having to defend your work is definately the solution. That way you can still cheat, but backing it up is actually harder than if you didn't cheat in the first place (learning how the work was done by heart is a lot harder if you didn't do it =P )
Problem is, even in high end universities, professors and TAs tend to be lazy-ish and prefer to do stuff such as having a batch script grade all the assignments in one go. And you'd have to hire more people to have it done at a greater scale (for all courses, etc), and of course universities don't want that, even at the current cost of tuition.
In the end, it would solve so many problems...not only with school, but with our society as a whole... those cheaters who get away with it (and there's a LOT of them...) can really mess things up down the line.
Nice freudian slip (start early, leave late, is what you said).
8 to 5, 40 hours days... I had to do that once. From my experience, less than 5% (and I'm being generous, though keep in mind thats for software development, millage may vary in other fields) of people can sit in front of a computer that long and be productive... When I worked for a company who did that, projects were easily 100-200% late when compared to the initial estimates (and the estimates were VERY conservative). Inefficient as all hell. 30 people working, and honestly, with 4 people on a regular, more permissive schedule could have done as much work in the same amount of days. It was totally rediculous. Now, I refuse those hours systematically.
Now I do 5 days a week, but 35 hours (so 9 to 5 with 1 hour lunch, more typical stuff), and I'm allowed to come in and leave whenever I want (as long as it totals 35 hours + lunch), and projects really purr along, in comparison. Crazy what 1 hour a day can do.
Telecommuting is great, IF most of your employee base has a high level of experience and is responsible. In this day and age, thats the minority though... I've worked for a small-ish company who did it, but they lucked out big time on the quality of their employees. As for 4 day weekends...considering fridays don't even count as it is for a lot of people because its the "last day of the week", when you cut it to four, its even worse. Again, worked for a company who did that...nothing was getting done. It can work, but you need one hell of a nice corporate culture and good employees to do it. Not for everyone, definately.
And for doing 4 days but more hours each days to compensate...again, very, very few people can be efficient at their job for more than like 6 hours, nevermind 9-10.
These are things that work well in a small company of "special" people who can take it...but people who can take it are quite rare...even though many would pretend otherwise and lie to themselves about their own limits.
Its not a matter of can or cannot be cracked, its a matter of how available (and easy to use) the crack is from trustworthy source within how long of release. Having a crack available (for a leaked version) 3 days before release from shady web sites, as opposed to 2 weeks prior everywhere on the web, makes a significant difference. A difference that MAY be more significant than the amount of legit customer you piss off, considering the state of the non-online PC game industry.
Now, in the long term it probably will destroy the market, but since when have public companies been about the long term:)
Honestly, who buys a game as a last resort when they can't find a pirated copy of it?
A ton, and I mean, a TON of people. Its really just anecdotal (but thats enough to prove the amount is > 0 at least, hehe), but I always hear less tech savy people how they finally caved in and bought some game/software/windows/whatever after they couldn't find a crack/got a virus from a crack/crack glitched a part of the game/wanted to play NOW and the crack wasn't available yet.
PC game piracy is so high, that if you can just delay the mainstream pirated version a day or two, that probably translates in significant sale. Of course, the better, far more effective way, is to have the purchace of the game be a key to access the online part of the game... but that sucks for single player games like Oblivion/Devil May Cry/etc, to the point that the barrier for entry of offline games on PC becomes impossibly high.
Dunno... in Windows there's a billion way to do it, from the Windows Script Host for anything able to use COM components, to CodeDom for managed (.NET) environments, and a bunch of third party solutions.
And yet there's a lot of people who are probably worse off than him who work their ass off, and either accept their failures or succeed anyway. Being screwed isn't an excuse to go around screwing others.
fact is, people who have it easy in the world are a minority. An insignificant one.
I'm fuzzy about the details, and while this isn't a murder, it can have quite significant impact... Grades do affect your future... if you're at the top, and people below you cheat, whatever... but if you're borderline, working your ass off, and you'll JUST make it in the college/program you want, and 10 people cheat and get ahead of you, they just ruinned it for you. Sure, you're still alive, but for a select few that may mean trashing their dreams and going toward another path.
Add that a lot more people who commit murders get caught than people who do stuff like this, and you need to make an example out of them, so the risk isn't worth it. Open the pandora's box and the education system, as shitty as it already is, will make the patent system look great.
It is a mistake that they are enforcing such drastic copy protection, but its not too surprising: they are panicking. piracy is simply so high, but most importantly, people are starting to think you are stupid if you DONT pirate games (and I'm not talking about those who pirate games not to have to deal with copy protection... im talking about those who don't even know how evil copy protection is, and just think you're a retard for paying for what you can get free, legitimately or not). They desperately want people to know that piracy isn't ok. And as with anyone who panic, they make stupid mistakes and make everything worse.
No. PC gaming IS dying in large part (but not only) because of piracy. The market is almost not there anymore (relative to the development time and cost), and it starts a downward spiral, with companies trying to cut down cost, which leads to other issues that make the problem worse.
Things like Mass Effect and Spore's DRM are the result of the publishers going in "panic mode". When the piracy rate is so high (we are not talking about a minority anymore), from the point of view of the person who pays the bill, anything is worth trying to stop it. Pissing off 80% of your "would buy it anyway" customer base is starting to be worth it if you can manage to force some pirates to buy the thing (and it DOES work, to some low extent): the pirates outnumber the other group by a factor.
Only a short term solution though, and it will make things worse over time, but since corporations are all about the short term, well...
Of course, certain games do very well regardless, but the barrier for entry is simply becoming huge. If you make the game online, then you're good... but that kills off an entire market (single player offline games, such as Devil May Cry... I'm really scared for the PC version...). The result is that all games (and eventually also for consoles) will be MMO.
If everything becomes WoW clone, I definately will quit gaming:)
you need a Vista patch for VS2005 (which isn't the latest version, and hasn't been for quite a few months now) because the graphic API changed and VS relies on it a lot for the design surfaces, but it sure as hell runs -peachy- with UAC on:) And 2008 runs much better on both platforms.
I had teachers do similar things, also with parents complaining. Parents always complain when their kids are being punished for being sheeps. So we have a world ran by sheeps.
Actually... DMCA makes it illegal to hack copy protection, so it depends in which category the iphone's lock falls in, but it definately can be illegal to hack a device you own.
Its implementing an optional part of the specs, but its still part of the specs, and the packets its sending are valid in every ways, shape and form. The router is buggy, period. The router's makers figured that since no one or almost used that part of the spec, that they didn't need to test it as a valid use case, and it bit them. Don't blame MS for that.
I live in Montreal, and my girlfriend is in Boston right now, and I've been wondering for like ever why there wasn't a train linking the two... is that seriously why? I keep having to give my money to the air carriers (No way in hell im driving 5 hours, way too boring) because of the lack of trains, and Greyhound buses suck...
The public doesn't hear about the trimmed XP because it doesn't exist yet. XP is supported for a -while- still, the trimmed one will be out before its phased out. Once the "new" XP comes out, you can bet Microsoft's marketing machine will boost it in full force.
The software isn't expensive btw. The equivalent editions in Vista to XP are either cheaper, or are priced the same with more features, and that doesn't count inflation since XP's launch which makes Vista actually cheaper, just fyi.
XP was definately more reliable than 98SE, but faster? Of the hundreds/thousands of computers I had to upgrade over time, I've never heard anyone say that until you...not even online. I guess millage vary, but... o.O
As for the bad experience with Vista... I have 2 experiences in particular that can explain the issues... My first Vista computer was my couple years old machine that had XP on it, and that I wiped clean and installed Vista from MSDN from scratch on it...flawless, even with unsupported hardware, faster in every possible ways (after the 2-3 days that it takes for Vista to analyse your usage pattern.), etc. Then, me and my girlfriend bought 2 exactly similar gaming machines, cuz ours were not up to snuff for the latest games anymore.
Out of the box, slow and buggy. It didn't make any sense: the hardware was better supported, the machines were easily 5-8 times faster than my original one, etc. Turns out the OEM (Dell/Alienware) used slightly tweaked XP images for Vista. Result? Incompatible codecs, outdated version of Nero, chipset drivers that were years old, our CPUs were -underclocked- by -50%- in the BIOS (wtf?!?! not related to the images, but still, wtf?), and I'm skipping some. The codecs alone were part of most of the performance issues, since Vista uses them everywhere... upgrading them with versions that had been out for over 6 months fixed 80% of the problems.
Clean Vista installs are great. OEMs are -awful- with it, unfortunately. I also mentionned it, but to repeat: Vista cache aggressively and analyses usage patterns... so when you get a brand new computer, or a brand new install, for the first couple of hours (10-15 I think, maybe more), the hard disk will be trashing constantly, and performance is sub par. After a few days, it becomes worth it though, things get seriously zippy (Visual Studio opening at near notepad speed on a decent machine). Just make sure everything is up to date (and not just drivers). Oh also, McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc are known to bring Vista to its knees, because they're not written properly for it. NOD32 and others work fine.
My last job was with a Vista-only company (yup, a business with tons of Vista machines), and everything was sweet... now though I work at a XP-only multi-national corp... it is seriously painful, even though my new workstation is significantly faster.
Even more so, why even boot a computer at all anymore? My 5 years old lap-top can stay 2-3 days in sleep mode, and wakes up from it in 5 seconds. My desktop machine can wake up from -hibernating- in about 15 seconds (though I prefer sleep mode, especially since Vista's implementation is pretty cool).
The only time I see a reboot is when windows update requires it... (and even then I don't really feel it, since I reboot the machine when I'm going to bed)
Go back and look at Slashdot's articles from the day XP came out. It is not -as- bad as what you see about Vista, but the theme is similar. People saying its bloated, runs games slow, take a ton of memory, with a couple denying it thrown in.
I've had Vista since it was available on MSDN (so before the general public release), and I had no hardware issues (Creative not withstanding...those asses don't count, since they scrap support on every freagin new windows release on purpose or almost), no software incompatibilities, and it is much faster and stable than XPSP2 (oh, benchmarks suck for it. But real life usage? Rock solid), and it is zippy on my 3 years old PC with 1 gig of RAM.
Compare that to XP back then, where I had to upgrade my lap-top that I had purchase the same year because 128 megs of RAM and 366 mhz, while it worked, was unbearable... that (I was a tech support back then) had to reinstall Win98/ME (ME!!!) for -hundreds- of people who couldn't play their Win9X games and whined non-stop, and the flood of people saying how much better Win2k was... and you have exactly the same situation you see with Vista.
Its just to a lesser level, because Win98, WinME, Win2k and WinXP were released very close to each other, so people expected more issues, they were used to it. With Vista, not so much.
Microsoft did state they were working on a trimmed version of XP for computers such as the Eee btw, so its a moot point. It is phasing it out for desktops.
Its not so much the "things that interest you vs things that don't" thats the problem.
It is that kids, teens more so than young kids actually, have an issue understanding WHY they have to learn that stuff. When something interests you, you KNOW "why" you're learning it. Because it will be your future job, because you can use it in your hobbys, or simply because you enjoy it.
When something doesn't interest you, and no one told you for real WHAT it is for, it seems pointless. I went to school in Canada, not the US, and when I did, the school system was ok (it is totally upside down right now though), and TODAY, I know that most of the stuff I found useless back then, actually was quite useful... Even the obscure science or math stuff (though I liked those), even the french and english rules, etc.
Even once I went to college in computer science, certain mandatory classes felt like a bore. I remember my first year network class... "Why the hell should I learn about TCP/IP stacks, the history of networks from Unix to Windows, and learn how a freagin packet is shaped? I want to program business applications, not network card drivers!".
Well, now I'm an ASP.NET developer, and I keep having to think about that stuff to deal with certain edge case security concerns that neither the framework, the web server, or the OS (any OS) would handle on their own. if I knew back then what I'd need to know today, I would have -loved- these classes.
Kids and teens need a purpose. Just talking with your average 14 years old shows that quite quickly. "You should go out with friends more instead of being in front of the computer all day!!" "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?"
Indeed, they are giving up. It makes sense too: The main reason to continue developing IE is for backward compatibility (the rendering engine alone is used in more software than most people here probably realise...) and for PR purposes, as well as to keep MS independant from third parties for internal purpose (be it for the better or the worse).
The browser market monopoly is already lost: making a IE-only public web site is now corporate suicide. Trying to keep a monopoly on the browser software itself then has very very little gain, but has a very heavy cost: the anti-trust lawsuits.
Any monopoly that doesn't bring in MAJOR dough, directly or indirectly (Windows, Office, etc) must be dropped at all cost, as the less they have, the easier it is to make inspectors eat up the important ones.
In other words, by now, if Microsoft could lose IE without losing their face, they probably would. Its in their best interest.
Slashdot Mirror
having to defend your work is definately the solution. That way you can still cheat, but backing it up is actually harder than if you didn't cheat in the first place (learning how the work was done by heart is a lot harder if you didn't do it =P )
Problem is, even in high end universities, professors and TAs tend to be lazy-ish and prefer to do stuff such as having a batch script grade all the assignments in one go. And you'd have to hire more people to have it done at a greater scale (for all courses, etc), and of course universities don't want that, even at the current cost of tuition.
In the end, it would solve so many problems...not only with school, but with our society as a whole... those cheaters who get away with it (and there's a LOT of them...) can really mess things up down the line.
You tell me!!! You probably heard of him before... totally crazy dude. I think his last name was... err... Slip. Freudian Slip.
Nice freudian slip (start early, leave late, is what you said).
8 to 5, 40 hours days... I had to do that once. From my experience, less than 5% (and I'm being generous, though keep in mind thats for software development, millage may vary in other fields) of people can sit in front of a computer that long and be productive... When I worked for a company who did that, projects were easily 100-200% late when compared to the initial estimates (and the estimates were VERY conservative). Inefficient as all hell. 30 people working, and honestly, with 4 people on a regular, more permissive schedule could have done as much work in the same amount of days. It was totally rediculous. Now, I refuse those hours systematically.
Now I do 5 days a week, but 35 hours (so 9 to 5 with 1 hour lunch, more typical stuff), and I'm allowed to come in and leave whenever I want (as long as it totals 35 hours + lunch), and projects really purr along, in comparison. Crazy what 1 hour a day can do.
Telecommuting is great, IF most of your employee base has a high level of experience and is responsible. In this day and age, thats the minority though... I've worked for a small-ish company who did it, but they lucked out big time on the quality of their employees. As for 4 day weekends...considering fridays don't even count as it is for a lot of people because its the "last day of the week", when you cut it to four, its even worse. Again, worked for a company who did that...nothing was getting done. It can work, but you need one hell of a nice corporate culture and good employees to do it. Not for everyone, definately.
And for doing 4 days but more hours each days to compensate...again, very, very few people can be efficient at their job for more than like 6 hours, nevermind 9-10.
These are things that work well in a small company of "special" people who can take it...but people who can take it are quite rare...even though many would pretend otherwise and lie to themselves about their own limits.
Its not a matter of can or cannot be cracked, its a matter of how available (and easy to use) the crack is from trustworthy source within how long of release. Having a crack available (for a leaked version) 3 days before release from shady web sites, as opposed to 2 weeks prior everywhere on the web, makes a significant difference. A difference that MAY be more significant than the amount of legit customer you piss off, considering the state of the non-online PC game industry.
Now, in the long term it probably will destroy the market, but since when have public companies been about the long term :)
A ton, and I mean, a TON of people. Its really just anecdotal (but thats enough to prove the amount is > 0 at least, hehe), but I always hear less tech savy people how they finally caved in and bought some game/software/windows/whatever after they couldn't find a crack/got a virus from a crack/crack glitched a part of the game/wanted to play NOW and the crack wasn't available yet.
PC game piracy is so high, that if you can just delay the mainstream pirated version a day or two, that probably translates in significant sale. Of course, the better, far more effective way, is to have the purchace of the game be a key to access the online part of the game... but that sucks for single player games like Oblivion/Devil May Cry/etc, to the point that the barrier for entry of offline games on PC becomes impossibly high.
Dunno... in Windows there's a billion way to do it, from the Windows Script Host for anything able to use COM components, to CodeDom for managed (.NET) environments, and a bunch of third party solutions.
Dunno about the *nix world, however.
And yet there's a lot of people who are probably worse off than him who work their ass off, and either accept their failures or succeed anyway. Being screwed isn't an excuse to go around screwing others.
fact is, people who have it easy in the world are a minority. An insignificant one.
I'm fuzzy about the details, and while this isn't a murder, it can have quite significant impact... Grades do affect your future... if you're at the top, and people below you cheat, whatever... but if you're borderline, working your ass off, and you'll JUST make it in the college/program you want, and 10 people cheat and get ahead of you, they just ruinned it for you. Sure, you're still alive, but for a select few that may mean trashing their dreams and going toward another path.
Add that a lot more people who commit murders get caught than people who do stuff like this, and you need to make an example out of them, so the risk isn't worth it. Open the pandora's box and the education system, as shitty as it already is, will make the patent system look great.
Actually, Vista -does- have a specific Download folder now, for the record.
It is a mistake that they are enforcing such drastic copy protection, but its not too surprising: they are panicking. piracy is simply so high, but most importantly, people are starting to think you are stupid if you DONT pirate games (and I'm not talking about those who pirate games not to have to deal with copy protection... im talking about those who don't even know how evil copy protection is, and just think you're a retard for paying for what you can get free, legitimately or not). They desperately want people to know that piracy isn't ok. And as with anyone who panic, they make stupid mistakes and make everything worse.
No. PC gaming IS dying in large part (but not only) because of piracy. The market is almost not there anymore (relative to the development time and cost), and it starts a downward spiral, with companies trying to cut down cost, which leads to other issues that make the problem worse.
:)
Things like Mass Effect and Spore's DRM are the result of the publishers going in "panic mode". When the piracy rate is so high (we are not talking about a minority anymore), from the point of view of the person who pays the bill, anything is worth trying to stop it. Pissing off 80% of your "would buy it anyway" customer base is starting to be worth it if you can manage to force some pirates to buy the thing (and it DOES work, to some low extent): the pirates outnumber the other group by a factor.
Only a short term solution though, and it will make things worse over time, but since corporations are all about the short term, well...
Of course, certain games do very well regardless, but the barrier for entry is simply becoming huge. If you make the game online, then you're good... but that kills off an entire market (single player offline games, such as Devil May Cry... I'm really scared for the PC version...). The result is that all games (and eventually also for consoles) will be MMO.
If everything becomes WoW clone, I definately will quit gaming
you need a Vista patch for VS2005 (which isn't the latest version, and hasn't been for quite a few months now) because the graphic API changed and VS relies on it a lot for the design surfaces, but it sure as hell runs -peachy- with UAC on :) And 2008 runs much better on both platforms.
I had teachers do similar things, also with parents complaining. Parents always complain when their kids are being punished for being sheeps. So we have a world ran by sheeps.
Actually... DMCA makes it illegal to hack copy protection, so it depends in which category the iphone's lock falls in, but it definately can be illegal to hack a device you own.
Its implementing an optional part of the specs, but its still part of the specs, and the packets its sending are valid in every ways, shape and form. The router is buggy, period. The router's makers figured that since no one or almost used that part of the spec, that they didn't need to test it as a valid use case, and it bit them. Don't blame MS for that.
I live in Montreal, and my girlfriend is in Boston right now, and I've been wondering for like ever why there wasn't a train linking the two... is that seriously why? I keep having to give my money to the air carriers (No way in hell im driving 5 hours, way too boring) because of the lack of trains, and Greyhound buses suck...
The public doesn't hear about the trimmed XP because it doesn't exist yet. XP is supported for a -while- still, the trimmed one will be out before its phased out. Once the "new" XP comes out, you can bet Microsoft's marketing machine will boost it in full force.
The software isn't expensive btw. The equivalent editions in Vista to XP are either cheaper, or are priced the same with more features, and that doesn't count inflation since XP's launch which makes Vista actually cheaper, just fyi.
XP was definately more reliable than 98SE, but faster? Of the hundreds/thousands of computers I had to upgrade over time, I've never heard anyone say that until you...not even online. I guess millage vary, but... o.O
As for the bad experience with Vista... I have 2 experiences in particular that can explain the issues... My first Vista computer was my couple years old machine that had XP on it, and that I wiped clean and installed Vista from MSDN from scratch on it...flawless, even with unsupported hardware, faster in every possible ways (after the 2-3 days that it takes for Vista to analyse your usage pattern.), etc. Then, me and my girlfriend bought 2 exactly similar gaming machines, cuz ours were not up to snuff for the latest games anymore.
Out of the box, slow and buggy. It didn't make any sense: the hardware was better supported, the machines were easily 5-8 times faster than my original one, etc. Turns out the OEM (Dell/Alienware) used slightly tweaked XP images for Vista. Result? Incompatible codecs, outdated version of Nero, chipset drivers that were years old, our CPUs were -underclocked- by -50%- in the BIOS (wtf?!?! not related to the images, but still, wtf?), and I'm skipping some. The codecs alone were part of most of the performance issues, since Vista uses them everywhere... upgrading them with versions that had been out for over 6 months fixed 80% of the problems.
Clean Vista installs are great. OEMs are -awful- with it, unfortunately. I also mentionned it, but to repeat: Vista cache aggressively and analyses usage patterns... so when you get a brand new computer, or a brand new install, for the first couple of hours (10-15 I think, maybe more), the hard disk will be trashing constantly, and performance is sub par. After a few days, it becomes worth it though, things get seriously zippy (Visual Studio opening at near notepad speed on a decent machine). Just make sure everything is up to date (and not just drivers). Oh also, McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc are known to bring Vista to its knees, because they're not written properly for it. NOD32 and others work fine.
My last job was with a Vista-only company (yup, a business with tons of Vista machines), and everything was sweet... now though I work at a XP-only multi-national corp... it is seriously painful, even though my new workstation is significantly faster.
Even more so, why even boot a computer at all anymore? My 5 years old lap-top can stay 2-3 days in sleep mode, and wakes up from it in 5 seconds. My desktop machine can wake up from -hibernating- in about 15 seconds (though I prefer sleep mode, especially since Vista's implementation is pretty cool).
The only time I see a reboot is when windows update requires it... (and even then I don't really feel it, since I reboot the machine when I'm going to bed)
Go back and look at Slashdot's articles from the day XP came out. It is not -as- bad as what you see about Vista, but the theme is similar. People saying its bloated, runs games slow, take a ton of memory, with a couple denying it thrown in.
I've had Vista since it was available on MSDN (so before the general public release), and I had no hardware issues (Creative not withstanding...those asses don't count, since they scrap support on every freagin new windows release on purpose or almost), no software incompatibilities, and it is much faster and stable than XPSP2 (oh, benchmarks suck for it. But real life usage? Rock solid), and it is zippy on my 3 years old PC with 1 gig of RAM.
Compare that to XP back then, where I had to upgrade my lap-top that I had purchase the same year because 128 megs of RAM and 366 mhz, while it worked, was unbearable... that (I was a tech support back then) had to reinstall Win98/ME (ME!!!) for -hundreds- of people who couldn't play their Win9X games and whined non-stop, and the flood of people saying how much better Win2k was... and you have exactly the same situation you see with Vista.
Its just to a lesser level, because Win98, WinME, Win2k and WinXP were released very close to each other, so people expected more issues, they were used to it. With Vista, not so much.
Microsoft did state they were working on a trimmed version of XP for computers such as the Eee btw, so its a moot point. It is phasing it out for desktops.
Its not so much the "things that interest you vs things that don't" thats the problem.
It is that kids, teens more so than young kids actually, have an issue understanding WHY they have to learn that stuff. When something interests you, you KNOW "why" you're learning it. Because it will be your future job, because you can use it in your hobbys, or simply because you enjoy it.
When something doesn't interest you, and no one told you for real WHAT it is for, it seems pointless. I went to school in Canada, not the US, and when I did, the school system was ok (it is totally upside down right now though), and TODAY, I know that most of the stuff I found useless back then, actually was quite useful... Even the obscure science or math stuff (though I liked those), even the french and english rules, etc.
Even once I went to college in computer science, certain mandatory classes felt like a bore. I remember my first year network class... "Why the hell should I learn about TCP/IP stacks, the history of networks from Unix to Windows, and learn how a freagin packet is shaped? I want to program business applications, not network card drivers!".
Well, now I'm an ASP.NET developer, and I keep having to think about that stuff to deal with certain edge case security concerns that neither the framework, the web server, or the OS (any OS) would handle on their own. if I knew back then what I'd need to know today, I would have -loved- these classes.
Kids and teens need a purpose. Just talking with your average 14 years old shows that quite quickly. "You should go out with friends more instead of being in front of the computer all day!!" "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?"
Its not about the "what", its about the "why"...
Indeed, they are giving up. It makes sense too: The main reason to continue developing IE is for backward compatibility (the rendering engine alone is used in more software than most people here probably realise...) and for PR purposes, as well as to keep MS independant from third parties for internal purpose (be it for the better or the worse).
The browser market monopoly is already lost: making a IE-only public web site is now corporate suicide. Trying to keep a monopoly on the browser software itself then has very very little gain, but has a very heavy cost: the anti-trust lawsuits.
Any monopoly that doesn't bring in MAJOR dough, directly or indirectly (Windows, Office, etc) must be dropped at all cost, as the less they have, the easier it is to make inspectors eat up the important ones.
In other words, by now, if Microsoft could lose IE without losing their face, they probably would. Its in their best interest.
they were talking about raw Flash i beleive. Silverlight to CLR what Flex to Flash is, so to speak (not quite).