Exactly, he's concerned with the short term, I'm pointing out the long term benefits to the company - and thus to Bill Gates' personal net worth (or at least as long term as Bill is capable of conceiving.)
The real problem with the inkjet model is companies like PrintPal.com - where I buy ink cartridges that would cost $30 from Epson for $6. I don't know how PrintPal can stay in business with those prices, but they've held out for a couple years now. The only reason Epson keeps making a profit on their ink cartridges is that most people don't realize (or don't care) that there are cheaper sources.
If you're going to do open source, your business model had better be smart or you will run into trouble keeping your old closed-source revenue flowing. This is good for the consumer, but not so good for companies who want to see their stock price stay up there. I'm not saying that open source can't be as profitable as closed-source. I'm saying that running an open source company AS IF it was a closed source company is going to cause trouble - as I think Nessus will find, as I said before during that discussion.
As for Sun, as somebody mentioned, they used to pull in $100 million a year from their software licenses. It's not going to be easy to replace that revenue with support licenses only, at least in the near term.
On the other hand, since Sun has yet to build a community around its software to the degree other open source products have, this could actually be an advantage for them, as people downloading their software will pretty much HAVE to turn to Sun for support they need. Certainly all their current licensees will likely prefer to continue to deal with Sun rather than support the products themselves. As Microsoft likes to claim (and some open source studies have confirmed), if the cost of support and licenses is NOT the main issue in deciding what software you use, Sun should continue to do well open-sourcing their products.
And eventually they WILL be forced to open source Java, within five years, as the projects to reverse-engineer the JVM and the class libraries ramp up and succeed in producing fully open source, free versions that are completely compatible and interoperable with Sun's versions.
See, the money men can't comprehend the concept - so it must be bad.
This is Bill Gates' thinking.
Much as I think Sun is doomed no matter what it does, I give kudos to the company for at least trying, as opposed to Microsoft that will NEVER understand what is going on as long as Gates and his henchmen are running the company.
What if the person is about to head-on collide with another car which has lost control due to a malfunction? The driver may need to accelerate to avoid the accident, even over the speed limit.
Removing personal control of a device from the user is really, really stupid. It assumes every possible situation has been identified and that is never true.
As for DeGaris being on Art Bell, a lot of people have been on Art Bell - doesn't mean he's a nut. Various well known scientists, such as Michio Kaku and "fuzzy logic" guru Bart Kosko, have been on his show.
My view is very simple - we need some good emulation of the process of conceptual processing - the ability to extract essential characteristics from a set of entities and abstract them into a whole. As far as I know, there is no software that can do this at this time. However, I suspect that it is possible. While the emulation might not be done on the same principles as the brain does it, if it was good enough performance-wise to have practical applications, it would revolutionize software development, database management, educational software, robotics control, etc. It would allow the ability you mention in your comment - to take English (or any language's) instructions and execute them - to be realized.
The problem with the article announcement is - there's nothing there that says this is anything more than an advanced version of the Eliza program. At least de Garis is trying to go beyond that limited capability by trying to build an "artificial brain" that might be trained to do something more significant more efficiently. I've no idea whether his approach is feasible - at least he claims four machines that do it on some level have been actually built and installed. Whether his quantum approach is feasible I have no idea.
As for ethics, there is no interest on my part. I want an AI that is capable of being rational and has enough conceptual knowledge to comprehend its position and the position of humans without having any "personal" interest in its position. In any event, I don't believe AIs should be created "externally" - I believe that the necessary technology needs to be developed to enable human brains to be transmogrified to a higher level, and also to provide external devices with enough intelligence to be able to work well with intelligent entities. Thus, I don't believe that AIs intelligent enough and with an independent awareness to be a threat should - or need to - be constructed. And that renders the issue of ethics irrelevant.
In other words, if we can create an AI system, then the same technology can be used via nanotechnology to modify the human brain for superior intelligence. In that case, why bother creating an AI externally? Especially if it could become a threat.
I view the ethics issue as merely a smokescreen for humans who are afraid of confronting a possibly superior intelligence - or even one of equal intelligence that might disagree with their (usually mystical) notions of reality.
I believe there are three primary principles that computer systems should be required to meet:
1) Comprehension - they should have some clue what they're doing rather than just executing one instruction after another with little or no concept of the desired end result or their current status in achieving that result.
2) Cooperation - they should work well with humans and other systems without having to be explicitly designed for every single interface or function.
3) Communication - they should be able to report status and results in a manner easily comprehended by humans and other systems, from the most general overview to the most detailed.
Almost NO software meets these criteria today. AI needs to be developed to allow this to occur, as conventional software development technigues are far from being able to do this.
The Turing Test is a joke for identifying intelligent behavior - not least because it's conditions are usually misinterpreted by most people who babble about it.
As for Eliza, my point was that unless you have some reason to believe this new program is capable of conceptual processing, it's likely to be no more significant than Eliza in terms of passing EVEN the Turing Test.
Face it, you got caught babbling about something you know nothing about - no surprise on/. - and now you're embarassed and have to cover with nonsense.
A quick Google reveals nine hits for the "Cam-Brain" phrase. It appears to be the work of Hugo de Garis, a well-known researcher in AI and "artifical brains", who worked at ATR. His previous work apparently was stopped due to bankruptcy of his previous lab (see below).
He's currently here:
Prof. Dr. Hugo de GARIS, Associate Professor, Head, Brain Builder Group, Computer Science Dept., Utah State University, USU, Old Main 423, Logan, Utah, UT 84322-4205, USA. tel: + 1 435 797 0959
His home page says the following:
I head the Brain Builder Group at the Computer Science Department, of Utah State University (USU), Logan, Utah, USA. My main professional goals over the next few years are to find increasingly evolvable neural net models that I can implement in the latest generation of programmable/evolvable hardware (Xilinx Inc.'s "Virtex" family of FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips) and then to scale up to building the 2nd generation brain building machine (BM2) which should contain about a billion artificial neurons to build an artificial brain. I teach the planet's first university lecture course on "Brain Building" to M.Sc./Ph.D. level students at USU.
The BM2 will be an improved version of the 1st generation brain building machine (the CAM-Brain Machine (CBM) (see photo above) whose future was stymied by the bankruptcy of my previous lab (Starlab). The aim of the CBM was to build an artificial brain with a billion artificial neurons, by the year 2001, using evolved cellular automata (CA) based neural circuit modules. In reality, this number was maximum 75 million neurons and 64,000 modules. These CA based neural network modules grew and evolved at electronic speeds inside the FPGA based CBM, which updated CA cells at a rate of 130 Billion a second, and evolved a neural net module in about 1 second. This speed should make brain building practical. It was planned that tens of thousands and more of these evolved modules would be assembled into humanly defined artificial brain architecures.
I was hired by the Computer Science Dept. of USU principally to establish a Brain Building Center, which will consist of professors, researchers, students, and industrialists, all working towards the same goal of building artificial brains, both as a new research discipline, and to create a new brain building industry. The steady exponential growth of electronic capacities resulting from Moore's law, makes brain building a realistic enterprise in the near future. The existence of the four CAM-Brain Machines (CBMs) worldwide shows this. The 2nd generation machine, BM2, should be about 1000 times more powerful. In fact, I hope to create a new generation of brain building machine, and its corresponding artificial brain, every 5 years or so, for the next 20 years before I retire (and before Moore's Law hits the atomic barrier). The fact that today's programmable/evolvable chips contain nearly ten million logic gates means that "brain building" should explode on the scene in the next few years. It is inevitable.
In the summer of 2002, I devoted some of my research effort to the problem of generating neural nets at the quantum scale. In 10 years or so, Moore's Law will take electronic circuitry down to the molecular scale, therefore the creation of neural nets will require the appropriate quantum computing algorithms. Since I have a theoretical physics background (I worked with the famous Prof. David Bohm (of Bohmian Mechanics fame)) I and my research assistants are now working on quantum algorithms applied to neural net creation. In fact, our group no longer speaks of neural net evolution, since evolutionary algorithms are only needed in a classical computing context, where a classical computer can only process one Nbit bitstring at a time. Since there are too many (2**N) possible chromosomes in the search space, only a sampled search can be undertaken, which is what an evolutionary algorithm is. BUT, with quantum algorithmic techniques, all 2**N chromoses can be proc
These guys are VoIP specialists, apparently. I don't see where they get into AI. Also, they claim they worked on this for "over three years" - they must have some brilliant fucking guys to solve a problem that has bested the best brains in AI for the last four decades...
This is marketing horseshit for some "smart sales agent" software they've come up with, nothing more.
Nothing to see here (unless you NEED a "smart sales agent") - move along.
Without a decent emulation of conceptual processing, it can't be done.
I haven't yet heard of anyone doing a decent emulation of conceptual processing yet. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'd say the odds are it can, I just haven't heard of it being done yet.
That said, I'll check out the site and see what they say about the technology - if they say nothing, I'd be skeptical.
Just think of all the "Linux Rules!" ads that IBM and others can run during the Olympics, all sending the message "If the Olympics can run on open source, why can't my company?"
Ballmer must be throwing chairs. All his underhanded sneaky PR tricks in the IT trade press trumped by the Olympic coverage.
Bwahahahahahah!!!
And there's a new PENGUIN movie coming out! I saw the trailer the other night during "Harry Potter". Penguins dancing!
Between the "Madagascar" movie, the "March of the Penguins" and now this, penguins are gonna be the most loved animal on the planet before long...Linus must have been prescient (as well as bitten) to pick them as the Linux mascot.
Christ, you really have no clue how to reason, do you?
Let me try to walk you through this again, SLOWLY:
EVERY company wants to stock price to stay up OVER TIME. They'd like it to stay up permanently, but even management isn't that stupid. They know it will go up and down. But if their business is perceived as trending downward - as Microsoft was because it's profit margins have been trending downward from double-digit to single-digit over the past few years, they know they have to do something to entice investors or their stock value WILL go down.
They also know some, if not all investors, like to receive a cash dividend from their investments.
Microsoft had tons of cash in the bank. So they conceived the notion of looking good by handing over billions of it to investors. To each investor, the amount actually received is small - but free money is always welcome. To the PR-influenced public, it looks big - and that was the point - to make Microsoft look like an attractive investment to the stock-buying rubes who don't know any better.
The downward movement of the stock after the dividend was obviously expected. That was the reaction of professional investors and institutions. It was also expected not to be permanent and to be offset by the increased in investors who are primarily after dividends or who would invest simply because they think Microsoft must be a great company to invest in if they hand out billions to people (relevant to Gates' Foundation here, as well.)
The end result was expected to be an influx of investors and a retention of existing investors, which would keep the stock value higher THAN IT WOULD BE IF THEY DIDN'T DO THIS.
What part of this can't you comprehend?
Apparently you are fixated on the day-to-day stock price which is totally irrelevant to the overall goal.
Do you really believe Microsoft issued a dividend to DEPRESS their stock price PERMANENTLY?
Are you an idiot?
I don't have any more time to explain REAL business to someone who just graduated a course in the stock market.
They got issues all right, my last client bought one from Best Buy - dead on arrival (well, not entirely, the wireless radio was functioning according to the Microsoft wireless client on a Dell laptop - but neither I nor an SBC tech could get it to connect to the Net even though it was pulling its IP from SBC through the DSL modem and it's DHCP server was handing out IPs to the desktop - weird.)
Probably just a bad batch at Best Buy (or maybe a repackaged returned unit, or something.)
And Linksys is universally reviled for having hideously bad tech support outsourced to India or someplace.
"Dividends move money from the company to the shareholder, but they don't create new money."
What part of "dividends move money...to the shareholder" don't YOU understand? Not everybody buys stocks just to see the price rise, you know. And even those who do like to get some real money from their stocks once in a while without selling out. The fact that there was downward movement during the period they did it is completely irrelevant to my point.
Look at this way - do you really believe Bill Gates would do something that seriously reduced his wealth? Oh, please.
"Bill did get a big chunk of change out of it, but it went straight to the Bill Gates Foundation."
Which is a stock laundering operation he uses to invest in companies he wants to control, while deriving PR benefit from being considered the "great philanthropist" even though the Foundation barely gives out its income every year. Standard operation for rich foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation was known for this approach.
Yes, I know, their code is spaghetti code as Allchin told Gates last year IIRC.
I'm not talking about hiring MORE guys, I'm talking about hiring SMARTER guys and less of the "geek morons" and clueless puzzle solvers they have working there now. I'm talking about changing their design practices and corporate culture to emphasize the "featuritis" less and the reliability and security more, not to mention making at least SOME effort to advance the state of the art in software design in general.
No, obviously handing out money to shareholders entices shareholders and people who DON'T own Microsoft shares to buy them - thus driving up the price and - just incidently of course - making Bill personally richer.
A better approach would be to REMOVE the Registry - it's the one huge, single-point of failure/insecurity in the system.
People bitch about dozens of text config files in Linux - that makes Linux FAR more secure and reliable than that stupid Registry. You're not constantly updating text files like you are the Registry.
Windows design is flawed from its base up. Only a total rewrite breaking all compatibility with past versions could possibly improve its security or reliability.
And if that doesn't put money in Bill's pocket, it ain't gonna happen.
The service, which offers anti-virus, firewall, backup and recovery, as well as personal computer maintenance, will eventually be available for a subscription fee, said Microsoft spokeswoman Samantha McManus. The company has not yet determined how much it will charge.
If it doesn't put money in Bill's pocket, it isn't done at Microsoft.
Look at their new "security" software. It is going to be CHARGED for. They created the crap that produced the need, and now they're going to charge for fixing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, he's concerned with the short term, I'm pointing out the long term benefits to the company - and thus to Bill Gates' personal net worth (or at least as long term as Bill is capable of conceiving.)
...for $1.99 this way?
Jesus, an iPod for $4.99! Somebody's an idiot - and I'd say both the kid and whoever actually rang up a sale for this price qualify.
The real problem with the inkjet model is companies like PrintPal.com - where I buy ink cartridges that would cost $30 from Epson for $6. I don't know how PrintPal can stay in business with those prices, but they've held out for a couple years now. The only reason Epson keeps making a profit on their ink cartridges is that most people don't realize (or don't care) that there are cheaper sources.
If you're going to do open source, your business model had better be smart or you will run into trouble keeping your old closed-source revenue flowing. This is good for the consumer, but not so good for companies who want to see their stock price stay up there. I'm not saying that open source can't be as profitable as closed-source. I'm saying that running an open source company AS IF it was a closed source company is going to cause trouble - as I think Nessus will find, as I said before during that discussion.
As for Sun, as somebody mentioned, they used to pull in $100 million a year from their software licenses. It's not going to be easy to replace that revenue with support licenses only, at least in the near term.
On the other hand, since Sun has yet to build a community around its software to the degree other open source products have, this could actually be an advantage for them, as people downloading their software will pretty much HAVE to turn to Sun for support they need. Certainly all their current licensees will likely prefer to continue to deal with Sun rather than support the products themselves. As Microsoft likes to claim (and some open source studies have confirmed), if the cost of support and licenses is NOT the main issue in deciding what software you use, Sun should continue to do well open-sourcing their products.
And eventually they WILL be forced to open source Java, within five years, as the projects to reverse-engineer the JVM and the class libraries ramp up and succeed in producing fully open source, free versions that are completely compatible and interoperable with Sun's versions.
See, the money men can't comprehend the concept - so it must be bad.
This is Bill Gates' thinking.
Much as I think Sun is doomed no matter what it does, I give kudos to the company for at least trying, as opposed to Microsoft that will NEVER understand what is going on as long as Gates and his henchmen are running the company.
What if the person is about to head-on collide with another car which has lost control due to a malfunction? The driver may need to accelerate to avoid the accident, even over the speed limit.
Removing personal control of a device from the user is really, really stupid. It assumes every possible situation has been identified and that is never true.
As for DeGaris being on Art Bell, a lot of people have been on Art Bell - doesn't mean he's a nut. Various well known scientists, such as Michio Kaku and "fuzzy logic" guru Bart Kosko, have been on his show.
My view is very simple - we need some good emulation of the process of conceptual processing - the ability to extract essential characteristics from a set of entities and abstract them into a whole. As far as I know, there is no software that can do this at this time. However, I suspect that it is possible. While the emulation might not be done on the same principles as the brain does it, if it was good enough performance-wise to have practical applications, it would revolutionize software development, database management, educational software, robotics control, etc. It would allow the ability you mention in your comment - to take English (or any language's) instructions and execute them - to be realized.
The problem with the article announcement is - there's nothing there that says this is anything more than an advanced version of the Eliza program. At least de Garis is trying to go beyond that limited capability by trying to build an "artificial brain" that might be trained to do something more significant more efficiently. I've no idea whether his approach is feasible - at least he claims four machines that do it on some level have been actually built and installed. Whether his quantum approach is feasible I have no idea.
As for ethics, there is no interest on my part. I want an AI that is capable of being rational and has enough conceptual knowledge to comprehend its position and the position of humans without having any "personal" interest in its position. In any event, I don't believe AIs should be created "externally" - I believe that the necessary technology needs to be developed to enable human brains to be transmogrified to a higher level, and also to provide external devices with enough intelligence to be able to work well with intelligent entities. Thus, I don't believe that AIs intelligent enough and with an independent awareness to be a threat should - or need to - be constructed. And that renders the issue of ethics irrelevant.
In other words, if we can create an AI system, then the same technology can be used via nanotechnology to modify the human brain for superior intelligence. In that case, why bother creating an AI externally? Especially if it could become a threat.
I view the ethics issue as merely a smokescreen for humans who are afraid of confronting a possibly superior intelligence - or even one of equal intelligence that might disagree with their (usually mystical) notions of reality.
I believe there are three primary principles that computer systems should be required to meet:
1) Comprehension - they should have some clue what they're doing rather than just executing one instruction after another with little or no concept of the desired end result or their current status in achieving that result.
2) Cooperation - they should work well with humans and other systems without having to be explicitly designed for every single interface or function.
3) Communication - they should be able to report status and results in a manner easily comprehended by humans and other systems, from the most general overview to the most detailed.
Almost NO software meets these criteria today. AI needs to be developed to allow this to occur, as conventional software development technigues are far from being able to do this.
The Turing Test is a joke for identifying intelligent behavior - not least because it's conditions are usually misinterpreted by most people who babble about it.
As for Eliza, my point was that unless you have some reason to believe this new program is capable of conceptual processing, it's likely to be no more significant than Eliza in terms of passing EVEN the Turing Test.
Face it, you got caught babbling about something you know nothing about - no surprise on
Have a nice day.
Are you familiar with "Eliza"?
This appears to be just an advanced version.
And, no, it isn't "intelligent" in the conceptual processing sense - and that's the only sense that the word "intelligent" is relevant to.
A quick Google reveals nine hits for the "Cam-Brain" phrase. It appears to be the work of Hugo de Garis, a well-known researcher in AI and "artifical brains", who worked at ATR. His previous work apparently was stopped due to bankruptcy of his previous lab (see below).
He's currently here:
Prof. Dr. Hugo de GARIS,
Associate Professor,
Head, Brain Builder Group,
Computer Science Dept.,
Utah State University, USU,
Old Main 423, Logan,
Utah, UT 84322-4205, USA.
tel: + 1 435 797 0959
His home page says the following:
I head the Brain Builder Group at the Computer Science Department, of Utah State University (USU), Logan, Utah, USA. My main professional goals over the next few years are to find increasingly evolvable neural net models that I can implement in the latest generation of programmable/evolvable hardware (Xilinx Inc.'s "Virtex" family of FPGA (field programmable gate array) chips) and then to scale up to building the 2nd generation brain building machine (BM2) which should contain about a billion artificial neurons to build an artificial brain. I teach the planet's first university lecture course on "Brain Building" to M.Sc./Ph.D. level students at USU.
The BM2 will be an improved version of the 1st generation brain building machine (the CAM-Brain Machine (CBM) (see photo above) whose future was stymied by the bankruptcy of my previous lab (Starlab). The aim of the CBM was to build an artificial brain with a billion artificial neurons, by the year 2001, using evolved cellular automata (CA) based neural circuit modules. In reality, this number was maximum 75 million neurons and 64,000 modules. These CA based neural network modules grew and evolved at electronic speeds inside the FPGA based CBM, which updated CA cells at a rate of 130 Billion a second, and evolved a neural net module in about 1 second. This speed should make brain building practical. It was planned that tens of thousands and more of these evolved modules would be assembled into humanly defined artificial brain architecures.
I was hired by the Computer Science Dept. of USU principally to establish a Brain Building Center, which will consist of professors, researchers, students, and industrialists, all working towards the same goal of building artificial brains, both as a new research discipline, and to create a new brain building industry. The steady exponential growth of electronic capacities resulting from Moore's law, makes brain building a realistic enterprise in the near future. The existence of the four CAM-Brain Machines (CBMs) worldwide shows this. The 2nd generation machine, BM2, should be about 1000 times more powerful. In fact, I hope to create a new generation of brain building machine, and its corresponding artificial brain, every 5 years or so, for the next 20 years before I retire (and before Moore's Law hits the atomic barrier). The fact that today's programmable/evolvable chips contain nearly ten million logic gates means that "brain building" should explode on the scene in the next few years. It is inevitable.
In the summer of 2002, I devoted some of my research effort to the problem of generating neural nets at the quantum scale. In 10 years or so, Moore's Law will take electronic circuitry down to the molecular scale, therefore the creation of neural nets will require the appropriate quantum computing algorithms. Since I have a theoretical physics background (I worked with the famous Prof. David Bohm (of Bohmian Mechanics fame)) I and my research assistants are now working on quantum algorithms applied to neural net creation. In fact, our group no longer speaks of neural net evolution, since evolutionary algorithms are only needed in a classical computing context, where a classical computer can only process one Nbit bitstring at a time. Since there are too many (2**N) possible chromosomes in the search space, only a sampled search can be undertaken, which is what an evolutionary algorithm is. BUT, with quantum algorithmic techniques, all 2**N chromoses can be proc
Been to their site.
Nothing on the AI but the press release.
These guys are VoIP specialists, apparently. I don't see where they get into AI. Also, they claim they worked on this for "over three years" - they must have some brilliant fucking guys to solve a problem that has bested the best brains in AI for the last four decades...
This is marketing horseshit for some "smart sales agent" software they've come up with, nothing more.
Nothing to see here (unless you NEED a "smart sales agent") - move along.
Without a decent emulation of conceptual processing, it can't be done.
I haven't yet heard of anyone doing a decent emulation of conceptual processing yet. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'd say the odds are it can, I just haven't heard of it being done yet.
That said, I'll check out the site and see what they say about the technology - if they say nothing, I'd be skeptical.
Just think of all the "Linux Rules!" ads that IBM and others can run during the Olympics, all sending the message "If the Olympics can run on open source, why can't my company?"
Ballmer must be throwing chairs. All his underhanded sneaky PR tricks in the IT trade press trumped by the Olympic coverage.
Bwahahahahahah!!!
And there's a new PENGUIN movie coming out! I saw the trailer the other night during "Harry Potter". Penguins dancing!
Between the "Madagascar" movie, the "March of the Penguins" and now this, penguins are gonna be the most loved animal on the planet before long...Linus must have been prescient (as well as bitten) to pick them as the Linux mascot.
Christ, you really have no clue how to reason, do you?
Let me try to walk you through this again, SLOWLY:
EVERY company wants to stock price to stay up OVER TIME. They'd like it to stay up permanently, but even management isn't that stupid. They know it will go up and down. But if their business is perceived as trending downward - as Microsoft was because it's profit margins have been trending downward from double-digit to single-digit over the past few years, they know they have to do something to entice investors or their stock value WILL go down.
They also know some, if not all investors, like to receive a cash dividend from their investments.
Microsoft had tons of cash in the bank. So they conceived the notion of looking good by handing over billions of it to investors. To each investor, the amount actually received is small - but free money is always welcome. To the PR-influenced public, it looks big - and that was the point - to make Microsoft look like an attractive investment to the stock-buying rubes who don't know any better.
The downward movement of the stock after the dividend was obviously expected. That was the reaction of professional investors and institutions. It was also expected not to be permanent and to be offset by the increased in investors who are primarily after dividends or who would invest simply because they think Microsoft must be a great company to invest in if they hand out billions to people (relevant to Gates' Foundation here, as well.)
The end result was expected to be an influx of investors and a retention of existing investors, which would keep the stock value higher THAN IT WOULD BE IF THEY DIDN'T DO THIS.
What part of this can't you comprehend?
Apparently you are fixated on the day-to-day stock price which is totally irrelevant to the overall goal.
Do you really believe Microsoft issued a dividend to DEPRESS their stock price PERMANENTLY?
Are you an idiot?
I don't have any more time to explain REAL business to someone who just graduated a course in the stock market.
The one that exploits a flaw in the Restart Manager to constantly reboot your machine...
You KNOW it's going to happen...
They got issues all right, my last client bought one from Best Buy - dead on arrival (well, not entirely, the wireless radio was functioning according to the Microsoft wireless client on a Dell laptop - but neither I nor an SBC tech could get it to connect to the Net even though it was pulling its IP from SBC through the DSL modem and it's DHCP server was handing out IPs to the desktop - weird.)
Probably just a bad batch at Best Buy (or maybe a repackaged returned unit, or something.)
And Linksys is universally reviled for having hideously bad tech support outsourced to India or someplace.
"Dividends move money from the company to the shareholder, but they don't create new money."
What part of "dividends move money...to the shareholder" don't YOU understand? Not everybody buys stocks just to see the price rise, you know. And even those who do like to get some real money from their stocks once in a while without selling out. The fact that there was downward movement during the period they did it is completely irrelevant to my point.
Look at this way - do you really believe Bill Gates would do something that seriously reduced his wealth? Oh, please.
"Bill did get a big chunk of change out of it, but it went straight to the Bill Gates Foundation."
Which is a stock laundering operation he uses to invest in companies he wants to control, while deriving PR benefit from being considered the "great philanthropist" even though the Foundation barely gives out its income every year. Standard operation for rich foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation was known for this approach.
"Malicious software removal" - they've HAD that since forever.
The bottom line: they caused the problem, now they're charging for A fix - when THE fix is to correct their lousy system design.
Attempting to redirect the issue doesn't change the facts.
Yes, I know, their code is spaghetti code as Allchin told Gates last year IIRC.
I'm not talking about hiring MORE guys, I'm talking about hiring SMARTER guys and less of the "geek morons" and clueless puzzle solvers they have working there now. I'm talking about changing their design practices and corporate culture to emphasize the "featuritis" less and the reliability and security more, not to mention making at least SOME effort to advance the state of the art in software design in general.
No, obviously handing out money to shareholders entices shareholders and people who DON'T own Microsoft shares to buy them - thus driving up the price and - just incidently of course - making Bill personally richer.
Well, came off Reuters via Google today, all I can tell you.
A better approach would be to REMOVE the Registry - it's the one huge, single-point of failure/insecurity in the system.
People bitch about dozens of text config files in Linux - that makes Linux FAR more secure and reliable than that stupid Registry. You're not constantly updating text files like you are the Registry.
Windows design is flawed from its base up. Only a total rewrite breaking all compatibility with past versions could possibly improve its security or reliability.
And if that doesn't put money in Bill's pocket, it ain't gonna happen.
From Reuters today:
The service, which offers anti-virus, firewall, backup and recovery, as well as personal computer maintenance, will eventually be available for a subscription fee, said Microsoft spokeswoman Samantha McManus. The company has not yet determined how much it will charge.
So much for your logic.
YES!
If it doesn't put money in Bill's pocket, it isn't done at Microsoft.
Look at their new "security" software. It is going to be CHARGED for. They created the crap that produced the need, and now they're going to charge for fixing it.
Assholes.
Excuse me, how much CASH do they have in hand? Some tens of BILLIONS, I believe?
(When they aren't handing it out to stockholders in one-time stock prop schemes...)
This is exactly my constant point - they HAVE THE MONEY to hire the PEOPLE to FIX their problems! AND THEY DON'T!
Period. End of story. Nuttin' more needs to be said (but will be, anyway.)
"it's really nothing to be so upset about, there is much more to life than your chosen brand of operating system :-)"
So shut the fuck up already...you sound worse than the moron who wrote the Register article...