Criticism of Microsoft – Wikipedia.Microsoft Visio Professional Free Download

Criticism of Microsoft has followed various aspects of its products and business practices. Issues with ease of use , robustness , and security of the company’s software are common targets for critics. In the s, a number of malware mishaps targeted security flaws in Windows and other products. Microsoft was also accused of locking vendors and consumers in to their products, and of not following or complying with existing standards in its software.

The company has been the subject of numerous lawsuits , brought by several governments and by other companies, for unlawful monopolistic practices. Commission case, and it received an million euro fine. On September 14, , Microsoft’s flagship store was shut down by protestors as part of a direct action organized by Close the Camps NYC.

From its inception, Microsoft defined itself as a platform company and understood the importance of attracting third-party programmers.

It did so by providing development tools, training, access to proprietary APIs in early versions, and partner programs. Although the resulting ubiquity of Microsoft software allows a user to benefit from network effects , critics and even Microsoft itself decry what they consider to be an ” embrace, extend and extinguish ” strategy of adding proprietary features to open standards or their software implementations, thereby using its market dominance to gain unofficial ownership of standards “extended” in this way.

Microsoft software is also presented as a “safe” choice for IT managers purchasing software systems. The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most independent software vendors would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO total cost of ownership , our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties [ In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago.

Concerns were raised that this requirement would hinder the use of alternate operating systems such as Linux. In a post discussing secure boot on the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft developer Tony Mangefeste indicated that vendors would provide means to customize secure boot, stating that “At the end of the day, the customer is in control of their PC. Microsoft’s philosophy is to provide customers with the best experience first, and allow them to make decisions themselves.

Gates’ letter provoked many responses, with some hobbyists objecting to the broad accusation, and others supporting the principle of compensation. The Halloween documents , internal Microsoft memos which were leaked to the open source community beginning in , indicate that some Microsoft employees perceive “open source” software — in particular, Linux — as a growing long-term threat to Microsoft’s position in the software industry.

Another concern of critics is that Microsoft may be using the distribution of shared source software to harvest names of developers who have been exposed to Microsoft code, as some believe that these developers could someday be the target of lawsuits if they were ever to participate in the development of competing products. This issue is addressed in published papers from several organizations including the American Bar Association and the Open Source Initiative.

Starting in the s, Microsoft was accused of maintaining “hidden” or “secret” APIs: interfaces to its operating system software that it deliberately keeps undocumented to gain a competitive advantage in its application software products. On October 10, , Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network community despite holding more than 60, patents. On July 6, , Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA and ECMA specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of.

NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project.

The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the. NET and Windows Forms see non-standardized namespaces , i. These technologies are today [ when? In June the Ubuntu Technical Board stated that it saw “no reason to exclude Mono or applications based upon it from the archive, or from the default installation set. Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields has stated, “We do have some serious concerns about Mono and we’ll continue to look at it with our legal counsel to see what if any steps are needed on our part”, yet “We haven’t come to a legal conclusion that is pat enough for us to make the decision to take mono out”.

In November at an Ubuntu Developer Summit , developers voted to have the Mono-based Banshee media player removed from Ubuntu’s default installation beginning on Ubuntu Mono developer Joseph Michael Shields defended the performance of Banshee on ARM, and also the claims that Banshee was not well-maintained as being a “directed personal insult” to one of its major contributors.

Microsoft ignored unauthorized copying of its own software for their benefit on the long term. While talking about users in China who don’t pay for the software they use in , to an audience at the University of Washington, Bill Gates said “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

The practice allowed Microsoft to gain some dominance over the Chinese market and only then taking measures against unauthorized copies. In , by means of the Windows update mechanism, a verification program called ” Windows Genuine Advantage ” WGA was downloaded and installed. This behavior angered users and generated complaints in China with a lawyer stating that “Microsoft uses its monopoly to bundle its updates with the validation programs and forces its users to verify the genuineness of their software”.

A common complaint [50] comes from those who want to purchase a computer that usually comes preinstalled with Windows without a copy of Windows pre-installed and without paying extra for the license either so that another operating system can be used or because a license was already acquired elsewhere, such as through the MSDN Academic Alliance program.

While it is possible to obtain a computer with no or free operating systems, [56] virtually all large computer vendors continue to bundle Microsoft Windows with the majority of the personal computers in their ranges.

The claimed increase in the price of a computer resulting from the inclusion of a Windows license has been called the “Windows tax” or “Microsoft tax” by opposing computer users. In , all major OEMs agreed to this restriction. Microsoft does not provide refunds for Windows licenses sold through an OEM, including licenses that come with the purchase of a computer or are pre-installed on a computer.

According to Microsoft’s End User License Agreement for Windows 7 the ability to receive a refund for the operating system is determined by the hardware manufacturer: [61]. By using the software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the software. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine its return policy.

You must comply with that policy, which might limit your rights or require you to return the entire system on which the software is installed. Acer Inc. Instead, contact the manufacturer or installer to determine their return policy for a refund or credit. Based on the updated language, vendors refused to issue partial refunds for Windows licenses, requiring that the computer be returned altogether.

In some countries, this practice has been ruled a violation of consumer protection law. Microsoft’s market dominance and business practices have attracted widespread resentment, which is not necessarily restricted to the company’s competitors. In a publication, Dan Geer argued the prevalence of Microsoft products has resulted in a monoculture which is dangerously easy for viruses to exploit. Microsoft has been criticized for the use of permatemp employees employees employed for years as “temporary,” and therefore without medical benefits , use of forced retention tactics, where departing employees would be sued to prevent departure, as well as more traditional cost-saving measures, ranging from cutting medical benefits to not providing towels in company locker rooms.

Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company.

The company is often referred to as a “Velvet Sweatshop”, a term which originated in a Seattle Times article, [71] and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft’s own employees. For example, the kitchenettes have free beverages and many buildings include exercise rooms and showers. However, the company has been accused of attempting to keep employees at the company for unreasonably long hours and working them too much.

A US state lawsuit was brought against Microsoft in representing 8, current and former employees that had been classified as “temporary” and “freelance”, and became known as Vizcaino v.

The Final Settlement [73] came in The case was decided on the IRS-defined basis that such “permatemps” had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms. A side effect of the “permatemp” lawsuit is that now contract employees are prevented from participating in team morale events and other activities that could be construed as making them “employees”. They are also limited to month contracts and must leave after that time for 6 months before returning under contract.

Microsoft is the largest American corporate user of H-1B guest worker visas and has joined other large technology companies like Google in recently lobbying for looser H-1B visa restrictions.

Jesse Jackson believes Microsoft should hire more minorities and women. Jackson has urged other companies to diversify their workforce. He believes that Microsoft made some progress when it appointed two women to its board of directors in During the antitrust case United States v. Microsoft , ATL sent a poll to 19 state attorneys general purporting to show that “the public believes state AGs should devote their energy to causes other than Microsoft”.

In June , the AdTI published a report, quickly pulled under the argument that it was a draft version, which contained criticism of the copyleft model and the GNU General Public License. A May press release for the report stated that it would contain arguments suggesting that governments could be threatened by hackers and terrorists who could study potential vulnerabilities due to source availability if it used open source software.

However, the draft contained no references to these topics. The advert featured a newborn baby being launched out of its mother—aging as it flies through the air, and crashing into a gravestone.

It contained the tagline “Life is short, play more. The comparison included the cost of hardware, and put Linux at a disadvantage by installing it on more expensive but poorer-performing hardware compared to that used for Windows. Microsoft spokesperson Catherine Brooker expressed the belief that the article had been “heavily written” by IBM employees who supported the rival OpenDocument format, though she provided no specific evidence.

Internet entrepreneur and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales described Microsoft’s offer as unethical. In , it was found that a photo on the Polish version of Microsoft’s business productivity website—which depicted three people of various races during an office meeting—had been edited to replace the head of an African-American man with that of a Caucasian , whilst also failing to edit the person’s hand to match the different skin color.

Microsoft apologized and quickly removed the image. In , Moneylife. Sapkale was accused of breaking his own site’s privacy policy by posting the IP and email addresses of the commenters, while the commenting duo’s failure to declare any interest looked, at best, like astroturfing. In details on a partnership between Machinima. This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for ‘Microsoft Round Island One’, a subsidiary that collects licence fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide.

Dame Margaret Hodge , a Labour MP in the UK said, “It is unsurprising — yet still shocking — that massively wealthy global corporations openly, unashamedly and blatantly refuse to pay tax on the profits they make in the countries where they undertake business”. John C. Dvorak said that in the s, Microsoft classified journalists as “Okay”, “Sketchy”, or “Needs work” and targeted “Needs work” journalists in an attempt to have them terminated.

Dvorak said that he was denied information about Windows because he was on a blacklist. Microsoft along with Google, Yahoo , Cisco , AOL , Skype , and other companies has cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of Internet censorship. On June 4, , the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre , searches for the Tank Man image and videos were censored by Microsoft Bing search engine worldwide.

Hours after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the search returned only pictures of tanks elsewhere in the world. Search engines that license results from Microsoft such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo faced similar issues. Microsoft said the issue was “due to an accidental human error. The director of Human Rights Watch , Kenneth Roth , said he found the idea it was an inadvertent error “hard to believe”. David Greene, Civil Liberties Director at Electronic Frontier Foundation , said that content moderation was impossible to do perfectly and “egregious mistakes are made all the time”, but he further elaborated that “At worst, this was purposeful suppression at the request of a powerful state.

Microsoft was the first company to participate in the PRISM surveillance program , according to leaked NSA documents obtained by The Guardian [] and The Washington Post [] in June , and acknowledged by government officials following the leak. Microsoft has denied [] participation in such a program. In a statement, Microsoft said that they “provide customer data only in response to legal processes.

Microsoft visio professional 2016 uk free.Criticism of Microsoft

It is used to develop computer programs , as well as websites , web apps , web services and mobile apps. It can produce both native code and managed code. Visual Studio includes a code editor supporting IntelliSense the code completion component as well as code refactoring. The integrated debugger works both as a source-level debugger and a machine-level debugger.

Other built-in tools include a code profiler , designer for building GUI applications, web designer , class designer, and database schema designer. It accepts plug-ins that expand the functionality at almost every level—including adding support for source control systems like Subversion and Git and adding new toolsets like editors and visual designers for domain-specific languages or toolsets for other aspects of the software development lifecycle like the Azure DevOps client: Team Explorer.

Visual Studio supports 36 different programming languages and allows the code editor and debugger to support to varying degrees nearly any programming language, provided a language-specific service exists. Support for other languages such as Python , [9] Ruby , Node. Java and J were supported in the past. The most basic edition of Visual Studio, the Community edition, is available free of charge.

As of 8 November [update] the current production-ready Visual Studio version is , with older versions such as and on Extended Support, and and on Mainstream Support. Visual Studio does not support any programming language, solution or tool intrinsically; instead, it allows the plugging of functionality coded as a VSPackage. When installed, the functionality is available as a Service.

In addition, the IDE is also responsible for coordinating and enabling communication between services. A language service defines various interfaces which the VSPackage implementation can implement to add support for various functionalities. Language services are implemented on a per-language basis. The implementations can reuse code from the parser or the compiler for the language. Visual Studio does not include any source control support built in but it defines two alternative ways for source control systems to integrate with the IDE.

Visual Studio. Visual Studio supports running multiple instances of the environment each with its own set of VSPackages. The instances use different registry hives see MSDN ‘s definition of the term “registry hive ” in the sense used here to store their configuration state and are differentiated by their AppId Application ID.

The instances are launched by an AppId-specific. The various product editions of Visual Studio are created using the different AppIds. Consequently, one can install the Express editions side-by-side with other editions, unlike the other editions which update the same installation.

The professional edition includes a superset of the VSPackages in the standard edition, and the team suite includes a superset of the VSPackages in both other editions.

Visual Studio like any other IDE includes a code editor that supports syntax highlighting and code completion using IntelliSense for variables , functions , methods , loops , and LINQ queries. In Visual Studio onwards, it can be made temporarily semi-transparent to see the code obstructed by it. The Visual Studio Code Editor also supports setting bookmarks in code for quick navigation. Other navigational aids include collapsing code blocks and incremental search , in addition to normal text search and regex search.

A management tool for code snippets is built in as well. These tools are surfaced as floating windows which can be set to automatically hide when unused or docked to the side of the screen. The Visual Studio code editor also supports code refactoring including parameter reordering, variable and method renaming, interface extraction, and encapsulation of class members inside properties, among others.

Visual Studio includes a debugger that works both as a source-level debugger and as a machine-level debugger. It works with both managed code as well as native code and can be used for debugging applications written in any language supported by Visual Studio. In addition, it can also attach to running processes, monitor, and debug those processes.

If source code is not available, it can show the disassembly. The Visual Studio debugger can also create memory dumps as well as load them later for debugging. The debugger can be configured to be launched when an application running outside the Visual Studio environment crashes. The Visual Studio Debugger allows setting breakpoints which allow execution to be stopped temporarily at a certain position and watches which monitor the values of variables as the execution progresses.

Code can be stepped over , i. When debugging, if the mouse pointer hovers over any variable, its current value is displayed in a tooltip “data tooltips” , where it can also be modified if desired. During coding, the Visual Studio debugger lets certain functions be invoked manually from the Immediate tool window. The parameters to the method are supplied at the Immediate window.

Visual Studio includes a host of visual designers to aid in the development of applications. These tools include:. Visual Studio allows developers to write extensions for Visual Studio to extend its capabilities.

These extensions “plug into” Visual Studio and extend its functionality. Extensions come in the form of macros , add-ins , and packages. Macros represent repeatable tasks and actions that developers can record programmatically for saving, replaying, and distributing.

Macros, however, cannot implement new commands or create tool windows. They are written using Visual Basic and are not compiled. Add-Ins can be used to implement new functionality and can add new tool windows. They can create designers and other tools, as well as integrate other programming languages. However, the managed API isn’t as comprehensive as the unmanaged one. Express Editions do not support hosting extensions.

On top of that, other packages can be added to customize the installation. The Isolated mode of the shell creates a new AppId where the packages are installed. These are to be started with a different executable. It is aimed for development of custom development environments, either for a specific language or a specific scenario.

It serves as the central location for posting information about extensions to Visual Studio. Community developers as well as commercial developers can upload information about their extensions to Visual Studio. NET through Visual Studio Users of the site can rate and review the extensions to help assess the quality of extensions being posted. An extension is stored in a VSIX file. One of the main advantages of these extensions is that they do not require Administrator rights to be installed.

RSS feeds to notify users on updates to the site and tagging features are also planned. The Community edition was announced on November 12, , as a new free version, with similar functionality to Visual Studio Professional.

Prior to this date, the only free editions of Visual Studio were the feature-limited Express variants. Unlike the Express variants, Visual Studio Community supports multiple languages, and provides support for extensions. Individual developers have no restrictions on their use of the Community edition. The following uses also allow unlimited usage: contributing to Open Source projects, academic research, in a classroom learning environment and for developing and testing device drivers for the Windows operating system.

All other use by an organization depends on whether you are classified as an Enterprise more than employees or more than 1 million USD in annual revenue, per Microsoft.

As of Visual Studio , the Professional edition is the entry level commercial edition of Visual Studio. Previously, a more feature restricted Standard edition was available. Windows Mobile development support was included in Visual Studio Standard, however, with Visual Studio , it is only available in Professional and higher editions.

Windows Phone 7 development support was added to all editions in Visual Studio Development for Windows Mobile is no longer supported in Visual Studio It is superseded by Windows Phone 7.

In addition to the features provided by the Professional edition, the Enterprise edition provides a new set of software development, database development, collaboration, metrics, architecture, testing and reporting tools. The first version of Visual Studio was Visual Studio Microsoft first released Visual Studio codenamed Boston , [] for the city of the same name , thus beginning the VS codenames related to places [] in , bundling many of its programming tools together for the first time.

Visual Studio 97 was an attempt at using the same development environment for multiple languages. The next version, version 6.

The v6 edition of Microsoft was the core environment for the next four releases to provide programmers with an integrated look-alike platform.

This led Microsoft to transition the development on the platform independent. NET Framework. Visual Studio 6. Microsoft released Visual Studio. NET VS. The biggest change was the introduction of a managed code development environment using the. Programs developed using. When a CIL application executes, it is compiled while being executed into the appropriate machine language for the platform it is being executed on, thereby making code portable across several platforms.

Programs compiled into CIL can be executed only on platforms which have an implementation of Common Language Infrastructure. Microsoft introduced C C-sharp , a new programming language, that targets. Visual J programs use Java’s language-syntax. Visual Basic changed drastically to fit the new framework, and the new version was called Visual Basic. NET and Web Services and, with an add-in, portable devices using the. NET Compact Framework. The internal version number of Visual Studio.

Microsoft visio professional 2016 uk free. Compare Visio options

 
 
Templates come with stencils /16316.txt are full of the shapes needed to create a particular kind of drawing. Tip: A great way to find out what a shape can do is to right-click it to see if there visil any special commands on its shortcut menu. Submit feedback. You can check what version you have. Make Money with Us.