How would this work exactly? From what little I know about email, wouldn't this mean that the receiving server (or possibly the sending server) would need to do a check on aol.com servers to determine if that computer is able to send that email?
If the sending server needs to check it, then it doesn't change much (as a spammer will just set up their own server that will ignore that step). Either way, what happens if the server that needs to be checked doesn't support that feature? If you reject it, then you have the case where you need to upgrade all the servers (so use one of the other protocols that have been discussed). If you accept it, then wouldn't a spammer just make it appear to come from a particular computer that doesn't support the checking (for example, one of the hundreds of servers that will be set up for this exact purpose)?
Also, couldn't this check be a new form of DoS? If I wanted to grind a server down, I would send a heap of spam pretending to be from a fictitious user: if I send out a few million emails like that, then wouldn't each one of those have to hit a particular computer to determine if it's valid?
Seems like a lot of extra network communication to me when you could just use another secure protool.
Just in case you're not making a joke (sorry if you are!) the grandparent post was actually about asking the computer that's sending the email the "question": some sort of factoring question most likely.
That's true, but they do have kde.org. What I mean is the only people that are going to be interested in a UserLinux distribution that contains (and supports) KDE are those users that know what KDE is and have made a decision that they won't use UserLinux without it.
Hopefully, of these people most will know that one of two places will tell you if/how/when KDE is supported in UserLinux: the UserLinux site, or the KDE site. When they go to the KDE site, they'll know doubt see a link to more information about UserLinux and KDE, and then get to purchase this KDE-enabled distribution.
I think the easiest way to tell when Microsoft might be close is the day that the MSDN search feature provided by Microsoft is more accurate than using Google with site:msdn.microsoft.com.
If Microsoft can't make a search engine that works on a known set of like data to produce better results than a search engine that uses a "generic" search function, then they have problems.
Hehe, my pleasure. If I didn't try and stay honest, I couldn't make it. I can't remember making this coffee I'm drinking: how could I remember lies I had to tell to cover my arse?:)
Sure, it's silly to assume they have the expertise to support *everything* that's installed, but I think that for normal every day users, the GUI is going to be the most asked about thing. When the target audience is not a niche / expert user group, I do believe that the GUI will be the most supported thing (especially for users coming from Windows).
OK, so the developers say they will support KDE, but that's in theory. We don't know how that would pan out in real life, though. It does make one assumption in that the companies requiring support from the KDE developers can communicate with them, for a start. If KDE is in the install, and the support company would be expected to support it, and they don't have the ability to do that, how could that company get help from the KDE developers if they didn't have a common language they could communicate in?
I guess the whole KDE support issue is a moot point, really. If the KDE team believe that there's a market out there for a "KDE UserLinux" (and I don't doubt there is), and they're willing to support it, then do what LLC is doing: create a KDE distro of it, release it and support it. That way, the smaller support companies don't need to worry about supporting two GUIs, but those people who want it can get it, and who better to get it from than the actual developers? At the same time, the developers will have less smaller support companies hassling them for their own support, too.
OK, so I guess I was wrong on that. I've tried to do a bit more research, and you're right in that I'm wrong, but I still don't agree with what you're saying.
So I can't find a link to the original announcement, but according to this link, I see no mention of his support company. Yes, I know he was talking about LLC in this last message, but I'm talking about at the start.
Firstly, (in the link) there is no real mention of a difficulty in supporting Qt. The difficulty and *expense* lies in supporting two frameworks, and that difficulty and expense is in reference to any support provider, not Perens' in particular: "For developers and support staff, maintaining expertise in both of two GUIs is an expensive proposition" and "The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers".
So, still, no preference for GNOME/GTK over KDE/Qt. The decision at this point is that, to reduce economic strains for any support provider, UserLinux will only have one GUI.
The decision then has to come down to something else, and that decision was made on licensing: Qt is GPL, GTK is LGPL. The LGPL is better for commercial users of UserLinux. As "in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today" it's better in *this* instance to pick the LGPL library. Hence, we make a defacto decision to use GNOME.
Now, in reference to "keeping up with the distro". I look at Mandrake, and see that KDE has been "tweaked" for Mandrake. I assume GNOME is the same. Red Hat, the same. I guess most (if not all) distros don't just take the default desktop and ship with that. They value add, either through extra components, through themes, through different menus, whatever. UL's GNOME support being just one meta-package is to be expected: UserLinux doesn't really exist yet! However, when it does, you can be sure that it'll be tweaked, with a little extra config app over here, and pretty buttons over there.
From what I can remember, when RedHat started using their BlueCurve themes (I think that's the name), of the few positive comments about it most of them were along the lines of "well, you gotta hand it to them: its not easy to get KDE and GNOME to have such similar and consistent themes". That's what I mean when I say keeping up with the distro: apparently theming and everything else is difficult to keep consistent across desktop environments, and any time changes are made to the "distribution" (as in from a top level "marketing" point of view) those changes will now only need to be reflected in one desktop environment.
Finally, fair enough: the KDE developers providing the effort "required" answers the problem that I just discussed, but would they also provide all of the support that the customer facing support providers could not? No, and again we come back to supporting the GUIs at a user level, and attempting to reduce the cost of running *any* support company.
When I read the line about it being too hard to support both, I read that as a distribution management problem. ie. it is too much effort to try and keep track of both projects and keep them up to date for UserLinux, when it didn't really meet the goals of the distribution.
Even if that's not what was intended, we also have to look at the fact that UserLinux seems to almost be like a distribution that's *intended* to be repackaged / redistributed by other companies for their own markets. Here, too, is a problem in that you can reduce market penetration if all of these extra companies are going to have to support both desktops.
So if you make the base as easy as possible to support, you have more companies willing to distribute and support it ie. more market share. Once a company decides to support the "base", let them make up their own minds with regard to their abilities and desires as to what extra support they want to give.
I always assumed that the differentiation was based on geology, as opposed to geography. I just figured that each major continental plate defined each continent.
This whole "it breaks down the software industry" line makes me laugh. In the scheme of things, the concept of proprietary, closed source software is a new idea. Not many (if any) companies sold their software (let alone closed their source) before Microsoft came along.
So along come a few companies that decide to close their software, and create an industry. Yes, there are a lot of companies doing it now, and yes, there is a lot of money involved with it now, but the fact remains that in the overall life of software, paying for something, without code, is really quite foreign.
Just because you weren't around to remember, or have never heard of this, doesn't make it untrue.
In the beginning, software was not an industry. People who claim that open source is killing this industry make me sick, as it was the industrialisation of software by a relatively greedy few that almost killed off open source software to begin with. Now that there's a new wave of people ready to support the original ideas, don't come whinging if you don't like it.
Yeah, except for the fact that Windows Server 2003 has IE installed, right? "Ironic" that an MS product that is running no network services by default is still not as secure as a RedHat Linux box, whilever you're using a browser...
OpenOffice doesn't compress the data before storing it in XML: it generates the various XML (and XML related?) files then compresses them together.
If you change the extension on an OpenOffice document you can uncompress it and read through the XML (ie. the data is definitely not compressed before going into the XML).
That's right, but while ever spammers are able to "teach" new internet users this valuable lesson, they still make money.
Until we can prove to new internet users how simple it is to be fooled, people will make money off that. The idea of these false scams is to prove the point, before having them lose their money.
At the same time, if someone's first experience with spam proves to be a scam, this can have a much bigger effect on them than being scammed on the 5th or 10th time they try to buy from spam.
Once you get to these people before they spend any money, you would hope to see a reduction in the number of people that are buying from spammers. This is the final goal: if you reduce the number of people buying from spam, it will become financially unviable for spammers to use these forms of marketing.
Or, instead of trying to educate the spammers, how about trying to educate the people who respond to spam?
Just do a mass spam once a month, or even once a week, to every email address you can find. Do a few spams: one selling Viagra, a few pushing different types of porn, etc. Cover the basic list of things that get spammed for on a regular basis.
Make the offers believable, and direct the recipient to an appropriately believable web site. Take their credit card details (but don't actually charge the card), do the whole lot. Right at the end, though, put up a page and say "hey, this is a scam site. Lucky we didn't really take your money!"
This will make all of those people that actually buy from these emails actually think twice the next time they go to purchase.
I wouldn't mind getting these "spams" as often as other spam if only for the fact that because the goal of these emails is to educate, there would be no reason to try and break through Bayesian filtering (or any other form). That is to say that they would be very easy for me to filter and never see, and hopefully at the same time we would see a reduction in other types of spam as people are educated about the problems associated with it (as it would drive sales down).
Having said that, I know there is no limit to stupidity, so maybe the market will always be big enough...
A short while later, I am the first to come along and see it. Because I am the first, as soon as I see it and intend to pick it up, it becomes my property, so long as there is no evidence found of the identity of the unfortunate one.
I have a question regarding this "clarity" (BTW, I do realise this is a quote by Nemitz, and not the parent poster). Obviously he wasn't the first person to see it, but what proves that he was the first to intend to pick it up?
Imagine you were in the situation of Nemitz with this $20 note. He sees it and heads towards it to pick it up but at the same time (or seconds before hand, who really knows?) someone else sees it and goes to collect it. Who does the note now belong to?
Is it the first person who intended to pick it up? Nemitz would hope not, because I'm sure someone else said that they owned it before him (and besides, how could anyone prove it either way?).
Is it the first person to pick it up? Again, if this were the case, then that right would go to NASA I would assume.
Is it the first person to say it, and loud enough for everyone to hear? Well, interesting: what if the second person was deaf? Similarly, what if the other person who claims this asteroid doesn't know about Nemitz's claim? Too bad for him? Well let's assume, then that this person who was unable to counter the claim (because they didn't hear about it) made their own claim prior to Nemitz. Too bad that he didn't hear about that claim for him to fight.
You know what? I'm more than happy to concede this point on clarity to Nemitz, once he proves that he was the first person to make that claim.
You might own the DVD, but you don't own the copyright: two very different things. As the parent noted, you own the copyright on your photos, so it would be interesting to see what Ritz can do.
I think it can be argued, though, that the the FDL does not count as an End User Licence Agreement. In fact, it has nothing to do with USE, but instead with DISTRIBUTION.
If 99.9% of the users wouldn't notice it because they don't run Linux, then now we have 99.9% of the users having code installed that is not necessary but for 0.1% of the users.
What are MS thinking? They're not exactly known for their bug-free bug fixes. What if something goes wrong here? Is the risk really worth it to stop such a minority of X-Box owners?
OK, so off topic now, but do you really think that it was Telstra who ripped off the investors in T2 (the sale of the second lot of Telstra shares for those not in AU)?
Do you not think that it could have been at least a little influenced by the fact that the government, the media and almost every second person was screaming from the hilltops that this was a good thing to get in to?
I think this hype would have caused a much larger initial price increase in stock than anything legal that Telstra may have had to say to increase the price...
We don't *want* to use it, we *have* to use it if we want to talk to anyone using MSN
Yeah, and what's the deal with telephone companies? I don't *want* to use a telephone, I *have* to use it if I want to talk to anyone else using one.
The point is that if I want to communicate with someone using their medium of choice, then I have to deal with the costs. MSN doesn't have to do anything like setting up a server-to-server architecture because the problem is not them: it's the person you want to communicate with.
Why don't you just get them to install a Jabber client and have them hook up to your $9.95/month Jabber server? By the way, hope you don't mind when another few million people start using your server, 'cause that's what's happening to MSN right now...
Imagine if the RIAA got involved in writing this tax: then it would get really confusing.
"That's two machines running dual processors each with a clock speed of 450Mhz. Well, because they're faster than what our idea of a 'normal' computer is, you're going to have to triple your tax payments. Oh, you didn't say you were using a 100Mb ethernet... You may as well just give us the keys to your business."
I'd have thought that the cost of operating and maintaining the system was already taxed in the form of income tax for the staff who do it, or some sort of sales tax payable on the service when provided by another company.
Maybe Hotmail will include an option of "integrating" your regular POP email with Hotmail (like, for one of many examples, mail2web.com)? That way, the user doesn't lose their email address, but MS still keep that share of the market (the users just roll over to Hotmail).
You say that like the worm was aimed at government agencies, which is absolutely not true. That would be almost like saying "let's prove how powerful we are by taking out the town hall" just before dropping the bomb on Hiroshima...
OK, so maybe not, but I hope you get my point.
What I found interesting in the article was that now, apparently, only Windows machines are connected to the internet: "Millions of unprotected personal computers remain vulnerable to the worm, which can infect any machine connected to the Internet, experts said Tuesday".
Who are these experts saying this, or is it just another case of a reporter getting it wrong?
Re:Only True Within the Developer Community
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There are always other options. One is in response to "We need this code to keep our business running." If they needed the code to keep the business running, that means that the business is already running and if the code is needed for that to happen, then obviously that code already exists for this to happen. What I'm trying to say is that no-one is taking the code away from them (unlike Microsoft, for example, whose licencing terms revolve around subscriptions these days). At the same time, people do not need to continually update their software to keep their business running. It's not like in four years time, they'll have "run out" of software, and they're going to need to find more. On top of this, most people do not need new software to advance their business. They're just told so, and encouraged by subscription type situations where they are licenced it whilever they pay for it.
On the point about not wanting to spend money on developers, and instead give it to Microsoft. Microsoft makes commodity software: that is, software that is not unique and tailored to a particular company (on the lower end, at least). This means, then, that there are other companies out there with the same software. What's stopping these companies who have similar needs joining to hire developers? The benefits are plenty: software that is what the group actually wants (as opposed to what Microsoft have given you), access to developers for support and fixes when you want them, and finally a cost that is distributed over the group, in which case it would probably be cheaper than what the business was paying to Microsoft in the first place.
In reality, what is more likely to keep the business going? Code from Microsoft, or code from you and other like minded people?
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How would this work exactly? From what little I know about email, wouldn't this mean that the receiving server (or possibly the sending server) would need to do a check on aol.com servers to determine if that computer is able to send that email?
If the sending server needs to check it, then it doesn't change much (as a spammer will just set up their own server that will ignore that step). Either way, what happens if the server that needs to be checked doesn't support that feature? If you reject it, then you have the case where you need to upgrade all the servers (so use one of the other protocols that have been discussed). If you accept it, then wouldn't a spammer just make it appear to come from a particular computer that doesn't support the checking (for example, one of the hundreds of servers that will be set up for this exact purpose)?
Also, couldn't this check be a new form of DoS? If I wanted to grind a server down, I would send a heap of spam pretending to be from a fictitious user: if I send out a few million emails like that, then wouldn't each one of those have to hit a particular computer to determine if it's valid?
Seems like a lot of extra network communication to me when you could just use another secure protool.
Just in case you're not making a joke (sorry if you are!) the grandparent post was actually about asking the computer that's sending the email the "question": some sort of factoring question most likely.
That's true, but they do have kde.org. What I mean is the only people that are going to be interested in a UserLinux distribution that contains (and supports) KDE are those users that know what KDE is and have made a decision that they won't use UserLinux without it.
Hopefully, of these people most will know that one of two places will tell you if/how/when KDE is supported in UserLinux: the UserLinux site, or the KDE site. When they go to the KDE site, they'll know doubt see a link to more information about UserLinux and KDE, and then get to purchase this KDE-enabled distribution.
I think the easiest way to tell when Microsoft might be close is the day that the MSDN search feature provided by Microsoft is more accurate than using Google with site:msdn.microsoft.com .
If Microsoft can't make a search engine that works on a known set of like data to produce better results than a search engine that uses a "generic" search function, then they have problems.
Hehe, my pleasure. If I didn't try and stay honest, I couldn't make it. I can't remember making this coffee I'm drinking: how could I remember lies I had to tell to cover my arse? :)
Sure, it's silly to assume they have the expertise to support *everything* that's installed, but I think that for normal every day users, the GUI is going to be the most asked about thing. When the target audience is not a niche / expert user group, I do believe that the GUI will be the most supported thing (especially for users coming from Windows).
OK, so the developers say they will support KDE, but that's in theory. We don't know how that would pan out in real life, though. It does make one assumption in that the companies requiring support from the KDE developers can communicate with them, for a start. If KDE is in the install, and the support company would be expected to support it, and they don't have the ability to do that, how could that company get help from the KDE developers if they didn't have a common language they could communicate in?
I guess the whole KDE support issue is a moot point, really. If the KDE team believe that there's a market out there for a "KDE UserLinux" (and I don't doubt there is), and they're willing to support it, then do what LLC is doing: create a KDE distro of it, release it and support it. That way, the smaller support companies don't need to worry about supporting two GUIs, but those people who want it can get it, and who better to get it from than the actual developers? At the same time, the developers will have less smaller support companies hassling them for their own support, too.
So I can't find a link to the original announcement, but according to this link, I see no mention of his support company. Yes, I know he was talking about LLC in this last message, but I'm talking about at the start.
Firstly, (in the link) there is no real mention of a difficulty in supporting Qt. The difficulty and *expense* lies in supporting two frameworks, and that difficulty and expense is in reference to any support provider, not Perens' in particular: "For developers and support staff, maintaining expertise in both of two GUIs is an expensive proposition" and "The difference between one and two GUIs may spell profitability or bankruptcy for some of our service providers".
So, still, no preference for GNOME/GTK over KDE/Qt. The decision at this point is that, to reduce economic strains for any support provider, UserLinux will only have one GUI.
The decision then has to come down to something else, and that decision was made on licensing: Qt is GPL, GTK is LGPL. The LGPL is better for commercial users of UserLinux. As "in order to get any Free Software into businesses, our Free system must promote the creation of a large collection of proprietary solutions that do not exist today" it's better in *this* instance to pick the LGPL library. Hence, we make a defacto decision to use GNOME.
Now, in reference to "keeping up with the distro". I look at Mandrake, and see that KDE has been "tweaked" for Mandrake. I assume GNOME is the same. Red Hat, the same. I guess most (if not all) distros don't just take the default desktop and ship with that. They value add, either through extra components, through themes, through different menus, whatever. UL's GNOME support being just one meta-package is to be expected: UserLinux doesn't really exist yet! However, when it does, you can be sure that it'll be tweaked, with a little extra config app over here, and pretty buttons over there.
From what I can remember, when RedHat started using their BlueCurve themes (I think that's the name), of the few positive comments about it most of them were along the lines of "well, you gotta hand it to them: its not easy to get KDE and GNOME to have such similar and consistent themes". That's what I mean when I say keeping up with the distro: apparently theming and everything else is difficult to keep consistent across desktop environments, and any time changes are made to the "distribution" (as in from a top level "marketing" point of view) those changes will now only need to be reflected in one desktop environment.
Finally, fair enough: the KDE developers providing the effort "required" answers the problem that I just discussed, but would they also provide all of the support that the customer facing support providers could not? No, and again we come back to supporting the GUIs at a user level, and attempting to reduce the cost of running *any* support company.
When I read the line about it being too hard to support both, I read that as a distribution management problem. ie. it is too much effort to try and keep track of both projects and keep them up to date for UserLinux, when it didn't really meet the goals of the distribution.
Even if that's not what was intended, we also have to look at the fact that UserLinux seems to almost be like a distribution that's *intended* to be repackaged / redistributed by other companies for their own markets. Here, too, is a problem in that you can reduce market penetration if all of these extra companies are going to have to support both desktops.
So if you make the base as easy as possible to support, you have more companies willing to distribute and support it ie. more market share. Once a company decides to support the "base", let them make up their own minds with regard to their abilities and desires as to what extra support they want to give.
I don't know, but a combination of this list of continents and this list of continental plates would possibly agree...
This whole "it breaks down the software industry" line makes me laugh. In the scheme of things, the concept of proprietary, closed source software is a new idea. Not many (if any) companies sold their software (let alone closed their source) before Microsoft came along.
So along come a few companies that decide to close their software, and create an industry. Yes, there are a lot of companies doing it now, and yes, there is a lot of money involved with it now, but the fact remains that in the overall life of software, paying for something, without code, is really quite foreign.
Just because you weren't around to remember, or have never heard of this, doesn't make it untrue.
In the beginning, software was not an industry. People who claim that open source is killing this industry make me sick, as it was the industrialisation of software by a relatively greedy few that almost killed off open source software to begin with. Now that there's a new wave of people ready to support the original ideas, don't come whinging if you don't like it.
Yeah, except for the fact that Windows Server 2003 has IE installed, right? "Ironic" that an MS product that is running no network services by default is still not as secure as a RedHat Linux box, whilever you're using a browser...
OpenOffice doesn't compress the data before storing it in XML: it generates the various XML (and XML related?) files then compresses them together.
If you change the extension on an OpenOffice document you can uncompress it and read through the XML (ie. the data is definitely not compressed before going into the XML).
That's right, but while ever spammers are able to "teach" new internet users this valuable lesson, they still make money.
Until we can prove to new internet users how simple it is to be fooled, people will make money off that. The idea of these false scams is to prove the point, before having them lose their money.
At the same time, if someone's first experience with spam proves to be a scam, this can have a much bigger effect on them than being scammed on the 5th or 10th time they try to buy from spam.
Once you get to these people before they spend any money, you would hope to see a reduction in the number of people that are buying from spammers. This is the final goal: if you reduce the number of people buying from spam, it will become financially unviable for spammers to use these forms of marketing.
Or, instead of trying to educate the spammers, how about trying to educate the people who respond to spam?
Just do a mass spam once a month, or even once a week, to every email address you can find. Do a few spams: one selling Viagra, a few pushing different types of porn, etc. Cover the basic list of things that get spammed for on a regular basis.
Make the offers believable, and direct the recipient to an appropriately believable web site. Take their credit card details (but don't actually charge the card), do the whole lot. Right at the end, though, put up a page and say "hey, this is a scam site. Lucky we didn't really take your money!"
This will make all of those people that actually buy from these emails actually think twice the next time they go to purchase.
I wouldn't mind getting these "spams" as often as other spam if only for the fact that because the goal of these emails is to educate, there would be no reason to try and break through Bayesian filtering (or any other form). That is to say that they would be very easy for me to filter and never see, and hopefully at the same time we would see a reduction in other types of spam as people are educated about the problems associated with it (as it would drive sales down).
Having said that, I know there is no limit to stupidity, so maybe the market will always be big enough...
I have a question regarding this "clarity" (BTW, I do realise this is a quote by Nemitz, and not the parent poster). Obviously he wasn't the first person to see it, but what proves that he was the first to intend to pick it up?
Imagine you were in the situation of Nemitz with this $20 note. He sees it and heads towards it to pick it up but at the same time (or seconds before hand, who really knows?) someone else sees it and goes to collect it. Who does the note now belong to?
Is it the first person who intended to pick it up? Nemitz would hope not, because I'm sure someone else said that they owned it before him (and besides, how could anyone prove it either way?).
Is it the first person to pick it up? Again, if this were the case, then that right would go to NASA I would assume.
Is it the first person to say it, and loud enough for everyone to hear? Well, interesting: what if the second person was deaf? Similarly, what if the other person who claims this asteroid doesn't know about Nemitz's claim? Too bad for him? Well let's assume, then that this person who was unable to counter the claim (because they didn't hear about it) made their own claim prior to Nemitz. Too bad that he didn't hear about that claim for him to fight.
You know what? I'm more than happy to concede this point on clarity to Nemitz, once he proves that he was the first person to make that claim.
You might own the DVD, but you don't own the copyright: two very different things. As the parent noted, you own the copyright on your photos, so it would be interesting to see what Ritz can do.
I think it can be argued, though, that the the FDL does not count as an End User Licence Agreement. In fact, it has nothing to do with USE, but instead with DISTRIBUTION.
If 99.9% of the users wouldn't notice it because they don't run Linux, then now we have 99.9% of the users having code installed that is not necessary but for 0.1% of the users.
What are MS thinking? They're not exactly known for their bug-free bug fixes. What if something goes wrong here? Is the risk really worth it to stop such a minority of X-Box owners?
OK, so off topic now, but do you really think that it was Telstra who ripped off the investors in T2 (the sale of the second lot of Telstra shares for those not in AU)?
Do you not think that it could have been at least a little influenced by the fact that the government, the media and almost every second person was screaming from the hilltops that this was a good thing to get in to?
I think this hype would have caused a much larger initial price increase in stock than anything legal that Telstra may have had to say to increase the price...
Yeah, and what's the deal with telephone companies? I don't *want* to use a telephone, I *have* to use it if I want to talk to anyone else using one.
The point is that if I want to communicate with someone using their medium of choice, then I have to deal with the costs. MSN doesn't have to do anything like setting up a server-to-server architecture because the problem is not them: it's the person you want to communicate with.
Why don't you just get them to install a Jabber client and have them hook up to your $9.95/month Jabber server? By the way, hope you don't mind when another few million people start using your server, 'cause that's what's happening to MSN right now...
He. I bet those first anniversary "paper" processors would fly. So long as you could bend them and throw like back in school...
Imagine if the RIAA got involved in writing this tax: then it would get really confusing.
"That's two machines running dual processors each with a clock speed of 450Mhz. Well, because they're faster than what our idea of a 'normal' computer is, you're going to have to triple your tax payments. Oh, you didn't say you were using a 100Mb ethernet... You may as well just give us the keys to your business."
I'd have thought that the cost of operating and maintaining the system was already taxed in the form of income tax for the staff who do it, or some sort of sales tax payable on the service when provided by another company.
This sounds amazingly like a double tax...
Maybe Hotmail will include an option of "integrating" your regular POP email with Hotmail (like, for one of many examples, mail2web.com)? That way, the user doesn't lose their email address, but MS still keep that share of the market (the users just roll over to Hotmail).
You say that like the worm was aimed at government agencies, which is absolutely not true. That would be almost like saying "let's prove how powerful we are by taking out the town hall" just before dropping the bomb on Hiroshima...
OK, so maybe not, but I hope you get my point.
What I found interesting in the article was that now, apparently, only Windows machines are connected to the internet: "Millions of unprotected personal computers remain vulnerable to the worm, which can infect any machine connected to the Internet, experts said Tuesday".
Who are these experts saying this, or is it just another case of a reporter getting it wrong?
There are always other options. One is in response to "We need this code to keep our business running." If they needed the code to keep the business running, that means that the business is already running and if the code is needed for that to happen, then obviously that code already exists for this to happen. What I'm trying to say is that no-one is taking the code away from them (unlike Microsoft, for example, whose licencing terms revolve around subscriptions these days). At the same time, people do not need to continually update their software to keep their business running. It's not like in four years time, they'll have "run out" of software, and they're going to need to find more. On top of this, most people do not need new software to advance their business. They're just told so, and encouraged by subscription type situations where they are licenced it whilever they pay for it.
On the point about not wanting to spend money on developers, and instead give it to Microsoft. Microsoft makes commodity software: that is, software that is not unique and tailored to a particular company (on the lower end, at least). This means, then, that there are other companies out there with the same software. What's stopping these companies who have similar needs joining to hire developers? The benefits are plenty: software that is what the group actually wants (as opposed to what Microsoft have given you), access to developers for support and fixes when you want them, and finally a cost that is distributed over the group, in which case it would probably be cheaper than what the business was paying to Microsoft in the first place.
In reality, what is more likely to keep the business going? Code from Microsoft, or code from you and other like minded people?