It's not about the #@!!%% install/maintenance of XP it's about:
1. Ensuring Microsoft maximizes profit. 2. Reinforcing Microsoft's ownership of their IP. If they didn't take this step, it's possible in some court of law where illogical things happen with startling regularity that MS's lax enforcement somehow makes their IP vulnerable to being used without paying microsoft. Crazy? Yes. Possible? Yes. 3. The current political and social environment is focused on the expansion of the corporate welfare state. In this instance, they would be fools not to try to extract every possible penny of wealth and reinforce/extend their ownership opportunity along the way. It's easier now than ever before. 4. Microsoft's customer is the PHB, not the Sys Admin. If anything, the PHB likes this kind of move because Microsoft is thinking like a capitalist. That's what employees are for after all, to do the dirty work so the PHB gets the glory.
Conservatives learned some lessons from the democrats some time ago. They stopped fighting for small government and fiscal responsibility because neither gets you so many votes.
Instead, they make it safe for businesses to make a profit and spend money and behave in ways that keep the voters happy.
It's the equivalent of pork-barrel legislation circa 2005.
I admit I banged the stats out quickly, so let me try again with a little more clarity. 1. I think it's reasonable to assume 42% of American households have computers. 2. Of the 42%, I think it's reasonable to assume somewhere between 13% and 26% are broadband users. 3. Of the remaining 42% of households with computers and no broadband, I'd guess 90% are using dial-up. I'm leaving 10% of the no broadband users with no internet connection at all.
To put it in very simple number terms: If there were only 100 americans, 42 of them would have computers in their home. Of the 42 with computers, between 5 and 10 have broadband. The dial-up group would be between 28 and 33 users. 4 users would have a computer with no internet connection.
42.1 percent of American households now own a computer. See www.natat.org/ncsc/Pubs/Getting%20Online/Chapter_1.htm
In 2003 about 13 percent of American households are actually using broadband. See www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,107834,00.asp The stats are two years old, but broadband adoption isn't happening that quickly. Even if you double broadband to 26%, you have 74% still using dial-up.
The dial-up users may want to go wireless at some point and this is the American way to do it. Plug it into the wall, personalize it and leave it alone.
If I'm working for the company marketing this thing, I'd be on the phone with every dial-up ISP in the world. It's a no-brainer for the dial-up ISP.
Like it or not, dial-up (in the U.S. anyway) is like the dot-matrix printer and more recently the floppy disk. It's going to hang around for a long time. Not sexy, but useful and cheap.
For example, they might sell GTA SA to a big-box store for $20.00 ea. For each game in inventory, the retailer demands $20.00 plus a return processing fee, (20% per copy?) plus they're probably not going to actually get anything back from the retailer anytime soon because the retailer's supply chain doesn't work like that.
Add to that the shelf-space fee they'll charge for putting the sanitized version back on the shelf, plus a likely free first order and the big box has just done very very well.
Do that for each chain in the first or second tier of retailers and RockStar pays dearly.
Does anyone know on average how many units are in the channel at any given time?
"True" economic and social systems simply don't exist.
Please go, participate in local government and come back and tell me about it.
I don't advocate any particular form of government. They all have good/bad qualities. I participate in local gov't to try to improve my local conditions. But that's about all I choose to do.
In the real world, the answer is a qualified yes, as in Microsoft claims to have a search engine product all their own, so they compete with Google.
In the legal world, I wonder if Google relies on notion that they don't compete with Microsoft because they aren't an operating system company. It wouldn't be the first time such absurd arguements are effective.
I wonder what the long-term effect of this will be on Google's share price? If this is one of likely many Microsoft-sponsored litigation, I wonder if shareholders will bail out much to the pleasure of Microsoft.
You point out some very good defects/distortions that gov't incentives created, but: -The goal of coast-to-coast railroads wouldn't have happened without gov't support and enforcing some standards. -Some railroads would have failed with our without gov't intervention. -The country as a whole was made better off as a result despite the pork-barreling.
Let's go your way and leave it all up to private industry to provide infrastructure. Let's use the mobile phone industry as an example. -Poor allocation of resources. Each networks must provide their own infrastructure in any given area. How is having 3 different, incompatible networks doing the same thing efficient? How many incompatible java phone implementations are there??? Answer: Most of them are incompatible with each other. -Oligarchy -Excess utility (profit) goes to shareholders, not society. If you think that's okay, then know that you create a minority ruling class dominating an impoverished masses.
>The job market really isn't as bad as folks are >saying. Everyone has a different experience in this economy. Yours, for whatever reason has not been bad. Assinine comments like this make you look like a windbag.
>When I was a junior in college I landed an >internship that paid me 15 bucks an hour.
And that job was at your Dad's company was it? Maybe your Mom/Dad was a Veep or something? Maybe parent's friend? Who/What was the connection there? What was the college, hmm? Not some second-tier state school I'm sure.
>Finding a job is not difficult if you're into it >enough that you're a cut above the rest.
So you've just described the other 90+% of people in your field. You are far too cavalier to suggest you are anything else but a well-connected, pompous, ass.
One thing about capitalism that some think is a benefit is the ability to assign ownership and a price to anything. This FCC guy thinks that an entity owning/maintaining this infrastructure and individuals paying for the right is better.
This, IMHO is ridiculous given it is the 2005 equivalent of Interstate highways or going further back railroads. This has the capacity to expand the economy exactly like the railroad and highways. But that's my opinion.
I think you have forgotten the time and effort you made when you learned to use windows.
To use an old analogy: Windows is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. Buy a new one when this one breaks. Mac and OSX is like buying a luxury car. Lots of status and high-performance for driving to the market. Linux is like owning a formula 1 race car. Very high performance, modifiable, and now with very attractive body. It has a hood you can open and modify to do exactly what you want. All at a very attractive price.
Finally, the oft-referred to "common user" uses what fills their needs. Linux can definitely fill their needs. My wife is quite happy and she is definitely the "common user."
Try making the fix/buy decision on an $800 Epson inkjet that's a couple of years old and needs a new head. They simplify their cartridge making too. Win-Win for HP.
It gives one comfort in knowing a huge ruthless comptetitor like HP can shoot themselves in the foot on a regular basis. I'm glad I'm not an investor in that organization.
HP Parody: Invent nothing. Reorganize everything. HP 2005 = Xerox 1999.
Let's give the knuckleheads advocating this scheme the benefit of the doubt for a minute.
School: Budget Line (smaller than last year's) item for books still goes to publsher who- Publisher: Buys computer and loads their e-books onto it.
Publisher profits handsomely because they don't have to do all that expensive printing, binding inventory and shipping.
Off Topic Comment: Here in Los Angeles, unless you belong to the top 5% of the socio-economic ladder, I'd say the schools suffer from a severe case of benign neglect.
Taxpayers don't want to fund schools, yet demand to keep kids in school longer to somehow "fix" failing schools. This fails to address the fact few parents actively participate (neither time nor tax dollars) in the education system of their own children.
Based on my experience switching the family PC over to linux, I have to say creating a familiar UI with a new feature thoroughly implemented is the most important thing MS or any OSS project can shoot for.
The wife is a GUI person and as such the way she organizes tasks is by the GUI steps. Go to the start button, click, go to Internet, click on kmail.
What impresses her is the familiarity and predictable behavior. The rest just doesn't matter so much. I do side work fixing PC's and find this to be pretty common.
MS's UI is familiar and new-looking. In that sense, I think MS is doing a great job and will likely get many upgraders when it's preinstalled on a new PC.
Having just installed Suse 9.3, I'd say the familiarity and functionality is there on KDE for OSS. But there's still the media playing problem for the mass market user and there is no "killer app" to urgently drive users over to the platform.
There have been huge leaps in the linux desktop though, so I hope it will come.
A long time ago in America, railroads used fluff pieces like this to justify to their investors that they needed more money to stay competitive.
Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.
Off-Topic: I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
Monopolies overprice even the simplest add-on services with a cell phone.
I work for a company who can make a cell phone carry cash-value then the user dials-out to perform the value transfer to the merchant. (not a credit/debit card!) Yet there's no interest. None.
What's worse is the PHB carrier people think they should get the solution from Visa/MC's outrageously expensive infrastructure and antiquated payment technology.
1. it's nice to see another distro with some resources behind it.
2. I've installed the Kubuntu a few times on a few different boxes with numerous permissions problems that I've eventually fixed one-by-one. -Control panel doesn't allow login as administrator. Despite applying updates. -Can't use printers as a user (permission denied) -On my first dialup machine install for a friend (ouch) last night kppp simply didn't work. wvdial did as su, but that's a non-starter for this smart but average user. Debian install went without a hitch. -And then there's the mysterious sound problems. As of last night, I'm all done with Kubuntu for a few years.
3. Is this really a non-profit as in charity or a new business arrangement that is expected to make one of the principal backers wealthier?
4. I predict the profit-seeking-motive related to the foundation will make the foundation the red-headed-step-child to the "subscription-linux" profit seeking parent.
I've installed all of the popular distros on a few different pc's with different components. This is what I've found that may/may not assist you.
1. Is your install CD okay? Large file transfers (CD ISO's) are not perfect. Even though you can successfully burn the ISO, the ISO you burned might not be exactly right. That's why they have those handy checksums.
2. The dog (distro) just won't hunt. It happens sometimes that the hardware/software package you have is not well implemented in a particular distro or even in Linux at all. I've had it happen a number of different times, on different pc's. Ex. I have a dual-monitor setup that set-up great in KDE, but fails miserably in Gnome.
3. I've got problems (maybe lots)that don't come up in Google. It's unlikely you will discover show-stopper issues that others have not already documented somewhere on the web. See #1 first.
Seek help: www.linuxquestions.org is a good place. Try to be specific.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars just evaporating in court and lawyer costs every month this thing goes on. Is Novell so well-off this won't affect their bottom line every quarter?
If there's any SCO left when they get to the end, they declare bankruptcy. Then what does Novell have? Satisfaction in being right? I wish I could feed my family by just being right.
Or maybe the IP issues are better clarified. Well, Novell can't use that to their exclusive benefit. So where's the money?
Everyone and their dog knows that MS is between platforms.
This is an act of contrition. The public loves these and generally forgives and forgets. They are buying time. Enjoy it, because it won't last.
What I'm most interested to see is if they are so used to being a monopoly that pronhorn is a.Net for the desktop. Takes lots of explaining and has backward compatibility problems. It will be interesting to see what the desktop retailers will do if Longhorn doesn't go over great-guns.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about the #@!!%% install/maintenance of XP it's about:
1. Ensuring Microsoft maximizes profit.
2. Reinforcing Microsoft's ownership of their IP. If they didn't take this step, it's possible in some court of law where illogical things happen with startling regularity that MS's lax enforcement somehow makes their IP vulnerable to being used without paying microsoft. Crazy? Yes. Possible? Yes.
3. The current political and social environment is focused on the expansion of the corporate welfare state. In this instance, they would be fools not to try to extract every possible penny of wealth and reinforce/extend their ownership opportunity along the way. It's easier now than ever before.
4. Microsoft's customer is the PHB, not the Sys Admin. If anything, the PHB likes this kind of move because Microsoft is thinking like a capitalist. That's what employees are for after all, to do the dirty work so the PHB gets the glory.
Conservatives learned some lessons from the democrats some time ago. They stopped fighting for small government and fiscal responsibility because neither gets you so many votes.
Instead, they make it safe for businesses to make a profit and spend money and behave in ways that keep the voters happy.
It's the equivalent of pork-barrel legislation circa 2005.
I admit I banged the stats out quickly, so let me try again with a little more clarity.
1. I think it's reasonable to assume 42% of American households have computers.
2. Of the 42%, I think it's reasonable to assume somewhere between 13% and 26% are broadband users.
3. Of the remaining 42% of households with computers and no broadband, I'd guess 90% are using dial-up. I'm leaving 10% of the no broadband users with no internet connection at all.
To put it in very simple number terms:
If there were only 100 americans, 42 of them would have computers in their home. Of the 42 with computers, between 5 and 10 have broadband. The dial-up group would be between 28 and 33 users. 4 users would have a computer with no internet connection.
And here's why:
1 .htm
42.1 percent of American households now own a computer. See www.natat.org/ncsc/Pubs/Getting%20Online/Chapter_
In 2003 about 13 percent of American households are actually using broadband. See www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,107834,00.asp The stats are two years old, but broadband adoption isn't happening that quickly. Even if you double broadband to 26%, you have 74% still using dial-up.
The dial-up users may want to go wireless at some point and this is the American way to do it. Plug it into the wall, personalize it and leave it alone.
If I'm working for the company marketing this thing, I'd be on the phone with every dial-up ISP in the world. It's a no-brainer for the dial-up ISP.
Like it or not, dial-up (in the U.S. anyway) is like the dot-matrix printer and more recently the floppy disk. It's going to hang around for a long time. Not sexy, but useful and cheap.
The penalty costs to RockStar are staggering.
For example, they might sell GTA SA to a big-box store for $20.00 ea. For each game in inventory, the retailer demands $20.00 plus a return processing fee, (20% per copy?) plus they're probably not going to actually get anything back from the retailer anytime soon because the retailer's supply chain doesn't work like that.
Add to that the shelf-space fee they'll charge for putting the sanitized version back on the shelf, plus a likely free first order and the big box has just done very very well.
Do that for each chain in the first or second tier of retailers and RockStar pays dearly.
Does anyone know on average how many units are in the channel at any given time?
"True" economic and social systems simply don't exist.
Please go, participate in local government and come back and tell me about it.
I don't advocate any particular form of government. They all have good/bad qualities. I participate in local gov't to try to improve my local conditions. But that's about all I choose to do.
Prove me wrong here. Really!
Post a current advertisement for an internship paying that much.
If it exists, I want my kid to know about it. She's on the right track (unlike her father at that age) and I want to be sure she stays on it.
Please do it for the children!!!
In the real world, the answer is a qualified yes, as in Microsoft claims to have a search engine product all their own, so they compete with Google.
In the legal world, I wonder if Google relies on notion that they don't compete with Microsoft because they aren't an operating system company. It wouldn't be the first time such absurd arguements are effective.
I wonder what the long-term effect of this will be on Google's share price? If this is one of likely many Microsoft-sponsored litigation, I wonder if shareholders will bail out much to the pleasure of Microsoft.
You point out some very good defects/distortions that gov't incentives created, but:
-The goal of coast-to-coast railroads wouldn't have happened without gov't support and enforcing some standards.
-Some railroads would have failed with our without gov't intervention.
-The country as a whole was made better off as a result despite the pork-barreling.
Let's go your way and leave it all up to private industry to provide infrastructure. Let's use the mobile phone industry as an example.
-Poor allocation of resources. Each networks must provide their own infrastructure in any given area. How is having 3 different, incompatible networks doing the same thing efficient? How many incompatible java phone implementations are there??? Answer: Most of them are incompatible with each other.
-Oligarchy
-Excess utility (profit) goes to shareholders, not society. If you think that's okay, then know that you create a minority ruling class dominating an impoverished masses.
I've got karma to burn so here goes...
>The job market really isn't as bad as folks are >saying.
Everyone has a different experience in this economy. Yours, for whatever reason has not been bad. Assinine comments like this make you look like a windbag.
>When I was a junior in college I landed an >internship that paid me 15 bucks an hour.
And that job was at your Dad's company was it? Maybe your Mom/Dad was a Veep or something? Maybe parent's friend? Who/What was the connection there? What was the college, hmm? Not some second-tier state school I'm sure.
>Finding a job is not difficult if you're into it >enough that you're a cut above the rest.
So you've just described the other 90+% of people in your field. You are far too cavalier to suggest you are anything else but a well-connected, pompous, ass.
One thing about capitalism that some think is a benefit is the ability to assign ownership and a price to anything. This FCC guy thinks that an entity owning/maintaining this infrastructure and individuals paying for the right is better.
This, IMHO is ridiculous given it is the 2005 equivalent of Interstate highways or going further back railroads. This has the capacity to expand the economy exactly like the railroad and highways. But that's my opinion.
I think you have forgotten the time and effort you made when you learned to use windows.
To use an old analogy:
Windows is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. Buy a new one when this one breaks.
Mac and OSX is like buying a luxury car. Lots of status and high-performance for driving to the market.
Linux is like owning a formula 1 race car. Very high performance, modifiable, and now with very attractive body. It has a hood you can open and modify to do exactly what you want. All at a very attractive price.
Finally, the oft-referred to "common user" uses what fills their needs. Linux can definitely fill their needs. My wife is quite happy and she is definitely the "common user."
Getting a larger format, postscript native inkjet printer isn't $99.
Thus the fix/buy issue.
Puhleeze.
Try making the fix/buy decision on an $800 Epson inkjet that's a couple of years old and needs a new head. They simplify their cartridge making too. Win-Win for HP.
It gives one comfort in knowing a huge ruthless comptetitor like HP can shoot themselves in the foot on a regular basis. I'm glad I'm not an investor in that organization.
HP Parody:
Invent nothing. Reorganize everything. HP 2005 = Xerox 1999.
I read they summary as "allowed to use non-reusable" at first.
I don't like no double-negatives.
Let's give the knuckleheads advocating this scheme the benefit of the doubt for a minute.
School: Budget Line (smaller than last year's) item for books still goes to publsher who-
Publisher: Buys computer and loads their e-books onto it.
Publisher profits handsomely because they don't have to do all that expensive printing, binding inventory and shipping.
Off Topic Comment:
Here in Los Angeles, unless you belong to the top 5% of the socio-economic ladder, I'd say the schools suffer from a severe case of benign neglect.
Taxpayers don't want to fund schools, yet demand to keep kids in school longer to somehow "fix" failing schools. This fails to address the fact few parents actively participate (neither time nor tax dollars) in the education system of their own children.
Based on my experience switching the family PC over to linux, I have to say creating a familiar UI with a new feature thoroughly implemented is the most important thing MS or any OSS project can shoot for.
The wife is a GUI person and as such the way she organizes tasks is by the GUI steps. Go to the start button, click, go to Internet, click on kmail.
What impresses her is the familiarity and predictable behavior. The rest just doesn't matter so much. I do side work fixing PC's and find this to be pretty common.
MS's UI is familiar and new-looking. In that sense, I think MS is doing a great job and will likely get many upgraders when it's preinstalled on a new PC.
Having just installed Suse 9.3, I'd say the familiarity and functionality is there on KDE for OSS. But there's still the media playing problem for the mass market user and there is no "killer app" to urgently drive users over to the platform.
There have been huge leaps in the linux desktop though, so I hope it will come.
A long time ago in America, railroads used fluff pieces like this to justify to their investors that they needed more money to stay competitive.
Because everyone needs faster trains right? Well as history has shown, yes to a point in time when a disruptive technology comes along to do the job cheaper/better in one way or another.
Off-Topic:
I'd be interested to find some non-marketing stats on how many homes have computers in America and the breakdown of dialup/broadband.
I'd be interested in working with you on that any way I can.
I've documented an install and like most how-to's on the web it's missing many details that I don't even think about.
Ubuntu has some documents online, but they don't acknowledge their own problems or attempt to get an install going when it hic-ups.
Let's do it!
Michael
mpapet@yahoo.com
Mod parent UP!
Monopolies overprice even the simplest add-on services with a cell phone.
I work for a company who can make a cell phone carry cash-value then the user dials-out to perform the value transfer to the merchant. (not a credit/debit card!) Yet there's no interest. None.
What's worse is the PHB carrier people think they should get the solution from Visa/MC's outrageously expensive infrastructure and antiquated payment technology.
1. it's nice to see another distro with some resources behind it.
2. I've installed the Kubuntu a few times on a few different boxes with numerous permissions problems that I've eventually fixed one-by-one.
-Control panel doesn't allow login as administrator. Despite applying updates.
-Can't use printers as a user (permission denied)
-On my first dialup machine install for a friend (ouch) last night kppp simply didn't work. wvdial did as su, but that's a non-starter for this smart but average user. Debian install went without a hitch.
-And then there's the mysterious sound problems.
As of last night, I'm all done with Kubuntu for a few years.
3. Is this really a non-profit as in charity or a new business arrangement that is expected to make one of the principal backers wealthier?
4. I predict the profit-seeking-motive related to the foundation will make the foundation the red-headed-step-child to the "subscription-linux" profit seeking parent.
Note to self:
Kill my television.
is one of the hyperlinks goes to a Microsoftie blog.
1 /423909.aspx#426416
Here's the link:
https://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2005/06/0
Offtopic Question:
What's the benefit of running a blog on an https server? (Or whatever it's actually called)
I've installed all of the popular distros on a few different pc's with different components. This is what I've found that may/may not assist you.
1. Is your install CD okay?
Large file transfers (CD ISO's) are not perfect. Even though you can successfully burn the ISO, the ISO you burned might not be exactly right. That's why they have those handy checksums.
2. The dog (distro) just won't hunt.
It happens sometimes that the hardware/software package you have is not well implemented in a particular distro or even in Linux at all. I've had it happen a number of different times, on different pc's. Ex. I have a dual-monitor setup that set-up great in KDE, but fails miserably in Gnome.
3. I've got problems (maybe lots)that don't come up in Google.
It's unlikely you will discover show-stopper issues that others have not already documented somewhere on the web. See #1 first.
Seek help:
www.linuxquestions.org is a good place. Try to be specific.
to keep this case going.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars just evaporating in court and lawyer costs every month this thing goes on. Is Novell so well-off this won't affect their bottom line every quarter?
If there's any SCO left when they get to the end, they declare bankruptcy. Then what does Novell have? Satisfaction in being right? I wish I could feed my family by just being right.
Or maybe the IP issues are better clarified. Well, Novell can't use that to their exclusive benefit. So where's the money?
What does Microsoft get? One less competitor.
Everyone and their dog knows that MS is between platforms.
.Net for the desktop. Takes lots of explaining and has backward compatibility problems. It will be interesting to see what the desktop retailers will do if Longhorn doesn't go over great-guns.
This is an act of contrition. The public loves these and generally forgives and forgets. They are buying time. Enjoy it, because it won't last.
What I'm most interested to see is if they are so used to being a monopoly that pronhorn is a