Third option. Work for someone else with the assumption that what you create is owned by them. If you can't accept your creations being the property of some corporate entity, then go back to one of the first two options.
For Microsoft it is a Windows piracy issue. Microsoft is concerned with getting paid for the software they develop. They are most likely also concerned with copy protection because it would make Windows an opperating system that would have wide industry support from comercial copyright holders. The sale of copyrighted material over the internet is likely to be a huge business in the near future, and they don't want left out.
I don't like the concept of hardware-level copy protection. I don't like these business models where the copyright holders want to control every aspect of how their material is used and distributed. However, I can understand why microsoft will support copy protection in their OS.
I don't know how you expected him to answer the question, but I think the major points are in his answer. Our software has security holes. As we find them we try to fix them. This is becomming an increasing problem for our customers, and we're making it a higher priority because of it.
Microsoft is a big company and change takes time. It's pretty easy to see that functionality took precedence over security and stability in their designs. At the time it seemed to take precedence for their customers too. Four or five years ago you wouldn't consider a Microsoft OS for any part of your network that needed to be secure, but for the average users desktop, the security risk was acceptable. Customers no longer find the security risk acceptable. Microsoft has responded by increasing the security of thier OS and applications. They aren't there yet, but they are making improvements. They also have a problem that many of thier users are security stupid, and won't apply the patches even when Microsoft fixes the problems.
The reason you didn't get an answer that you're happy with is that there is no answer he could give that would make you happy.
Unless I'm mistaken, Fair Use just says it's not illegal to make coppies for personal use. It doesn't require the record companies to make it so that you can make those coppies. With the DCMA it now appears that tool to get around their copy protections are now illegal as well. IANAL and all that crap.
Sure someone will crack it within a day or two. Of course that crack will be difficult for joe user to use, and will probably not be available for every OS. The recording industry is on the order of a $10 Billion business. If they only make it inconvienient enough that 10% of the people that would have outright pirate CDs decide to buy them. Or they convince those people who want two coppies that it's just easier to buy another one for their car than to get around the copy protection. If can mean 10s of Millions of dollars of more profits to them. So a few hundred thousand tech geeks figure out how to get around their new copy protection scheme. The bottom line is that they still make more money.
Just about every operating system in the world including Windows has a way to read and write raw data to a disk. If CD-RWs accept simpe block read and write commands, then your should be able to ignore CDFS and whatever junk they use for copy protection.
No, the proper answer is, "If you don't like the V-chip... don't buy one -- and let the people who want one pay the legitimate market price for it, not the subsidy price generated by forcing it on anyone who buys a new TV."
I have two different views on this. I agree that the people who want this and benefit from it should pay for it. This means that parents have to spend a bit more to get this feature on the TV their children are allowed to watch.
The other issue is that if V-chips are put in every TV then TV manufacturers can't gouge consumers for the added feature. Once the chips reach the volume of one in every TV, they become very cheap to produce. The development costs get spread out over a much larger number of units, and it ends up costing less than a buck for the manufacturers to add the feature.
In the end is there enough benefit to society to having this ability for parents to limit what their children see? I guess Congress gets to decide if they add a couple dollar tax to the price of TVs for this purpose.
I don't have kids, I don't watch the TV much, and a couple bucks extra on the price of a TV won't make much difference in my life. There's still an incredible market for programming that is inappropriate for children, so I don't think that programming is going away. I just don't see the free speach issue here, so I think it's a good thing.
As kids mature, you need to give them some responsibilities. You still need to limit that responsibility, guide them, and keep them from making bad choices. However, you can't control what they do all their lives, and it seems to work better if handing over that responsibility is a gradual process. Doesn't it make sence that there comes a stage where you want to be able to hand your kid the remote, but still limit their choices?
You can't watch over your children ALL the time. Yes it's your responsibility to filter what your children are exposed to. Children don't have enough experience to be able to make informed decisions or to know that many things that are interesting have serious downsides. But it's not reasonable to expect parents to watch over their children's shoulders all the time. The technological ability to limit what can be displayed on the TV in your house can let responsible parents have a couple hour break, and give their children some freedom of choice within a limited spectrum. This assumes the children are old enough to be left alone in a room for an extended period of time, and the TV isn't used as a babysitter for long periods of time.
I don't see this working with the internet. There's no way to rate the content and filter it properly. Parent's are going to have to supervise their children. They are also going to had to do their best to raise them right and give them increasing responsibilities and privleges as they mature. I've seen too many kids grow up in extremely sheltered homes, hit college and nearly self destruct. They hit 18 and can't think for themselves. That makes them extremely susceptable to peer pressure.
Try running Win95 with 16MB of RAM. It's slow enough to be unusable. Why was such a low about of RAM speced as a minimum requirement? Be cause RAM was really expensive in 1995 and 1996. It's relatively cheap now, so they are making the minimum requirements something that's a little more usable. Spend the $75 and get 256 MB of SDRAM. If you can't afford the RAM and the price of the OS, then stick with whatever you have now.
Sorry you had such bad luck with it. I've installed it dozens of times, and never had it lock up on the boot disk. Most of my test machines are slower than 300 MHz. I've never looked at the hardware compatability list, because I haven't had problems. I'm not doubting that your problem exhists, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule.
Glad to hear that Linux works for you. That's what it's all about, use what works.
While we're on the subject of things we're sick of hearing about.
Win2k is running like snail with 64MB Ram - even with no third party apps running!
256MB of SDRAM costs $75, this is a server, so I guess you should spend the $90 for ecc, but get over it. Don't spend hours trying to optimize things to save less than $100. I think it's great that Linux can run well on a lower end system. There are design tradeoffs that were made to achieve this. I'm glad Linux works for you. Right now I'd personally love a more bloated version of Linux with a binary driver interface, but that's my problem.
Mucho dollars? My copy was $130. It cost me more than that to have a guy come out to my house and tell me my furnace didn't work because a bird was stuck in the exaust. For the average person who can afford a computer, is $130 really that much to have an OS you don't have to spend half your time tinkering with. Sure you have to spend an hour customizing it once you install it, and you have to update drivrs once in a while. But for the most part it's not hard to figure out. Isn't an OS wort the price of 3 computer games you play on it?
What new features are you looking for? I always hear that Microsoft code is too bloated, and then people complain that there's no new features.
The new features going from 95 to 98 to ME for the most part haven't been that visible to the average user. Microsoft has been merging the Win9X driver model with the NT one. They've been making the NT user interface more usable by home users, and they've been working on makeing the interface more consistent. What does this deliver to their users?
How about an OS they use that's the same at both home an work? Most people don't want to tinker with their computer at home. It's a tool they use to browse the internet, word processing, and touch up the photos they took with their new digital camera.
How about a OS that plays games yet doesn't crash all the time. It even has a journeling file system so, if you get some bad drivers that crash you don't have to reload/restore the system because all the dlls got trashed.
There's also a benefit for those of us driver writers that won't have to write a seperate win9x driver and waste development time. Of course we now spend it trying to update our driver to work with the latest Linux kernel, but you can't have everything.
They didn't can UO2, they delayed it in order to get UO:Third Dawn updated. UO's servers can only handle so many users, they still get new customers by word of mouth, and really just need to protect their current customer base from jumping ship to Everquest and Asheron's Call. In the long run UO2 is a great idea, but if what they need are some short term fixes to keep UO viable then this might not be a bad idea. I was playing UO when they came out with the last major update. The server updates were a month late. There were lots of server crashes. They had to hive all their new customers who bought the new version in the box a free month of service. Putting a project on hold and putting developers on another project isn't a very efficient solution, but with growing competition in their market, they can't afford to piss off their customer base.
This sounds like very good advice, unfortunately a lot of companies have taken a different approach. We have a large customer which is a hardware vendor. They develop special purpose systems, and have their own Linux distribution which is tailored to their needs. They support a variety of operatin systems, but Linux's open source nature is a nice advantage when dealing with custom systems. When problems arrive, they don't have to deal with intellectual property issues with the OS vendor when working with their customers to resolve the problems.
When working on a large system, the fast pace of changes in Linux can be a problem, so they have all the different vendors use their version of Linux, which they then control how often it gets updated.
The problem then arrises that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. Changes to the kernel often break device drivers. It's very difficult to release a driver in binary form at all, and making it work on a variety of systems and distributions is even worse.
We can't just release a source code version of the driver and have the customer recompile their kernel with our driver built in for three reasons.
1. The customer doesn't want their customers to have to recompile the kernel to install a new driver. The people installing and updating the drivers are not Linux experts. The installation must be simple. If running Linux on the system means they have to have better trained users, then Linux is no longer cost effective.
2. The source code contains intellectual property of the ASIC vendor that we have access to under NDA. We cannot legally release the source.
3. The ASIC we use in available and used by other vendors. Our software is what makes our products superior to our competitors. Making the source available so our competitors, when they've been promising the same features for a year but can't get it to work, can catch up is not a good business decision.
The problems get even worse because the customers want to use software from a third party which they think should work with our hardware. Unfortuately, that software contains kernel patches which are poorly hacked into the kernel. Now we're spending our development time patching a customer specific kernel and third party software.
After a couple months of this we think we've got it worked out. My managers are happy and mentioned that they have some other customers who want Linux drivers and can't wait to give the customers the new code. Of course the customer has a different distribution with a different kernel version. My boss was not happy to find our that changes to the kernel break our driver, and more development needs to be done to get the driver working for that customer, who also has some very specialized needs.
Our product has a lot of features. Fully running our verification tests takes several weeks to a month. Supporting a large number of OSes is expensive. Supporting an OS like Linux where everyone cooks there own version is very expensive. Support for anything but Red Hat or Linux PPC (yes we support PPC) will likely not be a free product from us in the future. It just isn't cost effective unless there's a very large order involved.
Your first assumption seems to be that Microsoft has a monopoly on word processors, which this case doesn't cover. Assuming they do have a monopoly in that area, is it still illegal for them not to disclose their file format. If they disclosed the file format, they'd just have every other company that makes word processors screaming antitrust when they changed it to add new features. And even if the format were open. There would still be incompatabilities, because no software package the size of a present day word processor is without bugs. Every time Microsoft changed something, their competitors would have to play catch-up.
And we have the important question of are consumers really being harmed? You can always say that another word processor is better, but in large it's a matter of preference. What conusmers seem to be lacking is a variety of choices. Although consumers like to have choices, you can definately make an argument that business customers have actually benefitted from this lack of choice. They don't have to train their users or tech support teams on mutiple applications. Since everyone uses it, it's likely that their users will be famialiar with Word when they hire them. The cost of the software is small compared to training costs. Home users also want to use at home what they have at work, so one choice works for them too. Now if Microsoft's Word was a really bad product that didn't meet most of people's needs, then people would switch. But for now it's the industry standard, and it's not perfect but it's good enough. If MS quits improving/changing Word to meet consumer's needs, then they will eventually get replaced by somone else's software. But, Microsoft continues to dump a large chunk of their profits back into development and work to improve their products. Therefore it's unlikly that a competitor will have a product that will overcome the barrier that Word being the standard represents. I don't see consumers haveing much by the way of viable choices to Word in the near future. That may harm individual consumers, but on the whole they aren't really being hurt.
He sent letters and legal notices in the past. They just ignored him. He obviously tried to settle this in a reasonable manner, but he did try and enforce his trademark. This guy has created a good product that people use. He just wants people to associate the product name with just his product, so his product can compete on it's merrits, not the merrits or lack problems that other people's products have. That's the purpose of trademarks.
Finally! I now have a valid reason to move my computers back in the living room. Really dear, we're saving on the heating bill. Yes, I know it's freezing in the rest of the house, but it's fine in here. If it's cold in the kitchen, turn the oven on and make me some dinner.
If the BIOS on so many motherboards wasn't so buggy you could enable the power management features and not have an unstable system. Unfortunately, this isn't the case so Microsoft can't really make it the default. I've seen power management work fine on some systems and cause the system to crash consistently on others. Just another reason to spend a little extra on quality hardware instead of buying the cheapest system you can find.
There's more than just corporate FUD flying around.
Consumer Activist FUD - These utilities shouldn't be able to charge consumers more to make up for their bad business solutions.
Nice theory, but if the utilities don't have any way of paying off their debt, then they will go bankrupt. That means you might see some banks go under which would be really bad for the economy, not to mention the bank's accounts are federally insured, so there goes a ton ot tax money. The utilities aren't the only ones who made some bad decisions either. This plan was was passed by the Legislature in California. The people of California put them in office, and if someone has to bail out the utilities, it should be California, not the federal government.
Politician FUD - This deregulation law was passed by the previous administration and the utilities were the ones pushing for it, therefore it's not our fault.
There may be some truth to this, but this problem's been building for years, and they still haven't done anything about it. All they've managed to do is have the assembly pass a law to have the state buy power at a price that's unacceptable to the power producers.
Electricity producer FUD - Our costs have gone up, we have to charge more
They say the costs of natural gas have trippled, but the price they're chargin for electricity has gone up 10 times as much as it was. Sounds like some greedy wholesalers are getting rich. Of course they have to invest billions of dollars to build power plants, and they never know if some new Californian environmental regulation will cause them to have to shut their plants down before they pay them off, so I can't blame them too much for wanting to recoup their investments when they've got the advantage in the market.
I don't live in California, and my gas and electric bill is twice what it was last year, and I just put in a new more efficient furnance. Most Californian's on the other hand are still benefiting from the price caps on their electric bills, and aren't paying for the fact that oil and gas prices have shot through the roof. I just hope the federal govenment doesn't bail California out of this mess. If they do, the rest of the country gets to bail our most prosperous state out of their mess.
I'm for a free market economy, but maybe it just doesn't work well for utilities. After all to some extent utilities (especially heating) is a necessity, and the truly poor in this country are really going to be hurt at times like this when naturat gas and oil prices skyrocket.
That is the big difference - in an open source project, a security flaw is accidental, and not exploitable until someone finds it - and hopefully it is the comunity that finds it and not a hacker.
Why is it that you think the security flaws in open source are all accidental, while the ones in closed source are all by design. There's no reason an open source developer couldn't hide a designed security flaw in an open source project. I'm sure it's harder, but it can still be done. There's security flaws found in open source software all the time. If they can get in there accidently, then some one could design them in just as well.
Microsoft seems to be looking for a way to maintain a steady stream of cash flow. Over the years they've gone from just selling products, to selling a constant stream of upgrades and maintence plans to larger companies, to the.NET plan where they sell you a service and you never even get the illusion of owning a product.
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Third option. Work for someone else with the assumption that what you create is owned by them. If you can't accept your creations being the property of some corporate entity, then go back to one of the first two options.
For Microsoft it is a Windows piracy issue. Microsoft is concerned with getting paid for the software they develop. They are most likely also concerned with copy protection because it would make Windows an opperating system that would have wide industry support from comercial copyright holders. The sale of copyrighted material over the internet is likely to be a huge business in the near future, and they don't want left out.
I don't like the concept of hardware-level copy protection. I don't like these business models where the copyright holders want to control every aspect of how their material is used and distributed. However, I can understand why microsoft will support copy protection in their OS.
I don't know how you expected him to answer the question, but I think the major points are in his answer. Our software has security holes. As we find them we try to fix them. This is becomming an increasing problem for our customers, and we're making it a higher priority because of it.
Microsoft is a big company and change takes time. It's pretty easy to see that functionality took precedence over security and stability in their designs. At the time it seemed to take precedence for their customers too. Four or five years ago you wouldn't consider a Microsoft OS for any part of your network that needed to be secure, but for the average users desktop, the security risk was acceptable. Customers no longer find the security risk acceptable. Microsoft has responded by increasing the security of thier OS and applications. They aren't there yet, but they are making improvements. They also have a problem that many of thier users are security stupid, and won't apply the patches even when Microsoft fixes the problems.
The reason you didn't get an answer that you're happy with is that there is no answer he could give that would make you happy.
Unless I'm mistaken, Fair Use just says it's not illegal to make coppies for personal use. It doesn't require the record companies to make it so that you can make those coppies. With the DCMA it now appears that tool to get around their copy protections are now illegal as well. IANAL and all that crap.
Sure someone will crack it within a day or two. Of course that crack will be difficult for joe user to use, and will probably not be available for every OS. The recording industry is on the order of a $10 Billion business. If they only make it inconvienient enough that 10% of the people that would have outright pirate CDs decide to buy them. Or they convince those people who want two coppies that it's just easier to buy another one for their car than to get around the copy protection. If can mean 10s of Millions of dollars of more profits to them. So a few hundred thousand tech geeks figure out how to get around their new copy protection scheme. The bottom line is that they still make more money.
Just about every operating system in the world including Windows has a way to read and write raw data to a disk. If CD-RWs accept simpe block read and write commands, then your should be able to ignore CDFS and whatever junk they use for copy protection.
No, the proper answer is, "If you don't like the V-chip... don't buy one -- and let the people who want one pay the legitimate market price for it, not the subsidy price generated by forcing it on anyone who buys a new TV."
I have two different views on this. I agree that the people who want this and benefit from it should pay for it. This means that parents have to spend a bit more to get this feature on the TV their children are allowed to watch.
The other issue is that if V-chips are put in every TV then TV manufacturers can't gouge consumers for the added feature. Once the chips reach the volume of one in every TV, they become very cheap to produce. The development costs get spread out over a much larger number of units, and it ends up costing less than a buck for the manufacturers to add the feature.
In the end is there enough benefit to society to having this ability for parents to limit what their children see? I guess Congress gets to decide if they add a couple dollar tax to the price of TVs for this purpose.
I don't have kids, I don't watch the TV much, and a couple bucks extra on the price of a TV won't make much difference in my life. There's still an incredible market for programming that is inappropriate for children, so I don't think that programming is going away. I just don't see the free speach issue here, so I think it's a good thing.
As kids mature, you need to give them some responsibilities. You still need to limit that responsibility, guide them, and keep them from making bad choices. However, you can't control what they do all their lives, and it seems to work better if handing over that responsibility is a gradual process. Doesn't it make sence that there comes a stage where you want to be able to hand your kid the remote, but still limit their choices?
You can't watch over your children ALL the time. Yes it's your responsibility to filter what your children are exposed to. Children don't have enough experience to be able to make informed decisions or to know that many things that are interesting have serious downsides. But it's not reasonable to expect parents to watch over their children's shoulders all the time. The technological ability to limit what can be displayed on the TV in your house can let responsible parents have a couple hour break, and give their children some freedom of choice within a limited spectrum. This assumes the children are old enough to be left alone in a room for an extended period of time, and the TV isn't used as a babysitter for long periods of time.
I don't see this working with the internet. There's no way to rate the content and filter it properly. Parent's are going to have to supervise their children. They are also going to had to do their best to raise them right and give them increasing responsibilities and privleges as they mature. I've seen too many kids grow up in extremely sheltered homes, hit college and nearly self destruct. They hit 18 and can't think for themselves. That makes them extremely susceptable to peer pressure.
Try running Win95 with 16MB of RAM. It's slow enough to be unusable. Why was such a low about of RAM speced as a minimum requirement? Be cause RAM was really expensive in 1995 and 1996. It's relatively cheap now, so they are making the minimum requirements something that's a little more usable. Spend the $75 and get 256 MB of SDRAM. If you can't afford the RAM and the price of the OS, then stick with whatever you have now.
Sorry you had such bad luck with it. I've installed it dozens of times, and never had it lock up on the boot disk. Most of my test machines are slower than 300 MHz. I've never looked at the hardware compatability list, because I haven't had problems. I'm not doubting that your problem exhists, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule.
Glad to hear that Linux works for you. That's what it's all about, use what works.
While we're on the subject of things we're sick of hearing about.
Win2k is running like snail with 64MB Ram - even with no third party apps running!
256MB of SDRAM costs $75, this is a server, so I guess you should spend the $90 for ecc, but get over it. Don't spend hours trying to optimize things to save less than $100. I think it's great that Linux can run well on a lower end system. There are design tradeoffs that were made to achieve this. I'm glad Linux works for you. Right now I'd personally love a more bloated version of Linux with a binary driver interface, but that's my problem.
Something you are installing is corrupting the registry. Take a good look at the software and drivers you are using when things go bad.
Mucho dollars? My copy was $130. It cost me more than that to have a guy come out to my house and tell me my furnace didn't work because a bird was stuck in the exaust. For the average person who can afford a computer, is $130 really that much to have an OS you don't have to spend half your time tinkering with. Sure you have to spend an hour customizing it once you install it, and you have to update drivrs once in a while. But for the most part it's not hard to figure out. Isn't an OS wort the price of 3 computer games you play on it?
What new features are you looking for? I always hear that Microsoft code is too bloated, and then people complain that there's no new features.
The new features going from 95 to 98 to ME for the most part haven't been that visible to the average user. Microsoft has been merging the Win9X driver model with the NT one. They've been making the NT user interface more usable by home users, and they've been working on makeing the interface more consistent. What does this deliver to their users?
How about an OS they use that's the same at both home an work? Most people don't want to tinker with their computer at home. It's a tool they use to browse the internet, word processing, and touch up the photos they took with their new digital camera.
How about a OS that plays games yet doesn't crash all the time. It even has a journeling file system so, if you get some bad drivers that crash you don't have to reload/restore the system because all the dlls got trashed.
There's also a benefit for those of us driver writers that won't have to write a seperate win9x driver and waste development time. Of course we now spend it trying to update our driver to work with the latest Linux kernel, but you can't have everything.
They didn't can UO2, they delayed it in order to get UO:Third Dawn updated. UO's servers can only handle so many users, they still get new customers by word of mouth, and really just need to protect their current customer base from jumping ship to Everquest and Asheron's Call. In the long run UO2 is a great idea, but if what they need are some short term fixes to keep UO viable then this might not be a bad idea. I was playing UO when they came out with the last major update. The server updates were a month late. There were lots of server crashes. They had to hive all their new customers who bought the new version in the box a free month of service. Putting a project on hold and putting developers on another project isn't a very efficient solution, but with growing competition in their market, they can't afford to piss off their customer base.
This sounds like very good advice, unfortunately a lot of companies have taken a different approach. We have a large customer which is a hardware vendor. They develop special purpose systems, and have their own Linux distribution which is tailored to their needs. They support a variety of operatin systems, but Linux's open source nature is a nice advantage when dealing with custom systems. When problems arrive, they don't have to deal with intellectual property issues with the OS vendor when working with their customers to resolve the problems.
When working on a large system, the fast pace of changes in Linux can be a problem, so they have all the different vendors use their version of Linux, which they then control how often it gets updated.
The problem then arrises that Linux doesn't have a binary driver interface. Changes to the kernel often break device drivers. It's very difficult to release a driver in binary form at all, and making it work on a variety of systems and distributions is even worse.
We can't just release a source code version of the driver and have the customer recompile their kernel with our driver built in for three reasons.
1. The customer doesn't want their customers to have to recompile the kernel to install a new driver. The people installing and updating the drivers are not Linux experts. The installation must be simple. If running Linux on the system means they have to have better trained users, then Linux is no longer cost effective.
2. The source code contains intellectual property of the ASIC vendor that we have access to under NDA. We cannot legally release the source.
3. The ASIC we use in available and used by other vendors. Our software is what makes our products superior to our competitors. Making the source available so our competitors, when they've been promising the same features for a year but can't get it to work, can catch up is not a good business decision.
The problems get even worse because the customers want to use software from a third party which they think should work with our hardware. Unfortuately, that software contains kernel patches which are poorly hacked into the kernel. Now we're spending our development time patching a customer specific kernel and third party software.
After a couple months of this we think we've got it worked out. My managers are happy and mentioned that they have some other customers who want Linux drivers and can't wait to give the customers the new code. Of course the customer has a different distribution with a different kernel version. My boss was not happy to find our that changes to the kernel break our driver, and more development needs to be done to get the driver working for that customer, who also has some very specialized needs.
Our product has a lot of features. Fully running our verification tests takes several weeks to a month. Supporting a large number of OSes is expensive. Supporting an OS like Linux where everyone cooks there own version is very expensive. Support for anything but Red Hat or Linux PPC (yes we support PPC) will likely not be a free product from us in the future. It just isn't cost effective unless there's a very large order involved.
Your first assumption seems to be that Microsoft has a monopoly on word processors, which this case doesn't cover. Assuming they do have a monopoly in that area, is it still illegal for them not to disclose their file format. If they disclosed the file format, they'd just have every other company that makes word processors screaming antitrust when they changed it to add new features. And even if the format were open. There would still be incompatabilities, because no software package the size of a present day word processor is without bugs. Every time Microsoft changed something, their competitors would have to play catch-up.
And we have the important question of are consumers really being harmed? You can always say that another word processor is better, but in large it's a matter of preference. What conusmers seem to be lacking is a variety of choices. Although consumers like to have choices, you can definately make an argument that business customers have actually benefitted from this lack of choice. They don't have to train their users or tech support teams on mutiple applications. Since everyone uses it, it's likely that their users will be famialiar with Word when they hire them. The cost of the software is small compared to training costs. Home users also want to use at home what they have at work, so one choice works for them too. Now if Microsoft's Word was a really bad product that didn't meet most of people's needs, then people would switch. But for now it's the industry standard, and it's not perfect but it's good enough. If MS quits improving/changing Word to meet consumer's needs, then they will eventually get replaced by somone else's software. But, Microsoft continues to dump a large chunk of their profits back into development and work to improve their products. Therefore it's unlikly that a competitor will have a product that will overcome the barrier that Word being the standard represents. I don't see consumers haveing much by the way of viable choices to Word in the near future. That may harm individual consumers, but on the whole they aren't really being hurt.
He sent letters and legal notices in the past. They just ignored him. He obviously tried to settle this in a reasonable manner, but he did try and enforce his trademark. This guy has created a good product that people use. He just wants people to associate the product name with just his product, so his product can compete on it's merrits, not the merrits or lack problems that other people's products have. That's the purpose of trademarks.
Finally! I now have a valid reason to move my computers back in the living room. Really dear, we're saving on the heating bill. Yes, I know it's freezing in the rest of the house, but it's fine in here. If it's cold in the kitchen, turn the oven on and make me some dinner.
If the BIOS on so many motherboards wasn't so buggy you could enable the power management features and not have an unstable system. Unfortunately, this isn't the case so Microsoft can't really make it the default. I've seen power management work fine on some systems and cause the system to crash consistently on others. Just another reason to spend a little extra on quality hardware instead of buying the cheapest system you can find.
There's more than just corporate FUD flying around.
Consumer Activist FUD - These utilities shouldn't be able to charge consumers more to make up for their bad business solutions.
Nice theory, but if the utilities don't have any way of paying off their debt, then they will go bankrupt. That means you might see some banks go under which would be really bad for the economy, not to mention the bank's accounts are federally insured, so there goes a ton ot tax money. The utilities aren't the only ones who made some bad decisions either. This plan was was passed by the Legislature in California. The people of California put them in office, and if someone has to bail out the utilities, it should be California, not the federal government.
Politician FUD - This deregulation law was passed by the previous administration and the utilities were the ones pushing for it, therefore it's not our fault.
There may be some truth to this, but this problem's been building for years, and they still haven't done anything about it. All they've managed to do is have the assembly pass a law to have the state buy power at a price that's unacceptable to the power producers.
Electricity producer FUD - Our costs have gone up, we have to charge more
They say the costs of natural gas have trippled, but the price they're chargin for electricity has gone up 10 times as much as it was. Sounds like some greedy wholesalers are getting rich. Of course they have to invest billions of dollars to build power plants, and they never know if some new Californian environmental regulation will cause them to have to shut their plants down before they pay them off, so I can't blame them too much for wanting to recoup their investments when they've got the advantage in the market.
I don't live in California, and my gas and electric bill is twice what it was last year, and I just put in a new more efficient furnance. Most Californian's on the other hand are still benefiting from the price caps on their electric bills, and aren't paying for the fact that oil and gas prices have shot through the roof. I just hope the federal govenment doesn't bail California out of this mess. If they do, the rest of the country gets to bail our most prosperous state out of their mess.
I'm for a free market economy, but maybe it just doesn't work well for utilities. After all to some extent utilities (especially heating) is a necessity, and the truly poor in this country are really going to be hurt at times like this when naturat gas and oil prices skyrocket.
If we returned to the caves we'd just polute the caves which would ruin our ground water.
That is the big difference - in an open source project, a security flaw is accidental, and not exploitable until someone finds it - and hopefully it is the comunity that finds it and not a hacker.
Why is it that you think the security flaws in open source are all accidental, while the ones in closed source are all by design. There's no reason an open source developer couldn't hide a designed security flaw in an open source project. I'm sure it's harder, but it can still be done. There's security flaws found in open source software all the time. If they can get in there accidently, then some one could design them in just as well.
Microsoft seems to be looking for a way to maintain a steady stream of cash flow. Over the years they've gone from just selling products, to selling a constant stream of upgrades and maintence plans to larger companies, to the .NET plan where they sell you a service and you never even get the illusion of owning a product.