I've been using various flavours of Linux as my primary OS for seven years now, switched from Windows 98SE / Windows 2000 back in the day. Seven years later there's still nothing that compares with Dreamweaver for fast standards-compliant web development and Indesign for printed media.
Now I've got a bit more money and don't want to spend my weekends battling with substandard software to do the bits and pieces of pro bono web and print design I do in my spare time I've convinced my wife to let me buy a Mac Mini and a copy of Adobe Design Premium CS3.
I'll miss Ubuntu but I really need to be able to sit down at my computer and just get the job done. I know there's software that can do the job, but I'm constantly having to work-around the limitations of the software. I'm perfectly capable of hand-editing HTML/CSS but I'd much rather concentrate on the design in Dreamweaver and the tidy up the code by hand at the end if there's anything I'm not happy with.
I had hoped that Linux would have decent commercial software available by now, or that Wine would run 99% of Windows software, but it's just not the case. In the meantime OS X has become a stable, well-supported and above all Unix-based OS that does everything I need without getting in the way. I still love Linux, will probably still run Ubuntu on my laptop (had Vista Ultimate on it for the past 4 months -- aweful, really really aweful...) and have a 3-head MythTV (mythbuntu) setup that keeps me happy. (When I plead for that Mac Pro in a year's time the Mac Mini will make a great MythTV head).
You're quite right, we wouldn't know the difference... until IIS gets hacked and the web server slows to a crawl because it's become a zombie machine for a network of spammers.
One of the reasons IIS has such a reputation for being compromised is that it's so difficult (not impossible) to lock down a Windows machine, particularly so at the dawn of Windows-based internet services when NT4 was the norm. It's not that difficult on the Unix box to use different accounts for different purposes within the server environment, so that e.g. the SQL backend has one account, the web user authentication (which is not the same as a unix account) has another, etc. If something is compromised, the worst that can happen is the hacker gains access to a specific account that may well be running in a chroot jail, and certainly wouldn't have root privileges.
Classically on a Windows box, if you compromise IIS you have root/admin access to the box and can do what you like. That's the point. I'm not saying it's impossible, the GP's point is that the Windows 'heritage' makes it more difficult and unintuitive.
...it managed to host a web server, a DNS server, telnetd, ntpd, postgres, php, AND ssh reliably, 24x7 for MONTHS before I learned enough of what's going on to see that it was actually doing all that... so in other words no-one actually accessed those services, they spent their 7 months in the swapfile:-)
Well... uh... imagine this piece of paper is the universe, and this pencil is a quantum singularity in n-th dimensional space. No, better still, imagaine that this salt cellar is the universe and this napkin is a small black hole - uh, no, that doesn't work... in fact, *thunk*.
And the answer is... no there wasn't a contract. If I did some detective work and found out who pimpin_apollo is, worked out your street address and mailed something to you, would there be a contract? No! These guys are sending take-down notices to Ebay for traders that are selling promo copies on the basis that they are promo copies with no idea of thier provenance. If there had been some sort of record, e.g. numbered copies sent to named individuals with whom an agreement (i.e. contract) had been made then things might be a bit different, but that's apparently not the case here.
Also, you're a little of the mark with the gift/abandonment thing. The GP is saying that that are a gift, but if it is argued that they're not a gift then they are in fact abandoned. I said similar with another comment - if they claim they have not given these items to the recipient and that claim is upheld then they should be charged with fly-tipping/dumping/whatever is the local equivalent because they are sticking object in people's mailboxes without prior consent.
Giving away is essentially the same as selling. If you're sent something unsolicited in the mail, then it has deemed to have been given to you just as if you had bought it in a shop or got it as a gift for your birthday. This neatly avoids some very old scams, such as sending a book or an encyclopedia through the mail and then following it with an invoice.
What's going on here is nothing special to CDs - if you send something through the mail unsolicited then it belongs to the intended recipient, and they have every right to do with it as they please within the confines of applicable law. It would be illegal to make a copy of a copyright work without permission of the copyright owner, but it would not be illegal to sell or give it away, so that's fine.
If you had joined a book club then received a book+invoice, fair enough - or in this case joined a 'promo club' with T&Cs - then there might be extra terms in addition to the law (i.e. you entered into a contract). Otherwise the sender can write whatever they want on the object and it doesn't matter - the recipient never agreed to those terms and doesn't have to abide by them, in which case they can treat the object as they would anything else they happen to own.
Another angle is that UMG put an object into someone's mail box. If they don't want that object to be treated as a gift for the recipient to be done with as they pleased, and if there is no prior agreement for that object to be placed there, they are effectively dumping litter, just as if they had placed an empty coke can in the mail box. I should imagine there's laws on dumping or 'fly tipping' in most states, and UMG must be doing it on a grand scale, so if they win this case they should be prosecuted on those grounds.
Man, how do you have time to do all this? You should write a lifestyle guru book exaplaining how you manage to spend hours writing posts on Slashdot and replying to yourself and still fit in things like eating and washing.
Yup, and in fact the stupid London 2012 olympics logo trailer could trigger epilepsy and had to be removed from the web site. The fact that it is uniquely offensive in its own right without being combined into a mind-wrenching flashing animation makes the whole thing even worse.
"it's also known that there are no configurations that can be solved in 21 moves."
Yup - that's a bizarre thing to say. Surely after the first move in solving a configuration that can be optimally solved in 22 moves you obtain a configuration that can be optimally solved in 21 moves, by definition?
uhhh... no - power steering does transfer vibrations to the driver. There's still a direct connection between the steering wheel and the steering rack, but when the steering wheel is turned the power assist kicks in and helps to turn the drive wheels. If you've ever tried to drive a car when the power assist has broken then you'll find out...
Well, if you're used to evaluating functions in your head, the former style is actually far more readable and quicker to understand than the latter imperative version. It really does depend on what you're used to. Again, I find while(--i) totally intuitive - I can see all the information I need on one line and understand what it means, whereas --i; while (i>=0) could get split across a page and I have to scan across two lines to see what's going on.
The best dialogs in Windows XP are the ones that allocate different meanings to the standard buttons, e.g. 'click YES to save the file in XXX format, click NO to save the file in YYY format, click CANCEL to return to editing'. I think Openoffice.org is guilty of that too.
Why should it matter if prices stay low during an auction if everyone knows that all the real bids are going to come in the last few seconds?
Well, my observation is that buyers are more likely to looks at and watch items that have a low price. If really serious bidders snipe and therefore don't enter high bids early then casual bidders are more likely to 'have a shot' and drive the eventual price up. I'm not trying to 'spin' anything - you have made the presumption that I'm a buyer when in fact I sell loads of stuff via ebay. When I do buy I usually use a snipe tool, and I don't have any problems with my buyers doing the same. My auctions that have sold for less then I expected have invariably had a high-ish bid placed early and little interest after that.
This could be a good idea for high-value items but for cheap items that are put on ebay in their thousands (e.g. iPods) it would force bidders to choose a particular item and chase it, which would ultimately put people off ebay.
Sniping is actually not as much of a problem as it seems - if you don't use a sniping tool and really just put your maximum bid in at any time before auction closes then you haven't lost anything if someone snipes. If you are disappointed that the sniper won then you should have put a higher bid in the first place. The main reason for sniping is actually psychological benefit for the buyer - you choose a bunch of similar products, put them in a bid group with sensible maximum bids, and let the software do the rest. If you don't win any, then have another think and decide whether to pay more.
For the seller, arguably sniping tools actually make their item more attractive - rather than bidding the price up high early on and putting potential buyers off, the item looks cheap for most of the auction time and people put it in their favourites and make small bids. If it's a decent item the price rises dramatically in the last few minutes and sells at a decent rate.
It seems to me that once you have HIV then rich or poor this doesn't help you much, it's more of a help your community. So the incentives for treatment are a bit unusual. If there was ever a case for government funding of a drug, it's here, ie in the absence of any real personal benefit for the individual who would otherwise be asked to pay.
Uhhhh... I think you've misunderstood the point of antiretrovirals. They very much help the individual. AIDS kills because your immune system is knocked out, and sufferers eventually die of one of a number of fairly nasty illnessess that are very rarely contracted by non-AIDS sufferers. No-one dies of HIV. Taking antiretrovirals will do two things: lower the person's viral load (i.e. how much of the virus they have in their serum) and raise their T-cell count, which is a measure of immune system function. Although people tend to feel more unwell for the first few weeks of ARV treatment, after that they generally feel much better than they did before, and thier quality and length of life improves dramatically.
As for the point of this article, it's actually a bit obvious and not all that exciting. One of the measures of 'successful' ARV treatment is lowering of viral load. It's common sense that someone with less virus in their serum would be less infective. This has already been demonstrated by giving ARVs to HIV infected pregnant ladies - it is known to lower vertical (mother-baby) transmission. What this study does is give robust empirical evidence of what was already theoretically and anecdotally known. It's a bit like saying (here comes the car analogy) 'a car that uses less gas will go for more miles on a full tank' - fairly obvious, but there is some value in proving it empirically in case something has been missed.
Not at all. Like I said, until you've tried it, it's difficult to appreciate just how hard it is to manipulate two or three small objects inside a 3D space with only a 2D view. It's a bit like the first time you try to do something familiar in a mirror, or tie someone else's bow-tie - you know what your fingers should be doing, but the mental translation required to get it right is surprisingly difficult. I've seen very experienced surgeons with an excellent scope get a stitch lined up perfectly, all looking good, then pull the trigger and it becomes obvious that they weren't actually in the right place at all.
All cables have a resistance, which can be quoted as ohms per metre. So a cable that works fine for a 3m distance may well drop the voltage significantly over a 20-30m run. Thick conductors of the same material have a lower resistance per metre, so in general it's better to use the thickest cable you can for runs of more than a couple of metres, if you're going to be drawing a significant amount of power. (Significant means anything with a heater or a motor, or multiple small pieces of equipment). You can think about it like water pipes - narrow pipes will be at a higher pressure to deliver the same volume of water per second. It's also worth remembering that the energy lost by the voltage drop has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is heat. Depending on where the cables are run this could be a safety issue.
Having said that I would expect your little beer fridge actually draws very little current and wouldn't be a problem on a narrow guage cable.
I can think of a very good use for this: laparoscopic "keyhole" surgery. One of the difficult things about that sort of operation is depth perception: until you've tried to do it, it isn't at all obvious just how difficult it can be to get a 5mm scissor blade over e.g. a blood vessel at the right angle. If a computer could analyse the image and add some depth perception cues it could really speed up the surgery and make a difference when something's going wrong and needs to be sorted out fast.
Since the "neutral" line is actually ground as well (it ties to the grounding bar at your breaker panel)
Actually, it totally depends on your local electrical system. In the UK the grounds are usually tied to neutral at a substation. It's also possible for 'ground' to be literally that - a conductive-tipped pole driven deep into the ground somewhere near the property. I'm sure there is variation within the US too.
The reality is that they can't, and that's the difficulty of abusing monopoly powers - you can end up in a situation where the monopoly business can't do everything that the non-monopoly competitors might be able to do. Not only have Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer and Media Player with Windows (which is fine), in the past they have abused their monopoly by penalising companies that install competing browsers and players when selling machines (which is an abuse of monopoly). If Microsoft had left the market open by allowing OEM sellers to do as they please, they probably would have been able to continue bundling so long as it was possible to remove the bundled software and use something else.
Now that abuse of monopoly powers has been established, some sort of remedy is needed if e.g. Europe feel that competition in web browser and media player markets is desirable. One remedy is the 'default programs' tool that is included with Vista and was added in a service pack to XP. Probably the fairest solution would be for Microsoft to provide a freely distributable ISO (they could call it 'Genuine Advantage Pack:-)) on their website with all the software they would like to bundle with Windows, including trial versions of Office etc.. It would then be up to OEMs (e.g. Dell) whether they wished to supply that CD, pre-install the software on the computer, or use some other third-party software as they saw fit. That would be a level playing field and not disadvantage consumers in any way.
All facetiousness aside, the investors -can- sue the board of directors etc. for malfeasance if M$ does not take every effort to make the maximum possible profit--so that's not really so much 'ethics' as 'staying on the investors' good side'
I think they would have to demonstrate that the directors were grossly negligent. It's arguable that choosing a strategy of ethical business practices and good relationships with governments and public sector organisations might decrease profit in the short-term (e.g. by supporting ODF properly in MS Office and therefore open that market up) but in the long-term Microsoft can compete on merits for 'vertical' type markets and perhaps make more money from long-term support contracts rather than having to force new application software down everyone's throats every 18 months.
I don't think the directors are bound to choose a short-term profit-maximising policy in every situation, and in fact that will tend to lead to an unstable business that causes shareholders to lose out in the long term. An interesting parallel is ATM/cash-machine charges in the UK. In 2000, most banks were charging for use of cash machines by other banks' customers. It got to the point where you had to look for a machine physically at a bank branch to be sure you wouldn't be charged. Now in 2007 I'm not aware of any banks that charge for withdrawals, except for some 'independent' machines placed in shops and motorway service stations, and they are clearly marked. Recently a couple of UK banks started adding charges for overdrafts that had previously been free, and within three months reverted to the previous situation. In both cases short-term profiteering led to seriously disgruntled customers and the banks realised they were better off keeping customers and losing some profit in the short term. I think the latest versions of Office and Windows have caused similar reactions in software customers, and I think Microsoft will probably need to rethink its strategies.
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Now I've got a bit more money and don't want to spend my weekends battling with substandard software to do the bits and pieces of pro bono web and print design I do in my spare time I've convinced my wife to let me buy a Mac Mini and a copy of Adobe Design Premium CS3.
I'll miss Ubuntu but I really need to be able to sit down at my computer and just get the job done. I know there's software that can do the job, but I'm constantly having to work-around the limitations of the software. I'm perfectly capable of hand-editing HTML/CSS but I'd much rather concentrate on the design in Dreamweaver and the tidy up the code by hand at the end if there's anything I'm not happy with.
I had hoped that Linux would have decent commercial software available by now, or that Wine would run 99% of Windows software, but it's just not the case. In the meantime OS X has become a stable, well-supported and above all Unix-based OS that does everything I need without getting in the way. I still love Linux, will probably still run Ubuntu on my laptop (had Vista Ultimate on it for the past 4 months -- aweful, really really aweful...) and have a 3-head MythTV (mythbuntu) setup that keeps me happy. (When I plead for that Mac Pro in a year's time the Mac Mini will make a great MythTV head).
You're quite right, we wouldn't know the difference... until IIS gets hacked and the web server slows to a crawl because it's become a zombie machine for a network of spammers.
One of the reasons IIS has such a reputation for being compromised is that it's so difficult (not impossible) to lock down a Windows machine, particularly so at the dawn of Windows-based internet services when NT4 was the norm. It's not that difficult on the Unix box to use different accounts for different purposes within the server environment, so that e.g. the SQL backend has one account, the web user authentication (which is not the same as a unix account) has another, etc. If something is compromised, the worst that can happen is the hacker gains access to a specific account that may well be running in a chroot jail, and certainly wouldn't have root privileges.
Classically on a Windows box, if you compromise IIS you have root/admin access to the box and can do what you like. That's the point. I'm not saying it's impossible, the GP's point is that the Windows 'heritage' makes it more difficult and unintuitive.
...it managed to host a web server, a DNS server, telnetd, ntpd, postgres, php, AND ssh reliably, 24x7 for MONTHS before I learned enough of what's going on to see that it was actually doing all that...so in other words no-one actually accessed those services, they spent their 7 months in the swapfile
Well... uh... imagine this piece of paper is the universe, and this pencil is a quantum singularity in n-th dimensional space. No, better still, imagaine that this salt cellar is the universe and this napkin is a small black hole - uh, no, that doesn't work... in fact, *thunk*.
And the answer is... no there wasn't a contract. If I did some detective work and found out who pimpin_apollo is, worked out your street address and mailed something to you, would there be a contract? No! These guys are sending take-down notices to Ebay for traders that are selling promo copies on the basis that they are promo copies with no idea of thier provenance. If there had been some sort of record, e.g. numbered copies sent to named individuals with whom an agreement (i.e. contract) had been made then things might be a bit different, but that's apparently not the case here.
Also, you're a little of the mark with the gift/abandonment thing. The GP is saying that that are a gift, but if it is argued that they're not a gift then they are in fact abandoned. I said similar with another comment - if they claim they have not given these items to the recipient and that claim is upheld then they should be charged with fly-tipping/dumping/whatever is the local equivalent because they are sticking object in people's mailboxes without prior consent.
Giving away is essentially the same as selling. If you're sent something unsolicited in the mail, then it has deemed to have been given to you just as if you had bought it in a shop or got it as a gift for your birthday. This neatly avoids some very old scams, such as sending a book or an encyclopedia through the mail and then following it with an invoice.
What's going on here is nothing special to CDs - if you send something through the mail unsolicited then it belongs to the intended recipient, and they have every right to do with it as they please within the confines of applicable law. It would be illegal to make a copy of a copyright work without permission of the copyright owner, but it would not be illegal to sell or give it away, so that's fine.
If you had joined a book club then received a book+invoice, fair enough - or in this case joined a 'promo club' with T&Cs - then there might be extra terms in addition to the law (i.e. you entered into a contract). Otherwise the sender can write whatever they want on the object and it doesn't matter - the recipient never agreed to those terms and doesn't have to abide by them, in which case they can treat the object as they would anything else they happen to own.
Another angle is that UMG put an object into someone's mail box. If they don't want that object to be treated as a gift for the recipient to be done with as they pleased, and if there is no prior agreement for that object to be placed there, they are effectively dumping litter, just as if they had placed an empty coke can in the mail box. I should imagine there's laws on dumping or 'fly tipping' in most states, and UMG must be doing it on a grand scale, so if they win this case they should be prosecuted on those grounds.
Yeah, I kinda knew I was setting that up, but thought we could play the 'straight guy, funny guy' routine. Slam dunk.
Man, how do you have time to do all this? You should write a lifestyle guru book exaplaining how you manage to spend hours writing posts on Slashdot and replying to yourself and still fit in things like eating and washing.
Yup, and in fact the stupid London 2012 olympics logo trailer could trigger epilepsy and had to be removed from the web site. The fact that it is uniquely offensive in its own right without being combined into a mind-wrenching flashing animation makes the whole thing even worse.
youtube? - lets you view TV shows you missed, see humerous home videos...
Yup - that's a bizarre thing to say. Surely after the first move in solving a configuration that can be optimally solved in 22 moves you obtain a configuration that can be optimally solved in 21 moves, by definition?
uhhh... no - power steering does transfer vibrations to the driver. There's still a direct connection between the steering wheel and the steering rack, but when the steering wheel is turned the power assist kicks in and helps to turn the drive wheels. If you've ever tried to drive a car when the power assist has broken then you'll find out...
Well, if you're used to evaluating functions in your head, the former style is actually far more readable and quicker to understand than the latter imperative version. It really does depend on what you're used to. Again, I find while(--i) totally intuitive - I can see all the information I need on one line and understand what it means, whereas --i; while (i>=0) could get split across a page and I have to scan across two lines to see what's going on.
The best dialogs in Windows XP are the ones that allocate different meanings to the standard buttons, e.g. 'click YES to save the file in XXX format, click NO to save the file in YYY format, click CANCEL to return to editing'. I think Openoffice.org is guilty of that too.
Why should it matter if prices stay low during an auction if everyone knows that all the real bids are going to come in the last few seconds?
Well, my observation is that buyers are more likely to looks at and watch items that have a low price. If really serious bidders snipe and therefore don't enter high bids early then casual bidders are more likely to 'have a shot' and drive the eventual price up. I'm not trying to 'spin' anything - you have made the presumption that I'm a buyer when in fact I sell loads of stuff via ebay. When I do buy I usually use a snipe tool, and I don't have any problems with my buyers doing the same. My auctions that have sold for less then I expected have invariably had a high-ish bid placed early and little interest after that.
This could be a good idea for high-value items but for cheap items that are put on ebay in their thousands (e.g. iPods) it would force bidders to choose a particular item and chase it, which would ultimately put people off ebay.
Sniping is actually not as much of a problem as it seems - if you don't use a sniping tool and really just put your maximum bid in at any time before auction closes then you haven't lost anything if someone snipes. If you are disappointed that the sniper won then you should have put a higher bid in the first place. The main reason for sniping is actually psychological benefit for the buyer - you choose a bunch of similar products, put them in a bid group with sensible maximum bids, and let the software do the rest. If you don't win any, then have another think and decide whether to pay more.
For the seller, arguably sniping tools actually make their item more attractive - rather than bidding the price up high early on and putting potential buyers off, the item looks cheap for most of the auction time and people put it in their favourites and make small bids. If it's a decent item the price rises dramatically in the last few minutes and sells at a decent rate.
Uhhhh... I think you've misunderstood the point of antiretrovirals. They very much help the individual. AIDS kills because your immune system is knocked out, and sufferers eventually die of one of a number of fairly nasty illnessess that are very rarely contracted by non-AIDS sufferers. No-one dies of HIV. Taking antiretrovirals will do two things: lower the person's viral load (i.e. how much of the virus they have in their serum) and raise their T-cell count, which is a measure of immune system function. Although people tend to feel more unwell for the first few weeks of ARV treatment, after that they generally feel much better than they did before, and thier quality and length of life improves dramatically.
As for the point of this article, it's actually a bit obvious and not all that exciting. One of the measures of 'successful' ARV treatment is lowering of viral load. It's common sense that someone with less virus in their serum would be less infective. This has already been demonstrated by giving ARVs to HIV infected pregnant ladies - it is known to lower vertical (mother-baby) transmission. What this study does is give robust empirical evidence of what was already theoretically and anecdotally known. It's a bit like saying (here comes the car analogy) 'a car that uses less gas will go for more miles on a full tank' - fairly obvious, but there is some value in proving it empirically in case something has been missed.
Not at all. Like I said, until you've tried it, it's difficult to appreciate just how hard it is to manipulate two or three small objects inside a 3D space with only a 2D view. It's a bit like the first time you try to do something familiar in a mirror, or tie someone else's bow-tie - you know what your fingers should be doing, but the mental translation required to get it right is surprisingly difficult. I've seen very experienced surgeons with an excellent scope get a stitch lined up perfectly, all looking good, then pull the trigger and it becomes obvious that they weren't actually in the right place at all.
All cables have a resistance, which can be quoted as ohms per metre. So a cable that works fine for a 3m distance may well drop the voltage significantly over a 20-30m run. Thick conductors of the same material have a lower resistance per metre, so in general it's better to use the thickest cable you can for runs of more than a couple of metres, if you're going to be drawing a significant amount of power. (Significant means anything with a heater or a motor, or multiple small pieces of equipment). You can think about it like water pipes - narrow pipes will be at a higher pressure to deliver the same volume of water per second. It's also worth remembering that the energy lost by the voltage drop has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is heat. Depending on where the cables are run this could be a safety issue.
Having said that I would expect your little beer fridge actually draws very little current and wouldn't be a problem on a narrow guage cable.
I can think of a very good use for this: laparoscopic "keyhole" surgery. One of the difficult things about that sort of operation is depth perception: until you've tried to do it, it isn't at all obvious just how difficult it can be to get a 5mm scissor blade over e.g. a blood vessel at the right angle. If a computer could analyse the image and add some depth perception cues it could really speed up the surgery and make a difference when something's going wrong and needs to be sorted out fast.
Since the "neutral" line is actually ground as well (it ties to the grounding bar at your breaker panel)
Actually, it totally depends on your local electrical system. In the UK the grounds are usually tied to neutral at a substation. It's also possible for 'ground' to be literally that - a conductive-tipped pole driven deep into the ground somewhere near the property. I'm sure there is variation within the US too.
I love the way it says 'PATENT PANDING' under each picture. Good job the website developers have a good grasp of Engrish.
The reality is that they can't, and that's the difficulty of abusing monopoly powers - you can end up in a situation where the monopoly business can't do everything that the non-monopoly competitors might be able to do. Not only have Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer and Media Player with Windows (which is fine), in the past they have abused their monopoly by penalising companies that install competing browsers and players when selling machines (which is an abuse of monopoly). If Microsoft had left the market open by allowing OEM sellers to do as they please, they probably would have been able to continue bundling so long as it was possible to remove the bundled software and use something else.
:-)) on their website with all the software they would like to bundle with Windows, including trial versions of Office etc.. It would then be up to OEMs (e.g. Dell) whether they wished to supply that CD, pre-install the software on the computer, or use some other third-party software as they saw fit. That would be a level playing field and not disadvantage consumers in any way.
Now that abuse of monopoly powers has been established, some sort of remedy is needed if e.g. Europe feel that competition in web browser and media player markets is desirable. One remedy is the 'default programs' tool that is included with Vista and was added in a service pack to XP. Probably the fairest solution would be for Microsoft to provide a freely distributable ISO (they could call it 'Genuine Advantage Pack
All facetiousness aside, the investors -can- sue the board of directors etc. for malfeasance if M$ does not take every effort to make the maximum possible profit--so that's not really so much 'ethics' as 'staying on the investors' good side'
I think they would have to demonstrate that the directors were grossly negligent. It's arguable that choosing a strategy of ethical business practices and good relationships with governments and public sector organisations might decrease profit in the short-term (e.g. by supporting ODF properly in MS Office and therefore open that market up) but in the long-term Microsoft can compete on merits for 'vertical' type markets and perhaps make more money from long-term support contracts rather than having to force new application software down everyone's throats every 18 months.
I don't think the directors are bound to choose a short-term profit-maximising policy in every situation, and in fact that will tend to lead to an unstable business that causes shareholders to lose out in the long term. An interesting parallel is ATM/cash-machine charges in the UK. In 2000, most banks were charging for use of cash machines by other banks' customers. It got to the point where you had to look for a machine physically at a bank branch to be sure you wouldn't be charged. Now in 2007 I'm not aware of any banks that charge for withdrawals, except for some 'independent' machines placed in shops and motorway service stations, and they are clearly marked. Recently a couple of UK banks started adding charges for overdrafts that had previously been free, and within three months reverted to the previous situation. In both cases short-term profiteering led to seriously disgruntled customers and the banks realised they were better off keeping customers and losing some profit in the short term. I think the latest versions of Office and Windows have caused similar reactions in software customers, and I think Microsoft will probably need to rethink its strategies.