Actually having been through one shutdown and watching a few others from the sidelines, the HR director usually goes when the big layoff happens. The guy who shuts off the lights is the day to day financials guy. He/she gets to liquidate the assets, issue severance, pay what's left to the very angry stock holders, etc.
I'm not sure that will happen though. When XP came out, MS said that the only way to get Media Player 8 was to get XP. They weren't lying, but Media Player 9 was released for other than XP. If MS starts loosing browser mind share because not everyone is running Longhorn and IE 7, you can bet they will find a way to get IE 8 on older OSs.
However this kind of crime probably won't get him the kind of jail time you're thinking of. He'll end up at one of those resort jails (I know a few folks who've been honored guests). It's sort of dorm where you have to come home every night. He'll still have a job, go to work each day, church on the weekends if he wants to, etc.
It's not the same, when you swap CDs, you can't listen to that same CD while it's in your roommate's car. If you rip it and all wander off with your MP3 copy, you have duplicated and are enjoying the simultanous use of the product. When I was going to school it would have been the same as copying my friends CDs to tape and wandering off. I never heard anybody argue that wasn't just plain stealing or music should be "free", somehow because it's easy, faster, and digital it's okay? Seeing it any way else is just kidding yourself. I don't see where there is any line to draw. I'm all for fair use, rip to mp3, copy it to your computer, your portable, your jukebox, mix your own CDs, etc., but as soon as you give that MP3 to your friend, it's the same as taping the CD, photocopying the book, copying the video, you're a thief.
In my town they shut down adult clubs when there is prostitution involved. Part of the business, nude dancing is legal, but the prostitution is not (I'm not expressing my personal beliefs towards prostitution, just reporting the laws in my area). So they bust the dancers and owner involved and close the business. I don't see how a peer-to-peer network which probably was used mostly for swapping copyrighted material without permission is any different. If you want your peer-to-peer network up and available for legal purposes, police yourselves and keep it clean.
Maybe that was the original strategy, but they haven't changed the format since Word 6, and that was in their best interest. They got so much flak from that 2.0 to 6.0 format change that they haven't changed it since then. I can still install word 6 and open an Word XP document. MS can't win in this one, somebody is going to unhappy. If they make the default format DOC, you have people like the original poster complaining that they are only paying lip service to the XML format. If they make the XML the default, they irritate the big corporate customers who don't want to replace every copy of Word at the same time. Since the big corporate customers probably spend a lot more money than the original poster, I expect DOC will stay the default and the XML format will be popular in the web crowd, but heh, I could wrong.
Okay, maybe never is strong word, but the Word for DOS, Word for Windows comparison is not really the same thing. In those days all we sold were mainframe products, not like today where everyone has a PC or two and all the documentation is generated and reviewed using word. The Word 2.0 to Word 95 is probably a better comparison. At the time I worked for company with only about 1100 people, it took about 6 months for that to get deployed and it was nightmare. Nobody with 95 could remember to save in the old format, you were always having to ask folks to resave and send documents. That is why I think keeping the DOC format as the default is perfectly reasonable.
I can certainly understand them leaving the default the old DOC format. I work in a company with close to a half million employees. Deployment of new software is never quick. You might have a mixed batch of Word users for years. If all the new installs produced documents the old installs couldn't read, they simply would never upgrade.
What version of Frontpage do you use? I use Frontpage for my site, I test with and it looks fine on IE, Mozilla, Netscape (haven't tried anything lower than 4), and Opera. I'll admit that Word generates some crap, but Frontpage is fine.
Your 3 guys must have been pretty slow. I worked for a company with about 1200 employees, 12 sites, probably close to a hundred or so NT servers doing various things. There were only 3 guys supporting that and one of them was supposed to be just the DBA, though he did help out with the network stuff. They were never very busy except on the occasional weekend server upgrade.
I graduated years ago and have been happily working in the MS centric world since then. My school seemed to have it in for MS. In school I had one professor who wouldn't let me use NT to do timing studies even though my desktop could accomplish the task much faster than the big UNIX box on campus and NT had 10x finer resolution when measuring time in a thread.
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At least they didn't compare it to the length of VW beetle, bus, or football field.
Actually having been through one shutdown and watching a few others from the sidelines, the HR director usually goes when the big layoff happens. The guy who shuts off the lights is the day to day financials guy. He/she gets to liquidate the assets, issue severance, pay what's left to the very angry stock holders, etc.
I'm not sure that will happen though. When XP came out, MS said that the only way to get Media Player 8 was to get XP. They weren't lying, but Media Player 9 was released for other than XP. If MS starts loosing browser mind share because not everyone is running Longhorn and IE 7, you can bet they will find a way to get IE 8 on older OSs.
However this kind of crime probably won't get him the kind of jail time you're thinking of. He'll end up at one of those resort jails (I know a few folks who've been honored guests). It's sort of dorm where you have to come home every night. He'll still have a job, go to work each day, church on the weekends if he wants to, etc.
It's not the same, when you swap CDs, you can't listen to that same CD while it's in your roommate's car. If you rip it and all wander off with your MP3 copy, you have duplicated and are enjoying the simultanous use of the product. When I was going to school it would have been the same as copying my friends CDs to tape and wandering off. I never heard anybody argue that wasn't just plain stealing or music should be "free", somehow because it's easy, faster, and digital it's okay? Seeing it any way else is just kidding yourself. I don't see where there is any line to draw. I'm all for fair use, rip to mp3, copy it to your computer, your portable, your jukebox, mix your own CDs, etc., but as soon as you give that MP3 to your friend, it's the same as taping the CD, photocopying the book, copying the video, you're a thief.
In my town they shut down adult clubs when there is prostitution involved. Part of the business, nude dancing is legal, but the prostitution is not (I'm not expressing my personal beliefs towards prostitution, just reporting the laws in my area). So they bust the dancers and owner involved and close the business. I don't see how a peer-to-peer network which probably was used mostly for swapping copyrighted material without permission is any different. If you want your peer-to-peer network up and available for legal purposes, police yourselves and keep it clean.
Maybe that was the original strategy, but they haven't changed the format since Word 6, and that was in their best interest. They got so much flak from that 2.0 to 6.0 format change that they haven't changed it since then. I can still install word 6 and open an Word XP document. MS can't win in this one, somebody is going to unhappy. If they make the default format DOC, you have people like the original poster complaining that they are only paying lip service to the XML format. If they make the XML the default, they irritate the big corporate customers who don't want to replace every copy of Word at the same time. Since the big corporate customers probably spend a lot more money than the original poster, I expect DOC will stay the default and the XML format will be popular in the web crowd, but heh, I could wrong.
Okay, maybe never is strong word, but the Word for DOS, Word for Windows comparison is not really the same thing. In those days all we sold were mainframe products, not like today where everyone has a PC or two and all the documentation is generated and reviewed using word. The Word 2.0 to Word 95 is probably a better comparison. At the time I worked for company with only about 1100 people, it took about 6 months for that to get deployed and it was nightmare. Nobody with 95 could remember to save in the old format, you were always having to ask folks to resave and send documents. That is why I think keeping the DOC format as the default is perfectly reasonable.
I can certainly understand them leaving the default the old DOC format. I work in a company with close to a half million employees. Deployment of new software is never quick. You might have a mixed batch of Word users for years. If all the new installs produced documents the old installs couldn't read, they simply would never upgrade.
What version of Frontpage do you use? I use Frontpage for my site, I test with and it looks fine on IE, Mozilla, Netscape (haven't tried anything lower than 4), and Opera. I'll admit that Word generates some crap, but Frontpage is fine.
I was downloading dirty pictures and movies on my C64 in the mid 80s, wouldn't that be prior art?
Your 3 guys must have been pretty slow. I worked for a company with about 1200 employees, 12 sites, probably close to a hundred or so NT servers doing various things. There were only 3 guys supporting that and one of them was supposed to be just the DBA, though he did help out with the network stuff. They were never very busy except on the occasional weekend server upgrade.
I graduated years ago and have been happily working in the MS centric world since then. My school seemed to have it in for MS. In school I had one professor who wouldn't let me use NT to do timing studies even though my desktop could accomplish the task much faster than the big UNIX box on campus and NT had 10x finer resolution when measuring time in a thread.