Maybe they won't bundle it right now, but do you not think this is a possibility long term? I see this as the only reason why they are making an anti-virus program. Otherwise, why try to break into a field in which there is already extensive competition (something Microsoft hates) and in which they don't exactly have the greatest reputation?
I believe most current SCO customers are looking for alternatives, as we saw last week when it was announced that McDonalds was considering moving to SUSE Linux for their German division (probably soon to be followed by other divisions as well). Companies don't want to be stuck with an unsupported OS on crucial systems, and it doesn't take a business analyst to conclude that SCO will not be around much longer.
As for resellers, I've seen interviews with SCO resellers in which they say they haven't really sold any SCO products for years and don't count on SCO for any significant portion of their income. I think this says a lot about SCO's prospects for any new customers.
And with any luck, IBM can take down all of Canopy instead of just the burned out shell of SCO. I'm sure Canopy designed the whole scenario so they can loot SCO's assets and leave nothing behind when IBM comes to collect on the countersuits. If Canopy involvement in the whole bogus lawsuit/stock pumping scheme can be proven, these bunch of scumbags might be put out of business for good.
Its a question of how much redundancy you need in a personal file server. How many people make regular offsite backups of personal data? Unless its really important, I'd say nobody does. Most people are willing to assume the risk of the extremely unlikely possibility of 2 drives failing at the exact same moment. If this is a concern for you, back up onto external media.
This is why I've always been against the idea of expensive remotes. Dropping a $20 universal remote, or spilling beer on it, is not a big deal. But the possibility ruining a $300 remote is more than I would want to risk. For the same reason, I will not own an expensive cell phone even though I'm usually pretty careful with them.
Remember this is the company that sued Al Franken over the title of his book, and got laughed out of court. They even considered suing one of their own subsidiaries, Fox Entertainment, because the Simpsons writers made fun of Fox News in an episode. Frivolous lawsuits are very much a part of News Corp.
That's the way settlements are supposed to work, but if an individual who has little legal knowledge and no attorney involved is presented with a lawsuit and told to sign these papers or face crippling legal bills, they might very well sign something that causes them to admit guilt, pay a bunch of money, hand over their first born, etc. An attorney would advise against this and make sure the settlement is confidential and admits nothing, but many people are not aware of this.
Uninformed customers are the reason the electronics industry as a whole has become the way it is, with products having a lot of pretty LEDs and flashy features instead of quality materials. People buy based on flash, and since companies make money from flashy products, that is what they will produce. This makes it hard for those of us who buy based on quality to find anything that meets our standards. Ultimately, the people end up getting what they want.
In both cases, the real problem is partial deregulation. The California energy companies were bankrupted because their wholesale providers were able to raise rates, but they were not then able to raise consumer rates. Telecom was partially deregulated, but there are still lots of regulatory hurdles and tariffs for anyone wanting to provide telecom services. The main reason VOIP is becoming so popular is because it has not (yet) been classified as a telecom service for regulatory purposes. If it does, expect to see this technology stagnate as well. The idea of providers beeing required to lease out their network capacity to competitors is not a realistic idea in the long term.
Forwarding your spam from one account to another is probably not the best way to test spam filters, since the filters look at the source and headers from the sender to help determine what is spam. If the messages were sent in bulk, with the mail server receiving several similar messages in a short period of time, they are much more likely to be tagged as spam than if the same message was sent once. The messages that were caught in the filter during your test were probably sufficiently 'spammy' to be tagged as spam regardless of the sender.
Wow. SCO is so lucky that the stock market is closed today. With 2 bad news items hitting at once (this and the McDonalds story), the effect on their share price would be devastating. Still, Monday will not be a good trading day for them.
I don't know why this is considered newsworthy. The sole purpose of commercial radio is to push products. Everything is a commercial. Morning radio shows are nothing but commercials. Ever notice the show hosts always mention some product they supposedly love and then put in a small plug for it. Do you think they're not getting paid to do that? Between the in-show commercials, the official commercials, and the songs which are really just commercials for an album, there's not much else played on the radio. Now that we have established that any sound you hear on the radio is some form of a commercial, what's the difference if it is for a car dealer or a new album?
I think McDonalds is making the switch because they realize that SCO will almost certainly be out of business within 2 years, and they would not want to be stuck with unsupported software on crucial systems. At this point, it would be a prudent business decision for any SCO customer to look for alternatives, not just to be 'anti-SCO', but for their own good. Of course, a company that has a habit of suing its own customers is not likely to make someone want to keep doing business with them anyway.
The problem is that there is no way to make sure that companies that oursource actually pass those savings on to customers in the form of cheaper goods, or instead just give their ceos larger bonuses.
Sure there is. Its called competition. When a company finds a way to reduce costs, their first urge probably isn't to lower prices. But when a competitor who wants some of their market share sees that they can make money while selling the same thing cheaper, that's what they will do. The first company will then lower prices or watch the new competitor eat their lunch. That's the beauty of capitalism.
They're trying to keep you from noticing that it is the same Hamas that is universally associated with terrorism. Anyone who does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization is truly distorting the definition of the word.
I understand why people don't want to sign contracts, and honestly I don't either, but you generally get ripped off when you DON'T sign one. The cost of a new cell phone is basically nothing with a 2 year contract, and it is about $300 without one. That right there is as much as the contract cancellation fee. Then there's the higher monthly fee that you pay without a contract since you won't have access to the 'preferred plans'. Some people feel they will get better service without a contract since you could just switch providers, but then there's the new number issue or the hassle of getting it ported to a new carrier. Cell phone companies operate kind of like banks: screw the customer because its hard for them to leave.
This is not entirely true, regarding the legal means to cancel a contract. If a company misrepresented their service in a major way, the customer could still have an out even if they signed a cleverly worded contract. Under consumer protection and truth in advertising laws, a company could face legal action if they 'grossly misrepresented' their products and services. If someone has copies of company ads promising 'nationwide free and clear service' and all they actually got was dropped calls and roaming fees out the ass, that would be deceptive advertising at the very least. In this situation, the burden of proof for the consumer would be much higher and would likely be rewarding only in a class action situation. But you are correct in saying that companies generally prefer to eat a few hundred dollars in cancellation fees rather than face the bad press that would come along with a class action suit. Then again, this didn't stop Blockbuster from being taken to court over their deceptive late fee practices.
Wow, that's pretty amusing. Of course, Mr Storrie ended up better off as a result of this, since the company apparently offered him a 'confidential compensation package'. I'm surprised a call center rep would even have the ability to add arbitrary charges to a customer's bill.
Re:Maybe we shouldn't be so quick to judge the ISP
on
Testing ISP Censorship
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· Score: 1
The government has a responsibility to allow you to speak freely, as stated in the first amendment to the constitution, unless your speech will clearly cause harm to others. An ISP, or any company or individual, does not have this responsibility.
If you come into my living room and start making a speech praising socialism, I am well within my rights to kick you out. If you do the same thing on the town square, it is protected speech and it would be censorship of the illegal variety if you were ordered to stop.
This is the difference between government censorship and private censorship. My preventing you from making a speech in my living room does not suppress your ideas; you are free to make the speech in someone else's living room if they let you. When the government prevents you from speaking, you have no other choice, unless you want to find a new country to live in.
This would be cause for a lawsuit for libel, slander, defamation of character, or something along those lines. Regardless of ISP policies, it is illegal to conduct a smear campaign against someone by spreading untrue information to the public.
When the EV1 deal was first announced, an SCO exec described the price tag being in the 7 figures. I guess that includes the decimal numbers ($11,000.00).
Slashdot Mirror
What sound does a firewall make when someone clicks on a goatse link?
Maybe they won't bundle it right now, but do you not think this is a possibility long term? I see this as the only reason why they are making an anti-virus program. Otherwise, why try to break into a field in which there is already extensive competition (something Microsoft hates) and in which they don't exactly have the greatest reputation?
I believe most current SCO customers are looking for alternatives, as we saw last week when it was announced that McDonalds was considering moving to SUSE Linux for their German division (probably soon to be followed by other divisions as well). Companies don't want to be stuck with an unsupported OS on crucial systems, and it doesn't take a business analyst to conclude that SCO will not be around much longer.
As for resellers, I've seen interviews with SCO resellers in which they say they haven't really sold any SCO products for years and don't count on SCO for any significant portion of their income. I think this says a lot about SCO's prospects for any new customers.
And with any luck, IBM can take down all of Canopy instead of just the burned out shell of SCO. I'm sure Canopy designed the whole scenario so they can loot SCO's assets and leave nothing behind when IBM comes to collect on the countersuits. If Canopy involvement in the whole bogus lawsuit/stock pumping scheme can be proven, these bunch of scumbags might be put out of business for good.
Its a question of how much redundancy you need in a personal file server. How many people make regular offsite backups of personal data? Unless its really important, I'd say nobody does. Most people are willing to assume the risk of the extremely unlikely possibility of 2 drives failing at the exact same moment. If this is a concern for you, back up onto external media.
This is why I've always been against the idea of expensive remotes. Dropping a $20 universal remote, or spilling beer on it, is not a big deal. But the possibility ruining a $300 remote is more than I would want to risk. For the same reason, I will not own an expensive cell phone even though I'm usually pretty careful with them.
Remember this is the company that sued Al Franken over the title of his book, and got laughed out of court. They even considered suing one of their own subsidiaries, Fox Entertainment, because the Simpsons writers made fun of Fox News in an episode. Frivolous lawsuits are very much a part of News Corp.
That's the way settlements are supposed to work, but if an individual who has little legal knowledge and no attorney involved is presented with a lawsuit and told to sign these papers or face crippling legal bills, they might very well sign something that causes them to admit guilt, pay a bunch of money, hand over their first born, etc. An attorney would advise against this and make sure the settlement is confidential and admits nothing, but many people are not aware of this.
Uninformed customers are the reason the electronics industry as a whole has become the way it is, with products having a lot of pretty LEDs and flashy features instead of quality materials. People buy based on flash, and since companies make money from flashy products, that is what they will produce. This makes it hard for those of us who buy based on quality to find anything that meets our standards. Ultimately, the people end up getting what they want.
In both cases, the real problem is partial deregulation. The California energy companies were bankrupted because their wholesale providers were able to raise rates, but they were not then able to raise consumer rates. Telecom was partially deregulated, but there are still lots of regulatory hurdles and tariffs for anyone wanting to provide telecom services. The main reason VOIP is becoming so popular is because it has not (yet) been classified as a telecom service for regulatory purposes. If it does, expect to see this technology stagnate as well. The idea of providers beeing required to lease out their network capacity to competitors is not a realistic idea in the long term.
This is slashdot, where you always get bonus points for pointing out potential privacy abuses, no matter how remote the possibility is.
Forwarding your spam from one account to another is probably not the best way to test spam filters, since the filters look at the source and headers from the sender to help determine what is spam. If the messages were sent in bulk, with the mail server receiving several similar messages in a short period of time, they are much more likely to be tagged as spam than if the same message was sent once. The messages that were caught in the filter during your test were probably sufficiently 'spammy' to be tagged as spam regardless of the sender.
Wow. SCO is so lucky that the stock market is closed today. With 2 bad news items hitting at once (this and the McDonalds story), the effect on their share price would be devastating. Still, Monday will not be a good trading day for them.
I don't know why this is considered newsworthy. The sole purpose of commercial radio is to push products. Everything is a commercial. Morning radio shows are nothing but commercials. Ever notice the show hosts always mention some product they supposedly love and then put in a small plug for it. Do you think they're not getting paid to do that? Between the in-show commercials, the official commercials, and the songs which are really just commercials for an album, there's not much else played on the radio. Now that we have established that any sound you hear on the radio is some form of a commercial, what's the difference if it is for a car dealer or a new album?
I think McDonalds is making the switch because they realize that SCO will almost certainly be out of business within 2 years, and they would not want to be stuck with unsupported software on crucial systems. At this point, it would be a prudent business decision for any SCO customer to look for alternatives, not just to be 'anti-SCO', but for their own good. Of course, a company that has a habit of suing its own customers is not likely to make someone want to keep doing business with them anyway.
Maybe he thought he would get rich from a lawsuit. Hey why not, McDonalds has been sued by so many other people.
The problem is that there is no way to make sure that companies that oursource actually pass those savings on to customers in the form of cheaper goods, or instead just give their ceos larger bonuses.
Sure there is. Its called competition. When a company finds a way to reduce costs, their first urge probably isn't to lower prices. But when a competitor who wants some of their market share sees that they can make money while selling the same thing cheaper, that's what they will do. The first company will then lower prices or watch the new competitor eat their lunch. That's the beauty of capitalism.
They're trying to keep you from noticing that it is the same Hamas that is universally associated with terrorism. Anyone who does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization is truly distorting the definition of the word.
I understand why people don't want to sign contracts, and honestly I don't either, but you generally get ripped off when you DON'T sign one. The cost of a new cell phone is basically nothing with a 2 year contract, and it is about $300 without one. That right there is as much as the contract cancellation fee. Then there's the higher monthly fee that you pay without a contract since you won't have access to the 'preferred plans'. Some people feel they will get better service without a contract since you could just switch providers, but then there's the new number issue or the hassle of getting it ported to a new carrier. Cell phone companies operate kind of like banks: screw the customer because its hard for them to leave.
This is not entirely true, regarding the legal means to cancel a contract. If a company misrepresented their service in a major way, the customer could still have an out even if they signed a cleverly worded contract. Under consumer protection and truth in advertising laws, a company could face legal action if they 'grossly misrepresented' their products and services. If someone has copies of company ads promising 'nationwide free and clear service' and all they actually got was dropped calls and roaming fees out the ass, that would be deceptive advertising at the very least. In this situation, the burden of proof for the consumer would be much higher and would likely be rewarding only in a class action situation. But you are correct in saying that companies generally prefer to eat a few hundred dollars in cancellation fees rather than face the bad press that would come along with a class action suit. Then again, this didn't stop Blockbuster from being taken to court over their deceptive late fee practices.
Wow, that's pretty amusing. Of course, Mr Storrie ended up better off as a result of this, since the company apparently offered him a 'confidential compensation package'. I'm surprised a call center rep would even have the ability to add arbitrary charges to a customer's bill.
The government has a responsibility to allow you to speak freely, as stated in the first amendment to the constitution, unless your speech will clearly cause harm to others. An ISP, or any company or individual, does not have this responsibility.
If you come into my living room and start making a speech praising socialism, I am well within my rights to kick you out. If you do the same thing on the town square, it is protected speech and it would be censorship of the illegal variety if you were ordered to stop.
This is the difference between government censorship and private censorship. My preventing you from making a speech in my living room does not suppress your ideas; you are free to make the speech in someone else's living room if they let you. When the government prevents you from speaking, you have no other choice, unless you want to find a new country to live in.
This would be cause for a lawsuit for libel, slander, defamation of character, or something along those lines. Regardless of ISP policies, it is illegal to conduct a smear campaign against someone by spreading untrue information to the public.
When the EV1 deal was first announced, an SCO exec described the price tag being in the 7 figures. I guess that includes the decimal numbers ($11,000.00).
It would be hard to do this without also picking up at least some of SCO's liability for the IBM countersuits.