1. If Intel writes code for Mono that infringes on a patent or Richard Stallman writes the code for CORBA that infringes on a patent, it's still patent infringing.
2. Once Intel notifies you that you're infringing, if you strip that functionality, you're not infringing. If you can't strip it, and have Mono still work, then I suggest to you that CORBA won't work either. In that case, the idea of an open source component model is pretty much dead until the patent expires or is contributed to the public.
3. When you own a patent, you can license it any way you wish. If you choose to write reference code and distribute it under the GPL, that's a very valid option. Intel would be free to change the license, but anyone with their hands on previous, GPL-licensed code would... well, have a license. It really is that simple (IANAL). Could this be a test for the GPL? Sure, and that's a seperate topic, but one I'm not too concerned about. Why? Because it's in the direction that the GPL is strongest. The GPL is weakest in defending the code owner (potentially) not the user.
4. I think she was not so much concerned about Intel contributing code as writing components that were proprietary and patented. Again, if they did this, we should all carefully avoid using Intel's proprietary components. Again, this comes down to sloppy reporting.
The article is very hard to read, as it seems to confuse patents and copyright in ways that are imiscable. I will try to lay out the timeline that I think she's assuming when she says "Intel, having gleefully taken advantage of the MIT licensing on Mono's class libraries, enforces its patents against every entity making use of its modifications, including the Gnome project, effectively shutting it down."
1 Mono exists 2 Gnome adopts Mono (a reach, but ok) 3 Intel writes proprietary (non-MIT-licensed) components for Mono 4 Intel enforces patentson those components and shuts down Gnome!
Ok... so we come to the obvious solution. Assuming that #2 happens (no pun intended), #4 can only happen if #3 is followed by:
3.4 Gnome adopts Intel proprietary components via Mono
Um... *WHY*?!
Of course, if Gnome implements these features using Bonobo and Orbit guess what Intel can do? That's right... enforce their patents!
This is, AFAIKT, junk reporting. If I'm wrong, please show me specifically what timeline you see occuring.
The casual coppier who rips a DVD, converts it to divx:-) and sends it off to the world is not really the concern of the big studios. They want to own the Asian market, and right now it's owned by the bulk-coppiers.
Of course, all a unique ID gets them is to know where the bulk coppier in question got the first DVD. I can see it now: "yup, we're certain that Mr. Smith bought this DVD with a stolen credit card from Amazon and had it shipped to a field in Thailand. We'll get right on it!";-)
No, they don't. They keep their logs without identifiying information (though, I expect them to have a neilsen-like service at some point where you will be able to sign up to share personal information for other sorts of demographic research purposes).
Read the privacy policy. Now's a good time, since they just updated it.
Also, you can opt-out of communicating with TiVo at all (very limiting) or just sending them viewing data (no harm to your viewing or service). Now, the thumbs-up/down I'm not sure about. If you *can* limit this, it would restrict the usefulness of the suggestions feature, if not eliminate it. I'm not sure if you can do that, but it's worth the research if you're uncomfortable sharing your likes and dislikes.
People are right to be concerned an watchful here, but let's not go overboard until TiVo proves themselves unreliable on this point.
Oracle is pretty well know [sic] for being rock solid IF you know what you're doing with it.
I'm pretty well known for being the smartest guy on the planet. And my dog is pretty well known for curing cancer.
Hyperbole asside, I dont' know that Oracle is rock solid. I just know that it's fairly stable bloatware that has good name recognition. I would trust my data to Sybase long before trusting Oracle again.
Consider, for a moment, how many man/years have gone into the devopement of this product,
And Windows, for that matter.
how many other products (rdb, for example) have been integrated in
Bloat is not a good thing.
and overall, how mature of a product it is.
If, by mature, you mean old. Yes, I agree.
Then consider who's running it right now;
Same people who were running IBM mainframes in the late 80s and laughing at all those "idiots" who were trying to move their end-users off the green screen. Nuff said.
who has been running it for eons (folks who can't afford to have their "databases simply go away").
In ever large Oracle environment I've seen Oracle is not relied on to keep data secure. That's what contingency planning and hot spares are for.
You can arm-wave at my experience all you want, but 15,000 high schools were none too pleased when Oracle lost their data and I had to spend 1/2 hour restoring the backup... THREE TIMES IN 2 MONTHS just because a Sun decided to crash, and Oracle doesn't tollerate partially completed transactions on disk.
I finally gave up and moved Oracle off to a NetApp where I could do atomic snapshots every hour, and snap-restore the whole filesystem. It sucks to have to move my fault tolerance out to disk, but it was the only way, since the front-end software we were using only supported Oracle:-(
Then consider what you're comparing it to. Seems a little naive, yes?
Horse hockey. Most Oracle users use it because they are told (by sales types) that, "Oracle stable. Stable good. Open Source unstable. Unstable bad."
There are a small fraction of Oracle users that "cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of." Both of which are not 100% true of Oracle (personal experience(*) here), but true enough that sales droids make good money.
(*)I've had Oracle databases simply go away when the machine crashed (would not even try to recognize the data on disk until a full backup had been restored). Mysql and Postgresql have never done this to me. As for scalability, Oracle is a beast. It costs exponentially more as you get into options like parallel server (which makes it less stable and harder to manage by an order of magnitude), and your hardware costs skyrocket as you have to start buying boxes capable of calculating the last digit of pi. Personally, I don't call that scalable. Call me wierd.
Studios should be asking themselves, "who are your early adopters?"
DVD is too new for your average consumer to want to run out and buy a new player (even if it plays VHS too).
High-end videophiles will know better. Random access media has too much going for it in terms of non-linear content (think "the making of" and trailers) and fast search forward or back. They also know that tape involves more moving parts, and thus more wear.
So, they've got to be targeting the low-end videophiles who know just enough to be dangerous. Oddly enough, the vast majority of THAT market segment are college students or recent graduates, and would be the most likely to be turned off by the new copy-protection features!
Oh yeah, this is going to be lucky to go as far as DIVX (the DVD format, not the video codec) did.;-)
You've got to understand, this isn't "Yahoo". You're just looking at PR Newswire, which is a dumping ground for anyone to send in advertisements (er, "press-releases") for a fee.
This is one of the many tactics that I would *expect* of a competent scammer.
I have not altered a single letter. This is a direct quote from Microsoft.
Please note that only one of the three concerns noted here is related to the GPL. No, Microsoft wants to paint the entire community of Open Source with one brush. GPL=Bad. Source=Bad. OSS=Bad....
They're not only wrong, but their use of OSS (e.g. BSD networking, Mosaic as the foundation for IE) makes it pretty clear that they are being two-faced about this.
Anonymous Coward: "Spider is not BSD you flaming idiot."
From the cited article (the link to which I was responding): "some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix"
If we're to believe this "Microsoft insider", here, then the conclusion is pretty clear. As usual, MS bought their technology (standard business practice for most large corporations), but they were unhappy with it. They re-wrote much of it, but left the parts that it did not make sense to re-invent. Plus, they largely did not touch the utilities.
None of this should be suprising, nor is it a bad thing. In fact, herein lies the power of Open Source. It also shows Microsoft's true colors, however. They brought a TCP/IP stack to market much faster than they otherwise would have because of OSS (not to mention their browser, which is based on Mosaic), but now you hear them decrying such software as dangerous and "viral" (yes, they paint the whole OSS industry with the same brush, regardless of license).
You may find these facts distasteful. I do too. However, that's no reason to complain about my facts without checking your own.
"I won't even swear on a stack of bibles that the "new" TCP/IP now shipping in NT/2000/XP and Windows 95/98/Me is completely free of the old code from Spider. Since I don't work there I don't have access to the source code. Certainly some parts of TCP (the checksum calculation comes to mind) are the same everywhere and once someone has written an optimized version, why rewrite it? And once again, this would be perfectly legitimate for Microsoft to do under the license."
You, an average end-user, are not supposed to know this. You are supposed to do what all software end-users do. Wait for your vendor to add it as a configuration option to some gui menu somewhere.
It's not the XFree86 folks' job to give you wizzy convinient way to do it. It's their "job", if you'll pardon the term, to provide the underlying functionality.
I imagine that by the time the next rev of Gnome is integrated into the next rev of Red Hat, you'll see such an option in the Gnome control panel. If that's too long to wait, then you're not an end-user.
If it only feels too long, then you're SOL;-) Start reading them man-pages!
That's a pretty thin case for moral justification of destroying documents.
What made you think that I was making a "moral justification"?! This is a simple cost/benefit thing. If you keep the old stuff, you'll get screwed in court. The least harmful thing that will happen is you will have to wade through every document your company ever produced every time someone sprained your ankle on your front step. And no-fair trying to do it ahead of time! No one will buy that you didn't miss anything, and they will send in their team to work with your team to do it all over again.
And just because you don't believe that such an act constitutes leaking of financial information does not make it so.
You're turning my example into a straw-man. I stated as an axiom that it was innocent email for the purpose of the example. It was not a matter for debate.
Yes, you could construct an alternate scenario where something seems innocent, but is not. That is an interesting scenario, I suppose, but not related to what I was saying.
Unless your concern is security related (i.e. information theft), there really isn't a valid reason to be destroying documents for most law-abiding corporations.
The simplest reason is that the government should not be able to impose on your average company the massive overhead of saving everything forever, and then dealing with that mound of dung every time someone decides to drag them into court.
Do check with your lawyer, but I think the topic here is more related to internal documentation, not customer records. Obviously when you get into customer records, there are many legal hurdles that would not apply to, for example, internal email.
Not at all. The problem is most obvious with email, so I'll use that as an example.
Let's say that your company has done nothing wrong, but the SEC thinks that you might have been leaking information to financial institutions, in order to affect your stock price.
That's a pretty serious charge, but if you're innocent you have nothing to worry about, right? Well, it turns out that you have an employee that sent a seemingly innocent comment to his friend at such a company, but now, in light of the charges, it could be seen as an indication that such activity did exist and widen the investigation. This costs you in terms of legal expenses, time, credibility, etc.
Having old documents taken out of context can be truly damning, and it's just not worth the expense. Much better to destroy what could be used against you later.
The problem is hard on many levels. For example, many small companies have the, "we have nothing to hide" attitude, because they're not able to think in terms of large business dealings where years of internal email could be dragged out into court and used out of context.
Once you convince a company that document "retention" is valuable, many managers will immediately declare themselves exempt because they feel that they will one day need that email from a vendor thanking them for buying the Widget 10,000 last week.
What I think the industry really needs is some kind of software that manages information archives in a way that lets people specifically call out information that needs to be preserved as annotation. In this way, you could keep all of the headers of all of the mail and all of the filenames of all of the documents on a fileserver, but only keep the annotations (which may include some key points from an original).
I know that I would find this more useful than the usual way that people annotate documents (named folders).
This is what capitolism and a free market are all about.
The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.
Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.
Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).
This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.
This is exactly correct. A great example is the Wurmslayer. This is a weapon that used to be one of the very best in the game. Ignoring the fact that that is no longer the case, let's look at how it came to be valuable in the first place:
It requires a quest which involves killing a fairly tough dragon. So, only people who are high level and can call on a few other high-level folks to help will have the item. Also, the dragon only shows up ("spawns", in the lingo) infrequently, so this further restricts supply.
Ok, so you have very few of these, and they're hotly contested. This jacks up the price and people who do the quest get well rewarded.
After a few months, however you start to get secondary sales. People get better weapons (their "epics") or they decide to stop playing a class that can use such a weapon, so they decide to sell it. This creates a second wave of availability from folks who expect to take a little bit of a loss from what they paid (sellers rarely expect to make more money than what they paid in EQ).
So, now the price bumps down a notch, but it's still fairly high, and rewards those who do the quest well. However, as time goes by and more people do the quest, you begin to reach an equilibrium where there are more folks selling Wurmslayers second-hand than there are doing the quest. Now, the price can drop BELOW the level where it's worth doing the quest at all!
In the end, an item that started selling around 5-10k is now down to about 2k after just 2 years since the expansion's release.
More dramatic drops happen when items first come out in an expansion though. The recent release of Shadow of Luclin created a flood of neat new items people were willing to pay a great deal for until they realized that they were relatively common.
You're 100% correct. MS would have to ask, "who is Red Hat's largest competitor in the desktop arena." I think they're smart enough to figure out the proviso, though.
You're incorrect. AOL has said exactly what you quoted and no more. To assume that that means they did not meet with RHAT to discuss the suit would seem to a) ignore the fact that the Washington Post would not go to print with at least one source and b) be putting words in AOL's mouth that they never uttered.
I think AOL would have been very unwise to issue this suit without their lawyers knowing exactly what Red Hat will say when Microsoft calls them to the stand. And you just know that MS has to call Red Hat to the stand to ask the magic question: "who is Red Hat's largest source of competition?" The answer is Microsoft, and that gives MS room to wiggle in their bogus claim that they can't be a monopoly if they have a billion dollar company for competition.
Of course, we know that this is bogus, but it's hard to fight in court without information, and I suspect that there was a meeting between RHAT and AOL to establish that information.
I have no hard evidence, just convinient facts. However, there is also no evidence (and less convinient facts) to suggest that no such meeting occured.
You're mostly right here. The key factor is that MS had an existing market that it leveraged to kill Netscape. If MS had said, "look, we'll give you full access to the OS, but we're going to give our browser away for free because it's worthless to us, they might have been able to defend that in court. However, what they actually did was to tie the browser into the desktop without allowing NS the same access. *Then* they shipped it "for free" with the OS.
Bundling was the key issue here. MS was using its monopoly in another market to squash a potential rival in this new market. This is the very heart of the problem that anti-trust laws attempt to address.
First shot?! You must be joking. The Corporate wars have been raging since the early 1900s. Cars were probably the largest example pre-1960s, but we've seen this in agricultural products, chain stores, computer manufacturers (DEC vs IBM comes to mind), movie studios (the wars between which have become movies themselves), etc, etc.
This is the most recent volly in the long-standing AOL/MS fight which has affected the Windows desktop, AOL's bundling, MSN's partnerships, Netscape's buy-out and many other skirmishes.
So, this would explain talks between AOL and RHAT. AOL would be very interested in RHAT's PoV on this, since MS has a track record for trotting out Linux as an example of their competition (which, on the desktop, Linux simply is not... yet).
Slashdot Mirror
I've had one of these bad-boys in my grubby mits for over a year. A friend brought it back from Hong Kong.
The funniest thing is Tux on the cover carrying the red flag. eerie....
Your concern is valid, but ill placed.
1. If Intel writes code for Mono that infringes on a patent or Richard Stallman writes the code for CORBA that infringes on a patent, it's still patent infringing.
2. Once Intel notifies you that you're infringing, if you strip that functionality, you're not infringing. If you can't strip it, and have Mono still work, then I suggest to you that CORBA won't work either. In that case, the idea of an open source component model is pretty much dead until the patent expires or is contributed to the public.
3. When you own a patent, you can license it any way you wish. If you choose to write reference code and distribute it under the GPL, that's a very valid option. Intel would be free to change the license, but anyone with their hands on previous, GPL-licensed code would... well, have a license. It really is that simple (IANAL). Could this be a test for the GPL? Sure, and that's a seperate topic, but one I'm not too concerned about. Why? Because it's in the direction that the GPL is strongest. The GPL is weakest in defending the code owner (potentially) not the user.
4. I think she was not so much concerned about Intel contributing code as writing components that were proprietary and patented. Again, if they did this, we should all carefully avoid using Intel's proprietary components. Again, this comes down to sloppy reporting.
I think this whole thing is a no-brainer.
The article is very hard to read, as it seems to confuse patents and copyright in ways that are imiscable. I will try to lay out the timeline that I think she's assuming when she says "Intel, having gleefully taken advantage of the MIT licensing on Mono's class libraries, enforces its patents against every entity making use of its modifications, including the Gnome project, effectively shutting it down."
1 Mono exists
2 Gnome adopts Mono (a reach, but ok)
3 Intel writes proprietary (non-MIT-licensed) components for Mono
4 Intel enforces patentson those components and shuts down Gnome!
Ok... so we come to the obvious solution. Assuming that #2 happens (no pun intended), #4 can only happen if #3 is followed by:
3.4 Gnome adopts Intel proprietary components via Mono
Um... *WHY*?!
Of course, if Gnome implements these features using Bonobo and Orbit guess what Intel can do? That's right... enforce their patents!
This is, AFAIKT, junk reporting. If I'm wrong, please show me specifically what timeline you see occuring.
The casual coppier who rips a DVD, converts it to divx:-) and sends it off to the world is not really the concern of the big studios. They want to own the Asian market, and right now it's owned by the bulk-coppiers.
;-)
Of course, all a unique ID gets them is to know where the bulk coppier in question got the first DVD. I can see it now: "yup, we're certain that Mr. Smith bought this DVD with a stolen credit card from Amazon and had it shipped to a field in Thailand. We'll get right on it!"
No, they don't. They keep their logs without identifiying information (though, I expect them to have a neilsen-like service at some point where you will be able to sign up to share personal information for other sorts of demographic research purposes).
Read the privacy policy. Now's a good time, since they just updated it.
Also, you can opt-out of communicating with TiVo at all (very limiting) or just sending them viewing data (no harm to your viewing or service). Now, the thumbs-up/down I'm not sure about. If you *can* limit this, it would restrict the usefulness of the suggestions feature, if not eliminate it. I'm not sure if you can do that, but it's worth the research if you're uncomfortable sharing your likes and dislikes.
People are right to be concerned an watchful here, but let's not go overboard until TiVo proves themselves unreliable on this point.
Linear vs. random access won't make a difference in this respect. The player can simply say, "oh, you didn't rewind, let me help you...."
Oracle is pretty well know [sic] for being rock solid IF you know what you're doing with it.
:-(
I'm pretty well known for being the smartest guy on the planet. And my dog is pretty well known for curing cancer.
Hyperbole asside, I dont' know that Oracle is rock solid. I just know that it's fairly stable bloatware that has good name recognition. I would trust my data to Sybase long before trusting Oracle again.
Consider, for a moment, how many man/years have gone into the devopement of this product,
And Windows, for that matter.
how many other products (rdb, for example) have been integrated in
Bloat is not a good thing.
and overall, how mature of a product it is.
If, by mature, you mean old. Yes, I agree.
Then consider who's running it right now;
Same people who were running IBM mainframes in the late 80s and laughing at all those "idiots" who were trying to move their end-users off the green screen. Nuff said.
who has been running it for eons (folks who can't afford to have their "databases simply go away").
In ever large Oracle environment I've seen Oracle is not relied on to keep data secure. That's what contingency planning and hot spares are for.
You can arm-wave at my experience all you want, but 15,000 high schools were none too pleased when Oracle lost their data and I had to spend 1/2 hour restoring the backup... THREE TIMES IN 2 MONTHS just because a Sun decided to crash, and Oracle doesn't tollerate partially completed transactions on disk.
I finally gave up and moved Oracle off to a NetApp where I could do atomic snapshots every hour, and snap-restore the whole filesystem. It sucks to have to move my fault tolerance out to disk, but it was the only way, since the front-end software we were using only supported Oracle
Then consider what you're comparing it to. Seems a little naive, yes?
Nope.
Horse hockey. Most Oracle users use it because they are told (by sales types) that, "Oracle stable. Stable good. Open Source unstable. Unstable bad."
There are a small fraction of Oracle users that "cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of." Both of which are not 100% true of Oracle (personal experience(*) here), but true enough that sales droids make good money.
(*)I've had Oracle databases simply go away when the machine crashed (would not even try to recognize the data on disk until a full backup had been restored). Mysql and Postgresql have never done this to me. As for scalability, Oracle is a beast. It costs exponentially more as you get into options like parallel server (which makes it less stable and harder to manage by an order of magnitude), and your hardware costs skyrocket as you have to start buying boxes capable of calculating the last digit of pi. Personally, I don't call that scalable. Call me wierd.
Studios should be asking themselves, "who are your early adopters?"
;-)
DVD is too new for your average consumer to want to run out and buy a new player (even if it plays VHS too).
High-end videophiles will know better. Random access media has too much going for it in terms of non-linear content (think "the making of" and trailers) and fast search forward or back. They also know that tape involves more moving parts, and thus more wear.
So, they've got to be targeting the low-end videophiles who know just enough to be dangerous. Oddly enough, the vast majority of THAT market segment are college students or recent graduates, and would be the most likely to be turned off by the new copy-protection features!
Oh yeah, this is going to be lucky to go as far as DIVX (the DVD format, not the video codec) did.
You've got to understand, this isn't "Yahoo". You're just looking at PR Newswire, which is a dumping ground for anyone to send in advertisements (er, "press-releases") for a fee.
This is one of the many tactics that I would *expect* of a competent scammer.
Wow, the mis-information is flowing like water around here. I guess this will be my last comment on this thread, since it's getting rather old, but...
Quote the AC, "MS never claimed Opensource to be bad, but the GPL."
Sorry, wrong again. Next time, try citing some references.
"But there also are elements to be avoided" in the OSS model, said Mundie, "such as a strong possibility of unhealthy forking, interoperability concerns and significant licensing issues." Forking is when the code base for a piece of software splits into separate directions, essentially becoming two or more different pieces of software.
I have not altered a single letter. This is a direct quote from Microsoft.
Please note that only one of the three concerns noted here is related to the GPL. No, Microsoft wants to paint the entire community of Open Source with one brush. GPL=Bad. Source=Bad. OSS=Bad....
They're not only wrong, but their use of OSS (e.g. BSD networking, Mosaic as the foundation for IE) makes it pretty clear that they are being two-faced about this.
Anonymous Coward: "Spider is not BSD you flaming idiot."
From the cited article (the link to which I was responding): "some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix"
If we're to believe this "Microsoft insider", here, then the conclusion is pretty clear. As usual, MS bought their technology (standard business practice for most large corporations), but they were unhappy with it. They re-wrote much of it, but left the parts that it did not make sense to re-invent. Plus, they largely did not touch the utilities.
None of this should be suprising, nor is it a bad thing. In fact, herein lies the power of Open Source. It also shows Microsoft's true colors, however. They brought a TCP/IP stack to market much faster than they otherwise would have because of OSS (not to mention their browser, which is based on Mosaic), but now you hear them decrying such software as dangerous and "viral" (yes, they paint the whole OSS industry with the same brush, regardless of license).
You may find these facts distasteful. I do too. However, that's no reason to complain about my facts without checking your own.
You, an average end-user, are not supposed to know this. You are supposed to do what all software end-users do. Wait for your vendor to add it as a configuration option to some gui menu somewhere.
;-) Start reading them man-pages!
It's not the XFree86 folks' job to give you wizzy convinient way to do it. It's their "job", if you'll pardon the term, to provide the underlying functionality.
I imagine that by the time the next rev of Gnome is integrated into the next rev of Red Hat, you'll see such an option in the Gnome control panel. If that's too long to wait, then you're not an end-user.
If it only feels too long, then you're SOL
That's a pretty thin case for moral justification of destroying documents.
What made you think that I was making a "moral justification"?! This is a simple cost/benefit thing. If you keep the old stuff, you'll get screwed in court. The least harmful thing that will happen is you will have to wade through every document your company ever produced every time someone sprained your ankle on your front step. And no-fair trying to do it ahead of time! No one will buy that you didn't miss anything, and they will send in their team to work with your team to do it all over again.
And just because you don't believe that such an act constitutes leaking of financial information does not make it so.
You're turning my example into a straw-man. I stated as an axiom that it was innocent email for the purpose of the example. It was not a matter for debate.
Yes, you could construct an alternate scenario where something seems innocent, but is not. That is an interesting scenario, I suppose, but not related to what I was saying.
Unless your concern is security related (i.e. information theft), there really isn't a valid reason to be destroying documents for most law-abiding corporations.
The simplest reason is that the government should not be able to impose on your average company the massive overhead of saving everything forever, and then dealing with that mound of dung every time someone decides to drag them into court.
Do check with your lawyer, but I think the topic here is more related to internal documentation, not customer records. Obviously when you get into customer records, there are many legal hurdles that would not apply to, for example, internal email.
Not at all. The problem is most obvious with email, so I'll use that as an example.
Let's say that your company has done nothing wrong, but the SEC thinks that you might have been leaking information to financial institutions, in order to affect your stock price.
That's a pretty serious charge, but if you're innocent you have nothing to worry about, right? Well, it turns out that you have an employee that sent a seemingly innocent comment to his friend at such a company, but now, in light of the charges, it could be seen as an indication that such activity did exist and widen the investigation. This costs you in terms of legal expenses, time, credibility, etc.
Having old documents taken out of context can be truly damning, and it's just not worth the expense. Much better to destroy what could be used against you later.
The problem is hard on many levels. For example, many small companies have the, "we have nothing to hide" attitude, because they're not able to think in terms of large business dealings where years of internal email could be dragged out into court and used out of context.
Once you convince a company that document "retention" is valuable, many managers will immediately declare themselves exempt because they feel that they will one day need that email from a vendor thanking them for buying the Widget 10,000 last week.
What I think the industry really needs is some kind of software that manages information archives in a way that lets people specifically call out information that needs to be preserved as annotation. In this way, you could keep all of the headers of all of the mail and all of the filenames of all of the documents on a fileserver, but only keep the annotations (which may include some key points from an original).
I know that I would find this more useful than the usual way that people annotate documents (named folders).
This is what capitolism and a free market are all about.
The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.
Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.
Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).
This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.
This is exactly correct. A great example is the Wurmslayer. This is a weapon that used to be one of the very best in the game. Ignoring the fact that that is no longer the case, let's look at how it came to be valuable in the first place:
It requires a quest which involves killing a fairly tough dragon. So, only people who are high level and can call on a few other high-level folks to help will have the item. Also, the dragon only shows up ("spawns", in the lingo) infrequently, so this further restricts supply.
Ok, so you have very few of these, and they're hotly contested. This jacks up the price and people who do the quest get well rewarded.
After a few months, however you start to get secondary sales. People get better weapons (their "epics") or they decide to stop playing a class that can use such a weapon, so they decide to sell it. This creates a second wave of availability from folks who expect to take a little bit of a loss from what they paid (sellers rarely expect to make more money than what they paid in EQ).
So, now the price bumps down a notch, but it's still fairly high, and rewards those who do the quest well. However, as time goes by and more people do the quest, you begin to reach an equilibrium where there are more folks selling Wurmslayers second-hand than there are doing the quest. Now, the price can drop BELOW the level where it's worth doing the quest at all!
In the end, an item that started selling around 5-10k is now down to about 2k after just 2 years since the expansion's release.
More dramatic drops happen when items first come out in an expansion though. The recent release of Shadow of Luclin created a flood of neat new items people were willing to pay a great deal for until they realized that they were relatively common.
You're 100% correct. MS would have to ask, "who is Red Hat's largest competitor in the desktop arena." I think they're smart enough to figure out the proviso, though.
You're incorrect. AOL has said exactly what you quoted and no more. To assume that that means they did not meet with RHAT to discuss the suit would seem to a) ignore the fact that the Washington Post would not go to print with at least one source and b) be putting words in AOL's mouth that they never uttered.
I think AOL would have been very unwise to issue this suit without their lawyers knowing exactly what Red Hat will say when Microsoft calls them to the stand. And you just know that MS has to call Red Hat to the stand to ask the magic question: "who is Red Hat's largest source of competition?" The answer is Microsoft, and that gives MS room to wiggle in their bogus claim that they can't be a monopoly if they have a billion dollar company for competition.
Of course, we know that this is bogus, but it's hard to fight in court without information, and I suspect that there was a meeting between RHAT and AOL to establish that information.
I have no hard evidence, just convinient facts. However, there is also no evidence (and less convinient facts) to suggest that no such meeting occured.
You're mostly right here. The key factor is that MS had an existing market that it leveraged to kill Netscape. If MS had said, "look, we'll give you full access to the OS, but we're going to give our browser away for free because it's worthless to us, they might have been able to defend that in court. However, what they actually did was to tie the browser into the desktop without allowing NS the same access. *Then* they shipped it "for free" with the OS.
Bundling was the key issue here. MS was using its monopoly in another market to squash a potential rival in this new market. This is the very heart of the problem that anti-trust laws attempt to address.
First shot?! You must be joking. The Corporate wars have been raging since the early 1900s. Cars were probably the largest example pre-1960s, but we've seen this in agricultural products, chain stores, computer manufacturers (DEC vs IBM comes to mind), movie studios (the wars between which have become movies themselves), etc, etc.
This is the most recent volly in the long-standing AOL/MS fight which has affected the Windows desktop, AOL's bundling, MSN's partnerships, Netscape's buy-out and many other skirmishes.
So, this would explain talks between AOL and RHAT. AOL would be very interested in RHAT's PoV on this, since MS has a track record for trotting out Linux as an example of their competition (which, on the desktop, Linux simply is not... yet).