The creation of an e-book Napster would more than likely happen if e-books ever picked up in popularity however I don't know if they would cause readers to buy copies legally in the same way that Napster increased CD sales.
If they can get the whole book for free why would they bother buying it? Some may do it out of support for their favorite author/publishing group (as I do in buying copies of Linux rather than downloading them for free) but most likely would not.
I think the reason CD sales increased was that users would find a bands latest hit online then decide that they would give that album a try to get the rest of the groups work. I don't think most people digitize their entire CD collection to their hard drive (at least they don't share it with others) but they do digitize and share the latest hit of a band. It's like a preview of what the band is like.
If there were a way to limit it so that a user could read the first few chapters, get hooked, and have to buy the e-book to find out the ending, then you may have something.
As far as I can tell they were but I think someone mentioned they were dual-boot systems. Dell and Microsoft may have had some kind of deal on pre-installing Windows with all Dell computers.
I may have misunderstood that part. The fact still remains though that if Microsoft wants to put an icon on the Windows desktop then they can. It's their operating system so they can include any of their products that they want really. Whether or not I want that icon or that product there is irrelevant.
From that header line you probably think I'm about to give you the whole "What do you expect from Microsoft. Antitrust and blah blah blah" but I'm not. Microsoft is a business. A business becomes successful by getting people to buy their products. What kind of business tries to get you to use other people's products. Whether you feel Microsoft's products are inferior or not is irrelevant. Use something else. You can't tell me that there aren't other options out there. There are plenty of viable alternatives.
I'm sure they did test the software quite well but on systems like SQL Server it is tough to run through every instruction and every control branch that the code contains. Even on a simple nested loop with a few conditional tests there are hundreds and possibly thousands of values that may have to be tested to take everything into account depending on how complex the conditional tests are. If systems were tested exhaustively they would never be released as they would be in perpetual test mode. And the fact remains that it was custom code that was causing the problem.
That's exactly right but everybody is too busy trying to find more and more ways to bash Gates. It seems that we always have to blame somebody else for our problems. Granted that Microsoft code has had security problems before but last time I checked so did UNIX and Linux and Mac as well I believe.
It may be that your young cousins use Linux but you still installed it for them and I bet you troubleshoot for them and install and configure any new devices that they get. Do you know every single bit of what happens in a computer have you disassembled a CPU to see what it looks like and examined every single etching. Saying that someone has to completely understand every inner working makes no sense. If that's the case then take away my car, tv, phone, stereo. I may know a lot about them but I certainly couldn't build one for myself without doing a lot of reading about them. How can anyone learn about a system without first using it(without knowing all about it). My old home economics teacher made us read all this stuff about cooking and the likes but when it came time to do it I sure had a hell of a time because I had no first hand experience with it.
And just so you know I am a computer programmer as well and have sound technical knowledge so I do know where I'm coming from.
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If they can get the whole book for free why would they bother buying it? Some may do it out of support for their favorite author/publishing group (as I do in buying copies of Linux rather than downloading them for free) but most likely would not.
I think the reason CD sales increased was that users would find a bands latest hit online then decide that they would give that album a try to get the rest of the groups work. I don't think most people digitize their entire CD collection to their hard drive (at least they don't share it with others) but they do digitize and share the latest hit of a band. It's like a preview of what the band is like.
If there were a way to limit it so that a user could read the first few chapters, get hooked, and have to buy the e-book to find out the ending, then you may have something.
As far as I can tell they were but I think someone mentioned they were dual-boot systems. Dell and Microsoft may have had some kind of deal on pre-installing Windows with all Dell computers.
I may have misunderstood that part. The fact still remains though that if Microsoft wants to put an icon on the Windows desktop then they can. It's their operating system so they can include any of their products that they want really. Whether or not I want that icon or that product there is irrelevant.
And do you propose that Microsoft pay itself to put their icon on the desktop?
From that header line you probably think I'm about to give you the whole "What do you expect from Microsoft. Antitrust and blah blah blah" but I'm not. Microsoft is a business. A business becomes successful by getting people to buy their products. What kind of business tries to get you to use other people's products. Whether you feel Microsoft's products are inferior or not is irrelevant. Use something else. You can't tell me that there aren't other options out there. There are plenty of viable alternatives.
I'm sure they did test the software quite well but on systems like SQL Server it is tough to run through every instruction and every control branch that the code contains. Even on a simple nested loop with a few conditional tests there are hundreds and possibly thousands of values that may have to be tested to take everything into account depending on how complex the conditional tests are. If systems were tested exhaustively they would never be released as they would be in perpetual test mode. And the fact remains that it was custom code that was causing the problem.
That's exactly right but everybody is too busy trying to find more and more ways to bash Gates. It seems that we always have to blame somebody else for our problems. Granted that Microsoft code has had security problems before but last time I checked so did UNIX and Linux and Mac as well I believe.
I suppose it was just a misunderstanding of your posting. I agree with what you just posted right now. Especially about reading the manuals!
It may be that your young cousins use Linux but you still installed it for them and I bet you troubleshoot for them and install and configure any new devices that they get. Do you know every single bit of what happens in a computer have you disassembled a CPU to see what it looks like and examined every single etching. Saying that someone has to completely understand every inner working makes no sense. If that's the case then take away my car, tv, phone, stereo. I may know a lot about them but I certainly couldn't build one for myself without doing a lot of reading about them. How can anyone learn about a system without first using it(without knowing all about it). My old home economics teacher made us read all this stuff about cooking and the likes but when it came time to do it I sure had a hell of a time because I had no first hand experience with it.
And just so you know I am a computer programmer as well and have sound technical knowledge so I do know where I'm coming from.