Releasing their video codecs still isn't as good as simply using open formats in the first place, because third parties will always be one step behind their newly opened codecs, and future versions may not get opened.
Producing good products that people actually want is expensive... Producing crap products that users are forced to use because there are no compatible alternatives is much cheaper... MS just aren't used to competing on a level playing field.
It was big news that this leaked... This guy is a journalist, therefore it is his job to download this to verify the story and comment on it... Not doing so would be incompetent journalism, because he would just be going on the word of others and not finding out definitively for himself.
Actually, some reviewers are given preview copies, and some reviewers aren't... This makes the review system entirely corrupt, if you don't kiss ass to the movie publishers you don't get the pre-releases to review and it looks like you're behind everyone else... If you do kiss ass, then you won't be able to write bad reviews...
Actually, if you make filesharing software illegal it is only the legitimate users of it that lose out... Downloading movies/warez/etc is already illegal, so those who do it are unlikely to be concerned about possessing another piece of illegal software to do it.
Because the cost involved in trying to track down and sue 60k users, many of whom will be in foreign countries or using isps who won't cooperate would just be stupid.
The only difference is that the low quality movies now have a lot more money spent to publicize them, so you hear about them all over the place before you find out how crap they are.
With an analog cable you could argue the difference and it was pretty much impossible to prove it beyond a certain point... For a digital cable like HDMI it can be proven... Simply compare the data at both ends of the cable, if it's identical then your cable is perfect, if it differs then your cable is imperfect.
Aside from the branding, the difference is that many of the features which are costly optional extras on the Toyota or Honda models come fitted as standard to the higher end Lexus and Acura models... Sometimes it can actually be cheaper to buy the higher end model than it is to buy the cheaper model and opt for all the extra (because its cheaper for the manufacturer to produce a number of the higher end models than it is to make one off custom builds). Other manufacturers do the same, Volkswagen own Audi on the high end and Skoda on the low, but many of the cars share a common chassis... Jaguar also sell cars under the Daimler brand in some countries.
Linux is actually way ahead, not sure about mac... The idea of ASLR was implemented on Linux first, and there are other protections like selinux which go way beyond anything available on other platforms...
Wether people/distributions actually use the features is another matter, but they do exist and do work.
Most companies care about having support available, but will never actually use it... Because most of their customers never actually use it, the support is rather lousy.
The people making the purchasing decisions seem more concerned about being able to blame someone else if something goes wrong, rather than trying to minimize the risks of something going bad, and trying to mitigate the damage that could result.
Blaming someone else is not going to help the business.
Most people don't know about their actions... Most of the shareholders are simply greedy and quite happy for the company to do illegal things if it makes profit, crime is highly profitable and in the case of corporations the usual risks that discourage people from committing crimes don't apply.
So long as these corporations are so big and influential with the media, they can ensure that the vast majority have no idea what they're up to. The few that do may well boycott their products, but the revenue lost from these people is less than the revenue they make from their illegal actions so nothing will change.
Then those in charge will simply shut down the corporation that got caught and move all the assets to a new shell corporation...
You need a way to take their assets, shut the corporation down and jail those in charge.... They will be a lot more careful when the penalties actually cost more than the profits from continuing illegal activity.
The ability of people worldwide to communicate over the Internet is making this model even more broken... If they release a movie 6 months earlier in one region than another and it's lousy, the word soon spreads.
So the producer wants distributors who will sell their dvds in a particular region, surely multiple distributors willing to sell in a particular region is better?
No, it's all about artificially inflating the price... They want to gouge customers for as much as they can.
There is absolutely no guarantee that commercial developers will continue developing a product, and if they don't then you really are up shit creek...
Similarly, how do you know Nissan won't throw in the towel? I don't know about the state of Nissan's finances, but the American auto makers seem pretty screwed right now and there is a good chance they will go under.
A while ago we evaluated a commercial mail server product called Postpath... Since then, this company was bought by Cisco who fairly quickly decided to drop the Postpath product. Had we bought into that or even started reselling it, we would be pretty screwed right now... Commercial products get dropped all the time and for all kinds of reasons, with no recourse available to anyone who was using them.
I think you pointed out the issue yourself with OSS: If an OSS application stops being developed you can continue developing it yourself. If the company paying a lone developer stops you can hire that same developer yourself to continue his work. If the application does the job you can continue deploying the existing version indefinitely, only a small amount of developer time *may* be needed for bugfixes and security patches. Most OSS uses openly documented protocols and formats, so migration away is generally fairly easy, should you want to.
With a proprietary product: Migration may be very difficult if the product uses proprietary formats for data. If the supplier stops developing it you won't be able to deploy additional instances and won't get any bugfixes or security patches.
At the end of the day, especially in the current economic climate, you have to cover your own ass... Becoming dependent on a proprietary vendor is a bad idea because ANY vendor could go bust or decide to stop supporting something. OSS or at the very least demanding that vendors support open protocols gives you an exit strategy should something bad happen. Depending on *anything* will always be a risk to your business, wether it be OSS or proprietary, so you need to work out how to mitigate the risk and insure that whatever happens your business has a plan to keep doing what it needs to.
Being able to blame a proprietary vendor doesn't help your business get it's work done, you need a real solution. I'm sure i remember hearing Alan Sugar say something similar but i can't find the quote right now...
During the course of my work i have been to hundreds of different businesses, and while most of them are using some OSS code in one place or another... A lot of them have legacy proprietary systems that are no longer supported, cannot be upgraded, cannot be migrated away from (or migration would be extremely painful/costly), but are performing essential business functions. And i have seen situations where migrations from old proprietary systems have been forced (its still doing the job, but they need to expand and cant buy more licenses, or cant buy/replace the antiquated hardware or OS it runs on etc).. Some of which have resorted to paying people to input the data by hand into the new system because the old system stored it in an undocumented proprietary format. I have even seen companies run totally unsupported installations, like old dos programs designed for native dos, running under winxp with all kinds of kludges to make it run or even a full blown vm running dos, and effectively "abandonware" installations where the company runs unlicensed copies because they just couldn't get any more licenses for something. I've also been to companies who scoured ebay for particular models of antiquated equipment so they could keep a cache of it to replace units that failed.
How big is Google's network compared to most companies? And also consider the people doing this weren't working on it full time and were a relatively small team.
The hardest part of deploying IPv6 is actually getting IPv6 network transit... Very few ISPs will offer it, or charge a high premium for it ontop of their ipv4 charges such that it isn't worth the expense.
Enterprise distributions are those bundled and supported by a vendor, there is nothing to stop an ISV like IBM making their own distribution which would cost IBM nothing to sell.
Businesses just want something that's supported by a supplier, whether your ISV is a middleman that resells products and support from a third party, or provides the products and support itself.
Other vendors can't support MS products to any useful degree, since they have no access to the source code or the original developers, anything beyond basic configuration help and they can't do it... And if you resell an MS product, you still have to pay for the support and pass the cost on to the customer.
If a vendor sells an OSS based product then they will be supporting it, and if they don't someone else could step up. If there is a market for supporting an OSS product then third parties will pop up to provide support for it.
Providing support and products is highly profitable, reselling someone else's support and products has very thin margins... With OSS anyone can do the former.
You, as an ISV, still make a net win from not paying to buy in the original product, even if you still have to buy in the support from a third party.
Configure them to shut off when idle instead of run a screensaver, when you power it back on it boots pretty much instantly and the user can re-enter their password (or reinsert their smartcard) and be back where they were, all the session state is stored on the server.
No need to keep machines on overnight for updates, because the terminals are dumb enough not to need updates...
Dumb terminals boot instantly, so no need to keep machines pre loaded to save booting time.
Put a power breaker by the door, last one out can turn the breaker off, first one in can turn it on (they used to do this in our computer labs at college)... There shouldn't need to be anything turned on in an office when there's no people there.
Need to talk to whoever devised such a system then, because it's completely open to abuse... Some big vendors need to offer OSS based products with a ridiculously high MSRP, and then offer 99% discounts to anyone who asks...
Bonuses for buyers should be based on how much of the assigned budget they save while still fulfilling the specified goals.
Slashdot Mirror
Releasing their video codecs still isn't as good as simply using open formats in the first place, because third parties will always be one step behind their newly opened codecs, and future versions may not get opened.
Producing good products that people actually want is expensive...
Producing crap products that users are forced to use because there are no compatible alternatives is much cheaper... MS just aren't used to competing on a level playing field.
It was big news that this leaked... This guy is a journalist, therefore it is his job to download this to verify the story and comment on it... Not doing so would be incompetent journalism, because he would just be going on the word of others and not finding out definitively for himself.
Actually, some reviewers are given preview copies, and some reviewers aren't...
This makes the review system entirely corrupt, if you don't kiss ass to the movie publishers you don't get the pre-releases to review and it looks like you're behind everyone else...
If you do kiss ass, then you won't be able to write bad reviews...
Reviewers are screwed either way.
And the Amiga...
Actually, if you make filesharing software illegal it is only the legitimate users of it that lose out...
Downloading movies/warez/etc is already illegal, so those who do it are unlikely to be concerned about possessing another piece of illegal software to do it.
Because the cost involved in trying to track down and sue 60k users, many of whom will be in foreign countries or using isps who won't cooperate would just be stupid.
The only difference is that the low quality movies now have a lot more money spent to publicize them, so you hear about them all over the place before you find out how crap they are.
Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/11/1840225.shtml
I would have thought people on slashdot were smart enough to use google...
With an analog cable you could argue the difference and it was pretty much impossible to prove it beyond a certain point...
For a digital cable like HDMI it can be proven... Simply compare the data at both ends of the cable, if it's identical then your cable is perfect, if it differs then your cable is imperfect.
Aside from the branding, the difference is that many of the features which are costly optional extras on the Toyota or Honda models come fitted as standard to the higher end Lexus and Acura models... Sometimes it can actually be cheaper to buy the higher end model than it is to buy the cheaper model and opt for all the extra (because its cheaper for the manufacturer to produce a number of the higher end models than it is to make one off custom builds).
Other manufacturers do the same, Volkswagen own Audi on the high end and Skoda on the low, but many of the cars share a common chassis... Jaguar also sell cars under the Daimler brand in some countries.
Linux is actually way ahead, not sure about mac...
The idea of ASLR was implemented on Linux first, and there are other protections like selinux which go way beyond anything available on other platforms...
Wether people/distributions actually use the features is another matter, but they do exist and do work.
Linux on the other hand does have both of those features, and had them long before vista...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization
Most companies care about having support available, but will never actually use it...
Because most of their customers never actually use it, the support is rather lousy.
The people making the purchasing decisions seem more concerned about being able to blame someone else if something goes wrong, rather than trying to minimize the risks of something going bad, and trying to mitigate the damage that could result.
Blaming someone else is not going to help the business.
Sure you can...
I have a 21" CRT from 1999 which can handle resolutions higher than 1080p over the VGA connector without issues.
Most people don't know about their actions...
Most of the shareholders are simply greedy and quite happy for the company to do illegal things if it makes profit, crime is highly profitable and in the case of corporations the usual risks that discourage people from committing crimes don't apply.
So long as these corporations are so big and influential with the media, they can ensure that the vast majority have no idea what they're up to. The few that do may well boycott their products, but the revenue lost from these people is less than the revenue they make from their illegal actions so nothing will change.
Then those in charge will simply shut down the corporation that got caught and move all the assets to a new shell corporation...
You need a way to take their assets, shut the corporation down and jail those in charge.... They will be a lot more careful when the penalties actually cost more than the profits from continuing illegal activity.
The ability of people worldwide to communicate over the Internet is making this model even more broken...
If they release a movie 6 months earlier in one region than another and it's lousy, the word soon spreads.
So the producer wants distributors who will sell their dvds in a particular region, surely multiple distributors willing to sell in a particular region is better?
No, it's all about artificially inflating the price... They want to gouge customers for as much as they can.
There is absolutely no guarantee that commercial developers will continue developing a product, and if they don't then you really are up shit creek...
Similarly, how do you know Nissan won't throw in the towel? I don't know about the state of Nissan's finances, but the American auto makers seem pretty screwed right now and there is a good chance they will go under.
A while ago we evaluated a commercial mail server product called Postpath... Since then, this company was bought by Cisco who fairly quickly decided to drop the Postpath product. Had we bought into that or even started reselling it, we would be pretty screwed right now... Commercial products get dropped all the time and for all kinds of reasons, with no recourse available to anyone who was using them.
I think you pointed out the issue yourself with OSS:
If an OSS application stops being developed you can continue developing it yourself.
If the company paying a lone developer stops you can hire that same developer yourself to continue his work.
If the application does the job you can continue deploying the existing version indefinitely, only a small amount of developer time *may* be needed for bugfixes and security patches.
Most OSS uses openly documented protocols and formats, so migration away is generally fairly easy, should you want to.
With a proprietary product:
Migration may be very difficult if the product uses proprietary formats for data.
If the supplier stops developing it you won't be able to deploy additional instances and won't get any bugfixes or security patches.
At the end of the day, especially in the current economic climate, you have to cover your own ass... Becoming dependent on a proprietary vendor is a bad idea because ANY vendor could go bust or decide to stop supporting something. OSS or at the very least demanding that vendors support open protocols gives you an exit strategy should something bad happen. Depending on *anything* will always be a risk to your business, wether it be OSS or proprietary, so you need to work out how to mitigate the risk and insure that whatever happens your business has a plan to keep doing what it needs to.
Being able to blame a proprietary vendor doesn't help your business get it's work done, you need a real solution. I'm sure i remember hearing Alan Sugar say something similar but i can't find the quote right now...
During the course of my work i have been to hundreds of different businesses, and while most of them are using some OSS code in one place or another...
A lot of them have legacy proprietary systems that are no longer supported, cannot be upgraded, cannot be migrated away from (or migration would be extremely painful/costly), but are performing essential business functions.
And i have seen situations where migrations from old proprietary systems have been forced (its still doing the job, but they need to expand and cant buy more licenses, or cant buy/replace the antiquated hardware or OS it runs on etc).. Some of which have resorted to paying people to input the data by hand into the new system because the old system stored it in an undocumented proprietary format.
I have even seen companies run totally unsupported installations, like old dos programs designed for native dos, running under winxp with all kinds of kludges to make it run or even a full blown vm running dos, and effectively "abandonware" installations where the company runs unlicensed copies because they just couldn't get any more licenses for something. I've also been to companies who scoured ebay for particular models of antiquated equipment so they could keep a cache of it to replace units that failed.
These problems just don't happen with OSS.
How big is Google's network compared to most companies?
And also consider the people doing this weren't working on it full time and were a relatively small team.
The hardest part of deploying IPv6 is actually getting IPv6 network transit... Very few ISPs will offer it, or charge a high premium for it ontop of their ipv4 charges such that it isn't worth the expense.
Enterprise distributions are those bundled and supported by a vendor, there is nothing to stop an ISV like IBM making their own distribution which would cost IBM nothing to sell.
Businesses just want something that's supported by a supplier, whether your ISV is a middleman that resells products and support from a third party, or provides the products and support itself.
Other vendors can't support MS products to any useful degree, since they have no access to the source code or the original developers, anything beyond basic configuration help and they can't do it...
And if you resell an MS product, you still have to pay for the support and pass the cost on to the customer.
If a vendor sells an OSS based product then they will be supporting it, and if they don't someone else could step up. If there is a market for supporting an OSS product then third parties will pop up to provide support for it.
Providing support and products is highly profitable, reselling someone else's support and products has very thin margins... With OSS anyone can do the former.
You, as an ISV, still make a net win from not paying to buy in the original product, even if you still have to buy in the support from a third party.
Use dumb terminals, something like sunrays...
Configure them to shut off when idle instead of run a screensaver, when you power it back on it boots pretty much instantly and the user can re-enter their password (or reinsert their smartcard) and be back where they were, all the session state is stored on the server.
No need to keep machines on overnight for updates, because the terminals are dumb enough not to need updates...
Dumb terminals boot instantly, so no need to keep machines pre loaded to save booting time.
Put a power breaker by the door, last one out can turn the breaker off, first one in can turn it on (they used to do this in our computer labs at college)... There shouldn't need to be anything turned on in an office when there's no people there.
Need to talk to whoever devised such a system then, because it's completely open to abuse...
Some big vendors need to offer OSS based products with a ridiculously high MSRP, and then offer 99% discounts to anyone who asks...
Bonuses for buyers should be based on how much of the assigned budget they save while still fulfilling the specified goals.