it's not about the widget. It's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates.
That quote from my original post is a key to an article I wrote for the house rag of a Fortune 500 company I worked for five years ago - in a Star Trek article believe it or not. It's my way of telling them they screwed the pooch. I placed it carefully on slashdot so they'd be sure to read it, because they do come here - and no, I'm not going to get more specific.
As for your post, let me recommend the Xanax. It's great stuff.
They haven't shipped the thing yet, and already they've sold a million of them.
What matters to Apple and their shareholders: they turned a profit on every one. Like they always do. The damned company makes margin like there's no competition. It's not even remotely fair. And that's the way (ah, ha!) they like it.
Faith. Perhaps, as you note, my faith is misplaced. I understand your doubt. I have a pretty good record for believing in stuff though, and I'll stick with it. Don't bet on my faith though - mind your gut. This is neither legal nor investment advice. Consult your lawyer, your financial advisor, your psychic and your Yoga instructor for definitive advice.
Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. That's $4B right there. Once their court case is over and they're cleansed of the SCO debacle Unix will see a resurgence and Novell will ride it for all it's worth. Don't count them out yet - the jury will come back in a week or two. Unix has some serious proper respect in the geek community, and in the business community that has been deferred due to these ridiculous legal actions. Once they're over, they're over and Unix will reclaim its rightful place at the peak of the IS pantheon.
I like Linux, and BSD, and OS-X, and in some ways they're Unixes. But they're not Unix. Unix is the grand-daddy of modern OS's. It's the shit that other OS's hope to emulate and for the most part do it badly.
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
In the words of Hank Spencer: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
It may yet not be time to write off Unix, and so, to write off Novell. Novell lost the war for the network architecture, but there's some hope they can rise like a phoenix from the ashes and reclaim their place.
Your phone probably has more compute power than the cluster of computers that saw men to the moon. Display now really is the problem because processor watts have been beaten by ARM, and storage watts have been beaten by SSD. All that's left is the watts that drive the display. Roughly a billion people need a platform that's online and delivers the ability to participate in the digital economy. The iPad delivers it, at admittedly too high a price for them - but it's a start. We're on our way to welcoming the slumdogs into the online discourse. I, for one, can't wait to hear what they have to say.
You're going to love the Android slates then. Multitasking is a standard feature of course since Android is based on Linux. Preemptive multitasking (not the hopeless cooperative multitasking of Windows < W95) has been a feature of Linux since before Linus unleashed it on the public in 1991. Unix and other BSD based operating systems have had it since 1969 of course. You will probably be able to install a BSD based operating system on your Android slate before too long after it's introduced because those guys are legendary for getting their stuff to run on almost anything that executes instructions.
Anyway, the iPhone OS of the iPad has multitasking (it's based on Unix technologies too) - Apple just doesn't allow it for third party apps. That's one reason why the iPad will be my slate of last recourse. Getting Apple gear to work with a real OS is a pain. I would frankly rather Tuxify the HP slate that comes with W7 and the Intel Atom, even though the battery life won't be there, because my computers belong to me and they do what I tell them to or they get disassembled - sometimes in a most informal fashion. The Windows tax is a nuisance in that case, but I might be willing to pay it. By far I would prefer an Android slate with Snapdragon or equivalent (hardware video decode and >1GHz CPU).
BTW, we could have had this stuff nearly a year ago. Asus had an ARM (Snapdragon/Android) netbook nearly a year ago that was looking to be the darling of Computex but someone gave them a call and they "disappeared it" in the middle of the trade show. Keep your eye on this topic, as no doubt we'll be seeing an antitrust investigation one day that enlightens us about what happened here. I think ASUS is going to regret playing ball here - that thing was sweet, they had it, and they let it go - they caved. They probably got a one year discount on XP licenses in return. Sigh.
How fine a nit do you want to pick? Processor performance and power requirements were the problem. Now they're not. If Apple can really get 10 hours of video playback on this thing, we're over the necessary threshold and it only gets better from here. This is the disruptive innovation tablets were waiting for to take off. See?
I'm with you there. The Android slates look to come in at about this number, or less depending on what you get. The Always Innovating slate in the above reply comes in at $300 without the keyboard so that looks about right, though at 600MHz the CPU looks a little light for what I want. It might do, though. I may give it a go.
$500 isn't that much in the US, but the world is not the US. A $300 price point will go a good distance in a lot of places in the world where that's Serious Money. And in schools.
Certainly the low-wattage and long battery life thing is a boon in places where power is unavailable, unreliable or intermittent - which it is for about half of the people on the planet.
Although I agree with most of what you say, we have good examples in the market of an OS that's "full enough," like the iPhone OS on this iPad and Android on the others, and yet has the UI goodies you want. It's here, now. It's good enough. And at least the Androids will be flashable to a proper Linux and I'm sure somebody will gen up some multitouch widgets to go with it.
link. 10 hours battery life playing video, reading books or browsing the Internet on WiFi.
I like Apple, but I don't think you could consider me a fanboy. I don't do iTunes, own any of their products for myself personally, or really expect to buy any. I like what the stock is doing over the last decade relative to, well, everybody, but I don't hold any. Like I said, I'd prefer an Android slate and would probably wipe and install real Linux on it. If I can't get that, I'll probably muddle along with a Tux'd HP slate before I'd buy an Apple product of any kind. I am however a geek, and I know good tech when I see it.
Specifically to the point, I follow the trends and I can see us turning the corner on power and utility to the human vs ever increasing clock speeds and cores. ARM derived processors since only just recently have the power to deliver a good and lasting experience in the 12" display form factor on battery. It takes time to design this stuff, and more time to build the business relationships. It can't be an accident that Apple bought an ARM shop when they did and so has this in-house Apple A4 ARM-Cortex processor tech to put in their iPad.
That would require quite a breakthrough, either in battery or processor tech.
Apparently we have that. The new ARM processors when put with the new hardware decoders are capable of this, as we'll see. Apparently Apple was waiting for just this breakthrough to enable this platform and as soon as it was able, made it.
The HP one will run Vista apparently on Intel Atom. I don't have high hopes they'll deliver as much battery life, though the platform will be very interesting. I would still rather have an Android slate with Snapdragon, and probably put a real Linux on it. I hear there are at least 150 models of that coming our way here soon.
When it's time, it's time. It seems now it's time for this.
Let's just try to remember that all of these things aren't about the widget - they're about the needs and desires of people, and what they can do with it. That, to me, is what's so frustrating about the Apple tablet. They're putting their business needs in the way of people's full exploitation of the device's potential, or allowing their cellular partners to do so. We'll have none of that nonsense on the Android version, or on the HP slate once Windows is wiped off and replaced with a decent OS.
The thing is, it's not about the widget. It's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. A tablet that plays 10 hours of hi-def video and audio on one battery charge definitely has its niche. One that does so on a screen that you can actually use with Citrix or RDP over wireless or cellular wireless? Another niche. Ebooks too? You can use it to carry your reference materials? And you can keep up with your social media at the same time? What about navi? Will it find me the closest theatre that's playing the movie I want to see, even if I'm in a strange town, give me showtimes and navigate me to it?
Yeah, a full OS on a tablet platform isn't going to fly - until the tablet is powerful enough and the OS light enough to do enough niche things that it has broad utility. That would be right about... now.
A lot of the strong dislike about Microsoft products comes from these strategic decisions to lock in users, move them along to the next product, and prevent uptake of competing technologies. There's a lot here on/. about the persistent security issues that Windows suffers as Microsoft persists in choosing features and ease of use over security.
This whole issue persists and is so hot precisely because knowledgable people in the industry know that achieving compatibility and higher security is absolutely possible because it's done by other platforms like Open Office and BSD. It would never occur to me to claim that Office can't be made compatible, that Windows can't approach Unix in levels of security. Obviously that is possible because anything one program can do, another program can do. But then we read the Comes documents and the Halloween documents and see that these things are not only seen as "not worthwhile," but anathema to the Microsoft monopoly. They are deliberately avoided as a matter of policy - and that's what fuels the frustration - that Microsoft deliberately denies us this great boon because they see it as not in their best interest to do so, and then they field proxies who claim the things themselves are not even possible. That's rubbish.
Now in TFA it appears that some PFY on the Explorer team stumbled across w3.org and they're investigating what parts of this "web standards" nonsense might be worth embracing and extending. That's cool in a way, but most of us just assume that Microsoft will only keep the Explorer team alive (again!) long enough to reverse their market share losses and retain "ownership" of the web in the minds of common users. It's assumed that as soon as they've rebuilt their share they'll extend the standards in non-compliant ways to prevent compatibility by other browers - perhaps defending that turf with patents and patent licensing. This is what that whole HTML5 H264 vs Ogg Theora thing is about. Then once they've got their share built up again and the threat is extinguished, off to the slag heap once more with the Explorer team until their monopoly is threatened by innovation again, as their users languish in an abyss of incompatibilities and insecurities (again!). This is the song that never ends.
To come out in front of God and Everybody and say that compatibility and security are not possible is an outright lie, and I'm going to call out that lie ever time I see it. Maybe I could be nicer about it, but we've seen this nonsense for so long now that somebody who would claim to know something worth sharing should be mindful of it.
Repeat after me: "Anything one program can do, another program can do."
Before you go investing your faith in some web article about what's possible, try to get read up on the classics like Alan Turing's amazing body of work. Especially if you're going to go to a site like Slashdot and air out your ingnorance in front of the world.
1. As a YouTube account holder you may submit video content ("User Videos") and textual content ("User Comments"). User Videos and User Comments are collectively referred to as "User Submissions." You understand that whether or not such User Submissions are published, YouTube does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any User Submissions.
2. You shall be solely responsible for your own User Submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service.
So Viacom employees uploading content on behalf of their employer - the copyright holder, asignee or licensee - under these terms is the grant of a legitimate license to use the content forever. Google should go back and re-host all of this content again.
Also, I'm pretty sure that filing takedown licenses against somebody when you yourself gave them a license to use it is "theft of intellectual property in the first degree" as in, when they steal back this permission when they're not entitled do so, they actually do deprive somebody of something that was theirs.
Ethics can be a little fuzzy, especially about stuff like this. Nobody got physically hurt. Nobody died. Many people profited righteously and fairly, and a great many more continue to do so. A huge industry has formed and huge numbers of people benefit.
The standard isn't really, "if one kid uploads a 40 second clip of a new movie, four people see it and one of those who would have bought the DVD doesn't, that's evil and they should take a full page ad for their apology, fire all the employees and burn the building down". Well, most people wouldn't take that opinion. The legal experts down at the MPAA may feel that way.
If you don't like what Google does with the data you hang out on the Internet in front of God and Everybody, fix it. Put up a robots.txt file and tell the googlebot it's not welcome there.
Meanwhile, Google says, Viacom "regularly uses so-called 'stealth marketing' to get its content onto YouTube. The goal is to create the appearance of authentic grassroots interest in the content being promoted." Google cites a marketing executive at Viacom's Paramount studio who said that clips posted to YouTube "should definitely not be associated with the studio -- should appear as if a fan created and posted it." To accomplish that, Google says that "Viacom employees have made special trips away from the company's premises (to places like Kinko's) to upload videos to YouTube from computers not traceable to Viacom."
Also, "Viacom has altered its own videos to make them appear stolen." Indeed, Google says that a former president of MTV, not named, testified that Viacom didn't take down clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because "we were concerned that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert believed that their presence on YouTube was important for their ratings as well as for their relationship with their audience."
I don't buy into the notion that Slashdot is infested with full-time trolls, who intentionally spread FUD for kicks, or that they are paid to do so. Rather, I think people are just stupid, and posts like this just boggle my mind.
There's no margin in free software to pay trolls - whether on slashdot or in Gartner, or in Network World. Free software has to stand on its own - and without merchandising it's still killing you. You would think with billions of marketing dollars you could sell anybody anything, but it's not so.
Slashdot Mirror
There's still a chance they'll hire you to show them the way to the promised land. Or me. Or somebody else with a clue. It could happen.
it's not about the widget. It's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates.
That quote from my original post is a key to an article I wrote for the house rag of a Fortune 500 company I worked for five years ago - in a Star Trek article believe it or not. It's my way of telling them they screwed the pooch. I placed it carefully on slashdot so they'd be sure to read it, because they do come here - and no, I'm not going to get more specific.
As for your post, let me recommend the Xanax. It's great stuff.
They haven't shipped the thing yet, and already they've sold a million of them.
What matters to Apple and their shareholders: they turned a profit on every one. Like they always do. The damned company makes margin like there's no competition. It's not even remotely fair. And that's the way (ah, ha!) they like it.
Faith. Perhaps, as you note, my faith is misplaced. I understand your doubt. I have a pretty good record for believing in stuff though, and I'll stick with it. Don't bet on my faith though - mind your gut. This is neither legal nor investment advice. Consult your lawyer, your financial advisor, your psychic and your Yoga instructor for definitive advice.
Um, no. If somebody offered me all of Yahoo for fifty bucks, a case of beer and a carton of smokes, I'd pass.
Novell owns the copyrights to Unix. That's $4B right there. Once their court case is over and they're cleansed of the SCO debacle Unix will see a resurgence and Novell will ride it for all it's worth. Don't count them out yet - the jury will come back in a week or two. Unix has some serious proper respect in the geek community, and in the business community that has been deferred due to these ridiculous legal actions. Once they're over, they're over and Unix will reclaim its rightful place at the peak of the IS pantheon.
I like Linux, and BSD, and OS-X, and in some ways they're Unixes. But they're not Unix. Unix is the grand-daddy of modern OS's. It's the shit that other OS's hope to emulate and for the most part do it badly.
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
- Dave McIlroy
In the words of Hank Spencer: "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
It may yet not be time to write off Unix, and so, to write off Novell. Novell lost the war for the network architecture, but there's some hope they can rise like a phoenix from the ashes and reclaim their place.
I predicted some time ago here that the iPad would drive fashion back toward Safari jackets and cargo pockets. Form follows function.
Your phone probably has more compute power than the cluster of computers that saw men to the moon. Display now really is the problem because processor watts have been beaten by ARM, and storage watts have been beaten by SSD. All that's left is the watts that drive the display. Roughly a billion people need a platform that's online and delivers the ability to participate in the digital economy. The iPad delivers it, at admittedly too high a price for them - but it's a start. We're on our way to welcoming the slumdogs into the online discourse. I, for one, can't wait to hear what they have to say.
You're going to love the Android slates then. Multitasking is a standard feature of course since Android is based on Linux. Preemptive multitasking (not the hopeless cooperative multitasking of Windows < W95) has been a feature of Linux since before Linus unleashed it on the public in 1991. Unix and other BSD based operating systems have had it since 1969 of course. You will probably be able to install a BSD based operating system on your Android slate before too long after it's introduced because those guys are legendary for getting their stuff to run on almost anything that executes instructions.
Anyway, the iPhone OS of the iPad has multitasking (it's based on Unix technologies too) - Apple just doesn't allow it for third party apps. That's one reason why the iPad will be my slate of last recourse. Getting Apple gear to work with a real OS is a pain. I would frankly rather Tuxify the HP slate that comes with W7 and the Intel Atom, even though the battery life won't be there, because my computers belong to me and they do what I tell them to or they get disassembled - sometimes in a most informal fashion. The Windows tax is a nuisance in that case, but I might be willing to pay it. By far I would prefer an Android slate with Snapdragon or equivalent (hardware video decode and >1GHz CPU).
BTW, we could have had this stuff nearly a year ago. Asus had an ARM (Snapdragon/Android) netbook nearly a year ago that was looking to be the darling of Computex but someone gave them a call and they "disappeared it" in the middle of the trade show. Keep your eye on this topic, as no doubt we'll be seeing an antitrust investigation one day that enlightens us about what happened here. I think ASUS is going to regret playing ball here - that thing was sweet, they had it, and they let it go - they caved. They probably got a one year discount on XP licenses in return. Sigh.
How fine a nit do you want to pick? Processor performance and power requirements were the problem. Now they're not. If Apple can really get 10 hours of video playback on this thing, we're over the necessary threshold and it only gets better from here. This is the disruptive innovation tablets were waiting for to take off. See?
I'm with you there. The Android slates look to come in at about this number, or less depending on what you get. The Always Innovating slate in the above reply comes in at $300 without the keyboard so that looks about right, though at 600MHz the CPU looks a little light for what I want. It might do, though. I may give it a go.
$500 isn't that much in the US, but the world is not the US. A $300 price point will go a good distance in a lot of places in the world where that's Serious Money. And in schools.
Certainly the low-wattage and long battery life thing is a boon in places where power is unavailable, unreliable or intermittent - which it is for about half of the people on the planet.
Although I agree with most of what you say, we have good examples in the market of an OS that's "full enough," like the iPhone OS on this iPad and Android on the others, and yet has the UI goodies you want. It's here, now. It's good enough. And at least the Androids will be flashable to a proper Linux and I'm sure somebody will gen up some multitouch widgets to go with it.
Oops. W7 obviously. Freudian slip.
link. 10 hours battery life playing video, reading books or browsing the Internet on WiFi.
I like Apple, but I don't think you could consider me a fanboy. I don't do iTunes, own any of their products for myself personally, or really expect to buy any. I like what the stock is doing over the last decade relative to, well, everybody, but I don't hold any. Like I said, I'd prefer an Android slate and would probably wipe and install real Linux on it. If I can't get that, I'll probably muddle along with a Tux'd HP slate before I'd buy an Apple product of any kind. I am however a geek, and I know good tech when I see it.
Specifically to the point, I follow the trends and I can see us turning the corner on power and utility to the human vs ever increasing clock speeds and cores. ARM derived processors since only just recently have the power to deliver a good and lasting experience in the 12" display form factor on battery. It takes time to design this stuff, and more time to build the business relationships. It can't be an accident that Apple bought an ARM shop when they did and so has this in-house Apple A4 ARM-Cortex processor tech to put in their iPad.
That would require quite a breakthrough, either in battery or processor tech.
Apparently we have that. The new ARM processors when put with the new hardware decoders are capable of this, as we'll see. Apparently Apple was waiting for just this breakthrough to enable this platform and as soon as it was able, made it.
The HP one will run Vista apparently on Intel Atom. I don't have high hopes they'll deliver as much battery life, though the platform will be very interesting. I would still rather have an Android slate with Snapdragon, and probably put a real Linux on it. I hear there are at least 150 models of that coming our way here soon.
When it's time, it's time. It seems now it's time for this.
Let's just try to remember that all of these things aren't about the widget - they're about the needs and desires of people, and what they can do with it. That, to me, is what's so frustrating about the Apple tablet. They're putting their business needs in the way of people's full exploitation of the device's potential, or allowing their cellular partners to do so. We'll have none of that nonsense on the Android version, or on the HP slate once Windows is wiped off and replaced with a decent OS.
The thing is, it's not about the widget. It's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. A tablet that plays 10 hours of hi-def video and audio on one battery charge definitely has its niche. One that does so on a screen that you can actually use with Citrix or RDP over wireless or cellular wireless? Another niche. Ebooks too? You can use it to carry your reference materials? And you can keep up with your social media at the same time? What about navi? Will it find me the closest theatre that's playing the movie I want to see, even if I'm in a strange town, give me showtimes and navigate me to it?
Yeah, a full OS on a tablet platform isn't going to fly - until the tablet is powerful enough and the OS light enough to do enough niche things that it has broad utility. That would be right about... now.
A lot of the strong dislike about Microsoft products comes from these strategic decisions to lock in users, move them along to the next product, and prevent uptake of competing technologies. There's a lot here on /. about the persistent security issues that Windows suffers as Microsoft persists in choosing features and ease of use over security.
This whole issue persists and is so hot precisely because knowledgable people in the industry know that achieving compatibility and higher security is absolutely possible because it's done by other platforms like Open Office and BSD. It would never occur to me to claim that Office can't be made compatible, that Windows can't approach Unix in levels of security. Obviously that is possible because anything one program can do, another program can do. But then we read the Comes documents and the Halloween documents and see that these things are not only seen as "not worthwhile," but anathema to the Microsoft monopoly. They are deliberately avoided as a matter of policy - and that's what fuels the frustration - that Microsoft deliberately denies us this great boon because they see it as not in their best interest to do so, and then they field proxies who claim the things themselves are not even possible. That's rubbish.
Now in TFA it appears that some PFY on the Explorer team stumbled across w3.org and they're investigating what parts of this "web standards" nonsense might be worth embracing and extending. That's cool in a way, but most of us just assume that Microsoft will only keep the Explorer team alive (again!) long enough to reverse their market share losses and retain "ownership" of the web in the minds of common users. It's assumed that as soon as they've rebuilt their share they'll extend the standards in non-compliant ways to prevent compatibility by other browers - perhaps defending that turf with patents and patent licensing. This is what that whole HTML5 H264 vs Ogg Theora thing is about. Then once they've got their share built up again and the threat is extinguished, off to the slag heap once more with the Explorer team until their monopoly is threatened by innovation again, as their users languish in an abyss of incompatibilities and insecurities (again!). This is the song that never ends.
To come out in front of God and Everybody and say that compatibility and security are not possible is an outright lie, and I'm going to call out that lie ever time I see it. Maybe I could be nicer about it, but we've seen this nonsense for so long now that somebody who would claim to know something worth sharing should be mindful of it.
Really, I don't. Or "difficult". Or "not in Microsoft's best interest", or "it's contrary to Microsoft's long term stragetgy". That's credible.
But impossible? No. Not for a minute would I believe that.
Repeat after me: "Anything one program can do, another program can do."
Before you go investing your faith in some web article about what's possible, try to get read up on the classics like Alan Turing's amazing body of work. Especially if you're going to go to a site like Slashdot and air out your ingnorance in front of the world.
6. Your User Submissions and Conduct
1. As a YouTube account holder you may submit video content ("User Videos") and textual content ("User Comments"). User Videos and User Comments are collectively referred to as "User Submissions." You understand that whether or not such User Submissions are published, YouTube does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any User Submissions.
2. You shall be solely responsible for your own User Submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service.
So Viacom employees uploading content on behalf of their employer - the copyright holder, asignee or licensee - under these terms is the grant of a legitimate license to use the content forever. Google should go back and re-host all of this content again.
Also, I'm pretty sure that filing takedown licenses against somebody when you yourself gave them a license to use it is "theft of intellectual property in the first degree" as in, when they steal back this permission when they're not entitled do so, they actually do deprive somebody of something that was theirs.
Ethics can be a little fuzzy, especially about stuff like this. Nobody got physically hurt. Nobody died. Many people profited righteously and fairly, and a great many more continue to do so. A huge industry has formed and huge numbers of people benefit.
The standard isn't really, "if one kid uploads a 40 second clip of a new movie, four people see it and one of those who would have bought the DVD doesn't, that's evil and they should take a full page ad for their apology, fire all the employees and burn the building down". Well, most people wouldn't take that opinion. The legal experts down at the MPAA may feel that way.
If you don't like what Google does with the data you hang out on the Internet in front of God and Everybody, fix it. Put up a robots.txt file and tell the googlebot it's not welcome there.
TANSTAAFL.
Another article:
Meanwhile, Google says, Viacom "regularly uses so-called 'stealth marketing' to get its content onto YouTube. The goal is to create the appearance of authentic grassroots interest in the content being promoted." Google cites a marketing executive at Viacom's Paramount studio who said that clips posted to YouTube "should definitely not be associated with the studio -- should appear as if a fan created and posted it." To accomplish that, Google says that "Viacom employees have made special trips away from the company's premises (to places like Kinko's) to upload videos to YouTube from computers not traceable to Viacom."
Also, "Viacom has altered its own videos to make them appear stolen." Indeed, Google says that a former president of MTV, not named, testified that Viacom didn't take down clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because "we were concerned that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert believed that their presence on YouTube was important for their ratings as well as for their relationship with their audience."
So... who's evil here?
I don't buy into the notion that Slashdot is infested with full-time trolls, who intentionally spread FUD for kicks, or that they are paid to do so. Rather, I think people are just stupid, and posts like this just boggle my mind.
There's no margin in free software to pay trolls - whether on slashdot or in Gartner, or in Network World. Free software has to stand on its own - and without merchandising it's still killing you. You would think with billions of marketing dollars you could sell anybody anything, but it's not so.
Do you know how we detected your position as a Microsoft astroturfer?
Think back to your prior posts and think about what you wrote. The clues are there, thought they might be subtle.