If all of those pirates paid to see the movie instead, that would increase sales by 0.5%... However:
Some pirates may have downloaded it for multiple people to watch. Some may have downloaded it but also paid to see the movie, perhaps using the pirate copy to decide if the movie is worth watching or not, then going to see a full quality copy. Some of those who downloaded it might never have watched it at all had a download not been available. Some who watched the downloaded copy may have told others it was worth watching, who then went and paid to see it.
What the box office record does say however, is that piracy is not responsible for low sales... If a movie bombs, the poor sales are more likely to do with the movie being garbage (and there have been a LOT of crap movies released lately) than down to piracy.
Piracy is a scapegoat, used as an excuse for crap movies and as justification for implementing even more draconian restrictions on paying customers.
Ofcourse its a self fulfilling prophecy, if you release crap movies and enforce draconian restrictions on legitimate customers, then people will flock to the pirate copies which lack those restrictions (and a shit movie might be worth watching for free if your bored, while not being worth the time and expense to see it legitimately).
It's not just a lower and more savvy userbase that reduces the malware on linux... The system is better designed than windows has been, with a number of features that make the spread of malware more difficult, for instance:
central updates of all software (vs windows update which only handles the base os, leaving acrobat/flash/java easily exploitable) non root user by default (which ms have finally caught on to, years after everyone else) downloaded files dont have execute permission by default file extensions are not only less important (aren't used to determine if a file is executable) but are also not hidden by default doesn't automatically execute anything on inserted media package management - users are less likely to download and execute random binaries, if they want to install something they can select it from the package manager
The problem with distributions like linpus, is that they are barely supported and unheard of... So if the user even bothers to try it, they will end up with a poor experience of "linux" and refuse to try other distros in the future...
Installing freedos or a crippled unheard of linux distro is actually good for ms, as it gives the perception that the free alternatives are useless. Similarly the use of pirated windows is better for ms than the alternative. If they were not able to pirate windows, very few users would buy it instead... You would end up with a sudden explosion of linux use, which would massively increase mindshare as users realised linux was actually usable and not just something useless that only serves to demonstrate the hardware is functional.
If you decide not to use the built in components, you are still stuck with them on your machine and have to keep them updated etc...
Also changing the ui on windows is a troublesome manual process, doing so on linux is a simple matter of selecting an alternative ui through the package manager, and then choosing which one to use when you next log in.
When i've seen windows systems with alternative interfaces, there have often been all manner of weird bugs mainly because very few windows software is designed with anything other than the default interface in mind, whereas use of different interfaces is very common on linux (seems every distro has its own default)...
There is plenty of demand for "anything that is free" from china, since they will just install pirated windows anyway, they don't want to waste their money on an unnecessary non pirated version of windows.
Installing blackbox on windows is actually more effort than installing a different wm on ubuntu (through the software center) and then selecting it when you log in... It's also a far less common thing to do on windows, so you often get all kinds of unexpected bugs cropping up because 99% of software just assumes the default wm will be in use.
That said, it could be easier still, ubuntu could offer users a few screenshots and the opportunity to select from a few environments by default... This would have been a lot better for users than defaulting to a radical change which was also quite buggy - this put a lot of users off completely.
The big question is, where? I tried to find a laptop with linux preinstalled a few months ago, and the few i could find were either overpriced, outdated models or wouldn't ship to where i am... None of the big vendors seemed to offer anything at all, or they were extremely well hidden on their websites.
Then you might as well have simply installed normal pirated versions for your company too, the windows bulk licenses are upgrades to be applied over the oem versions which will get you screwed if anyone ever decides to do an audit.
If you had issues like these then the hardware clearly wasn't exactly the same, and this is a common problem... Large scale box shifters like dell will often change the hardware in a box without changing the model number, wether its wifi chipset, motherboard revision, hard drive model etc... It's quite common to see supposedly "identical" machines with different guts.
Religious education and religious indoctrination are two different things...
Education where you teach people about several religions in a neutral way is a good thing, since people will encounter these religions at some point and should be prepared..
On the other hand indoctrination is when you preach a single religion and push the students towards that religion... This is exactly what should not be happening in schools.
People who actually want security are more likely to have upgraded to filevault 2 when they upgraded to lion, i certainly did as did everyone else i know who is running lion.
It's not just about age, its the fact that she is in a position of authority and trust. People in such positions have been known to wield their position as a way to influence someone into bed with them... This is generally called grooming.
Now if you were 19 and seeing a teacher who works at a different school to you i doubt anyone would care.
Private businesses are unscrupulous and ruthless with very little accountability, profit at any cost... If you don't do something to keep them in check then they will abuse to the maximum possible extent if it helps improve the bottom line.
When you talk of reliability and mentioning that calls are routed over voice gsm you are not comparing like for like...
Three actually provide a similar product for SIP, that is any calls you make in the normal way on the gsm handset are transparently routed to a SIP server of your choice...
No client necessary, any standard cellphone works. I think the service is mostly aimed at business users, where your cellphone can integrate totally with the existing sip based pbx.
This service is as reliable as your telco and your voip provider, and seeing as there are multiple sip providers vs one skype provider you remove a single point of failure with sip and can choose a provider based on their reliability, or switch if they're not up to it.
They get subscribers who inevitably pay for more services through them. Such as when I purchase temporary Internet access when traveling.
Seems a fairly desperate way to get subscribers, considering no other provider offers such a service... Once they are established you can expect to see this loss leading service either go away entirely, or start costing.
Three are growing, but still have the smallest market share of any of the major operators. Setting up a telco is a huge investment in infrastructure, so its likely to be quite some time before they are able to break even. Also if they offer free services, there will be a lot of users who exclusively use the free services and never pay for anything at all. This inflates the market share and subscriber numbers, but is otherwise damaging to the bottom line as these customers are a cost rather than a revenue source. Also low market share results in unused capacity, so the costs of giving away some of that capacity for free are significantly less than if the free users were depriving paying customers of capacity. You can expect the free services to be dropped just as soon as paying customers need the capacity.
You can use it with a TV, which most people already have so thus no need to purchase a monitor.
You could purchase a keyboard and mouse, or you could just get a used one for free, these things get thrown out all the time. Or you might already have them. Depending on your intended use of the device you might not want these things either.
A case you can do without, its not pretty but it works just fine. Depending on your intended use you might not actually want a case at all.
For a power supply you can use many mobile phone chargers, which you either already have or can obtain cheaply or for free, most people throw away their old chargers when they get a new phone.
If they were to bundle all these things with it, then it would increase the price unnecessarily for those of us who already have the accessories, can easily obtain them or simply don't want them. Also things like SD cards are coming down in price so rapidly that they would need to keep constantly revising the product/price or face charging an extortionate price for the cards.
I'm sure third party distributors will start offering bundles once there is sufficient stock to go round anyway.
The idea is that there is a high likelihood you already have keyboards, mice and screens (You can connect it to a tv or monitor)... No point forcing people to buy things they might not need.
Most new computers come with a complete set of keyboard/mouse/screen/cables and people typically throw away the perfectly good ones they used with their previous computer, which is terribly wasteful.
Not only that, but provide a foolproof way to roll back to the factory image...
If education is the goal, the ability to experiment with the system safe in the knowledge that you can't permanently damage it is very important...
To give an example:
When i started with computers, i had a Sinclair Spectrum... This machine, and some of the subsequent systems i had provided me a FAR superior introduction to computers than todays windows boxes for a number of reasons.
1, this computer was mine and mine alone, my parents never used it and couldn't care less about it... i could experiment with it all i liked, by contrast had it been a shared family computer i would be scared of breaking it for fear of angering my parents and siblings.
2, the computer came with a manual clearly laying out that whatever you do you can't break the machine via software, if you made it crash worse case you just hit reset and your back at the original basic prompt as if nothing had happened. by contrast, a windows system is very easy to break and could be quite complex, time consuming and expensive to fix afterwards. Knowing that you can't permanently break the system and that worst case you can perform a trivial reset procedure is VERY important, as it gives you (especially as a child) confidence to experiment with the system, and experimentation is the best way to learn.
3, the computer came with a manual that gave programming examples and encouraged you to try things out, again safe in the knowledge that you couldn't break it... by contrast, windows actively discourages users from messing with the system, certain files are hidden by default, certain locations on the filesystem are considered off limits and display a warning (which is quite scary to inexperienced users) when you try to access them...
4, the computer came with a built in programming language that was readily accessible and oriented at beginners and also came with lots of examples, providing a good way to ease people into it, i don't think windows even includes qbasic anymore and even when it did it was well hidden.. instead you have a few scripting languages that are not beginner friendly, are not located where a novice will find them and are not documented in the supplied paperwork...
5, you got a paper manual... sure i would usually advocate electronic manuals because they are more environmentally friendly, searchable and easier to update.. BUT, for a novice having an electronic manual is a stumbling block - with zero computer knowledge, how will they know how to view the electronic manual?
Hopefully if properly marketed and distributed, the raspberry pi can replicate much of what made the earlier computers so accessible to youngsters, and teach people to experiment with computers rather than to be fearful of them.
You can get the OpenRD, which is the bigger brother of the sheevaplug, it also lacks hardware floating point but it does have video and audio outputs. It also has SATA so you can connect an internal hdd.
You are beholden to skype to make a port for Linux/ARM, never good to get locked into a single vendor service. Or you could possibly try to run the android version on it...
Alternatively you could use a standard communication protocol like SIP, and for that there are a multitude of clients available with sourcecode, most of which have already been compiled for ARM (although you could even compile them yourself if really necessary).
You can even run a full blown Asterisk PBX on it, i do so on a similar ARM based board (the Sheevaplug, makes a very good low power home pbx to in my case handle 4 internal voip handsets, 1 analog line (via sipura adapter) and 3 sip trunks)...
Socialised healthcare actually benefits the majority of people... Heavy handed copyright enforcement only benefits a very select few, often to the detriment of the majority...
Surely the government should be there to provide useful benefits to the majority of its people, not just a select few.
How do you think Three make any money from that deal? The fact is its a money losing venture, both for three and skype... a loss leader to get customers, otherwise known as a bait and switch. They get you locked into the service with a good deal, and then pull it away knowing that it will be painful for you to move once you have a large group of people who are used to that method of contacting you. How long do you expect that deal to last, and what is your exit strategy?
I always found SIP to provide much better reliability than skype, it especially helps that you know the protocol and its direct between you and the sip provider, and not routed via some arbitrary third party. If it performs poorly on a mobile, you can force it to use a more heavily compressed codec.
I usually use voipraider.com for outbound, they provide free (well inclusive) calls to a bunch of countries for 90 days from the date of your last top up, so you only need to top up every 90 days and you get 100% of your topup fee as calling credit separate from the free calls they offer, ie for calling non-free destinations.
I have several other providers, which offer non expiring credit balances which i use for backup routing (which is handled automatically by asterisk in my case)...
I also have a friendly provider, although not the cheapest, who provide various other features such as the ability to set arbitrary caller id values and some other even more nefarious things.
And i have a few inbound numbers, some are revenue share (ie i get a small payment every time someone calls them), others are regular numbers... They too are routed through the asterisk pbx, where i can filter calls (known telemarketers get forwarded to a script which plays sound samples of borat and records the call for my amusement), manage multiple extensions, voicemail including emailed notifications, automatically reroute to different handsets depending on availability (eg if my mobile is seen on my home wireless, assume im at home and ring the home handsets, otherwise route to the mobile) and a whole bunch of other stuff
The result of their strategy so far has been to accelerate their loss of market share, declaring symbian dead has been very effective at driving users away from the platform while changing plans for what your going to replace it with doesn't help.
Also market conditions haven't changed that much, windows mobile was never very successful and windows phone wasnt very successful before the nokia deal so they had no real reason to believe it would be afterwards. On the other hand they had every reason to believe that switching their focus would cause customer losing delays, not to mention the loss of many existing customers who were either using symbian or waiting for meego.
It was obvious to anyone that nokia's gamble on windows phone was extremely risky, with a very low chance of paying off... If i were a nokia shareholder i would be extremely upset by that decision.
No it wouldn't, because MS are a bit player in the virtualization arena... Without this support, those who wanted to use virtualization with linux would use vmware, xen or kvm instead. If MS were dominant in the virtualization market there is no way they would do anything to make it easier to run linux.
There are plenty of SIP providers which offer considerably better deals than that...
I've never understood any anyone would want to sign up to a monopoly telco service like skype, they are basically bell/dtag/bt/etc from 40 years ago, forced to use their supplied clients on their supplied network (ie cant run your own pbx), proprietary protocols, "free calls to other users" for now but no free interoperability to other systems (ie no peering, you have to dial out through the pstn).
Compare that to SIP, where you have a choice of hundreds of providers which you can mix and match depending on your needs, easy free peering to other sip users even those using different providers, a huge range of hardware and software clients, full specifications of the protocol to implement your own, all manner of advanced features available via fully blown pbx systems such as asterisk or freeswitch...
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If all of those pirates paid to see the movie instead, that would increase sales by 0.5%... However:
Some pirates may have downloaded it for multiple people to watch.
Some may have downloaded it but also paid to see the movie, perhaps using the pirate copy to decide if the movie is worth watching or not, then going to see a full quality copy.
Some of those who downloaded it might never have watched it at all had a download not been available.
Some who watched the downloaded copy may have told others it was worth watching, who then went and paid to see it.
What the box office record does say however, is that piracy is not responsible for low sales... If a movie bombs, the poor sales are more likely to do with the movie being garbage (and there have been a LOT of crap movies released lately) than down to piracy.
Piracy is a scapegoat, used as an excuse for crap movies and as justification for implementing even more draconian restrictions on paying customers.
Ofcourse its a self fulfilling prophecy, if you release crap movies and enforce draconian restrictions on legitimate customers, then people will flock to the pirate copies which lack those restrictions (and a shit movie might be worth watching for free if your bored, while not being worth the time and expense to see it legitimately).
It's not just a lower and more savvy userbase that reduces the malware on linux...
The system is better designed than windows has been, with a number of features that make the spread of malware more difficult, for instance:
central updates of all software (vs windows update which only handles the base os, leaving acrobat/flash/java easily exploitable)
non root user by default (which ms have finally caught on to, years after everyone else)
downloaded files dont have execute permission by default
file extensions are not only less important (aren't used to determine if a file is executable) but are also not hidden by default
doesn't automatically execute anything on inserted media
package management - users are less likely to download and execute random binaries, if they want to install something they can select it from the package manager
The problem with distributions like linpus, is that they are barely supported and unheard of... So if the user even bothers to try it, they will end up with a poor experience of "linux" and refuse to try other distros in the future...
Installing freedos or a crippled unheard of linux distro is actually good for ms, as it gives the perception that the free alternatives are useless. Similarly the use of pirated windows is better for ms than the alternative. If they were not able to pirate windows, very few users would buy it instead... You would end up with a sudden explosion of linux use, which would massively increase mindshare as users realised linux was actually usable and not just something useless that only serves to demonstrate the hardware is functional.
If you decide not to use the built in components, you are still stuck with them on your machine and have to keep them updated etc...
Also changing the ui on windows is a troublesome manual process, doing so on linux is a simple matter of selecting an alternative ui through the package manager, and then choosing which one to use when you next log in.
When i've seen windows systems with alternative interfaces, there have often been all manner of weird bugs mainly because very few windows software is designed with anything other than the default interface in mind, whereas use of different interfaces is very common on linux (seems every distro has its own default)...
There is plenty of demand for "anything that is free" from china, since they will just install pirated windows anyway, they don't want to waste their money on an unnecessary non pirated version of windows.
Installing blackbox on windows is actually more effort than installing a different wm on ubuntu (through the software center) and then selecting it when you log in...
It's also a far less common thing to do on windows, so you often get all kinds of unexpected bugs cropping up because 99% of software just assumes the default wm will be in use.
That said, it could be easier still, ubuntu could offer users a few screenshots and the opportunity to select from a few environments by default... This would have been a lot better for users than defaulting to a radical change which was also quite buggy - this put a lot of users off completely.
The big question is, where?
I tried to find a laptop with linux preinstalled a few months ago, and the few i could find were either overpriced, outdated models or wouldn't ship to where i am... None of the big vendors seemed to offer anything at all, or they were extremely well hidden on their websites.
Then you might as well have simply installed normal pirated versions for your company too, the windows bulk licenses are upgrades to be applied over the oem versions which will get you screwed if anyone ever decides to do an audit.
If you had issues like these then the hardware clearly wasn't exactly the same, and this is a common problem...
Large scale box shifters like dell will often change the hardware in a box without changing the model number, wether its wifi chipset, motherboard revision, hard drive model etc... It's quite common to see supposedly "identical" machines with different guts.
Religious education and religious indoctrination are two different things...
Education where you teach people about several religions in a neutral way is a good thing, since people will encounter these religions at some point and should be prepared..
On the other hand indoctrination is when you preach a single religion and push the students towards that religion... This is exactly what should not be happening in schools.
People who actually want security are more likely to have upgraded to filevault 2 when they upgraded to lion, i certainly did as did everyone else i know who is running lion.
It's not just about age, its the fact that she is in a position of authority and trust.
People in such positions have been known to wield their position as a way to influence someone into bed with them... This is generally called grooming.
Now if you were 19 and seeing a teacher who works at a different school to you i doubt anyone would care.
Private businesses are unscrupulous and ruthless with very little accountability, profit at any cost... If you don't do something to keep them in check then they will abuse to the maximum possible extent if it helps improve the bottom line.
I have two of them right here, newit.co.uk sells them although i'm not sure if they have any stock currently.
When you talk of reliability and mentioning that calls are routed over voice gsm you are not comparing like for like...
Three actually provide a similar product for SIP, that is any calls you make in the normal way on the gsm handset are transparently routed to a SIP server of your choice...
For instance, see:
http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-telecoms-sip2sim.html (aaisp resell the service of 3 i believe, not sure if 3 will deal direct to a single customer)
No client necessary, any standard cellphone works.
I think the service is mostly aimed at business users, where your cellphone can integrate totally with the existing sip based pbx.
This service is as reliable as your telco and your voip provider, and seeing as there are multiple sip providers vs one skype provider you remove a single point of failure with sip and can choose a provider based on their reliability, or switch if they're not up to it.
They get subscribers who inevitably pay for more services through them. Such as when I purchase temporary Internet access when traveling.
Seems a fairly desperate way to get subscribers, considering no other provider offers such a service... Once they are established you can expect to see this loss leading service either go away entirely, or start costing.
Looking at the stats:
http://www.telecomsmarketresearch.com/resources/UK_Mobile_Operator_Subscriber_Statistics_2.shtml#EE_subs
Three are growing, but still have the smallest market share of any of the major operators. Setting up a telco is a huge investment in infrastructure, so its likely to be quite some time before they are able to break even. Also if they offer free services, there will be a lot of users who exclusively use the free services and never pay for anything at all. This inflates the market share and subscriber numbers, but is otherwise damaging to the bottom line as these customers are a cost rather than a revenue source.
Also low market share results in unused capacity, so the costs of giving away some of that capacity for free are significantly less than if the free users were depriving paying customers of capacity. You can expect the free services to be dropped just as soon as paying customers need the capacity.
You can use it with a TV, which most people already have so thus no need to purchase a monitor.
You could purchase a keyboard and mouse, or you could just get a used one for free, these things get thrown out all the time. Or you might already have them. Depending on your intended use of the device you might not want these things either.
A case you can do without, its not pretty but it works just fine. Depending on your intended use you might not actually want a case at all.
For a power supply you can use many mobile phone chargers, which you either already have or can obtain cheaply or for free, most people throw away their old chargers when they get a new phone.
If they were to bundle all these things with it, then it would increase the price unnecessarily for those of us who already have the accessories, can easily obtain them or simply don't want them. Also things like SD cards are coming down in price so rapidly that they would need to keep constantly revising the product/price or face charging an extortionate price for the cards.
I'm sure third party distributors will start offering bundles once there is sufficient stock to go round anyway.
The idea is that there is a high likelihood you already have keyboards, mice and screens (You can connect it to a tv or monitor)... No point forcing people to buy things they might not need.
Most new computers come with a complete set of keyboard/mouse/screen/cables and people typically throw away the perfectly good ones they used with their previous computer, which is terribly wasteful.
Not only that, but provide a foolproof way to roll back to the factory image...
If education is the goal, the ability to experiment with the system safe in the knowledge that you can't permanently damage it is very important...
To give an example:
When i started with computers, i had a Sinclair Spectrum... This machine, and some of the subsequent systems i had provided me a FAR superior introduction to computers than todays windows boxes for a number of reasons.
1, this computer was mine and mine alone, my parents never used it and couldn't care less about it... i could experiment with it all i liked, by contrast had it been a shared family computer i would be scared of breaking it for fear of angering my parents and siblings.
2, the computer came with a manual clearly laying out that whatever you do you can't break the machine via software, if you made it crash worse case you just hit reset and your back at the original basic prompt as if nothing had happened. by contrast, a windows system is very easy to break and could be quite complex, time consuming and expensive to fix afterwards. Knowing that you can't permanently break the system and that worst case you can perform a trivial reset procedure is VERY important, as it gives you (especially as a child) confidence to experiment with the system, and experimentation is the best way to learn.
3, the computer came with a manual that gave programming examples and encouraged you to try things out, again safe in the knowledge that you couldn't break it... by contrast, windows actively discourages users from messing with the system, certain files are hidden by default, certain locations on the filesystem are considered off limits and display a warning (which is quite scary to inexperienced users) when you try to access them...
4, the computer came with a built in programming language that was readily accessible and oriented at beginners and also came with lots of examples, providing a good way to ease people into it, i don't think windows even includes qbasic anymore and even when it did it was well hidden.. instead you have a few scripting languages that are not beginner friendly, are not located where a novice will find them and are not documented in the supplied paperwork...
5, you got a paper manual... sure i would usually advocate electronic manuals because they are more environmentally friendly, searchable and easier to update.. BUT, for a novice having an electronic manual is a stumbling block - with zero computer knowledge, how will they know how to view the electronic manual?
Hopefully if properly marketed and distributed, the raspberry pi can replicate much of what made the earlier computers so accessible to youngsters, and teach people to experiment with computers rather than to be fearful of them.
You can get the OpenRD, which is the bigger brother of the sheevaplug, it also lacks hardware floating point but it does have video and audio outputs.
It also has SATA so you can connect an internal hdd.
You are beholden to skype to make a port for Linux/ARM, never good to get locked into a single vendor service.
Or you could possibly try to run the android version on it...
Alternatively you could use a standard communication protocol like SIP, and for that there are a multitude of clients available with sourcecode, most of which have already been compiled for ARM (although you could even compile them yourself if really necessary).
You can even run a full blown Asterisk PBX on it, i do so on a similar ARM based board (the Sheevaplug, makes a very good low power home pbx to in my case handle 4 internal voip handsets, 1 analog line (via sipura adapter) and 3 sip trunks)...
Socialised healthcare actually benefits the majority of people...
Heavy handed copyright enforcement only benefits a very select few, often to the detriment of the majority...
Surely the government should be there to provide useful benefits to the majority of its people, not just a select few.
How do you think Three make any money from that deal?
The fact is its a money losing venture, both for three and skype... a loss leader to get customers, otherwise known as a bait and switch. They get you locked into the service with a good deal, and then pull it away knowing that it will be painful for you to move once you have a large group of people who are used to that method of contacting you. How long do you expect that deal to last, and what is your exit strategy?
I always found SIP to provide much better reliability than skype, it especially helps that you know the protocol and its direct between you and the sip provider, and not routed via some arbitrary third party. If it performs poorly on a mobile, you can force it to use a more heavily compressed codec.
I usually use voipraider.com for outbound, they provide free (well inclusive) calls to a bunch of countries for 90 days from the date of your last top up, so you only need to top up every 90 days and you get 100% of your topup fee as calling credit separate from the free calls they offer, ie for calling non-free destinations.
I have several other providers, which offer non expiring credit balances which i use for backup routing (which is handled automatically by asterisk in my case)...
I also have a friendly provider, although not the cheapest, who provide various other features such as the ability to set arbitrary caller id values and some other even more nefarious things.
And i have a few inbound numbers, some are revenue share (ie i get a small payment every time someone calls them), others are regular numbers... They too are routed through the asterisk pbx, where i can filter calls (known telemarketers get forwarded to a script which plays sound samples of borat and records the call for my amusement), manage multiple extensions, voicemail including emailed notifications, automatically reroute to different handsets depending on availability (eg if my mobile is seen on my home wireless, assume im at home and ring the home handsets, otherwise route to the mobile) and a whole bunch of other stuff
The result of their strategy so far has been to accelerate their loss of market share, declaring symbian dead has been very effective at driving users away from the platform while changing plans for what your going to replace it with doesn't help.
Also market conditions haven't changed that much, windows mobile was never very successful and windows phone wasnt very successful before the nokia deal so they had no real reason to believe it would be afterwards. On the other hand they had every reason to believe that switching their focus would cause customer losing delays, not to mention the loss of many existing customers who were either using symbian or waiting for meego.
It was obvious to anyone that nokia's gamble on windows phone was extremely risky, with a very low chance of paying off... If i were a nokia shareholder i would be extremely upset by that decision.
No it wouldn't, because MS are a bit player in the virtualization arena... Without this support, those who wanted to use virtualization with linux would use vmware, xen or kvm instead.
If MS were dominant in the virtualization market there is no way they would do anything to make it easier to run linux.
There are plenty of SIP providers which offer considerably better deals than that...
I've never understood any anyone would want to sign up to a monopoly telco service like skype, they are basically bell/dtag/bt/etc from 40 years ago, forced to use their supplied clients on their supplied network (ie cant run your own pbx), proprietary protocols, "free calls to other users" for now but no free interoperability to other systems (ie no peering, you have to dial out through the pstn).
Compare that to SIP, where you have a choice of hundreds of providers which you can mix and match depending on your needs, easy free peering to other sip users even those using different providers, a huge range of hardware and software clients, full specifications of the protocol to implement your own, all manner of advanced features available via fully blown pbx systems such as asterisk or freeswitch...