Of course they are. And isn't it amusing that Microsoft, which basically fought the U.S. Federal Government to a standstill in the court room, is now looking at being brought to their knees by a bunch of quick-buck con-artists masquerading as Patent Lawyers?
Sure, they might buy out NTP. But once they pay out, the other Patent Lawyers will smell the blood in the water and start circling like the sharks that they are.
You'd better believe that a lot of people are going to be looking at the big giants with deep pockets if Microsoft gives these guys money. It's an INCREDIBLY easy way to make money.
And not even a company as large as Microsoft or IBM can stand up to a beowulf-cluster (pardon the term - it seems appropriate) of attack lawyers doing the same game that NTP is.
Clearly it can't last for long. The name of the game is right now is to milk the system for all its worth. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the sad show. In the meantime, this will have a negative effect on startups and new technology.
Agreed. Unless, of course, there are O.S.'s out there where someone has pulled this stunt. The password for the backdoor is quite unlikely to have changed, making it a contender.:)
Part of the reason why I mentioned it is because it is easier to pull off with closed source O.S.'s.
My favorite quote from Dennis Ritchie:
"I promise that no such thing has ever been included in any distributed
version of Unix. However, this took place about the time that NSA
was first acquiring the system, and there was considerable temptation."
Yes, that one had definite potential for abuse. How's your favorite closed source C compiler doing these days?:)
I concure with the statements about its stability, in production systems no less.
In fact, I prefer it over the RH Enterprise stuff, simply because it has been reliable, and it also has the latest set of features, which has saved my butt in being able to get things done. This has happened over and over again. The Fedora folks deserve Kudos for their efforts.
I would also say that the FC releases aren't flawless. But there are always issues with every O.S. release, be it FC, other Linux distros, Windows, OS X, or BSD. The key thing is being able to recognize which OS meets your needs for the work you need done.
For much of my work, FC has been able to meet my requirements betther than the other Distros or O.S.'s, and it's been extremely reliable. As always, YMMV.
Not really; I think you miss the point. While the newest gizmo might play the latest song they want, a truly locked DRM device will have to reject the format of the older archives (otherwise it might be playing some ripped version and promoting piracy).
So, yes, I do think most people might notice it when their old collection of songs no longer works. Especially when they'd have to pay again to hear the songs that they already own.
The point being is that the cost of supporting DRM formats is more than the cost of the DRM player; it's that of the player and paying again for one's prior collection. Which provides an economic incentive for other options.
Generally speaking, in high-tech, retaining backwards compatibility is an extremely strong force. So much so, that one has to have an extremely powerful motivation to toss it aside.
It remains to be seen whether DRM media provides enough of a motivating factor to the market to ignore backwards compatibility. There's no benefit for the consumer; the only benefit is for the manufacturer. I can't think of any product like this in history which has survived for long. Which is why I am sceptical of this one being the first.
And the worst thing about it is the fact that it's only normal, legal customers that won't be laughing. The real pirates will still be able to crack the DRM one way or another and not be put off even the slightest.
Sadly, I think that must be the best thing about it. The general population might begin to wonder why their media hardware is broken. And that's how it will be viewed, as broken.
Or they'll have to turn into "pirates" themselves, in order to get things working the way they want it. That would be an interesting twist.
Either way, it ought to give a boost to independent media which is isn't published with restraints.
The emphasis on cost is presumably because the argument might stand up in Court. In case you hadn't noticed, upholding a legal argument based upon Rights guaranteed in the Consititution isn't in vogue within the Court system, and hasn't been for quite some time.
Nor is this likely to change; witness the nomination of a Scalia-clone to the Supreme Court.
However, an argument based upon cost just might gain a sympathic ear from a Judge. And goodness knows, the Justice Department doesn't want to bear the cost of this. Nor do they want to have to ask Congress for the money, where the Educational System does have influence via lobbying.
The big problem with this type of argument is that the cost of the technology gets cheaper every year. At some point in the not-too-distant future it will reach $4.50 per student to implement, not $450. Then it will be harder to fight against.
"First, contrary to popular belief, the sig on the back of the card is not there for identification purposes,"
Yes it is. You clearly have never heard of the concept called "signature authority". It's been around ever since people started signing contracts. It's what companies use to establish who can sign checks for the company. You filled out such a card when you opened up your bank account. And yes, clerks are supposed to verify that the signature matches.
Don't be so quick to criticize others when you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
If you dispute this, please cite some authoritative sources.
I agree. Perhaps the problem is with how the infrastructure market is set up? It's all designed around the "big daddy" approach. For either DSL or Cable, you have to go through a big TelCo or a big CableCo to get access to a line. And they restrict your choices heavily to what they want to sell. Even those CLECs in the DSL biz have to go through the TelCo just to resell the same lines.
You have NO other options for landlines.
Since this approach hasn't worked, perhaps we need to get to the core of the problem by spinning off the portion of the business which actually provides the physical lines? That is, separate out the local Central Offices from the current Phone Companies. Instead of giving preferrential treatment to the Big TelCo's, let all of the businesses compete evenly here.
The key point here is to actively encourage a business to actually sell lines, regardless of what those lines are carrying. Right now we have the opposite situation, where you are banned from carrying higher speed signals than what the Phone Company sells.
An example of the effectiveness of this can be seen with "Naked DSL". Back in the late 1990's, some people figured out that they COULD get high speed DSL if they bought a "naked line". That is, a line without any of the normal telephone signals on them (these are commonly used by Alarm Companies, for home/biz security systems). At your home, you installed a high-speed DSL router, and at the ISP was another one. Presto, instand DSL.
Just like in the old days when Dialup first started the takeoff of the first real Internet ISP's like Netcom.
Of course, once the phone companies realized that people would end up by-passing the TelCo's for any time of ISP service, they quashed that immediately. Now they actively scan for any DSL signals on a naked line; and they disconnect the naked line if they find them.
If instead you spun off the CO's into a business model which was based upon profiting from active line connections, then this would never have happened. Instead, the DSL industry would be encouraged to grow, with speeds even faster than our current Cable offerings (Japan has been bragging about such DSL "modems" for years).
Of course, the Phone companies will fight this tooth and nail. They like having a discount compared to the CLECs. But the real question is at what point do we realize that the current scheme isn't working, and when do we cut over to a more market-driven approach to the core technologies? Only when we do so will we see real improvements to high speed connections. It is clear that the current scheme hasn't worked, nor will it work in the future.
Something has to change if it is ever going to work.
Saying that it's the personality doesn't shed any light on the issue.
Of course it's the personality; the question is what are the specific
personality traits which lead people into both coding and RPG? Jungian
analysis doesn't cut it, IMO.
It's more than creating a character; that's insufficient. If it were the
case, there'd only be MUSH's around. Personally, I think just creating a char
is rather pointless unless you actually DO something with it.
This is why I mentioned adventure. In a nutshell, it was D&D boiled
down to the basics. If the excitement was about creating a character,
adventure never would never have been such an excellent filter for spotting
talented hackers. Rather, it was about having an adventure. In one's
imagination.
So I think this is the key connection; namely, having an imagination,
and being able to DO something with it. This is why D&D appeals to talented
coders. Such people like to use their imagination to create new worlds, whether
those worlds are in real life, or virtual.
I think it goes beyond the people skills issue, or the fantasy wish fullfillment issue. Problem solving is one key aspect to it.
Way back before real network connectivity started appearing in RP games (Muds, etc.), there were similar games that you played solo. "adventure" is the classic one which comes to mind. It was quite popular, and still can be found in the BSD releases. This game was one of the first, if not the first, of the exploring-a-fantasy-world times of games. It was also mentioned in the book "The Soul of a new Machine".
Perhaps the phrase "maze of twisty passages all alike" might ring some bells with people.
There's something inherent about the problem solving nature of that type of game which simply appeals to good hackers. One thing I've noticed is that good hackers are (or were) drawn to this game. Lesser talented people generally weren't.
It's like a variation of the typical computer problems which one solves, but with "adventure", it's done as entertainment.
It's this problem-solving-as-entertainment which plays a key part in the appeal to real hackers, IMHO. And which, incidentally, leads these people on to greater understanding of other things far more complex. Like Operating Systems for one. And in turn, it's this understanding which makes people better with their technical abilities.
My bet is that Tivo is going to die before the VCR. The VCR still lets me play anything I like, the way I want it. This is a feature which Tivo is lacking.
Could you please explain how in the world you're going to replace the chipsets on an existing PC motherboard with an FPGA? Or even what motherboards out there ship with an OpenCore FPGA which allows you to do this, for any reasonable modern CPU?
I don't keep up with the current state-of-the-art with OpenCores; but I was under the impression that they aren't at this stage yet. A quick perusal of opencores.org doesn't dissuade me from this view.
So, could you either provide a link to what you're referring to? Or is this just BS?
Note to mods: I wouldn't mod the parent up until some more real proof comes along. Hopefully my skeptiscm is misplaced.
While it would be nice if it were available for general purchase, that's a bit irrelevant. This could FINALLY serve as a reference design for an Open Source laptop. MIT simply needs to make the schematics available, preferrably under the GPL, so that anyone can ship the design to an online shop and have it built.
Granted, you couldn't do that for $100 - not at first. But what would happen is that businesses would sprout up selling this in volume. Which would bring down the cost for the average geek, as well as MIT. The spinoffs from this would mean that we could FINALLY get commodity parts for a laptop.
Or, in short, MIT has the opportunity to do to the laptop what IBM did to the PC.
I, for one, would be willing to help with whatever work is involved, if they GPL the schematics. I am sick and tired of dealing with the rediculous prices for proprietary laptops.
Suppose your current boss either sells the company, or he suddenly dies, and it gets sold to someone else.
Unless you have a written agreement which CLEARLY calls out your ownership, the software which you claim may no longer be yours. If it becomes of value, there's a real good probability that someone else will make a claim on it if they can. It's amazing how people come out of the woodwork when there's a possibility of money to be had.
If for no other reason than to settle out of court for a few tens-of-thousands of dollars (that is, what it would cost you for legal defense). Or, in the worst case, a judge will take your property away from you, and give it to someone else. There are a LOT of sleazy quick-buck artists out there who would view it as easy as taking candy from a baby, and would do so with any qualms whatsoever.
I've seen a number of ugly situations which really shouldn't have happened. Fortunately, not with myself because I've learned from others.
A good lawyer can save you from letting a lot of grief happening.
It could be, but that's not an issue. Perhaps I should've pointed out more that what we have here is another
manufactured
shortage, which is clear if you had read the article. Wages haven't risen, nor have prices increased. Instead, you've got the farmers crying about it, just so that they can get a law passed in Congress to encourage more illegal immigrants as farmworkers to keep wages low.
The point being is that even when there is no labor shortage, it seems to be a time honored tradition of big business to claim otherwise. Just so they can keep wages as low as possible, and pocket the profit.
And we're seeing this directly in high technology, as well as the farm fields. Few professions are immune to this. The only question is where is it going to stop, and what kind of society we want to live in.
There's a very related parallel example going on in (of all things) farm labor. For years, the growers in California have had access to abundant, cheap farm labor; due to the massive amounts of illegal immigration.
Since 9/11 however, things have tightened up at the border. The result is that now the farmers are crying about how they can't find farmworkers.
What they are really saying is that they can't find CHEAP farmworkers. There are plenty of people who are willing to work; just not at the wages that the farmers are willing to pay. Construction firms apparently come down to the farms, offer more money, and off go the farmworkers.
So here's another clear example that what companies want is the cheapest labor that they can get away with, in the form of bringing in immigrants - no matter what it takes. And these companies truly start crying when they can't get bring in these people who are willing to work for peanuts.
Exactly. It's wasn't compatibility that killed UNIX; that issue came later.
Back in the 80's (about 10 years before the compatibility issue resulted in POSIX), there was a complete, well defined standard for UNIX. This was ATT's version, which was BINARY compatible across all x86 versions (not just source code compatible).
UNIX should have won out over Windows then. It had networking back in 1986. It had graphics. It had far superior technology to the main competition, which was DOS.
But, AT&T did everything in their power to kill UNIX. Not deliberately, but out of greed and incompetance. And one of the key factors was that the people who sold cheap UNIX on the PC (Microport, ISC, etc.) all had to pay an exhorbitant royalty to ATT - while Microsoft didn't have any royalties to pay.
The royalty was about $100 IIRC. That's absolutely rediculous in the PC biz. This meant you simply couldn't beat Microsoft when it came to OEM deals. Nor could you beat them when selling to the average consumer, where price almost always won out.
So this was the main reason why UNIX could never beat DOS, or later Windows. Not even binary compatibility could surmount that cost difference. Fragmentation of the standards was an issue later on, and was only a secondary issue.
As an amusing side note, for a while NONE of those small UNIX companies selling x86 UNIX were paying the royalties to AT&T, not even SCO. When AT&T found out about it, it caused a serious collapse in the x86 UNIX biz. Microport went out of business, Bell Tech got "aquired" by Intel (who was responsible for the licenses - via the ATT "Micro Port" program). That is, Intel paid AT&T in exchange for aquiring Bell Technologies.
Even SCO wasn't immune. They licensed their Xenix code from Microsoft. It was Microsoft who ended up paying AT&T, and in turn got 20% of SCO stock there for a while.
Now, with Linux, there are no royalties to pay. Everyone is on a level playing field with Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
This "success" reminds me very much of how the Vietnam war was declared a "succcess", so they could pull the troops out of Vietnam and go home.
I'm sure there are other examples.
Sure, they might buy out NTP. But once they pay out, the other Patent Lawyers will smell the blood in the water and start circling like the sharks that they are.
You'd better believe that a lot of people are going to be looking at the big giants with deep pockets if Microsoft gives these guys money. It's an INCREDIBLY easy way to make money.
And not even a company as large as Microsoft or IBM can stand up to a beowulf-cluster (pardon the term - it seems appropriate) of attack lawyers doing the same game that NTP is.
Clearly it can't last for long. The name of the game is right now is to milk the system for all its worth. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the sad show. In the meantime, this will have a negative effect on startups and new technology.
Part of the reason why I mentioned it is because it is easier to pull off with closed source O.S.'s.
Trojan horses -- the definitive answer
My favorite quote from Dennis Ritchie:
"I promise that no such thing has ever been included in any distributed version of Unix. However, this took place about the time that NSA was first acquiring the system, and there was considerable temptation."
Yes, that one had definite potential for abuse. How's your favorite closed source C compiler doing these days? :)
In fact, I prefer it over the RH Enterprise stuff, simply because it has been reliable, and it also has the latest set of features, which has saved my butt in being able to get things done. This has happened over and over again. The Fedora folks deserve Kudos for their efforts.
I would also say that the FC releases aren't flawless. But there are always issues with every O.S. release, be it FC, other Linux distros, Windows, OS X, or BSD. The key thing is being able to recognize which OS meets your needs for the work you need done.
For much of my work, FC has been able to meet my requirements betther than the other Distros or O.S.'s, and it's been extremely reliable. As always, YMMV.
Ok, Ok, that was an easy one. Here's another that I heard of recently.
Luddate: Someone you are going out with who does not understand your obsession with technology.
In fact, this whole situation strikes me pretty much as a joke, especially the final result of forming a committee to deal with it.
The only unfunny thing is how much money was spent on this nonsense. I doubt we'll ever see a final tally on that number.
Gosh, I was getting worried there. :)
So, yes, I do think most people might notice it when their old collection of songs no longer works. Especially when they'd have to pay again to hear the songs that they already own.
The point being is that the cost of supporting DRM formats is more than the cost of the DRM player; it's that of the player and paying again for one's prior collection. Which provides an economic incentive for other options.
Generally speaking, in high-tech, retaining backwards compatibility is an extremely strong force. So much so, that one has to have an extremely powerful motivation to toss it aside.
It remains to be seen whether DRM media provides enough of a motivating factor to the market to ignore backwards compatibility. There's no benefit for the consumer; the only benefit is for the manufacturer. I can't think of any product like this in history which has survived for long. Which is why I am sceptical of this one being the first.
Sadly, I think that must be the best thing about it. The general population might begin to wonder why their media hardware is broken. And that's how it will be viewed, as broken.
Or they'll have to turn into "pirates" themselves, in order to get things working the way they want it. That would be an interesting twist.
Either way, it ought to give a boost to independent media which is isn't published with restraints.
Nor is this likely to change; witness the nomination of a Scalia-clone to the Supreme Court.
However, an argument based upon cost just might gain a sympathic ear from a Judge. And goodness knows, the Justice Department doesn't want to bear the cost of this. Nor do they want to have to ask Congress for the money, where the Educational System does have influence via lobbying.
The big problem with this type of argument is that the cost of the technology gets cheaper every year. At some point in the not-too-distant future it will reach $4.50 per student to implement, not $450. Then it will be harder to fight against.
"First, contrary to popular belief, the sig on the back of the card is not there for identification purposes,"
Yes it is. You clearly have never heard of the concept called "signature authority". It's been around ever since people started signing contracts. It's what companies use to establish who can sign checks for the company. You filled out such a card when you opened up your bank account. And yes, clerks are supposed to verify that the signature matches.
Don't be so quick to criticize others when you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
If you dispute this, please cite some authoritative sources.
You have NO other options for landlines.
Since this approach hasn't worked, perhaps we need to get to the core of the problem by spinning off the portion of the business which actually provides the physical lines? That is, separate out the local Central Offices from the current Phone Companies. Instead of giving preferrential treatment to the Big TelCo's, let all of the businesses compete evenly here.
The key point here is to actively encourage a business to actually sell lines, regardless of what those lines are carrying. Right now we have the opposite situation, where you are banned from carrying higher speed signals than what the Phone Company sells.
An example of the effectiveness of this can be seen with "Naked DSL". Back in the late 1990's, some people figured out that they COULD get high speed DSL if they bought a "naked line". That is, a line without any of the normal telephone signals on them (these are commonly used by Alarm Companies, for home/biz security systems). At your home, you installed a high-speed DSL router, and at the ISP was another one. Presto, instand DSL.
Just like in the old days when Dialup first started the takeoff of the first real Internet ISP's like Netcom.
Of course, once the phone companies realized that people would end up by-passing the TelCo's for any time of ISP service, they quashed that immediately. Now they actively scan for any DSL signals on a naked line; and they disconnect the naked line if they find them.
If instead you spun off the CO's into a business model which was based upon profiting from active line connections, then this would never have happened. Instead, the DSL industry would be encouraged to grow, with speeds even faster than our current Cable offerings (Japan has been bragging about such DSL "modems" for years).
Of course, the Phone companies will fight this tooth and nail. They like having a discount compared to the CLECs. But the real question is at what point do we realize that the current scheme isn't working, and when do we cut over to a more market-driven approach to the core technologies? Only when we do so will we see real improvements to high speed connections. It is clear that the current scheme hasn't worked, nor will it work in the future.
Something has to change if it is ever going to work.
Heh. You should've gotten a +1 funny for that.
Right. Now the plan is to pop up, grab the cash, and disappear.
I suppose that works if you're the one grabbing the cash. It would seem that the speed of Economic Darwiniam Evolution just increased.
Of course! They're called girlfriends/wives.
;)
Hmmm. Given the crowd here, perhaps that IS news for Slashdot.
It's more than creating a character; that's insufficient. If it were the case, there'd only be MUSH's around. Personally, I think just creating a char is rather pointless unless you actually DO something with it.
This is why I mentioned adventure. In a nutshell, it was D&D boiled down to the basics. If the excitement was about creating a character, adventure never would never have been such an excellent filter for spotting talented hackers. Rather, it was about having an adventure. In one's imagination.
So I think this is the key connection; namely, having an imagination, and being able to DO something with it. This is why D&D appeals to talented coders. Such people like to use their imagination to create new worlds, whether those worlds are in real life, or virtual.
Way back before real network connectivity started appearing in RP games (Muds, etc.), there were similar games that you played solo. "adventure" is the classic one which comes to mind. It was quite popular, and still can be found in the BSD releases. This game was one of the first, if not the first, of the exploring-a-fantasy-world times of games. It was also mentioned in the book "The Soul of a new Machine".
Perhaps the phrase "maze of twisty passages all alike" might ring some bells with people.
There's something inherent about the problem solving nature of that type of game which simply appeals to good hackers. One thing I've noticed is that good hackers are (or were) drawn to this game. Lesser talented people generally weren't.
It's like a variation of the typical computer problems which one solves, but with "adventure", it's done as entertainment.
It's this problem-solving-as-entertainment which plays a key part in the appeal to real hackers, IMHO. And which, incidentally, leads these people on to greater understanding of other things far more complex. Like Operating Systems for one. And in turn, it's this understanding which makes people better with their technical abilities.
My bet is that Tivo is going to die before the VCR. The VCR still lets me play anything I like, the way I want it. This is a feature which Tivo is lacking.
Could you please explain how in the world you're going to replace the chipsets on an existing PC motherboard with an FPGA? Or even what motherboards out there ship with an OpenCore FPGA which allows you to do this, for any reasonable modern CPU?
I don't keep up with the current state-of-the-art with OpenCores; but I was under the impression that they aren't at this stage yet. A quick perusal of opencores.org doesn't dissuade me from this view.
So, could you either provide a link to what you're referring to? Or is this just BS?
Note to mods: I wouldn't mod the parent up until some more real proof comes along. Hopefully my skeptiscm is misplaced.
Thanks.
While it would be nice if it were available for general purchase, that's a bit irrelevant. This could FINALLY serve as a reference design for an Open Source laptop. MIT simply needs to make the schematics available, preferrably under the GPL, so that anyone can ship the design to an online shop and have it built.
Granted, you couldn't do that for $100 - not at first. But what would happen is that businesses would sprout up selling this in volume. Which would bring down the cost for the average geek, as well as MIT. The spinoffs from this would mean that we could FINALLY get commodity parts for a laptop.
Or, in short, MIT has the opportunity to do to the laptop what IBM did to the PC.
I, for one, would be willing to help with whatever work is involved, if they GPL the schematics. I am sick and tired of dealing with the rediculous prices for proprietary laptops.
Where do I sign up?
I agree completely.And here's one key reason why.
Suppose your current boss either sells the company, or he suddenly dies, and it gets sold to someone else.
Unless you have a written agreement which CLEARLY calls out your ownership, the software which you claim may no longer be yours. If it becomes of value, there's a real good probability that someone else will make a claim on it if they can. It's amazing how people come out of the woodwork when there's a possibility of money to be had.
If for no other reason than to settle out of court for a few tens-of-thousands of dollars (that is, what it would cost you for legal defense). Or, in the worst case, a judge will take your property away from you, and give it to someone else. There are a LOT of sleazy quick-buck artists out there who would view it as easy as taking candy from a baby, and would do so with any qualms whatsoever.
I've seen a number of ugly situations which really shouldn't have happened. Fortunately, not with myself because I've learned from others.
A good lawyer can save you from letting a lot of grief happening.
The point being is that even when there is no labor shortage, it seems to be a time honored tradition of big business to claim otherwise. Just so they can keep wages as low as possible, and pocket the profit.
And we're seeing this directly in high technology, as well as the farm fields. Few professions are immune to this. The only question is where is it going to stop, and what kind of society we want to live in.
Since 9/11 however, things have tightened up at the border. The result is that now the farmers are crying about how they can't find farmworkers.
What they are really saying is that they can't find CHEAP farmworkers. There are plenty of people who are willing to work; just not at the wages that the farmers are willing to pay. Construction firms apparently come down to the farms, offer more money, and off go the farmworkers.
So here's another clear example that what companies want is the cheapest labor that they can get away with, in the form of bringing in immigrants - no matter what it takes. And these companies truly start crying when they can't get bring in these people who are willing to work for peanuts.
Here's the URL of the article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/1267833 5.htm
If you hit an issue with registeration there, bugmenot.com works just fine. But in any case, here's a copy from google's cache:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:IZeb9ugcOlIJ:ww w.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/12678335.htm+sit e:mercurynews.com+farm+labor+shortage
Back in the 80's (about 10 years before the compatibility issue resulted in POSIX), there was a complete, well defined standard for UNIX. This was ATT's version, which was BINARY compatible across all x86 versions (not just source code compatible).
UNIX should have won out over Windows then. It had networking back in 1986. It had graphics. It had far superior technology to the main competition, which was DOS.
But, AT&T did everything in their power to kill UNIX. Not deliberately, but out of greed and incompetance. And one of the key factors was that the people who sold cheap UNIX on the PC (Microport, ISC, etc.) all had to pay an exhorbitant royalty to ATT - while Microsoft didn't have any royalties to pay.
The royalty was about $100 IIRC. That's absolutely rediculous in the PC biz. This meant you simply couldn't beat Microsoft when it came to OEM deals. Nor could you beat them when selling to the average consumer, where price almost always won out. So this was the main reason why UNIX could never beat DOS, or later Windows. Not even binary compatibility could surmount that cost difference. Fragmentation of the standards was an issue later on, and was only a secondary issue.
As an amusing side note, for a while NONE of those small UNIX companies selling x86 UNIX were paying the royalties to AT&T, not even SCO. When AT&T found out about it, it caused a serious collapse in the x86 UNIX biz. Microport went out of business, Bell Tech got "aquired" by Intel (who was responsible for the licenses - via the ATT "Micro Port" program). That is, Intel paid AT&T in exchange for aquiring Bell Technologies.
Even SCO wasn't immune. They licensed their Xenix code from Microsoft. It was Microsoft who ended up paying AT&T, and in turn got 20% of SCO stock there for a while.
Now, with Linux, there are no royalties to pay. Everyone is on a level playing field with Microsoft.