There's also a long-standing notion that piracy is good for the business. In an odd twist, tacitly allowing people to watch pirated TV is a way to gain market share, since many pirates eventually give in and convert to paying customers.
I hadn't expected to hear that on MSNBC. In fact, I'm led to wonder if the 'higher ups' even know of this policy.
Of course they do. Back a few years ago when there were three office application suites that all had a decent market share for PC's (being WordPerfect, Lotus and MSOffice), Micro$oft released it's Office97 suite, and also offered $5-$10 try out that were nearly identical to the full suite, with exception of a 90-day expiration. This expiration was extremely easy for crackers to break (I believe as simple as altering a single byte), and downloadable patches were on the Internet within a day of the Office97 release.
This cheap way to obtain the full suite for a few dollars, rather than paying for the more expensive and better protected competitors suites destroyed their market shares and in a matter of months Micro$oft have over 95% of all office application users utilizing their own software. By the '2000' release of their office suite, the copy protection was now nearly uncrackable, but they'd already secured their monopoly. Users, no longer trained in other suites, were stuck in using whatever Micro$oft provided.
The MS part of MSNBC knows all to well the value of piracy in gaining initial pirated users who become paying customers later.
If this idiot do manage to reach escape velocity and survive the ascent, but screws up on his calculations, we may very well have the first manned trip to Mars...
It's actually a good strategy on the part of Microsoft. Since the states' legal costs are carried by state taxpayers, most of which don't care about the the actions of Microsoft so long as the can open their email and surf the web, the concern over state tax dollars going to fight a long court battle is an effective deterent. Microsoft has the coffers for these delays, but elected state officials don't and they have their livihoods to consider.
While I'll admit Flash can be useful in developing UI's for website, animation, ad banners and such, there's one important limitation to consider about Flash on the Web -- It's not searchable.
Search engines and web portals employ spiders and bots for purposes of finding web pages. Even submissions to search engine databases will be less than ideal if sites employ the majority of their documentation in Flash, or behind flash menus and screens, many search engines will lack the ability to index those pages.
How much does a company in question want to spend in external advertising to augment this loss of searchability, and therefore likelihood that a site will be found in a target audience search query? Adobe's PDF format, along with text, html, and a number of other *docment* based formats can be found via search engines. I don't know of any that successfully search flash.
St. Louis, MO, Nov 31, 2030: An American Airline plane, piloted by Microsoft Pilot software, crashed 50 miles outside St. Louis. The flight recorder listed a general protection error as the cause of the crash. American Airlines apparently forgot to renew the software subscription...
A laser diode is a far cry from a Class I laser in terms of wattage output, and even a Class I laser isn't rated as a vision risk.
The concern about the laser diode is a lot like putting a surge protector on a 9 volt battery!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they do. Back a few years ago when there were three office application suites that all had a decent market share for PC's (being WordPerfect, Lotus and MSOffice), Micro$oft released it's Office97 suite, and also offered $5-$10 try out that were nearly identical to the full suite, with exception of a 90-day expiration. This expiration was extremely easy for crackers to break (I believe as simple as altering a single byte), and downloadable patches were on the Internet within a day of the Office97 release.
This cheap way to obtain the full suite for a few dollars, rather than paying for the more expensive and better protected competitors suites destroyed their market shares and in a matter of months Micro$oft have over 95% of all office application users utilizing their own software. By the '2000' release of their office suite, the copy protection was now nearly uncrackable, but they'd already secured their monopoly. Users, no longer trained in other suites, were stuck in using whatever Micro$oft provided.
The MS part of MSNBC knows all to well the value of piracy in gaining initial pirated users who become paying customers later.
There's another possibility...
If this idiot do manage to reach escape velocity and survive the ascent, but screws up on his calculations, we may very well have the first manned trip to Mars...
one way.
It's actually a good strategy on the part of Microsoft. Since the states' legal costs are carried by state taxpayers, most of which don't care about the the actions of Microsoft so long as the can open their email and surf the web, the concern over state tax dollars going to fight a long court battle is an effective deterent. Microsoft has the coffers for these delays, but elected state officials don't and they have their livihoods to consider.
While I'll admit Flash can be useful in developing UI's for website, animation, ad banners and such, there's one important limitation to consider about Flash on the Web -- It's not searchable.
Search engines and web portals employ spiders and bots for purposes of finding web pages. Even submissions to search engine databases will be less than ideal if sites employ the majority of their documentation in Flash, or behind flash menus and screens, many search engines will lack the ability to index those pages.
How much does a company in question want to spend in external advertising to augment this loss of searchability, and therefore likelihood that a site will be found in a target audience search query? Adobe's PDF format, along with text, html, and a number of other *docment* based formats can be found via search engines. I don't know of any that successfully search flash.
News:
St. Louis, MO, Nov 31, 2030: An American Airline plane, piloted by Microsoft Pilot software, crashed 50 miles outside St. Louis. The flight recorder listed a general protection error as the cause of the crash. American Airlines apparently forgot to renew the software subscription...
Windows 95: It will be free of MS-DOS Windows 98: It will be free of MS-DOS Windows ME: DOS, you mean DOS? DOS isn't here...
A laser diode is a far cry from a Class I laser in terms of wattage output, and even a Class I laser isn't rated as a vision risk. The concern about the laser diode is a lot like putting a surge protector on a 9 volt battery!