Unless IBM's license agreement specifically allows SCO to revoke it
Even if it did, the users who have already purchased licenses will still have valid licenses. They may not be able to renew it if SCO wins, but this bull about "People will be running AIX without a valid license" simply would not be. They have paid for there licenses. SCO has their portion of that money. It would be like an attorney, who has gotten half way through your case, quitting and telling you that you can't use the evidence he/she has gathered for your case because he/she isn't involved anymore. It's still your evidence!
In fact, if you are running AIX, please note that some of your license money would go and has gone to SCO. You might want to ask IBM about a Linux install. I understand that they DO know the meaning of customer loyalty.
Further, if SCO looses this, I doubt Big Blue would continue buying licenses from them. Imagine what losing an IBM contract would do to their stock price. Customer loyalty is especially important if that customer is a Fortune 500 company.
Or give then basic compilers and basic interpreters that will run on today's hardware. We still teach writing with a pencil and paper. Most learn to ride a bike before learning to drive. Teach them good old basic and avoid trying to re-invent the wheel (unless you've come up with something like Logo).
Hey, what you said makes me wonder if I'm re-accepting the old agreement when I re-install and how the "retro-activeness" of an old click-wrap license would work. Has anyone ever spotted a clause that you are accepting the agreement in it's revised form, not even in your posession (even worse for someone without internet access)?
You might be saying that the revised agreements would supercede the old no matter when it's accepted, but that can't be applied to both a first time installer and a repeat installer. AYAL anyone?
Bank of America has my money. They are making interest on it and investing it to their profit. Where's my friggin office software? I keep giving them more money!
Unfortunately, the more people that pull the "Terrorist" card for an excuse, the less is will be listened to when it's real. (pleae note, I'm not right wing or republican) So, when it's real, the media will demand to see the information anyway citing the other jerks who used it as a bluff (including many politicians). Ironically, they are slowly creating a potential threat to national security by watering down the occasional importance of the "terrorist" card.
While picking out pieces of fur-embedded squirrel meat from the treads
There I was thinking "I'll sit down, eat dinner and read some slashdot". So much for that appetite now... My dog enjoyed the burger though. I love writers that create imagery.
(offtopic) Kind of like a second Spinal Tap movie. If you take all of the promotional appearances of the Spinal
Tap members to hype the sequel and string them together, you've got your sequel. It was filmed and played out in the RealWorldâ. (/offtopic)
Oddly enough, there is one realm where this is happening less and less: Video Cards. With the recent benchmarking antics of nVidia and ATI, early adopters are waiting for "real" results and critiques from hardware websites. Couple that with the immediate drop in price of the last model card (which less tech saavy consumers don't see much difference in), and the number of immediate/early adopters for these cards dwindles dramatically.
The early adopter market isn't having much of an impact on the (mal)practices of these companies though, so I doubt early adopter sales dropping off for software would have much effect either.
I just hit "submit" only to find that everyone else was posting a Duke Nukem remark too. That's a lot of community pie in the face for 3DRealms. Must suck to be them.
3DRealms is in serious trouble if this goes through, but I doubt a judge would hear the case of millions of bummed out gamers wishing for Duke Nukem.
It's interesting to see the possibility of a company called on vaporware though. Large companies get screwed all the time by sales people over-inflating the features of new versions forenterprise level software that they are shoehorned into buying in order to keep support of previous versions. Business is hurt by these tactics so much more than consumers, but it has become a (laughable) standard practice.
Now if only we could find a way to punish software that did get released and just plain sucks (Microsoft Bob anyone?).
So what happened to the money collected so far? I would think that the payments collected for a service that hasn't been activated for years might help defer the cost of finally activating that service. This says that "Southwestern Bell charges 33 cents to each customer" and has been for since 1999. So let's see, this says that SBC has "6.9 million wireless customers across the United States" as of 1999. It's been 54 months since January 1, 1999 including this month. 54 * 6,900,000 = 372,600,000 months of total charges. 372,600,000 * $0.33 = $122,958,000.00 which makes a $22,958,000.00 profit(!!!!) on the $100,000,000.00 re-tooling you mention if it were SBC. That's not even counting the growth of the customer base since 1999!
Are the Feds keeping track of how much is collected? Probably not. I suspect nobody is but some wily executives and accountants.
We did a checkpoint restore and ran some tests. Our customer support staff spent a few hours on the "system" remotely, but we couldn't justify the cost of continual testing so we planned to capture their activity. We then used the captured data from the tests to repeat the process for further testing. If I remember right (it was a few years ago), the IBM sys-programmers captured the data from the initial restore as well. For them, the second restore process was kicked off with a single command.
Because it was an insurance company I worked for, I can't give too many details without violating my exit NDA. If you contact the IBM Disaster Recovery Center in Boulder, CO, I'm sure they would be happy to answer questions. Alternately, any good S390 systems consultant should be familiar with this type of process.
I wonder if we could use TVs and VCRs as packet sniffers if the spectrum gets converted to communications (al la cell phone) use... I would hardly call that dead:)
The thing that this gentleman forgot to account for was the loss of sales to electronics manufacturers. He's focused on the media companies, which are only a part of the equation. How many portable TVs end up at sporting events, fishing trips, etc.? Though I haven't been able to find hard statistics, Circuit City carries five models and Casio even has a section for portable TVs on the front page of their website. I don't think he understands what a lobbying power the electronics industry is. Without broadcasts, every one of the portables out there would be useless and a revenue stream for manufacturers would dry up. How about anteanna sales and such for companies like Recoton? I'm sure they would join the fight ageanst any legislation destroying the boradcasts.
Isn't this how IBM has been running Linux on it's S390 mainframes? They can virtualize just about anything because of VM. I remember a disaster recovery simulation at IBM where we restored a copy of our MVS/S390 mainframe within their VM system from our backup tapes. For all intents and purposes, it was our mainframe running inside another OS, and the other OS (VM) logged all of our activity too. We even joked with the IBMers about being able to run VM within VM and MVS within that. This is not new technology, it's just new(ish) to the smaller architectures and a new implementation of the idea.
say Microsoft wanted Outlook to have some special capabilities in the operating system
Then you would be saying the truth. Outlook, and the rest of Office, register themselves extensively into the OS. To see what I mean, grab scanreg.exe (if my site goes down, look on Google) and run the command "scanreg outlook". It will show literally hundreds of entries in the registry for both Outlook and Outlook Express (on my machine 1157 occurances). For comparison if you have Norton Anti-Virus (which should register itself extensively into the OS), try the command "scanreg norton" and note the 150 or so results (163 on my machine). I'm betting more than Outlook will eventually crash with constant use of the machine and a re-named outlook.exe.
Because a programmer wouldn't touch that NDA with someone else's ten foot pole. But hey, if he was ninny enough to sign the NDA, then the good thing is that the NDA should keep him from ever becoming a programmer.
I actually thought twice about posting this because I bet some SCO jerk is reading this and might try something stupid...
"an easier solution would seem to be to copyright it"
Under current copyright law since it has been written it is copywritten. It does have an ever shrinking chance of entering the public domain someday though.
4. COMPLAINING. Employee shall not, upon leaving the office, complain, celebrate, share or disclose any details of any day at work or the disposition (good or bad day) of any day. Further SCO reserves the right to alter the empoyee's view of any working day based on whether SCO believes it to be a good or bad day at work.
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In fact, if you are running AIX, please note that some of your license money would go and has gone to SCO. You might want to ask IBM about a Linux install. I understand that they DO know the meaning of customer loyalty.
Further, if SCO looses this, I doubt Big Blue would continue buying licenses from them. Imagine what losing an IBM contract would do to their stock price. Customer loyalty is especially important if that customer is a Fortune 500 company.
Or give then basic compilers and basic interpreters that will run on today's hardware. We still teach writing with a pencil and paper. Most learn to ride a bike before learning to drive. Teach them good old basic and avoid trying to re-invent the wheel (unless you've come up with something like Logo).
You might be saying that the revised agreements would supercede the old no matter when it's accepted, but that can't be applied to both a first time installer and a repeat installer. AYAL anyone?
Bank of America has my money. They are making interest on it and investing it to their profit. Where's my friggin office software? I keep giving them more money!
By the way, are "terrorist" cards a method of divination? (thanks for the inspiration dude!)
The early adopter market isn't having much of an impact on the (mal)practices of these companies though, so I doubt early adopter sales dropping off for software would have much effect either.
I just hit "submit" only to find that everyone else was posting a Duke Nukem remark too. That's a lot of community pie in the face for 3DRealms. Must suck to be them.
It's interesting to see the possibility of a company called on vaporware though. Large companies get screwed all the time by sales people over-inflating the features of new versions forenterprise level software that they are shoehorned into buying in order to keep support of previous versions. Business is hurt by these tactics so much more than consumers, but it has become a (laughable) standard practice.
Now if only we could find a way to punish software that did get released and just plain sucks (Microsoft Bob anyone?).
How's this offtopic? I think it's a brief attempt at irony. What you (the consumer) don't know can't hurt me (the folks porposing this).
Are the Feds keeping track of how much is collected? Probably not. I suspect nobody is but some wily executives and accountants.
Because it was an insurance company I worked for, I can't give too many details without violating my exit NDA. If you contact the IBM Disaster Recovery Center in Boulder, CO, I'm sure they would be happy to answer questions. Alternately, any good S390 systems consultant should be familiar with this type of process.
I wonder if we could use TVs and VCRs as packet sniffers if the spectrum gets converted to communications (al la cell phone) use... I would hardly call that dead :)
The thing that this gentleman forgot to account for was the loss of sales to electronics manufacturers. He's focused on the media companies, which are only a part of the equation. How many portable TVs end up at sporting events, fishing trips, etc.? Though I haven't been able to find hard statistics, Circuit City carries five models and Casio even has a section for portable TVs on the front page of their website. I don't think he understands what a lobbying power the electronics industry is. Without broadcasts, every one of the portables out there would be useless and a revenue stream for manufacturers would dry up. How about anteanna sales and such for companies like Recoton? I'm sure they would join the fight ageanst any legislation destroying the boradcasts.
Isn't this how IBM has been running Linux on it's S390 mainframes? They can virtualize just about anything because of VM. I remember a disaster recovery simulation at IBM where we restored a copy of our MVS/S390 mainframe within their VM system from our backup tapes. For all intents and purposes, it was our mainframe running inside another OS, and the other OS (VM) logged all of our activity too. We even joked with the IBMers about being able to run VM within VM and MVS within that. This is not new technology, it's just new(ish) to the smaller architectures and a new implementation of the idea.
4. COMPLAINING. Employee shall not, upon leaving the office, complain, celebrate, share or disclose any details of any day at work or the disposition (good or bad day) of any day. Further SCO reserves the right to alter the empoyee's view of any working day based on whether SCO believes it to be a good or bad day at work.