Everyone who wants legal music pays $5/month, and the money is pooled, with the entire pot allocated to artists proportional to downloads. It would bring the underground P2P industry "above the radar" and the artists would get a tiny share of a huge pie instead of a big share of nothing. Honestly, I spend even LESS on music now, but $60/yr is about as much as this is worth to me.
Even by the most conservative estimates, it would produce hundreds of millions of dollars per year in royalties. Or they can maintain the status quo and get nearly nothing. If it were me, I would take the money. But what do I know?
Back when the original Napster was under attack, I suggested this as a reasonable plan. Nobody thought the music industry would accept an "all you can eat" plan at such a low price. But today's P2P reality is exactly that at a price of $0. When the music industry finished overplaying their hand, $0 was the only price left on the table. It's like playing "Deal or No Deal", turning down all the offers, holding out for the $1M prize, only to watch the entire board clear, leaving the $.01 prize. Considering where the music industry is today, $5/month from a huge population is no longer a lowball offer.
If it were ridiculously cheap, I would have no problem with throwing some coffee money into music. It would probably renew my interest in the product. As it stands today, I have an Ipod full of ripped CDs I bought over the last 20 years, and I can listen to the classics indefinitely. At $18.95 per disc, I won't be seen in the music store anytime soon.
That was a good description of circumstantial evidence. And yes it CAN be enough for a conviction. But in this case, nobody has found a body. Without it, the prosecution will be hard-pressed to prove that Nina is dead, which is a prerequisite to proving Hans committed the murder. If they can locate her body, then it becomes much easier for the prosecution. Otherwise, I think he walks.
This is such a bizarre case. He certainly looks guilty. Without being caught in the act, there is not much more he could do to stand out as an obvious suspect. But Nina could easily be alive, in which case there was no crime at all.
The last desktop computer that I can remember running perpetually was a VAXstation running VMS. Those things could run for as long as the mainframes they were clustered with. Then we migrated to high-end PCs around 1994 (running Windows for Workgroups!) to replace the VAXstations. Developers were incredulous that they had to shutdown their computers at night because they weren't stable enough to be left running 24x7. Dr. Watson was a frequent visitor back in those days. Granted, the boot time of VAXstations was nearly 40 minutes, so they HAD to stay up. Even so, I don't remember ANY version of Windows that can remain stable over an extended period of time in a desktop environment. Then again, I stopped looking after Windows 2000.
With modern power management, desktop machines really WANT to hibernate, spin down the disk drive, or at least turn off their ethernet cards. And with that comes the confusion of apps that think they have files open when the file server thinks otherwise, sessions that appear open but are not, etc. I just tell everyone "Do a full shutdown at night, with a fresh start in the morning. It makes things easier on you and the helpdesk. And since the first response out of the help desk is always 'Reboot', you might as well take care of that first thing in the morning while you pour a cup of coffee."
I wonder if the money can be used to ditch cable altogether and go satellite. After all, a DirecTV receiver does the conversion to analog, no muss no fuss. Not everyone can get satellite service, but it might be enough to keep the cable companies from going hog wild with punitive surcharges for analog customers.
In the case of property tax, the basis is a somewhat subjective assessment of property. I have every right to look at yours and compare it with mine, to see if I should challenge the assessment on my property. Before moving to a new city, I might legitimately use this tax data in the planning process.
On the other hand, the calculations for other taxes are straightforward. Income tax returns have no public value, and a great potential for abuse. So I have no problem with keeping those private.
Everything else is somewhere between these extremes and is now subject to debate.
In general, when the government HAS information, the data belongs to the taxpayers collectively. After all, we OWN the government. With a few notable exceptions, the taxpayers have a right to get the information. This is the basis for the "Freedom of Information Act" -- mostly a good thing.
I agree that the Internet opens up some new opportunities for abuse, but withholding public information has a pretty steep downside as well. As a taxpayer, I expect a transparent view of how tax money is collected and spent.
Sorry to quash the conspiracy theory, but if Diebold was trying to throw the election (and leave open the possibility of throwing future elections), they would have made a better choice than Access. After all, there is not much value in hijacking an election if ANYONE can do it. The corrupt choice would be a totally embedded system built from scratch, with a boatload of DRM. Instead they took the Teletubbies approach.
Never assume conspiracy when pure stupidity will suffice.
Oh yes, I remember. In order to avoid a self-terminating process, every possible error needed to be trapped and gracefully handled. This was not necessary with ordinary Access. After all, it might be OK to let certain errors go untrapped or possibly revert back to the system menu. Not so in Access run-time. By the time you had sandbagged every possible way that the app could self-destruct, it was like writing your own operating system.
You are also right about the reporting capabilities. Access is a decent report writer. Not great, but good enough to be not easily replaced without spending much more on a commercial solution that creates as many problems as it solves.
As bad as the run-time was, Access had one huge advantage over VB. When you have an homegrown corporate application that is going to be deployed internationally, it's really nice to avoid compiling a project and building a setup kit. ActiveX controls and Windows local settings (currency, decimal punctuation, etc.) will break anything short of a really robust setup kit. I had zero confidence that my staff could build such a thing, and with Access we never needed to. If our offices in the field had the right version of Access, we could send them an mdb file with high confidence that it would work. Eventually, we built equivalent mdb files for each version of Access, which mitigated the version incompatibility problem.
It was the downside of Access that made me appreciate open source. Over a long period of time, we migrated to PHP and Zope as part of a major initiative to phase out a huge Access application that was running a global WIP tracking system.
From ancient times, I remember there was such a thing as an Access "developer edition". It included the ability to take an.mdb file and create a "compiled" executable that was essentially the original.mdb file bundled with a crippled version of Access -- just enough to distribute a database and embedded VBA application to a computer that had nothing beyond ordinary Windows installed. It was a fragile solution -- many ways to screw it up. Along the same lines, the dev kit also included a freely distributable program that could synchronize databases across the internet. It was even MORE error-prone. Typical Microslop.
The original concept of Access was very good -- a personal database with snazzy query, forms, VBA, etc. Problem is, whenever the data has more than one interested party, Access goes downhill pretty fast. Choosing Access for voting machines tells me a great deal about Diebold's IT capabilities. Based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, I think they chose MS as a vendor, right off the bat. Then they considered MS products that would be useful. Then they tried to limit the cost while meeting someone's hyper-aggressive Gantt chart (prepared in MS Project, of course). Put them all together and you end up with Access. If you release any of those constraints (MS, cost, time) the solution can be made more reliable, more secure, and cheaper. It would be hard to choose ANY other alternative without picking up some kind of benefit.
Large scale log processing isn't hard if you have the right tools.:) Let's hope their corporate policy allows something a little more robust than "Event Viewer".
When the victim's phone is answered, the dialer has to rapidly determine if the voice on the other side is human or machine. To do this, they try to analyze the greeting. The dialer wants to hear the word "Hello", followed by silence. Actually, it wants to hear ANY sound for about half a second, with a few seconds of silence.
To waste more of the telemarketer's time, consider changing your outgoing message:
OLD: "You have reached the Smith residence. We are not available at the moment, but leave your name and number so we can get back to you."
NEW: "Hello [3 second pause] You have reached..."
This should cause the dialer to connect the call to a telemarketer, who will miss about 5 seconds of your message, but they will hear the rest. Obviously, the telemarketer will hang up in a few seconds, but not before wasting a little more time. I think of it as redirecting the annoyance back to the source.
Why don't they write off piracy losses as an expense on their corporate income tax? If the IRS won't recognize piracy as an expense, why should anyone else?
The biggest contribution on the list is $9000; most are $2000 or less. If you knew about the public opinion on the RIAA, why would you take money from them? It seems like the negative publicity f having taken money would outweigh whatever you could do with the money. Unfortunately, you are mistaken. We, the voters, have done a poor job of holding these people accountable for much of anything. RIAA is just one of many special interest groups whose low 4-figure contributions make up the funding of a campaign. I suspect if someone looked at the non-cash perks being tossed around by lobbyists, the results would be interesting.
That the few iPods in the bin were purchased on E-bay and planted in the box. After all, an empty box would be an embarrassment by itself, and MS has a track record of manufacturing its own fans.
I, for one, welcome the new Gmail overlords. Here's why:
I had a DSL account with AT&T/SBC/Yahoo in Connecticut. The e-mail address is @snet.net. I have similar accounts for my wife and daughter.
I recently moved to Ohio, and pickup up a new DSL subscription from AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. At the time, I asked about keeping my old e-mail addresses. I was told, "no problem". I spoke with tech support when I put my DSL modem online, and they said the transfer would be taken care of.
After about two months, the old e-mail addresses were "suspended", evidently because they were no longer "linked" with an active DSL account. After EIGHT attempts (phone, e-mail, IM) to get this fixed, I have been given a combination of contradictory answers, finger-pointing, and "the runaround". Level 2 tech support seems to have no avenue of escalation to get this fixed. One of the more common answers goes like this: "We can register e-mail addresses from ANY other SBC domain, EXCEPT the SNET.NET region.
I managed to persuade a level 2 tech to "un-suspend" my e-mail accounts, but she warned me, "They're just going to get re-suspended in two months..." Now, THAT'S customer service!!!
The problem seems to be related to some kind of internal billing software issue. Evidently, the left hand is unable to work cooperatively with the right hand. AT&T/SBC bought SNET several years ago. If they can't move a customer smoothly across domains, they need a wholesale reorg of IT until they can operate like one company.
Gmail can't possibly be any worse than AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. NEVER, EVER RELY ON AT&T/SBC/YAHOO FOR E-MAIL. THEIR MIND-BOGGLING STUPIDITY MAKES THEM UNSUITABLE FOR RUNNING AN E-MAIL SYSTEM. I honestly don't think Google can be any worse. And besides, Gmail works reasonably well on my Blackberry.
Ah yes, the good old "Help us with a security study" scam. Perhaps you even get a free iPod for participating. All it takes is a fancy domain name, like nationalcenterforbankingsecurity.org It would probably work much better than the unimaginative phishing tactics that are commonly used today.
For as long as I can remember, the concept of spelling and grammar remains a central weak point of spammers. I sometimes wonder how much of the spam and phishing problem could be defeated by automated spelling/grammar checking.
It's not at all hard to get companies to tell you what they think of you as a customer and just how much they want your business.
When CDs hit $19 each, I realized they are simply too precious to be sold to ordinary consumers like me. For whatever reason, the music companies want the product to sit on store shelves instead. And so they do. If I attempt to interfere with their stockpiling of "shelfware", I will be punished with high prices until I learn my lesson.
Years ago, I moved from the suburbs to the city. My daily commute dropped from 30 miles round-trip to zero (walking 100 yards). The car insurance company didn't like that, not one little bit. They increased my premium over 100%, despite the fact that the car was driven 95% less, and sat parked every day about 100 yards away from where it used to be parked when I commuted from the suburbs. Silly me. So I moved back to the suburbs, even FARTHER from work than before, driving most of those extra miles in the city that was evidently so dangerous, and my premiums were LOWER than ever! I sure learned my lesson on that one!
When the government wants to discourage something, they tax it. The additional income that my wife could generate if she had a job would put us in a sky-high tax bracket. As an added bonus, we would have to pay child care expenses with after-tax money. The government really wants my wife to stay home. And so she does. We got the clue! We know what to do!
Forget the class-action suit. The central theme here is that you should take unilateral action in response to the various "incentives" that you encounter. Microsoft causing headaches with product [re]activation? That's because they want you to switch to OSX or Linux. Sounds to me like they are really determined to get you onboard with the "switch" program. The punishment will continue until you get the message. The problem isn't Microsoft, it's you.
But with totally obnoxious terms. Red Hat could enact some kind of fee whenever DRM-protected content is played, essentially turning the whole DRM world into pay-per-view. And then there would be the price increases, linked to the average price of cable TV. I even have a name for it: Digital Rights Restriction -- Genuine Annoyance Edition. It that's too long to fit in a banner ad, they could just call it "Revenue Assurance".
The key is not to make money, it is to drive home the high cost of DRM, making the downside totally obvious to all. Remember, no matter how ridiculous the terms might be, it really won't be any worse than the copyright industry will do all by themselves in a few years. But instead of using the salami-slice method, the all-at-once/in-your-face method forces everyone to confront the issue here and now.
I think the DRM patent is a really nifty strategy, and presented here on Martin Luther King day, no less!
Re:Um, market manipulation for 2 million
on
Red Hat Sales Surge
·
· Score: 1
Your theory works just as well in reverse. Perhaps the Oracle threat was wildly hyped and exaggerated. "Unbreakable Linux" turns out to be Centos with a different logo and shrink wrap. And Oracle support is...well...Oracle support. Perhaps the market overreacted to the last quarterly report. I have seen truly awful companies whose stock price holds through all kinds of bad news.
Although the "spike" brings the price to 22+, the company is not much worse off than when it traded at 30. I really thought Larry did that whole Unbreakable Linux thing as a tactic to drive down the price and take over RHT. But it's too late for that now.
After that, who knows? Let's see who can RENEW at the discount price. After people are committed (and unable to easily migrate back to Red Hat), let's see what Oracle charges THEN to renew for years 2 thru N.
Sure, they said, "half price". Half of what and availble to whom?
This is Oracle we are talking about. Surely there will be strings attached. Let's see if EVERYONE gets the low price (if it's as low as they claim). Knowing Oracle as I do, I predict that the wonderful pricing will somehow apply to only those customers with Oracle support contracts for other Oracle products. I will be very surprised if they offer it as a straight-up substitute for RHEL, available in quantity 1, to everyone with a credit card.
Don't get me wrong, Oracle has some great products. But my purchase experience as an enterprise customer has been like walking into a car dealership. There was always some kind of nifty deal that I should be able to get, followed by lots of "reasons" why the wonderful discount was not available to ME.
Let's see if Oracle REALLY undercuts Red Hat support prices. I have yet to see Oracle undercut ANYONE on the price of ANYTHING. They would be well advised to properly support their own products first. I've had my fair share of offshore disappointment with Oracle support -- not anxious to repeat the experience. Then again, I suppose anyone can serve patches. Hell, I run Centos at home. There is nothing going on with Oracle vs. Red Hat that Centos isn't doing already (on a smaller scale, of course).
Meanwhile, a competitive market might actually help Red Hat. Lower prices would increase Red Hat's volume, even if some of the sales went to Oracle. The trick is to figure out the optimum price that maximizes total revenue. I suspect that magic price is somewhere south of Red Hat's current pricing. Oracle might accidentally help Red Hat find a richer price point.
For many other reasons, you are correct. Buying Red Hat means Larry gets JBOSS, which he wanted to buy before. And Oracle becomes the top Linux company overnight. That won't happen if players like Red Hat are still on the playing field. Otherwise, "Unbreakable Linux" is simply the latest Red Hat knockoff. Besides, growth via acquisition is Larry's game. Very rarely does Oracle crank up a new line of business on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who wants legal music pays $5/month, and the money is pooled, with the entire pot allocated to artists proportional to downloads. It would bring the underground P2P industry "above the radar" and the artists would get a tiny share of a huge pie instead of a big share of nothing. Honestly, I spend even LESS on music now, but $60/yr is about as much as this is worth to me.
Even by the most conservative estimates, it would produce hundreds of millions of dollars per year in royalties. Or they can maintain the status quo and get nearly nothing. If it were me, I would take the money. But what do I know?
Back when the original Napster was under attack, I suggested this as a reasonable plan. Nobody thought the music industry would accept an "all you can eat" plan at such a low price. But today's P2P reality is exactly that at a price of $0. When the music industry finished overplaying their hand, $0 was the only price left on the table. It's like playing "Deal or No Deal", turning down all the offers, holding out for the $1M prize, only to watch the entire board clear, leaving the $.01 prize. Considering where the music industry is today, $5/month from a huge population is no longer a lowball offer.
If it were ridiculously cheap, I would have no problem with throwing some coffee money into music. It would probably renew my interest in the product. As it stands today, I have an Ipod full of ripped CDs I bought over the last 20 years, and I can listen to the classics indefinitely. At $18.95 per disc, I won't be seen in the music store anytime soon.
Well said. Too bad +5 is the max for moderation.
That was a good description of circumstantial evidence. And yes it CAN be enough for a conviction. But in this case, nobody has found a body. Without it, the prosecution will be hard-pressed to prove that Nina is dead, which is a prerequisite to proving Hans committed the murder. If they can locate her body, then it becomes much easier for the prosecution. Otherwise, I think he walks.
This is such a bizarre case. He certainly looks guilty. Without being caught in the act, there is not much more he could do to stand out as an obvious suspect. But Nina could easily be alive, in which case there was no crime at all.
The last desktop computer that I can remember running perpetually was a VAXstation running VMS. Those things could run for as long as the mainframes they were clustered with. Then we migrated to high-end PCs around 1994 (running Windows for Workgroups!) to replace the VAXstations. Developers were incredulous that they had to shutdown their computers at night because they weren't stable enough to be left running 24x7. Dr. Watson was a frequent visitor back in those days. Granted, the boot time of VAXstations was nearly 40 minutes, so they HAD to stay up. Even so, I don't remember ANY version of Windows that can remain stable over an extended period of time in a desktop environment. Then again, I stopped looking after Windows 2000.
With modern power management, desktop machines really WANT to hibernate, spin down the disk drive, or at least turn off their ethernet cards. And with that comes the confusion of apps that think they have files open when the file server thinks otherwise, sessions that appear open but are not, etc. I just tell everyone "Do a full shutdown at night, with a fresh start in the morning. It makes things easier on you and the helpdesk. And since the first response out of the help desk is always 'Reboot', you might as well take care of that first thing in the morning while you pour a cup of coffee."
Those bastards!
I wonder if the money can be used to ditch cable altogether and go satellite. After all, a DirecTV receiver does the conversion to analog, no muss no fuss. Not everyone can get satellite service, but it might be enough to keep the cable companies from going hog wild with punitive surcharges for analog customers.
In the case of property tax, the basis is a somewhat subjective assessment of property. I have every right to look at yours and compare it with mine, to see if I should challenge the assessment on my property. Before moving to a new city, I might legitimately use this tax data in the planning process.
On the other hand, the calculations for other taxes are straightforward. Income tax returns have no public value, and a great potential for abuse. So I have no problem with keeping those private.
Everything else is somewhere between these extremes and is now subject to debate.
In general, when the government HAS information, the data belongs to the taxpayers collectively. After all, we OWN the government. With a few notable exceptions, the taxpayers have a right to get the information. This is the basis for the "Freedom of Information Act" -- mostly a good thing.
I agree that the Internet opens up some new opportunities for abuse, but withholding public information has a pretty steep downside as well. As a taxpayer, I expect a transparent view of how tax money is collected and spent.
Sorry to quash the conspiracy theory, but if Diebold was trying to throw the election (and leave open the possibility of throwing future elections), they would have made a better choice than Access. After all, there is not much value in hijacking an election if ANYONE can do it. The corrupt choice would be a totally embedded system built from scratch, with a boatload of DRM. Instead they took the Teletubbies approach.
Never assume conspiracy when pure stupidity will suffice.
Oh yes, I remember. In order to avoid a self-terminating process, every possible error needed to be trapped and gracefully handled. This was not necessary with ordinary Access. After all, it might be OK to let certain errors go untrapped or possibly revert back to the system menu. Not so in Access run-time. By the time you had sandbagged every possible way that the app could self-destruct, it was like writing your own operating system.
You are also right about the reporting capabilities. Access is a decent report writer. Not great, but good enough to be not easily replaced without spending much more on a commercial solution that creates as many problems as it solves.
As bad as the run-time was, Access had one huge advantage over VB. When you have an homegrown corporate application that is going to be deployed internationally, it's really nice to avoid compiling a project and building a setup kit. ActiveX controls and Windows local settings (currency, decimal punctuation, etc.) will break anything short of a really robust setup kit. I had zero confidence that my staff could build such a thing, and with Access we never needed to. If our offices in the field had the right version of Access, we could send them an mdb file with high confidence that it would work. Eventually, we built equivalent mdb files for each version of Access, which mitigated the version incompatibility problem.
It was the downside of Access that made me appreciate open source. Over a long period of time, we migrated to PHP and Zope as part of a major initiative to phase out a huge Access application that was running a global WIP tracking system.
From ancient times, I remember there was such a thing as an Access "developer edition". It included the ability to take an .mdb file and create a "compiled" executable that was essentially the original .mdb file bundled with a crippled version of Access -- just enough to distribute a database and embedded VBA application to a computer that had nothing beyond ordinary Windows installed. It was a fragile solution -- many ways to screw it up. Along the same lines, the dev kit also included a freely distributable program that could synchronize databases across the internet. It was even MORE error-prone. Typical Microslop.
The original concept of Access was very good -- a personal database with snazzy query, forms, VBA, etc. Problem is, whenever the data has more than one interested party, Access goes downhill pretty fast. Choosing Access for voting machines tells me a great deal about Diebold's IT capabilities. Based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, I think they chose MS as a vendor, right off the bat. Then they considered MS products that would be useful. Then they tried to limit the cost while meeting someone's hyper-aggressive Gantt chart (prepared in MS Project, of course). Put them all together and you end up with Access. If you release any of those constraints (MS, cost, time) the solution can be made more reliable, more secure, and cheaper. It would be hard to choose ANY other alternative without picking up some kind of benefit.
When the victim's phone is answered, the dialer has to rapidly determine if the voice on the other side is human or machine. To do this, they try to analyze the greeting. The dialer wants to hear the word "Hello", followed by silence. Actually, it wants to hear ANY sound for about half a second, with a few seconds of silence.
To waste more of the telemarketer's time, consider changing your outgoing message:
OLD: "You have reached the Smith residence. We are not available at the moment, but leave your name and number so we can get back to you."
NEW: "Hello [3 second pause] You have reached..."
This should cause the dialer to connect the call to a telemarketer, who will miss about 5 seconds of your message, but they will hear the rest. Obviously, the telemarketer will hang up in a few seconds, but not before wasting a little more time. I think of it as redirecting the annoyance back to the source.
Why don't they write off piracy losses as an expense on their corporate income tax? If the IRS won't recognize piracy as an expense, why should anyone else?
That the few iPods in the bin were purchased on E-bay and planted in the box. After all, an empty box would be an embarrassment by itself, and MS has a track record of manufacturing its own fans.
I, for one, welcome the new Gmail overlords. Here's why:
I had a DSL account with AT&T/SBC/Yahoo in Connecticut. The e-mail address is @snet.net. I have similar accounts for my wife and daughter.
I recently moved to Ohio, and pickup up a new DSL subscription from AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. At the time, I asked about keeping my old e-mail addresses. I was told, "no problem". I spoke with tech support when I put my DSL modem online, and they said the transfer would be taken care of.
After about two months, the old e-mail addresses were "suspended", evidently because they were no longer "linked" with an active DSL account. After EIGHT attempts (phone, e-mail, IM) to get this fixed, I have been given a combination of contradictory answers, finger-pointing, and "the runaround". Level 2 tech support seems to have no avenue of escalation to get this fixed. One of the more common answers goes like this: "We can register e-mail addresses from ANY other SBC domain, EXCEPT the SNET.NET region.
I managed to persuade a level 2 tech to "un-suspend" my e-mail accounts, but she warned me, "They're just going to get re-suspended in two months..." Now, THAT'S customer service!!!
The problem seems to be related to some kind of internal billing software issue. Evidently, the left hand is unable to work cooperatively with the right hand. AT&T/SBC bought SNET several years ago. If they can't move a customer smoothly across domains, they need a wholesale reorg of IT until they can operate like one company.
Gmail can't possibly be any worse than AT&T/SBC/Yahoo. NEVER, EVER RELY ON AT&T/SBC/YAHOO FOR E-MAIL. THEIR MIND-BOGGLING STUPIDITY MAKES THEM UNSUITABLE FOR RUNNING AN E-MAIL SYSTEM. I honestly don't think Google can be any worse. And besides, Gmail works reasonably well on my Blackberry.
If "More than a quarter of the alleged music pirates have accepted the RIAA's offer", what are the other 74.9% doing?
Ah yes, the good old "Help us with a security study" scam. Perhaps you even get a free iPod for participating. All it takes is a fancy domain name, like nationalcenterforbankingsecurity.org It would probably work much better than the unimaginative phishing tactics that are commonly used today.
For as long as I can remember, the concept of spelling and grammar remains a central weak point of spammers. I sometimes wonder how much of the spam and phishing problem could be defeated by automated spelling/grammar checking.
It's not at all hard to get companies to tell you what they think of you as a customer and just how much they want your business.
When CDs hit $19 each, I realized they are simply too precious to be sold to ordinary consumers like me. For whatever reason, the music companies want the product to sit on store shelves instead. And so they do. If I attempt to interfere with their stockpiling of "shelfware", I will be punished with high prices until I learn my lesson.
Years ago, I moved from the suburbs to the city. My daily commute dropped from 30 miles round-trip to zero (walking 100 yards). The car insurance company didn't like that, not one little bit. They increased my premium over 100%, despite the fact that the car was driven 95% less, and sat parked every day about 100 yards away from where it used to be parked when I commuted from the suburbs. Silly me. So I moved back to the suburbs, even FARTHER from work than before, driving most of those extra miles in the city that was evidently so dangerous, and my premiums were LOWER than ever! I sure learned my lesson on that one!
When the government wants to discourage something, they tax it. The additional income that my wife could generate if she had a job would put us in a sky-high tax bracket. As an added bonus, we would have to pay child care expenses with after-tax money. The government really wants my wife to stay home. And so she does. We got the clue! We know what to do!
Forget the class-action suit. The central theme here is that you should take unilateral action in response to the various "incentives" that you encounter. Microsoft causing headaches with product [re]activation? That's because they want you to switch to OSX or Linux. Sounds to me like they are really determined to get you onboard with the "switch" program. The punishment will continue until you get the message. The problem isn't Microsoft, it's you.
But with totally obnoxious terms. Red Hat could enact some kind of fee whenever DRM-protected content is played, essentially turning the whole DRM world into pay-per-view. And then there would be the price increases, linked to the average price of cable TV. I even have a name for it: Digital Rights Restriction -- Genuine Annoyance Edition. It that's too long to fit in a banner ad, they could just call it "Revenue Assurance".
The key is not to make money, it is to drive home the high cost of DRM, making the downside totally obvious to all. Remember, no matter how ridiculous the terms might be, it really won't be any worse than the copyright industry will do all by themselves in a few years. But instead of using the salami-slice method, the all-at-once/in-your-face method forces everyone to confront the issue here and now.
I think the DRM patent is a really nifty strategy, and presented here on Martin Luther King day, no less!
Your theory works just as well in reverse. Perhaps the Oracle threat was wildly hyped and exaggerated. "Unbreakable Linux" turns out to be Centos with a different logo and shrink wrap. And Oracle support is...well...Oracle support. Perhaps the market overreacted to the last quarterly report. I have seen truly awful companies whose stock price holds through all kinds of bad news.
Although the "spike" brings the price to 22+, the company is not much worse off than when it traded at 30. I really thought Larry did that whole Unbreakable Linux thing as a tactic to drive down the price and take over RHT. But it's too late for that now.
Buy now, play maybe.
After that, who knows? Let's see who can RENEW at the discount price. After people are committed (and unable to easily migrate back to Red Hat), let's see what Oracle charges THEN to renew for years 2 thru N.
Sure, they said, "half price". Half of what and availble to whom?
This is Oracle we are talking about. Surely there will be strings attached. Let's see if EVERYONE gets the low price (if it's as low as they claim). Knowing Oracle as I do, I predict that the wonderful pricing will somehow apply to only those customers with Oracle support contracts for other Oracle products. I will be very surprised if they offer it as a straight-up substitute for RHEL, available in quantity 1, to everyone with a credit card.
Don't get me wrong, Oracle has some great products. But my purchase experience as an enterprise customer has been like walking into a car dealership. There was always some kind of nifty deal that I should be able to get, followed by lots of "reasons" why the wonderful discount was not available to ME.
Let's see if Oracle REALLY undercuts Red Hat support prices. I have yet to see Oracle undercut ANYONE on the price of ANYTHING. They would be well advised to properly support their own products first. I've had my fair share of offshore disappointment with Oracle support -- not anxious to repeat the experience. Then again, I suppose anyone can serve patches. Hell, I run Centos at home. There is nothing going on with Oracle vs. Red Hat that Centos isn't doing already (on a smaller scale, of course).
Meanwhile, a competitive market might actually help Red Hat. Lower prices would increase Red Hat's volume, even if some of the sales went to Oracle. The trick is to figure out the optimum price that maximizes total revenue. I suspect that magic price is somewhere south of Red Hat's current pricing. Oracle might accidentally help Red Hat find a richer price point.
For many other reasons, you are correct. Buying Red Hat means Larry gets JBOSS, which he wanted to buy before. And Oracle becomes the top Linux company overnight. That won't happen if players like Red Hat are still on the playing field. Otherwise, "Unbreakable Linux" is simply the latest Red Hat knockoff. Besides, growth via acquisition is Larry's game. Very rarely does Oracle crank up a new line of business on their own.