. But again, to a MS hater you have to believe that MS killed JFK, regardless of the evidence. Lastly, Blu-Ray sucks. I still know several people who are p.o.'ed for having effectively been scammed by Blu-Ray's early version devices that don't play any modern disks. BD Plus is why Fox stuck with it. But the reason WB sent there is, it's where the installed player base was. You can't sell movies in a format no-one has players for

True for Fox. They liked the DRM of BD+. For WB, they've never stated their motivation. Given that Blu-Ray did have a larger installed base, this is possible. Although most of the installed base was tied to a game console.

How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft? How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with .Net?

They tried that. It's called getting sued by Sun for trying to actually exploit features on your operating system. If you look at how much MS has been able to do with .NET vs the drip-like speed that Java moves, I'm glad MS didn't stick with Sun and Java. C# is probably the most impressive mainstream language in existence. How much better would cellphones be if Microsoft had not bought, and slowly strangled, Danger?

Danger... really? They bought them like 2 years ago. What exactly do you think Danger had planned to do in this past two years that would have revolutionized the cellphone industry? How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?

Can you give me one example of this? Most of the people doing R&D are researchers. Microsoft researchers have free reign to publish whatever they like, and they do. Product developers almost never go to MS R&D -- at least no experts that I can think of. Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?

Your history on this is screwed up. If you recall HD-DVD was doing quite well until WB announced right before CES (or maybe during) that they were going to support Blu-Ray. If WB tips their hat to HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray then Blu-Ray is in its last throes. And again, to blame Microsoft is absurd considering you also had folks like Toshiba, Intel, and HP supported HD-DVD.

The funny thing is that part of the reason the studios went with Blu-Ray is because it has much tighter DRM. Yet most people here would complain about MS's DRM positions.

If you're going to knock MS, at least pick things that really would have made a difference.

They probably have their own USB driver to prevent the Pre from syncing with it :-)

It's not that suspicious. It asked me to uninstall SQL Server 2008 and MagicDisc. I uninstalled Magic Disk, but SQL Server I decided to roll the dice on, because it is a pain getting it set back up the way I like it on my dev box. A month or so later, no problems (I'm on MSDN).

Partially wrong. The portion covered by ECMA is generally safe. The Fx built on top of that could be threatened by patents, but to be honest MS is far LESS likely to go after Mono than after some other competing technology. MS has tons of patents and can just as easily go after Linux or KDE or even gcc. And frankly they have a lot more incentive to attack those other technologies.

I suspect the reason why MS doesn't extend their promise of patent safety to all of the Fx... is not because of Mono. I suspect they have no intention of ever suing Mono. It's for Java. They want to make sure that IBM doesn't implement the Fx on a Java runtime. And to be honest it makes sense. If I were Miguel I'd have not a worried cell in me.

Being a principled man and a good one aren't the same thing (not that RMS is necessarily bad). With that said, I tend to disagree with RMS on most things. It is true that I'll know where he stands -- on the opposite side of me.

My issue is that fundamentally I disagree with him on freedom. To me freedom is the ability to release software w/o code being available (although I do think we should be allowed to reverse engineer the software for personal use). Just like I can sell you a dish without the recipe. My difference is I support GPL, but I also support commercial proprietary software. I support their right to make it and my right to use it. Stallman basically believes that we should deny one group freedom, because he believes they infringe on anothers group freedom. But I disagree in that I believe that while this first group may reduce total freedom from other groups, the other groups must knowing elect to be a part of it. At the end of the day my right to limit "my own" freedom in some space has greater total freedom than Stallman's approach (and in fact I'd argue that if I can't voluntarily limit my freedom, I have no freedom). Again, Stallman's approach is that he will dicatate to you where you will have limited freedom.

The issue of credibility is a different one. I can read your philosophy and debate that w/o knowing if you're credible or not. Maybe he's great at making predictions (less good on predicting how the HURD kernel would play out), not sure how that's relevant unless you think he's like a TV oracle of sorts.

That's only one particular type of particle. But as you note, the computer (which you argue is rightfully patentable) is not made of only electrons. Nevertheless it is made up of various subatomic particles. To construct this computer is just a series of instructions in how to order these subatomic particles. Today those instructions are patentable. The actual material that constitutes the computer is in fact not patentable (it's an instance of the application of instructions, i.e., the application of a patent). That is the computer is just a program manifest of bits that aren't an interpretation of electrons, but nevertheless just the result of instructions. These instructions are really no different than the instructions that create any other program, except the constituent parts of the instructions.

There's really no difference between software patents and other non-design patents. They are all effectively declarative and/or algorithmic descriptions of an idea. The only real difference with software patents is that there is usually no physical capital required to produce, reproduce, or copy it. But the degree of non-obviousness and utility may be no less than a new fuel technology. Furthermore, one can argue that all matter is simply a program of atomic and subatomic particles. It's just that particles are a scarcer resource than bits, and less malleable. But once we have the technology to manipulate these particles as bits, the world is just a big program. I say we should be consistent. Either software is patentable, or just abolish patents altogether.

Actually it's also quality. There's pretty good research that shows that for underprivilege children they give back a significant portion of their educational gains in the summer. For middle/upper class kids the summers don't cost them much. In terms of educational benefit during the school year, both groups grow equally. There's also research that shows a correlation with number of days in school and educational gains. At the end of the day it's pretty clear that for poorer children this would be very beneficial. If your parents are professors and neurosurgeons it's probably a net loss for you. Less vacation time, and more competition.

We used to do the same thing at my job, until someone quoted the employee guide to point out that using someone elses computer without permission was against company policy and potentially a firing offense. That ended that.

While I appreciate your argument I think its harder than you may believe. Attempting to explain away pseudoscience is difficult, because you must give air time to the pushers of pseudoscience. And as you note, many (most?) scientists are horrible at explaining their ideas, pseudoscientists are often quite good. And one of the reasons why they're quite good is they latch on to common fallacies that non-scientists have.

Try it. Take a patently false position, but base it on something that might resonate with people. Here's an example... global warming. I bet you could convince most people that a possible explanation of global warming has to do with changes in our distance to the sun based on the gravitational pull of Jupiter. I know... I've done it.

Another example is autism and MMR vaccination. The arguments for it sound pretty good, especially to those that have children with autism. The problem with the argument against it is that it is simply that, an argument against the vaccination theory. The next question you get is, "So if it's not that then what is it...". Of course the anwer is that we don't fully know yet. To many people this hole effects the credibility of your original refutation.

I just say this to say that the road is tricky, and giving air time to people who push pseudoscience I think can (and usually will) do more harm than good, given the state of the world today.

That's absurd. The main knock against MS has historically been that they undercut the prices of their competitors. Even their Office suite originally was cheaper than WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Pretty much the only products that are cheaper than Microsoft products are the free (as in beer) open source products. But if you look in areas where there are commercial products, Microsoft is competitive with the top competitors. Look at database pricing (SQL Server vs DB2 vs Oracle), or compilers (Intel C vs Visual C++), or servers (Windows Server vs Solaris/AIX historically), etc... Of course now companies like IBM have given up selling a lot of software and want to make money by selling you a lifelong team of consultants.