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I need claim that MS stole my IP and put it in windows and then spam spam spam asking for my $700. If even a fraction of a fraction of a percent gave me money, i'd me a millionare

Already a work in progress

1. They're looking to go with .Net instead of Unix or another stable, secure system. Insert your own jokes here.

2. They're building a Unionized auto plant. Obviously, this guy has no idea why big automakers have constantly moved their plants from heavily-unionized northern states to right-to-work states in the sun belt. Notice what a great benefit being heavily unionized was for the steel industry...

3. He's starting a new business in California. This is the same California, mind you, where Gray Davis and the Democratic Legislature have been making it almost impossible for businesses to operate profitably in. If he was serious about lowering costs, he'd be opening his plant someplace like Nevada or Texas.

Here are few sources to read up on the current California economic crises:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/ 0,15114,465792,00.html

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20030713- 9999_1n13workers.html

http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legislative_issues/fede ral_issues/hot_issues_in_congress/legal_reform/tre vor_law_group.html

http://www.americandaily.com/item/1853

Sorry, the iPod has already claimed that title

• "The state has lost 289,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001."
  
  
• Davis and the legislature have approved new legislation that will increase some businesses' costs per worker "by $4,000 to $5,000 a year."
  
  
• "The legislature made workers' compensation more expensive by mandating a large increase in benefits. California businesses now contribute the highest premiums by far per $100 of employee wages: $5.85, vs. a national average of about $2.50. Yet instead of cutting costs, as other states have done, the legislature recently raised maximum benefits by 71%, from $490 per week in 2002 to $840 in 2005. Countrywide and Verizon both pay four to five times more in workers' comp per employee in California than in Texas."

Then I shall sue you for not using Linux, because that action damages me in a manner to be specified later.

ANYONE can sue you for ANYTHING. Or, for no reason at all (Yes, I do know about barratry. THat doesn't seem to be a showstopper for baseless litigation, nowadays.). You should never let the possibility that someone might sue you stop you from doing what's right. Stick to worrying about real problems, and don't let a paid shill's imagination lead you astray.

Right now, SCO has sued IBM over a contract dispute. That suggests that you should NOT enter into a contract with SCO. They haven't won that, nor shown any sign that they could win, IF they let it go to court. They've sent out some extortion letters, but again, there is no sign that there is any substance to those letters. Their ``licensing'' scheme is pretty plainly patterned after the false invoice scams: send out thousands of bills for services not rendered, and hope a few suckers pay.

Microsoft has promised to indemnify it customers for this sort of patent/copyright problem, but with their patent problems, that could be an empty promise. We all know about their $50B cash horde, but if Intertrust wins, $50B might not go far enough. It appears that Intertrust will pretty much be able to ask MS for a blank check, and get it, when they win. MS wouldn't have made such a promise unless they figured it wouldn't cost them anything. I'm sure they realized that if they lose this one it's all over anyway, so the indemnification looks like cheap talk to me. So far, it looks as if they can only win by buying the judge, but that won't be as easy as it was when they were up against the DOJ.

The *BDS's claim to be safe, but I seem to remember SCO saying that they weren't immune.

Sun seems to be in the clear this week, but who knows about next week? SCO keeps changing their story, like a four-year-old trying to tell a lie.

When it comes to lawsuits, there is no safe harbor in the US. As you say, even if you're right, it costs too much to defend yourself. No one will ever recover a penny from SCO; they'll be bankrupt when the dust settles, and so will you, if you let them stampede you into doing something stupid like using proprietary software when your competitors are using superior, libre software.

Microsoft has just been successfully sued by InterTrust over patent violations in their line of products. InterTrust claims that 85% of Microsoft's products are involved. Read about it here.

Wish I were as horrible. I'd be richer than Tiger Woods.

Wish I were as horrible. I'd be richer than Tiger Woods.

Yeah. I can only think of 500 or so off the top of my head.

Don't pretend that big company CEOs are compensated grossly beyond their usefulness.

I would be DELIGHTED to take my compensation in stock (in a reputable company), assuming that I was able to run the company as I saw fit. However, if Ken Lay is the one pouring the Kool-Aid (and don't even THINK about pretending he's an aberration), then I'll take my compensation in the form of nice, negotiable dollars.

This sounds a lot like where the article in HBR was heading and the counterpoint in Forbes discussed. This concept, though, is a lot more novel than the approach that HBR took in that the functions of IT are not marginalized but, rather, those working in that field are. As IT systems, computers, the Internet, etc. are looked at more as the tools they are and not the end itself, those working on them will be seperated from those working with them. Just like your mechanic example. Very interesting.

You need to read this Slashdot post which links to this Fortune article. Lemelson has "earned" over $1.5 BILLION in licensing fees for stuff he didn't even really invent.

It would be appealing to view Lemelson as part of the great American tradition of the small inventor battling the rapacious corporation. Certainly there have been plenty of people who have seen him in this light. The distinguished writer Tom Wolfe once hailed him as a "genius" in a laudatory article. Two of the most prestigious institutions in the country, MIT and the Smithsonian, have allied themselves with his name. To many small inventors, Lemelson is a figure of heroic proportions.

Lemelson may well have been a genius: He earned 558 patents (some came after his death), which leaves him four places behind the inventore-di-tutti-inventori, Thomas Edison. But his was a different kind of brilliance altogether. In truth, his most lucrative patents were the product of a masterful exploitation of the patent system, and they created a huge legal web that to this day ensnares corporations. Critics--especially the many businesses he has sued--portray Lemelson as the anti-Edison. They contend that he never invented the key technologies for which he had the patents. Even one of Lemelson's former attorneys, Arthur Lieberman, questions whether Lemelson was an inventor in the layman's sense of the word. Rather, he says, Lemelson would figure out where an industry was headed--and then place a patent claim directly in its path. "In many cases, Lemelson didn't patent inventions," says Lieberman. "He invented patents."

The Lemelson litigation and licensing program--which has been masterminded over the past dozen years by a wily lawyer named Gerald Hosier--is unprecedented in its size and scope, and has become the leading edge in a wave of patent litigation. Even as personal-injury and product-liability suits--the bane of most large corporations--have been declining, federal patent lawsuit filings have increased 60% since 1993.

***

Lemelson would grind down the examiners by submitting "jumbo" applications that stretched to more than 100 pages. "There's no way that you could read an entire application in the case of the jumbo applications," says Miller. Not only were they huge, they could be incredibly vague; some patent examiners began referring to Lemelson as "Black Box Jerry" because of his tendency to offer sweeping notions with very little technical detail.

And then there were the delays. Until that 1995 law changed the rules, a newly issued patent had a 17-year life span--during which time nobody was supposed to be able to use the idea without paying for it. But a patent application could be delayed through something called a "continuation." During that process, applicants were permitted to amend, modify, or add claims to their inventions. As long as the inventor could persuade an examiner that the new claims were consistent with the original specifications, he could even go so far as to incorporate somebody else's technology into his own patent application.

Nobody ever sought continuations the way Lemelson did. Some of his applications had a half-dozen continuations, each of which could add years to the process. Sometimes Lemelson would be informed that one of his patents was about to be issued--and respond by filing a continuation, inexplicably creating another delay.

But as any savvy patent practitioner knows, his action wasn't inexplicable at all. Consider: Lemelson first submitted some of his key technological patent applications in the mid-1950s. But thanks to all the delays--delays often triggered by Lemelson's continuations--many of them weren't issued until the '80s and '90s. By then, though, Lemelson had amended them to include real products that had come on the market--which he could claim to have invented because he had applied for the patent back in the '50s! And because the patent only took effect when it was i

The problem with that solution is that you are merely shifting the polution.

How is this a problem? I read an interview recently (regected by slashdot editors) with Ballard describing this. You can centralize the pollution, allowing easier regulation. In fact, once this happens, you can concentrate on something like nuclear power. You wouldn't want a nuclear powered car, would you?

It is really interesting to me that neither the Sony product page nor the CNet article mention these device's power requirements or how long you can expect to use them before needing to recharge. When PDAs first hit the market, one of the selling points was how long you could go without changing the batteries. Then they became rechargeable, and for a little while the time between charges got some mention. Now, at least for these PDAs, it isn't mentioned at all.

What brought me in mind of this was a Steward Alsop article in Fortune magazine in which he notes that one of the hurdles to becoming truly wireless is the development of better mobile power sources. He neglects to mention the movement towards more efficient devices that is converging with efforts to find better power sources, but still he has a point.

Wal-Mart in 2003 is, in short, a lot like America in 2003: a sole superpower with a down-home twang. As with Uncle Sam, everyone's position in the world will largely be defined in relation to Mr. Sam. Is your company a "strategic competitor" like China or a "partner" like Britain? Is it a client state like Israel or a supplier to the opposition like Yemen? Is it France, benefiting from the superpower's reach while complaining the whole time? Or is it ... well, a Target? You can admire the superpower or resent it or--most likely--both. But you can't ignore it.

Wal-Mart in 2003 is, in short, a lot like America in 2003: a sole superpower with a down-home twang. As with Uncle Sam, everyone's position in the world will largely be defined in relation to Mr. Sam. Is your company a "strategic competitor" like China or a "partner" like Britain? Is it a client state like Israel or a supplier to the opposition like Yemen? Is it France, benefiting from the superpower's reach while complaining the whole time? Or is it ... well, a Target? You can admire the superpower or resent it or--most likely--both. But you can't ignore it.

"Patients with AD had an average daily caffeine intake of 73.9 +/- 97.9 mg during the 20 years that preceded diagnosis of AD, whereas the controls had an average daily caffeine intake of 198.7 +/- 135.7 mg during the corresponding 20 years of their lifetimes"

Have they accounted for the possibility that the heavy caffeine consumption is actually linked to a more mentally active lifestyle? In my experience, people who drink a lot of caffeinated drinks do so because they're doing mentally taxing work - coding, writing essays, studying - and they find the stimulant effects help their concentration. On the other hand, when was the last time you heard of someone brewing a fresh pot of coffee before sitting down to watch Springer or a football game?

I'd guess someone who spends 20 years using their brains in a problem-solving capacity daily - coding, designing bridges, balancing accounts, whatever - will probably drink a lot more coffee than someone who spends 20 years working on checkouts, answering phones or watching TV. There's also evidence suggesting that staying mentally active can have beneficial effects on mental health in later life. Which makes me wonder if caffeine has any specific effect on mental health, or is there just a correlation between caffeine intake, daily mental activity and subsequent mental health?

As long as his broadcasts sell ads, he's happy. "If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company," says Mays, 67. "We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products."

As a rising junior in a technical college, here's what worked for me:

1. Unless the school mandates you bring a computer to campus, you may want to wait a few months before purchasing anything. Many campuses now have very good technology available for campus-wide use (computer clusters, public printers, etc.)... look into what the school offers. This allows the student to get a feel for what sort of technology will be useful. It also helps if the campus is a one-OS campus, so that the student doesn't get stuck with something incompatible.
2. In the same vein as ``Look at what the school offers...'' Be sure to check with the college and see if it has a computer store with technology discounts offered. You can save a bundle here... for example, some schools partner with Microsoft and other software companies to offer products like Microsoft Office for $10 through site licenses for all students. The same may apply to hardware... remember, you have a student in the family now, and plenty of people are willing to give students free stuff (see ``college is expensive'' comment above)!
3. I use a Palm III for all my organizational needs, but whatever works for the student is the best choice. College is a place where one will determine what works best for oneself... if your college-bound youth organizes best using a pencil and some conveniently-placed scraps of notebook paper in all pockets, let them go with it! They should be old enough now to determine what works for them, so if they've had an opportunity to use an electronic organizer before and turned it down, they aren't likely to pick it up now. It's not necessary for college survival; in fact, I've only seen two Palm users trade electronic business cards three times in my two years, and two of them were with me ;)
4. Buy behind the tech curve. College can be expensive, and your student isn't likely to need the absolute top-of-the-line to do book reports or surf the web. Even if he or she is majoring in a technical field, the software and hardware used is likely to be provided by the campus if it's required for courses, so the only major advantage gained would probably be the ability to work in the privacy of their own dorm room. On the other hand, more modern technology means the computer can run the latest games, which could lead to more slacking off. Personally, I feel I've saved myself a lot of time by never having a computer capable of running the latest and greatest in time-wasting technology, but your milage may vary. My advice is to stay away from the most powerful machine, and use the money to invest in extra memory or a better warranty.
5. Laptops are more fun than desktops :)

That's my input. Good luck to the college-bound.

Must be a fairly new trend because this site kind of indicates otherwise. view from the other side

Hmmm, Fortune magazine this spring... No Shame

Oink! CEO pay still out of control"

Exactly which Fortune magazine did this pay reduction occur in??????????

Must be a fairly new trend because this site kind of indicates otherwise. view from the other side

Hmmm, Fortune magazine this spring... No Shame

Oink! CEO pay still out of control"

Exactly which Fortune magazine did this pay reduction occur in??????????

Pringles are a product of Proctor & Gamble, currently #31 on the Fortune 500 list--no small potatoes!

You linked to the third page of the article, not the first. This is particularly inconvenient because every page in a Fortune article is self-contained and looks identical to all other pages. I ended up reading the article backwards.

I suggest that the correct way to link to an article like this is to link to page one and note that the relevant info is on page three. Here's the correct link.

Never mind. I *tried* to type this (http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,4508 93,00.html)

For the whole thing, try here

I didn't know iPods came in black.

Well, a black iPod would certainly match the style of Steve Jobs.

--Bud

I'm reading an article in Fortune about the iTunes music store, and it says this regarding profit margins in the recording industry:

the five major record companies have had to slash costs in the face of declining sales. BMG laid off 1,400 people, EMI shed 1,800, and Sony Music recently announced it was reducing headcount by 1,000. Even with those cuts, average profit margins for the five majors have slipped to 5%, compared with 15% to 20% in the late 1980s when the CD came into vogue.

Now, this is only one person's statistic, but maybe they aren't making as much money as we really thought?

According to Fortune: "The iTunes Music Store will initially offer 200,000 tunes, paying the record companies an average of 65 cents for each track it sells."

Apple gets $.99 for singles, but less for albums (I bought a 20 track album fo $9.99)... and I'm sure that they need to pay the credit card companies some percentage, and then pay Akamai for the servers, and Amazon for the one-click patents... so I doubt they make more that 15 cents per song on average... but that's still a good margin... but more like $40,000 than El Reg's $100,000 estimate

• 2 1/2-hour meeting, he chided the commissioners for forcing him to rent his phone network to competitors at cut-rate prices. Their actions were ruining SBC's profits and diminishing its ability to compete, he said. In his trademark unhurried Texas cadence--and with his trademark directness--Whitacre explained that their actions would come back to haunt them. Keep the rates low, he warned testily, and SBC would be forced to start firing its Michigan employees. Within several quarters, the telco might even be bankrupt.
• one-man crusade to repeal federal rules that require SBC to resell its network at deep discounts. He decried the regulations in speeches to investors and trade groups. He sat with federal policymakers, members of Congress, and newspaper editorial boards. In each meeting he trotted out the same stats: SBC was losing over 12,000 customers a day, revenue had dropped more than $1 billion in the first half of 2002, and the company was cutting jobs--20,000 of them in 2002.
• "The FCC ruling sends a terrible message to businesses across every sector. It simply isn't fair," he says. "But they'll say I'm whining."

Jobs, however, isn't targeting just Mac users. He plans to roll out a Windows version of iTunes by the end of the year. (Apple already sells a Windows-compatible version of the iPod, which accounts for about half of all units sold.) It is a dramatic departure for Steve, who has deliberately kept the Mac's best features off the screens of the much larger Microsoft-dominated world.

The iTunes Music Store will initially offer 200,000 tunes, paying the record companies an average of 65 cents for each track it sells

I was checking out the scoop over at Fortune and noticed a picture of a very sexy yet sinister BLACK iPod accompanying the story. Where were these during the announcement? More colours to come perhaps...?

no more restricted than MP3 is
Not true: there's a key built in to the files.. I'd say that's more restricted.

Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online.

Corporations are people and pay taxes just like we do.

Not if they give out enough stock options to employees.

This article looks at it from HP management's point of view.

go here and read about it.

The headline reads: "Iraq's New Chief? Jay Garner could soon be in charge of 23 million Iraqis."

odds are these are much bigger companies than yours

No odds about it:
Amazon - #492
Google - not listed
E*Trade - #686

And the fact that no one's filed suit on it yet doesn't mean it won't (or can't) happen. consider the SCO v. IBM case right now. If SCO were to (improbably) win the suit, how big a leap of logic would it be for them to turn around and demand licensing fees from Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, etc, and/or their customers?

Microsoft has always been one of the Fortune top rated copmanies to work for. Up there with Adobe, WalMart, Wegmans, and Pfizer.
(granted they did have an issue with being sued by the part time people because those people apparently felt that the contract that they agreed to and signed... was unfair - not sure what ever came of that - perhaps with the downturn in the economy those people realized that they were lucky for their jobs and shut the hell up)

I have 10 friends that I went to college with that interviewed with Microsoft, and now 5 of them work there (they all got offers, 3 of them didn't want to move, one of them opted for grad school, and the last thought he had a chance at Apple or something... he didn't last I heard). (I can remember one of the guys wore Tevas, a shirt he had painted in that had holes in it, and ragged cut offs to his Microsoft interview, while some others debated on suits or not - he wanted to make sure that they were only going by his brain... he got the offer... and turned it down to go to grad school)
The guys that work there love it. And in the tech world (I guess only outside of slashdot), seeing that you worked at Microsft actually has some tech cred to it - I know of 3 guys that I went to school with that went on to start their own companies and the MS name on their cv helped get their funding.
I know a guy that works in their computer game department, and I know a guy that works in their XBox game department (I think it is slightly funny that they are even different departments). They each think it is the coolest job on the planet, and I'm not sure I blame them.

I find it really amusing that "everyone" here thinks MS is so evil, when in reality, they are one of the best companies to work for - and perhaps are even doing some things right - as much as it hurts the people here to think.
It is human nature to strive to be at the top, and to some extent, to resent those that sit at the top. Were Apple or Linux to rise up and dethrone the current MS position, the same people here would start griping about the exact same issues that MS is going through because they are side effects of beinga successful company.
and in true slashdot mentality, I'm sure this will get modded troll

But the improved R&D money thing is fine. Sure. But what has gotten the HPs and IBMs? Answer: undercut by Dell.

Just because Dell sells more desktops does not make them a more successful company than HP or IBM.

IBM got out of a low-margin business where it couldn't compete with edge-cutters like Dell. HP's desktop unit became eclipsed because it couldn't compete with the likes of Dell.

BUT, both companies have HUGE other endeavours that a specialist like Dell doesn't. It will be a while before Dell's attempts at diversification push them to HP's level, and they will probably never be able to touch IBM without a core change in corporate strategy.

Last year, IBM was the 9th-highest earning company in the US, with $86 billion in income. All the higher-earners were Energy, Oil, or Automobile companies, except for one bank and Wal-Mart.

HP was 28th, with $45 billion.

Dell was 53rd, with $31 billion.

Here, see for yourself.

IBM's status as the highest-earning tech company in the world is, even today, untouched and probably will be for a while. In huge part, this is IMHO because IBM has better R&D labs, and more R&D expenditure, than any other tech corporation in the world. They discover or invent and patent a huge fraction of the technologies everyone else ends up using a few years down the line.

That is the opposite of price gouging. The were so aggressively low fee/price that they were nearly bankrupted by a minor economic downturn.

• What else? Well, what about Microsoft? Its margins are--can this be right?--44%, and it's sitting on $38 billion in cash. Mr. Sam would not approve. Log on to walmart.com and you'll find $199 computers powered by a fledgling Windows competitor, Lindows.

This is important for open source. Wal-Mart likes generic products and price competition. No one supplier gets 100% of a product category at Wal-Mart. Start thinking "Linux for Joe Sixpack".

I found this article about Wal*Mart to be an interesting read. It offers insight into the pricing game from the "other end".

...but have you never sold or returned a present, to get what you really wanted?

So long as Apple would have otherwise rented a jet and Jobs pays taxes, fine. The airplane was originally reported as compensation (right?). If I were to question anything, it would be giving him the plane in the first place, although execs can negotiate pretty freely (the new post-Enron law did ban the multimillion dollar "loan" trick). Jets are often enough used for abuses on the company's tab -- golf "business" trips and the like -- as a way to provide disguised compensation and evade taxation.

Executive compensation gets pretty unbelievable. On the other hand, and unlike typical executives, without Jobs this mutlibillion dollar company would be dead, close to dead, or bought out. (Remember when Michael Dell said if he owned Apple he'd liquidate it to try to give shareholder something back?) Hmm, maybe not a bad quid pro quo.

Fortune Magazine does a nice business in tallying obscenity, check out year 2000.

...but have you never sold or returned a present, to get what you really wanted?

So long as Apple would have otherwise rented a jet and Jobs pays taxes, fine. The airplane was originally reported as compensation (right?). If I were to question anything, it would be giving him the plane in the first place, although execs can negotiate pretty freely (the new post-Enron law did ban the multimillion dollar "loan" trick). Jets are often enough used for abuses on the company's tab -- golf "business" trips and the like -- as a way to provide disguised compensation and evade taxation.

Executive compensation gets pretty unbelievable. On the other hand, and unlike typical executives, without Jobs this mutlibillion dollar company would be dead, close to dead, or bought out. (Remember when Michael Dell said if he owned Apple he'd liquidate it to try to give shareholder something back?) Hmm, maybe not a bad quid pro quo.

Fortune Magazine does a nice business in tallying obscenity, check out year 2000.

A vote for Steve Jobs is a vote for closed source, proprietary operating systems. Vote Linus Torvalds today!

strange to speak of Pooh and copyright - it's not even, strictly speaking, a Disney invention. he was made by A.A. Milne (after 1920, to boot).

still hasn't stopped Disney from making a hefty profit on it.

Fortune magazine has an article in their most recent issue covering Vincent Shear, InterTrust, and the recent DRM patents lawsuits with Microsoft. I wonder if RealNetworks' DRM suite relies on similar technology...

You go to work and help the parent company, but you don't get any of the benefits, or share in the profit you helped create. Most the the IT labor is now contracted out.

Come work for number 38. We have excellent performance-based benefits that are tied to both our individual and company performance. Its a sliding scale that starts out primarily based on the company's performance and moves towards your individual performance the higher up you go in the organization.