Either way this plays out, I hope there will be some incentive for the provider to keep up the quality, increase bandwidth as needed, etc. I cannot even imagine how frustrating it's going to be to have your internet go down for a week, and to have nothing but an answering machine to complain to. And what happens when the municipality claims that there is a budget crunch, and there is no money to improve coverage? Then we'll want the private provider to come back. There's something to be said for "you get what you pay for."
People are free to complain about bugs and security vulnerabilities that they discover - it helps everyone. But when it's done with this personal tone, the author loses credibility. When you read the article it seems that the author's purpose wasn't to inform people, but rather to bash the company.
P.S. It's not "my" OS - it's just my choice for maximizing personal time. Everyone knows that Windows is buggy, but some people choose it because it lets us spend more time with family and friends instead of staring at the kernel. And yes, maybe one day there will be a better alternative, but you should at least show some respect for the people who work on Vista - they're not stupid you know.
Did anyone notice that none of the lawyers on that site have any technical experience? It's all wonderful to talk about patents from the point of view of "legal" freedoms and history, but our world is a little more complicated than that.
Yet another bunch of "Intellectual Property" lawyers that aren't even admitted to practice before the US Patents and Trademarks office.
Once again the great slashdot posters offer very insightful posts showing off their great intelligence in matters....they know nothing about.
Not only does the Czech republic have to educate 36 times less people, they also have to coordinate EVERYTHING that is on a much smaller scale than what the US needs to do.
Are you telling me that as the size of the population increases, the costs for supporting the infrastructure linearly increase?
Umm, because if you are, this conversation is over.
You obviously have a Ph. D. in economics to be able to say that it's a meaningless figure and have some weight.
But anyways, if their education systems are so much better, why do they all flock to this country? I'm an immigrant from eastern europe and i can tell you that those education metrics ain't worth shit.
The amount of qualified individuals (ratio wise) is the same in any civilized country.
Guys, for the love of everything, can we please get some real facts without sounding like the sky is falling?
The czech republic spends 1/3 of what the US spends. Well the czech republic is 1/36th of the US in population. Can you imagine the infrastructure that we have to support?
And I have yet to see greatness emanating from Korea - who pays for their defense? We do. Who builds their defense? We do. Who invests into their economy? We do.
So the next time someone tells me their country's "education" is better than ours i would like to point them toward our GDP.
They actually ARE losing money on the hardware. Same as Microsoft losing money on the XBOX hardware - but they make it up on software and services.
The only reason they keep PCs around is because when you're doing a large scale infrastructure upgrade your client doesn't want to go to 5 different places to get everything done. They want the PCs, Servers, Software, Services from the same vendor.
I guess now they figured that it wasn't worth keeping them around either.
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Either way this plays out, I hope there will be some incentive for the provider to keep up the quality, increase bandwidth as needed, etc. I cannot even imagine how frustrating it's going to be to have your internet go down for a week, and to have nothing but an answering machine to complain to. And what happens when the municipality claims that there is a budget crunch, and there is no money to improve coverage? Then we'll want the private provider to come back. There's something to be said for "you get what you pay for."
People are free to complain about bugs and security vulnerabilities that they discover - it helps everyone. But when it's done with this personal tone, the author loses credibility. When you read the article it seems that the author's purpose wasn't to inform people, but rather to bash the company.
P.S. It's not "my" OS - it's just my choice for maximizing personal time. Everyone knows that Windows is buggy, but some people choose it because it lets us spend more time with family and friends instead of staring at the kernel. And yes, maybe one day there will be a better alternative, but you should at least show some respect for the people who work on Vista - they're not stupid you know.
Thank you. There must be something else to complain about out there.
Did anyone notice that none of the lawyers on that site have any technical experience? It's all wonderful to talk about patents from the point of view of "legal" freedoms and history, but our world is a little more complicated than that.
Yet another bunch of "Intellectual Property" lawyers that aren't even admitted to practice before the US Patents and Trademarks office.
Once again the great slashdot posters offer very insightful posts showing off their great intelligence in matters....they know nothing about.
Not only does the Czech republic have to educate 36 times less people, they also have to coordinate EVERYTHING that is on a much smaller scale than what the US needs to do.
Are you telling me that as the size of the population increases, the costs for supporting the infrastructure linearly increase?
Umm, because if you are, this conversation is over.
You obviously have a Ph. D. in economics to be able to say that it's a meaningless figure and have some weight.
But anyways, if their education systems are so much better, why do they all flock to this country?
I'm an immigrant from eastern europe and i can tell you that those education metrics ain't worth shit.
The amount of qualified individuals (ratio wise) is the same in any civilized country.
Guys, for the love of everything, can we please get some real facts without sounding like the sky is falling?
The czech republic spends 1/3 of what the US spends. Well the czech republic is 1/36th of the US in population. Can you imagine the infrastructure that we have to support?
And I have yet to see greatness emanating from Korea - who pays for their defense? We do. Who builds their defense? We do. Who invests into their economy? We do.
So the next time someone tells me their country's "education" is better than ours i would like to point them toward our GDP.
They actually ARE losing money on the hardware. Same as Microsoft losing money on the XBOX hardware - but they make it up on software and services.
The only reason they keep PCs around is because when you're doing a large scale infrastructure upgrade your client doesn't want to go to 5 different places to get everything done. They want the PCs, Servers, Software, Services from the same vendor.
I guess now they figured that it wasn't worth keeping them around either.
About time - enough losing money on PC hardware.
They're the best company in the world and they know when to get out of a bad business.