I disagree - you're probably right that any company that has tried to move into a hundred million dollar market, quickly finds themselves quickly obliterated by an IBM or a Microsoft. That said, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP... they don't care about ten million dollar ideas. Those ideas are risky business in the US and Europe, because small business owners have to invest a substantial quantity of capital into development of a product and hope that the limitted market can sustain the business. In developing nations where the cost to produce smaller products is substantially lower, the risk is significantly reduced, giving them more flexibility on the range of potential products they can build.
I have no earthly clue where Cerulean Studios (the makers of Trillian) are based - I could look it up easily enough, but they already have my money. So does the makers of MindMap, Newsgator, and the dozens of other small products I've purchased to try and make my Windows life at work easier. All of these are products that a small company can produce, but given the differing value of currency, are immensly profitable if created in a developing nation. The value of a $19.99 sale is significantly greater there, particularly when there's basically no additional overhead involved in the distribution of the product. That is profit that can supplement a software services venture they can launch locally, allowing businesses to expand optimistically in a market that isn't ready yet, but gives them fantastic positioning in the years to come. This in turn makes them fantastic candidates for capital investment from the more developed nations, who would be willing to take greater risks with relatively low sums of money betting on a company with a proven track record for profitability. Best yet, they're good candidates for investment but poor candidates for purchase - the potential payoff is too low balanced against the risk to warrant the administration overhead of managing a large number of disconnected software companies in an immature geographically seperated market.
Yes, those types of apps are the small frys of the software market - that's why they are a fantastic oppurtunity for small development companies. The sum total of the revenue based on those sales is not particularly high by American standards - Large American IT firms will not allow billion dollar businesses to go unchecked, and until those nations have a stronger IT infrastructure, they won't be able to defend themselves "when the eye of Sauron is cast upon them". So developing nations will have to make billion dollars the good old fashion way - by making a thousand million dollar businesses.
I don't concur with the condescending view that the presumed ignorance or inability to understand the license exists more in undeveloped countries than developed ones.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the case.
Its not an issue of being inable to understand liscenses - its an issue of culture and availability. Third world nations historically have not contributed much in the way of IP to the world, as the barrier of entry in the world of science of manufacturing was pretty high, and all of the owners of the facilities were based in other nations. Even if scientists and inventors in those nations did invent things, that IP was almost always transfered out of the country!
In a number of cases, patentable technologies are developed in third world nations, but simply not patented - the idea of intellectual property protection is not entrenched into the cultures yet. Also, its nigh-impossible in many areas of the world for small companies to realistically afford the process to file for protection in first world nations. The result is that the idea is stolen by companies in other nations, which is ultimately bad for the developing nation as a whole.
Look at India's IT industry for example - the education system, attempting to capitalize on their newfound oppurtunities, is trying to train people in technology, its use and its creation as fast as possible and then spit them out into the industry where they can begin working immediately. The education system is increasingly short circuiting the other parts of an education which include amoung other things, what we consider trivial legal knowledge. In the case of India, India has a developed legal system with a substantial per capita supply of lawyers and legal experts that legal advice on how to protect one's IP is available at an affordable rate - that was not the case when India's IT revolution began, as it will not be the case as other developing nations begin to invest in IT.
The danger is ignorant or accidental inclusion of GPL'd material into a product. It happens in the US even with legal oversight and a culture that grew up breathing terms like copyright, so its very reasonable it could happen in third world nations. If you misuse Microsoft's technology, they'll charge you a liscensing fee which hurts your business, but likely won't destroy a profitable business. If you're caught misusing the GPL, your only remedy is to release the source to your product which beheads your ability to profit based on sales.
I used IBM and SCO as an example of bodies that could sue on behalf of code contributed to the GPL - My suspicion is that these forms of lawsuit are not that far off from becoming quite the norm. If the GPL is unenforceable on account of no one stepping up to the plate to catch transgressions, as open source software becomes more commonplace in the business world people will just begin walking all over the GPL.
The issue as far as developing nations go is that, although there is a distinguishment between source code and IP, there is a direct link between source code and how you can profit off a system. I can't think of any companies that are profitable selling open source products for obvious reasons - rather, they're profitable selling services based on those products.
The issue is that firms in developing nations do not have the same service oppurtunities as they do in the first world. There are two main types of profitable services - support services, where you sell the expertise of consultants, tech support, etc, and automated services, ala iTunes, XBox Live, Amazon, etc, where you are buying a capability from a system.
Developing nations do not have much foothold in either of these. The IT markets in their native countries are not fully sustainable - there just isn't that much money in IT budgets for computers for everyone, much less large support contracts. The real money comes from selling to companies in IT entrenched societies, but few IT managers in the first world are going to risk their job buying support services from Uganda. Its too risky, not to mention the legal issues of working with states that have less developed trade agreements than exist between first world nations, and the inevitable communication issues. Also, if the core product is GPL'd, nothing prevents me from opening a firm in Massachusetts that competes directly with your African firm, and even though my rates are higher, I'll win the business in the United States, and I'd argue I'd have a better chance of winning the business in Europe and Japan than you as well.
This leaves technical services - Again, a huge disadvantage. Without good cause or no, consumers will be wary - pricing will be very difficult as its not unreasonable to think that a service company in Brazil will want to make their prices affordable to their friends and neighbors which catagorize wealth in an entirely different way than the United States does. Also, honestly, a person living in a developing nation is going to have a hell of time understanding the mindset of first world consumers enough to produce a service that we're interested in that someone else hasn't already stolen the market on. Speaking of stealing the market, in the rare case you do come up with a viable solution, you WILL be muscled out by an American company that will destroy you on brandname.
Developing nations will only be able to sell services locally, and until those markets are fully self-sustaining and IT is fully entrenched, revenue potential will be very low making the barrier of entry for new businesses very high (which in turn lowers the rate at which IT is adopted). If developing nations wish to be able to jumpstart IT industries by bringing in revenue and investment from first world nations, they must have the capacity to make direct product sales in addition to growing a service economy, which is not realistic under the GPL.
IBM also has a legion of lawyers to help them distinguish how to work in a GPL'd environment and yet keep as much of their IP close to home as possible. Firms in developing countries for the most part are denied this luxury. What happens if an company in Uganda develops a product / service that has real value to the world at large, and the IBMs or SCOs of the world note that it has included GPL'd code and sue "on behalf of the GPL".
I have to agree with Schwartz - The GPL should be the exception, not the rule. Platforms should be GPL'd to prevent vendors from locking in users base on proprietary solutions, but products and applications should be able to benefit from using open source while maintaining control over their IP - this is never more true than in third world markets where services are not as viable a business option as they are in the United States. I believe other open source liscenses are much better suited for this task.
Its not inevitable - The conflict between the Taiwan and China has been raging for decades, and although every couple of years its reignited politically, to date we've been fortunate enough that no one has stepped over the line. Although its certainly possible that we could end up in a war we don't want to be in, I believe that its possible to diffuse this peacefully over the coming decades. The US doesn't want a war with China, and few in China want to rile the US. If we keep cool heads and a strong diplomatic relationship, and we continue to entwine our markets closer together, I think this one is going to end up okay.
Sure, but you don't leave the thing running fulltime and you only need to run it on the frequency range the UAVs use. You just turn it on when enemy aircraft are in the near vicinity, and you won't need to leave it running long. Simply having the capacity to nullify enemy aircraft at the touch of a button is enough of a disincentive that your enemy would likely never actually launch an air attack.
Yes, it just takes a ton of energy. Its not practical for most applications, but if I can deploy a unit in the middle of my military base that prevents enemy aircraft from passing within 4 kilometers, I've significantly reduced the enemies capacity to strike me.
You're presuming that in the next 15 years, some mathmatician doesn't find a backdoor to the encryption algorythm the connection uses. If that happens, the enemies of the US aren't going to put out a press release informing us of that. They'll just one day start using it during an air raid and suddenly the US has lost half its air fleet, and has to send to the rest back to the US to be refitted with new comm modules during which time, we have no air defense against the combination of our enemies planes next to the planes they stole from us. And we have to pray that whatever module we end up jamming into our remote fighters isn't also broken, or on the verge of being broken.
All of that is a moot point, because the more realistic option (as another poster mentioned) is simply that your enemy is going to jam your signal .
China is the last potential danger to the US militarily - the EU is our closest ally, and even if we pretend that isn't the case, our economies are too intertwined and the UK is the only nation in Europe with the capacity to deploy a sizeable force outside their homeland. I can't see the EU ever reinventing its economy around the industry of war, and so long as it doesn't, it can't sustain a fighting force to match the Arkansas National Guard, much less the US Army. Although India could muster a mighty Army, it wouldn't be able to compare to the US - not to mention we have a good relationship with India. I hope that our relationship with China doesn't turn that way, but its possible, and the US military needs to continue to prepare itself for that possibility. Hopefully cool heads and a shared market will prevent issues like Taiwan from being blown out of proportion and causing an incident.
There's alot of worry in DoD about how remote controlled fighters and bombers can resist signal hijacking. This isn't much of an issue with today's predator aircraft because we're aware of the information capabilities of our enemy, but we can't build a fleet of next generation fighters that we intend to use for twenty years if we believe there's a reasonable chance that 12 years from now, the Chinese will have to capacity to make our aircraft theirs at the touch of a button.
IANAL, but I wasn't aware that the terms of the Microsoft settlement required them to open up with a liscense compatible with the GPL. In fact, that seems particularly unfair because although we may disagree with software patents, they are legal in the United States and in the current legal environment, the EU is expected to at least respect those patents, even if they don't observe them.
The GPL allows others to freely extend a system with only the stipulation that the extension must in turn be GPL'd. For systems and protocols invented by Microsoft, the embrace and extend approach is a violation of their core rights to their IP - when Microsoft has done it to other's IP, they got hit hard for it (ala the Java fight), so we shouldn't create a double standard in which Microsoft can't extend but everyone else can.
Microsoft absolutely must publish specifications for communicating with Microsoft systems - the protocols need to be fully documented and freely available to other system makers. But it should be enough that Microsoft releases the protocols under a non-modification open liscense, as long as they do it freely and the protocol description is complete and accurate.
Except that patents are very very cheap to file for small companies. Small entity status floors the price of filing a patent. I can't recall off the top of my head what the cutoff for small entity is, but any tech shop larger than that can afford an increase in patent pricing unless they're filing in volume.
I may be wrong on this, but I can't think of a single occasion where Microsoft has ever sued someone for patent infringement - they've pulled out their portfolio defensively a number of times, but I don't believe they've ever gone on the offense.
Like I said, that I can remember - if anyone knows of an occasion when they did, lemme know.
Disclaimer - I don't read much in the Mac world, so I don't know how credible their site normally was.
What steams me up about the whole thing is, they got sued because they were right. They didn't invent a bogus story. They uncovered a piece of news that they later reported which happened to turn out to be absolutely true.
If credibility and accuracy to the truth on the items they report on is the line we define for journalism, they met it. A very brief perusal of their news archive shows it to be pretty accurate, so what is burden they must meet in order to be considered journalism?
Longhorn is the way that MS basically ended up delivering software by subscription. If you think about how XP has changed since it was released, its a vastly different product today. Longhorn will be the same - although the core WinFX technologies are being backported, the technologies that come out AFTER 2006 won't be. IE8, WMP 11, and the whole round of products that we know will exist someday but haven't begun yet.
The difference between XP and Longhorn when Longhorn is released is very small, but the difference between XP and Longhorn when Blackcomb comes out will be much more substantial.
That said, Longhorn does have the new command line shell, Monad - the MSDN Longhorn site indicates it has some new security layer which sounds a good deal like jails but can't possibly be as thorough. Not to mention, a completely new build of Notepad!!!
The Konfabulator thing pisses me off. Only Steve Jobs could find a way to make a guy who wrote an extraordinarily popular platform for OSX so pissed off the guy declared he was moving the whole thing over to Windows.
To MS' credit, when they steal an idea, they at least offer to buy off the inventor, ESPECIALLY if the inventor is a small to midsized firm.
Granted, if you turn down the offer, MS is probably going to destroy you, but they do offer to compensate the inventor first.
I'm amazed at how people have have misinterpreted this news. Sure MarkL was a higher level engineer on the NT team, but lets be honest - most senior engineers at MS through the 90s worked in platform services or Office.
What's much more interested is that he was chief engineer on Hailstorm (MS Passport) for the past 5 years. Given Googles service spread and the fact that MS axed the Passport team, its much more likely he moved to Google to continue his vision of a centralized web authentication system.
If I was going to make wild predictions out of this announcement, I'd say Google is going to try a run around the Liberty Alliance and establish themselves as Passport with a more friendly face. Of course, just about everyone was predicting they would start working towards this months ago, so its just reinforcement.
There won't be a commercial Google OS - Consumers who jump off the Microsoft boat are moving to Apple, and Google simply isn't a position to beat Apple at their own game. More reasonable is to expect that Google has a whole slew of OS developers to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their 100,000 machine search cluster, and to implement customized OS level clustering.
That said, I'm not so sure that losing MarkL is that big of a deal. He hasn't been working on the NT team for a while. As was mentioned in the article, he was the chief software architect on Hailstorm. Hailstorm is dead - MS axed a substantial slice of the Passport team and is abandoning the technology. I suspect that Google is in a better position to continue the construction of a centralized web authentication system, and MarkL wanted to see the vision he had over the past 3-4 years come to fruition.
I think its very unlikely you'll see MS attack Linux on IP issues. Its pretty well known that MS infringes on half of IBM's patents and IBM infringes on half of MS' patents, so the cold war peace between them is based on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. MS has tested the legal grounds by "donating" to other companies, but to the best of my knowledge, modern Microsoft has never actually prosecuted any of its patents - trademarks and copyrights all the time, but I can't remember a case of them suing anyone else for infringement. Not to say it hasn't happened, but they are very reluctant to do it.
Office will never be available to run on Mono, because so much of Office is still written in C++ calling Win32 - although most future development of MS Office and other products is done in.NET, Microsoft will never rewrite the millions of lines of Win32 code that Office already uses - it just doesn't make any business sense to do so, especially since.NET plays with C++ so well.
Based on what I've read, the Mac Mini lacks both the processor speed and disk speed to do realtime compression and serialization of multiple video feeds. There is a company another poster to your comment replied with that offers a system for the heftier Macs though.
Tivo has somehow managed to pick up almost 5bil in debt. NO ONE is going to buy them. Everyone is waiting for Tivo to go under and then buy up everyone's support contract after the fact and take over from there.
I agree - its actually less of a joke for me than it is a serious problem.
I own all three consoles, an N64, a Tivo, a DVD player, and a few stereo components. None of these match with my fiance's vision of the IKEA lifestyle. Finding a cabinet capable of holding all of that stuff is amazingly hard, especially one that doesn't disrupt my remotes.
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I have no earthly clue where Cerulean Studios (the makers of Trillian) are based - I could look it up easily enough, but they already have my money. So does the makers of MindMap, Newsgator, and the dozens of other small products I've purchased to try and make my Windows life at work easier. All of these are products that a small company can produce, but given the differing value of currency, are immensly profitable if created in a developing nation. The value of a $19.99 sale is significantly greater there, particularly when there's basically no additional overhead involved in the distribution of the product. That is profit that can supplement a software services venture they can launch locally, allowing businesses to expand optimistically in a market that isn't ready yet, but gives them fantastic positioning in the years to come. This in turn makes them fantastic candidates for capital investment from the more developed nations, who would be willing to take greater risks with relatively low sums of money betting on a company with a proven track record for profitability. Best yet, they're good candidates for investment but poor candidates for purchase - the potential payoff is too low balanced against the risk to warrant the administration overhead of managing a large number of disconnected software companies in an immature geographically seperated market.
Yes, those types of apps are the small frys of the software market - that's why they are a fantastic oppurtunity for small development companies. The sum total of the revenue based on those sales is not particularly high by American standards - Large American IT firms will not allow billion dollar businesses to go unchecked, and until those nations have a stronger IT infrastructure, they won't be able to defend themselves "when the eye of Sauron is cast upon them". So developing nations will have to make billion dollars the good old fashion way - by making a thousand million dollar businesses.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the case.
Its not an issue of being inable to understand liscenses - its an issue of culture and availability. Third world nations historically have not contributed much in the way of IP to the world, as the barrier of entry in the world of science of manufacturing was pretty high, and all of the owners of the facilities were based in other nations. Even if scientists and inventors in those nations did invent things, that IP was almost always transfered out of the country!
In a number of cases, patentable technologies are developed in third world nations, but simply not patented - the idea of intellectual property protection is not entrenched into the cultures yet. Also, its nigh-impossible in many areas of the world for small companies to realistically afford the process to file for protection in first world nations. The result is that the idea is stolen by companies in other nations, which is ultimately bad for the developing nation as a whole.
Look at India's IT industry for example - the education system, attempting to capitalize on their newfound oppurtunities, is trying to train people in technology, its use and its creation as fast as possible and then spit them out into the industry where they can begin working immediately. The education system is increasingly short circuiting the other parts of an education which include amoung other things, what we consider trivial legal knowledge. In the case of India, India has a developed legal system with a substantial per capita supply of lawyers and legal experts that legal advice on how to protect one's IP is available at an affordable rate - that was not the case when India's IT revolution began, as it will not be the case as other developing nations begin to invest in IT.
The danger is ignorant or accidental inclusion of GPL'd material into a product. It happens in the US even with legal oversight and a culture that grew up breathing terms like copyright, so its very reasonable it could happen in third world nations. If you misuse Microsoft's technology, they'll charge you a liscensing fee which hurts your business, but likely won't destroy a profitable business. If you're caught misusing the GPL, your only remedy is to release the source to your product which beheads your ability to profit based on sales.
I used IBM and SCO as an example of bodies that could sue on behalf of code contributed to the GPL - My suspicion is that these forms of lawsuit are not that far off from becoming quite the norm. If the GPL is unenforceable on account of no one stepping up to the plate to catch transgressions, as open source software becomes more commonplace in the business world people will just begin walking all over the GPL.
The issue is that firms in developing nations do not have the same service oppurtunities as they do in the first world. There are two main types of profitable services - support services, where you sell the expertise of consultants, tech support, etc, and automated services, ala iTunes, XBox Live, Amazon, etc, where you are buying a capability from a system.
Developing nations do not have much foothold in either of these. The IT markets in their native countries are not fully sustainable - there just isn't that much money in IT budgets for computers for everyone, much less large support contracts. The real money comes from selling to companies in IT entrenched societies, but few IT managers in the first world are going to risk their job buying support services from Uganda. Its too risky, not to mention the legal issues of working with states that have less developed trade agreements than exist between first world nations, and the inevitable communication issues. Also, if the core product is GPL'd, nothing prevents me from opening a firm in Massachusetts that competes directly with your African firm, and even though my rates are higher, I'll win the business in the United States, and I'd argue I'd have a better chance of winning the business in Europe and Japan than you as well.
This leaves technical services - Again, a huge disadvantage. Without good cause or no, consumers will be wary - pricing will be very difficult as its not unreasonable to think that a service company in Brazil will want to make their prices affordable to their friends and neighbors which catagorize wealth in an entirely different way than the United States does. Also, honestly, a person living in a developing nation is going to have a hell of time understanding the mindset of first world consumers enough to produce a service that we're interested in that someone else hasn't already stolen the market on. Speaking of stealing the market, in the rare case you do come up with a viable solution, you WILL be muscled out by an American company that will destroy you on brandname.
Developing nations will only be able to sell services locally, and until those markets are fully self-sustaining and IT is fully entrenched, revenue potential will be very low making the barrier of entry for new businesses very high (which in turn lowers the rate at which IT is adopted). If developing nations wish to be able to jumpstart IT industries by bringing in revenue and investment from first world nations, they must have the capacity to make direct product sales in addition to growing a service economy, which is not realistic under the GPL.
I have to agree with Schwartz - The GPL should be the exception, not the rule. Platforms should be GPL'd to prevent vendors from locking in users base on proprietary solutions, but products and applications should be able to benefit from using open source while maintaining control over their IP - this is never more true than in third world markets where services are not as viable a business option as they are in the United States. I believe other open source liscenses are much better suited for this task.
Its not inevitable - The conflict between the Taiwan and China has been raging for decades, and although every couple of years its reignited politically, to date we've been fortunate enough that no one has stepped over the line. Although its certainly possible that we could end up in a war we don't want to be in, I believe that its possible to diffuse this peacefully over the coming decades. The US doesn't want a war with China, and few in China want to rile the US. If we keep cool heads and a strong diplomatic relationship, and we continue to entwine our markets closer together, I think this one is going to end up okay.
Sure, but you don't leave the thing running fulltime and you only need to run it on the frequency range the UAVs use. You just turn it on when enemy aircraft are in the near vicinity, and you won't need to leave it running long. Simply having the capacity to nullify enemy aircraft at the touch of a button is enough of a disincentive that your enemy would likely never actually launch an air attack.
Yes, it just takes a ton of energy. Its not practical for most applications, but if I can deploy a unit in the middle of my military base that prevents enemy aircraft from passing within 4 kilometers, I've significantly reduced the enemies capacity to strike me.
All of that is a moot point, because the more realistic option (as another poster mentioned) is simply that your enemy is going to jam your signal .
China is the last potential danger to the US militarily - the EU is our closest ally, and even if we pretend that isn't the case, our economies are too intertwined and the UK is the only nation in Europe with the capacity to deploy a sizeable force outside their homeland. I can't see the EU ever reinventing its economy around the industry of war, and so long as it doesn't, it can't sustain a fighting force to match the Arkansas National Guard, much less the US Army. Although India could muster a mighty Army, it wouldn't be able to compare to the US - not to mention we have a good relationship with India. I hope that our relationship with China doesn't turn that way, but its possible, and the US military needs to continue to prepare itself for that possibility. Hopefully cool heads and a shared market will prevent issues like Taiwan from being blown out of proportion and causing an incident.
There's alot of worry in DoD about how remote controlled fighters and bombers can resist signal hijacking. This isn't much of an issue with today's predator aircraft because we're aware of the information capabilities of our enemy, but we can't build a fleet of next generation fighters that we intend to use for twenty years if we believe there's a reasonable chance that 12 years from now, the Chinese will have to capacity to make our aircraft theirs at the touch of a button.
The GPL allows others to freely extend a system with only the stipulation that the extension must in turn be GPL'd. For systems and protocols invented by Microsoft, the embrace and extend approach is a violation of their core rights to their IP - when Microsoft has done it to other's IP, they got hit hard for it (ala the Java fight), so we shouldn't create a double standard in which Microsoft can't extend but everyone else can.
Microsoft absolutely must publish specifications for communicating with Microsoft systems - the protocols need to be fully documented and freely available to other system makers. But it should be enough that Microsoft releases the protocols under a non-modification open liscense, as long as they do it freely and the protocol description is complete and accurate.
Except that patents are very very cheap to file for small companies. Small entity status floors the price of filing a patent. I can't recall off the top of my head what the cutoff for small entity is, but any tech shop larger than that can afford an increase in patent pricing unless they're filing in volume.
Like I said, that I can remember - if anyone knows of an occasion when they did, lemme know.
What steams me up about the whole thing is, they got sued because they were right. They didn't invent a bogus story. They uncovered a piece of news that they later reported which happened to turn out to be absolutely true.
If credibility and accuracy to the truth on the items they report on is the line we define for journalism, they met it. A very brief perusal of their news archive shows it to be pretty accurate, so what is burden they must meet in order to be considered journalism?
That said, Longhorn does have the new command line shell, Monad - the MSDN Longhorn site indicates it has some new security layer which sounds a good deal like jails but can't possibly be as thorough. Not to mention, a completely new build of Notepad!!!
To MS' credit, when they steal an idea, they at least offer to buy off the inventor, ESPECIALLY if the inventor is a small to midsized firm.
Granted, if you turn down the offer, MS is probably going to destroy you, but they do offer to compensate the inventor first.
What's much more interested is that he was chief engineer on Hailstorm (MS Passport) for the past 5 years. Given Googles service spread and the fact that MS axed the Passport team, its much more likely he moved to Google to continue his vision of a centralized web authentication system.
If I was going to make wild predictions out of this announcement, I'd say Google is going to try a run around the Liberty Alliance and establish themselves as Passport with a more friendly face. Of course, just about everyone was predicting they would start working towards this months ago, so its just reinforcement.
That said, I'm not so sure that losing MarkL is that big of a deal. He hasn't been working on the NT team for a while. As was mentioned in the article, he was the chief software architect on Hailstorm. Hailstorm is dead - MS axed a substantial slice of the Passport team and is abandoning the technology. I suspect that Google is in a better position to continue the construction of a centralized web authentication system, and MarkL wanted to see the vision he had over the past 3-4 years come to fruition.
I think its very unlikely you'll see MS attack Linux on IP issues. Its pretty well known that MS infringes on half of IBM's patents and IBM infringes on half of MS' patents, so the cold war peace between them is based on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. MS has tested the legal grounds by "donating" to other companies, but to the best of my knowledge, modern Microsoft has never actually prosecuted any of its patents - trademarks and copyrights all the time, but I can't remember a case of them suing anyone else for infringement. Not to say it hasn't happened, but they are very reluctant to do it.
XP only has to corrupt my disk 40 times before it pays for itself!
Office will never be available to run on Mono, because so much of Office is still written in C++ calling Win32 - although most future development of MS Office and other products is done in .NET, Microsoft will never rewrite the millions of lines of Win32 code that Office already uses - it just doesn't make any business sense to do so, especially since .NET plays with C++ so well.
Based on what I've read, the Mac Mini lacks both the processor speed and disk speed to do realtime compression and serialization of multiple video feeds. There is a company another poster to your comment replied with that offers a system for the heftier Macs though.
Tivo has somehow managed to pick up almost 5bil in debt. NO ONE is going to buy them. Everyone is waiting for Tivo to go under and then buy up everyone's support contract after the fact and take over from there.
I own all three consoles, an N64, a Tivo, a DVD player, and a few stereo components. None of these match with my fiance's vision of the IKEA lifestyle. Finding a cabinet capable of holding all of that stuff is amazingly hard, especially one that doesn't disrupt my remotes.
Don't get me started on controllers.
Have you seen how weak the dollar is right now? BillG would have to liquidate a ton of his stocks to buy an authentic cheese danish right now.