It would be good if someone somewhere would set up a legal defense fund for these folks, one that you and I and other "little" Linux users could easily contribute to.
Linus and Stallman have made my a lot easier, it certainly is worth a click and a donation to make theirs go just a bit smoother.
Microsoft certainly innovate, they were the ONLY software company who saw the possibilities of Apple's MacIntosh OS and consequently the only company other than Apple who wrote software for the system. Apple would have died without Microsoft's support.
In 1986 when I first got a Mac Plus, there was already a good set of software available for it and not all of it was Microsoft.
Yes, Claris was owned by Apple, but in it's day, it had a good set of applications for the Mac. Lotus, Adobe, and others were releasing software for the Mac at that point in time.
While your point is well taken, it is incorrect to say that there was no other 3rd party software being developed for the Mac than that which came from Microsoft. Further, what drove the Mac's success was it WYSIWYG in the DP sector, not the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Microsoft sold none of that (DP) during the time frame of the early Mac. Instead, it was Aldus with their Pagemaker product.
As for Apple not being in business today were it not for Microsoft, my take is that it is in business despite Microsoft, and that their drop from 85% of the PC market (prior to the PC) to the 1-2% it "enjoys" today is largely due to it's own arrogance and business incompetence. When the IBM PC came out it was the PC, not the Apple II that had a lack of software. Apple failed to compete effectively and thus the PC became what it is today. And for that, I blame Steve Jobs, who IMHO is both the wunderkind and worst enemy that Apple has. Had they had a more pragmatic head of theirt company, who knows, they may have retained far more of their business...
I imagine this is what Stallman wanted, a chance to prove the GPL in court. And involvement in the case may give him legal room to see 'evidence' without signing non-disclosures.
Maybe so, but in this round, Stallman is going to be grilled by lawyers. He won't really get to ask any questions of his own. IBM's lawyers will do that for him but likely as not he will not be there.
At some point, however, this whole case will be public. Our dear friend RMS will likely be in the front row of seeing things as they come out.
Obviously, Microsoft can only comprehend companies rather than organizations. If "free software is dead" is true, why can you 1) still download it 2) still develop it and 3) have an eager community still willing to contribute?
Last time I checked, Debian is still "in business" (so to speak) and is in fact one of the more vital and robust Linux distributions.
Add to that, FreeBSD is more than just around, it is an alternative that some choose to use and many that do proclaim as superior.
And that's just a few. There are others, but I have work to do. Fill in your own blanks, that's why there's Google.
Folks need to remember that the easiest way to tell Microsoft is lying is the simple fact that they are talking.
It seems to me that film critics hate almost everything...everything but films about someone self-loathing that is. I guess everyone wants to see their story on the big screen and when a critic gets to watch a self-loather movie, well, they must shout out silently "Hey man! That's ME!"
First of all, you have to understand that the first job of a critic is to, well, criticize. They are required (or so it seems) by their job description to go and loathe everything that they see and then lambast it in print. If they like most everything that they saw, they must lose some cahe' with the Critic's Union, if there is such a thing. At the very least, they don't get special treatment down at the coffee-house where everyone wears black, drinks back cofee while smoking stinky Turkish cigarettes and whine to each other that "we know better but no one will listen!"
That when they're not coming up with those cute little quips like "A must see!" "The best film of the year!" or the movie posters and TV ads.
Take their opinions into guidance if you will, but you yourself are the best film critic you know. After all, do you load into the car and drive down to the Multi-Giga-Plex to see a great piece of visual literature or do you go to see a good story and have a good time? When you walk out of Matrix Revolutions or any other film, you'll always say to yourself "well that was great" or "dag -- that sucked" and there you go...the only review that matters.
ps.: If you go to Revolutions to see "Jane Eyre" you're going to be disappointed. If you go to see some pretty nifty fight scenes, some hot chicks dressed in latex and leather and some pretty nifty computer animations all wrapped around a fairly decent story, your going to have a good time. But your mileage may vary.
Groupwise really hasn' t done much in the marketplace and most admins I've ever dealt with were thrilled to move from Groupwise (either to Exchange or SendMail).
I bet their "thrill" was gon when they encountered the first of many viruses that they had to / will deal with on Exchange.
Groupwise is not glamorous, but neither is ELM, or Pine. But all three are safe from the "malware o' the day" that those of us who have been forced to admin Exchange boxes do.
It has become fashionable to label everyone who has an extreme point of view on nearly any subject a "terrorist."
Make no mistake about this -- Linux advocates are not terrorists. They are zealots. By definition, a zealot is a fanatically committed person. That could describe any number of people -- Cubs fans, religious folks, car enthusiasts, bikers, and yeah, Linux fans. Do any of the aforementioned folks necessarily blow up people, depriving them of life or liberty in order to propogate their aims? No. Therefore, they are not terrorists, they are zealots.
It bears saying that it is extremely provocative to label someone a 'terrorist' and the term is akin to calling someone a Jew in 1930's Germany, or a Communist in 1950's America. In the case of Linux "terrosits" the idea is specious and slanderous on it's face: the writer is imply because some people go over the top and do things that embarass a larger group that they are the equivilant of murderers.
"It is on this principle that the government confesses error in this case," Cheng [the prosecutor] said.
That's all well and good, but how is this going to help this guy get his life back?
Are they going to renumerate his legal fees?
His lost wages?
His lost reputation?
Undoubtedly no.
The guy is ruined from a financial standpoint, unless of course he was a rich man to begin with. He enters an incredibly tight job market in the IT industry with a raltively ruined resume thanks to overzealous prosecution, and a record as a felon. Good luck finding a job -- given the way HR departments work, he wouldn't get past their "due diligence" background check.
"You can dress a pig up in a miniskirt and high heels but would you want to take it to the dance on Saturday night?"
In other words, same organization, same (bad) methodology, same stupid patents that not only stifle innovation, they also tie up the court system having to prove them wrong.
It will take a complete overhaul of USPTO to straighten this out. Too many patents with years of obvious prior art have been and will be granted.
What's next? Microsoft patenting their TCP/IP stack?
I for one find it ironic that someone can detect and possibly decode my WiFi signal from roughly 70 miles (per the new world WiFi record) but I can't get a useable signal on my laptop three rooms away from the WAP.
Baird was the inventor of mechanical scanning television.
Q: How many of those are in use today?
A: About 1x10^e-120 (okay, so it's a guess)
Philo Farnsworth invented the electronic scanning system that you watch today.
Vladimir Zworykin, who is often cited as the "inventor" of television said after his 1930 visit to Farnsworth lab that "I wish I might have invented it."
Of course, Zworkin was in the employ of David Sarnoff of RCA. (as an aside: if you think that Microsoft is an anti-competitive monopoly, you should check out "Radio" of the 1920s. They had a portfolio of literally hundreds of patents that effectively denied entry in the radio marketplace unless you went first to them and paid licensing fees. And if Radio did not like you or wanted to own you, no license and no business for you.)
Anyways, Sarnoff wanted RCA to dominate television the same way that they dominated radio. RCA tried for many years to discredit Farnworth and his invention, instead saying that Zworkin had invented the iconoscope in 1923. This, history shows us, was clearly a lie. It is a lie as grand as Apple or Microsoft claiming the invention of the graphical user interface for computing. Or that Marconi invented radio. Neither is true.
History does show that on September 27, 1927 Philo T. Farnsowrth demonstrated the first all-electronic television system.
Farnsworth was a brilliant man, and should be given full credit for all that he did.
For more info: http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-who_inve nted_what.html
It's good to hear that a wry voice from the 80's will be back in the Sunday comics. Ever since Bill Watterson quit drawing/writing Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County disappeared, the comics haven't been the same IMO.
Now, if only Watterson would get inspired to further the adventures of Calvin, there would be some ubiquity in the "Intellectual Section" of the daily fishwrap!
"The best anyone could say was that it was mine and that I made it public," Woz said to Briel.
Seems like the Woz is saying that he originally published the specifications of the Apple I, including the ROM code into open source.
One wonders if he could be convinced to put it into the GNU license. Yes, it is ancient-ancient code that would be good for only esoteric or educational purposes, but it would also make a statement about obsoleted programs that have little or no commercial value being used to teach by example. Something Microsoft and other huge commercial code vendors should take a lesson from.
Heinlein is one of those authors who made science fiction. His chauvinism
occasionally sets my teeth on edge, and his later works are preachy, but these
are small blemishes on the body of work of a man, who above everything else,
knew how to tell a story.
Carolyn, your comments are somewhat valid to Heinlein the writer, but Heinlein
the man was somewhat different:
July 20, 1969, is probably the most important day in human history - the
day men from Earth first set foot on another planet, Earth's moon. Robert Heinlein
was a guest commentator (along with Arthur C. Clarke) with Walter Cronkite on
this historic occasion. He managed to reduce Cronkite to a state of spluttering
indignation at the suggestion that women should have been included in this mission.
(The text of the out-take is preserved in Leon Stover's monograph for Twayne's
United States Authors series, Robert A. Heinlein.
I wonder if it has ocurred to anyone over at the RIAA that a large part of the fact that their client's sales have dropped is the fact that the products they push the hardest, well, sucks.
You may your taste in music, and I have mine, but what is clear is that the pablum of the Britney's, Madonnas, Christinas, MAriahs, Justins and the like are CD's with just one or two songs worth buying and the rest of the CD is not really worth listening to -- not even by their fans. So why waste $18.99 or $12.99 on music you just don't like?
Most people learn about new music from either the radio or MTV, and to a degree, from what their friends listen to. Go to any typical American city and you'll hear the same music. In the same order. By the same artists. Over and over and over. I guess that's because two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, pretty much own nearly all of the radio stations in the land of the free. And they make the record companies pay "promotional fees" to add a song. No payola, no new music.
So, instead of hearing a great song by some hitherto great new artist, something that makes you want to go to the record store and get that CD right *now* you never even know about it. And nobody is going to take a $20 buck chance on music they have never even heard.
The system that the RIAA and the radio cartel created is the root of their own problem and instead of blaming the kids that can't afford to spend $100 on five CD's, they ought to look at how they promote and sell the music that they record. Then, if they increase the quality and breadth of their offerings, you might see album/CD/DVD sales go back up.
SCO is going to say that they inadvertantly released their code into the Linux kernel.
And that I, the end user, am responsible for it. That I am committing reprehensible acts of piracy because of it. That I am starving their poor famine-ridden children by using the code and denying them their just lucre.
For something they did?
Why, I wonder, does SCO not sue itself for this tragedy? After all, they did it to themselves.
To my mind, their assertations are becoming more ridiculous by the minute. Next, I suppose, they will claim to have invented binary numbering, and that any computer using "1" and "0" in it's basal operations violates their copyright.
Who do they think they are fooling -- besides themselves?
After all, they already know. The government has already "read" your e-mail using various and sundry tools like Carnivore, etc., microseconds after the bitsream leaves your ethernet card.
Besides, only if you are a CEO, a major contributor or both does the President (any president) care what you think. If you're not, you're just hanging chad, pal.
After umpteen times staying up all night trying to coax various NT Servers back to life, applying patches and praying and generally overall poor performance realtive to the platform upon which it ran, I am hardly sad to see NT4 go. To me, it is satisfying like watching Ahhh-nald kill off the bad-guy in a Terminator movie. "Hasta la vista, mother @#$%3er!
In reality, it is too late. It was with pleasure I watched NT4 go on my machines whilst under the spell of the Red Hat installer. I've caught up on my sleep now, and viruses? What viruses?
That is a question you may want to ask Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
Currently, I hear he is working with sertain Arab partners to patent the concept of zero. He's familiar already with it, given their extensive profit statements where the number is repeated endlessly.
>> 1) Putting license key schemes in place >> on their OS's
They've done that and do that on a number of retail versions I have seen. Andden (to quote the Chinese Drive-Through lady in "Dude Where's My Car") you just go to your favorite alt. newsgroup and get all the S/N's you could ever want. Guess that's why they went to that Product Activation scheme that was essentially throwing lead balloons at their customers.
>> 2) I imagine the same thing will happen >> with MS Office soon
And it already has too... andden...
It's my firm belief that Microsoft has an unwritten policy of actually relying on piracy to get penetration of their products. For example, how many folks do you know that have slipped a copy of Office into their coat and "upgraded" their home PC from the free version of Works that came with their Dell?
Microsoft could have put a stop on this a long time ago, with real Product Activation instead of 16 (or however many) digit schemes that are about as hard to copy as writing them on a Sticky.
So, if they really DID starting charging the full ride for Office, or whatever, folks would all of a sudden become quite interested in WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice, any Office that was cheaper and effectively typed letters to Grandma. Once they got used to that other software, they'd certainly feel free to suggest it to their IT staff and management as a fine way to save the company money.
More than anything, Microsoft has really hurt itself through it's new licensing plan -- and this with a competitor who offers an initial software cost of zero. That defies market logic -- to raise your prices when faced by a seemingly lower cost competitor. It almost forces the hands of IT engineers (who already face much tighter budgets) to consider open source solutions instead of Microsoft when they need an implementation of, say, an extra file and print server to hold all of the new graphics files generated by the marketing department.
At the end of the day, it is money that makes the corporation go 'round. And, if I can offer my management and users a better solution that costs less money, it is in my absolute best interests to do so.
I think that the BSA (what an appropriate acronym, BTW) must be overlooking Red Hat's piracy rate: that's right, a steady 0.0%. How they acieve that must be relative to their pricing scheme for their software, one must conclude.
While it is admirable that Microsoft is trying to improve their patching system, anyone with any experience whatsoever administering their products will know to wait until the first service pack patches for the new patch intaller are made available. A 1.0 anything from Microsoft is an invitation to re-image the machine in question after it irrevocably locks up and thus requires a rebuild.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be good if someone somewhere would set up a legal defense fund for these folks, one that you and I and other "little" Linux users could easily contribute to.
Linus and Stallman have made my a lot easier, it certainly is worth a click and a donation to make theirs go just a bit smoother.
Microsoft certainly innovate, they were the ONLY software company who saw the possibilities of Apple's MacIntosh OS and consequently the only company other than Apple who wrote software for the system. Apple would have died without Microsoft's support.
In 1986 when I first got a Mac Plus, there was already a good set of software available for it and not all of it was Microsoft.
Yes, Claris was owned by Apple, but in it's day, it had a good set of applications for the Mac. Lotus, Adobe, and others were releasing software for the Mac at that point in time.
While your point is well taken, it is incorrect to say that there was no other 3rd party software being developed for the Mac than that which came from Microsoft. Further, what drove the Mac's success was it WYSIWYG in the DP sector, not the word processing and spreadsheet markets. Microsoft sold none of that (DP) during the time frame of the early Mac. Instead, it was Aldus with their Pagemaker product.
As for Apple not being in business today were it not for Microsoft, my take is that it is in business despite Microsoft, and that their drop from 85% of the PC market (prior to the PC) to the 1-2% it "enjoys" today is largely due to it's own arrogance and business incompetence. When the IBM PC came out it was the PC, not the Apple II that had a lack of software. Apple failed to compete effectively and thus the PC became what it is today. And for that, I blame Steve Jobs, who IMHO is both the wunderkind and worst enemy that Apple has. Had they had a more pragmatic head of theirt company, who knows, they may have retained far more of their business...
I imagine this is what Stallman wanted, a chance to prove the GPL in court. And involvement in the case may give him legal room to see 'evidence' without signing non-disclosures.
Maybe so, but in this round, Stallman is going to be grilled by lawyers. He won't really get to ask any questions of his own. IBM's lawyers will do that for him but likely as not he will not be there.
At some point, however, this whole case will be public. Our dear friend RMS will likely be in the front row of seeing things as they come out.
Obviously, Microsoft can only comprehend companies rather than organizations. If "free software is dead" is true, why can you 1) still download it 2) still develop it and 3) have an eager community still willing to contribute?
Last time I checked, Debian is still "in business" (so to speak) and is in fact one of the more vital and robust Linux distributions.
Add to that, FreeBSD is more than just around, it is an alternative that some choose to use and many that do proclaim as superior.
And that's just a few. There are others, but I have work to do. Fill in your own blanks, that's why there's Google.
Folks need to remember that the easiest way to tell Microsoft is lying is the simple fact that they are talking.
Former registry content will now be distributed across directories into a new file type
.CONF (oops, .CNF in Windows) and the directory will be be c:/ETC ?
Let me guess...
The file type will be
Microsoft innovation...an oxymoron.
It seems to me that film critics hate almost everything...everything but films about someone self-loathing that is. I guess everyone wants to see their story on the big screen and when a critic gets to watch a self-loather movie, well, they must shout out silently "Hey man! That's ME!"
First of all, you have to understand that the first job of a critic is to, well, criticize. They are required (or so it seems) by their job description to go and loathe everything that they see and then lambast it in print. If they like most everything that they saw, they must lose some cahe' with the Critic's Union, if there is such a thing. At the very least, they don't get special treatment down at the coffee-house where everyone wears black, drinks back cofee while smoking stinky Turkish cigarettes and whine to each other that "we know better but no one will listen!"
That when they're not coming up with those cute little quips like "A must see!" "The best film of the year!" or the movie posters and TV ads.
Take their opinions into guidance if you will, but you yourself are the best film critic you know. After all, do you load into the car and drive down to the Multi-Giga-Plex to see a great piece of visual literature or do you go to see a good story and have a good time? When you walk out of Matrix Revolutions or any other film, you'll always say to yourself "well that was great" or "dag -- that sucked" and there you go...the only review that matters.
ps.: If you go to Revolutions to see "Jane Eyre" you're going to be disappointed. If you go to see some pretty nifty fight scenes, some hot chicks dressed in latex and leather and some pretty nifty computer animations all wrapped around a fairly decent story, your going to have a good time. But your mileage may vary.
Groupwise really hasn'
t done much in the marketplace and most admins I've ever dealt with were thrilled to move from Groupwise (either to Exchange or SendMail).
I bet their "thrill" was gon when they encountered the first of many viruses that they had to / will deal with on Exchange.
Groupwise is not glamorous, but neither is ELM, or Pine. But all three are safe from the "malware o' the day" that those of us who have been forced to admin Exchange boxes do.
It has become fashionable to label everyone who has an extreme point of view on nearly any subject a "terrorist."
Make no mistake about this -- Linux advocates are not terrorists. They are zealots. By definition, a zealot is a fanatically committed person. That could describe any number of people -- Cubs fans, religious folks, car enthusiasts, bikers, and yeah, Linux fans. Do any of the aforementioned folks necessarily blow up people, depriving them of life or liberty in order to propogate their aims? No. Therefore, they are not terrorists, they are zealots.
It bears saying that it is extremely provocative to label someone a 'terrorist' and the term is akin to calling someone a Jew in 1930's Germany, or a Communist in 1950's America. In the case of Linux "terrosits" the idea is specious and slanderous on it's face: the writer is imply because some people go over the top and do things that embarass a larger group that they are the equivilant of murderers.
Get real.
"It is on this principle that the government confesses error in this case," Cheng [the prosecutor] said.
That's all well and good, but how is this going to help this guy get his life back?
Are they going to renumerate his legal fees?
His lost wages?
His lost reputation?
Undoubtedly no.
The guy is ruined from a financial standpoint, unless of course he was a rich man to begin with. He enters an incredibly tight job market in the IT industry with a raltively ruined resume thanks to overzealous prosecution, and a record as a felon. Good luck finding a job -- given the way HR departments work, he wouldn't get past their "due diligence" background check.
All for a "mistake."
There's an old saying that applies here:
"You can dress a pig up in a miniskirt and high heels but would you want to take it to the dance on Saturday night?"
In other words, same organization, same (bad) methodology, same stupid patents that not only stifle innovation, they also tie up the court system having to prove them wrong.
It will take a complete overhaul of USPTO to straighten this out. Too many patents with years of obvious prior art have been and will be granted.
What's next? Microsoft patenting their TCP/IP stack?
I for one find it ironic that someone can detect and possibly decode my WiFi signal from roughly 70 miles (per the new world WiFi record) but I can't get a useable signal on my laptop three rooms away from the WAP.
Baird was the inventor of mechanical scanning television.
e nted_what.html
Q: How many of those are in use today?
A: About 1x10^e-120 (okay, so it's a guess)
Philo Farnsworth invented the electronic scanning system that you watch today.
Vladimir Zworykin, who is often cited as the "inventor" of television said after his 1930 visit to Farnsworth lab that "I wish I might have invented it."
Of course, Zworkin was in the employ of David Sarnoff of RCA. (as an aside: if you think that Microsoft is an anti-competitive monopoly, you should check out "Radio" of the 1920s. They had a portfolio of literally hundreds of patents that effectively denied entry in the radio marketplace unless you went first to them and paid licensing fees. And if Radio did not like you or wanted to own you, no license and no business for you.)
Anyways, Sarnoff wanted RCA to dominate television the same way that they dominated radio. RCA tried for many years to discredit Farnworth and his invention, instead saying that Zworkin had invented the iconoscope in 1923. This, history shows us, was clearly a lie. It is a lie as grand as Apple or Microsoft claiming the invention of the graphical user interface for computing. Or that Marconi invented radio. Neither is true.
History does show that on September 27, 1927 Philo T. Farnsowrth demonstrated the first all-electronic television system.
Farnsworth was a brilliant man, and should be given full credit for all that he did.
For more info: http://www.farnovision.com/chronicles/tfc-who_inv
It's good to hear that a wry voice from the 80's will be back in the Sunday comics. Ever since Bill Watterson quit drawing/writing Calvin and Hobbes, and Bloom County disappeared, the comics haven't been the same IMO.
Now, if only Watterson would get inspired to further the adventures of Calvin, there would be some ubiquity in the "Intellectual Section" of the daily fishwrap!
"The best anyone could say was that it was mine and that I made it public," Woz said to Briel.
Seems like the Woz is saying that he originally published the specifications of the Apple I, including the ROM code into open source.
One wonders if he could be convinced to put it into the GNU license. Yes, it is ancient-ancient code that would be good for only esoteric or educational purposes, but it would also make a statement about obsoleted programs that have little or no commercial value being used to teach by example. Something Microsoft and other huge commercial code vendors should take a lesson from.
Heinlein is one of those authors who made science fiction. His chauvinism occasionally sets my teeth on edge, and his later works are preachy, but these are small blemishes on the body of work of a man, who above everything else, knew how to tell a story.
Carolyn, your comments are somewhat valid to Heinlein the writer, but Heinlein the man was somewhat different:
Robert Heinlein Biography
July 20, 1969, is probably the most important day in human history - the day men from Earth first set foot on another planet, Earth's moon. Robert Heinlein was a guest commentator (along with Arthur C. Clarke) with Walter Cronkite on this historic occasion. He managed to reduce Cronkite to a state of spluttering indignation at the suggestion that women should have been included in this mission. (The text of the out-take is preserved in Leon Stover's monograph for Twayne's United States Authors series, Robert A. Heinlein.
Food for thought, anyway.
I wonder if it has ocurred to anyone over at the RIAA that a large part of the fact that their client's sales have dropped is the fact that the products they push the hardest, well, sucks.
You may your taste in music, and I have mine, but what is clear is that the pablum of the Britney's, Madonnas, Christinas, MAriahs, Justins and the like are CD's with just one or two songs worth buying and the rest of the CD is not really worth listening to -- not even by their fans. So why waste $18.99 or $12.99 on music you just don't like?
Most people learn about new music from either the radio or MTV, and to a degree, from what their friends listen to. Go to any typical American city and you'll hear the same music. In the same order. By the same artists. Over and over and over. I guess that's because two companies, Clear Channel and Infinity, pretty much own nearly all of the radio stations in the land of the free. And they make the record companies pay "promotional fees" to add a song. No payola, no new music.
So, instead of hearing a great song by some hitherto great new artist, something that makes you want to go to the record store and get that CD right *now* you never even know about it. And nobody is going to take a $20 buck chance on music they have never even heard.
The system that the RIAA and the radio cartel created is the root of their own problem and instead of blaming the kids that can't afford to spend $100 on five CD's, they ought to look at how they promote and sell the music that they record. Then, if they increase the quality and breadth of their offerings, you might see album/CD/DVD sales go back up.
SCO is going to say that they inadvertantly released their code into the Linux kernel.
And that I, the end user, am responsible for it. That I am committing reprehensible acts of piracy because of it. That I am starving their poor famine-ridden children by using the code and denying them their just lucre.
For something they did?
Why, I wonder, does SCO not sue itself for this tragedy? After all, they did it to themselves.
To my mind, their assertations are becoming more ridiculous by the minute. Next, I suppose, they will claim to have invented binary numbering, and that any computer using "1" and "0" in it's basal operations violates their copyright.
Who do they think they are fooling -- besides themselves?
I did some Googling and found this guy has done some math:m .vs.dig ital.1.html
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/fil
Example:
Fujichrome Velvia has an lpm1.6 = 80 lpm. Equation 1 gives 10 megapixels for intensity detail, but
16 Megapixels is not that far away from the consumer market.
Me, I'll stick with my view camera. You'd need a few gigapixels to even approach an 8X10 contact print.
"With Us" and "Against Us" is a redundancy.
After all, they already know. The government has already "read" your e-mail using various and sundry tools like Carnivore, etc., microseconds after the bitsream leaves your ethernet card.
Besides, only if you are a CEO, a major contributor or both does the President (any president) care what you think. If you're not, you're just hanging chad, pal.
After umpteen times staying up all night trying to coax various NT Servers back to life, applying patches and praying and generally overall poor performance realtive to the platform upon which it ran, I am hardly sad to see NT4 go. To me, it is satisfying like watching Ahhh-nald kill off the bad-guy in a Terminator movie. "Hasta la vista, mother @#$%3er!
In reality, it is too late. It was with pleasure I watched NT4 go on my machines whilst under the spell of the Red Hat installer. I've caught up on my sleep now, and viruses? What viruses?
>how can a person own an idea?
That is a question you may want to ask Jeff Bezos of Amazon.
Currently, I hear he is working with sertain Arab partners to patent the concept of zero. He's familiar already with it, given their extensive profit statements where the number is repeated endlessly.
>> 1) Putting license key schemes in place
... andden ...
>> on their OS's
They've done that and do that on a number of retail versions I have seen. Andden (to quote the Chinese Drive-Through lady in "Dude Where's My Car") you just go to your favorite alt. newsgroup and get all the S/N's you could ever want. Guess that's why they went to that Product Activation scheme that was essentially throwing lead balloons at their customers.
>> 2) I imagine the same thing will happen
>> with MS Office soon
And it already has too
It's my firm belief that Microsoft has an unwritten policy of actually relying on piracy to get penetration of their products. For example, how many folks do you know that have slipped a copy of Office into their coat and "upgraded" their home PC from the free version of Works that came with their Dell?
Microsoft could have put a stop on this a long time ago, with real Product Activation instead of 16 (or however many) digit schemes that are about as hard to copy as writing them on a Sticky.
So, if they really DID starting charging the full ride for Office, or whatever, folks would all of a sudden become quite interested in WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice, any Office that was cheaper and effectively typed letters to Grandma. Once they got used to that other software, they'd certainly feel free to suggest it to their IT staff and management as a fine way to save the company money.
More than anything, Microsoft has really hurt itself through it's new licensing plan -- and this with a competitor who offers an initial software cost of zero. That defies market logic -- to raise your prices when faced by a seemingly lower cost competitor. It almost forces the hands of IT engineers (who already face much tighter budgets) to consider open source solutions instead of Microsoft when they need an implementation of, say, an extra file and print server to hold all of the new graphics files generated by the marketing department.
At the end of the day, it is money that makes the corporation go 'round. And, if I can offer my management and users a better solution that costs less money, it is in my absolute best interests to do so.
I think that the BSA (what an appropriate acronym, BTW) must be overlooking Red Hat's piracy rate: that's right, a steady 0.0%. How they acieve that must be relative to their pricing scheme for their software, one must conclude.
While it is admirable that Microsoft is trying to improve their patching system, anyone with any experience whatsoever administering their products will know to wait until the first service pack patches for the new patch intaller are made available. A 1.0 anything from Microsoft is an invitation to re-image the machine in question after it irrevocably locks up and thus requires a rebuild.