Actually, no; a) they still make in Denmark with one of the highest safety standards in the business b) reduced "one off" special parts actually is a return to the spirit of building it yourself c) all the build it yourself stuff is still available d) you can still buy basic kits and they are as good as ever.
There is one thing; the violence and Star Wars shit but you don't have to buy that for your kids. I don't. This is a major change (the didn't make green bricks for a long time so that nobody could make tanks and so on) but it's not the main or nearly most crucial element of Lego.
You expressed my thoughts perfectly. I don't have any mod points, so I bought you a "mod you up" spell. It should begin to take effect within 30 days. I'm afraid I haven't had a mail yet, but it's such a powerful spell that I'm sure that she'll be "completely drained" for the next several days.
The grandparent's statement that "here are no definitive arguments against having pluggable schedulers" glosses over the fact that Linus' arguments have to be proven wrong. I can believe that in this, like most things, Linus is wrong; however it's experimental science not philosophy. Someone has to write the code.
The scheduler is probably the piece of kernel code which actually does something which gets called most (many times a second even if only user activity is ongoing). A level of inefficiency which would be okay in an IO scheduler which will normally have to wait for a slow disk access just can't be accepted in a process scheduler and even a single level of indirection might really be a killer. Possibly it would be better to have separate kernel builds for small and large installs than having pluggability in which case even CK's new scheduler may not prove the need for pluggable schedulers. Alternatively, maybe pluggability would have to be done with self modifying code which left no indirection in place?
"You'd all do it if you got the chance" is such a standard criminal's justification that it's really worth thinking about it properly every time you hear it. It really sounds like it might be true, however, you'll find that if you drop your wallet somewhere, 9 times out of 10 someone comes running with it to you. It's just not true and the Kim Jong-Il example is very good for making people realise what they actually wouldn't do. (Almost?) nobody is perfect, we all do little things, like accidentally dropping something and then when we realise later, not returning to clean up. Most of us commit minor traffic offences from time to time. That doesn't mean that we would all do the same as either Microsoft or Kim Jong-Il.
There are lots of companies in the world. Almost all of them have done small things. For example they have cleaners who throw out something electronic in the wrong rubbish and don't audit them. There are managers in all of them that get away with small scale work place discrimination. Not every HR department is perfect. That often makes the people in them feel that their company is a bit criminal just like Microsoft. However the scale is completely different and that does make a real qualitative difference. Most companies are fundamentally honest with a few deviations. Microsoft is a fundamentally amoral organisation and being reminded that most people are better than them is a good thing. If you had to compete with someone, you would probably try to price below them; to build a better product than them; to generally deal with it. It probably wouldn't occur to you to cheat, and if it did you probably wouldn't do it. Microsoft has done that regularly. Their solution to being caught has been to get their politician buddies to buy the justice department off them. That's not what normal people do and people shouldn't forget that.
The funniest thing about my comment having been moderated troll is that I subsequently learned that the grandparent was straight up wrong. The books had been sold legally and the publisher just changed their mind. Read through the other thread and you'll see that this misunderstanding about an illegal sale grew up and Amazon never confirmed it (so it wasn't true) but they carefully didn't contradict it.
There are other comments on this thread which say that you can choose to back up or not your annotations. The restore works regardless of which you do. However; my point is not the technical detail of whether they back up or not. My point is that, if they wanted to they could always restore content, independent of what your backup status is. However, if you don't have a backup with them, they won't and you can't properly back it up yourself because it's all DRMed. That's all.
it should be impossible to get a patent on implementing an Open specification
Well, there seem to several misunderstandings here. Firstly I believe that the patent is quite old and pre-dates the open specifications that we are discussing, in which case the implementation might be obvious now (based on the literature now), but probably wasn't when the patent was made.
Secondly, patents are not about "doing things", they are about "ways of doing things". Thus, the open standard might say "put the ball in the hoop" and a standard method of doing it might be to throw the ball. However, you can get a patent on "using a very tall robot to put the ball in the hoop". The fact that the action is specified in an open standard doesn't in any way influence your ability to patent a way of doing that.
Patents on software should be invalid because they are essentially patents on mathematics which are excluded and because, if the affect FOSS software then they are affecting freedom of speech and are thus illegal under the UN conventions on human rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the US constitution. Relying on obviousness is a pretty major risk.
SANS points to top IP addresses. According to TFA this is supposed to point to top hackers. I have some doubt about that, but if it was true it would be much more useful.
Doesn't this mean that Amazon has backed up every single Kindle? Presumably if you tried hard enough after losing your Kindle you could get all your books back...
Mod parent "+1 so innocent it's funny". Amazon can have their own copy of all the material (for archival and backup) if they want. They can also keep a list of all the things they sold you. Then they don't have to "back it up" to restore it. The reason they won't restore it is because then they can charge you for the same material all over again. You have no legal come back; giving you back your stuff isn't in your contract. This is exactly what the point of the DRM is. It gives them power; it takes away your power and rights.
I think you're missing a key detail, that the books were pulled because the SELLER (that is: not Amazon)
no; I don't think that we're wrong because of that. There are two choices:
this is Amazon's buisiness transaction in which case they are responsible for the sale and should make it good
this isn't Amazon's buisiness transaction in which case they should not interfere.
If you are right, then Amazon has made a big tactical mistake. They turned on the DRM features too early. They have shown that there is no way no know if you have a Kindle book or not. At any time, Amazon can take it away. Compare that to a normal book, where, if you buy an illegal copy which is identical to the legal one and which you thought was legal, it is the person who copied it who has a problem. Not you.
This is a tactical, not strategic mistake, however. The only thing they did wrong was to delete a book early enough that there is still non-DRM competition. A feature like "remotely delete books" does not get created by accident. You can't risk using it without extensive testing that it will delete exactly the book that you want it to delete and no others. The FSF has been right all along; you can't trust DRM. In some years, Amazon hope to be able do this kind of stuff and you won't complain because all their competition will do it at the same time too.
That's one of the true determiners of quality software. For example the <blink> tag is just missing on several browsers which makes web page display annoyingly inconsistent.
However; I think there's something in what you say. There is a single root cause. What fundamentally changed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century was that the laws of low energy physics where more or less settled. There was a series of major breakthroughs, for example electrodynamics (about 1860 onwards), then quantum physics (1905-1920) and relativity (1905-1930??). These breakthroughs were so big that it took years to understand them and even today we are still working on many of the implications
since that time, fundamental breakthroughs such as QED and the standard theory have been out of reach to normal manufacturing techniques. Rather, interesting work has been in the implications of the older work. For example, the transistor, the laser, the LED and the LCD come directly from quantum physics. Even the light bulb and the electric motor fundamentally need electrodynamics. What day to day object depends on QED? How could you make such a thing? Even GPS is a product of general relativity (making the clocks accurate enough to give position) and quantum mechanics (the devices).
The major discoveries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries have worked through to many other subjects and caused major changes. For example computers need QM and have driven many discoveries in biology and chemistry. Radio comms stems from electrodynamics. Moble phones, require computers, electrodynamics and quantum physics (in the radio circuitry etc). They also use many modern materials which required quantum driven breakthroughs in chemistry and solid state physics. I think we are gradually working through the implications of those discoveries and, whilst there's still quite a roller coaster ride to go, we can really expect things to slow down.
The funniest, most ironic thing, I think, is that where we (you; not me) laughed at our grandparents inability to cope with new stuff; out children (if they survive) will probably laugh at our strange cult like belief in intelligence "singularities" and indefinite exponential improvement. The same predictions of indefinite exponential growth were made about aeroplane engines at one time. And they were followed for some time. Then the advance just stopped.
Remote management ; cfengine / ssh / vnc / apt. I guess eventually tivoli and evil stuff like that may be ported. Encryption; all standard linux encryption devices. Firewalling; iptables built in.
If you aren't able to cope with a device like that then I guarantee you that there are business units out in your company that are just going ahead and running systems you are failing to support. Yes. They have sign off on that.
Personally, though, I think the corporate use is really a thing that comes after. First people build applications and get to want to use the device. Then, after some time the device is "needed" in a corporate situation because it has a feature someone wants.
Judging by the way my phone behaved when it's GPS antenna was breaking (reception later broke completely) A-GPS is really great. When in coverage I could lock on pretty much immediately and get an acceptable fix. Without coverage it would just never work. That same calculation works in bad GPS coverage or just when you want it to start fast. Plus, if you have a flat rate data plan A-GPS doesn't cost anything and saves battery (since you can lock on faster you don't have to run GPS all the time). Well recommended. In fact the only thing against it is that I suspect that it makes it difficult to check the GPS receiver in the phones. Remember to turn A-GPS off if you want to test what performance you will get in the Wilderness.
Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica. This is even taking into account the risk of vandalism. I don't care about the detail; there seem to be ways of counting which make Wikipedia win and ways that make Britannica win; what matters is that this means that statistically, a fact in Wikipedia is much more likely to be true than not. If you wouldn't worry when using a different Encyclopaedia, then you shouldn't worry when using Wikipedia.
Now, if you care about a fact enough that you are worried even in this situation. A; typical example where this might be true is when involved in academic studies; then you need to check the sources of the fact. This is where Wikipedia's citation policy is a killer. Whilst you should still check the fact in multiple sources, knowing the original source tends to make it much easier to be clear when a fact is wrong. Why was it wrong? What is the original source of the misunderstanding etc. etc.
The only thing to be aware of in Wikipedia is that it's more likely that a fact is maliciously and deliberately wrong. In this case, it helps to check the history of the fact and see who added it; again something not possible in Britannica. If that doesn't matter / isn't likely for the fact you are interested in then again you just go back to statistics, which are in your favour.
I've always wondered what happens if you refuse to let them onto your property. Presumably their only recourse would be to sue you and obtain access to your computer systems through the discovery process. Given the "speed" with which the court system moves I wonder if you could have the whole operation switched over an open source movement by the time it reached that point?
Please look up the following terms on google. felony software piracy conviction and statutory damages. Basically the first thing means that the person deciding has a choice between paying over the companies (shareholder's) money or personally going to prison. It becomes an easy decision.
Alternatively what happens if you claim trade secrets or privacy restrictions (HIPAA?) on your computer system?
You have a contract which says you have to let them audit you. If you fail to deliver, you are liable anyway. If you destroy evidence then you are in deep trouble and any court will likely treat it as if the evidence was all against you. In the end, that means that you deliver the systems to them and have to find a way to do it whilst satisfying the HIPAA restrictions. In other words, you have to use much more expensive investigators with appropriate clearence for whatever they are reading and techiques which don't involve reading restricted data. In other words, you pay more.
the only way to completely avoid such an audit is to have no software licensed from a BSA member. For small companies this is seriously worth considering.
In the case of social responsibility and volunteering for internet access there were many good projects to build local access between people long ago. "Freenet" had a completely different meaning before it became a crypto project. What killed these projects was that the big corporations wanted to gain market share and so were willing to sell internet access well below cost at the same time as making huge investments. For almost nothing people were getting better access than the Freenets could provide and the volunteers stopped seeing the point. We're still, to some extent, under the influence of that. However, things are changing, as we see with broadband rationing. Wireless community networks are already a start of a return but I think the time of community networks is coming back big time and it's time for people to start thinking about how to build them again.
you know; you're so so right. In fact, if you think about it all the people who ever paid for an internet connection helped contribute to this by supporting the infrastructure used for all those people to "potentially" infringe.
I think everybody who ever used the internet should have to pay at least this much to the RIAA. They have (potentially) suffered so much. In fact, if you think about it, and multiply the number of potential people who could have copied by the number of potential people who could have been copied from by the number of potential songs that could have been copied by the maximum potential statutory damages, I think you'll find that their potential losses must run to more dollars than the number of atoms in the planet. We should just declare them galactic rulers and do their every bidding.
Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft Software+Hardware.
Interesting. Do you have a link for that?
I don't think most of the PC manufacturers would be able to complain any more than the mouse manufacturers did about the MS mouse. It might make sense. Microsoft needs the revenue and the whole Netbook thing really scared them. I'd guess that the PC manufacturers could easily be the next partner for them to crush.
duhhh... oh. You're right; why didn't I think of that at the time. At least that or some similar Linux user difference (customers more tolerant of small glitches?). That would actually make them a valuable market for Dell, especially if it can be continued into more and more mass market.
Probably they do have experimental builds, but there's very little point in MS actually making products from them. The reason why you want Windows is because Windows apps run on Windows. They also have to produce ARM builds of all of the software that people need. They can do that for their own stuff, but most Windows software is not produced by MS. It's important to remember that when you get Ubuntu, you get a whole load more software than on a plain Windows box and even most of the software not included comes with source code so it's relatively easy for someone to port it to the new architecture. Not to mention that Windows Mobile has done real damage to the Windows brand by looking so much worse than Symbian phones, let alone Android or the iPhone. They can't afford to keep repeating that.
The Intel Atom is produced specifically to make an i386 platform which competes with the ARM. MS would do much better to commit to that kind of platform. The power consumption is "good enough" and they don't risk splitting their market share.
we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux
is it that you have difficulty reading. What he's saying is that Windows machines return at the approximately same rate for technical problems as Linux machines return due to both technical problems and misunderstandings. This implies that if they can improve their communication then the return rate of Linux machines will be significantly lower than the return rate for Windows machines. To be honest I have difficulty working out why. Surely the hardware should be pretty much the same? Is it possible that the rate of malware infection at the beginning of a modern, up to date, Windows system's life is really high enough to account for the extra Windows returns?
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Actually, no; a) they still make in Denmark with one of the highest safety standards in the business b) reduced "one off" special parts actually is a return to the spirit of building it yourself c) all the build it yourself stuff is still available d) you can still buy basic kits and they are as good as ever.
There is one thing; the violence and Star Wars shit but you don't have to buy that for your kids. I don't. This is a major change (the didn't make green bricks for a long time so that nobody could make tanks and so on) but it's not the main or nearly most crucial element of Lego.
You expressed my thoughts perfectly. I don't have any mod points, so I bought you a "mod you up" spell. It should begin to take effect within 30 days. I'm afraid I haven't had a mail yet, but it's such a powerful spell that I'm sure that she'll be "completely drained" for the next several days.
Linus Torvalds has, for once, made pretty clear arguments against it. Various philosophical ones etc. but also several solid technical ones
See this email and this one.
The grandparent's statement that "here are no definitive arguments against having pluggable schedulers" glosses over the fact that Linus' arguments have to be proven wrong. I can believe that in this, like most things, Linus is wrong; however it's experimental science not philosophy. Someone has to write the code.
The scheduler is probably the piece of kernel code which actually does something which gets called most (many times a second even if only user activity is ongoing). A level of inefficiency which would be okay in an IO scheduler which will normally have to wait for a slow disk access just can't be accepted in a process scheduler and even a single level of indirection might really be a killer. Possibly it would be better to have separate kernel builds for small and large installs than having pluggability in which case even CK's new scheduler may not prove the need for pluggable schedulers. Alternatively, maybe pluggability would have to be done with self modifying code which left no indirection in place?
Kim Jong-Il is so utterly irrelevant ...
"You'd all do it if you got the chance" is such a standard criminal's justification that it's really worth thinking about it properly every time you hear it. It really sounds like it might be true, however, you'll find that if you drop your wallet somewhere, 9 times out of 10 someone comes running with it to you. It's just not true and the Kim Jong-Il example is very good for making people realise what they actually wouldn't do. (Almost?) nobody is perfect, we all do little things, like accidentally dropping something and then when we realise later, not returning to clean up. Most of us commit minor traffic offences from time to time. That doesn't mean that we would all do the same as either Microsoft or Kim Jong-Il.
There are lots of companies in the world. Almost all of them have done small things. For example they have cleaners who throw out something electronic in the wrong rubbish and don't audit them. There are managers in all of them that get away with small scale work place discrimination. Not every HR department is perfect. That often makes the people in them feel that their company is a bit criminal just like Microsoft. However the scale is completely different and that does make a real qualitative difference. Most companies are fundamentally honest with a few deviations. Microsoft is a fundamentally amoral organisation and being reminded that most people are better than them is a good thing. If you had to compete with someone, you would probably try to price below them; to build a better product than them; to generally deal with it. It probably wouldn't occur to you to cheat, and if it did you probably wouldn't do it. Microsoft has done that regularly. Their solution to being caught has been to get their politician buddies to buy the justice department off them. That's not what normal people do and people shouldn't forget that.
The funniest thing about my comment having been moderated troll is that I subsequently learned that the grandparent was straight up wrong. The books had been sold legally and the publisher just changed their mind. Read through the other thread and you'll see that this misunderstanding about an illegal sale grew up and Amazon never confirmed it (so it wasn't true) but they carefully didn't contradict it.
There are other comments on this thread which say that you can choose to back up or not your annotations. The restore works regardless of which you do. However; my point is not the technical detail of whether they back up or not. My point is that, if they wanted to they could always restore content, independent of what your backup status is. However, if you don't have a backup with them, they won't and you can't properly back it up yourself because it's all DRMed. That's all.
it should be impossible to get a patent on implementing an Open specification
Well, there seem to several misunderstandings here. Firstly I believe that the patent is quite old and pre-dates the open specifications that we are discussing, in which case the implementation might be obvious now (based on the literature now), but probably wasn't when the patent was made.
Secondly, patents are not about "doing things", they are about "ways of doing things". Thus, the open standard might say "put the ball in the hoop" and a standard method of doing it might be to throw the ball. However, you can get a patent on "using a very tall robot to put the ball in the hoop". The fact that the action is specified in an open standard doesn't in any way influence your ability to patent a way of doing that.
Patents on software should be invalid because they are essentially patents on mathematics which are excluded and because, if the affect FOSS software then they are affecting freedom of speech and are thus illegal under the UN conventions on human rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the US constitution. Relying on obviousness is a pretty major risk.
SANS points to top IP addresses. According to TFA this is supposed to point to top hackers. I have some doubt about that, but if it was true it would be much more useful.
Doesn't this mean that Amazon has backed up every single Kindle? Presumably if you tried hard enough after losing your Kindle you could get all your books back...
Mod parent "+1 so innocent it's funny". Amazon can have their own copy of all the material (for archival and backup) if they want. They can also keep a list of all the things they sold you. Then they don't have to "back it up" to restore it. The reason they won't restore it is because then they can charge you for the same material all over again. You have no legal come back; giving you back your stuff isn't in your contract. This is exactly what the point of the DRM is. It gives them power; it takes away your power and rights.
I think you're missing a key detail, that the books were pulled because the SELLER (that is: not Amazon)
no; I don't think that we're wrong because of that. There are two choices:
If you are right, then Amazon has made a big tactical mistake. They turned on the DRM features too early. They have shown that there is no way no know if you have a Kindle book or not. At any time, Amazon can take it away. Compare that to a normal book, where, if you buy an illegal copy which is identical to the legal one and which you thought was legal, it is the person who copied it who has a problem. Not you.
This is a tactical, not strategic mistake, however. The only thing they did wrong was to delete a book early enough that there is still non-DRM competition. A feature like "remotely delete books" does not get created by accident. You can't risk using it without extensive testing that it will delete exactly the book that you want it to delete and no others. The FSF has been right all along; you can't trust DRM. In some years, Amazon hope to be able do this kind of stuff and you won't complain because all their competition will do it at the same time too.
Let us count the ways patents destroy value
just because it doesn't kill people doesn't mean it isn't negative.
Having a feature vs not having a feature?
That's one of the true determiners of quality software. For example the <blink> tag is just missing on several browsers which makes web page display annoyingly inconsistent.
(note my sig before moderating)
I would like to suggest a single root cause: The Plague of Lawyers.
the issue of lawyers has been going since Shakespearian time (and surely before) so I don't really see what's different there.
However; I think there's something in what you say. There is a single root cause. What fundamentally changed at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century was that the laws of low energy physics where more or less settled. There was a series of major breakthroughs, for example electrodynamics (about 1860 onwards), then quantum physics (1905-1920) and relativity (1905-1930??). These breakthroughs were so big that it took years to understand them and even today we are still working on many of the implications
since that time, fundamental breakthroughs such as QED and the standard theory have been out of reach to normal manufacturing techniques. Rather, interesting work has been in the implications of the older work. For example, the transistor, the laser, the LED and the LCD come directly from quantum physics. Even the light bulb and the electric motor fundamentally need electrodynamics. What day to day object depends on QED? How could you make such a thing? Even GPS is a product of general relativity (making the clocks accurate enough to give position) and quantum mechanics (the devices).
The major discoveries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries have worked through to many other subjects and caused major changes. For example computers need QM and have driven many discoveries in biology and chemistry. Radio comms stems from electrodynamics. Moble phones, require computers, electrodynamics and quantum physics (in the radio circuitry etc). They also use many modern materials which required quantum driven breakthroughs in chemistry and solid state physics. I think we are gradually working through the implications of those discoveries and, whilst there's still quite a roller coaster ride to go, we can really expect things to slow down.
The funniest, most ironic thing, I think, is that where we (you; not me) laughed at our grandparents inability to cope with new stuff; out children (if they survive) will probably laugh at our strange cult like belief in intelligence "singularities" and indefinite exponential improvement. The same predictions of indefinite exponential growth were made about aeroplane engines at one time. And they were followed for some time. Then the advance just stopped.
from you:
[...] the helmet isnt actually causing brain damage. The critique is in the design not preventing something that could be fixed[...]
from the article:
[...]. "The helmet acts as a windscoop, so the pressure between the skull and helmet is larger than the blast wave by itself," [...]
do you see the disparity? Are you reading the fucking article? In the case of a shockwave; wearing the helmet may be worse than not wearing it.
Errrr; it runs "linux".
Remote management ; cfengine / ssh / vnc / apt. I guess eventually tivoli and evil stuff like that may be ported.
Encryption; all standard linux encryption devices.
Firewalling; iptables built in.
If you aren't able to cope with a device like that then I guarantee you that there are business units out in your company that are just going ahead and running systems you are failing to support. Yes. They have sign off on that.
Personally, though, I think the corporate use is really a thing that comes after. First people build applications and get to want to use the device. Then, after some time the device is "needed" in a corporate situation because it has a feature someone wants.
Judging by the way my phone behaved when it's GPS antenna was breaking (reception later broke completely) A-GPS is really great. When in coverage I could lock on pretty much immediately and get an acceptable fix. Without coverage it would just never work. That same calculation works in bad GPS coverage or just when you want it to start fast. Plus, if you have a flat rate data plan A-GPS doesn't cost anything and saves battery (since you can lock on faster you don't have to run GPS all the time). Well recommended. In fact the only thing against it is that I suspect that it makes it difficult to check the GPS receiver in the phones. Remember to turn A-GPS off if you want to test what performance you will get in the Wilderness.
Key fact Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica. This is even taking into account the risk of vandalism. I don't care about the detail; there seem to be ways of counting which make Wikipedia win and ways that make Britannica win; what matters is that this means that statistically, a fact in Wikipedia is much more likely to be true than not. If you wouldn't worry when using a different Encyclopaedia, then you shouldn't worry when using Wikipedia.
Now, if you care about a fact enough that you are worried even in this situation. A; typical example where this might be true is when involved in academic studies; then you need to check the sources of the fact. This is where Wikipedia's citation policy is a killer. Whilst you should still check the fact in multiple sources, knowing the original source tends to make it much easier to be clear when a fact is wrong. Why was it wrong? What is the original source of the misunderstanding etc. etc.
The only thing to be aware of in Wikipedia is that it's more likely that a fact is maliciously and deliberately wrong. In this case, it helps to check the history of the fact and see who added it; again something not possible in Britannica. If that doesn't matter / isn't likely for the fact you are interested in then again you just go back to statistics, which are in your favour.
I've always wondered what happens if you refuse to let them onto your property. Presumably their only recourse would be to sue you and obtain access to your computer systems through the discovery process. Given the "speed" with which the court system moves I wonder if you could have the whole operation switched over an open source movement by the time it reached that point?
Please look up the following terms on google. felony software piracy conviction and statutory damages. Basically the first thing means that the person deciding has a choice between paying over the companies (shareholder's) money or personally going to prison. It becomes an easy decision.
Alternatively what happens if you claim trade secrets or privacy restrictions (HIPAA?) on your computer system?
You have a contract which says you have to let them audit you. If you fail to deliver, you are liable anyway. If you destroy evidence then you are in deep trouble and any court will likely treat it as if the evidence was all against you. In the end, that means that you deliver the systems to them and have to find a way to do it whilst satisfying the HIPAA restrictions. In other words, you have to use much more expensive investigators with appropriate clearence for whatever they are reading and techiques which don't involve reading restricted data. In other words, you pay more.
the only way to completely avoid such an audit is to have no software licensed from a BSA member. For small companies this is seriously worth considering.
In the case of social responsibility and volunteering for internet access there were many good projects to build local access between people long ago. "Freenet" had a completely different meaning before it became a crypto project. What killed these projects was that the big corporations wanted to gain market share and so were willing to sell internet access well below cost at the same time as making huge investments. For almost nothing people were getting better access than the Freenets could provide and the volunteers stopped seeing the point. We're still, to some extent, under the influence of that. However, things are changing, as we see with broadband rationing. Wireless community networks are already a start of a return but I think the time of community networks is coming back big time and it's time for people to start thinking about how to build them again.
It is potentially everone on the planet.
you know; you're so so right. In fact, if you think about it all the people who ever paid for an internet connection helped contribute to this by supporting the infrastructure used for all those people to "potentially" infringe.
I think everybody who ever used the internet should have to pay at least this much to the RIAA. They have (potentially) suffered so much. In fact, if you think about it, and multiply the number of potential people who could have copied by the number of potential people who could have been copied from by the number of potential songs that could have been copied by the maximum potential statutory damages, I think you'll find that their potential losses must run to more dollars than the number of atoms in the planet. We should just declare them galactic rulers and do their every bidding.
Microsoft is planning to build "Microsoft PC" products that are Microsoft Software+Hardware.
Interesting. Do you have a link for that?
I don't think most of the PC manufacturers would be able to complain any more than the mouse manufacturers did about the MS mouse. It might make sense. Microsoft needs the revenue and the whole Netbook thing really scared them. I'd guess that the PC manufacturers could easily be the next partner for them to crush.
duhhh... oh. You're right; why didn't I think of that at the time. At least that or some similar Linux user difference (customers more tolerant of small glitches?). That would actually make them a valuable market for Dell, especially if it can be continued into more and more mass market.
You may find this link helpful
Probably they do have experimental builds, but there's very little point in MS actually making products from them. The reason why you want Windows is because Windows apps run on Windows. They also have to produce ARM builds of all of the software that people need. They can do that for their own stuff, but most Windows software is not produced by MS. It's important to remember that when you get Ubuntu, you get a whole load more software than on a plain Windows box and even most of the software not included comes with source code so it's relatively easy for someone to port it to the new architecture. Not to mention that Windows Mobile has done real damage to the Windows brand by looking so much worse than Symbian phones, let alone Android or the iPhone. They can't afford to keep repeating that.
The Intel Atom is produced specifically to make an i386 platform which competes with the ARM. MS would do much better to commit to that kind of platform. The power consumption is "good enough" and they don't risk splitting their market share.
Which exact part of
we don't see a significant difference between the return rate for Windows versus the rate for Linux
is it that you have difficulty reading. What he's saying is that Windows machines return at the approximately same rate for technical problems as Linux machines return due to both technical problems and misunderstandings. This implies that if they can improve their communication then the return rate of Linux machines will be significantly lower than the return rate for Windows machines. To be honest I have difficulty working out why. Surely the hardware should be pretty much the same? Is it possible that the rate of malware infection at the beginning of a modern, up to date, Windows system's life is really high enough to account for the extra Windows returns?