I think you could argue, though, that it *IS* common knowledge that if you want to rip the audio from a hybrid mode CD, you have to suppress any autorun on the data track to prevent it disturbing the ripping software.
Also, if I'm right, the driver wasn't installed if you clicked Cancel to the EULA. So you could just insert the disc, Cancel the EULA, and then play the CD on your computer by right of first sale (after all, other CDs didn't have to have EULAs on them to let you play them on CD, and the EULA can't say "if you don't accept this, you can't play the CD" because if you don't accept a license, nothing in it takes effect, not even that sentence)
The real issue here is about facilitation. Although the DMCA says you can't break copy protection, it doesn't say you have to give it resources (such as clock cycles) that it needs to run, nor that you have to make it easy for it to operate. (Remember that phrase? Yep, same one from the MPAA/FSF lawsuit where they argued that they didn't have to "make it easy" for fair use rights to be asserted.)
I suppose in extremis you could argue that no computer program can actually check things in reality (such as CD identities) - it can only send requests to other hardware asking that it should do so, and there's no legal obligation for it to return information consistent with reality. (No, it's not "interfering with the operation of the copy protection" - the operation of the copy protection is to ask the hardware and then work on the answer. Actually finding out the result without asking the hardware is beyond the abilities of any software.)
I don't think you could get them for installing the driver... BUT....
If the driver remains installed, it checks other CDs to see if they're protected or not. If you insert a CD *other* than the protected one, it must read it to find out that it's not protected.
In that split second of doing that read check, it engages in unauthorised access to the data on the CD. (I doubt that the EULA says you have to allow SunComm access to all the data on all your CDs, and even if it did, if the other CD contains licensed software you don't have authority to do so anyway)
And I'm sick of this old argument (ie, "You don't like Capitalism, Marxism is not Capitalism, therefore you must like Marxism, even though we all know Marxism sucks".)
Current economics does NOT provide free enterprise. Nobody but the folks who are rich to start with can afford to start up a business that has any hope of competing in most fields. And you can't get rich enough through 90% of jobs.
But why not have "somethingelse-ism"? A new economic system which hasn't been thought of yet?
Here's an example I've heard of. Binary Flow Capitalism. It's the old capitalism you know and love, except the country has *two* currencies. Let's call 'em redbacks and bluebacks (unlike the old style greenbacks). Here's how it works: in any transaction, when the consumer sets the price, it's paid in bluebacks. When the producer sets the price, it's paid in redbacks. They can't be exchanged.
This immediately puts a whole bunch of throttles onto the gradual deterioration (into a "solved" system of megacorporations) that is endemic to capitalism. Taxes are charged in bluebacks (because the government sets them), so firms can't just pass them on to customers; if the firm has the power to pass costs on the customers, it must be setting the price, and thus all the money it'll get from the customers will be redbacks which are useless to pay a blueback tax. Likewise, firms have an incentive to prevent individuals getting frozen out of the economy. If the current situation arose in binary flow capitalism, all the money individuals have from the sale of labour would be bluebacks (because the consumer, their boss, set the price) but many goods would be charged in redbacks (because the firms are setting the prices), so nobody could afford anything and the firms would all collapse unless they took action to get Joe Average involved in the economy again.
Problem here is, this is exactly what the British government did with trains (private corporations run the trains, but a state monopoly owns all the track) for exactly the same reason.
As anyone who's ridden a British train recently can tell you, it didn't go too well. Specifically, innovation *and* decent maintenance were shut down by continuous buck-passing between companies. (Say, one company wants to run fast trains that need upgraded track. Does the state firm charge just that one company for the track upgrade, so that the others firms can later upgrade their trains without paying for the track upgrade? Or does it charge all the firms for the upgrade, and have those firms that aren't ready to run the faster trains right now hold back their money to stymie the competition?)
It's not hard to imagine similar things happening with power..
This actually did GET a government investigation a while back. Typically companies were doing the following:
- Get into a bad patch economically. - Hire a new executive officer from outside to try and turn the company around. Pay him massive amounts. - New executive offer fails to turn company around and is dismissed with a golden handshake of millions of pounds. - Due to failing company, regular staff are laid off with no such perks.
The enquiry wasn't about the high salaries, it was about the golden handshakes. Why were these people being rewarded for failure? The answer is predictable enough: because all the majority shareholders in these companies were exectives themselves who weren't spending their own money and had an incentive to create a culture of unearned executive reward.
> Money is just a way to keep score. The reasons > they have the money has nothing to do with the > money itself.
Not true; somebody who inherits a lot of money has an advantage just because of that. Money is an advantage as well as a score, and any game designer will tell you that this will create a parade effect over time.
Re:The Rich: not to burst bubbles either ...
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
·
· Score: 1
There's a simple solution to this: a binary economy.
Here's how it works. Instead of one kind of money, you have two, which are completely seperate. We have greenbacks now, so let's call these new kinds redbacks and bluebacks.
Here's how it works. You get paid in redbacks for goods on which YOU set the price. You get paid in bluebacks for goods of which the BUYER sets the price.
Now, this has a whole bunch of neat effects. You can take taxes in bluebacks, for instance; then, the rich can't just pass them onto their customers, because if they have the power to alter their prices at will they'll get paid for those items in redbacks which are useless to pay the tax.
Likewise, entertainment firms and similar will have to sell their products for redbacks. But in order to have redbacks to buy them with, Joe Average will have to be selling something for which he sets the price. So these big industries now has an incentive to keep the labour market worker-driven (and thus ensure that Joe Average has a stake in capitalism) - if they don't, and the employers start setting the price, then Joe Average will be paid in blue backs and the firms won't sell anything because nobody has redbacks to afford it.
Nobody's ever said that Madonna or Britney made only $3/cd, that I know of. These big names get good contracts for the simple reason that if they want to, they can go sign with another label who'll be happy to have them.
The ones who get screwed are the little guys who have to get lucky to get into a label at all. If they do, the low pay they get cripples them.
First of all, there's good evidence that she was entirely misinformed. In all their statements the parents have said that they had the impression that their ISP service fee was a subscription which entitled them to download this material off the internet. They might be wrong, they might be stupid to think that, but it seems that's what they thought.
Secondly, it also seems that she wasn't deliberately making the music available for others, and it's entirely possible that she didn't know Kazaa did that.
The first example implies that she didn't have the intent to download music without paying (she thought she had paid already). The second example shows she didn't have the intent to distribute it (she didn't know Kazaa did that automatically).
A lack of intent WOULD have been considered in court. If "justice" is so far with the RIAA, why does it keep dodging courtrooms via the "settle for $2000 or go to court for $15m" trick?
Also, you cite the "recording artists" as those with justice in that area. But the RIAA - in spite of their name - aren't recording artists, they're publishers. The recording artists probably aren't going to see a dime of that $2000.
> The RIAA would not need a search warrant to > enter a dwelling. The Bill of Rights only > protects you from search and seizure by the > government. The RIAA is a private party and as > such as MUCH greater leeway in what they can > do.
That's ridiculous. The RIAA have no more right to go around barging into private houses than anyone else does. But since they've never done this I'm not sure what the point was.
The problem is that it's an impasse. Companies can always continue to use the excuse that it's "not practical" to create copy protection that doesn't infringe on consumer rights. Of course, you can bet that they aren't actually doing any research into how they might be able to do so - they don't need to and it's to their advantage not to.
This is why a stand should be taken in law - to force companies to start working on copy protection systems that respect the user's rights. It seems harsh to force firms to do this, but if they aren't forced they won't do it any other way.
As has already been mentioned, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was made by Sony.
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was made by Handmade Films, a long established company which was also responsible for The Life Of Brian and Time Bandits.
Blair Witch? *Made* by small companies, but *distributed* by Artisan Entertainment, a huge firm with over 224 films to their name.
Shine? Heh. Buena Vista International. Yep, they're indie alright, I mean, they're only Disney. (Huh.)
Further, it's not 100% clear if entertainment can still be regarded as a luxury.
It sounds pretty bizarre, but think of it this way: in order to talk to other people, you have to have stuff to talk about that you're both familiar with. Commercial entertainment, nowadays, is a major part of that. I think you could argue that somebody who consumed no commercial entertainment whatsoever would find it significatly harder to socialize. And socialization *is* a fundamental human need.
Because if there were no pre-installed browsers or media players, then consumers would be forced to go and and get the knowledge and then make an informed choice.
Capitalism *requires* that consumers make informed choices. If they don't, the entire system of people being rewarded for making the best and most effecient stuff collapses on its ass - the only people who actually get rewarded are those who sink the most money into advertising, placement, or whatever, which transforms "the rich get richer" from a tendancy into a rule.
Unfortunately, this also means that it demands that if customers are too stupid to make informed choices, they must not be allowed to make any choice at all.
The real problem is that at the moment it's being a horrible tradeoff.
It's cool that inventors and researchers should get rewarded for the stuff they invent and research.
But it's NOT cool when other inventors and researchers can't even BEGIN to invent or research because they can't afford to pay rewards to the people who discovered the fundamentals of their fields.
And it's INCREDIBLY uncool when nobody can innovate, because the patents on the fundamentals are held by companies who refuse to license them to potential competitors, and the existing companies can only survive because they can trade patents with each other.
It's not in the least clear how this ought to be resolved; but in "Patents, yes or no", neither is the correct answer!
[i] oh? you loose hundreds of hours in training, across the org. [/i]
If you set the Linux boxen up properly, maybe not.
[i] actually, she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps. let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app. You may scoff, after all, this unix-y stuff is familiar to you. The windows environment is far simpler to grasp and always the same. that is to stay, the environment is stable, even if some of the apps aren't. *nixes are wildly varient. just take the switch from netscape's "Alt-C" for copy to Moz's "Ctrl-C" for copy, and you'll have your proof of what I'm saying.[/i]
How often does Sally have to delve into the filetree of an application on either system? She just keeps her files in My Documents and subfolders, most likely. She can do that on Linux too.
[i]In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.[/i]
Yea, that's a bad one. Still, in Windows I often get a dialog box which says "There has been an error, click OK." Why do I want to say that an error is OK? And half the time the "help" on those dialogs is as useless as none at all ("Help: An error has occured. Click the OK button to exit the application. Your work so far will be lost."). Why don't user interface designers know the difference between help and information?
[i] wtf? she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.[/i]
Really. A VAST majority of office users I've seen are annoyed by the clip and haven't gotten rid of it. Largely because the process you describe above is likely to be the only time Sally will ever use the right mouse button in Word.
[i]fwiw, BSODs haven't been a problem for years. and when they were, 99% of the time it was the result of 3rd party developers stomping all over the memory space of a kernel that was working to support 20+ years of legacy apps and hardware. And professionals all over the world understand this.[/i]
So.. why not use a kernel that doesn't have this problem?
Only once. License fees usually have to be renewed.
> 2. Required software doesn't exist, or isn't > as functional as under MS-platforms. Exchange > is the biggest kicker - there are free > alternatives, but not much matches the > functionality. It is de facto.
Instead of spending the money on license fees, offer grants or hire coders directly to add the functionality.
> 3. Support staff. You've got an entire IS > infrastructure built around supporting the > platform. I agree, the tail should not wag the > dog, but the cost of retraining these guys to > become necessarily savvy with Linux may even > be more than point 1.
But again, it only has to be done once.
> 4. MS has a support infrastructure that is > much better suited to helping large > organisations meet their IS roles than any > Linux based organisation, especially here in > Australia.
Start a government funded Linux support centre.
The big point about all of these is that none of them except the retraining costs increase with number of users/computers, and the retraining costs don't increase with time because once it's done it's done. License costs increase with computers AND time.
I think for that, though, you've got to love Japanese, which also seems to grab words from everywhere.
"Ball" in Japanese is.. well, "Ball". "Bread" in Japanese is "Pan" - that's the french "pain". A part-time job is "arubaito" - that's the German "albeit".
Possibly the funniest bit is when they grab words from other languages but got confused about what they meant. Like the Japanese for a man's business suit is "Sabiro", which is a strangulation of "Saville Row"!
> Without some legal protection, a living could > not be made by creators. Nor could the owners > of the means of production be encouraged to > take risks on new material. When there is no > exclusivity of rights, anyone with the > investment in plant can take all the profit or > potential profit out of a work.
And this is an important point. Because let's be absolutely clear on this: if this [i]was[/i] the aim of copyright law, then [i]it has failed[/i]. No question. Modern publishers [i]aren't[/i] taking risks on new material - they're just a) reprinting old stuff with negligable alterations, and b) selling new stuff from sources that'll sell by name alone, immaterial of the quality of the content (and thus taking no risk on that quality). Just ask any new book author, any small band, any new programming team who wants a console development kit. The basic answer they all get is the same "well, we're alright at the moment, jack, and you're a risk we don't need to take so, uh, no."
Slashdot Mirror
> No, if you cancel the EULA popup the disc is
> ejected.
Not if you block the tray with your finger it isn't...
I think you could argue, though, that it *IS* common knowledge that if you want to rip the audio from a hybrid mode CD, you have to suppress any autorun on the data track to prevent it disturbing the ripping software.
Also, if I'm right, the driver wasn't installed if you clicked Cancel to the EULA. So you could just insert the disc, Cancel the EULA, and then play the CD on your computer by right of first sale (after all, other CDs didn't have to have EULAs on them to let you play them on CD, and the EULA can't say "if you don't accept this, you can't play the CD" because if you don't accept a license, nothing in it takes effect, not even that sentence)
The real issue here is about facilitation. Although the DMCA says you can't break copy protection, it doesn't say you have to give it resources (such as clock cycles) that it needs to run, nor that you have to make it easy for it to operate. (Remember that phrase? Yep, same one from the MPAA/FSF lawsuit where they argued that they didn't have to "make it easy" for fair use rights to be asserted.)
I suppose in extremis you could argue that no computer program can actually check things in reality (such as CD identities) - it can only send requests to other hardware asking that it should do so, and there's no legal obligation for it to return information consistent with reality. (No, it's not "interfering with the operation of the copy protection" - the operation of the copy protection is to ask the hardware and then work on the answer. Actually finding out the result without asking the hardware is beyond the abilities of any software.)
I don't think you could get them for installing the driver... BUT....
If the driver remains installed, it checks other CDs to see if they're protected or not. If you insert a CD *other* than the protected one, it must read it to find out that it's not protected.
In that split second of doing that read check, it engages in unauthorised access to the data on the CD. (I doubt that the EULA says you have to allow SunComm access to all the data on all your CDs, and even if it did, if the other CD contains licensed software you don't have authority to do so anyway)
And I'm sick of this old argument (ie, "You don't like Capitalism, Marxism is not Capitalism, therefore you must like Marxism, even though we all know Marxism sucks".)
Current economics does NOT provide free enterprise. Nobody but the folks who are rich to start with can afford to start up a business that has any hope of competing in most fields. And you can't get rich enough through 90% of jobs.
But why not have "somethingelse-ism"? A new economic system which hasn't been thought of yet?
Here's an example I've heard of. Binary Flow Capitalism. It's the old capitalism you know and love, except the country has *two* currencies. Let's call 'em redbacks and bluebacks (unlike the old style greenbacks). Here's how it works: in any transaction, when the consumer sets the price, it's paid in bluebacks. When the producer sets the price, it's paid in redbacks. They can't be exchanged.
This immediately puts a whole bunch of throttles onto the gradual deterioration (into a "solved" system of megacorporations) that is endemic to capitalism. Taxes are charged in bluebacks (because the government sets them), so firms can't just pass them on to customers; if the firm has the power to pass costs on the customers, it must be setting the price, and thus all the money it'll get from the customers will be redbacks which are useless to pay a blueback tax. Likewise, firms have an incentive to prevent individuals getting frozen out of the economy. If the current situation arose in binary flow capitalism, all the money individuals have from the sale of labour would be bluebacks (because the consumer, their boss, set the price) but many goods would be charged in redbacks (because the firms are setting the prices), so nobody could afford anything and the firms would all collapse unless they took action to get Joe Average involved in the economy again.
Problem here is, this is exactly what the British government did with trains (private corporations run the trains, but a state monopoly owns all the track) for exactly the same reason.
As anyone who's ridden a British train recently can tell you, it didn't go too well. Specifically, innovation *and* decent maintenance were shut down by continuous buck-passing between companies. (Say, one company wants to run fast trains that need upgraded track. Does the state firm charge just that one company for the track upgrade, so that the others firms can later upgrade their trains without paying for the track upgrade? Or does it charge all the firms for the upgrade, and have those firms that aren't ready to run the faster trains right now hold back their money to stymie the competition?)
It's not hard to imagine similar things happening with power..
Well, he does have a point.
This actually did GET a government investigation a while back. Typically companies were doing the following:
- Get into a bad patch economically.
- Hire a new executive officer from outside to try and turn the company around. Pay him massive amounts.
- New executive offer fails to turn company around and is dismissed with a golden handshake of millions of pounds.
- Due to failing company, regular staff are laid off with no such perks.
The enquiry wasn't about the high salaries, it was about the golden handshakes. Why were these people being rewarded for failure? The answer is predictable enough: because all the majority shareholders in these companies were exectives themselves who weren't spending their own money and had an incentive to create a culture of unearned executive reward.
> Money is just a way to keep score. The reasons
> they have the money has nothing to do with the
> money itself.
Not true; somebody who inherits a lot of money has an advantage just because of that. Money is an advantage as well as a score, and any game designer will tell you that this will create a parade effect over time.
There's a simple solution to this: a binary economy.
Here's how it works. Instead of one kind of money, you have two, which are completely seperate. We have greenbacks now, so let's call these new kinds redbacks and bluebacks.
Here's how it works. You get paid in redbacks for goods on which YOU set the price. You get paid in bluebacks for goods of which the BUYER sets the price.
Now, this has a whole bunch of neat effects. You can take taxes in bluebacks, for instance; then, the rich can't just pass them onto their customers, because if they have the power to alter their prices at will they'll get paid for those items in redbacks which are useless to pay the tax.
Likewise, entertainment firms and similar will have to sell their products for redbacks. But in order to have redbacks to buy them with, Joe Average will have to be selling something for which he sets the price. So these big industries now has an incentive to keep the labour market worker-driven (and thus ensure that Joe Average has a stake in capitalism) - if they don't, and the employers start setting the price, then Joe Average will be paid in blue backs and the firms won't sell anything because nobody has redbacks to afford it.
> Paying them directly ignores the fact that
> they need marketing to be viable.
They only need marketing because others have it.
So ban marketing.
Then consumers have to think, but that won't hurt, surely.
Um, I don't know where you got this idea from.
Nobody's ever said that Madonna or Britney made only $3/cd, that I know of. These big names get good contracts for the simple reason that if they want to, they can go sign with another label who'll be happy to have them.
The ones who get screwed are the little guys who have to get lucky to get into a label at all. If they do, the low pay they get cripples them.
Simple. It's because they fall into two categories:
- The big famous established musicians, who *don't* get such a bad deal on their contracts (because labels compete for them);
- The small musicians, who have no chance of being distributed if they don't sign with a label.
Not quite.
First of all, there's good evidence that she was entirely misinformed. In all their statements the parents have said that they had the impression that their ISP service fee was a subscription which entitled them to download this material off the internet. They might be wrong, they might be stupid to think that, but it seems that's what they thought.
Secondly, it also seems that she wasn't deliberately making the music available for others, and it's entirely possible that she didn't know Kazaa did that.
The first example implies that she didn't have the intent to download music without paying (she thought she had paid already). The second example shows she didn't have the intent to distribute it (she didn't know Kazaa did that automatically).
A lack of intent WOULD have been considered in court. If "justice" is so far with the RIAA, why does it keep dodging courtrooms via the "settle for $2000 or go to court for $15m" trick?
Also, you cite the "recording artists" as those with justice in that area. But the RIAA - in spite of their name - aren't recording artists, they're publishers. The recording artists probably aren't going to see a dime of that $2000.
> The RIAA would not need a search warrant to
> enter a dwelling. The Bill of Rights only
> protects you from search and seizure by the
> government. The RIAA is a private party and as
> such as MUCH greater leeway in what they can
> do.
That's ridiculous. The RIAA have no more right to go around barging into private houses than anyone else does. But since they've never done this I'm not sure what the point was.
The problem is that it's an impasse. Companies can always continue to use the excuse that it's "not practical" to create copy protection that doesn't infringe on consumer rights. Of course, you can bet that they aren't actually doing any research into how they might be able to do so - they don't need to and it's to their advantage not to.
This is why a stand should be taken in law - to force companies to start working on copy protection systems that respect the user's rights. It seems harsh to force firms to do this, but if they aren't forced they won't do it any other way.
The BBC has always been paid for by the taxpayer. In the UK, to watch TV you have to buy a license (!), which contributes towards the BBC.
This is also why the BBC has no advertising (except for adverts for itself) and thus runs programs and films all through without a break.
Ummm... this search is kinda duffo, I think.
As has already been mentioned, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was made by Sony.
Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was made by Handmade Films, a long established company which was also responsible for The Life Of Brian and Time Bandits.
Blair Witch? *Made* by small companies, but *distributed* by Artisan Entertainment, a huge firm with over 224 films to their name.
Shine? Heh. Buena Vista International. Yep, they're indie alright, I mean, they're only Disney. (Huh.)
Further, it's not 100% clear if entertainment can still be regarded as a luxury.
It sounds pretty bizarre, but think of it this way: in order to talk to other people, you have to have stuff to talk about that you're both familiar with. Commercial entertainment, nowadays, is a major part of that. I think you could argue that somebody who consumed no commercial entertainment whatsoever would find it significatly harder to socialize. And socialization *is* a fundamental human need.
Right.
What the EU need to address is not the bundling of MWP with Windows, but the license barring transcoding of WMx files.
Because if there were no pre-installed browsers or media players, then consumers would be forced to go and and get the knowledge and then make an informed choice.
Capitalism *requires* that consumers make informed choices. If they don't, the entire system of people being rewarded for making the best and most effecient stuff collapses on its ass - the only people who actually get rewarded are those who sink the most money into advertising, placement, or whatever, which transforms "the rich get richer" from a tendancy into a rule.
Unfortunately, this also means that it demands that if customers are too stupid to make informed choices, they must not be allowed to make any choice at all.
If you sang it badly enough, you could claim it was a parody.
Well, not quite.
The real problem is that at the moment it's being a horrible tradeoff.
It's cool that inventors and researchers should get rewarded for the stuff they invent and research.
But it's NOT cool when other inventors and researchers can't even BEGIN to invent or research because they can't afford to pay rewards to the people who discovered the fundamentals of their fields.
And it's INCREDIBLY uncool when nobody can innovate, because the patents on the fundamentals are held by companies who refuse to license them to potential competitors, and the existing companies can only survive because they can trade patents with each other.
It's not in the least clear how this ought to be resolved; but in "Patents, yes or no", neither is the correct answer!
[i]
oh? you loose hundreds of hours in training, across the org.
[/i]
If you set the Linux boxen up properly, maybe not.
[i]
actually, she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps. let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app. You may scoff, after all, this unix-y stuff is familiar to you. The windows environment is far simpler to grasp and always the same. that is to stay, the environment is stable, even if some of the apps aren't. *nixes are wildly varient. just take the switch from netscape's "Alt-C" for copy to Moz's "Ctrl-C" for copy, and you'll have your proof of what I'm saying.[/i]
How often does Sally have to delve into the filetree of an application on either system? She just keeps her files in My Documents and subfolders, most likely. She can do that on Linux too.
[i]In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.[/i]
Yea, that's a bad one. Still, in Windows I often get a dialog box which says "There has been an error, click OK." Why do I want to say that an error is OK? And half the time the "help" on those dialogs is as useless as none at all ("Help: An error has occured. Click the OK button to exit the application. Your work so far will be lost."). Why don't user interface designers know the difference between help and information?
[i]
wtf? she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.[/i]
Really. A VAST majority of office users I've seen are annoyed by the clip and haven't gotten rid of it. Largely because the process you describe above is likely to be the only time Sally will ever use the right mouse button in Word.
[i]fwiw, BSODs haven't been a problem for years. and when they were, 99% of the time it was the result of 3rd party developers stomping all over the memory space of a kernel that was working to support 20+ years of legacy apps and hardware. And professionals all over the world understand this.[/i]
So.. why not use a kernel that doesn't have this problem?
> 1. Retraining costs. For an entire Government.
Only once. License fees usually have to be renewed.
> 2. Required software doesn't exist, or isn't
> as functional as under MS-platforms. Exchange
> is the biggest kicker - there are free
> alternatives, but not much matches the
> functionality. It is de facto.
Instead of spending the money on license fees, offer grants or hire coders directly to add the functionality.
> 3. Support staff. You've got an entire IS
> infrastructure built around supporting the
> platform. I agree, the tail should not wag the
> dog, but the cost of retraining these guys to
> become necessarily savvy with Linux may even
> be more than point 1.
But again, it only has to be done once.
> 4. MS has a support infrastructure that is
> much better suited to helping large
> organisations meet their IS roles than any
> Linux based organisation, especially here in
> Australia.
Start a government funded Linux support centre.
The big point about all of these is that none of them except the retraining costs increase with number of users/computers, and the retraining costs don't increase with time because once it's done it's done. License costs increase with computers AND time.
I think for that, though, you've got to love Japanese, which also seems to grab words from everywhere.
"Ball" in Japanese is.. well, "Ball". "Bread" in Japanese is "Pan" - that's the french "pain". A part-time job is "arubaito" - that's the German "albeit".
Possibly the funniest bit is when they grab words from other languages but got confused about what they meant. Like the Japanese for a man's business suit is "Sabiro", which is a strangulation of "Saville Row"!
> Without some legal protection, a living could
> not be made by creators. Nor could the owners
> of the means of production be encouraged to
> take risks on new material. When there is no
> exclusivity of rights, anyone with the
> investment in plant can take all the profit or
> potential profit out of a work.
And this is an important point. Because let's be absolutely clear on this: if this [i]was[/i] the aim of copyright law, then [i]it has failed[/i]. No question. Modern publishers [i]aren't[/i] taking risks on new material - they're just a) reprinting old stuff with negligable alterations, and b) selling new stuff from sources that'll sell by name alone, immaterial of the quality of the content (and thus taking no risk on that quality). Just ask any new book author, any small band, any new programming team who wants a console development kit. The basic answer they all get is the same "well, we're alright at the moment, jack, and you're a risk we don't need to take so, uh, no."