In which case MS needs kicked in the nuts...HARD...for making it so the average consumer has no choice but to use Windows. All that antitrust bullshit they keep pulling.
And Ubuntu needs to start doing some marketing. The average consumer has never even heard of linux, and until "soemething besides windows" gets on joe sixpack's computer menu, MS is going to keep getting stronger, more vicious, and more apt to strangle dough out of its users.
Could she have gotten XP preinstalled if she'd gone somewhere else?
If so, then she's an idiot for not shopping around.
If not, then MS is guilty of putting the screws on the OEM through illegal use of monopoly power, and she is merely eating the costs that were shoved down the OEM's throats.
By refusing to sell XP standalone, and making the premium version of vista the only one you're allowed to downgrade, then you force people to buy primo vista to get XP.
The suit is because MS is illegally forcing you to buy primo vista to get XP. A move which, owing to OEM being required to purchase the primo vista, and then expend labor to downgrade to XP, costs the consumer more money than if XP could have been bought separately.
It's an illegal tie because microsoft's market dominance in XP is being used to force people to buy vista to get it.
It's as if you owned the town's only water supply and forced everyone to buy their water from you carried in expensive containers that you can't bring back for a rebate.
If IP Innov. knew about multiple desktops (say, in gnome and kde) long before the suit was filed, and did nothing until the time was ripe for blood-sucking, wouldn't that cause them to lose on grounds of procedural laches or something?
I would hope so, since you can't "sleep on your rights" from what I've studies.
I would like to add that if you get a emloyee who contributes something awesome, don't stab him in the back by gulping it down without so much as a thanks.
I think the first thing you need to do is take care of your workers and make it safe for them to share their ideas.
A few cultural obstacles that will spoil it
1. Making them feel owned
Nabbing a great idea from an employee and then showing them no thanks for it, really kills initiative. Make sure they fell the company values them as a member of the team, and not just a golden goose that can be milked for all its worth before being sent to the foie gras factory.
Case in point:
Employee shares great improvement for labor efficiency, then gets laid off as unneeded because his position became obsolete. Perhaps bad strategy on the employee, but also complete disregard on the company. Strategy battles are divisive enough intercompany, they are sure as HELL not needed inside one.
2. Making them feel threatened
Often times especially with traditional hierarchies, "new ideas" are seen as a challenge to authority, as in how DARE a mere peon would even think of one-upping his boss by coming up with something his boss didn't already sanction by coming up with first.
Make a culture where a boss and his subordinates can be peers. Good amicability really makes good task grease.
Put yourself in your employee's shoes and make sure they have no reason to NOT contribute.
Once that's taken care of, make sure you actually ask for ideas.
Actually, the RIAA would be better off using this than what they currently do.
The status quo is slipshod blitzkriegs against dozens of does based on shared folders.
This could help them weed out innocent people. They shouldn't have a problem with it, since it would be worth their while to get evidence damning enough to not settle for relative chump change. Then they could, maybe, leave the innocent ppl alone?
At least if they stick with evidence of transfer, rather than merely "making available", their lawsuits would trade in quantity for quality, and they'd be netting a much lower false positive rate.
Personally, I'd like to see the REAL pirates get nailed red handed than be able to hide among the innocent "shared folder" folks and try to stink up the place by faking defenses that real innocents legitimately use. Real pirates are no less scum than the RIAA in my book, since they have no scruples about ripping people off.
The RIAA has a valid business mission to stop piracy. It's only because of their devil-may-care attitude when they mistarget innocent people that they have such a bad rap with me. Were the RIAA to have perfect aim and only nail guilty offenders, then I'd have no problem with them.
And yes, I'm serious. The RIAA needs to stop being an incompetent reckless lawsuit factory and start using hard evidence like this to nail the RIGHT people.
If a good bigger chunk of the RIAA's defendants were actually guilty, and smoking guns were plentiful, I'm sure their public image would get at least a bit of repair.
Of course, my faith in the RIAA not exploiting the "protection racket" gravy train they get by making it prohibitively expensive for even an obviously innocent defendant to not settle...don't make me laugh.
I wouldn't be surprised if silverlight was created (which IE magically supports very well) to give non MS browsers something else to choke on.
Having a big share in the browser market gives you a loud voice as to what standards will or will not be followed by web publishers. Web publishers kowtowing just to keep IE happy keeps their support for other browsers to a minimum, surfers find IE more supported so they ditch competing browsers and the cycle is complete.
The funny thing about open standards...monopolies don't like them.
They like to fight, and our continued presence is like holding a floodgate closed, and getting a charlie horse doing it.
There is nothing wrong with yielding to the inevitable. Iraq is going to either patch itself up soon, or go to hell completely, and our presence is only maintaining a stalemate among the various factions.
We should have struck hard, and made shock and awe really count. Better yet, we should have finished up in afghanistan before we started screwing around in iraq in the first place, so we wouldn't wind up splitting up our troops.
Continuing to have troops in iraq for indefinite periods is not sustainable, so the benefits of doing so don't count. Morale is suffering, families miss their members, it's like vietnam all over again.
We had a chance to fix iraq, and we blew it. Game over. Either regroup and recover and wait for round 2, or just leave it alone.
And yes, I voted for obama, because I believed him to be the lesser of two evils, not because I liked his policies. I just hated them less than the old republican BS. So it's more like I voted against mccain.
The trouble with politics in the US is that you have to be a dirty rotten cheater to even get into the final 2. Money money money is what you need to get enough airtime to even get on the final ballot, and the only way to get it is to make deals with the money men who happen to have agendas of their own.
If you are honest and unbribable and don't take deals, you'll never get into office, because the guy you're running against will almost certainly be more than willing to compromise his ethics just a little bit more than you.
Put more generally, an honest person can't win a game played by cheaters.
So kindly do not diss folks who voted for obama. Instead, consider what else they could have done. Think back of Kane and Kodos in the Simpsons:
"It's a two party system. You have to vote for one of us!"
On a more serious note, WP vandalism tends not to stick around, neither does misinformation, for long.
I recently reverted someone making inappropriate non-g rated comentary in an article.
Vandals are probably out numbered by good editors and even casual readers, neither of which put up with vandalism for long. WP tends to stay accurate because it effectively hires its readership as an army of proofreaders.
All it does is open the doors of competition and keep apple from putting a chokehold on end users who, through the first sale doctrine, ought to be able to put their bought and paid for copy of OSX on any damned device they see fit.
Apple still has a right to develop its equipment as it sees fit, as well as specializing in synergy between apple hardware and apple software (as long as it doesn't run afoul of the same tying that got MS in trouble with IE), and even voiding warranties if end users don't play by apple's rules.
If I buy a car, it's not illegal for me to do what I want with the parts. I own them, and if I want to cobble together a hot rod out of parts from a Model T, that is my right. Now, mind you, there's an unapplicable aspect about safety regulations that doesn't apply to computers, but as long as I paid for the car, I own it, as well as the parts.
Similiarly, when I buy a computer, I own all of it. The code (just the code, not the IP rights in it), AND the hardware.
Actually, if you combine metering with rate limiting, you are, at worst, at what the status quo already is.
The beauty of metering PLUS rate limit is that if you don't fill your pipe, you effectively get a rebate for the BW you don't use.
DDoS and spam and whatnot are not a concern with this idea because:
1. They won't be able to exceed a throttle on your pipe any more than regular traffic would, and 2. spam and other network garbage can already clogs your tubes up anyway.
Anyone wanna count and see how long it takes for the RIAA to give this guy a pink slip?
Of course, I don't know if AC priv applies or not to your client's attempts to have you break ethical regs. If this guy can blow any whistles, I hope his lungs are full.
1. You pay for every byte that passes THROUGH your pipe, no matter which way it goes.
Metering, at a simple rate, to discourage customers from using bandwidth wastefully
2. Your monthly charge depends on how relatively fat your tube is.
This for guarantees in the face of congestion. If people are starving for a limited bandwidth pie, you get a bigger share of it if you pay more. Possibly implemented as a CFS style algorithm.
Important points:
You pay for your usage You don't get throttled unless bandwidth becomes scarce In event of contention, you can pay to get a bigger share of it.
Slashdot Mirror
In which case MS needs kicked in the nuts...HARD...for making it so the average consumer has no choice but to use Windows. All that antitrust bullshit they keep pulling.
And Ubuntu needs to start doing some marketing. The average consumer has never even heard of linux, and until "soemething besides windows" gets on joe sixpack's computer menu, MS is going to keep getting stronger, more vicious, and more apt to strangle dough out of its users.
Odd...
If anything those should have been 503's.
Maybe some of /. files are off-site and were unreachable?
It MUST NOT be possible for one router to do this.
The internet MUST have redundant paths in the backbone.
Companies SHOULD peer with each other more often at the top level and be damned with trying to force transit payments.
Companies at the top who fail to do so MAY go themselves.
Could she have gotten XP preinstalled if she'd gone somewhere else?
If so, then she's an idiot for not shopping around.
If not, then MS is guilty of putting the screws on the OEM through illegal use of monopoly power, and she is merely eating the costs that were shoved down the OEM's throats.
By refusing to sell XP standalone, and making the premium version of vista the only one you're allowed to downgrade, then you force people to buy primo vista to get XP.
The suit is because MS is illegally forcing you to buy primo vista to get XP. A move which, owing to OEM being required to purchase the primo vista, and then expend labor to downgrade to XP, costs the consumer more money than if XP could have been bought separately.
It's an illegal tie because microsoft's market dominance in XP is being used to force people to buy vista to get it.
It's as if you owned the town's only water supply and forced everyone to buy their water from you carried in expensive containers that you can't bring back for a rebate.
MS needs spanked on this one.
Indeed, if they took so long then why aren't they getting dismissed for sleeping on their rights?
Sounds like a ripe opportunity for Red Hat to assert laches or something.
IANAL.
Quick question, perhaps for NYCL.
If IP Innov. knew about multiple desktops (say, in gnome and kde) long before the suit was filed, and did nothing until the time was ripe for blood-sucking, wouldn't that cause them to lose on grounds of procedural laches or something?
I would hope so, since you can't "sleep on your rights" from what I've studies.
as long as MS is extorting obscene profits do you honestly think the shareholders are going to complain?
I would like to add that if you get a emloyee who contributes something awesome, don't stab him in the back by gulping it down without so much as a thanks.
I think the first thing you need to do is take care of your workers and make it safe for them to share their ideas.
A few cultural obstacles that will spoil it
1. Making them feel owned
Nabbing a great idea from an employee and then showing them no thanks for it, really kills initiative. Make sure they fell the company values them as a member of the team, and not just a golden goose that can be milked for all its worth before being sent to the foie gras factory.
Case in point:
Employee shares great improvement for labor efficiency, then gets laid off as unneeded because his position became obsolete. Perhaps bad strategy on the employee, but also complete disregard on the company. Strategy battles are divisive enough intercompany, they are sure as HELL not needed inside one.
2. Making them feel threatened
Often times especially with traditional hierarchies, "new ideas" are seen as a challenge to authority, as in how DARE a mere peon would even think of one-upping his boss by coming up with something his boss didn't already sanction by coming up with first.
Make a culture where a boss and his subordinates can be peers. Good amicability really makes good task grease.
Put yourself in your employee's shoes and make sure they have no reason to NOT contribute.
Once that's taken care of, make sure you actually ask for ideas.
Actually, the RIAA would be better off using this than what they currently do.
The status quo is slipshod blitzkriegs against dozens of does based on shared folders.
This could help them weed out innocent people. They shouldn't have a problem with it, since it would be worth their while to get evidence damning enough to not settle for relative chump change. Then they could, maybe, leave the innocent ppl alone?
At least if they stick with evidence of transfer, rather than merely "making available", their lawsuits would trade in quantity for quality, and they'd be netting a much lower false positive rate.
Personally, I'd like to see the REAL pirates get nailed red handed than be able to hide among the innocent "shared folder" folks and try to stink up the place by faking defenses that real innocents legitimately use. Real pirates are no less scum than the RIAA in my book, since they have no scruples about ripping people off.
The RIAA has a valid business mission to stop piracy. It's only because of their devil-may-care attitude when they mistarget innocent people that they have such a bad rap with me. Were the RIAA to have perfect aim and only nail guilty offenders, then I'd have no problem with them.
And yes, I'm serious. The RIAA needs to stop being an incompetent reckless lawsuit factory and start using hard evidence like this to nail the RIGHT people.
If a good bigger chunk of the RIAA's defendants were actually guilty, and smoking guns were plentiful, I'm sure their public image would get at least a bit of repair.
Of course, my faith in the RIAA not exploiting the "protection racket" gravy train they get by making it prohibitively expensive for even an obviously innocent defendant to not settle...don't make me laugh.
Encryption manifests an expectation of privacy and therefore necessitates a warrant.
As far as MS is concerned they probably are.
I wouldn't be surprised if silverlight was created (which IE magically supports very well) to give non MS browsers something else to choke on.
Having a big share in the browser market gives you a loud voice as to what standards will or will not be followed by web publishers. Web publishers kowtowing just to keep IE happy keeps their support for other browsers to a minimum, surfers find IE more supported so they ditch competing browsers and the cycle is complete.
The funny thing about open standards...monopolies don't like them.
This is good, it means MS is admitting that Vista is crap and is keeping their customers by helping them get what vista should have been.
I have a good idea to get the drivers while still eliminating the bloat.
Have an option to compile the kernel during installation, based on detected devices.
If iraq goes to hell, it won't be because of us.
They like to fight, and our continued presence is like holding a floodgate closed, and getting a charlie horse doing it.
There is nothing wrong with yielding to the inevitable. Iraq is going to either patch itself up soon, or go to hell completely, and our presence is only maintaining a stalemate among the various factions.
We should have struck hard, and made shock and awe really count. Better yet, we should have finished up in afghanistan before we started screwing around in iraq in the first place, so we wouldn't wind up splitting up our troops.
Continuing to have troops in iraq for indefinite periods is not sustainable, so the benefits of doing so don't count. Morale is suffering, families miss their members, it's like vietnam all over again.
We had a chance to fix iraq, and we blew it. Game over. Either regroup and recover and wait for round 2, or just leave it alone.
And yes, I voted for obama, because I believed him to be the lesser of two evils, not because I liked his policies. I just hated them less than the old republican BS. So it's more like I voted against mccain.
The trouble with politics in the US is that you have to be a dirty rotten cheater to even get into the final 2. Money money money is what you need to get enough airtime to even get on the final ballot, and the only way to get it is to make deals with the money men who happen to have agendas of their own.
If you are honest and unbribable and don't take deals, you'll never get into office, because the guy you're running against will almost certainly be more than willing to compromise his ethics just a little bit more than you.
Put more generally, an honest person can't win a game played by cheaters.
So kindly do not diss folks who voted for obama. Instead, consider what else they could have done. Think back of Kane and Kodos in the Simpsons:
"It's a two party system. You have to vote for one of us!"
You probably made that edit yourself beforehand.
On a more serious note, WP vandalism tends not to stick around, neither does misinformation, for long.
I recently reverted someone making inappropriate non-g rated comentary in an article.
Vandals are probably out numbered by good editors and even casual readers, neither of which put up with vandalism for long. WP tends to stay accurate because it effectively hires its readership as an army of proofreaders.
An example of crowdsourcing at its finest.
The problem is that MS's power in the OS market is being used abusively to restrain competition in the browser market.
It's an anti-competitive practice called tying.
All it does is open the doors of competition and keep apple from putting a chokehold on end users who, through the first sale doctrine, ought to be able to put their bought and paid for copy of OSX on any damned device they see fit.
Apple still has a right to develop its equipment as it sees fit, as well as specializing in synergy between apple hardware and apple software (as long as it doesn't run afoul of the same tying that got MS in trouble with IE), and even voiding warranties if end users don't play by apple's rules.
If I buy a car, it's not illegal for me to do what I want with the parts. I own them, and if I want to cobble together a hot rod out of parts from a Model T, that is my right. Now, mind you, there's an unapplicable aspect about safety regulations that doesn't apply to computers, but as long as I paid for the car, I own it, as well as the parts.
Similiarly, when I buy a computer, I own all of it. The code (just the code, not the IP rights in it), AND the hardware.
Actually, if you combine metering with rate limiting, you are, at worst, at what the status quo already is.
The beauty of metering PLUS rate limit is that if you don't fill your pipe, you effectively get a rebate for the BW you don't use.
DDoS and spam and whatnot are not a concern with this idea because:
1. They won't be able to exceed a throttle on your pipe any more than regular traffic would, and
2. spam and other network garbage can already clogs your tubes up anyway.
I was just thinking about this.
Anyone wanna count and see how long it takes for the RIAA to give this guy a pink slip?
Of course, I don't know if AC priv applies or not to your client's attempts to have you break ethical regs. If this guy can blow any whistles, I hope his lungs are full.
Actually ethical lawyers ARE novel.
NYCL's *uniqueness* only emphasizes it.
Here's my ideal business plan:
1. You pay for every byte that passes THROUGH your pipe, no matter which way it goes.
Metering, at a simple rate, to discourage customers from using bandwidth wastefully
2. Your monthly charge depends on how relatively fat your tube is.
This for guarantees in the face of congestion. If people are starving for a limited bandwidth pie, you get a bigger share of it if you pay more. Possibly implemented as a CFS style algorithm.
Important points:
You pay for your usage
You don't get throttled unless bandwidth becomes scarce
In event of contention, you can pay to get a bigger share of it.
Step 3: Sue everyone with submarine patents you had on your source all along?
I'm suspicious of MS if they do this.
They already do
It's called "beat your opponent into settlement"