You miss one thing: (Almost) nobody is forcing users to run software he developed.
You say: "Whoever was responsible for writing such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.".
While you IMO should write "Fine, let developers develop such programs. As far as they do not force anybody to run in, then whoever was responsible for running such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.".
Like with guns - not those who made them are (rightly) going to jail for injuries and deaths caused by them - users do! Same with any other tool, be it HW or SW.
Of course situation is slightly different when some SW developer is in monopoly position but that's off-topic here.
I personally think they should have been made to refund 50% of the purchase price of all Windows licenses, as... that advantage was gained through illegal monopoly...
50% is not enought because MS' margin on Office is more than 70% and if there are users which were forced to buy Office because "other have it" then they should get 100% refund plus damages (loses caused by working with Office - for example loses caused by viruses?).
[Note: This is offtopic to "Fulfilling the Promise of XML-based Office Suites?".]
... Microsoft's plans to 'significantly increase its donation of software to the nation's nonprofit organizations, to a level that may approach $1 billion annually in the next three to four years... Is it true philanthropy or just another tactic to assimilate everyone into the MS collective?
Based on history lessons we alredy learned (or at least experienced without understanding them or acting upon them) I guess the seconds is the right anwser.
In truly free society such arguments are bogus (because IMO in truly free society there is nothing like todays terrorism).
But we do not live in free society because world is not free. Even if we assume just few countries, which are most free, that still is not truly free society. Because we are at best in the middle of the road to free society.
And while we are not free, various governments often choose and implement various half solutions often represented by "restrict freedom" tactics to achieve something (by "something" I mean "hopefully good things for citizens").
And half solutions... well, are ussualy short sighted and dangerous themselves. Sometimes even more dangerous than the problems they are trying to solve.
So pursuing freedom and happiness by restricting our own freedom and happines because of terrorism of others (or copyright infrigements over internet, or whatever)... that sounds strange.
oddjob:... Under microsoft's new plan, they reserve the right to sell your work for a profit without paying for it, but they don't give the same right to you.
you: Fair enough... considering that they've almost certainly contributed several orders of magnitude more to the project than you have
You really mean it?
I'm not denying MS put together (for now) all of the Windows CE. Now you implement some new feature into it (under this new Shared Source program). It costs you say $100'000. Now you have 6 months to sell as much copies of altered Windows CE as you can so you make those money back (from the margin you have on those modified Windows CE). After those 6 month MS will sell your work to others and you wont see any money from those sales.
It realy sounds to me as "you implement new interesting features, we will not pay you anything and the only think you get for your work is that you can try to sell it for 6 months ahead of us". That's not very interesting scenario even if we assume MS will play fair with this rules.
If MS won play fair... Say you make feature "Super Kerberos For Handhels(TM)". You are selling it but in the mean time they are implementing their ussual "embrace and extend" on your idea and work and after 6 month you come to compete with MS and others, who by that time will be "armed" with "MS Enhanced UltraSuper Kerberos For Handhelds(TM)" which may or may not be interoperable with your implementation.
IMO, at best, you may make enough money from enthusiasts and early adopters to pay your development bills, but majority of (your potential) users/customers will learn that buying features from you is not worth it because it is better to wait 6 months when "those pretty new features you produced(TM)" come out directly from MS and ussualy for lower price.
Such bug is exactly what a lot of people were pointing out when MS claimed Paladium like systems can protect PCs from viruses/trojans/crackers/...
Yes, it maybe can, but only if a system is bug free (without bugs, which can be exploitable). But if you have bug free system, then you do not need Paladium to protect you from viruses/trojans/crackers/....
After the Win9x series, I'd say it's Microsoft's worst product. Windows 2000 replaced it, and is much better.
Coincidence is, that Windows 2000 (or why not just straight XP?) is also very good for Microsoft's income. And this income originates in wallets of its customers.
So that's why there are reasons to use what you pay for even if it is getting old.
Well, if bank/shop/... says that they are open till 18:00 and you walk in say at 17:59 they ussualy does not throw you away just because your quite ussual request may take longer than 1 minute to process.
Best examples are bars - if you had come when it was open you may well end up being there even hours after official closing hour if you are "making business" with bar.:)
So, such cases IMO pretty clearly illustrate how each business value their customer.
So does prohibition brought a lot of money for Capone and alikes.
So is "War on drugs" now bringing awfull lot of money to narco-barons.
I'm expecting emergence of some terms like "content-pitates(TM)" in conjunction to some "War on Content Pirates". With that - higher prices of both legal and illegal content and also higher taxes.
Kleinschmit: "This suggests that copyright enforcement efforts are unfortunately being misinterpreted by these consumers, and additional education and awareness on the importance of intellectual property rights in this new era of content distribution may be necessary."
Which may be translated as: "An Estimated 40 million Americans do not understand or do not want to understand that giving money to (MP|RI)AA is for their own benefit so they have to be gently showed that they are wrong."
Mr. Kleinschmit or whoever should consult Mr. Capone or somebody with equal qualities but still alive so that such "education" will be done the proper way.
He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with.
I mean no offence nor I'm terrorist or planig to be one but:
Did it occur to you that maybe those terrorits are not attacking USA because they "disagree with ideals of USA" but because "they do not like ideals of USA being imposed on their country/culture (because they disagree with such ideals)"?
I'm asking because I'm curious. I would like to hear also from terrorists for that matter.
It looks like to me that while coder includes resources for such "looping" in their estimates, marketers do not.
Marketers make some initial cost offering, maybe leave some breathing room in it (so profit wont be smaller when somehing goes wrong) but when they are "looping" they think that "it is just small change, it took me 2 minutes to think it up so it takes say another 20 minutes to coders to add this to project (originaly I planed it for 2 hours and they said it'll take them 20 hours to code)" never minding possibility of risking something like:
need to deep rewrite of existing codebase (say plus another 20 hours for that addition dreamed up in 2 minutes)
need to just quick-hack existing codebase which (as a sideeffect) introduces a lot of bugs and race conditions
But I'm not marketer, they should know better. But indications show thet they generaly do not.
I still don't trust all the misc info that is dumped to disk at install time. 400+ printer def's, and misc. etc... More apps, more code...more room for something to go wrong...
You:
I thought Linux/OSS was of the "Do one thing, and do it right" philosophy? So if Microsoft does the same, it's unsecure and A Bad Thing?
IMO AcquaCow is talking mainly about unused stuff (hardly anybody has 400+ different printers installed all at the same time) while you are talking about all stuff (both used and unused by user of the system).
Such attempts to security may work. May, if the real world goes like this:
If Joe Average Citizen does not know that atom bombs exist, then atom bombs does not exist thus it is impossible for terrorists to nuke Joe Average Citizen using them.
Sounds like Matrix. So, maybe those editors are going to prove to us we live in Matrix.:)
I agree with you that it is not very likely HP, IBM,... want to help MS nad RIAA to make more money or to help John Ashcroft "to fight terrorists". I also agree with you that HP, IBM,... are running current PC industry.
What I do not agree with is the extrapolation: "If you trust them (excluding Microsoft, judging by your comments) enough to use a PC, it's not a terribly large leap to trust they'll run the TCPA in the interests of PC users."
Why?
MS showed us, that manipulating large quantities of not very skilled users (skilled in computing) can bring monopoly and huge profits associated with it. - A lot of users are not running Windows because its better but because everybody has it. And they do not know it can be better. And of those who know (and are able to do more about it than just switch to other OS as they are not just users) very few are willing to break ranks and provide office documents in some open format, provide their application to non Windows platforms or at least make their website accessible to non MS IE users.
So maybe HW vendors get inspired by this and are now planing to sell more HW (at higher prices) which can do less (because for example it will limit users while they are copying files - now they can allways, tomorow they will be able only sometimes) with the benefit of MPAA and RIAA members willing to hand their "data" to TCPA enabled systems (at some price, of course) which may be presented to Joe User Average as a huge benefit which is impossible with current technology.
Thus IBM, HP,... get more revenue with side-effect (from HW vendor perspective) of MS and MPAA and RIAA members also geting higher revenues. And Joe Average User wont know that all of those "benefits" (i.e. entertainment over Net, etc.) were possible also today with current PCs at lower costs (for user) but that MPAA and RIAA members were not willing to accept low margins.
But still, you got the point - CD/DVD writer manufacturers (and those making equipment to which those writers are installed) make much more money than "content" producers so it'll be stupid for them to risk those profits because RIAA or MPAA are screaming.
On the other hand, making HW is low margin bussiness. Making "content" and "monopoly software" is high margin business - so that's tempting.
And also Woody Allen said somewthing like this: "I am paranoind but that does not mean they are not after me!".:)
So maybe I'm more paranoid than you but in case I'm right we'll be both robed quite equaly. So why not to demant those making that TCPA spec to change it so users can tamper with keys stored in there? So as owners of TCPA enabled system we'll at least feel more in control?:)
A significant number of people think trusted software will take off, because it's better. Hysterical opponents of TC are practically admitting the same thing by their hysteria; if they didn't think everyone would start using trusted software (which would require real advantages over untrusted software), there'd be nothing for them to fear, since nothing in the TC platform stops anyone running untrusted software.
Three things:
How it is going to combine with Microsoft abusing its monopoly power as alredy happened (and has been confirmed by court even if it was not punished properly)?
Better, better, better... to whom? To user? Or to RIAA, Microsoft,..., John Ashcroft,...?
Trust: Trust has two sides, even where we are talking about trust between vendor and customer. Vendor can't force the trust upon customer. If forced, that's not trust. If it is enforced (by say customer being unable do what he wants with keys in TCPA part of his own PC) than it's not about trust too (because how can customer trust vendor if vendor do not trust customer as expressed by mentioned denied access to keys).
So I still se TCPA as attempt to either rob me of my money, rob me of my freedoms or rob me of both. Especialy when government get involved and TCPA gets mandated.
Slashdot Mirror
You miss one thing: (Almost) nobody is forcing users to run software he developed.
You say: "Whoever was responsible for writing such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.".
While you IMO should write "Fine, let developers develop such programs. As far as they do not force anybody to run in, then whoever was responsible for running such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.".
Like with guns - not those who made them are (rightly) going to jail for injuries and deaths caused by them - users do! Same with any other tool, be it HW or SW.
Of course situation is slightly different when some SW developer is in monopoly position but that's off-topic here.
And he forgot also "... of Microsoft ...".
So to clarify everything, I'm quite sure prockcore wanted to write:
He was talking about Financial security of Microsoft, you insensitive clod!
:)
Maybe cryptographers are using Slashdot to practice decyphering - look at all those cryptic posts and/or signatures. :)
50% is not enought because MS' margin on Office is more than 70% and if there are users which were forced to buy Office because "other have it" then they should get 100% refund plus damages (loses caused by working with Office - for example loses caused by viruses?).
[Note: This is offtopic to "Fulfilling the Promise of XML-based Office Suites?".]
If so, than we can patent following business model:
Based on history lessons we alredy learned (or at least experienced without understanding them or acting upon them) I guess the seconds is the right anwser.
:)
I just hope moonlings wont consider this as a declaration of war by earthlings. :)
Small correction:
Drug dealers suing DEA?
In truly free society such arguments are bogus (because IMO in truly free society there is nothing like todays terrorism).
But we do not live in free society because world is not free. Even if we assume just few countries, which are most free, that still is not truly free society. Because we are at best in the middle of the road to free society.
And while we are not free, various governments often choose and implement various half solutions often represented by "restrict freedom" tactics to achieve something (by "something" I mean "hopefully good things for citizens").
And half solutions ... well, are ussualy short sighted and dangerous themselves. Sometimes even more dangerous than the problems they are trying to solve.
So pursuing freedom and happiness by restricting our own freedom and happines because of terrorism of others (or copyright infrigements over internet, or whatever) ... that sounds strange.
you: Fair enough... considering that they've almost certainly contributed several orders of magnitude more to the project than you have
You really mean it?
I'm not denying MS put together (for now) all of the Windows CE. Now you implement some new feature into it (under this new Shared Source program). It costs you say $100'000. Now you have 6 months to sell as much copies of altered Windows CE as you can so you make those money back (from the margin you have on those modified Windows CE). After those 6 month MS will sell your work to others and you wont see any money from those sales.
It realy sounds to me as "you implement new interesting features, we will not pay you anything and the only think you get for your work is that you can try to sell it for 6 months ahead of us". That's not very interesting scenario even if we assume MS will play fair with this rules.
If MS won play fair ... Say you make feature "Super Kerberos For Handhels(TM)". You are selling it but in the mean time they are implementing their ussual "embrace and extend" on your idea and work and after 6 month you come to compete with MS and others, who by that time will be "armed" with "MS Enhanced UltraSuper Kerberos For Handhelds(TM)" which may or may not be interoperable with your implementation.
IMO, at best, you may make enough money from enthusiasts and early adopters to pay your development bills, but majority of (your potential) users/customers will learn that buying features from you is not worth it because it is better to wait 6 months when "those pretty new features you produced(TM)" come out directly from MS and ussualy for lower price.
Yes, it maybe can, but only if a system is bug free (without bugs, which can be exploitable). But if you have bug free system, then you do not need Paladium to protect you from viruses/trojans/crackers/... .
Coincidence is, that Windows 2000 (or why not just straight XP?) is also very good for Microsoft's income. And this income originates in wallets of its customers.
So that's why there are reasons to use what you pay for even if it is getting old.
Best examples are bars - if you had come when it was open you may well end up being there even hours after official closing hour if you are "making business" with bar. :)
So, such cases IMO pretty clearly illustrate how each business value their customer.
So is "War on drugs" now bringing awfull lot of money to narco-barons.
I'm expecting emergence of some terms like "content-pitates(TM)" in conjunction to some "War on Content Pirates". With that - higher prices of both legal and illegal content and also higher taxes.
Which may be translated as: "An Estimated 40 million Americans do not understand or do not want to understand that giving money to (MP|RI)AA is for their own benefit so they have to be gently showed that they are wrong."
Mr. Kleinschmit or whoever should consult Mr. Capone or somebody with equal qualities but still alive so that such "education" will be done the proper way.
Sounds funny but ...
I mean no offence nor I'm terrorist or planig to be one but:
Did it occur to you that maybe those terrorits are not attacking USA because they "disagree with ideals of USA" but because "they do not like ideals of USA being imposed on their country/culture (because they disagree with such ideals)"?
I'm asking because I'm curious. I would like to hear also from terrorists for that matter.
... or for your own bad.
It looks like to me that while coder includes resources for such "looping" in their estimates, marketers do not.
Marketers make some initial cost offering, maybe leave some breathing room in it (so profit wont be smaller when somehing goes wrong) but when they are "looping" they think that "it is just small change, it took me 2 minutes to think it up so it takes say another 20 minutes to coders to add this to project (originaly I planed it for 2 hours and they said it'll take them 20 hours to code)" never minding possibility of risking something like:
But I'm not marketer, they should know better. But indications show thet they generaly do not.
I still don't trust all the misc info that is dumped to disk at install time. 400+ printer def's, and misc. etc... More apps, more code...more room for something to go wrong...
You:
I thought Linux/OSS was of the "Do one thing, and do it right" philosophy? So if Microsoft does the same, it's unsecure and A Bad Thing?
IMO AcquaCow is talking mainly about unused stuff (hardly anybody has 400+ different printers installed all at the same time) while you are talking about all stuff (both used and unused by user of the system).
So if you are sharing your car with your mom, you are hurting profits of car makers, because your mom does not need to buy her own car.
So, if you look at it this way, then it is appropriate to "punish" you for such sharing by requiring you to pry out your eye.
:)
Why also 'and'??? That'll make files like 'My Bozz Iz Ignorand' unconstitutional.
:)
If Joe Average Citizen does not know that atom bombs exist, then atom bombs does not exist thus it is impossible for terrorists to nuke Joe Average Citizen using them.
Sounds like Matrix. So, maybe those editors are going to prove to us we live in Matrix. :)
What I do not agree with is the extrapolation: "If you trust them (excluding Microsoft, judging by your comments) enough to use a PC, it's not a terribly large leap to trust they'll run the TCPA in the interests of PC users."
Why?
MS showed us, that manipulating large quantities of not very skilled users (skilled in computing) can bring monopoly and huge profits associated with it. - A lot of users are not running Windows because its better but because everybody has it. And they do not know it can be better. And of those who know (and are able to do more about it than just switch to other OS as they are not just users) very few are willing to break ranks and provide office documents in some open format, provide their application to non Windows platforms or at least make their website accessible to non MS IE users.
So maybe HW vendors get inspired by this and are now planing to sell more HW (at higher prices) which can do less (because for example it will limit users while they are copying files - now they can allways, tomorow they will be able only sometimes) with the benefit of MPAA and RIAA members willing to hand their "data" to TCPA enabled systems (at some price, of course) which may be presented to Joe User Average as a huge benefit which is impossible with current technology.
Thus IBM, HP, ... get more revenue with side-effect (from HW vendor perspective) of MS and MPAA and RIAA members also geting higher revenues. And Joe Average User wont know that all of those "benefits" (i.e. entertainment over Net, etc.) were possible also today with current PCs at lower costs (for user) but that MPAA and RIAA members were not willing to accept low margins.
But still, you got the point - CD/DVD writer manufacturers (and those making equipment to which those writers are installed) make much more money than "content" producers so it'll be stupid for them to risk those profits because RIAA or MPAA are screaming. :)
On the other hand, making HW is low margin bussiness. Making "content" and "monopoly software" is high margin business - so that's tempting.
And also Woody Allen said somewthing like this: "I am paranoind but that does not mean they are not after me!".
So maybe I'm more paranoid than you but in case I'm right we'll be both robed quite equaly. So why not to demant those making that TCPA spec to change it so users can tamper with keys stored in there? So as owners of TCPA enabled system we'll at least feel more in control? :)
Three things:
So I still se TCPA as attempt to either rob me of my money, rob me of my freedoms or rob me of both. Especialy when government get involved and TCPA gets mandated.