All the CEOs and CFOs and other people with impressive titles read the New York Times.
Said people have the "final word" on workplace policy or some such.
If enough of these corporate types know about Firefox, and it gets into their thick skulls [ for corporate executives are among the stupidest people, technology wise, that I know of ] that it's a Good Thing, then said executives may pass down an Order from On High relating to it.
Not really. I mean, I can see his justification...he gets a lot of news attention from all the tech sites, which draws more attention to the company at large [ and perhaps the windows version, specifically ]. And remember, Google's a plublically traded company now. Anything that looks like some form of new product is likely to raise the interest in the stock, meaning more people buying, meaning the price goes up, meaning the CEO has more money for pot. Or whatever.
.....who not only cannot afford to fight back, but can't really afford to pay their fines in the first place. Since these people are students, it's not as if they can hire Johnny Cochran or someone to defend them...this, I dare say, makes the RIAA's number of 'sucessful suits' more effective, as more of them are settled out of court.
It really is kind of like the schoolyard bully shaking down the smaller kids for their lunch money. Why does the RIAA exist these days, anyway? I haven't heard a single thing about what they've done other than file lawsuits....
I meant "legit" in the sense of "hasn't been passed around like a bong at a hippy convention", rather than "not generated by some script kiddie with too much time on his hands".....though I rather doubt they'd keep some sort of database of every key they send out....what would happen when it was inevitably stolen and/or leaked?
You wouldn't happen to know if the program takes a few non-volunteered bits of info from the OS? Like, logs IP, login name, that manner of thing...as I'm not a windows user, I'm not quite sure exactly how much they could find out, but I'm sure there's something....
Hrmn. Using "free" software to convince people to be stool pigeons. That's kind of evil, I guess.....playing the greed of the end user off against the greed of the habitual pirate....
Actually, it's sort of ingenious when you think about it.....for a modest expenditure of manpower setting up the authentication system [ they already have mondo loads of coders working for them, anyway, so what's one more project? ] and giving away some software they wouldn't be able to scalp for a high price, they potentially reap many rewards.
If they weren't so evil, I'd shake their hands. I guess that's why Gates is a billionare, and I make $7.50/hr answering 411 calls.
But it would probably be rather easy for M$ to keep a nice tidy database of who has "legit" windows vs. those who don't. Also, this could, with trivial modification, be used to detect duplicate product activation keys....might it be something along the lines of a means to find these keys for a future crackdown?
The article states that there is "no 'stick' as yet", and perhaps there never will be any official action taken against those with pirated copies who foolishly enough decide to tell Microsoft about it. [ After all, if they suddenly started sending out flying attack squads of lawyers, that would make for some bad press. ] However, how long will it be before such a check is integrated into the OS, and checked every time the computer goes online? It certainly wouldn't be that difficult to program in such a "feature', with the added bonus of locking down the system should the results not be acceptable.....
At any rate, it makes me sort of pity all those poor windows users who are going to get screwed over...and makes me very glad that I don't use windows.
....just not in a very sophisticated form. For an analogy, we can look at computers. The language today, we can compare to Visual Basic--fluffy, easy, and meaningless. The language of the Elder Days, though, would best be represented by Assembler--raw, not pretty, and entirely utilitarian. I dare say there was spoken language, of a sort....it just would not have been very sophisticated.
No offence to those who must program in VB intended.
This sort of makes you realize just how relative measurements really are....and how really small humans and our problems are on a cosmic scale....
Kind of dangerous, actually....'anyone remember the nefarious device from _The_Resteraunt_at_the_End_of_the_Universe_, the "Total reality perspective vortex", or whatever it was called?
Excuse me whilst I quietly go insane from the scale of things.....
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All the CEOs and CFOs and other people with impressive titles read the New York Times.
Said people have the "final word" on workplace policy or some such.
If enough of these corporate types know about Firefox, and it gets into their thick skulls [ for corporate executives are among the stupidest people, technology wise, that I know of ] that it's a Good Thing, then said executives may pass down an Order from On High relating to it.
Not really. I mean, I can see his justification...he gets a lot of news attention from all the tech sites, which draws more attention to the company at large [ and perhaps the windows version, specifically ]. And remember, Google's a plublically traded company now. Anything that looks like some form of new product is likely to raise the interest in the stock, meaning more people buying, meaning the price goes up, meaning the CEO has more money for pot. Or whatever.
.....who not only cannot afford to fight back, but can't really afford to pay their fines in the first place. Since these people are students, it's not as if they can hire Johnny Cochran or someone to defend them...this, I dare say, makes the RIAA's number of 'sucessful suits' more effective, as more of them are settled out of court.
It really is kind of like the schoolyard bully shaking down the smaller kids for their lunch money. Why does the RIAA exist these days, anyway? I haven't heard a single thing about what they've done other than file lawsuits....
I meant "legit" in the sense of "hasn't been passed around like a bong at a hippy convention", rather than "not generated by some script kiddie with too much time on his hands".....though I rather doubt they'd keep some sort of database of every key they send out....what would happen when it was inevitably stolen and/or leaked?
You wouldn't happen to know if the program takes a few non-volunteered bits of info from the OS? Like, logs IP, login name, that manner of thing...as I'm not a windows user, I'm not quite sure exactly how much they could find out, but I'm sure there's something....
Hrmn. Using "free" software to convince people to be stool pigeons. That's kind of evil, I guess.....playing the greed of the end user off against the greed of the habitual pirate....
Actually, it's sort of ingenious when you think about it.....for a modest expenditure of manpower setting up the authentication system [ they already have mondo loads of coders working for them, anyway, so what's one more project? ] and giving away some software they wouldn't be able to scalp for a high price, they potentially reap many rewards.
If they weren't so evil, I'd shake their hands. I guess that's why Gates is a billionare, and I make $7.50/hr answering 411 calls.
But it would probably be rather easy for M$ to keep a nice tidy database of who has "legit" windows vs. those who don't. Also, this could, with trivial modification, be used to detect duplicate product activation keys....might it be something along the lines of a means to find these keys for a future crackdown?
The article states that there is "no 'stick' as yet", and perhaps there never will be any official action taken against those with pirated copies who foolishly enough decide to tell Microsoft about it. [ After all, if they suddenly started sending out flying attack squads of lawyers, that would make for some bad press. ] However, how long will it be before such a check is integrated into the OS, and checked every time the computer goes online? It certainly wouldn't be that difficult to program in such a "feature', with the added bonus of locking down the system should the results not be acceptable.....
At any rate, it makes me sort of pity all those poor windows users who are going to get screwed over...and makes me very glad that I don't use windows.
....just not in a very sophisticated form. For an analogy, we can look at computers. The language today, we can compare to Visual Basic--fluffy, easy, and meaningless. The language of the Elder Days, though, would best be represented by Assembler--raw, not pretty, and entirely utilitarian. I dare say there was spoken language, of a sort....it just would not have been very sophisticated.
No offence to those who must program in VB intended.
This sort of makes you realize just how relative measurements really are....and how really small humans and our problems are on a cosmic scale.... Kind of dangerous, actually....'anyone remember the nefarious device from _The_Resteraunt_at_the_End_of_the_Universe_, the "Total reality perspective vortex", or whatever it was called? Excuse me whilst I quietly go insane from the scale of things.....