Garbage. If someoene can't be bothered to check whether something already exists before inventing it, then he's a fool.
1. Most lawyers will tell you absolutely not to do a patent check because there can be serious legal repercussions to doing so. 2. How do you propose finding out whether something has already been patented? There are a *lot* of patent applications, sifting through them to discover whether or not your invention (or a component thereof) has already been patented would be prohibitively costly for all but the largest of organisations. 3. At where do you draw the line? Are you going to go through the time and expense of (2) for every little trivial idea you come up with? There are a huge number of patents for stuff so trivial and obvious that most reasonable people wouldn't expect to be patentable. 4. Assuming that you actually mean "exists" rather than "is patented", how do you propose determining absolutely whether something unpatented exists? This is orders of magnitude more costly and less reliable than the already infeasible task of searching patent applications.
Yeah, I'd say that simultaneous patent applications are a serious problem, and patent law doesn't really deal with research efforts where obvious areas of research are looked at by multiple individuals.
It isn't really "simultaneous patents" which are the problem - you shouldn't *have* to patent your invention to avoid getting sued by someone who invented and patented theirs at the same time.
In fact, it isn't even "simultaneous" inventions which are the problem - it's simply the fact that you shouldn't be expected to pay another inventor just because you happen to come up with the same thing independently. If you invent something and then 10 years later I invent the same thing with no knowledge of your invention then I shouldn't be expected to pay you, since the existence of your invention hasn't helped me in any way, and I would still have come up with it even without your work.
For popular "whole products", such as the telephone, the vacuum cleaner, etc. it might be unlikely that someone wouldn't have knowledge of the existing invention, but patents are frequently taken out for innovative designs of minor components within a product, for which there should be no expectation of people knowing about them. Not to mention all the really trivial stuff that gets patented. It has got to the point where, for many patents, developing something is actually less time consuming than searching for a suitable patent to see if someone already developed it (with no guarantee that you'll find anything, so may have to expend the time developing it anyway). And many legal departments will tell people that they must not actively search for existing patents since that can land you in deeper hot water than if you just went ahead and unknowingly infringed a patent.
the invention is described in full meaning that when it does expire any man or his dog can replicate the technology without having to conduct the research.
Many modern patents are vague enough to make it extremely difficult (at best) or impossible (at worst) to implement the technology from the patent documentation.
Whilst I agree that in principle patents are a nice idea, I think in practice the pros are usually outweighed by the cons (whether they be for physical stuff, software, etc.).
A fundamental problem with patents is that they don't deal with independent invention at all: If you develop something and I use your invention then it is fair enough that I should pay you for this work, since it either cut my development costs (assuming I would otherwise have invented the same thing myself), or it actually enabled me to produce something (if I couldn't have come up with the invention myself). However, if you invent something and I independently invent the same thing without any knowledge of your invention then I shouldn't be required to pay you, since your work has not in any way helped me. Of course, proving independent invention is next to impossible.
For example, if I'm developing a product, and I come up with a microcontroller design to be embedded in that product, there is no reasonable expectation for someone else to know about that design, even if I've patented it. There *may* be some merit in allowing patents on ideas used in whole products though, rather than small components of a product.
This is not limited to the government, this happens in business as well.
Not to the same extent - no private business can afford to spend £40 billion on a computer system (which is the last estimate I heard for the NHS computer system - I believe the original quote was about £6 billion, so still outrageous).
Private business is governed by competition in the market - if the costs of contracting some work out is going to push the cost of their products up too high then they simply can't do it since it would seriously harm their business. Government, on the other hand, is not constrained so much - if a project turns out really expensive then they can just put up taxes to compensate; the public can only lose.
For example we landed a big contract with a private company even though they raised doubts of our size. In practice, it's the 2-3% of the organization in my team that knows anything about it, it might as well have been just us you were hiring. The chances we'd flop and go away is really no smaller or bigger than our company saying "that business area isn't losing us money, let's drop it".
You can't just drop a project that you're under contract to produce (unless your contract allows you to do that, and the person contracting you would be an idiot to allow such a clause). On the other hand, if the company goes out of business mid-project then everyone's screwed. Small businesses do generally have a higher chance of going out of business. However, my personal opinion is that small businesses usually provide a much higher quality of service and better value, probably because they can't afford to lose any customers if they can help it, and usually have far less worthless bureaucracy getting in the way of the job. There is a risk/reward payoff when choosing the size of company to deal with - IMHO the reward of dealing with a small company far outweighs the risk in most cases.
Maybe you missed the bit where I pointed out that *every* insurance company works this way.
I've never even HEARD of your "disloyalty bonus" but, if that kind of thing works where you are, you've got bigger problems than your insurance premiums
I guess you don't live in the UK then - this is situation normal for car insurers here.
Does your car-insurance company try to screw you the same way?
Insurance companies (car insurance included) are renound for trying to screw over their customers and weasel out of paying out. As an example, if I crashed and wrote off my car tomorrow, the money I get from my insurance company will in no way buy me a car of the same age and condition - they will pay me the amount it'd cost me to get a rust-bucket of the same age at auction. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it still sucks. Luckily, so far all my insurance claims have been for stuff that was very clearly another driver's fault (there wasn't any weaselling-out-room) and didn't result in my car being written of, so the damage got fixed at no cost to myself.
Every year my car insurance company puts up my premium by about 50%, and so I cancel the policy and apply for a new one as a "new customer" - this isn't just one insurance company, *every* car insurance company I've used does this, on the assumption that the customer is too lazy to shop around. IMHO this sort of "disloyalty bonus" constitutes "screwing over the customer".
As another example, in the news today - the regulator has just slapped down a lot of mortgage payment protection insurance companies (i.e. those that pay your mortgage when you get made redundant) for doing too much weaselling out of payouts after the recession hit.
Developing an eHealth system costs money. End of story. At the end of the day it is better to roll out a eHealth system that is secure, reliable and well integrated than a system that is unreliable, unsecure and convoluted.
Here in the UK, the government has been putting billions into the NHS computer systems. From talking to people who work with them, the consultants responsible basically have no clue about PKI, so there goes your security. As for being reliable and well integrated, experience of past (very expensive) government IT projects makes me doubt that this is likely too.
At the end of the day, the government goes to one of the really big 2 or 3 IT companies to develop a system (I'm talking about you, EDS, Capita, etc.), get quoted a crazy amount of money, accept the quote and then watch as the whole thing becomes a disaster and goes many times over budget. Then when the next IT project comes up they go back to exactly the same company. It is true that there are a limited number of huge IT companies to choose from, but many of the IT projects could be done just fine by smaller companies, and wouldn't cost the earth, with the advantage that supporting small businesses is a Good Thing for the economy. However, the government won't use small businesses to do these jobs because doing so is seen as high risk - personally, I don't see how you can get much higher risk than using one of the big companies that seem to have a 100% record of screwing up projects. Hell, for the amount these big companies get paid, you could probably get 4 or 5 small companies doing exactly the same job as each other and then actually roll out the project that looks the most likely to succeed.
The 'pain' of 'switching' was less than the pain of the pricetag for Office
In my experience, the "pain" of switching from MS Office to a non-MS office suite tends to be a bit less than the pain pain of upgrading from one version of MS Office to another anyway - OOo is certainly less "different" than some versions of MS Office.
Unfortunately, it does seem that people are more accepting of the MS-inspired pain though - maybe that has something to do with the feeling that upgrading MS Office is something that has to be done so the pain must be endured, whereas switching to an alternative is a choice, so there is an easy way to avoid that pain (by not switching). Most people take a very short-term view and avoid the immediate hassle, even if it might mean more hassle in the future.
I think this 'free' pre-bundled Office Lite may have quite an impact on the uptake of OOo though. If only because there'll be fewer non-tech users buying a PC without Office pre-installed. At that point they usually turn to their 'techie friend' for help, whereupon their friend may suggest OOo like I did.
I'm not convinced - PCs have traditionally come with *some* crappy office suite installed (e.g. MS Works). I'm not sure this is going to change anything.
People like free - if it's pre-installed it's free, yet OOo is also free. People like easy too - pre-installed means no extra work, installing OOo means 5 minutes of work which isn't QUITE as a easy... shame, but OOo loses on those odds I fear.
I suppose a lot will depend on what the PC manufacturers decide to bundle with the machines. Sadly, I suspect they will bundle the MS product, just because "MS Office" is a brand that people recognise (even if it happens to have "(crap edition)" after it). If OEMs were going to start bundling OOo, I suspect they might've done it before now - I can't think of an especially good reason for them to have been bundling MS Works instead of OOo for years, other than for the ability to use the MS brand and _maybe_ because using OOo might undercut some of their MS Office sales.
MMS uses the "voice" side of the protocol like SMS does.
Really? ISTR that MMS goes over HTTP (over GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, etc). I believe the only "voice" side stuff is a short SMS control message to tell the phone to pull the MMS message off the MMSC.
Anyway, am I the only one who finds it sad that the perpetual "iPhone news" is persistently nothing but Apple/AT&T banning services that every other phone has had since the dawn of time, or begrudgedly granting services that everyone else already has?
I guess, then, that you hate what Intel is doing to stop, via hardware measures, any kind of code overflow attack. Should a hacker have the "right" to crash your media player so he can do a remote code execution attack?
Huh? How does that commend have *anything* to do with my post?
But anyway, I'll bite - a remote execution attacker does not have any "right" to execute code on my computer. In fact, doing so is a crime, as laid out by the Computer Misuse Act. Conversely, my phone is owned by me - I paid for it, I get to do what I like with it.
"If you're dealing with massive graphics / CAD or something than lots of memory is a big help,"
I remember doing massive graphics/CAD on a 400MHz Pentium 2 with 256MB of PC-133 back in high school. Stuff today looks almost THE EXACT SAME BUT SEEMS TO RUN MUCH SLOWER.
Because the programmers have NO CLUE on how to optimize their code and make it streamlined.
Whilst I agree with you that the advent of fast CPUs and oodles of memory has made programmers really lazy, I'm thinking of the kind of graphics that are 90 megapixel HDR panoramas - that kind of thing needs half a gig just for the data of a single layer image.
especially when one considers the additional, needless RAM overhead this requires.
Can you clarify this? This is news to me, at least.
64 bit means you have 64 bit pointers, so instructions are longer to accommodate them. This means the code takes up more RAM, more memory bandwidth and more cache.
I'm sure it's just a GCC option. I suspect the problem is code that incorrectly assumes sizeof(long)==sizeof(void*).
ISTR, C requires that a long be big enough to contain a pointer doesn't it? (of course, that doesn't mean that a long can't be bigger than a pointer, but you should be able to stick a pointer in a long and then get it back again without trashing it in the process).
Umm... why? If you're dealing with massive graphics / CAD or something than lots of memory is a big help, but the vast vast majority of computer users aren't doing this sort of stuff. Your word processor and web browser shouldn't need over 2GB of RAM, especially since most people don't even seem to run multiple apps concurrently.
Nothing really wrong with 32 bit if you don't have oodles of RAM - if you've only got a couple of gig of RAM, the only real advantage of 64 bit is that it has a few extra registers which marginally speed up stuff like context switching. Conversely, 64 bit code is bigger than 32 bit code, so you need more RAM, memory bandwidth and cache...
They don't? Every company I've worked for has used Linux in some (fairly major) capacity - one of them used Linux exclusively and I currently run a company that uses Linux exclusively.
Real service calls aside, it is nice to have a software maker that is ultimately responsible for the product, as opposed to Linux where at best you can get a forum post on whatever software is broken.
If you think the vendor is "ultimately responsible" then you clearly didn't bother to read the EULAs on the commercial software you're using, which all pretty much universally disclaim responsibility for anything that goes wrong (as far as the law allows them to).
As for support, if you want commercial support for Linux then there are plenty of companies willing to sell it to you, so your argument seems bunk.
With consultants, Windows is FAR cheaper than finding someone who knows Linux in a production setting.
My experience contradicts this.
Very few people actually have worked on Linux in a true business production environment, and that expertise does not come cheap.
Most of the _clueful_ IT people I've dealt with (and some of the clueless ones) have got a reasonable amount of Linux experience.
You also have to realize that Sony is, like other large multinational corporations, made up of a bunch of smaller companies doing things like pressing DVDs, manufacturing consumer electronics, and making movies. These smaller divisions probably aren't aware of each others activities to a very large extent. So anthropomorphizing Sony or any large corporation is pointless, and it is silly to assign a personality to any very large corporation, whether it be Sony, IBM, or even Microsoft.
But there is some amusement value to be had when Sony/BMG bangs on about how ripping CDs to MP3 so you can listen to them on your MP3 player is bad, wrong and illegal whilst Sony is selling MP3 players that require you to do exactly that... (this dates from before the days when you could legally buy MP3s of much).
The industry will be satisfied when they gain the ability to monitor everyone's net connection for signs of "illicit filesharing activity." If you think I'm joking, watch the kind of legislation the entertainment lobbies put their weight behind.
The current proposals in the UK (which the government seem to be firmly standing behind) is to chop someone's internet connection after receiving 3 accusations of copyright infringement. No courts involved.
Still, it shouldn't surprise me - presumption of guilt seems to be the foundation for most of the recent laws.
But they CAN create a restriction mechanism that the network can use to send signals to your device saying "hey, don't fucking do that."
They can, but that would be a pretty stupid design since there's no way for the network to guarantee my device will honour the signal, because it is my device and I can make it do whatever the hell I like. It's about as sensible as creating a firewall that politely asks an attacking botnet to please stop.
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Garbage. If someoene can't be bothered to check whether something already exists before inventing it, then he's a fool.
1. Most lawyers will tell you absolutely not to do a patent check because there can be serious legal repercussions to doing so.
2. How do you propose finding out whether something has already been patented? There are a *lot* of patent applications, sifting through them to discover whether or not your invention (or a component thereof) has already been patented would be prohibitively costly for all but the largest of organisations.
3. At where do you draw the line? Are you going to go through the time and expense of (2) for every little trivial idea you come up with? There are a huge number of patents for stuff so trivial and obvious that most reasonable people wouldn't expect to be patentable.
4. Assuming that you actually mean "exists" rather than "is patented", how do you propose determining absolutely whether something unpatented exists? This is orders of magnitude more costly and less reliable than the already infeasible task of searching patent applications.
such a system would be completely unworkable.
Isn't that what I already said?
Yeah, I'd say that simultaneous patent applications are a serious problem, and patent law doesn't really deal with research efforts where obvious areas of research are looked at by multiple individuals.
It isn't really "simultaneous patents" which are the problem - you shouldn't *have* to patent your invention to avoid getting sued by someone who invented and patented theirs at the same time.
In fact, it isn't even "simultaneous" inventions which are the problem - it's simply the fact that you shouldn't be expected to pay another inventor just because you happen to come up with the same thing independently. If you invent something and then 10 years later I invent the same thing with no knowledge of your invention then I shouldn't be expected to pay you, since the existence of your invention hasn't helped me in any way, and I would still have come up with it even without your work.
For popular "whole products", such as the telephone, the vacuum cleaner, etc. it might be unlikely that someone wouldn't have knowledge of the existing invention, but patents are frequently taken out for innovative designs of minor components within a product, for which there should be no expectation of people knowing about them. Not to mention all the really trivial stuff that gets patented. It has got to the point where, for many patents, developing something is actually less time consuming than searching for a suitable patent to see if someone already developed it (with no guarantee that you'll find anything, so may have to expend the time developing it anyway). And many legal departments will tell people that they must not actively search for existing patents since that can land you in deeper hot water than if you just went ahead and unknowingly infringed a patent.
the invention is described in full meaning that when it does expire any man or his dog can replicate the technology without having to conduct the research.
Many modern patents are vague enough to make it extremely difficult (at best) or impossible (at worst) to implement the technology from the patent documentation.
Whilst I agree that in principle patents are a nice idea, I think in practice the pros are usually outweighed by the cons (whether they be for physical stuff, software, etc.).
A fundamental problem with patents is that they don't deal with independent invention at all: If you develop something and I use your invention then it is fair enough that I should pay you for this work, since it either cut my development costs (assuming I would otherwise have invented the same thing myself), or it actually enabled me to produce something (if I couldn't have come up with the invention myself). However, if you invent something and I independently invent the same thing without any knowledge of your invention then I shouldn't be required to pay you, since your work has not in any way helped me. Of course, proving independent invention is next to impossible.
For example, if I'm developing a product, and I come up with a microcontroller design to be embedded in that product, there is no reasonable expectation for someone else to know about that design, even if I've patented it. There *may* be some merit in allowing patents on ideas used in whole products though, rather than small components of a product.
So al-Qaeda won't sue for trademark infringement?
This is not limited to the government, this happens in business as well.
Not to the same extent - no private business can afford to spend £40 billion on a computer system (which is the last estimate I heard for the NHS computer system - I believe the original quote was about £6 billion, so still outrageous).
Private business is governed by competition in the market - if the costs of contracting some work out is going to push the cost of their products up too high then they simply can't do it since it would seriously harm their business. Government, on the other hand, is not constrained so much - if a project turns out really expensive then they can just put up taxes to compensate; the public can only lose.
For example we landed a big contract with a private company even though they raised doubts of our size. In practice, it's the 2-3% of the organization in my team that knows anything about it, it might as well have been just us you were hiring. The chances we'd flop and go away is really no smaller or bigger than our company saying "that business area isn't losing us money, let's drop it".
You can't just drop a project that you're under contract to produce (unless your contract allows you to do that, and the person contracting you would be an idiot to allow such a clause). On the other hand, if the company goes out of business mid-project then everyone's screwed. Small businesses do generally have a higher chance of going out of business. However, my personal opinion is that small businesses usually provide a much higher quality of service and better value, probably because they can't afford to lose any customers if they can help it, and usually have far less worthless bureaucracy getting in the way of the job. There is a risk/reward payoff when choosing the size of company to deal with - IMHO the reward of dealing with a small company far outweighs the risk in most cases.
Most likely the real reason is that a small company couldn't afford the bidding process, even without whatever "incentives" get unofficially offered.
Sad, but unfortunately probably true.
Are these "huge IT companies" actually IT companies or do they just subcontract random bits of the task in hand to small companies?
As far as I know they mostly handle it in-house. Or maybe "mishandle" is a better term. :)
As I said - find a better insurance company
Maybe you missed the bit where I pointed out that *every* insurance company works this way.
I've never even HEARD of your "disloyalty bonus" but, if that kind of thing works where you are, you've got bigger problems than your insurance premiums
I guess you don't live in the UK then - this is situation normal for car insurers here.
Does your car-insurance company try to screw you the same way?
Insurance companies (car insurance included) are renound for trying to screw over their customers and weasel out of paying out. As an example, if I crashed and wrote off my car tomorrow, the money I get from my insurance company will in no way buy me a car of the same age and condition - they will pay me the amount it'd cost me to get a rust-bucket of the same age at auction. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it still sucks. Luckily, so far all my insurance claims have been for stuff that was very clearly another driver's fault (there wasn't any weaselling-out-room) and didn't result in my car being written of, so the damage got fixed at no cost to myself.
Every year my car insurance company puts up my premium by about 50%, and so I cancel the policy and apply for a new one as a "new customer" - this isn't just one insurance company, *every* car insurance company I've used does this, on the assumption that the customer is too lazy to shop around. IMHO this sort of "disloyalty bonus" constitutes "screwing over the customer".
As another example, in the news today - the regulator has just slapped down a lot of mortgage payment protection insurance companies (i.e. those that pay your mortgage when you get made redundant) for doing too much weaselling out of payouts after the recession hit.
Developing an eHealth system costs money. End of story. At the end of the day it is better to roll out a eHealth system that is secure, reliable and well integrated than a system that is unreliable, unsecure and convoluted.
Here in the UK, the government has been putting billions into the NHS computer systems. From talking to people who work with them, the consultants responsible basically have no clue about PKI, so there goes your security. As for being reliable and well integrated, experience of past (very expensive) government IT projects makes me doubt that this is likely too.
At the end of the day, the government goes to one of the really big 2 or 3 IT companies to develop a system (I'm talking about you, EDS, Capita, etc.), get quoted a crazy amount of money, accept the quote and then watch as the whole thing becomes a disaster and goes many times over budget. Then when the next IT project comes up they go back to exactly the same company. It is true that there are a limited number of huge IT companies to choose from, but many of the IT projects could be done just fine by smaller companies, and wouldn't cost the earth, with the advantage that supporting small businesses is a Good Thing for the economy. However, the government won't use small businesses to do these jobs because doing so is seen as high risk - personally, I don't see how you can get much higher risk than using one of the big companies that seem to have a 100% record of screwing up projects. Hell, for the amount these big companies get paid, you could probably get 4 or 5 small companies doing exactly the same job as each other and then actually roll out the project that looks the most likely to succeed.
Office 10, that's so 2002. I think you mean Office 13.
Is that the one that turns into a disaster shortly after launch, but then they manage to rescue it whilst completely missing the mission objective? :)
The 'pain' of 'switching' was less than the pain of the pricetag for Office
In my experience, the "pain" of switching from MS Office to a non-MS office suite tends to be a bit less than the pain pain of upgrading from one version of MS Office to another anyway - OOo is certainly less "different" than some versions of MS Office.
Unfortunately, it does seem that people are more accepting of the MS-inspired pain though - maybe that has something to do with the feeling that upgrading MS Office is something that has to be done so the pain must be endured, whereas switching to an alternative is a choice, so there is an easy way to avoid that pain (by not switching). Most people take a very short-term view and avoid the immediate hassle, even if it might mean more hassle in the future.
I think this 'free' pre-bundled Office Lite may have quite an impact on the uptake of OOo though. If only because there'll be fewer non-tech users buying a PC without Office pre-installed. At that point they usually turn to their 'techie friend' for help, whereupon their friend may suggest OOo like I did.
I'm not convinced - PCs have traditionally come with *some* crappy office suite installed (e.g. MS Works). I'm not sure this is going to change anything.
People like free - if it's pre-installed it's free, yet OOo is also free. People like easy too - pre-installed means no extra work, installing OOo means 5 minutes of work which isn't QUITE as a easy... shame, but OOo loses on those odds I fear.
I suppose a lot will depend on what the PC manufacturers decide to bundle with the machines. Sadly, I suspect they will bundle the MS product, just because "MS Office" is a brand that people recognise (even if it happens to have "(crap edition)" after it). If OEMs were going to start bundling OOo, I suspect they might've done it before now - I can't think of an especially good reason for them to have been bundling MS Works instead of OOo for years, other than for the ability to use the MS brand and _maybe_ because using OOo might undercut some of their MS Office sales.
MMS uses the "voice" side of the protocol like SMS does.
Really? ISTR that MMS goes over HTTP (over GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, etc). I believe the only "voice" side stuff is a short SMS control message to tell the phone to pull the MMS message off the MMSC.
Anyway, am I the only one who finds it sad that the perpetual "iPhone news" is persistently nothing but Apple/AT&T banning services that every other phone has had since the dawn of time, or begrudgedly granting services that everyone else already has?
I'm guessing because Skype is to China as Fire is to Frankenstein's Monster.
Seriously, I'm pretty sure citizens in China can't have Skype installed on their computers due to the encryption or some such thing.
Since there was a story not so long ago about Skype handing over private messages to the Chinese government, I have to assume that Skype is allowed.
I guess, then, that you hate what Intel is doing to stop, via hardware measures, any kind of code overflow attack. Should a hacker have the "right" to crash your media player so he can do a remote code execution attack?
Huh? How does that commend have *anything* to do with my post?
But anyway, I'll bite - a remote execution attacker does not have any "right" to execute code on my computer. In fact, doing so is a crime, as laid out by the Computer Misuse Act. Conversely, my phone is owned by me - I paid for it, I get to do what I like with it.
"If you're dealing with massive graphics / CAD or something than lots of memory is a big help,"
I remember doing massive graphics/CAD on a 400MHz Pentium 2 with 256MB of PC-133 back in high school. Stuff today looks almost THE EXACT SAME BUT SEEMS TO RUN MUCH SLOWER.
Because the programmers have NO CLUE on how to optimize their code and make it streamlined.
Whilst I agree with you that the advent of fast CPUs and oodles of memory has made programmers really lazy, I'm thinking of the kind of graphics that are 90 megapixel HDR panoramas - that kind of thing needs half a gig just for the data of a single layer image.
especially when one considers the additional, needless RAM overhead this requires.
Can you clarify this? This is news to me, at least.
64 bit means you have 64 bit pointers, so instructions are longer to accommodate them. This means the code takes up more RAM, more memory bandwidth and more cache.
I'm sure it's just a GCC option. I suspect the problem is code that incorrectly assumes sizeof(long)==sizeof(void*).
ISTR, C requires that a long be big enough to contain a pointer doesn't it? (of course, that doesn't mean that a long can't be bigger than a pointer, but you should be able to stick a pointer in a long and then get it back again without trashing it in the process).
Unfortunately 2 GBs *ain't* enough for anybody
Umm... why? If you're dealing with massive graphics / CAD or something than lots of memory is a big help, but the vast vast majority of computer users aren't doing this sort of stuff. Your word processor and web browser shouldn't need over 2GB of RAM, especially since most people don't even seem to run multiple apps concurrently.
This will be another nail in the 32bit coffin.
Nothing really wrong with 32 bit if you don't have oodles of RAM - if you've only got a couple of gig of RAM, the only real advantage of 64 bit is that it has a few extra registers which marginally speed up stuff like context switching. Conversely, 64 bit code is bigger than 32 bit code, so you need more RAM, memory bandwidth and cache...
This is exactly why businesses don't use Linux.
They don't? Every company I've worked for has used Linux in some (fairly major) capacity - one of them used Linux exclusively and I currently run a company that uses Linux exclusively.
Real service calls aside, it is nice to have a software maker that is ultimately responsible for the product, as opposed to Linux where at best you can get a forum post on whatever software is broken.
If you think the vendor is "ultimately responsible" then you clearly didn't bother to read the EULAs on the commercial software you're using, which all pretty much universally disclaim responsibility for anything that goes wrong (as far as the law allows them to).
As for support, if you want commercial support for Linux then there are plenty of companies willing to sell it to you, so your argument seems bunk.
With consultants, Windows is FAR cheaper than finding someone who knows Linux in a production setting.
My experience contradicts this.
Very few people actually have worked on Linux in a true business production environment, and that expertise does not come cheap.
Most of the _clueful_ IT people I've dealt with (and some of the clueless ones) have got a reasonable amount of Linux experience.
You also have to realize that Sony is, like other large multinational corporations, made up of a bunch of smaller companies doing things like pressing DVDs, manufacturing consumer electronics, and making movies. These smaller divisions probably aren't aware of each others activities to a very large extent. So anthropomorphizing Sony or any large corporation is pointless, and it is silly to assign a personality to any very large corporation, whether it be Sony, IBM, or even Microsoft.
But there is some amusement value to be had when Sony/BMG bangs on about how ripping CDs to MP3 so you can listen to them on your MP3 player is bad, wrong and illegal whilst Sony is selling MP3 players that require you to do exactly that... (this dates from before the days when you could legally buy MP3s of much).
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony_releases_new_stupid_piece_of.
The industry will be satisfied when they gain the ability to monitor everyone's net connection for signs of "illicit filesharing activity." If you think I'm joking, watch the kind of legislation the entertainment lobbies put their weight behind.
The current proposals in the UK (which the government seem to be firmly standing behind) is to chop someone's internet connection after receiving 3 accusations of copyright infringement. No courts involved.
Still, it shouldn't surprise me - presumption of guilt seems to be the foundation for most of the recent laws.
But they CAN create a restriction mechanism that the network can use to send signals to your device saying "hey, don't fucking do that."
They can, but that would be a pretty stupid design since there's no way for the network to guarantee my device will honour the signal, because it is my device and I can make it do whatever the hell I like. It's about as sensible as creating a firewall that politely asks an attacking botnet to please stop.