The truth is anybody can break into your house at anytime. They don't because there's some risk, however slight, that somebody will notice and they'll get caught. Same logic here. It's not going to prevent somebody from pirating but it will discourage the lesser crimes.
You thought this was something intended to defeat deliberate large scale pirates? Why would you think that? I mean none of the DRM crap stops them either, so why should this?:)
All of this wonderful copy protection stuff doesn't actually stop piracy. Wasn't it just a day or two ago that there was a rip of an HD-DVD on BitTorrent? So why incorporate all these complex and onerous technologies when, in the end, all they do is make it so your paying customers have buggy hardware?
Let's say a major airline did just that and had to charge an extra $10/ticket to make up for the cost. Now, every time somebody's shopping for tickets on Expedia, that airline looks more expensive and is avoided. You might think that the airline could advertise that security feature, but there's a problem with that. By saying that their planes now have anti-missile defense, it would have the net effect of scaring potential airline customers. Associating your product with fear of death is usually not a good formula for success.
On the other hand you can just require it accross the board, and then the airlines will all install it, everybody will pay the extra per ticket cost without thinking about it and we'll all be safer. Arguably, such a system is a far better step towards airline saftey than the ridiculous hoops they make you jump through at the security lines.
Having said that, I'd really rather they started focussing on cargo screening first. Much easier to get explosives than a guided missile. But I think the guided missile threat is legitimate.
Seriously. I worked at a company that was totally allergic to the notion of hiring permanent employees. So most of the time they just contracted things out to India. Had that option not existed, they would have hired local contractors or permanent employees. They go to India because it's cheap, not because the talent doesn't exist here.
I'm a firm believe in the power of a competitive marketplace to provide the goods that people need in the most efficient manner. Having said that, most people have 1-3 choices for their service. This is a very limited marketplace which gives those companies a lot of power to informally set standards for pricing, service, etc.
If the market was being competed in by dozens of providers, then if AT&T had policies I didn't like I'd have a number of other providers that offer a service I want. I mean right now, I have DSL service through Speakeasy. In an unregulated market, why would AT&T allow speakeasy to compete with them for that service? They wouldn't.
If I open a trucking business, I don't control the roads between Chicago and San Francisco. Any other company can open their own trucking business and compete for business shipping goods using the common infrastructure of those roads. Imagine for a moment if all those roads were privately owned and my shipping company could charge different rates to different shippers. How would that be competitive?
This is what I love. On some level my interest in Linux came down to a question of choice and freedom. When it really first came to prominence, Apple was floundering and Microsoft seemed on a path to total hegemony. I liked Linux because it was free, and free, and gave me a choice. Sometimes it was harder to do things in Linux than it was under windows, but then I came to learn that there were a lot of things that then became easier. I loved how many tools I could get for it that were also free and free.
Today I have 3 very solid choices (more, possibly, depending on how you count your linuxes) and we can all find the right environment for us. I love that, on my new computer, I can run OSX, Linux, and Windows, not just on the same box, but even at the same time. When I work from home I have OSX on one screen and Windows XP running in parallels connected to my work desktop. Theoretically I could probably hook up a third monitor and have a Linux desktop running too, but that'd be a wee bit of overkill (and I don't have nearly the desk space).
It still frustrates me though how much support is given to windows to the total exclusion of all else. I understand the business reasons for it, but it does drive me nuts that I have to dual-boot my computer just to play a game. But we are making progress I think, and perhaps growth in OSX may help Linux down the line, encouraging developers to write software that can take advantage of all platforms more easily.
I have to say, I'd prefer that it were open, but really I'm rather pragmatic about it. At one point I like to play with the OS more, and then Linux was good. Today I find I'm more in a mood to just get stuff done. I want to just edit photos, or play a game, or send an e-mail, or write some code. It does that well.
Then there's the little touches. I love dashboard, something I never quite got until I accidentally triggered it by pressing my scroll button. Then I was like, "my god, that's so useful". Then there's expose which makes finding things on my desktop or in a myriad of windows so much easier. It's things like that which could, of course, be added to Linux, or even Windows, but it's there in OSX today and it just works nicely.
I will say I do find the hardware quirkiness a bit annoying. That is, I've got the basic vid card for my pro, and if I want a better one I only have one option really. I want to upgrade the memory, but the memory for it is crazy expensive. It's that whiff of propietariness that I've never liked, but it does work well aside from that.
I was a big proponent of Linux on the desktop for a while, but these days it's not installed on any of my desktops. Instead, I have a MacPro. The Mac offers me all the Unixy goodness but with a much better interface and overall integration. On Linux I was constantly wrestling to get everything to work, but on the Mac, it just works.
It makes sense though when you think about it. How many companies are out there looking for a support contract for MySQL but aren't using RedHat, etc? Considering that supporting Debian could entail supporting several different specific flavors, it doesn't really seem like the revenue for it would be worth the complications.
Presumably if there's enough of a business for such support, somebody will come in and fill the gap. That's the beauty of open source, non? You can actually get support from somebody other than the originaly developer. If it was Microsoft refusing to support some old version of their software, you'd be up a creek.
This sounds a lot like a deliberate strategy. Put out a proposal that's totally extreme and ridiculous to freak people out. Then when they reject it out of hand you come back with what you really wanted in the first place and it'll pass without dispute. Given labor's reaction, it looks like it worked.
While maybe most of those young hipster types aren't able to afford Apple computers, they are definitely buying scores of IPods. This feeds a brand loyalty and interest in Apple as a whole and then can lead towards them eventually purchasing Apple hardware.
The reality is when you do an apples to apples comparison (pun unintended), Apple's are not expensive. Go out and buy a dual woodcrest workstation from random PC vendor and see what kind of price they are charging you. What makes Apple seem expensive is that the average person will compare that against a desktop PC with half the power and think it's a valid comparison.
Generally speaking Apple systems are more of a long term investment and so it costs more. Overall you're probably getting better quality for your dollar, but if you only have a few dollars, that doesn't matter much. While the other PC vendors are fighting for every little cent on sub $400 PC's, Apple is selling $2500 PC's and making enormous margins.
If an exploit does nothing more than let you play solitare someplace you shouldn't, then it doesn't matter. And the thing is, even if OS X is only as secure as Windows (which I'd dispute), it's still good for overall security of the Internet. One of the biggest problems with the Internet today is that if 95% of the computers run one operating system, it becomes easier to write exploits that affect the majority of people.
On the other hand, if 50% of the people were running OS X, then no exploit could harm more than half the people at any given time. So in the long run, perversely, OS X is beneficial to the security of Windows.
Well the reality is that while your IPod might be able to hold all the video in the world you still need some insanely fat pipe to download all of the world's video from. Today I can go to the Itunes store and download a video, but it takes like 20-30 minutes to get it. Going to take an awfully long time to fill my ipod at that rate.
Right now I have the 60GB Video IPod and I do not fill it. The limitations imposed on me are not storage capacity, but rather bandwidth and time. I'd love to put every video I own on it, and clearly I'd exceed the capacity if I did, but the reality is even on my Mac Pro it takes me 40 minutes to rip a DVD (which I guess technically I'm not supposed to be able to do anyhow). It's a huge hassle.
Until I can get video onto an ipod as readily as I can get music onto an ipod, the storage capacity isn't that critical.
Definitely. All the characters had their imperfections and that all played into what happened. When the big war was over it set the seeds for the next big war. Truly ony of my favorite bits was how the Vorlons and Shadows were in a way almost more childish than the other species that came after them even though they were heald up as a kind of god-like creature initially. Good stuff:)
Traditionally television has been more about taking excerpts from people's lives and showing them as they happen. Today in court, the lawyers did X, Y, and Z, the doctor saved 3 people, and the family down the street had this most comedic run-in with the mail man. These shows are safer for networks to produce because you don't need background to get into them. If I watch an episode of Law and Order, I can get 95% of it without any need for background.
Babylon 5 helped to establish that a TV show with a defined story arc could be successful. If you walked into Babylon 5 during season 3, you'd be completely lost. Yet because of the defined arc, those who did follow it followed it very loyally. The real struggle though was if you didn't start from the beginning it was hard to catch up.
Well since they broke that ground we've seen the advent of two things that make such shows possible:
1) Season by season DVD releases of TV shows 2) ITunes
With Lost, for example, I heard good things about it all during the first season but never got around to watching it. AS the second season approached I decided to give it a try. After watching two episodes I was totally hooked. A friend of mine just finished the season one DVD's in a marathon and is now eagerly awaiting netflix to deliver season 2. Then for season 3, they can catch up via Itunes.
But ultimately Babylon 5 is what broke this ground and whatever may be said about it's production values, it did make for some great televison that even now is relevant. Go back and watch Intersections in Real Time as a prime example. This is the episode where Sheridan is tortured to get him to turn against his friends in favor of the government. Now go and read about waterboarding and some of the crap that's legal for our government to do to people right now and it's just chilling.
Agreed. I just upgraded from a Sony point and shoot digital to the Pentax K100D and have been totally thrilled. The Pentax is in the same realm as the entry level Nikon and Canon DSLR's but also has image stabilization incorporated into the CCD making low light photos better. Totally pleased with it so far.
The one caveat on the Pentax is finding good lenses for it is a bit more difficult. While you can use pretty much any lens ever made for a Pentax camera, I found that the selection of modern lenses for the canons and nikons is a bigger. Having said that, the lens it comes with is a good all purpose lense and I picked up a 50-200mm zoom that works really well.
The thing that always hurt Napster was that nobody could go to Napster's system and legitimately say that it was being used for anything other than piracy. There was a handful of legal content on there, burried in a sea of pirated files. On the other hand, YouTube is mostly non-copyrighted material.
Sure we get excerpts of the occasional TV show, clips from Olberman, and Stewart, but it's not wholesale copying and the quality is twelth rate. Nobody's going to decide to not buy a DVD of a film because they watched it on YouTube. So really I don't see YouTube having a problem. They take down content when notified that it infringes copyright and they move on.
One quick comment, but Vista closes the gap briefly. When was the last major update to Windows prior to Vista? 2001. That's 6 years between upgades, and the changes we've seen between versions haven't been particularly significant.
Windows is rapidly becoming a victim of it's own success. Making substantial changes to the code is difficult because they have to maintain compatibility with all the crap that's already out there. Apple has been able to go back to the drawing board and start with something totally new which has allowed them to be far more innovative.
So while Vista will close the gap, it'll then be another 5-6 years before the next Windows version and Apple will come out with many useful changes in the meantime.
Aside from that though, I believe Apple would be foolish to change their business model. Their selling point is that they control the whole experience. Apple's always have the impression of being more expensive, but that's because Apple doesn't generally make low end systems. They make higher end high quality systems and then make sure everything works well.
I'm sure they complained to the buggy whip manufacturers too. I think in the end though these are empty threats. The truth of the matter is that DVD's get people into the store. Getting somebody in to buy a single DVD leads to two or three or maybe a new DVD player or clothes or whatever else. It's like the milk in a grocery store.
Lest we forget, Walmart and Target both sell CD's in their stores still even though downloading music is a very established business. This is a negotiation tactic, trying to use their current market position to get a better deal out of the movie studios. If they can get the studios to drop the wholesale prices a $1, it would be a huge boost to the store profits.
Making it redundant is important, but the other challenge is making sure that it's usable by programming people who don't have significant technical expertise (at least not of this sort). Intutive ways to queue up programs, ads, etc. You can have a system with all of the bells and whistles in terms of redundancy, storage, etc, but if nobody knows how to use it effectively, it doesn't matter.
Strange times indeed. I mean wouldn't this ultimately be an expense to the bottom line of most companies? Here's the thing. Sure they go out and buy a new copy of Vista which benefits nobody other than Microsoft. Then they go out and buy new computers, which is also a cost to them. Finally they have to do training and support to make sure everybody moves to the new computers/os smoothly.
Now, how much of a productivity boost do you think people will get from the new version of Windows. The majority of people are just doing standard office productivity work, and Windows today does that fine. Hell, Windows of 10 years ago did that kind of work just fine. I have a copy of MS Office '97 at home and it works just fine.
Sure it'll help the bottom lines of Dell, etc, but a good portion of the money they generate is actually going overseas to their parts suppliers in Taiwan, etc. I just don't see how this could possible be a stimulus to the economy. It seems to me that it'll be a slight boost for tech and a slight dip for everybody sending them checkes.
Support is the critical thing here. If I buy Win XP Pro I don't expect support. I expect little more than the support I get if I download Fedora off a website. On the other hand if I'm going out of my way to pay for a supported license, odds are I'm going to use the support. If I pay money for real support, the software will always cost more.
When I worked at one of the largest insurance companies in the world, we had an amazing support contract for DB/2. Like we'd call them and they'd have overnight turnaround on patches. They'd fly people out to our office and help fix things. All "free" in exchange for the fact that they paid out the ass for a massive support contract.
Oh, one other thing to keep in mind. When we're talking about VS costing less, that's a major deception. Yes, VS costs less. Why? Because it's a hook. You buy VS, develop a windows app, then Microsoft sells more copies of Windows and Office. Eventually if you're lucky they'll write a product that competes with you and give it away for free in the next release of Windows.
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.
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The truth is anybody can break into your house at anytime. They don't because there's some risk, however slight, that somebody will notice and they'll get caught. Same logic here. It's not going to prevent somebody from pirating but it will discourage the lesser crimes.
You thought this was something intended to defeat deliberate large scale pirates? Why would you think that? I mean none of the DRM crap stops them either, so why should this? :)
All of this wonderful copy protection stuff doesn't actually stop piracy. Wasn't it just a day or two ago that there was a rip of an HD-DVD on BitTorrent? So why incorporate all these complex and onerous technologies when, in the end, all they do is make it so your paying customers have buggy hardware?
Let's say a major airline did just that and had to charge an extra $10/ticket to make up for the cost. Now, every time somebody's shopping for tickets on Expedia, that airline looks more expensive and is avoided. You might think that the airline could advertise that security feature, but there's a problem with that. By saying that their planes now have anti-missile defense, it would have the net effect of scaring potential airline customers. Associating your product with fear of death is usually not a good formula for success.
On the other hand you can just require it accross the board, and then the airlines will all install it, everybody will pay the extra per ticket cost without thinking about it and we'll all be safer. Arguably, such a system is a far better step towards airline saftey than the ridiculous hoops they make you jump through at the security lines.
Having said that, I'd really rather they started focussing on cargo screening first. Much easier to get explosives than a guided missile. But I think the guided missile threat is legitimate.
Seriously. I worked at a company that was totally allergic to the notion of hiring permanent employees. So most of the time they just contracted things out to India. Had that option not existed, they would have hired local contractors or permanent employees. They go to India because it's cheap, not because the talent doesn't exist here.
I'm a firm believe in the power of a competitive marketplace to provide the goods that people need in the most efficient manner. Having said that, most people have 1-3 choices for their service. This is a very limited marketplace which gives those companies a lot of power to informally set standards for pricing, service, etc.
If the market was being competed in by dozens of providers, then if AT&T had policies I didn't like I'd have a number of other providers that offer a service I want. I mean right now, I have DSL service through Speakeasy. In an unregulated market, why would AT&T allow speakeasy to compete with them for that service? They wouldn't.
If I open a trucking business, I don't control the roads between Chicago and San Francisco. Any other company can open their own trucking business and compete for business shipping goods using the common infrastructure of those roads. Imagine for a moment if all those roads were privately owned and my shipping company could charge different rates to different shippers. How would that be competitive?
This is what I love. On some level my interest in Linux came down to a question of choice and freedom. When it really first came to prominence, Apple was floundering and Microsoft seemed on a path to total hegemony. I liked Linux because it was free, and free, and gave me a choice. Sometimes it was harder to do things in Linux than it was under windows, but then I came to learn that there were a lot of things that then became easier. I loved how many tools I could get for it that were also free and free.
Today I have 3 very solid choices (more, possibly, depending on how you count your linuxes) and we can all find the right environment for us. I love that, on my new computer, I can run OSX, Linux, and Windows, not just on the same box, but even at the same time. When I work from home I have OSX on one screen and Windows XP running in parallels connected to my work desktop. Theoretically I could probably hook up a third monitor and have a Linux desktop running too, but that'd be a wee bit of overkill (and I don't have nearly the desk space).
It still frustrates me though how much support is given to windows to the total exclusion of all else. I understand the business reasons for it, but it does drive me nuts that I have to dual-boot my computer just to play a game. But we are making progress I think, and perhaps growth in OSX may help Linux down the line, encouraging developers to write software that can take advantage of all platforms more easily.
I have to say, I'd prefer that it were open, but really I'm rather pragmatic about it. At one point I like to play with the OS more, and then Linux was good. Today I find I'm more in a mood to just get stuff done. I want to just edit photos, or play a game, or send an e-mail, or write some code. It does that well.
Then there's the little touches. I love dashboard, something I never quite got until I accidentally triggered it by pressing my scroll button. Then I was like, "my god, that's so useful". Then there's expose which makes finding things on my desktop or in a myriad of windows so much easier. It's things like that which could, of course, be added to Linux, or even Windows, but it's there in OSX today and it just works nicely.
I will say I do find the hardware quirkiness a bit annoying. That is, I've got the basic vid card for my pro, and if I want a better one I only have one option really. I want to upgrade the memory, but the memory for it is crazy expensive. It's that whiff of propietariness that I've never liked, but it does work well aside from that.
I was a big proponent of Linux on the desktop for a while, but these days it's not installed on any of my desktops. Instead, I have a MacPro. The Mac offers me all the Unixy goodness but with a much better interface and overall integration. On Linux I was constantly wrestling to get everything to work, but on the Mac, it just works.
It makes sense though when you think about it. How many companies are out there looking for a support contract for MySQL but aren't using RedHat, etc? Considering that supporting Debian could entail supporting several different specific flavors, it doesn't really seem like the revenue for it would be worth the complications.
Presumably if there's enough of a business for such support, somebody will come in and fill the gap. That's the beauty of open source, non? You can actually get support from somebody other than the originaly developer. If it was Microsoft refusing to support some old version of their software, you'd be up a creek.
This sounds a lot like a deliberate strategy. Put out a proposal that's totally extreme and ridiculous to freak people out. Then when they reject it out of hand you come back with what you really wanted in the first place and it'll pass without dispute. Given labor's reaction, it looks like it worked.
While maybe most of those young hipster types aren't able to afford Apple computers, they are definitely buying scores of IPods. This feeds a brand loyalty and interest in Apple as a whole and then can lead towards them eventually purchasing Apple hardware.
The reality is when you do an apples to apples comparison (pun unintended), Apple's are not expensive. Go out and buy a dual woodcrest workstation from random PC vendor and see what kind of price they are charging you. What makes Apple seem expensive is that the average person will compare that against a desktop PC with half the power and think it's a valid comparison.
Generally speaking Apple systems are more of a long term investment and so it costs more. Overall you're probably getting better quality for your dollar, but if you only have a few dollars, that doesn't matter much. While the other PC vendors are fighting for every little cent on sub $400 PC's, Apple is selling $2500 PC's and making enormous margins.
I'd rather be in Apple's position than Gateway's.
If an exploit does nothing more than let you play solitare someplace you shouldn't, then it doesn't matter. And the thing is, even if OS X is only as secure as Windows (which I'd dispute), it's still good for overall security of the Internet. One of the biggest problems with the Internet today is that if 95% of the computers run one operating system, it becomes easier to write exploits that affect the majority of people.
On the other hand, if 50% of the people were running OS X, then no exploit could harm more than half the people at any given time. So in the long run, perversely, OS X is beneficial to the security of Windows.
Well the reality is that while your IPod might be able to hold all the video in the world you still need some insanely fat pipe to download all of the world's video from. Today I can go to the Itunes store and download a video, but it takes like 20-30 minutes to get it. Going to take an awfully long time to fill my ipod at that rate.
Right now I have the 60GB Video IPod and I do not fill it. The limitations imposed on me are not storage capacity, but rather bandwidth and time. I'd love to put every video I own on it, and clearly I'd exceed the capacity if I did, but the reality is even on my Mac Pro it takes me 40 minutes to rip a DVD (which I guess technically I'm not supposed to be able to do anyhow). It's a huge hassle.
Until I can get video onto an ipod as readily as I can get music onto an ipod, the storage capacity isn't that critical.
Definitely. All the characters had their imperfections and that all played into what happened. When the big war was over it set the seeds for the next big war. Truly ony of my favorite bits was how the Vorlons and Shadows were in a way almost more childish than the other species that came after them even though they were heald up as a kind of god-like creature initially. Good stuff :)
Traditionally television has been more about taking excerpts from people's lives and showing them as they happen. Today in court, the lawyers did X, Y, and Z, the doctor saved 3 people, and the family down the street had this most comedic run-in with the mail man. These shows are safer for networks to produce because you don't need background to get into them. If I watch an episode of Law and Order, I can get 95% of it without any need for background.
Babylon 5 helped to establish that a TV show with a defined story arc could be successful. If you walked into Babylon 5 during season 3, you'd be completely lost. Yet because of the defined arc, those who did follow it followed it very loyally. The real struggle though was if you didn't start from the beginning it was hard to catch up.
Well since they broke that ground we've seen the advent of two things that make such shows possible:
1) Season by season DVD releases of TV shows
2) ITunes
With Lost, for example, I heard good things about it all during the first season but never got around to watching it. AS the second season approached I decided to give it a try. After watching two episodes I was totally hooked. A friend of mine just finished the season one DVD's in a marathon and is now eagerly awaiting netflix to deliver season 2. Then for season 3, they can catch up via Itunes.
But ultimately Babylon 5 is what broke this ground and whatever may be said about it's production values, it did make for some great televison that even now is relevant. Go back and watch Intersections in Real Time as a prime example. This is the episode where Sheridan is tortured to get him to turn against his friends in favor of the government. Now go and read about waterboarding and some of the crap that's legal for our government to do to people right now and it's just chilling.
Agreed. I just upgraded from a Sony point and shoot digital to the Pentax K100D and have been totally thrilled. The Pentax is in the same realm as the entry level Nikon and Canon DSLR's but also has image stabilization incorporated into the CCD making low light photos better. Totally pleased with it so far.
The one caveat on the Pentax is finding good lenses for it is a bit more difficult. While you can use pretty much any lens ever made for a Pentax camera, I found that the selection of modern lenses for the canons and nikons is a bigger. Having said that, the lens it comes with is a good all purpose lense and I picked up a 50-200mm zoom that works really well.
The thing that always hurt Napster was that nobody could go to Napster's system and legitimately say that it was being used for anything other than piracy. There was a handful of legal content on there, burried in a sea of pirated files. On the other hand, YouTube is mostly non-copyrighted material.
Sure we get excerpts of the occasional TV show, clips from Olberman, and Stewart, but it's not wholesale copying and the quality is twelth rate. Nobody's going to decide to not buy a DVD of a film because they watched it on YouTube. So really I don't see YouTube having a problem. They take down content when notified that it infringes copyright and they move on.
One quick comment, but Vista closes the gap briefly. When was the last major update to Windows prior to Vista? 2001. That's 6 years between upgades, and the changes we've seen between versions haven't been particularly significant.
Windows is rapidly becoming a victim of it's own success. Making substantial changes to the code is difficult because they have to maintain compatibility with all the crap that's already out there. Apple has been able to go back to the drawing board and start with something totally new which has allowed them to be far more innovative.
So while Vista will close the gap, it'll then be another 5-6 years before the next Windows version and Apple will come out with many useful changes in the meantime.
Aside from that though, I believe Apple would be foolish to change their business model. Their selling point is that they control the whole experience. Apple's always have the impression of being more expensive, but that's because Apple doesn't generally make low end systems. They make higher end high quality systems and then make sure everything works well.
I'm sure they complained to the buggy whip manufacturers too. I think in the end though these are empty threats. The truth of the matter is that DVD's get people into the store. Getting somebody in to buy a single DVD leads to two or three or maybe a new DVD player or clothes or whatever else. It's like the milk in a grocery store.
Lest we forget, Walmart and Target both sell CD's in their stores still even though downloading music is a very established business. This is a negotiation tactic, trying to use their current market position to get a better deal out of the movie studios. If they can get the studios to drop the wholesale prices a $1, it would be a huge boost to the store profits.
Government is very poor at creation and is typically very poor at selecting future winners in the technology race.
See also the Internet you're using to post your comment. Oh wait, DARPA created that, nevermind.
Making it redundant is important, but the other challenge is making sure that it's usable by programming people who don't have significant technical expertise (at least not of this sort). Intutive ways to queue up programs, ads, etc. You can have a system with all of the bells and whistles in terms of redundancy, storage, etc, but if nobody knows how to use it effectively, it doesn't matter.
Strange times indeed. I mean wouldn't this ultimately be an expense to the bottom line of most companies? Here's the thing. Sure they go out and buy a new copy of Vista which benefits nobody other than Microsoft. Then they go out and buy new computers, which is also a cost to them. Finally they have to do training and support to make sure everybody moves to the new computers/os smoothly.
Now, how much of a productivity boost do you think people will get from the new version of Windows. The majority of people are just doing standard office productivity work, and Windows today does that fine. Hell, Windows of 10 years ago did that kind of work just fine. I have a copy of MS Office '97 at home and it works just fine.
Sure it'll help the bottom lines of Dell, etc, but a good portion of the money they generate is actually going overseas to their parts suppliers in Taiwan, etc. I just don't see how this could possible be a stimulus to the economy. It seems to me that it'll be a slight boost for tech and a slight dip for everybody sending them checkes.
Support is the critical thing here. If I buy Win XP Pro I don't expect support. I expect little more than the support I get if I download Fedora off a website. On the other hand if I'm going out of my way to pay for a supported license, odds are I'm going to use the support. If I pay money for real support, the software will always cost more.
When I worked at one of the largest insurance companies in the world, we had an amazing support contract for DB/2. Like we'd call them and they'd have overnight turnaround on patches. They'd fly people out to our office and help fix things. All "free" in exchange for the fact that they paid out the ass for a massive support contract.
Oh, one other thing to keep in mind. When we're talking about VS costing less, that's a major deception. Yes, VS costs less. Why? Because it's a hook. You buy VS, develop a windows app, then Microsoft sells more copies of Windows and Office. Eventually if you're lucky they'll write a product that competes with you and give it away for free in the next release of Windows.
Things to consider:
1) Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were VERY close. They ultimately came down a to a relatively thin margin of votes in select states. So we basically get into an uncertainty situation because we end up having to measure a vote exactly when the technology is rather imprecise (hanging chads, etc)
2) Electronic voting machines did not exist in significant quantities prior to the 2000 election. Given that there's no physical evidence to support the numbers that come out of the polls, it creates a definite sense of insecurity.
3) We have seen ample evidence of deliberate efforts by Republicans to distort the vote. In Ohio there were many fewer polling machines made available to typically Democratic districts. They also gave people registration forms that were invalid, then said they wouldn't accept them. Also don't forget the phone bank jamming scheme in New Hampshire that hamstrung get out the vote efforts by Democrats.
4) Gerrymandering of districts has meant that the margins of victory have shrunk in many locations. You gerrymander by dividing up opposition support accross enough of your own candidates. So you end up with two of your candidates winning by say 5% rather than having one win by 10% and the other narrowly lose.