The Vole sticks the knife in to yet another Halo "partner" ... oh my!

It's hard to believe that any developer making a game based on Halo could be shut down for financial reasons, but that's the fate awaiting Dallas-based Ensemble Studios.

Microsoft, which owns Ensemble, recently told the successful, well-regarded maker of strategy games that it will be shuttered after its newest game, Halo Wars, is finished in a few months.

Bruce Shelley, a high-profile designer at Ensemble, said on his official blog that when Microsoft delivered the bad news earlier this month, "Everyone at our studio was shocked."

First Microsoft mugs Bungie then kicks them out onto the street, and now this.

Maybe it would be a good idea for games devs to simply avoid Halo, since it seems to be as cursed as the infamous Xbox 360 itself, and its equally infamous Xbox Live service.

It hasn't exactly been a great year for the Vole, what with losing 90 Billion Dollars in the first half of the year, then another 24 Billion - in just 2 weeks - recently. Let's not even get started about their 40 Billion dollar stock buyback.

Of course, thanks to Microsoft, it's not exactly a great year for Halo developers either ... nor its fans.

But it may turn out to be the best year ever for those who want to see the end of Microsoft's reign of terror, as they pillaged and plundered their way through the IT industry, with their gangster mentality and racketeering operations. At this rate, the Vole's days of plundering may soon come to an abrupt end, and finally the industry can flourish with competition coexisting in relative harmony and parity, in a Free Market economy, rather than the Vole's current monopoly.

I live in hope.

And it's only the beginning of the second half of 2008!

Another 90 Billion down the pan, and there won't be a Microsoft much longer.

WOOT!

Bloomberg.com: Exclusive

Microsoft, the biggest software maker, has lost about $90 billion in market value this year as Ballmer vacillated on Yahoo and failed to show how he would crack Google Inc.'s dominance of Internet advertising.

Microsoft is quickly shaping up to be the next SCO.

In the wake of the death of Joe Barr, Linux.com's editor, I've been reacquainting myself with his work, and his insights into Microsoft's earlier "dirty tricks". I was vaguely familiar with some of this, but it's worth remembering that Microsoft's racketeering techniques are hardly new ... they've been doing this stuff since day one.

I may end up adding this to the collection at Grokdoc's Dirty Tricks History wiki pages, but for now - here's a sample:

For those who think that the "binary blob" situation is exactly the same with ODF as OOXML, please read the following:

Two people on opposite sides of the world have exactly the same idea at the same time. Which one of those two people would be most morally justified in claiming to own the exclusive rights to that idea?

Should it be the first to dash through the doors of the USPTO office, with a big wad of cash in his hand?

Isn't that just further rewarding someone for already being affluent (or quick, or both), rather than rewarding him for having an original thought?

And how original are anyone's thoughts anyway?

Surely our knowledge is merely the sum of what we have been taught, and not some divine gift handed down from God, entitling the bearer to exclusive privileges. How can anyone claim exclusive rights to that which has been collected from others, such as authors; teachers; parents and peers? Are those contributors not equally entitled to attribution and rights to that knowledge? Are such contributors not also entitled to benefit from those ideas? Given the scope of where one acquires knowledge, shouldn't those beneficiaries encompass all mankind?

This is the essence of Free Software.