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College Students Are Buying More, Warez-ing Less
Keefesis writes: "This story from a researcher at the University of Florida states that software piracy among college students dropped between the 1996-97 school year and the 2000-01 school year. One reason cited is that software makers have found 'creative' ways to entice students to purchase software(rather than the heavy-handed and largely unsuccessful tactics of the RIAA)."
Does this report take into account the use of free software among students? Maybe students don't need to pirate XP/Office/Photoshop/etc. because they're using Linux/StarOffice/Gimp/etc.
This just proves that piracy is GOOD for consumers.
Piracy is really just another form of competition -- whine about it being "unfair" or not. Piracy offers the base product at no price.
Thus, producers are forced to lower their prices in order to compete and offer other benefits or increase the value of other benefits already offered (such as making customer support better). Those producers that arrogantly think the approach to piracy si to raise the price of products eventually find out that such only pushes more people to piracy.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Which of our favorite monopolies do you think will use this study to say that bundling provides customer benefit?
Am I off my rocker? Is there another way to interpret this that doesn't say that bundling provides customer benefit? Is this an endorsement of Microsoft's biz practices?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
> (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)
SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, which also includes a mobile version and also caters for disabled users and non standard display devices.
There are tools to author it such as Jasc WebDraw, and it can be displayed on a significant proportion of browsers (IE is the only browser I know supports it, Mozilla probably does too).
I can't actually think of a single person I know who has a legal copy of anything above windows 95.
What MS realizes is that they are running out of "new releases" of Windows. This is why most official licenses come phsyically affixed to the PC in question. Since you can't get the license off of the PC (they are designed to destroy themselves if removed), you can't transfer the license. This should be illegal! Once the license has been purchased, there is no reason that it can't be used on new PCs. This frightens MS since it would effectively eliminate the need to sell an OS, sooner or later. I currently see no need to move from Windows 2k in the next 5-10 years (unless Linux becomes viable for me).
What the DOJ needs to do is require MS to license individuals instead of PCs. If someone has already purchased an XP license, then they should be able to buy a PC without the MS tax and simply register it under their name. The DOJ should also REQUIRE PC vendors to itemize the cost of the operating system on new PC sales. This would cause consumers to become cost-conscious of the MS-tax of which MS has done a good job to hide. Once this happens, Linux becomes more viable and consumers stop throwing away Windows licenses with their old PC.
But who is gonna listen?
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