Their competitors don't transfer mp3s yet. If something that includes congestion control lands first, AOL might pick it up, and not have multimedia IM without congestion control. Since I don't think AOL does point-to-point messages, they'd probably be really happy to have the congestion control, too.
Furthermore, the people who will probably most like congestion control are the end users. Most people have a really slow connection at the lasthop, and all of their traffic has to go through that link. So if they're running multimedia IM full-blast, any time someone sends them an MP3, their web surfing will slow to a crawl.
I think the main reason for CLR is that the x86 architecture is clearly on the way out, but it has not yet become clear what its successor will be. There are several candidates, and MS doesn't want to build and keep separate versions of their code for all of them, nor does it want to risk choosing a loser. So it designs a VM layer so that the only code that needs to know what hardware you have is Windows, which you buy with the hardware anyway. In any case where you don't know what the user will be using, introduce a layer of abstraction and you don't invest much in your guess. Of course, they've got code in many languages, so all of the languages have to target this virtual machine.
It's probably a proof-of-concept. The idea is that, if you have a way to attack something, you need to demonstrate that you can break in far enough to do something potentially significant.
It infects other SWF files, but this really just means that it can do whatever it wants, including becoming an attack not traceable to the actual source.
In my aikido dojo, we never do anything to joints beyond a reasonable stretch. In general, the idea is to get the joints to the point where the person can't bend themselves farther, and then concentrate on joints farther along. Doing more to a particular joint hurts, but doesn't really force the person to move the way you want.
Our black belts (of whom I know 6 from various times; people move and visit) all have flexible wrists when they actually want to bend them (they're also quite strong, and you probably won't actually bend them much in technique).
I suspect that this may be a philosophical difference between hapkido and aikido. Aikido is intended as both a defense against assailants and against lawsuits: you should be able to defend yourself against any potential attackers without injuring them in case they try to sue you.
Certainly; there's plenty of important code that wouldn't get written if the authors weren't paid for it (although I find code not to be boring if it has to be clever or well-designed; not to say that there isn't code which is basically data-entry [ejb]).
On the other hand, there's a lot of code that gets written mostly for fun by people who find the strangest things interesting. There's also a lot of code written by people who need to write it before they can get the interesting code to work.
The thing to realize about the software is that there's some software that's fun for the people who do it, and that will get written and improved so long as the people who are interested have time to write it. There's other software that is boring, and that will only get written if people get paid to do it. When trying to guess about the future of some software, it is important to determine which sort of software it is.
There seems to be all this concern about whether people will write software if they derive no obvious benefits from it. This is all based on the misconception that people dislike writing software. Many of the same people who don't understand will play solitaire when they don't have to (and even when they're not supposed to). They derive no obvious benefit from it, nobody cares how they do, nobody pays them, and the damn thing doesn't even stay solved.
Writing OSS is like playing solitaire, in that it is fun (you're solving little puzzles which are non-trivial, but not impossible), but when you've done it, you end up with a program that does what you like, and you can give it to people and they'll be impressed. Some people might even pay you. Of course, at some point they start expecting you do what they want rather than just what you feel like.
People get paid a huge amount of money to play basketball. Other people don't even get reimbursed for buying a ball and a net, but they play anyway. The same thing is true of writing software.
OOP is mainly useful for the design of large systems. Unless your language is being overly intrusive, there won't be anything OO inside the solution of an engineering problem like the ones you describe.
The way OOP would apply to your problems would be when you're looking at the problem from more of a distance. You might have a situation in which some code wants the solution to a problem; the problem is specified by some other code, and it is solved by some other code, but there is a chunk in between that is doing something with the two parts (e.g., graphing them or something). You could make a "problem" interface, with a "solve" method, and various methods for getting information about the data. Then the intermediate code doesn't need to know what procedure to call to get the solution, because the problem object knows that.
As for things like "solve a differential equation" or "solve a set of linear equations", OOP means that you're writing a big method instead of a big procedure. It's not a big deal. The real jump is switching to a functional language, where you write your code without side effects, and the compiler can do optimizations which change when code gets run and do not run the same code with the same data more than once.
Since they know exactly how this temple is shaped and how to build it, I wonder if someone will start putting up exact duplicates in other places. They could even have some materials from the original (e.g., while moving the original, replace some old parts with new copies, and use the old parts in a different building).
It would be even more interesting to build a replica of the temple in the temple's original location with new materials, and leave it for future archeologists to find.
By then, we'll have the ability to connect a number of keyboard/mouse/monitor/removable-drive combinations to a single computer, and OSes will have enough stability and extra power to handle it. A family will buy a single fast computer and 2-3 heads for it, and then they'll never have to argue over it, because each head is really cheap. In fact, they'll probably get extra heads to have in different rooms, just because it's convenient.
Once flat-panel displays are as cheap as CRTs, there's no reason to sit at a desk to use the computer; have something laptop-shaped, but attached to a machine in the closet. Everything that is expensive to make small isn't; everything that's small by default fits on your lap.
Then people will want to ditch the cords, and they'll be out of Bluetooth range, so the heads will turn into 802.11 network appliances; LAN appliances, not internet appliances. You'll buy a computer, and it won't have a monitor or anything; those will be in the appliance. The whole thing will only cost a bit more than having a single unit, and it will be much more convenient.
Eventually, of course, you'll be able to do things like use your home computer from a friend's house; since everything has been designed for having an 802.11 network between the user and the CPU, having the internet in between isn't much different.
So, in 2004, my "desktop" computer won't be on a desk, and I won't be sitting at a desk to use it.
The effect is being entirely in the shadow world is what the Riders have: you can't even really see things in the normal world. The reason the Riders are normally on their horses (and the reason that their horses drowning in the Ford mattered) is that their horses can tell what's going on in the normal world.
Wearing the Ring seems to make you invisible in the normal world, visible in the shadow world, and able to see in both. There's no sign that Bilbo had a hard time with the normal world at his birthday party, or that Frodo has a hard time getting over to the corner in the inn in Bree.
I think the effect is cool, and it's certainly the right effect for seeing the Nazgul when you've got it on, and a bit of it might be appropriate for ordinary stuff (terrain features and such seem to exist in the shadow world, so having overlapping effects of the real world and the shadow world makes sense).
Those were based on only five atoms. The 2 tons were for the case, the power supply, the monitor, the fans, those sturdy IBM keyboards, the user manual, and so forth. But all of the really clever design was in those five atoms.
First off, I thought it was really good, and the flaws were minor. That said:
The movie gives away what's going on with Gandalf before Frodo reached Rivendell. Most everyone knows anyway, but I still preferred the effect of the book where they're really hoping Gandalf will show up any minute, and it's a big mystery why this wizard, who's always on time, is late.
Frodo doesn't shout anything at the Nazgul on Weathertop. Having him shout Elbereth and saving himself long enough for Aragorn to get back helped to set up the effect where Frodo sometimes just does the right thing, without knowing that it's right, because he's fated to be doing these things.
The effect of wearing the Ring was a bit over the top. If I were Bilbo and that happened when I put on the Ring, I'd have thrown it away long before finding out that it made you invisible. And I'd have never worn it for as long as Frodo does near the end.
Some of Moria didn't make much sense. They were surrounded by a huge army with range weapons and good vantage points. Then they're saved by the balrog, which scares away the orcish horde. The orcish horde almost certainly could have done them in with a bit of persistence. Then they cross the broken stairs. If they were fleeing the balrog, it must have ended up behind that area when it crumbled. So how did it catch up with them at the Bridge? It can't fly or anything, and it didn't look like there was a way around that chasm. And if the stairs were in that bad shape, they'd probably have broken under Balin's group.
Merry and Pippin didn't intentionally join Sam and Frodo. It saved a bit of time, I guess, but it seemed odd that they'd follow him halfway across the world after running into him randomly in a field.
Things I thought they did particularly well:
Bilbo, when he sees the Ring. I thought for an instant he might actually be able to take it away. Yow. Also Galadriel, when she sees it. I noticed that, despite the transformation, she didn't actually reach towards it, and Frodo didn't draw back.
Aragorn running into Frodo near the end. I was worried that it would be bad, because it wasn't in the book at all, but it worked really well. They really got what Aragorn would have done, had he found Frodo, and having it happen helped demonstrate his character even more.
The Nazgul looked more true to the text than my imagination was. The cloak is a real cloak, the horse is a real horse, and the rest is shadows.
I wished:
They'd had the camera swoop through Middle-Earth from important event to important event. The movie didn't really give the idea of Middle-Earth being a really long walk; one thing I liked about the book was the feeling that there was a really big world that they go through.
Frodo had worn the ring when he was about to try crossing the lake. But that's just because I wanted to see the boat launch itself. Plus he could have just gone by the orcs.
It had been winter outside Lothlorien, for the contrast.
And a couple dozen tiny details they didn't bother with.
It hasn't yet been determined what happens to the things that the TC cannot resolve. Presumably they go to a court, but they could end up merged and with the govt arguing them. If the case were something like: MS, being a monopoly, can't refuse to sell their products to people, and, as MS refused to offer reasonable terms to these people, these people can just use it.
The TC does have a limited lifetime, but it's likely long in terms of the computer industries, and may be extended as punishment for misdeeds. After the TC goes away, the situation is likely to be entirely different, particularly if the target has been able to operate for a while with complete legal protection.
You still have to have proof that you created it, which translates to being able to prove that you had it before anyone else can prove they had it. Even if my works are copyrighted when they're created, that doesn't help if somebody else shows up and claims that I didn't create it. That's why mailing a copy to yourself works, without any interaction with a copyright-related part of the government. If you've got a postmarked sealed envelope containing the item, you can open it in court and demonstrate that you had it at that date, before anyone else can prove they had it.
Of course, submitting an item to the LoC is somewhat firmer proof that you have it at a certain time, since it is not all that hard to forge the envelope thing. If Parker Bros. has lost all copies of the game, and never got proof that they had it, it's copyrighted, but not provably copyright anyone in particular.
It seems to me that a number of MicroSoft's dirty tricks involve going to the legal system when they want to hurt someone, rather than doing something that hurts the victem and then resisting legal action.
If the TC can take complaints of the form "MS, via the BSA, is threatening to sue me for doing something I should be allowed to", and prevent MS et al from filing suit, the TC would have a major stick to use against MS. MS, being an information company, needs legal means for controlling the use of their products. If they had to ask the TC if they wanted to make anyone pay for anything, and the TC was looking unfavorably on their practices, they'd be sunk.
If an OEM knew that, if MicroSoft cancelled their special license, the TC would reject any MS copyright infringement suits against the OEM or their customers, they'd be able to make Windows optional with complete impunity.
If the TC found that a patent was anti-competitive, they'd be able to prevent MS from ever enforcing it.
Of course, this depends on the courts agreeing to send MS suits to the TC before granting injunctions or anything. If the point of the TC is to avoid slow and expensive lawsuits, it is hardly useful if it doesn't stop MS from suing people (and make MS threats useless).
On the other hand, it's possible that this ROM isn't covered by copyright, because the publisher may not have actually gotten it in the first place. In order to get the copyright, you can register it with the library of congress, but that only really works for published works, or you can do the cheap thing and keep a copy with proof that you had it at the time (i.e., mail it to yourself). If they never published it, and AtariAge ended up with the original ROM, they may now entirely lack proof that they have the rights to it.
If I steal your car while you're on vacation for a month, and you get amnesia while you're gone, and your registration expires and the title got lost, I'll probably get away with it. But physical objects are different anyway, because stealing them is a criminal, not civil, offense. So they could still catch me for having a car I don't have the documents for.
Broadband is a profitable market with a large start-up cost. If you were doing it when venture capital and loans were easy to get, you probably just went ahead and spent the money to get started everywhere, and ignored the fact that, if things continued as planned, you'd lose money for the forseeable future paying back the loans and so forth.
Then the bubble burst, and suddenly it was hard to come by the capital to pay the loans. So, while people are actually interested in your service and paying for it, you've budgetted to lose a ton of money, and you'll continue to lose the money until you reorganize with profit in mind-- ditch a lot of your longer-term infrastructure investments, get more reasonable terms on loans, and so forth. What was a reasonable business strategy before doesn't work now, and changing strategies like that can require protection from creditors.
If you're in a situation where you can put a dollar into infrastructure each day for a week and get back twenty at the end, and you can get loans based on your expected worth at the end, you'll want to put in as much money as you can. If suddenly you can't get the loans any more, you'll find that you can't finish building your infrastructure, and you can't pay off the loans you've taken, either, since the payoff you expected won't happen.
Probably your local companies chose a more conservative initial strategy, and then didn't have as much difficulty changing, or had the capital from other sources to cover it. If they didn't take on a lot of debt initially, because they started with a small deployment, they're probably fine.
And MicroSoft is cheap at only a penny for each bug...
But seriously, the only thing that makes sense is to determine if various packages have the features you want, and then determine which costs the least. If you want only a small set of features, then go for a program that has just the features you want.
AbiWord does have support, as they mention. It's just that it doesn't work over the phone. The people doing it are probably easier to insult, due to doing it just because they want to, but they're also only motivated by solving your problem, so they care more, assuming you're pleasent about your problem.
There may not be prebuilt binaries for your platform. There aren't prebuilt binaries of commercial software for most platforms. AbiWord is probably ahead of MicroSoft here, and there's a chance that you can build binaries yourself if you need to, unlike with commercial software.
Complaining about bugs and missing features to places other than the proper channels will get you nowhere, and being rude about it won't help either. This is certainly true of all OSS. It's not true of MicroSoft, reportedly, but that's just because MicroSoft's proper channels are ignored by their programmers.
Getting support from programmers is difficult, in general, because they're busy programming. MicroSoft won't even let you talk to them. You can't demand a feature or to have a bug fixed from the makers of any software: what you want may be too difficult, or there may be more important things on the list.
The reduced functionality is what you'd have to expect from a newer program from a smaller group. It doesn't really matter whether the motivation is financial or not, a small number of people will write a program with fewer features than MS will. Hopefully the features that AbiWord has are the ones you want, and the features that are missing are ones that would just get in your way.
The letter is particular to AbiWord, but it applies in most of the parts to everyone, including MicroSoft.
That's what you could get a shell script to do it.
If a distribution put that line in a shell script (and had error checking), you could just have a single command or a clickable or spoken interface, and people who actually want to look at the results of intermediate steps could do them individually.
The point is that it makes sense to have a number of smaller steps for those people who want them, and have a very simple program to run all of the steps for those people who want it to be simple. Automatically doing a bunch of steps is much easier than breaking up a single step.
Having P2P features could make a commercial product more successful. You're not going to make any money being a bottleneck in a P2P system, but providing a good front end for a particular use of a P2P system is a reasonable business model for selling software, and adding such features to a product adds value. In order to be able to sell such programs, you need there to be a network of worthwhile content for it to access, which means encouraging the enthusiasts to use a common format that you can tap into.
Things like the CB radio range are free, but it's still possible to build a business on selling the radios, and this requires everyone agreeing on what the radios do.
Slashdot Mirror
Their competitors don't transfer mp3s yet. If something that includes congestion control lands first, AOL might pick it up, and not have multimedia IM without congestion control. Since I don't think AOL does point-to-point messages, they'd probably be really happy to have the congestion control, too.
Furthermore, the people who will probably most like congestion control are the end users. Most people have a really slow connection at the lasthop, and all of their traffic has to go through that link. So if they're running multimedia IM full-blast, any time someone sends them an MP3, their web surfing will slow to a crawl.
I think the main reason for CLR is that the x86 architecture is clearly on the way out, but it has not yet become clear what its successor will be. There are several candidates, and MS doesn't want to build and keep separate versions of their code for all of them, nor does it want to risk choosing a loser. So it designs a VM layer so that the only code that needs to know what hardware you have is Windows, which you buy with the hardware anyway. In any case where you don't know what the user will be using, introduce a layer of abstraction and you don't invest much in your guess. Of course, they've got code in many languages, so all of the languages have to target this virtual machine.
It's probably a proof-of-concept. The idea is that, if you have a way to attack something, you need to demonstrate that you can break in far enough to do something potentially significant.
It infects other SWF files, but this really just means that it can do whatever it wants, including becoming an attack not traceable to the actual source.
In my aikido dojo, we never do anything to joints beyond a reasonable stretch. In general, the idea is to get the joints to the point where the person can't bend themselves farther, and then concentrate on joints farther along. Doing more to a particular joint hurts, but doesn't really force the person to move the way you want.
Our black belts (of whom I know 6 from various times; people move and visit) all have flexible wrists when they actually want to bend them (they're also quite strong, and you probably won't actually bend them much in technique).
I suspect that this may be a philosophical difference between hapkido and aikido. Aikido is intended as both a defense against assailants and against lawsuits: you should be able to defend yourself against any potential attackers without injuring them in case they try to sue you.
Certainly; there's plenty of important code that wouldn't get written if the authors weren't paid for it (although I find code not to be boring if it has to be clever or well-designed; not to say that there isn't code which is basically data-entry [ejb]).
On the other hand, there's a lot of code that gets written mostly for fun by people who find the strangest things interesting. There's also a lot of code written by people who need to write it before they can get the interesting code to work.
The thing to realize about the software is that there's some software that's fun for the people who do it, and that will get written and improved so long as the people who are interested have time to write it. There's other software that is boring, and that will only get written if people get paid to do it. When trying to guess about the future of some software, it is important to determine which sort of software it is.
There seems to be all this concern about whether people will write software if they derive no obvious benefits from it. This is all based on the misconception that people dislike writing software. Many of the same people who don't understand will play solitaire when they don't have to (and even when they're not supposed to). They derive no obvious benefit from it, nobody cares how they do, nobody pays them, and the damn thing doesn't even stay solved.
Writing OSS is like playing solitaire, in that it is fun (you're solving little puzzles which are non-trivial, but not impossible), but when you've done it, you end up with a program that does what you like, and you can give it to people and they'll be impressed. Some people might even pay you. Of course, at some point they start expecting you do what they want rather than just what you feel like.
People get paid a huge amount of money to play basketball. Other people don't even get reimbursed for buying a ball and a net, but they play anyway. The same thing is true of writing software.
OOP is mainly useful for the design of large systems. Unless your language is being overly intrusive, there won't be anything OO inside the solution of an engineering problem like the ones you describe.
The way OOP would apply to your problems would be when you're looking at the problem from more of a distance. You might have a situation in which some code wants the solution to a problem; the problem is specified by some other code, and it is solved by some other code, but there is a chunk in between that is doing something with the two parts (e.g., graphing them or something). You could make a "problem" interface, with a "solve" method, and various methods for getting information about the data. Then the intermediate code doesn't need to know what procedure to call to get the solution, because the problem object knows that.
As for things like "solve a differential equation" or "solve a set of linear equations", OOP means that you're writing a big method instead of a big procedure. It's not a big deal. The real jump is switching to a functional language, where you write your code without side effects, and the compiler can do optimizations which change when code gets run and do not run the same code with the same data more than once.
Since they know exactly how this temple is shaped and how to build it, I wonder if someone will start putting up exact duplicates in other places. They could even have some materials from the original (e.g., while moving the original, replace some old parts with new copies, and use the old parts in a different building).
It would be even more interesting to build a replica of the temple in the temple's original location with new materials, and leave it for future archeologists to find.
By then, we'll have the ability to connect a number of keyboard/mouse/monitor/removable-drive combinations to a single computer, and OSes will have enough stability and extra power to handle it. A family will buy a single fast computer and 2-3 heads for it, and then they'll never have to argue over it, because each head is really cheap. In fact, they'll probably get extra heads to have in different rooms, just because it's convenient.
Once flat-panel displays are as cheap as CRTs, there's no reason to sit at a desk to use the computer; have something laptop-shaped, but attached to a machine in the closet. Everything that is expensive to make small isn't; everything that's small by default fits on your lap.
Then people will want to ditch the cords, and they'll be out of Bluetooth range, so the heads will turn into 802.11 network appliances; LAN appliances, not internet appliances. You'll buy a computer, and it won't have a monitor or anything; those will be in the appliance. The whole thing will only cost a bit more than having a single unit, and it will be much more convenient.
Eventually, of course, you'll be able to do things like use your home computer from a friend's house; since everything has been designed for having an 802.11 network between the user and the CPU, having the internet in between isn't much different.
So, in 2004, my "desktop" computer won't be on a desk, and I won't be sitting at a desk to use it.
No problem; I like discussing this sort of thing.
The effect is being entirely in the shadow world is what the Riders have: you can't even really see things in the normal world. The reason the Riders are normally on their horses (and the reason that their horses drowning in the Ford mattered) is that their horses can tell what's going on in the normal world.
Wearing the Ring seems to make you invisible in the normal world, visible in the shadow world, and able to see in both. There's no sign that Bilbo had a hard time with the normal world at his birthday party, or that Frodo has a hard time getting over to the corner in the inn in Bree.
I think the effect is cool, and it's certainly the right effect for seeing the Nazgul when you've got it on, and a bit of it might be appropriate for ordinary stuff (terrain features and such seem to exist in the shadow world, so having overlapping effects of the real world and the shadow world makes sense).
Those were based on only five atoms. The 2 tons were for the case, the power supply, the monitor, the fans, those sturdy IBM keyboards, the user manual, and so forth. But all of the really clever design was in those five atoms.
First off, I thought it was really good, and the flaws were minor. That said:
The movie gives away what's going on with Gandalf before Frodo reached Rivendell. Most everyone knows anyway, but I still preferred the effect of the book where they're really hoping Gandalf will show up any minute, and it's a big mystery why this wizard, who's always on time, is late.
Frodo doesn't shout anything at the Nazgul on Weathertop. Having him shout Elbereth and saving himself long enough for Aragorn to get back helped to set up the effect where Frodo sometimes just does the right thing, without knowing that it's right, because he's fated to be doing these things.
The effect of wearing the Ring was a bit over the top. If I were Bilbo and that happened when I put on the Ring, I'd have thrown it away long before finding out that it made you invisible. And I'd have never worn it for as long as Frodo does near the end.
Some of Moria didn't make much sense. They were surrounded by a huge army with range weapons and good vantage points. Then they're saved by the balrog, which scares away the orcish horde. The orcish horde almost certainly could have done them in with a bit of persistence. Then they cross the broken stairs. If they were fleeing the balrog, it must have ended up behind that area when it crumbled. So how did it catch up with them at the Bridge? It can't fly or anything, and it didn't look like there was a way around that chasm. And if the stairs were in that bad shape, they'd probably have broken under Balin's group.
Merry and Pippin didn't intentionally join Sam and Frodo. It saved a bit of time, I guess, but it seemed odd that they'd follow him halfway across the world after running into him randomly in a field.
Things I thought they did particularly well:
Bilbo, when he sees the Ring. I thought for an instant he might actually be able to take it away. Yow. Also Galadriel, when she sees it. I noticed that, despite the transformation, she didn't actually reach towards it, and Frodo didn't draw back.
Aragorn running into Frodo near the end. I was worried that it would be bad, because it wasn't in the book at all, but it worked really well. They really got what Aragorn would have done, had he found Frodo, and having it happen helped demonstrate his character even more.
The Nazgul looked more true to the text than my imagination was. The cloak is a real cloak, the horse is a real horse, and the rest is shadows.
I wished:
They'd had the camera swoop through Middle-Earth from important event to important event. The movie didn't really give the idea of Middle-Earth being a really long walk; one thing I liked about the book was the feeling that there was a really big world that they go through.
Frodo had worn the ring when he was about to try crossing the lake. But that's just because I wanted to see the boat launch itself. Plus he could have just gone by the orcs.
It had been winter outside Lothlorien, for the contrast.
And a couple dozen tiny details they didn't bother with.
It hasn't yet been determined what happens to the things that the TC cannot resolve. Presumably they go to a court, but they could end up merged and with the govt arguing them. If the case were something like: MS, being a monopoly, can't refuse to sell their products to people, and, as MS refused to offer reasonable terms to these people, these people can just use it.
The TC does have a limited lifetime, but it's likely long in terms of the computer industries, and may be extended as punishment for misdeeds. After the TC goes away, the situation is likely to be entirely different, particularly if the target has been able to operate for a while with complete legal protection.
You still have to have proof that you created it, which translates to being able to prove that you had it before anyone else can prove they had it. Even if my works are copyrighted when they're created, that doesn't help if somebody else shows up and claims that I didn't create it. That's why mailing a copy to yourself works, without any interaction with a copyright-related part of the government. If you've got a postmarked sealed envelope containing the item, you can open it in court and demonstrate that you had it at that date, before anyone else can prove they had it.
Of course, submitting an item to the LoC is somewhat firmer proof that you have it at a certain time, since it is not all that hard to forge the envelope thing. If Parker Bros. has lost all copies of the game, and never got proof that they had it, it's copyrighted, but not provably copyright anyone in particular.
It seems to me that a number of MicroSoft's dirty tricks involve going to the legal system when they want to hurt someone, rather than doing something that hurts the victem and then resisting legal action.
If the TC can take complaints of the form "MS, via the BSA, is threatening to sue me for doing something I should be allowed to", and prevent MS et al from filing suit, the TC would have a major stick to use against MS. MS, being an information company, needs legal means for controlling the use of their products. If they had to ask the TC if they wanted to make anyone pay for anything, and the TC was looking unfavorably on their practices, they'd be sunk.
If an OEM knew that, if MicroSoft cancelled their special license, the TC would reject any MS copyright infringement suits against the OEM or their customers, they'd be able to make Windows optional with complete impunity.
If the TC found that a patent was anti-competitive, they'd be able to prevent MS from ever enforcing it.
Of course, this depends on the courts agreeing to send MS suits to the TC before granting injunctions or anything. If the point of the TC is to avoid slow and expensive lawsuits, it is hardly useful if it doesn't stop MS from suing people (and make MS threats useless).
On the other hand, it's possible that this ROM isn't covered by copyright, because the publisher may not have actually gotten it in the first place. In order to get the copyright, you can register it with the library of congress, but that only really works for published works, or you can do the cheap thing and keep a copy with proof that you had it at the time (i.e., mail it to yourself). If they never published it, and AtariAge ended up with the original ROM, they may now entirely lack proof that they have the rights to it.
If I steal your car while you're on vacation for a month, and you get amnesia while you're gone, and your registration expires and the title got lost, I'll probably get away with it. But physical objects are different anyway, because stealing them is a criminal, not civil, offense. So they could still catch me for having a car I don't have the documents for.
Broadband is a profitable market with a large start-up cost. If you were doing it when venture capital and loans were easy to get, you probably just went ahead and spent the money to get started everywhere, and ignored the fact that, if things continued as planned, you'd lose money for the forseeable future paying back the loans and so forth.
Then the bubble burst, and suddenly it was hard to come by the capital to pay the loans. So, while people are actually interested in your service and paying for it, you've budgetted to lose a ton of money, and you'll continue to lose the money until you reorganize with profit in mind-- ditch a lot of your longer-term infrastructure investments, get more reasonable terms on loans, and so forth. What was a reasonable business strategy before doesn't work now, and changing strategies like that can require protection from creditors.
If you're in a situation where you can put a dollar into infrastructure each day for a week and get back twenty at the end, and you can get loans based on your expected worth at the end, you'll want to put in as much money as you can. If suddenly you can't get the loans any more, you'll find that you can't finish building your infrastructure, and you can't pay off the loans you've taken, either, since the payoff you expected won't happen.
Probably your local companies chose a more conservative initial strategy, and then didn't have as much difficulty changing, or had the capital from other sources to cover it. If they didn't take on a lot of debt initially, because they started with a small deployment, they're probably fine.
Out of curiousity, was there any earthly reason for the box you were dealing with to be running an ftp daemon?
....you get what you pay for.
And MicroSoft is cheap at only a penny for each bug...
But seriously, the only thing that makes sense is to determine if various packages have the features you want, and then determine which costs the least. If you want only a small set of features, then go for a program that has just the features you want.
AbiWord does have support, as they mention. It's just that it doesn't work over the phone. The people doing it are probably easier to insult, due to doing it just because they want to, but they're also only motivated by solving your problem, so they care more, assuming you're pleasent about your problem.
There may not be prebuilt binaries for your platform. There aren't prebuilt binaries of commercial software for most platforms. AbiWord is probably ahead of MicroSoft here, and there's a chance that you can build binaries yourself if you need to, unlike with commercial software.
Complaining about bugs and missing features to places other than the proper channels will get you nowhere, and being rude about it won't help either. This is certainly true of all OSS. It's not true of MicroSoft, reportedly, but that's just because MicroSoft's proper channels are ignored by their programmers.
Getting support from programmers is difficult, in general, because they're busy programming. MicroSoft won't even let you talk to them. You can't demand a feature or to have a bug fixed from the makers of any software: what you want may be too difficult, or there may be more important things on the list.
The reduced functionality is what you'd have to expect from a newer program from a smaller group. It doesn't really matter whether the motivation is financial or not, a small number of people will write a program with fewer features than MS will. Hopefully the features that AbiWord has are the ones you want, and the features that are missing are ones that would just get in your way.
The letter is particular to AbiWord, but it applies in most of the parts to everyone, including MicroSoft.
It was brilliant chosing for Boromir someone who wanted to play Aragorn. That's the perfect way to get into the character...
That's what you could get a shell script to do it.
If a distribution put that line in a shell script (and had error checking), you could just have a single command or a clickable or spoken interface, and people who actually want to look at the results of intermediate steps could do them individually.
The point is that it makes sense to have a number of smaller steps for those people who want them, and have a very simple program to run all of the steps for those people who want it to be simple. Automatically doing a bunch of steps is much easier than breaking up a single step.
Having P2P features could make a commercial product more successful. You're not going to make any money being a bottleneck in a P2P system, but providing a good front end for a particular use of a P2P system is a reasonable business model for selling software, and adding such features to a product adds value. In order to be able to sell such programs, you need there to be a network of worthwhile content for it to access, which means encouraging the enthusiasts to use a common format that you can tap into.
Things like the CB radio range are free, but it's still possible to build a business on selling the radios, and this requires everyone agreeing on what the radios do.