Sounds like the judge was completely clueless about the technologies in this case. I'm willing to be this will be appealed shortly, and the chances of it being overturned are probably pretty good.
SCO ain't dead yet. They've proven time and again that no tactic is too outrageous to let this thing drag on as long as they possibly can. If anybody can find a way to postpone the inevitable even further it's the SCOundrels.
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine. This allows updates to a live machine.
If you have a load balanced environment then you have the ability to redirect new connections away from a given server. Then it's just a matter of waiting for the active connections to terminate before the machine ends up in an idle state where you can safely apply patches offline. I've worked in a number of telephony environments and this was always the way we would patch systems. Stop accepting new connections, wait for existing ones to end, then perform the patch, reboot, verify, and start accepting connections again.
Second, this is telephony, meaning it is the infrastructure on which the internet is based. There's no dns tricks or tcp/ip you can use to send people to a different "server" if that server is the switch connected to your fiber backbone. Basically, there are points in the infrastructure where there are by necessity a single chokepoint.
Any mission critical hardware, switches, routers, servers, etc. should be set up in redundant pairs (or triplets,...) so that if a hardware failure occurs the remaining hardware can keep the service up. Single points of failure are avoided like the plague in datacenters that require 100% uptime. Part of that is to deal with hardware failures but part is also to provide an ability to perform software/firmware upgrades when necessary. Once again, you migrate all traffic off the system you're upgrading then apply the upgrades offline. Upgrading a kernel, especially, in an online environment, is something virtually any sysadmin would want to avoid if at all possible.
Redundancy is key, and any commercial datacenter will offer it all the way from their connections to the outside world to the connections they provide their customers. Every datacenter used by every company I ever worked for (about 10) offered redundant power and redundant network drops (using HSRP, VRRP, etc) for our equipment. If the datacenter needed to upgrade a router they'd move all traffic off one router so they could upgrade and test it, then move traffic off the other and repeat the process. Similarly if we needed to upgrade our firewalls, switches, etc. we'd fail over to the second redundant device first. In some cases we had bonded interfaces right on the end servers so as long as one path remained active we could power down an entire switch, router, firewall, etc. In other cases we relied on load balancing across servers that were alternately connected to one or another switch.
I have a Macbook Pro and decided to get Undercover for it. It's easy to set up and doesn't require a subscription, unlike some of the other programs out there. I'd read a bit about it before getting it, and the thing that really helped me in the end were the success stories that they have posted on their website. The fact that it makes use of the MacBook's built-in video camera to snap pictures of whoever is using it really impressed me.
Well "Microsoft", "Encarta", and "MSN" are all examples of registered trademarks of "Microsoft Corporation", so a trademarked domain would be msn.com, for example. The domain "foo.msn.com" doesn't exist but it sounds like it will resolve if you're on one of these ISP's. If you try to go to http://foo.msn.com/ on one of them then you'll end up with an advertising page of their own making rather than a simple "Firefox can't find the server at foo.msn.com" style of error from your web browser.
I've already pretty much decided to never use Windows again once I can no longer run XP on the two systems I have it installed on at home. I use a Mac at work to manage a number of linux & solaris systems. Nobody in my department uses Windows. I also know more family members & friends who are perfectly happy with Windows XP and have no desire whatsoever to upgrade to Vista. They're also perfectly happy with the versions of Office, etc. that they currently have. If MS really tries to force people to switch to a rental model for their software I can only see it alienating more of their customers and convincing them to look to Macs & linux systems a a cost-effective replacement.
Yeah, but will Microsoft continue to license Windows XP, 2000, etc. so that customers can run those in Windows 7 VMs? They've already stated an intention to stop supporting XP. So what if you have an application that only runs properly on Windows 2000? If they can't install and activate Win2K as a VM then the whole VM issue is moot. They won't be able to run their older applications any more.
That depends entirely on the software. Ours was a high level client/server programming language. It was an English-like language, along the lines of BASIC. Since there were no statement separators (like semicolons in C, java, etc) it meant the language parser (built via YACC) had to be extended significantly. YACC is, by default, a look-ahead 1 parser. Thanks to our language not using statement separators the grammar was eventually extended to the point (thanks to the addition of new features) where it eventually had to look ahead 7 tokens. Trying to improve on that while maintaining backward compatibility would have required maintaining all that legacy code in the modified YACC parser, etc.
The application also saved itself by basically dumping the entire contents of the running applications memory to a disk image. So to load/run an application you just read the entire image into memory and started executing it. In order to maintain binary compatibility with earlier versions of the product you had to maintain all the features that existed in earlier versions of the product since any binary image that got loaded could make use of those older features. Again, it effectively required a reliance on legacy code. If the legacy code was modified/replaced then it would have required customers to likely modify their code and recompile, which is exactly what the decision makers wanted to avoid.
If anything, legacy code will be Microsofts downfall (as TFA stated). I saw this happen firsthand for a company I worked for over a decade ago. They had a pretty impressive application and a long list of Fortune 500 corporations as customers. Even IBM (we're talking back before the Windows 3.x days) was basically giving the company a few million dollars a year for the privilege of reselling the software themselves. Well rather than build new versions of the application from the ground up, or even introducing potential incompatibilities between major releases, the powers that be insisted on full backward compatibility.
Over time more competitors showed up in the marketplace, and as the economy shifted IBM stopped tossing money in our laps. Our engineers (of which I was one) spent most of their time trying to figure out how to shoehorn new features and entire new parallel products on top of the existing legacy codebase. The inevitable result was that we struggled while our competitors came out with newer, more modern & more powerful software. I eventually left that company to go to a startup where 7 others from this company had already gone to. That company was acquired a couple years later, and the application pretty much no longer exists.
If the engineers, who had requested the ability to create a new product from the ground up, had been listened to, then perhaps that company would still be around and competitive. It was mainly because of the business decisions to retain backward compatibility, like MS has done with Windows, that they eventually disappeared. As long as MS maintains their own demand for backward compatibility they'll be waging a slow & prolonged war that they have no chance of winning.
You're penny wise and pound foolish. 720p is sufficient for any screen up to 50" - 60" in a normal sized living room. 1080p is ideal for screens 60" to 100".
Thanks for justifying my argument against investing in Blu-Ray. My upconverting DVD player looks fine on my 720p screen. Why should I spend a ton of money to invest in a Blu-Ray DVD player and Blu-Ray disks which would look much better on 1080 when my existing setup looks fine on 720p? Besides, I actually don't watch a ton of DVD's. Most of what I watch is HD television content. Maybe if I watched DVD's on a daily basis I might consider it, but even then the cost is still a big issue.
Why would you waste all the money on 2 HDTV screens, and not make use of its maximum resolution?
One larger one for the living room, one smaller one for the bedroom. I get good use of both their maximum resolutions thanks to a combination of HD cable and HD OTA (and a cheap pair of rabbit ears) as well as my two TiVo S3's.
Agreed. I actually have 2 HDTV's and about 50 DVD's but I have no intention of upgrading to Blu-Ray for a LONG time. My HDTV's are only 720p resolution, and my upconverting DVD player is good enough for my needs. I probably won't upgrade to Blu-Ray until I first upgrade at least one of my HDTV's to 1080i or 1080p, and I don't expect to do that for a long time. The way I see it, the longer I hold out the less I'll pay for a Blu-Ray player and the more likely they'll have ones that support newer Blu-Ray specs, which means a much better investment when I do finally decide its time.
Unless, of course, Sony wants to replace my HDTV with a 1080p one for me, then I'll be glad to invest in Blu-Ray tomorrow.
This is just making sure various popular OSS projects can run on top of Windows. That's not interoperability. It'll be interoperability when MS helps OSS projects written specifically for Windows port to *nix without the need for WINE or other emulators.
XM/Sirius is a pay service. They offer music, news, talk shows, etc.
AM/FM radio is free. They offer music, news, talk shows, etc.
iPods can be used to listen to music, news (podcasts, etc), talk shows, etc. (also for free)
New emerging technologies like wimax may offer alternative ways of streaming music, news, talk shows, etc.
This is basically what the DoJ ultimately decided. There are enough alternatives for content delivery that a merger of these two wouldn't create a monopoly in the economic sense. True they may be the only company offering services by satellite but they certainly couldn't jack up the prices without customers leaving for perfectly viable alternatives like terrestrial radio, iPods, etc.
It won't become worthless. It'll likely become more valuable. If the merger completes then in the short term you'll likely see content being shared between the two services. Right now the various sports franchises have pitted the two satellite providers against each other for lucrative exclusive deals. You can hear NFL on Sirius only, MLB on XM only, etc. When the merger completes you'll likely be able to hear baseball on Sirius and football on XM. Other exclusive content, like Oprah on XM, Howard Stern on Sirius, etc. will also likely be made on the other service. So the bottom line is that you'll probably have more content available to you.
Eventually you'll probably see receivers that can receive both services, but that will depend a lot on how the companies decide to merge their two technologies. That likely won't happen for years though, and during all that time they have to keep supporting their existing customers.
XM & Sirius asked the justice department for approval over a year ago. Why on earth did it take them so long to approve this? Here are a few other mergers that the DoJ approved in under a year: Exxon/Mobil, AT&T/Bellsouth, Chevron/Texaco, Sprint/Nextel, Whirlpool/Maytag, etc.
Of course a number of these other huge mergers didn't require FCC approval as well. The XM/Sirius merger now as to wait for FCC approval, so it's going to end up being a lot longer before this is all said and done. It absolutely disgusts me that XM/Sirius is taking so much longer than the consolidation of the oil industry, telephone industry, etc. This will end up being the longest approval process in history. What justifies taking so long when mergers involving bigger economic concerns like oil took hardly any time in comparison?
I always accepted Microsoft because early on they had the appearance of being the only option. They release Windows 3.x when there wasn't anything else really like it available for PC's at the time. I never thought their software was spectacular or even innovative. I'd already seen X11 on Solaris, etc. but at that point X11 wasn't an option on PC architecture. Windows was the only alternative. I accepted Word, Excel, etc. because they were by the same company and easy to get a copy of. Hell, I was even a professional Windows software developer for 10+ years but practically from day one I felt their software was bloated and unwieldy.
I think Google has done some very impressive stuff and I do think they've been very innovative. Apps like Google Earth, Google Book Search, etc. have a lot of originality & creativity in them. However I still tend to be a bit wary of them given their apparent desire to index virtually every bit of digital data ever generated. They may claim that they want to "do no evil" but a lot of evil can potentially arise from the ease at which they make all this data available.
Apple has done some innovative stuff like the iPod, iPhone, etc. but I also question their secretive behaviors. I understand their desire to control user experience by tightly controlling both hardware and software development but unless they are extremely careful that can be seen as monopolistic behavior. They're walking a very thin line, and although I use and own Macs & other Apple products I still question how they'll handle their unique position.
But as mentioned above, this wouldn't explain why the republican tally is +1 and the democratic tally is -1. If it was a dumb programmer bug like you mention then both tallies would be off by the same amount, either they'd both be +1 or they'd both be -1.
Just to play the devil's advocate: Could it be because the supposed benefits are outweighed by the known and (currently) uncontrollable abuses (piracy)?
Show me an independent report from a neutral party that shows the level of P2P piracy outweighs legitimate uses and I'd accept your argument. Better yet, show me that these idiots in Washington have read such a report.
I've already shown a couple valid uses for P2P. Here are a few others:
Content delivery networks like Akamai that help keep popular websites responsive
The delivery of software updates in everything from operating systems to games
Peer applications like Groove are built upon a foundation of P2P
Legal music/movie downloads from a growing number of websites
I bet that most people don't realize that by simply visiting popular websites like Google you're relying on P2P to some extent. They may not be using well known products like bittorrent or limewire but the data moving around the back end of search engines, the images you see on websites like Microsofts, and even the videos you watch on a site like youtube, are all distributed in part through P2P systems of some sort. They may be entirely custom built or they may rest on top of a protocol like bittorrent. The bottom line is that there's a lot of data being transferred legally via P2P for a number of purposes. I bet if somebody could come up with a realistic and impartial set of numbers you'd be surprised at how much legitimate P2P traffic there is compared to illegal P2P traffic.
"Hey, X can be used in illegal ways, therefore we should make it illegal!"
Let's see, that can apply to everything from raw sugar to automobiles. Quick, file legislation to make them all illegal!
Compromised Windows systems are being used to flood the internet with spam in violation of various state and federal laws. Outlaw Windows!
Why cant these congresscritters get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P, even in a university environment. A university in Holland is using bittorrent to manage 6500 workstations and it's saving them time and money. The university I work at uses SystemImager on its high performance research cluster to manage the software on all the compute nodes. SystemImager supports the use of bittorrent as a transport mechanism. If these aren't legal, legitimate, and highly useful implementations of bittorrent then I don't know what is. These are just two working examples of P2P being used in university environments in responsible ways, but I'm sure those stuffed shirts in Washington could care less.
But it would still be possible to differentiate between text ads and chat coming from another IM user. The chat protocol has to identify the user in order to display the chat properly. AOL would have to forge the text ad to look like it comes from another user you're currently chatting with to ensure you couldn't programatically filter them out. And I'm sure end users would love to see somebody they're chatting with suddenly suggest that they visit www.mcafee.com to download an antivirus scanner. NOBODY would use an IM system where ads are forged directly into conversations.
True, but then the application simply doesn't have to support this. There are plenty of IM clients out there already supporting AOL by reverse-engineering the protocols. And there are plenty of other IM services out there that also don't force advertising on the Pidgins, Adiums, etc. of the world. If AOL forced this then my guess is they'd just lose customers. I've got the same account name on AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and GMail. I'll gladly give up any of them in a heartbeat if my Adium IM client starts popping up unsolicited advertisements for any of them.
Besides, keep in mind that Pidgin, Adium, etc. are all open source. So even if these projects do break down and add in advertising support for AOL or any of these others, all it takes is somebody to download the source code, strip out the code that displays the ads, then rebuild it. I'm a former professional software developer and I'd gladly do that, even if just for myself and family/friends. And if necessary I'd simply make the client respond as if an advertisement was displayed so AOL is happy without it actually displaying the ad. Again, nothing AOL could do about that. They'd have absolutely no way of knowing if I actually DID view the ad or if the client just reported back to AOL that I did without my actually viewing it. It's a no-win situation for AOL since the clients are open source.
They can't force a client to display ads. They can request it, and a client can even pretend to do so, but there's no way they can force a third party to display ads they don't want to.
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Sounds like the judge was completely clueless about the technologies in this case. I'm willing to be this will be appealed shortly, and the chances of it being overturned are probably pretty good.
SCO ain't dead yet. They've proven time and again that no tactic is too outrageous to let this thing drag on as long as they possibly can. If anybody can find a way to postpone the inevitable even further it's the SCOundrels.
The very fact that there is load balancing means that every server is likely to have active connections going through it. If you currently have connections going through a specific server, you don't want to drop those connections in order to reboot that particular machine. This allows updates to a live machine.
...) so that if a hardware failure occurs the remaining hardware can keep the service up. Single points of failure are avoided like the plague in datacenters that require 100% uptime. Part of that is to deal with hardware failures but part is also to provide an ability to perform software/firmware upgrades when necessary. Once again, you migrate all traffic off the system you're upgrading then apply the upgrades offline. Upgrading a kernel, especially, in an online environment, is something virtually any sysadmin would want to avoid if at all possible.
If you have a load balanced environment then you have the ability to redirect new connections away from a given server. Then it's just a matter of waiting for the active connections to terminate before the machine ends up in an idle state where you can safely apply patches offline. I've worked in a number of telephony environments and this was always the way we would patch systems. Stop accepting new connections, wait for existing ones to end, then perform the patch, reboot, verify, and start accepting connections again.
Second, this is telephony, meaning it is the infrastructure on which the internet is based. There's no dns tricks or tcp/ip you can use to send people to a different "server" if that server is the switch connected to your fiber backbone. Basically, there are points in the infrastructure where there are by necessity a single chokepoint.
Any mission critical hardware, switches, routers, servers, etc. should be set up in redundant pairs (or triplets,
Redundancy is key, and any commercial datacenter will offer it all the way from their connections to the outside world to the connections they provide their customers. Every datacenter used by every company I ever worked for (about 10) offered redundant power and redundant network drops (using HSRP, VRRP, etc) for our equipment. If the datacenter needed to upgrade a router they'd move all traffic off one router so they could upgrade and test it, then move traffic off the other and repeat the process. Similarly if we needed to upgrade our firewalls, switches, etc. we'd fail over to the second redundant device first. In some cases we had bonded interfaces right on the end servers so as long as one path remained active we could power down an entire switch, router, firewall, etc. In other cases we relied on load balancing across servers that were alternately connected to one or another switch.
I have a Macbook Pro and decided to get Undercover for it. It's easy to set up and doesn't require a subscription, unlike some of the other programs out there. I'd read a bit about it before getting it, and the thing that really helped me in the end were the success stories that they have posted on their website. The fact that it makes use of the MacBook's built-in video camera to snap pictures of whoever is using it really impressed me.
Well "Microsoft", "Encarta", and "MSN" are all examples of registered trademarks of "Microsoft Corporation", so a trademarked domain would be msn.com, for example. The domain "foo.msn.com" doesn't exist but it sounds like it will resolve if you're on one of these ISP's. If you try to go to http://foo.msn.com/ on one of them then you'll end up with an advertising page of their own making rather than a simple "Firefox can't find the server at foo.msn.com" style of error from your web browser.
I've already pretty much decided to never use Windows again once I can no longer run XP on the two systems I have it installed on at home. I use a Mac at work to manage a number of linux & solaris systems. Nobody in my department uses Windows. I also know more family members & friends who are perfectly happy with Windows XP and have no desire whatsoever to upgrade to Vista. They're also perfectly happy with the versions of Office, etc. that they currently have. If MS really tries to force people to switch to a rental model for their software I can only see it alienating more of their customers and convincing them to look to Macs & linux systems a a cost-effective replacement.
Slashdot reposts a story found on Gizmodo that Gizmodo found on Digg that was first seen on reddit that...
Yeah, but will Microsoft continue to license Windows XP, 2000, etc. so that customers can run those in Windows 7 VMs? They've already stated an intention to stop supporting XP. So what if you have an application that only runs properly on Windows 2000? If they can't install and activate Win2K as a VM then the whole VM issue is moot. They won't be able to run their older applications any more.
Your company was run by idiots.
No arguments there.
achieving backward compatibility != keeping legacy code
That depends entirely on the software. Ours was a high level client/server programming language. It was an English-like language, along the lines of BASIC. Since there were no statement separators (like semicolons in C, java, etc) it meant the language parser (built via YACC) had to be extended significantly. YACC is, by default, a look-ahead 1 parser. Thanks to our language not using statement separators the grammar was eventually extended to the point (thanks to the addition of new features) where it eventually had to look ahead 7 tokens. Trying to improve on that while maintaining backward compatibility would have required maintaining all that legacy code in the modified YACC parser, etc.
The application also saved itself by basically dumping the entire contents of the running applications memory to a disk image. So to load/run an application you just read the entire image into memory and started executing it. In order to maintain binary compatibility with earlier versions of the product you had to maintain all the features that existed in earlier versions of the product since any binary image that got loaded could make use of those older features. Again, it effectively required a reliance on legacy code. If the legacy code was modified/replaced then it would have required customers to likely modify their code and recompile, which is exactly what the decision makers wanted to avoid.
If anything, legacy code will be Microsofts downfall (as TFA stated). I saw this happen firsthand for a company I worked for over a decade ago. They had a pretty impressive application and a long list of Fortune 500 corporations as customers. Even IBM (we're talking back before the Windows 3.x days) was basically giving the company a few million dollars a year for the privilege of reselling the software themselves. Well rather than build new versions of the application from the ground up, or even introducing potential incompatibilities between major releases, the powers that be insisted on full backward compatibility.
Over time more competitors showed up in the marketplace, and as the economy shifted IBM stopped tossing money in our laps. Our engineers (of which I was one) spent most of their time trying to figure out how to shoehorn new features and entire new parallel products on top of the existing legacy codebase. The inevitable result was that we struggled while our competitors came out with newer, more modern & more powerful software. I eventually left that company to go to a startup where 7 others from this company had already gone to. That company was acquired a couple years later, and the application pretty much no longer exists.
If the engineers, who had requested the ability to create a new product from the ground up, had been listened to, then perhaps that company would still be around and competitive. It was mainly because of the business decisions to retain backward compatibility, like MS has done with Windows, that they eventually disappeared. As long as MS maintains their own demand for backward compatibility they'll be waging a slow & prolonged war that they have no chance of winning.
You're penny wise and pound foolish. 720p is sufficient for any screen up to 50" - 60" in a normal sized living room. 1080p is ideal for screens 60" to 100".
Thanks for justifying my argument against investing in Blu-Ray. My upconverting DVD player looks fine on my 720p screen. Why should I spend a ton of money to invest in a Blu-Ray DVD player and Blu-Ray disks which would look much better on 1080 when my existing setup looks fine on 720p? Besides, I actually don't watch a ton of DVD's. Most of what I watch is HD television content. Maybe if I watched DVD's on a daily basis I might consider it, but even then the cost is still a big issue.
Why would you waste all the money on 2 HDTV screens, and not make use of its maximum resolution?
One larger one for the living room, one smaller one for the bedroom. I get good use of both their maximum resolutions thanks to a combination of HD cable and HD OTA (and a cheap pair of rabbit ears) as well as my two TiVo S3's.
Agreed. I actually have 2 HDTV's and about 50 DVD's but I have no intention of upgrading to Blu-Ray for a LONG time. My HDTV's are only 720p resolution, and my upconverting DVD player is good enough for my needs. I probably won't upgrade to Blu-Ray until I first upgrade at least one of my HDTV's to 1080i or 1080p, and I don't expect to do that for a long time. The way I see it, the longer I hold out the less I'll pay for a Blu-Ray player and the more likely they'll have ones that support newer Blu-Ray specs, which means a much better investment when I do finally decide its time.
Unless, of course, Sony wants to replace my HDTV with a 1080p one for me, then I'll be glad to invest in Blu-Ray tomorrow.
This is just making sure various popular OSS projects can run on top of Windows. That's not interoperability. It'll be interoperability when MS helps OSS projects written specifically for Windows port to *nix without the need for WINE or other emulators.
You're missing a lot.
XM/Sirius is a pay service. They offer music, news, talk shows, etc.
AM/FM radio is free. They offer music, news, talk shows, etc.
iPods can be used to listen to music, news (podcasts, etc), talk shows, etc. (also for free)
New emerging technologies like wimax may offer alternative ways of streaming music, news, talk shows, etc.
This is basically what the DoJ ultimately decided. There are enough alternatives for content delivery that a merger of these two wouldn't create a monopoly in the economic sense. True they may be the only company offering services by satellite but they certainly couldn't jack up the prices without customers leaving for perfectly viable alternatives like terrestrial radio, iPods, etc.
It won't become worthless. It'll likely become more valuable. If the merger completes then in the short term you'll likely see content being shared between the two services. Right now the various sports franchises have pitted the two satellite providers against each other for lucrative exclusive deals. You can hear NFL on Sirius only, MLB on XM only, etc. When the merger completes you'll likely be able to hear baseball on Sirius and football on XM. Other exclusive content, like Oprah on XM, Howard Stern on Sirius, etc. will also likely be made on the other service. So the bottom line is that you'll probably have more content available to you.
Eventually you'll probably see receivers that can receive both services, but that will depend a lot on how the companies decide to merge their two technologies. That likely won't happen for years though, and during all that time they have to keep supporting their existing customers.
XM & Sirius asked the justice department for approval over a year ago. Why on earth did it take them so long to approve this? Here are a few other mergers that the DoJ approved in under a year: Exxon/Mobil, AT&T/Bellsouth, Chevron/Texaco, Sprint/Nextel, Whirlpool/Maytag, etc.
Of course a number of these other huge mergers didn't require FCC approval as well. The XM/Sirius merger now as to wait for FCC approval, so it's going to end up being a lot longer before this is all said and done. It absolutely disgusts me that XM/Sirius is taking so much longer than the consolidation of the oil industry, telephone industry, etc. This will end up being the longest approval process in history. What justifies taking so long when mergers involving bigger economic concerns like oil took hardly any time in comparison?
I always accepted Microsoft because early on they had the appearance of being the only option. They release Windows 3.x when there wasn't anything else really like it available for PC's at the time. I never thought their software was spectacular or even innovative. I'd already seen X11 on Solaris, etc. but at that point X11 wasn't an option on PC architecture. Windows was the only alternative. I accepted Word, Excel, etc. because they were by the same company and easy to get a copy of. Hell, I was even a professional Windows software developer for 10+ years but practically from day one I felt their software was bloated and unwieldy.
I think Google has done some very impressive stuff and I do think they've been very innovative. Apps like Google Earth, Google Book Search, etc. have a lot of originality & creativity in them. However I still tend to be a bit wary of them given their apparent desire to index virtually every bit of digital data ever generated. They may claim that they want to "do no evil" but a lot of evil can potentially arise from the ease at which they make all this data available.
Apple has done some innovative stuff like the iPod, iPhone, etc. but I also question their secretive behaviors. I understand their desire to control user experience by tightly controlling both hardware and software development but unless they are extremely careful that can be seen as monopolistic behavior. They're walking a very thin line, and although I use and own Macs & other Apple products I still question how they'll handle their unique position.
But as mentioned above, this wouldn't explain why the republican tally is +1 and the democratic tally is -1. If it was a dumb programmer bug like you mention then both tallies would be off by the same amount, either they'd both be +1 or they'd both be -1.
It's called "political appointee job security"
... that there's a special place in hell for patent trolls.
Show me an independent report from a neutral party that shows the level of P2P piracy outweighs legitimate uses and I'd accept your argument. Better yet, show me that these idiots in Washington have read such a report.
I've already shown a couple valid uses for P2P. Here are a few others:
I bet that most people don't realize that by simply visiting popular websites like Google you're relying on P2P to some extent. They may not be using well known products like bittorrent or limewire but the data moving around the back end of search engines, the images you see on websites like Microsofts, and even the videos you watch on a site like youtube, are all distributed in part through P2P systems of some sort. They may be entirely custom built or they may rest on top of a protocol like bittorrent. The bottom line is that there's a lot of data being transferred legally via P2P for a number of purposes. I bet if somebody could come up with a realistic and impartial set of numbers you'd be surprised at how much legitimate P2P traffic there is compared to illegal P2P traffic.
"Hey, X can be used in illegal ways, therefore we should make it illegal!"
Let's see, that can apply to everything from raw sugar to automobiles. Quick, file legislation to make them all illegal!
Compromised Windows systems are being used to flood the internet with spam in violation of various state and federal laws. Outlaw Windows!
Why cant these congresscritters get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P, even in a university environment. A university in Holland is using bittorrent to manage 6500 workstations and it's saving them time and money. The university I work at uses SystemImager on its high performance research cluster to manage the software on all the compute nodes. SystemImager supports the use of bittorrent as a transport mechanism. If these aren't legal, legitimate, and highly useful implementations of bittorrent then I don't know what is. These are just two working examples of P2P being used in university environments in responsible ways, but I'm sure those stuffed shirts in Washington could care less.
But it would still be possible to differentiate between text ads and chat coming from another IM user. The chat protocol has to identify the user in order to display the chat properly. AOL would have to forge the text ad to look like it comes from another user you're currently chatting with to ensure you couldn't programatically filter them out. And I'm sure end users would love to see somebody they're chatting with suddenly suggest that they visit www.mcafee.com to download an antivirus scanner. NOBODY would use an IM system where ads are forged directly into conversations.
True, but then the application simply doesn't have to support this. There are plenty of IM clients out there already supporting AOL by reverse-engineering the protocols. And there are plenty of other IM services out there that also don't force advertising on the Pidgins, Adiums, etc. of the world. If AOL forced this then my guess is they'd just lose customers. I've got the same account name on AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and GMail. I'll gladly give up any of them in a heartbeat if my Adium IM client starts popping up unsolicited advertisements for any of them.
Besides, keep in mind that Pidgin, Adium, etc. are all open source. So even if these projects do break down and add in advertising support for AOL or any of these others, all it takes is somebody to download the source code, strip out the code that displays the ads, then rebuild it. I'm a former professional software developer and I'd gladly do that, even if just for myself and family/friends. And if necessary I'd simply make the client respond as if an advertisement was displayed so AOL is happy without it actually displaying the ad. Again, nothing AOL could do about that. They'd have absolutely no way of knowing if I actually DID view the ad or if the client just reported back to AOL that I did without my actually viewing it. It's a no-win situation for AOL since the clients are open source.
They can't force a client to display ads. They can request it, and a client can even pretend to do so, but there's no way they can force a third party to display ads they don't want to.