I'm no Bill fan, but the man has stated, repeatedly, that his wife and children will get none of the money and it will all go to charity. And the Gates Foundation is doing a lot of good work, completely unrelated to what Microsoft does.
So BilLG has donated more than 46% of his net worth to charity? That's great, and I'm not being sarcastic.
Don't suggest that that makes him moral, or worthy of emulation, or that those of us who haven't given away 46% of our net worth are somehow inferior.
Think about this: BillG has tens of billions of dollars. He would need several tens of millions to live in sybartic luxury for the rest of his life. He has given away roughly half of the money he wouldn't need. I'm just not impressed. It's great that he's doing what he is, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that he's giving till it hurts. When BillG gets his personal fortune down to the point that he's facing the same sort of retirement income that the average multimillionaire must contend with, I'll be enormously impressed with his sacrifice.
My family has a net worth of negative tens of thousands of dollars (student loans, mostly), and no dollars we don't need. Living in any sort of luxury (let alone sybartic luxury) for the rest of our lives is out of the question. We still give 10% of our income to various charities every year. If I were emulating BillG, I wouldn't give away a cent until my family was filthy rich.
BillG has given away ($billions)/(amount not needed >> 0) = 46%.
I've given away ($thousands)/(amount not needed == 0) = infinity%.
Here's a dirty little secret: one doesn't need a computer to do business with the regulated monopolies.
They may WANT you to use a computer, but you can refuse. When they try to sell you on the advantages of using their website for whatever (to save them money, though they rarely emphasize that), politely reply that you will do so when their website works with your computer.
I don't use the web for this sort of thing, regardless of the company's policy on which browsers they'll support. The savings never seem to be passed along to me, and the terms on which you make payments (unless via credit card) seem unfavorable.
Actually, I've had a similar problem on windows. Here's how it happens: I like to keep the screen at 1024x780 or so, but the kids (we have windows just so they can run Reader Rabbit, et al) like to switch to 640x480 for their games. So, we start at the higher resolution and then switch to a lower resolution so their game isn't in a little box on the screen. The windows which were open (like windows exploder) are lapping over the edge of the screen, and in the worst case, can't be dragged to where they can be closed. This is Win98, by the way.
In presentations, Brewster says his policy is to take out the complainers.
Does this mean that he has the Godfather send Guido around to take them out, or does he merely mean that he removes their data from the data base? For the sake of future social scientists, I sort of hope it's the first choice.
Better to have PETA on your back than all those monkeys and their poop.
If we assume moderate-sized monkeys, at 20 pounds each (about 10 kilograms), that's around 536.9(10^9) pounds of monkey, generating too many pounds of monkey poop. On the other hand, think of all the gardens we could fertilize with all that zoo poo.
... most Unix desktops... have a tendency to draw huge dialog boxes where the OK and cancel buttons and other options are below the screen and you can't reach it, no you can't even resize or scroll it up.
That's a very real problem, except for the part about ``... no you can't even resize or scroll it up.''
When you're using a too-small monitor, you should either turn on the virtual desktop, so that your little monitor acts as a window to a larger, virtual desktop (I detest this), or do the following: Hold down the ALT key, left-click anywhere in the window that you want to move, drag it to where you can reach the button you want to click.
I believe this will work with any window manager; I'm sure, at least, that it works with all the ones I've tried. Problem solved, or at least ameliorated.
Even then administring linux is not as simple as windows.
Too true. With Windows, everything is either compulsory or forbidden. If the boss tells the sysadmin to do something, it is either trivial or impossible. With Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX, everything is possible, if only you know how. You can't say ``That's impossible'' without fear of contradiction.
Everyone knows that Windows crashes periodically, and the sysadmin cannot be responsible for fixing problems: that's done in Redmond or not at all. When things just don't work, the Windows sysadmin can blame it all on MS, and ask for more money, while the Libre *nix sysadmin would have no one to blame but himself, and no excuse for a bigger budget.
Windows is simple, all right; it has little cartoons to guide you, no embarrasing choices and built-in excuses. Who could ask for less?
Hell, if you could get your hands on a piece of software that made you 25% more efficient at doing your job (of course this is in absolutely no way implying that office does this, this is just a generalzation), wouldn't you sink an extra $500 to acquire it? In a heartbeat you would.
Yep, you're right. That's what makes it so strange that so many people persist in using Windows and proprietary software in general.
I do quite a bit of writing, and a bit of statistical programming. GNU emacs and LaTeX and R increased my productivity by quite a lot [1]; I'm sure that it was more than a 25% increase. I would have paid to get that, but of course I didn't have to.
I think that a lot of the reason that folks hang on to Windows et cetera is that they define their tasks in terms of the software they use, as in: ``I use MS Word'' rather than ``I write things'', or ``I use SAS'' rather than ``I work with data''.
Of course, if your job is to have MS Word on the screen all day, you're going to be most productive running Windows. If your job is to write structured documents with meaningful content, you're going to be most productive using something suited to the job, and that's not a word processor, on any OS.
[1] The increased productivity is in comparison to running MS Word, MS Excel and SAS on Windows.
You missed the point. The browser war that MS was fighting was the war to keep the browser from making the OS irrelevant. They lost. Their browser may be the most popular, but it still makes the OS irrelevant. Don't believe it? Try a spoofed header on Mozilla. Today, mine is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows_98_under_Linux_on_SGI_Octane). Not a word of it is true, of course.
I haven't run into a site that won't function for me on Mozilla. If I do, I'll tell the operator that his site is broken. You mentioned credit card payments; credit card companies are begging for your business. So are banks, and most other businesses. If they won't do business on MY terms, they won't do business with me. That's not about browsers or operating systems or computers, that's about the customer (that's me) being right. The customer is always right, as long as the customer pays the businesses' bills. I've never had a problem with a bank which involved computers, but that would be reason enough to take my business elsewhere, just as surely as not being open at convenient times and locations is.
It seems funny that you say GNUcash isn't there yet. I find it's a bit of overkill: I wish there was a slightly less complicated and less capable program. GNUcash does the job, but it does way more than I need.
The parent post was correct: MS lost the browser war. They won the war to have the most popular browser, but they never wanted to win that one. What they wanted was to make sure that NO browser could undermine their OS monopoly.
Instead of obliterating x number of bits, a scratch on a more dense media obliterates many times x bits.
I get your point, but I think that we'll be able to get around it. Here's why:
For some years now, the next big thing [1] in eyeglasses has been diamond film coating for eyeglasses, to make your plastic lenses as scratch resistant as glass. It sounds as if that sort of thing is what we need here.
I suspect that the two technologies will finally come to market at about the same time, a long time from now. Rather than wasting too much disk space on error-correction-overkill, they'll make disks more scratch resistant.
[1] Sort of like the situation with the DVD replacement technologies; they've been the next big thing for a lot of years too.
Another reply already gave this link, but I want to expand on the suggestion a bit. This article shows that in the long run, libre solutions WILL have a lower TCO than proprietary solutions. The gist of the article is that any money the proprietary solution might save you through moneky-maintainability, support contracts [1], and kickbacks from the salesmen WILL be recaptured through licensing fees by the software's proprietor [2].
If the proprietor isn't recapturing all the savings he achieves for you IN THE LONG RUN, he's throwing away the advantage the monopoly gives him [3]. In the short run, of course, monopolists can subsidize you while you grow dependent, but they will only do this if they think that they will be able to get that money back, with interest, in the long run.
The only flaw in the argument is a relatively small one: the author does not address the difficulty of actually extracting the monopoly rents from the proprietor's customers. In practice, it won't be possible to extract 100% of the rents from 100% of the customers. I say that's a small flaw, because software proprietors such as MS and Oracle have obviously been able to extract enough of the monopoly rents from enough of their customers. If you think you can manage to get the better of an outfit like MS or Oracle in the long run, you're in a small and fortunate minority. Or, you're deluding yourself.
[1]See this slashdot comment for my experience with service contracts for proprietary solutions. They aren't good.
[2]Notice that this same argument can be applied to your certifications: any value that an MS or Cisco cert has to you can be extracted from you, at least in part, by the proprietor in the form of high fees for testing, recertification, et cetera.
[3] If it's a publicly-owned company, the stockholders will not be pleased. The stock price will fall, and the benevolent manager will be out on his ear.
Would you feel comfortable with the radioactive power source inside you? From the article:
Lal said that medical device makers and cell phone makers have shown interest in commercial applications of the atomic battery, adding that consumers may see the new batteries in cell phones in about three to four years.
So, when you get old, your pacemaker will probably have a radioactive battery, and that will probably seem very comforting indeed.
Batteries which capture the electrons given off during some sorts of radioactive decay are old hat. If the article is to be believed, this is something very different. Also from the article:
... a team from Cornell University last month unveiled a device that converts the energy stored in radioactive material directly into mechanical motion, which in turn moves the parts of a miniscule machine to generate electricity. This type of battery could supply power for decades, said Amit Lal, a professor at Cornell's electrical and computer engineering department and the lead researcher.
``Converts the energy... directly into mechanical motion''? I guess this would be sort of like the little solar engines, that have paddles which are shiny on one side and black on the other and spin in sunlight? Sounds as if they might have oversimplified when they paraphrased, maybe.
I've worked for a company which made medical billing software, and sold turnkey systems. We priced our maintenance contracts to maximize our profits. Sometimes that meant pricing high enough that the old equipment looked unattractive, so we could sell new equipment. Sometimes, if we didn't think that the new equipment would come from us, the price didn't go up fast, but we didn't give any more service than the letter of the contract required. That, of course, was astonishingly little. Always, the customer was gouged as deeply as possible. Usually, it would have been cheaper for the customer to do without a contract, though we were careful not to point that out.
I've also done a bit of government purchasing, and I know well how finicky and silly some of the requirements are. I also know that someone who wants to use the system can use those requirements to get whatever he wants, or to stonewall whatever he doesn't.
So, I've seen this sort of issue from both sides, and I know something about it. My point was not that you should have recommended one option or the other, but that this one issue didn't look right.
I'll say it again: Whether you use libre or proprietary, you'll need to have about the same amount of employee's time allocated to support. The cost of a support contract for the libre product will very likely be a lot lower FOR A COMPARABLE LEVEL OF SERVICE , for a ten year period with no upgrades, for reasons which I alluded to in the first paragraph. The libre guys don't have a monopoly, and aren't trying to sell you any hardware (or software, for that matter).
If the developers really aren't interested in selling support, that's an opportunity for you. You can learn it up and go into the support business. If you'd rather not have the conflict of interest, anyone you know and trust could get a nice little part-time business going doing this sort of thing. This is one of the unsung advantages of owning the source code: anyone can contract to do support!
... and noboy knows whether GPL is truly enforceable.
If the GPL is not valid, you have no right to distribute any GPLed software, unless you own the copyright. You can still use it, and fiddle with it, and on and on. But the GPL is the only thing which gives you the additional privilege of redistributing it.
I hear a lot of nonsense about ``... the GPL has never been tested...''. It's nonsense because testing the GPl will be a loose-loose proposition for the challenger. If he busts the GPL, he's left with no rights, other than the right to keep and use the copy (or copies) that he has paid for. If he wants to keep his right to redistribute, with or without changes, he'd better not bust the GPL, because then his only rights are the rights you get when you buy a book.
My current user agent string is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows_98_under_Linux_on_SGI_Octane). Not a word of it is true, but it gets past those sites which will serve up content only to IE on Windows.
If Mozilla would spoof the string on a case-by-case basis, then only the lazy, bigoted idiots who want to lock out other browsers/OSs would get garbage in their logs. As it is, I have to spoof all of them or none, so mozilla doesn't get the representation it deserves in the server logs of the world.
A number of posts here have attacked the 10% of an FTE figure I used. These posts basically break down into "4 hours a week just to read a mailing list, that is so ridiculous!" and the more informed "You would still have to patch and update a commercial product, what about that?"
To the first I answer that it isn't 4 hours a week to read a mailing list. It also includes time to come up to speed with the product, with the tools the product uses (like 'make' and GCC which are not used in the shop) and with the programming language the product is written in (also not used in the shop).
So, let's say that when there is a new guy assigned to support, or whenever there is a problem, doing support eats up the entire 40 hour week. That seems a little high, but it's plausible. So, there must be either a new guy or a problem every 10 weeks to get to the 0.1 FTE. That's NOT plausible.
My guess is that once things get going, there won't be any troubles from one year to the next. When there is a problem, it will probably be along the lines of: ``How do we get this old turkey to work with our new Whizz-Bang 5000?'', and that sort of problem is likely to be expensive, whether you've gone proprietary or libre. With a Libre software solution, it is likely to be solvable. With a proprietary solution, the vendor's reply is likely to be: ``You don't. Replace your reliable old system with our new, proprietary, Gouge-You-Deeper product.'' There goes your 10-year minimum lifespan.
My guess is that the in-house costs for support are going to be about the same either way you go. Someone is going to have to be up to speed and able to ask the right questions if things go sour, no matter what the license and no matter what you pay for outside support.
I supspect that if you offer money to the developers, you will find one or more of them would be happy to contract to be available to fix problems as they arise. If you can't make arrangements with a developer, anyone who cares to spend some time learning the program can do the same job for you. You will be able to negotiate mutually beneficial terms if you go this route. If you get support from a proprietary vendor, you won't. You'll find yourself paying a lot for a little, until they decide to raise support prices and make you buy a new product. I've seen this done.
... the Mac versions are basically unusable and the Windows version is hurting.
Don't know about Mac, but the windows verion is peachy. I'm using build id 2002091014 on Windows at work, and it provides a subjectively better browsing experience than does IE.
Well, a tablet pc which is a big screen (say 14 in diagonal) AND NOTHING ELSE (no keyboard, et cetera) would be great for carrying around some books in pdf or html format, and reading and taking notes. A plugin (or better yet wireless) keyboard would let me do seroius typing if I needed to. Ethernet would let me put it on a network and up/down-load whatever.
It would have to be thin, light, and not too fragile.
It may be just you. Look again at the quote, noting my change in the emphasis:
Saari has calculated that in three-candidate elections, depending on the voting system, more than two-thirds of all possible configurations of voters' preferences will yield different outcomes.
Thus, he's saying that the choice of voting system will decide the outcome of the election in more than 2/3 of the cases. Here, a ``case'' is a set of voter preferences. His point is that how we choose to ask the question (i.e., choice of voting system) is vitally important.
One big problem we see in general is that most folks who attack this issue begin by saying that they want a ``good'' or ``optimal'' system, but they never define optimal, or even good. Arrow's work is a notable exception, but unfortunately, his definition is one that a reasonable person might take exception to.
One reasonable definition of good would be ``it induces people to accurately state their preferences.'' I'm sure that our current system does NOT meet this criterion. The result is that we vote for the least evil candidate who is perceived to have a chance to win, rather than for the candidate we really prefer.
An example of something which is NOT a reasonable definition is ``it is fair'', unless it is preceded by an implementable definition of fair.
Well, my Windows 2000 Start Menu now has a little Icon that allows me to tell it not to launch Outlook Express, Media Player, MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer...
Nifty. Since I have a Win2k box at work, I'll have to apply the service packs and look for it.
Was that really worth all those tens of millions of dollars? I hope so, because that's probably all we're going to get. It probably won't last very long either. Want to bet that's an unacceptable security risk by SP5 or so?
>>The value of the stock, ultimately, is nothing but the present (i.e., discounted) value of the stream of future DIVIDENDS. Dividends are vital, since if the company doesn't pay out something, someday, why own it?
>You do share in it - all those non-paid dividends are included in the value of the stock...
You missed my point. If the hypothetical company is NEVER going to pay out a dividend, what do I care about owning it? Why does anyone ever care? It never does me any good unless it pays me money! Growth is great, if and only if it enables larger dividends in the future.
When a company is able to grow fast, it can make good sense for it to not pay dividends. Retaining the money to finance growth can increase the expected present value of the stream of future dividends enough to outweight the present sacrifice. If this never stops, the company becomes infinitely large, and there is never a payout to the infinitely patient stockholders. The idea that a company can never pay dividends is obvious nonsense, unless you mean that it will go broke before it starts repaying the owners for the use of their capital.
And a company is worth more than just the dividends it would pay - something that pays a (generally) predictable cash flow is a bond.
You should know better than that. A bond is a promise to repay money, like an IOU. It is a certificate saying that you have loaned money. A stock certificate is a certificate of (limited liability) ownership. A stock which pays regular dividends has the same sort of value that a bond has.
A stock which pays a dividend is speculative: you're betting that the dividend stream will reimburse you for the use of your money during the time you own the stock. This is essentially the same bet you make when you buy their bonds.
A stock which pays no dividends is a bit more speculative: you're betting that it'll start paying dividends before it goes broke, or that someone else will make that bet by buying it from you, or that some bigger fool will take it off your hands at a profit. Further more, you're betting that the future dividends, or the profit you get from that bigger fool, will be enough to compensate you for waiting while you hold the stock.
To take a line from MR.T, I pity the fool who bought MSFT when it first was listed.
Imagine that you bought some share of MSFT when it was first listed, and that you never sell any. So far, you've gotten no return on your investment (MSFT pays no dividend, right?). There are three possibilities: 1) MSFT will eventually start paying a dividend. If it is big enough, it will pay you sufficently to justify your years of patient waiting. 2) MSFT will eventually go broke. You get no reward for your years of patient waiting. 3) (included only for completeness) MSFT never pays a dividend, even though it stops growing, as all real things eventually must. You get no reward for your years of patient waiting.
Number 3 is unlikely: stockholders are already agitating to force MSFT to start paying dividends. Notice that unless you sell, only number 1 gives you any reward. If you are to sell, someone must buy. Only a bigger fool than you will buy unless there is some reasonable expectation of number 1, with the sufficient return.
My original point stands: the value of a stock is the expected present value of the future stream of dividends.
>>"... To give one example of where this is heading, I think that Samba will still have to rely on reverse engineering."
>Unfortunately, that is probably (or will soon be) illegal via the DMCA.
That may be, but it's a bit off topic. If my understanding is correct, the decision means, effectively, ``business as usual'' for MS, and ``things are going to get worse instead of better'' for the rest of us.
If someone can show how this decision is really in the public interest, that is, better than the suit never having been brought in the first place, I'd like to hear about it. I certainly couldn't get any evidence for that from the judge's proclamation that it is so.
... Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, IAPs,
ICPs, and OEMs,... the APIs and related Documentation...
So, can some random developer (say some Norwegian kid who wants to crack some encryption, or RMS, or little ol' you) get ahold of the goods? I don't think so.
If you are a big player, MS must now look over its shoulder while jerking you around. If you're one of us hippie-pinko-opensource-libre-software types, this doesn't even seem to require that they bother to jerk you around.
I also notice that in the part you are quoting, there is no mention made of openess of access, prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, und so weiter. To give one example of where this is heading, I think that Samba will still have to rely on reverse engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
So BilLG has donated more than 46% of his net worth to charity? That's great, and I'm not being sarcastic.
Don't suggest that that makes him moral, or worthy of emulation, or that those of us who haven't given away 46% of our net worth are somehow inferior.
Think about this: BillG has tens of billions of dollars. He would need several tens of millions to live in sybartic luxury for the rest of his life. He has given away roughly half of the money he wouldn't need. I'm just not impressed. It's great that he's doing what he is, but you'll have a hard time convincing me that he's giving till it hurts. When BillG gets his personal fortune down to the point that he's facing the same sort of retirement income that the average multimillionaire must contend with, I'll be enormously impressed with his sacrifice.
My family has a net worth of negative tens of thousands of dollars (student loans, mostly), and no dollars we don't need. Living in any sort of luxury (let alone sybartic luxury) for the rest of our lives is out of the question. We still give 10% of our income to various charities every year. If I were emulating BillG, I wouldn't give away a cent until my family was filthy rich.
BillG has given away ($billions)/(amount not needed >> 0) = 46%.
I've given away ($thousands)/(amount not needed == 0) = infinity%.
So, who's holier than who?
They may WANT you to use a computer, but you can refuse. When they try to sell you on the advantages of using their website for whatever (to save them money, though they rarely emphasize that), politely reply that you will do so when their website works with your computer.
I don't use the web for this sort of thing, regardless of the company's policy on which browsers they'll support. The savings never seem to be passed along to me, and the terms on which you make payments (unless via credit card) seem unfavorable.
Actually, I've had a similar problem on windows. Here's how it happens: I like to keep the screen at 1024x780 or so, but the kids (we have windows just so they can run Reader Rabbit, et al) like to switch to 640x480 for their games. So, we start at the higher resolution and then switch to a lower resolution so their game isn't in a little box on the screen. The windows which were open (like windows exploder) are lapping over the edge of the screen, and in the worst case, can't be dragged to where they can be closed. This is Win98, by the way.
Does this mean that he has the Godfather send Guido around to take them out, or does he merely mean that he removes their data from the data base? For the sake of future social scientists, I sort of hope it's the first choice.
If we assume moderate-sized monkeys, at 20 pounds each (about 10 kilograms), that's around 536.9(10^9) pounds of monkey, generating too many pounds of monkey poop. On the other hand, think of all the gardens we could fertilize with all that zoo poo.
That's a very real problem, except for the part about ``... no you can't even resize or scroll it up.''
When you're using a too-small monitor, you should either turn on the virtual desktop, so that your little monitor acts as a window to a larger, virtual desktop (I detest this), or do the following:
Hold down the ALT key,
left-click anywhere in the window that you want to move,
drag it to where you can reach the button you want to click.
I believe this will work with any window manager; I'm sure, at least, that it works with all the ones I've tried.
Problem solved, or at least ameliorated.
Too true. With Windows, everything is either compulsory or forbidden. If the boss tells the sysadmin to do something, it is either trivial or impossible. With Linux/*BSD/Solaris/AIX, everything is possible, if only you know how. You can't say ``That's impossible'' without fear of contradiction.
Everyone knows that Windows crashes periodically, and the sysadmin cannot be responsible for fixing problems: that's done in Redmond or not at all. When things just don't work, the Windows sysadmin can blame it all on MS, and ask for more money, while the Libre *nix sysadmin would have no one to blame but himself, and no excuse for a bigger budget.
Windows is simple, all right; it has little cartoons to guide you, no embarrasing choices and built-in excuses. Who could ask for less?
Yep, you're right. That's what makes it so strange that so many people persist in using Windows and proprietary software in general.
I do quite a bit of writing, and a bit of statistical programming. GNU emacs and LaTeX and R increased my productivity by quite a lot [1]; I'm sure that it was more than a 25% increase. I would have paid to get that, but of course I didn't have to.
I think that a lot of the reason that folks hang on to Windows et cetera is that they define their tasks in terms of the software they use, as in: ``I use MS Word'' rather than ``I write things'', or ``I use SAS'' rather than ``I work with data''.
Of course, if your job is to have MS Word on the screen all day, you're going to be most productive running Windows. If your job is to write structured documents with meaningful content, you're going to be most productive using something suited to the job, and that's not a word processor, on any OS.
[1] The increased productivity is in comparison to running MS Word, MS Excel and SAS on Windows.
I haven't run into a site that won't function for me on Mozilla. If I do, I'll tell the operator that his site is broken. You mentioned credit card payments; credit card companies are begging for your business. So are banks, and most other businesses. If they won't do business on MY terms, they won't do business with me. That's not about browsers or operating systems or computers, that's about the customer (that's me) being right. The customer is always right, as long as the customer pays the businesses' bills. I've never had a problem with a bank which involved computers, but that would be reason enough to take my business elsewhere, just as surely as not being open at convenient times and locations is.
It seems funny that you say GNUcash isn't there yet. I find it's a bit of overkill: I wish there was a slightly less complicated and less capable program. GNUcash does the job, but it does way more than I need.
The parent post was correct: MS lost the browser war. They won the war to have the most popular browser, but they never wanted to win that one. What they wanted was to make sure that NO browser could undermine their OS monopoly.
I get your point, but I think that we'll be able to get around it. Here's why:
For some years now, the next big thing [1] in eyeglasses has been diamond film coating for eyeglasses, to make your plastic lenses as scratch resistant as glass. It sounds as if that sort of thing is what we need here.
I suspect that the two technologies will finally come to market at about the same time, a long time from now. Rather than wasting too much disk space on error-correction-overkill, they'll make disks more scratch resistant.
[1] Sort of like the situation with the DVD replacement technologies; they've been the next big thing for a lot of years too.
Therefore, isn't the fact that Microsoft's closed source policies stand in the way of China's attempts at fullscale net censorship, a good thing?
That's not the issue, MS's policy wouldn't stand in the way, and doing the right thing for the wrong reason shouldn't buy one any moral credit.
If the proprietor isn't recapturing all the savings he achieves for you IN THE LONG RUN, he's throwing away the advantage the monopoly gives him [3]. In the short run, of course, monopolists can subsidize you while you grow dependent, but they will only do this if they think that they will be able to get that money back, with interest, in the long run.
The only flaw in the argument is a relatively small one: the author does not address the difficulty of actually extracting the monopoly rents from the proprietor's customers. In practice, it won't be possible to extract 100% of the rents from 100% of the customers. I say that's a small flaw, because software proprietors such as MS and Oracle have obviously been able to extract enough of the monopoly rents from enough of their customers. If you think you can manage to get the better of an outfit like MS or Oracle in the long run, you're in a small and fortunate minority. Or, you're deluding yourself.
[1]See this slashdot comment for my experience with service contracts for proprietary solutions. They aren't good.
[2]Notice that this same argument can be applied to your certifications: any value that an MS or Cisco cert has to you can be extracted from you, at least in part, by the proprietor in the form of high fees for testing, recertification, et cetera.
[3] If it's a publicly-owned company, the stockholders will not be pleased. The stock price will fall, and the benevolent manager will be out on his ear.
Batteries which capture the electrons given off during some sorts of radioactive decay are old hat. If the article is to be believed, this is something very different. Also from the article:
``Converts the energyI've also done a bit of government purchasing, and I know well how finicky and silly some of the requirements are. I also know that someone who wants to use the system can use those requirements to get whatever he wants, or to stonewall whatever he doesn't.
So, I've seen this sort of issue from both sides, and I know something about it. My point was not that you should have recommended one option or the other, but that this one issue didn't look right.
I'll say it again: Whether you use libre or proprietary, you'll need to have about the same amount of employee's time allocated to support. The cost of a support contract for the libre product will very likely be a lot lower FOR A COMPARABLE LEVEL OF SERVICE , for a ten year period with no upgrades, for reasons which I alluded to in the first paragraph. The libre guys don't have a monopoly, and aren't trying to sell you any hardware (or software, for that matter).
If the developers really aren't interested in selling support, that's an opportunity for you. You can learn it up and go into the support business. If you'd rather not have the conflict of interest, anyone you know and trust could get a nice little part-time business going doing this sort of thing. This is one of the unsung advantages of owning the source code: anyone can contract to do support!
If the GPL is not valid, you have no right to distribute any GPLed software, unless you own the copyright. You can still use it, and fiddle with it, and on and on. But the GPL is the only thing which gives you the additional privilege of redistributing it.
I hear a lot of nonsense about ``... the GPL has never been tested ...''. It's nonsense because testing the GPl will be a loose-loose proposition for the challenger. If he busts the GPL, he's left with no rights, other than the right to keep and use the copy (or copies) that he has paid for. If he wants to keep his right to redistribute, with or without changes, he'd better not bust the GPL, because then his only rights are the rights you get when you buy a book.
If Mozilla would spoof the string on a case-by-case basis, then only the lazy, bigoted idiots who want to lock out other browsers/OSs would get garbage in their logs. As it is, I have to spoof all of them or none, so mozilla doesn't get the representation it deserves in the server logs of the world.
To the first I answer that it isn't 4 hours a week to read a mailing list. It also includes time to come up to speed with the product, with the tools the product uses (like 'make' and GCC which are not used in the shop) and with the programming language the product is written in (also not used in the shop).
So, let's say that when there is a new guy assigned to support, or whenever there is a problem, doing support eats up the entire 40 hour week. That seems a little high, but it's plausible. So, there must be either a new guy or a problem every 10 weeks to get to the 0.1 FTE. That's NOT plausible.
My guess is that once things get going, there won't be any troubles from one year to the next. When there is a problem, it will probably be along the lines of: ``How do we get this old turkey to work with our new Whizz-Bang 5000?'', and that sort of problem is likely to be expensive, whether you've gone proprietary or libre. With a Libre software solution, it is likely to be solvable. With a proprietary solution, the vendor's reply is likely to be: ``You don't. Replace your reliable old system with our new, proprietary, Gouge-You-Deeper product.'' There goes your 10-year minimum lifespan.
My guess is that the in-house costs for support are going to be about the same either way you go. Someone is going to have to be up to speed and able to ask the right questions if things go sour, no matter what the license and no matter what you pay for outside support.
I supspect that if you offer money to the developers, you will find one or more of them would be happy to contract to be available to fix problems as they arise. If you can't make arrangements with a developer, anyone who cares to spend some time learning the program can do the same job for you. You will be able to negotiate mutually beneficial terms if you go this route. If you get support from a proprietary vendor, you won't. You'll find yourself paying a lot for a little, until they decide to raise support prices and make you buy a new product. I've seen this done.
Don't know about Mac, but the windows verion is peachy. I'm using build id 2002091014 on Windows at work, and it provides a subjectively better browsing experience than does IE.
It would have to be thin, light, and not too fragile.
That would be useful, if it were cheap.
>We can do that. Do we have to give them pressurized suits?
They don't need no steenken suits! If vaccuum would do them harm, the insides of their heads would have killed them all years ago.
It may be just you. Look again at the quote, noting my change in the emphasis:
Thus, he's saying that the choice of voting system will decide the outcome of the election in more than 2/3 of the cases. Here, a ``case'' is a set of voter preferences. His point is that how we choose to ask the question (i.e., choice of voting system) is vitally important.One big problem we see in general is that most folks who attack this issue begin by saying that they want a ``good'' or ``optimal'' system, but they never define optimal, or even good. Arrow's work is a notable exception, but unfortunately, his definition is one that a reasonable person might take exception to.
One reasonable definition of good would be ``it induces people to accurately state their preferences.'' I'm sure that our current system does NOT meet this criterion. The result is that we vote for the least evil candidate who is perceived to have a chance to win, rather than for the candidate we really prefer.
An example of something which is NOT a reasonable definition is ``it is fair'', unless it is preceded by an implementable definition of fair.
Nifty. Since I have a Win2k box at work, I'll have to apply the service packs and look for it.
Was that really worth all those tens of millions of dollars? I hope so, because that's probably all we're going to get. It probably won't last very long either. Want to bet that's an unacceptable security risk by SP5 or so?
>You do share in it - all those non-paid dividends are included in the value of the stock ...
You missed my point. If the hypothetical company is NEVER going to pay out a dividend, what do I care about owning it? Why does anyone ever care? It never does me any good unless it pays me money! Growth is great, if and only if it enables larger dividends in the future.
When a company is able to grow fast, it can make good sense for it to not pay dividends. Retaining the money to finance growth can increase the expected present value of the stream of future dividends enough to outweight the present sacrifice. If this never stops, the company becomes infinitely large, and there is never a payout to the infinitely patient stockholders. The idea that a company can never pay dividends is obvious nonsense, unless you mean that it will go broke before it starts repaying the owners for the use of their capital.
And a company is worth more than just the dividends it would pay - something that pays a (generally) predictable cash flow is a bond.
You should know better than that. A bond is a promise to repay money, like an IOU. It is a certificate saying that you have loaned money. A stock certificate is a certificate of (limited liability) ownership. A stock which pays regular dividends has the same sort of value that a bond has.
A stock which pays a dividend is speculative: you're betting that the dividend stream will reimburse you for the use of your money during the time you own the stock. This is essentially the same bet you make when you buy their bonds.
A stock which pays no dividends is a bit more speculative: you're betting that it'll start paying dividends before it goes broke, or that someone else will make that bet by buying it from you, or that some bigger fool will take it off your hands at a profit. Further more, you're betting that the future dividends, or the profit you get from that bigger fool, will be enough to compensate you for waiting while you hold the stock.
To take a line from MR.T, I pity the fool who bought MSFT when it first was listed.
Imagine that you bought some share of MSFT when it was first listed, and that you never sell any. So far, you've gotten no return on your investment (MSFT pays no dividend, right?). There are three possibilities:
1) MSFT will eventually start paying a dividend. If it is big enough, it will pay you sufficently to justify your years of patient waiting.
2) MSFT will eventually go broke. You get no reward for your years of patient waiting.
3) (included only for completeness) MSFT never pays a dividend, even though it stops growing, as all real things eventually must. You get no reward for your years of patient waiting.
Number 3 is unlikely: stockholders are already agitating to force MSFT to start paying dividends. Notice that unless you sell, only number 1 gives you any reward. If you are to sell, someone must buy. Only a bigger fool than you will buy unless there is some reasonable expectation of number 1, with the sufficient return.
My original point stands: the value of a stock is the expected present value of the future stream of dividends.
>Unfortunately, that is probably (or will soon be) illegal via the DMCA.
That may be, but it's a bit off topic. If my understanding is correct, the decision means, effectively, ``business as usual'' for MS, and ``things are going to get worse instead of better'' for the rest of us.
If someone can show how this decision is really in the public interest, that is, better than the suit never having been brought in the first place, I'd like to hear about it. I certainly couldn't get any evidence for that from the judge's proclamation that it is so.
So, can some random developer (say some Norwegian kid who wants to crack some encryption, or RMS, or little ol' you) get ahold of the goods? I don't think so.
If you are a big player, MS must now look over its shoulder while jerking you around. If you're one of us hippie-pinko-opensource-libre-software types, this doesn't even seem to require that they bother to jerk you around.
I also notice that in the part you are quoting, there is no mention made of openess of access, prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, und so weiter. To give one example of where this is heading, I think that Samba will still have to rely on reverse engineering.