The summary describes the benefits, but in reality they are potential benefits. There are also potential downsides (for players). It is plain to see which have been more likely to manifest themselves.
Microsoft has costs outside the pressing of a CD. Their costs are actually significantly higher than you would expect due to poor organization and product management (as documented everywhere), and the lack of financial pressure to change (they've got enough revenue to sustain high development costs).
If you subtract their well publicized margin (the SEC has rules, after all) from their average product price, you can see that while $158 per unit of windows is highly profitable for them, $11*(the number of copies they sell) wouldn't cover their expenditures.
Media playback is not going to be the primary use of Vista DRM in as little as 2 years from now. Vista + MS Office (post 2003) + active directory should provide businesses with a content control solution top to bottom. Data theft will become considerably more difficult, so will data leaks both internal and external. If implemented correctly any data the company values will be locked down using DRM to the company systems with a very strict and effective policy all the way to the desktop using TPM, per machine, per user keys, etc. Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
I can smell that pile of crap from all the way over here.
There is a feature that you forgot to mention that currently does not exist in DRM free environments. Your new DRM order will allow verifiable fee payments to microsoft for every device participating in document lifecycle. Hardware purchase requirements will eliminate the possibility of mitigating these requirements through bulk licensing for all but the largest of corporate customers (strike one). The longevity of legacy systems up to ten times longer than Microsoft's best hopes will require exploitable concessions to be made in the "security" in order to get the technology in the door. Easily breakable DRM (before any of the inevitable flaws are found) means zero cost-benefit (strike two). Administrative and bureaucratic costs of technical (and thus actual) enforcement of such policies will be so high in both lost productivity and increased management requirements will either cause the technology to be rejected, or protections to be disabled leading to the solutions being useless (strike three).
Additionally, despite the ubiquity of Microsoft Office, it is not the cornerstone application of most businesses. Microsoft is incapable of providing top-to-bottom DRM because they don't play in vertical software markets (and have failed spectacularly at every attempt, though they may have partial success in the mobile phone market in the next decade). Unless you are a lawyer, document processing is not your business' bread and butter. Custom, or industry specific database applications are king.
If OO wants to be relevant in 2 years it will have to have it in a year from now.
Anybody sane only considers OO a stop-gap between now and the end of the monolithic document suite. They don't need to innovate or advance any. They just need to polish so they can be relevant for the transition. It'll be irrelevant in a few years either way.
In other words, the guy was willing to pay Microsoft a price that allowed practically no profit (but probably a little) instead of the over 400% profit margin that Microsoft asked for.
I'm all for Microsoft making as much money as they can manage, but it is hard to consider the $11 offer unreasonable when compared to the $158 price point. They both seem equally outrageous to me.
(The Windows group at Microsoft regularly posts profits in excess of 400%, and $158 is a decidedly average price for a single unit of their product.)
I read a study awhile back which concluded that drivers who are aware of a red light camera are more likely to slam on their brakes when the light turns yellow, thus causing more accidents. The study was done on a pair of NYC intersections before and after the red light cameras were installed. (you'll have to search for it yourself. I'm too lazy to find the link)
I think that "a" is more probable. I don't see why cameras would cause an increase in reports of accidents, but it is clear why cameras would cause drivers to change their behavior in a way that makes them less predictable to other drivers on the road.
Are you asking about a particular technology? Because that is not what I am talking about. He has rejected market based approaches in favor of regulatory approaches.
Technology wise, in the past he has opposed nuclear power as a replacement for coal.. Of course on other occasions he has also supported it, so it's hard to say what he actually thinks on the matter.
I have not seen "An Inconvenient Truth", so I would not know. Al Gore's body of work is much larger than that single movie, and he has proposed solutions elsewhere, including in his presidential campaign and in his books. Some of his suggestions are ridiculous and draconian, to the point where they make fascists look like moderates.
The problem with Al Gore, and many other "environmentalists," is that they are only interested in solutions to climate change that further their social policy goals. If we don't find a solution that involves a reduction in personal SUV sized transportation, involves zero increase in nuclear power, and is administered solely through government regulation, they don't want anything to do with it. It's not about fixing the environment so much as it is inflicting lifestyle changes on people.
If they stopped treating climate change as a tool for social engineering and more like an actual engineering problem, not only would we be making some forward progress, but people would be more likely believe them.
That's the funny thing about liars. You tend to disbelieve everything they say. Even the true stuff.
Even if Microsoft hadn't rewritten the stack, testers would have had to test those protocols - meaning a considerable (yes, really) test cost.
Considerable.... If you're not working on Microsoft's R&D budget. If their development process wasn't so messed up, they could have supported this stuff and still spent less time and money to develop the product they released. The impact on Microsoft's bottom line is probably close to negligible. It would only take two or so large customers using the feature to more than justify the expense.
And "engineered in"? Give me a break. They needed to be implemented on the new interface. Those protocols have ceased being "engineered" over a decade ago.
The real reason they were dropped was likely because they were hedging their bets security wise. It was easier for them to cut the features than button them down sufficiently to guarantee they wouldn't be in the headlines for a zero-day exploit. In other words, they wussed out.
Devices that plug in to your household power need 3rd party certification (e.g. UL approval in US).
No they don't.
Many rectified DC power supplies with a transformer aren't UL listed. I just did a quick poll of the devices on my desk... Half (3 of 6) aren't UL listed. Unless you have a name-brand PC, there is a good chance that your PC's power supply isn't UL listed either.
It's just cheaper and easier to use an external power supply. It makes it so that part of your design can be re-sourced when a cheaper supplier is available without having to redesign the rest of the system.
So parents should have sole responsibility for their children's education? That's pretty much a formula for an illiterate populace.
Can you only see in black and white?
It is the government's job to provide an education. It is a parent's job to make sure their child benefits from that education sufficiently.
It is impossible to produce a public school system that can take kids for 6 hours a day 180 days a year and produce well educated individuals. Education has to happen at home as well as at school.
Yeah, so what's your point? That we should abolish public education? Or what?
Why would you possibly think that is my point?
My point is that we need to start placing blame correctly, and instead of writing our schools off as a failure because parents didn't do their job, we should place the blame where it belongs. That way progress can be made.
Parents showing up for PTA meetings is evidence that they care about somebody else doing their job for them, not that they care about doing the work themselves.
Libertarian agenda? Give me a break. I am very much for public education. However, public education alone does not and can not produce a well-educated child unless we had a 1:1 teacher to student ratio for a significant portion of early development. You just plain cannot learn to read well in a group, and you can't learn to learn if you can't read well. You can show up at all the PTO meetings you want, but if you don't sit your child down and read to them every day for the first several years of your life, then all those PTO meetings are a token effort at best.
Those bumper stickers that say "If you can read this, thank a teacher" (Except that they usually leave out the comma) piss me off. Public education starts at age 5 in this country. Kids should learn to read before they ever meet a teacher.
Sweden and Russia and two good examples of how a government can achieve excellent results by actively developing and implementing common standards in education. Parents, who themselves grew up in the TV-watching culture, are unlikely to encourage their children to read.
Your example only has meaning if you have evidence that parents in those countries don't encourage reading outside of school. I'll bet that they do, and that if they didn't the schools would be much less successful.
The destruction of the concept that parents should educate their children
That's the entire problem right there. People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them, when really it is their responsibility to make sure their child learns. A typical child's success learning to read or write has little to with how much money the local school has, and everything to do with whether the parents culture is one of reading and teaching, and the parents career is one that allows for that.
It' almost like people do thees studies so they can pipm their concept for a name of the current generation. I just assume anybody who feels the need to do that has no credibility by default and is simply after the publicity.
The thing that should be worrying to Microsoft is that by this time last year, they hadn't sold any more 360s than Sony has already sold of PS3s, and the only reason Sony hasn't sold more is that they aren't available. A $50 premium is still a premium. 360 Core systems were abundant at retail the week before christmas last year.
What both of them should be worried about is that they both made the possibly fatal blunder of releasing a console that comes in two different configurations. Nobody wants the low end version of either system, and when that version is not in high demand it makes the whole platform look bad to analysts.
Congratulations. You've parroted the slashdot party line.
Instead of spewing a list of stereotypical comments that add up to the conclusion you want everybody else to come to, why don't you compare the same points for all three systems? And why leave out stuff? You didn't say anything about DRM, for example, but maybe because that makes the 360 look just as bad as the PS3.
The key is to find the "dead" person in between times and REALLY knock them off.
That is ridiculous. Murder is a physical act, and if you murder somebody after you've already been convicted of killing them, clearly the murder that occurred after your trial already ended, it is a different criminal act than what you were originally convicted for. Don't worry though, they'd reverse your prior conviction before throwing you back in jail; even though technically they wouldn't have to.
You don't get convicted for murder. You get convicted for murder of person x at time y in location z. Making x y and z the same for the 'second' killing is a big job.
Only idiots believe that Treo users that can't avoid crashes are idiots. What kind of apologist would make such a stupid statement anyway?
If your Treo crashed so much, clearly it was defective and you should have gotten yourself a working one.
What a piece of crap. I owned three and knew several people that also owned them. All of mine behaved the same way and my friends had similar experiences.
Tens of thousands of business people everywhere rely on these things for their daily lives to function. I refuse to believe that I got the only one that doesn't crash randomly. Either your anecdote was an amazing coincidence, or you and your friends all installed some dumb app that was crashing your Treo.
Incidentally, it is technically impossible for your i320 to have a superior browser, since it has no touchscreen, and WM5's crippled-in-software screen resolution.
My life is on my Treo. I use it for e-mail, telephone, scheduling, GPS navigation... If it crashed at random, my carrier would be hearing from me constantly until it was fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
You nailed it.
The summary describes the benefits, but in reality they are potential benefits. There are also potential downsides (for players). It is plain to see which have been more likely to manifest themselves.
Microsoft has costs outside the pressing of a CD. Their costs are actually significantly higher than you would expect due to poor organization and product management (as documented everywhere), and the lack of financial pressure to change (they've got enough revenue to sustain high development costs).
If you subtract their well publicized margin (the SEC has rules, after all) from their average product price, you can see that while $158 per unit of windows is highly profitable for them, $11*(the number of copies they sell) wouldn't cover their expenditures.
Then the invoice will come, and the CFO will set them straight.
Media playback is not going to be the primary use of Vista DRM in as little as 2 years from now. Vista + MS Office (post 2003) + active directory should provide businesses with a content control solution top to bottom. Data theft will become considerably more difficult, so will data leaks both internal and external. If implemented correctly any data the company values will be locked down using DRM to the company systems with a very strict and effective policy all the way to the desktop using TPM, per machine, per user keys, etc. Any mid-size and large business will jump at the opportunity. They will be idiots not to.
I can smell that pile of crap from all the way over here.
There is a feature that you forgot to mention that currently does not exist in DRM free environments. Your new DRM order will allow verifiable fee payments to microsoft for every device participating in document lifecycle. Hardware purchase requirements will eliminate the possibility of mitigating these requirements through bulk licensing for all but the largest of corporate customers (strike one). The longevity of legacy systems up to ten times longer than Microsoft's best hopes will require exploitable concessions to be made in the "security" in order to get the technology in the door. Easily breakable DRM (before any of the inevitable flaws are found) means zero cost-benefit (strike two). Administrative and bureaucratic costs of technical (and thus actual) enforcement of such policies will be so high in both lost productivity and increased management requirements will either cause the technology to be rejected, or protections to be disabled leading to the solutions being useless (strike three).
Additionally, despite the ubiquity of Microsoft Office, it is not the cornerstone application of most businesses. Microsoft is incapable of providing top-to-bottom DRM because they don't play in vertical software markets (and have failed spectacularly at every attempt, though they may have partial success in the mobile phone market in the next decade). Unless you are a lawyer, document processing is not your business' bread and butter. Custom, or industry specific database applications are king.
If OO wants to be relevant in 2 years it will have to have it in a year from now.
Anybody sane only considers OO a stop-gap between now and the end of the monolithic document suite. They don't need to innovate or advance any. They just need to polish so they can be relevant for the transition. It'll be irrelevant in a few years either way.
High horse?
Sounds like somebody is overly altruistic and foolishly thinks they not only can expect reciprocation, but that they deserve it for some reason.
If you can get what you want as quickly as you want at lower risk to you, you should take advantage. Almost everybody else will.
In other words, the guy was willing to pay Microsoft a price that allowed practically no profit (but probably a little) instead of the over 400% profit margin that Microsoft asked for.
I'm all for Microsoft making as much money as they can manage, but it is hard to consider the $11 offer unreasonable when compared to the $158 price point. They both seem equally outrageous to me.
(The Windows group at Microsoft regularly posts profits in excess of 400%, and $158 is a decidedly average price for a single unit of their product.)
a) cameras deliberately/ randomly cause accidents
I read a study awhile back which concluded that drivers who are aware of a red light camera are more likely to slam on their brakes when the light turns yellow, thus causing more accidents. The study was done on a pair of NYC intersections before and after the red light cameras were installed. (you'll have to search for it yourself. I'm too lazy to find the link)
I think that "a" is more probable. I don't see why cameras would cause an increase in reports of accidents, but it is clear why cameras would cause drivers to change their behavior in a way that makes them less predictable to other drivers on the road.
Are you asking about a particular technology? Because that is not what I am talking about. He has rejected market based approaches in favor of regulatory approaches.
Technology wise, in the past he has opposed nuclear power as a replacement for coal.. Of course on other occasions he has also supported it, so it's hard to say what he actually thinks on the matter.
I have not seen "An Inconvenient Truth", so I would not know. Al Gore's body of work is much larger than that single movie, and he has proposed solutions elsewhere, including in his presidential campaign and in his books. Some of his suggestions are ridiculous and draconian, to the point where they make fascists look like moderates.
The problem with Al Gore, and many other "environmentalists," is that they are only interested in solutions to climate change that further their social policy goals. If we don't find a solution that involves a reduction in personal SUV sized transportation, involves zero increase in nuclear power, and is administered solely through government regulation, they don't want anything to do with it. It's not about fixing the environment so much as it is inflicting lifestyle changes on people.
If they stopped treating climate change as a tool for social engineering and more like an actual engineering problem, not only would we be making some forward progress, but people would be more likely believe them.
That's the funny thing about liars. You tend to disbelieve everything they say. Even the true stuff.
Even if Microsoft hadn't rewritten the stack, testers would have had to test those protocols - meaning a considerable (yes, really) test cost.
Considerable.... If you're not working on Microsoft's R&D budget. If their development process wasn't so messed up, they could have supported this stuff and still spent less time and money to develop the product they released. The impact on Microsoft's bottom line is probably close to negligible. It would only take two or so large customers using the feature to more than justify the expense.
And "engineered in"? Give me a break. They needed to be implemented on the new interface. Those protocols have ceased being "engineered" over a decade ago.
The real reason they were dropped was likely because they were hedging their bets security wise. It was easier for them to cut the features than button them down sufficiently to guarantee they wouldn't be in the headlines for a zero-day exploit. In other words, they wussed out.
Many legacy business apps still use IPX.
Supporting those old protocols wasn't hurting anybody.
Devices that plug in to your household power need 3rd party certification (e.g. UL approval in US).
No they don't.
Many rectified DC power supplies with a transformer aren't UL listed. I just did a quick poll of the devices on my desk... Half (3 of 6) aren't UL listed. Unless you have a name-brand PC, there is a good chance that your PC's power supply isn't UL listed either.
It's just cheaper and easier to use an external power supply. It makes it so that part of your design can be re-sourced when a cheaper supplier is available without having to redesign the rest of the system.
So parents should have sole responsibility for their children's education? That's pretty much a formula for an illiterate populace.
Can you only see in black and white?
It is the government's job to provide an education. It is a parent's job to make sure their child benefits from that education sufficiently.
It is impossible to produce a public school system that can take kids for 6 hours a day 180 days a year and produce well educated individuals. Education has to happen at home as well as at school.
Yeah, so what's your point? That we should abolish public education? Or what?
Why would you possibly think that is my point?
My point is that we need to start placing blame correctly, and instead of writing our schools off as a failure because parents didn't do their job, we should place the blame where it belongs. That way progress can be made.
Parents showing up for PTA meetings is evidence that they care about somebody else doing their job for them, not that they care about doing the work themselves.
Libertarian agenda? Give me a break. I am very much for public education. However, public education alone does not and can not produce a well-educated child unless we had a 1:1 teacher to student ratio for a significant portion of early development. You just plain cannot learn to read well in a group, and you can't learn to learn if you can't read well. You can show up at all the PTO meetings you want, but if you don't sit your child down and read to them every day for the first several years of your life, then all those PTO meetings are a token effort at best.
Those bumper stickers that say "If you can read this, thank a teacher" (Except that they usually leave out the comma) piss me off. Public education starts at age 5 in this country. Kids should learn to read before they ever meet a teacher.
Sweden and Russia and two good examples of how a government can achieve excellent results by actively developing and implementing common standards in education. Parents, who themselves grew up in the TV-watching culture, are unlikely to encourage their children to read.
Your example only has meaning if you have evidence that parents in those countries don't encourage reading outside of school. I'll bet that they do, and that if they didn't the schools would be much less successful.
The destruction of the concept that parents should educate their children
That's the entire problem right there. People have come to expect that the government is going to do that job for them, when really it is their responsibility to make sure their child learns. A typical child's success learning to read or write has little to with how much money the local school has, and everything to do with whether the parents culture is one of reading and teaching, and the parents career is one that allows for that.
It' almost like people do thees studies so they can pipm their concept for a name of the current generation. I just assume anybody who feels the need to do that has no credibility by default and is simply after the publicity.
Who wants to pay a premium if you're not even going to get it in time for Christmas?
Those resellers are idiots.
The thing that should be worrying to Microsoft is that by this time last year, they hadn't sold any more 360s than Sony has already sold of PS3s, and the only reason Sony hasn't sold more is that they aren't available. A $50 premium is still a premium. 360 Core systems were abundant at retail the week before christmas last year.
What both of them should be worried about is that they both made the possibly fatal blunder of releasing a console that comes in two different configurations. Nobody wants the low end version of either system, and when that version is not in high demand it makes the whole platform look bad to analysts.
Congratulations. You've parroted the slashdot party line.
Instead of spewing a list of stereotypical comments that add up to the conclusion you want everybody else to come to, why don't you compare the same points for all three systems? And why leave out stuff? You didn't say anything about DRM, for example, but maybe because that makes the 360 look just as bad as the PS3.
The key is to find the "dead" person in between times and REALLY knock them off.
That is ridiculous. Murder is a physical act, and if you murder somebody after you've already been convicted of killing them, clearly the murder that occurred after your trial already ended, it is a different criminal act than what you were originally convicted for. Don't worry though, they'd reverse your prior conviction before throwing you back in jail; even though technically they wouldn't have to.
You don't get convicted for murder. You get convicted for murder of person x at time y in location z. Making x y and z the same for the 'second' killing is a big job.
Only idiots believe that Treo users that can't avoid crashes are idiots. What kind of apologist would make such a stupid statement anyway?
If your Treo crashed so much, clearly it was defective and you should have gotten yourself a working one.
What a piece of crap. I owned three and knew several people that also owned them. All of mine behaved the same way and my friends had similar experiences.
Tens of thousands of business people everywhere rely on these things for their daily lives to function. I refuse to believe that I got the only one that doesn't crash randomly. Either your anecdote was an amazing coincidence, or you and your friends all installed some dumb app that was crashing your Treo.
Incidentally, it is technically impossible for your i320 to have a superior browser, since it has no touchscreen, and WM5's crippled-in-software screen resolution.
Then why haven't you returned it as defective?
My life is on my Treo. I use it for e-mail, telephone, scheduling, GPS navigation... If it crashed at random, my carrier would be hearing from me constantly until it was fixed.