Although I don't share quite the same quantity of unabashed Linux boosterism as the above poster, I thought I would point out:
Do you know what a themable GUI does to the training and support organisation of a company of any size?
That's an organizational problem, though - the company could lock that down easily (moreso than customizing Windows since they've got the source code). A major organization could put together their own customized Linux desktop, deploy it worldwide, and support it much more cheaply than an equivalent install of Windows. "Users changing their themes" on Linux is exactly as much of a problem as "Users installing non-approved screensavers" on Windows - no problem at all with appropriate organizational planning ahead of time and appropriate IT controls on desktop customization.
The reason that XP is better is precisely because there is competition (of a sort) from Linux and Mac OS X. This is more pronounced in the server arena, though - from all reports W2K is a big improvement over NT4 for server use, precisely because Linux is a very credible threat in the server arena. Also, Microsoft has some impetus to turn out new (not necessarily better) software frequently in order to keep customers on the upgrade trail and ensure consistent cash flow to meet Microsoft's business needs.
True, Microsoft has innovated at times, mostly as a direct result of being spurred by competition. But their usual practice is to innovate a little and then market a lot in order to bury the most recent threat (lately it's Real, leading to Windows Media Player). Once Microsoft switches to its new subscription pricing model, they will have no reason to innovate at all without competition (because they don't have to force an upgrade every few years), and I think you'll see innovation stop in those markets where they have no competition.
The
market is still as open as it ever has been. Programmers just don't try hard enough to compete (they sure do bitch though).
If you can't get your really cool software onto new PCs because Microsoft has used its OS monopoly to push MS-apps, then it doesn't matter how hard you've tried. If you've written the most innovative code anywhere, but Microsoft can use its ill-gotten gains to clone your project from scratch faster than you can lock in market share, it doesn't matter how much work you've put into things. For very basic reasons ingrained in our capitalistic system, as well as network effects dictated by the nature of software in general, it's very tough to unseat a reigning monopoly, especially one which has shown itself to be as unprincipled as Microsoft.
You only have to read a quote from a venture capitalist saying that they won't fund businesses that would go up against Microsoft to see how strong and resilient the monopoly really is. VCs understand innovation - they're not afraid of funding projects that are often too innovative and ahead of their time. But they know markets too, and the truth is that in some markets it has been and will continue to be almost impossible to compete with Microsoft on the basis of innovative products or competitive (but profitable) pricing.
(although it's kind of
cool that when the lawsuits are over, my state gets a bit more $ and New Mexico gets shit, except for the congressman / governor etc,
who continues to get campaign contributions from MS)
I hate to burst your bubble, but according to the article, NM still gets a portion of any ultimate settlement reached by the states and the DOJ. So it's "money for nothing" in NM.
I read that comment as "We know that no one can control Microsoft, so at least we'll get on their good side while they're relatively weakened". What a huge loss for the forces of law and order.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do
nothing. - Edmund Burke
I'm amazed that anyone would consider lightening up on Microsoft just because they're trying (not very convincingly) to clean up their act now. Present good deeds don't make up for past misconduct in any other court in the land. The attitude is "Well, they've changed their ways, and it would be too hard to prosecute them any further, so...". Where's the famous American thirst for vengeance that gets fired up whenever some lunatic blows up a building?:)
Apparently they're planning to take a fingerprint of the audio itself, rather than just going off of song titles. It's really some pretty neat technology if you read up on it - www.loudeye.com.
After thinking about it for a little bit, that did become more clear to me even before reading your post, mostly because MySQL.org wouldn't submit a press release calling itself a threatening obscure web site:)
It was submitted to us by Marten Mickos
from MySQL
But which MySQL is he from? Methinks that the good Cmdr missed the whole point of the story a little - you now have to qualify the name "MySQL" a little more carefully. You wouldn't say "Hacker X from BSD" or "Hacker Y from SSH", now would you?
It's all up to what regulation the government has planned for us next.
More realistically, something along the lines of enshrining the Secure Audio Path technology into law, and making it illegal to alter your PC such that it can store off content that's supposed to be one-time-use. Such a regulation would be just a small step from the DMCA. Sure, you could still mod your PC, but imagine getting taken to court and having to prove that your changes weren't the illegal kind of modifications. Technically you're innocent until proven guilty, but in reality most of us couldn't wage this court battle and would have to cave. The end result, just like the DMCA, would be that most people wouldn't dare make any changes to their PCs for fear of an expensive legal suit.
For the truly paranoid, I might point out that with Windows XP, Microsoft will know when you've changed your hardware, and thus might be one of those evil hardware hackers. This hasn't come to pass yet, and doesn't seem too likely yet, but who really knew about the effects of the DMCA before it happened?
This is the most insightful comment on this article, bar none. Microsoft's hold on OEMs has always been financial, and it will take more than a press release to change that.
IANAL, but it seems to me that I've seen products compared to other trademarked products by name as long as they say "Product X is a registered trademark of X Corp., etc.". So in my mind you could say "It's as good as Adobe Illustrator" as long as you give props to Adobe somewhere in the ad. I've heard that this is illegal in some countries, though.
The piggybacking is a good point, though - Adobe did create the original name recognition of Illustrator as a vector drawing tool with certain features. I suppose they should expect to reap some reward from those efforts, as far as keeping up the association that "Illustrator" is not just a vector drawing tool with features X, Y, and Z, but it's Adobe's tool.
I think those grounds are a lot shakier than the "deliberately causing consumer confusion" issue, but it is a good point that you've made.
I bet that's the first time a woman with a Doctorate has been on their cover:)
I though some of the other images of her I've seen were more realistic looking, though. Maybe more skin leads to more chances to notice that it's not real?
Also, if you thought about it while watching the movie, you could see how it tied into a quest RPG style video
game. Before characters could do stuff, they would have to collect objects or do things.
So did they ever take a break and play Tetra Master? Maybe ride around on Chocobos?
On the contrary, it's the whole point. Trademark infringement can only occur if there's a reasonable chance that the two marks could be confused. I just don't think that a reasonable person could confuse them. Apparently the courts tend to see things differently, though.
I don't think that opening the code is automatically a bad thing, but in this case I don't think it would help too much. Open source code improves when people look at it, and people look at it when they use it and have problems with it. This was a custom system written for exactly one customer, and you can bet the DOE could have (and maybe did) get the source code if they wanted to. Making this system open source wouldn't have helped much since there really wouldn't be enough eyes looking at it to make the bugs shallow. In the worst case, the only people looking for flaws would be the people with something to gain from the flaws - black hats. You really only want something to be open source if you can be sure that there will be enough white hats contributing to balance out that risk, or if it's a program that has very minimal security implications, like gEdit or something like that.
That's assuming that the problem really was in the custom app and not in NT or MSSQL, but I assume any bugs where MSSQL quietly "disappears" certain information would be common knowledge by now...
I can't understand how consumers could not tell the difference between "Kapple" and "Apple". They're even pronounced different, for cryin' out loud. I could see more problems if it was "Apple" and "Appple" (pronounced the same) or "Apple" and "Apple" (pronounced differently (I don't know how) but spelled the same). But "Kapple" is spelled and pronounced differently than "Apple", just like "KIllustrator" is spelled and pronounced differently than "Illustrator". I still hold out hopes that the average consumer is not so stupid, I guess.
That sounds like a pretty poor German law - what if Adobe didn't even have a problem with KIllustrator? Some law firm has just gone and destroyed a lot of Adobe mindshare in the Linux market, effectively dragging Adobe's name through the mud (a lot more than the clone named KIllustrator ever did, I might point out) and now said law firm wants to charge Adobe for the privilege? If I were in that entirely hypothetical situation, I'd sue the pants off of the lawyers that started the whole ruckus:)
Wow, I missed the $100 million figure. Although I imagine they might be able to make the case that $100 million is the launch cost, but the satellite itself (the property) is really worth considerably less. After all, if I had to pay through the nose to buy a classic car and get it shipped to LA, the tax on that property itself is still only going to be based on the actual value of the car, no matter what I paid to get it.
It sounds like they're going to change the law anyway, which will work OK I guess until we get some companies whose only assets are a constellation of satellites. Hmmm, I wonder if the states of IL or AZ ever considered property taxes on Iridium?
The idea that the more a
company owns physically the more taxes it pays is a sure way to send companies packing to a nicer municipality.
Why should it be any different for companies than for private citizens? This may be the basic disagreement here, but IMHO taxes are supposed to be progressive. The largest companies gain a huge amount of advantage from the community, and as you said are often able to depreciate much of their tax burden anyway. I think it's reasonable that they be taxed somewhat more than smaller, struggling businesses. After all, corporate behemoths aren't really the result that we necessarily want to encourage, are they?
I'm curious as to why the overall opinion here seems to be very business-friendly: "don't tax them or they'll leave". But Hughes already pays other taxes on its property in the area, and they haven't left. I don't understand the attitude of "please Mr. Big Business, we're really sorry about the whole taxes thing, why don't we just repeal them and you don't have to leave". The impact of the additional tax on these satellites will be miniscule compared to the property taxes that Hughes already pays on its facilities in the area.
AFAIK, it sounds like the assessor understands the law, and everyone on the other side of the issue is just doing some vague hand-waving about how "it's just not right" and how "over-reaching" it is. If it's a bad law, then by all means change it, as long as you're willing to see companies move all sorts of equipment out of LA in order to avoid paying taxes on it. But it sounds like for the moment the tax assessor has Hughes dead to rights.
Trust me, Hughes isn't going to relocate a huge amount of employees and equipment just because of the added taxes on these satellites. They're just bitching because for the moment they've got the support of (uninformed) public opinion.
So we each get a local copy of Passport, then? I don't see how that will work. Some part of.NET has to be an internet service for the centralized Microsoft authentication to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I don't share quite the same quantity of unabashed Linux boosterism as the above poster, I thought I would point out:
That's an organizational problem, though - the company could lock that down easily (moreso than customizing Windows since they've got the source code). A major organization could put together their own customized Linux desktop, deploy it worldwide, and support it much more cheaply than an equivalent install of Windows. "Users changing their themes" on Linux is exactly as much of a problem as "Users installing non-approved screensavers" on Windows - no problem at all with appropriate organizational planning ahead of time and appropriate IT controls on desktop customization.
The reason that XP is better is precisely because there is competition (of a sort) from Linux and Mac OS X. This is more pronounced in the server arena, though - from all reports W2K is a big improvement over NT4 for server use, precisely because Linux is a very credible threat in the server arena. Also, Microsoft has some impetus to turn out new (not necessarily better) software frequently in order to keep customers on the upgrade trail and ensure consistent cash flow to meet Microsoft's business needs.
True, Microsoft has innovated at times, mostly as a direct result of being spurred by competition. But their usual practice is to innovate a little and then market a lot in order to bury the most recent threat (lately it's Real, leading to Windows Media Player). Once Microsoft switches to its new subscription pricing model, they will have no reason to innovate at all without competition (because they don't have to force an upgrade every few years), and I think you'll see innovation stop in those markets where they have no competition.
If you can't get your really cool software onto new PCs because Microsoft has used its OS monopoly to push MS-apps, then it doesn't matter how hard you've tried. If you've written the most innovative code anywhere, but Microsoft can use its ill-gotten gains to clone your project from scratch faster than you can lock in market share, it doesn't matter how much work you've put into things. For very basic reasons ingrained in our capitalistic system, as well as network effects dictated by the nature of software in general, it's very tough to unseat a reigning monopoly, especially one which has shown itself to be as unprincipled as Microsoft.
You only have to read a quote from a venture capitalist saying that they won't fund businesses that would go up against Microsoft to see how strong and resilient the monopoly really is. VCs understand innovation - they're not afraid of funding projects that are often too innovative and ahead of their time. But they know markets too, and the truth is that in some markets it has been and will continue to be almost impossible to compete with Microsoft on the basis of innovative products or competitive (but profitable) pricing.
Sounds like you need to use verb tenses from the part of the book that was left blank to save printing costs :)
I hate to burst your bubble, but according to the article, NM still gets a portion of any ultimate settlement reached by the states and the DOJ. So it's "money for nothing" in NM.
I read that comment as "We know that no one can control Microsoft, so at least we'll get on their good side while they're relatively weakened". What a huge loss for the forces of law and order.
I'm amazed that anyone would consider lightening up on Microsoft just because they're trying (not very convincingly) to clean up their act now. Present good deeds don't make up for past misconduct in any other court in the land. The attitude is "Well, they've changed their ways, and it would be too hard to prosecute them any further, so...". Where's the famous American thirst for vengeance that gets fired up whenever some lunatic blows up a building? :)
It's a different genius 20-year-old who came up with the audio fingerprinting technology. You're correct that it's not Shawn Fanning.
Apparently they're planning to take a fingerprint of the audio itself, rather than just going off of song titles. It's really some pretty neat technology if you read up on it - www.loudeye.com.
After thinking about it for a little bit, that did become more clear to me even before reading your post, mostly because MySQL.org wouldn't submit a press release calling itself a threatening obscure web site :)
But which MySQL is he from? Methinks that the good Cmdr missed the whole point of the story a little - you now have to qualify the name "MySQL" a little more carefully. You wouldn't say "Hacker X from BSD" or "Hacker Y from SSH", now would you?
More realistically, something along the lines of enshrining the Secure Audio Path technology into law, and making it illegal to alter your PC such that it can store off content that's supposed to be one-time-use. Such a regulation would be just a small step from the DMCA. Sure, you could still mod your PC, but imagine getting taken to court and having to prove that your changes weren't the illegal kind of modifications. Technically you're innocent until proven guilty, but in reality most of us couldn't wage this court battle and would have to cave. The end result, just like the DMCA, would be that most people wouldn't dare make any changes to their PCs for fear of an expensive legal suit.
For the truly paranoid, I might point out that with Windows XP, Microsoft will know when you've changed your hardware, and thus might be one of those evil hardware hackers. This hasn't come to pass yet, and doesn't seem too likely yet, but who really knew about the effects of the DMCA before it happened?
This is the most insightful comment on this article, bar none. Microsoft's hold on OEMs has always been financial, and it will take more than a press release to change that.
IANAL, but it seems to me that I've seen products compared to other trademarked products by name as long as they say "Product X is a registered trademark of X Corp., etc.". So in my mind you could say "It's as good as Adobe Illustrator" as long as you give props to Adobe somewhere in the ad. I've heard that this is illegal in some countries, though.
The piggybacking is a good point, though - Adobe did create the original name recognition of Illustrator as a vector drawing tool with certain features. I suppose they should expect to reap some reward from those efforts, as far as keeping up the association that "Illustrator" is not just a vector drawing tool with features X, Y, and Z, but it's Adobe's tool.
I think those grounds are a lot shakier than the "deliberately causing consumer confusion" issue, but it is a good point that you've made.
I bet that's the first time a woman with a Doctorate has been on their cover :)
I though some of the other images of her I've seen were more realistic looking, though. Maybe more skin leads to more chances to notice that it's not real?
So did they ever take a break and play Tetra Master? Maybe ride around on Chocobos?
See, robots could never replace real ballplayers, because mankind doesn't have the technology to build a robot as ugly as Randy Johnson :)
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
On the contrary, it's the whole point. Trademark infringement can only occur if there's a reasonable chance that the two marks could be confused. I just don't think that a reasonable person could confuse them. Apparently the courts tend to see things differently, though.
I don't think that opening the code is automatically a bad thing, but in this case I don't think it would help too much. Open source code improves when people look at it, and people look at it when they use it and have problems with it. This was a custom system written for exactly one customer, and you can bet the DOE could have (and maybe did) get the source code if they wanted to. Making this system open source wouldn't have helped much since there really wouldn't be enough eyes looking at it to make the bugs shallow. In the worst case, the only people looking for flaws would be the people with something to gain from the flaws - black hats. You really only want something to be open source if you can be sure that there will be enough white hats contributing to balance out that risk, or if it's a program that has very minimal security implications, like gEdit or something like that.
That's assuming that the problem really was in the custom app and not in NT or MSSQL, but I assume any bugs where MSSQL quietly "disappears" certain information would be common knowledge by now...
...actually, it really sounds like a Klingon proverb somehow :)
I can't understand how consumers could not tell the difference between "Kapple" and "Apple". They're even pronounced different, for cryin' out loud. I could see more problems if it was "Apple" and "Appple" (pronounced the same) or "Apple" and "Apple" (pronounced differently (I don't know how) but spelled the same). But "Kapple" is spelled and pronounced differently than "Apple", just like "KIllustrator" is spelled and pronounced differently than "Illustrator". I still hold out hopes that the average consumer is not so stupid, I guess.
That sounds like a pretty poor German law - what if Adobe didn't even have a problem with KIllustrator? Some law firm has just gone and destroyed a lot of Adobe mindshare in the Linux market, effectively dragging Adobe's name through the mud (a lot more than the clone named KIllustrator ever did, I might point out) and now said law firm wants to charge Adobe for the privilege? If I were in that entirely hypothetical situation, I'd sue the pants off of the lawyers that started the whole ruckus :)
Wow, I missed the $100 million figure. Although I imagine they might be able to make the case that $100 million is the launch cost, but the satellite itself (the property) is really worth considerably less. After all, if I had to pay through the nose to buy a classic car and get it shipped to LA, the tax on that property itself is still only going to be based on the actual value of the car, no matter what I paid to get it.
It sounds like they're going to change the law anyway, which will work OK I guess until we get some companies whose only assets are a constellation of satellites. Hmmm, I wonder if the states of IL or AZ ever considered property taxes on Iridium?
Why should it be any different for companies than for private citizens? This may be the basic disagreement here, but IMHO taxes are supposed to be progressive. The largest companies gain a huge amount of advantage from the community, and as you said are often able to depreciate much of their tax burden anyway. I think it's reasonable that they be taxed somewhat more than smaller, struggling businesses. After all, corporate behemoths aren't really the result that we necessarily want to encourage, are they?
I'm curious as to why the overall opinion here seems to be very business-friendly: "don't tax them or they'll leave". But Hughes already pays other taxes on its property in the area, and they haven't left. I don't understand the attitude of "please Mr. Big Business, we're really sorry about the whole taxes thing, why don't we just repeal them and you don't have to leave". The impact of the additional tax on these satellites will be miniscule compared to the property taxes that Hughes already pays on its facilities in the area.
AFAIK, it sounds like the assessor understands the law, and everyone on the other side of the issue is just doing some vague hand-waving about how "it's just not right" and how "over-reaching" it is. If it's a bad law, then by all means change it, as long as you're willing to see companies move all sorts of equipment out of LA in order to avoid paying taxes on it. But it sounds like for the moment the tax assessor has Hughes dead to rights.
Trust me, Hughes isn't going to relocate a huge amount of employees and equipment just because of the added taxes on these satellites. They're just bitching because for the moment they've got the support of (uninformed) public opinion.
That was sort of the joke, but oh well.
So we each get a local copy of Passport, then? I don't see how that will work. Some part of .NET has to be an internet service for the centralized Microsoft authentication to work.