However, it seems to me that we are now in a position where Microsoft gets up and states "We support open standards! Look, our Office product uses XML!" but what they don't say is "Fortunately, some of those standards are written in such a way that we can genuinely support them without actually helping interoperability one little bit".
Conspiracy theories aside, it seems to me that the current state of affairs means that there doesn't need to be a big Microsoft conspiracy in order to maintain a monopoly position. They *could* (and this was the point of my original post), but why bother?
If something else (such as Linux) does start making big inroads on the desktop, I'd expect Microsoft to have something in mind. Thing is, this doesn't have to be something which depends on them holding a monopoly. It could just be licensing something which is nearly-essential to computers in 2010. It could be patents. It could even be rewriting WINE in-house and selling it as a commercial product.
If Microsoft changed the MSIL format, it would wreak havoc on all.NET applications
< hat type="tinfoil" > If Microsoft have already "hidden" parts of the API which identify their implementation of.NET & ensure that Windows apps run in Microsoft's.NET have access to something - anything - which Mono doesn't (and perhaps can't without DMCA issues) - they don't need to make changes. They've already got a pseudo-compatible API which Mono can re-implement, and if Mono's version doesn't work very well with apps, they can point the finger at Mono. </hat >
This is very much conspiracy-don't trust MS-who knows if it's true stuff. But it has already happened once with Windows 3.1 and DOS.
Many places (think Autozone for one) only ever had dumb terminals - the move is from some other Unix, which is where Linux is really clearing up. My employer did exactly this - it was hell for the first 6 months or so but now we get virus alerts and about 70-80% of our systems are totally immune.
Some people are talking about moving from Windows on the desktop because of cost. This isn't the only issue, however. The plethora of viruses and the difficulty in providing a well locked-down system are, IMHO, equally important.
However, this is definitely something he should have been aware of previously if he is in fact the all-knowing, all-seeing lobbyist that people claim he is.
He isn't aware for a simple reason: Jack Valenti lives in a different world to you and me. He lives in a different world to the MIT student.
In his world, you hand over real, hard cash for everything. Free software? What's that? Why on earth would people work to create software then give it away? Everything is paid for, everything is commercial. And everything is generated by companies who, if necessary, work together to make sure their products all work together. But they sure as heck don't reveal how they got it to work with the general public - then anyone could get in on the act! It's unthinkable that a person would even bother trying to work it out for themselves and then tell the world - after all, nobody does that kind of thing.
In his world, commercially produced DVD players (be it "real" DVD players or computer programs) are all that anyone will ever want. Nobody will want a DVD player for Linux because Linux doesn't exist.
As Linux becomes more mainstream, especially on the desktop, it's likely that commercial software to do things like play DVDs will pop into existence. But until then (and probably after then), the free software community will work it out for themselves. Mr. Valenti doesn't account for this simply because in his world, the free software community doesn't exist.
Epson Stylus C64/C84/R200/R300/R800 - all have one cartridge per colour.
I've used many epson printers and IME it takes several weeks/months before they dry out.
The chip is only for the printer to keep track of how much ink is left in the cartridge - it doesn't identify the cartridge as being genuine. The chip may not keep an accurate record of how much ink is left but that's a separate matter.
The RIAA exists to protect the interests of the record labels it represents. On a small scale, it's quite understandable that they'd want to minimise piracy - after all, as far as they're concerned, a downloaded track is one which wasn't bought in a store.
However, I'm taking a long-term view here. I postulate that the RIAA doesn't want people to download MP3s - legal or otherwise - because they are concerned that the labels they represent cannot maintain a business in an economy where the distribution and marketing inherent in the current music business is rendered obsolete by technology.
Of course, it may be the case that the RIAA isn't acting out of fear at all - but I think it would be reasonable to consider it as a possibility.
Technically you're quite correct. But what annoys me (and, I suspect, many Slashdotters) is the following:
1. Mass-produced CDs have a unit cost of a couple of pence/cents. 2. Many musicians never get signed to a major label, and thus never get any of their music in stores or on the radio. 3. The musicians who are signed to a major label are sidelined by whatever the label thinks will sell - eg. Britney Spears. 4. The label charges the artist for the privilege of advertising & distribution. So much so that in order to make $1,000,000 the artist may have to pay various suits $900,000. 5. The Internet eliminates parts 2-4 - if you want to ensure everything's fair, a bunch of artists could easily set up some sort of a "co-operative" to market their songs over the web, charging a nominal fee for the song and giving most of it for the artist, only keeping a relatively small amount back for bandwidth and system maintenance. The only reason this hasn't happened more is the dot-com boom has taught us that such things are very difficult to market successfully. 6. The RIAA is well aware of point 5. If it actually takes off, their entire business model evaporates. 7. The RIAA is therefore doing everything in their power to prevent this from happening. Brainwashing people that "MP3s are Evil!" is vital to this.
Quite right. But if you read the article, you'll understand that what is being taught is basically a simple "MP3s are Evil!" mantra.
No mention is made of legal MP3s, fair use doctrine or indeed any part of copyright law which doesn't agree with the RIAA.
Re:Simply an establishment of precedent
on
Update on Playfair
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Consumer: Calls the Feds/(insert your country's law enforcement here). Nothing happens (but maybe the feds keep an eye on that consumer).
Apple: Calls the lawyers. Who send your ISP a C&D order. And your ISP has better things to spend money on than lawyers, so complies.
RIAA/MPAA: Think they *are* the Feds,
Apple already provides a means to permit legal licensees of songs from iTunes to play on non Apple authorized hardware via CD burning
No they haven't. You need Apple authorised (hard|soft)ware to burn it to CD in the first place.
Still a heckuva distributed database. After all, I very much doubt each node holds a complete copy of the database: with 2x80GB hard disks and 4 billion pages that would give only 40 bytes per record, with no space for operating system or software.
Because I object to being forced to pay 35+ for an ID card I don't particularly want.
Because it will cost a fortune to implement all the IT infrastructure, which I'll pay for out of my taxes.
Because I'd rather my taxes were spent on something useful at a grass-roots level. Like policemen to reduce crime. Like schools to educate children. Like universities so my kids in years to come aren't forced to choose the quality of education they receive purely on the basis of how much debt they're prepared to take on.
I'm surprised they're not going the PanIP route and going after small companies, settling for miniscule amounts from a large number of defendants. Or would that stragegy backfire?
Nope, they just haven't got the time. The patent expires before long - better to target a few companies with deep pockets and claim fees for the past 10 years than send your lawyers all over the place targetting tiny comanies and running out of time before you've made any real money.
This is something I wasn't aware of and certainly acts as damage limitation. But AFAICT it doesn't seem to stop the plaintiff serving a cease & desist order, or offering to license the technology for juuuuust less than it would cost major software vendors to invent something entirely different and implement support across every relevant part of their product range.
I am an IT professional who works mainly with Linux. How you migrate to Linux is as follows:
1. Accept that it won't be a 100% migration. At least not at first. 2. Write down every application your business uses. 3. Investigate Linux equivalents. This is the difficult bit. Commonplace stuff like Office has equivalents. Specialised business software is less likely to have equivalents; however Freshmeat, Sourceforge, Google & Google Groups can help here. 4. Some apps won't have a direct alternative. As a businessman, you then have four choices:
- Write an alternative or pay someone to write one.
- Run it through Citrix (only a couple of servers to keep patched and virus-free rather than many desktops)
- Identify who in the company needs to use the app(s) and don't migrate them. We do this at work and it can be made to work OK.
- Give up & stick with Windows.
It may be that for your business a migration to Linux makes no sense. Despite what a lot of Slashdotters will tell you, this is perfectly all right! You may depend on many Windows apps, you may not have the budget to pay for a whole app to be written, it may not run very well on Citrix.
Ultimately, the best system is what does the job, and that might mean you have to accept a treadmill of patches, viruses and enforced upgrades. So be it. No system is 100% perfect.
1. SCO. 2. Windows Media Center. 3. Patented/legally "protected" DTD's in Office's XML formats. 4. Palladium/hardware DRM and Microsoft patents. 5. Patents and licensing of VFAT.
I reckon the more likely scenario is Microsoft accepts it no longer has a monopoly in software per se, but instead intends to have patents in virtually every form of technology it can think of and thus charges licensing fees for every operating system, motherboard and eventually DVD player and digital camera out there.
It's really not that difficult for 90% of users. For sysadmins and users who actually make use of Office's more obscure features, migration is somewhat harder.
But the media has a wonderful way of conditioning people into believing that the tiniest change ("That icon's a slightly different colour! Help! I'm lost!") to a computer system turns it from a system they knew quite well into this mystifying box which does "magic things".
A well-designed, locked down KDE/Gnome desktop is as easy to use as a Windows one and a whole heap more reliable because it's less susceptible to being messed around. The designing and locking down is your IT department's problem - not yours.
Slashdot Mirror
What if you buy 1x the normal amount of fertilizer someone may require, ten times from ten different suppliers?
All of which is quite true.
However, it seems to me that we are now in a position where Microsoft gets up and states "We support open standards! Look, our Office product uses XML!" but what they don't say is "Fortunately, some of those standards are written in such a way that we can genuinely support them without actually helping interoperability one little bit".
Conspiracy theories aside, it seems to me that the current state of affairs means that there doesn't need to be a big Microsoft conspiracy in order to maintain a monopoly position. They *could* (and this was the point of my original post), but why bother?
If something else (such as Linux) does start making big inroads on the desktop, I'd expect Microsoft to have something in mind. Thing is, this doesn't have to be something which depends on them holding a monopoly. It could just be licensing something which is nearly-essential to computers in 2010. It could be patents. It could even be rewriting WINE in-house and selling it as a commercial product.
The biggest irony is that many of these people have never actually tried calling the number.
If they did, Linux would be taken a lot more seriously at a high level within a few months.
If Microsoft changed the MSIL format, it would wreak havoc on all .NET applications
.NET & ensure that Windows apps run in Microsoft's .NET have access to something - anything - which Mono doesn't (and perhaps can't without DMCA issues) - they don't need to make changes. They've already got a pseudo-compatible API which Mono can re-implement, and if Mono's version doesn't work very well with apps, they can point the finger at Mono. /hat >
< hat type="tinfoil" >
If Microsoft have already "hidden" parts of the API which identify their implementation of
<
This is very much conspiracy-don't trust MS-who knows if it's true stuff. But it has already happened once with Windows 3.1 and DOS.
Bye-bye, karma.
What would be the new term? "WMD"?
"Microsoft are working to maintain their monopoly".
In other news:
"The sky is blue, and grass is green" claims top scientist.
"Water is wet" according to dolphins.
"Jimicus' Corollary: Or, in the case of smaller computers, never trust a computer which cannot lift you."
Moving to Linux is not "free". Nothing is "free".
Quite true. If you're moving from Windows.
Many places (think Autozone for one) only ever had dumb terminals - the move is from some other Unix, which is where Linux is really clearing up. My employer did exactly this - it was hell for the first 6 months or so but now we get virus alerts and about 70-80% of our systems are totally immune.
Some people are talking about moving from Windows on the desktop because of cost. This isn't the only issue, however. The plethora of viruses and the difficulty in providing a well locked-down system are, IMHO, equally important.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
as long as OSS developers and distro providers are providing a superior alternative, users can and will switch.
Right. Just like they do with Apple.
(Karma be damned!)
However, this is definitely something he should have been aware of previously if he is in fact the all-knowing, all-seeing lobbyist that people claim he is.
He isn't aware for a simple reason: Jack Valenti lives in a different world to you and me. He lives in a different world to the MIT student.
In his world, you hand over real, hard cash for everything. Free software? What's that? Why on earth would people work to create software then give it away? Everything is paid for, everything is commercial. And everything is generated by companies who, if necessary, work together to make sure their products all work together. But they sure as heck don't reveal how they got it to work with the general public - then anyone could get in on the act! It's unthinkable that a person would even bother trying to work it out for themselves and then tell the world - after all, nobody does that kind of thing.
In his world, commercially produced DVD players (be it "real" DVD players or computer programs) are all that anyone will ever want. Nobody will want a DVD player for Linux because Linux doesn't exist.
As Linux becomes more mainstream, especially on the desktop, it's likely that commercial software to do things like play DVDs will pop into existence. But until then (and probably after then), the free software community will work it out for themselves. Mr. Valenti doesn't account for this simply because in his world, the free software community doesn't exist.
Are you trolling or just ill-informed?
Epson Stylus C64/C84/R200/R300/R800 - all have one cartridge per colour.
I've used many epson printers and IME it takes several weeks/months before they dry out.
The chip is only for the printer to keep track of how much ink is left in the cartridge - it doesn't identify the cartridge as being genuine. The chip may not keep an accurate record of how much ink is left but that's a separate matter.
Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither.
Fortunately, they also get neither.
Actually, I do.
Let me explain why I believe this.
The RIAA exists to protect the interests of the record labels it represents. On a small scale, it's quite understandable that they'd want to minimise piracy - after all, as far as they're concerned, a downloaded track is one which wasn't bought in a store.
However, I'm taking a long-term view here. I postulate that the RIAA doesn't want people to download MP3s - legal or otherwise - because they are concerned that the labels they represent cannot maintain a business in an economy where the distribution and marketing inherent in the current music business is rendered obsolete by technology.
Of course, it may be the case that the RIAA isn't acting out of fear at all - but I think it would be reasonable to consider it as a possibility.
Technically you're quite correct. But what annoys me (and, I suspect, many Slashdotters) is the following:
1. Mass-produced CDs have a unit cost of a couple of pence/cents.
2. Many musicians never get signed to a major label, and thus never get any of their music in stores or on the radio.
3. The musicians who are signed to a major label are sidelined by whatever the label thinks will sell - eg. Britney Spears.
4. The label charges the artist for the privilege of advertising & distribution. So much so that in order to make $1,000,000 the artist may have to pay various suits $900,000.
5. The Internet eliminates parts 2-4 - if you want to ensure everything's fair, a bunch of artists could easily set up some sort of a "co-operative" to market their songs over the web, charging a nominal fee for the song and giving most of it for the artist, only keeping a relatively small amount back for bandwidth and system maintenance. The only reason this hasn't happened more is the dot-com boom has taught us that such things are very difficult to market successfully.
6. The RIAA is well aware of point 5. If it actually takes off, their entire business model evaporates.
7. The RIAA is therefore doing everything in their power to prevent this from happening. Brainwashing people that "MP3s are Evil!" is vital to this.
Quite right. But if you read the article, you'll understand that what is being taught is basically a simple "MP3s are Evil!" mantra.
No mention is made of legal MP3s, fair use doctrine or indeed any part of copyright law which doesn't agree with the RIAA.
The Consumer: Calls the Feds/(insert your country's law enforcement here). Nothing happens (but maybe the feds keep an eye on that consumer). Apple: Calls the lawyers. Who send your ISP a C&D order. And your ISP has better things to spend money on than lawyers, so complies. RIAA/MPAA: Think they *are* the Feds,
Apple already provides a means to permit legal licensees of songs from iTunes to play on non Apple authorized hardware via CD burning No they haven't. You need Apple authorised (hard|soft)ware to burn it to CD in the first place.
Still a heckuva distributed database. After all, I very much doubt each node holds a complete copy of the database: with 2x80GB hard disks and 4 billion pages that would give only 40 bytes per record, with no space for operating system or software.
That'll be a no, then.
So I ask the question, why not?
Because I object to being forced to pay 35+ for an ID card I don't particularly want.
Because it will cost a fortune to implement all the IT infrastructure, which I'll pay for out of my taxes.
Because I'd rather my taxes were spent on something useful at a grass-roots level. Like policemen to reduce crime. Like schools to educate children. Like universities so my kids in years to come aren't forced to choose the quality of education they receive purely on the basis of how much debt they're prepared to take on.
I'm surprised they're not going the PanIP route and going after small companies, settling for miniscule amounts from a large number of defendants. Or would that stragegy backfire?
Nope, they just haven't got the time. The patent expires before long - better to target a few companies with deep pockets and claim fees for the past 10 years than send your lawyers all over the place targetting tiny comanies and running out of time before you've made any real money.
This is something I wasn't aware of and certainly acts as damage limitation. But AFAICT it doesn't seem to stop the plaintiff serving a cease & desist order, or offering to license the technology for juuuuust less than it would cost major software vendors to invent something entirely different and implement support across every relevant part of their product range.
OK, fair enough.
I am an IT professional who works mainly with Linux. How you migrate to Linux is as follows:
1. Accept that it won't be a 100% migration. At least not at first.
2. Write down every application your business uses.
3. Investigate Linux equivalents. This is the difficult bit. Commonplace stuff like Office has equivalents. Specialised business software is less likely to have equivalents; however Freshmeat, Sourceforge, Google & Google Groups can help here.
4. Some apps won't have a direct alternative. As a businessman, you then have four choices:
- Write an alternative or pay someone to write one.
- Run it through Citrix (only a couple of servers to keep patched and virus-free rather than many desktops)
- Identify who in the company needs to use the app(s) and don't migrate them. We do this at work and it can be made to work OK.
- Give up & stick with Windows.
It may be that for your business a migration to Linux makes no sense. Despite what a lot of Slashdotters will tell you, this is perfectly all right! You may depend on many Windows apps, you may not have the budget to pay for a whole app to be written, it may not run very well on Citrix.
Ultimately, the best system is what does the job, and that might mean you have to accept a treadmill of patches, viruses and enforced upgrades. So be it. No system is 100% perfect.
I think you are. Let me explain why.
1. SCO.
2. Windows Media Center.
3. Patented/legally "protected" DTD's in Office's XML formats.
4. Palladium/hardware DRM and Microsoft patents.
5. Patents and licensing of VFAT.
I reckon the more likely scenario is Microsoft accepts it no longer has a monopoly in software per se, but instead intends to have patents in virtually every form of technology it can think of and thus charges licensing fees for every operating system, motherboard and eventually DVD player and digital camera out there.
It's really not that difficult for 90% of users. For sysadmins and users who actually make use of Office's more obscure features, migration is somewhat harder.
But the media has a wonderful way of conditioning people into believing that the tiniest change ("That icon's a slightly different colour! Help! I'm lost!") to a computer system turns it from a system they knew quite well into this mystifying box which does "magic things".
A well-designed, locked down KDE/Gnome desktop is as easy to use as a Windows one and a whole heap more reliable because it's less susceptible to being messed around. The designing and locking down is your IT department's problem - not yours.