Remember, succes in the consumer market is never decided on technical merit.
Don't get too pessimistic, that is not always true...
Apache vs. NAS and IIS Firefox vs. IE (market share climbing against MASSIVE monopoly abuse) Toyota Tundra vs. Chevrolet full-size pickups Ford F-150 vs. Chevrolet full-size pickups Honda Accord vs. Ford Taurus Bosch & Makita hand power tools vs. Nearly All Established Brands DVD vs. DiVX (the old self-destructing rental DVDs, not the video format)
How could that possibly happen? My hosts file (presumably like the hosts file on any rationally configured system) is owned by root and mod 644. Is this script doing privilege escalation? Or is it actually common for some computers to leave hosts modifiable by an unprivileged user?
Obviously I'm being a bit facetious, but let's give a little credit where credit is due - this rogue program is not the worst of the malware in the formula. The worst malware is the program (whether that program be an OS, an installer, or simply a set of memes running on the wetware of our society) that leaves hosts editable by unprivileged users, or which leads to privileged users running untrusted software.
This rogue program is like salmonella - it is taking advantage of poor practices like not cooking meat thoroughly. Blaming this software is like blaming salmonella. Damn you salmonella! It does not grant sufficient credit to the program (or OS, or meme, or OS installer) which is actually to blame.
PHPBB has terms very similar to what you are talking about. You have to pay for it, but you are explicitly allowed to modify it for your purposes.
I agree with the earlier posts which say you don't need a license - regular copyright works exactly like you want, but it might be worth checking out the way PHPBB handles it.
Ummm, why would I want to be warned about this? Shouldn't I be excited?
As it stands today, we tax license plates, gasoline, and we have federal highway funds. Each of those makes sense as a component of the funding, but so do usage fees.
When my car sits in my garage, it has very little cost to society. I drive about 2,000 miles a year, yet I pay the same license tax as someone who drives a similar car 15,000 miles each year.
Road use taxes make sense - they couple the consumption of public resources (roads and bridges) with a maintenance fee. Roads are a good public resource, and should be partially funded by society as a whole because of the positive externality of having a sound transportation system. But they also confer asymmetric benefit on some members of society -- those who use the resource most heavily -- and so should be partially funded by those users. It is an excellent example case for hybrid funding - part free market (use fees and gasoline taxes), part community funded (license fees), part society funded (federal highway funds).
Lots of people are poo-pooing this because we are far from #1 per capita.
Well, we're also a company that has some very serious, entrenched problems with coming to terms with our energy problems. There are many milestones ahead that we will have to pass to survive, but this is a nice one. Let's give some credit where it is due for getting us past the first milestone.
For my part: Thanks, and congratulations, to those who are helping to drive us down the path to a more secure future - keep up the good fight.
"Free market theory" is that buying and selling takes places voluntarily between two rational parties, both of whom agree to the terms of the deal. If he thinks he's getting shafted, but keeps buying the games anyway, then it's nobody's fault but his own. If he doesn't think the game is worth buying a second time, then he simply shouldn't buy it. The fact that he does buy it is not the fault of the video game companies, and it's not a problem with the free market.
Ooooo - interesting angle. Since both parties are not fully informed -- in this case the buyer did not know the game included default-fail security, or did not understand the degree of risk -- it is not a free market transaction. So it is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of our society to protect the free market system from being infected by non-free-market transactions.
I like that angle. Not sure I 100% agree, but you're making me think, and that is the highest praise I can give.
I was ready to buy a house in 2003. I decided the market was high, and I'd wait. 6 years I've been waiting, now is my time. I acted responsibly. Now I have to pay the bankers who failed at their number one job (risk management), and the real estate speculators? That is a real crock of shit!
Ummm, when I'm pushing a properties file to production because part of the system is misbehaving, it's a helluva lot more important than stalling the video of Ninja Cat. OK - admittedly - even when I work from home I'm remoted in and pushing that file from the secure network over a leased line - but you get the idea, right?
There just might be a valid reason for this (then again there might not be).
There is exactly one valid reason for doing this, and it is not the case at present.
That one valid reason is a Constitutional Amendment which revises the Fourth Amendment.
There are lots of costs to the highest law of the land. Free speech means we have to put up with David Duke. Freedom of religion means we have to put up with the opposite side of our dogma (or our dogmatic belief that dogma is bad). The fifth amendment means we can't put a bad guy in jail for refusing to admit that he did it. Due process means we have to let criminals have their day in court, even when they are caught red-handed and video recorded.
There are many costs associated with the highest law in this land. Or, said differently: Freedom isn't free.
But it is one helluva lot better than tyranny. It is better to lose lives to terrorists, to lose property to burglars, and to lose dignity to bigots than it is to violate the principles of liberty that make this nation what it is.
"Freedom isn't free" isn't just about sending our children to die in a far off land. It is about making personal security sacrifices right here at home because tyranny is worse.
Hmmm, I don't know - being allowed to just "know" what the government is doing seems a little fishy. How are they supposed to keep us terrified and docile if they can't pretend that they always, just barely, have the boogeyman on the point of a knife -- but it's too dangerous to let us see him? And if we are not terrified and docile, how can they maintain their lack of accountability? The lack of accountability that is the very hallmark of the modern United States political system.
Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.
And what's more, when they do make a solid enhancement, they have given back (at least once). Here's a damned fine contribution:
I wound up poking through the Windows Mobile development stuff yesterday a bit after I posted. It looks like it would be roughly as easy to write for Windows Mobile from not Windows as it would be to write native code for Android. IE: there is no official support but also no significant barrier to prevent you from doing it. At least that is the look on the surface.
In the US, at least, the DMCA would beg to differ with that interpretation, for media protected by an anti-circumvention device. That would be pretty much anything relevant today aside from audio CDs.
Incorrect. Read the law. It restricts distribution of circumvention tools, but not circumvention for lawful purposes.
Sounds like you know a fair bit about developing for Windows Mobile. I'm curious - how easy / common is it to develop for the Windows Mobile platform from a non-Windows platform?
If it is difficult, then I wonder about this statement:
You are allowed, and encouraged, to develop and use third-party apps, which have no relationship to Microsoft.
Is it valid to say that there is no relationship between those third party apps and Microsoft if one must purchase Microsoft products to develop third party applications?
Also, do you know if the license for the developer kit places any limitations on the software that you develop or component libraries that you can use?
Don't worry, your iPhone will not wink out of existance because somebody with different preferences buys a different phone, or prefers cars without the hoods welded shut.
hehe - indeed. I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Linux media center at home. Each is brilliant for its intended purpose. Viva La Difference!
DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content,
Not sure what gray content you are referring to. I'm assuming this is about legal shades of gray, but there aren't any in terms of content (or at least not the ones you are probably talking about):
There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.
There is a law against distributing ripping software (the DMCA), but it doesn't sound like you're talking about that.
There is a law about distributing the content itself, but that isn't gray - it's illegal.
The only gray areas are content used for criticism and education.
'course - entirely possible I've misunderstood what "grey" is supposed to mean - maybe a hipster term for re-encoding or something.
It's not dumping if the competition (Linux) is free.
That is only true with price competitors, which Linux and Windows are not. With quality competitors, dumping must be gauged by other criteria, which actually don't work too well here either.
The most "perfect" definition of dumping is selling below the marginal cost. Since the marginal cost for Windows is somewhere between a few bucks (packaging) and the marginal cost of support (moderate - a few tens of dollars at most), it is difficult to say what exact price constitutes dumping. It can, from this, be said to be greater than zero.
For companies that have high fixed and low marginal costs, one could theoretically calculate the effective per-unit cost. But with a company such as Microsoft which sells many goods in diverse markets which have shared fixed costs, this would be an exceedingly difficult calculation. You'd have to get into lots of guesses about incidence rates and it wouldn't be much better than throwing darts.
In a quality competitive market of imperfect competing monopolies (all copyrighted works are monopolies), another possible definition is selling below the market price. Simultaneously, though, it is difficult to gauge the market price of a low marginal cost good which uses monopoly pricing. The natural price is probably somewhere between the $60 or whatever OEMs pay and $320 for a full retail copy of Ultimate Edition.
As for competitor prices, in a quality competitive market the natural price of each good is different. Therefore it is possible for a competitor to be selling for less and not dumping, or to be selling for more and dumping. The competitors' prices are not relevant in quality competition, except inasmuch as they promote natural pricing.
Finally the question of harm - with some goods dumping is actually beneficial to the target market. If customer loyalty (lock-in being one example) is low, and barriers to competitor entry and exit are low, dumping is a good thing. It doesn't harm the competitor and it benefits the customer. In this case the reason it makes sense for MS is the customer loyalty angle - as long as they have most of the market they can continue to dictate things like de facto standards, and hence continue to inhibit competition.
In summary; the price of Linux is not directly relevant, and dumping harms this market. Whether they are in fact dumping is not definitively answered here, but it cannot be ruled out based on the price of Linux alone, and if they are regularly selling for $0 then they are almost certainly dumping (the only possible exception being $0 marginal price for per-seat licenses if MS's marginal cost is zero (no packaging, no support)).
I'd be happy for the gov't to just stop inhibiting the IT industry.
You've got the knee of two labor tax curves landing squarely on IT labor (payroll taxes become regressive starting at $105k, and the progressivity slope of income tax bends over toward flat at around $200k).
Then you've got capital gains tax set way below total labor tax, which transfers wealth from high skill labor companies (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc) and gives it to high capital expense companies (industrial sector).
Lower capital gains taxes made sense, I think, during the industrial revolution and advent of the assembly line. Socialism though it is, it helped vault us to superpower status. Perhaps it could be argued that the same is now true of the high skill labor sector; universities, hospitals, IT - the sectors in which we kick the rest of the planet's ass - might benefit from that same treatment.
But I'm always skeptical of government interference. I'd like to start with just having the government stop putting the bulk of the tax burden on our industry (and other high-skill labor intensive sectors).
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be intentional inefficiency in the labor market.
She went away, and back comes the HR guy himself. He was nice enough, but he tried to convince me that I had to sign it, "Why is it a problem? Everyone else here signed it." I told him that if my continued employment was dependent upon that "agreement", that I would happily clean out my desk right then and there. He went away, and that was the last I heard of it. I was serious, however, and if they'd pushed the matter I'd have walked out right then and there. As it happens, I work in an "at-will" State: sometimes that sucks, but sometimes it works in your favor.
Thank you. It's tough to do the right thing sometimes, and you took a big risk. Your integrity helps all of us, and our entire industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, succes in the consumer market is never decided on technical merit.
Don't get too pessimistic, that is not always true...
Apache vs. NAS and IIS
Firefox vs. IE (market share climbing against MASSIVE monopoly abuse)
Toyota Tundra vs. Chevrolet full-size pickups
Ford F-150 vs. Chevrolet full-size pickups
Honda Accord vs. Ford Taurus
Bosch & Makita hand power tools vs. Nearly All Established Brands
DVD vs. DiVX (the old self-destructing rental DVDs, not the video format)
Just a few examples off the top of my head.
Can I get one of these things to take my lazy butt down to the gym in the morning?
which modifies your HOSTS file
How could that possibly happen? My hosts file (presumably like the hosts file on any rationally configured system) is owned by root and mod 644. Is this script doing privilege escalation? Or is it actually common for some computers to leave hosts modifiable by an unprivileged user?
Obviously I'm being a bit facetious, but let's give a little credit where credit is due - this rogue program is not the worst of the malware in the formula. The worst malware is the program (whether that program be an OS, an installer, or simply a set of memes running on the wetware of our society) that leaves hosts editable by unprivileged users, or which leads to privileged users running untrusted software.
This rogue program is like salmonella - it is taking advantage of poor practices like not cooking meat thoroughly. Blaming this software is like blaming salmonella. Damn you salmonella! It does not grant sufficient credit to the program (or OS, or meme, or OS installer) which is actually to blame.
PHPBB has terms very similar to what you are talking about. You have to pay for it, but you are explicitly allowed to modify it for your purposes.
I agree with the earlier posts which say you don't need a license - regular copyright works exactly like you want, but it might be worth checking out the way PHPBB handles it.
Ummm, why would I want to be warned about this? Shouldn't I be excited?
As it stands today, we tax license plates, gasoline, and we have federal highway funds. Each of those makes sense as a component of the funding, but so do usage fees.
When my car sits in my garage, it has very little cost to society. I drive about 2,000 miles a year, yet I pay the same license tax as someone who drives a similar car 15,000 miles each year.
Road use taxes make sense - they couple the consumption of public resources (roads and bridges) with a maintenance fee. Roads are a good public resource, and should be partially funded by society as a whole because of the positive externality of having a sound transportation system. But they also confer asymmetric benefit on some members of society -- those who use the resource most heavily -- and so should be partially funded by those users. It is an excellent example case for hybrid funding - part free market (use fees and gasoline taxes), part community funded (license fees), part society funded (federal highway funds).
Lots of people are poo-pooing this because we are far from #1 per capita.
Well, we're also a company that has some very serious, entrenched problems with coming to terms with our energy problems. There are many milestones ahead that we will have to pass to survive, but this is a nice one. Let's give some credit where it is due for getting us past the first milestone.
For my part: Thanks, and congratulations, to those who are helping to drive us down the path to a more secure future - keep up the good fight.
"Free market theory" is that buying and selling takes places voluntarily between two rational parties, both of whom agree to the terms of the deal. If he thinks he's getting shafted, but keeps buying the games anyway, then it's nobody's fault but his own. If he doesn't think the game is worth buying a second time, then he simply shouldn't buy it. The fact that he does buy it is not the fault of the video game companies, and it's not a problem with the free market.
Ooooo - interesting angle. Since both parties are not fully informed -- in this case the buyer did not know the game included default-fail security, or did not understand the degree of risk -- it is not a free market transaction. So it is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of our society to protect the free market system from being infected by non-free-market transactions.
I like that angle. Not sure I 100% agree, but you're making me think, and that is the highest praise I can give.
Thanks! :)
Thanks!
I was ready to buy a house in 2003. I decided the market was high, and I'd wait. 6 years I've been waiting, now is my time. I acted responsibly. Now I have to pay the bankers who failed at their number one job (risk management), and the real estate speculators? That is a real crock of shit!
Nice to hear someone else say it, though. Thanks.
Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads
Ummm, when I'm pushing a properties file to production because part of the system is misbehaving, it's a helluva lot more important than stalling the video of Ninja Cat. OK - admittedly - even when I work from home I'm remoted in and pushing that file from the secure network over a leased line - but you get the idea, right?
If your record is clean, pretty much anyone can get this license.
You need a class 1 dealer or gunsmith license for full auto and silencers - though I don't know what that entails - a bit more here:
http://www.nationalgunsmithsassociation.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Firearms_License
There just might be a valid reason for this (then again there might not be).
There is exactly one valid reason for doing this, and it is not the case at present.
That one valid reason is a Constitutional Amendment which revises the Fourth Amendment.
There are lots of costs to the highest law of the land. Free speech means we have to put up with David Duke. Freedom of religion means we have to put up with the opposite side of our dogma (or our dogmatic belief that dogma is bad). The fifth amendment means we can't put a bad guy in jail for refusing to admit that he did it. Due process means we have to let criminals have their day in court, even when they are caught red-handed and video recorded.
There are many costs associated with the highest law in this land. Or, said differently: Freedom isn't free.
But it is one helluva lot better than tyranny. It is better to lose lives to terrorists, to lose property to burglars, and to lose dignity to bigots than it is to violate the principles of liberty that make this nation what it is.
"Freedom isn't free" isn't just about sending our children to die in a far off land. It is about making personal security sacrifices right here at home because tyranny is worse.
If society wants these things investigated, then society should pay the cost of the investigation. What's so hard to understand about that?
Hmmm, I don't know - being allowed to just "know" what the government is doing seems a little fishy. How are they supposed to keep us terrified and docile if they can't pretend that they always, just barely, have the boogeyman on the point of a knife -- but it's too dangerous to let us see him? And if we are not terrified and docile, how can they maintain their lack of accountability? The lack of accountability that is the very hallmark of the modern United States political system.
Honestly - the ideas this guy comes up with...
>> I like to bash the gov't as much as the next patriotic American, but they've made some
>> fine contributions to our community.
> I was thinking of "helpful" legislation.
Ahhh - now that I can get on board with :)
Let's just hope they don't try to "help".
OK, sure, funny, haha - but seriously - let's give some credit where credit is due.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)
Just off the top of my head.
I like to bash the gov't as much as the next patriotic American, but they've made some fine contributions to our community.
Don't be daft. It's "open source" in that the client--- in this case the US gov't--- has complete access to the source code, not that every drooling twit with a web browser can download a tar.gz of it from the DOD. The "open" in "open source" has always been relative to the end user.
And what's more, when they do make a solid enhancement, they have given back (at least once). Here's a damned fine contribution:
SELinux - From our NSA.
I wound up poking through the Windows Mobile development stuff yesterday a bit after I posted. It looks like it would be roughly as easy to write for Windows Mobile from not Windows as it would be to write native code for Android. IE: there is no official support but also no significant barrier to prevent you from doing it. At least that is the look on the surface.
In the US, at least, the DMCA would beg to differ with that interpretation, for media protected by an anti-circumvention device. That would be pretty much anything relevant today aside from audio CDs.
Incorrect. Read the law. It restricts distribution of circumvention tools, but not circumvention for lawful purposes.
Sounds like you know a fair bit about developing for Windows Mobile. I'm curious - how easy / common is it to develop for the Windows Mobile platform from a non-Windows platform?
If it is difficult, then I wonder about this statement:
You are allowed, and encouraged, to develop and use third-party apps, which have no relationship to Microsoft.
Is it valid to say that there is no relationship between those third party apps and Microsoft if one must purchase Microsoft products to develop third party applications?
Also, do you know if the license for the developer kit places any limitations on the software that you develop or component libraries that you can use?
Don't worry, your iPhone will not wink out of existance because somebody with different preferences buys a different phone, or prefers cars without the hoods welded shut.
hehe - indeed. I have a Mac laptop, a Linux workstation, and a Linux media center at home. Each is brilliant for its intended purpose. Viva La Difference!
DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content,
Not sure what gray content you are referring to. I'm assuming this is about legal shades of gray, but there aren't any in terms of content (or at least not the ones you are probably talking about):
There is exactly nothing illegal about making copies of your own discs for personal use.
There is a law against distributing ripping software (the DMCA), but it doesn't sound like you're talking about that.
There is a law about distributing the content itself, but that isn't gray - it's illegal.
The only gray areas are content used for criticism and education.
'course - entirely possible I've misunderstood what "grey" is supposed to mean - maybe a hipster term for re-encoding or something.
It's not dumping if the competition (Linux) is free.
That is only true with price competitors, which Linux and Windows are not. With quality competitors, dumping must be gauged by other criteria, which actually don't work too well here either.
The most "perfect" definition of dumping is selling below the marginal cost. Since the marginal cost for Windows is somewhere between a few bucks (packaging) and the marginal cost of support (moderate - a few tens of dollars at most), it is difficult to say what exact price constitutes dumping. It can, from this, be said to be greater than zero.
For companies that have high fixed and low marginal costs, one could theoretically calculate the effective per-unit cost. But with a company such as Microsoft which sells many goods in diverse markets which have shared fixed costs, this would be an exceedingly difficult calculation. You'd have to get into lots of guesses about incidence rates and it wouldn't be much better than throwing darts.
In a quality competitive market of imperfect competing monopolies (all copyrighted works are monopolies), another possible definition is selling below the market price. Simultaneously, though, it is difficult to gauge the market price of a low marginal cost good which uses monopoly pricing. The natural price is probably somewhere between the $60 or whatever OEMs pay and $320 for a full retail copy of Ultimate Edition.
As for competitor prices, in a quality competitive market the natural price of each good is different. Therefore it is possible for a competitor to be selling for less and not dumping, or to be selling for more and dumping. The competitors' prices are not relevant in quality competition, except inasmuch as they promote natural pricing.
Finally the question of harm - with some goods dumping is actually beneficial to the target market. If customer loyalty (lock-in being one example) is low, and barriers to competitor entry and exit are low, dumping is a good thing. It doesn't harm the competitor and it benefits the customer. In this case the reason it makes sense for MS is the customer loyalty angle - as long as they have most of the market they can continue to dictate things like de facto standards, and hence continue to inhibit competition.
In summary; the price of Linux is not directly relevant, and dumping harms this market. Whether they are in fact dumping is not definitively answered here, but it cannot be ruled out based on the price of Linux alone, and if they are regularly selling for $0 then they are almost certainly dumping (the only possible exception being $0 marginal price for per-seat licenses if MS's marginal cost is zero (no packaging, no support)).
I'd be happy for the gov't to just stop inhibiting the IT industry.
You've got the knee of two labor tax curves landing squarely on IT labor (payroll taxes become regressive starting at $105k, and the progressivity slope of income tax bends over toward flat at around $200k).
Then you've got capital gains tax set way below total labor tax, which transfers wealth from high skill labor companies (Oracle, Microsoft, Google, etc) and gives it to high capital expense companies (industrial sector).
Lower capital gains taxes made sense, I think, during the industrial revolution and advent of the assembly line. Socialism though it is, it helped vault us to superpower status. Perhaps it could be argued that the same is now true of the high skill labor sector; universities, hospitals, IT - the sectors in which we kick the rest of the planet's ass - might benefit from that same treatment.
But I'm always skeptical of government interference. I'd like to start with just having the government stop putting the bulk of the tax burden on our industry (and other high-skill labor intensive sectors).
JM2C
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be intentional inefficiency in the labor market.
There - fixed that for ya. :)
Good post - thanks!
She went away, and back comes the HR guy himself. He was nice enough, but he tried to convince me that I had to sign it, "Why is it a problem? Everyone else here signed it." I told him that if my continued employment was dependent upon that "agreement", that I would happily clean out my desk right then and there. He went away, and that was the last I heard of it. I was serious, however, and if they'd pushed the matter I'd have walked out right then and there. As it happens, I work in an "at-will" State: sometimes that sucks, but sometimes it works in your favor.
Thank you. It's tough to do the right thing sometimes, and you took a big risk. Your integrity helps all of us, and our entire industry.