I don't think you understand the concept of class action suits. Instead of having loads of little suits, all the lawyers get together and file a huge suit. That way the company getting sued does not go broke paying legal fees, the lawyers all collect millions of dollars each, and the consumers get checks for the ten cents left.
If there are class action suits, it will be a few, at most. The legal bills will be miniscule in the microsoft scheme of things. The payouts will be small, far less than the profits Microsoft made off of windows.
All this, of course, assumes that Microsoft is found guilty, which is probably not going to happen, given that many Americans still see Microsoft as just a bunch of enterprising guys who worked their butts off to enjoy the American dream.
Beyond that, people can bitch as much as they want, they will have a hard time proving that Microsoft hurt consumers. At best they can sue Microsoft for charging too much for the OS, which is unlikely, given how much software out there costs many more times than an OEM Windows license, and you need the OS just to run the software.
Nothing will ever get rid of Microsoft. They might lost their monopoly on the OS market. Their dominance in the office app market will liekly die out as they move to XML based file formats, which will be nigh-impossible to keep proprietary..net will never be as huge as Bill would like, because the ASP companies already have a ton of ground and people won't need MS to make that business work.
Yeah, selling a box for Linux geeks to hack is going to make a ton of money. Especially when it will be sold at a loss for the first year, possibly two years, just to get a little market share. They definately wanted to sell it to guys like you, who would hack the box and not even buy games because you were using it for other stuff. Sounds like the perfect business model to me.
Emachines makes boxes for guys like you. Console companies make games for people who buy loads of licensed software and peripherals.
"It sure looked like it could have been something tho."
A console by a company with no reputation, no serious financial backers, no experience, and no large parent firm, and you thought it could have been something? Why? Because it ran Linux? Linux was the only thing Indrema ever had going for them, because it was a great buzzword.
If anything, the Linux community should be glad to see Indrema go. People who use Linux to fund their cash-burning startups and never produce anything do little to advance the cause.
"There is nothing like good competitors to help a company focused on building even more value in their offerings..."
So why does Microsoft work so hard to cruah competition through other means? Wouldn't they have been better off making Internet Explorer 4.0 a better browser, instead of tying it into the OS to make it hard for Windows users to remove? Couldn't Microsoft have just have fixed all the performace and stability problems in Windows that made OS/2 Warp look like such a great alternative, instead of strongarming IBM into dumping it? Why didn't Microsoft just fix the bugs in NT sooner to compete with Linux, instead of pushing Compaq to not support it years ago when Compaq wanted to ship Linux machines?
While I am sure the Slashdot guys are pleased to be able to have a Microsoft representative answer questions, stating that he is not weasly is little more than an ass-kissing attempt to get Doug to come back for more. The truth is, Miller simply spouts out the standard Microsoft line, trying to make his company look a little bit less like the corporate scum they are.
Free software definately has upsides now that the economy is in the shitter, but I think that in the long run the cost of the hardware is more important, and that is what will push Linux.
One of the reasons that linux has become such a popular webserver platform is because people love to run webservers on Sun hardware. Sun hardware provides a reliable, easy to manage hardware platform, with great support options. Beyond that, it comes with a wonderful OS, that most popular free software has been ported to. The downside of the Sun hardware is the cost. For a webserver that does not need the massive throughput provided by a Sun CPU and bus, Sun hardware is damned expensive. X86 hardware usually costs many tens of thousands of dollars less, but until recently it was hard to get support for x86 platforms running Linux.
Now that major vendors like Dell support Linux on their hardware (And vice-versa.) people will be far more likely to abandon expensive sun hardware in favor of dirt cheap Linux machines. This will probably lead to some nice trickle down business for companies like Penguin computing (And perhaps even the always-overpriced VALinux.) and further help the Linux market, by inspiring competition that leads to lower prices.
This is going to get moderated down to troll, but...
Passport is a "free" service provided by a company with decades of sleazy history. People should know better than to trust them from the start. We all saw Micro$oft screw one company after another. We saw what they did to Dr DOS and Stacker. We watched them show forged evidence to a federal court in their own antitrust hearings. And all of those actions were given plenty of press. People should know better than to trust Micro$oft already. Anyone screwed by this deserves it for using a Micro$oft service to begin with.
This sends a great message to all of the major news agencies in the USA: your news is CRAP.
CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, and just about everyone besides the Christian Science monitor produce some of the most hideously slanted crap out there. Almost every piece of news sent out by a major news source is reactionary tripe, leaving objectivism behind in favor of a ratings boost. These people live in constant fear of offending advertisers or the corporations that own them.
Not so for Comedy Central. While they probably could get in some very deep ship for angering their parent, Viacom, they do not give a damn. Everyone is open to jokes, be they charged with ethnic, political, or scatalogical humor. This leads to a total, unabashed, unbiased news source.
I certainly hope that this shames the big news sources into change.
Why do these people comply with Micro$oft's requests for license audits? Is there actually a lay that forces them to do so? It seems to me that if a company owns the hardware, and knows that they at least got an OEM license for Windows with the machine, they should be able to tell Micro$oft to take their audit request and shove it.
So does anyone know what happens if a company refuses to audit?
"If only we figured out a way for it to break even;)"
Give me a way to support it. I cannot tell you how many times I have needed to look up tech jargon at work and found an instant answer of E2. That site is a lifesaver.
Perhaps we should start a push for boxing rings in schools. Remember the old stereotype of the catholic priest dragging students into the gym to fight it out in the boxing ring? That is what all of out schools need.
is that our culture discourages hitting back. There was a time when if a child in this country was bullied, his father would take him in the backyard, and teach the son how to beat the living shit out of another boy. The boy would return to school, and the next round of bullying would result in the bully getting into a serious fight. Sure the bully might not always win, but fighting back usually gained one enough respect that future bullying and humiliation were drastically reduced.
Unfortunatly, those halcyon days are no more. Now a child who hits back is as likely to be given a long term suspension as the bully is. Kids are taught to seek out peer mediation, or to just turn the other cheek. The problem is, however, that these strategies do not fit into the hormonally charged mind of male youths. Humans are a violent species, especially teenage-boys, and they have an instinctive need to fight. This is why teachers and school administrators often have a "boys will be boys" attitude toward bullying, but at the same time pressure from concerned parents forces them to allow children to be drastically punished for natural behavior.
The real solution to this problem is to just go back to letting the kids fight out their problems. Sure boys will get hurt. Egos will be temporarily crushed. But in the world of teenage boys, no amount of talking things out will ever earn a boy the respect that punching a bully in the eye does.
I turn my head to look around a corner in Quake, and suddenly... I am looking away from the monitor. This kind of gadget has been around for years in numerous incarnations (Even for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.) and always fails for the same reason: there is only one, small, stationary screen.
Beyond that, if you are sitting in one place, constantly moving one's head around to view parts of a screen is a bit annoying.
People have always used media to escape reality. That's the point. This is why video/role playing games have always been bad for "geeks," providing an escape from the reality that they fear to a false one that they can feel safe in.
It goes back farther than that though. Remember your mother yelling at you to stop watching TV and do your homework? Same concept. Stop shirking important stuff just to be a zombie.
The book Katz speaks of is just the work of someone stating the obvious. Of course, Katz being the genius that he is, needs the obvious pointed out, and assumes that others do, too.
This item really cements that whole "news for nerds" thing. This is why I am getting sick of Slashdot: more and more articles are pointless. It isn't enough that they waste all the space on the Jon Katz stories that so many of us have stopped reading, but crap like this takes the cake.
I know plenty of people submit better stuff than this. Hell, I can think to two stories I have submitted about online music (One about Prince moving his music sales online, and one about a group of artists striking out against record companies.) and neither were posted, although they were certainly of more interest than yet another case modded for lan parties.
Is it just me, or does it seem that/. is just getting too geeky?
The UO2 project has had issues from day one. EA wanted the game done far too soon, and cut out most of the features it would have had over EverQuest (Beyond the obvious graphical differences.). It was announced that most of the features would instead be introduced in a later expansion, at an additional cost to the players.
After that, Lord British, sick of EA marketing shoving all of his games out the door far too soon, left the company. A little later most of the game's developers left at once, and quickly (And suspiciously.) reappeared at Verant's new studio in Texas, to work on Star Wars: Galaxies.
The problem here is EA. EA is a company driven by marketing. They see Ultima as nothing beyond a brand name, and always assume that a game will sell more copies by being released during a huge, carefully planned advertising blitz, right before christmas, just as school lets out for summer, etc.. If they would just look at how Blizzard works, releasing games with little care about what anyone else thinks, or what the game looks like, they would see that with a little patience Ultima could be revived and turned around. Or at least they could have before every decent Origin employee got sick of it and quick.
* side note - before you reply about Blizzard complaining about Warcraft Adventures not taking advantage of modern technology, the big facter was actually that adventure game sales have been in the toilet for years and the time it would have taken to finish the game would have cost more than an adventure game will ever sell.
Indrema was bound for disaster from the start. They never had enough funding or connections with developers to go anywhere. Their only saving grace was that plent of VC suckers were willing to throw money at a Linux company.
If Indrema had wanted to do this right, they would have needed backing from someone with oodles of money from day one. They also would have needed to chase down japanese game developers like crazy, because a console will go nowhere without them.
Indrema was just another product of the dotcom mess. It would have been great to see them succeed, but we all knew it was just a pipe dream.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really wanted to degrade him, you should have pointed out that he could do all of that with an iMac!
I don't think you understand the concept of class action suits. Instead of having loads of little suits, all the lawyers get together and file a huge suit. That way the company getting sued does not go broke paying legal fees, the lawyers all collect millions of dollars each, and the consumers get checks for the ten cents left.
.net will never be as huge as Bill would like, because the ASP companies already have a ton of ground and people won't need MS to make that business work.
If there are class action suits, it will be a few, at most. The legal bills will be miniscule in the microsoft scheme of things. The payouts will be small, far less than the profits Microsoft made off of windows.
All this, of course, assumes that Microsoft is found guilty, which is probably not going to happen, given that many Americans still see Microsoft as just a bunch of enterprising guys who worked their butts off to enjoy the American dream.
Beyond that, people can bitch as much as they want, they will have a hard time proving that Microsoft hurt consumers. At best they can sue Microsoft for charging too much for the OS, which is unlikely, given how much software out there costs many more times than an OEM Windows license, and you need the OS just to run the software.
Nothing will ever get rid of Microsoft. They might lost their monopoly on the OS market. Their dominance in the office app market will liekly die out as they move to XML based file formats, which will be nigh-impossible to keep proprietary.
/me bows softly in a moment of silence for Yokoi-san.
Yeah, selling a box for Linux geeks to hack is going to make a ton of money. Especially when it will be sold at a loss for the first year, possibly two years, just to get a little market share. They definately wanted to sell it to guys like you, who would hack the box and not even buy games because you were using it for other stuff. Sounds like the perfect business model to me.
Emachines makes boxes for guys like you. Console companies make games for people who buy loads of licensed software and peripherals.
"It sure looked like it could have been something tho."
A console by a company with no reputation, no serious financial backers, no experience, and no large parent firm, and you thought it could have been something? Why? Because it ran Linux? Linux was the only thing Indrema ever had going for them, because it was a great buzzword.
If anything, the Linux community should be glad to see Indrema go. People who use Linux to fund their cash-burning startups and never produce anything do little to advance the cause.
I wish that this was not in response to one of my comments, just so I could mod it up!
This will get -1, Troll, but I just cannot resist:
"Does Peer-to-Peer Suck?"
Not as much as these lame stories from you, Katz!
"There is nothing like good competitors to help a company focused on building even more value in their offerings..."
So why does Microsoft work so hard to cruah competition through other means? Wouldn't they have been better off making Internet Explorer 4.0 a better browser, instead of tying it into the OS to make it hard for Windows users to remove? Couldn't Microsoft have just have fixed all the performace and stability problems in Windows that made OS/2 Warp look like such a great alternative, instead of strongarming IBM into dumping it? Why didn't Microsoft just fix the bugs in NT sooner to compete with Linux, instead of pushing Compaq to not support it years ago when Compaq wanted to ship Linux machines?
While I am sure the Slashdot guys are pleased to be able to have a Microsoft representative answer questions, stating that he is not weasly is little more than an ass-kissing attempt to get Doug to come back for more. The truth is, Miller simply spouts out the standard Microsoft line, trying to make his company look a little bit less like the corporate scum they are.
I looked at this, was impressed, and have begun using the name.space servers to resolve DNS. truly a better way to go.
.2000 :)
I did, however, find it silly that there is a
Free software definately has upsides now that the economy is in the shitter, but I think that in the long run the cost of the hardware is more important, and that is what will push Linux.
One of the reasons that linux has become such a popular webserver platform is because people love to run webservers on Sun hardware. Sun hardware provides a reliable, easy to manage hardware platform, with great support options. Beyond that, it comes with a wonderful OS, that most popular free software has been ported to. The downside of the Sun hardware is the cost. For a webserver that does not need the massive throughput provided by a Sun CPU and bus, Sun hardware is damned expensive. X86 hardware usually costs many tens of thousands of dollars less, but until recently it was hard to get support for x86 platforms running Linux.
Now that major vendors like Dell support Linux on their hardware (And vice-versa.) people will be far more likely to abandon expensive sun hardware in favor of dirt cheap Linux machines. This will probably lead to some nice trickle down business for companies like Penguin computing (And perhaps even the always-overpriced VALinux.) and further help the Linux market, by inspiring competition that leads to lower prices.
This is going to get moderated down to troll, but...
Passport is a "free" service provided by a company with decades of sleazy history. People should know better than to trust them from the start. We all saw Micro$oft screw one company after another. We saw what they did to Dr DOS and Stacker. We watched them show forged evidence to a federal court in their own antitrust hearings. And all of those actions were given plenty of press. People should know better than to trust Micro$oft already. Anyone screwed by this deserves it for using a Micro$oft service to begin with.
This sends a great message to all of the major news agencies in the USA: your news is CRAP.
CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, and just about everyone besides the Christian Science monitor produce some of the most hideously slanted crap out there. Almost every piece of news sent out by a major news source is reactionary tripe, leaving objectivism behind in favor of a ratings boost. These people live in constant fear of offending advertisers or the corporations that own them.
Not so for Comedy Central. While they probably could get in some very deep ship for angering their parent, Viacom, they do not give a damn. Everyone is open to jokes, be they charged with ethnic, political, or scatalogical humor. This leads to a total, unabashed, unbiased news source.
I certainly hope that this shames the big news sources into change.
Why do these people comply with Micro$oft's requests for license audits? Is there actually a lay that forces them to do so? It seems to me that if a company owns the hardware, and knows that they at least got an OEM license for Windows with the machine, they should be able to tell Micro$oft to take their audit request and shove it.
So does anyone know what happens if a company refuses to audit?
I know allowing people to patent a plant alone is bad enough, but ignoring that:
Shouldn't the person who gave/sold him the seeds/starter plants to begin with be the one paying up?
"If only we figured out a way for it to break even ;)"
Give me a way to support it. I cannot tell you how many times I have needed to look up tech jargon at work and found an instant answer of E2. That site is a lifesaver.
Perhaps we should start a push for boxing rings in schools. Remember the old stereotype of the catholic priest dragging students into the gym to fight it out in the boxing ring? That is what all of out schools need.
is that our culture discourages hitting back. There was a time when if a child in this country was bullied, his father would take him in the backyard, and teach the son how to beat the living shit out of another boy. The boy would return to school, and the next round of bullying would result in the bully getting into a serious fight. Sure the bully might not always win, but fighting back usually gained one enough respect that future bullying and humiliation were drastically reduced.
Unfortunatly, those halcyon days are no more. Now a child who hits back is as likely to be given a long term suspension as the bully is. Kids are taught to seek out peer mediation, or to just turn the other cheek. The problem is, however, that these strategies do not fit into the hormonally charged mind of male youths. Humans are a violent species, especially teenage-boys, and they have an instinctive need to fight. This is why teachers and school administrators often have a "boys will be boys" attitude toward bullying, but at the same time pressure from concerned parents forces them to allow children to be drastically punished for natural behavior.
The real solution to this problem is to just go back to letting the kids fight out their problems. Sure boys will get hurt. Egos will be temporarily crushed. But in the world of teenage boys, no amount of talking things out will ever earn a boy the respect that punching a bully in the eye does.
"charging listeners $9.99 for the season."
They have to pay for the bandwidth somehow.
"No word on whether you will be forced to pay $29.95 for a registered copy of RealNetworks' software."
Forced? Not likely. The last time I checked paying for RealPlayer was just as voluntary as listening to a baseball game on the radio.
"The words 'suck' and 'criminal' want to appear here in the worst way."
Of course they do. After all, the constitution demands a right to hear a baseball game for free, doesn't it?
"Especially after team owners extort taxpayers to help build their stadiums."
Extort? The taxpayers can let the teams go elsewhere. No town needs a baseball team, and taxpayers can always watch the game on TV for free.
Seems to me that someone is testy over *shock* a for profit corporation attempting to make money! heaven forbid!
I turn my head to look around a corner in Quake, and suddenly... I am looking away from the monitor. This kind of gadget has been around for years in numerous incarnations (Even for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.) and always fails for the same reason: there is only one, small, stationary screen.
Beyond that, if you are sitting in one place, constantly moving one's head around to view parts of a screen is a bit annoying.
People have always used media to escape reality. That's the point. This is why video/role playing games have always been bad for "geeks," providing an escape from the reality that they fear to a false one that they can feel safe in.
It goes back farther than that though. Remember your mother yelling at you to stop watching TV and do your homework? Same concept. Stop shirking important stuff just to be a zombie.
The book Katz speaks of is just the work of someone stating the obvious. Of course, Katz being the genius that he is, needs the obvious pointed out, and assumes that others do, too.
This puts a huge smile on my face. At least one of the Linux companies has some serious potential to make money.
I guess this proves that when you do it right, you CAN make money off of Open Source. Free stuff making money. That is just too cool.
This item really cements that whole "news for nerds" thing. This is why I am getting sick of Slashdot: more and more articles are pointless. It isn't enough that they waste all the space on the Jon Katz stories that so many of us have stopped reading, but crap like this takes the cake.
/. is just getting too geeky?
I know plenty of people submit better stuff than this. Hell, I can think to two stories I have submitted about online music (One about Prince moving his music sales online, and one about a group of artists striking out against record companies.) and neither were posted, although they were certainly of more interest than yet another case modded for lan parties.
Is it just me, or does it seem that
The UO2 project has had issues from day one. EA wanted the game done far too soon, and cut out most of the features it would have had over EverQuest (Beyond the obvious graphical differences.). It was announced that most of the features would instead be introduced in a later expansion, at an additional cost to the players.
After that, Lord British, sick of EA marketing shoving all of his games out the door far too soon, left the company. A little later most of the game's developers left at once, and quickly (And suspiciously.) reappeared at Verant's new studio in Texas, to work on Star Wars: Galaxies.
The problem here is EA. EA is a company driven by marketing. They see Ultima as nothing beyond a brand name, and always assume that a game will sell more copies by being released during a huge, carefully planned advertising blitz, right before christmas, just as school lets out for summer, etc.. If they would just look at how Blizzard works, releasing games with little care about what anyone else thinks, or what the game looks like, they would see that with a little patience Ultima could be revived and turned around. Or at least they could have before every decent Origin employee got sick of it and quick.
* side note - before you reply about Blizzard complaining about Warcraft Adventures not taking advantage of modern technology, the big facter was actually that adventure game sales have been in the toilet for years and the time it would have taken to finish the game would have cost more than an adventure game will ever sell.
Indrema was bound for disaster from the start. They never had enough funding or connections with developers to go anywhere. Their only saving grace was that plent of VC suckers were willing to throw money at a Linux company.
If Indrema had wanted to do this right, they would have needed backing from someone with oodles of money from day one. They also would have needed to chase down japanese game developers like crazy, because a console will go nowhere without them.
Indrema was just another product of the dotcom mess. It would have been great to see them succeed, but we all knew it was just a pipe dream.
Lord British left EA/Origin ages ago, rather than be involved with the fiasco that is UO2.