Try to deliver selected results in person to your manager, especially big or sought after items. If possible, include your manager's manager. It doesn't have to be formal, just in person.
Otherwise, even though their brain knows otherwise, they will be getting your work "from the computer".
Also, find a way to make the managers feel that they can contact you. However, be careful to reward planning, and prevent situations where crises are rewarded.
So if your phone is in your front pants pocket, you're zapping your nads even when the phone is "inactive" but turned on.
First there's distance.
Newton's Inverse Square Law tells us that a radiation source 1" from your nads is going to be nine times stronger than the same source 3" away, or 144 times as strong as a foot away.
Then as you move the phone occasionally has to establish the appropriate tower to contact. In an urban area, you have quite a few metal obstacles which move around you or you yourself move around, making the phone more active. In an urban area you also have quite a few other phones fighting for contact with the same towers, also requiring your phone to increase activity.
If contact is bad then the phone tries with a stronger signal and more often. Note that being in a car, a train, or other metal container hinders contact -- and reflects the signal back at you.
So commuting, you're getting a solid dose of radiation.
On the surface, this is about patents, but (assuming we're not being misled)
this is about democracy, and the EU Parliament being made irrelevant.
Weren't there several earlier scandals involving the appointed European Commission which had to be straightened out by the elected European Parliament? I recall several involving resignations and losses of millions of .
Perhaps it is time to rethink the concept of the European Commission. This clearly has not been working out. In fact it has been getting worse over time. The U.S. has also had very bad times from people being appointed to positions of responsibility. Try to learn from the mistakes rather than imitate them.
The software patent proposal hurts closed and open source developers. That much is in the news every day.
Software patents would also hurt any business wishing to use computers to make money.
Sure it may only cost between $50 USD and $50 000 USD per year per patent license, plus attorney's fees, but your company's web site probably violates over 50 by now, all of them either obvious or prior art. Some are even ripped right out of old RFCs.
Or you can fight them in court. It costs only about and average of $4 000 000 USD per patent to get them overturned.
So your choice is pay them and go bankrupt or fight them in court and go bankrupt. The non-producing patent portfolio companies come out ahead on average and only the attorneys win flat out.
If this really ocurred in court I would expect to find that someone had posted the transcript online. Particularly something as explosive as this.
You put too much faith in the WWW. It's great for buying or selling things, especially computer related things, and is great for commentary but it contains very little factual information otherwise.
There is really very little information on the web, even today, compared to what are in court records, court transcripts, journals, books, etc.
Even big web indexes like Google seem to hit less than 30% - 40% of these according to people researching web robots.
Then you have the issue of ranking algorithms. In Google, it's a popularity contest. If enough people link to a site, then it's important. If an important site links to a document in your search result then it gets a higher rank and shows up near the beginning of the results. If no one at all links to it, then it stays at the end and out of sight -- a self-perpetuating cycle.
I no longer have access to Lexis-Nexis or other law databases, nor to a law labrarian. If you are happy to consider the CP/M story an urban legend, then fine. Maybe it is. So are DRM and software patents, since no mainstream press write about those. However, if you want to know for sure, then check with a law librarian and search for the relevant court records (not transcripts).
There is a lot of "explosive" stuff not yet on the web. You can easily be the first to post it.
CALs push the cost of MS products way up. Not just on the purchase price, but on the administrative overhead. You also get further delays (lost staff time) when adding new clients if the licensing managent by people other than the maintenance staff.
Plus they are a convenient way of locking out competing platforms through differential pricing. Though that's not needed, just having another hoop to hop through is often enough. Getting (or giving) that extra sheet of paper can be too much hassle / politics.
Overall, I've had only negative experiences with MS licensing issues, especially the last five years, and say that you must compare apples with apples. Price comparisons don't count for skeletal systems, you have to take into account the costs for a usable setup.
Google is not the alpha and omega of information retrieval. You will not find court records there. For that you have to look to other sources.
That aside, it would be very useful and interesting to know more about Killdall's court room demo. Knowing the case number, date and which court would make it a relevant citation.
Bill Gates is the Osama bin Laden of the Internet and should be locked up for all the harm he's done, which by the way exceeds the economic damage caused by the real Osama bin Laden.
MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting
other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.
What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.
To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contributions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or are fictional Enron style accounting.
Ok. So what's left? His philantropic seem to be based on getting matching funds for purchases of expensive medications manufactured by the multi-national pharmaceuticals he has invested heavily in. The targeting of the so called gifts can also be questioned as they have the appearance of an
agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.
Actually, OOo handles long documents and styles better than MS-Office and is therefore of great benefit to schools, colleges and universities. Anyone that has ever tried to write or edit a thesis or dissertation using MS-Word already knows first hand that it doesn't cut the mustard. Yes, TeX and TeX variants are out there, but OOo is easier for non-science students.
Also, OpenOffice.org handles royalty-free, open, XML-based file formats like OpenDocument, unlike MS-Office which cannot/does not. That ought to have been in the article summary.
He's the Osama bin Laden of the Internet and should be locked up for all the harm he's done, which by the way exceeds the economic damage caused by the real Osama bin Laden.
MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting
other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.
What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.
To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contriutions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or fictional Enron style accounting.
I have had 2 or 3 bots trying to brute-force my main box's password for months on end. The attacks all come from (likely compromised) server farms. I used to run without a firewall, but now I block every IP that tries to run an attack.
I hope that you or your network administrator have been on the phone and spoken with the sysadmin for that server farm. Let your own team know the outcome and progress of the dialog. Unless, the server farm's sysadmin is a complete asshole and / or incompetent, you can expect the attacks based from there to cease right away. Get the police involved if the phone calls don't work, the police can lean on the sysadmin or his boss. Police may claim ignorance or other bullshit, but if they give you lip, politely and firmly remind them that it is there job to help deal with crime.
Aside from digging up the phone number, it takes only a few minutes of your time if you use the speaker phone or head set while you're on hold.
Microsoft doesn't have to build a better browser. It just has to build one that's good enough.
Not even that. It just has to provide it pre-installed on every x86 machine sold, or include it as part of a 'service pack' or 'seccurity' upgrade. Or it can cajole so-called computer secuirty public service announcements to neglect to mention other options.
The jobs would still be there, it's just that instead of putting out Bill's fires, you'd be using your computers to improve service or make new services.
1 or 2 3rd party members in congress won't do a lot, but when that number grows to 10% of the floor, then they have some power.
Yes, but that power will be to split the vote between other similar parties and let a dissimilar party dominate. The U.S. still runs on simple majority, until that changes there will be no "third" party in federal government. Local yes, but not federal.
Because you can't compile the code, you have no way to verify that it is even the right source code.
Initiatives such as Microsoft's Shared Source program are worthless PR exercises. That has been proven almost a decade before the initiative by Ken Thompson.
If MS-Shared Source is anything other than a PR move, then perhaps it is to taint developers to prevent them from contributing to free or open source projects in the future.
Remember that one of your sites' most important audiences, the web robots are 'blind', too, and deal only with text. So called content locked away in a Flash presentation won't get indexed. If it's not indexed in Google and co., then it won't show up there at all.
...I could see it being worth it if everyone loved Windows. But the only reason people even use it in the first place is because it's easy...
That implies choice, which is has not been part of the equation. People use MS-Windows because the OEMs have preloaded it onto the machines, also referred to as the Microsoft tax: it's been impossible to get an x86 machine without MS-Windows. Yes, it is now theoretically possible, but hardly practical unless you go Apple or Pegasos etc.
More OEMs need to offer linux. However, just as importantly there needs to be an return to discussion of software based on technical merits rather then just tossing up a five-star review based purely on the MS "look and feel". Currently the rating is more often than not an evaluation of the advertising revenue, not the tool. Also, federally funded public service programs like the ones in the UK and Finland need to stop shilling for Chairman Bill and point out other software and systems.
Disabling online MS-Windows Product Activation could be a real windfall for Linux service providers and distributors if they play their cards right.
Ever heard of Active Directory? Or seen MS's educational pricing? Both of those are much more compelling than you might think.
Both are a compelling reason to go with something more scalable, interoperable, easy to use and cheaper.
If you want off the shelf, then Novell's NDS or eDirectory is the way to go.
If you have some system administration background or really want Free Software, then Kerberos or Kerberos + LDAP is the way to go. It's not the bear people make it out to be.
kstars is great for astronomy and I've run it on a PII with 128 MB RAM using the current debian stable (woody), though with the 2.2 kernel. On a PII it's slow but usable.
In a perfect world, we'd run perfect software. We're not in a perfect world, and most of it uses MS software, so lets patch the holes with the tools we're given. If everyone on the road drives a ford, and fords have X mechanical problem, do you tell people how to fix the problem, or do you tell them to buy a toyota? I mean, be reasonable. maybe NEXT time they'll buy a toyota, but for now, they've GOT a ford.
Information about better options is a prequisite for making an informed decision NEXT time.
Microsoft may be a problem here and now for most of the desktop users, but like with other epidemics the key to control is prevention. Sure there is a need for corrective action to help those still on MS systems on purpose or by accident. It is the responsible thing to mention better products so that informed decisions can be made as the public gets the chance.
Options like
Mozilla,
Firefox,
Opera,
Thunderbird,
Eudora, and
OpenOffice.org, to name a few for starters, should at least get a mention. They work here and now, even on MS-Windows. Aren't we talking about technology where we can choose the best tool for the job or is it a religion where we all face Redmond and bleat "yaaaay Bill!" ?
By neglecting to mention better options, even those options usable by MS systems, the site does two disservices. First, it turns an otherwise good idea into a state sponsored marketing campaign for a single vendor. Second, it keeps people in the dark, preventing them from improving their existing systems or to making more informed choices in the future.
Along the same lines, further proactive effort is needed to prevent defective systems from becoming a problem in your cars, television sets, taxes, public records or health care. All ofthis makes a good illustration of why commodity services and protocols are good for the market by preventing lock in.
Government money should promote actual computer security and increase public awareness. This announcement looks like it's just government funding for another MS media circus.
Plus the advice summary is bullshit:
Install anti-virus software
That's corrective action. How about prevenaitive action like pointing out secure products and warning the public to avoid defective ones?
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Keep your anti-virus software up to date
You can't patch fast enough. That includes so called anti-virus software. Someone has to get hit first. AV companies have to then react and update the AV software profile. Then users have to add the updated profile, over a modem that can take time. MS-Slammer reached saturation in 8.5 minutes.
Install a personal firewall
Web pages and e-mail go right through that fire wall, they're supposed to, so do outgoing connections usually. Unfortunately most MS malware comes in via MSIE (the web) or MS-Outlook (mail), so how exactly is a firewall going to help?
How about swapping out vulnerable applications and services instead?
Use Windows updates to patch security holes
There are other systems besides MS-Windows. Currently these do not even get viruses or worms. Some of these (e.g. Ubuntu) are easy to install and work on existing x86 hardware. Macintoshes are low maintenance and work out of the box. Unless you're a heavy gamer, you don't need MS-Windows.
Do not open e-mail messages that look suspicious
A virus is only harmless data, unless your system is designed to run it on sight. How about choosing an e-mail client that's not designed to spread viruses.
Thunderbird,
Mozilla, and
Eudora are excellent choices.
Do not click on e-mail attachments you were not expecting
Use one of the above mail clients and/or switch to an operating system not designed to spread viruses.
How about at least mentioning that the "report" is just another MS sponsored infomercial?
1 x "Microsoft Analyst Review and Report"
@
$26 000
and
1 x "FL Tech will deliver services to define and document all the various aspects of testing for security vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, as directed by Microsoft."
@ $50 000
Hopefully, the EU will remain independent of MS long enough to ban sw patents permanenty. However, as a point of information, the harm caused by sw patents is not limited to developers.
Remember the "1-click" patent? How about the "shopping basket" patent?
Those and many others like them, affect any business using the web for sales. Other more general sw patents affect any business using the Internet or WWW for anything business related.
And no, so called defensive patents won't work against portfolio companies, they don't produce or sell anything.
Microsoft's fourth, and perhaps largest, competitor is OpenOffice.org. MS' profit is currently focused on two major products - MS Windows and MS Office (aka MSO). Both of these are in decline. OOo cuts into the latter especially since it is easier to drop MSO completely than it is to drop MS-Windows completely.
Unlike MS Office, OOo supports several open file formats, including OASIS' OpenDocument which is already on it's way to being supported by dozens of applications -- but not MSO. Losing control of the file format means that MS would eventually lose that revenue stream. That's why it's lobbying so hard to force sw patents into the EU and to hinder further spread of open standards everywhere.
Open standards are what made the Internet and the WWW possible. There were many networks and even some internets back in the 60's and 70's but none took off because being proprietary prevented easy adoption. Enter TCP/IP and later HTTP and HTML.
So no income from MS, great expense from MS, and it's largely MS pushing the sw patent issue. So who's going to gain from sw patents in Europe except the portfolio companies? They might gain, but they sure don't produce or develop software.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to deliver selected results in person to your manager, especially big or sought after items. If possible, include your manager's manager. It doesn't have to be formal, just in person.
Otherwise, even though their brain knows otherwise, they will be getting your work "from the computer".
Also, find a way to make the managers feel that they can contact you. However, be careful to reward planning, and prevent situations where crises are rewarded.
First there's distance. Newton's Inverse Square Law tells us that a radiation source 1" from your nads is going to be nine times stronger than the same source 3" away, or 144 times as strong as a foot away.
Then as you move the phone occasionally has to establish the appropriate tower to contact. In an urban area, you have quite a few metal obstacles which move around you or you yourself move around, making the phone more active. In an urban area you also have quite a few other phones fighting for contact with the same towers, also requiring your phone to increase activity.
If contact is bad then the phone tries with a stronger signal and more often. Note that being in a car, a train, or other metal container hinders contact -- and reflects the signal back at you.
So commuting, you're getting a solid dose of radiation.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the concept of the European Commission. This clearly has not been working out. In fact it has been getting worse over time. The U.S. has also had very bad times from people being appointed to positions of responsibility. Try to learn from the mistakes rather than imitate them.
The software patent proposal hurts closed and open source developers. That much is in the news every day. Software patents would also hurt any business wishing to use computers to make money.
Sure it may only cost between $50 USD and $50 000 USD per year per patent license, plus attorney's fees, but your company's web site probably violates over 50 by now, all of them either obvious or prior art. Some are even ripped right out of old RFCs.
Or you can fight them in court. It costs only about and average of $4 000 000 USD per patent to get them overturned.
So your choice is pay them and go bankrupt or fight them in court and go bankrupt. The non-producing patent portfolio companies come out ahead on average and only the attorneys win flat out.
There is really very little information on the web, even today, compared to what are in court records, court transcripts, journals, books, etc.
Even big web indexes like Google seem to hit less than 30% - 40% of these according to people researching web robots.
Then you have the issue of ranking algorithms. In Google, it's a popularity contest. If enough people link to a site, then it's important. If an important site links to a document in your search result then it gets a higher rank and shows up near the beginning of the results. If no one at all links to it, then it stays at the end and out of sight -- a self-perpetuating cycle.
I no longer have access to Lexis-Nexis or other law databases, nor to a law labrarian. If you are happy to consider the CP/M story an urban legend, then fine. Maybe it is. So are DRM and software patents, since no mainstream press write about those. However, if you want to know for sure, then check with a law librarian and search for the relevant court records (not transcripts).
There is a lot of "explosive" stuff not yet on the web. You can easily be the first to post it.
Plus they are a convenient way of locking out competing platforms through differential pricing. Though that's not needed, just having another hoop to hop through is often enough. Getting (or giving) that extra sheet of paper can be too much hassle / politics.
Overall, I've had only negative experiences with MS licensing issues, especially the last five years, and say that you must compare apples with apples. Price comparisons don't count for skeletal systems, you have to take into account the costs for a usable setup.
That aside, it would be very useful and interesting to know more about Killdall's court room demo. Knowing the case number, date and which court would make it a relevant citation.
Bill Gates is the Osama bin Laden of the Internet and should be locked up for all the harm he's done, which by the way exceeds the economic damage caused by the real Osama bin Laden.
MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.
What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.
To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contributions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or are fictional Enron style accounting.
Ok. So what's left? His philantropic seem to be based on getting matching funds for purchases of expensive medications manufactured by the multi-national pharmaceuticals he has invested heavily in. The targeting of the so called gifts can also be questioned as they have the appearance of an agenda to persuade beneficiary governments to reverse policies promoting the use of open source software.
He should be locked up.
Also, OpenOffice.org handles royalty-free, open, XML-based file formats like OpenDocument, unlike MS-Office which cannot/does not. That ought to have been in the article summary.
MS-viruses, worms, trojans alone cost billions in lost productivity every quarter. That's not counting other security problems caused by MS' shoddy products and lack of security. Other platforms and software are largely immune to worms and viruses, at worst they are merely resistent. Then there's the lost productivity due to MS' difficult, labor intensive mainenance and egregious interoperability with competing tools. The competing tools do, in contrast, work just fine together, only Bill's tools cause trouble. MS' interoperability is poor even between other MS products. All that costs money and burns people out, which in turn costs money.
What Gates and his company did between 1993-1998 was a crime, pure and simple. He and his flunkies took a healthy, wealthy, competitive market that was good for everybody and crushed it with OEM agreements, giveaways and secret API's. This is an established truth from the US trial statement of facts.
To really put the damage in context, it's not like the company brings in any tax dollars either. It pays no taxes, so aside from campaign contriutions, nothing goes into the system. The mythical billions the company is rumored to be sitting on is either out of circulation, thus harming the economy, or fictional Enron style accounting.
Lock him up.
Aside from digging up the phone number, it takes only a few minutes of your time if you use the speaker phone or head set while you're on hold.
Firefox is still doing well despite the fact that users have to take three non-passive actions: 1 ) actively seek it out and 2) download it and 3) install it. Also, large installations are reluctant to draw attention to themselves for fear of reprisal in the form of increased MS fees and such. There are, however, ways to hide from MS.
The jobs would still be there, it's just that instead of putting out Bill's fires, you'd be using your computers to improve service or make new services.
If MS-Shared Source is anything other than a PR move, then perhaps it is to taint developers to prevent them from contributing to free or open source projects in the future.
Remember that one of your sites' most important audiences, the web robots are 'blind', too, and deal only with text. So called content locked away in a Flash presentation won't get indexed. If it's not indexed in Google and co., then it won't show up there at all.
More OEMs need to offer linux. However, just as importantly there needs to be an return to discussion of software based on technical merits rather then just tossing up a five-star review based purely on the MS "look and feel". Currently the rating is more often than not an evaluation of the advertising revenue, not the tool. Also, federally funded public service programs like the ones in the UK and Finland need to stop shilling for Chairman Bill and point out other software and systems.
Disabling online MS-Windows Product Activation could be a real windfall for Linux service providers and distributors if they play their cards right.
If you want off the shelf, then Novell's NDS or eDirectory is the way to go.
If you have some system administration background or really want Free Software, then Kerberos or Kerberos + LDAP is the way to go. It's not the bear people make it out to be.
For file sharing there's Samba or OpenAFS
Regarding the over all setup, take a look at the thin client linux setup at Riverdale High School in Oregon.
For distros I'd recommend debian or something debian based like skolelinux or ubuntu.
Options like Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, Eudora, and OpenOffice.org, to name a few for starters, should at least get a mention. They work here and now, even on MS-Windows. Aren't we talking about technology where we can choose the best tool for the job or is it a religion where we all face Redmond and bleat "yaaaay Bill!" ?
By neglecting to mention better options, even those options usable by MS systems, the site does two disservices. First, it turns an otherwise good idea into a state sponsored marketing campaign for a single vendor. Second, it keeps people in the dark, preventing them from improving their existing systems or to making more informed choices in the future.
Along the same lines, further proactive effort is needed to prevent defective systems from becoming a problem in your cars, television sets, taxes, public records or health care. All ofthis makes a good illustration of why commodity services and protocols are good for the market by preventing lock in.
Plus the advice summary is bullshit:
Install anti-virus software
That's corrective action. How about prevenaitive action like pointing out secure products and warning the public to avoid defective ones? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Keep your anti-virus software up to date
You can't patch fast enough. That includes so called anti-virus software. Someone has to get hit first. AV companies have to then react and update the AV software profile. Then users have to add the updated profile, over a modem that can take time. MS-Slammer reached saturation in 8.5 minutes.
Install a personal firewall
Web pages and e-mail go right through that fire wall, they're supposed to, so do outgoing connections usually. Unfortunately most MS malware comes in via MSIE (the web) or MS-Outlook (mail), so how exactly is a firewall going to help? How about swapping out vulnerable applications and services instead?
Use Windows updates to patch security holes
There are other systems besides MS-Windows. Currently these do not even get viruses or worms. Some of these (e.g. Ubuntu) are easy to install and work on existing x86 hardware. Macintoshes are low maintenance and work out of the box. Unless you're a heavy gamer, you don't need MS-Windows.
Do not open e-mail messages that look suspicious
A virus is only harmless data, unless your system is designed to run it on sight. How about choosing an e-mail client that's not designed to spread viruses. Thunderbird, Mozilla, and Eudora are excellent choices.
Do not click on e-mail attachments you were not expecting
Use one of the above mail clients and/or switch to an operating system not designed to spread viruses.
Remember the "1-click" patent? How about the "shopping basket" patent?
Those and many others like them, affect any business using the web for sales. Other more general sw patents affect any business using the Internet or WWW for anything business related.
And no, so called defensive patents won't work against portfolio companies, they don't produce or sell anything.
Unlike MS Office, OOo supports several open file formats, including OASIS' OpenDocument which is already on it's way to being supported by dozens of applications -- but not MSO. Losing control of the file format means that MS would eventually lose that revenue stream. That's why it's lobbying so hard to force sw patents into the EU and to hinder further spread of open standards everywhere.
Open standards are what made the Internet and the WWW possible. There were many networks and even some internets back in the 60's and 70's but none took off because being proprietary prevented easy adoption. Enter TCP/IP and later HTTP and HTML.
In other words, no income for the government from them.
So in other words if you count the lost productivity due to M$ viruses, worms, trojans, and general interoperability problems, it's a liability for the U.S. to have M$ in the country. Oh, yeah and arrays of cracked MS-Windows machines cranking out spam for damage of over $58 billion per year
So no income from MS, great expense from MS, and it's largely MS pushing the sw patent issue. So who's going to gain from sw patents in Europe except the portfolio companies? They might gain, but they sure don't produce or develop software.