I suppose you can take your own stand, but I have a hard time faulting the UW on "ethical" grounds. Clearly the people participating in illegal filesharing are the ones that have ethical issues. You might consider the RIAA a bully, but it is only looking to protect its property. Twenty years ago the sort of illegal mass distribution of copyrighted material was the province of organized crime. These days technology has enabled anyone with a computer to commit precisely the same crime, but it still is a crime.
So while you see the RIAA as a bully, it is more literally true that it is a victim of a crime. If you had information about a robbery withholding that information from the authorities would be unethical. How is this different? In this particular case the "bully" may be larger, but it is the smaller kids that are stealing the bully's lunch money.
I happen to believe in sharing, but that doesn't mean that I believe that people should be forced to share against their will. Ethics is about right and wrong, and it is hard to argue that the RIAA doesn't have the right to try and protect its copyrighted material.
However, my guarantee still stands. If the majority of Washington state taxpayers feel the same way that you do then the school will surely reverse its decision shortly. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
The UW admins keep this information because otherwise it is hard to find the guy that trying to DOS your mail server into oblivion. Student networks are notorious for having internal attackers of all different kinds. If you were an admin you'd want to be able to put a finger on the students too.
Take away the anonymity and people start to behave in a civilized manner. That's just how things work.
The University of Washington is heavily subsidized by the government. The students aren't paying for bandwidth, taxpayers are paying for bandwidth, and I can guarantee you that they aren't paying for the bandwidth so that college students can distribute the latest pop albums.
Besides, why precisely should the schools get tangled up with the RIAA. The University of Washington has copyrighted material that it wants protected, why should it aid students in distributing someone else's copyrighted materials illegally? I can't believe that *all* Universities, or at least all public Universities, don't do the same thing. When you consider the wasted bandwidth, and the increased likelihood of viruses and other malware that invariably follow online filesharing it is a wonder that this isn't the status quo.
I don't like the RIAA either, but I protest by not listening to its copyrighted material, not by trying to make their material even more popular by distributing its wares.
Yes, you can hide the key in some magic box in the hardware. However, the hardware (the television in this instance) is still in my possession. I can do whatever I want with it. Worse comes to worst I can always take my video camera and simply point it at the television. With a little bit of knowhow I could even disassemble my television and find a way to extract a digital signal. Sure, the hardware folks can make this difficult, but at some point the hardware companies are just in the business to sell hardware.
More importantly, we aren't talking about DRM that gets hardwired into your television set. We are talking about DRM that is supposed to work with bog standard PCs. Throw a programmable machine into the mix and all of a sudden the very idea of functional DRM goes straight down the tubes. Especially in an age where virtualizing the PC hardware has already been done to death. The whole idea is ridiculous.
Even in the perfect hardware scenario there is always a hardware vendor that screws up. Heck, chances are good that there is a vendor that screws up on purpose so that his gear is more functional than his competitor's gear. The whole idea of DRM is stupid.
Or perhaps the folks at the University of Washington simply don't feel comfortable using their network as a haven for illegal filesharing. Seriously, if it was my network I would do the same thing. I'd send out a flier to all of the students telling them that the University would cooperate with the RIAA and then I'd watch network utilization drop. There will be some students that are so ridiculously retarded that they continue to use the university network to distribute files on unencrypted networks, but they aren't likely to be the sort of folks that you want graduating from your institution anyhow. No screening process is perfect, and this simply adds one more failsafe in the UW's screen processing. Think of it as one of those signs keeping small children off of rides ad Disneyland.
You must be at least this smart to graduate from the U of W.
I can sort of understand why it is that the ISPs shield their customers. After all, downloading illegal content is one of the primary draws of broadband connections. To a certain extent ISPs profit off of illegal filesharing. Universities, on the other hand, aren't selling bandwidth, but are instead paying for it.
Don't get me wrong, I personally think the RIAA is evil. However, I don't think that distributing the RIAA's copyrighted material illegally is the best use of the University of Washington's resources, or even the best way to bring down the RIAA.
You are confused. Public/private key cryptography can only secure communications between a sender and a receiver. The problem with DRM systems is that the end user in this case is both the receiver and the attacker. The end users needs the have the private key that allows them to decrypt the data, otherwise they wouldn't be able to listen to the song or watch the movie. Once the end user can decrypt the content then protecting the content basically becomes impossible. So DRM "solutions" basically revolve on ways of A) hiding the key, B) revoke keys that people have misused, C) make it difficult to add a recording device to the mix.
The whole idea is ridiculous, and it only has a snowball's chance in hell of working on systems where people aren't allowed to poke around. Free Software operating systems obviously need not apply.
Of course there are some bad private schools. However, the beauty of school vouchers is that I get to choose. Heck, perhaps I *want* my children to go to a school where more money is spent on football uniforms than text books. I had a couple of buddies go to school on athletic scholarships. If you have the aptitude athletic scholarships are a perfectly good way to get someone else to pay for your schooling.
As far as private schools being as incompetent as public schools, I beg to differ. I guarantee you that you can't point to a single private school that somehow managed to misplace $5 million dollars worth of computers as this particular school district in California seems to have done. The fact of the matter is that private schools face pressures that no public school district ever has to face. In a private school if parents don't think that your services are worth their money they can leave. Unpopular private schools end up getting closed down. With the current public school system the only options that I have if I end up in a bad school district is to A) move, B) pay for private school out of my own pocket, or C) home school my children myself.
I am not denying that there are good school districts. I just think that it is a shame that the only way get your children in them is to move. Vouchers solve that problem nicely without bothering good school districts at all.
The problem with giving money to schools is that school administrators tend to *always* spend it on glossy paint, then when the money is gone they turn around and complain about the books that they didn't buy when they had the money.
A perfect example of this is the recent teacher pay raise in Utah. The teachers union (and basically everyone else) complained about teacher salaries so $100 million was raised to bump every teacher's salary by $2500 and give them a $1000 bonus. The school districts immediately began planning to spend that money on everything but pay increases. This has forced the legislature to audit the various districts to ensure that the teachers actually receive the money.
I am sure that the school districts planned to simply continue doing the same thing that they have done for years. The plan undoubtedly was to complain about teacher pay, get more money from the legislature, and then spend the new funds on everything but teach salaries allowing them to complain about teacher pay the next year.
What we really need are school vouchers. If there is one thing that public schools across the country continue to prove it is that the government does a poor job of providing education.
The problem with your idea is that Microsoft lost $1.2 billion on the XBox this last fiscal year. It's easy to say that Microsoft should simply target hard core gamers, but promoting to hard core gamers doesn't pay the bills. The money is clearly in the market that Nintendo is targeting with the Wii.
Microsoft has promised investors that the XBox would make a profit in the year starting in July, and that isn't going to happen if everyone purchases from Nintendo instead. To a certain extent Microsoft is only still in the console business because it can afford to lose more than its competitors. "Willing to lose more money" is not an attribute that investors prize very highly.
The last thing that most parents want is for their children to play Gears of War or Halo 2 with random asshats on line. The fact that XBox Live exists actually works against Microsoft when selling to families. Parents want a console where they can monitor who their children play with without knowing anything about TCP/IP, and where people can play together while sitting in the same room.
Microsoft is doing fairly well with the sort of gamer that plays M-rated games and sneers at the idea of sharing a screen. The problem is that Nintendo is doing well in a slightly different market that is apparently twice as big.
That's precisely what makes the business people unhappy about the 360. Nintendo is already making money on the Wii while Microsoft has *lost* more than $1.2 billion this year alone on the 360. What's more Nintendo is likely to sell at least 60% more consoles this year than Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo had to deal with supply issues with their new console.
The 360 is most definitely *not* the Wii, and investors wish it was.
Yes, that's true, but what happens if switching the part doesn't fix the issue? How exactly do you verify that the part is actually broken? Dell doesn't want to give you a new part unless your old one is well and truly broken. Unless Dell's techs can do some sort of troubleshooting in the field then it is quite likely that they'll give away more parts than they need to.
Eventually Dell will probably work this stuff out, especially if the Ubuntu machines become popular. In the meantime it makes perfect sense to only offer mail-in hardware support.
The problem with this line of thinking is that Dell relies on third parties to provide on-site service. Contracting for on-site Windows desktop support is difficult enough. Finding competent techs with a Linux background would basically be impossible. So Dell will be doing Linux hardware support in house.
I'm sure that Dell would like to be able to sell extended warranties on this hardware, but a technical force that can service Ubuntu laptops simply doesn't exist.
And the power and allure of Wal-Mart is such that even Jim Wier, the man who said no to Wal-Mart, a man who knows all the reasons why that was the right decision, has slivers of doubt.
"I could go to my grave, and my tombstone could say, 'Here lies the dumbest CEO ever to live. He chose not to sell to Wal-Mart.' "
It is a little early to declare victory for Snapper. Lawn mowers are not luxury automobiles no matter how fiery red they may be painted. Currently Snapper's plan hinge on the viability of thousands of independent dealerships all of which face the same pressure that have killed small independent hardware and toy stores. These days when people go to buy a lawnmower they don't go to the "lawnmower store" they go to Lowe's or Home Depot or Walmart.
This whole line of reasoning is a load of crap. It completely neglects the history of the last 25 years.
I certainly agree that my original post is an oversimplification of the issue that basically assumes that there was only one hardware architecture. That makes sense when talking about the competition between Windows and Linux. By the time Linux came on the scene the Apple/Amiga/Commodore/PC war was done, and the PC had won decisively. That's why Linus originally wrote Linux for his Intel 386 PC and not for some other hardware architecture.
Microsoft didn't win against Apple, Commodore, and Amiga by making their software pirated more than the rest. Microsoft became dominant because it teamed up with IBM and Intel and went for the business customer. They won because they were the software for the IBM PC, the desktop computer adopted by commercial business. If a business bought a PC, then they DID pay for a copy of DOS along with it. Businesses tend to follow the law and not pirate software.
Yes, that's right. When the competition was between different hardware architectures software piracy was not a particularly important issue. Whether you purchased a PC or something else the operating system generally was included as part of the price. The reason that the PC won out over the other architectures is that PCs were "good enough" at a lower price. Businesses, especially small businesses tend to be quite price conscious.
Apple, Commodore, and Amiga went for school/home use and ended up competing amongst themselves and losing out. Commodore is long gone. Amiga is reborn, but limping. Apple barely managed to stay on during the '90s and ended up taking a huge investment from Bill Gates. All their software was pirated, but it certainly didn't help them much.
All of these computers (including the PC) were marketed similarly, although it is true that Apple, Commodore, Amiga (and Atari) all had machines that were more capable graphically. It just turns out that business customers weren't particularly interesting in fancy graphics. PCs were cheaper and "good enough" and soon they were so popular that the network effects from so many PCs made it so that any other architecture was limited to niche markets. Compaq and the clones had as much to do with the eventual PC dominance as anything else. The competition between the various clones and the IBM PC basically guaranteed that PC kit was less expensive, and DOS provided a common software platform that was ubiquitous.
The fact is ONE of those companies was bound to become dominant sooner or later. It happened to be Microsoft because they went along with IBM and Intel and targeted the business market. Their dominance had NOTHING to do with encouraging piracy, especially since Apple, Commodore, and Amiga were all pirated as well.
Agreed. However, once the competition was between Windows and Linux then software piracy did become an issue, especially in third world countries where no one had really every paid for Windows (or DOS for that matter). Microsoft's operating system prices are ridiculous in companies (like India) where the average worker earns less than $1000 a year. Historically Microsoft hasn't cared about piracy in these regions, and now, in certain cases, it does care. One of the primary issues with Linux in the first world is that it requires expensive retraining of personnel. Retraining is significantly less expensive in third world countries because labor is so much less expensive.
Microsoft became dominant because since their primary customers were businesses, they were pirated less than the others.
Microsoft beat Apple because it ran on less expensive hardware, but that battle was essentially done before Linux even existed. PCs were already dominant before the first line of Linux was written. However, it is hard to argue th
Microsoft benefited from it, then why would they crackdown on it?
Let's just say that Microsoft now believes that it can start harvesting the investment it made in the past by not hassling system builders in the Indian market. India now has a large technology industry, much of which is based on Microsoft software. Like the original poster said this almost certainly would not be the case if Microsoft had always been strict about licensing in India, but it is certainly the case now.
Besides, like executives in any publicly traded company Microsoft's executives are concerned about providing the growth in profits that will drive the stock price up. In Microsoft's case that means opening up new markets. India's technology sector is in a position to start paying for Windows, and Microsoft wants to make sure that Indians do exactly that.
If Microsoft wanted to use Aquantive's patents against Google the last thing that it would do is buy the company. Microsoft almost certainly infringes on some patents that Google owns, especially if you throw in Windows and the rest of Microsoft's software. The Holy Grail of patent litigation is to produce a patent that is being infringed by Windows as the potential payoff can be enormous. If Aquantive sues Google then the possible damages from a counter suit are much lower than the possible damages from a counter suit against Microsoft. If this was about patent litigation then Microsoft would announce a "partnership" (or maybe it wouldn't even do that) and Aquantive would sue Google.
Microsoft is not going to sue any organization that has software patents over patent infringement as Microsoft almost certainly has more to lose than any other player.
Microsoft has a *lot* more to lose than Red Hat or Novell does, and don't even get me started about the insanity of starting a patent war with IBM. If Microsoft sues Red Hat or Novell (or any of their customers) then these companies will sue counter sue with the patents that they have amassed. Throw in the patents in the OIN and Microsoft's customers are also in the soup. Eolas has already shown how much a few patents can be worth if they are tied to Windows. Microsoft, on the other hand has a much more difficult time showing damages (the software is given away for free), and the second that it lays its patent hand on the table the Free Software community can get to work on circumventing the patents in question.
Not to mention the fact that once Microsoft gets into the protection racket the easiest way to free yourself from Microsoft's tyranny is to move as far as possible away from Microsoft's software. To a certain extent all software developers compete with Microsoft. Basing your work on Microsoft's software stack would become ridiculously perilous if Microsoft was suing competitors.
That's why Microsoft is not going to do anything but stick to its current course. It will continue to assert in the press that Linux has "intellectual property" issues because these types of threats have been the only tactic that has worked against Free Software to date. It won't start suing Free Software companies, however, and it certainly won't start suing its own customers.
It always amuses me when people read articles like this and then take them at face value. You have no idea what the comic actually said in his conversation. You have no idea whether or not the person that complained was stupid. What you do know is that the person that complained to HR was apparently more credible a witness than the comic. You also know that the comic's manager apparently didn't think it was worth his time to try and save the guy's job.
Replacing someone is almost always a difficult job, especially if there services really are valuable to the business. Tons of time and effort get wasted on finding and interviewing candidates. When someone finally is hired there is paper work to be done, and orientation, and finally there is always a ramp up time while the new hire learns what the job actually entails. There is a cost involved in replacing employees even when all the employee has to do is pull the green potatoes out of the production line. The fact that this person's employer was willing to let him go for this particular infraction tells me that either A) his services weren't particularly valuable to the business in the first place and the complaint was a perfect excuse to let him go, or B) he struck his manager as the sort of person that might actually be a serial killer.
I suppose that it is possible that the manager, the person that complained, and everyone in HR is absolutely totally inept, but Occam's razor points to a simpler explanation.
Either way, it highlights a very important truth. If you like your job then you need to spend some time socializing with your co-workers. If you can't be absolutely sure that none of your co-workers would suspect you of being a serial killer then you have some work to do. If you can't handle that, then you need to take a job where you can work out of your basement.
Microsoft hasn't publicly threatened to sue anyone. It's executives have, on occasion, talked about the threat that "Intellectual Property" poses to Linux, but that's not even close to the same thing. Microsoft has a long and storied history of using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to sell software. Microsoft doesn't, on the other hand, have a history of suing its customers, and Mono users are all Microsoft customers. The reason that Microsoft submitted the specifications to C# and large portions of.NET to ECMA was that Microsoft realized that unless.NET was seen as open that Java would win by default. The threat from Java hasn't gone away even though.NET has done well in the marketplace. Microsoft's technologies can't be seen as a tool for vendor lock in, and there is no quicker way to do that than to start litigating against companies that provide.NET integration tools. In the end Mono is basically an integration tool.
As for litigation by proxy, that only works in situations in very distinct situations. Microsoft was more than willing to help SCO sue IBM (as was Sun), but this strategy wouldn't have worked if SCO's executives wouldn't have been willing to throw away the company on a mad gamble. When all is said and done SCO's investors are going to have spent far more trying to destroy Linux than Microsoft and Sun did. Even worse the gamble was almost a complete and utter failure. Linux is still gaining marketshare at a remarkable pace, and SCO is a hair's breadth away from being completely destroyed.
How does this affect the mono project? What about other projects that might use...
Armchair strategists in the Free Software community have been concerned about Mono and patents from day one, but the reality is that Mono is probably the safest technology on the planet. The reason behind this is simple. If you were going to sue someone over patent infringement would you rather sue Microsoft with its billions of dollars in the bank and millions of customers that rely on every misfeature in its product, or would you rather sue the Mono project which has less money than your average chess club and would happily remove features rather than risk going to court.
The answer is so obvious that it is laughable. If you had a patent that both Mono and.NET used you would almost certainly go after Microsoft. That means that the only company that is likely to sue Mono over patents is Microsoft itself. Even Microsoft knows that if it started suing developers that it would be committing suicide. Ballmer was right when he pointed out that the game is all about developers, and only the stupidest of developers would use Microsoft's technologies for new projects if Microsoft starting suing groups that created technologies that integrated with its development stack. At a certain level everyone that programs is in competition with Microsoft. If Microsoft started throwing its patent weight around developers would flee to other stacks in a hurry.
So what does this mean for Mono? It means that, in this particular case hiding in Microsoft's big shadow is probably the safest place to be. The patent trolls will go after Microsoft and if it turns out that the patent troll actually wins then Mono can always remove the functionality in question long before they face a similar suit. Not that a company that takes a large bite out of Microsoft is going to want to waste money and time trying to shake down a Free Software project.
In the meantime Microsoft will continue to talk big words about Linux and problems with "intellectual property" and the money that is supposedly owed them by Linux users. Ironically this will likely help the patent trolls, like this particular company, in their quest to extract some of Microsoft's money, as it will make it very hard for Microsoft to argue against expensive damages in the case that they lose. After all, Microsoft's own executives have commented any number of times about the need to maintain proper patent licenses.
What are you talking about. Microsoft lost billions on the original XBox. In fact, the reason that Microsoft came out with the 360 early was that it wanted to get the original XBox off of shelves as soon as possible. Microsoft is doing much better in this particular iteration, but that's mostly because it moved away from subsidizing the hardware to such a ridiculous extent. The XBox is still a long way from being profitable. Right now the best you can say about the XBox is that it is losing money at a slower pace.
Microsoft has been able to buy a lot of friends by giving away hardware, and it tricked Sony into following a similar ruinous path, so it is not all bad news for the boys in Redmond, but Microsoft's investors are likely to jump ship if every single new venture involves flushing billions of dollars down the crapper.
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I suppose you can take your own stand, but I have a hard time faulting the UW on "ethical" grounds. Clearly the people participating in illegal filesharing are the ones that have ethical issues. You might consider the RIAA a bully, but it is only looking to protect its property. Twenty years ago the sort of illegal mass distribution of copyrighted material was the province of organized crime. These days technology has enabled anyone with a computer to commit precisely the same crime, but it still is a crime.
So while you see the RIAA as a bully, it is more literally true that it is a victim of a crime. If you had information about a robbery withholding that information from the authorities would be unethical. How is this different? In this particular case the "bully" may be larger, but it is the smaller kids that are stealing the bully's lunch money.
I happen to believe in sharing, but that doesn't mean that I believe that people should be forced to share against their will. Ethics is about right and wrong, and it is hard to argue that the RIAA doesn't have the right to try and protect its copyrighted material.
Well played.
However, my guarantee still stands. If the majority of Washington state taxpayers feel the same way that you do then the school will surely reverse its decision shortly. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.
The UW admins keep this information because otherwise it is hard to find the guy that trying to DOS your mail server into oblivion. Student networks are notorious for having internal attackers of all different kinds. If you were an admin you'd want to be able to put a finger on the students too.
Take away the anonymity and people start to behave in a civilized manner. That's just how things work.
You are kidding right.
The University of Washington is heavily subsidized by the government. The students aren't paying for bandwidth, taxpayers are paying for bandwidth, and I can guarantee you that they aren't paying for the bandwidth so that college students can distribute the latest pop albums.
Besides, why precisely should the schools get tangled up with the RIAA. The University of Washington has copyrighted material that it wants protected, why should it aid students in distributing someone else's copyrighted materials illegally? I can't believe that *all* Universities, or at least all public Universities, don't do the same thing. When you consider the wasted bandwidth, and the increased likelihood of viruses and other malware that invariably follow online filesharing it is a wonder that this isn't the status quo.
I don't like the RIAA either, but I protest by not listening to its copyrighted material, not by trying to make their material even more popular by distributing its wares.
Yes, you can hide the key in some magic box in the hardware. However, the hardware (the television in this instance) is still in my possession. I can do whatever I want with it. Worse comes to worst I can always take my video camera and simply point it at the television. With a little bit of knowhow I could even disassemble my television and find a way to extract a digital signal. Sure, the hardware folks can make this difficult, but at some point the hardware companies are just in the business to sell hardware.
More importantly, we aren't talking about DRM that gets hardwired into your television set. We are talking about DRM that is supposed to work with bog standard PCs. Throw a programmable machine into the mix and all of a sudden the very idea of functional DRM goes straight down the tubes. Especially in an age where virtualizing the PC hardware has already been done to death. The whole idea is ridiculous.
Even in the perfect hardware scenario there is always a hardware vendor that screws up. Heck, chances are good that there is a vendor that screws up on purpose so that his gear is more functional than his competitor's gear. The whole idea of DRM is stupid.
Or perhaps the folks at the University of Washington simply don't feel comfortable using their network as a haven for illegal filesharing. Seriously, if it was my network I would do the same thing. I'd send out a flier to all of the students telling them that the University would cooperate with the RIAA and then I'd watch network utilization drop. There will be some students that are so ridiculously retarded that they continue to use the university network to distribute files on unencrypted networks, but they aren't likely to be the sort of folks that you want graduating from your institution anyhow. No screening process is perfect, and this simply adds one more failsafe in the UW's screen processing. Think of it as one of those signs keeping small children off of rides ad Disneyland.
You must be at least this smart to graduate from the U of W.
I can sort of understand why it is that the ISPs shield their customers. After all, downloading illegal content is one of the primary draws of broadband connections. To a certain extent ISPs profit off of illegal filesharing. Universities, on the other hand, aren't selling bandwidth, but are instead paying for it.
Don't get me wrong, I personally think the RIAA is evil. However, I don't think that distributing the RIAA's copyrighted material illegally is the best use of the University of Washington's resources, or even the best way to bring down the RIAA.
You are confused. Public/private key cryptography can only secure communications between a sender and a receiver. The problem with DRM systems is that the end user in this case is both the receiver and the attacker. The end users needs the have the private key that allows them to decrypt the data, otherwise they wouldn't be able to listen to the song or watch the movie. Once the end user can decrypt the content then protecting the content basically becomes impossible. So DRM "solutions" basically revolve on ways of A) hiding the key, B) revoke keys that people have misused, C) make it difficult to add a recording device to the mix.
The whole idea is ridiculous, and it only has a snowball's chance in hell of working on systems where people aren't allowed to poke around. Free Software operating systems obviously need not apply.
Of course there are some bad private schools. However, the beauty of school vouchers is that I get to choose. Heck, perhaps I *want* my children to go to a school where more money is spent on football uniforms than text books. I had a couple of buddies go to school on athletic scholarships. If you have the aptitude athletic scholarships are a perfectly good way to get someone else to pay for your schooling.
As far as private schools being as incompetent as public schools, I beg to differ. I guarantee you that you can't point to a single private school that somehow managed to misplace $5 million dollars worth of computers as this particular school district in California seems to have done. The fact of the matter is that private schools face pressures that no public school district ever has to face. In a private school if parents don't think that your services are worth their money they can leave. Unpopular private schools end up getting closed down. With the current public school system the only options that I have if I end up in a bad school district is to A) move, B) pay for private school out of my own pocket, or C) home school my children myself.
I am not denying that there are good school districts. I just think that it is a shame that the only way get your children in them is to move. Vouchers solve that problem nicely without bothering good school districts at all.
The problem with giving money to schools is that school administrators tend to *always* spend it on glossy paint, then when the money is gone they turn around and complain about the books that they didn't buy when they had the money.
A perfect example of this is the recent teacher pay raise in Utah. The teachers union (and basically everyone else) complained about teacher salaries so $100 million was raised to bump every teacher's salary by $2500 and give them a $1000 bonus. The school districts immediately began planning to spend that money on everything but pay increases. This has forced the legislature to audit the various districts to ensure that the teachers actually receive the money.
I am sure that the school districts planned to simply continue doing the same thing that they have done for years. The plan undoubtedly was to complain about teacher pay, get more money from the legislature, and then spend the new funds on everything but teach salaries allowing them to complain about teacher pay the next year.
What we really need are school vouchers. If there is one thing that public schools across the country continue to prove it is that the government does a poor job of providing education.
The problem with your idea is that Microsoft lost $1.2 billion on the XBox this last fiscal year. It's easy to say that Microsoft should simply target hard core gamers, but promoting to hard core gamers doesn't pay the bills. The money is clearly in the market that Nintendo is targeting with the Wii.
Microsoft has promised investors that the XBox would make a profit in the year starting in July, and that isn't going to happen if everyone purchases from Nintendo instead. To a certain extent Microsoft is only still in the console business because it can afford to lose more than its competitors. "Willing to lose more money" is not an attribute that investors prize very highly.
The last thing that most parents want is for their children to play Gears of War or Halo 2 with random asshats on line. The fact that XBox Live exists actually works against Microsoft when selling to families. Parents want a console where they can monitor who their children play with without knowing anything about TCP/IP, and where people can play together while sitting in the same room.
Microsoft is doing fairly well with the sort of gamer that plays M-rated games and sneers at the idea of sharing a screen. The problem is that Nintendo is doing well in a slightly different market that is apparently twice as big.
That's precisely what makes the business people unhappy about the 360. Nintendo is already making money on the Wii while Microsoft has *lost* more than $1.2 billion this year alone on the 360. What's more Nintendo is likely to sell at least 60% more consoles this year than Microsoft despite the fact that Nintendo had to deal with supply issues with their new console.
The 360 is most definitely *not* the Wii, and investors wish it was.
Yes, that's true, but what happens if switching the part doesn't fix the issue? How exactly do you verify that the part is actually broken? Dell doesn't want to give you a new part unless your old one is well and truly broken. Unless Dell's techs can do some sort of troubleshooting in the field then it is quite likely that they'll give away more parts than they need to.
Eventually Dell will probably work this stuff out, especially if the Ubuntu machines become popular. In the meantime it makes perfect sense to only offer mail-in hardware support.
The problem with this line of thinking is that Dell relies on third parties to provide on-site service. Contracting for on-site Windows desktop support is difficult enough. Finding competent techs with a Linux background would basically be impossible. So Dell will be doing Linux hardware support in house.
I'm sure that Dell would like to be able to sell extended warranties on this hardware, but a technical force that can service Ubuntu laptops simply doesn't exist.
It is a little early to declare victory for Snapper. Lawn mowers are not luxury automobiles no matter how fiery red they may be painted. Currently Snapper's plan hinge on the viability of thousands of independent dealerships all of which face the same pressure that have killed small independent hardware and toy stores. These days when people go to buy a lawnmower they don't go to the "lawnmower store" they go to Lowe's or Home Depot or Walmart.
I certainly agree that my original post is an oversimplification of the issue that basically assumes that there was only one hardware architecture. That makes sense when talking about the competition between Windows and Linux. By the time Linux came on the scene the Apple/Amiga/Commodore/PC war was done, and the PC had won decisively. That's why Linus originally wrote Linux for his Intel 386 PC and not for some other hardware architecture.
Yes, that's right. When the competition was between different hardware architectures software piracy was not a particularly important issue. Whether you purchased a PC or something else the operating system generally was included as part of the price. The reason that the PC won out over the other architectures is that PCs were "good enough" at a lower price. Businesses, especially small businesses tend to be quite price conscious.
All of these computers (including the PC) were marketed similarly, although it is true that Apple, Commodore, Amiga (and Atari) all had machines that were more capable graphically. It just turns out that business customers weren't particularly interesting in fancy graphics. PCs were cheaper and "good enough" and soon they were so popular that the network effects from so many PCs made it so that any other architecture was limited to niche markets. Compaq and the clones had as much to do with the eventual PC dominance as anything else. The competition between the various clones and the IBM PC basically guaranteed that PC kit was less expensive, and DOS provided a common software platform that was ubiquitous.
Agreed. However, once the competition was between Windows and Linux then software piracy did become an issue, especially in third world countries where no one had really every paid for Windows (or DOS for that matter). Microsoft's operating system prices are ridiculous in companies (like India) where the average worker earns less than $1000 a year. Historically Microsoft hasn't cared about piracy in these regions, and now, in certain cases, it does care. One of the primary issues with Linux in the first world is that it requires expensive retraining of personnel. Retraining is significantly less expensive in third world countries because labor is so much less expensive.
Microsoft beat Apple because it ran on less expensive hardware, but that battle was essentially done before Linux even existed. PCs were already dominant before the first line of Linux was written. However, it is hard to argue th
Let's just say that Microsoft now believes that it can start harvesting the investment it made in the past by not hassling system builders in the Indian market. India now has a large technology industry, much of which is based on Microsoft software. Like the original poster said this almost certainly would not be the case if Microsoft had always been strict about licensing in India, but it is certainly the case now.
Besides, like executives in any publicly traded company Microsoft's executives are concerned about providing the growth in profits that will drive the stock price up. In Microsoft's case that means opening up new markets. India's technology sector is in a position to start paying for Windows, and Microsoft wants to make sure that Indians do exactly that.
If Microsoft wanted to use Aquantive's patents against Google the last thing that it would do is buy the company. Microsoft almost certainly infringes on some patents that Google owns, especially if you throw in Windows and the rest of Microsoft's software. The Holy Grail of patent litigation is to produce a patent that is being infringed by Windows as the potential payoff can be enormous. If Aquantive sues Google then the possible damages from a counter suit are much lower than the possible damages from a counter suit against Microsoft. If this was about patent litigation then Microsoft would announce a "partnership" (or maybe it wouldn't even do that) and Aquantive would sue Google.
Microsoft is not going to sue any organization that has software patents over patent infringement as Microsoft almost certainly has more to lose than any other player.
Microsoft has a *lot* more to lose than Red Hat or Novell does, and don't even get me started about the insanity of starting a patent war with IBM. If Microsoft sues Red Hat or Novell (or any of their customers) then these companies will sue counter sue with the patents that they have amassed. Throw in the patents in the OIN and Microsoft's customers are also in the soup. Eolas has already shown how much a few patents can be worth if they are tied to Windows. Microsoft, on the other hand has a much more difficult time showing damages (the software is given away for free), and the second that it lays its patent hand on the table the Free Software community can get to work on circumventing the patents in question.
Not to mention the fact that once Microsoft gets into the protection racket the easiest way to free yourself from Microsoft's tyranny is to move as far as possible away from Microsoft's software. To a certain extent all software developers compete with Microsoft. Basing your work on Microsoft's software stack would become ridiculously perilous if Microsoft was suing competitors.
That's why Microsoft is not going to do anything but stick to its current course. It will continue to assert in the press that Linux has "intellectual property" issues because these types of threats have been the only tactic that has worked against Free Software to date. It won't start suing Free Software companies, however, and it certainly won't start suing its own customers.
It always amuses me when people read articles like this and then take them at face value. You have no idea what the comic actually said in his conversation. You have no idea whether or not the person that complained was stupid. What you do know is that the person that complained to HR was apparently more credible a witness than the comic. You also know that the comic's manager apparently didn't think it was worth his time to try and save the guy's job.
Replacing someone is almost always a difficult job, especially if there services really are valuable to the business. Tons of time and effort get wasted on finding and interviewing candidates. When someone finally is hired there is paper work to be done, and orientation, and finally there is always a ramp up time while the new hire learns what the job actually entails. There is a cost involved in replacing employees even when all the employee has to do is pull the green potatoes out of the production line. The fact that this person's employer was willing to let him go for this particular infraction tells me that either A) his services weren't particularly valuable to the business in the first place and the complaint was a perfect excuse to let him go, or B) he struck his manager as the sort of person that might actually be a serial killer.
I suppose that it is possible that the manager, the person that complained, and everyone in HR is absolutely totally inept, but Occam's razor points to a simpler explanation.
Either way, it highlights a very important truth. If you like your job then you need to spend some time socializing with your co-workers. If you can't be absolutely sure that none of your co-workers would suspect you of being a serial killer then you have some work to do. If you can't handle that, then you need to take a job where you can work out of your basement.
Microsoft hasn't publicly threatened to sue anyone. It's executives have, on occasion, talked about the threat that "Intellectual Property" poses to Linux, but that's not even close to the same thing. Microsoft has a long and storied history of using Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to sell software. Microsoft doesn't, on the other hand, have a history of suing its customers, and Mono users are all Microsoft customers. The reason that Microsoft submitted the specifications to C# and large portions of .NET to ECMA was that Microsoft realized that unless .NET was seen as open that Java would win by default. The threat from Java hasn't gone away even though .NET has done well in the marketplace. Microsoft's technologies can't be seen as a tool for vendor lock in, and there is no quicker way to do that than to start litigating against companies that provide .NET integration tools. In the end Mono is basically an integration tool.
As for litigation by proxy, that only works in situations in very distinct situations. Microsoft was more than willing to help SCO sue IBM (as was Sun), but this strategy wouldn't have worked if SCO's executives wouldn't have been willing to throw away the company on a mad gamble. When all is said and done SCO's investors are going to have spent far more trying to destroy Linux than Microsoft and Sun did. Even worse the gamble was almost a complete and utter failure. Linux is still gaining marketshare at a remarkable pace, and SCO is a hair's breadth away from being completely destroyed.
Armchair strategists in the Free Software community have been concerned about Mono and patents from day one, but the reality is that Mono is probably the safest technology on the planet. The reason behind this is simple. If you were going to sue someone over patent infringement would you rather sue Microsoft with its billions of dollars in the bank and millions of customers that rely on every misfeature in its product, or would you rather sue the Mono project which has less money than your average chess club and would happily remove features rather than risk going to court.
The answer is so obvious that it is laughable. If you had a patent that both Mono and .NET used you would almost certainly go after Microsoft. That means that the only company that is likely to sue Mono over patents is Microsoft itself. Even Microsoft knows that if it started suing developers that it would be committing suicide. Ballmer was right when he pointed out that the game is all about developers, and only the stupidest of developers would use Microsoft's technologies for new projects if Microsoft starting suing groups that created technologies that integrated with its development stack. At a certain level everyone that programs is in competition with Microsoft. If Microsoft started throwing its patent weight around developers would flee to other stacks in a hurry.
So what does this mean for Mono? It means that, in this particular case hiding in Microsoft's big shadow is probably the safest place to be. The patent trolls will go after Microsoft and if it turns out that the patent troll actually wins then Mono can always remove the functionality in question long before they face a similar suit. Not that a company that takes a large bite out of Microsoft is going to want to waste money and time trying to shake down a Free Software project.
In the meantime Microsoft will continue to talk big words about Linux and problems with "intellectual property" and the money that is supposedly owed them by Linux users. Ironically this will likely help the patent trolls, like this particular company, in their quest to extract some of Microsoft's money, as it will make it very hard for Microsoft to argue against expensive damages in the case that they lose. After all, Microsoft's own executives have commented any number of times about the need to maintain proper patent licenses.
What are you talking about. Microsoft lost billions on the original XBox. In fact, the reason that Microsoft came out with the 360 early was that it wanted to get the original XBox off of shelves as soon as possible. Microsoft is doing much better in this particular iteration, but that's mostly because it moved away from subsidizing the hardware to such a ridiculous extent. The XBox is still a long way from being profitable. Right now the best you can say about the XBox is that it is losing money at a slower pace.
Microsoft has been able to buy a lot of friends by giving away hardware, and it tricked Sony into following a similar ruinous path, so it is not all bad news for the boys in Redmond, but Microsoft's investors are likely to jump ship if every single new venture involves flushing billions of dollars down the crapper.
Then how the heck did "Planet of the Apes" make it in. Heck, that was made in 1968 and starred a young Charlton Heston.