...okay so Linux is being applied to all these terrific projects of scale both large and small. Is it because it's an open system with seemingly hyperactive development or is it because it's simply better than anything else out there?
Linux is being used because there's no x86/Itanium port of Irix. SGI use Irix, which as of 6.5 is a superb Unix implementation, on their MIPS hardware. IBM use Linux because of all the software that's available for it, but Linux runs within a virtual machine on top of their proprietary zOS.
XFS has already made it into Linux, maybe some other Irix stuff like GRIO will be next.
Consider installing some propriatory OS instead.. where they cannot play around, change kernel design, drivers, VM or whatever they fancy. Would not that be a greater drawback ?
But IBM already have the source to AIX... they wrote it.
And there is no reason that my friend who is having these issue should have to change....if he was once worth $60K(actually he was worth alot more)...he should still be worth that...
Yeah, I bet the stableowners said the same when the motorcar was invented. Times change, and people who don't change with them are lucky to get anything. If he's not worth it now, then the hard cold truth is that he was never worth it, and was living on borrowed time.
A job is "worth" whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Hot skills of 3 years ago like HTML are now commonplace. There are no barriers to learning new skills, if someone is willing to study and not sit around waiting for someone to send them on "training".
It might be bad for some employees, but it's good for as many more.
Wouldn't it be sad if we actually had something relevant and recent to discuss? Or, for that matter, something which in some remote way applies to the subject? Horrible thought...
The point is simple: even well-meaning governments, given too much power, abuse it. Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
. I firmly believe that when their are American Citizens with the skill to do a job out of work, that a non-us citizen should not be taking a job that American citizen could be doing. I feel firmly as well that if they can't find a us citizen with the exact training to do said job, that they should be hiring one with the skills and background to learn that job, not looking at an H1B visa from outside.
But Americans priced themselves out of the market. A couple of years ago there were people demanding, and getting $60k just to write HTML. This was way more than they job was worth, and the market correction put a lot of these people out of work. If they go back to the market now with the same $60k demand, they will find no jobs, but might get a job - the same way the H1Bs do - by asking a more realistic salary.
The H1B visa, don't have any skills that US citizens don't already have(or could aquire through retraining), they are just willing to work for less and get beat on more! Kick all their asses out, hire an US IT worker who is currently out of work, but would love a Job(I know many), for a fair wage, and move on... H1B visa's are the equivalent of the scabs in a labor strike.
Great attitude. That's why the major software houses and systems integrators are moving offshore as fast as they can.
A fair wage is whatever someone is willing to do that job for. No-one's pointing a gun at their heads and saying "write code or die". Frankly, if someone can do a job as well or better than you for less money, then they deserve it, not you. If you think you have a god-given right to high pay without producing the best work, then you are mistaken. If you do produce the best work, then you have nothing to worry about.
When you submit a resume to HR, talk about your 25 years of experience with.NET and 50 years of Java.
Care to back that up? Lying on an H1B application results in a 10-year ban from travelling to the US, so it's not something that anyone would do lightly. And it's not just a HR department checking up on you, it's the INS. And if a company decides to stretch the truth a little in a pitch about the experience of its employees, that's not necessarily the employee's fault.
Or was that just another whiny "the dang foreigners are takin' all our jobs and women" remark? Remember, the only difference between you and a green card holder is that your parents caught an earlier flight or boat.
The only companies that I have come in contact with that might consider fresh graduates are Microsoft and government agencies such as the FBI. If I can actually compete with the 76% foreign immigrant population of Microsoft then I might see that as a fairly good start, though the odds don't seem to roll in my favor.
I think you will find that the vast majority of non-US citizens at Microsoft, or any other organization that hire H1Bs for that matter, aren't fresh graduates, but were already experienced software developers before the H1B is granted. It would be very difficult under the terms of H1B to hire fresh graduates, as one of the conditions is that the holder must have skills that are not in ready supply in the US.
Therefore, these people are entirely irrelevant; you wouldn't be competing with them for an entry level job anyway.
Corect me if I'm wrong but I always thought SGI was using light in it's interconnectors between machines? That's how they can achieve amazing throughput.
Optical fibre point-to-point has been around for years, it's often used to connect storage arrays to hosts. What the article is about is being able to switch and route optical data streams, which is an order or magnitude more complex. You see, it's easy to store an electronic signal in an electronic form, so a conventional router can stop a packet, look into it to work out what to do with it, then send it to the right place (or regenerate it on the right port). If you want to do that with light, you have to convert it into an electronic form, process it, then reconstruct the optical signal. An all-optical switch does away with the conversions. I'm not even sure if an all-optical (i.e. no electronics at all) router is even possible.
I had spam yesterday where they spelt Viagra wrong. Unless Viagrea is a new wonder drug?
Not funny at all. You knew what they meant; a filter on your inbox on the keyword 'Viagra' wouldn't have. Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible; a human's ability to communicate FUCK without out actually typing it was far ahead of any rules he could encode into his software without breaking legitimate conversations. That's one of the reasons the spam problem is so difficult to solve purely with technology.
Didn't Apple finance one of the Linux distros that runs on older Apple hardware? My memory's a bit hazy on this as I've never owned an m68k or PowerPC machine of any kind, but I'm sure it's true.
Yes, MkLinux, which was Linux on top of the Mach microkernel. But it was never intended to be a commercial product, more a laboratory for Apple engineers to familiarize themselves with Mach.
Come ON. If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it? I find it difficult to believe that your government is so corrupt, so incompetent and so basically naughty that a National ID is impossible without a Big Brother situation. And if it is, why whine about the National ID instead of making sure that the incompetent government goes away?
The whole point of the US, its very raison d'etre, is that it is a country that doesn't have to do things the way the Europeans do. And while we're on the subject of how great the Scandanavian governments are, perhaps you'd care to explain this and this?
No, you're wrong- they ARE fighting the next war. But it is not against the terrorists, at all. The terrorists are indispensable and if they don't exist they will be invented [google.com], because they are a tool for instilling a climate of fear for the purposes of tightening state control over the populace.
It's not just the US government that employ this technique, the British government have been at it too. They keep dropping hints about terrorism, then denying that they've done so. Clearly, they are doing so in order to create a climate of fear, while trying to avoid panic, to suppress opposition to the "war on terror".
Note that my links are to the BBC, the news organization most supportive of New Labour.
If linux was so wonderful then why would apple choose BSD for OS X and not linux?
Umm, they didn't. Choose, that is. The decision was made by NeXT, years before, after Jobs had left Apple and started hanging out with Avi Tenevian (sp?). NeXT chose BSD over Mach, which was state-of-the-art for Unix at the time, and is still very good (I personally am ambivalent on the subject of microkernels, but some people have very strong feelings about them).
Apple's next-generation OS (Copland, Pink, whatever) was in fairly dire straits, they had been working on it for years and had gotten precisely nowhere. So Apple bought NeXT, but NeXT people wound up in charge, and they made the decision that MacOS X would be the next (no pun intended) iteration of the NeXT OS.
Even without this, Apple would never have chosen Linux - if they had to release their modifications to it under the GPL, people would just have run it on cheaper PCs, and Apple make almost all their money on hardware. The BSD license allowed them to compromise.
One of the reasons I choose Linux over BSD is the rate at which Linux development takes place.
Well, a new kernel every couple of weeks is fine if you're running Linux on a PC in your bedroom, but in the real world, it takes time to deploy software. It has to be tested, downtime scheduled, documentation updated, staff trained, etc. The big advantage of FreeBSD (and Debian for that matter) is that it gets much more thoroughly tested before it's declared "STABLE". Although it may lag behind the cutting edge a little, that's a far, far happier place to be if you are relying on your systems to run your business. Not only that, but there is one FreeBSD, maintained in a consistent way by a single organization. If you are writing or deploying software that requires certain versions of certain things to be in certain places, then you have to only support a subset of the possible Linux distributions, or choose something like FreeBSD which is far more consistent. FreeBSD does not need to make compromises for portability to other platforms (like NetBSD and Linux), it is wholly developed for x86.
In short, my position is that Linux is better if you want to experiment, FreeBSD is better if you want to run crucial applications or infrastructure.
They added their proprietary code to a GPL'ed program and distributed it. The only legal way to do that is by GPL'ing their proprietary code, which they didn't.
Not technically true. It's perfectly legal to distribute a GPL'd program and an entirely closed-source.so or.dll containing proprietary code, and a GPL'd wrapper layer allowing the GPL'd code to call the proprietary code without ever cross-contaminating the sources. This is, IIRC, how certain hardware manufacturers supply their Linux kernel drivers.
I am going to venture a wild guess and say that the licensing costs to run windows on this thing would be the #1 reason why Mr. Allen is using linux
Why would he pay licensing costs? He'd just create the company as a Microsoft spin-off, subsidiary or even business unit and after a little accounting, get it effectively for free. Therefore, there must be a technological reason for his decision.
You would have to be a bona-fide moron to think windows has competitors that actually force market prices. Compare ximian connector to the costs of maintaining outlook on a windows box.
V. funny. You think that price isn't a consideration for deciding between Oracle and MSSQL, or Notes and Exchange, or NT Server and Solaris? Sure there are other factors, but like for any large software company, no-one buying in bulk pays list price.
Now they are up to WinXP, which costs $300 for the professional version, which they are selling to 90% of the computer market. It should be obvious that MS is charging far, far more than they need to.
The Home edition is much cheaper, and that's going to be the bulk of their bundled sales. Also note that the whole point of bundling is that the OEMs pay a massively reduced price for Windows, and they pass that saving on to the end consumer. That's why OEM's signed up with Microsoft to put a copy on every PC in the first place. It's a win-win-win for Microsoft, the OEM, and the end users. Everyone trades (less money) for (more convenience).
Also, keep in mind that most sales of Windows XP are preinstalled bundles on PC's, so who knows how much profit is made when you shell out the $300 for a shrink-wrapped copy.
Which almost no-one does because they're either getting it bundled with the hardware, or they're a corporation with a volume-licensing deal.
As a capitalist, I'd much rather see the market solve it's own problems. One way would certainly be for the government to seek out open source solutions as much as possible.
LOL, you can't claim to be a capitalist then in the next sentence say you'd like the government to intervene!!
I just wouldn't want to see it issued as a directive that all departments must switch to Linux, because I'd hate to see Mac OS X get shut out.
You won't, because the dirty little secret that no Slashbot will ever admit out loud is that for the vast majority of users, considering software availability, cost of training, cost of hardware, availability of third-party documentation, etc, Windows really is the best desktop OS in the world right now. MacOS X has less software available, has fewer users who already know how to use it, runs on more expensive hardware, and doesn't have very many books written about it. It might be "better" in a purely technical sense, but purely technical decisions aren't made in the real world.
According to the field of Microeconomics no firm will be able to maintain high profit margins in the long term unless they are a monopoly (or similar things like oligopoly w/ collusion.) In a real competitive market with low costs of entry, other firms will see Microsoft with such high profits and have incentive to enter the market, undercutting Microsoft. As the result of new firms entering, prices go down to a point of "normal or zero economic profit." This is how the competitive market works.
Two points:
The market has attracted competitors. Corel, Lotus, StarOffice, many more. The fact that they were unsuccessful is neither here nor there: they did enter the market and they did compete.
Microsoft haven't been around long enough for anyone to use them as an example of long-term economic trends.
You almost want to ask, why don't they spin off the Windows division? Well, we know that the Windows division bankrolls other, future plans of the Microsoft Corporation as it casts about trying to provide for its ongoing viability.
Umm, every company funds new product development from the sales of existing products. I challenge you to name one company that doesn't. IBM does it. Xerox does it. Sun does it, where do you suppose they got the money to develop Java and give it away for free? That's right, their hardware division.
What is being presented is the fact the Microsoft enjoys abnormally high profit margins from their core products of Windows and Office. Under normal market conditions, if a manufacturer is able to enjoy such high margins, competition soon sprouts up with the aim of underselling the unusually high prices of the original manufacturer.
That's an overly simplistic analysis. After all, you can buy a pair of sneakers for $10 at Wal*mart but Nike still sell plenty for $100 or more. Are Nike a monopoly? No, because Reebok and Adidas enjoy similar profit margins. Then are they a cartel? There's no evidence of that, since there are no barriers to product substitution. You can see a similar phenomenon in many markets, from food to electronics.
The price of any product reflects its value to the buyer, remember. If Windows wasn't worth what it cost (and I am talking cold, hard economic facts here, not some Slashbot's biased opinion) then it would not sell, period.
Personally if I was an MS stockholder I would like to see this profit in my hands as a dividend of some sort, where I can decide to invest it myself, rather than let MS invest in non-performing projects (negative NPV) or donate away.
But then you'd have to pay tax on it. The reason MS doesn't pay dividends is that its shareholders prefer their capital to increase, and to extract dollars from their investment by selling stock. The alternative would see the stock less volatile, but with less growth potential. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends entirely on your personal investment strategy.
AFAIK, genes don't have the ability to do an inter-species jump like that...
You are absolutely right. For example, there are genes in perfectly unnatural, unmodified tomatoes, but you don't find them "jumping" into humans and causing humans to develop tomato-like characteristics.
Slashdot Mirror
...okay so Linux is being applied to all these terrific projects of scale both large and small. Is it because it's an open system with seemingly hyperactive development or is it because it's simply better than anything else out there?
Linux is being used because there's no x86/Itanium port of Irix. SGI use Irix, which as of 6.5 is a superb Unix implementation, on their MIPS hardware. IBM use Linux because of all the software that's available for it, but Linux runs within a virtual machine on top of their proprietary zOS.
XFS has already made it into Linux, maybe some other Irix stuff like GRIO will be next.
Consider installing some propriatory OS instead.. where they cannot play around, change kernel design, drivers, VM or whatever they fancy. Would not that be a greater drawback ?
But IBM already have the source to AIX... they wrote it.
And there is no reason that my friend who is having these issue should have to change....if he was once worth $60K(actually he was worth alot more)...he should still be worth that...
Yeah, I bet the stableowners said the same when the motorcar was invented. Times change, and people who don't change with them are lucky to get anything. If he's not worth it now, then the hard cold truth is that he was never worth it, and was living on borrowed time.
A job is "worth" whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Hot skills of 3 years ago like HTML are now commonplace. There are no barriers to learning new skills, if someone is willing to study and not sit around waiting for someone to send them on "training".
It might be bad for some employees, but it's good for as many more.
Wouldn't it be sad if we actually had something relevant and recent to discuss? Or, for that matter, something which in some remote way applies to the subject? Horrible thought...
The point is simple: even well-meaning governments, given too much power, abuse it. Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it.
. I firmly believe that when their are American Citizens with the skill to do a job out of work, that a non-us citizen should not be taking a job that American citizen could be doing. I feel firmly as well that if they can't find a us citizen with the exact training to do said job, that they should be hiring one with the skills and background to learn that job, not looking at an H1B visa from outside.
But Americans priced themselves out of the market. A couple of years ago there were people demanding, and getting $60k just to write HTML. This was way more than they job was worth, and the market correction put a lot of these people out of work. If they go back to the market now with the same $60k demand, they will find no jobs, but might get a job - the same way the H1Bs do - by asking a more realistic salary.
The H1B visa, don't have any skills that US citizens don't already have(or could aquire through retraining), they are just willing to work for less and get beat on more!
Kick all their asses out, hire an US IT worker who is currently out of work, but would love a Job(I know many), for a fair wage, and move on...
H1B visa's are the equivalent of the scabs in a labor strike.
Great attitude. That's why the major software houses and systems integrators are moving offshore as fast as they can.
A fair wage is whatever someone is willing to do that job for. No-one's pointing a gun at their heads and saying "write code or die". Frankly, if someone can do a job as well or better than you for less money, then they deserve it, not you. If you think you have a god-given right to high pay without producing the best work, then you are mistaken. If you do produce the best work, then you have nothing to worry about.
When you submit a resume to HR, talk about your 25 years of experience with .NET and 50 years of Java.
Care to back that up? Lying on an H1B application results in a 10-year ban from travelling to the US, so it's not something that anyone would do lightly. And it's not just a HR department checking up on you, it's the INS. And if a company decides to stretch the truth a little in a pitch about the experience of its employees, that's not necessarily the employee's fault.
Or was that just another whiny "the dang foreigners are takin' all our jobs and women" remark? Remember, the only difference between you and a green card holder is that your parents caught an earlier flight or boat.
The only companies that I have come in contact with that might consider fresh graduates are Microsoft and government agencies such as the FBI. If I can actually compete with the 76% foreign immigrant population of Microsoft then I might see that as a fairly good start, though the odds don't seem to roll in my favor.
I think you will find that the vast majority of non-US citizens at Microsoft, or any other organization that hire H1Bs for that matter, aren't fresh graduates, but were already experienced software developers before the H1B is granted. It would be very difficult under the terms of H1B to hire fresh graduates, as one of the conditions is that the holder must have skills that are not in ready supply in the US.
Therefore, these people are entirely irrelevant; you wouldn't be competing with them for an entry level job anyway.
Corect me if I'm wrong but I always thought SGI was using light in it's interconnectors between machines? That's how they can achieve amazing throughput.
Optical fibre point-to-point has been around for years, it's often used to connect storage arrays to hosts. What the article is about is being able to switch and route optical data streams, which is an order or magnitude more complex. You see, it's easy to store an electronic signal in an electronic form, so a conventional router can stop a packet, look into it to work out what to do with it, then send it to the right place (or regenerate it on the right port). If you want to do that with light, you have to convert it into an electronic form, process it, then reconstruct the optical signal. An all-optical switch does away with the conversions. I'm not even sure if an all-optical (i.e. no electronics at all) router is even possible.
I had spam yesterday where they spelt Viagra wrong. Unless Viagrea is a new wonder drug?
Not funny at all. You knew what they meant; a filter on your inbox on the keyword 'Viagra' wouldn't have. Someone I know once worked on software to do realtime filtering of keywords in "family friendly" chatrooms. He said it was almost impossible; a human's ability to communicate FUCK without out actually typing it was far ahead of any rules he could encode into his software without breaking legitimate conversations. That's one of the reasons the spam problem is so difficult to solve purely with technology.
Didn't Apple finance one of the Linux distros that runs on older Apple hardware? My memory's a bit hazy on this as I've never owned an m68k or PowerPC machine of any kind, but I'm sure it's true.
Yes, MkLinux, which was Linux on top of the Mach microkernel. But it was never intended to be a commercial product, more a laboratory for Apple engineers to familiarize themselves with Mach.
Come ON. If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it? I find it difficult to believe that your government is so corrupt, so incompetent and so basically naughty that a National ID is impossible without a Big Brother situation. And if it is, why whine about the National ID instead of making sure that the incompetent government goes away?
The whole point of the US, its very raison d'etre, is that it is a country that doesn't have to do things the way the Europeans do. And while we're on the subject of how great the Scandanavian governments are, perhaps you'd care to explain this and this?
No, you're wrong- they ARE fighting the next war. But it is not against the terrorists, at all. The terrorists are indispensable and if they don't exist they will be invented [google.com], because they are a tool for instilling a climate of fear for the purposes of tightening state control over the populace.
It's not just the US government that employ this technique, the British government have been at it too. They keep dropping hints about terrorism, then denying that they've done so. Clearly, they are doing so in order to create a climate of fear, while trying to avoid panic, to suppress opposition to the "war on terror".
Note that my links are to the BBC, the news organization most supportive of New Labour.
If linux was so wonderful then why would apple choose BSD for OS X and not linux?
Umm, they didn't. Choose, that is. The decision was made by NeXT, years before, after Jobs had left Apple and started hanging out with Avi Tenevian (sp?). NeXT chose BSD over Mach, which was state-of-the-art for Unix at the time, and is still very good (I personally am ambivalent on the subject of microkernels, but some people have very strong feelings about them).
Apple's next-generation OS (Copland, Pink, whatever) was in fairly dire straits, they had been working on it for years and had gotten precisely nowhere. So Apple bought NeXT, but NeXT people wound up in charge, and they made the decision that MacOS X would be the next (no pun intended) iteration of the NeXT OS.
Even without this, Apple would never have chosen Linux - if they had to release their modifications to it under the GPL, people would just have run it on cheaper PCs, and Apple make almost all their money on hardware. The BSD license allowed them to compromise.
One of the reasons I choose Linux over BSD is the rate at which Linux development takes place.
Well, a new kernel every couple of weeks is fine if you're running Linux on a PC in your bedroom, but in the real world, it takes time to deploy software. It has to be tested, downtime scheduled, documentation updated, staff trained, etc. The big advantage of FreeBSD (and Debian for that matter) is that it gets much more thoroughly tested before it's declared "STABLE". Although it may lag behind the cutting edge a little, that's a far, far happier place to be if you are relying on your systems to run your business. Not only that, but there is one FreeBSD, maintained in a consistent way by a single organization. If you are writing or deploying software that requires certain versions of certain things to be in certain places, then you have to only support a subset of the possible Linux distributions, or choose something like FreeBSD which is far more consistent. FreeBSD does not need to make compromises for portability to other platforms (like NetBSD and Linux), it is wholly developed for x86.
In short, my position is that Linux is better if you want to experiment, FreeBSD is better if you want to run crucial applications or infrastructure.
What's up with the pseudo-Japanese name?
A node I wrote on E2 should explain.
They added their proprietary code to a GPL'ed program and distributed it. The only legal way to do that is by GPL'ing their proprietary code, which they didn't.
.so or .dll containing proprietary code, and a GPL'd wrapper layer allowing the GPL'd code to call the proprietary code without ever cross-contaminating the sources. This is, IIRC, how certain hardware manufacturers supply their Linux kernel drivers.
Not technically true. It's perfectly legal to distribute a GPL'd program and an entirely closed-source
I am going to venture a wild guess and say that the licensing costs to run windows on this thing would be the #1 reason why Mr. Allen is using linux
Why would he pay licensing costs? He'd just create the company as a Microsoft spin-off, subsidiary or even business unit and after a little accounting, get it effectively for free. Therefore, there must be a technological reason for his decision.
You would have to be a bona-fide moron to think windows has competitors that actually force market prices. Compare ximian connector to the costs of maintaining outlook on a windows box.
V. funny. You think that price isn't a consideration for deciding between Oracle and MSSQL, or Notes and Exchange, or NT Server and Solaris? Sure there are other factors, but like for any large software company, no-one buying in bulk pays list price.
Now they are up to WinXP, which costs $300 for the professional version, which they are selling to 90% of the computer market. It should be obvious that MS is charging far, far more than they need to.
The Home edition is much cheaper, and that's going to be the bulk of their bundled sales. Also note that the whole point of bundling is that the OEMs pay a massively reduced price for Windows, and they pass that saving on to the end consumer. That's why OEM's signed up with Microsoft to put a copy on every PC in the first place. It's a win-win-win for Microsoft, the OEM, and the end users. Everyone trades (less money) for (more convenience).
Also, keep in mind that most sales of Windows XP are preinstalled bundles on PC's, so who knows how much profit is made when you shell out the $300 for a shrink-wrapped copy.
Which almost no-one does because they're either getting it bundled with the hardware, or they're a corporation with a volume-licensing deal.
As a capitalist, I'd much rather see the market solve it's own problems. One way would certainly be for the government to seek out open source solutions as much as possible.
LOL, you can't claim to be a capitalist then in the next sentence say you'd like the government to intervene!!
I just wouldn't want to see it issued as a directive that all departments must switch to Linux, because I'd hate to see Mac OS X get shut out.
You won't, because the dirty little secret that no Slashbot will ever admit out loud is that for the vast majority of users, considering software availability, cost of training, cost of hardware, availability of third-party documentation, etc, Windows really is the best desktop OS in the world right now. MacOS X has less software available, has fewer users who already know how to use it, runs on more expensive hardware, and doesn't have very many books written about it. It might be "better" in a purely technical sense, but purely technical decisions aren't made in the real world.
Two points:
You almost want to ask, why don't they spin off the Windows division? Well, we know that the Windows division bankrolls other, future plans of the Microsoft Corporation as it casts about trying to provide for its ongoing viability.
Umm, every company funds new product development from the sales of existing products. I challenge you to name one company that doesn't. IBM does it. Xerox does it. Sun does it, where do you suppose they got the money to develop Java and give it away for free? That's right, their hardware division.
What is being presented is the fact the Microsoft enjoys abnormally high profit margins from their core products of Windows and Office. Under normal market conditions, if a manufacturer is able to enjoy such high margins, competition soon sprouts up with the aim of underselling the unusually high prices of the original manufacturer.
That's an overly simplistic analysis. After all, you can buy a pair of sneakers for $10 at Wal*mart but Nike still sell plenty for $100 or more. Are Nike a monopoly? No, because Reebok and Adidas enjoy similar profit margins. Then are they a cartel? There's no evidence of that, since there are no barriers to product substitution. You can see a similar phenomenon in many markets, from food to electronics.
The price of any product reflects its value to the buyer, remember. If Windows wasn't worth what it cost (and I am talking cold, hard economic facts here, not some Slashbot's biased opinion) then it would not sell, period.
Personally if I was an MS stockholder I would like to see this profit in my hands as a dividend of some sort, where I can decide to invest it myself, rather than let MS invest in non-performing projects (negative NPV) or donate away.
But then you'd have to pay tax on it. The reason MS doesn't pay dividends is that its shareholders prefer their capital to increase, and to extract dollars from their investment by selling stock. The alternative would see the stock less volatile, but with less growth potential. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends entirely on your personal investment strategy.
AFAIK, genes don't have the ability to do an inter-species jump like that...
You are absolutely right. For example, there are genes in perfectly unnatural, unmodified tomatoes, but you don't find them "jumping" into humans and causing humans to develop tomato-like characteristics.