Once people can invoke COM objects over HTTP all hell is going to break loose on the corporate world. I pity the poor corporate IS shmuck who has to add yet another task on to this overworked plate. Between trying to please clueless PHBs, operators from hell, programming and such. It will take years to get the security infrastructure in place when any idiot can call com objects over the net. Of course by then SOAP will be left in the dust as MS pushes their new acronym of the day.
You may be right. After all It's not like Microsoft is some giant corporation with hundreds of subsidiaries, thousands of programmers, or terrabytes of storage at their disposal.
How could they ever muster enough money, processing power, database space, and brain power to try and corrolate the information they get from web bugs, sales at one of their subsidiaries, registrations at popular web sites like MSN or hotmail or msnbc, and product registrations of office and IE.
Why that would take millions of dollars and I really don't think MS can afford such a large outlay even if it means making tens of millions selling that information to others.
I don't think he is disagreeing with you per se. For example you say "I think that people DO have the right to restrict the use of things they create in certain ways." well this is exactly what the GPL does. The creator of GPLed software restricts you from using the said code to build proprietary applications.
Whoever wrote the code dictates how the code may be used.
The register brings up an excellent point.
Copy protection schemes will only help open source software especially if they are enforced overseas. Right now millions of people will never even try perfect office, smartsuite, open office or whatever because they can freely pirate ms office.
Once they are unable to pirate MS software they will be forced to look at lower cost and free alternatives. Almost overnight the market share of MS office will shrink to a managable level if not a downright minority when you consider worldwide figures.
The open source crowd ought to really back this thing and have it applied world wide. Super tight woldwide enforced copy protection schemes will either for MS to drastically lower their prices or will once and for all break the "they sent me a word 2000 file now I gotta upgrade" cycle.
FIrt of all Gore won the election (he got more votes aways). Second of all go check the contributions MS made to bush, republican party and the so called think tanks which are nothing but fund raising arms of the republican party.
Thirds MS had hired ashcroft before he became the AG. That's right the AG of the United States used to work for MS go scratch your head on that one for a while.
It wouln't matter much. It's not just sound dolphins as well as most aquatic creatures can detect subltle changes in water pressure and electrical fields. Dolphins not only communicate using sound but also rely on posture, waves and who knows what else.
Let's say that someone undertook a very worth cause and was able to simulate all the sensory input a dolphin receives and somehow translated it into some sort of sensory input a human understood. Do you think a human being could make sense out of it? Of course not.
In order to communicate you need to have something in common with the creature. I am afraid a creature which only experiences air a minute fraction of it's life will find very little to communicate to you.
They are not idiots trust me. MS bought the president they wanted, they got the Attorney General they wanted installed and now the DOJ is going to throw the case for them.
Even if the circuit court sees through this kabuki dance the republican supreme court is going to give Bill Gates what he want's anyway.
At this time this nothing but a waste of our tax dollars.
Don't all laws have to be tried before a judge sooner or later?
According to your analysis it should be legal for corporations to hire death squads to assinate competitors. If they were simply allowed to kill anybody they wanted they would not worry about the uncertainty of trying to make a profit.
You gotta draw the line somewhere and the society has done exactly that. No matter where you draw the line someone will object and it will end up in front of a judge. This is how our system works.
I think it's much more plausable that they simply copied it. I imagine MS does incredible amounts of industrial espionage and they knew full well what was going on in cupertino.
Even if what you say is true once they found out what icon the competition was using (whose screenshots came first?) they should have switched the icon. How hard is it for chrissake.
I have always maintained that the more draconian copy protection schemes are the better it is for open source software.
Right now one of the main reasons MS has such a huge monopoly on office software is because a huge number of people pirate their copy. Add to that the millions of copies that are pirated worldwide and you see what I mean. All of these people have zero incentive to explore lower cost, free or open source options because they can get office for free.
Imagine if nobody in the entire world could copy office!. Overnight the market share of perfect office, star office, smartsuite etc would rocket upward. Especially overseas where people would drop office like a hot potato because paying for it would mean giving up a years wage.
To fight this MS would have to drop their prices drasticaly which would be a good thing for everybody. It also would take away another cash cow from MS and that would be a good thing.
Consider this.
As you said the golden rule emphasizes that you ought to treat people good no matter how you have been treated. Maybe this gives people the impression that is they treat somebody bad it will never turn around and bite them. For example. If I beat up a good person that good person would never beat me up or seek revenge because he follows the golden rule.
If on the other hand the golden rule is to treat people like you have been treated then it's OK to hit back. The person doing the hitting might not feels so secure that a good person would not retaliate or seek revenge.
If the golden rule was restated I actually think people would behave better because their motivation would change from behaving correctly because of some eternal reward to behaving correctly out of fear. Fear is always a more palpable motivator.
I still don't get your argument. You state that renting office would cost you more in the long run then buying yet you still claim it would lower TCO. Did I read that wrong?
As for my upgrade when and if you need it point consider this.
In my office everybody uses office 97. If someone sends us a office 2000 document there is ONE pc with office 2000 on it. That person simply saves it as HTML and forwards it to the person who needs it. It rarely happens mind you because most people are reasonable and will send you the format you need. You don't need to upgrade the entire office just a few desktops to get compatibility. It's also important to be able to manage your upgrade schedule. If you have seasonal downturns or are suffering from a temporary downturn then you should have the choice to wait till better times to upgrade. MS will soon take that choice away from you. You WILL upgrade WHEN they want to not when you can best afford it.
If the GPL is tested and found invalid it would be best thing to ever happen. Whatever the reason is for the GPL being invalid it could be used to invalidate all software licenses. I think the FSF ought to pick the right case and purposfully throw the case. If they did it carefully they could invalidate all shrink wrap and clickthrough licenses. That would be good thing but it might sink the whole.net scheme.
"If a billion chinese use your product for free illegally, have you lost anything?
Do you really believe if they all paid, that the price would drop?"
It's not that MS lost it's that we lost. We paid for something other people get for free and that makes us suckers.
If we didn't pay either then MS could not afford to keep making windows and office or whatever else. In a very real sense we pay to subsidize the software the rest of the world uses for free.
So the question is not "Do you really believe if they all paid, that the price would drop?" the question is "what would happen if we didn't pay either?"
I really admire how he twisted a very common phrase and changed the entire meaning of it. When phrased this way the golden rule becomes almost menacing. It's like maryln manson taking "boogie man" and turning into a sinister stalker song.
Ask yourself this. If the golden rule had been stated this way from the start would it affect your behavior towards other humans and how?
First of all the chief claim made by Allchin was not that free software does not innovate it was that it's un-american, destroys intellectual property, and ought to be legislated. I don't think he even mentioned the lack of innovation bit.
As for the second part every time this subject comes up I refer to the same projects.
Postgres does things no database vendor ever even thought of like user defined operators, loadable stored procedure languages, in addition to the vastly rich geometric and time datatypes and corresponding operators. Yes in postgres you can run the following query. "select all points that are outside this circle" or "list all lines that are perpendicular to this one". That's just scratching the surface of what postgres offers.
Leaving that aside take a look at zope, enhydra (and xmlc), jabber. Yes dig a little into just these four projects and you will see more innovation that MS has ever made in their entire history.
One last thing go and browse around sourceforge, set up an account and play for a while. Sourceforge itself is one of most innovative things I have seen in a long time.
Open source is the richest source of innovation in the industry today.
Yes the declaration of independence was very vehement about free enterprise and profiteering. In fact our entire constitution is filled with praising free enterprise and corporate profits. All that talk about inaliable rights and pursuit of happiness is always quoted but nobody seems to want to publisize the parts of the declration, constitution, or the bill of rights that talk about corporatism and profit.
How does paying more for something reduce the TCO?
Right now most businesses can decide for themselves weather to upgrade or not and when to upgrade. Being forced to upgrade weather you like it or not and whenever MS tells you to regardless of your cash flow does not reduce the TCO.
It is in most countries. Most people in the US pay for it when they buy hardware. We are the suckers who subsidize a billion chinese who get windows for free.
They would have no real reason to do that. The only time MS gives away stuff is to put a competitor out of business by "cutting off their air supply". Sinse there is no competition for windows in the home market (they own over 90%) then there is no need to give away anything. Even under a best case scenario of Linux taking 20 or 30 percent of the home market it still wouldn't make sense to give it away because it could not cut off the air supply. Servers on the hand that's a different story. I bet they give away server licenses before they give away desktop licenses.
In the unlikely scenario that MS gives away windows in any segment it would be Good Thing. With a major cash cow out of the picture at least to some degree it undermines their ability to subsidize other programs like IE.
Not that I think it's ever going to happen but it's fun to think about. Can you imagine all the quotes that are out there from Allchin, Ballmer and Gates about how it's communist to give away programs and how free programs are actually more expensive? All those quotes will be dredged up shoved down their throats it would be fun to watch.
Well DUH!. What does that have to do with anything. Those tens of thousands of MAN hours were written by human beings who did not want corporations to profit from their work.
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Once people can invoke COM objects over HTTP all hell is going to break loose on the corporate world. I pity the poor corporate IS shmuck who has to add yet another task on to this overworked plate. Between trying to please clueless PHBs, operators from hell, programming and such. It will take years to get the security infrastructure in place when any idiot can call com objects over the net. Of course by then SOAP will be left in the dust as MS pushes their new acronym of the day.
You may be right. After all It's not like Microsoft is some giant corporation with hundreds of subsidiaries, thousands of programmers, or terrabytes of storage at their disposal.
How could they ever muster enough money, processing power, database space, and brain power to try and corrolate the information they get from web bugs, sales at one of their subsidiaries, registrations at popular web sites like MSN or hotmail or msnbc, and product registrations of office and IE.
Why that would take millions of dollars and I really don't think MS can afford such a large outlay even if it means making tens of millions selling that information to others.
I don't think he is disagreeing with you per se. For example you say "I think that people DO have the right to restrict the use of things they create in certain ways." well this is exactly what the GPL does. The creator of GPLed software restricts you from using the said code to build proprietary applications.
Whoever wrote the code dictates how the code may be used.
The register brings up an excellent point.
Copy protection schemes will only help open source software especially if they are enforced overseas. Right now millions of people will never even try perfect office, smartsuite, open office or whatever because they can freely pirate ms office.
Once they are unable to pirate MS software they will be forced to look at lower cost and free alternatives. Almost overnight the market share of MS office will shrink to a managable level if not a downright minority when you consider worldwide figures.
The open source crowd ought to really back this thing and have it applied world wide. Super tight woldwide enforced copy protection schemes will either for MS to drastically lower their prices or will once and for all break the "they sent me a word 2000 file now I gotta upgrade" cycle.
FIrt of all Gore won the election (he got more votes aways). Second of all go check the contributions MS made to bush, republican party and the so called think tanks which are nothing but fund raising arms of the republican party.
Thirds MS had hired ashcroft before he became the AG. That's right the AG of the United States used to work for MS go scratch your head on that one for a while.
It wouln't matter much. It's not just sound dolphins as well as most aquatic creatures can detect subltle changes in water pressure and electrical fields. Dolphins not only communicate using sound but also rely on posture, waves and who knows what else.
Let's say that someone undertook a very worth cause and was able to simulate all the sensory input a dolphin receives and somehow translated it into some sort of sensory input a human understood. Do you think a human being could make sense out of it? Of course not.
In order to communicate you need to have something in common with the creature. I am afraid a creature which only experiences air a minute fraction of it's life will find very little to communicate to you.
They are not idiots trust me. MS bought the president they wanted, they got the Attorney General they wanted installed and now the DOJ is going to throw the case for them.
Even if the circuit court sees through this kabuki dance the republican supreme court is going to give Bill Gates what he want's anyway.
At this time this nothing but a waste of our tax dollars.
Don't all laws have to be tried before a judge sooner or later?
According to your analysis it should be legal for corporations to hire death squads to assinate competitors. If they were simply allowed to kill anybody they wanted they would not worry about the uncertainty of trying to make a profit.
You gotta draw the line somewhere and the society has done exactly that. No matter where you draw the line someone will object and it will end up in front of a judge. This is how our system works.
I think it's much more plausable that they simply copied it. I imagine MS does incredible amounts of industrial espionage and they knew full well what was going on in cupertino.
Even if what you say is true once they found out what icon the competition was using (whose screenshots came first?) they should have switched the icon. How hard is it for chrissake.
Even so you'd think they would take a chance at being original and use some other picture.
I have always maintained that the more draconian copy protection schemes are the better it is for open source software.
Right now one of the main reasons MS has such a huge monopoly on office software is because a huge number of people pirate their copy. Add to that the millions of copies that are pirated worldwide and you see what I mean. All of these people have zero incentive to explore lower cost, free or open source options because they can get office for free.
Imagine if nobody in the entire world could copy office!. Overnight the market share of perfect office, star office, smartsuite etc would rocket upward. Especially overseas where people would drop office like a hot potato because paying for it would mean giving up a years wage.
To fight this MS would have to drop their prices drasticaly which would be a good thing for everybody. It also would take away another cash cow from MS and that would be a good thing.
An agreement is an agreement it really does not matter what you are agreeing to that much (as long as it's not criminal or unconstitutional).
Consider this.
As you said the golden rule emphasizes that you ought to treat people good no matter how you have been treated. Maybe this gives people the impression that is they treat somebody bad it will never turn around and bite them. For example. If I beat up a good person that good person would never beat me up or seek revenge because he follows the golden rule.
If on the other hand the golden rule is to treat people like you have been treated then it's OK to hit back. The person doing the hitting might not feels so secure that a good person would not retaliate or seek revenge.
If the golden rule was restated I actually think people would behave better because their motivation would change from behaving correctly because of some eternal reward to behaving correctly out of fear. Fear is always a more palpable motivator.
I still don't get your argument. You state that renting office would cost you more in the long run then buying yet you still claim it would lower TCO. Did I read that wrong?
As for my upgrade when and if you need it point consider this.
In my office everybody uses office 97. If someone sends us a office 2000 document there is ONE pc with office 2000 on it. That person simply saves it as HTML and forwards it to the person who needs it. It rarely happens mind you because most people are reasonable and will send you the format you need. You don't need to upgrade the entire office just a few desktops to get compatibility. It's also important to be able to manage your upgrade schedule. If you have seasonal downturns or are suffering from a temporary downturn then you should have the choice to wait till better times to upgrade. MS will soon take that choice away from you. You WILL upgrade WHEN they want to not when you can best afford it.
If the GPL is tested and found invalid it would be best thing to ever happen. Whatever the reason is for the GPL being invalid it could be used to invalidate all software licenses. I think the FSF ought to pick the right case and purposfully throw the case. If they did it carefully they could invalidate all shrink wrap and clickthrough licenses. That would be good thing but it might sink the whole .net scheme.
"If a billion chinese use your product for free illegally, have you lost anything?
Do you really believe if they all paid, that the price would drop?"
It's not that MS lost it's that we lost. We paid for something other people get for free and that makes us suckers.
If we didn't pay either then MS could not afford to keep making windows and office or whatever else. In a very real sense we pay to subsidize the software the rest of the world uses for free.
So the question is not "Do you really believe if they all paid, that the price would drop?" the question is "what would happen if we didn't pay either?"
Do onto others what has been done to you.
"Might is right, or The Satanic bible? "
Neither it's a line from a tool song.
I really admire how he twisted a very common phrase and changed the entire meaning of it. When phrased this way the golden rule becomes almost menacing. It's like maryln manson taking "boogie man" and turning into a sinister stalker song.
Ask yourself this. If the golden rule had been stated this way from the start would it affect your behavior towards other humans and how?
First of all the chief claim made by Allchin was not that free software does not innovate it was that it's un-american, destroys intellectual property, and ought to be legislated. I don't think he even mentioned the lack of innovation bit.
As for the second part every time this subject comes up I refer to the same projects.
Postgres does things no database vendor ever even thought of like user defined operators, loadable stored procedure languages, in addition to the vastly rich geometric and time datatypes and corresponding operators. Yes in postgres you can run the following query. "select all points that are outside this circle" or "list all lines that are perpendicular to this one". That's just scratching the surface of what postgres offers.
Leaving that aside take a look at zope, enhydra (and xmlc), jabber. Yes dig a little into just these four projects and you will see more innovation that MS has ever made in their entire history.
One last thing go and browse around sourceforge, set up an account and play for a while. Sourceforge itself is one of most innovative things I have seen in a long time.
Open source is the richest source of innovation in the industry today.
Yes the declaration of independence was very vehement about free enterprise and profiteering. In fact our entire constitution is filled with praising free enterprise and corporate profits. All that talk about inaliable rights and pursuit of happiness is always quoted but nobody seems to want to publisize the parts of the declration, constitution, or the bill of rights that talk about corporatism and profit.
Oh wait a minute....
How does paying more for something reduce the TCO?
Right now most businesses can decide for themselves weather to upgrade or not and when to upgrade. Being forced to upgrade weather you like it or not and whenever MS tells you to regardless of your cash flow does not reduce the TCO.
I believe that you are indeed mistaken. The announcement of dropping linux came AFTER ms gave them money.
It is in most countries. Most people in the US pay for it when they buy hardware. We are the suckers who subsidize a billion chinese who get windows for free.
They would have no real reason to do that. The only time MS gives away stuff is to put a competitor out of business by "cutting off their air supply". Sinse there is no competition for windows in the home market (they own over 90%) then there is no need to give away anything. Even under a best case scenario of Linux taking 20 or 30 percent of the home market it still wouldn't make sense to give it away because it could not cut off the air supply. Servers on the hand that's a different story. I bet they give away server licenses before they give away desktop licenses.
In the unlikely scenario that MS gives away windows in any segment it would be Good Thing. With a major cash cow out of the picture at least to some degree it undermines their ability to subsidize other programs like IE.
Not that I think it's ever going to happen but it's fun to think about. Can you imagine all the quotes that are out there from Allchin, Ballmer and Gates about how it's communist to give away programs and how free programs are actually more expensive? All those quotes will be dredged up shoved down their throats it would be fun to watch.
Well DUH!. What does that have to do with anything. Those tens of thousands of MAN hours were written by human beings who did not want corporations to profit from their work.
"If you do anything that involves a computer you are a competitor of Microsoft)"
Yes MS is involved in just about every software market. It's also involved in some computer hardware markets.
Of course it is also involved in media companies and venture capital also.
I would venture to say that there are very fields in which the ms juggernaut is NOT involved in.