Not likely. Its not about money. MS has more money than it knows what to do with. If it needs more, it just raises the price on Windows or releases a newer version.
Its about power and control. As the other guy said, its more likely that you'll have your account data-mined than skimmed. But the bank is probably already doing that anyway.
After they win the anti-trust case, MS might go so far as to insert notes in your records. Just to let you know who's boss. Things like "Good choice!" next to some items to let you know that they know, or maybe "You could have gotten that cheaper at Bill's Butt-Buddies e-Mall." Not to generate revenue, mind you, just to humilate you.
The other queer thing is that most of the victim sites are running *NIX as their server... I was begining to wonder if maybe it wasn't a plan from Redmond. After all, D-day for Windows '00 is just around the corner. A coincidence? You decide.
Another thing I don't understand, if anyone wanted to attack comercialism on the net, why hasn't MS been attacked?
The numbers in the article reveal the real reason why Linux hasn't captured more market share. They (you know, the ones who control everything) know what would happen if everyone switched to Linux; $5.7 billion would evaporate from the GDP. Markets would collapse, we'd all be standing in soup lines and the penguins in the zoo would be all be murdered.
Too damned true. That is one reason why MS is not too worried about rising Linux usage. As long they have their exclusive distribution contracts with the hardware suppliers, the customer pays for Windows whether they use it or not. If the user runs Linux instead of Windows/NT, it just means less customer complaints to handle and is probably reflected as an increased profit margin: less cost for the same sales.
That's kinda dumb. Why buy a pre-installed OS at all if you're just going to install NT over it?
Often, it works the other way around. I have NT on my laptop because that is how it came from the factory. I had no choice. The vendor said I could have the machine with NT, Linux or Linux and NT, all for the same price. Even if I had asked for the Linux-only configuration, it would still be logged as an NT sale. Remember last year's Windows return-athon that fizzled?
They may take the MS OS off of the disk, but it doesn't come off of the price. Unless your company is buying enough volume of machines to make it worth the supplier's while to step outside their contract with MS, you may well be paying for an MS OS on each of those machines anyway.
I agree that/. is probably not the best venue for this sort of discussion. Somehow, because they're alive people think they understand Life. I think they could found a branch of sociology on why non-biologists think biology is simple and intuitively obvious while physics is hard.
I like the idea of a more biologist-centric/.-ish site. I'd be willing to help. My background is neurobiology.
Have you looked at Squishdot? It isn't as full featured as/., but it might be easier to deploy.
"What you would have is a PERFECT system of information that did not need to be continually self-corrected (like an imperfect system such as science)."
Even if (and I don't concede the point) that every word of the Bible (or Koran, or...) is the inspired word of God, words don't have exact, precise, unique, or unchanging meanings. You can't have a "PERFECT system of information" with a degenerate code.
Even if the Bible is perfect knowledge, religion is in fact human interpretation of a book, not the book itself much less the content of that book. Even if the Word Of God needs no correction, people's interpretaions of that word certainly would. Otherwise, how do you account for the many divergent (and sometimes overtly hostile) forms of Christianity?
As a matter of historical fact Christianity has disputed its doctrines year after year. Are you saying then that it is a man-invented hoax not worthy of anyone's time?
Sigh... As much as I respect Chesterton and Lewis (Aquinas I can live without), these are not the people to look to for insight into modern biology.
"Actually, some recent scientific work in the field of molecular biology has tended to demonstrate just that, that life is too complex to have evolved. Take, for instance, the standard Darwinian explanation for the evolution of the eye. Eyes, over time, developed in complexity from simple eyespots."
I know of no such work. In fact, the consensus I see regarding the eye is that results from molecular biology support just that scenario. The development of the eyes in animals as diverse as humans and insects are controled by homologous genes (the Six/sine oculishomeobox family). That is, structures as distinctly different as a fly's compound eye and the human eye are controled by essentially the same genes as modified by divergent evolutionary histories. When you also consider that the vertebrate and arthropod lineages probably diverged before the Cambrian period, before there were eyes as such, anything other than "standard Darwinian explanation" become unlikely.
This is a common theme in biology. Simple, non-essential adaptations can arise in simple contexts. Later, clusters of other mechanisms evolove around that seed adaptaion, and so are dependent upon it, until the cluster is a complex and essential feature; a cluster of small adaptations become a single, essential complex through their tight interdependence. Another interesting example is the " longevity gene" in the worm C. elegans. It seems it is a member of the insulin receptor gene family and is deeply involved in the regulation of metabolism via similar intermediary mechanism (kinases) insulin uses in mammals. Here the basic metabolic control framework arose about 700 MY ago and has, like homeobox, been adjusted and tuned to serve other, somewhat related , functions over time.
The opinions of people like Aquinas, for whom the syllogism was high-tech innovation, are useless as guides for evaluating contemporary sciences which are based on inductive reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, its a cruel man indeed who slashdots an NT server oughtabe a crime to do that
Is Bill Gates human?
Its about power and control. As the other guy said, its more likely that you'll have your account data-mined than skimmed. But the bank is probably already doing that anyway.
After they win the anti-trust case, MS might go so far as to insert notes in your records. Just to let you know who's boss. Things like "Good choice!" next to some items to let you know that they know, or maybe "You could have gotten that cheaper at Bill's Butt-Buddies e-Mall." Not to generate revenue, mind you, just to humilate you.
Another thing I don't understand, if anyone wanted to attack comercialism on the net, why hasn't MS been attacked?
The numbers in the article reveal the real reason why Linux hasn't captured more market share. They (you know, the ones who control everything) know what would happen if everyone switched to Linux; $5.7 billion would evaporate from the GDP. Markets would collapse, we'd all be standing in soup lines and the penguins in the zoo would be all be murdered.
Too damned true. That is one reason why MS is not too worried about rising Linux usage. As long they have their exclusive distribution contracts with the hardware suppliers, the customer pays for Windows whether they use it or not. If the user runs Linux instead of Windows/NT, it just means less customer complaints to handle and is probably reflected as an increased profit margin: less cost for the same sales.
Often, it works the other way around. I have NT on my laptop because that is how it came from the factory. I had no choice. The vendor said I could have the machine with NT, Linux or Linux and NT, all for the same price. Even if I had asked for the Linux-only configuration, it would still be logged as an NT sale. Remember last year's Windows return-athon that fizzled?
They may take the MS OS off of the disk, but it doesn't come off of the price. Unless your company is buying enough volume of machines to make it worth the supplier's while to step outside their contract with MS, you may well be paying for an MS OS on each of those machines anyway.
unless it's not science... and it isn't
OK, great, I'll check back in here from time to time.
I agree that /. is probably not the best venue for this sort of discussion. Somehow, because they're alive people think they understand Life. I think they could found a branch of sociology on why non-biologists think biology is simple and intuitively obvious while physics is hard.
I like the idea of a more biologist-centric /.-ish site. I'd be willing to help. My background is neurobiology.
Have you looked at Squishdot? It isn't as full featured as /., but it might be easier to deploy.
Even if (and I don't concede the point) that every word of the Bible (or Koran, or...) is the inspired word of God, words don't have exact, precise, unique, or unchanging meanings. You can't have a "PERFECT system of information" with a degenerate code.
Even if the Bible is perfect knowledge, religion is in fact human interpretation of a book, not the book itself much less the content of that book. Even if the Word Of God needs no correction, people's interpretaions of that word certainly would. Otherwise, how do you account for the many divergent (and sometimes overtly hostile) forms of Christianity?
As a matter of historical fact Christianity has disputed its doctrines year after year. Are you saying then that it is a man-invented hoax not worthy of anyone's time?
"Actually, some recent scientific work in the field of molecular biology has tended to demonstrate just that, that life is too complex to have evolved. Take, for instance, the standard Darwinian explanation for the evolution of the eye. Eyes, over time, developed in complexity from simple eyespots."
I know of no such work. In fact, the consensus I see regarding the eye is that results from molecular biology support just that scenario. The development of the eyes in animals as diverse as humans and insects are controled by homologous genes (the Six/sine oculis homeobox family). That is, structures as distinctly different as a fly's compound eye and the human eye are controled by essentially the same genes as modified by divergent evolutionary histories. When you also consider that the vertebrate and arthropod lineages probably diverged before the Cambrian period, before there were eyes as such, anything other than "standard Darwinian explanation" become unlikely.
This is a common theme in biology. Simple, non-essential adaptations can arise in simple contexts. Later, clusters of other mechanisms evolove around that seed adaptaion, and so are dependent upon it, until the cluster is a complex and essential feature; a cluster of small adaptations become a single, essential complex through their tight interdependence. Another interesting example is the " longevity gene" in the worm C. elegans. It seems it is a member of the insulin receptor gene family and is deeply involved in the regulation of metabolism via similar intermediary mechanism (kinases) insulin uses in mammals. Here the basic metabolic control framework arose about 700 MY ago and has, like homeobox, been adjusted and tuned to serve other, somewhat related , functions over time.
The opinions of people like Aquinas, for whom the syllogism was high-tech innovation, are useless as guides for evaluating contemporary sciences which are based on inductive reasoning.