As I see it MS has warmed up to open source more in the last 6 months than slashdotters have.
I think you've been drinking too much M$ marketing koolaid. M$ has $40,000,000,000+ per year of catching up to do, money taken largely because of dubious business practices past and present. Their DRM efforts alone make your comment incorrect.
Please stop trying to represent slashdot contributers in particular and OSS supporters in general as being monolithic. It's an outright lie. M$ marketdroids love to do this but the truth is M$ as a company is far more monolithic than the OSS community and the borg icon/. uses is entirely appropriate.
It's also incorrect to state/. doesn't have a diversity of opinion and anybody who claims otherwise is either a liar or a marketing zealot. Amongst many other things closed source software is often recommended by contributers. If you want a truly monolothic opinion head over to www.microsoft.com. Microsoft's pathetic idea of diversity of opinion is a site like Paul Thurrott.
Like it or not,/. is an open source news site and will push open source viewpoints. If you want corporate propaganda please head for one of the numerous corporate propaganda websites out there. I for one want some balance from those marketing parasites. Their attempts to manipulate/. readers are just one more example of their parasitic behaviour; I get enough of their dreck forced down my throat in other media.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Communities, brand names and network effects are where it's at today for value and open source arguably helps that through peer-to-peer and word of mouth. Close source companies like Adobe and and Flickr do successfully leverage network effects but they are not the only approaches. In addition open source can be a powerful tool for companies that think laterally to leverage the power of open source software into other forms of "power" (e.g. Google with their highly tweaked search engine gaining advertising eyeballs, Sun increasing the value of their hardware with OpenSolaris or large retail chains reducing costs by doing one-off adaption of OSS rather than paying for per-seat licensing that doesn't scale).
Part of the problem is that people from the closed source software world think that selling like closed source software vendors is the only way to go. The closed source software vendors you see in the retail shop employ only a tiny fraction of software programmers today. It's just that they're in-your-face visible because of the marketing. Most software programmers are employed inhouse or on one-off contracts delivering source and have never worked on closed source retail software. In addition the software industry is only a fraction of industry in general.
I see OSS simply as market correction. It's not reasonable that a very small number of software vendors make a huge some of money at the expense of rest of the community indefinitely without the market correcting, assuming the free market is not compromised by bad law. I think all commodity software in the not too distant future will either be OSS or some reasonable facsimile. This argument does not apply to niche or special purpose software and VC's maybe able to make more money there.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
em>The moment that happens is the moment they stop selling anything at all,
Correction: The moment that happens is the moment they stop making excessive profits while still selling virtually the same product much more efficiently and without excessive marketing.
Unfortunately, the same cant be said for music or movies - the cost of entry is a lot higher
Yep, incredibly inefficient industries. I wonder why?
Maybe because it's largely controlled by a distribution cartel raking off most of the potential profits?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as by too little signal.
WTF does IP law have to do with the $$$ actors/actresses are being paid?
Quite a lot. The privileged few in Hollywood would be paid orders of magnitude less and other artists paid more for a start if IP law was more rational rather than "winner take all".
Are you one of those people who believes that such "content" (music, movies, software, etc.) should be free to everyone, and that the producers of said content shouldn't be compensated for their work?
No, stop trying to deliberately tar me with the RIAA/MPAA piracy tunnel vision framing the debate. I did not say that.
Get a clue; the media industries aren't charities.
Nope, they're a cartel where a small number of media royalty are making an extraordinary amount of money at the expense of the larger population. Just like royalty in the middle ages who thought they had a god given right to rule over the serfs. Funnily enough the law was conveniently in their favor too.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/MPAA/RIAA abuse.
You mean the freeloaders in their offices in Hollywood? Or the freeloaders acting in movies who actually think it's reasonable they should be paid millions of dollars for a few hours work because of broken IP law? Surely you don't mean the freeloaders who download copies of content and probably wouldn't have bought anything anyway?
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Considering the endless blind bashing of anything MS says and/or does
It's to cancel out the endless blind bashing of OSS by M$ marketing parasites, often behind closed doors, and closed source marketing parasites in general. Why on earth should the marketing parasites be given free reign?
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
So the product WILL be available in such-and-such a date. How are they lying?
They are claiming it will be available to anybody interested. If that's not true and
it's reasonably predictable then they're lying.
Let's say that your local Ford dealership places an ad that says the 2006 F150 will be on their lot on December 1st. But they sell out before you can get there. Does that make what they did illegal?
Not necessarily; it depends on whether they said or implied it would be available to anybody interested on that date. If they warned potential customers when telling them about the release date it was a limited not general release then no problem.
Why not?
Depends on whether they were lying about some predictable future event. If they claim or imply it will be generally available on such-and-such a date and it's not due to circumstances under their control then they're lying.
"They SAID it would be available to me on December 1st!" you cry. "They SAID it would be available to me on December 1st!" you cry. Yes, it was available, but they only got shipped three of them and you didn't line up early enough.
Fair enough if that's what they're claiming. I'm not objecting to them artificially restricting supply, though I do think it's manipulative business practice. I'm objecting to them lying about a limited release, and the reasons why; the restriction is not due to excessive demand as they're implying for marketing reasons but due to a deliberate restriction of supply.
Marketing people try to rationalise their lying all the time and this is a typical example. This post may be relevant.
---
Most modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share and so is purely parasitic. Everybody loses except the marketing industry.
It's not exactly original or unheard of. Plenty of other companies have done this, including Slashdot's favorite company, Apple.
So what? That doesn't make it ethical or honest.
They're claiming the box will be available to the general public on a particular date. They're deliberately lying.
If their publicity material makes clear that supplies will be limited, and the true reasons why, then they're not lying and the market can take it's course.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Relax. I was just responding to your comment "What you're saying is that nobody can succeed and not be evil. I disbelieve that." implying to me that success is independent of "evilness".
I know little about Google; they may well be bucking the statistics (that's why I said "many" and "generally") and if they are that's good news because they will be setting a much better example for the software industry than M$ has.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
runs correctly the first time on any modern linux platform.
Why? You're not running any modern linux platform; You're running one modern linux platform. If your platform of choice supports a package manager (all the major's do) you're done.
I use Ubuntu. The Synaptic package manager is more usable than the M$Windows/XP installation procedure. It has a unified GUI interface for all parts of the system, handles updates much more cleanly, including updating the available package list, comprehensively handles dependencies, has a search function, has a huge range of system and application packages available, doesn't require an infinite number of reboots, doesn't ask stupid questions about installation folders; downloads, installs and configures packages in the background and just works (tm).
You're complaint about Linux not being unified is the equivalent of a Ford car owner complaining when they can't install a Toyota car part. Sure, it'd be nice if we had standardised, interchangeable car parts and car dealers supporting all brands of car. In a free and competitive market though it's not going to happen and I for one prefer variety, competition and cooperation, not monoculture, stagnation and lockin.
The complaints by commercial vendors about the difficulty of supporting multiple Linux distributions are way overblown, and like your complaint, stem more from an M$Windows-way-of-doing-things bias than any intrinsic difficulty with the Linux platform. Supporting the big four Linux distributions (.rpm/.deb/.tar.gz/.tar.bz2) is a good start and can be easily automated. Problems mainly arise when the vendors want to apply the M$Windows way of doing things to the Linux platform e.g. not allowing redistribution so standard package repositories can't support their software, trying to put non-generic binary modules without a wrapper into the Linux kernel, making their packages too large to download and/or installing software with fixed path or font names.
Having said the above I do agree there's room for significant improvement. The Linux Standard Base are attempting to address some of it and the market will eventually settle on more comprehensive standards.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
What you're saying is that nobody can succeed and not be evil. I disbelieve that.
Depends what you mean by succeed.
An unethical person/business can always act ethically if that is the optimal strategy in a situation to maximise income but an ethical person/business does not have the option of acting unethically if the situation demands it.
Unfortunately, in a complex business environment there will always be situations where unethical approaches will maximise income while the ethical competitor loses out.
The reality appears to be that the optimal strategy for many business leaders is to talk a storm about ethics but to not actually do ethics unless forced to. They rationalise anything they do that maximises their income as ethical.
An ethical person can succeed, but only by accepting a different definition of success.
Society deals with this by having ethical people gang up on unethical people via the law or social networks so that the optimal strategy for an unethical business person is to act ethically.
This strategy breaks down when the business environment is so complex or new that the law can't handle it. e.g. software patents, broken IP law, manipulation of congress by lobbyists, manipulation of the public by lying marketing or large companies cross subsidising products to kill competition and create monopolies.
Having said the above I do agree there's plenty of successful, ethical, admirable people out there. Generally though, they're not the most financially successful.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Google could do worse than devote a developer or two to a project that slows down that gravy train....
On that thought, it might make sense for Sony and Nintendo to throw in a few developers to work on OpenOffice as well. Put some pressure on Microsoft's XBox unit.
Yes, many companies are grossly underestimating the importance that M$'s ~$40,000,000,000 per year income has on their own competitiveness. The free market is dead when a company is subsidised to that extent.
In software M$ is basically doing nothing more than polishing a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. Their costs, despite what their accountants are claiming, are comparatively small. On the other hand they probably have more unproductive hangers-on and internal politics/competition reducing their efficiency than they used to.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
In any event, it's *substantially* less than the total cost of all of the OS versions and application software included,
That's only good value (as you implied) if you actually use "all of the OS versions and application software included". Probably what you're paying is similar to what you'd be paying for full retail for the software you use anyway.
Software and IP pricing models are dubious, to say the least, and M$ is, like most companies and being a monopoly, trying to maximise their revenue (i.e. cost to customers).
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I like evolution, but it crashes more than a 90-year-old drunk Irishman on St. Patrick's day.
You're probably hitting the same bug[s] repeatedly. I rarely see it crash and I use it daily. I had a neighbour who saw it crash when she attempted to print certain calendar entries on her printer; maybe you have a printer driver problem?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Sorry, I only mention it because you were careful with case in the rest of your post.
M is the SI prefix for mega (versus m for milli) and B is the commonly accepted abbreviation for byte (versus b for bit). More information than you ever wanted to know here.
True however keep in mind that there are just as many ways to infringe on closed source software licenses.
Whether a license is for open source or closed source is irrelevant to the question of legality.
Some people might argue that because open source software is easier to get then infringement is much more likely. Other people might argue that because closed source software licenses are generally much more restrictive then infringement is easier and much more likely. Either is true to a certain degree so if you're going to argue for the need for insurance you should be arguing the need for insurance for all software licenses, and not just open source.
The fact that the insurance company is only offering the insurance for open source suggests to me that, apart from it being trendy, they think that they can maximise their profits. In other words their costs in this area, as compared to closed source insurance, are lower and is evidence for lower monetary risk when using open source software.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
So M$ should have no problem releasing a patch now to change the default Microsoft Windows/XP install to non-admin?
Thought not.
Having said that, M$ have now lifted their game a little in this area (finally, after 25 years!). They should be much more aggressive in encouraging their client vendors to lift their game too so we can finally ditch the M$ lack-of-security model.
I'd check the size and income of the Sony Electronics division (consumer products) versus the Sony Pictures (content creation). To some degree they're in conflict with each other (consumer friendly versus unfriendly) and whichever "wins" will have a significant impact on the direction of the company and how much DRM they use.
Myself, I think Sony's quality has gone down a lot recently after the trinitron patent expired. I don't buy their consumer products anymore, not only because of the poorer quality but also because of various forms of DRM and consumer unfriendliness they're using.
I think it is very inaccurate to call what Sony did "trespass,"
No, the person clicking on the icon has a reasonable expectation that all they're doing is playing music, not triggering the deliberate compromise of the basic integrity of their system with a root kit.
Of course the marketing parasites will try to wriggle out of admitting this with the usual marketing spin and lies.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Slashdot Mirror
As I see it MS has warmed up to open source more in the last 6 months than slashdotters have.
I think you've been drinking too much M$ marketing koolaid. M$ has $40,000,000,000+ per year of catching up to do, money taken largely because of dubious business practices past and present. Their DRM efforts alone make your comment incorrect.
reich
I hereby invoke Godwin's law
Please stop trying to represent slashdot contributers in particular and OSS supporters in general as being monolithic. It's an outright lie. M$ marketdroids love to do this but the truth is M$ as a company is far more monolithic than the OSS community and the borg icon /. uses is entirely appropriate.
It's also incorrect to state /. doesn't have a diversity of opinion and anybody who claims otherwise is either a liar or a marketing zealot. Amongst many other things closed source software is often recommended by contributers. If you want a truly monolothic opinion head over to www.microsoft.com. Microsoft's pathetic idea of diversity of opinion is a site like Paul Thurrott.
Like it or not, /. is an open source news site and will push open source viewpoints. If you want corporate propaganda please head for one of the numerous corporate propaganda websites out there. I for one want some balance from those marketing parasites. Their attempts to manipulate /. readers are just one more example of their parasitic behaviour; I get enough of their dreck forced down my throat in other media.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Except that it is impossible to build any value.
Communities, brand names and network effects are where it's at today for value and open source arguably helps that through peer-to-peer and word of mouth. Close source companies like Adobe and and Flickr do successfully leverage network effects but they are not the only approaches. In addition open source can be a powerful tool for companies that think laterally to leverage the power of open source software into other forms of "power" (e.g. Google with their highly tweaked search engine gaining advertising eyeballs, Sun increasing the value of their hardware with OpenSolaris or large retail chains reducing costs by doing one-off adaption of OSS rather than paying for per-seat licensing that doesn't scale).
Part of the problem is that people from the closed source software world think that selling like closed source software vendors is the only way to go. The closed source software vendors you see in the retail shop employ only a tiny fraction of software programmers today. It's just that they're in-your-face visible because of the marketing. Most software programmers are employed inhouse or on one-off contracts delivering source and have never worked on closed source retail software. In addition the software industry is only a fraction of industry in general.
I see OSS simply as market correction. It's not reasonable that a very small number of software vendors make a huge some of money at the expense of rest of the community indefinitely without the market correcting, assuming the free market is not compromised by bad law. I think all commodity software in the not too distant future will either be OSS or some reasonable facsimile. This argument does not apply to niche or special purpose software and VC's maybe able to make more money there.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
As a desktop OS, Linux sucks.
For you, maybe. For me Ubuntu works just fine after an hour's installation.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
em>The moment that happens is the moment they stop selling anything at all,
Correction: The moment that happens is the moment they stop making excessive profits while still selling virtually the same product much more efficiently and without excessive marketing.
Unfortunately, the same cant be said for music or movies - the cost of entry is a lot higher
Yep, incredibly inefficient industries. I wonder why?
Maybe because it's largely controlled by a distribution cartel raking off most of the potential profits?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as by too little signal.
WTF does IP law have to do with the $$$ actors/actresses are being paid?
Quite a lot. The privileged few in Hollywood would be paid orders of magnitude less and other artists paid more for a start if IP law was more rational rather than "winner take all".
Are you one of those people who believes that such "content" (music, movies, software, etc.) should be free to everyone, and that the producers of said content shouldn't be compensated for their work?
No, stop trying to deliberately tar me with the RIAA/MPAA piracy tunnel vision framing the debate. I did not say that.
Get a clue; the media industries aren't charities.
Nope, they're a cartel where a small number of media royalty are making an extraordinary amount of money at the expense of the larger population. Just like royalty in the middle ages who thought they had a god given right to rule over the serfs. Funnily enough the law was conveniently in their favor too.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/MPAA/RIAA abuse.
Freeloaders are the other half.
You mean the freeloaders in their offices in Hollywood? Or the freeloaders acting in movies who actually think it's reasonable they should be paid millions of dollars for a few hours work because of broken IP law? Surely you don't mean the freeloaders who download copies of content and probably wouldn't have bought anything anyway?
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Considering the endless blind bashing of anything MS says and/or does
It's to cancel out the endless blind bashing of OSS by M$ marketing parasites, often behind closed doors, and closed source marketing parasites in general. Why on earth should the marketing parasites be given free reign?
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
So the product WILL be available in such-and-such a date. How are they lying?
They are claiming it will be available to anybody interested. If that's not true and it's reasonably predictable then they're lying.
Let's say that your local Ford dealership places an ad that says the 2006 F150 will be on their lot on December 1st. But they sell out before you can get there. Does that make what they did illegal?
Not necessarily; it depends on whether they said or implied it would be available to anybody interested on that date. If they warned potential customers when telling them about the release date it was a limited not general release then no problem.
Why not?
Depends on whether they were lying about some predictable future event. If they claim or imply it will be generally available on such-and-such a date and it's not due to circumstances under their control then they're lying.
"They SAID it would be available to me on December 1st!" you cry. "They SAID it would be available to me on December 1st!" you cry. Yes, it was available, but they only got shipped three of them and you didn't line up early enough.
Fair enough if that's what they're claiming. I'm not objecting to them artificially restricting supply, though I do think it's manipulative business practice. I'm objecting to them lying about a limited release, and the reasons why; the restriction is not due to excessive demand as they're implying for marketing reasons but due to a deliberate restriction of supply.
Marketing people try to rationalise their lying all the time and this is a typical example. This post may be relevant.
---
Most modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share and so is purely parasitic. Everybody loses except the marketing industry.
It's not exactly original or unheard of. Plenty of other companies have done this, including Slashdot's favorite company, Apple.
So what? That doesn't make it ethical or honest.
They're claiming the box will be available to the general public on a particular date. They're deliberately lying.
If their publicity material makes clear that supplies will be limited, and the true reasons why, then they're not lying and the market can take it's course.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
But its an industry wide practice and not dishonest.
Nonsense. M$ is claiming their product will be available to the general public on such-and-such a date. They're lying.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Why does more than one company doing it somehow make it okay?
It's like a little child saying "He did it first!"
Two wrongs don't make a right etc.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Relax. I was just responding to your comment "What you're saying is that nobody can succeed and not be evil. I disbelieve that." implying to me that success is independent of "evilness".
I know little about Google; they may well be bucking the statistics (that's why I said "many" and "generally") and if they are that's good news because they will be setting a much better example for the software industry than M$ has.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
runs correctly the first time on any modern linux platform.
Why? You're not running any modern linux platform; You're running one modern linux platform. If your platform of choice supports a package manager (all the major's do) you're done.
I use Ubuntu. The Synaptic package manager is more usable than the M$Windows/XP installation procedure. It has a unified GUI interface for all parts of the system, handles updates much more cleanly, including updating the available package list, comprehensively handles dependencies, has a search function, has a huge range of system and application packages available, doesn't require an infinite number of reboots, doesn't ask stupid questions about installation folders; downloads, installs and configures packages in the background and just works (tm).
You're complaint about Linux not being unified is the equivalent of a Ford car owner complaining when they can't install a Toyota car part. Sure, it'd be nice if we had standardised, interchangeable car parts and car dealers supporting all brands of car. In a free and competitive market though it's not going to happen and I for one prefer variety, competition and cooperation, not monoculture, stagnation and lockin.
The complaints by commercial vendors about the difficulty of supporting multiple Linux distributions are way overblown, and like your complaint, stem more from an M$Windows-way-of-doing-things bias than any intrinsic difficulty with the Linux platform. Supporting the big four Linux distributions (.rpm/.deb/.tar.gz/.tar.bz2) is a good start and can be easily automated. Problems mainly arise when the vendors want to apply the M$Windows way of doing things to the Linux platform e.g. not allowing redistribution so standard package repositories can't support their software, trying to put non-generic binary modules without a wrapper into the Linux kernel, making their packages too large to download and/or installing software with fixed path or font names.
Having said the above I do agree there's room for significant improvement. The Linux Standard Base are attempting to address some of it and the market will eventually settle on more comprehensive standards.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
What you're saying is that nobody can succeed and not be evil. I disbelieve that.
Depends what you mean by succeed.
An unethical person/business can always act ethically if that is the optimal strategy in a situation to maximise income but an ethical person/business does not have the option of acting unethically if the situation demands it.
Unfortunately, in a complex business environment there will always be situations where unethical approaches will maximise income while the ethical competitor loses out.
The reality appears to be that the optimal strategy for many business leaders is to talk a storm about ethics but to not actually do ethics unless forced to. They rationalise anything they do that maximises their income as ethical.
An ethical person can succeed, but only by accepting a different definition of success.
Society deals with this by having ethical people gang up on unethical people via the law or social networks so that the optimal strategy for an unethical business person is to act ethically.
This strategy breaks down when the business environment is so complex or new that the law can't handle it. e.g. software patents, broken IP law, manipulation of congress by lobbyists, manipulation of the public by lying marketing or large companies cross subsidising products to kill competition and create monopolies.
Having said the above I do agree there's plenty of successful, ethical, admirable people out there. Generally though, they're not the most financially successful.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
It crashes when I hit "reply," so I don't think so. It has something to do with the exchange connector. Not sure what exactly.
Makes sense - I'm not using the exchange connector.
---
Keep your options open!
Google could do worse than devote a developer or two to a project that slows down that gravy train. ...
On that thought, it might make sense for Sony and Nintendo to throw in a few developers to work on OpenOffice as well. Put some pressure on Microsoft's XBox unit.
Yes, many companies are grossly underestimating the importance that M$'s ~$40,000,000,000 per year income has on their own competitiveness. The free market is dead when a company is subsidised to that extent.
In software M$ is basically doing nothing more than polishing a dozen programs mostly written more than a decade ago. Their costs, despite what their accountants are claiming, are comparatively small. On the other hand they probably have more unproductive hangers-on and internal politics/competition reducing their efficiency than they used to.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
In any event, it's *substantially* less than the total cost of all of the OS versions and application software included,
That's only good value (as you implied) if you actually use "all of the OS versions and application software included". Probably what you're paying is similar to what you'd be paying for full retail for the software you use anyway.
Software and IP pricing models are dubious, to say the least, and M$ is, like most companies and being a monopoly, trying to maximise their revenue (i.e. cost to customers).
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I like evolution, but it crashes more than a 90-year-old drunk Irishman on St. Patrick's day.
You're probably hitting the same bug[s] repeatedly. I rarely see it crash and I use it daily. I had a neighbour who saw it crash when she attempted to print certain calendar entries on her printer; maybe you have a printer driver problem?
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
300/400/80 millibits? That's impressive compression software!
Sorry, I only mention it because you were careful with case in the rest of your post.
M is the SI prefix for mega (versus m for milli) and B is the commonly accepted abbreviation for byte (versus b for bit). More information than you ever wanted to know here.
---
Keep your options open!
True however keep in mind that there are just as many ways to infringe on closed source software licenses.
Whether a license is for open source or closed source is irrelevant to the question of legality.
Some people might argue that because open source software is easier to get then infringement is much more likely. Other people might argue that because closed source software licenses are generally much more restrictive then infringement is easier and much more likely. Either is true to a certain degree so if you're going to argue for the need for insurance you should be arguing the need for insurance for all software licenses, and not just open source.
The fact that the insurance company is only offering the insurance for open source suggests to me that, apart from it being trendy, they think that they can maximise their profits. In other words their costs in this area, as compared to closed source insurance, are lower and is evidence for lower monetary risk when using open source software.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
There is indeed such a thing as "accidentally" infringing on open-source code licenses. ...
There is indeed such a thing as "accidentally" infringing on any code licenses. ...
---
Keep your options open!
Why do people keep saying this.
It's not true.
So M$ should have no problem releasing a patch now to change the default Microsoft Windows/XP install to non-admin?
Thought not.
Having said that, M$ have now lifted their game a little in this area (finally, after 25 years!). They should be much more aggressive in encouraging their client vendors to lift their game too so we can finally ditch the M$ lack-of-security model.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
and I really can't decide what to do about it.
I'd check the size and income of the Sony Electronics division (consumer products) versus the Sony Pictures (content creation). To some degree they're in conflict with each other (consumer friendly versus unfriendly) and whichever "wins" will have a significant impact on the direction of the company and how much DRM they use.
Myself, I think Sony's quality has gone down a lot recently after the trinitron patent expired. I don't buy their consumer products anymore, not only because of the poorer quality but also because of various forms of DRM and consumer unfriendliness they're using.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
WHY DID YOU RUN THEIR EXECUTABLE??
The label said that the CD was music, not a root kit that compromises the basic integrity of the computer.
Sony lied and should be prosecuted for fraud and trespass.
---
Paid marketing parasites are the worst zealots.
I think it is very inaccurate to call what Sony did "trespass,"
No, the person clicking on the icon has a reasonable expectation that all they're doing is playing music, not triggering the deliberate compromise of the basic integrity of their system with a root kit.
Of course the marketing parasites will try to wriggle out of admitting this with the usual marketing spin and lies.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.